Air and Odour

Author(s):  
William Tullett

Starting with the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s experience of the Royal Institution lectures of 1802, this chapter sets out the relationship between smell, chemistry, and environmental medicine in the period from the 1660s to the 1820s. Putridity and putrefaction had long been associated with bad smell, but what the chemical investigations of the mid-eighteenth century succeeded in doing was separating the stink of putridity from its unhealthy qualities. Eudiometers, devices for measuring the quality of air that enjoyed a short vogue in the later eighteenth century, were one way of replacing the, now untrustworthy, sense of smell. Ultimately smell became a useful analogy for thinking about airborne disease or contagious particles, but by the early nineteenth century most physicians and chemists no longer believed that all smell was disease.

2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-315
Author(s):  
JAMES LEES

AbstractThis article examines the conduct of Richard Goodlad, the East India Company's collector in Rangpur, north Bengal, upon the outbreak of a peasant rebellion in his district during 1783. It uses his reaction to this event to illustrate the nature of the Company's district bureaucracy and its relationship with the central colonial authorities in Calcutta during the later eighteenth century.The article considers the aims and limitations of the European officials who were sent out to administer Bengal's districts, detailing their priorities and practices within a weak and decentralised state structure. Ultimately it argues that the relationship between these local and central components of the colonial state was, prior to the Company's rise to subcontinental hegemony in the early nineteenth-century, profoundly shaped both by widespread military under-resourcing, and by the primacy of personal interest among its local officials.


2007 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER KING

As other sources of printed information about crime, such as the Ordinary's Accounts of the lives of executed criminals, lost their audience in the final third of the eighteenth century, newspapers came increasingly to dominate printed discussions of crime. However, no substantial study of the overall nature of newspaper reporting on crime and criminal justice issues has yet been undertaken. By focusing on the London press from the 1780s to the early years of the nineteenth century, this study aims to address a range of questions about the structure of crime and justice reporting, about the selectivity of law and order news and about the types of narratives and discursive structures that can be found at different periods. In particular it highlights the ways in which the multi-vocal, sporadic, brief and sometimes chaotic styles of crime reporting in newspapers created a kaleidoscope of different and often contradictory messages about such issues as the prevalence of violent crime, the effectiveness of policing and penal institutions and the quality of justice meted out by the courts. The printed word had a much less integrative role in relation to law and order issues than historians have sometimes suggested.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.


Author(s):  
Ritchie Robertson

Ritchie Robertson situates Lessing’s text within debates over the proper depiction of extreme suffering in art, focusing on Goethe’s essay on the Laocoon group (1798), as well as other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century works on the representation of pain. The issue of suffering in art was of utmost significance to Goethe’s ideology of the classical, Robertson explains; more than that, the themes introduced in Lessing’s essay—above all, its concerns with how suffering can be depicted in words and images—proved pivotal within Goethe’s prescriptions about the relationship between idealism and individuality (or ‘the characteristic’) in art. As part of a larger campaign against what he called ‘naturalism’ in art, Goethe argued that the ancients did not share the false notion that art must imitate nature. For Goethe, responding to Lessing, the power of the Laocoon group lay precisely in its depiction of bodily suffering as something not just beautiful, but also anmutig (‘sensuously pleasing’).


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Cynthia Roman

Abstract Focusing on A smoking club (1793/7) by James Gillray, this essay presents satiric representations of smoking clubs in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British prints, arguing that they reflect and mediate contemporary understandings of tobacco as an intoxicant in British associational life. The breadth of potential cultural connotations – from political and social parody to light-hearted humour – is traced through the content and imagery of selected prints. These prints rely on the familiarity of contemporary audiences with political and social knowledge, as well as a visual iconography iconically realized in William Hogarth's A midnight modern conversation (1732).


2021 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-162
Author(s):  
Joe Bray

Joe Bray, “‘Come brother Opie!’: Amelia Opie and the Courtroom” (pp. 137–162) This essay examines how Amelia Opie’s lifelong fascination with the human drama of the courtroom is reflected in her fiction, specifically in her tales that revolve around trial scenes. Focusing on three examples in particular, “Henry Woodville” (1818), “The Robber” (1806), and “The Mysterious Stranger” (1813), it argues that Opie’s fictional courtrooms encourage an emotional engagement on the part of both characters and narrators, which in turn can be extended to that of the reader. In the case of “The Mysterious Stranger,” a character is on figurative trial throughout, with both narrator and reader frequently in the dark as to her motives. As a result, judgment is both hazardous and uncertain. Through a sympathetic representation of the passions and vicissitudes experienced by all those in the courtroom context, whether real or metaphorical, Opie’s fiction develops a model of readerly participation that adds a new, affective dimension to traditional accounts of the relationship between early-nineteenth-century literature and the law.


2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-269
Author(s):  
Waïl S. Hassan

Abstract According to a well-known narrative, the concept of Weltliteratur and its academic correlative, the discipline of comparative literature, originated in Germany and France in the early nineteenth century, influenced by the spread of scientism and nationalism. But there is another genesis story that begins in the late eighteenth century in Spain and Italy, countries with histories entangled with the Arab presence in Europe during the medieval period. Emphasizing the role of Arabic in the formation of European literatures, Juan Andrés wrote the first comparative history of “all literature,” before the concepts of Weltliteratur and comparative literature gained currency. The divergence of the two genesis stories is the result of competing geopolitical interests, which determine which literatures enter into the sphere of comparison, on what terms, within which paradigms, and under what ideological and discursive conditions.


2020 ◽  
pp. 115-139
Author(s):  
Sarah Clemmens Waltz

This chapter re-evaluates Felix Mendelssohn’s ‘Scottish’ works by placing them in the context of the early-nineteenth-century North German view of Scotland, especially as channelled through Mendelssohn’s mentors Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Carl Friedrich Zelter. Such interest in Scotland was undergirded by a belief in a shared German-Celtic past and a sense that Scottish culture was not exotic but rather essentially German. Figures in Mendelssohn’s circle participated in deliberate attempts to claim a general northern antiquity for German culture, using arguments concerning the relationship of climate, race, and character. A recontextualization of Scotland as representing a lost German past may signal additional reinterpretations of Mendelssohn’s anticipations of travel, his travel experiences, and his statements concerning folk song, as well as his Fantasy, Op. 28, originally titled Sonate écossaise.


2019 ◽  
Vol 88 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-119
Author(s):  
Doron Avraham

In the early nineteenth century, a neo-Pietist circle of awakened Protestants emerged in Prussia and other German lands. Disturbed by the consequences of the French Revolution, the ensuing reforms and the rising national movement, these neo-Pietists—among them noble estate owners, theologians, and other scholars—tried to introduce an alternative meaning for the alliance between state and religion. Drawing on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pietist traditions, neo-Pietists fused their keen religious devotion with newly constructed conservative ideals, thus rehabilitating the legitimacy of political authority while investing the people's confession with additional meaning. At the same time, and through the same pietistic source of inspiration, conservative neo-Pietists forged their own understanding of national identity: its origins, values, and implications. In this regard, and against the prevailing view of the antagonist stance taken by Christian conservatives toward nationalism in the first half on the nineteenth century, this article argues for the consolidation of certain concepts of German national identity within Christian conservatism.


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