Second Nature and the Sonic Sublime

Like other spaces of the Enlightenment, the sublime was what Michel de Certeau might have called “a practiced place.” Its rhetorical commonplaces, philosophical terrains, and associated physical environments were cultivated, shaped, and framed by human action and habit. But can the sublime—epiphanic, quasi-spiritual, unmasterable, extraordinary—ever really become a habit? Is it possible, even natural, to become habituated to sublimity? Taking as its point of departure the Aristotelian claim that “habit is a second nature,” this article explores the counterintuitive relationship between habit and the sublime. It focuses not on that eighteenth-century “cultivar,” the natural sublime, but on sonic sublimity, exploring on one hand overwhelming sounds, and on the other a conceptualization of sound itself as a sublime phenomenon stretching beyond audibility to fill all space. As this exploration shows, both the sublime and habit were seen as capable of creating a second nature, and prominent writers connected habit, practice, or repetition to the sublime. Equally, however, there are points of friction between the aesthetic of the sublime and philosophies of habit, especially in the idea that habit dulls or removes sensation. This is a prominent idea in Félix Ravaisson's landmark De l'habitude (1838), a text currently enjoying renewed attention, and one that apparently stems from Enlightenment attempts to explain sensation, consciousness, and freedom. Similar concerns inform the eighteenth-century sublime, yet the logic behind the sublime is at odds with the dulling of sensation. The article closes by touching on the reemergence of “second nature” in contemporary art oriented toward the sublime, and on the revisions of Enlightenment nature this involves.

Producing Philosophes in Oceania: Enlightenment through Pacific Spaces

The belated European rediscovery of the Pacific helped to test, modify, extend, or otherwise realize the critical, collecting, and conjecturing ethos of the Enlightenment. Whether official philosophers or not, voyagers found in the “new” space of the Pacific more data about the natural and social worlds than they had known before, which led to more empirical comparing, more systematic speculation, and more secular self-questioning. Most scholarship on Enlightenment and Pacific voyaging, however, focuses on relatively elite or well-educated thinkers who were already on the path toward an Enlightenment mindset before they even saw the southern hemisphere. A different story about Enlightenment and the Pacific emerges for less-obviously philosophical voyagers. For these travelers—most of them destined for a maritime but not necessarily an intellectual life—the Pacific could prove to be the primary or originary field for creating an Enlightenment disposition. More particularly, interactions with Pacific people were the means by which some Europeans apprehended what their “philosophical betters” typically discovered via texts. Pacific spaces prompted Enlightenment practices in ordinary mariners more readily or more evidently than they originated them in the educationally advantaged. This article surveys the experiences of a handful of ordinary voyagers to the Pacific Ocean. It aims to move forward discussions about the role the Pacific region and Pacific people played in developing so-called Western modernity.

Miscellaneous Spaces of Enlightenment: Dodsley, Percy, and the Midcentury Verse Miscellany

Using current scholarship on verse miscellanies to contextualize a comparison of Robert Dodsley's Collection of Poems by Several Hands (1748) and Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), this article considers how the verse miscellany was used to different purposes by editors in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. It was, variously, a space in which to preserve poetry, to test readers’ appetites for the unfamiliar, and to establish or challenge poetic taste. Most of all, however, the verse miscellany functioned as a virtual space of the Enlightenment that encouraged literary experimentation and innovation. Editors like Dodsley and Percy used paratext not only to justify their specific poetic choices, but also to establish identity of their collection. In Dodsley's case, obvious editorial interventions are absent and the typography is elegant, while for Percy, the paratext is busy and noisy, an alternative space in the miscellany through which the collection's antiquarian character is expressed. Both collections test their reader's willingness to engage with less well-known material. This article suggests that although the two poetic collections seem to have little in common, they are both concerned with ideas of literary preservation and loss, on the one hand, and cultural progress and decline, on the other, that helped to establish the poetic miscellany as a key print genre of the Enlightenment.

Home Is Where the Heart Is: The Rise of Emotional Spaces in the German Late Enlightenment

The emergent political arena of the late eighteenth century, and the literary one that preceded it, were claimed to be based upon a functional dichotomy between a private sphere of emotive ties and associations, and a “public sphere” of rational criticism (Habermas, 1962). This categorical distinction, however, scantily registered the emergence of a corollary affective economy in this period, which redefined social, political, and physical spaces according to their emotional content, or lack thereof. This article focuses on the rise of emotional language, its spatial configurations, and its dissemination during the late German Enlightenment in three thematic contexts: the “popular Enlightenment” (Volksaufklärung) and its emphasis on the enhancement of literacy among the lower classes to achieve emotional refinement; the visual representation of domestic emotional scenarios in the context of the Franco-German cultural exchange surrounding the French Revolution; and the emergence of “homeland” (Heimat) as an increasingly ubiquitous emotion-bound metaphor in the nationalization of space toward the century's end. These contexts reveal major shifts in the cultural dynamics of space and emotion in this period: first, the reaffirmation of emotion as a culturally viable interpretive mode, set against earlier concerted attempts to suppress or control it; second, the osmosis between private and public that enabled emotional protocols to transgress supposedly natural boundaries of class, status, and gender across society, and establish new contacts between exclusive and excluded communities; and last, the article shows how the spatial imaginary that emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century—despite its reliance on older dispositions regarding space in German culture—deployed emotional vocabularies for engendering new forms of sociability, which went on to became central determinants of Germanness in the early nineteenth century.

The Battlefield as Enlightened Space: War, the Senses, and the Emotional Soldier, ca. 1790–1840

The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars produced a new generation of military authors and artists who recounted their wartime experiences with unprecedented vividness and immediacy. Exploring the intense conflict and suffering of men at war while also underscoring their virtue and heroism, this work typifies what has come to be known as “military Enlightenment.” This essay examines a selection of military texts and images that represent soldiers’ sensory and emotional experience of the wartime spaces of battlefield and bivouac: the anonymous Journal Kept in the British Army (1796), L. T. Jones's Historical Journal of the British Campaign on the Continent (1797), the work of the army officer and historian William Napier (1785–1860), and the Waterloo images of the army officer and painter George “Waterloo” Jones (1786–1869) presented the wider British public with a complex understanding of war. Even as they represented battlefield violence and death with visceral intensity, they understood battlefield space itself to be grounded in affective practices associated with enlightened modes of virtue, sensibility, and civility. There the chaos and horror of conflict gave way to duty, order, civility, and community, and the distinctions of rank were maintained, even as the common humanity of officers and their men was affirmed.

“For I Asked Him Men's Questions”: Late Eighteenth-Century British Women Tourists’ Contributions to Scientific Inquiry

“We endeavoured with some tools our servants had, to carry some pieces of it with us,” Caroline Powys wrote of her visit to Stonehenge in 1759. “Tho’ our party were chiefly female,” she remarked, “we had no more curiosity than the learn'd gentlemen of the Royal Society.” Carolyn was not alone in challenging the gendered demarcation of scientific observation. From the second half of the century, British women travelers carefully packed minerals in cases, filled bags with botanical specimens, and roamed the shores in search of shells and seaweed. This article proposes that British women of the late eighteenth century used the empirical approach promoted by their polite scientific education to turn their leisured travels into knowledge-finding pursuits. The specimens and observations that they brought home played an overlooked role in allowing them to shape themselves as authoritative observers within the larger scientific knowledge-building enterprise that drew from the diffusion of Enlightenment classificatory systems, overseas exploration, and trade. This article brings to light four understudied eighteenth-century female empiricists: the mistress of Hardwick House, Whitchurch, Oxfordshire, Caroline Lybbe Powys (1738–1817); the first woman to publish a Grand Tour account, Lady Anna Miller (1741–81) of Batheaston, Somerset; the unmarried daughter of the rector of Thornton in Craven, Yorkshire, Dorothy Richardson (1748–1819); and the Whig political salon hostess, Lady Elizabeth Holland (1732–95). Each woman is of interest in her own right, but together, as I will argue, their scientific contributions add significantly to the ongoing investigation of the role that women played in developing Enlightenment science.

Enlightened “Museums of Images” or Decorative Displays? Elizabeth Seymour Percy and the Eighteenth-Century Print Room

In the second half of the eighteenth century, “print rooms”—created by pasting prints and paper ornaments directly onto walls—were a short-lived mode of fashionable English interior decoration. Concurrently, collections of prints continued to be bound into albums or stored in portfolios in private libraries. Although they took different forms, print rooms and print albums shared characteristics that marked them as “enlightened” cultural practices: both featured prints arranged in preconceived aesthetic or intellectual schemes that presented elite, pan-European cultural subjects, imagery, and ideas. Prints in albums or prints on walls could therefore operate as “museums of images”—each format ostensibly encouraged viewers to respond emotionally or intellectually to prints. Yet there is strong evidence to suggest that prints in print rooms and in print collections were perceived differently. This essay draws on the predominantly unpublished journals and correspondence of English collector Elizabeth Seymour Percy, first Duchess of Northumberland (1716–76), to reveal the very different ways in which she described prints in each setting. For her, albums or portfolios of prints were edifying “spaces of enlightenment,” while prints in print rooms performed merely a decorative function.

A Tale of Two Boycotts: Riot, Reform, and Sugar Consumption in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain and France

Atlantic sugar production and European sugar consumption rose dramatically in the late eighteenth century. Despite this increase, there were two separate calls to refrain from consuming sugar in both Britain and France at the end of the eighteenth century. Demands for abstinence were directed toward women to stop household consumption of sugar. In Britain, abolitionists urged women to stop buying West Indian sugar because it was a slave good, produced on plantations where enslaved Africans were subject to cruelty and where mortality rates were high. In France, the call to forego sugar came during the early years of the Revolution of 1789, in response to rising sugar prices. The women of Paris were asked to refrain from buying sugar at high prices that were assumed to be a result of market manipulation by speculators and hoarders engaging in anti-revolutionary behavior. The increase in Parisian sugar prices was not driven primarily by profiteering, but by a global shortage caused by the slave revolt in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, now Haiti. Comparing these two sugar boycotts, one in Britain, the other in France, provides an opportunity outside of national historical narratives to consider how both events employed the same technique for very different aims. The call to renounce sugar in both cases used economic pressure to create political change. An exploration of these movements for abstinence will provide a better understanding of how they critiqued consumption, and translated discourses, both abolitionist and revolutionary, into practice.

“Everlasting Memorials”: Urban Improvement and the Shadow of Ruin in Mid-Eighteenth-Century London

This essay explores the relationship between plans for the improvement of London and other forms of writing about the city that imagine its inevitable decline and fall. Those lamenting the appearance of London in the eighteenth century frequently looked back to the Great Fire as a missed opportunity to rebuild the city in a grander, more magnificent manner. For these critics, London's built environment did little to stake the nation's claims to polite refinement and cultural prestige. Such concerns became especially pressing in the wake of Britain's victories in the Seven Years’ War, which made London the center of an extensive global empire. Through an examination of proposals for and accounts of urban improvements as well as works that look to a future moment when visitors survey London's faded glories, this essay considers how imagining London in ruins—a trope thus far explored in the context of the loss of the American colonies and Britain's role in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars—served two competing purposes in mid-eighteenth-century Britain. While, on the one hand, improvers acknowledged the transience of imperial power by arguing that now was the time to build grand monuments to mark the achievements of the present, on the other, a range of writers invoked the trope of future ruin to indicate how the seeds of decline had already been sown. The manifold meanings of ruin to which these works gesture would continue to play out in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.