University Life in Eighteenth-century Oxford

University Life in Eighteenth-century Oxford
Author: Graham Midgley
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 200
Release: 1996-01-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780300068139

This social history of academic life in 18th-century Oxford presents an account of the activities of students and dons at the university: the often inordinate eating and drinking; life in the senior common rooms; the struggles with authority; the place of women in an all-male environment; the pleasures of sauntering in a still-rural Oxford; the sports and pastimes that kept students from their books; music, theatre, and the astounding variety of entertainment found in the streets: executions, political riots, and circuses that the gown as well as the town attended and relished.

The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse

The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse
Author: Roger Lonsdale
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 1800
Release: 2009-03-26
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0191501425

No previous anthology has succeeded in illustrating so thoroughly the kinds of verse actually written in the eighteenth century. The familiar tradition is fully represented by selections from such poets as Pope, Swift, Tomson, Gray, Smart, Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns, and Blake. In addition, the anthology includes verse by many forgotten writers, both men and women, from all levels of society. Although they have never figured in conventional literary history, they wrote humorous, idiosyncratic, and graphic verse about their personal experience and the world around them, in a way that should challenge received ideas about the period's restraints and inhibitions.

The Social Life of Books

The Social Life of Books
Author: Abigail Williams
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2017-06-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0300228104

“A lively survey…her research and insights make us conscious of how we, today, use books.”—John Sutherland, The New York Times Book Review Two centuries before the advent of radio, television, and motion pictures, books were a cherished form of popular entertainment and an integral component of domestic social life. In this fascinating and vivid history, Abigail Williams explores the ways in which shared reading shaped the lives and literary culture of the eighteenth century, offering new perspectives on how books have been used by their readers, and the part they have played in middle-class homes and families. Drawing on marginalia, letters and diaries, library catalogues, elocution manuals, subscription lists, and more, Williams offers fresh and fascinating insights into reading, performance, and the history of middle-class home life. “Williams’s charming pageant of anecdotes…conjures a world strikingly different from our own but surprisingly similar in many ways, a time when reading was on the rise and whole worlds sprang up around it.”—TheWashington Post

Daily Life in 18th-Century England

Daily Life in 18th-Century England
Author: Kirstin Olsen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2017-04-17
Genre: History
ISBN:

Informative, richly detailed, and entertaining, this book portrays daily life in England in 1700–1800, embracing all levels of society—from the aristocracy to the very poor—to describe a nation grappling with modernity. When did Western life begin to strongly resemble our modern world? Despite the tremendous evolution of society and technology in the last 50 years, surprisingly, many aspects of life in the 21st century in the United States directly date back to the 18th century across the Atlantic. Daily Life in Eighteenth-Century England covers specific topics that affect nearly everyone living in England in the 18th century: the government (including law and order); race, class, and gender; work and wages; religion; the family; housing; clothing; and food. It also describes aspects of life that were of greater relevance to some than others, such as entertainment, the city of London, the provinces and beyond, travel and tourism, education, health and hygiene, and science and technology. The book conveys what life was like for the common people in England in the years 1700–1800 through chapters that describe the state of society at the beginning of the century, delineate both change and continuity by the century's end, and identify which segments of society were impacted most by what changes—for example, improvements to roads, a key change in marriage laws, the steam engine, and the booming textile industry. Students and general readers alike will find the content interesting and the additional features—such as appendices, a chronology of major events, and tables of information on comparative incomes and costs of representative items—helpful in research or learning.

All Souls College, Oxford in the Early Eighteenth Century

All Souls College, Oxford in the Early Eighteenth Century
Author: Jeffrey Wigelsworth
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2018-06-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 900437535X

In the first detailed history of All Souls College under the Wardenship of Bernard Gardiner, Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth offers a character driven story that addresses scheming, duplicity, and self-righteousness projected against some of the most important political and religious episodes of the early eighteenth century and the people who animated them. Throughout this book, Wigelsworth illuminates the ways in which All Souls and its warden were caught between competing visions of what England, and consequently Oxford, would look like in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Smell in Eighteenth-Century England

Smell in Eighteenth-Century England
Author: William Tullett
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2019-08-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0192582453

In England from the 1670s to the 1820s a transformation took place in how smell and the senses were viewed. The role of smell in developing medical and scientific knowledge came under intense scrutiny, and the equation of smell with disease was actively questioned. Yet a new interest in smell's emotive and idiosyncratic dimensions offered odour a new power in the sociable spaces of eighteenth-century England. Using a wide range of sources from diaries, letters, and sanitary records to satirical prints, consumer objects, and magazines, William Tullett traces how individuals and communities perceived the smells around them, from paint and perfume to onions and farts. In doing so, the study challenges a popular, influential, and often cited narrative. Smell in Eighteenth-Century England is not a tale of the medicalization and deodorization of English olfactory culture. Instead, Tullett demonstrates that it was a new recognition of smell's asocial-sociability, and its capacity to create atmospheres of uncomfortable intimacy, that transformed the relationship between the senses and society.

Student Consumer Culture in Nineteenth-Century Oxford

Student Consumer Culture in Nineteenth-Century Oxford
Author: Sabine Chaouche
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2020-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 3030463877

This book explores students’ consumer practices and material desires in nineteenth-century Oxford. Consumerism surged among undergraduates in the 1830s and decreased by contrast from the 1860s as students learned to practice restraint and make wiser choices, putting a brake on past excessive consumption habits. This study concentrates on the minority of debtors, the daily lives of undergraduates, and their social and economic environment. It scrutinises the variety of goods that were on offer, paying special attention to their social and symbolic uses and meanings. Through emulation and self-display, undergraduate culture impacted the formation of male identities and spending habits. Using Oxford students as a case study, this book opens new pathways in the history of consumption and capitalism, revealing how youth consumer culture intertwined with the rise of competition among tradesmen and university reforms in the 1850s and 1860s.

Enlightened Oxford

Enlightened Oxford
Author: Nigel Aston
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 844
Release: 2023-09-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0198872887

Enlightened Oxford aims to discern, establish, and clarify the multiplicity of connections between the University of Oxford, its members, and the world outside; to offer readers a fresh, contextualised sense of the University's role in the state, in society, and in relation to other institutions between the Williamite Revolution and the first decade of the nineteenth century, the era loosely describable (though not without much qualification) as England's ancien regime. Nigel Aston asks where Oxford fitted in to the broader social and cultural picture of the time, locating the University's importance in Church and state, and pondering its place as an institution that upheld religious entitlement in an ever-shifting intellectual world where national and confessional boundaries were under scrutiny. Enlightened Oxford is less an inside history than a consideration of an institutional presence and its place in the life of the country and further afield. While admitting the degree of corporate inertia to be found in the University, there was internal scope for members so inclined to be creative in their teaching, open new research lines, and be unapologetic Whigs rather than unrepentant Tories. For if Oxford was a seat of learning rooted in its past - and with an increasing antiquarian awareness of its inheritance - yet it had a surprising capacity for adaptation, a scope for intellectual and political pluralism that was not incompatible with enlightened values.

Concert Life in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Concert Life in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Author: Susan Wollenberg
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1351571206

In recent years there has been a considerable revival of interest in music in eighteenth-century Britain. This interest has now expanded beyond the consideration of composers and their music to include the performing institutions of the period and their relationship to the wider social scene. The collection of essays presented here offers a portrayal of concert life in Britain that contributes greatly to the wider understanding of social and cultural life in the eighteenth century. Music was not merely a pastime but was irrevocably linked with its social, political and literary contexts. The perspectives of performers, organisers, patrons, audiences, publishers, copyists and consumers are considered here in relation to the concert experience. All of the essays taken together construct an understanding of musical communities and the origins of the modern concert system. This is achieved by focusing on the development of music societies; the promotion of musical events; the mobility and advancement of musicians; systems of patronage; the social status of musicians; the repertoire performed and published; the role of women pianists and the 'topography' of concerts. In this way, the book will not only appeal to music specialists, but also to social and cultural historians.