Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies最新文献

This article offers an overview of the research project Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers (2019–2023) — the impetus for this special issue — and positions it within the field of eighteenth-century studies. After outlining the project's genesis, we describe one of its core outputs, the digital edition of Mary Hamilton's archive, providing key technical information which is referenced in the articles that follow. We then summarize the contents of the special issue, reflect on answers to the project's original research questions that the authors provide, and highlight key synergies and themes.

This foreword provides core biographical information about Mary Hamilton and tells the story of the archive she left behind. It presents a brief overview of the scholarship addressing Mary Hamilton before the research project Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers (2019–2023), and shows how the resulting digital edition has stimulated a new interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary wave of research that is able to exploit the archive holistically. The academic contributions to the project are contextualized by acknowledging the immensely important labour of curators, archivists, photographers, and digital specialists, among others.

This article examines how space, sociability, and letter-writing are conceptualised as self-care strategies by female correspondents in the Hamilton archive. Building on a recent proliferation of interest in histories of mental health and emotions, it explores familiar correspondence written to Mary Hamilton between 1776 and 1809 by Louisa Murray (Lady Stormont), Jane Hamilton Holman, and Lady Mary Webb, which addresses low spirits, nervousness, melancholy, depression, and agitation of mind. It finds that three distinct yet interrelated strategies of care — change of scene, intimate sociability, and therapeutic epistolary practice — gave these correspondents important ways to manage and maintain mental health.

This article investigates the literary culture revolving around Queen Charlotte (1744–1818) between 1761 and 1818. The Queen's library, sold after her death in 1818, contained more than 4500 volumes, and the sales catalogue (1819) offers a fascinating glimpse into her collecting habits and reading interests. This article uses the catalogue, as well as manuscript letters recently digitized by the Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers project and The Georgian Papers Programme, to show how she connected with other readers both in and out of Court via a shared love of reading.

This article evaluates the benefits and drawbacks of using quantitative digital analysis to reconstruct eighteenth-century reading practices using manuscript life writing. Our corpus is over a thousand pages of Mary Hamilton's letters and diary entries covering one year of her life. We report significant findings concerning the space, time, nature, and mode of Hamilton's reading, and the media, genre, authorship, and provenance of her material. Her reading diet is more dominated by female-authored manuscript prose, inflected by personal acquaintance, and reliant on a private loan economy than we anticipated — conclusions that we would not have reached using qualitative analysis alone.

Eighteenth-century postage was comparatively expensive and usually paid for by a letter's recipient, although Members of Parliament could post free of charge by adding their signature to the address (a ‘frank’). This privilege was intended only for MPs; nevertheless, franking fraud was widespread. This article uses evidence from letters in The Mary Hamilton Papers to explore how postage and franking aided correspondents' politeness and identity work. It finds that Hamilton and her correspondents exploited their social networks to get free postage, and that ‘frank talk’ (discourse about obtaining and using franks) played an important role in promoting and maintaining friendships.

This article explores adverbs in The Mary Hamilton Papers, examining the factors which may influence correspondents' decisions as to whether or not to use the -ly suffix (e.g. exceedingly/exceeding). While the use of -ly forms is generally well established in the dataset, tendencies differ depending on the specific adverb. This study investigates some factors determining the choice of forms — e.g. the nature of the word that the adverb modifies — arguing that linguistic factors are more influential than extra-linguistic factors in the data examined. Mary Hamilton's own writings exhibit a slightly delayed adoption of -ly compared to the overall trend in the entire dataset, suggesting possible linguistic conservatism that warrants further research.

This article combines close reading of manuscript correspondence with digital analysis of reading practices to trace literary and sociable interactions between the Bluestocking writers Frances Burney and Mary Hamilton between 1782 and 1796. I argue that Burney's well-established dislike of Hamilton was motivated by the (accurate) perception that Hamilton was a shallow and disingenuous reader of her novels, more interested in capitalizing on Burney's celebrity than appreciating her work. Hamilton and Burney's differing characters as readers and writers sat uneasily together, compromising their friendship's potential — a conclusion that can only be reached by combining traditional archival research with digital scholarship.

This article considers Mary Hamilton's agency and influence in promoting poetry within and beyond Bluestocking circles during the 1780s. Drawing on evidence from Hamilton's diaries, correspondence, and manuscript books, it reconstructs Hamilton's relationships with Hannah More, Ann Yearsley, and Anne Hunter, demonstrating how these poets benefited in terms of prestige from their well-connected friend's proactive stance. Hamilton's varied activities enhanced the visibility of female poets in society, helped to establish a positive perception of their works, and made a significant contribution to the cumulative influence of the Bluestockings on late eighteenth-century literary culture.

This article explores how social relationships are developed and conveyed through correspondence, with a particular focus on self-corrections in the surviving letters from Mary Hamilton (1756–1816) to Frances Burney (1752–1840). The findings show that the more closely connected the writer feels with the recipient, the more self-corrections are deemed socially acceptable. Engaging in interdisciplinary dialogue with Coulombeau's (this issue) assessment of Hamilton and Burney's complex and evolving relationship, this essay underlines the importance of self-corrections for the study of handwritten documents as well as social relationships and networks in the past.