Changing Sentiments and the Magdalen Hospital: Luxury, Virtue and the Senses in Eighteenth-Century Culture by Mary Peace (review)

Abstract

and print in poetic publications uncovers the successful manipulation and mixed approaches of a diverse range of authors, including Lamb, Pope, Blake, and D’Israeli. As ever, Douglas is careful about dogmatic conclusions and points out that the evidence suggests not rivalry or teleological outcomes, but complex and comparative co-existence. Th e chapter on Maria Edgeworth’s novels returns to questions of gender and class, arguing that “Edgeworth manifested a sustained interest in relationships between writing and social position” and that “acts of copying” represented “access to social power” (153). Perhaps the most compelling chapter is the fi nal one recounting the experiences of Joseph Barker, a Methodist preacher whose working-class narrative of self-improvement evidences the tensions parsed throughout the monograph. Returning to her discursive emphasis, Douglas synthesizes the ways in which wider disciplinary structures, the physicality of writing, and our continuing belief in the transformative eff ects of writing technology fi rst developed in the long eighteenth century.