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This study examines the health care system which existed for the men of the British Navy between the years 1689 and 1713. The first half of this work considers the administrative side of the health care system, including both government offices and health care personnel. The second half presents the way in which the system actually functioned, with an emphasis on the rates of morbidity and mortality as they appear in a sample of ship's muster books. The majority of the conclusions reached in the course of this work are based upon unpublished primary sources held in various libraries in London, England. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

An understanding of the nature and role of the parlements is essential to effective study of the French old régime, and of the origins of the Revolution. Much light can be thrown on this question by the study of the magistrates of these courts, their interests, and the conditions under which they passed their lives. The results of such enquiries have the added use of illustrating aspects of aristocratic life not directly connected with the parlements. The study of parlementaires, therefore, has relevance to political, institutional, social, economic, and intellectual history. Too often, studies have been too narrowly tied to their political or social and economic aspects, with no attempts other than the crudest to link them, and the result has tended to produce an unbalanced picture. In this thesis an attempt has been nade to bind together all the aspects of the lives of one group of parlementaires, to relate then one to another, and to to present a total view which will make the ways of parlementaires more understandable.

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1965 M21 / Master of Science

This thesis considers the presence of the epistolary tradition of female complaint in the writings of five late eighteenth-century women writers: Hester Thrale Piozzi, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Turner Smith, Mary Robinson, and Frances Burney D’Arblay. The epistolary female complaint tradition is premised on the suggestion that readers are permitted, through the literary endeavours of male authors/transcribers, a glimpse into the authentically felt woes of women; the writers in this study both question and exploit this expectation. Often viewed by critics like John Kerrigan as a tradition that stifled female creativity, epistolary female complaint proves, this thesis argues, a lively and enlivening tradition for women writers; it provided opportunities for literary experimentation and enabled them to turn their experiences into artistic form. Five themes central to the epistolary female complaint tradition are considered: betrayal, absence, suicide, falls, and authorship. Each chapter looks at one theme and one author specifically. Chapter 1 examines the narrative of betrayal Hester Thrale Piozzi established in her journals from 1764 to 1784. Chapter 2 turns to Mary Wollstonecraft and her accounts of absence in her private letters to Gilbert Imlay, and her epistolary travel account, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796). Chapter 3 discusses Charlotte Turner Smith’s engagement with the theme of suicide in her Elegiac Sonnets (1784) and her epistolary novel, Desmond(1792). Chapter 4 considers the strategies employed in Mary Robinson’s autobiographical, poetic, and fictional writings, which work to move beyond the moral fall the tradition implied. Chapter 5 focuses on the recurrent theme of authorial debt in Frances Burney D’Arblay’s journals, plays, and fiction. I conclude by considering Jane Austen’s appropriation of the tradition in her final novel, Persuasion (1818), and her transformation of the tradition by providing a resolution to the cause of complaint.

In Letters to a Young Man (1801) Jane West states that “no character is so difficult to invent or support as that of a gentleman” (74). The invention of that character, determining what qualities, qualifications, and behaviour befits a gentleman, preoccupied writers and thinkers throughout the eighteenth century. This thesis traces the evolution of the masculine ideals – chivalry, republican virtue, professional merit – that informed what it meant to be a gentleman. Because gentlemanliness had implications for citizenship and political rights, Defoe, Richardson, Rousseau, and the other men who sought to define gentlemanliness increasingly connected it and citizenship to gendered virtue rather than socio-economic status. Women writers were equally concerned with the developing gentlemanly ideal and, as I will show, its political implications. This thesis brings together masculinity studies and feminist literary history, but also combines the gendered social history that often frames studies of women’s writing with the political and military history traditionally associated with men. Doody (1988) suggests that novels are influenced by three separate histories: “the life of the individual, the cultural life of the surrounding society, and the tradition of the chosen art” (9). With the feminocentric novel, however, the historical context is often circumscribed by a concern for what is ‘feminine’ and what polite lady novelists might be responding to. With the exception of women’s participation in the 1790s debates, eighteenth-century women writers have been seen as shying away from divisive political topics, including war. However, I will show that masculinity is central to re-evaluating the ways in which women writers engaged with politics through the courtship plot, because, as McCormack (2005) stresses, “politics and the family were inseparable in Georgian England” (13). Furthermore, as Russell (1995) observes, war is a cultural event that affects and alters “the textures of thought, feeling, and behaviour” (2-3). Focusing on late-eighteenth-century wars, this thesis will explore how political and military events influenced masculine ideals – particularly independence – and how these changes were negotiated in women's novels. Beginning with Frances Burney, this thesis explores the ways in which women writers offered solutions to the problem of masculinity while promoting a (proto)feminist project of equality. By rejecting chivalry and creating a model of manliness that builds on republican virtue and adopts the emerging professional ethic, women writers created heroes defined by personal merit, not accidents of birth. Burney begins this process in Evelina (1778) before problematising the lack of manly independence in Cecilia (1782). Charlotte Smith and Jane West take the problems Burney’s work exposes and offer alternatives to chivalric masculinity amidst the heightened concerns about liberty and citizenship surrounding the French revolution. Finally, Maria Edgeworth’s and Jane Austen’s Napoleonic-era novels promote professionalism as a path to gentility but also as a meritocratic alternative to landed and aristocratic social models. Though the solutions offered by these writers differ, in their opposition to chivalric masculinity they demonstrate that liberating men from the shackles of feudal dependence is essential to freeing women from patriarchal tyranny.

Eighteenth-century Scottish bibliography is a vast subject still awaiting exploration. There are, however, some landmarks to look for and guides to employ. I am thinking particularly, in the context of my own interests, of the writings of Philip Gaskell, and a work that should open up new sources, Robert H. Carnie’s awaited dictionary of the Scottish Book trade. The national Library of Scotland is in the early stages of compliling a catalogue of its eighteenth-century Scottish books which, no matter what form it takes, will provide scholars with a major tool. The description of books has been and doubtless will continue to be a controvertial subject, but those students who have much to identify can take encouragement, I believe from David Foxon’s ‘Thoughts on the History and future of Bibliographical Description’. In this work I map some particular and general areas of Scottish publishing history by examining the partnership of Gavin Hamilton and John Balfour, and the association they formed with the printer Patrick Neill. I study the partners in their own right as booksellers, publishers and printers, but I am concerned also with the larger bibliographical background. Hamilton and Balfour were strong-willed individuals who bought the force of their personal and private interests to bear on their professional lives; Hamilton, especially, in the period under consideration, saw little difference between his duty as a Scottish gentleman and his activities as a Scottish publisher. He and Balfour were far-sighted and adventurous, and deserve to be thought of as central figures in the story of the Edinburgh book trade.

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