Pope, Curll, and the intermediality of eighteenth-century character

Pope, Homer and manliness: some aspects of eighteenth-century classical learning

with which the debate turned towards the reliability of the witnesses and the social consequences of accepting their statements. As the witnesses were predominantly women (sometimes poor women), the supposedly scientific accounts degenerated into arguments as to whether supporting or gainsaying the testimony in question would help or hinder the maintenance of patriarchy and hierarchy. Virtually...

Literature of the Eighteenth Century

Eighteenth century in England was an age equal to the age of Augustus Caesar, when the Roman society had reached the peak of its glory. The name Augustan Age was chosen by writers who saw in Pope, Addison, Swift, Johnson and Burke the modern parallels to Horace, Virgil and Cicero, and all that brilliant company who made Roman literature famous in the day of Augustus. Past ages of England were l...

Eighteenth-Century Europe

Chapter 6: Varieties of the Public Sphere To this point, we have encountered changes, as well as continuity, in European politics, economics, society, and thought. Each of these developments contributed to a transformation that some consider the most fundamental transformation of the century -the emergence, between the state sector and private economic sphere, of autonomous institutions of civi...

Eighteenth-Century Europe

Population Trends: The Eighteenth Century and Earlier

The proper study of mankind is man.' In its early years angina pectoris was for the most part an affliction of middle-aged and elderly men, almost exclusively a complaint of the affluent and a "British disease".2 It was first reported in 1768 and became prevalent by the 1770s, a time when the population of England was growing rapidly and its expectation of life lengthening. It is therefore pert...