Papers by Christine Gerrard
Aaron Hill: The Muses' Projector, 1685-1750
List of Illustrations Abbreviations Introduction 1. Hackney Apollo, 1685-1711 2. Schemes and Proj... more List of Illustrations Abbreviations Introduction 1. Hackney Apollo, 1685-1711 2. Schemes and Projects, 1712-1721 3. 'Heavenly Clio': the making of the Hillarian circle, 1720-1723 4. The 'Scorpion Haywood': the breaking of the Hillarian circle, 1723-1725 5. The Plain Dealer and the religious sublime, 1724-1728 6. 'Dipt in the Dirt': Pope, cultural politics, and Grub Street, 1728-1733 7. Hill and the London stage, 1731-1736 8. Hill, Voltaire, and Prince Frederick, 1733-1738 9. 'Essex man': Richardson and the Hill family, 1733-1738 10. Patriotism, fame, and death, 1743-1750 Bibliography
The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725-1742
The American Historical Review, Feb 1, 1998
What did it mean to be a 'Patriot' during the Walpole administration? This is the first f... more What did it mean to be a 'Patriot' during the Walpole administration? This is the first full-length study of the so-called Patriot opposition to Walpole which reached its height during the clamour for war against Spain at the turn of the 1730s. The book examines the interrelationship between patriotism, politics, and poetry in the period 1724-1742. Christine Gerrard investigates the growing Patriot opposition during the Walpolian oligarchy, and asks whether a broad credo united all of Walpole's political opponents, or whether there was a distinction between Whig and Tory Patriots. The role of Frederick Prince of Wales as the campaign's cultural and political figurehead (Bolingbroke's visionary 'Patriot King') is discussed, as are the poetry and drama of such authors as James Thomson, Alexander Pope, and the young Samuel Johnson, who were all drawn to the heady idealism of the young Boy Patriots. Thomson's Rule Britannia and Johnson's London exploit the appeal to British history so central to the emotive propaganda of the Patriot campaign. Drawing on the literature, prints, architecture, and statuary of the 1730s, Christine Gerrard also discusses two of the decade's most powerful romantic patriotic myths - Gothic liberty, and Elizabethan greatness - and reveals that in its nationalistic emphasis upon Nordic and Celtic traditions, the figure of the ancient British Druid, and native 'bards', Patriot literature anticipates the 'Gothic' strain emerging in the poetry of Gray, Collins, and the Wartons only a few years later.
The Patriot Opposition to Walpole
Oxford University Press eBooks, Dec 8, 1994
This book is a full-length study of the so-called Patriot opposition to Robert Walpole, which rea... more This book is a full-length study of the so-called Patriot opposition to Robert Walpole, which reached its height during the clamour for war against Spain at the turn of the 1730s. The book examines the inter-relationship between patriotism, politics, and poetry in the period 1724-1742. It investigates the growing Patriot opposition during the Walpolian oligarchy, and asks whether a broad credo united all of Walpole's political opponents, or whether there was a distinction between Whig and Tory Patriots. The role of Frederick Prince of Wales as the campaign's cultural and political figurehead is discussed, as are the poetry and drama of such authors as James Thomson, Alexander Pope, and the young Samuel Johnson, who were all drawn to the heady idealism of the young Boy Patriots. Thomson's Rule Britannia and Johnson's London exploit the appeal to British history so central to the emotive propaganda of the Patriot campaign. Drawing on the literature, prints, architecture, and statuary of the 1730s, the book also discusses two of the decade's most powerful romantic patriotic myths — Gothic liberty, and Elizabethan greatness — and reveals that in its nationalistic emphasis upon Nordic and Celtic traditions, the figure of the ancient British Druid, and native ‘bards’, Patriot literature anticipates the ‘Gothic’ strain emerging in the poetry of Gray, Collins, and the Wartons only a few years later.
Whigs in Opposition
Oxford University Press eBooks, Dec 8, 1994
Eighteenth-century patriotism once seemed a relatively straightforward phenomenon. Recent cultura... more Eighteenth-century patriotism once seemed a relatively straightforward phenomenon. Recent cultural and historical research has rendered it more interesting and (inevitably) infinitely more complicated. The same may be said of the transformations which revisionist historians of the last two decades have made to the landscape of early Hanoverian party politics. In both Parliament and the press, Robert Walpole faced a heterogeneous body of political adversaries, a ‘hybrid’ opposition. The Tories, consigned to near-permanent opposition after the Hanoverian accession in 1714 and the onset of single-party Whig government, formed the largest and most consistent opposition element in the Commons. They were joined by a number of ‘independents’ (though their number is debatable) and by a series of dissident or Patriot Whigs who switched from supporting to opposing the Whig administration. The dissident Whig element became a consistent feature of opposition politics only after Walpole achieved a virtual monopoly on power in Britain in the early 1720s.
Review: God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492-1945
The Review of English Studies, Apr 1, 2004
... in the last ®ve hundred years: war, imperial conquest, the impulse to exterminate', ... more ... in the last ®ve hundred years: war, imperial conquest, the impulse to exterminate', Rawson's apparently e ortless mastery of the rich tapestry of modern and classical literature and history supplies a triumphantly a rmative tribute to the power of civilization. christine gerrard Lady ...
Alexander Pope, Windsor‐Forest
Senate or Seraglio? Swift’s ‘Triumfeminate’ and the literary coterie
Eighteenth-century Ireland, 2016
This article uses recent scholarship on literary coteries to re-examine Swift’s « Triumfeminate »... more This article uses recent scholarship on literary coteries to re-examine Swift’s « Triumfeminate », the Dublin circle of women writers active between 1724 and 1734. The contradictory epithets which Swift’s friends applied to this circle, point to the complex, malleable and indeterminate spaces that characterise female literary coteries
Sansom [née Fowke], Martha (1689–1736), poet
Oxford University Press eBooks, Sep 23, 2004
The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725-1742
South Atlantic Review, Sep 1, 1995
SUBJECT (S): Great Britain; Politics and government; Civilization; 1714-1760; 18th century; Engli... more SUBJECT (S): Great Britain; Politics and government; Civilization; 1714-1760; 18th century; English poetry; Politics and literature; Poets, English; Political poetry, English; Opposition (Political science) in literature; Prime ministers in literature; Myth in literature; History and ...
Pope, Politics, and Genre
Oxford University Press eBooks, Dec 8, 1994
In the Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue II, Alexander Pope pronounced himself proud to count Geo... more In the Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue II, Alexander Pope pronounced himself proud to count George Lyttelton, Lord Cobham, and other Patriots his friends. The extent of Pope's involvement with Patriot Whig politics and Prince Frederick raises questions about the traditional equation of Pope with Toryism, and more recently Toryism of a discernibly Jacobite flavour. Pope's close friendships with Patriot Whigs cannot be attributed merely to the political influence of his mentor Bolingbroke. Yet the fluctuating pattern of his commitment to their campaign, alternating between idealism and mistrust, tells us much about broader Tory attitudes towards Patriot Whiggery in this period as well as hinting at more complex and deep-seated sources of ambivalence in the poet himself. Did the deepening pessimism so many critics have discerned in his later years make any form of optimistic patriotism impossible? This chapter looks at the politics of Pope's poetry and the connection between politics and genre, focusing on satire, epic, and tragedy.
Patriots and Patriotism
Oxford University Press eBooks, Dec 8, 1994
This book deals with patriotism, politics, and poetry in the age of Robert Walpole. It is especia... more This book deals with patriotism, politics, and poetry in the age of Robert Walpole. It is especially concerned with the activities and writings of the dissident, or ‘Patriot’ Whigs, Walpole's most vigorous critics in parliament and the press in the years after 1725. It explores the broader currents of national feeling enshrined in the Patriots' distinct brand of oppositional poetry and drama: a body of literature which played a vital role in shaping the way in which poets (and, indeed, less elevated mortals) from the 1740s onwards conceived of themselves as uniquely British. It was James Thomson, one such poet, who produced ‘Rule, Britannia’ for his royal masque, Alfred, written for Frederick, Prince of Wales, the Patriots' political figurehead. When Alfred's venerable British Bard, ancient and blind, first stepped across an open-air stage to Arne's swelling tune and spoke those memorable lines one warm night in August 1740, Britain was basking in Admiral Vernon's recent victory at Porto Bello. National pride was at its height, and ‘Rule, Britannia’, which began life as a potent piece of opposition propaganda, soon became the unofficial national anthem.
Hackney Apollo, 1685–1711
Oxford University Press eBooks, Aug 7, 2003
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, Oct 1, 2020
One of the most endearing traces of Locke's influence on Dublin women writers can be seen in a sm... more One of the most endearing traces of Locke's influence on Dublin women writers can be seen in a small poem published in 1735, 'Written for My Son, and spoken by him in School, upon his Master's first bringing in a Rod'. 1 The schoolboy speaking the poem complains bitterly about the grim prospect of school beatings, then turns to praise 'that great Sage', who 'Who taught to play us into Learning, / By graving Letters on the Dice'. The 'Sage' is John Locke, who in his 1693 Thoughts Concerning Education recommends that children should enjoy learning their alphabet by playing with a polygon with letters engraved on each face. The child ends by showering praise on Locke: May Heav'n reward the kind Device. And crown him with immortal Fame, Who taught at once to read and game! …………………………………………………… O may I live to hail the Day, When Boys shall go to School to play! 1 Mary Barber, 'Written for my Son, and spoken by him in School, upon his Master's first bringing in a Rod',
Martha Fowke’s Tributes to Mary, Lady Chudleigh , 1711 and 1726
University of Delaware Press eBooks, May 1, 2019
When the distinguished poet Mary, Lady Chudleigh, died after a long illness on 15 December 1710, ... more When the distinguished poet Mary, Lady Chudleigh, died after a long illness on 15 December 1710, her death seems to have passed almost unnoticed by both the general public and by other writers. Such absence of tribute seems ironic given Chudleigh’s own reputation not just as the author of the well-known The Ladies Defence and ‘To the Ladies’, but as a moving elegist who paid eloquent public tribute to the lives of other women. In her Poems on Several Occasions (1703) Chudleigh published three distinctive elegies under her own name, ‘On the Death of his Highness the Duke of Glocester’,‘On the Death of my Honoured Mother Mrs Lee: A Dialogue between Lucinda and Marissa’, and ‘On the Death of my dear Daughter Eliza Maria Chudleigh: A Dialogue Between Lucinda and Marissa’. Anne K Mellor has described Chudleigh as a superlative elegist, who in ‘three extraordinarily powerful and perceptive elegies … defines the conventions of the elegy as intuitive grief-work’. In her tribute to the Duke of Gloucester, who died aged eleven in 1700, Chudleigh unashamedly shows maternal grief as a far more powerful and obsessive emotion than paternal grieving, attributing to Anne an overwhelming sensation of drowning in despair at the loss of her last surviving son. Chudleigh herself lost several children in early infancy, including her son Richard. But the double blow of her daughter Eliza’s death aged around eight or nine, following the death of her own mother Mary Sydenham Lee the previous year, inspired her two deeply personal elegies, ‘On the Death of my Honoured Mother Mrs Lee’ and ‘On the Death of my dear Daughter Eliza Maria Chudleigh’. Like her elegy on the Duke of Gloucester, Chudleigh’s elegy to Eliza dwells painfully on the tension between hope and despair, the sense of helplessness as the mother watches her own child die. These two elegiac dialogues dramatize Chudleigh’s grieving process, and her struggle to reconcile her deep sense of loss with a state of stoic acceptance and Christian consolation
The Review of English Studies, Nov 20, 2018
The role memory plays in Laetitia Pilkington's Memoirs has been oddly underexplored. Although Pil... more The role memory plays in Laetitia Pilkington's Memoirs has been oddly underexplored. Although Pilkington draws heavily upon biographical details of her life as Swift acolyte, scandalous divorcee and Grub Street demimondaine, she supplements personal memory with her 'astonishing' memory for literary texts. The Memoirs' 'rich embroidery' of over 250 lengthy quotations from other authors, especially Shakespeare and Milton, as well as many of the poems written by Pilkington herself, were taken from memory. Pilkington, often homeless and on the move, had little access to physical books or manuscripts while writing the Memoirs. This article sets Pilkington's own prodigious textual memory, of which she often boasted, within the context of the long-standing educational practice of memorising and reciting poetry, still widespread during the eighteenth century and valued as a social accomplishment of educated girls. Pilkington's frequent discussions of memory in the Memoirs reveal her keen interest in memory as a mental faculty and cognitive function. Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, read in the Dublin intellectual circles in which she grew up, shapes her own poem 'Memory'. Memory for Pilkington is more than the marketable resource of the 'kiss and tell' scandal memoirist but a foundational part of her identity as author and wit. Poem' which she composed around 1733 and first published in the Memoirs. This philosophical, Lockean enquiry into the function of memory has no poetic counterparts in its time. Pilkington constantly peppers her Memoirs with observations on the function and nature of memory. In proto-Proustian mode, she remarks that 'I have observed, that the Scent of a Flower, or the Tune of a Song, always conveys to Remembrance the exact Image of the Place in which they were first noticed' (Memoirs, 282-3). Discussing the relationship between wit, memory and the imagination, she disputes an aphorism in Pope's Essay on Criticism-'Where Beams of warm Imagination play, / The Memory's soft Figures melt away'to argue that that memory is a prerequisite for wit. 'I know not how any Person can be witty without a good Memory' (Memoirs, 55). Her own retentive textual memory supplied her with material for wit and play. She matches Swift in a wager, quotation by quotation, through the works of Shakespearehe throws out a line and she continues the passage, no matter how obscure. He counters by reciting to her the whole of Samuel Butler's mock-heroic poem Hudibras (Memoirs, 55). Pilkington's lively personal memories are what sold the Memoirs: the closely observed personal quirks and domestic anecdotes of her mentor the great Dean Jonathan Swift, the salacious details of her failed marriage to Matthew, her descent into demimondaine
The Plain Dealer and the Religious Sublime, 1724–1728
Oxford University Press eBooks, Aug 7, 2003
Patriotism, Fame, and Death, 1743-1750
Oxford University Press eBooks, Aug 7, 2003
‘Dipt in the Dirt’: Pope, Cultural Politics, and Grub Street, 1728–1733
Oxford University Press eBooks, Aug 7, 2003
Blackwell Publishing Ltd eBooks, Nov 21, 2007
Party politics and dynastic uncertainty shaped the lives of writers born in the immediate afterma... more Party politics and dynastic uncertainty shaped the lives of writers born in the immediate aftermath of the Civil Wars. For poets such as Alexander Pope, Anne Finch, Jonathan Swift, and Matthew Prior, a sense of the political was thus deeply ingrained. Swift, born in 1667 and dying in 1745, lived through the reigns of no fewer than six English monarchs-Charles II, James II, William III, Queen Anne, George I, and George II. On at least two occasions he had a price on his head for his interventions in English and Irish politics. Alexander Pope, born in 1688, the year in which the Dutch Protestant William of Orange's bloodless coup ousted the Catholic James II from the English throne, suffered the direct consequences of that so-called "Glorious Revolution"-the punitive Williamite legislation against Catholics affecting rights of residence, worship, and university education. So did Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720), who lost her Court post serving James's wife Mary of Modena: as non-jurors (those who refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the new regime), she and her husband went on the run, and her husband was arrested for Jacobitism. Matthew Prior (1664-1721), the most important English poet in the decade following Dryden's death in 1700, enjoyed a distinguished diplomatic career under William and his successor Queen Anne. Yet at George I's accession in 1714, Prior, like many of his Tory friends, faced a vendetta from the new Whig administration: refusing to implicate his friends in allegations of support for the Stuart dynasty, he was impeached and spent two years in close custody. Yet if political events changed the lives of the poets, poets saw themselves as agents of political change. Poetry of all kinds-highbrow and lowbrow, satires, odes, panegyrics, ballads-proliferated during the restored monarchy of Charles II, especially after the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1679. The growing prominence of the poet as political commentator, satirist, propagandist, and panegyrist was both a cause and a consequence of the inexorable rise of party politics during Charles's reign. During the 1670s a two-party political system developed from the clashes between Charles and his political supporters on the one hand and, on the other, the parliamentary pressure 1
Uploads
Papers by Christine Gerrard