This thesis is an examination of the work of William Mason, an eighteenth-century poet who, though highly regarded in his own time, is little known in ours. The thesis seeks to revalidate Mason as a poet worthy of attention in the twenty-first century. The Introduction contextualises Mason, both socially and culturally. Emphasis is given to the importance of Whig politics in his life and works, and to the influence upon him from an early age of the philosophy of John Locke. Attention is also drawn to Mason’s ability as an innovative adaptor of ancient genres, the importance to him of Milton’s verse, and the relevance of his ‘public’ poetry to modern Britain. The first part of Chapter One provides an overview of Mason’s poetic trajectory, from his popularity in the eighteenth century to his decline in the nineteenth. The general loss of interest in eighteenth-century poetry, and its revival in the twentieth, is considered. In the second part of the chapter, Mason’s youthful poetic claim to be the literary and moral descendant of Milton and Pope is examined in the context of his early monody, and its innovative purpose and style. Attention is drawn to the intertextuality that informs much of the poetry discussed in this thesis. The treatment of the Pindaric ode in the hands of earlier poets, and Mason’s far more authentic one, are subsequently discussed. Examples are given which illustrate Mason’s successful treatment of the genre, and of his concern with the preoccupations of the age. In Chapter Two Mason’s georgic, The English Garden, is examined. Consideration is given to Mason’s choice of Miltonic form, to the poet’s employment of his subject, gardening, as a representation of the state of the nation, and to the poet’s personal involvement in the verse in a variety of manifestations. His success in matching subject to form is demonstrated. Mason’s correspondence with Walpole concerning the American war, his collaboration with William Burgh, and his use of prose as well as poetry for political purposes, are discussed. Chapter Three provides a brief account of the attitudes to satire from the late seventeenth century to Pope’s death, and goes on to look at Mason’s own satire. His satires are discussed in the context of his political and literary relationships with Walpole, Gray, Pope and Churchill, and his concern with the issue of slavery is foregrounded. The individual satires are examined, and examples explored of Mason’s novel and varying employment of the genre in the service of his Whig viewpoint. The Conclusion draws together the points made in the body of the text, and claims a place for Mason amongst the eighteenth-century poets rediscovered by recent scholarship.

This thesis addresses the possible sources of melancholy evident in Eighteenth Century writing. Possibilities include nature, mental state, attitudes, sentimentalism, and significant works of fiction.

Eighteenth-century Britons witnessed unprecedented growth in garment production. As modes of production moved away from a small-scale domestic model toward increasing mechanization and steadily growing fabrication of clothing for the middle classes, the period’s new methods of production relied heavily on the labour of women. Despite the considerable participation of women in the proto-industrial workroom, narratives of women employed in the garment trades remain largely understudied. One of the primary reasons garment trades women have received relatively little critical attention is that they are epistemologically slippery. Unlike the more affluent women of the period whose lives were often meticulously documented, garment workers are largely absent from the historical record. Beginning with popular and well-documented characters and persons in the eighteenth-century socio-cultural lexicon, this project traces networks of female labour that run between the playhouse and the workshop to illuminate the lives of women who have previously been relegated to the margins of discourse. Whereas intellectual history often focuses on garments and fashion as particularly important to female networks of communication, I argue that there is much to be gained by examining the women who made these items and the ways in which they are represented in literary accounts and historical records.

The mercenary whore is a recurring character-type in Henry Fielding’s plays and early fictions. This thesis examines Fielding’s representations of the sex-worker in relation to popular eighteenth-century discourses surrounding prostitution reform and the so-called ‘woman question’. Fielding routinely confronted, and at times affronted his audience’s sensibilities toward sexuality, and London’s infamous sex-trade was a particularly contentious issue among the moralists, politicians, and religious zealots of his day. As a writer of stage comedy and satirical fiction, Fielding attempted to laugh his audience into a reformed sensibility toward whoredom. He complicates common perceptions of the whore as a diseased, licentious, and irredeemable social other by exposing the folly, fallibility, and ultimate humanity of the modern sex-worker. By investigating three of Fielding’s stage comedies—"The Covent-Garden Tragedy" (1732), "The Modern Husband" (1734), and "Miss Lucy in Town" (1742)—and two of his early prose satires—"Shamela" (1741) and "Joseph Andrews" (1742)—in relation to broader sociocultural concerns and anxieties surrounding prostitution in eighteenth-century Britain, this thesis locates Fielding’s early humanitarian efforts to engender a reformed paradigm of charitable sympathy for fallen women later championed in his work as a justice and magistrate. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

This dissertation examines how leaders in the Church of England sought to reorganize the colonial church at critical moments, in the late 1740s, the early 1760s and the mid 1770s, by installing one or two resident bishops when the British government moved to bring the colonies into closer economic and political alignment with England. Examining Anglican attempts to bring bishops to the American colonies within the context of the Anglo-American world moves beyond the current literature and provides insight into the difficulties British political and ecclesiastical authorities had managing the colonies more efficiently. Even though the Church of England sustained wide influence over the population, the failure of the Anglicans’ proposal to install bishops into the colonies was symptomatic of the declining influence of the Church on politics in the eighteenth century. Differing views over political and ecclesiastical authority between the colonists and the Anglicans, and the possibility religious conflict might have on elections, concerned British authorities enough to reject Anglicans’ proposals for resident bishops for the colonies. The failure also highlights how the British government in the eighteenth century increasingly focused on the political and economic administration of the expanded more diverse British Empire than it did on religious administration.

No description available.

No description available.

Voltaire's role in the luxury debate, the controversy about civilisation, capitalism, and progress which accompanied the birth of modern consumer society in the eighteenth century, is generally limited to his Mondain and its Défense, and reduced to a hedonist apology for luxury. The thesis sets out to re-examine and refute this. It analyses Voltaire's discovery of commercial societies in Holland and England, and, focussing on the latter, it finds that the apology for commerce became a centralising theme in the Lettres philosophiques, explaining its purpose and coherence. The thesis then turns to Voltaire's apology for luxury in the 1730s, analysing how du Châtelet and Voltaire, having recourse to classic Epicureanism and deist voluntarism, transformed Mandeville's Fable of the Bees into a justification of commercial societies. Close readings of the Mondain and its companion pieces provide further proof that Voltaire's position on luxury was more nuanced than previously assumed. The Siècle de Louis XIV and the Essai sur les moeurs demonstrate the importance of luxury in Voltaire's view of civilisation, which in turn serves to explain the shift in Voltaire's appreciation of Montesquieu. The thesis opposes the claim that in later life Voltaire adopted a Rousseauian view of luxury. Examining Voltaire's later poetry on luxury in light of the analyses offered in the previous chapters, it concludes that his position remained consistent and showed no Rousseauian influence. Concluding with Voltaire's last defence of luxury, his entries 'Luxe' in the Dictionnaire philosophique and the Questions sur l'Encyclopédie, the thesis explains, with the help of the Fragments sur l'Inde, why and how his attitude to luxury seemed ambiguous in the latter work. The thesis thus proves that Voltaire's contribution to the debate was not only sustained, independent, and carefully nuanced, but that the debate itself played a crucial rule in Voltaire's thought and writing.

Joseph Haydn’s final oratorio, The Seasons (1801), has consistently been neglected in performance and scholarship, particularly when compared to its earlier, more successful counterpart, The Creation (1798). A number of factors contribute to this neglect, central among them the belief that The Seasons lacked the musical innovation of Haydn’s setting of the Judeo-Christian creation story, a thought that would gain further momentum as aesthetic and musical tastes changed throughout the nineteenth century. Yet Haydn’s final oratorio is a work of remarkable musical artistry and insight, especially when considered in the context of the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility and the rise of sentimental opera, conventions with which Haydn’s would have been intimately aware given his work in opera composition and production from 1762 to 1790. By examining the ways in which Hanne, one of the three central characters in The Seasons, is constructed as sentimental in van Swieten’s libretto and Haydn’s score, I demonstrate how the librettist and composer engage the trope of the sentimental heroine. Hanne features many of the expected qualities: she is chaste, virtuous, and possesses refined sensibility and sensitivity. Furthermore, her singing style is firmly rooted in sentimental traditions. Yet her music is also imbued with coloratura and musical markers of nobility. Through these musical choices and by textually defining Hanne through joy rather than suffering and pathos, Haydn and van Swieten depart from typical constructions to rethink the sentimental heroine. Therefore, in his final major musico-dramatic work, Haydn experiments with one of the central operatic tropes of the eighteenth century. In being aware of this feature, we might simultaneously arrive at a renewed appreciation for The Seasons and of Haydn’s abilities as a musical dramatist. / Graduate

In this dissertation, I argue that modern understandings of both technology and gendered selfhood were mutually fashioned across the long eighteenth century. This argument makes a number of interventions in current scholarly narratives by contending, first, that interiorized subjectivity was conceptualized in the eighteenth century as constructed from (and perceptible through) a series of technological objects; second, that as gender difference was increasingly inscribed on bodies thought to be characterized by intrinsic biological variance, the importance of technological supplements to defining bodily capacities meant that this variance was often realized through artificial objects; and third, that the mechanization of the British textile manufacture, which has been identified as the industrial revolution’s catalyst, was premised not on machines’ inherent efficacy, but on the identification of technological ingenuity with a new kind of British masculinity, and a concurrent devaluation of supposedly primitive Indian and British female labourers. In my first chapter, I explore the relationship between optical technologies and stage machinery through a reading of Aphra Behn’s The Emperor of the Moon, arguing that Behn’s play enacts a radical revision of technological empiricism by privileging experiences of feminized spectacular materiality as sites of knowledge. My second chapter traces the afterlife of Restoration mechanical philosophy in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, and explores how Clarissa’s interiority is conceptualized by both Lovelace and Richardson as fundamentally technological. In my third chapter I turn to John Cleland’s pornographic Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, showing how the text’s representations of the technologies of textual production are intimately linked with its eroticism and violence. In my final chapter, I analyse a collection of political pamphlets and popular treatises to show how the industrialization of the British cotton manufacture erected a technological nationalism through the mechanical appropriation of women’s labour. By attending to the material, textual, and conceptual operations of eighteenth-century technologies through readings of a wide range of literary and popular works, this project ultimately demonstrates how the boundaries of modern gender difference were constructed along with and out of the body’s most artificial parts. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)