In July 1789 George Cadogan Morgan, born in Bridgend, Wales, and the nephew of the celebrated radical dissenter Richard Price (1723-91), found himself caught up in the opening events of the French Revolution and its consequences. In 1808, his family left Britain for America where his son, Richard Price Morgan, travelled extensively, made a descent of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers by raft and helped build some of the early American railroads. The adventures of both men are related here via letters George sent home to his family from France and through the autobiography written by his son in America.
A collection of essays exploring the impact on Welsh culture of one of the most exciting periods in history, the decades surrounding the French Revolution of 1789.
Curious Travellers: Writing the Welsh Tour, 1760-1820 provides the first extensive literary study of British tours of Wales in the Romantic period (c.1760-1820). It examines writers' responses to Welsh landscapes and communities at a time of drastic economic, environmental, and political change. Opening with an overview of Welsh tours up to the early 1700s, Mary-Ann Constantine shows how the intensely intertextual nature of the genre imbued particular sites and locations with meaning. She next draws upon a range of manuscript and published sources to trace a circular tour of the country, unpicking moments of cultural entanglement and revealing how travel-writing shaped understanding of Wales and Welshness within the wider British polity. Wales became a popular destination for visitors following the publication of Thomas Pennant's Tours in Wales in the late 1770s. Hundreds of travel-accounts from the period are extant, yet few (particularly those by women) have been studied in depth. Wales proves, in these narratives, as much a place of disturbance as a picturesque haven--a potent mixture of medieval past and industrial present, exposed down its west coast to the threat of invasion during the Napoleonic Wars. From castles to copper-mines, Constantine explores the full potential of tour writing as an idiosyncratic genre at the interface of literature and history, arguing for its vital importance to broader cultural and environmental studies.
Pamphleteering was a vital component of the popular political discussion opened up by the French Revolution of 1789, but while the English pamphlet wars have been exhaustively explored, Welsh pamphlet literature has been ignored. During the fifteen years following the French Revolution of 1789, over 100 Welsh pamphlets and sermons engaged in a public discourse which discussed the larger issues raised by the Revolution and the war against the French Republic. This pioneering volume seeks to capture the excitement of the period by demonstrating how radicals and loyalists, Dissenters, Methodists and Churchmen, pacifists and warmongers engaged in a lively argument in their published works. An in-depth essay reviews and interprets texts written by artisans, Dissenting ministers, country curates and Anglican bishops, who all used religion as politics; promoted war or peace; argued over republicanism and loyalism, and utilized the law as a stage for political ideas. All texts are fully translated and thus made accessible to an English-speaking audience for the first time.
Unbounded Attachment is about the uses of the language of sentiment in British women's writing from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jane Austen. It focuses on a range of writers for whom this language has the potential to hold together disparate elements in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century society. This potential is important to the complex politics of Charlotte Smith's response, in her long poem The Emigrants, to the onset of war with France in 1793. The language of sentiment eases the transitions in Mary Robinson's writing between courtly praise for the French queen and liberal political opinion, and shapes her attitudes to the exchange between personal sociability and the expanding commercial market for her work. For women writers such as Amelia Alderson Opie and Elizabeth Inchbald the display of sentiment makes it possible to negotiate between the demands of commercial success and sociable or political allegiance. William Godwin admired Mary Wollstonecraft's capacity for an all-embracing sentiment of 'unbounded attachment' to humanity, and posthumous accounts such as Mary Hays's, as well as fictional heroines loosely based on Wollstonecraft's reputation, emphasised the strength of feeling, the enthusiasm, which united her private character and her politics, and evoked powerful responses from both her immediate social circle and her readers. The success of Jane Austen's novels depended on the access they gave readers to the privacy of her heroines' minds, where their sensibility apprehends an underlying coherence in the apparently disjointed social worlds in which they lived.
Part of a seven-volume facsimile set, this volume comprises firsthand accounts of France in the 1790s. It includes Helen Maria Williams' letters which narrate the fall of Robespierre in 1794 and her 1798 book on Switzerland which comments sceptically on the necessary coexistence of liberty with peace.
Enlightenment studies are currently in a state of flux, with unresolved arguments among its adherents about its dates, its locations, and the contents of the 'movement'. This book cuts the Gordian knot. There are many books claiming to explain the Enlightenment, but most assume that it was a thing. J. C. D. Clark shows what it actually was, namely a historiographical concept. Currently 'the Enlightenment' is a term widely accepted across popular culture and in a variety of academic disciplines, notably history, philosophy, political theory, political science, literary studies, and theology; Clark calls for a fundamental reconsideration in each. The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History provides a critical historical analysis of the Enlightenment in England, Scotland, France, Germany, and the United States from c. 1650 to the present. It argues that the degree of commonality between social and intellectual movements in each--and, more broadly, between the five societies--has been overstated for polemical purposes. Clark shows that the concept of 'the Enlightenment' was not widely adopted in those societies until the mid-twentieth century; indeed, that it was unknown in the eighteenth. Without the concept, people at the time were unable to act in ways that would have created the Enlightenment as a coherent movement. Since the conventional account has held that the Enlightenment was a phenomenon, the idea could be used as a component of what has been called a 'civil religion': a summing up of the myths of origin, aims, and essential values of a society from which dissent is not permitted. An appreciation that it was instead a historiographical concept undermines, in turn, the idea that there was any great transition to what came to be called 'modernity'.
At the heart of Wordsworth's concerns is the question of how travel - both foreign and everyday - might also become an adventure into philosophy itself. This is an art of travel both as an approach to experience - one that draws on habits in order to revise them in the shock of new - and as a poetic approach that gives voice to the singular and foreign through the unique shapes of verse. Close readings of Wordsworth's 'pictures of Nature, Man, and Society' show how the natural is entangled with - and not simply opposed to, as many critics have suggested - the social, the political and the historical in this verse. This book draws on both eighteenth-century anthropology and travel literature, and debates in modern critical theory, to highlight Wordsworth's remarkable originality and his ongoing ability to transform our theoretical prejudgements in the unknown territory of the travel encounter.
