Thomas Day Research Articles

Possible Sources for Thomas Day’s Depictions of the Enslaved

Possible Sources for Thomas Day’s Depictions of the Enslaved

Abolishing Cruelty: The Concurrent Growth of Anti‐Slavery and Animal Welfare Sentiment in British and Colonial Literature

AbstractThis article argues that anti‐slavery and animal welfare writers actively and concurrently extended the boundaries of sympathy to promote an anti‐cruelty ethos that encompassed both suffering animals and suffering people and demanded that this shift in sensibilities be enshrined in legislation. It charts this from the 1680s to the 1770s in pamphlets and novels by Thomas Tryon, Sarah Scott, Humphrey Primatt and Laurence Sterne, before exploring parallel early nineteenth‐century debates over bull‐baiting and the abolition of slavery in texts by Thomas Day, Percival Stockdale and Elizabeth Heyrick.

The nonhuman turn and the body in the Anthropocene in Thomas Day’s Seven Seconds to Become an Eagle

Reading Thomas Day’s Seven Seconds to Become an Eagle (2013), this article shows how the human body distinguishes itself from the nonhuman and then how the nonhuman turn inaugurates the emancipatory imagination in the Anthropocene. Many studies of the Anthropocene have approached the problem from a global and universalizing perspective, overlooking problems of race, sex, and class. Few have looked at the material agency of nature or animism. Current ecological crises have revealed the vulnerability and permeability of the human body. Day’s stories reveal trans-corporeality and deconstruct ontological divisions between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, in the process showing the human failure to control nature. Most strikingly trans-corporeal in his stories is the hybridity of the animal skin and the human blood. This article argues that animism is a powerful theoretical weapon not only for deconstructing human exceptionalism but for re-imagining human and nonhuman relationships.

Habeas corpus and the Politics of Freedom: Slavery and Romantic Suicide

This essay sets Thomas Day and John Bicknell's poem The Dying Negro (1773) against the 1772 trial Somerset v. Stewart, which won a slave his freedom through a successful appeal for a writ of habeas corpus. Day and Bicknell, the essay argues, transform the triumph of habeas corpus into the tragedy of suicide in order to draw attention to paradoxes in Enlightenment liberalism's conception of freedom—paradoxes largely rooted in Lockean notions of property and personhood. Such a reading enables us to view The Dying Negro as central to ongoing reassessments not only of slavery, but also of the cultural meaning of suicide, which takes on a political tenor largely by way of Day and Bicknell's poem. By tracing how the law is made to echo through poetry, the essay finally suggests that sentimentalist abolitionism offers an important context within which to interpret Romanticism's fascination with the subject of suicide.

Thomas Day: Portrait of a Gentleman

Thomas Day: Portrait of a Gentleman

Review: Thomas Day: Master Craftsman and Free Man of Color by Patricia Phillips Marshall, Jo Ramsey Leimenstoll

Patricia Phillips Marshall and Jo Ramsey Leimenstoll Thomas Day: Master Craftsman and Free Man of Color . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010, 320 pp., 20 color and 243 b/w illus. $40, ISBN 9780807833414 In 1850 Thomas Day, a free man of color, owned the most successful cabinetmaking shop in the state of North Carolina. In their book Thomas Day: Master Craftsman and Free Man of Color , Patricia Phillips Marshall and Jo Ramsey Leimenstoll outline the unique life of this artist, who was an anomaly in this region. They examine the idiosyncrasies of Day's style of furniture and architectural woodwork, which made him so sought after by the elite white population of the Dan River region of North Carolina and Virginia. To unravel the personal and professional history of an extraordinary man of the antebellum South, the authors make extensive use of primary source materials, such as census records, correspondence, real estate records, pattern books, and advertisements in local newspapers, as well as numerous examples of Thomas Day's works, many of which appear in this richly illustrated book. Marshall and Leimenstoll set Day's life story and professional output within the larger political, social, and cultural climate of North Carolina during the three decades preceding the Civil War. They argue that Thomas Day was able to achieve his great success, and amass a large fortune, despite his race through a combination of business acumen, hard work, and immense talent, …

Talking Animals in British Children's Fiction, 1786–1914, and: Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse (review)

Reviewed by: Talking Animals in British Children's Fiction, 1786-1914, and: Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse Zoe Jaques (bio) Tess Cosslet , Talking Animals in British Children's Fiction, 1786–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) 205 pages, hardback, £45 (ISBN 0 7546 3656 9); Gina M. Dorré , Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) 179 pages, hardback, £47.50 (ISBN 0 7546 5515 6). The nineteenth century saw a significant rise in animal-welfare groups, including the SPCA in 1824 and the anti-vivisectionist Victoria League in 1876, a cause supported by Lewis Carroll's Some Popular Fallacies about Vivisection (1875). The emergence of ecocritical and post-human theory has led to a renewed interest in the place of animals in this period. Although differently positioned in their relation to post-humanism, Tess Cosslett's Talking Animals in British Children's Fiction, 1786–1914and Gina M. Dorré's Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse are both clearly influenced by animal-rights agendas and work to complicate naturalised relationships between humans and animals. While Cosslett is more interested in animals themselves, Dorré focuses on how animals relate to human identities. [End Page 354] Across six chronologically ordered chapters, and in what is essentially a series of readings of grouped and paired texts, Cosslett critiquesa range of work from Rousseau's Émile (1762) to Grahame's The Windin the Willows (1908). In her opening chapter, Cosslett sees SarahTrimmer's An Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature (1770) as standing out from other late eighteenth-century works (such as Thomas Day's Sandford and Merton (1783–9), Mary Wollstonecraft's Original Stories from Real Life (1788), and Anna Barbauld and John Aikin's Evenings at Home (1792–6)), by advocating a more positive treatment of animals. Trimmer here exemplifies an early animal-rights tension by attempting to reconcile Man's God-given superiority with the need to be sympathetic towards animals (18). Although Cosslett finds tracesof political debates (36) in these stories, she argues that they largely reinforce traditional hierarchies both between humans and at the intersections of human-animal relations. Cosslett's second discussion focuses on Sarah Trimmer's Fabulous Histories (1786) (later published as The Story of the Robins) and the fanciful Papillonades, a group of poems so named by Mary V. Jackson, which are all 'sequels to or imitations of William Roscoe's (1807) The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast' (Cosslett, 40).1 Cosslett frames thischapter around the question: '… how and why does anyone write stories about talking animals for children in an age of Enlightenment and Reason, of Progress and Modernity?' (37). Her answer is simply that these authors wished '… to amuse and interest a juvenile audience, and to arouse their sympathy and benevolent instincts' (39), a Horation aim typical of the period. Cosslett teases out a range of tensions expressed by the authors, however, and this is where the strength ofthe chapter lies. Here she argues against Mary V. Jackson's political bifurcation of children's literature as either conservative or socially mobile. Instead, Cosslett sees these talking-animal stories as occupying a middle ground, whereby carnivalesque elements fracture attempts at full social stability. The third chapter situates Black Beauty within its talking-animal contexts. Cosslett shows how a range of books, including Argus's The Adventures of a Donkey (1815), Cobbe's Confessions of a Lost Dog (1867), and Stables's Sable and White: the Autobiography of a Show Dog (1894), work against seeing animals as mere machines. She also shows how such 'animal autobiography' has striking similarities with contemporary slave narratives, in offering first-hand accounts of abuse, invoking sympathy, and making readers empathise against large gaps in identity. Because the early chapters are at least partially engaged with the recovery of several forgotten works, they tend to lack detailed textual [End Page 355] analysis. Chapters four, five and six, however, redress this deficiency. Chapter four considers Margaret Gatty's Parables from Nature and Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies in critically orthodox terms, whereby Gatty opposes evolutionary theory and Kingsley reconciles it withnatural theology. Cosslett's originality, however...

Slavery and Romanticism

This article surveys the history, literature, and culture of slavery and abolition during the Romantic period. It opens with an outline of the main historical developments from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries before examining the ways in which slavery was represented and challenged in novels, poems and plays written by both well-known poets such as Blake and Wordsworth, and by lesser known writers such as Thomas Day and Ann Yearsley. It surveys the role of slavery in music and art, before concluding with a discussion of the historiography and critical literature dealing with slavery, and writing about slavery, in the Romantic era. Suggestions for further reading are included.

Thomas of Marlborough: History of the Abbey of Evesham (review)

Thomas of Marlborough: History of the Abbey of Evesham. Edited and translated by Jane Sayers and Leslie Watkiss. [Oxford Medieval Texts.] (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2003. Pp. lxxxix, 597.£95.00; $150.00.) In the half-century between 1858 and 1896 the Rolls Series published well over one hundred volumes of Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages. This undertaking, directed by the Master of the Rolls as the Keeper of English government records, broke new ground in making available to English and American medievalists an impressive quantity of primary source materials in print. However, no finite beings, not even historians, will ever produce the definitive word on any given subject. It is not surprising, therefore, that in more recent years the editors of Oxford Medieval Texts (successors to Nelson's Medieval Texts after 1966) have commissioned new editions of some of these earlier volumes, with the express aim of bringing our knowledge of important records of the past up to date by making use of the latest scholarly research available. This has led to a notable increase in our understanding of the context in which these works were originally written and to fresh insights into the minds and motives of their medieval authors. The Chronicle of Evesham is one of the volumes selected as deserving of a new edition to replace the edition of 1863 by William Dunn Macray, at that time a special assistant in the Bodleian Library Oxford, chaplain, and later a Fellow of Magdalen College. One of the chief advantages of the Oxford Medieval Texts format is the Latin / English parallel text providing an accurate translation for many of today's students and scholars, who have regrettably little or no knowledge of Latin. The single manuscript source, used by both Macray and the present editors, is Bodleian Library, Ms Rawlinson A 287, folios 118-187, which contain what Macray entitled a 'Chronicle'; but it has now been renamed, more accurately, a 'History' because, as Professor Sayers and Dr. Watkiss explain, it does not so much follow a chronological sequence as present a thematic approach to events. The purpose underlying Thomas of Marlborough's writing of the History was the promotion of the dignity and status of the abbey, of which he was a prominent member, by tracing its history from the first foundation in the early eighth century to Thomas's own day. He begins by incorporating and rearranging some earlier accounts of the lives and miracles of local saints such as Odulf, Wigstan, and above all Ecgwine, the third bishop of Worcester and Evesham's first abbot. In Book III he brings his history up to his own time and then proceeds to record contemporary events in which he, as dean of the Vale of Evesham and later sacrist and then prior, played a major role. The importance of Thomas's contribution to the genre of medieval local history lies in the unique, vividly narrated account of the abbey's final and successful struggle to obtain the privilege of exemption from the diocesan jurisdiction of the bishops of Worcester. Here we are entertained with a spirited tale of the journey, in 1204, of Thomas and of his duplicitous and tyrannical abbot, Roger Norreis, to the Roman curia, of the abbot's early departure, and of Thomas's prolonged stay throughout the legal proceedings. …

Revising Women: Eighteenth-Century "Women's Fiction" and Social Engagement

Contents: The Novel's Gendered Space, Paula R. Backscheider * The Rise of Gender as Political Category, Paula R. Backscheider * Renegotiating the Gothic, Betty Rizzo * My Art Belongs to Daddy? Thomas Day, Maria Edgeworth, and the Pre-Texts of Belinda: Women Writers and Patriachal Authority Mitzi Myers * Jane Austen and the Culture of Circulating Libraries: The Construction of Female Literacy, Barbara M. Benedict

Inspiring Lunatics: Biographical Portraits of the Lunar Society's Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Day, and Joseph Priestley

Inspiring Lunatics: Biographical Portraits of the Lunar Society's Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Day, and Joseph Priestley

The Furniture of Thomas Day: A Reevaluation

The Furniture of Thomas Day: A Reevaluation

Where Have You Gone, Michelangelo?: The Loss of Soul in Catholic Culture. By Thomas Day. New York: Crossroad, 1993. xii + 240 pages. $19.95.

Where Have You Gone, Michelangelo?: The Loss of Soul in Catholic Culture. By Thomas Day. New York: Crossroad, 1993. xii + 240 pages. $19.95.

The culture of sensibility: sex and society in eighteenth-century Britain

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1: Sensibility and the Nervous System Wollstonecraft's Perspective: The Gendering of Sensibility A New Psychoperceptual System The Application of the New System: George Cheyne, 1671-1743 The Reformation of Manners Combined with Consumerism Nerve Theory in Novels Female Nerves and Sensibility's Ambiguity 2: The Reformation of Male Manners The Public Manners of Men The Campaign for the Reformation of Manners Heart Religion The Civilizing Process and British Commercial Capitalism Changed Environments and the New World of Parents and Children 3: The Question of Effeminacy Shaftesbury Mandeville Hume and Smith Henry MacKenzie Politics and Boys' Literature: Thomas Day. 4: Women and Eighteenth-Century Consumerism Home Demand Women Become Literate, Women Write Novels Women's Self-Expression in Fashion Fiction Records Women's Pleasure Seeking Ambivalence toward Women's Pursuit of Consumer Pleasures Taste 5: A Culture of Reform Antiworldview Women and Humanitarian Reform Stalking Horses: The Campaign on Behalf of Victims of Male Barbarity Sensibility's Goal: The of Feeling Sensibility's Method: Conversion The Cult of Sensibility Methodism and the Culture of Sensibility The Rights of Woman and the Reformation of Manners 6: Women and Individualism: Inner and Outer Struggles over Sensibility The Sentimentalizing Process Egotism and Opposition The Reality of Heroism and Romance Subversive Potentials in Women's Developing Minds: Marriage and Class Still More Subversive Potentials: Sensibility and Sex 7: Wollstonecraft and the Crisis over Sensibility in the 1790s Amazons at the Boundary Wollstonecraft, Hays, and the Conflict over Sensibility Wollstonecraft Becomes Amazon Man Was Made to Reason, Woman to Feel: Compromise Notes Index

Introduction: The Swiss Family Robinson

Keynote Address Introduction: The Swiss Family Robinson by John Seelye If it can be said that the English novel begins with The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, then it can also be claimed that The Swiss Family Robinson occupies a similar place in the history of novels written for children. True, there were other long books written for young readers that appeared well before it was published , books of a similarly didactic design, but few of these have had the long shelf life of Swiss Family Robinson and none have survived deep into the twentieth century. The earnest purpose of books like Thomas Day's Sandford and Merton (1783-89), which within a century of its publication was inspiring parodists, not imitators, or J.H. Campe's Robinson der Jüngere (1779), simply could not cross the great divide, which we can identify with the emergence of Robert Louis Stevenson on one side of the Atlantic and Mark Twain on the other. It is a division that demarks a later tradition of books written largely to entertain from those of the earlier dispensation, in which entertainment was a thin coating upon heavily instructional material. It is a tribute to the authors of this story about a family marooned on a tropical island that they so cannily lightened the burden of instruction with an almost breathless series of encounters, discoveries, and adventures, that children have continued for almost two centuries to find the book exciting and readable. I have written "authors" advisedly, for the credit often given on the title page to Johann Rudolf Wyss is misleading, as is the title itself. For not only is the book not about a Swiss family named "Robinson," it was not written by Johann Rudolf Wyss (1791-1830) but by his father, Johann David (1743-1818), a former army chaplain and pastor in Bern. The younger Wyss, a poet and composer as well as a professor of philosophy , took up the manuscript that had been written for himself and his brothers as children and revised it for publication, a first volume appearing in 1812, to be followed by a second the next year. This text was then translated from German into French by Baroness Isabelle de Montolieu, who apparently made a few minor changes, which were then incorporated in the first English translation, from the French, by either William Godwin or his second wife, Mary, in 1814. Then in 1816 the Godwins brought out a "Second Edition" "from the German of M. WISS," which remained for many years the basis for the standard English edition. The Baroness had in the meantime not been idle. The story written by the Wysses had ended two years after the shipwreck, with the family still on their island. A rescue ship had arrived, but before the castaways could embark, a storm forced the rescuers out to sea, taking with them the father's manuscript account of his family's adventures, which was carried back to Europe and published. The possibilities of making much more of a good thing inspired de Montolieu to continue the story in five additional volumes, published between 1824 and 1826. In 1847, this continuation was translated into English by J. D. Clinton Locke, and, combined with a somewhat modified version of the Godwin translation, first published in 1826 as the "Sixth Edition," remained in print throughout the century. Yet another sequel was provided in Le Pilote Willis, by Adrien Paul, translated as Willis the Pilot by 1857, which continued the adventures of the two sons who left the island at the end of Montolieu's version but who took almost as long as Ulysses before reaching home. By mid-century, moreover, revisionists were already at work, reducing the bulk of the expanded text or inserting "improvements " of their own. At least three major new translations had been made by the end of the century by editors who took considerable liberties with the story also, either reducing or expanding the pious and moralizing elements or introducing new adventures while cutting out old. This continuing process, by means of which editors and translators felt free to tinker with the story, taking their cue from the Baroness de...

The Light of Day: the Background to Thomas Day'sSandford and Merton

The Light of Day: the Background to Thomas Day's<i>Sandford and Merton</i>

REVIEWS OF MUSIC

Journal Article REVIEWS OF MUSIC Get access Antonio Lotti, Duetti, terzetti, e madrigali a più voci, ed. Thomas Day. ‘Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era’, xliv-xlv. ( A–R Editions, Madison, 1985, $47.90.) JOHN STEELE JOHN STEELE Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Music and Letters, Volume 68, Issue 1, January 1987, Pages 88–89, https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/68.1.88 Published: 01 January 1987

Thomas day and the politics of sentiment

(1984). Thomas day and the politics of sentiment. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History: Vol. 12, Perspective on Imperialism Decolonization: Essays in Honour of A.F. Madden, pp. 57-79.

Educational Research: A Tercentenary Romp

Educational Research: A Tercentenary Romp

Rousseau's Émile and Early Children's Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Rousseau's Émile and Early Children's Literature Robert J. Bator (bio) Sylvia W. Patterson . Rousseau's Émile and Early Children's Literature (Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1971). Histories of children's literature usually hop through the eighteenth century in a single chapter. Newbery, Day, Edgeworth and a few others are leapfrogged in an impatient effort to get on to that "golden" nineteenth century. To see Patterson pause to search out some of the rarer stuff from the 1700's is pleasurable. That Patterson, limiting herself to the influence of one philosopher on ten English writers in the last twenty years of the century, can come up with a 177-page book demonstrates how rich the period can be. After lengthy summary of Émile, the author painstakingly scrutinizes for Rousseau's influence twenty-one works from: Anna Barbauld and John Aikin, Thomas Day, Maria Edgeworth, Eleanor Fenn, Dorothy and Mary Jane Kilner, Hannah More, Sarah Trimmer, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Influence is too strong a word. Patterson acknowledges that her intent is to show what Rousseau's ideas were, that major authors knew them, and that some of the ideas crop up in the juvenile works covered. Where direct influence cannot be posited, Patterson wisely suggests that Rousseau's ideas coincide with a given author. Mostly, Patterson demonstrates such parallelism abundantly and credibly. [End Page 238] Thus, when she points out that Rousseau felt the same way that Mary Wollstonecraft did about breast feeding, the reader cannot carp. A few pages later (p. 109) Patterson converts this to "Mary Wollstonecraft follows Rousseau in the idea of the mother nursing her own child." Such overreaching does not clarify but clouds the extent of Rousseau's influence. On Wollstonecraft there is also some omission. Only internal evidence is cited by Patterson to show that Original Stories (1788) exhibits Wollstonecraft's use of Rousseau, yet at least one biographer of Wollstonecraft gives the year and month when she read Émile—and her favorable reaction to it (G. R. Stirling Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft: a Study in Economics and Romance, London: Martin Secker, 1911, p. 74). In summarizing Émile and in illustrating the central irony of Rousseau's disciples writing any books for children, Patterson is admirable. I would fault only the selective vision. What about some apostles of Rousseau who, though French, had a wide English audience? Maria Edgeworth saw Arnaud Berquin's The Children's Friend (England, 1783) as universally popular. She also translated a work of Madame de Genlis to whom one critic attributes more influence in England than Émile. Even accepting the restriction to English authors, one finds the works chosen with a restricted field of vision. Granted that three works by Lady Eleanor Fenn can epitomize the fourteen or so she wrote, why not include Fables in Monosyllables (c. 1783), which Patterson mentions but does not cite even though it contains the first direct quotation from Rousseau in an English children's book? Why omit that and then hunt for parallels to Émile in her other works? One suspects that Fenn's Fables were not accessible to the author. Only eight of the major works traced by Patterson are used in eighteenth-century versions; of the eight only four are first editions. Such versions are admittedly hard to come by, but later editions are likely to be brutally revised the way even Goody Two-Shoes was butchered by nineteenth-century editors. To focus on major authors is a sound way of explicating Rousseau. It might be difficult to grant even nodding attention to what Percy Muir calls the "monstrous regiment" of anonymous and lesser known female writers of the period. One can dispense with Harriet English or Lucy Peacock, but Lucy Pinchard in The Two Cousins (1794) and H. S.'s Anecdotes of Mary (1795) both contain direct quotations from Rousseau. There may be more among the hack writers. Under minor lapses in biography, the reader should know that the Kilners, Mary Jane and Dorothy, were not sisters, as Patterson has them, but sisters-in-law. The notion of Rousseau's influence on juvenile literature which has often been skeletally treated elsewhere has been fleshed out by Patterson...