Blake’s critics have never attempted to illustrate in a systematic manner how Blake used information he learned from writings published by members of the circle of Joseph Johnson in his own works during the period 1790-95. Although Blake was a peripheral figure in the Johnson circle – known to them through his profession of engraving and marginalized on account of his social position and lack of university education – his works reveal a continuing engagement with topics addressed in the writings of authors associated with Johnson, perhaps signifying Blake’s desire to be recognized as an author participating, like them, in the literary deliberations of the public sphere. Chapter 1, ‘Blake, Priestley and Swedenborg’, examines Blake’s treatment in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell of body and soul, the natures of God and Jesus Christ, and Swedenborgianism in relation to Joseph Priestley’s History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782) and Letters to the Members of The New Jerusalem Church (1791). Chapter 2, ‘The Voice of a Devil and the Printing House in Hell’, considers The Marriage as an attempt to join the Revolution controversy and compares this work with writings by Richard Price, Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine. Chapter 2 also assesses the relationship between The Marriage and radical diabolism and Blake’s engagement with ‘energy’ as a distinctively radical concept in the work of Erasmus Darwin, Henry Fuseli, William Godwin, Priestley and Mary Wollstonecraft. Chapter 3, ‘Topical Representations in The French Revolution’, considers Blake’s engagement with Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and the Bastille in relation to responses to Reflections by Wollstonecraft, Paine and other authors published by Johnson. Chapter 3 concludes with an analysis of the response The French Revolution might have elicited from the Analytical Review. Chapter 4, ‘The French Revolution and Three Contemporary Discourses’, approaches this poem in terms of the discourses of ancient liberty, nature and the sublime, once again in comparison with responses to Reflections by members of the Johnson circle. My discussion of the sublime considers the possible influence on The French Revolution of Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and Bishop Robert Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1787). Chapter 5, ‘The Continental Prophecies: Prophetic Form and Contemporary Prophecy’, examines America, Europe and The Song of Los in relation to writings concerning prophecy published by Johnson (with special emphasis on Lowth’s Lectures and Priestley’s 1793 and 1794 Fast Day sermons). The second part of Chapter 5 compares aspects of the works of Blake and Richard Brothers with Priestley’s Fast Day sermons, suggesting that Priestley and Blake’s works of 1793 and 1794 are rather less dissimilar than traditionally assumed. Chapter 6, ‘Blake’s “Bible of Hell” and Contemporary Critics of the Bible’, discusses Urizen, The Book of Ahania and The Book of Los in light of biblical criticism from the 1780s and 1790s (with particular reference to the Analytical and the writings of Alexander Geddes, Priestley and Paine). The final section of Chapter 6 reads Ahania in terms of the contemporary debate regarding the doctrine of the Atonement. The Conclusion, ‘ “melting apparent surfaces away”: Continuities in the Thought of Priestley and Blake’, revisits my discussion in Chapter 5 of similarities between Priestley and Blake and proposes that they are not so far apart in ideas and the content of their works as modern scholars usually argue.

Between 1740 and 1770, a number of women writers choose to make explicit in their printed texts their collaboration with a ‘familiar’: a family member or close friend. In so doing, they strategically enact their personal relationships through the medium of print in order to claim for themselves a level of literary power and delineate the terms on which they entered the marketplace as authors. This thesis argues that familiar relations expressed along a horizontal axis – those of husband, wife, brother, sister and friend – offer a relatively flexible model of familiar relations in which women could acquire a level of agency in self-definition, supported by ideologies that valued women’s contribution to the polite sphere of sociable conversation. It demonstrates that Elizabeth Griffith, Sarah Fielding, Jane Collier, and Susannah and Margaret Minifie not only engage in collaborative literary production that is thoroughly inflected with the pressures of their historical context but that through familiar collaboration women writers display their professional authorial personae and generate social and literary criticism. Through close readings of carefully selected collaborative texts in the corpus of each writer, including the material history of the texts themselves, and the relationships expressed through those texts, this thesis highlights the complexity with which family relations interacted with print culture in the period. Far from using the familiar relation as a means of modestly retiring to the domestic sphere these women writers used their familiar relations as a basis from which to launch, describe and defend their authorial careers.

This thesis investigates the life and work of six eighteenth-century writers, two male and four female. It explores their experience of depression through their letters and other autobiographical material, and examines the ways in which they represent melancholy in their poetry and prose. The subject of Chapter Two is Thomas Gray, whose real life persona as the lonely intellectual is also identifiable in his poetry. The Scottish poet Robert Fergusson is studied in Chapter Three. Fergusson’s lively and vigorous mind was shattered in the months leading up to his death, during which time some of his writing became darkly nihilistic. Chapter Four looks at Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, a lifelong depressive who often wrote about her feelings of despair in her poetry. Chapter Five explores Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. She was a courageous and controversial figure, but despite her resilience, on occasion in her letters she reveals her vulnerability and susceptibility to low spirits, a mood which is sometimes expressed in her creative writing. Sarah Scott, whose life and work have not yet been considered in relation to the subject of melancholy, is examined in Chapter Six. Her novel includes several low-spirited and depressed female characters who are continually seeking asylum from a hostile world. Chapter Seven analyses Charlotte Smith, a mother of twelve children whose unhappy marriage ended in separation. Smith wrote extensively about her depression in her letters, prefaces, poetry and novels. This study shows that the women in particular use their writing on melancholy and depression to express their discontent with the confined way in which they are often expected to live out their lives.

This thesis examines the widespread use of bestial imagery in satirical verse, prose and prints published between 1789 – 1820, through a study of Shelley, Spence, Gillray, Gifford, Robinson, Catherine Ann Dorset, Thelwall, Eaton, and Wolcot. The thesis asks why these writers and printers used animal metaphors so frequently, but moreover, what impact the use of this imagery had on the political landscape of satire in the period. Recent criticism has focussed on the historical and political contexts of Romantic-era satire, and this thesis follows that criticism with an historicist methodology, combining literary, historical and political approaches. Furthermore, the thesis analyses verse, prose and pictorial satires as contributing to the same political discourse and as doing so in closely related cultural arenas. This thesis claims originality on the basis that not only the use of animal imagery has a significant impact on how both contemporary and modern readers interpret its political meanings and contexts, but also that this is an argument that has not yet been posited by other critics. In addition, this thesis argues that through bestial metaphors, satirical writers and artists create a community wherein imagery is exchanged, developed and manipulated, and that this practice of cultural exchange significantly shapes those satires’ historical contexts. Each of the thesis’ five chapters focuses on a major satiric animal metaphor, whereby close readings of satires are offered alongside wider political and historical contexts. Consequently, this thesis provides a map of the most common satiric animal metaphors and their concomitant politics, and in doing so creates a new critical framework in which the growing interest in Romantic- period satire can be further developed.

This thesis is a study of the representations of childhood in the works of the family circle of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin and their intellectual inheritors, Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley. It argues that their literary representations of the child, as a group, form an index of their political resistance to the dominant cultures of their era. The thesis situates these representations of childhood against the backdrop of the Romantic-era cultural celebration of childhood as established in works by historians and critics such as Philippe Ariés and James McGavran, Jr. It argues that the new sentimental category of the child established in the writings of Rousseau and Wordsworth, paradoxically, tends to marginalise the child from the socially powerful world of adults, even while establishing the child’s new specificity. This ethical impasse is resolved by the Wollstonecraft-Godwin family circle through its literary representations of the child, where the child becomes a shifting metaphor for all socially oppressed groups. Moreover, the adult author invites the child to participate in the world of adult power, eschewing a totalising adult perspective that erases the child’s specific concerns. This thesis tracks the development of the versions of the child in the works of the Wollstonecraft-Godwin family circle, from their early, discursive, political works such as Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Godwin’s Political Justice, where they represent their late-eighteenth century ideals of political emancipation through the education of the child, to more imaginative versions of the child in their later works. I locate a moment in each writer’s career at which the adult-child divide observed in their early works collapses: their doubts about rationalist epistemology crystallise, and they switch to open-ended modes of discourse in literary genres such as novels, which allow more freedom for the coded expression of radical political ideas through the representations of the child. In their later works, especially in Godwin’s radical publications for children, the adult-child hierarchy is dissolved: the child becomes a complex metaphor, representing the varied political concerns of disempowered adults and children. The discussion concludes with a sketch of the imaginative appropriation and transformation of the Wollstonecraft-Godwin representations by the Shelleys. Mary Shelley, and to a lesser extent, Percy Bysshe Shelley, adapt the radicalism of their predecessors’ literary representations of the child to suit their own altered socio-political contexts.

This thesis presents an analysis of the English-language work of three Welsh writers during the eighteenth century, spanning the period of the 1750s to 1794. During this period, the British state consolidated its power following the last of the significant internal uprisings in 1745, and attempted to create a British nation with internal unity. Such a unity entailed a renegotiation of older national identities as subjects attempted to partake of multiple identities simultaneously. In Wales, the manifestation of multiple identities was especially clear, as the language of the state did not accord with the mother tongue of the majority of Welshmen. Though Welsh literati had written in English since before the Act of Union (1536), choosing to write in English becomes more interesting for the critic during such a time of change. Previously, these works have been treated as aberrations, or literary curiosities less worthy of note than the Welsh-language productions of the same authors. This thesis argues that, instead, they should be analysed as offering an insight into these authors’ conception of Britain, and their place within the state and the new nation, both in the choice of language and the topics considered. As a theoretical basis for these analyses, I consider the concept of Prydeindod from the work of philosopher J.R. Jones, as distinct from the idea of Britishness, and as a way of complicating Anglocentric or binary discussions of Britishness. This in turn informs readings of the English-language productions of Welsh writers in the eighteenth century, and shows that their negotiations of new identities are not as forthright as has previously been assumed.