Primogeniture and Entail in England

Primogeniture and Entail in England

Author: Zouheir Jamoussi

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2011-05-25

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1443830607

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This book examines the history and literary representation of one of the most idiosyncratic aspects of English socio-economic history, namely primogeniture as a rule governing the succession to landed estates. This double approach roughly covers the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Although this inheritance custom usually made the elder son sole heir to the whole paternal estate, to the exclusion and sometimes the utter impoverishment of the other children, and was therefore denounced as unjust and against nature, it also had its unflinching supporters. Indeed there was enough weight in the socio-political arguments of the latter to explain why this custom continued to dominate English social life for so long. This fundamental contradiction was at the heart of an ideological debate in which the plight of younger sons and the relationship between the individual, the nuclear and patrilineal family were among the issues permanently discussed. Neither were these issues the only hotly debated primogeniture-related questions. Indeed there was not one major economic, social and political development throughout the period examined to which primogeniture and entail did not directly or indirectly relate. The survey of the ideological debate on primogeniture and entail undertaken here is, to our knowledge, unprecedented. Moreover, primogeniture and entail were perceived by playwrights and novelists as a major cultural phenomenon and treated as such. The overview of their literary representation attempted here is, we believe, also unprecedented. As may be expected, emphasis throughout this book is laid on the interaction between history and literature.


Men, Women and Property in England, 1780–1870

Men, Women and Property in England, 1780–1870

Author: R. J. Morris

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-02-03

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13: 9781139442725

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This is an innovative study of middle-class behaviour and property relations in English towns in Georgian and Victorian Britain. Through the lens of wills, family papers, property deeds, account books and letters, the author offers a reading of the ways in which middle-class families survived and surmounted the economic difficulties of early industrial society. He argues that these were essentially 'networked' families created and affirmed by a 'gift' network of material goods, finance, services and support, with property very much at the centre of middle-class survival strategies. His approach combines microhistorical studies of individual families with a broader analysis of the national and even international networks within which these families operated. The result is a significant contribution to the history, and to debates about the place of structural and cultural analysis in historical understanding.


Law, Land, and Family

Law, Land, and Family

Author: Eileen Spring

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2000-11-09

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 0807864706

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Eileen Spring presents a fresh interpretation of the history of inheritance among the English gentry and aristocracy. In a work that recasts both the history of real property law and the history of the family, she finds that one of the principal and determinative features of upper-class real property inheritance was the exclusion of females. This exclusion was accomplished by a series of legal devices designed to nullify the common-law rules of inheritance under which--had they prevailed--40 percent of English land would have been inherited or held by women. Current ideas of family development portray female inheritance as increasing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but Spring argues that this is a misperception, resulting from an incomplete consideration of the common-law rules. Female rights actually declined, reaching their nadir in the eighteenth century. Spring shows that there was a centuries-long conflict between male and female heirs, a conflict that has not been adequately recognized until now.


Jane Austen For Dummies

Jane Austen For Dummies

Author: Joan Elizabeth Klingel Ray

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2011-03-03

Total Pages: 395

ISBN-13: 1118050541

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Explains Austen's methods, motivations, and morals The fun and easy way(r) to understand and enjoy Jane Austen Want to know more about Jane Austen? This friendly guide gives the scoop on her life, works, and lasting impact on our culture. It chronicles the events of her brief life, examines each of her novels, and looks at why her stories - of women and marriage, class and money, scandal and hypocrisy, emotion and satire - still have meaning for us today. Discover * Why Austen is so popular * The impact on manners, courtships, and dating * Love and life in Austen's world * Her life and key influences * Her most memorable characters


The Fee Tail and the Common Recovery in Medieval England

The Fee Tail and the Common Recovery in Medieval England

Author: Joseph Biancalana

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2001-09-27

Total Pages: 522

ISBN-13: 1139430823

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Fee tails were a heritable interest in land which was both inalienable and could only pass at death by inheritance to descendants of the original grantee. Biancalana's study considers the origins of the entail, and the development of a reliable legal mechanism for their destruction, the common recovery.


Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

Author: Helena Kelly

Publisher: Icon Books

Published: 2016-11-03

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 1785781170

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'A sublime piece of literary detective work that shows us once and for all how to be precisely the sort of reader that Austen deserves.' Caroline Criado-Perez, Guardian Almost everything we think we know about Jane Austen is wrong. Her novels don't confine themselves to grand houses and they were not written just for readers' enjoyment. She writes about serious subjects and her books are deeply subversive. We just don't read her properly - we haven't been reading her properly for 200 years. Jane Austen, The Secret Radical puts that right. In her first, brilliantly original book, Austen expert Helena Kelly introduces the reader to a passionate woman living in an age of revolution; to a writer who used what was regarded as the lightest of literary genres, the novel, to grapple with the weightiest of subjects – feminism, slavery, abuse, the treatment of the poor, the power of the Church, even evolution – at a time, and in a place, when to write about such things directly was seen as akin to treason. Uncovering a radical, spirited and political engaged Austen, Jane Austen, The Secret Radical will encourage you to read Jane, all over again.


The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600–1870

The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600–1870

Author: Daniel R. Mandell

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Published: 2020-04-07

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1421437112

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An important examination of the foundational American ideal of economic equality—and how we lost it. Winner of the Missouri Conference on History Book Award for 2021 The United States has some of the highest levels of both wealth and income inequality in the world. Although modern-day Americans are increasingly concerned about this growing inequality, many nonetheless believe that the country was founded on a person's right to acquire and control property. But in The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600–1870, Daniel R. Mandell argues that, in fact, the United States was originally deeply influenced by the belief that maintaining a "rough" or relative equality of wealth is essential to the cultivation of a successful republican government. Mandell explores the origins and evolution of this ideal. He shows how, during the Revolutionary War, concerns about economic equality helped drive wage and price controls, while after its end Americans sought ways to maintain their beloved "rough" equality against the danger of individuals amassing excessive wealth. He also examines how, after 1800, this tradition was increasingly marginalized by the growth of the liberal ideal of individual property ownership without limits. This politically evenhanded book takes a sweeping, detailed view of economic, social, and cultural developments up to the time of Reconstruction, when Congress refused to redistribute plantation lands to the former slaves who had worked it, insisting instead that they required only civil and political rights. Informing current discussions about the growing gap between rich and poor in the United States, The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America is surprising and enlightening.


The Family Novel in Russia and England, 1800-1880

The Family Novel in Russia and England, 1800-1880

Author: Anna A. Berman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-08-25

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0192691864

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This book offers a new understanding of the relationship between family structures and narrative structure in the nineteenth-century novel. Comparing Russia and England, it argues that the two nations had fundamentally different conceptions of the family and that these, in turn, shaped the way they constructed plots. The English placed primary value on the vertical, diachronic family axis—looking back to ancestors and head to progeny—while the Russians emphasized the lateral, synchronic axis—family expanding outward in the present from nuclear core, to extended and chosen kin. This difference shaped the way authors plotted consanguineal relations, courtship and marriage, and alternative kinship constructions. Idealizing the domestic sphere and emphasizing family continuity, the English novel made family a conservative force, while Russian novels approached it as a backward site of patriarchal tyranny in desperate need of reform. Russian family plots offered a progressive, liberalizing push toward new, nontraditional family constructions. The book's comparative approach calls for a re-evaluation of reigning theories of the novel, theories that are based on the linear English family model and cannot accommodate the more complex, Russian alternative. It reveals where these theories fall short, explains the reasons for their shortcomings, and offers a new way of conceptualizing family's role in shaping the nineteenth-century novel. Classics from Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope, to Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev are contextualized in the broader literary landscape of their day, and Russia's great women writers regain their rightful place alongside their male counterparts as the book draws together family history, literary analysis, and novel theory.


On Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations

On Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations

Author: Samuel Fleischacker

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2009-01-10

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 1400826055

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Adam Smith was a philosopher before he ever wrote about economics, yet until now there has never been a philosophical commentary on the Wealth of Nations. Samuel Fleischacker suggests that Smith's vastly influential treatise on economics can be better understood if placed in the light of his epistemology, philosophy of science, and moral theory. He lays out the relevance of these aspects of Smith's thought to specific themes in the Wealth of Nations, arguing, among other things, that Smith regards social science as an extension of common sense rather than as a discipline to be approached mathematically, that he has moral as well as pragmatic reasons for approving of capitalism, and that he has an unusually strong belief in human equality that leads him to anticipate, if not quite endorse, the modern doctrine of distributive justice. Fleischacker also places Smith's views in relation to the work of his contemporaries, especially his teacher Francis Hutcheson and friend David Hume, and draws out consequences of Smith's thought for present-day political and philosophical debates. The Companion is divided into five general sections, which can be read independently of one another. It contains an index that points to commentary on specific passages in Wealth of Nations. Written in an approachable style befitting Smith's own clear yet finely honed rhetoric, it is intended for professional philosophers and political economists as well as those coming to Smith for the first time.