“Bonnie Prince
Charlie”
House of
Hanover

(r. 1689-1702) (r. 1689-94)
Portrait of Mary II by Sir Godfrey
Kneller (1646?-
1723). © Royal
Collection
Portrait of William
III by Sir Godfrey
Kneller (1646?-
1723)
© Royal
Collection

Portrait of Anne by Sir Godfrey Kneller (1646?-
1723).

George I by Georg Wilhelm Lafontaine
(1680-1745)
© Royal Collection

George II by Sir Godfrey Kneller
© Royal Collection

George III, portrait by
Johann Zoffany (1733/4-
1810)
© Royal Collection

• The Aristocracy
• Professionals
• Scientists
• Physicians
• Attorneys
• Clergy
• Literati
• Military Officers
• Merchants and Bankers
• Tradespeople
• Working Class
• Domestic Servants
• Hired labor
• Apprentices
• The Unemployed: debtors, beggars,thieves
• Peasants

A replica of Isaac Newton's telescope of 1672.
•
Emphasis on experimentation and inductive reasoning
• Scientific Method
•
New methods of observation: the microscope and the telescope
• 1662: Charles I chartered the Royal Society of
London for the
Improving of Natural
Knowledge
• Natural Religion: Deism
A clockwork universe with a watchmaker God

• Mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, and natural philosopher
•
Developed calculus contemporaneously but separately from Liebniz
•
Philosophiae Naturalis
Principia Mathematica: described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion
•
Opticks: discovered that light was composed of particles
• Master of the Mint: moved
English coinage to the gold standard
Godfrey Kneller's Sir Isaac Newton at 46

Mary Astell Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu
1666-1731
• A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of Their True and
Greatest Interest
(1694)
• Some Reflections
on Marriage (1700)
• Advocated equal education for women
• Questioned the value of marriage for women in a patriarchal society
1689-1762
•
Poet, prodigious letter writer, world traveller
• Advocate for smallpox vaccination
• Carried on poetic debate with
Alexander Pope
•
Court Poems,
1716
• Letters from
Turkey, 1763
• Shared Astell’s opinions on education and marriage

Brawling peasants at
Tyburn Gate, London.
The Warder
Collection
.
Large movements of people from the country to the cities.
Shift from agrarian to urban lifestyles.
Peddlar hawking tarts. The Warder Collection.

screeching parrot foreign violinist ballad-monger oboist churchbells milkmaid cry of chimney sweep howling cats
London
Cries dustman sow-gelder baby with rattle paver fish-monger peeing boy drumming child knife-grinder barking dog
Engraving and etching by
William
Hogarth.
The Art
Institute of
Chicago.

•
Displaced agrarian labor
•
No social safety net
•
Education only for the elite
•
Child labor
•
Cheap gin
Gin Lane (1751). Etching and Engraving by William Hogarth.
The New York Public Library.

• Master of plain prose and powerful narrative
•
Reportial: highly realistic detail
•
Robinson Crusoe
• Journal of the Plague
Year
•
Moll Flanders
•
Roxana

AFTERNOON
Coffee and
News
Periodicals and Newpapers
Addison and Steele
The Spectator
Periodical Essays
Literary Criticism
Character Sketches
Political Discussion
Philosophical Ideas
A London coffeehouse.
The British Museum

A London coffeehouse. The British Museum

The Royal Exchange. Engraving by Bartolozzi.
The British Library
The Rise of the Middle Class
Increased Literacy
Leisure Time
International Trade
Empire Building

Leisure time nurtured middle class women’s interest in fashion, society, the arts and even literature.
London ladies shopping for fabric. From Rudolph Ackermann's Repository of Arts (1800).

Large public gatherings were the fashionable places to see and be seen in society.
Prince of Wales
Samuel Johnson
Oliver
Goldsmith
James Boswell Hester Thrale
Duchess of Devonshire
Mary “Perdita” Robinson
Vauxhall Gardens (1784). A drawing by Thomas Rowlandson.
Victoria and Albert Royal Museum.

•
Alexander Pope
•
Mock epic:
“The Rape of the Lock”
•
Poetic Satire:
“The
Dunciad
•
Jonathan Swift
•
Satiric Essay:
“A
Modest Proposal”
•
Satiric Fiction:
Gulliver’s Travels

J. S. Muller after Samuel Wale, A General Prospect of Vaux Hall Gardens Shewing at one View the disposition of the whole Gardens
(after 1751).

• Art as an improvement upon nature
•
Neo-classical ideals: balance, harmony, reason
•
Formal Gardens
•
Landscape painting
• Rise of literary criticism
•
Major poetic forms:
•
Heroic couplets: rhymed iambic pentameter
• Epic and mock epic
•
Poetic essay
• Occasional poems
John Dryden
1631-1700

Thomas Gainsborough,
Heneage Lloyd and his sister, c.1750

• Samuel Richardson’s
Pamela, or Virtue
Rewarded (1740)
•
Epistolary
• Realistic detail
• Morality tale
• Servant resisting seduction by her employer
• Henry Fielding’s Joseph
Andrews (1742) and Tom
Jones (1749)
•
Picaresque protagonist
• “comic epic in prose”
• Parody of Richardson
• First to acknowledge the novel as pure fiction
•
Wide range of social classes

• Novels in which the narrative is told in letters by one or more of the characters
•
Allows author to present feelings and reactions of characters, brings immediacy to the plot, allows multiple points of view
•
Psychological realism
• Contemporary epistolary novels: Alice Walker’s The Color
Purple; Nick Bantock’s Griffin
and Sabine; Kalisha Buckhanon,
Upstate
Jean-Baptiste Greuze,
The Letter Writer

•
Derives from Spanish picaro: a rogue
• A usually autobiographical chronicle of a rascal’s travels and adventures as s/he makes his/her way through the world more by wits than industry
• Episodic, loose structure
•
Highly realistic: detailed description and uninhibited expression
• Satire of social classes
•
Contemporary picaresques:
Saul Bellow’s Adventures of
Augie March; Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road

Theatre
Opera
Symphony
The Laughing Audience (1733).
Etching and engraving by William
Hogarth. The New York Public
Library

th


Theatres reopened with restoration of
Charles II
French influence:


Actresses
Heroic couplets
 17 th C. Comedy of Manners
 Witty--language driven
 Satirical of social mores
 Risque

Marriage and money

Neoclassical modes:


Social comedies
Heroic tragedies
 18 th C. Comedy of Sentiment
Ladies at the opera from Gallery of Fashion (1796).
 Marriage and money
 Moralistic in tone
 Controlled by censors

Novelist

Venice Preserv'd
 The History of the
Nun

Love Letters between a
Nobleman and his
sister (1684)
 The Fair Jilt (1688)

Oroonoko (c.1688)

The Unfortunate
Happy Lady: A
True History
Playwright

The Forced Marriage
(1670)
 The Amorous Prince
(1671)

Abdelazar (1676)

The Rover (1677-81)

The Feign'd
Curtezans (1679)

The City Heiress
(1682)

The Lucky Chance
(1686)
 The Lover's Watch
(1686)

The Emperor of the
Moon (1687)

Lycidus (1688)

“
All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.” Virginia Woolf
Painting of the interior of the Drury Lane Theater.
Thomas Rowlandson. The British Library.

Mary Pix
1666-1709
Eliza Haywood
1693-1756
Susanna Centlivre
1669-1723
Popular 17 th -18 th C. Dramatists
Charlotte Charke
1713-1760
Hannah More
1745-1833
Elizabeth Inchbald
1753-1821
Painting of the interior of the Drury Lane Theater List of Women Dramatists.

A riot mob in Covent Garden (1763).
The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C

Night (1738). Etching and engraving by William Hogarth.