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6 Eighteenth-century paper: the readers’ digest Amélie Junqua Paper circulates from hand to hand, from one social group to another. This passive surface is touched by skins, pens and wares, absorbing ink, dirt and body waste. Fashioned by a long manufacturing process, it is read, consumed – in either case, metaphorically digested – and then excreted, cast away to be recycled or destroyed. I well remember that some of [my particles] were twisted up with a half-pennyworth of tobacco for a night-man, others soaked in brandy, and plaistered over the black eye of
1 The eighteenth-century knowledge economy E urope was becoming an information-rich society in the eighteenth century and educated Europeans were increasingly conscious of the fact. James Keir, a West Midlands factory owner and chemist, underlined as much in an oft-quoted remark penned towards the century’s end: ‘the diffusion of general knowledge, and of a taste for science, over all classes of men, in every nation of Europe, or of European origin, seems to be the characteristic feature of the present age’.1 Whether the consumption of knowledge was quite as
Just as Scotland experienced great challenges and stresses in the second half of the eighteenth century so too did the West Indies. The most profound disjunctions lay between the free white residents and the communities of enslaved blacks and free people of colour. For Europeans, this manifested itself in the maintenance of a colour bar that determined the rights that were enjoyed
During the eighteenth century, Scotland experienced a series of profound economic, social, cultural and political changes. Industry and agriculture were transformed, moving Scotland from a relative economic backwater (in European terms) to a country that witnessed innovations in agricultural and industrial production able to rival those anywhere on the globe. Fostered by
1 Women in eighteenth-century Methodism O 0n her forty-second birthday Catherine Cowlin O’Bryan sat down to reflect on her Methodist conversion experience nearly a quarter-century before. She had lived in the Devon village of Stoke Damerel for about a year. It was probably in one of the new small villas that were filling in the area between Stoke Damerel and the rapidly growing town of Dock (soon to be renamed Devonport), where she often preached in the newly opened Bible Christian chapel on Prince’s Street. She probably did not feel settled; the family had
3 Digesting in the long eighteenth century Ian Miller Roy Porter once described the stomach as a historically ambiguous organ; one awarded great significance in the bodily economy while subject at the same time to condemnation as a source of pathology, illness and degradation.1 This essay unravels these ambiguities. Historically, the workings of the human stomach and digestive system were mysterious. Hidden inaccessibly within the body, the living human stomach remained unseen and virtually unknowable until the nineteenth century. Eighteenth-century
3 Woman in France during the Eighteenth Century To judge of the intellect and influence of the women of those times, we must therefore consider them in their social relations, and often in their private affections. (Woman in France during the Eighteenth Century (I: 164)) Introduction Kavanagh was born within three decades of the onset of the French Revolution, so it is not surprising that, with her French education and her interest in women’s lives, she chose to write a history of women in France during the eighteenth century. It is clear from her novels that
This essay discusses the ways in which different models of historical and social development, and especially of the relationship of the Gothic past to the present, might be seen to structure – and help us now to interpret – eighteenth-century Gothic fiction. It begins with an account of the representation of ‘Gothick days’ in James Beattie‘s poem The Minstrel (1771–4), and then gives an overview of how‘ Scottish’ conjectural histories attributed a pivotal modernizing role to feudalism and chivalry, in some cases defining an exceptional Gothic legacy with particular reference to the agency and influence of women. The essay concludes by suggesting that critical attention to different accounts of social development, and contemporary ‘histories of women’, might help to provide a better literary-historical map of eighteenth-century Gothic fiction, and a richer sense of the cultural and political work that that fiction may have performed.
2 Time and society in the eighteenth century P eople’s perception of time, of how it might be measured or divided up, and how it ought to be spent, depended very much on whether they lived in town or country, and where they stood in the social hierarchy. England in 1700 was a dominantly rural society. Just under a quarter of the population inhabited towns with a population over 2,500, nearly half of these urban dwellers living in London.1 If the minimum population of a town is raised to 5,000, then 83 per cent of the population were rural dwellers in 1700, a
This book offers a full account of the role played by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English Republican ideas in eighteenth-century France. Challenging some of the dominant accounts of the Republican tradition, it revises conventional understandings of what Republicanism meant in both Britain and France during the eighteenth century, offering a distinctive trajectory as regards ancient and modern constructions and highlighting variety rather than homogeneity within the tradition. The book thus offers a new perspective on both the legacy of the English Republican tradition and the origins and thought of the French Revolution. It centres around a series of case studies that focus on a number of colourful and influential characters including John Toland, Viscount Bolingbroke, John Wilkes, and the Comte de Mirabeau.