Abstract
‘Luxury’ today is a poor, diminished term, mere advertising cant that barely registers on our intellectual radar. It is unrecognizable as the watchword that once played a decisive role in the mighty war of words fought over the establishment of free market capitalism and consumer culture. Over the past thirty years there has been a growing appreciation of its centrality to an understanding of eighteenth-century thought in every sphere. John Sekora, author of a seminal study of the topos, describes it as probably ‘the greatest single social issue and the greatest single commonplace’ in the period, while the historian Paul Langford goes further:
A history of luxury and attitudes to luxury would come very close to being a history of the eighteenth century. There is a sense in which politics in this period is about the distribution and representation of this luxury, religion about the attempt to control it, public polemic about generating and regulating it, and social policy about confining it to those who did not produce it.1
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Notes
John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977 ), p. 66;
Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998 ), pp. 3–4.
Christopher Berry, The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 ), p. 98.
Elizabeth Eger, ‘Luxury, Industry and Charity: Bluestocking Culture Displayed’, in Luxury in the Eighteenth Century, ed. by Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002 ), pp. 190–204.
P.G. Marshall, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit 1688–1756 (London: Macmillan and New York: St Martin’s Press, 1967 );
John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 ( New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993 ).
Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole ( 1968; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992 );
J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975 ), pp. 423–506;
John Carswell, The South Sea Bubble ( London: Cresset Press, 1960 ), pp. 10–11;
Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 ), pp. 30–1.
Laura Brown, The Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1993 ).
E.J. Clery, The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England: Literature, Commerce and Luxury ( Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004 ).
Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, ed. by Patricia Springborg (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2002 ), p. 51.
Catherine Gallagher, ‘Embracing the Absolute: The Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England’, Genders, 1 (Spring 1988), 24–39.
Nicholas Barbon, Discourse of Trade (London, 1690), p. 14.
Patrick Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood ( London: Pickering and Chatto, 2004 ), p. 89.
William B. Warner, ‘Formulating Fiction for the General Reader: Manley’s New Atalantis and Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess’, in his Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), chapter 3, esp. pp. 111–27.
Paula R. Backscheider, Introduction, Selected Fiction and Drama of Eliza Haywood (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. xxxii.
Ian Watt, ‘Robinson Crusoe as Myth’, Robinson Crusoe, Norton Critical Edition ( New York: Norton, 1975 ), pp. 311–31.
Ros Ballaster, ‘A Gender of Opposition: Eliza Haywood’s Scandal Fiction’, in The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood: Essays on Her Life and Work, ed. by Kirsten Saxton and Rebecca Bocchicchio (Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 2000 ), pp. 143–67.
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© 2010 E.J. Clery
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Clery, E.J. (2010). Luxury. In: Ballaster, R. (eds) The History of British Women’s Writing, 1690–1750. The History of British Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230298354_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230298354_3
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