Urban Burial Reform in William Wordsworth’s “Village Churchyard”

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 279-304
Author(s):  
Katherine E. Blake
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
Economic Theories ◽  
Rural Sites ◽  
The Relationship

Katherine E. Blake “Urban Burial Reform in William Wordsworth’s ‘Village Churchyard’” (pp. 279–304) This essay looks at the relationship between space and class in nineteenth-century English burials in order to shed new light on William Wordsworth’s Essays upon Epitaphs (1810, 1876) and “The Brothers” (1800). While Wordsworth’s work dwells on pastoral images of burial, I argue that his representations in fact align more closely with the cultural practices and values underpinning urban burial conventions. Through his representation of burial space, Wordsworth’s work plays out urban concerns about burial in the countryside. Ultimately, this essay argues that the exportation of urban concerns to imaginary rural sites accounts for the utility of Wordsworth’s work to mid-nineteenth-century burial reformers, and particularly to Edwin Chadwick, a utilitarian known for his work on the 1832 Poor Law and sanitary guidelines for burial. By reevaluating what prior studies have said about Chadwick’s reforms in light of recent work on his economic theories, I argue that Chadwick’s citation of Wordsworth’s first “Essay upon Epitaphs” transforms the latter’s pastoral vision into an endorsement of a national cemetery. I explore the extent to which Wordsworth’s early-nineteenth-century ideas are and are not compatible with Chadwick’s mid-century reforms.

Disease and Civilization: A Scottish Atlantic Network of Physicians in the Enlightenment

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Practice Of Medicine ◽  
Benjamin Rush ◽  
American Physician ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
A Current

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.

Suffering in Art

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ritchie Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Words And Images ◽  
The Relationship

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’).

scholarly journals “Come brother Opie!”

2021 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-162
Author(s):  
Joe Bray
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Emotional Engagement ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Affective Dimension ◽  
Nineteenth Century Literature ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Century Literature ◽  
Amelia Opie

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.

Negotiating medical welfare

2018 ◽  
pp. 69-104
Author(s):  
Steven King
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Moral Hazard ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
Core Business ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Poor

This chapter foregrounds the concept of pauper agency. Using the largest corpus of letters by or about the poor ever assembled, it argues that sickness was the core business of the Old Poor Law by the early nineteenth century. Rather than paupers being simply subject to the whim and treatment of the parish, the chapter argues that they had considerable agency. Despite problems of moral hazard and the idea that sickness could be faked, paupers and officials agreed that ill health and its treatment was an area of acceptable contestation.

Air and Odour

2019 ◽  
pp. 67-87
Author(s):  
William Tullett
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Environmental Medicine ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sense Of Smell ◽  
Royal Institution ◽  
Airborne Disease ◽  
The Relationship

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.

Mendelssohn and the Idea of the North

2020 ◽  
pp. 115-139
Author(s):  
Sarah Clemmens Waltz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe ◽  
Folk Song ◽  
German Culture ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The North ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

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.

“The Foreign Element”: Newcomers and the Rhetoric of Race, Nation, and Empire in “Oxbridge” Undergraduate Culture, 1850–1920

1998 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul R. Deslandes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
University Students ◽  
Individual Student ◽  
Student Life ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Interest ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Literature And Film ◽  
Apparent Level

The Oxford and Cambridge man has long inspired fascination both in Great Britain and abroad. Many have, in fact, acquired an illusory understanding of these enigmatic university students through various caricatures and representations created in literature and film. Yet, despite an apparent level of popular interest, relatively few attempts have been made to understand the culture of male undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge in a systematic and scholarly way. With the exception of Sheldon Rothblatt's work on student life in the early nineteenth century, J. A. Mangan's skillful exploration of the cult of athleticism's impact on the ancient universities, and some select studies of individual student societies and organizations, we know very little about the ways in which undergraduates lived their lives, saw their worlds, and viewed those who were traditionally excluded from these milieus. We know even less perhaps, despite the existence of Richard Symonds's examination of the relationship between Oxford and empire, about the ways “Oxbridge” undergraduates saw themselves as Britons and leaders of an imperial and “superior” English race. The conflation of English and British is intentional here. Applying English attributes to Britons did not generally present many problems for university men, even those from Scottish, Welsh, and Anglo-Irish backgrounds. “Britishness” and “Englishness” were often applied interchangeably by Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates although, as others have observed, uses of the term “English” tended most often to refer to the admired attributes or “personal” and “communal” traits of Britons, particularly those among the elite.

Bunyan and the Historians

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamsin Spargo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
English Literature ◽  
First Century ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
John Bunyan ◽  
Theoretical Assumptions ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Research Analysis

This chapter offers a chronological account of varying historical and historicist approaches to the life and writings of John Bunyan from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. The theoretical assumptions of major scholars in the field are highlighted, from a Whig such as Macaulay in the nineteenth century to a Marxist such as Christopher Hill in the twentieth, to more recent work by contemporary historians such as Richard L. Greaves and N. H. Keeble. It explores changing conceptions of the relationship between text and context, and past, present, and future, as they have informed research, analysis, historiography, and interpretation within the developing disciplines of History and of English Literature. This exploration is coupled with a consideration of the often unacknowledged relationship between teleological conceptions of history and the practice of historical research and historiography.

scholarly journals "He that Hath an Ear to Hear": Deaf America and the Second Great Awakening

2011 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sari Altschuler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Deaf People ◽  
Deaf Community ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
National Unity ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Oral Transmission ◽  
The Relationship

<p>This essay explores the American Deaf community as a revealing limit-case for constructions of nineteenth-century national identity — specifically, how the religious boom during the Second Great Awakening rhetorically, structurally, and conceptually clashed with the Deaf community it spawned. The argument has three parts. The first part is a prehistory that explores the relationship between early nineteenth-century evangelism and construction of the first American Deaf community. The second part probes the hearing-based rhetoric and practice of evangelical preachers and the problems that deaf people the posed to emerging Protestant-American identity. The last section focuses on the actual battleground — language — arguing that oralism/manualism conflicts grew impassioned because they both located issues that deaf people raised with regard to oral transmission and became a lightning rod for less articulable threats to national unity. Finally, I suggest that many significant contributions Deaf studies has to offer American history and historiography have yet to be explored.</p>

scholarly journals Governors, Regents, and Rituals: an Exploration of Colonial Diplomacy in Ambon at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

Diplomatica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-94
Author(s):  
Philip Post
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
British Rule ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Dutch Colonial

Abstract This article analyses how the Dutch colonial state in Ambon in the early nineteenth century tried to reestablish relations with local regents, making use of already existing protocols that were produced during the period of the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (1602–1799). Engaging in colonial diplomacy was very important because the demise of the voc (1796) and two short periods of British rule in Ambon (1796–1803 and 1810–17) had shaken Dutch rule to its foundations. To reestablish its legitimacy with these local rulers, the colonial state made use of diplomatic protocols, documents and rituals which had been drawn up and negotiated by the voc. This article will focus on comparing the so-called “Instruction for the Regents,” which was drawn up in 1771 by a voc administrator, with one that was reissued in 1818 by the colonial state and will analyze a number of rituals and protocols which played an important role in defining the relationship between the governor and the regents.

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