Fiction or ‘Faction’? Literary Representations of the Early Nineteenth-century Criminal Courtroom *

Author(s):  
Allyson N. May
Romantik ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 49
Author(s):  
Kate Scarth

Historians have established late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Brighton’s role in the urban renaissance by tracking its emergence as a centre of fashion, polite sociability, and consumerism. Other versions of the town, such as domestic experiences and home life, have, however, been neglected. Yet in the early nineteenth century, contemporaries increasingly present a version of Brighton that is domestic and retired instead of public; polite instead of fashionable; rational instead of dissipated; intimate rather than crowded; more country and nature-orientated than urban focused. This article explores how Elizabeth Sandham’s didactic novel, Sketches of Young People; or, a Journey to Brighton (1822), negotiates this transition. It moreover argues for the empowering possibilities that this new Brighton offers middle-class women in terms of satisfying intellectual curiosity and facilitating physical mobility. While Brighton’s history has been explored, this article calls for future work into the cultural, including literary, representations of romantic-period Brighton.


Romanticism ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-15
Author(s):  
Gabriel Cervantes ◽  
Dahlia Porter

This essay identifies a new source for the politicization of walking in the final decades of the eighteenth century, John Howard's The State of the Prisons (1777). Howard made a case for reforming prisons in Britain and across Europe based on evidence collected on his wide-ranging travels, during which he made a practice of stepping into spaces of incarceration where others – including jailors themselves – refused to tread. As we show, Howard was celebrated for the seemingly global reach of his humanitarian mission, but in the work of poets and biographers he also became an icon for the levelling potential of walking into spaces occupied by the legally, socially and economically disenfranchised. Howard's text, however, presents a tension between asserting common humanity with prisoners and exercising patrician benevolence. As we show in conclusion, this tension persists in early nineteenth-century literary representations of both prison reform and walking by Wordsworth and De Quincey, whose texts trouble the (by then established) assumption that walking constituted a politically radical act of social levelling.


2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans-JüRgen Lechtreck

Two early nineteenth century texts treating the production and use of wax models of fruit reveal the history of these objects in the context of courtly decoration. Both sources emphasise the models' decorative qualities and their suitability for display, properties which were not simply by-products of the realism that the use of wax allowed. Thus, such models were not regarded merely as visual aids for educational purposes. The artists who created them sought to entice collectors of art and natural history objects, as well as teachers and scientists. Wax models of fruits are known to have been collected and displayed as early as the seventeenth century, although only one such collection is extant. Before the early nineteenth century models of fruits made from wax or other materials (glass, marble, faience) were considered worthy of display because contemporaries attached great importance to mastery of the cultivation and grafting of fruit trees. This skill could only be demonstrated by actually showing the fruits themselves. Therefore, wax models made before the early nineteenth century may also be regarded as attempts to preserve natural products beyond the point of decay.


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.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-67
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Ritchie

In 1814 in a small Highland township an unmarried girl, ostracised by her neighbours, gave birth. The baby died. The legal precognition permits a forensic, gendered examination of the internal dynamics of rural communities and how they responded to threats to social cohesion. In the Scottish ‘parish state’ disciplining sexual offences was a matter for church discipline. This case is situated in the early nineteenth-century Gàidhealtachd where and when church institutions were less powerful than in the post-Reformation Lowlands, the focus of most previous research. The article shows that the formal social control of kirk discipline was only part of a complex of behavioural controls, most of which were deployed within and by communities. Indeed, Scottish communities and churches were deeply entwined in terms of personnel; shared sexual prohibitions; and in the use of shaming as a primary method of social control. While there was something of a ‘female community’, this was not unconditionally supportive of all women nor was it ranged against men or patriarchal structures.


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