Nicola Parsons

Reading gossip in early eighteenth-century England

Acknowledgments List of Illustrations Introduction: Queen Annes Bounty Gossip and Government: Deciphering the Body of the State Reading Secrets of State: Delarivier Manley and the New Atalantis Reforming Reference: Trials and Texts Lucubrating London: The Tatler and the Female Tatler A Newer Atalantis : Political and Generic Revolutions Conclusion: Annes Legacy Notes Bibliography Index

Reading the Represented Past: History and Fiction from 1700 to the Present

When the Institute of Historical Research (UK) held its annual conference for 2011 on the topic of historical fiction, involving academic and public historians as well as historical novelists and publishers (though notably not literary critics), public demand for access was so great that the organisers developed a website in order to host a ‘virtual’ conference only a few days later. The conference, entitled ‘Novel Approaches’, probed a number of questions relating to the relationship between academic history and historical fiction, including how the two fields might be differentiated, how firm the boundary is between them, and whether the genre of historical fiction has become ‘respectable’. None of these questions are new; all have been the subject of popular and academic debate at least since the eighteenth century and yet they continue to be the focus of energetic discussion.

“The ARMS of Friendship”: John Dunton’s Platonic Acquisitions

This chapter examines how platonic love was staged in the pages of the Athenian Mercury and in John Dunton’s later Athenian texts. Focussing on Dunton’s professional interactions with Elizabeth Singer (later Rowe)—a leading contributor to the Athenian Mercury and an important figure in Dunton’s later publication—this chapter illuminates platonic love’s overlooked role in Dunton’s commercial aspirations. It argues that Dunton capitalised on platonic love’s capacity to act as an engine of textual production, and appropriated its tenets to fit the imperatives of acquisition and novelty associated with serial publication. Espousing this public intimacy allowed Dunton to enact a professional claim to Rowe’s poetic corpus and person.

Reading and Remembering History in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year

A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), a fictionalised account of the bubonic plague that swept through London in 1665, highlights the uneasy accommodation that exists between Daniel Defoe’s interest in historical detail and the development of the novel, as it is generally understood. The novel both relies upon and incorporates printed historical documents, including civic orders promulgated to prevent the progress of the plague; epidemiological observations as to how infection spreads and might be forestalled; and mortality statistics published weekly throughout the epidemic (Bastian 1965, 160-1). This explicit concern with historicity is often understood to disrupt the narrative, compromising its fictional status and constraining the text’s ability to imaginatively reconstruct the history of this ‘great visitation’ (Richetti 1976, 240; 1987, 119). But this reading overlooks the fact that many eighteenth-century readers of A Journal of the Plague Year, including Sir Walter Scott, identified the text not as history but as romance — a mode that privileges imaginative and sympathetic identification with the past.