scholarly journals Hannah More Meets Simple Simon: Tracts, Chapbooks, and Popular Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century England

1986 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Pedersen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
First Year ◽  
Great Success ◽  
Rural Poor ◽  
Horace Walpole ◽  
Hannah More ◽  
Sunday Schools ◽  
Good Works ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century

During the winter of scarcity of 1794, Hannah More wrote “a few moral stories,” drew up a plan for publication and distribution, and sent the package around to her evangelical and bluestocking friends. Their response was enthusiastic; even Horace Walpole abandoned his usual teasing to write back, “I will never more complain of your silence; for I am perfectly convinced that you have no idle, no unemployed moments. Your indefatigable benevolence is incessantly occupied in good works; and your head and your heart make the utmost use of the excellent qualities of both…. Thank you a thousand times for your most ingenious plan; may great success reward you!” Walpole then sent off copies of the plan to the duchess of Gloucester and other aristocratic friends. Following Wilberforce's example, such wealthy philanthropists subscribed over 1,000 pounds to support the project during its first year. Henry Thornton agreed to act as treasurer and Zachary Macaulay as agent, and the ball was rolling.In March 1795, the Cheap Repository of Moral and Religious Tracts issued its first publications. Prominent evangelicals and gentry worked to distribute them to the rural poor, booksellers, and hawkers and among Sunday schools and charity children. During the Repository's three-year existence, the fifty or so tracts written by Hannah More were supplemented by contributions from fellow evangelicals Thornton, Macaulay, John Venn, and John Newton, the poet William Mason, More's literary friend Mrs. Chapone, her protégée Selina Mills, and her sisters Sally and Patty More and by reprints of old favorites by Isaac Watts and Justice John Fielding.

scholarly journals WITCHCRAFT, THE PRESS, AND CRIME IN IRELAND, 1822–1922

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 741-764
Author(s):  
ANDREW SNEDDON ◽  
JOHN FULTON
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Interpersonal Violence ◽  
Traditional Beliefs ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Press ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Complex Picture ◽  
Sectarian Conflict ◽  
Irish People

AbstractDrawing on witchcraft cases reported in newspapers and coming before Ireland's courts, this article argues that witch belief remained part of Protestant and Catholic popular culture throughout the long nineteenth century. It is shown that witchcraft belief followed patterns established in the late eighteenth century and occasioned accusations that arose from interpersonal tensions rather than sectarian conflict. From this article, a complex picture emerges of the Irish witches and their ‘victims’, who are respectively seen to have fought accusation and bewitchment using legal, magical, physical, and verbal means. In doing so, the contexts are revealed in which witchcraft was linked to other crimes such as assault, slander, theft, and fraud in an era of expansion of courts and policing. This illustrates how Irish people adapted to legal changes while maintaining traditional beliefs, and suggests that witchcraft is an overlooked context in which interpersonal violence was exerted and petty crime committed. Finally, popular and elite cultural divides are explored through the attitudes of the press and legal authorities to witchcraft allegations, and an important point of comparison for studies of witchcraft and magic in modern Europe is established.

State intervention and provincial health care: the county infirmary system in late eighteenth-century Ulster

2012 ◽  
Vol 38 (149) ◽  
pp. 5-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Sneddon
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Analytical Approach ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
Rural Poor ◽  
Self Medication ◽  
Medical Practitioners ◽  
Patent Medicines ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

The eighteenth century, a period when pain, suffering and illness was an ‘omnipresent threat’, saw medicine became more institutionally-based, increasingly state-funded, and wedded to a more scientific and analytical approach to disease. Voluntary hospitals, county infirmaries, medical supply dispensaries for the poor, the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons, and various medical guilds, schools and societies, were established or grew in importance. Collectively these institutions did much to influence how Ireland's main medical practitioners (physicians, surgeons, apothecaries) were educated, trained and organised, as well as the way the sick were cared for. While university-trained Irish physicians catered mostly for wealthy elites, the sick, rural poor usually only possessed the means or opportunity to engage the services of apothecaries or, occasionally, surgeons. Along with commercial, patent medicines, domestic remedies and self-medication, the sick had at their disposal an array of untrained, unregulated empirics, quacks, mountebanks, druggists, oculists, and faith and magical healers.

Mira lo que hace el diablo: The Devil in Mexican Popular Culture, 1750-1856

2002 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonya Lipsett-Rivera
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sharp Knife ◽  
The One ◽  
Illicit Sexuality ◽  
The Devil

As she lay bleeding to death from an accidental knife wound, María Josefa Vargas said to her husband: “Look what the Devil has done (Mira lo que hace el diablo).” María Josefa and her husband, José Rosario, were both indigenous, natives of Almoloya and Tenancingo respectively, and at the time living in Malinalco in the Valley of Mexico. They had been fighting playfully over some meat that María Josefa had bought to make cecina Mock anger and a very sharp knife made for bad companions, and José Rosario accidentally cut María Josefa in the leg.María Josefa's words are one of those elusive examples of the key place occupied by the Devil in Mexican popular culture in the late eighteenth century. By the late colonial period the Devil seems to have become more of a concern for rural Mexicans, particularly within indigenous communities, than he had been before. Once a European import, the Devil had become a more evident part of the symbols used by Indians in the countryside. He had become less of a concern to Church and State authorities and was rather used to explain accidents, such as the one cited above, but more frequently as an excuse or a reason for unacceptable conduct, such as violence or illicit sexuality.

The Evangelical Novel

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Wood
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Hannah More ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
Mary Brunton ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of

This essay explores the development of the Evangelical novel in the early years of the nineteenth century. Drawing primarily on the novels of Barbara Hofland, Hannah More, and Mary Brunton, as well as the Cheap Repository Tracts, the essay identifies key characteristics of the Evangelical novel and proposes a theoretical framework for analysing it as homiletic and didactic fiction. The essay positions the Evangelical novel within the religious and social context of the late eighteenth century, as well as within the history of the novel, where its generic connections to individualism and realism are examined.

The Turbulent First Year of the Royal Circus (1782–1783)

1978 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-170
Author(s):  
Robert Fahrner
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
First Year ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Industrial Age ◽  
Late Eighteenth

In the late eighteenth century, and with increasing momentum in the early nineteenth, the minor theatres in London steadily challenged the monopoly of the two patent houses—with great ingenuity in circumventing several Licensing Acts; with highly imaginative and lively (albeit generally unsophisticated) bills; and with eager support from the workers, flocking to the capital as part of the industrial age, for whom the minor theatres provided escape. By the time Planché's “Mother Drama” admitted confusion about her sons “Legitimate Drama” and “Illegitimate Drama” on the stage of the Olympic Theatre on 16 April 1838, the minor theatres had prevailed.

Juvenile Holiness: Catholic Revivalism among Children in Victorian Britain

1984 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 220-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Sharp
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Sunday Schools ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Ambivalent Attitude

Studies of revivalism, from Calvin Colton's explanation of the ‘classic’ American experience to John Kent's recent unsympathetic work, have highlighted the use of children as instruments of adult conversion and have illustrated the way in which revivalism sought to influence the whole of domestic life by confirming the sect's alienation from wider society. Equally, children were evangelised in their own right, an important fact to remember in view of the large numbers who died before they reached late adolescence. Although it may strike us as precocious, Victorian children were considered the possessors of an instinctive religious sense, which revivalism sought to harness and develop. The notion of the ‘child-leader’, which was the mainstay of much religious literature throughout the nineteenth century and, propagated by the Sunday schools, was embedded in the growing revivalist ideology, grew out of an ambivalent attitude towards children. Against the older, theological assertion of the depravity of all human beings, there emerged in the late eighteenth century a ‘softer’, more sentimental attitude, which depicted children in particular as potential recipients and bearers of grace. The roots of this attitude lay as much in the theological tradition as in a reaction against it on the part of those who rejected any idea of the aboriginal sinfulness of children and stressed instead their essential innocence.

Democratizing Abolitionism: Anti-slavery Discourses and Sentiments in August von Kotzebue's Die Negersklaven (1796)

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-45
Author(s):  
Sarah J. Adams
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Denis Diderot ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
German States ◽  
Political Sources ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Peripheral Position ◽  
Histoire Des Deux Indes ◽  
Political Leverage

Despite their peripheral position in the Atlantic slave trade, authors of the late eighteenth-century German states composed a number of dramas that addressed imperialism and slavery. As Sigrid G. Köhler has argued (2018), these authors aimed to exert political leverage by grounding their plays in the international abolitionist debate. This article explores how a body of intellectual texts resonated in August von Kotzebue's bourgeois melodrama Die Negersklaven (1796). In a sentimental preface, he mentions diverse philosophical, historical and political sources that contributed to the dramatic plot and guaranteed his veracity. Looking specifically at the famous Histoire des deux Indes (1770) by Denis Diderot and Guillaume-Thomas F. Raynal, I will examine the ways in which Kotzebue adapted highbrow abolitionist discourses to the stage in order to convery an anti-slavery ideology to the white European middle classes. Kotzebue seems to ground abolitionism in the bourgeois realm by moulding political texts into specific generic templates such as an elaborate mise-en-scène, the separation and reunion of lost lovers, a fraternal conflict, and the representation of suffering victims and a compassionate white hero.

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