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Attention to Victorian reviews of eighteenth-century and Romantic novels reveals sympathy's importance to the survival of classic novels and its role as a catalyst for critical standards that remain central. I demonstrate that reviewers used sympathy to describe a widespread but untheorized system of useful reading. Reviewers argue that rational sympathy could make reading a process of moral education. That is, if readers reject emotional stimulation, then reading about characters' motives teaches readers to evaluate the people and situations they encounter in the real world. By looking at already canonical novelists like Richardson, Fielding and Scott, by denying canonicity to gothic novelists, and by creating new classics with figures like Austen, Victorian reviewers engage sympathy to teach their readers how to read reviews and novels appropriately. In doing so, reviewers also alter the reviewing voice, making it more sympathetic as well as using it to cajole and convince readers (rather than expecting agreement based on the reviewer's expertise). Additionally, reviewers use persuasive techniques to build imagined relationships between readers, encouraging readers to take the moral ideals garnered from their reading and put them to use in relationships. I claim, then, that Victorian reviews, aimed at leisure readers, explore artistic questions primarily as contributors to sympathy and focus on how to read for moral and emotional education. As a result, crucial definitions and tenets about novel writing and reading are buried in paragraphs on morality or biography. If scholars understand why and how Victorian reviewers criticize novels, they will also recognize the complex arguments in these oft-derided articles. The result will be a fuller understanding of the history of novel criticism and a clearer picture of the values that guided the canonizing process during the Victorian period. / English

Life in the eighteenth-century Tidewater was set against the grim specter of death. Children were especially vulnerable, perishing with disheartening frequency throughout the century. Yet despite the high rates of child mortality, Tidewater culture underwent a revolution in regard to the eighteenth-century family. Children became the emotional focus of the family, becoming cherished for their youthful capering and playful nature. However, child death was no less common. The way in which parents coped with the death of a child changed throughout the century, reflecting the emotionalized understanding of children and childhood. The rituals surrounding the death of a child—from preparations for burial, the funeral, and lasting commemorations—evolved over the course of the eighteenth century, reflecting the new place of the child within the eighteenth-century family and the emotional trauma felt by the family after the death of a child. / Master of Arts

This thesis examines the context and causes of signal reform in the British Royal Navy during the American War of Independence. It argues that changes in the ethos of the officer corps before and during the American War of Independence led to a complex period of signal reform. The original system was tied to the General Printed Sailing and Fighting Instructions, more often referred to as the Fighting Instructions. For around a century (ca. 1690 to ca. 1790), the Royal Navy utilized the Fighting Instructions as its main system of communication. During the American War for Independence, however, some sea officers began to question the system and devise new methods of signaling. This change was brought on by changes within the officer corps. Among the changes were trends of centralization and the influence of Enlightenment ideals. Both of these shifts helped to inspire the signal reformers, while also creating the environment to sustain signal reforms. This thesis examines the signal reforms of the three principal signal reformers of the war: Richard Howe, Richard Kempenfelt, and George Rodney. / Master of Arts / This thesis examines the context and causes of signal reform in the British Royal Navy during the American War of Independence. It argues that changes in the ethos of the officer corps before and during the American War of Independence led to a complex period of signal reform. For nearly one hundred years, the navy utilized the same system of signaling to communicate between ships: the General Printed Sailing and Fighting Instructions, more commonly known as the Fighting Instructions. During the American War of Independence, some British sea officers began to question that system and propose alternate systems of their own design. Influenced by their lengthy naval experience, shifts in trends of centralization, and the influence of Enlightenment ideals, officers like Richard Howe, Richard Kempenfelt, and George Rodney experimented with new methods of signaling.

protein chemistry, unnatural amino acids, chemical biology, proteomicsThe foundation of political societies is a central theme in Rousseau's work. This is no surprise coming from a man who was born into a people who had their own celebrated founder and foundations, and immersed himself in the writings of classical republicans and the quasi-mythical histories of ancient city-states where the heroic lawgiver played an important and legitimate role in political foundations. However, Rousseau's propositional political writings (those written for Geneva, Corsica, and Poland) have been accused of being unsystematic and running the spectrum from conservative and prudent to radical and utopian. It is this seeming incongruence which is the subject of this thesis. In particular, it is argued that this confusion is born out the failure to recognize a systematic distinction between "founding" and "re-founding" political societies in both the history of political thought, and Rousseau's own work (a distinction in Rousseau which has rarely been noted, let alone treated to a study of its own). By recognizing this distinction one can identify two Rousseaus; the conservative and prudent thinker who is wary of making changes to established political systems and constitutional foundations (the re-founder), and the radical democrat fighting for equality, and claiming that no state is legitimate without popular sovereignty (the founder). In demonstrating this distinction, this thesis examines the ancient concept of the lawgiver, the growth and expansion of the idea leading up to the eighteenth century, Rousseau's own philosophic writings on the topic, and the differing political proposals he wrote for Geneva, Corsica, and Poland. The thesis argues that although there is a clear separation between these two types of political proposals, they remain systematically Rousseauvian.

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Social history has been much criticised over the past thirty years. This criticism and the consequent turn to cultural history have brought many advances, developing our understanding of the language, discourse, ritual and culture. However, it has also led to a neglect of structural factors and a turn away from the study of collectivities. This has meant that many subjects that class used to explain (social difference, social relationships and collective actions) are often ignored or undertheorized in current historical scholarship. This thesis examines one of these issues: how should historians understand and analyse the process of social-group formation? It does this through a case study of propertied society in Birmingham between 1780 and 1832. Propertied society is a loose category that does not have the connotations of concepts such as ‘middle class’. This thesis suggests that there were many different types of social group and that historians need to differentiate between them when analysing past societies. The most important distinction is between groups who shared attributes and groups that acted together. However, there was no simple relationship between attributes and actions; individuals who shared attributes did not necessarily act in the same way. The first part of the thesis (chapters 1-3) discusses who was included within the category of propertied society and the social and geographical understandings of those individuals. The second part of the thesis (chapters 4-6) moves from the general material and cultural structures of propertied society to consider three case studies that examine a number of processes by which individuals came together to form groups focused on particular discourses, institutions and events. The three case studies discuss the family and the transfer of social knowledge (chapter 4), local government and the nature of elites (chapter 5), and the process of politicization through examining membership of the Birmingham Political Union (chapter 6).

The aim of this dissertation is to describe the sphere of use of the Russian Instrumental case in written sources from the eighteenth century. The research is based on approximately 11,300 instances of the use of the Instrumental and almost 2,400 constructions with other cases, excerpted from documents of various genres and styles. The corpus includes texts written by forty eighteenth-century authors, and contains works of poetry and drama, literary prose, letters, memoirs and learned tracts. Previous studies of the Instrumental case have in the main dealt with the development of the system of its meanings in the Old Russian period, or else have described its condition in modern times. The present work attempts to systematise its most typical uses and to trace the changes in the function of the Instrumental that took place during the period when a national literary language was coming into being in Russia. The research is primarily focused on the competition between the Instrumental case and other means of expression of particular meanings. In particular it describes (with statistical data) the variation in case forms within the predicate, with the function of an object, and also of the agent in passive constructions. A detailed description is given of those meanings of the Instrumental which are known from the earliest period and still in active use in the eighteenth century, but nowadays perceived as archaic. The most important of these are the Instrumental of cause, and also various uses of the Instrumental without a preposition to indicate time or place.

This thesis explores the crowds that attended London's executions, pillories and public whippings during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It aims to reappraise a literature describing the carnivalesque and voyeuristic nature of popular behaviour, and to trace a continuum in the public's active engagement with the criminal justice system between 1783 and 1868. By employing a range of little used sources to examine the biographical, geographical and social texture of punishment audiences, it details the lives and motivations of the men, women and children who assembled to watch these often brutal events. In the process, this thesis significantly revises our received understanding of the troublesome punishment 'mob', the unruliness and low character of which has been frequently assumed on the basis of uncritical reading of contemporary sources inveighing against plebeian behaviour. It reveals a more stable picture of public participation, and argues that this experience was characterized by the remarkable social diversity and relative good order of the crowd. This study in consequence problematizes teleological narratives of social 'improvement' and a putative 'civilizing process', which have traditionally described the fall of public punishments as a product of changing urban sensitivities. In analysing the crowd's structure and responses to public punishments over time, the thesis demonstrates how popular expectations surrounding older forms of public justice remained essentially unchanged, and continued to speak forcefully to the metropolitan conscience. To explain the undoubted changes in punishment policy in the period, in the absence of a clear teleological narrative of attitudes towards public punishment, the thesis in turn argues that the decline of the pillory, whippings and public executions in London was driven by elite fears regarding mass behaviour, particularly in the wake of the Gordon Riots of 1780, and suggests that public punishments disappeared not because of their dwindling moral relevance or failing penal utility, but as a result of the middle class's increasingly nervous perceptions of urban mass phenomena. The thesis argues that the decline of public punishment did not result from 'squeamishness' about judicial murder and corporal punishment, but from anxiety about the authority and power of the crowd.

Embedded within various works of Eighteenth-Century literature lie themes regarding how the protagonists of these stories pursue their own versions of happiness. This thesis examines how characters from a wide variety of Eighteenth-Century novels engage with their surroundings, often resisting the dominant social structures of the time, to fashion more fulfilling lives for themselves. From Robinson Crusoe to Elizabeth Bennet to Frankenstein's monster, these characters come from a wide variety of backgrounds but all reveal several unifying themes. They seek out personal connections rather that striving to fulfill antiquated social expectations and they focus on their own agency, rather than circumstances out of their control. Their respective journeys are often fraught with peril, but each one is a journey worth embarking on.