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Eighteenth century Archive
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Functional Goods and Fancies: The Production and Consumption of Consumer Goods in Northumberland, Newcastle upon Tyne and Durham c. 1680-1780
Posted on August 22, 2012 | No CommentsThis thesis explores the place of consumer goods in the culturally changing environment of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain. It specifically focuses on the production and consumption of consumer goods in Northumberland, Newcastle and Durham between c. 1680 to 1780. -
The English fishing industry, 1790-1914: a case study of the Yorkshire coast
Posted on August 21, 2012 | No CommentsThe work also charts the associated development of the Yorkshire coast herring fishery. It furthermore, seeks to explain the causes of decline which afflicted all sectors of the local industry from the 1880s onwards.In all areas of this thesis, the research work undertaken has utilised a wide variety of primary sources including records of both local and national organisations. -
‘Wanton and torturing punishments’ : patterns of discipline and punishment in the Royal Navy, 1783-1815
Posted on August 20, 2012 | No CommentsThe British Navy of the time of the Napoleonic Wars acquired a fearsome reputation, not only for its success but also, in the eyes of many historians, for the cruelty with which it recruited and treated its men. It is not simply that the forms of punishment, including hanging, flogging and gagging were, to the modern eye, barbaric and unacceptable. -
The reform of punishment and the criminal justice system in England and Wales from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century
Posted on August 20, 2012 | No CommentsDuring the late seventeenth-century and throughout the eighteenth-century crime provided one of the principal subjects for popular literature. -
Melancholy and the Idle Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century
Posted on August 19, 2012 | No CommentsThe thesis considers Johnson‘s preoccupation with idleness as a symptom of his melancholy, a notion that has received little critical attention. Shenstone‘s experience is used to illustrate the depressing effect that a retired lifestyle could have on the individual. -
Good Reads for the Dog Days of Summer
Posted on August 18, 2012 | No CommentsSee summer off with these fun reads! -
Leather Stocks and Wooden Heads? British Military Thought during and as a consequence of the Seven Years’ War, 1756-63
Posted on August 14, 2012 | No CommentsBy the early to middle of the 18th century there was a brisk market for books on military matters. These ranged from drill and tactics manuals, philosophical discourses on the nature of soldiering and soldiers, to studies of previous and near-contemporary campaigns. -
Dealer in Magic: James Cox’s Jewelry Museum and the Economics of Luxurious Spectacle in Late-Eighteenth-Century London
Posted on August 14, 2012 | No CommentsI suggest that the museum Cox established in the 1770s illuminates an eighteenth- century arts industry located in London, the nature of which needs to be better understood if we are adequately to understand the concept of an alliance between heritage and commerce for the benefit of the nation in which much current economic and cultural discourse is grounded. -
Robert Harley and the Myth of the Golden Thread: Family Piety,Journalism and the History of the Assassination Attempt of 8 March 1711
Posted on August 14, 2012 | No CommentsOn 8 March 1711, a possible French double agent, the marquis de Guiscard, on his own initiative bearing a grudge against both Robert Harley and Henry St John, attempted to assassinate Harley, the chancellor of the exchequer (later lord treasurer and earl of Oxford) and head of the new tory ministry established the previous year, by stabbing him with a penknife. -
Lord Nelson, HMS Victory and Sardinia – A Forgotten Episode? The Ingenious Mr Dummer: Rationalizing the Royal Navy in Late Seventeenth-Century England
Posted on August 14, 2012 | No CommentsThis article describes the circumstances of Nelson's gift of a solid silver crucifix and two candlestick holders to the church of Santa Maria Maddalena, La Maddalena, Sardinia, in 1804. -
Political Verse in Late Georgian Britain: Poems Referring to William Pitt the Younger (1759-1806)
Posted on August 14, 2012 | No CommentsThough Pitt was remarkable for the length of his tenure of office and for his youth when first appointed – he became Prime Minister at the age of twenty-four and only Sir Robert Walpole held office for a longer period – it is not our intention to suggest that he was in any way a unique phenomenon in the history of political versifying. -
‘The art of dancing, demonstrated by characters and figures’: French and English sources for court and theatre dance, 1700-1750
Posted on August 14, 2012 | No CommentsIn the early seventeenth century, during the reigns of James I and Charles I, England developed its own court entertainment in the masque - many of them devised by the dramatist and poet Ben Jonson in collaboration with the architect and designer Inigo Jones. -
Bonnets, Muffs and Trinkets, Oh My! Conspicuous Consumption of Prostitutes in London
Posted on July 20, 2012 | No CommentsImitation and emulation in fashion gained considerable notice from commentators in England during the eighteenth century. A quote from The British Magazine in 1763 illustrates this well. “The present rage of imitating the manners of high life hath spread itself so far among the gentle folks of lower life, that in a few years we shall probably have no common folk at all. -
England and the Machinery of Reason 1780 to 1830
Posted on July 18, 2012 | No CommentsThe increasingly sturdy optimism that nature could be understood and controlled both influenced and was equally strengthened by, the growing development of manufactures and attempts to understand labour productivity during this period. -
“I am her majesty’s subject”: Prince George of Denmark and the transformation of the English male consort
Posted on July 18, 2012 | No CommentsAmid the historical attention paid to the Revolution of 1688/89 and the Act of Settlement of 1701, an explanation for the constitutional demise of the male consort has never emerged. -
Sporting Days in Eighteenth Century England
Posted on July 11, 2012 | No CommentsThe typical view of the sports historian has not disturbed this accepted analysis of the role of play in eighteenth century life. The argument goes that “modern sport” was born of the industrial revolution...While this account has some proximate truth, it is too precise, sweeping and simple. -
Requirement for and subsequent development of a training scheme for the officers and staff of the British Army 1799 -1858
Posted on July 6, 2012 | No CommentsIt is interesting to note that the curriculum established for the education of army officers in Great Britain was, during the early years of the training scheme in the nineteenth century, based upon mathematics, languages, science and sketching. -
Criminal trial procedure in eighteenth-century England: the impact of lawyers
Posted on June 3, 2012 | No CommentsBut how precisely did this happen? Langbein’s astute detective work has now revealed that this important shift in courtroom practice followed hard on the heels of a series of scandals by which innocent defendants were prosecuted on the initiative of unscrupulous thief-takers and ‘Newgate solicitors’ who invented evidence and coached witnesses with the aim of profiting from rewards for convictions. -
Britain 1660-1714: competing historiographies
Posted on June 3, 2012 | No Comments“In the 1970s and 1980s”, Alan Houston and Steve Pincus added in their introduction to A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration (2001), “at the exact high point of revisionist scholarship in early-modern English historiography, modernization theory came under fierce attack throughout the social sciences. -
King George III and porphyria: an elemental hypothesis and investigation
Posted on May 24, 2012 | No CommentsKing George III (1738–1820), who was monarch from 1760 until his death, was one of the longest serving British sovereigns. During his reign, Britain achieved oceanic mastery, the defeat of Napoleonic France, and expansion of its empire to a level similar to a superpower. Despite these achievements, his reign is best remembered for the humiliating loss of the American colonies and his well-documented bouts of madness. -
The blindness, deafness and madness of King George III: psychiatric interactions
Posted on May 24, 2012 | No CommentsIn 1966–69 Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, mother and son psychiatrists and historians, claimed on the basis of selective reading and interpretation of the medical and contemporary accounts of King George III’s illnesses that he suffered from acute intermittent porphyria. -
Ledger reveals secrets of Victorian espionage
Posted on May 24, 2012 | No CommentsAn Article detailing evidence of Victorian espionage. Ledger reveals secrets of Victorian espionage Cloak of secrecy is torn from the spy world: Boxes of documents released at the Public Record Office chart the activities of British intelligence and its network of agents from a century ago. -
Patriotic women: Shakespearean heroines of the 1720s
Posted on May 19, 2012 | No CommentsEarly 18th-century adaptations of Shakespeare can arguably be regarded as reconstructions of the plays for the ‘modern’ stage. Commentators such as Jean Marsden have convincingly suggested that post-1660 drama turns its attention to love, family and marriage, all subjects befitting the presence of women... -
Anciennete among the Non-Jurors: a study of Henry Dodwell
Posted on May 19, 2012 | No CommentsThe present study may be regarded as treating upon those attitudes to the past and its relationship to the present generally discussed under the rubric of the conflict of the Ancients and the Moderns. -
An ordinary metropolis: the evolution of criminal justice in London, 1750-1830
Posted on April 19, 2012 | No CommentsHistorians often view the creation of the police as separate from legal and penal reform. The three are intricately related. Reformers' and pamphleteers' messages for reform joined law reform to a general plea for modernity. -
Playing at Command: Midshipmen and Quarterdeck Boys in the Royal Navy, 1793-1815
Posted on April 11, 2012 | No CommentsThe increasing social status of young gentlemen in the Royal Navy of the Great Wars and the processes that maintained their authority reflected wider social and cultural trends - developments that confirmed the view of Georgian England as an ancien regime. -
Westall’s peasants : British identity and the crisis of nation in 1799
Posted on April 10, 2012 | No CommentsThis thesis examines a set of stipple engravings representing groups of peasants and the rural countryside in four regions of the British Isles. -
From obligation to agreement: concepts of servitude in early modern England
Posted on April 10, 2012 | No CommentsUntil quite recently, servants played a central role in European family life...Early Modern England was no exception, for nearly every household participated in the institution of servitude. -
Conflict, consensus and charity: politics and the provincial voluntary hospitals in the eighteenth century
Posted on March 15, 2012 | No CommentsJust as each individual infirmary linked county and town, so collectively the provincial voluntary hospitals displayed both national and local features. On the one hand, they were linked in a national movement. -
The taming of the duel: masculinity, honour and ritual violence in London, 1660–1800
Posted on March 15, 2012 | No CommentsThe duel had a long history, but it was a malleable custom, and has been variously described as fundamentally feudal, early modern, and modern."Although traceable back to medieval tournaments, feuds, and judicial combat, the single combat to resolve questions of honour developed in the sixteenth century in several European countries, arriving in England in the 1570s. -
The Wife’s Administration of the Earnings’? Working-Class Women and Savings in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
Posted on March 15, 2012 | No CommentsThe late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw a range of proposals for ways to improve the condition of the poor by stimulating savings. Institutions that encouraged and rewarded thrift would, it was argued, reduce dependence in old age on the Poor Law: the industrious would be rewarded for their good habits and the idle and vicious would suffer if required to rely on their own exertions rather than on public assistance. -
An Inquiry into Scottish Identity Between the Years 1688 and 1707
Posted on March 7, 2012 | No CommentsImpoverished and stagnant, Scotland was looked upon as a backward kingdom to the north, having started the 17th century as the poorest kingdom in western Europe yet managing to decline through the century. The English actually viewed them in nearly as worse a light as they did the Irish. But how did Scotland view itself? -
Garden seeds in England before the late eighteenth century: I. Seed growing
Posted on February 19, 2012 | No CommentsPeculiar elements which shaped the development of garden seed production and marketing include the important role of foreigners in the process of innovation, technical difficulties and uncertainties of production balanced by the possibility of high profits, competition from imports, dependence on a retail market subject to fashion, and the emergence of seed growing from another innovation-market gardening. -
To the Ends of the Earth: A Study of the Explorative Discourse Promoting British Expansionism in Canada
Posted on February 19, 2012 | No CommentsBetween the second half of the eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth century, the British conception of the western Canadian wilderness remained remarkably consistent. The popular British image of western Canada, persisting into the 1830s, was of a wasteland fit only for the fur trade. -
Writing the Self? Love and the Letter in England, c. 1660–c. 1760
Posted on February 15, 2012 | No CommentsBefore we examine the socio-cultural meanings of Ursula’s letters, and what they tell us about emotional experience and expression in long eighteenth-century England, we need to consider their circumstances of production. -
Below stairs at Arbury Hall: Sir Richard Newdigate and his household staff, c.1670–1710
Posted on February 9, 2012 | No CommentsIn all these spheres of activity, Newdigate had a preference for micro-management which sat very uneasily with his irascible, volatile personality. He was, therefore, the worst type of control-freak: that is,none with time on his hands -
Voltaire’s English alter-ego unmasked by new letters
Posted on February 2, 2012 | No Comments14 newly-discovered letters by Voltaire have allowed an Oxford University team to shed light on his brief but important time in England. Two of the new letters shed new light... -
Chinoiserie: Revisiting England’s Eighteenth-Century Fantasy of the East
Posted on January 31, 2012 | No CommentsChinoiserie, a French word, is also used in the English language for a seventeenth and eighteenth century European style of ornamentation whose inspiration is entirely Oriental. Spanning centuries, continents and cultures, Chinoiserie explores the clash and fusion of values and perceptions between the East and the West. -
English hunger and industrial disorders : a study of social conflict during the first decade of George III’s reign
Posted on January 13, 2012 | No CommentsThis dissertation will argue that while the distress of the industrious poor, which followed sudden fluctuations in food prices and declining employment was the common denominator in the numerous riots of the 1760's, the disorders were merely the surface manifestation of underlying political, economic, social and intellectual ferment which affected all levels of society. -
The development of the British army during the wars with France, 1793-1815
Posted on January 3, 2012 | No CommentsThe British Army that fought the engagement at Waterloo in 1815, was outwardly little changed from that which was engaged in the initial campaigns of the Wars, twenty- two years previously. -
High crimes: the law of treason in late Stuart Britain
Posted on December 14, 2011 | No CommentsThis is the first work on treason to concentrate exclusively on the all important years between the Restoration and the Union, when the number of trials for this most serious of all crimes reached new heights and during which time the procedural law of treason underwent significant changes. -
The boot and shoe trades in London and Paris in the long eighteenth century
Posted on December 13, 2011 | No CommentsVery different appears to be the Parisian case, where provincial producers flourished only after the mechanisation of the sector. By the 1850s mechanisation meant the beginning of a new phase in the trade. -
The Royal dockyards in England at the time of the American War of Independence
Posted on December 13, 2011 | No CommentsThe system was at fault. Individuals, such as Lord Sandwich and Charles Middleton, worked hard to keep it going, while trying at the same time to improve it. Fortunately, defeat in the war encouraged the start of this reform in the 1780's. -
The contexts and contours of British economic literature, 1660-1760
Posted on December 12, 2011 | No CommentsIn the century after the Restoration of Charles II there was a remarkable outpouring of thinking about economic issues in Britain, of exploring the ways and means to prosperity and plenty. -
The Ghost in Early Modern Protestant Culture: Shifting perceptions of the afterlife, 1450-1700
Posted on October 25, 2011 | No CommentsThe Ghost in Early Modern Protestant Culture:Shifting perceptions of the afterlife, 1450-1700 McKeever, Amanda Jane PhD Thesis, Philosophy, University of Sussex, September 27, (2010) Abstract My thesis seeks to address... -
“And With All That, Who Believes in Vampires?” Undead Legends and Enlightenment Culture
Posted on October 25, 2011 | No Comments“And With All That, Who Believes in Vampires?” Undead Legends and Enlightenment Culture Burns, Stu Paper given at 33rd Annual European Studies Conference (2007) Abstract In the winter of 1740,... -
The bio-medical pursuits of Christopher Wren
Posted on October 16, 2011 | No CommentsI suppose that anyone who reads the English language sooner or later crosses the path of Christopher Wren. A meteorologist, an astronomer... -
The Poetic Nocturne: From Ancient Motif to Renaissance Genre
Posted on March 18, 2010 | No CommentsThe Poetic Nocturne: From Ancient Motif to Renaissance Genre Fitter, Chris Early Modern Literary Studies 3.2 (September 1997) Abstract The genre of poetic nocturne needs dating not to the eighteenth... -
The Laureate Dunces and the Death of the Panegyric
Posted on February 25, 2010 | No CommentsThe Laureate Dunces and the Death of the Panegyric Heaney, Peter F. Early Modern Literary Studies 5.1 (May, 1999) Abstract The final, 1743 version of The Dunciad, included amongst its... -
Marvell’s Now
Posted on February 23, 2010 | No CommentsMarvell's Now Raman, Shankar Early Modern Culture, No. 6 (2007) Abstract If the subsequent line -- "So restless Cromwell could not cease" -- identifies the "forward youth" with the man...