Stephen Duck Research Articles

Scribleriana Transferred: Portraits, Manuscripts, and Books, 2020–2022.

Scribleriana Transferred: Portraits, Manuscripts, and Books, 2020–2022.

A People's History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland, 1689 to 1939

A People's History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland, 1689 to 1939

Teaching Laboring-Class British Literature of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Ed. Kevin Binfield and William J. Christmas.

In this volume of MLA’s Options for Teachings series, the editors explain their use of “laboring class”: it captures the “plurality and diversity” of experiences and authors, such as “women and authors of African descent.” “Laboring class” is denoted by “material reality” and “world view,” yet delineations should examine “the blurring of class lines” and “changes in an author’s material circumstances,” which will “enrich our understanding” of “dominant heuristic categories, of gender, race, and empire.” Even though the editors eschew imposing a laboring-class canon, certain names reappear, such as John Clare, Stephen Duck, and Mary Leapor. Nonetheless, these categories as well as varied authors and texts, perhaps unfamiliar to some instructors, are demonstrated amply in the selection of essays.Gender, Moyra Haslett suggests, functions as a “heuristic category” in Mary Leapor’s “Crumble Hall,” “Essay on Woman,” and “Man the Monarch.” In accounts of African descent and labor such as Briton Hammon’s A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, A Negro Man (1760), Vincent Carretta argues, authors “position themselves rhetorically as strangers in strange lands to comment on the society [in which] they found themselves.” James Simmons explores relations between laboring-class and canonical writings.Theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, Henri Lefebvre, and Michel de Certeau are invoked as offering means to theorize everyday life. One minor quibble: the editors state that “laboring class writers do not fit tidily into overarching literary or intellectual paradigms,” which is why “none of the essays” utilizes “classical Marxism.” Yet surely “intellectual paradigms” of the sort Marx has provided for almost two centuries could stimulate students’ “reflection,” as called for by the editors, in interrogating the origins, tendencies, and models of economic inequality. A second quibble: although the volume title would suggest an equal number of essays on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century figures, it tilts heavily toward the latter period. There is thus little here of interest for eighteenth-century instructors.

Jennifer Batt, Class, Patronage, and Poetry in Hanoverian England: Stephen Duck, the Famous Threshing Poet

Jennifer Batt, <i>Class, Patronage, and Poetry in Hanoverian England: Stephen Duck, the Famous Threshing Poet</i>

Annual Bibliography of Works about Life Writing, 2020

Annual Bibliography of Works about Life Writing, 2020 Zoë E. Sprott Books Ammann, Carole. Women, Agency, and the State in Guinea: Silent Politics. Routledge, 2020. Examines how women in Guinea articulate themselves politically within and outside institutional politics, and documents the everyday practices that local female actors adopt to deal with the continuous economic, political, and social insecurities that emerge in times of political transformation. Arfuch, Leonor. Memory and Autobiography: Explorations at the Limits. Polity Press, 2020. Examines the place of the subject and the role of biographical and autobiographical genres in contemporary cultures to reveal how challenging it is to represent traumas and violence, as well as how necessary that representation is as a political strategy for combating the tides of forgetting and for finding ways of being in common. Batt, Jennifer. Class, Patronage, and Poetry in Hanoverian England: Stephen Duck, The Famous Threshing Poet. Oxford English Monographs, Oxford UP, 2020. Presents an account of Stephen Duck's life, work, and place in literary culture, encompassing new developments in laboring class writing, Hanoverian court culture, and eighteenth-century literature. Draws on contemporary archival sources, including eighteenth-century newspapers and magazines; manuscript verse and letters; and books and pamphlets. Beers, Carla van. Diary 1944: A Return Ticket to the Past. Historisch Onderzoeksbureau De Huisdetective, 2020. Unfolds the hidden history of an anonymous diary found in a display cabinet in a second-hand shop in The Hague, and weaves together two narratives: the historical tale of life in rural England during the Second World War and the tale of an artist's quest as an urban Dutch detective on the diarist's trail. Belsey, Alex. Image of a Man: The Journal of Keith Vaughan. Liverpool UP, 2020. Provides a comprehensive critical reading of Vaughan's journal, and offers a sustained argument on the constructed nature of the "artist" persona in early and mid-twentieth-century culture—and the opportunities afforded by journal and diary forms to make such constructions possible. Bradley Smith, Susan. A Splendid Adventure: Australian Suffrage Theatre on the World Stage. Peter Lang, 2020. Spotlights the experiences and experiments of suffrage feminists in Australian theatre and their contribution to the development of international women's theatre of the period. Brozgal, Lia. Absent the Archive: Cultural Traces of a Massacre in Paris, 17 October 1961. Liverpool UP, 2020. Presents the first cultural history devoted to literary and visual representations of the police massacre of peaceful Algerian protesters, based on stories about the massacre that have survived over time, and discusses how they have been told and their functions as both documentary and aesthetic objects. Conn, Robert. Bolívar's Afterlife in the Americas: Biography, Ideology, and the Public Sphere. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Examines the afterlives of Simón Bolívar in the Americas, focusing on Venezuela, Colombia, the United States, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, Mexico, and Cuba, and studies Bolívar as a rich site for questions of political and cultural identity, nationalism, race, and governance. Cooke, Jennifer. Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing: The New Audacity. Cambridge UP, 2020. Analyzes the "new audacity" of recent feminist writings from life, which are characterized by boldness in both style and content, willingness to explore difficult and disturbing experiences, the refusal of victimhood, and a lack of respect for traditional genre boundaries. Daly Carr, Jo Ann, editor. Such Anxious Hours: Wisconsin Women's Voices from the Civil War. U of Wisconsin P, 2020. Places messages from women to soldiers during the Civil War in historical context, detailing what was happening simultaneously in the nation, state, and local communities. Decker, William Merrill. Geographies of Flight: Phillis Wheatley to Octavia Butler. Northwestern UP, 2020. Provides a comprehensive treatment of the ways African American authors across three centuries have confronted the predicament of inhabiting space under conditions of structural oppression, and examines how, in testifying to those conditions, black authors have transformed a national cartography that reflects white supremacist assumptions. Dekker, Rudolf. Plagiarism, Fraud and Whitewashing: The Grey Turn in the History of the German Occupation of the Netherlands, 1940– 1945. Panchaud, 2020. Discusses two problems in Dutch history writing: plagiarism and other forms of academic misconduct, and the current "gray" view of the Netherlands during the...

Jennifer Batt. Class, Patronage, and Poetry in Hanoverian England: Stephen Duck, the Famous Threshing Poet

<scp>Jennifer Batt</scp>. <i>Class, Patronage, and Poetry in Hanoverian England: Stephen Duck, the Famous Threshing Poet</i>

Stephen Duck, Hoby Stanley and Sarah Stanley (Nee Sloane)

Stephen Duck, Hoby Stanley and Sarah Stanley (Nee Sloane)

The Review of English Studies Prize Essay * 'It Ought not to be Lost to the World': The Transmission and Consumption of Eighteenth-Century Lyric Verse

‘The Midsummer Wish’ is a rather ordinary lyric poem, an unremarkable example of the retirement mode featuring generic diction and uncontroversial subject matter, and lacking a famous author, political edge, satirical bite or much in the way of sexual tension. Yet despite its apparent ordinariness, this poem had a remarkable existence in the eighteenth century: it was reproduced at least fifty times in newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, miscellanies and songbooks, and in broadside and slip-song format. It was copied into manuscript miscellanies, set to music, performed on stage, and alluded to in satirical prints. It attracted the attention of scholars and poets, it was abridged and bowdlerized, and it became tangled up in a Jacobite scandal. It was attributed, at various points, to an anonymous dead student, Stephen Duck, George Granville, Samuel Croxall, and Thomas Chatterton. Tracing the publication and reception of ‘The Midsummer Wish’, this article explores what this remarkable story might reveal about the landscape of eighteenth-century poetic culture.

Literary Technique, the Aestheticization of Laboring Experience, and Generic Experimentation in Stephen Duck's The Thresher's Labour

Literary Technique, the Aestheticization of Laboring Experience, and Generic Experimentation in Stephen Duck's The Thresher's Labour Steve Van-Hagen The year 2005 was the tri-centennial of the birth of Stephen Duck, the "thresher poet" of Wiltshire accorded patronage by Queen Caroline after the success of poems including The Thresher's Labour and The Shunamite (both 1730). The year 2006, meanwhile, is the 250th anniversary of his (probable) suicide in a river behind a Reading tavern. These anniversaries, coupled with the recent surge of interest in Duck and other laboring-class poets make this an appropriate moment to reexamine his most celebrated and discussed individual work.1 The Thresher's Labour is believed to have been composed third of Duck's extant poems2 (after "To a Gentleman, who requested a Copy of Verses from the Author" and "On Poverty," and immediately before the biblical-historical The Shunamite).3 Even now, these, as well as other significant poems, such as "On Richmond Park, and Royal Gardens," A Description of a Journey to Marlborough, Bath, Portsmouth, &c. (both 1736),4 Every Man in his own Way: An Epistle to a Friend (1741), and the prospect poem Caesar's Camp (1755), are often read (if at all) for the light they shed on The Thresher's Labour and its author. Despite Joseph Spence's view that The Shunamite was his finest poem,5 Duck's biographer Rose Mary Davis calls The Thresher's Labour "the best poem" he wrote,6 adding, "critics are almost unanimous in placing this poem, from the point of view of merit, at the head of Duck's works."7 Commentators in the eighty years since her assessment have tended to agree, or if they have not always been concerned with aesthetics, nonetheless often concur that The Thresher's Labour is Duck's most noteworthy work. As John Goodridge has written with reference to laboring-class poets in general, "one thing these writers have rarely been allowed to be is poets . . . Historically, the considerable interest there has been in labouring-class [End Page 421] poetry has not always extended to a recognition of literary merit."8 Yet a number of recent treatments of the poem have focused anew on its "literary" and formal achievements.9 In the wake of these readings, some of which concentrate on the relationship of The Thresher's Labour to existing genres such as georgic and pastoral,10 the aim of the present essay is to plot the poem's attempts to reconcile laboring-class experiences with verse, with reference to poetic mediums, techniques, and genres. The Thresher's Labour was composed when one of Duck's patrons, Rev. Stanley, suggested that he write about the life he knew.11 As a necessary part of doing so, a laboring-class poetic voice and a mode of writing about labor that dominates the poem emerged. In enabling the representation of experiences, this mode fosters an informal, confidential tone of friend to friend rather than of poet to public.12 It tends to produce narrative, descriptive verse, describing the vigorous performance of physical labor and depicting labor and laborer with respect and dignity. It does not just describe everyday objects or processes, however, but mimetically evokes the sights and sounds of physical labor. This mode is interested in physical objects as they are rooted in a world of sights, sounds, and smells, yet is suspended within the amber of neoclassical versification (the heroic couplet), and mingles specific everyday and colloquial terms with a familiar neoclassical poetic medium. In advancing these arguments through a detailed close reading, I will also be concerned to suggest that whereas The Thresher's Labour has long been defined in terms of being either pastoral or georgic, there are good grounds for arguing that it should be considered generically distinct. II The heroic couplets in which The Thresher's Labour is written were, as critics including J. Paul Hunter and Margaret Anne Doody have observed, the dominant medium of their time.13 As Bridget Keegan has argued, laboring-class poets were particularly influenced by the couplet's greatest practitioner, Alexander Pope (and other canonical figures who regularly used the couplet...

&lt;span xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" style="font-style:italic;"&gt;The Stamp of Class: Reflections on Poetry &amp;amp; Social Class&lt;/span&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: The Stamp of Class: Reflections on Poetry & Social Class Emily Bobo The Stamp of Class: Reflections on Poetry & Social Class. Gary Lenhart. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006. xviii + 152 pp. $19.95 (paper). Poet and critic Gary Lenhart offers an accessible and engaging critical look at poetry and social class in his new book, The Stamp of Class: Reflections on Poetry & Social Class, building upon his earlier pedagogical work in the 1998 The Teachers & Writers Guide to William Carlos Williams. As Lenhart clearly and honestly shows, class in poetry is complicated by education, connection, employment, income, language, form, publication, location, subject, and a myriad of other daily choices such as whether one drinks beer from the bottle or a can. Lenhart socially examines representative poems from what one might call the State of Poetry—what Jed Rasula defines as “the world of poetry” (Lenhart 3) in the American Poetry Wax Museum in 1996 and what Lenhart redefines here as “the poetry scene in the United States” in 2006 (3). Lenhart essentially asks whether or not this poetic State or scene is an equal opportunity reader. Chapters such as “The ‘Uneducated Poets,’” “Caviar and Cabbage,” “A Song for Occupations,” and “Literary Men in Blue Jeans” expose a cultural tension between class relationships, education, and/or occupation. Lenhart identifies himself as “an experienced reader of poetry who has learned to appreciate the classics of our culture despite the xenophobia, misogyny, racism, and class bias that infect them” (114). His book more than sufficiently backs up this large occupational claim, but Lenhart also stresses, through multifarious examples, just how difficult a claim this is for him, or anyone from a lower-class background, to make, because of cultural issues related to class. As New York City poet Ron Padgett told Lenhart in an interview, “large claims imply a presumption of authority. Lower-class people think that they don’t have any authority. Maybe subconsiously they feel that they shouldn’t have any authority. . . . If they did, why are [End Page 75] they near the bottom of the social ladder?” (106–7). Citing class culture as a prohibiting factor, Lenhart offers a counteractive measure to break this cycle: education. At first glance, Lenhart’s solution seems to veer dangerously close to a maxim toted by politicians across the United States: knowledge is power; education leads to success; no child left behind. Thankfully a scholar and not a politician, Lenhart refuses to accept or offer such easy answers. Education may be freely available to the American and poetic publics, but, as Lenhart’s examples attest, acceptance of this offer can carry a high cost. Poets such as Stephen Duck, Mary Leapor, Mary Collier, and Ann Yearsley were initially prized for the novelty of their origins (i.e., milkwoman), their colloquial language usages (i.e., “not worth a straw”), and choices of subject (i.e., manual labor); however, these poets were ultimately discouraged from leaping class categories through education, station, or occupation. They could be successful only as long as their verse retained the markers of a lower economic status. Over the course of his lifetime, Melvin Tolson, an African American poet, too, was criticized: both for being too pedantic and “rural” as well as too “white” in his elitist, high modernist verse. Lenhart uses examples such as these to expose the often contradictory and even hypocritical attitudes of readers within the State of Poetry toward both poetic occupation and education. Lenhart makes less obvious, and equally valid, connections, however, between distorted versus necessary autobiographical and sociopolitical content in chapters like “Poor Doc, Nobody Wants His Life or His Verses” and “Special Handling,” both chapters that hold special interest for readers of William Carlos Williams, particularly for those readers of Paterson. Lenhart’s argument here is against New Critical approaches. Lenhart points out the class bias in a reader’s refusal to allow a poet’s autobiography, particularly when it affects perceptions of his/her social and economic class, to color readings of a work. Lenhart employs John Ashberry’s term “special handling” to refer to work that requires some “previous adjustment” or “tuning” (Ashberry 95, qtd. in Lenhart 47) such...

From the Field to the Coffeehouse: Changing Representations of Stephen Duck

The natural habitat of Stephen Duck is often assumed to be fields and barns of his native Wiltshire. Duck is frequently referred to as thresher poet and is chiefly remembered for a single poem, The Thresher's Labour, which he wrote inl729orl730 when he was employed as an agricultural laborer in Wiltshire.1 The Thresher's Labour depicts yearly cycle of endless Toils that an agricultural laborer must endure: threshing Wheat, Barley, and Pease through autumn and winter; mowing and haymaking in spring and summer months; and reaping and collecting ripen'd Harvest at end of summer.2 The first-person narrative of the Year's revolving Course and rep etition of personal pronouns we, us, and our situate speaker of The Thresher's Labour, often identified with Duck, within landscape of fields and barns that he describes:

Duck, Collier, and the Ideology of Verse Forms

Do verse forms have ideologies? Stephen Duck's unwitting affirmation of the current socioeconomic order in "The Thresher's Labour" seems to imply that the heroic couplet has a necessary connection to a hierarchical and authoritative universe, just as scholars have implied for decades. But at his better moments, Duck uses the couplet to convey rather than betray his class-based anguish. These moments of control suggest what Mary Collier's more consistent success in "The Woman's Labour" more forcefully supports: the most dominant verse form of the eighteenth century does not have an essential ideology. The two poems remind us that though verse forms can support powerful patterns and tendencies, their meanings must be derived from actual practice.

Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property by Wolfram Schmidgen

73 Eighteenth-Century English LabouringClass Poets: 1700–1800, 3 volumes, ed. John Goodridge. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003. Pp. xl ⫹ xxxvi ⫹ xl ⫹ 1288. $420. The need for a comprehensive anthology of laboring poets has been clearsince 1973, when Raymond Williams incorporated a number of them into the argument of The Country and the City. Roger Lonsdale brought forward a fascinating representation of them in his New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse (1984) and Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (1989). However, the subsequent study of poets outside the canon has generally concentrated on women. Mr. Goodridge’s Introduction reminds us that, in the past, poets of the laboring class, when mentioned,haveusuallybeen absorbed into various agendas as ‘‘peasant poets,’’ ‘‘natural geniuses,’’ and ‘‘uneducated poets’’: ‘‘They have been repeatedly invoked in cultural and political debate, whether as pawns in the game of patronly power-broking, literary noveltyacts , or as ‘natural’ homegrown versions of the ‘noble savage.’For some, theyhave been exemplars of the virtues of hard work and self-reliance; for others, they offer evidence of proletarian resistance and cultural vitality.’’ These writers, Mr. Goodridge commonsensically notes, have rarely been considered in their own right as poets. A few of these poets are outstanding— Stephen Duck, Mary Leapor, James Woodhouse, and Robert Burns (granted a cameo). Many are merely good, and their work, at best, distinctive. Some, such as Edward Ward, Edward Chicken, Robert Tatersal, Mary Collier, and Elizabeth Hands, produced truly remarkable poems. For readers who actually care about eighteenth-centurypoetry,andwho resent the vulgarreductionofitsliterature to just a half-dozen major figures, these volumes should be read carefully. The anthology is sensitive to the aesthetics of eighteenth-century poetry, but Mr. Goodridge and his colleagues see their work not merely as a late gleaning of solitary talents: ‘‘The fifty or so poets whose work is brought together here represent not only individual voices and histories , but a tradition of writing that was an integral part of the eighteenth-century literary scene.’’In the Introductions to the volumes, the editors consider the origins, achievements, functions,andreceptionof this kind of verse. They recover a vast number of largely neglected works and their contexts. Poets could disagreewidely on almost any topic. The tradition is one of poetic practice, but not of creed or outlook. There are a few odd choices. Chatterton , who was not truly of the laboring class, appears as an influence upon the tradition; Crabbe, who was brought up in desperate poverty, is excluded. However, the value in this anthology is not the reprinting of poems easily obtainable elsewhere , but the recuperation of unknown poems by the likes of Brimble, Shaw, Aram, Elliott, and Freeth. Mr. Goodridge and his colleagues haveperformedagreat labor; we are all in their debt. Richard Greene University of Toronto WOLFRAM SCHMIDGEN. Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2002. Pp. vii ⫹ 266. £45. This book will interest readers concerned with the novel or with Marxisttheory . Mr. Schmidgen usefully redirects attention to description in the novel, description having been relatively neglected by modern criticsmorefascinated 74 with narration. He considers novelistic description of places, especially estates, and of things. Thus, he offers a chapter on Robinson Crusoe’s island, one on Paradise Hall in Tom Jones, then a more miscellaneous one on the objects Crusoe retrieves from the ship wreck and ‘‘itnarratives ’’ including The History and Adventures of a Lady’s Slippers and Shoes and objects in sentimental narratives . The book concludes with chapters on landscape and houses in Radcliffe and on the Bradwardine estate in Scott’sWaverley . Landed property was still the major source of political, social, and economic power in the eighteenth century. In contrast to others who have recently emphasized the capitalist commodity as the most significant force shaping identity in the period, Mr. Schmidgen arguesthatthe eighteenth century was a transitional period between feudalism and capitalism and that communal forms, especially the manor, in which identity was embedded in land and its attendant social relations, continued to shape novelistic constructions of identity. Allworthy’s Paradise Hall is such a place. Allworthy’s combining the roles of land owner and magistrate effaces the Lockean distinctionbetween public and private. Mr. Schmidgen reads the narrator’s studied refusal...

Eighteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets: 1700–1800 ed. by John Goodridge

73 Eighteenth-Century English LabouringClass Poets: 1700–1800, 3 volumes, ed. John Goodridge. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003. Pp. xl ⫹ xxxvi ⫹ xl ⫹ 1288. $420. The need for a comprehensive anthology of laboring poets has been clearsince 1973, when Raymond Williams incorporated a number of them into the argument of The Country and the City. Roger Lonsdale brought forward a fascinating representation of them in his New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse (1984) and Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (1989). However, the subsequent study of poets outside the canon has generally concentrated on women. Mr. Goodridge’s Introduction reminds us that, in the past, poets of the laboring class, when mentioned,haveusuallybeen absorbed into various agendas as ‘‘peasant poets,’’ ‘‘natural geniuses,’’ and ‘‘uneducated poets’’: ‘‘They have been repeatedly invoked in cultural and political debate, whether as pawns in the game of patronly power-broking, literary noveltyacts , or as ‘natural’ homegrown versions of the ‘noble savage.’For some, theyhave been exemplars of the virtues of hard work and self-reliance; for others, they offer evidence of proletarian resistance and cultural vitality.’’ These writers, Mr. Goodridge commonsensically notes, have rarely been considered in their own right as poets. A few of these poets are outstanding— Stephen Duck, Mary Leapor, James Woodhouse, and Robert Burns (granted a cameo). Many are merely good, and their work, at best, distinctive. Some, such as Edward Ward, Edward Chicken, Robert Tatersal, Mary Collier, and Elizabeth Hands, produced truly remarkable poems. For readers who actually care about eighteenth-centurypoetry,andwho resent the vulgarreductionofitsliterature to just a half-dozen major figures, these volumes should be read carefully. The anthology is sensitive to the aesthetics of eighteenth-century poetry, but Mr. Goodridge and his colleagues see their work not merely as a late gleaning of solitary talents: ‘‘The fifty or so poets whose work is brought together here represent not only individual voices and histories , but a tradition of writing that was an integral part of the eighteenth-century literary scene.’’In the Introductions to the volumes, the editors consider the origins, achievements, functions,andreceptionof this kind of verse. They recover a vast number of largely neglected works and their contexts. Poets could disagreewidely on almost any topic. The tradition is one of poetic practice, but not of creed or outlook. There are a few odd choices. Chatterton , who was not truly of the laboring class, appears as an influence upon the tradition; Crabbe, who was brought up in desperate poverty, is excluded. However, the value in this anthology is not the reprinting of poems easily obtainable elsewhere , but the recuperation of unknown poems by the likes of Brimble, Shaw, Aram, Elliott, and Freeth. Mr. Goodridge and his colleagues haveperformedagreat labor; we are all in their debt. Richard Greene University of Toronto WOLFRAM SCHMIDGEN. Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2002. Pp. vii ⫹ 266. £45. This book will interest readers concerned with the novel or with Marxisttheory . Mr. Schmidgen usefully redirects attention to description in the novel, description having been relatively neglected by modern criticsmorefascinated ...

"'To Sing the Toils of Each Revolving Year': Song and Poetic Authority in Stephen Duck's 'The Thresher's Labour'"

"'To Sing the Toils of Each Revolving Year': Song and Poetic Authority in Stephen Duck's 'The Thresher's Labour'"

Editor's Note

Editor's Note The directions of scholarship in eighteenth-century studies are quite exciting, as the essays in this volume suggest. These pieces, all presented at a regional or national meeting of the American Society for EighteenthCentury Studies, draw on unusual archival materials, discuss a variety of non-"literary" or extra-textual materials, employ new theoretical approaches, or offer innovative discussions of canonical texts. Like our field of study, which embraces multiple disciplines, this volume creates vibrant conversation, a heterogeneous mix of approaches, texts, and languages. The "novel" as a genre remains a dominant focus, and a number of essays in this volume offer new perspectives on the genre or new readings of canonical texts. Neil Saccamano reads dramatizations of sentimental attachments in relation to discussions of political authority in Laclos 's Les Liaisons dangereuses. Barbara Benedict explores the ways early advertising discourse, like early fiction of Eliza Haywood and Daniel Defoe, commodifies desire, and the implications of that parallel on the novel. In her discussion of Burney's Cecilia, Susan Greenfield redefines "madness" as a kind of heroic quixotism, and explores the interesting intersections between madness and imagination. The connection between prison reform efforts and the English Jacobin novel is the focus of Alexander Pitofsky's essay. Though Casanova's Histoire de ma vie is not a novel, that autobiography is often compared to one; within the text, suggests Ted Emery, Casanova critiques the novel's construction of feminine subjectivity. Laurence Mall distinguishes the tragic exoticism of the Abbé Prévost's Histoire de M. Cleveland'from the ancillary exoticism of the baroque novel that preceded it and the aesthetically charged exoticism of the Romantics that followed. These pieces share a concern with situating fictional discourses into a wider cultural field. A number of essays use unusual or little-known sources or materials. Melissa Downes discusses The Jamaica Lady, a novel published long ago in William McBurney 's Four Before Richardson (1963) but infrequently discussed since. She reveals how deeply imbricated the conversation about the West Indies—both in terms of finance and race—is with the anxieties emerging from the South Sea Bubble. April Shelford similarly focuses on the Caribbean as the context for her discussion of an unidentified eighteenth- xii / Editor's Note century British sailor's previously uncovered journal and the journals of Edward Thompson. Laura Schattschneider examines the narratives implicitly created by "tokens"—or "infant's petitions"— left with foundlings at the foundling hospital, and their intersections with contemporaneous novels. These three essays demonstrate how archival work and unusual sources invigorate our discipline. The volume also includes essays that explore notions of "author"-ity. Geoffrey Turnovsky suggests how the dystopic representation of commercial publishing and so-called "marginal" writers redefine both the literary marketplace and the construction of authorship in eighteenth-century France. Discussing the poetry of Stephen Duck, James Mulholland examines the use of singing, as differentiated from other types of orality, and its relation to class, gender, and poetic authority in the pastoral. Caroline Weber explores the representations of statuary in eighteenth-century French painting and literature, and focuses on their implications for subjectivity, sociability, and gender. Samuel Johnson's commitment in his moral writing to the ancient Stoic and Baconian principle that learning and happiness derive from attempting difficulties and registering mistakes is the subject of Jeffrey Barnouw's essay. George Haggerty reconsiders the correspondence between Horace Walpole and William Cole, usually considered in terms of antiquarianism, in terms of homosocial interaction. Finally, the volume contains a cluster of essays that meditate on "beauty" in the eighteenth century. The first three of these four essays were drawn from the 32nd annual meeting of the Midwestern ASECS which was organized around the theme of beauty. Downing Thomas, program chair, hoped to encourage the discussion of eighteenth-century creations and preoccupations within the aesthetic frameworks of the period, but also in light of recent critical concerns with the category of the aesthetic and the renewed interest in beauty that has emerged at the turn of the millennium. All three essays from the conference frame the recent return of interest in beauty in light of the complex discourses that grappled with the subject throughout the...

The Lab'ring Muses: Work, Writing, and the Social Order in English Plebeian Poetry, 1730-1830 by William J. Christmas (review)

MLR, 98.4, 2003 969 of Johnson's anxious pulling of strings to secure the release of Frank Barber, his black servant, from the navy (whether he wanted to leave or not). That Johnson strongly supported many women intellectuals of his time is clear and important; that this support was far from universal, was qualified by some very conservative views, and sometimes concealed a sexual component, needs to be acknowledged also. Johnson was an outspoken opponent of slavery, but nowhere more so than in the pamphlet in which he attacked the American colonists' opposition to the Crown. To look back at Johnson looking both forward and back is certainly to imagine his continuing force in the future, and at its best this book tries to do more than make Johnson our contemporary, or consign him to a dispiriting process of redemption through historicization. All the essays 'keep past and present in reciprocal play' (p. 12) in a way of which Johnson would have approved. He might, however, have expressed some scepticism about the book's needlessly embattled stance?and about its unnecessarily ugly title. University of Liverpool Paul Baines The Lab'ring Muses: Work, Writing,and the Social Order in English Plebeian Poetry, 1730-1830. By William J. Christmas. Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2001. 364 pp. ?44. ISBN o874i3 -747-oInitial reaction to the title of this book will inevitably be slightly negative?is there indeed room for yet another analysis of that peculiarly eighteenth-century preoccu? pation with writers described in their own times as variously 'illiterate', 'primitive', 'uneducated', or, less often and more positively, 'self-taught'? Any new assessment will need both a fresh approach and new information to be of value. William Christmas seeks to provide both; he has seen what he believes to be a clear development during the period in the production and reception of this writing which has not previously been identified; and he adds to the familiar list some names which are not so well known, and whose work tends to support his thesis?that although, as so many people have maintained, 'class' in the Marxist sense did not exist in the eighteenth century, a kind of proto-class-consciousness, its early glimmerings , can be perceived to be developing in the relations between those he calls 'plebeian' poets and their patrons. 'I seek', he says, 'to identify a range of discursive currents within eighteenth-century print culture, and within English plebeian poetry in particular, that became the raw material out of which "class" would be explicitly articulated and defined in the nineteenth century' (p. 51); and he later asserts that the 'critical task, as I see it,is to situate these poets and their work within relevant cultural/ historical contexts in order to come to terms with the extent of their participation in counter-hegemonic practice' (p. 62). The rest of the book attempts, in four more chapters and an epilogue, to demon? strate how relative submission to the patron's agenda in the early part of the period gave way to a growing confidence and sense of literary self-worth in mid-century, which itself led to downright confrontation towards the end; he provides detailed ac? counts ofthe careers of sixteen poets from Stephen Duck in the 1730s, through poets like Mary Leapor and Elizabeth Hands in mid-century, to Ann Yearsley, Robert Bloomfield, and John Clare in the later period, who relied upon supporters with some kind of influence to get their work into print. Their experience, he suggests, demonstrates the developmental curve that he has in mind. The danger with such a tight schema is that readers, especially those in any degree familiar with the material, will become distracted by reflection on the acceptability 970 Reviews of what inevitably looks like generalization or partiality. I guarantee that practically every reader will want to adduce some exception or call in question some statement. Fortunately, however, the author's very evident knowledge and enthusiasm diminish this objection: in the event he does not become so imprisoned by his thesis as his firstchapter seems to predict; his accounts of these complex relationships are lively and readable (I...

Georgic Transformations and Stephen Duck's "The Thresher's Labour"

No early-eighteenth-century poet sweated more, both in and about his poetry, than Stephen Duck. 1 A glance at 'The Thresher's Labour reveals five descriptions of sweating in this 283-line poem. This perspiration was a necessary by-product of arduous manual labor that forms text's central subject. Moreover, such sweat has typically been read as a sign of authenticity of experience, a category which has allowed critics to classify Duck as a minor poet and poem as a paraliterary phenomenon. Although even Raymond Williams has tried to rescue Duck's name from its 'limiting' associations, Williams's strategy is ultimately similar to those who have been responsible for initial limiting of Duck's relevance.2 Williams argues for poem's simple power heard behind the strain of this labourer's voice.3 As such, Williams marshals same standard of documentary accuracy that has impeded sustained analyses of poem's literary (and not just historical) attributes and achievements. Because he was involved in manual labor, critics for nearly three centuries have found themselves profoundly uneasy in approaching seriously Duck's poetic labors.

Georgic Transformations and Stephen Duck's "The Thresher's Labour"

Georgic Transformations and Stephen Duck's "The Thresher's Labour"

Enclosure and Taxonomy in John Clare

In the preface to his 1840 Canadian Naturalist, P. H. Gosse referred to the rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada that had been quelled just before he published his work: [Canada] is here presented in light on which there can be no clashing of opinion, no discordancy of sentiment: the smiling face of Nature, the harmony and beauty of the works of God, may be turned to by men of all parties as refreshing relief from the stern conflict of political warfare.' Gosse's confident separation of powers-human from nonhuman, political from natural-is one that John Clare, writing around the same time, was destined to dispute. Even the title page of his first book, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1821), identified the author as 'John Clare the Northamptonshire Peasant.2 Not only did Clare thus receive from the start both topographical and social gloss, but he also promised to address the human community indisseverably from its environment. Elizabeth Helsinger has pointed out that Clare's binomial label peasant-poet constitutes a contradiction in terms from the perspective of English literary history.3 Of course, figures as different as Stephen Duck and Robert Burns had preceded Clare as peasant-poets. Nevertheless, Clare complicated the terms of this discordia concors by his aspiration to be, like Gosse, natural historian. His poems Remembrances, The mores and [The Badger] execute thought experiments exploring the implications and impasses of taxonomies, some of them scientific, that advantaged and obstructed writer who was defined from the start by the intersection of class and locality. Clare diagnoses the dynamism of classificatory systems-