Rechercher
Refine your search
Filtrer par mot clé
Debating societies [ Clubs & Societies / Associational culture ]
… debate became impossible and societies were outlawed. Despite those chequered fortunes they served as places for self-improvement for many men of limited formal education and provided forums for a broad part of the population, … conjoined they could part ways: they provided political, diplomatic, and literary-cultural debates to those bent on self-improvement and/or proud of their civic capacity; they also offered lighter subjects on fashion or gossip for those … entertainment’ to those who could not afford higher forms, such as a night at the theatre. They could be places of self-improvement for men with little formal learning. They served as schools for rhetoric and clearing houses for news …
Advertisement | Clubs | Debate | Eloquence | Gender | Middling sort | North America | Politics | Public sphere
Encyclopedia
Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi [ Art and Literature / Travel ]
… © National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG 4942, ca. 1785-86. Résumé Often considered a contradictory character herself, Hester Thrale Piozzi, now best remembered as a Bluestocking hostess and biographer of Samuel Johnson, embodies some … and having suffered various miscarriages before her only child was born, she ‘nursed up her Infant Daughter my simple Self, to play a thousand pretty Tricks, & tell a Thousand pretty Stories and repeat a Thousand pretty Verses to divert … actually her mother’s choice, and the singer and music master to her daughter Gabriele Piozzi (1740-1809), were self-made men, though of different social standing. For the first few years after her first marriage in 1763, Hester …
Bluestockings | Commerce | Friendship | Italy | Literature | Politics
Encyclopedia
William Wordsworth, the worldly recluse [ Art and Literature ]
… Revolution Politics Solitude In a letter of 27 October 1818 to Richard Woodhouse, John Keats famously distanced himself from ‘the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime.’ 1 In coining the phrase, Keats initiated a tradition of regarding Wordsworth as a solitary, if not self-involved, poet. The poems for which he is best remembered, such as ‘Daffodils’ or The Prelude , tend to confirm … of the poet to other men. In the Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), he accordingly asserts himself as ‘a man speaking to men’ and endeavours to speak in ‘the real language of men in a state of vivid excitement’. 2 …
Correspondence | Domesticity | French Revolution | Politics | Solitude
Encyclopedia
Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire [ Aristocracy / Fashion ]
… participant rushes from one activity to the next there is no time for the kind of social interaction that resulted in self-reflection and self-improvement that epitomised eighteenth-century sociability. In fact reflection is positively scorned by Sir William, … John Damer had accrued debts of near to £70,000. Having been refused aid by his father, Lord Milton, Damer shot himself in an upstairs room in the Bedford Arms in Covent Garden. Gambling is portrayed as the root of all ills in The Sylph …
Correspondence | Fashion | Fiction | Gambling | Politics | Suicide
Encyclopedia
John Keats [ Art and Literature ]
… also highlights the extent to which Keats, far from the ethereal misfit his Victorian successors held him to be, saw himself as embedded in a variety of social networks, which pushed against the borders of his more narrowly defined … the time he composed the ‘Great Odes’ and narrative poems grouped together in this volume, Keats had come to distance himself somewhat from Hunt and his circle – particularly in the wake of the notoriously hostile reviews directed at the … founded in fellowship would continue to inform his writing in subtle ways. 5 If these ‘late’ poems are inflected by self-scrutinizing irony and riddled with doubts – about the limits of the imagination, and the efficacy of poetry to …
Correspondence | Friendship | Nature | Poetry | Politics | Romanticism
Encyclopedia
Grub Street [ Cities / Literary & Artistic genres ]
… account from 1812, he made it abundantly clear that ‘he was ready to be hired to any cause; […] he actually put himself to auction to the two contending Parties [and], after several biddings, the honest Mr. Ralph was bought by the … that a writer must be bad, as witnessed by his conjunction of the ‘Cave of Poetry and Poverty’ in the Dunciad . Pope himself is, as a professional and successful author, both transitional for the development of a commercial literary market … petty criticism, and a commercially successful writer who expertly navigated the book market. He did not auction himself out for the highest bidder like James Ralph, but he was not beneath tricking an enemy bookseller into publishing his …
Commerce | Patronage | Politics | Satire | Sex
Encyclopedia
Parish churches [ Institutions ]
… I must acknowledge […] the idle lazy way of preaching, which many of our clergy are got into, seeming rather to make self-interest the motive for the exercising their profession than the eternal happiness and salvation of men’s souls. […] … I think the precept and practice in most (that is, in too many of us) is an opposite to each other. [On 22 May 1763:] Myself and servant at church in the afternoon; the text Luke 24.49: "But tarry ye in the City of Jerusalem […]" The sermon … 2009-2017. https://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/travellers/Fiennes/21 A Swiss village church near Bern established itself as an unlikely tourist destination. An evocatively carved tombstone for Maria Magdalena Langhans, the pastor's wife …
Architecture | Assemblies | Catholicism | Churches | Dissent | Hierarchy | Politics | Religion | Towns
Encyclopedia
Essay periodical [ Reading & Writing / Communication / Literary & Artistic genres / Taste & Manners ]
… talk.’ 1 1 . The Spectator n° 4, ed D. F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965, 5 vols.) vol. 1, p. 21. The phrase itself shows the intimate relationship the Spectator ’s authors wished to establish between reading such ephemeral prints … conversation understood as sociability. 2 . The Free-Thinker n° 147 (London, 1722), vol. 3, p. 308. The move was in itself paradoxical. Periodicals claimed to improve upper-class forms of sociability by displacing their value from the … forms of sociability of upper-class women. For example, Fulvia ‘thinks life lost in her own Family, and fancies her self out of the World when she is not in the Ring, the Play-House, or the Drawing-Room. […] The missing of an Opera the …
Commerce | Correspondence | Femininity | Periodicals | Politics | Women
Encyclopedia
Frances Glanville Boscawen [ Aristocracy / Art and Literature ]
… Boscawen suffered bitterly when parted from her husband, but his career, and his absences, forced her to exert herself socially. She regulated home affairs on her own, and the house she bought and renovated in her husband’s absence, 14 … did the honours in a certain way that was agreeable and attentive to everybody, and yet (seemingly) with great ease to myself’ (Aspinall-Oglander, I, 166). Organizing the event had been a matter of some concern rather than great ease, but … felt a sense of achievement, dutifully couched in submissive terms in letters to her husband: I cannot help flattering myself that you think your choice of a wife happy in that point – in your public character. [...] I cannot but reflect with …
Bluestockings | Conversation | Correspondence | Politics | Women
Encyclopedia