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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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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‘A Walk Around Eighteenth-Century Covent Garden’ – 1st December

Birkbeck Eighteenth-Century Research Group:

Reading Group, led by Dr. Thom Braun, Department of History of Art, Birkbeck College

‘A Walk Around Eighteenth-Century Covent Garden’

12.30pm, Tuesday 1st December, Room 112, School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square

The most famous image of someone walking in eighteenth-century Covent Garden is by William Hogarth: his Morning, from The Four Times of the Day. Please follow this link to see the print version – the only thing you need to ‘read’ in advance of the session:

http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details/collection_image_gallery.aspx?assetId=135713001&objectId=1401103&partId=1

In the eighteenth century Covent Garden piazza was the centre of a dynamic ‘round-the-clock’ urban space that encompassed a fruit and vegetable market, a theatre, artists’ studios, print shops, coffee houses, bagnios, and houses of ill repute. It was one of the defining spaces of eighteenth-century London, and, as such, it was represented across a range of media in a variety of ways. As well as being the subject of more than twenty paintings and scores of prints, Covent Garden is mentioned in contemporary novels, poems, continental guidebooks to London, and a range of other texts.

With its main focus on the visual, and starting with maps and mapping, this interdisciplinary session will look at a sample of topographical prints, all of which mediate the space in different ways. Through discussion of the images – and in relation to other insights that participants bring to the session – the aim will be to explore some of the ways in which a key metropolitan space was understood and represented through the century.

For further information, please contact Kate Retford: k.retford@bbk.ac.uk

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Professor Tita Chico: ‘Aesthetics, Mediation, and Difference: British Literature and Science’ – 10th November

Birkbeck Eighteenth-Century Research Group:

Lecture by Prof. Tita Chico, ‘Aesthetics, Mediation, and Difference: British Literature and Science’

6pm, Tuesday 10th November, Keynes Library, School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square

The Birkbeck Eighteenth-Century Research Group is delighted to announce a forthcoming lecture by Tita Chico, Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Maryland.

Professor Chico is the author of Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture (2005), and co-editor of Atlantic Worlds in the Long Eighteenth Century: Seduction and Sentiment (2012), with Toni Bowers. She is also editor of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. This talk relates to her current book project, Experimentalism: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment.

For further information, please contact Ann Lewis: a.lewis@bbk.ac.uk

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