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Courtship in Georgian England was a decisive moment in the life cycle, imagined as a tactical game, an invigorating sport, and a perilous journey across a turbulent sea. This volume brings to life the emotional experience of courtship using the words and objects selected by men and women to navigate this potentially fraught process. It provides new insights into the making and breaking of relationships, beginning with the formation of courtships using the language of love, the development of intimacy through the exchange of love letters, and sensory engagement with love tokens such as flowers, portrait miniatures, and locks of hair. It also charts the increasing modernization of romantic customs over the Georgian era - most notably with the arrival of the printed valentine's card - revealing how love developed into a commercial industry. The book concludes with the rituals of disintegration when engagements went awry, and pursuit of damages for breach of promise in the civil courts. The Game of Love in Georgian England brings together love letters, diaries, valentines, and proposals of marriage from sixty courtships sourced from thirty archives and museum collections, alongside an extensive range of sources including ballads, conduct literature, court cases, material objects, newspaper reports, novels, periodicals, philosophical discourses, plays, poems, and prints, to create a vivid social and cultural history of romantic emotions. The book demonstrates the importance of courtship to studies of marriage, relationships, and emotions in history, and how we write histories of emotions using objects. Love emerges as something that we do in practice, enacted by couples through particular socially and historically determined rituals.
"The Georgian Art of Gambling" takes the reader on a miscellaneous tour through high and low society to reveal all aspects of gambling in the Georgian era. Descriptions of the most fashionable card and dice games of the day are interspersed with snippets of contemporary anti-gambling pamphlets, descriptions of the most famous (and degenerate) gambling houses, and accounts of the ruination of many high-profile aristocrats. "The Georgian Art of Gambling" covers wagering on sports such as cockfighting, bull baiting, boxing and cricket to the more sedentary pleasures of the card table. Both the civilised (card games portrayed in the novels of Jane Austen) and the debauched (card sharps and loaded dice) are explored, offering the reader a fascinating glimpse into the extent of gambling in Georgian Britain.
Being Single in Georgian England is the first book-length exploration of what family life looked like, and how it was experienced, when viewed from the perspective of unmarried and childless family members. Using a micro-historical approach, Amy Harris covers three generations of the famous musical and abolitionist Sharp family. The abundance of records the Sharps produced and preserved reveals how single family members influenced the household economy, marital decisions, childrearing practices, and conceptions about lineage and genealogy. The Sharps' exceptional closeness and good humor consistently shines through as their experiences reveal how eighteenth-century families navigated gender and age hierarchies, marital choices, and household governance. The importance of childhood relationships and the life-long nature of siblinghood stand out as central aspects of Sharp family life, no matter their marital status. Along the way, Being Single explores humor, music, religious practice and belief, death and mourning, infertility, disability, slavery, abolition, philanthropy, and family memory. The Sharps' experiences uncover how important lateral kin like siblings and cousins were to marital and household decisions. The analysis also reveals additional layers of Georgian family life, including: single sociability not centered on courtship; the importance of aunting and uncling on their own terms; the ways charitable acts and philanthropic endeavors could serve as outlets or partial replacements for parenthood; and how genealogical practices could be tied to values and identity instead of to biological descendants' possession of property. Ultimately, the Sharp siblings' remarkable lives and the single family members' efforts to preserve a record of those lives, show the enduring contribution of unmarried people to family relationships and household dynamics.
What happened when Jane Austen’s heroines and heroes were finally wed? Marriage is at the centre of Jane Austen’s novels. The pursuit of husbands and wives, advantageous matches, and, of course, love itself, motivate her characters and continue to fascinate readers today. But what were love and marriage like in reality for ladies and gentlemen in Regency England? Rory Muir uncovers the excitements and disappointments of courtship and the pains and pleasures of marriage, drawing on fascinating first-hand accounts as well as novels of the period. From the glamour of the ballroom to the pressures of careers, children, managing money, and difficult in-laws, love and marriage came in many guises: some wed happily, some dared to elope, and other relationships ended with acrimony, adultery, domestic abuse, or divorce. Muir illuminates the position of both men and women in marriage, as well as those spinsters and bachelors who chose not to marry at all. This is a richly textured account of how love and marriage felt for people at the time—revealing their unspoken assumptions, fears, pleasures, and delights.
A comprehensive history of the Georgians, comparing past views of these exciting, turbulent, and controversial times with our attitudes today The Georgian era is often seen as a time of innovations. It saw the end of monarchical absolutism, global exploration and settlements overseas, the world's first industrial revolution, deep transformations in religious and cultural life, and Britain's role in the international trade in enslaved Africans. But how were these changes perceived by people at the time? And how do their viewpoints compare with attitudes today? In this wide-ranging history, Penelope J. Corfield explores every aspect of Georgian life--politics and empire, culture and society, love and violence, religion and science, industry and towns. People's responses at the time were often divided. Pessimists saw loss and decline, while optimists saw improvements and light. Out of such tensions came the Georgian culture of both experiment and resistance. Corfield emphasizes those elements of deep continuity that persisted even within major changes, and shows how new developments were challenged if their human consequences proved dire.
Based on a study of the letters, diaries and account books of over 100 women from commercial, professional and gentry families, mainly in provincial England, this book provides an account of the lives of genteel women in Georgian times.
This interdisciplinary essay collection investigates the various interactions of people, feelings, and things throughout premodern Europe. It focuses on the period before mass production, when limited literacy often prioritised material methods of communication. The subject of materiality has been of increasing significance in recent historical inquiry, alongside growing emphasis on the relationships between objects, emotions, and affect in archaeological and sociological research. The historical intersections between materiality and emotions, however, have remained under-theorised, particularly with respect to artefacts that have continuing resonance over extended periods of time or across cultural and geographical space. Feeling Things addresses the need to develop an appropriate cross-disciplinary theoretical framework for the analysis of objects and emotions in European history, with special attention to the need to track the shifting emotional valencies of objects from the past to the present, and from one place and cultural context to another. The collection draws together an international group of historians, art historians, curators, and literary scholars working on a variety of cultural, literary, visual, and material sources. Objects considered include books, letters, prosthetics, religious relics, shoes, stone, and textiles. Many of these have been preserved in international galleries, museums, and archives, while others have remained in their original locations, even as their contexts have changed over time. The chapters consider the ways in which emotions such as despair, fear, grief, hope, love, and wonder become inscribed in and ascribed to these items, producing 'emotional objects' of significance and agency. Such objects can be harnessed to create, affirm, or express individual relationships, as, for example, in religious devotion and practice, or in the construction of cultural, communal, and national identities.
Another delicious Georgian gem from Lucinda Brant: High drama, deep emotion, and witty prose, all deftly sprinkled with historical detail to keep you mesmerized from beginning to end. Immerse yourself in the romance and opulence of her eighteenth century aristocratic world. When the Earl of Salt Hendon marries squire's daughter Jane Despard, Society is aghast. But Jane and Salt share a secret past of heartache and mistrust. They are forced into a marriage neither wants; the Earl to honor a dying man's wish, Jane to save her stepbrother from financial ruin. Beautiful inside and out, the patient and ever optimistic Jane believes love conquers all; the Earl will take some convincing. Enter Diana St. John, who has been living in a fool's paradise believing she would be the next Countess of Salt Hendon. She will go to extreme lengths, even murder, to hold Salt's attention. Can the newlyweds overcome past prejudices and sinister opposition to fall in love all over again? As the plot develops and darkens you realize the imagery is spectacular. If you've never met true evil just wait 'till you meet Diana St. John; definitely made me a fan. --SWurman: 5 STAR TOP PICK Night Owl Reviews. A love story that fans of historical romance will relish. The rakish and raucous character of the period is contrasted superbly with the sophistication of the age. --Fiona Ingram: 5 STARS Readers' Favorite. Brant's talent is undeniable and dare I admit... I enjoyed Salt Bride more than many of Georgette Heyer's own beloved works and that is high praise indeed. --Courtney Webb: Stiletto Storytime. 2015 B.R.A.G. Medallion Honoree, 2011 Australian Romance Readers Awards Finalist. Full-length novel (117,000 words, about 460 standard pages). Parental Guidance Recommended (mild sensuality). Classic romance with a modern voice, similar to Regency noir.
Our ideas about the long histories of young couples' relationships and women's efforts to manage their reproductive health are often premised on the notion of a powerful sexual double standard. In Sex in an Old Regime City, Julie Hardwick offers a major reframing of the history of young people's intimacy. Based on legal records from the city of Lyon, Hardwick uncovers the relationships of young workers before marriage and after pregnancy occurred, even if marriage did not follow, and finds that communities treated these occurrences without stigmatizing or moralizing. She finds a hidden world of strategies young couples enacted when they faced an untimely pregnancy. If they could not or would not marry, they sometimes tried to terminate pregnancies, to make the newborn go away by a variety of measures, or to charge the infant to local welfare institutions. Far from being isolated, couples drew on the resources of local communities and networks. Clerics, midwives, wet nurses, landladies, lawyers, parents, and male partners in and outside the city offered pragmatic, sympathetic ways to help young, unmarried pregnant women deal with their situations and hold young men responsible for the reproductive consequences of their sexual activity. This was not merely emotional work; those involved were financially compensated. These support systems ensured that the women could resume their jobs and usually marry later, without long-term costs. In doing so, communities managed and minimized the disruptions and consequences even of cases of abandonment and unprosecuted infanticide. This richly textured study re-thinks the ways in which fundamental issues of intimacy and gendered power were entwined with families, communities, and religious and secular institutions at all levels from households to neighborhoods to the state.
Lucas Haasis found a time capsule: A complete mercantile letter archive of the merchant Nicolaus Gottlieb Luetkens who lived in 18th century Hamburg. Luetkens travelled France between 1743-1745 in order to become a successful wholesale merchant. He succeeded in this undertaking via both shrewd business practice and proficient skills in the practice of letter writing. Based on this unique discovery, in this microhistorical study Lucas Haasis examines the crucial steps and activities of a mercantile establishment phase, the typical letter practices of Early Modern merchants, and the practical principles of persuasion leading to success in the 18th century.