This regional study examines the character and pace of change in landed society in the eighteenth century and the impact of change on social stability. It offers new perspectives on why the landed gentry, the 'untitled aristocracy', retained their estates and their influence throughout the period. Members of this distinct social group had to make more careful, strategic choices than the wealthier peerage, and their behaviour served as a barometer of the effects of socio-economic and cultural developments on society as a whole. In spite of this, there have been few regional studies of eighteenth-century landed gentry in recent years. The study's in situ holistic approach builds on the earlier historiography of landed elites but also on more recent scholarship on culture, performance, and polite behaviour. It uses archival records to study the fifty-two landed-gentry families in the New Forest and the Isle of Wight. It shows that the landed gentry of this region was open to newcomers, who added to the numbers rather than displacing established families. Furthermore, there was no evidence of elite withdrawal or of a separation into so-called 'old and local' and 'new and national' groups. This thesis adds an important new dimension by identifying two characteristics of successful families. They were social and cultural amphibians, able not only to move between their estates and London but also to adapt to the polite norms of behaviour of different groups. In addition, they used 'social power', which stemmed principally from their behaviour, to achieve their aims in spite of the greater wealth and status of the peerage. As a group, the landed gentry presented a picture of social continuity and stability in 1800, but they had achieved this through a process of gradual social accommodation. They had changed in order to preserve their place and their power.

To be placed above the Reach of Deceit is to be placed above the Rank of a human Being - Henry Fielding, A Clear State of the Case of Elizabeth Canning, 1753. Throughout his literary and legal careers, Fielding was concerned with the difficulties of reading and judging character accurately. He saw society as being rife with deceptive and duplicitous individuals and articulated his concerns in his writing, offering various advices to his readers. This thesis examines Fielding’s changing approaches to characterization and his proposed methods for judging character. There is a strong tradition within Fielding criticism, particularly prevalent in the mid-twentieth century, of seeing Fielding’s characters as ‘essential’, that is to say, innate and unchanging: the product of his theory of ‘Conservation of Character’. As such, his characters are often deemed easy-to-read and lacking fully-determined internal lives. Since the mid-1990s, however, critics have begun to argue that his characters are more dynamic than first supposed. While critics have noted the role of judgement in Fielding’s novels, it has not yet been explored in depth in his plays. With some notable exceptions, few studies have explored the interrelation between his novels and plays in a sustained way. I argue that Fielding examines questions of discerning character in both his plays and his novels, and that the early plays are essential for understanding the concepts which are central to his theory of judgement. This thesis contributes to studies of Fielding in three ways: by intervening in long-standing discussions of Fielding’s characterization; by analysing themes of good nature, perception and gossip which develop from his early dramatic work into the better-known novels; and by exploring its relationship to wider ideas about character in the eighteenth-century theatre and novel. Beginning with his plays, I consider Fielding’s presentation of the judgement of character in a range of his works from 1728-1753. I suggest that the early plays gave Fielding the space in which to experiment with the presentation of character and his relationship to his audience. His novels build upon concepts first introduced in the plays, such as good nature, perception and gossip, which he suggests are key to perceiving character. Fielding encourages his audiences and readers to engage with character as a process of discovery (as it is in life), but does not punish or mock them when they make mistakes. In doing so, he gives his audiences and readers indulgences he could ill afford in his magisterial career: time for judgement and the luxury of occasionally being proved wrong.

This project analyzes discourses of social legibility in eighteenth-century self-writing to argue that status-based conceptions of identity continued to influence perceptions of the self in society. Studies of the eighteenth century have been dominated by a "rise of the middle class" narrative that tends to underestimate the resilience and continued relevance of conceptions of rank as an essentialized or innate quality. However, social legibility--the idea that status was encoded on the body through clothing, manners, beauty, grace, and countenance--continue to function, particularly in the self-writing of this period. By examining these epistolary novels, fictional memoirs, diaries, autobiographies, and letters, this project clarifies how people imagined social hierarchy operating at the level of the body. The ways people recognize, enact, theorize, and represent status help us better understand how identity was reconceived between the Restoration in 1600 and the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815.

This study examines the development of theories of civil religion in Hanoverian Britain. In the aftermath of the seventeenth-century wars of religion, theorists of civil religion sought to render Protestant Christianity a faith whose ecclesiology was compatible with the civil state and whose practice encouraged civilised society. It presents lay thinkers including Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, Edward Gibbon, and David Hume, alongside clergymen such as Edmund Gibson, bishop of London, William Warburton, bishop of Gloucester, and Conyers Middleton. It considers such Dissenters as Joseph Priestley and Richard Price, who refashioned civil religion variously along Unitarian and congregational lines. In contrast to the usual scholarly preoccupation with the argument of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that Christianity could never become a civil religion, this study demonstrates how Hanoverian intellectuals constructed a Christian civil religion. They sought to purge the civil state and society of superstition, priestcraft, and enthusiasm by creating a religion of virtue, sociability, and happiness. They drew on the church-state relationship generated during the ‘long Reformation’ in England and Scotland by which the secular civil magistrate governed the national church and regulated its priests, who were to preach the simple morality of the gospel. Hanoverian theorists of civil religion synthesised primitive Christianity with the ancient civil religions, relying above all on Cicero. Irrespective of their inward views about the normative truths of the articles of faith of the churches of England and Scotland, civil religionists sought to reconcile them with civil ends. They believed that outward observance of the Reformed religion was a criterion for belonging within the Christian commonwealth of Hanoverian Britain.

"Rural Sports: The Poetry of Fishing, Fowling, and Hunting, 1650-1800" traces the evolution of poetry on the field sports over a 150-year span, with a view toward considering these poems in the first instance as sporting texts. This thesis analyzes sportsmen's attitudes toward their activities, noting the larger social implications of their sporting performances. The thesis also seeks to classify and understand the poems as distinct literary sub-genres. Current sociological insights into angling and hunting help to illustrate the poems' resemblances to one another, particularly Hobson Bryan's concept of "recreational specialization" and Norbert Elias's concept of "tension equilibrium." In providing a systematic survey of the rural sports poetry, this thesis argues that during successive stages of the period, poetry on certain sports came into vogue and then receded from fashion. This followed from historical and political developments but also from literary ones. The poetry on fishing after Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler (1653) maintained a dialogue between pastoral and georgic elements, as the two modes offered scope for the experience of angling. In the eighteenth century, the writers of hunting verse balanced a passion for sport with social and political awareness; hence, they tended to employ the techniques of the prospect view and topographical poetry, intermixing descriptive elements with didactic ones in the georgic mould. As the century progressed, hunting and shooting were either reproved in an increasing number of sentimental poems representing hunters as uncaring and pitiless toward animals or they were celebrated for their gentlemanly values and virtues in the manner of William Somervile's influential poem The Chace (1735) and George Markland's Pteryplegia (1727).

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.

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)

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