The emergence of the ‘complete drawing book’ in mid-eighteenth-century England was a remarkable phenomenon. Launched by print sellers as a new educational commodity, this particular type of drawing book exhibited both commercial acumen and cultural ambition by presenting a comprehensive programme to satisfy public desire for drawing instruction. It also embodied a subtle process of cultural assimilation and influence. Various kinds of pictorial model were assembled from diverse sources and organised in a way that visualised the ‘hierarchy of genres’. The complete drawing books thus played a role in shaping public perception of what constituted art within that hierarchy.
Most criticism on provincial authors argues that they succeeded through connections to the London metropolis. The career of Jane Cave Winscom (c.1762-1812) shows that another kind of provincial poet existed, one who moved through the provinces and eschewed metropolitan connections. New information on Winscom's biography and publications, and a close analysis of the content and rhetorical strategies of her poems, show her to have been a committed provincial author who interacted with the local community wherever she happened to be living.
Exploring the conspiratorial fictions surrounding the birth of James Francis Edward Stuart, prince of Wales, in 1688, this article argues for the centrality of confessional language and feeling in the representation of the revolution of 1688-9. The warming-pan scandal and related fictions, I argue, use obscurity and a (perceived) lack of evidence as the starting-point for a kind of propaganda that relies heavily on the suspension of disbelief, ironically demanding readerly faith in a sceptical, satirical, iconoclastic and pseudo-scientific deconstruction of an invented plot which ridicules Catholics for their implicit faith.
In England in the mid-1770s the feather head-dress emerged as a popular women's fashion and quickly became a prevalent comic trope in graphic satire. In 1776 over a dozen satires were published that featured feather head-dresses, making it a significant year for this graphic motif. Not only was this around the time that the fashion was imported into England from France, but it was also the dawn of the American Revolution. This article looks at a selection of these images and considers the feather's role as a signifier of gendered, racial and national ‘otherness’ during a period of imperial instability.
During the eighteenth century the didactic precepts of Virgil's Georgics were read as practical guidance by an emerging class of professional farmers, and a set of original vernacular georgics were written on agricultural improvement. Examining Smart's The Hop-Garden, Dodsley's Agriculture, Dyer's The Fleece and Jago's Edge-Hill, I argue that they offer a confident, progressive and scientific approach to land cultivation, revising the inherited attitudes of Virgilian georgic. I suggest, though, that this poetics of improvement provides one reason for the decline of the georgic didactic tradition, as it becomes unable to offer comprehensive instruction on a specialised field of knowledge.
This article locates the roots of much current memorialising practice in the early eighteenth century, when medieval traditions of commemorating conflict through erecting memorials on battlefields were revived. Through an examination of two cases, a memorial to the fifth-century Alleluia Victory erected in 1736 by Nehemiah Griffith (which can be compared with his poems) and Sanderson Miller's mid-eighteenth-century designed landscape to commemorate the battle of Edgehill (1642), the article also examines the use in such memorials of figures and languages from the ancient British and Saxon pasts to celebrate ideas of British and Protestant liberty and identity.
This article considers the political significance of sentimental language in the treason trial of James Hadfield. It argues that the sentimental resolution of the trial needs to be understood in relation to the pressures of modern war on the British nation and the political instability associated with the figure of the returned soldier. The trial dispelled the threat of revolution that Hadfield's attack on the king presented, but it also helped establish a new form of symbolic body politics in Britain that valorised both the king and the soldier as figures of manly self-command.
This article examines genres of general encyclopaedias in western Europe from 1670 to 1750. My approach is twofold. First, by examining references to genres in discourse about encyclopaedias, I will try to determine whether consensus existed about the kinds of general encyclopaedias. Second, I will evaluate late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century claims about the kinds of encyclopaedias in light of works' contents to arrive at a similar but more dynamic classification. Finally, besides providing information about the kinds of encyclopaedias in the early modern period, this investigation is meant to cast light on the ancestry of the modern encyclopaedia.
In the breeches comedy of the Restoration and early eighteenth century, the cross-dressed woman's gender transgression and sexual play are happily forgiven, but the femme who desires her comes to signify the deviant nature of women as a whole. Through deploying the traditional anti-woman triptych of excess femininity – mercenary whore, amoral widow and rebellious wife – the breeches comedy identifies the femme's desire as lesbian. In its effort to control such desire, the Restoration and early eighteenth-century breeches comedy instead invested all women with its frightening potential, engendering even more restrictive recuperation projects for female sexuality as the century progressed.
The literary character of the Broken Soldier is a cathartic presence in much eighteenth-century writing. In works by authors such as Oliver Goldsmith, Henry Mackenzie and Robert Bage we find the figure of the Broken Soldier as the smashed recipient of society's self-conscious benevolence. He is a sacrificial figure deflecting the realities of conflict and violence from the home front via his play-acting and sanctioned tales. The horrors of war that seep back into society are diffused by encounters with the Broken Soldier, allowing echoes of violence to be contained within these literary texts and broken bodies.
This article argues that in Tristram Shandy Sterne expresses his desire to be the sole owner of his literary work through images of the hand and handwriting. It explores his experimentation with the typographic manicule and his innovation in representing script in print. I suggest that Sterne represents the hand and handwriting as ambiguous markers of authenticity in order to illustrate and lament the complexities of assigning literary property in this period.
How did new technologies inform conceptions of masculinity in Enlightenment Britain? This article explores the practice and material culture of shaving as an expression of polite masculinity. The eighteenth-century masculine ideal was clean-shaven. New types of steel meant sharper and more durable razors, in turn affecting the practice of shaving. Men at this time increasingly began to shave themselves rather than visit a barber. But razor-makers advertised their wares using carefully constructed discourses, linking razors – and shaving – to a broader male interest in science. Razors were thus simultaneously a product of, and a vector for, Enlightenment ideas.
James Beattie's The Minstrel is often viewed as a proto-Romantic work for its portrayal of the developing genius of Edwin. In this article I show how Beattie's exploration of genius also has a particular connection to the intellectual culture of the Aberdeen Enlightenment, which was responsible for producing leading works on genius during the late eighteenth century. This article examines the influence of Marischal College in shaping the analysis of genius during the period. It further demonstrates the impact of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society on Beattie's thought about genius as it appears in his verse and later critical writing.
Reading German world traveller Georg Forster's influential A Voyage Round the World (1777), this essay discusses the typical conflict between Enlightenment ideology of progress and civilisation, which assigns Oceanian culture to a lower development stage, and the sentimental praise of the island Tahiti as the earthly paradise. Challenging the interpretive method of controlling coloniser and passive colonised, this essay stresses the real-world significance of Oceania in the transformation of Forster's cultural identity as it is manifested in his travel narrative. Hence Forster's travel account is less a distortion of Pacific history than a pivotal documentation of cultural transformation around 1800.
This article considers Samuel Richardson's final fictional work, ‘The History of Mrs Beaumont’, a story removed from his last published novel, Sir Charles Grandison (1753-4), that now survives in manuscript form (following partial publication in 1804). It explores Richardson's interest in different forms of life-writing, draws attention to the quasi-autobiographical nature of this work and argues that ‘Mrs Beaumont’ demonstrates a new interest in the way personal history could be used in fictional practice. The article concludes that, though fragmentary and neglected by critics to date, the work is a significant part of the novelist's literary oeuvre.