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Recent Posts
- Patriotic women: Shakespearean heroines of the 1720s
- Sir Francis Kynaston: The importance of the ‘Nation’ for a 17th-century English royalist
- Anciennete among the Non-Jurors: a study of Henry Dodwell
- Wet-nurses in early modern England: some evidence from the Townshend archive
- Masters and servants: the Hudson’s Bay Company and its personnel, 1668-1782
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Literature Archive
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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... -
Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1533-1556: a political study
Posted on April 21, 2012 | No CommentsSuch evaluations of Cranmer, which slight his political abil- ity during the reign of Henry VIII, are inadequate. They leave unexplained the glaring inconsistency between the non-political pawn who was Henry VHI's archbishop and the determined protestant reformer of Edward VI's reign. -
The British invasion of Egypt and the political press, 1882
Posted on April 21, 2012 | No CommentsThe objective of this paper is to return the study of the British invasion of of Egypt in 1882 to an important element of the original source material—the periodic press, which helped to condition the attitudes of the educated British public as well as reflect those attitudes. -
‘Feeling pleasures’: The sense of touch in renaissance England
Posted on April 18, 2012 | No CommentsMy dissertation contends that the nature and status of touch were granted unprecedented scrutiny in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, with the sense assuming a new importance amidst the cultural transformations that characterized those centuries. -
“The Prince and His People”: A Study of Edwardian Propaganda, 1547-1549
Posted on April 11, 2012 | No CommentsThe conclusion of this study draws direct parallels between the 1549 petitions and the rhetorical strategies used in the previous two years. The government’s direct patronage of this propaganda and the language that drew the commons into a political partnership with their king helped to spark the rebellions, resulting in a crisis of leadership and legitimacy. -
Anatomizing the social body: representing the plague in London, 1665
Posted on April 10, 2012 | No CommentsThis thesis will analyze the motivations behind a broadsheet produced in response to the outbreak of bubonic plague in the City of London in 1665. -
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. -
Victorian Governesses: A Look at Education and Professionalization
Posted on April 4, 2012 | No CommentsVictorian governesses found themselves central to the debate of ideal womanhood because of their roles as educators and workers. Governesses and others concerned with the conditions of governesses endeavored to professionalize that career by embracing and taking part in the movement for higher female education and the advancement of women in other fields of work. -
Ballads, Culture and Performance in England 1640-1660
Posted on March 27, 2012 | No CommentsThis study argues that ballads were a uniquely potent cultural medium. Because ballads were used for popular entertainment, the discourses about contemporary political and religious controversies contained in them pervaded culture more so than messages contained in other kinds of print. -
Buttressing a Monarchy: Literary Representations of William III and the Glorious Revolution
Posted on March 27, 2012 | No CommentsThe 1690s have been unfairly criticized as one of the dullest periods in English literature.i While the period lacks the euphoria of the years immediately following the Restoration, the literature in the years following William III’s ascension is anything but dull. As writers wrestled with the monumental changes to the English government brought about by the Glorious Revolution, they created a body of literature that significantly engages political issues and vibrantly expresses the varied conceptions of government circulating at the time. -
Haunting the House, Haunting the Page: The Spectral Governess in Victorian Fiction
Posted on March 27, 2012 | No CommentsFor James’s novella participates in a period-spanning discourse that associated governesses with ghosts both real and imaginary. Throughout the Victorian period, governesses found themselves implicitly allied with the legions of the unquiet dead. -
![Opium was not an enormously expensive commodity, and “at 1d [,] an ounce of laudanum was cheap enough—about the price of a pint of beer,” in consequence, many, even of the working class, were regular users. Self-medicating, the cheapest, and often the only means available to many of the poor when sickness struck, was a socially acceptable practice.](http://earlymodernengland.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Opium-115x115.jpg "Opium Use in Victorian England: The Works of Gaskell, Eliot, and Dickens")
Opium Use in Victorian England: The Works of Gaskell, Eliot, and Dickens
Posted on March 27, 2012 | No CommentsOpium was not an enormously expensive commodity, and “at 1d [,] an ounce of laudanum was cheap enough—about the price of a pint of beer,” in consequence, many, even of the working class, were regular users. Self-medicating, the cheapest, and often the only means available to many of the poor when sickness struck, was a socially acceptable practice. -
Violent Crime in Victorian England: A Gender Analysis of Sherlock Holmes
Posted on March 21, 2012 | No CommentsIn many ways, Sherlock Holmes serves as a mirror for the attitudes of Victorian England in regards to women and their involvement in crime; as both victims and perpetrators. -
Revolution and the British Nationalist Imaginary: The Case of Charles Dickens
Posted on March 15, 2012 | No CommentsEver since the late 16th Century, when protogenic nationalism made its appearance in England, the English Channel, rather than a watery passage connecting two seas and lands, figured in the nationalist Imaginary as a symbolic divide which insulated England from its Others - France and the Continent -
I, Easy Philosopher: Who is Andrew Marvell’s Upon Appleton House Really About?
Posted on March 11, 2012 | No CommentsIt is generally assumed that the poem is a tribute to General Fairfax and his house and family. While these are important to the poem, as well as weighty political and religious considerations of the time, I wish to argüe that it is primarily about the poet himself. -
Equine Imagery in Early Modern Literature
Posted on February 26, 2012 | No CommentsEarly modern England relied heavily on horses for a wide variety of trades and pursuits. Horses plowed fields, transported people and goods across the country, carried knights in tournaments and battles, raced for the enjoyment of the upper classes, and even occasionally performed alongside human entertainers. -
The English Reformation In Image and Print: Cultural Continuity, Disruptions, and Communications in Tudor Art
Posted on February 19, 2012 | No CommentsThe sixteenth century was a period of social, political, and religious change for the English Crown and people. Of these shifts the English Reformation and the resulting modifications to Catholic traditions were especially significant. Material culture (including art forms such as portraiture, church art, and illustrated texts) was a prominent indicator of larger political and religious alterations. -
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. -
The protestant idea of marriage in early modern England
Posted on February 14, 2012 | No CommentsThe English conduct book writers, themselves from the first generation of married pastors, saw it as their task to model the patriarchal family afresh for this new world. -
From Maiden to Matron: Victorian Heroines and the Creation of Domestic Identity
Posted on February 14, 2012 | No CommentsFor the Victorian heroine, no goal is as important to her happiness, social position and financial security as a successful courtship that leads to a successful marriage with a suitable man. -
Charles Dickens: Biography and Works
Posted on February 8, 2012 | No CommentsCharles Dickens was born on February 7th, 1812 in Landport, Portsmouth, England, the second of eight children, to John and Elizabeth Dickens. -
A Mechanized Society in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times
Posted on February 7, 2012 | No CommentsMy choice of writing about mechanization is not only to describe how this mechanization of the society is but, to show the importance of fancy and fiction in the life of people. -
“The wife of Lucifer” : women and evil in Charles Dickens
Posted on February 7, 2012 | No CommentsThe central thesis behind this is that no human being commits evil “knowingly” – an evil action must therefore be the result of mistakenly believing that the action is good; or it must be done unintentionally, through accident, coercion, or incapacity. -
The anatomy of Charles Dickens: a study of bodily vulnerability in his novels
Posted on February 7, 2012 | No CommentsThis dissertation concludes that the body’s vulnerability is not only a continual presence in Dickens’s novels but is an under-examined yet fundamental element in what makes his writing style distinctive and what makes his work continually popular. -
The importance of Charles Dickens in Victorian social reform
Posted on February 7, 2012 | No Comments...While the likes of Victorian thinkers such as Marx, Mill, Carlyle, and Ruskin to name but a few,formulated the ideas of and laid the groundwork for social reform in the 19th c., it was in reality men like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy who pointed out through their various novels, the abuses of the Industrial Age in Victorian England. -
English Assimilation and Invasion From Outside the Empire: Problems of the Outsider in England in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Posted on February 1, 2012 | No CommentsNo matter how relevant the novel may seem to current readers, it would be foolish to ignore the ways in which Dracula excited emotions in its earliest readers. Late Victorian English citizens would have viewed the novel through a number of different lenses that 21st century readers may be unable to appreciate. -
Scripture versus Church in the Debate of More and Tyndale
Posted on January 29, 2012 | No CommentsWritten law was given to the people of Israel as their morals got generally corrupted and they became blind to understand the will of God, thus God gave them the Ten Commandements of his his mercy... -
Victorian Governesses : A Look at Education and Professionalization
Posted on January 27, 2012 | No CommentsHistories and fictions explore the lives of Victorian governesses. The governess appeared lonely, depressed, and unwanted, yet thousands of women entered the profession. Victorian governesses experienced changing social and economic conditions. -
Courtship and Marriage Rituals in Seventeenth Century England
Posted on January 27, 2012 | No CommentsThis thesis will examine the more personal side of courtship and marriage, through the use of seventeenth century diaries and letters. -
Dickens’s fans sought to celebrate author’s bicentenary
Posted on January 24, 2012 | No CommentsUniversity of Leicester to stage series of events marking 200th anniversary of birth of Charles Dickens -
Imagining the pain and peril of seventeenth-century childbirth: travail and deliverance in the making of an early modern world
Posted on January 23, 2012 | No CommentsAlice Thornton’s accounts of the pains and perils of childbirth, including this passage on the birth of her fifth child, have attracted the attention of a number of recent historians as particularly detailed and evocative examples of personal testimony to the experience of giving birth in the early modern period. -
Young England : the medieval spirit in an industrial age, 1842-1850
Posted on January 12, 2012 | No CommentsIt cannot be said that Young England left an indelible mark on the legislation or social life of Victorian England. As Disraeli's biographer, E.T. Raymond,,, has remarked, "It left no mark on the statute book. -
Gothic Horror, Monstrous Science and Steampunk
Posted on January 3, 2012 | No CommentsUsing a case study of the Steampunk film Van Helsing, the Gothic roots are examined using the inspirational texts Frankenstein and Dracula alongside an analysis of the changing ethos of wonderment toward and faith in “safe” science. -
Literature, war and politics, 1642-1668
Posted on January 3, 2012 | No CommentsWhat the two poems could not register (beyond a loaded remark in the Epilogue to the effect that if the play had offended the prince then ‘we’ve now / Three hours done treason here’) was the full extent of the political crisis then unfolding. -
New in Victorian Books this Week!
Posted on December 29, 2011 | No CommentsRing in the New Year Victorian Style with these new releases! -
Dickens’s Haunted Christmas: The Ethics of the Spectral Text
Posted on December 21, 2011 | No CommentsMarley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. -
Working with the body : subjectivity, gender, commodification and the labouring body in Victorian England
Posted on December 20, 2011 | No CommentsThe dissertation’s contrapuntal structure places middle-class texts against working-class texts. -
The Creation, Reception and Perpetuation of the Sherlock Holmes Phenomenon, 1887 – 1930
Posted on December 16, 2011 | No CommentsDecember 1887 saw the publication of the first of sixty tales that have immortalized the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. -
Scholar discovers 16th-century love poem written by an Englishwoman
Posted on December 16, 2011 | No CommentsThe erotic-love poem seems to have been by a Roman Catholic woman and sent to a Protestant scholar who was the tutor to Edward VI. -
Charlotte Bronte manuscript sold for £690,000
Posted on December 15, 2011 | No CommentsA miniature manuscript written by Charlotte Bronte has been purchased at auction for £690,000 by a museum in Paris. -
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. -
An ideal woman : literary, parliamentary, and sexual representations of model femininity in mid-Victorian England
Posted on November 18, 2011 | No CommentsMiddle-class women of the Victorian era experienced isolation from various aspects of society, in favor of removal to the “woman‟s sphere” of hearth and home. -
Three early seventeenth-century watercolours of the tombs of Henry VII and Elizabeth I in Westminster Abbey
Posted on November 16, 2011 | No CommentsOne of the two paintings of Henry VII’s tomb (fol.24) shows the gilded bronze effigies of the King and his wife, Elizabeth of York. -
Literary detectives unravel famous Ben Jonson mystery
Posted on October 26, 2011 | No CommentsThe amazing chance discovery of a manuscript hidden among papers in an ancient family archive is shedding new light on the legendary career of William Shakespeare’s biggest rival, the poet and playwright, Ben Jonson. -
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,... -
Elfland Revisited: A Comparative Study of Late Twentieth Century Adaptations of Two Traditional Ballads
Posted on October 24, 2011 | No CommentsElfland Revisited: A Comparative Study of Late Twentieth Century Adaptations of Two Traditional Ballads Giebert, Stefanie PhD Dissertation, Philosophy, University of Trier, (2009) Abstract Once upon a time there was... -
Ophelia’s Mistreatment and Ignored Monastic Opportunities
Posted on October 16, 2011 | No CommentsAn examination of her relationship with Polonius and Laertes will culminate with an inspection of the relationship between Ophelia and Laertes, using the feminist theory employed by Virginia Wolf -
The Hunt for Jack the Ripper
Posted on October 16, 2011 | No CommentsWilliam D. Rubinstein reviews the achievements of the ‘Ripperologists’ and lends weight to the argument surrounding the Ripper Diaries. -
Margaret Cavendish’s Imaginary Friends
Posted on October 15, 2011 | No CommentsMargaret Cavendish’s Imaginary Friends Rachel Warburton – Lakehead University Session: “English Epistolary Friendships” Paper given at the conference: Friendship In Pre-Modern Europe (1300-1700) This paper analysed Margaret Cavendish’s sociable letters. They...