Leigh Wetherall Dickson

Introduction: Fashioning the Unfashionable

This volume is one of the publications arising out of the Leverhulme Trust research project ‘Fashionable Diseases: Medicine, Literature and Culture, 1660–1832’, which was conducted between 2013 and 2016 by members of the English division at the University of Northumbria and of the History Department at the University of Newcastle. The purpose of the project was to investigate how certain diseases, some of them extremely unpleasant, or even destructive to life, became fashionable during certain periods, as ideas about culture and the valuation of specific modes of living, suffering and dying change. In the period of the project, for example, mental conditions such as melancholy continued, at least in certain circles, to enjoy a high degree of fashionability, as they had since the early seventeenth century, partly because of their association with intelligence and creativity, and subsequently with nerves and sensibility.

Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture

This collection examines different aspects of attitudes towards disease and death in writing of the long eighteenth century. Taking three conditions as examples – ennui, sexual diseases and infectious diseases – as well as death itself, contributors explore the ways in which writing of the period placed them within a borderland between fashionability and unfashionability, relating them to current social fashions and trends. These essays also look at ways in which diseases were fashioned into bearing cultural, moral, religious and even political meaning. Works of literature are used as evidence, but also medical writings, personal correspondence and diaries. Diseases or conditions subject to scrutiny include syphilis, male impotence, plague, smallpox and consumption. Death, finally, is looked at both in terms of writers constructing meanings within death and of the fashioning of posthumous reputation.

Fashion Victim: High Society, Sociability and Suicide in Georgiana Cavendish’s The Sylph

On Tuesday 15 September 1789 a son of the French chancellor shot himself on arrival in Brighton. When efforts were made to repatriate his remains it was preferred that he stay ‘in the fatal soil of England’. It would appear that the soil of England was indeed fateful as the unfortunate Monsieur de Maupean had been in the country for less than 24 hours before he committed suicide. On his person was found a packet of papers including two credit notes, one for 6000 livres and one for ‘whatever sum he might have occasion’, and at the New Ship Inn his personal effects consisted of ‘two valuable watches, one of them set with diamonds; two diamond crosses of the Order of Knights of Malta; three miniatures of a Lady, set in gold; a pair of diamond shirt sleeve buttons’, a considerable amount of hard cash in varying currencies including 91 shillings, and a cryptic note that declared ‘“Je meurs innocent; J’en atteste de Ciel” I call Heaven to attest that I die innocent.’

What a Creature is Man

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?1 Hamlet’s speech to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern paints a picture of humanity’s infinite potential only to conclude that all ambitions and achievements are ultimately insignificant and worthless. As Allan Ingram and Stuart Sim have already noted, Hamlet is an exploration of how ‘Man, with all his advantages, is crippled –by time, by flesh, by motivation, by death and by uncertainty […]. [T]he human mind would be capable of anything were it not for thinking’.2 Hamlet’s words highlight the point where the ability and desire of ‘man’ as an individual, in order to elevate himself above the species, intersects with the self-consciousness of mortality. His speech is the articulation of a moment of melancholic introspection that serves to confirm the central place of death even in the midst of a desire for revenge and is, therefore, also an articulation of complete paralysis. Familiar with Shakespeare since childhood, Robert Burns quotes, or rather misquotes, from Hamlet throughout his correspondence and this speech clearly resonates with him as he paraphrases Hamlet’s exclamation on several occasions.