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Manuscript recipe books come in all shapes and sizes and run from tens to hundreds of pages. Those from the eighteenth century are not exclusively culinary, also incorporating medical, veterinary and household recipes. Surviving examples are almost all from genteel or elite households, the people who had time and resources to create them, and are preserved in local archives or dedicated collections. This thesis examines the medical recipes in particular and considers their role at a time when alternatives to domestic healthcare were proliferating: increasing numbers of physicians and surgeons, a growth in apothecaries’ shops, commercial offerings such as proprietary medicines and a variety of irregular practitioners. Advice and remedies in print were also widely available in books, periodicals and newspapers. This is the largest study of eighteenth-century manuscript medical recipes yet undertaken, encompassing 241 collections and a total of 19,134 recipes. It begins by considering the collections themselves as material objects, rather than merely text, which no other major study in this area has done. The range of recipes and ailments are assessed against prevalent illnesses and causes of death, and variations in recipe types identified regionally and temporally. Detailed case studies of coughs and colds, gout, hydrophobia, diet drinks and Daffy’s Elixir illustrate the variety of ingredients and methods, as well as regimens for health and differences by gender and age. Examination of compilers and contributors of recipes demonstrates that both women and men were involved in this practice. Recipe exchange is delineated as a form of social currency requiring trust and reciprocity, and case studies show how knowledge circulated through three forms of network: familial, sociable and political. Finally, a major contribution of this thesis is that it identifies manuscript medical recipe collections as fulfilling four important functions for their compilers: oeconomic, symbolic, personalised and instrumental.

This thesis explores how Anna Letitia Barbauld's book Lessons for Children Aged Two to Three Years (1778) facilitated the development of the conversational primer. This genre, which has not yet been theorised, may be identified by the way the texts present themselves as verisimilar and replicable sets of conversations, and depict parent-teachers and child-pupils as companions. This genre challenges the idea that there is a dichotomy between 'adult' and 'child' readers, a concept that inflects many contemporary approaches to children's literature studies. Through a close reading of Lessons for Children and subsequent conversational primers, this thesis suggests that Barbauld's Rational Dissenting value of discursive diversity influenced British middle-class children's culture, enabling the voices of verisimilar children to proliferate children's books on a previously unknown scale. The Introduction establishes ways in which concepts of child-parent relationships were used as paradigms for understanding modes of government in eighteenth-century Britain. Chapter One examines how children's books prior to Lessons for Children addressed different types of implied child readers with the aim of producing members of an ideal society. Chapter Two explores how Barbauld created a space in which parents could participate in the children's literature market through her introduction of the parent-author as a literary trope, her portrayals of verisimilar mother-child interactions in accessible, domestic spaces. Chapter Three charts how Lessons for Children became the prototype from which subsequent conversational primers drew their literary identity. The fourth chapter contextualises Lessons for Children as an expression of Barbauld's Rational Dissent, and posits that the rise of the conversational primer is indicative of the influence of Rational Dissenting values upon British middle-class children's culture. Chapter Five contrasts the afterlife of the conversational primer with children's books that generated readers' imaginative identification with characters. This comparison suggests that conversational primers encapsulated middle-class Georgian ideals regarding familial learning; an historical specificity that is, in part, responsible for the genre's popular demise. This thesis studies the lifecycle of the conversational primer in the British children's literature market. It examines the porousness between paratextual materials and texts, and shows how an individual author stimulated generic development by popularising specific literary tropes. By theorising the genre of the conversational primer, this study provides a new and productive discourse concerning adult-child interactions in children's literature.

The eighteenth century saw a remarkable increase in the number of works written by women, and also the number of women who made a living by writing. For the first time, being a writer was a viable career choice for a woman, and it was possible to support a family by writing, despite the backlash some individual writers, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, faced for their work. This thesis focuses on the work women did in the eighteenth-century theatre, and how they reconciled the demands of being a professional writer with their society's gender expectations. By analysing a variety of play texts written by different women, I show that they engaged critically with ideas about female virtue, the marriage market, and women's participation in the literary scene, the working world, and national politics. The plays of this period are relatively under-researched, and often do not appear at all in critical studies of eighteenth-century literature. My aim, therefore, is to rectify this situation, and to join other critics in rediscovering this interesting and vital era of female playwriting.

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To obtain the most complete picture of the Kentucky Resolutions, and the times which produced them, a careful study was made of contemporary newspapers for the period from March, 1798, to December, 1799.

The suggestions with which this thesis will be concerned are those that apply not so much to mankind as a whole as those pertaining to womankind. Defore surprisingly had much to say about women and their problems; it is surprising especially when we consider that hardly anyone other than the women themselves bothered to pay any attention to these afflictions.

This thesis takes a material culture approach to exploring how the Thames was experienced from 1660 to 1830. It conceives of the river as a material object, constantly shaped by its designers, makers and users. The river was an essential part of the day-to-say lives of Londoners and visitors and framing the river as a kind of object allows an exploration of the material-human interactions on a number of different levels, from transformative changes to the river's geography to more everyday contact at work, leisure and home. The thesis understands the river's changing relationship to key transformations in Britain's long eighteenth century as London became the metropolis of an expanding commercial and territorial empire. The first chapter addresses the redesigning of the river, tracing the building projects imposed by political and mercantile interest groups which transformed riverfront architecture with six new bridges and vast dock complexes and aimed to control how people experienced the river's relationship to the nation and its growing empire. The second chapter uses watermen's court records and criminal trials alongside material remnants of river work to show that watermen asserted an informal control over the river space which was increasingly eroded by the desire to secure imperial trade against theft. Chapter three explores the growing use of the river as leisure space, using diaries to identify quotidian leisure activities on the river. It highlights the increasing commercialisation of riverine leisure as boat trips and guidebooks proliferated. The final chapter uses objects depicting the Thames to show how the river filtered into everyday lives through consumption, often constructing a picturesque view for a polite audience. Like the other material engagements with the river, these objects constructed an experience of the eighteenth-century waterway which glorified commerce and obscured from everyday experience the realities of an imperial river.

Abstract Roxana is Defoe¡¦s last novel and his only one that ends in tragedy. In the eighteenth century when the idea of realism prevailed, the novel was a reflection of social reality. Unlike a romance in which love and imaginary adventures are depicted, a novel depicts ordinary people and their ordinary life. Based on this idea of realism, Defoe¡¦s Roxana touches its readers. This novel is mainly about how the heroine Roxana, a deserted woman, struggles to make money and how her mental state changes. Yet reading through the story, what readers learn is not only Roxana¡¦s tragedy in fighting through her life, but also, beyond that, the relationship between a woman and the society she lives in. Under the control of patriarchy, a woman, whether reliant on a man or independent, is doomed to be a loser. In order to give as full as possible a perspective about the process of Roxana¡¦s making money, I put many issues in the thesis, including gender, capital, marriage, morality and psychology. This thesis falls into six parts. The introduction gives a general idea of the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century and of Defoe¡¦s life. The first chapter deals with Roxana¡¦s marriage, exploring the reasons for her refusal of marriage and the possible results she may have to face if she remains unmarried. In the second chapter, I will discuss Roxana¡¦s business of prostitution, focusing on how she succeeds in making money by her body and beauty. In Chapter Three, I attempt to analyze the two Roxanas¡Xthe public Roxana and the private Roxana¡Xto see how she takes advantage of disguise in presenting a public self but still possesses a guilty feeling when she is alone. Here, I would like to apply Bakhtin¡¦s two terms ¡§centrifugal¡¨ and ¡§centripetal¡¨ to Roxana¡¦s public self and private self respectively. In the last chapter, I intend to use Freud¡¦s psycho-analysis to explain the three characters¡XRoxana, Amy and Susan¡Xand conclude with the unbalanced mental state that brings about Roxana¡¦s psychological chaos.