Lord Lyttelton Research Articles

Betty A. Schellenberg. Literary Coteries and the Making of Modern Print Culture, 1740–1790.

Betty A. Schellenberg. Literary Coteries and the Making of Modern Print Culture, 1740–1790.

Daniel O’Connell and Alfred Elmore’s Martyrdom of Thomas à Becket

Daniel O’Connell and Alfred Elmore’s Martyrdom of Thomas à Becket Caoimhín de Bhailís In a letter written in 1834, Daniel O’Connell describes his visit to Canterbury Cathedral and how, when directed to the exact spot on which Saint Thomas à Becket had been martyred, he ‘knelt down and kissed the stone which had received his life-blood’.1 The verger on duty who witnessed this act was horrified by such ‘Popish work’ in the Cathedral.2 In correspondence with Archbishop John McHale, in which they debated the merits and flaws of the 1837 Tithe Bill, O’Connell expressed his fear that, should the Whig government fall due to opposition to the Bill, they would lose the ‘only bearable government Ireland ever experienced since the fatal day when the followers of the murderers of Becket polluted our shores’.3 The Tithe Bill had been problematic on many fronts for the government in its attempts to appease the growing anger of the Catholic clergy and peasantry in Ireland while also ensuring that a tax was levied for educational purposes, both Anglican and Catholic. In his letter to McHale O’Connell saw this levy as a meritorious aspect of Lord Morpeth’s Bill.4 However, in a speech given at the Franchise Association in 1835, he disagreed with any appropriation of the Established church’s surplus revenue to the Catholic church.5 In his speech, O’Connell voiced his opinion that any link between the church and state would serve to undermine the role of the Catholic church through a financial dependency on the state, as, he had argued, was the case between the Established church and the state.6 Further to this, he pointed to Thomas à Becket as an example of the church’s opposition to the tyranny of the state, in the guise of Henry II, and as one who acted as ‘the guardian of the liberties of the people’.7 There can be no doubt that his earlier visit to Canterbury, in 1834, influenced the speech in which he pointed to the three hundred years prior to the Reformation during which the people congregated en masse at Becket’s shrine.8 O’Connell’s referencing and championing of Becket would have been noted by his audience, as the martyr was a subject of immense interest to the Victorian public. Studies • volume 107 • number 425 76 Thomas à Becket in thenineteenth century Nicholas Vincent has provided a worthy litany of the discussion and debate that surrounded the reappraisal of Becket during the nineteenth century.9 However, although Becket is the saint being discussed here, Devon Fisher has shown that Becket was just one of many saints that were being revisited, reappraised and repositioned in the religious cauldron of nineteenth century Britain.10 Charles Kingsley made a determined attempt to claim pre-reformation saints as Protestant, rather than Catholic, exemplars, something especially evident in his play based on the life of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, The Saint’s Tragedy.11 In this context and in connection with O’Connell, Becket becomes a disputed property. Having had the feast day of his translation abolished in 1536 and his shrine destroyed in 1538, Henry VIII was determined to undermine Becket, who quickly came to be seen as a traitor to the crown. This negation of the saint was still in vogue in the early nineteenth century, as examples in books of the period such as Lady Callcott’s Little Arthur’s History of England, Elizabeth Penrose’s History of England and works by Lord Lyttelton and David Hume confirm.12 However, a revisioning of Becket as a champion of the people and defender of the church, albeit a pre-reformation Catholic church, was also occurring at this time. Richard Hurrell Froude’s History of the Contest between Thomas À Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury and Henry II., King of England, sought to reevaluate Becket from the viewpoint of the Oxford Movement, as it looked to the medieval church as a foundational form of Anglicanism.13 As O’Connell had done in his speech to the Franchise Association, Froude saw Becket as a protector of the poor and of the defenceless against the tyranny of...

The Elizabeth Robinson Montagu Papers at the Huntington Library

The Elizabeth Robinson Montagu Papers at the Huntington Library Mary L. Robertson (bio) and Vanessa Wilkie (bio) a rich and incomparable archive of nearly seven thousand letters to and from Elizabeth Robinson Montagu was purchased in 1925 by Henry E. Huntington for his newly founded research library from the rare-book and manuscript dealer A. S. W. Rosenbach. The acquisition was perfectly consistent with Huntington's policy of collecting original materials for advanced scholarly research in English and American history and literature, and the Montagu papers are now, as they have been from the beginning, a mainstay of the Library's important holdings from eighteenth-century England. In addition to 3,500 letters by Montagu herself (including 691 addressed to her husband, Edward Montagu, 737 to her sister, Sarah Robinson Scott, 754 to Elizabeth Carter, and 254 to Elizabeth Vesey), the collection contains letters written to her by a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, providing a valuable cross section of elite English literary, social, and political life. Here are Margaret Bentinck, Duchess of Portland (62 letters), Frances Boscawen (73), George, Lord Lyttelton (116), Messenger Monsey (71), William Pulteney, Earl of Bath (283), Elizabeth Vesey (96), Gilbert West (54), and William Wilberforce (26). Here too are letters from Montagu's family: from her husband, Edward (439), her sister, Sarah (367), her nephew Matthew Montagu (129),1 and Dorothy Montagu, Countess of Sandwich (50). And finally, there are single or a few pieces penned by other prominent figures in her world: Edmund Burke, Hester Chapone, Thomas Clarkson, David Garrick, Samuel Johnson, Hannah More, Hester Thrale Piozzi, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Laurence Sterne, James Stuart, and Horace Walpole. The collection is fairly evenly distributed over the years 1740 through 1800, although the decade of the 1760s is particularly well represented. Topics covered in [End Page 465] the collection—which, unlike most preserved archives, often contains both sides of a correspondence—are wide-ranging, encompassing the literary, political, and social world of Montagu and her friends and acquaintances in London, Bath, Tunbridge Wells, and her home at Sandleford Priory in Berkshire; accounts of travel in England and abroad; and the financial matters and management of family coal mines in Northumberland. Montagu's papers have long been recognized as an important source for the history of England in the second half of the eighteenth century. Between 1809 and 1813 her nephew and executor Matthew Montagu solicited the return of her letters from many of their recipients (or their descendants) and published a selection of correspondence down to 1761,2 but the editorial work fell far short of modern standards and the chronological arrangement (since Montagu seldom fully dated her correspondence) was highly questionable. His granddaughter Emily J. Climenson edited and published in 1906 a second selection of Montagu's letters,3 also to 1761, and left the archive to a friend, Reginald Blunt, with the hope that he would continue her work. In 1923 Blunt published two further volumes of extracts of selected letters, covering the years 1762 through 1800, once again arranged in chronological order based on conjecture from internal evidence.4 Within two years of the publication of Blunt's edition, the Montagu papers were sold to the Huntington, where they were then more comprehensively arranged, and more than one Library cataloguer continued to struggle with the problems of fragmentary and undated or only partially dated letters. Full cataloguing was not completed until June 1952, although the Library had opened the material to research in the later 1920s, assisting readers on-site, microfilming selected items for scholars, and answering research inquiries as time allowed. A summary report about the archive,5 prepared by the Huntington cataloguer who completed the processing, presents a nice snapshot of mid-twentieth-century interests: he stressed information about Montagu's everyday life at London, Sandleford Priory, Bath, and Tunbridge Wells, with water-drinking and bathing, lectures, balls, assemblies, and tea parties; references to current books and plays; medicine (principally discussions of various ailments such as stomach trouble, headaches, eyestrain, influenza, and Montagu's smallpox inoculation); Montagu's various travels to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Bath, Sandleford Spa in 1763, Paris in 1776, and Scotland in 1766 and 1770; "local...

Chivalrous models of Patriot Kingship: Gilbert West, Lord Lyttelton and The Idea of a Patriot King

ABSTRACTThis article examines two explorations of the theory expounded in Lord Bolingbroke's The Idea of a Patriot King (written 1738, published 1749), Gilbert West's 1742 dramatic poem The Institution of the Order of the Garter and Lord Lyttelton's The History of the Life of Henry the Second (1767–1771). Both were associates of Bolingbroke's in the Patriot movement and were committed to his ideological programme, understanding its potential and appeal. They both recognised the significant potency in Bolingbroke's last and final theorem, that of the Patriot King, whose miraculous function it was to stamp out corruption, reform the state and rule as a father to his people. Yet they both reframe the theory, by providing relatable models of Patriot Kingship. The models West and Lyttelton provide are two historical English kings, Edward III and Henry II. By portraying these monarchs as Patriot Kings, both writers construct a mythopoeic idealisation of the English and British past, in which the manners of chivalry form the basis of Patriot Kingship. Both these works should also be understood within the context of an eighteenth-century tradition of using the English and British past to extol monarchy and reflect of contemporary politics and society.

James Thomson and the Affective Body in/of The Seasons

James Thomson and the Affective Body in/of The Seasons Kate Parker (bio) From the moment of its publication, James Thomson’s poem The Seasons both transfixed and transported its readers. In her 1796 novel Camilla, Frances Burney fictionalizes a young scholar’s ecstatic reading of “Spring.” Melmond becomes so enraptured by the “truly elegant and feeling description” of the poem that he “perceive[s]” and “regard[s] nothing but what he was about,” every so often punctuating his otherwise silent reading with “passionate ejaculations,” crying out that Thomson’s language is “too much! too much!” for him to bear physically (99–100). Similarly, in his Life of Thomson, Dr. Johnson muses that “the reader of the Seasons wonders that … he has never yet felt what Thomson impresses,” and John Aikin also observed in 1778 that “no poem was ever composed which addressed itself to the feelings of a greater number of readers” (4: 272; v). All three descriptions conjure the effects of Thomson’s “feeling description” on the susceptible and enthusiastic sentiments of the reader. For Johnson and Aikin, this is an emphatically physical process in which the poem “impresses” and “addresses” its readers; particularly intriguing is Johnson’s use of the verb “impress,” which analogizes the physical process of printing the published poem to the (presumably no less physical) imprinting of emotions onto the transported reader. Indeed, as eighteenth-century readers like Burney, Johnson, and Aikin strove to register the enormity of the public response to The Seasons, they did so by depicting an intimate and yet forceful relationship between reader and text: the active, pressing, material body of the poem colliding with the sentimental, felt body of the reader.1 The present essay extends their premise that Thomson’s poem behaves like a physical body: I argue that The Seasons, constantly reshaped and represented by Thomson’s obsessive revisions, reacts like the affective bodies introduced in the poem. The dominant sexual and sentimental experiences of Thomson’s own life are not only figured in the poem’s many sentimental episodes, but are also embodied in the poem’s dynamically responsive text. Though Thomson’s poetry has repeatedly and rightly been associated with the sentimental culture of eighteenth-century Britain, the notion of [End Page 1] Thomson himself as a sentimental figure has been mostly lost to critics. Contemporaries described him as a boorish, awkward man, and he never married and rarely courted.2 Yet there is ample evidence to suggest that many romantic and sentimental episodes in The Seasons were not only inspired by Thomson’s own singular experience of love and loss, but also repeatedly revised to correspond to significant shifts in his amorous allegiances. Thus, The Seasons—as evidenced by the numerous revisions that shaped later versions in the 1740s, including the final version in 1746— remained a deeply personal testament to Thomson’s attachments, even as it sought, more publicly, to inspire what G. Gabrielle Starr calls “affective consensus,” a form of “shared sensibility” enabled by lyric poetry (64). That The Seasons incorporates Thomson’s own affections has been recognized by Ralph Cohen, who, in calling “Spring” Thomson’s “love-song,” explicitly connects the poet’s emotions with his aesthetics, and also by Douglas Grant, who describes The Seasons as a form of “sentimental autobiography” (201). But scholarship has generally overlooked Thomson’s personal life in focusing on his extensive revisions of The Seasons, instead attributing these revisions to a lack of success in other writing and professional projects (see Sambrook and Grant, especially chap. 5). This essay will connect Thomson’s compulsive practice of revision to the dominant affective experiences in his life. Thomson’s practice of revision was legendary. From the initial publication of Winter in 1726 to the posthumous edition of Thomson’s Works supervised by George Lord Lyttelton in 1750, the four poems of The Seasons underwent very extensive revisions. Spring, for example, was initially published in 1728 and was transformed by at least three significant revisions in Thomson’s life, in 1730, 1744, and 1746. One identifiable effect of these revisions, as Sandro Jung has noted, is the condensing and tightening of the sentimental episodes that appear throughout the...

Mrs. Montagu's Contemplative Bench: Bluestocking Gardens and Female Retirement

Drawing on the correspondence of Elizabeth Montagu from the 1740s to the 1780s, Stephen Bending explores the role of gardens and retirement in the life of the leading eighteenth-century Bluestocking and argues that her estate at Sandleford played a crucial role in the fashioning of her identity. Aware that her garden could be framed as a site of fashion or of meditation, she demonstrates in her letters an acute and flexible response to the clashing and competing paradigms of female retirement. Montagu's correspondence with other Bluestocking women (notably her sister, Sarah Scott, and Elizabeth Carter) and with close male friends (including the Earl of Bath and Lord Lyttelton) demonstrates her manipulation of the gendered literary and cultural traditions in which her identity could be styled and defined, and shows the particular importance of pastoral, in its various modes, for a woman closely associated with spectacular urban display.

Sheila Fletcher. Victorian Girls: Lord Lyttelton ‘s Daughters. Rio Grande, Ohio: Hambledon Press. 1997. Pp. x, 249. $55.00. ISBN 1-85285-150-3.

Hagley an eloquent death Lord Lyttelton Meriel Lucy coming of age Lavinia courting inevitable change May a fall the last chapter.

Late Modern

The Industrial Revolution in Scotland. By Christopher Whatley The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III. By Diana Donald Napoleon's Jailer: Lt. Gen. Sir Hudson Lowe: A Life. By Desmond Gregory France 1814–1914. By Robert Tombs Regency England: The Age of Lord Liverpool. By John Plowright A Death‐dealing Famine: The Great Hunger in Ireland. By Christine Kinealy Victorian Chester. Edited by Roger Swift Sexualities in Victorian Britain. Edited by Andrew H. Miller and James Eli Adams Victorian Girls: Lord Lyttelton's Daughters. By Sheila Fletcher Religion and Society in England, 1850–1914. By Hugh McLeod Organizing Independence: the Artists' Federation of the Paris Commune and its Legacy, 1871–1889. By Gonzalo J. Sánchez Democratic Royalism: The Transformation of the British Monarchy, 1861–1914. By William M. Kuhn The Conservatives and British Society 1880–1990. Edited by Martin Francis and Ina Zweiniger‐Bargielowska State, Social Policy and Social Change in Germany 1880–1994. Second Edition. Edited by W. R. Lee and Eve Rosenhaft Balfour and Foreign Policy: The International Thought of a Conservative Statesman. By Jason Tomes The Modern Olympics: A Struggle for Revival. By David C. Young Nutrition in Britain: Science, Scientists and Politics in the Twentieth Century. Edited by David F. Smith A History of the British Labour Party. By Andrew Thorpe The People's Party: The History of the Labour Party. By Tony Wright and Matt Carter Metropolitan Maternity: Maternal and Infant Welfare Services in Early Twentieth Century London. By Lara V. Marks The First World War: Germany and Austria‐Hungary 1914–1918. By Holger H. Herwig Europe and Ethnicity: The First World War and Contemporary Ethnic Conflict. Edited by Seamus Dunn and T. G. Fraser Under Two Flags: The Life of Major‐General Sir Edward Spears. By Max Egremont Forging the Collective Memory: Government and International Historians through Two World Wars. Edited by Keith Wilson Austen Chamberlain and the Commitment to Europe: British Foreign Policy 1924–29. By Richard S. Grayson Resistance and Conformity in the Third Reich. By Martyn Housden Time to Kill: The Soldier's Experience of War in the West, 1939–1945. Edited by Paul Addison and Angus Calder The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp. By Wolfgang Sofsky France and Britain, 1940–1994: The Long Separation. By P. M. H. Bell Soviet Schooling in the Second World War. By J. Dunstan Commanding the Red Army's Sherman Tanks: The World War II Memoirs of Hero of the Soviet Union Dmitriy Loza. By Dmitriy Loza. Translated by James F. Gebhardt Attlee. By Robert Pearce The Cold War Reference Guide. By Richard Alan Schwartz

Feminists and Bureaucrats: A Study in the Development of Girls' Education in the Nineteenth Century

A radical measure, the Endowed Schools Act of 1869, empowered Commissioners to prise endowment from the old grammar schools and to set up, for the first time, grammar schools for girls. Sheila Fletcher shows how, in practice, such attempts met determined opposition and argues that what was actually secured for girls depended largely on the zeal and persistence of the civil servants administering the Act. The first of these, the Endowed Schools Commissioners, presided over by Gladstone's friend and relative Lord Lyttelton, were staunch supporters of Women's education, but zeal proved their undoing. In 1874 they were dismissed by the Conservatives and the working of the Act was placed in the 'safe' hands of the Charity Commissioners. Feminist concern that girls would suffer from this changeover proved well founded; their share in endowments fell sharply in the reign of the Charity Commissioners which lasted until the end of the century. Indeed, the contrast between the two Commissions highlights the extent to which progress in an area dear to the heart of the women's movement was determined by administrators.

THE LONDON LIBRARY BORROWINGS OF THOMAS CARLYLE, 1841–1844

THOMAS Carlyle's personal crusade for the opening of a lending library in London and his enlisting for the support of that cause influential and wealthy patrons such as Lord Clarendon, Bulwer‐Lytton, Lord Lyttelton, Dean Milman, Lord Houghton, W. E. Gladstone, Sir G. Cornewall Lewis, Henry Hallam—amongst a host of other now forgotten early Victorian luminaries—is well documented. According to Robert Harrison's Preface to the 1888 fifth edition of the Catalogue of the London Library, it opened on 3 May 1841 “with a collection of about 3,000 volumes, which, by the following March, when the first Catalogue was published, had increased to 13,000” (p.viii). The Library was declared formally open on 24 May 1841 using a hired hall in Pall Mall. There were 500 members. In April 1845 the Library moved to its present location in St. James's Square.

George, 1St Lord Lyttelton : His life and correspondence

George, 1St Lord Lyttelton : His life and correspondence Get access Rose M. Davis Rose M. Davis 1Crosby Hall, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, London, S.W.3 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume CLXII, Issue jan30, 30 January 1932, Page 82, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/CLXII.jan30.82c Published: 30 January 1932

Lord Lyttelton's 'History of the life of Henry the second,'

Lord Lyttelton's 'History of the life of Henry the second,' Get access G. F. R. B. G. F. R. B. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume s7-XI, Issue 274, 28 March 1891, Page 248, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s7-XI.274.248e Published: 28 March 1891

Dr. Johnstone and Lord Lyttelton

Journal Article Dr. Johnstone and Lord Lyttelton Get access Marcus Clarke Marcus Clarke Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume s5-VI, Issue 145, 7 October 1876, Page 287, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s5-VI.145.287a Published: 07 October 1876

Lord Lyttelton

Lord Lyttelton Get access Ed. Ed. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume s5-V, Issue 122, 29 April 1876, Page 341, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s5-V.122.341 Published: 29 April 1876

Lord Lyttelton's ghost

Lord Lyttelton's ghost Get access H. S. H. S. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume s5-II, Issue 52, 26 December 1874, Pages 508–509, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s5-II.52.508b Published: 26 December 1874

The dream and death of Thomas, lord Lyttelton

The dream and death of Thomas, lord Lyttelton

Remarkable dream of Thomas Lord Lyttelton

Journal Article Remarkable dream of Thomas Lord Lyttelton Get access Notes and Queries, Volume s3-II, Issue 32, 9 August 1862, Pages 107–108, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s3-II.32.107-f Published: 09 August 1862

Lord Lyttelton's vision

Lord Lyttelton's vision Get access Leek Leek Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume s2-VI, Issue 138, 21 August 1858, Pages 153–154, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s2-VI.138.153b Published: 21 September 1858

Thomas Lord Lyttelton

Journal Article Thomas Lord Lyttelton Get access Edward Y. Lowne Edward Y. Lowne Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume s2-III, Issue 66, 4 April 1857, Page 270, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s2-III.66.270b Published: 04 April 1857

Was Thomas Lord Lyttelton the author of Junius's letters?

Was Thomas Lord Lyttelton the author of Junius's letters?