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The Domino and the Eighteenth-Century London Masquerade
This Element presents new cultural, social, and economic perspectives on the eighteenth-century London masquerade through an in-depth analysis of the classic domino costume. Constructing the object biography of the domino through material, visual, and written sources will bring together various experiences of the masquerade and expand the existing geographical, chronological, and socio-economic scope of the entertainment beyond the masquerade event itself. This Element will examine the domino's physical and figurative movements from the masquerade warehouse, through eighteenth-century fashionable society, and into print and visual culture. It will draw upon masquerade warehouse records, newspapers, manuscripts, prints, and physical objects to establish a comprehensive understanding of the domino and how it reflected contemporary experiences of the real and imagined masquerade. Analysing the domino through interdisciplinary methodologies illustrates the impact material and visual sources can have on reshaping existing scholarship.
Empirical Knowledge in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
This Element examines the eighteenth-century novel's contributions to empirical knowledge. Realism has been the conventional framework for treating this subject within literary studies. This Element identifies the limitations of the realism framework for addressing the question of knowledge in the eighteenth-century novel. Moving beyond the familiar focus in the study of novelistic realism on problems of perception and representation, this Element focuses instead on how the eighteenth-century novel staged problems of inductive reasoning. It argues that we should understand the novel's contributions to empirical knowledge primarily in terms of what the novel offered as training ground for methods of reasoning, rather than what it offered in terms of formal innovations for representing knowledge. We learn from such a shift that the eighteenth-century novel was not a failed experiment in realism, or in representing things as they are, but a valuable system for reasoning and thought experiment.
Making Boswell's Life of Johnson
This Element documents the details and implications of Boswell's risky publication history. It argues that the success of the first edition of the Life of Samuel Johnson was the result not only of Boswell's biographical genius but also of collaboration with a devoted support network.
Science and Reading in the Eighteenth Century
Science and Reading in the Eighteenth Century studies the reading habits of a group of historians and science administrators known as the Hardwicke Circle. The research is based on an analysis of the reading recorded in the 'Weekly Letter', an unpublished private correspondence written from 1741 to 1766 between Thomas Birch (1705–1766), Secretary of the Royal Society, and Philip Yorke (1720–1790), later second earl of Hardwicke. Birch and Yorke were omnivorous, voracious, and active readers. The analysis uses the Weekly Letter to quantify the texts with which they engaged, and explores the role of reading in their intellectual life. The research argues that this evidence shows that, in the early 1750s, the Hardwicke Circle pivoted from a focus on early-modern British history to a new concern with the reform and renovation of British intellectual institutions, especially the Royal Society.
Secret Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century
Cryptology of the long eighteenth century became an explicit discipline of secrecy. Theorized in pedagogical texts that reached wide audiences, multimodal methods of secret writing during the period in England promoted algorithmic literacy, introducing reading practices like discernment, separation, recombination, and pattern recognition. In composition, secret writing manipulated materials and inspired new technologies in instrumentation, computation, word processing, and storage. Cryptology also revealed the visual habits of print and the observational consequences of increasing standardization in writing, challenging the relationship between print and script. Secret writing served not only military strategists and politicians; it gained popularity with everyday readers as a pleasurable cognitive activity for personal improvement and as an alternative way of thinking about secrecy and literacy.
Labour of the Stitch
The making of fashionable women's dress in Georgian England necessitated an inordinate amount of manual labour. From the mantuamakers and seamstresses who wrought lengths of silk and linen into garments, to the artists and engravers who disseminated and immortalised the resulting outfits in print and on paper, Georgian garments were the products of many busy hands. This Element centres the sartorial hand as a point of connection across the trades which generated fashionable dress in the eighteenth century. Crucially, it engages with recreation methodologies to explore how the agency and skill of the stitching hand can inform understandings of craft, industry, gender, and labour in the eighteenth century. The labour of stitching, along with printmaking, drawing, and painting, composed a comprehensive culture of making and manual labour which, together, constructed eighteenth-century cultures of fashionable dress.
How and Why to Do Things with Eighteenth-Century Manuscripts
This Element examines eighteenth-century manuscript forms, their functions in the literary landscape of their time, and the challenges and practices of manuscript study today. Drawing on both literary studies and book history, Levy and Schellenberg offer a guide to the principal forms of literary activity carried out in handwritten manuscripts produced in the first era of print dominance, 1730-1820. After an opening survey of sociable literary culture and its manuscript forms, numerous case studies explore what can be learned from three manuscript types: the verse miscellany, the familiar correspondence, and manuscripts of literary works that were printed. A final section considers issues of manuscript remediation up to the present, focusing particularly on digital remediation. The Element concludes with a brief case study of the movement of Phillis Wheatley's poems between manuscript and print. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
A Performance History of The Fair Penitent
Theatre is the most ephemeral of art forms. It is a truism that the ephemeral performance text is divorced from the static published play text. This Element is of the eighteenth-century performance history of The Fair Penitent demonstrates the interrelation of print and performance and models how readers can recover elements of performance through close attention to text. Traces of performance adhere to the mediascape in playbills and puffs, reviews and accounts. The printed text also preserves traces of performance in notation and illustration. By analysing traces found in performance trends, casting decisions, publication histories and repertory intertexts, this Element recovers how The Fair Penitent was interpreted at different points in the century and explains how a play that bombed in its first season could become a repertory staple.
Paratext Printed with New English Plays, 1660–1700
This Element Paratext printed with new English plays has a lot to tell us about what playwrights were attempting to do and how audiences responded, thereby contributing substantially to our understanding of larger patterns of generic evolution across two centuries. The presence (or absence) of twelve elements needs to be systematically surveyed. (1) Attribution of authorship; (2) generic designation; (3) performance auspices; (4) government license authorizing publication; (5) dedication; (6) prefaces of various sorts; (7a-b-c) list of characters (three types); (8) actors' names (sometimes with descriptive characterizations-very helpful for deducing intended authorial interpretation); (9) location of action; (10) prologue and epilogue for first production. Surveying these results, we can see that much of the generic evolution traceable in the later seventeenth century gets undone during the eighteenth-a reversal largely attributable to the Licensing Act of 1737. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England
This 2001 book concerns the history of the family in eighteenth-century England. Naomi Tadmor provides an interpretation of concepts of household, family and kinship starting from her analysis of contemporary language (in the diaries of Thomas Turner; in conduct treatises by Samuel Richardson and Eliza Haywood; in three novels, Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa and Haywood's The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless and a variety of other sources). Naomi Tadmor emphasises the importance of the household in constructing notions of the family in the eighteenth century. She uncovers a vibrant language of kinship which recasts our understanding of kinship ties in the period. She also shows how strong ties of 'friendship' formed vital social, economic and political networks among kin and non-kin. Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England makes a substantial contribution to eighteenth-century history, and will be of value to all historians and literary scholars of the period.
