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)

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The simulation of sickness intrigued British writers from the very beginning of the eighteenth century, attracting attention within a wide range of social spheres. Drawing upon texts from the fields of literature, medicine, theology, welfare policy, the military, and the law courts, this interdisciplinary thesis combines close textual analysis with an examination of social and cultural contexts in order to explain why the issue of feigned illness became such a prevalent and enduring source of debate in eighteenth-century Britain. Both the allure and the threat of simulated sickness lay in the ability of ill health to confer power upon the sufferer. On the one hand ill health might operate as a signifier of social or spiritual importance, yet sickness also functioned as a source of practical power, enabling emotional manipulation, exemption from social duties, and access to resources. The perceived benefits of ill health made the identification of simulated illness a matter of importance, yet the subject would not have attracted such attention were it not for prevailing doubts as to the legibility of the body. As this thesis indicates, the varied attitudes towards and representations of simulated sickness provide fascinating insights into the preoccupations of writers of different spheres and periods. Nevertheless, broader trends in attitudes towards bodily legibility and feigned illness are visible. Early eighteenth-century writers were generally wary of trusting external appearances, while the middle decades of the century were marked by an expression of faith in the natural legibility of the body, as demonstrated by the fashion for the literature of sensibility, acting through feeling, and the medico-literary rhetoric of nerves. Renewed scepticism towards the close of the century resulted in growing debates about the duty of medical practitioners to detect feigned illness, and the methods by which this might be accomplished. While the treatment of the subject evolved, its continued relevance highlights a sustained cultural preoccupation with the legibility of the body and its potential to mislead or even deceive, a subject that continued to fascinate writers to the very end of the eighteenth century.

This thesis examines the experiences and impacts of the deployment of Highland soldiers to North America in the mid to late-eighteenth century. Between 1756 and 1783, Britain sent ten Highland battalions to the North American theatre, where they fought for the duration of both the Seven Years‟ War and the War of American Independence. The pressures of recruiting, utilizing, and demobilizing these men created powerful new forces in the Scottish Highlands, occurring, and in some cases prefiguring, the region‟s severe socio-economic problems. The impact of military contributions to the imperial state also had significant implications for Gaelic self-perception and the politics of loyalty and interest. This thesis asserts the importance of imperial contacts in shaping the development of the Scottish Highlands within the British state. Rejecting the narrative of a centrifugal empire based on military subjugation, this thesis argues that Gaels, of all social groups, constructed their own experiences of empire, having tremendous agency in how that relationship was formed. The British Empire was not constructed only through the extension or strengthening of state apparatus in various geographical spaces. It was formed by the decision of local actors to willingly embrace the perceived advantages of empire. Ultimately, the disproportionately large Highland commitment to military service was a largely negative force in the Highlands. This thesis establishes, however, the importance of political and ideological imperatives which drove these decisions, imperatives that were predicated on inter-peripheral contacts with British America. It establishes the extent to which Highland soldiers willingly ensured the development of British imperialism in the late eighteenth century.

The thesis argues that never-married gentlewomen dissociated themselves from negative and ubiquitous stereotypes of the old maid by focussing on their gentility rather than their marital status. By demonstrably fulfilling the familial and social roles which belonged to their sex and rank, and by representing themselves in terms of approved genteel feminine virtues and conduct, they located themselves in networks of social reciprocity which extended from household and family into the wider social sphere. In doing so they confounded popular caricatures of mature unmarried women as selfish parasites whose failure to marry and procreate drained the resources of their natal families and undermined the nation’s strength. The thesis focuses on a number of case studies drawn from the extensive collections of family papers in the National Records of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland. Several of these never-married women were kin by birth or marriage, and their correspondence illustrates the reach of their relationship networks, their status, and influence. Their personal and, in some cases, published writing shows how they used ideals of gentility and associated language to support the familial and social positions they claimed. The thesis chapters examine the relationships they forged, and the resulting influence they were able to exercise, by considering them variously as members of households headed by male kin, as heads of their own households, and as familial patrons. While never-married women are increasingly the subjects of research, the lives of never-married gentlewomen remain under-examined. Yet gentlewomen, habituated to writing as an essential social skill, have left a wide range of sources by which their management of social status and singlehood can be assessed. This thesis shows some of the perspectives opened up by study of these sources.

This thesis is predicated upon a rejection of the existing characterisation of attitudes towards the dead in the eighteenth century. In current thinking this period witnessed the first signs of a reduction in the extent to which people had contact with the dead. However, this assumption is supported by very little research. In focusing on proximity and exposure to the dead body at an ‘everyday’ level this thesis tempers the century’s association with distance and change by revealing a high level of proximity and very significant continuities with both the preceding and proceeding periods. Utilising sources from London, Bristol and York it follows the dead body from the point of death through to its eventual resting place, concentrating in particular on the impact of the newly-emerged undertaking trade and burial practice in the century and a half prior to the widespread establishment of extramural cemeteries and eventual outlawing of burial in towns. The following key questions are addressed: how were spaces shared between the living and the dead; where exactly were the dead present; who had contact with them; and in what ways. The result is a picture which demonstrates that during the long eighteenth century the living shared their private and public urban spaces with the dead to a significant extent. The attitudes governing treatment of the dead body revealed in the process are shown to be at once timeless and period-specific. Foremost among these is the concept of ‘decency’. It is shown that this idea, whilst far from unique to the eighteenth century, had a particular contemporary significance shaped by social and economic factors and their effects on the class structure and urban environment. At the same time, visible in all aspects of treatment of the dead is a pragmatism born of limitations on time and, in particular, space which did not always sit easily with notions of decency, particularly once the dead were underground.

Shoplifting proliferated in eighteenth-century England with retail expansion, acquiring a new prominence as it was made a capital crime. This study comprehensively examines this phenomenon, seating it within the historiographies of crime, marketing and consumption. The majority of offenders were occasional thieves, drawn from some of the most economically vulnerable sectors of plebeian communities, their profile confirming the significance of age and gender. While specialist shops were shoplifters' primary target, particularly those selling textiles and clothing, a spatial analysis suggests that thieves preferred smaller, local shops to their more prestigious counterparts. Shoplifters matched their tactics to the size and status of shop, using performance as a tool to achieve their ends. Yet the study questions assumptions around the influence of fashion and consumer desire on shop theft, discussing how the type and quantity of goods stolen points to more complex economic motives, both financial and social. The potential impact of the crime on women's role as shopkeepers and the tendency to sexualise female offenders are also scrutinised. While retailers were initially instrumental in driving legislative change and worked constructively with magistrates to control the crime's incidence, their constant reluctance to prosecute conveys a false impression of the crime's true extent. The study calculates prevalence, and projects the financial impact of shoplifting on its victims at a time of highly competitive retailing. 'Risk-based' in their thinking, retailers developed practical means of protecting their stores, while new marketing techniques proved variously a boon and handicap. Yet shopkeepers' reactions were not uniform, some apparently preferring such situational prevention, while others turned more readily to the law. This ambivalence was also exhibited in their engagement with the capital law reform that ultimately saw the repeal of the Shoplifting Act. Employing a variety of sources from court transcripts to literature, the study finally explores how changing social perspectives on crime during the period coloured public attitudes to shoplifting, foreshadowing reconfigured nineteenth-century perceptions of the crime.

<p>This study focuses on a series of foundational stylistic and formal innovations in eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, and argues that they can be cumulatively attributed to the distinct challenges authors faced in representing human action and the will. The study focuses in particular on cases of “acting against better judgment” or “failing to do what one knows one ought to do” – concepts originally theorized as “akrasia” and “weakness of the will” in ancient Greek and Scholastic thought. During the Enlightenment, philosophy increasingly conceives of human minds and bodies like systems and machines, and consequently fails to address such cases except as intractable or incoherent. Yet eighteenth-century and Romantic narratives and poetry consistently engage the paradoxes and ambiguities of action and volition in representations of akrasia. As a result, literature develops representational strategies that distinguish the epistemic capacities of literature as privileged over those of philosophy.</p><p>The study begins by centering on narratives of distempered selves from the 1760s. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions and Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey narrate cases of knowingly and weakly acting against better judgment, and in so doing, reveal the limitations of the “philosophy of the passions” that famously informed sentimental literature at the time. These texts find that the interpretive difficulties of action demand a non-systematic and hermeneutic approach to interpreting a self through the genre of narrative. Rousseau’s narrative in particular informs William Godwin’s realist novels of distempered subjects. Departing from his mechanistic philosophy of mind and action, Godwin develops the technique of free indirect discourse in his third novel Fleetwood (1805) as a means of evoking the ironies and self-deceptions in how we talk about willing. </p><p>Romantic poetry employs the literary trope of weakness of will primarily through the problem of regretted inaction – a problem which I argue motivates the major poetic innovations of William Wordsworth and John Keats. While Samuel Taylor Coleridge sought to characterize his weakness of will in philosophical writing, Wordsworth turns to poetry with The Prelude (1805), revealing poetry itself to be a self-deceiving and disappointing form of procrastination. More explicitly than Wordsworth, John Keats identifies indolence as the prime symbol and basis of what he calls “negative capability.” In his letters and poems such as “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” (1817) and “Ode on Indolence” (1819), Keats reveals how the irreducibly contradictory qualities of human agency speak to the particular privilege of “disinterested aesthetics” – a genre fitted for the modern era for its ability to disclose contradictions without seeking to resolve or explain them in terms of component parts.</p> / Dissertation