scholarly journals ‘Too Frivolous to Interest the Public’?: Walter Scott, Richard Polwhele and Archipelagic Correspondence

Romantik ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 103
Author(s):  
Dafydd Moore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
The Public ◽  
Walter Scott

The Cornish writer Richard Polwhele and Sir Walter Scott corresponded on matters literary and social for a period of 25 years at the start of the nineteenth century without ever meeting. This article examines the published traces of this epistolary acquaintance and establishes what it might tell us about the lines of connection and dissemination it was possible to establish in Romantic Britain between what might otherwise be thought of as outlying areas of the nation. The article contributes to a number of recent archipelagic attempts to better understand the distributed or devolved nature of print culture within the nations and regions of Britain, in this case through a focus on the interconnections between them.

Social and Moral Vision in Great Expectations and Huckleberry Finn

1970 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-72
Author(s):  
Nicolaus C. Mills
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
Moral Vision ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
The Public ◽  
Episodic Nature ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
Specific Influence

With the exception of Sir Walter Scott and Fenimore Cooper, no two British and American writers of the nineteenth century are compared as frequently as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. Yet, despite the far greater literary importance of Dickens and Twain, we are without a thorough understanding of the parallels in their work. Why does this problem exist? There are two basic reasons. The first lies in the thinness of Twain's comments on Dickens. If, to a modern critic like Ellen Moers, it is clear that Twain resembled Dickens in ‘the theatricality of his prose, the conception of the public as an audience of responsive listeners rather than as solitary readers, the episodic nature of his fiction cut to an oral rather than a literary measure’, to Twain himself it seemed unnecessary to make such an acknowledgement. In his fiction, as well as in his correspondence, Dickens's specific influence is at best marginal, and in his Autobiography he relegates Dickens to the position of the artist-innovator of the public reading.

scholarly journals ”Kampagnen med Blæk i stedet for Blod”: Håndskrifter, trykk og opinionskamp i skandinavisk offentlighet, 1801–1814

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 106-128
Author(s):  
Ruth Hemstad
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
The Public ◽  
Vital Part ◽  
Monitoring Activities ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Secret War

“The campaign with ink instead of blood”: Manuscripts, print and the war of opinion in the Scandinavian public sphere, 1801–1814Handwritten pamphlets circulated to a high extend as part of the war of opinion which went on in the Norwegian-Swedish borderland around 1814. This ‘campaign with ink instead of blood’, as Danish writers soon characterized this detested activity, was a vital part of the Swedish policy of conquering Norway from Denmark through the means of propaganda. This ‘secret war of opinion’, as it was described in 1803, culminated around 1814, when Sweden accomplished its long-term goal of forming a union with Norway. In this article I am concerned with the role and scope of handwritten letters, actively distributed as pamphlets as part of the Swedish monitoring activities in the borderland, especially in the period 1812 to 1813. These manuscripts were integrated parts of the manifold of publications circulating within a common, although conflict oriented Scandinavian public sphere in the making at this time. The duplication and distribution of handwritten pamphlets, and the interaction with printed material, as Danish counter pamphlets quoting and discussing these manuscripts, illustrates that manuscripts remained important at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They coexisted and interacted with printed material of different kinds, and have to be taken into consideration when studying the public sphere and the print culture in this period.

The National Drama

1992 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 96-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Bell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Close Association ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
The Core ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
At Home

The National Drama was a nineteenth-century dramatic genre unique to Scotland, dealing with Scottish characters in Scottish settings. It has been neglected this century by scholars of theatre and of Scottish history in general. This is a curious oversight given the importance of the National Drama in the development of the Scottish theatre and to the image of Scotland as a nation at home and abroad. The omission may have been the result of a too close association with Sir Walter Scott in the minds of many for whom the phrase ‘High Tory Romanticism’ summed up Scott's career and influence. But, the National Drama is worthy of fresh consideration because, although it is true that dramatizations of some of Scott's Scottish works formed the core of the national repertoire, the National Drama comprised a wide variety of pieces from a range of sources and its influence over the Scottish theatre was considerable.

Pages from a Yellow Press: Print Culture, Public Life and Political Genealogies in Modern Brazil

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 353-379
Author(s):  
JAMES P. WOODARD
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Original Formulation ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Radical Republicanism

AbstractAn examination of the Brazilian newspaper O Combate, this article accomplishes four goals. First, it defines the politics of a periodical long cited but little understood by historians. Second, it documents O Combate's place, alongside other ‘yellow press’ outlets, in the making of a ‘public sphere’ in São Paulo. Third, it situates the same publications' role in the bringing into being of a more commercial, publicity-driven press, which would shed the yellow press's radicalism and abet the collapse of the public sphere of its heyday. Fourth, it suggests that O Combate's radical republicanism was one fount of the democratic radicalism of the late 1920s and early 1930s, as well as of the regionally chauvinist constitutionalism of 1932–7. In this rare application of the ‘public sphere’ idea to twentieth-century Brazil, readers may also detect an account closer to Jürgen Habermas’ original formulation than that found in the historiography of nineteenth-century Spanish America.

scholarly journals Historical Psychology, Utopian Dreams and Other Fool's Errands

2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-207
Author(s):  
Nick Hubble
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Walter Scott

The initial premise of Georg Lukács's The Historical Novel is well-known and can be found outlined in its opening sentence: “The historical novel arose at the beginning of the nineteenth century at about the time of Napoleon's collapse (Scott's Waverley appeared in 1814)” (15). According to Lukács, the classical historical novel inaugurated by Sir Walter Scott was distinguished from what had preceded it by the conscious employment of a historical sense, already implicitly present in the realist fiction of Smollett and Fielding, combined with an understanding that progress is driven by the conflict of social forces.

Present State of the Manners, Society, Etc. Etc. of the Metropolis of England

PMLA ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 119 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Robinson ◽  
Adriana Craciun
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Present State ◽  
Urban Culture ◽  
Urban Identity ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Contemporary Debate ◽  
The Public ◽  
Lyrical Ballads ◽  
The Public Sphere

Mary robinson's essay “present state of the manners, society, etc. etc. of the metropolis of England,” published in the reformist Monthly Magazine shortly before the author's death in 1800, makes a significant statement on the volatility of British print culture at the turn of the nineteenth century. Once again recognized as a major writer of the Romantic period, Robinson influenced and was influenced by contemporaries such as Southey, Wordsworth, and especially Coleridge, who called Robinson “a woman of undoubted genius” (Letter). “Metropolis” is an important document not only because of its engagement with the contemporary debate over the direction of print culture and the public sphere but also because of the alternative it offers to Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Moreover, it provides an important link between earlier eighteenth-century concepts of urban culture and cosmopolitan refinement and later nineteenth-century ideas of urban identity such as Poe's Man of the Crowd and Baudelaire's flâneur. Resolutely urban, democratic, and cosmopolitan, Robinson's essay amounts to a manifesto of metropolitan culture.

scholarly journals Off the Rails: The Influence of the British Railway on Nineteenth-Century Publishing

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-56
Author(s):  
Chelsea Humphries
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Book Publishing ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
History Of ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
Material Evidence

This paper examines two copies of The Fortunes of Nigel by Sir Walter Scott, exploring the novel’s transformation from a three-volume book published by Archibald Constable & Co. in Edinburgh in 1822 to a cheap yellowback published by James Campbell & Son in Toronto in 1866. By investigating the history of the spaces in which such three-volume novels and yellowbacks would have been purchased and read, while simultaneously considering the material qualities of these formats, it is possible to make clear connections between Victorian railway culture and the contemporary literary world. These books stand as material evidence of the far-reaching impact of the railway on nineteenth-century book publishing.

scholarly journals Walter Scott and the Islamic East: Ivanhoe and the Talisman

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 758-764
Author(s):  
Nisreen Tawfiq Yousef
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cultural Interaction ◽  
The West ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
East West

This paper examines representations of the Islamic East in two novels by Sir Walter Scott: Ivanhoe (1820) and The Talisman (1825). The paper’s argument is that Scott’s representations of the Islamic East seems influenced in very specific ways by dominant nineteenth-century portrayals of the East. Scott’s two novels present ambivalent depictions of the East, some of which deviate from standard patterns of representation of earlier centuries. For instance, on the one hand his novels attribute positive spiritual qualities to Saracens such as generosity, bravery and kindness to animals, while on the other, and often in the same passage, they sometimes depict Saracens as violent and atavistic. I argue that, through his various narrators and characters, Scott depicts the relationship between the Islamic East and the Christian West as a significant form of cultural interaction whereby the East is presented as complementing the West. However, Scott’s portrayal of East-West relation is complex, and it would be inaccurate to claim that this denotes total acceptance of Islamic manners, customs and perspectives. 

The First Scottish ‘National’ Dictionary

2019 ◽  
pp. 110-130
Author(s):  
Susan Rennie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
National Task ◽  
Etymological Dictionary ◽  
The Status ◽  
National Icon ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
National Significance

Rennie details John Jamieson’s compilation of the Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language from Jamieson’s initial interest in antiquarian research through the publication and mass popularity of the Etymological Dictionary, which became both a repository of cultural history and a national icon. Intrigued by similarities between Scots and Nordic languages, Jamieson examined existing foreign language dictionaries, early Scots texts, and spoken Scots to trace the origins and earliest occurrences of headwords and to codify the Scots language using the methods of historical lexicography. Sir Walter Scott described Jamieson’s dictionary compilation as ‘an important national task’, at a time when the status of Scots as a dialect of English or a distinct language was much debated, and the dictionary continued to be a work of cultural and national significance throughout the nineteenth century.

Opening Address, Session 1868-69

1869 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 391-430
Author(s):  
Christison
Keyword(s):  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
The Public ◽  
Coal Gas ◽  
The World ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
Oil Gas ◽  
Opening Address

Gentlemen,—It is now nearly five-and-forty years since I first opened my lips in this Society, a venturous young man, undertaking to instruct both practical men and men of science, as well as the public at large, all at the time keenly interested in the inquiry,—What were the principles for properly constructing burners for combustion of the light-giving gases? What the relative values of oil gas and coal-gas for giving out light, and which of the two should thenceforth be used for illuminating the world? At that time it was assuredly the farthest thing of all from my dreams that a period might come round when, by the voices of my Fellow-Members, I should be promoted to an office, the highest in learning or science, as the case may be, which Scotland can offer to their votaries,—held last by Sir David Brewster, and previously filled by the Duke of Argyll, Sir Thomas Brisbane, Sir Walter Scott, and Sir James Hall.

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