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Musical evenings (Dr Burney's) [ Dance, Music & Songs / Sports & Leisure ]

… Abstract The ‘Sunday evening musical parties hosted by Dr. Burney’ were informal gatherings of musicians as well as writers, actors, and painters, in order to perform in and listen … with the men. Practices > Dance, Music & Songs Places > Sports & Leisure Keywords Conversation Music Salon Artist Dr. Burney Among those who visited the Sunday evening musical parties at the Burneys’ on a more or less regular basis …

Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire [ Aristocracy / Fashion ]

… explores the relationship between high society, sociability and suicide. People > Aristocracy People > Fashion Keywords Burney Duchess Devonshire Epistolary Evelina Fashion Fashionability Gambling Suicide Sylph Georgiana Cavendish, the fifth … was widely reported and imitated. She popularized the much-satirized (and prohibitively expensive) ostrich-feather headdress and when painted by Gainsborough in an oversized, broad-brimmed ‘picture hat’, the demand for outsize headwear was … feathers. Such was her popularity that the mere association of her name with a performer, a play, a book, a style of dress, piece of china or even shade of brown could ensure success. Cavendish was also highly acclaimed in Paris and …

Touch and sociability [ Communication ]

… heroine, Charlotte Montgomery, notes: ‘Dancing introduces a kind of familiarity that would be quite inadmissible in a drawing room. When a gentleman solicits the honour of your hand, it is not a figure of speech; your hand really belongs … to him, for the time; and if he persists in taking it a little after the time, it would be very ill-natured to withdraw it – unless one did not like him.  For my part I found something so admirably persuasive in the touch of a man I do … boundaries of this more polite world, and its precise requirements of masculine conduct, were hardly set in stone. Fanny Burney records meeting a Mr. Thomas Barlow in 1775 at the home of some of her relations where her grandmother was taking …

Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi [ Art and Literature / Travel ]

… thus, Hester did not seem predestined to become a glittering salonnière : on the contrary, her life seemed confined and dreary, and her husband was widely known to be a womanizer even then – he even let himself be seen at the theatre in … of their eldest boy, Henry, cruelly upset their plans. An exacting mother, Hester spent years trying to teach her children only to see them die one after other: of fourteen children, only four would survive. As usual, she suppressed her … or had already achieved eminence, such as Oliver Goldsmith, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Joshua Reynolds, or Dr Charles Burney, who was engaged as Queenie’s music tutor but quickly gained a place at the famous dinner table. In 1777, Hester, …

Buckles [ Clothing & Fashion ]

… fashion in the 1790s, and epitomise many features of the intervening period. They were an essential part of fashionable dress for both men and women, but their significance for eighteenth-century sociability goes deeper than this. Their … The buckle therefore offered a small but conspicuous opportunity for display. The buckled shoe became central to the dress ensemble of the eighteenth century. Patrician men dressed in their uniform of jacket, waistcoat and breeches, with … clothing – but the visual effect was worth the risk. 7 . Alicia Kerfoot, ‘Declining Buckles and Movable Shoes in Frances Burney’s Cecilia’, The Burney Journal (11, 2011), p. 55-79. More sombrely, buckles were also part of the culture of …

Pierre-Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos [ Art and Literature / Association ]

… founder and editor of the Journal des Amis de la Constitution . Following the Champs-de-Mars massacre, however, he withdrew his membership from the club without resigning. 2 . Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, Franc-maçonnerie et sociabilité. Les … Laclos developed the idea of a constitutional monarchy to replace French absolutism. 4 . Mémoires du comte Alexandre de Tilly pour servir à l’histoire des mœurs de la fin du XVIIIe siècle, Christian Melchior-Bonnet (ed.) (Paris: … In 1784, two years after the succès de scandale of Les liaisons dangereuses , he published a review of Frances Fanny Burney’s Cecilia or Memoirs of an Heiress in the Mercure de France in which he made a plea for the novel as a portrait of …