Furniture history is often considered a niche subject removed from the main discipline of art history, and one that has little to do with the output of painters, sculptors and architects. This thesis, however, connects the key intellectual, artistic and architectural debates surfacing in 'the arts' between 1740 and 1840 with the design of British furniture. Despite the expanding corpus of scholarly monographs and articles dealing with individual cabinet-makers, furniture making in geographic areas and periods of time, little attention has been paid to exploring Gothic furniture made between 1740 and 1840. Indeed, no body of research on 'mainstream' Gothic furniture made at this time has been published. No sustained attempt has been made to trace its stylistic evolution, establish stylistic phases, or to place this development within the context of contemporary architectural practice and historiography — except for the study of A.W.N. Pugin's 'Reformed Gothic'. Neither have furniture historians been willing to explore the aesthetic's connection with the intellectual and sentimental position of 'the Gothic' in the period. This thesis addresses these shortcomings and is the first to bridge the historiographic, cultural and architectural concerns of the time with the stylistic, constructional and material characteristics of Gothic furniture. It argues that it, like architecture, was charged with social and political meanings that included national identity in the eighteenth century — around a century before Charles Barry and A.W.N. Pugin designed the Palace of Westminster and prominently associated the Gothic legacy with Britishness.

In much of the historiography surrounding print culture and the book trade, the worldliness of print remains a point of common emphasis. Indeed, many influential studies either assume or actively present the history of print as part of a broader ‘secularization thesis’. Recently, however, historians have challenged these narratives, recognizing the central role of religious print as a driver of growth within the book trade and discussion within the nascent ‘public sphere’. Yet the scholarship into ‘religion and the book’ remains fragmentary, focused on individual genres or persons, with no unified monograph or standard reference work yet to emerge. This dissertation addresses some of the barriers to synopsis by investigating the long-term print output of the largest social and professional group engaged in evangelizing Christianity to the public: the clergy of the Church of England. By focusing on the clergy, this dissertation evades the usual narrow focus on genre. In the past, book-historical and bibliographic studies have relied heavily on a priori classification schemes to study the market for print. While sufficient in the context of relatively well-defined genre categories, such as printed sermons, the validity of these classification schemes breaks down at the wider level, for example, under the conceptual burden of defining the highly fluid and wide-ranging category of ‘religious works’. This dissertation begins to remedy such problems by modelling the print output of a large population of authors who had the strongest stake in evangelizing Christianity to the public through print. It utilizes the latest techniques in the field of digital humanities and bibliometrics to create a representative sample of the print output of the Anglican clergy over the ‘long’ eighteenth-century (here 1660-1800). Based on statistical trends, the thesis identifies a crucial period in the history of clerical print culture, the first four decades of the Hanoverian regime. The period is explored in detail through three subsequent case studies. By combining both traditional and digital methods, therefore, the dissertation explores clerical publishing as a phenomenon subject to evolution and change at both the macro and micro level. The first chapter provides an overarching statistical study of clerical publishing between 1660 and 1800. By combining data from two bibliographical datasets, The English Short-Title Catalogue (ESTC), and the prosopographical resource, The Clergy of the Church of England Database (CCED), I extract and analyse a dataset of clerical works consisting of almost 35,000 bibliographic records. The remaining chapters approach the thesis topic through primary research-based case studies using both print and manuscript sources. The case studies were selected from the period identified in the preceding statistical analysis as a crucial transitional moment in the history of clerical publishing culture, c.1714 to 1750. These case studies form chapters 2, 3, and 4, each of which explore a different aspect of a network of authors who worked under the direction of the bishop of London, Edmund Gibson (1723-1748), during the era of Whig hegemony under Sir Robert Walpole. Finally, an appendix outlines the methodology used in chapter 1 to extract the sample of clerical printed works from the ESTC. Overall, the thesis demonstrates the profound influence of the clergy on the development of English print in the hand-press period. It thus forms both a historiographic intervention against the secularization thesis still implicit in discussions of print culture and the book trade, as well as providing a cautionary critique of the revisionism which has shaped recent investigations into the Church of England.

This thesis is an analysis of the manner in which the persona and works of Ben Jonson were appropriated – between the Restoration, in 1660, and the retirement of David Garrick, in 1776 – to reflect the political and social concerns of the age. Unlike previous studies, rather than primarily focusing on the stage history of Jonson, I analyse a wide range of sources – produced both within and outwith the theatre – in order to explore, across a variety of media, a breadth of material which appropriates the playwright and his works. I shall consider in my first main chapter the appropriations of Jonson within the Restoration court, in particular noting the assimilation of the playwright's work to what might be styled a proto-Tory ideology, as well as the way in which his plays could mirror the destabilising effects of the king's romantic liaisons. In my second chapter, I explore the moral reformation at the turn of the eighteenth century, in which we can see appropriations of Jonson which cast his works as being primarily didactic. The third chapter moves the narrative of the thesis into the years of the premiership of Sir Robert Walpole. I shall consider the way in which the playwright's works – especially The Alchemist and Eastward Ho! – were seen as being especially relevant to an age of speculation and mercantile endeavour, as well as examining the manner in which the figures of Sejanus and Volpone were appropriated to mock the increasingly unpopular premier. In the final chapter, I shall offer an analysis of Garrick's seminal portrayal of Drugger in the contexts of the political philosophy of the mid-eighteenth century, considering the manner in which it was interpreted alongside the character's further appropriations by Francis Gentleman. The thesis concludes by exploring political appropriations of Jonson up to the present day.