Abstract
This section continues the examination of the economics of poetry, in particular, the patronage of plebeian poets, offering as case studies Stephen Duck, Anne Yearsley, and Robert Dodsley, relating patronage to concepts of original and innate genius and primitivism. It then examines the emergence of publishing as a profession, the importance of copyright laws to the professional writer, and his or her status in society.
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Notes
- 1.
The term ‘plebeian’ is preferred by Gustav Klaus, The Literature of Labour: Two Hundred years of Working-Class Writing (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester, 1985), p. 2, whereas most other critics prefer ‘labouring-class’; see, for example, Blair and Mina Gorji, op. cit., and Bridget Keegan, British Labouring-Class Nature Poetry, 1730–1837 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Christmas discusses the descriptors used by writers since Southey, and concludes that plebeian or labouring-class are preferable. William J. Christmas, The Lab’ring Muses: Work: Writing, and the Social Order in English Plebeian Poetry, 1730–1830 (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2001), pp. 39–40.
- 2.
Raymond Williams cites Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776) as one of the first texts to use the term ‘industry’ in this way. Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1958); rprnt (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. xiii.
- 3.
The poem references the dissenting Warrington Academy, where Barbauld’s father, Dr John Aiken, taught. Dissenting academies did not customarily follow the Classical curriculum.
- 4.
Anna Letitia Barbauld, ‘The Invitation, to Miss B…’, Poems (London: Printed for Joseph Johnson, 1773), pp. 13–24; Virgil, Eclogue X ll.42–43.
- 5.
John Guillory, Cultural Capital : The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 100.
- 6.
Guillory, op. cit., p. 101.
- 7.
Edmund Waller in Poems Written upon Several Occasions and Several Persons , revd and expanded edn (London: Printed by T.W. for Humphrey Mosley, 1645), pp. 236–238.
- 8.
Daniel Defoe, ‘Of Academies’, An Essay Upon Projects (London: Printed for Thomas Cockerill, 1697), pp. 227–251 (229–234).
- 9.
Jonathan Swift, A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Language (London: Benjamin Tooke, 1712), p. 8.
- 10.
Joseph Addison, Spectator II 165 (8 September 1711), p. 150.
- 11.
Edward Phillips, New World of Words (1658), John Dryden, The Poems of John Dryden, ed James Kinsley 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958) III p. 1060, quoted in Lynda Mugglestone, ‘The End of Toleration? Language on the Margins in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language’ in Linda Pillière, Wilfred Andrieu, Valérie Kerfelec and Diana Lewis, eds, Standardising English: Norms and Margins in the History of the English Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 89–95 (90).
- 12.
Samuel Johnson, Preface, A Dictionary of the English Language in which the words are deduced from their originals, and illustrated in their different significations by examples from the best writers. To which are prefixed, a history of the language, and an English grammar (London: J. and P. Knapton, T. and T. Longman, C. Hitch and L. Hawes, A. Millar and R. and J. Dodsley, 1755) C2.
- 13.
Antony Easthope, Poetry as Discourse (1983) 2nd edn (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 23–24.
- 14.
Easthope, op. cit., p. 52.
- 15.
Easthope, op. cit., p. 53.
- 16.
Martin Halpern, ‘On the Two Chief Metrical Modes in English’, PMLA 77: 3 (June 1962), pp. 177–186 (177), quoted in Easthope, op. cit., p. 76.
- 17.
Easthope, op. cit., pp. 54–55.
- 18.
Easthope, op. cit., p. 56.
- 19.
Easthope, op. cit., p. 64.
- 20.
Easthope, op. cit., p. 65.
- 21.
James Raven, ‘The Book Trades’ in Isobel Rivers, ed., Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), pp. 1–34 (10).
- 22.
See Catherine Ingrassia, ‘Money’ in Pat Rogers, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 175–185 (177).
- 23.
See, for example, Alexander Pope, Of the Use of Riches, an Epistle to the Right Honourable Allen Lord Bathurst (London: Printed and Re-printed in Dublin by Sylvanus Pepyat, 1733).
- 24.
The Act for preventing abuses in printing seditious, treasonable, and unlicensed books and pamphlets, and for regulation of printing and printing presses (10 June 1662).
- 25.
James Ralph, The Case of Authors By Profession or Trade Stated, With Regard to Booksellers, the Stage, and the Public, No Matter by Whom (London: R. Griffiths, 1758).
- 26.
Ralph, op. cit., p. 7.
- 27.
Ralph, op. cit., p. 8.
- 28.
Ralph, op. cit., p. 22.
- 29.
Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, in which are Included Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, 4 vols (London: Printed for the Author and D. Wilson, 1751) IV p. 100.
- 30.
Charles Churchill, The Author (London: Printed for W. Flexney, G. Kearsley et al., 1763), p. 12.
- 31.
Ralph, op. cit., p. 58.
- 32.
Letter from Alexander Pope to William Wycherley in The Letters of Mr Alexander Pope and Several of His Friends (London: Printed for J. Knapton, L. Gilliver, J. Brindley and R. Dodsley, 1737), p. 22.
- 33.
Williams, op. cit., p. xiv.
- 34.
E.P. Thompson, ‘Education and Experience’ (The Fifth Annual Albert Mansbridge Memorial Lecture (1968) in The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Merlin Press, 1997), pp. 7–8.
- 35.
Thompson, op. cit., pp. 6–7.
- 36.
James Thomson, The Seasons (London: Printed for John Millan, 1730). ‘Winter’ was published in 1726, ‘Summer’ in 1727, ‘Spring’ in 1728, and ‘Autumn’ in The Seasons .
- 37.
Thompson, op. cit., pp. 9–11.
- 38.
Guillory, op. cit., p. 99.
- 39.
Guillory,ibid.
- 40.
Guillory, op. cit., p. 102.
- 41.
Thompson, op. cit., pp. 6–7. In a sense the lack of Holy Peasant myth is accounted for by the paucity of peasants in England after 1700, if that term is defined as ‘subsistence or neo-subsistence farmer’. See Roger A.E. Wells, ‘The Development of the English Rural Proletariat and Social Protest, 1700–1850’ Journal of Peasant Studies (6 January 1979), p. 115, cited by Christmas, op. cit., p. 42. Christmas’s note.
- 42.
Octavius Gilchrist, ‘Some Account of John Clare, An Agricultural Labourer and Poet’, London Magazine I (January 1820), pp. 7–11 in Mark Storey, ed., John Clare, The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1973), pp. 35–42 (p. 37).
- 43.
William Wordsworth, ‘Resolution and Independence’ in William Wordsworth, The Major Works, ed Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), p. 262. Subsequent line references will be to this edition unless otherwise stated.
- 44.
Barry MacSweeney, ‘Wolf Tongue’ in Wolf Tongue: Selected Poems 1965–2000 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 2003), pp. 68–72.
- 45.
Quoted in Allan Cunningham, The Works of Robert Burns with His Life (London: James Cochran, 1834) 8 vols, I, p. 35.
- 46.
Nigel Leaske asks ‘Was Burns a Labouring-Class Poet?’ in Kirstie Blair and Mina Gorji, eds, Class and the Canon: Constructing Labouring-Class Poetry and Poetics, 1750–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 16–33.
- 47.
Henry MacKenzie, Untitled editorial, The Lounger 97 (9 December 1786) in Alexander Chalmers, John Johnson et al., eds, British Essayists with Prefaces Historical and Biographical XXXVIII (London: 1808), pp. 300–307 (300).
- 48.
MacKenzie, op. cit., p. 306.
- 49.
Leaske, op. cit., pp. 16–33 (17).
- 50.
James Macaulay, ‘Rhyming Epistle to Mr R—B—, Ayrshire’, Edinburgh Evening Courant (23 June 1787), quoted in Low, op. cit., pp. 83–85.
- 51.
MacKenzie,ibid.
- 52.
See, for example, The works of Robert Burns; with an account of his life, and a criticism on his writings. To which are prefixed, some observations on the character and condition of the Scottish peasantry, eds Thompson (no first name) and James Currie, 4 vols, I (London: Thomas Cadell, 1802), p. 4.
- 53.
Unsigned notice, the Edinburgh Magazine IV (October 1786), pp. 284–288 quoted in Donald A. Low, Robert Burns, The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), pp. 63–64.
- 54.
Low, ibid., Low’s translation.
- 55.
Robert Southey, Lives and Works of Our Uneducated Poets to Which are Added some Attempts in Verse by John Jones An Old Servant (1831); (London: H.G. Bonn, 1836).
- 56.
Southey, op. cit., p. 12.
- 57.
Southey, op. cit., p. 13.
- 58.
Southey, op. cit., p. 24.
- 59.
Southey, op. cit., p. 105.
- 60.
See Steve Van-Hagen, ‘“But Genius is the Special Gift of God!” The Reclamation of “Natural Genius” in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Verses of Ann Yearsley and James Woodhouse’ in John Goodridge and Bridget Keenan, eds, A History of Working-Class Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 55–69 (55).
- 61.
Plato, Ion, ll.333–334, ed and transl R. G. Bury, The Symposium of Plato (Cambridge: Heffer, 1932).
- 62.
Aristotle, Poetics I: iv, ed and transl. S.H. Butcher, The Poetics of Aristotle (London: Macmillan, 1902), pp. 15–17.
- 63.
Anon, Latin aphorism.
- 64.
Longinus On the Sublime, ed and trans. H.L. Havell (London and New York: Macmillan, 1890) II, p. 4.
- 65.
Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie (London: Printed for William Ponsonby 1595), n.p.
- 66.
The Spectator 160 (3 September 1711), p. 238.
- 67.
Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition . In a letter to the author of Sir Charles Grandison (Dublin: Printed for P. Wilson, 1759), p. 8.
- 68.
Edward Young, ‘Epistle I ‘in Two Epistles to Mr Pope Concerning the Authors of the Age (London: Printed by S. Powell for George Risk, 1730), pp. 5–6.
- 69.
For complaints about the proliferation of writing in general and poetry in particular, see ‘Memoirs of Society of Grub-Street’, The Gentleman’s Magazine (I:55 21 January 1731), p. 268; Richard West, Letter to Horace Walpole (12 January 1736) Gray and his Friends: Letters and Relics in Great Part Hitherto Unpublished, ed D.C. Tovey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1890), pp. 88–89.
- 70.
Young, op. cit., pp. 15–16.
- 71.
Horace, Ars Poetica ll.295–298, transl. R. Rushton Fairclough, Horace, Satires, Epistles, Ars Poetica (1926); rprnt (London: Heinemann, 1947; Cambridge, MASS: Harvard University Press, 1947), p. 475.
- 72.
William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius ; and Its Various Modes of Exertion in Philosophy and the Fine Arts, Particularly in Poetry (London Printed for Edward and Charles Dilly, 1767), p. 37.
- 73.
Duff, op. cit., p. 38.
- 74.
Hannah More, ‘Sensibility, A Poetical Epistle’ in Sacred Dramas Chiefly Intended for Young Persons, The Subjects Taken from The Bible, to which is added, Sensibility, A Poem (London: Thomas Cadell, 1782), p. 273.
- 75.
Quoted in a letter from Capel Lofft to George Bloomfield (1 March 1800) The Letters of Robert Bloomfield and His Circle, eds Tim Fulford and Lynda Pratt, Romantic Circles https://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/bloomfield_letters/HTML/letterEEd.25.21.html.
- 76.
Duff, op. cit., pp. 271–272.
- 77.
Betty Rizzo, ‘The Patron as Poet-Maker: The Politics of Benefaction’ Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 20 (1991), pp. 241–266 (242) quoted in Van-Hagen, op. cit., p. 56.
- 78.
Van-Hagen, op. cit., pp. 61–63.
- 79.
W.A. Speck, ‘Politicians, Peers, and Publication by Subscription 1700–1750’, in Isabel Rivers, ed., Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982), pp. 47–48.
- 80.
Arnold Hauser, Sozialgeschichte der Kunst und Literatur (München, 1969), p. 565 quoted in and translated by Klaus, op. cit., p. 9.
- 81.
Ingrassia, op. cit., p. 180.
- 82.
Joseph Spence, A Full and Authentick Account of Stephen Duck, the Wiltshire Poet. Of his Education; his Methods of Improving himself; how he first engag’d in Poetry; and his great Care in writing. Of each of his particular Poems; of the first Encouragements he met with; and his original Sentiments on several Books, Things, &c. In a letter to a Member of Parliament (London: Printed for J. Roberts, 1731), p. 5.
- 83.
Spence, op. cit., p. 6.
- 84.
Spence, op. cit., p. 79.
- 85.
Spence, op. cit., pp. 10–11.
- 86.
Stephen Duck, Poems on Several Occasions (London: W. Bickerton, 1736), pp. xii–xiii. Subsequent parenthetical lines references are to this edition.
- 87.
Letter from Alured Clarke to Mrs Clayton (19 September 1730) quoted in A.T. Thomson, Memoirs of the court and times of King George the Second, and his consort Queen Caroline , including numerous private letters of the most celebrated persons of the time addressed to the Viscountess Sundon, mistress of the robes to the queen, and her confidential adviser, exhibiting much of the secret, political, religious, and literary history … Now first published from the originals by Mrs. Thomson (London: H. Colburn, 1850), p. 190.
- 88.
Letter to Mrs Clayton (19 September 1730) Thomson, op. cit., p. 202.
- 89.
Letter to Mrs Clayton (8 October 1730) Thomson, op. cit., p. 198.
- 90.
Thomson, op. cit., p. 197.
- 91.
Letter to Mrs Clayton (15 October 1730) Thomson, op. cit., pp. 189–190.
- 92.
Letter to Mrs Clayton (15 October 1730) Thomson, op. cit., p. 200.
- 93.
Letter to Mrs Clayton (4 October 1730) Thomson, op. cit., p. 195.
- 94.
Letter to Mrs Clayton (15 October 1730) Thomson, op. cit., pp. 200–201.
- 95.
Bridget Keenan, ‘Georgic Transformations and Stephen Duck’s “The Thresher’s Labour”’, SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 41.3 (2001), pp. 545–560 (546).
- 96.
From the Pegasus in Grub-Street, ‘On the Candidates for the Laurel, An Epigram’, The Grub-Street Journal 45 (12 November 1730).
- 97.
Bavius, ‘An Epigram’, The Grub-Street Journal 46 (19 November 1730).
- 98.
Jonathan Swift, ‘On Stephen Duck the Thresher, and Favourite Poet, A Quibbling Epigram, Written in the Year 1730’ in Poems on Several Occasions by J.S, D.D, D. S.P.D. Dublin: George Faulkner, 1735, p. 278, erroneously listed on the Contents page as p. 416.
- 99.
See, for example, The Grub-Street Journal 40 (8 October 1730), and Jonathan Swift, ‘On Stephen Duck, the Thresher and Favourite Poet, A Quibbling Epigram’ in Swift’s Poems, ed Harold Williams, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958) I I, p. 521 both quoted in Christmas, op. cit., p. 90.
- 100.
See, for example, William Christmas, The Lab’ring Muses: Work, Writing and the Social Order in English Plebeian Poetry, 1730–1830 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001), p. 65.
- 101.
Christmas, op. cit., p. 81.
- 102.
Thomson, ‘Summer’, The Seasons, l.342.
- 103.
Herrick, op. cit., pp. 113–115.
- 104.
Bridget Keenan, British Labouring-Class Nature Poetry, 1730–1837 (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 37. Joseph Addison, ‘Essay on Virgil’s Georgics’ in The Works of Joseph Addison, ed George Washington Greene, 6 vols (Philadelphia. J. B. Lippincott, 1888) II, pp. 379–388 (p. 380). Keenan’s note.
- 105.
Keenan, ibid.
- 106.
Spence, op. cit., p. 14.
- 107.
Keenan sees the ‘dutiful’ invocation of Pope’s ‘Windsor Forest’ as part of Duck’s elevation ‘of his plebeian voice with the requisite demonstration of familiarity with garden writing’. Keenan, op. cit., p. 43.
- 108.
Alexander Pope, Windsor Forest (London: Printed for Bernard Lintott, 1713).
- 109.
In a note to the poem, Duck states that it was composed in 1731, before the alterations were complete.
- 110.
Klaus, op. cit., p. 13.
- 111.
Kirsty Blair, Introduction, Blair and Gorji, op. cit., p. 6.
- 112.
Klaus, op. cit., p. 12.
- 113.
On this subject, see Keenan, ‘Georgic Transformations’.
- 114.
Jeffrey N. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 6.
- 115.
See, for example, Robert Dodsley, An Epistle from a Footman in London to the Celebrated Stephen Duck (London: Printed for J. Brindley, 1731); Robert Tatersal, The Bricklayer’s Miscellany, or, Poems on Several Subjects, subtitled ‘By Robert Tatersal, a Poor Country Bricklayer, of Kingston upon Thames, in Allusion to Stephen Duck’ (London: Printed for the Author, 1734), pp. 23–25; and Mary Collier, The Woman’s Labour: An Epistle To Mr Stephen Duck: In Answer to His Late Poem Called ‘The Thresher’s Labour’ (London: Printed for the Author: 1739) John Frizzle, ‘An Irish Miller to Mr Stephen Duck’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 3 (February 1733) 95. Subsequent parenthetical references will be to these editions.
- 116.
The relationship of David Garrick and More is discussed in Kerri Andrews, Ann Yearsley and Hannah More, Patronage and Poetry: The Story of a Literary Relationship (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 9–25.
- 117.
See Andrews, op. cit., p. 24.
- 118.
For the Yearsleys’ social status and Ann Yearsley’s early and married life, see Mary Waldron, Lactilla, Milkwoman of Clifton : The Life and Writings of Ann Yearsley, 1753–1806 (Athens GA and London: University of Georgia Press, 1996), pp. 1–12. Waldron argues that John Yearsley, recorded as of yeoman status, was initially well-to-do.
- 119.
Elizabeth Montagu to Hannah More, 1784, Memoirs, vol. 1, pp. 368–369. Andrews’ note. Andrews, op. cit., p. 29.
- 120.
Hannah More to Elizabeth Montagu, 22 October 1784. Quoted in Waldron, Lactilla, Milkwoman of Clifton, p. 53, Andrews’ note. Andrews, op. cit., p. 31.
- 121.
Horace Walpole to Hannah More, 13 November 1784, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W.S. Lewis, 48 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937–1983), vol. 31, pp. 220–221. Andrews’ note. Andrews, op. cit., p. 30.
- 122.
Ann Yearsley, Title page, Poems on Several Occasions (London: Thomas Cadell, 1775).
- 123.
Hannah More, ‘To Mrs Montagu’ in Ann Yearsley, Poems on Several Occasions (London: Thomas Cadell, 1775), p. xi. Parenthetical page and line references are to this edition unless stated otherwise.
- 124.
Ibid.
- 125.
More did not, however, habitually blame drunkenness or depravity among the labouring classes for their poverty, but in her letters refers to high rents, low pay, crop failures, and middlemen driving up food prices. See Jane Nardin, ‘Hannah More and the Problem of Poverty’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language (Fall 2001), pp. 267–284 (272–274).
- 126.
Yearsley, op. cit., p. vii.
- 127.
Yearsley , op. cit., p. vi. Landry notes that the subject of this pastoral work would have been deemed appropriate for the milkwoman, but that More would have assumed it to be inaccessible to Yearsley, even in English. Donna Landry, The Muses of Resistance: Labouring-class Women’s Poetry in Britain 1739–1796 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 129.
- 128.
Waldron notes that even during Yearsley’s lifetime Clifton was becoming a suburb of Bristol. Op. cit., p. 1.
- 129.
Yearsley, ‘On Mrs Montagu’, op. cit., pp. 104–105.
- 130.
Keegan discusses the differing and polyvalent meanings of ‘nature’ during the eighteenth century. See op. cit., pp. 1–2.
- 131.
See Landry, op. cit., pp. 127–128.
- 132.
John Gay, ‘The Hare and Many Friends’, Fables by Mr Gay (London: J. Tonson and J. Watts, 1727), p. 172.
- 133.
Yearsley, ‘Clifton Hill’, op. cit., pp. 107–127 (110). For the ambiguity of ‘prospect’ and the elevated perspective, see Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) and John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 23–25 and John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
- 134.
Donna Landry sees the consciousness of the poem as feminine, not seeking to dominate or exploit the natural world but finding consolation in it, and addressing contemporary sexual politics describing the victimisation of young women of fashion. Landry, op. cit., p. 131.
- 135.
In ‘On Mrs Montagu’ a gloss to Lactilla is provided: ‘The Author’.
- 136.
Richard Samuel, ‘Portraits in the Characters of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo’ oil on canvas (1778). National Portrait Gallery NPG 4905.
- 137.
Wilson Lowry, line engraving after portrait by an unknown artist (1787). National Portrait Gallery NPG D8853. In an oval frame surrounded by roses and surmounted by ribbons, Yearsley is shown in three-quarter profile bust-length. She wears a voluminously sleeved gown with a fichu and a large hat with a wreath of roses over a lace cap. Sarah Shiells’s portrait shows Yearsley seated at a table covered with a tablecloth and holding an inkstand, on a good-quality, possibly Chippendale chair, writing in a book. She wears a large pleated mob cap with a ribbon, a heavy fichu, and a dark gown and white apron. The under-gown or petticoat can be seen at the cuff of the three-quarter-length sleeve. Her hair, just visible at the side and on one shoulder, is curled and in ringlets. Joseph Grozer, Mezzotint, after Sarah Shiells, National Portrait Gallery, NPG D4452.
- 138.
See Waldron, op. cit., pp. 24–26.
- 139.
Ann Yearsley, Poems on Several Occasions 4th edn (London G.G.J. and J. Robinson, 1786), pp. xxvii–xxx.
- 140.
Yearsley, Poems on Several Occasions 1st edn, p. xxviii.
- 141.
Yearsley, Poems on Several Occasions 4th edn (London G.G.J. and J. Robinson, 1786), p. xxv, pp. xxx–xxix.
- 142.
See the Cheap Repository Tracts, some by and most edited by Hannah More, for example, ‘The Lancashire Collier Girl: A True Story’ (London: J. Marshall; and R. White; Bath: S. Hazard, 1795) and ‘The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain in Two Parts (London: J. Marshall and R. White; Bath: S. Hazard, 1795).
- 143.
Landry, op. cit., p. 123. Hannah More, letter to Dr Beadon, Bishop of Bath and Wells (1801), William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs Hannah More 4 vols (London: R.B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1834) III p. 133. Landry’s note.
- 144.
Nardin argues that though More wrote or edited these prescriptions for keeping the economic and politic system stable, her personal letters show that she had serious reservations about the accuracy of the ideas. Op. cit., p. 279. Other critics disagree, for example, ‘[i]n articulating these concepts More expresses to an extraordinary degree the social thinking of her class.’ Mona Scheuermann, ‘Hannah More and the English Poor’ Eighteenth-Century Life (Spring 2001) 25: 2, pp. 237–251 (242).
- 145.
Anne Stott, Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 168.
- 146.
For a discussion of the patronage of Wilmer Gossip and his relationship with Yearsley, see Frank Felsenstein, ‘Ann Yearsley and the Politics of Patronage, The Thorp Arch Archive: Part I’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 21: 2, The Adoption Issue (Autumn, 2002), pp. 346–392.
- 147.
Felsenstein gives the example of 17-year-old Eliza Dawson, who energetically raised money for Yearsley’s support. Op. cit., pp. 353–355.
- 148.
Waldron, op. cit., p. 5.
- 149.
Felsenstein, op. cit., p. 385.
- 150.
On the role of the milkwoman, see Waldron, op. cit., p. 14.
- 151.
Felsenstein, op. cit., p. 386.
- 152.
Hannah More quoted in Millicent G. Fawcett, Some Eminent Women of Our Time: Short Biographical Sketches (London: Macmillan, 1899), p. 212.
- 153.
Klaus, op. cit., p. 7.
- 154.
Straus states that Dodsley had the assistance of Daniel Defoe in polishing and publishing ‘Servitude’. Ralph Straus, Robert Dodsley: Poet, Publisher and Playwright (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1910), p. 21.
- 155.
Harry M. Solomon, The Rise of Robert Dodsley : Creating the New Age of Print (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University, 1996), p. 21.
- 156.
See Solomon, op. cit., p. 25.
- 157.
Solomon, op. cit., p. 26. Robert Dodsley, Dedication, A Muse in Livery, or, The Footman’s Miscellany (London: Printed for the Author, 1732), n.p.
- 158.
Dodsley, Dedication, op. cit., n.p.
- 159.
For a description of Dodsley’s informal apprenticeship, see Solomon, op. cit., pp. 32–33.
- 160.
Solomon, op. cit., p. 6.
- 161.
Michael J. Suarez, ‘Dodsley’s Collection of Poems and the Ghost of Pope: The Politics of Literary Reputation’ The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 88 (1 January 1994), pp. 189–206 (192).
- 162.
Suarez notes that Dodsley declined to publish Warton’s Essay on the Writings and Genius of Mr Pope (1756) because he could not endorse Warton’s estimate of Pope as a second-rank poet, even though the essay endorses the merit of poets published by Dodsley. Suarez, op. cit., p 194.
- 163.
A Collection of Poems by Several Hands 2nd edn (London: Robert Dodsley, 1748–1749).
- 164.
Suarez, op. cit., p. 190.
- 165.
Suarez,ibid.
- 166.
See Suarez, op. cit., p. 197.
- 167.
Suarez, op. cit., p. 199.
- 168.
Roger Lonsdale, ed., The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
- 169.
Roger Lonsdale, ed., Eighteenth-Century Women’s Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
- 170.
Simon White, Introduction, in Simon White, John Goodridge, and Bridget Keenan, eds, Robert Bloomfield: Lyric, Class and the Romantic Canon (Lewisburg NJ: Bucknell University Press, 2006), pp. 17–27 (20).
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Byrne, S. (2020). The Eighteenth Century. In: Poetry and Class. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29302-4_4
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