Tag Archives: London 18th-Century Postgraduate Reading Group

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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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London 18th-Century Postgraduate Reading Group – 3 March 2017 3.30pm

London 18th-Century Postgraduate Reading Group, 3rd March 2017

Christopher Smart & Empiricist Devotion

All welcome at this term’s second session of the London 18th-Century Postgraduate Reading Group, 3.30-5 pm on Friday 3rd March. We will be in room 1.21 of the Franklin-Wilkins building, at King’s College London’s Waterloo Campus (map here).

Continuing with the theme ‘the everyday’ with readings put together by Ari Messer (PhD candidate, English & Humanities, Birkbeck), we will be looking at Christopher Smart’s The Hop-Garden (written 1742-43; first published 1752) – a georgic poem in blank verse about growing hops – and a chapter from Courtney Weiss Smith’s recent book that argues for an alternative view of the eighteenth-century georgic as an empirical-devotional mode. The readings are:

Christopher Smart, The Hop-Garden, in The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, ed. Karina Williamson and Marcus Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980-96), IV, pp. 41-65

Courtney Weiss Smith, Empiricist Devotions (London: University of Virginia Press, 2016), pp. 173-210.

Those with more time may also wish to look at a short chapter from Chris Mounsey’s book on Smart, which situates the poem as a comic, non-religious response to John Philips’s Cyder (1708):

Chris Mounsey, Christopher Smart: Clown of God (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2001), pp. 64-80.

All the readings are available online here.

The georgic was an ‘everyday’ mode of conversing about natural subjects such as agriculture in eighteenth-century Britain, but one which has only recently been put under the lens of historical poetics. Does The Hop-Garden participate in what Weiss identifies as ‘meditative empiricism’, or is it just a funny poem about farming?

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 informations, 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 Ari Messer (amesse01@mail.bbk.ac.uk).

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London 18th-Century Postgraduate Reading Group: 10th November 2016

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Image credit: William Daniell, ‘Near Beachy Head’ (etching with aquatint), 1823. London: British Museum, Department of Prints & Drawings. © Trustees of the British Museum.

London 18th-Century Postgraduate Reading Group, 10th November – Everyday Geology in Beachy Head (1807)

Join us for this term’s first session of the London 18th-Century Postgraduate Reading Group. We will be meeting  3.30 – 5 pm on Thursday 10th November, in the Small Committee Room, King’s Building at the Strand Campus of King’s College London.

The loose theme of the reading group this year is ‘the everyday’. On the 10th, we will be looking at Charlotte Smith’s posthumously-published Beachy Head, together with a recent article on the poem by Kevis Goodman, which argues that Smith uses geology as a means through which to think about everyday experience and ‘comprehend the ground of Beachy Head as simultaneously local and global’. The readings are:

Charlotte Smith, Beachy Head (1807)

Kevis Goodman, ‘Conjectures on Beachy Head: Charlotte Smith’s Geological Poetics and the Ground of the Present’, ELH, 81.3 (2014), 983-1006.

A text of Beachy Head can be viewed here; Goodman’s article is available here.

Topics for discussion might include: Goodman argues that the kinds of quotidian experience she is discussing (and Smith is writing) have complex historical conditions of possibility; how useful is her approach for thinking about the history mediated by writing, or the situation of writing in history? How productive is it to think about literature through the category of the everyday, or a ‘complex historical present’? How does natural history / science figure in Goodman’s account of Smith’s poetry?

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 informations, 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 Jess Frith (jessica.frith@kcl.ac.uk).

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London 18th-Century Postgraduate Reading Group: ‘The Dangerous Mix of Atomism & Poetry’, 19 April 2016

 

The second session of the London 18th-Century postgraduate reading group will be at 12.30pm on Tuesday 19th April in Room S3.05, Strand Building, King’s College London, WC2R 2LS. We’ll be continuing with the theme of Resentment and Regard (more details on the group’s blog, here).

‘Whatever in Lucretius is Poetry is not Philosophical, whatever is Philosophical is not Poetry’ – Samuel Taylor Coleridge to William Wordsworth, May 1815.

The week’s reading is focused on the simultaneous resentment and regard directed towards Lucretius’s poetics from the late seventeenth-century English translations onwards. Seen as a prime example of atheistic poetry, the publication of various translations of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura provoked many backlashes that both regarded the high quality of his poetic verse whilst resenting the atomistic philosophy it aimed to teach its readers. We will look at various commentaries on Lucretius and his translations across the early to mid-eighteenth century as a way of discussing the interactions between poetics and dangerous philosophies in the period:

 

– Lucy Hutchinson’s dedication to her unpublished 1675 translation of De Rerum Natura [Available online here]

– John Dryden’s comments on Lucretius in his ‘Preface to Sylvae’ [Available on Eighteenth Century Collections Online here, images 10-18]

– Thomas Creech’s Preface to his 1682 translation of De Rerum Natura, [Available on Early English Books Online here, images 8-11]

– Aphra Behn’s ‘To the Unknown Daphnis on his Excellent Translation of Lucretius’, [Available on Eighteenth Century Collections Online here, images 62-65]

– Richard Blackmore’s preface to his 1712 anti-Lucretian poem Creation [Available on Eighteenth Century Collections Online here, looking at pages 1-2; 32-52]

– Later comments on Lucretius in the 1740 The Christian Free-Thinker: Or an Epistolary Discourse Concerning Freedom of Thought [Available on Eighteenth Century Collections Online here, pages 28-34]

 

Topics to discuss might include: the religious ramifications involved in a turn towards a classical past; the use of poetics to present philosophy; the power and danger of poetry; the place of Lucretius’s poetry as part of a gendered resentment in Behn and Hutchinson; the balance of regard for poetics and resentment for philosophy; the use of poetics to simultaneously promote and overturn.

For optional critical material on the place of Lucretius in the eighteenth-century, see: David Hopkins, ‘The English Voices of Lucretius from Lucy Hutchinson to John Mason Good’, in The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 254-273.

For further information (and for copies of the readings if you cannot access them through your institution), please contact Robert Stearn (rstear01@mail.bbk.ac.uk) or James Morland (james.morland@kcl.ac.uk).

You can read about the first session’s discussion here.

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London 18th-Century Postgraduate Reading Group: ‘Resentment & Regard in Low-Life’, 11 March 2016

London 18th-Century Postgraduate Reading Group, 11th March – Resentment & Regard in Low-Life (1750)

When: 12.30pm, Friday 11th March
Where: Room 112, School of Arts, Birkbeck, 43 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD

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. The theme for what’s left of this year will be ‘Resentment and Regard’. More about the theme can be found on the reading group’s blog here.

In this year’s first session we will be discussing excerpts from Low-Life: Or, One Half of the World Knows not how The Other Half Lives (London, ?1750, 1754, 1764) – a fictional hour-by-hour documentary account of a putatively specific day in London.  We will concentrate on hours I-III (pp. 1-19), VI-XI (pp. 27-51), and XIX-XX (pp. 80-87).

The 1764 ‘Third Edition’ of Low-Life has an engraved frontispiece depicting a relaxing Saint Monday. Low-Life’s writer announces in the prefatory address to Hogarth that the book is modelled on Hogarth’s Four Times of the Day series (1736, 1738).  So, for the first session, we will be looking closely at the frontispiece and Hogarth’s images along side the written text.

Topics for discussion might include: the relations between different modes of depiction and description that these materials signal; the affective loading of the point of view they indicate (or don’t); the ways of looking and accumulating knowledge that they model; how they encourage their readers and viewers to think about the lower classes, work, and holidays; and their differently oblique engagements with narrative in the service of enjoyment, social description, and moral correction.

For optional critical material which engages some of these questions in relation to Low-Life, see: Carolyn Steedman, ‘Cries Unheard, Sights Unseen: Writing the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis’, Representations, 118.1 (2012), 28-71.

The 1764 ‘3rd Edition’ of Low-Life  (including a poor-quality version of the frontispiece) is available on Historical Texts here.  A clearer image of a nineteenth-century copy of the 1764 frontispiece can be found on the National Library of Congress website here.  Lastly, images of Hogarth’s engravings after his Four Times of the Day paintings are available on the British Museum website: Morning, Noon, Evening, and Night.

On the 11th, we will also be talking about what we want to look at in further meetings of the reading group. So, if you have suggestions for primary materials in any format, or recent scholarship that has a bearing on the theme of the group, then please come along to the first session and share these ideas, or email suggestions to Robert Stearn and James Morland.

Ideas so far include: gender and resentment in 17th- and 18th-century engagements with translations of Lucretius and philosophical atomism; resentment and charlatanism in the 18th-century literary marketplaces; the mutual resentment of Swift and Pope and the suspiciousness of inauthentic resentment adopted as a literary persona; regarding ‘The Dark Side of the Landscape’.

For further information (and for copies of the readings if you cannot access them through your institution), please contact Robert Stearn (rstear01@mail.bbk.ac.uk) or James Morland (james.morland@kcl.ac.uk).

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