The rise of celebrity stage actresses in the long eighteenth century created a class of women who worked in the public sphere while facing considerable scrutiny about their offstage lives. Such powerful celebrity women used the cultural and affective significance of their reproductive bodies to leverage audience support and interest to advance their careers, and eighteenth-century London patent theatres even capitalized on their pregnancies. Carrying All Before Her uses the reproductive histories of six celebrity women (Susanna Mountfort Verbruggen, Anne Oldfield, Susannah Cibber, George Anne Bellamy, Sarah Siddons, and Dorothy Jordan) to demonstrate that pregnancy affected celebrity identity, impacted audience reception and interpretation of performance, changed company repertory and altered company hierarchy, influenced the development and performance of new plays, and had substantial economic consequences for both women and the companies for which they worked. Deepening the fields of celebrity, theatre, and women's studies, as well as social and medical histories, Phillips reveals an untapped history whose relevance and impact persists today.
Of his friend of many years, Dr. John Fothergill, Benjamin Franklin wrote: "I can hardly conceive that a better man has ever existed." Fothergill's letters provide a fascinating perspective of his time--a totally different view from that given by his contemporaries Horace Walpole and Dr. Johnson.
The "Quaker internationalist" (as his editors aptly call him) was during the middle decades of the eighteenth century one of the half dozen leading physicians of London, a horticulturist of great distinction, an educational reformer, a patron of many philanthropic causes, and a tireless friend of Americans and the cause of American rights. He was exceedingly generous as a patron of scientific undertakings and of young Americans abroad. He founded a famous Quaker school for boys and girls which is still flourishing; he helped found various benevolent and educational institutions in America and he continually subsidized worthy books and gave them to worthy recipients.
All these activities and others are recorded in the some two hundred letters here selected for publication. They throw light on Quaker history on both sides of the Atlantic, on advances in medical science and institutional care of the sick, on discoveries in natural history, and on political developments from the Jacobite Rebellion through the American Revolution. From the beginnings of the rift between colonies and mother country, Fothergill served as a vigorous advocate of conciliatory measures and commonwealth status for America, speaking with equal frankness and impartiality to leaders on both sides until well after hostilities began.
A few weeks before he died (at the end of 1780), he wrote Franklin in France to say that with all Europe leagued against England nothing could be hoped for her from this war, but that the world might hope for the establishment of a tribunal to settle disputes among nations and preclude war as an instrument of policy.
This edition includes a substantial introduction, and the letters have been annotated with great skill and authority. Lyman Butterfield, well known editor of the Adams Papers, says, "I have never encountered annotation on bibliographical, biographical, medical, botanical, and topographical matters that is more unfailingly readable per se. The transatlantic combination of editors was obviously just right. Toward understanding one prominent strand in the cultural history of the 18th century, this book is a uniquely valuable contribution."
Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian Londonexplores not only the challenges faced by reformers as they strove toclean up an increasingly filthy city but the resistance to their efforts.Beginning in the 1830s, reform-minded citizens, under the banner of sanitaryimprovement, plunged into London’s dark and dirty spaces and returned withthe material they needed to promote public health legislation and magnificentprojects of sanitary engineering. Sanitary reform, however, was not alwaysmet with unqualified enthusiasm. While some improvements, such as slumclearances, the development of sewerage, and the embankment of the Thames,may have made London a cleaner place to live, these projects also destroyedand reshaped the built environment, and in doing so, altered the meanings andexperiences of the city.
From the novels of Charles Dickens and George Gissing to anonymous magazinearticles and pamphlets, resistance to reform found expression in the nostalgicappreciation of a threatened urban landscape and anxiety about domestic autonomyin an era of networked sanitary services. Cleansing the City emphasizes the disruptions and disorientation occasioned by purification—a process we are generally inclined to see as positive. By recovering these sometimes oppositional, sometimes ambivalent responses, Michelle Allen elevates a significant undercurrent of Victorian thought into the mainstream and thus provides insight into the contested nature of sanitary modernization.
In the Anglo-Atlantic world of the late nineteenth century, groups of urban residents struggled to reconstruct their cities in the wake of industrialization and to create the modern city. New professional men wanted an orderly city that functioned for economic development. Women’s vision challenged the men’s right to reconstruct the city and resisted the prevailing male idea that women in public caused the city’s disorder.
Constructing the Patriarchal City compares the ideas and activities of men and women in four English-speaking cities that shared similar ideological, professional, and political contexts. Historian Maureen Flanagan investigates how ideas about gender shaped the patriarchal city as men used their expertise in architecture, engineering, and planning to fashion a built environment for male economic enterprise and to confine women in the private home. Women consistently challenged men to produce a more equitable social infrastructure that included housing that would keep people inside the city, public toilets for women as well as men, housing for single, working women, and public spaces that were open and safe for all residents.
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