Eighteenth-Century Life current issue

Hell-Fire Jane: Austen and the Dashwoods of West Wycombe

Barchas, J. — 2009-08-04

Modern readers of Jane Austen have been reluctant to acknowledge that Sense and Sensibility (1811) rewards, and perhaps even demands, detailed knowledge of one of England's most notorious families in Austen's time, namely the Dashwoods of West Wycombe Park. The best-known member of the Dashwood clan was Sir Francis Dashwood (1708-81), second Baronet and Lord Le Despencer, leader of a group of high-profile libertines whose decades of bacchanals earned it the label Hell-Fire Club. At West Wycombe, Sir Francis also designed an emblematic garden, infamous for the ribald features that mimicked the female form. Although Francis Dashwood died in 1781, throughout Austen's lifetime stories about his garden and Hell-Fire shenanigans proliferated in print, while his heirs (the next two baronets were both named John Dashwood) perpetuated his rakish legacy with high-profile domestic conflicts. In short, a lively print market for gossip at the turn of the century insured that the infamous name of Dashwood remained synonymous with diabolism, sexual lewdness, and the dubious privileges of wealth. This essay outlines some of the interpretive implications of this ignored historical context for the Dashwood-centered story of Sense and Sensibility.

Reference Point: Samuel Johnson and the Encyclopedias The David Fleeman Memorial Lecture, 2007

Tankard, P. — 2009-08-04

Samuel Johnson was interested in encyclopedias, and in his own lifetime, encyclopedias were interested in him. This essay examines five eighteenth-century encyclopedias: Rees's revision of Chambers' Cyclopaedia (1778-86), Kippis's revised Biographia Britannica (1777-93), and the first three editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768-71, 1777-84, 1788-97). In these five works, I have located 121 articles in which Johnson is mentioned or quoted as an authority; by giving a sense of the character of his presence, the essay traces the evolution of his reputation. The essay also draws attention to a number of curious details, including early critiques of Johnson's work, and mentions of Johnsonian publications or attributions that have been sometimes overlooked. The whole is intended to be a contribution to the understanding of Johnson's near-contemporary reception and reputation.

Preserved Remains: Embalming Practices in Eighteenth-Century England

Zigarovich, J. — 2009-08-04

This paper looks at the cultural discourse of embalming in the eighteenth century. Not uncommon, embalming was performed, improved, and commercialized. From mummy unrollings, to churchyard reorderings, to public viewings of "curiosities," the embalmed were often exposed to public circulation and commodification. As a mortuary practice, embalming spread beyond royal tradition, infiltrating the burial rites of the wealthy and aristocratic in an effort to preserve social distinction posthumously, demonstrating the increasing preoccupation with mortality and the corpse, and the intense anxiety about bodily dissolution after death. And at this time, the religious connotation of the uncorrupted corpse becomes translated into the endorsement of preservation as a guarantee that the body and soul will be properly rejoined in the afterlife. In medical terms, surgical innovations demanded improved embalming procedures that inevitably played a part in the rise of the task for the undertaker. This essay maintains that the curious history of preservation techniques in eighteenth-century Britain ultimately contributes to the understanding of a culture's attitudes towards death, the body, and representation.

The Evolution of the Plagiarist: Natural History in Anna Seward's Order of Poetics

Bailes, M. — 2009-08-04

This essay explains Anna Seward's famous, vitriolic attacks on the poetic plagiarisms of Charlotte Smith by examining them within the framework of natural history. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the vocabularies and methodologies of natural history overlapped with those of literary criticism. Taxonomic concerns with fixity and dynamism, with order and hybridity, permeated Seward's critical endeavors, which were central to her literary reputation. It is my contention that Seward's thinking about literary imitation was shaped by a belief in fixed biological forms. Her response to the zoological texts of the naturalist Erasmus Darwin elucidates her disapproval of Smith's (and Darwin's) poetic borrowings as examples of degenerative, stylistic hybrids. This study thus explores the tendency of Seward and her contemporaries to think in terms of interrelations between biological and poetic forms.

James "Athenian" Stuart and the Greek Revival

Spencer, S. — 2009-08-04

(Re)Solving Sterne's Unsolvable Riddles and Mysteries: Two New Tools

Kraft, E. — 2009-08-04

Romanticism, Religion, Secularization

Canuel, M. — 2009-08-04