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William Gilpin and picturesque unsociability [ Art and Literature ]

… life, it was more a solitary activity than a collective one. Gilpin’s experience of sociability was first and foremost epistolary and literary. However, the headmaster tried to prepare his pupils for a sociable life and imagined a sociable … with them in his letters. When his grand-children visited him, he kept to his study. 3   With his friends, he preferred epistolary exchanges to conversation as his son William explained bluntly in an unpublished note kept at the Bodelian … in many cases, it is probable, the attachments of this world, and those of the next, may not coincide. […] These hasty friendships, and all friendships that are not built upon virtue, will certainly be dissolved. (Warner 161) William …

Literary Academies [ Clubs & Societies / Associational culture ]

… Abstract Early modern literary academies were spaces of in-person and epistolary interaction and intellectual sociability. From the highly institutionalised royal academies to the academies … facets of relationships, but also the inherent logistics of communicating over distances. 18 Arcadia engendered a polite epistolary sociability through its system of communication grounded in a pastoral universe: members adopted unique … communication or recommendation, with epistolary relationships deepening with the passing of years. But it was existing friendships that most often led to founding new colonies, and it is impossible to fully appreciate the academic …

Helen Maria Williams [ Art and Literature / Travel ]

…  she initially socialised when in France with people connected to the House of Orléans (1790-1791) and then struck up a friendship with Manon Roland 5  (whose husband was to be appointed interior minister in two Girondist governments), who … off from some of her compatriots during the tensions between France and the United Kingdom (she had nevertheless kept up epistolary contact with Penelope Pennington and Ruth Barlow). 8 . Cited by M. Ray Adams, ‘Helen Maria Williams and the … the disappearance of society sociability, and so on. While sociability was central to Letters as a whole, the epistolary form had evolved significantly over the course of the violence and the trials of the Revolution. From volumes …

Richard Steele [ Art and Literature / Politics ]

… 2 . Spectator 152, 24 Aug. 1711. 3 . Spectator 97, 21 June 1711. Another feature of his life was his long-standing friendship with Joseph Addison, with whom he collaborated on the celebrated periodicals The Tatler (1709-10, with Steele … one case, Steele used his own love letters to his wife), 8 and therefore contributed significantly to the fashion for epistolary narratives as a vehicle for polite discussion. And the paper’s audience was explicitly the privately sociable …

Solitude [ Feelings & Emotions ]

… . Richard Baxter, Converse with God in Solitude: Or, The Christian Improving the Insufficiency and Uncertainty of Human Friendship, for Conversing with God in Secret, abridged by Benjamin Fawcett (2nd edition, 1774), p. 32. The devil … of solitude persisted well into the eighteenth century and are subtly conveyed in Samuel Richardson’s celebrated 1748 epistolary novel Clarissa, Or, the History of a Young Lady , which has been characterised as ‘a tragedy of solitude, inarticulacy and deceit’. 8 Like friendship, solitude in the troubled world of Clarissa, did not follow its expected course. Throughout the novel, but …

Giacomo Casanova [ Art and Literature / Travel ]

… genuine, enjoyable, and often based on mutual pleasure and common interests. At times, they would evolve into a real friendship and a long-term epistolary connection: the playwright Crébillon the elder, the physicist and natural scientist Albrecht von Haller, the … and the underground and whom Casanova met through Lord Pembroke. A low level yet prolific author, Goudar authored epistolary novels modelled after Montesquieu’s Persian Letters , such as L’Aventurier francais , L'Histoire des Grecs, ou …