Late Eighteenth-century Britain Research Articles

Attitudes to Pedlars and Street Traders in Late Eighteenth-Century England: ‘Commercial Hatred’ or Anti-Jewish Prejudice?

Abstract The late eighteenth century saw intense debate over the status of pedlars. In 1785, Pitt imposed a tax on shopkeepers and attempted to placate them by suggesting that he would ban the economic competition they faced from pedlars. It was only thanks to the support of manufacturers that pedlars were saved from economic destitution. Following the eventual repeal of the legislation, the spotlight moved to the itinerant tradesmen of London. The work of Patrick Colquhoun, a magistrate, highlighting Jewish street traders in London, led to proposed legislation which would have identified all Ashkenazi Jews in England and created a board with the power to levy a tax on the Jewish community. This article seeks to explain the complexity and inadequacy of the pedlars’ licensing legislation. It considers both economic and class conflicts and the anti-Jewish prejudices behind both debates. The article argues that the national debate over the tax on shopkeepers was a question of economic conflict and that anti-Jewish stereotypes played a limited role. In contrast, it argues that the debate over tradesmen in London was heavily influenced by anti-Jewish sentiments which were particularly powerful in the City of London. The debates highlight both the nature of economic conflict in late eighteenth-century England and the way in which anti-Jewish prejudice led to the proposal of legislation identifying and stigmatising the Jewish community.

Constructing Identities and Negotiating Relationships in Late Eighteenth-century England

During the eighteenth century, language became an increasingly valuable commodity for the construction of identities and the negotiation of relationships with others. Additionally, letter writing had emerged as a crucial means of maintaining relationships and forging deeper intimacy between individuals, and correspondence thus constitutes a rich resource for the study of language variation and change in relation to (social) identity, with forms of address as a key strategy in this respect. The current paper examines expressions of direct address and self-reference in Late Modern English ego-documents, more specifically two sets of letters involving Mary Hamilton (1756–1816), sub-governess at Court and a member of the Bluestocking circle. For each set, we discuss intra-speaker variation in the context of both the individual participants involved and the structure of the letters. The findings reveal different strategies through which Hamilton and her correspondents construct their identities and negotiate their relationships with each other, for example by using nicknames and terms of endearment, omitting signatures, or through changes in lexical choices over time.

Climate Change, Security, and the International System: It’s Still the Same Old Story

Climate Change, Security, and the International System: It’s Still the Same Old Story

Rational Dissenters in late eighteenth-century England. ‘An ardent desire of truth.’ By Valerie Smith. (Studies in Modern British Religious History.) Pp. xviii + 350 incl. 2 figs and 17 tables. Woodbridge–Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2021. £75. 978 1 78327 566 3

Rational Dissenters in late eighteenth-century England. ‘An ardent desire of truth.’ By Valerie Smith. (Studies in Modern British Religious History.) Pp. xviii + 350 incl. 2 figs and 17 tables. Woodbridge–Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2021. £75. 978 1 78327 566 3 - Volume 73 Issue 4

Review: Architecture: From Prehistory to Climate Emergency

Review: <i>Architecture: From Prehistory to Climate Emergency</i>

Pity the Fool: Satire, Sentiment, and Aristocratic Vice in George Colman’s The Suicide

The Suicide, A Comedy (1778) by George Colman (the Elder) is a sophisticated comedic response to the scourge of fashionable suicide in late eighteenth-century Britain. The play simultaneously operates on two comedic planes: (1) it aims the purgative power of contemptible and socially aversive satire at the bon-ton by insinuating the scandalous suicide of high-profile aristocrat John Damer (1744–76); and (2) the reformation of Tobine—the middle-class protagonist who aspires to fashionable self-destruction—invests in the socially rehabilitative and compassionate humour of sentimental comedy. Two comedic strategies are aimed at two different audiences, with both strategies working to reinforce middle-class values. The result is a comedy that merges two kinds of laughter to form a benign affective antidote to interclass suicidal contagion. This comedic antidote functions as an early demonstration of the positive value of narratives that depict the overcoming of suicidal intent—or what modern sociologists call the Papageno effect.

Slaves of Affection in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) and Jane Austen’s Emma (1817)

One of the reasons to associate Maria Edgeworth with Jane Austen is the importance of the former as a main source of inspiration for Austen’s domestic plots. Interestingly, both colonialism and gender studies have turned their eyes to Edgeworth’s and Austen’s approach to slavery. Nevertheless, the specific connection between Belinda and Emma in this regard has been overlooked while, indeed, there are many reasons to relate both works since both deal with women’s submission and emotional dependence from others in many ways. This article analyses two secondary characters in Edgeworth’s Belinda and Austen’s Emma. After examining the similarities of the status of blacks and women in late eighteenth-century England, I maintain that these works can be seen as two studies of gratitude and that they offer a new version of Edgeworth’s familiar theme of the grateful negro, though in this case it applies to woman’s surrogate social position. The ideas of Homi K. Bhabha on colonial discourse help to examine the relationship between gender and race in Belinda and Emma, as well as the lack of a fixed identity and unfulfilled desire of independence that was common to blacks and women. It is precisely this feature that adds some darkness and social critique to Edgeworth’s and Austen’s otherwise rather predictable plots.

Rational Dissenters in late eighteenth-century England, "An Ardent Desire of Truth." by Valerie Smith

Rational Dissenters in late eighteenth-century England, "An Ardent Desire of Truth." by Valerie Smith

A Tale of Two Boycotts: Riot, Reform, and Sugar Consumption in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain and France

Atlantic sugar production and European sugar consumption rose dramatically in the late eighteenth century. Despite this increase, there were two separate calls to refrain from consuming sugar in both Britain and France at the end of the eighteenth century. Demands for abstinence were directed toward women to stop household consumption of sugar. In Britain, abolitionists urged women to stop buying West Indian sugar because it was a slave good, produced on plantations where enslaved Africans were subject to cruelty and where mortality rates were high. In France, the call to forego sugar came during the early years of the Revolution of 1789, in response to rising sugar prices. The women of Paris were asked to refrain from buying sugar at high prices that were assumed to be a result of market manipulation by speculators and hoarders engaging in anti-revolutionary behavior. The increase in Parisian sugar prices was not driven primarily by profiteering, but by a global shortage caused by the slave revolt in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, now Haiti. Comparing these two sugar boycotts, one in Britain, the other in France, provides an opportunity outside of national historical narratives to consider how both events employed the same technique for very different aims. The call to renounce sugar in both cases used economic pressure to create political change. An exploration of these movements for abstinence will provide a better understanding of how they critiqued consumption, and translated discourses, both abolitionist and revolutionary, into practice.

Newspaper Debates in Late Eighteenth-Century England: ‘Letters to the Editor’ versus the Political Pamphlet

When exploring contributions to political debates in late eighteenth-century England, scholars have typically favoured non-serialized publications, most commonly the pamphlet, thus neglecting the many contributions appearing in the periodical press. This article redresses this oversight by exploring both the shortcomings and the advantages of the newspaper as a medium for political debate in this period. Based on a close reading of leading London newspapers from the politically turbulent years of 1791–95, this article explores the following questions: What advantages did the newspaper have over stand-alone publications such as the political pamphlet? What type of audience were writers of political newspaper commentary trying to reach, and what barriers did they encounter when attempting to do so? Why did the newspaper supplant the non-serialized pamphlet as the leading medium for political debate towards the end of the eighteenth century?

Grappling with Celebrity Status: Women, Theatre, and the Mechanisms of Celebrity in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain

ABSTRACT During the late eighteenth century, the emergence of popular and print culture facilitated the rise of celebrity and created an environment in which women’s bodies were consistently sexualized and materialized. Women increasingly became the targets of public scrutiny as printed texts and images proliferated. This paper traces this distinct kind of celebrity and its relationship with gendered discourses of the period. Utilizing Sarah Siddons (1755–1831) and Mary Robinson (1757–1800) as case studies, this paper examines how they accumulated celebrity, investigates the social and cultural aspects of celebrity culture, and explores the intersections of celebrity and femininity at that time. This paper argues for the significance of celebrity actresses and their roles in the shifting development of a celebrity in the late 1700s, illustrating how a modern kind of celebrity discourse emerged, and helping us understand celebrity culture in its current form.

Aeromania and Enlightenment: The Politics of Hot Air Balloons in Karamzin's "Letters of a Russian Traveler"

This paper focuses on Karamzin’s depiction, in Letters of a Russian Traveler, of Abbé Miolan’s failed hot air balloon flight in Paris in July 1784. After briefly tracing the history of aeromania in late eighteenth-century France and England, as well as its contemporary Russian reception, notably by Catherine the Great, the paper identifies Karamzin’s sources of information on the event and analyses the reasons why the Russian writer mentioned it in his travelogue. It demonstrates that Karamzin’s depiction of a physical experiment embodying European capacity for innovation in the late eighteenth century was not an expression of scientific curiosity. Instead, the young writer used the episode as a metaphor of social and political management, in order to reflect on the questions of social autonomy and the relation of the enlightened public with State power in both France and Russia. By depicting Miolan’s failed flight as a condemnable nuissance to public order, reminiscent of the revolutionary trouble he had witnessed during his journey through France, Karamzin showed his endorsement of Catherine’s conservative conception of the Enlightenment. By depicting how the French public sphere dealt with Miolan and possibly implicitly comparing it with the way Catherine had dealt with Radishchev, he nevertheless showed the superiority of self-regulation over political violence in managing the nobility’s growing longing for autonomy.

Height and health in late eighteenth-century England

Adult stature has become a widely used indicator of childhood nutritional status in historical populations and may provide insights into health inequalities that are not discernible in mortality rates. However, most pre-twentieth-century British data on heights suffer from selection biases. Here we present unique evidence on heights of adult males by occupation from an unbiased sample of adult males in Dorset in 1798–99. The mean height of fully grown (married) men was very similar to that of older military recruits, and our sample therefore confirms the taller stature of English males relative to males of other European countries in the same period. In contrast to previous evidence of negligible or U-shaped socio-economic gradients in mortality in this period, we found a fairly linear gradient in height by socio-economic status, that is similar in magnitude to class differences in adult height among English males born in the mid-twentieth century. Supplementary material for this article is available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2020.1823011

The Financing of Political Newspaper Commentary in Late Eighteenth-Century England

This article explores the financing of the newspaper content most closely identified with political commentary in the second half of the eighteenth century: the ‘letters to the editor’. Based on an important but largely unnoticed paragraph from John Trusler’s London Adviser and Guide, and a published excerpt from the account books of the Morning Herald, it argues that, while newspaper proprietors paid correspondents primarily for news and miscellany, they could also pay for letters of commentary (or publish them free of charge), if these were particularly well written and on topics of notable public interest. Importantly, however, they would also charge authors wishing to disseminate political texts, especially if these promulgated the commercial or political interests of individuals or larger interest groups.

Terror and Horror : Gothic Crosscurrents in Literature

The word “Gothic” was originally implied to anything that is wild, barbarous, destructive and outlandish. When applied to literature, the term, was used both with eulogistic and disparaging connotations and became the synonyms for the grotesque, ghastly and violently supernatural. The literature was based on gloom, fear, terror and horror. In its long run, the Gothic literature got its horizon expanded with the touch of novelty and multi dimensional perspectives. This study relates the affinity between the spirits of Gothic architecture and literature that came as a vogue in late eighteenth century England. The main argument of this study is to reveal how the spirits of horror and terror intersected in literature. Similarly, it is also interesting to see how the aspects of horror and terror have crosscurrents between themselves. The more the genre found its way, there remained crosscurrents between the Gothic literatures propagated in Germany, England and France. This study is qualitative and its nature, purpose and approaches are historical. As such, this study makes a systematic and objective evaluation of facts, themes and ideas related to the previous study to understand causes, development, and trends of Gothic. This analysis helps to explain the present relevance, and also anticipates future aspects of the Gothic literature, exploring how this literature got its efflorescence in our own day being modern Gothic, which incorporates many shades of interpretations.

Island Fictions, Intellectual Fictions: Dramas of Pacific Isolation in Stevenson, Wells, and Conrad

“Consider the Island,” Deryck Scarr invites us in his history of the Pacific: “the idea of the island.”1 That idea, which Westerners brought to and imposed upon the insular Pacific, is of serious antiquity, in existence well before Magellan’s entry to it in 1521. “Those of us involved in Pacific studies,” Kerry Howe writes,2 “have been too impressed with the apparent novelty of the eighteenth-century Pacific dream island. But that Tahitian mirage was at the end of a very long imaginative tradition, one that long predated the Enlightenment, and even the Renaissance. Indeed it goes back to the very beginnings of Western civilization”—in Greek myth, Plato’s Atlantis, the Bible, and stories like the supremely imaginative “The Shipwrecked Sailor” from the Egyptian Middle Kingdom. The Rousseauesque dream and mirage faded rapidly enough in Western thought after first contact with Tahiti in the 1760s, as stories of Polynesian infanticide and homosexuality were eagerly circulated by the fourth estate in an atmosphere of religious revival in late eighteenth-century England. (John Hawkesworth’s editorial compendium of 1773, An Account of the Voyages undertaken by the order of his present Majesty for making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, was an important early revelation in that process.) But a myth inverted need lose little of its power and influence. That which was once utopian became dystopian, and the noble savage became ignoble, but the precedent myth of island isolation, augmented as it had been by accounts of Magellan’s travels by Antonio Pigafetta and others, accompanied and intensified almost every aspect of the West’s imaginative involvement with the “South Sea.” It does so still, though indigenous writers and historians have long since cast doubt upon it. The most important revisionary intervention in that respect is probably Epeli Hau’ofa’s essay, “Our Sea of Islands,” which does a good deal of myth-inversion of its own as regards Western views (political, economic, and cultural) of the islands of the Pacific as “tiny, confined spaces” at immense distances from both each other and the cosmopolitan epicentres of the First World. The peoples of Oceania, Hau’ofa argued, “did not conceive of their world in such microscopic proportions”:

James Beattie, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the character of Common Sense philosophy

ABSTRACT Professor of Moral Philosophy at Marischal College, Aberdeen, James Beattie (1735–1803) was one of the most prominent literary figures of late eighteenth-century Britain. His major works, An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (1770) and the two-canto poem The Minstrel (1771–1774), were two of the best-sellers of the Scottish Enlightenment and were key to Beattie’s role in the emergence of both the ‘Scottish School’ of Common Sense Philosophy and British Romanticism. Intellectual history scholarship on the Scottish Enlightenment has tended to discuss Beattie in terms of his relationship to his fellow Aberdonian Thomas Read. While clearly important, his link with Reid does not exhaust our potential interest in Beattie. This article explores his extensive engagement with the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). In the process, it is argued that the Genevan’s works – especially the Confession of the Savoyard Vicar in Emile (1762) – played an important though little noticed role in both Beattie’s rhetoric and anti-scepticism in both the Essay and Minstrel. Moreover, Beattie’s initially praising stance on Rousseau as a potential friend to true religion indicates the complexity of the reception of the Genevan’s works in late eighteenth-century Britain.

VISUALIZING POVERTY IN WORDSWORTH’S POETRY

VISUALIZING POVERTY IN WORDSWORTH’S POETRY This paper departs from the assumption that Wordsworth’s poetry is highly visual in its quality and it focuses on his three “great period” poems, “Michael”, “The Old Cumberland Beggar” and “Resolution and Independence” (1798–1805) to show how Wordsworth represents poverty. By taking as its starting point some New Historicist readings of these poems (Simpson, Pfau, Connell, Liu) which highlighted Wordsworth’s blindness to social reality of the poor, it wants to enlarge the scope of historicist readings by introducing the framework of the New Poverty Studies (Korte, Christ). Furthermore, it insists on the assumption that the Romantic need to visualize landscape in the picturesque form becomes an important strategy of “configuring” (Korte) the reality of the poor. In other words, the way in which the poor are represented in Wordsworth’s poetry tells us something about practical engagements with poverty in late eighteenth-century England. Also, Wordsworth’s position of a middle-class observer who builds the tension between the seen and the deliberately unseen aspects of his social surrounding, show us how Wordsworth unconsciously falls under the spell of a larger class-related sensibility and thus fails in his humanitarian project.

The Quixotic Mother, the Female Author, and Mary Charlton's Rosella

To be a quixote is to be birthed by novels. In late eighteenth-century Britain, longstanding but newly urgent concerns around literary (re)production, the novel, female authorship, and gender roles converge within the fraught figure of the quixote who is also a mother. Focusing on quixotic mothers in general—and Mary Charlton's understudied novel Rosella, or Modern Occurrences (Minerva Press, 1799) in particular—this essay asserts that metaphors of authorship as biological maternity structure late eighteenth-century quixotic narratives' treatment of women's writing and the novel. Through creating a character who simultaneously embodies female authorship, quixotism, and maternity, Charlton suggests how late eighteenth-century quixotic figures provide a means for writers to explore, destabilize, and affirm models of maternal and authorial monstrosity.

Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction by Laura Marcus

Reviewed by: Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction by Laura Marcus Margaretta Jolly (bio) Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction Laura Marcus Oxford UP, 2018, 168 pp. ISBN 9780199669240, $11.95 paperback. For those in a hurry to know what autobiography is all about, Laura Marcus's Autobiography is the answer. In 145 pocketbook-size pages, one of the field's best analysts distills years of thinking to argue that memory, form, purpose, truth, and above all, the nature of selfhood constitute the core preoccupations of the genre. In so doing, she conjures up as many fabulous worlds as Proust did when he dipped a madeleine in his legendary tea cup. Noting autobiography's coinage in late eighteenth-century England, Marcus introduces the rise of a writing practice of "inward regard" in secular contexts that has become perhaps globally widespread. Mapping this, she ranges across some 135 autobiographical writers and many other thinkers, including philosophers, psychologists, historians, and literary critics, to conclude that even in today's provocative and quasi-fictional modes, this regard sets the genre apart. The classic forms such self-analysis takes—"confession, conversion, testimony"—are considered in the first chapter, which also traces literary autobiography's roots in religious, legal, and historical contexts. Taking us through Augustine, St. Teresa of Avila, Rousseau, Wordsworth, De Quincey, Jane Eyre, Benjamin Franklin, Oscar Wilde, J. M. Coetzee, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Primo Levi, and Otto Dov Kulka, she concludes with the hoax Holocaust [End Page 501] testimony by "Benjamin Wilkomirski" to emphasize that, despite the enormous variety and partiality of such texts, "referential truth continues to be judged as an essential element in autobiography in its role as the literature of witness" (28). The question of self-making complicates this referentiality, of course, and is considered in the next chapter. Here Marcus shows how the metaphor of the journey governs much autobiography, touching on a seemingly essential feeling about the life process in time and space. On the other hand, she connects the metaphor precisely to the advent of travel for pleasure or education, and walking as a valued, rather than simply necessary, activity. Early nineteenth-century holidaying fed, for example, Goethe's Italian Journey and William Wordsworth's "wandering" in the Lake District. This European Romantic idea of self persists in contemporary road trip narratives, nature writing, and urban psychogeography, though its American cousin in Transcendentalist autobiography by Emerson and Thoreau adds the possibility of self-forgetting on the way. Chapter 3 goes further into the question of "autobiographical consciousness," beginning with what philosophers have thought about it. Marcus points out that they often deploy autobiographical writing themselves to do so, delightfully reminding us that Descartes's famous "Cogito, ergo sum" comes nearly halfway through a story of his education and travels. Following Descartes, Marcus observes that, albeit in very different ways, thinkers from Wittgenstein to Paul Ricoeur and Charles Taylor have connected thought, language, and narrative, thus establishing autobiography as a precondition for identity itself. In an unusually direct moment, Marcus says this doesn't mean we ought to sort our ideas into narrative form (43). Pointing to existentialist autobiographers, including Nietzsche, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Violette Leduc, she proffers a perhaps less often discussed model premised on choice, instead of development/causality as operating principle. Marcus also separates out from both of these schools of thought writings influenced by ideas of the self as a social construct, whether Erving Goffman's "presentation of self in everyday life," Foucault's discursive self, Stephen Greenblatt's concept of self-fashioning, or Judith Butler's performative identities, with roots in Dilthey and Hegel. This socially-imagined self dominates contemporary life narrative, but in forms that also reflect the fragmented, fluid nature of today's world. More paradoxical still are life writings by deconstructionist critics Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, where the very point is to dwell on "the problematic relation between a life and a text" (50–51). Marcus's following chapter on psychoanalysis and autobiography also emphasizes self-division and evasiveness. "For so long a cultural ideal," she remarks, the self's unity "is now perceived as a product of a set of obsessions and, in Freud's phrase...