Eighteenth-Century Life recent issues

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

Person, Animal, Thing: The 1796 Dog Tax and the Right to Superfluous Things

Festa, L. — 2009-03-27

Drawing on Parliamentary debates, print polemics, and satirical prints, this essay traces the rhetorical erosion of seemingly categorical distinctions between human and animal, animate and inanimate, person and thing, in the controversy that arose around the 1796 imposition of a tax on dogs. The passage of this seemingly slight piece of legislation created impassioned debates about the nature and welfare of animals, about the rights of individuals to possess or keep property, and about the way the kinship felt for animals tampers with the seemingly self-evident borders of kind. At a moment in which sentimental humanitarian concern with the rights and interests of animals had reached new heights, the taxation of dogs seemed to reclassify the animal as a thing and to draw into question the relation between humans and their ostensible best friends. Although proponents of the bill endeavor to proceed as if dogs can be considered on the same terms as other kinds of taxable luxuries (devouring resources that might better be devoted to humans), opponents of the tax focus on the bonds of mutual dependency and reciprocal obligation that tie humans and animals together, arguing that the right to keep a beloved entity such as a dog expresses a distinctively human need to keep something beyond mere, bare, necessity. Inasmuch as humanity is expressed and inheres in the relation people take to other creatures, the seeming superfluity of the dog embodies the essence of what allows, or enables, people to act as humans.

William Smellie and Enlightenment Anti-Anthropocentrism

Wolloch, N. — 2009-03-27

This article examines the anti-anthropocentric views of the eighteenth-century Scottish natural philosopher William Smellie, in particular in comparison with the predominant anthropocentric ethic of the human mastery of nature more common during the Enlightenment. Smellie's views on this issue, and their importance for understanding some key aspects of eighteenth-century cosmology, are outlined, as is also their relevance for understanding the history of modern anthropocentrism in general.

Representations of the Social Order in The Gentleman's Magazine, 1785-1815

Stafford, W. — 2009-03-27

This essay studies the issues of The Gentleman's Magazine from 1785 to 1715, selecting those years because of the common view that society and a class system crystalized following the French Revolution. Rather than view society from an economist's or a Marxist's perspective, I am concerned with how London society, during this period, viewed itself. The data demonstrate different ranks, although what constitutes a gentleman remains flexible, with various people in the middling orders capable of ascending to a gentleman's status. While class separations and a disdain for the lowly rabble were clearly apparent, there was no sense that the rabble might become organized under the leadership of a significant section of the elite. Nor did the magazine did envisage a society chronically riven by class conflict, certainly not a clash between a middle and an upper class, and on balance, even the poor were depicted as loyal. The comfortable impression was given that the overwhelming majority of the elite—from aristocracy down to respectable traders and gentlemen farmer—was cemented together by gentlemanly solidarity and loyalty to king and constitution. There was no sense of an antagonism between trade and commerce, and the criteria for gentility that the magazine proposed were sufficiently numerous, and of such a nature, as to open the door to determined and aspiring traders and lesser professionals. The Gentleman's Magazine's synthesis of a hierarchical model with a generous dichotomous one offered its readers an alternative to imagining a middle class.

Atrocity in Mid Eighteenth-Century War Literature

Richardson, J. — 2009-03-27

The martial literature of the eighteenth century shows an increasing preoccupation with atrocity. By the middle decades of the century, writers imagining war routinely include narratives in which cruel enemy soldiers brutally mistreat and kill innocent civilians. The development reflects an affective ethical attitude towards war, according to which individual actors are responsible for its effects as well as leaders. It combines sympathy and moral outrage with a strong desire for retribution.

Books Received

2009-03-27

Editor's Note

Reverand, C. D. — 2008-12-29

Not Just Another Pretty Commodity

Wall, C. — 2008-12-29

Pious Times and Priestcraft Begin Again: The Upright Sexuality of the Enlightenment

Cope, K. L. — 2008-12-29

A Canon of Our Own

Kairoff, C. T. — 2008-12-29

Misreading Run Riot

Barnouw, J. — 2008-12-29

The Seamier Side of Eighteenth-Century France

Fink, B. — 2008-12-29

Ye Jacobites by Name?

Hammond, B. — 2008-12-29

Emotional Display and National Identity

Pascoe, J. — 2008-12-29

Scotland and Naples: Two Contexts, One Enlightenment

Smitten, J. — 2008-12-29

Highlandisms: The Expanding Scope of Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies

Shields, J. — 2008-12-29

Richard Sher's Bookish Scottish Enlightenment

Emerson, R. L. — 2008-12-29

Ireland and Books

Allen, N. — 2008-12-29

The Denaturalization of Economic Thought

Underwood, T. — 2008-12-29

The Female Spectator and the New Story of Eliza Haywood

Wolf, A. — 2008-12-29

J. G. A. Pocock and the History of British Political Thought: Assessing the State of the Art

Walker, W. — 2008-12-29

Understanding Whores

Turner, J. G. — 2008-12-29

Less Is More: The Modernity of the Early Modern Essay

Radcliffe, D. H. — 2008-12-29

The Consuming Subject and the Visual Culture of War

Rauser, A. — 2008-12-29

Incle and Yarico and The Incas: Two Plays by John Thelwall

Iwanisziw, S. B. — 2008-12-29

Company Affairs

Kaul, S. — 2008-12-29

Local History from Below

Levitan, K. — 2008-12-29

The Secret History of Almost Everything

Mackie, E. — 2008-12-29

"The Call of the Popular" Revisited; Or, English Literary History's Resistance to Balladry Corrected

Dugaw, D. — 2008-12-29

Colonial Sexual Cultures

Norton, R. — 2008-12-29

Matters of Style in the French Eighteenth Century

Pacini, G. — 2008-12-29

Jan van der Heyden (1637-1712): The Dutch Canaletto

Gealt, A. M. — 2008-12-29

Illustrating Sterne

Fanning, C. — 2008-12-29

Introduction

Lashmore-Davies, A. C. — 2008-09-23

The Correspondence of Henry St. John and Sir William Trumbull, 1698-1710

Lashmore-Davies, A. C. — 2008-09-23

Index to Letters

2008-09-23