"'A Restraint of Their Debauchery': Poverty, Power, and Social Policy in Augustan England, 1688-1723" examines the connections between ideas and definitions of poverty created by both elites and the poor, and social policy legislation and disbursement of relief. Specifically, Mackworth's failed 1704 omnibus reform bill, and Knatchbull's successful 1723 Workhouse Test Act are considered. Successive chapters are dedicated to historiography and methodology, the contemporary pamphlet debates over poverty, pauper self-definition in petitions to the state, and politics and policy during the early eighteenth century. Often this analysis focuses on individuals. Notable subjects include: John Locke, Matthew Hale, Bernard Mandeville, John Bellers, Daniel Defoe, Richard Cocks, Humphrey Mackworth, and Edward Knatchbull. Several observations about the character of contemporary perceptions of poverty are made, and their connection to the resulting legislative and published efforts is explained.

This thesis examines the history of the British novel from 1790 to 1814, arguing that the struggle for the authority of history that took place over the course of the French Revolution debate is foundational to understanding the novel's development in the period. In the political tracts of the 1790s, the Revolution controversy begins as a representational contest over the status of one historical moment (1688) and then escalates into a broad ideological war over the significance of the past for the present and future. The era's various novelistic forms participate in this ideological war, with Jacobin and anti-Jacobin novels, for instance, representing moments of the past or otherwise vying to enlist the authority of history to further a reformist or loyalist agenda, respectively. As the Revolution crisis recedes at the turn of the century, new forms of the novel emerge with new agendas, but historical representation---largely the legacy of the 1790s' novel---remains as an increasingly prevalent feature of the genre. The representation of history in the novel, I argue, is initially used strategically by novelists involved in the Revolution debate, is appropriated for other (often related) causes, and ultimately develops into a stable, non-partisan, aestheticised feature of the form. The novel's transformations in the 1790s, 1800s, and early 1810s thus help to establish the conditions for the emergence of the historical novel as it was first realised in Walter Scott's Waverley (1814). Chapter 1 reviews the political tracts of prominent contributors to the Revolution debate such as Edmund Burke, Richard Price, James Mackintosh, Thomas Paine, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, demonstrating the widespread engagement with history characteristic of the period and the distinctive historical paradigms reformers and loyalists invoke in support of their political positions. Chapters 2 and 3 examine how the historical discourses of the 1790s shape the anti-Jacobin and Jacobin novel, respectively. Using Charles Walker, Robert Bisset, and Jane West as its primary examples, chapter 2 argues that the antiJacobin novel draws heavily on Burkean historical discourse to develop a variety of tactics---including the representation of select historical moments and conscious attempts to "historicise" their works---whose goal is to characterise the reform movement as ignorant of the complex operations of historical accretion. Turning to Charlotte Smith, William Godwin, and Maria Edgeworth as its principal examples, chapter 3 shows how reformist novels appeal to the period's discourses of history to respond in kind, contesting Burke's logic by consciously travestying his tropes and arguments, by undermining and then re-defining the category of history, and by depicting in detail historical moments that challenge the Burkean paradigm. Investigating the work of Jane Porter, Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), and Walter Scott, chapter 4 demonstrates how early historical forms of the novel and, ultimately, the historical novel as it was realised by Scott emerge, in part, out of the legacy of the political novels of the 1790s. It argues that the novel experiences a generic shift in the early nineteenth century---one marked by continuity, re-deployment, and departure--whereby the political impetus for historical representation is ultimately displaced by aesthetic and, crucially, historicist concerns.

Modern Freemasonry emerged in the early eighteenth-century as part of European Enlightenment culture and gradually spread to the American continent. Masonry immediately aroused suspicion and continues to evoke controversy today. This study documents the development and maturation of lodge principles during the eighteenth century and then moves to specific periods of conflict between masons and antimasons in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is a comparative history of Freemasonry and antimasonry in the Russian Empire just after the Revolution of 1905, in France during the early decades of the Third French Republic, and in Massachusetts, 1826-1832. During each of these periods, in each area, antimasons coalesced to close lodge doors. Antimasons achieved temporary successes in two of the three cases. This study explains why antimasonry emerged as a political phenomena common to early constitutional states in the context of expanding male, suffrage rights, and an emerging market economy. It frames a dialogue between masons and antimasons concerning politics, religion, science, economics and morality, through an analysis of masonic and masonic presses and published works. Debate between masons and antimasons centered around new definitions of the public sphere, the separation of Church and state, the role of the press, and proper public morality in an elective order.

This dissertation argues that widespread belief in a British national character is the result of the wide circulation of images purporting to depict its traits, and further, that audiences for those images have been no less important than image makers in determining what kind of character has been imagined. To support these contentions depictions of the British or English are examined, chosen mainly for their own wide circulation or that of their authors' work in general, but also for their derivation from earlier images in order to demonstrate the continuity of the nation's self-imagining. Apart from one sixteenth century text by Sir Walter Raleigh, the images examined are taken from British works of the last two centuries: in the nineteenth century from texts by Thomas Macaulay, James Anthony Froude, Charles Kingsley, Matthew Arnold and Alfred Tennyson, and paintings by Ford Madox Brown and John Everett Millais; in this century from texts by Sapper, Maud Diver, E. M. Forster, George Orwell, Margaret Drabble and Salman Rushdie, political speeches by Margaret Thatcher, T. E. Utley and Britain's current chancellor Gordon Brown, and the 1980s re-enactment of Raleigh's activities known as Operation Raleigh. Reference is also made throughout to other contemporaneous images in a variety of media. Discussion draws on post-colonial theory and on theories of nations and nationalism and of narrative and historiography, with a predominantly Marxist approach. Although authors' motives for designedly portraying the national character have quite personal, even, at times, irrational aspects, they are primarily ideological. Motivation is, however, largely irrelevant to the images' reception, which mainly depends on their appeal, availability and general circulation. In conclusion, the construction and proclamation of a supposed national character is seen to be a continuing process which provides the nation's members with an acceptable collective self-image adapted to concerns of the time. Largely stereotypical, inevitably idealized and fraught with ideology, such collective representations incorporate much that is true but differ considerably from prevailing national norms of attitude and behavior. One or another such representation has nevertheless been embraced by a very large number of Britons as embodying their national character.

This dissertation is an attempt to portray the revolutionary character of the American Civil War through a comparative methodology utilizing the French Revolution as both point of influence and as a parallel example. Within this novel context, subtle trends in the ideological development of the Republican Party’s Radical wing undertake new meaning and an alternative revolutionary heritage takes shape around an idealization of the universalism of the French and Haitian Revolutions of the 1790s. The work argues that through a diffusion of ideas and knowledge of events from the streets of Paris into the fields of Haiti and onto the shores of the American coast, a small faction of militant abolitionists latched onto the ideal of the Haitian Revolution as their own legacy. By the late 1830s, this radical edge of the antislavery movement embarked onto two courses, both derived from and influenced by their newfound ideology. The first was towards violent direct action against slavery while the second aimed at legitimizing radical new legal theories and creating the political structure necessary to bring about their enforcement. While on the one hand John Brown and Gerrit Smith pursued militant action, on the other Alvan Stewart and Salmon P. Chase sought a political and legal redefinition of American society through the Liberty and eventually Republican parties. With the coming of war in the 1860s, these two trends, violence and radical politics, converged in the Union war effort. In the midst of the Civil War and the early fight for Reconstruction, Radical Republicans and their allies in the Union Army displayed themselves as American Jacobins. Through a set of comparisons with French Revolutionary events and political debates, this thesis argues that the result of the ideological development between the American Revolution and the Civil War Era in the United States was the creation of a revolutionary ideology parallel to that of French Jacobinism. By the time of their fall from power, the Radical Republicans had seen their ideals both lambasted as the radical edge of politics and then transformed into the status quo, helping to prepare the nation for modernity.

This study examines British-Indian relations in the Great Lakes and Upper Canada between 1783 and 1812 and focuses on intercultural frontier relations and Native responses to Britain's actions and imperial Indian policies as Native Americans explored ways to preserve their lands and cultures while simultaneously attempting to redefine their relationship with their former British allies. Specifically, the project compares British-Indian interaction and diplomacy in three regions throughout Upper Canada and the Old Northwest. These three locales correspond roughly to the areas served by Britain's three principal Indian agencies in Upper Canada at the time—namely Fort St. Joseph, Fort Amherstburg, and Fort George. The Natives of each of these three areas developed unique relationships with the British, and as a result, Britain could not establish a single Indian policy that applied everywhere in its North American borderlands. Government leaders and Indian agents in Canada and the Great Lakes were forced to adapt Whitehall's policies to conditions and circumstances that were prevalent in each of the sectors in which British agents and leaders dealt with indigenous peoples. Several factors affected the evolution of British-Indian relations from region to region. These included the fur trade, Indian relations and warfare with the United States, geographical position, the influence of British-Indian agents, intertribal relations between various Native groups, the degree of Indian acculturation with whites, Native cultural revitalization, and the constitutional issues of Native sovereignty and legal status. As a result, Britain was unable to preserve the unity among its confederated tribal allies that it had enjoyed during the American Revolution, and by the War of 1812, the old “Chain of Friendship” had devolved into a collection of smaller alliances.

In 1790s England, an expanding empire, a growing diaspora of English settlers in foreign territories, and spreading political unrest in Ireland and on the European continent all helped to contribute to a destabilization of British national identity. With the definition of “Englishperson” in flux, Ireland, France, and Italy—nations which are prominently featured in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Italian (1797), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)—could be understood, similar to England’s colonies, as representing threats to the nation’s cultural integrity. Because the people of these European countries were stereotypically perceived as being economically impoverished victims of political and “popish” tyranny, it would have been easy to construct them in popular and literary discourse as being both socially similar to the “primitive” indigenous populations of colonized territories and as uneasy reminders of England’s own “premodern” past. Therefore, the overarching goal of this project is twofold. First, it attempts to account for the Gothic’s frequent—albeit subtle—use of imperialist rhetoric, which is largely encoded within the novels’ representations of sublimity, sensibility, and domesticity. Second, it claims that the novels under consideration are preoccupied with testing and reaffirming the salience of bourgeois English identity by placing English or Anglo-inflected characters in conflict with “monstrous” continental Others. In so doing, these novels use the fictions of empire to contain and claim agency over a revolutionary France, an uncertainly-positioned Ireland, and a classically-appealing but socially-problematic Italy.

This dissertation examines the non-literary and non-aesthetic reasons underlying the bias in favor of realism in the formation of the traditional literary canon of nineteenth-century British fiction. Since English literature first became a recognized academic discipline in Great Britain in the 1870s and '80s, the study of fiction has been (with few exceptions) a study of realistic fiction. College survey courses in the period usually teach W. M. Thackeray through Thomas Hardy, but almost never make excursions into the fantasy fiction of Victorians like George MacDonald or Charles Kingsley. My thesis is that this exclusion can best be explained by examining the role of the Anglican Church as well as that of Non-Conformist or Dissenting evangelical sects in the educational institutions of nineteenth-century Britain in the first half of the century, and by examining the function that the academic study of English literature played in British imperialist ideology in the latter part of the century. Both Church and Empire needed a canon of realism to promote their own brand of conservative ideology, although each tended to define realism differently. Victorian fantasy writers often targeted Church doctrine or imperial dogma for especially satirical treatment, thus insuring their own exclusion from the universities which were run by the Church and operated to supply patriotic administrators to the Empire. My study examines in detail the ecclesiastical and political context of educational philosophy and how this context affected reading curriculum and ultimately, the canon. My study also examines in detail the lives and historical situations of five Victorian fantasy writers: John Ruskin, George MacDonald, Charles Kingsley, Henry Rider Haggard, and Rudyard Kipling. Ruskin, MacDonald and Kingsley used fantasy as a means of attacking various branches of organized Christianity. Haggard and Kipling used fantasy as a means of attacking various aspects of popular imperial rhetoric. Throughout the dissertation, I situate the writers' novels within their historical contexts to show why fantasy fiction has traditionally been ignored or denigrated by academic critics.

This dissertation contextualizes Brahms's vocal quartets within a largely forgotten discourse about Hausmusik that flourished in German-speaking lands in the second half of the nineteenth century. In numerous texts about Hausmusik from ca. 1848-1900, authors conceived the genre as an aesthetically and politically conservative expression of German identity and connected its accessible style to an ideal of social cohesion in the pre-industrial age. Similar issues of national identity and musical style arise in the reception of Brahms's quartets, which, I contend, was informed by the works' generic status as Hausmusik. Critics either praised Brahms's works for their simple, folk-like style or disparaged their complexity, artifice, and foreignness. Ultimately, I argue, Brahms sought to elevate the genre of Hausmusik in his vocal quartets by integrating aesthetic and cultural values associated with this genre with a more sophisticated musical style. The works' stylistic and generic ambiguity and the disparity in critics' responses reveal competing aesthetic, political, and cultural world views immediately before and after German unification. Chapter 2 shows how discourse about Hausmusik constructed German identity in the private sphere by promoting a folk-like aesthetic and accessible musical style over the perceived cosmopolitanism and commercialism of Salonmusik and other repertoires. Chapter 3 investigates the tension between Hausmusik and chamber styles and their associated opposing cultural values. Chapter 4 explores a similar conflict between folk and popular musical styles manifested in reactions to the Liebeslieder, which were interpreted as either Ländler or Viennese waltzes. Finally, chapter 5 demonstrates how reception of the Zigeunerlieder reflects the impulse to define German identity in opposition to a foreign "other" by sharply distinguishing between German and exotic musical styles. By relating these descriptive reviews of Brahms's works to largely prescriptive texts about Hausmusik, I define the genre by delimiting its boundaries and demonstrate the crucial role domestic music-making played in the expression of German identity in the second half of the nineteenth century.

This dissertation explores the evolution of English behavioral ideals from the publication of Lord Chesterfield's Letters To His Son in 1774 to the formalizing of professional status signified by the Medical Act of 1858. Between 1774 and 1830, these ideals found expression in conduct books. After 1830, they were embodied primarily in etiquette books and professional codes of behavior. This shift in the means of expressing behavioral norms is examined in order to illuminate the nature of and response to changes transforming English society during the early industrial period One of these changes was the rise of distinct classes. Conduct books embodied a middle-class behavioral code grounded in moral principles and opposed to upper-class 'Society's' amoral code of etiquette. Differences between the codes are evidence of antagonism between the two classes. According to the traditional view, these tensions resulted in a victory for middle-class values. This study of behavioral ideals challenges that view. The success and development of etiquette books together with the rise of professional ideals based on ethics and etiquette suggest that a blend of middle- and upper-class values triumphed in Victorian England Behavioral ideals also shed light on the problem of influence. The growing commercialization and urbanization of society enhanced the power of remote, impersonal persuaders such as the press, cities, advertisements and 'Society'. That is, the potential for mutual persuasion among strangers increased dramatically. Such a change made deception more feasible, constituting nothing less than a crisis of social confidence Conduct book writers confronted this crisis by dispensing a behavioral code designed to render strangers' moral characters immediately recognizable. This study concludes that etiquette as opposed to conduct books succeeded because moral character was not a viable basis for achieving social confidence in an urban, industrial society. Threats to reliable human interactions posed by such a society were most effectively mitigated by the easily perceived identity indicators of etiquette and professional codes and credentials. In that the evolution of behavioral ideals from 1774 to 1858 is ultimately a story of reconciliation and resolution, it helps us to understand why the mid-Victorian period was an age of relative repose / acase@tulane.edu