The Poor Soldier (1783)

10.31022/a006 ◽  
1978 ◽  
Author(s):  
John O’Keeffe ◽  
William Shield
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Comic Opera ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

Eighteen lilting airs and a melodious overture complement the action in The Poor Soldier, a comic opera by John O'Keefe and William Shield that was the most popular afterpiece in late-eighteenth-century theater. This newly edited version is based on five scores of the period and fourteen libretti. The Poor Soldier will delight modern audiences as much as it did George Washington.

Literary motifs, musical form and the quest for the ‘Sublime’: Cherubini'sEliza ou le Voyage aux glaciers du Mont St Bernard

1993 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Fend
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Musical Form ◽  
Central Location ◽  
Comic Opera ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Personal Interaction ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
At Home

A common feature of Cherubini's Parisian operas of the 1790s is the displacement of one or more of the protagonists. They are out of sorts with their environment, experiencing a need to escape that prevents the traditional unity of place from focusing the drama. The heroine ofLodoïska(1791)isimprisoned in a tower; inEliza ou le Voyage aux glaciers du Mont St BernardFlorindo travels to Mont St Bernard to forget his beloved Eliza, who pursues him and saves him from suicide. For the heroine ofMédée(1797), Corinth represents unhappiness: she returns to her former home only to take revenge. InLes deux Journées(1800), Armand and Constance flee Paris to save their lives; even in the comic operaL'Hôtellerie portugaise(1798) the central location serves merely as a rendez-vous for the two lovers on their way to evade the wicked plans of Donna Gabriele's stepfather. These operas do not, in other words, unfold in reassuring environments where characters feel at home; nor are there neutral backgrounds that enable the drama to concentrate on personal interaction. What is more, although placing protagonists in such unhappy circumstances is widespread in late eighteenth-century opera, and ‘rescue operas’ in particular, it is at least arguable that Cherubini exploited their restlessness in a uniquely successful manner.

scholarly journals VISUALIZING POVERTY IN WORDSWORTH’S POETRY

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 161-178
Author(s):  
Martina Domines Veliki
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Way

VISUALIZING POVERTY IN WORDSWORTH’S POETRY This paper departs from the assumption that Wordsworth’s poetry is highly visual in its quality and it focuses on his three “great period” poems, “Michael”, “The Old Cumberland Beggar” and “Resolution and Independence” (1798–1805) to show how Wordsworth represents poverty. By taking as its starting point some New Historicist readings of these poems (Simpson, Pfau, Connell, Liu) which highlighted Wordsworth’s blindness to social reality of the poor, it wants to enlarge the scope of historicist readings by introducing the framework of the New Poverty Studies (Korte, Christ). Furthermore, it insists on the assumption that the Romantic need to visualize landscape in the picturesque form becomes an important strategy of “configuring” (Korte) the reality of the poor. In other words, the way in which the poor are represented in Wordsworth’s poetry tells us something about practical engagements with poverty in late eighteenth-century England. Also, Wordsworth’s position of a middle-class observer who builds the tension between the seen and the deliberately unseen aspects of his social surrounding, show us how Wordsworth unconsciously falls under the spell of a larger class-related sensibility and thus fails in his humanitarian project.

Royal Paternalism with a Repressive Face: The Ideology of Poverty in Late Eighteenth-Century France

1990 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-185
Author(s):  
William Olejniczak
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Construction ◽  
Assistance Program ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Cultural Constructions

It is widely acknowledged that great numbers of the laboring poor experienced increasing immiseration throughout France after the 1760s. Less well known perhaps is the corresponding formation of an influential set of cultural constructions that shaped how the poor were understood. This framework, which might be called an “ideology of poverty,” is best seen in the widely diffused discourse on mendicity that appeared after midcentury. At its core stood the notion of the able-bodied mendiant vagabond, or “beggar/vagrant,” who was characterized as a “professional” deviant with a full-blown menacing and illegal état. This cultural construction provided the animating principle of the ideology that not only powerfully shaped royal and local strategies in treating the poor but also helped to screen out multicausal explanations of poverty and frustrate the development of a genuinely humane assistance program for all categories of poor.

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.

An Ingenious Emblem

Sans-Culottes ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sonenscher
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Society ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of

This chapter delves deeper into the history of the phrase, sans culottes. It shows that the point of the joke about breeches was that someone without culottes had the wrong kind of status, emotion, and decorum on which salon society was based. One further reason for the joke's late eighteenth-century resonance was that it fitted a real writer remarkably well. The chapter reveals that the writer in question was the satirical poet Nicolas-Joseph-Laurent Gilbert. Gilbert seems to have led a life that was something like a literal version of the tale of literary ambition, abject poverty, and unscrupulous exploitation told by Voltaire in his satirical poem Le pauvre diable (The Poor Devil, 1760). Finally, the chapter discusses some debates between Louis-Sébastien Mercier and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on vitalist and contractual conceptions of political society.

Scarcity and poor relief in eighteenth-century Ireland: the subsistence crisis of 1782–4

1992 ◽  
Vol 28 (109) ◽  
pp. 38-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Regional Level ◽  
Rural Populations ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Loss Of Life ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Demographic Impact

The population of Ireland in the eighteenth century experienced serious dearth on twelve occasions. Four of these crises resulted in famines and eight in subsistence crises. The four famines all took place in the first half of the century; the second half experienced only subsistence crises. Because of this, it is sometimes argued that the late eighteenth century enjoyed a ‘gap in famines’. The value of this concept has been questioned because it understates the persistence and impact of dearth at a regional level, but it is also vitiated by our lack of knowledge of the nature and impact of all twelve crises.The main difference between a famine and a subsistence crisis centres on their contrasting demographic effects. Famines invariably produced substantial increases in mortality; the major famines of 1740–11 and 1845–9, for example, cost hundreds of thousands of lives, while smaller famines, such as those of 1727–9, 1800–01 and 1816–18, which were manifestly less costly in human terms, nevertheless resulted in thousands of deaths. Subsistence crises, on the other hand, caused comparatively little loss of life. We are not currently in a position to identify the precise demographic impact of individual episodes of harvest failure in the late eighteenth century, but based on current understanding it is believed that overall associated mortality levels were low. We can, however, enhance our understanding of dearth in this period by tracing the causes, course, impact and response to individual harvest crises. The purpose of this paper is to describe the crisis of 1782–4; it reveals that harvest failure during the so-called ‘gap in famines’ weighed heavily on both urban and rural populations, but that mortality was kept within acceptable bounds by the efficacy of the poor relief deployed to combat distress. Relief was at its most sophisticated and efficient in urban areas.

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