Sociability: Literature and the City 1660-1780

MA in English Studies: Writing and Society 1700-1830

School of English & Drama
Markman Ellis 2010/11
Course Description
This course focuses on the representation of the city in the literature of the Restoration and eighteenth
century. In this period, London was the largest and most prosperous city in Europe. The course debates
how writers responded to the new experiences of city life, a form of sociability subsequently identified as
the birth of urbanism. The course will examine how this cultural and historical transformation can be
read in and through experiments in literary genre and style in the period. We will read widely in different
kinds of writing, including forms of popular satire, verse, periodical essays, prose fictions and the novel,
and will make dedicated studies of painting and cartography. The course will focus on four key debates,
which may include topics such as the city and its mock poetic forms, the coffee-house, the Spectator
project, and women writers (including Mary Wortley Montagu, Elizabeth Montagu and Frances Burney).
The course will also engage in key critical debates in twentieth-century city theory (such as Louis Wirth,
Georg Simmel, Henry LeFebvre, Michel de Certeau, and Richard Sennet).
The general research question this course investigates is the interaction between literature and history:
in particular how is urbanism the formation of a new and distinct affectual structure associated with
the structural transformation of urban life in the early eighteenth century manifested in and by the
literary.
Aims
To enable students to undertake research-led graduate level study in a topic specific to eighteenthcentury studies, to explore particular debates about literature, the city and its sociabilities in the
eighteenth century, and to help students develop the research, interpretative and synoptic skills
necessary to support extended critical writing.
Learning Outcomes
Demonstrate advanced-level knowledge of the topic.
Perform insightful readings of eighteenth-century literature.
Provide evidence of high-quality research.
Write lucidly and persuasively on a topic appropriate to the assessment (4000 word essay).
Class structure
Most classes require students to read a primary text (or a collection of short primary texts), and a
critical text. Texts marked with an asterisk* need to be acquired by students, either by purchasing them
from the bookshop, or borrowing from the library. The rest the great majority will be supplied as
a course pack available from the School online coursepack shop. These can also be found on googlebook
and ECCO, but please bring printed out copies to class (reading texts on laptops ruins class discussion).
Convenor
Professor Markman Ellis
Arts Faculty, Room 3.15
m.ellis@qmul.ac.uk
020788238523

Sociability

Syllabus
Week One: Introduction: London in history and representation.
Reading: Sophie Von La Roche, extract from Sophie in London 1786 (1933)
Critical texts: Louis Wirth, 'Urbanism as a Way of Life', American Journal of Sociology, 1938
Roy Porter, The Wonderful Extent and Variety of London, London 1753, ed. Sheila OConnell
(London, 2003).
Week Two: London and the space of literature
Primary text: Frances Burney, Evelina (1771)*
Critical texts: Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life, trans. by Hans Gerth in The Sociology of
Georg Simmel, ed. by Kurt H. Wolff (Glencoe: Free Press, 1950), pp. 409-24; reprinted in Simmel on
Culture, ed. by David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage Publications, 1997), pp. 174-85
Week Three: Poetry and the City: The Town Eclogue:
Primary texts: Jonathan Swift, A Description of the Morning (1709) and A Description of A City
Shower (1710) and related materials
Mary Wortley Montagu, Town Eclogues (1718/1762)
John Bancks, A Description of London (1738)
Critical text: Raymond Williams, Change in the City [extract] The Country and the City (London: OUP,
1973)
Week Four: Urban georgic:
Primary text: John Gay, Trivia or the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
James Smith, The Art of Living in London (1768)
Critical texts: Michel de Certeau, Walking in the City, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 91-110
Week Five: Research Exercise: the town eclogue.
A research exercise conducted in the British Library, focussing on little-known town eclogues by Daniel
Hayes, John Ogilvie, Andrew Erskine, William Woty, Charles Jenner, Richard Fitzpatrick, and
William Combe.
Individual reading and presentations based on independent research in British Library.
Week Six: The Coffee-House.
Restoration popular satires on coffee-house culture, 1662-1680.
Primary text: A Character of Coffee and Coffee-Houses. By M.P., (London: John Starkey, 1661)
The Maidens Complain[t] Against Coffee. (London: J. Jones, 1663)
A Cup of Coffee: or, Coffee in its Colours, (London, 1663)
The Women's Petition Against Coffee. By a Well-willer, (London, 1674).
The Mens Answer to the Womens Petition Against Coffee, (London: n.p., 1674)
The Ale-Wives Complaint, Against the Coffee-House (London: John Tomson, 1675)
Critical texts: Jrgen Habermas, Social Structures of the Public Sphere, The Structural Transformation of
the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger, (Cambridge:
Polity, 1992)
Week Seven: Reading week.
Week Eight: The Tea-Table
Primary text: Nahum Tate, Panacea: or, a Poem upon Tea (1700) and Peter Motteux, A Poem upon Tea
(1712)
Critical text: extract from Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: public, private and the division
of knowledge (Washington, DC: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005)
Week Nine: The vulgar city:
Primary text: Ned Wards London Spy (1698-1700)*

Sociability

Critical texts: Richard Sennett, The Public World of the Ancien Rgime, The Fall of Public Man (1977;
London: Penguin, 2002)
Week Ten: The Spectator Project: politeness and the polite essay
Primary text: Addison and Steele, The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from The Tatler and The
Spectator, ed. Erin Mackie (Bedford, 2000)*
Critical texts: Lawrence Klein, 'Coffeehouse civility, 1660-1714: An aspect of post-courtly culture in
England', Huntington Library Quarterly, (1997), 59, 1, 30-51
Week Eleven: Research exercise:
A research exercise conducted in the British Library. Topic to be decided (class to choose from: urban
womens self-writing; poetry of civic urbanism; representations of pleasure gardens; tea and the
tea-table).
Individual reading and presentations based on independent research in British Library.
Critical texts: Clare Brant, Varieties of Womens Writing, in Women and Literature in Britain 1700-1800,
ed. Vivien Jones (Cambridge, 2000), 285-303.
Week Twelve: Prostitution in the city.
Primary text: John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748)*
Samuel Johnson, 'History of Misella', The Rambler, 1752
Tracts promoting the foundation of the Magdalen House (by Saunders Welsh and Robert
Dingley), (1758)
The histories of some of the penitents in the Magdalen-House, as supposed to be related by themselves
(1760) [extract]
Critical text: Michel Foucault, Method: The Deployment of Sexuality from The History of Sexuality, (1976)
General preparatory reading list:
Ackroyd, Peter, London: the biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000)
Burke, Peter, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, revised edition (Aldershot, 1994)
Ellis, Markman, The Coffee House: a cultural history (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004)
George, Mary Dorothy, London Life in the XVIII Century (1924, reprint Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989)
LeGates Richard T., and Frederic Stout, The City Reader, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2000),
Linebaugh, Peter, The London Hangd: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century, (London: Penguin,
1991)
Marshall, Dorothy, Dr. Johnson's London, (New York, 1968)
Ogborn, Miles, Spaces of Modernity: London's geographies 1680-1780, (London: Guildford, 1998)
Reid, Christopher and John Mullan, Eighteenth-Century Popular Culture: a selection (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000)
Rogers, Pat, Grub Street: studies in a subculture, (London, 1972)
Rud, George, Hanoverian London 1714-1808, (London, 1971)
Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London, 1986), especially
chapters 1 and 2
Wienreb, Ben and Christopher Hibbert, et al, The London Encyclopedia, (London, Papermac, 1987)
Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City, (1973) repr. London: Hogarth, 1993.
Advice on editions of primary texts that can be purchased:
Frances Burney, Evelina: Or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World, ed. Vivien Jones (Oxford
World's Classics) (Paperback) ISBN: 0192840312
John Gay, Trivia or the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716): Abebooks.com has a cheap published on
demand copy of the 1922 edition edited by Williams, but you would be better of using the
Googlebook 1730 edition, which is a free pdf download. See also Clare Brants new edition,
Walking the Streets of Eighteenth-century London: John Gay's Trivia (1716) (Oxford, 2007), now in
paperback (but still 17).

Sociability

Ned Wards London Spy (1698-1700). The only unexpurgated modern edition is The London Spy, Compleat
in Eighteen Parts (from the Fourth Edition of 1709), edited by Paul Hyland (East Lansing: Colleagues
Press, 1993), which can be found second hand on Abebooks, but is very expensive. Photocopy
or pdf to be supplied.
Addison and Steele, The Tatler and The Spectator. The best recent edition is The Commerce of Everyday Life:
Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator, ed. Erin Mackie (Bedford, 2000) ISBN: 0333690915
find on Amazon or in QM bookshop.
John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748), ed. Peter Sabor, (Oxford World's Classics)
(Paperback) ISBN: 0192835653
The histories of some of the penitents in the Magdalen-House, as supposed to be related by themselves (1760)
[extract, photocopy or pdf to be supplied]. The complete text is now available: The Histories of
Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House, (Chawton House Library Series: Women's Novels),
ed. by Jennie Batchelor and Megan Hiatt (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006) ISBN-10:
1851968601 Hardcover, 45.