Tag Archives: 18C

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Birkbeck Eighteenth-Century Research Group: 12 February 2020 12-1.30pm

Wednesday 12 February, 12-1.30pm

Keynes Library, School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square.

‘Skill and Narrative Form in Early Eighteenth-Century Adventure Fiction’

Robert Stearn

In this session we will look at how a passage from Defoe’s The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), is treated in an early abridgement of the novel, undertaken for Edward Midwinter by the jobbing printer Thomas Gent, and published in 1722. Readings from these two books will be compared with a brief excerpt from The Adventures, and Surprizing Deliverances, of James Dubourdieu, and his Wife (1719) – a short novel of unknown authorship, published within months of the first two volumes of Robinson Crusoe and addressed to the same world of maritime adventure as Defoe’s fiction. The first of many similar works, Dubourdieu sought to capitalise on the success of Crusoe, while offering an intriguing revision of Defoe’s narrative poetics and ideological investments. A number of the men involved in printing and selling it would go on to publish and – in the case of Willian Chetwood – write further volumes of adventure fiction.

Taking together Defoe’s continuation of his novel, a re-written version of Crusoe, and a newly-composed piece of prose fiction that was advertised as ‘proper to be Bound up with Robinson Crusoe’, we can ask: what might the alternations made to Crusoe by abridgements and supplements tell us about eighteenth-century ways of reading in general, and about critical assessments of Defoe’s fiction in particular? How might the formal choices of Defoe, Gent, and the author of Dubourdieu  – including their decisions about the representation of speech and audience and about the segmentation of narrative episodes – produce or reflect different concepts of skill and practical knowledge? How are these ideas about skill shaped by their elaboration in relation to imagined colonial violence? And, how should we understand the place of commercial and material constraints in all these choices?

Robert Stearn is a PhD student in English at Birkbeck, working on skill and service in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. His thesis draws on a range of verbal and visual sources – visual satire, material culture, life-writing by employers and servants, poetry, and prose fiction – in order to chart the changing shapes of skill and its everyday, non-artisanal and non-professional, consistency.

Readings: if you would like to attend this Reading Group, please email Kate Retford, at k.retford@bbk.ac.uk, to be sent a PDF copy of these texts

  1. Daniel Defoe, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London, 1719), pp. 120-24.
  2. The Life And most Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner (London, 1722), pp. 252-55.
  3. ‘Ambrose Evans’, The Adventures, and Surprizing Deliverances, of James Dubourdieu and his Wife (London, 1719), pp. 1-16
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CANCELLED – ASSC: Designed in Parallel or in Translation? 2 March

Please note that Friday’s talk has been cancelled due to adverse weather.

Finola O’Kane Crimmins (UCD Dublin)

Designed in Parallel or in Translation? 

Plantation Landscapes from Ireland, Jamaica and Georgia 1730-1830

2 March, 6pm, Keynes Library, School of Arts, Birkbeck, 43 Gordon Square

 

 

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Birkbeck Eighteenth-Century Research Group: 30 November 17

Birkbeck Eighteenth-Century Research Group:

Reading Group, led by Emma Dowley, ‘Propaganda and Satire during the Jacobite Rebellion of ’45’

12-2pm, Thursday 30 November

Room 317, 43 Gordon Square

The last Jacobite rebellion of 1745/6 saw Charles Edward Stuart attempt to overthrow George II on behalf of his father, James. The growing market appetite for printed imagery that the rebellion spawned was consistent with a pattern set during times of political turbulence, reaching back to the Exclusion Crisis of the seventeenth century, but the volume of the output in 1745 and 1746 was unprecedented. The prints that are the subject of my thesis addressed the broader political and religious debates that were the principal causes of the division between the supporters of the house of Hanover and the exiled line of the Stuart dynasty. They attempted to paint as damaging a picture as possible of the Jacobites, France and the Catholic Church (the latter two presumed to be backing the rising), the ideological underpinning of Charles Edward’s mission and the potential consequences if he eventually succeeded. There is no evidence that the prints were part of a government orchestrated propaganda campaign, but Herbert Atherton has stated that, ‘their effect, taken in the context of the contemporary moment, may have given them the value of propaganda, especially when the tempo of polemic quickened’, as it did in 1745.

During the reading group session, I am interested in exploring to what extent these prints may be considered as propaganda, even if they were not officially sponsored. The preparatory ‘reading’ is the following three images:

The Invasion, or Perkin’s Triumph: http://digital.nls.uk/jacobite-prints-and-broadsides/archive/75241577?mode=zoom

The Highland Visitors: http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=1655512&partId=1&searchText=highland+visitors&page=1

The Fate of Rebellion:  http://digital.nls.uk/jacobite-prints-and-broadsides/archive/75241526?mode=zoom

Emma Dowley is a PhD student in History of Art at Birkbeck, working on anti-jacobite imagery in the eighteenth century.

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London 18th-Century Postgraduate Reading Group, 24 March 17 – High Art and Low Art

London 18th-Century Postgraduate Reading Group, 24 March – High Art and Low Art

Join us for the next session of the London 18th-Century Postgraduate Reading Group, 3.30-5 pm on Friday 24 March, in Room 106, School of Arts, Birkbeck (43 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD).

The hierarchies of art at the Royal Academy and the Society of Arts’ system of awards for excellence in drawing and design meant that most forms of artistic endeavour were categorised, ranked and compared in increasingly complex ways during the second half of the eighteenth century. However, the categories were permeable: many artists made careers both in high art and in the commercial world of product catalogues, advertising everyday goods. This session will look at some prints of ‘everyday’ items made by William Blake and John Bacon, with readings and images put together by Miriam Al Jamil (PhD candidate, Arts and Humanities, Birkbeck).

Guided by Granger’s category of ‘Painters, Artificers, Mechanics, and all of inferior professions’, we will look at Wedgwood’s catalogue – with its assertion that he would ‘rather give up the making of any particular article altogether, than suffer it to be degraded’ – together with an article by Anne Puetz, which discusses artisan instruction and 18th-century concerns about England’s competitiveness in the luxury goods trade. How did artists, designers and producers negotiate and engage with the status of artisanal work, and attempt to elevate and improve it? Did artists successfully straddle the divide or was there a penalty?

The readings are:

Josiah Wedgwood, Catalogue of Cameos, Intaglios, Medals, Bas-Reliefs, Busts and Small Statues (Etruria, 1787), pp. 63-73 – available here.

James Granger, A Biographical History of England […] consisting of Characters Disposed in Different Classes, and Adapted to a Methodical Catalogue of Engraved British Heads, 4 vols. (1769; 4th edn. London, 1804), I, ‘Plan of the Catalogue’, ‘Preface’, and  pp. 277-83 – available here.

Anne Puetz, ‘Design Instruction for Artisans in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Journal of Design History, 12 (1999), 217-39 – available here.

And the images are:

  1. William Blake, Creamware Shapes, from the Wedgwood Catalogue (1817).
  2. William Blake, River God, from Eleanor Coade, Coade’s Lithodipyra, or, Artificial Stone Manufactory: for all kind of statues, capitals, vases, tombs, coats of arms, & architectural ornaments &c. &c (London, 1784)
  3. John Bacon, Stock Classical Figures to hold candelabra [etching], from Coade’s Lithodipyra
  4. John Bacon, Further Classical Statuary [etching] from Coade’s Lithodipyra

These are all available here.

The London 18th-Century Postgraduate Reading Group is a student-run reading group organised in collaboration with the Centre for Enlightenment Studies at King’s and Birkbeck Eighteenth-Century Research Group. Staff and students at all London universities are very welcome. The reading group concentrates on a different theme each academic year, with an emphasis on primary texts and recent criticism. For more information, view the reading group’s blog.

If you have any queries about the readings or the reading group, please contact Robert Stearn (rstear01@mail.bbk.ac.uk) or Miriam Al Jamil (mstock05@mail.bbk.ac.uk).

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Writing Art: Women Writers as Art Critics in the Long Eighteenth Century – 25 February 2017

Writing Art: Women Writers as Art Critics in the Long Eighteenth Century
Saturday 25 February 2017
10am-4pm

This one-day conference focuses on women writers as art critics in the late Georgian and early Victorian period.

Tickets: £35; Students/Friends £30 (includes lunch and refreshments)

Writing Art: Women Writers as Art Critics in the Long Eighteenth Century

Chawton House Library, 25th February 2017

Long thought to be the domain of wealthy men, art criticism and connoisseurship underwent a transformation in the late Georgian period. This one-day conference focuses on women writers as art critics in the late Georgian and early Victorian period. Bringing together leading art historians and literary scholars on women’s writing and art criticism, speakers will draw on travel writing and private letters, on diaries and on novels by major English and French authors. We will explore the role of women writers in the emerging field of art history, their contribution to an evolving language of taste, and the problems of trespassing on once-male territory. Can we find in women’s writing a distinctly female voice that engages with the making and the experience of art?

This conference is held in conjunction with the National Gallery, London—which hosts, on the 10th November 2017, a conference on women as critics of Old Master paintings in the Victorian period—and the Southampton Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

10.00 – 10:30: Registration and tea/coffee

10:30: Stephen Lloyd (Knowsley Hall)

Walking tour of portraits in the Chawton House Library collection.

11:30: Susanna Avery-Quash (National Gallery, London)

‘”I shall be truly proud if we succeed both in rescuing some examples, and in introducing them into England, where already there are a chosen few who adore them”: the contribution of Lady Eastlake and her women friends to a new taste for early Italian art in Britain’.

12:15 Lunch

1:15:  Emma Barker (Open University)
‘Statues and Pictures: Germaine de Staël on art’

2:00:  Isabelle Baudino (Ecole Normale Superieure, Lyon)
‘Women travellers as art critics in Continental Europe’

2:45 Tea

3:15:  Carl Thompson (St Mary’s, Twickenham)
‘Maria Graham as art critic and connoisseur’

4:00:  Departure

To buy tickets, please visit our website or call us on
01420 541010
www.chawtonhouselibrary.org

Funding for this conference is provided by Chawton House Library, the Women’s History Network, and the Southampton Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

www.womenshistorynetwork.org

Registered UK Charity: 1118201

 

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Eighteenth-Century Reading Group, Wednesday 1 February 2017, 12-2pm

Birkbeck Eighteenth-Century Research Group: Reading Group

Wednesday 1 February 2017, 12.00-2.00pm

Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square

National and Cosmopolitan Antiquities in the Late Eighteenth Century (Irish, Scottish, German, Russian)

Readings chosen and introduced by:

Alexis Wolf (PhD candidate, English and Humanities, Birkbeck)

Catherine Angerson (PhD candidate, Cultures and Languages, Birkbeck)

The Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, Royal Charter (1783), pp. 2-5.

Matthew Guthrie, Dissertations sur les antiquities de Russie (1795), pp. 6-15.

Ekaterina Romanovna Dashkova and Martha Bradford, Memoirs of Princess Daschkaw, Lady of Honour to Catherine II (1840), pp. 16-21.

Johann Gottfried Herder, ‘Extract from a Correspondence on Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples’ (Auszug aus einem Briefwechsel über Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker) (1773) available online in German: http://www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/Herder,+Johann+Gottfried/Theoretische+Schriften/Von+deutscher+Art+und+Kunst/1.+Auszug+aus+einem+Briefwechsel

Gottfried August Bürger, Outpourings from the Heart on Folk Poetry (Herzensausguß über Volkspoesie) (1776) available online in German: https://www.uni-due.de/lyriktheorie/texte/1776_buerger.html

(English translations available)

Alexis Wolf will introduce the writings of Anglo-Irish sisters Martha and Katherine Wilmot, who travelled to Russia between 1803-1808 to live as the guests of Princess Yekaterina Dashkova, a major figure in the Russian Enlightenment, and recorded observations about the customs and songs of Russian peasants, relating them to Dissertations Sur Les Antiquities de Russie (1785) by Matthew Guthrie, a Scottish physician resident in St Petersburg and a Correspondent Member of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, whose Charter is also included in the reading pack. The transnational practice of the Irish women and the Scottish doctor in Russia will be compared to German reflections on the poetry of Ossian through texts by Herder and Bürger introduced by Catherine Angerson.

To request copies of the readings, please email Luisa Calè, l.cale@bbk.ac.uk

 

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