This thesis contributes insight into the lives and injury experiences of the working poor of London, UK during the “long” eighteenth century. The distribution of fracture types within individual bodies and the larger experiences of those living and dying during this period are explored. Skeletal evidence, drawn from five London cemeteries, and historical evidence, in the form of contemporary hospital admission records and surgeons’ and physicians’ notebooks, speak in concert to reveal evidence of sex-based differences in fracture patterning and evidence for interpersonal violence. Sex-based differences in fracture patterning reveal that males and females suffered differing constellations of fractures and that the risk of fracture for males and females differed throughout the life course. Patterning of fractures in the male skeletal sample suggests that males’ lives were punctuated with episodes of interpersonal violence, supporting the historical data found in contemporary court records. Significant differences observed in the fracture frequencies in the skeletal and archival datasets indicate that not all fractures were being treated in a hospital setting. These results allow for examination of the intangible notion of human choice regarding health care in the past. The mixture of healed, healing, and perimortem fractures found in the skeletal sample allows for a relative timeline of fracture events to be reconstructed, contributing to a more comprehensive life course understanding of fractures in this group. Ultimately, the combined skeletal and archival datasets contribute to anthropological and historical studies of fractures and health care by placing the working poor at the centre of their own narrative. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The genre paintings of the artist Pehr Hilleström (1732–1816) are frequently used as illustrations of everyday life in the Swedish late Eighteen-century bourgeois households. The aim of this study is to examine Hilleströms interior scenes as a source to the cultural history of the Eighteenth century in Sweden.  The Eighteenth century is often described as a period when the concepts of home and household changed and came to be seen as something private and more intimate than before. In this study I examine if these new perceptions of the household found expression in Hilleströms images. In addition, I also analyze if, and to what extent these images can be seen as moralizing.  I do this by examining Hilleströms bourgeoise interiors in relation both to French genre painting, and to accounts of home and household derived from readings of range of Eighteenth-century literary sources. In my examination of the views on household of Hilleström and his contemporaries I use Michael Baxandalls concepts troc and period eye. The primary sources I use to create a period eye, comprise novels, satirical verse, theatre plays and conduct books.  The study shows that Hilleströms images owe quite a lot to conventions of genre painting and, especially to French painters, such as Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin. The content of Hilleström’s pictures correspond well to the image of the traditional, ideal home found in contemporary literature. However, the new, more sentimental ideas about home and household are not to be found in Hilleström’s images. Whether Hilleström’s images are moralizing or not, I find more difficult to conclude. While not explicitly satirical, in the light of the Eighteenth-century literary texts, they might have been interpreted so by the viewer.

Writing at a moment of ideological crisis between individualism and hierarchical society, Jane Austen asserts a definition of moral behavior and female identity that mediates the two value systems. I argue that Austen most effectively articulates her belief in women's moral autonomy and social responsibility in her novels through her portrayal of sisterhood. Austen reshapes the stereotype of sisters and female friendships as dangerous found in her domestic novel predecessors. While recognizing women's social vulnerability, which endangers female friendship and turns it into a site of competition, Austen urges the morality of selflessly embracing sisterhood anyway. An Austen heroine must overcome sisterly rivalry if she is to achieve the moral strength Austen demands of her. As Mansfield Park (1814) and Pride and Prejudice (1813) demonstrate, such rivalry reveals the flawed morality of both individualism and patrilineal society. I further argue that in these novels sisterhood articulates the internally motivated selflessness Austen makes her moral standard. Sisterhood not only indicates female morality for Austen, it also enables this character. Rejecting Rousseau's proposal of men shaping malleable female minds, Austen pronounces sisters to be the best moral guides. In Northanger Abbey (1818), Austen shows the failure of the man to educate our heroine and the success of his sister. In Sense and Sensibility (1811), Austen pinpoints the source of sisterly education's success in its feminine context of nurture, affection, intimacy, and subtlety. With this portrait of sisterhood, Austen adheres to the moral authority inherent in Burkean philosophy while advocating individual responsibility, not external regulation, to choose selfless behavior. Austen further promotes gender equality by expressing women's moral autonomy, while supporting gender distinctions that privilege femininity. By offering such powerful, complex sister relationships, Austen transforms eighteenth-century literary thought about women, sisters, and morality.

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This dissertation explores the life and works of eighteenth-century labouring-class poet Mary Leapor. Leapor’s ability to use everyday objects to write poetry that speaks to important social and cultural transformations of the period is one of the most remarkable and interesting aspects of her poetry, and it sets her apart from other labouring-class writers. Therefore, while this dissertation situates Leapor as a female laborer who writes poetry about the labour she performs, it is more interested in how she uses her poetry about the labour she performs—and particularly how she offers her own version of “thing theory”—in order to speak to a number of problems of which labour is just one. By spotlighting the complex role of objects in Leapor’s poetry, this dissertation shows how she uses those objects to articulate new conceptions of the labouring body’s relationship to authorship and authority, claim authorship as a form of useful labour, and legitimize her own gendered and class-inflected authority as a subject in literary and intellectual discourse. While acknowledging the context of material history, I focus on the ways Leapor uses particular things to rethink the possibilities of labouring-class life, identity, literary expression, and what it might have meant for her to imagine a new kind of human subjectivity that is itself inseparable from the concept of labour. Moreover, Leapor’s work shows that she identifies labouring individuals as part of a community whose experience is heavily organized socially around labour but argues that their lived experience has provided them with a particular identity and perspective. Ultimately, this dissertation works to decenter our own moment in the history of ideas by showing how Leapor was theorizing about forms of situated knowledge over two hundred years before it entered academic discourse in the 20th century through feminist theories of embodied ways of knowing. Leapor’s poetry is not just an object that should be studied through a theoretical lens; it should be understood as a theory of situated knowledge transmitting ideas from its own materially embedded position. Leapor’s poetry lives on as a labouring thing—changing, growing, and theorizing as living humans do—inviting its readers to contemplate the complex components of being an embodied thinker. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation focuses on the life and works of Mary Leapor (1722-1746) and builds upon recent interest in the cultural work of particular literary forms by examining the emergence of the labouring-class writer and the rise of a new poetic mode, the labour poem. Existing scholarship has begun to explore the many ways these texts represent class-based and gendered oppression, hardship, and work, and how these writers were able to combine several literary traditions to speak out against adverse conditions. By emphasising the material history of inanimate objects and nonhuman animals found within labouring-class writing, my project seeks to demonstrate how Leapor and other labouring-class writers used their poetry about the labours they performed in order to speak to something more than labour, such as what it means to be a subject in a world that is circumscribed by things like status, class and gender.

This dissertation reframes the history eighteenth-century British art as a history of textiles. Women across England, Ireland, and Scotland grew, dressed, spun, and wove the hemp, flax, and wool textiles that were the basis for both the cultural implements and practical tools of empire: oil paintings on linen canvas and needlework of worsted thread hung in metropolitan exhibition spaces, while hemp rope, sail cloth, and coarse linen facilitated Britain’s global reach and transportation of commodities. Over the course of three chapters, “Rope,” “Linen,” and “Thread,” I demonstrate how ordinary textiles made and used by women were key tools for the funding, making, and aesthetics of art. In the first chapter, “Rope,” I trace the labor of female models in British drawing academies through their poses supported by rope, and consider historical encounters between rope and the female working body in carceral contexts. Following the entwined forms of life models and rope demonstrates just how entangled the spaces of punishment and the life studio were. The second chapter, “Linen,” is about the structure, materiality and hidden histories embedded in linen painting canvas. First, by comparing linen weaves, thread counts, stamps, and fiber content, I demonstrate the material connections between the world of coarse linen goods and the textile supports of oil paintings. I then argue that the texture of canvas was crucial to the “unfinished” aesthetic of portraiture that became fashionable in the late eighteenth century and attend to the racialized and gendered discourses intrinsic to this painting style. The last chapter, “Thread,” examines spinning and needlework as elite performances of female industry against the backdrop of mechanization, nascent labor movements, and imperial expansion. I contend that these conflicts played out in romanticized depictions of women spinning and the celebration of public exhibitions of worsted embroidery, namely Mary Linwood’s Gallery. While scholars from the fields of economic history, material culture, and art history have considered the topics of industrialization, labor, textiles, and art separately, this is the first study to bring them together as an intervention in eighteenth-century British art history. By rendering textile labor visible in eighteenth-century British art, I argue that manufacturing, imperialism and the visual arts were financially, materially, and ideologically enmeshed processes.

Existing studies of popular culture and popular politics in the long eighteenth century over-favour either the ‘culture’ or the ‘politics’. This thesis contributes to debates on the making of both national and class identity in Britain via intensive analysis of popular song culture, in the context of the Napoleonic Wars. Portrayals of Napoleon himself are used to shape the thesis’ source material and the forms of discussion. It argues for the necessity of sympathetic, informed contextualisation of political issues within contemporary cultural processes: that an understanding of the composition/production and performance/ consumption of song is a prerequisite of determining songs’ relevance and reception. In so doing, it uncovers a nuanced array of attitudes towards both Napoleon and British patriotism, of unsuspected breadth, assertiveness, and idiosyncrasy. The thesis is divided into two stages of argument. Part I consists of a close and contextualised reading of songs as literary and musical objects. Chapter One, after close historiographical engagement that moves to a focus on Colley’s Britons and revisionist arguments about British society, discusses those songs originating after Waterloo. Chapter Two considers songs from 1797-1805. Chapter Three considers songs from 1806-15. Part II builds upon the themes and conclusions of Part I by situating these songs within a lived context. Chapter Four looks at the role of songwriters and printers; Chapter Five at singers; Chapter Six at audiences and reception. Chapter Seven elaborates the overall argument in a synoptic case study of Newcastle. The conclusion is followed by an appendix, listing the songs most pertinent to the thesis, giving additional bibliographical information. A hard copy (USB) of recordings of a representative selection of these songs is also included. These appendices reinforce the thesis’ methodology: to consider songs, not as passive evidence of expression, but as active, dynamic objects.

Eighteenth-century Paris was the cultural capital of Europe and home to a vibrant network of theatres, not all of which are equally present in modern scholarship. The Comédie-Italienne in particular has frequently been downplayed in historical accounts, and there is no existing work outlining its relationship with its authors. This thesis aims to address this gap through a case study of the Italian author Carlo Goldoni, who began work for the Comédie-Italienne in 1762. His thirty years in Paris hold an ambiguous place in his career: the preface to his autobiography draws attention to France as the site of his authorial glory, but his work for the Comédie-Italienne is dismissed as a failure; a view echoed by many modern critics. This study therefore also sets out to explore this apparent contradiction. Substantial original work on the Comédie-Italienne archives sheds new light on the administration of this theatre, building up the most comprehensive existing account of its finances, audiences and author relations in the 1760s, and situating it in the contemporary cultural field. Dramatic authors are revealed to be at the heart of tensions between symbolic and financial concerns across eighteenth-century theatrical Paris. This re-evaluation also provides a new context for understanding Goldoni’s equivocal account of his Parisian career. He desired a glorious image in posterity, yet the Comédie-Italienne’s collaborative production and lack of publication thwarted the reputation-shaping tactics he had developed in Italy. The only weapon that remained was his French Mémoires (1787), in which he consciously constructed his image and the claim of Parisian glory. Goldoni’s case also raises broader questions about the creation of literary gloire, and the fate of the cosmopolitan artist in a strange land. In modern France, Goldoni is remembered as a famous foreigner, not the Frenchman he believed he had become. The thesis concludes that this failure in posterity stems from his misunderstanding of how to achieve gloire in his French context: to rely on artificially created image alone is not enough, and yet Goldoni had no choice.