A Summer Syllabus: The Enlightenment: At Risk?

Samuel Johnson reading (Joshua Reynolds)

A Syllabus

Where a great proportion of the people are suffered to languish in helpless misery, that country must be ill policed, and wretchedly governed: a decent provision for the poor, is the true test of civilization. — Samuel Johnson

For a course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at George University
Day: Six Wednesdays
June 26 to July 31
4215 Roberts Road, Tallwood, Fairfax, Va.
Dr Ellen Moody

Description of Course

The Enlightenment: At Risk

It’s been suggested the ideas associated with the European Enlightenment, a belief in people’s ability to act rationally, ideals of social justice, human rights, toleration, education for all, in scientific method, are more at risk than any time since the 1930s. In this course we’ll ask what was & is meant by the term, how & why did this movement spread, against what obstacles, what were the realities of the era and what were the new genres & forms of art that emerged. Our focus will be on select works by three major figures: Voltaire’s Letters on England, Diderot’s The Nun, Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands. We will also see Peter Watkins’s docudrama, Culloden (1965). It is asked that before class starts, people obtain and read Dorinda Outram’s The Enlightenment: New Approaches to European History.

Required Texts (in the order we’ll read them):

Voltaire, Letters on England, trans. Leonard Tancock. 1980; rpt. NY: Penguin, 2005.
Diderot, Denis. The Nun, trans., introd. Russell Goulbourne. 2005: rpt. NY: Oxford, 2008.
Johnson, Samuel. A Journey to the Western Islands in Scotland, together with Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, ed., introd. notes, Peter Levi. NY: Penguin, 1984.
(Alternative: Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, Journey to the Hebrides, ed., introd. Ian McGowan. 1996; rpt: Edinburgh: Canongate, 2001. ISBN 978-0-86241-4

Jean Huber, Voltaire Planting Trees, 1775 (click to enlarge).

Format: The class will be a mix of informal lecture and group discussion. Read for the first day on-line Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?”  http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html

June 26: What do we mean by this term? Voltaire: life & career. Values embodied: list of good and bad buzz words.  The 4 Revolutions. For next week read Letters on England.

July 3: Voltaire, Letters on England. Diderot: life, career, Encyclopedie, On Slavery, Art Criticism. Read for next time, “Eloge de Richardson” (“In Praise of Richardson”) online at Diderot site and Eloge de Richardson

July 9: Diderot’s The Nun. Introducing Scotland, Jacobites & Jacobins

July 17: Peter Watkins’s Culloden

July 24: London & Edinburgh: Johnson and English enlightenment (biographer, edition of Shakespeare, essays). Begin Journey to Western Islands in Scotland.

July 31: Finish Johnson; brief lecture on Madame Roland, Mary Wollstonecraft and the struggles of 1790s in France.

Johnson and Boswell’s route through Scotland (click to enlarge)

Bibliography: Supplementary reading:

Brewer, John. Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century. University of Chicago, 1897.
Buchan, James. Crowded with Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburgh’s Moment of the Mind. London: Harper Collins 2003.
Cobb, Richard & Colin Jones, ed. Voices of the French Revolution. NY: HarperCollins, 1998.
Curran, Andrew. Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely. NY: Other Press, 2009.
Davidson, Ian. Voltaire in Exile. NY: Grove, 2004.
Diderot, Denis. Selected Writings on Art and French Literature, ed, trans. introd. Geoffrey Bremner. Penguin, 1994.
————–. Letters to Sophie Volland, a selection translated by Peter France. London: Oxford, 1972.
Greene, Donald. Samuel Johnson. Boston: Twayne, 1989
McLynn, Frank. The Jacobites. Law Book Co of Australasia, 1985.
Mitford, Nancy. Voltaire in Love, introd. Adam Gopnik. NY: New York Review of Books, 2012. A classic.
Outram, Dorinda. The Enlightenment. 3rd edition. London: Cambridge, 2013
Prebble, John. Culloden, The Highland Clearances. Both Plimico, new edition 2002.
Roland, Marie-Jeanne. Memoirs of Madame Roland, trans, ed. Evelyn Shuckburgh Paris: Mercure de France, 1990.
Trouille, Mary. Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment: Women Read Rousseau. State University Press of NY, 1997.
Wain, John. Samuel Johnson. NY: VIking Press, 1974.
Williams, Helen Maria. Letters Written in France, ed. Neil Fristat & Susan Lanser. Ontario: Broadview, 2001.
Yalom, Marilyn. Blood Sisters: The French Revolution in Women’s Memory. NY: Basic Books, 1994.

Diderot

Madame Roland (probably drawn while she was in prison)

Films:

Culloden. Dir, Peter Watkins. Fictional documentary. Featuring: Tony Cosgrove, Olivier Espitalier-Noel, Don Fairservice. BBC, 1968.
La Nuit de Varennes. Dir. Ettore Scuola. Script. Sergeo Armidei. Featuring: Jean-Louis Barrault, Marcello Mastroianni, Hanna Schygulla, Harvey Keitel. Opera Film, 1982
The Nun. Dir., Script. Guillaume Nicoloux. Featuring: Pauline Etienne, Isabelle Huppert, Martha Gedeck, François Négret. Les films de Worso, 2013.

The whole of Culloden online:

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An autumn syllabus: The Enlightenment: At Risk?

Jean Huber, Voltaire Planting Trees, 1775 (click to enlarge).

A Syllabus

Where a great proportion of the people are suffered to languish in helpless misery, that country must be ill policed, and wretchedly governed: a decent provision for the poor, is the true test of civilization. — Samuel Johnson

“Tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes — Pangloss, Voltaire, Candide .

For a course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at American University
Day: Eleven Mondays,
Sept 24 to Dec 3
4801 Massachusetts Ave, NW. Washington DC
Dr Ellen Moody

Description of Course

The Enlightenment: At Risk

It’s been suggested the ideas associated with the European Enlightenment, a belief in people’s ability to act rationally, ideals of social justice, human rights, toleration, education for all, in scientific method, are more at risk than any time since the 1930s. In this course we’ll ask what was & is meant by the term, how & why did this movement spread, against what obstacles, what were the realities of the era and what were the new genres & forms of art that emerged. Our focus will be Voltaire’s Candide, Diderot’s The Nun, Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands, and an abridged edition of Madame Roland’s Memoirs. But we will also see clips from films, and I’ll offer a group of famous on-line texts (in the philosophical treatise vein), which people are free to peruse or not for further context. It is suggested that before class starts, people obtain and read Dorinda Outram’s The Enlightenment: New Approaches to European History.

Garand, Diderot (1760)

Required Texts (in the order we’ll read them):

Voltaire, Candide, trans. Robert M. Adams, ed. NIcholas Cronk. 1966; rpt. NY: Norton, 2016. 978-393-93252-2
(Alternative: Voltaire, Candide, Zadig and Selected Stories, trans. Donald Frame, ed. John Iverson, afteward Thaisa Frank. 1961; rpt. NY: Signet, 2009.978-0-451-53115-5
Diderot, Denis. The Nun, trans., introd. Leonard Tancock. NY: Penguin, 1974. ISBN 978-0-140-44300-4
(Alternative: Diderot, Denis. The Nun, trans., introd. Russell Goulbourne. 2005: rpt. NY: Oxford, 2008. ISBN 978-0-19-955524-6)
Johnson, Samuel. A Journey to the Western Islands in Scotland, together with Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, ed., introd. notes, Peter Levi. NY: Penguin, 1984. ISBN:0-14-043221-3
(Alternative: Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, Journey to the Hebrides, ed., introd. Ian McGowan. 1996; rpt: Edinburgh: Canongate, 2001. ISBN 978-0-86241-4
Johnson, Samuel: Oxford Authors, ed. Donald Greene. NY: Oxford, 1984.
Roland, Marie-Jeanne Phlipon, Memoirs of Madame Roland: A Heroine of the Revolution, trans, abridged, introd. Evelyn Shuckburgh. NY: Moyer Bell, 1990. ISBN 1-55921-014-1. It is nowadays available in paperback.

Johnson and Boswell’s route through Scotland (click to enlarge)

Format: The class will be a mix of informal lecture and group discussion.

Sept 24th: 1st week. Introd. What do we mean by this term? Overview of course. For next week read Letters on the English 5-11, 13; and all of Candide.

Oct 1st: 2nd week: Clip from La Nuit de Varennes; Voltaire, life, career. For next week finish or reread Candide, and Letters on England, 15-16, 18, 23-24. Also Roy Wolpert, “The Gull in the Garden,” Eighteenth Century Studies, 3:2 (1969):265-77. For those who bought the Norton, J. G. Weightman’s “The Quality of Candide,” pp 175-88.

Oct 8th: 3rd week: Candide & Letters on England. For next week, read one-half of Diderot’s The Nun.

Oct 15th:  Voltaire’s life and career;  then introduction to Diderot, life, career. The Encyclopedia, On Slavery, other works. For next week, finish Diderot’s The Nun.

Oct 22nd: Clips from Candide?  Diderot; career, Eloge de Richardson, Rameau’s Nephew, The Nun, introducing Johnson

Oct 29th: 6th week Clips from 2013 film, Finish discussion of Diderot. Introducing Scotland, Jacobitism,  Johnson and English enlightenment:

Nov 5th: 7th week. Johnson biography. Dictionary, Shakespeare.   ?ourney to the Western Islands of Scotland, Boswell’s Tour of Hebrides.

Nov 12th: 8th  Culloden; Discuss movies

Nov 19th: 9th week:  Finish Johnson; Begin Madame Roland and the 1790s in France, England, Ireland, US

Nov 26th: 10th week French Revolution seen from outlook of Roland Memoirs. Helen Maria Williams, Letters from France

Dec 3rd: 11th week. More on French revolution, 1781-1995; going over Roland’s text; final thoughts on what’s at risk; Richard Feynman’s Address to the Academy of Sciences upon his resignation

Stills from La Nuit de Varennes

Bibliography: Supplementary reading:

Blum, Carol. Diderot: The Virtue of a Philosopher. NY Viking, 1974. Very readable reasonably short biography.
Buchan, James. Crowded with Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburgh’s Moment of the Mind. London: Harper Collins 2003.
Cobb, Richard & Colin Jones, ed. Voices of the French Revolution. NY: HarperCollins, 1998.
Craveri, Benedetta, trans. Teresa Waugh. Madame du Deffand and Her World. Boston: Godine, 1994. One chapter on her correspondence with Voltaire.
Davidson, Ian. Voltaire in Exile. NY: Grove, 2004. You’ll learn a lot about Voltaire.
Diderot, Denis. Selected Writings on Art and French Literature, ed, trans. introd. Geoffrey Bremner. Penguin, 1994.
Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, trans., intro. Leonard Tancock. NY: Penguin, 1966. Also Gutenberg pdf at University of Australia. http://tems.umn.edu/pdf/Diderot-RameausNephew.pdf
Diderot, Éloge de Richardon [In praise of Richardson], translated online: http://graduate.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/dictionary/25diderotC1.html
Greene, Donald. Samuel Johnson. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Has the real merit of presenting Johnson apart from Boswell.
Johnson, Samuel. Selected Writings, ed. Patrick Cruttwell. 1968; rpt. NY: Penguin, 1986. Wonderful choices of texts. You emerge with a good picture of Johnson and having read some of his finest texts.
Hitchings, Henry. The world in 38 Chapters, or Dr Johnson’s Guide to Life; Defining the World: The extraordinary story of Johnson’s Dictionary. Macmillan, 2018; Picador (Farrar, Strauss Giroux), 2006.
Yale Digital Works: http://www.yalejohnson.com/frontend/node/1 Complete Works.
Kant, Immanuel. “What is Enlightenment.” 1784. Online: http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html
May, Gita. Madame Roland and the Age of Revolution NY: Columbia, 1970. Superlative.
McLynn, Frank. The Jacobites. Law Book Co of Australasia, 1985.
Mitford, Nancy. Voltaire in Love, introd. Adam Gopnik. NY: New York Review of Books, 2012. A classic.
Outram, Dorinda. The Enlightenment. 3rd edition. London: Cambridge, 2013
Prebble, John. Culloden, The Highland Clearances. Both Plimico, new edition 2002.
Roland, Jeanne-Marie Phlippon. Memoires of Madame Roland, complete, unabridged, ed. C.A. Daudan. Paris, 1864. Elibon facsimile reprint
Shenker, Israel. In the Footsteps of Johnson and Boswell. NY: Oxford UP, 1982.
Trouille, Mary. Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment: Women Read Rousseau. State University Press of NY, 1997.
Voltaire, Letters on the English, or Lettres Philosophiques. Fordham University, https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1778voltaire-lettres.asp
Wain, John. Samuel Johnson. NY: VIking Press, 1974. If you can get hold of this one, it is so enjoyable.
Williams, Helen Maria. Letters Written in France, ed. Neil Fristat & Susan Lanser. Ontario: Broadview, 2001.
Wilson, Arthur. Diderot. London: Oxford UP, 1972. The standard and a great biography of the man.
Yalom, Marilyn. Blood Sisters: The French Revolution in Women’s Memory. NY: Basic Books, 1994. A long excellent chapter on Roland

Films:

Candide. Dir. Humphrey Burton. Script. Hugh Wheeler. Music: Leonard Bernstein. Featuring: Jerry Hadley, June Anderson, Christa Ludwig. Barbican, 1991.
Candide. Dir. Lonny Price. Script changed to Broadway comedy. Music: Marin Alsop. Featuring: Paul Groves, Kristin Chenoweth, Patti LuPone. Lincoln Center, 2004
Culloden. Dir, Peter Watkins. Fictional documentary. Featuring: Tony Cosgrove, Olivier Espitalier-Noel, Don Fairservice. BBC, 1968.
La Nuit de Varennes. Dir. Ettore Scuola. Script. Sergeo Armidei. Featuring: Jean-Louis Barrault, Marcello Mastroianni, Hanna Schygulla, Harvey Keitel. Opera Film, 1982
The Nun. Dir., Script. Guillaume Nicoloux. Featuring: Pauline Etienne, Isabelle Huppert, Martha Gedeck, François Négret. Les films de Worso, 2013.

Madame Roland, circa 1790 (click to enlarge)

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The Enlightenment: At Risk? & Madame Roland

Madame Roland, from her last year of life

Friends,

For quite a while I’ve been considering giving a course on “The Enlightenment: at risk?” at one of the two Oscher Institutes of Lifelong Learning I teach at, and finally I bit the bullet and wrote this proposal for an 11 week course at the American University OLLI:

It’s been suggested the ideas associated with the European Enlightenment, a belief in people’s ability to act rationally, ideals of social justice, human rights, toleration, education for all, in scientific method, are more at risk than any time since the 1930s. In this course we’ll ask what was & is meant by the term, how & why did this movement spread, against what obstacles, what were the realities of the era and what were the new genres & forms of art that emerged. We’ll read Voltaire’s Candide, Diderot’s The Nun, Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands, and excerpts from Madame [Jeanne-Marie] Roland’s Memoirs.

I originally thought to repeat my work on Susan Sontag’s Volcano Lover, the novel of Naples in the 18th century, but decided it was too long, top heavy, and obviously tendentiousnessly pessimistic.

Then I discovered an English translation and good paperback edition of Madame Roland’s Memoirs as A Heroine of the French Revolution, translated and edited by Evelyn Shuckburgh. New York: Moyer Bell/Rizzoli, 1989. I first read Roland’s Memoirs in an Elibron facsimile of the 19th century original French edition published by her daughter, and at that time had just read a great biography by Francois Kermina (not well-known among English readers), Madame Roland ou La Passion Revolutionaire (Paris, 1976). In type Kermina’s biographies are like Amanda Vickery’s marvelous books, or Amanda Foreman’s biography of the Duchess of Devonshire. Beautifully well done scholarship meant to be read by the serious common reader, and written from a woman’s point of view. Not worshipful: she sees the ambitious conflicted woman who had an affair with Brissot. I enjoyed Gita May’s biography less because it seemed more superficial even if factually full. Gita does show what a reading girl Roland was. Now I look upon May as a conventional biographer with Kermina writing a modernist biography. Also Charles A. Dauban, Etude sur Madame Roland et son temps, another Elibron reprint, a perceptive study in the thorough 19th mode.

The value of Dauban is about 1/3 is made up of her letters. Though all my notes on a review I wrote of Eighteenth-Century Women: Studies in Their Lives, Work, and Culture, ed. Linda V. Troost, an anthology of mostly excellent essays on 18th century women writers seems to have vanished, I have the review itself on my website. I’ll transfer it to the academia.edu page (where such papers get more attention).

One exception was of Madame Roland by Mary Cisar (“Madame Roland and the Grammar of Female Sainthood”). Cisar erases what Marie-Jeanne (Manon) Phlippon (born 1754, guillotined 1793) turned to in order to lead a life at odds with her era’s mores and customs: the power of an intensely rebellious and non-religious private spiritual life. Cisar argues that Roland was an unconsciously religious anorexic recluse through a chart which correlates a generalized life pattern of a typical saint with Roland’s unsocial habits and, emptied of its political content, the record Roland left of her sexual and literary experiences; and through an insistence that a subset of religious books meant far more to Roland than all others. Cisar denigrates Roland: Roland’s memoir is “a somewhat self-indulgent reminiscence,” her “intellectual journey [is] hardly original;” she was reluctant to marry because she “considered all of [her suitors] inferior to herself”; her life was “flight from social obligation.” (How terrible.) Roland’s preference for communing with her books and thoughts and overt claims to “exceptionality” are treated with resentment.

Cisar cites and then ignores Caroline Bynum Walker’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast and “Women’s Stories, Women’s Symbols” (in Anthropology and the Study of Religion, ed, R. L. Moore and F. E. Reynolds [Chicago: Center for the Scientific Study of Relgion, 1984], 105-25) whose study of female saints, women’s symbols and individual women differentiates actual life patterns and those of women from men. Cisar also dismisses Edith Bernardin’s Les Idées Religieuses de Madame Roland (Paris, 1933), which does persuasively show Roland’s faith to have been theoretically optimistic, secular, and Rousseauistic. Roland’s references to Francis of Sales’s “La Philothée” (which Cisar makes much of), consist of one ironic reference to its sensuality and one anxious one to its injunction to repress unprocreative sex (Mémoires de Madame Roland, ed. C. A. Dauban [Paris: Elibron Facsimile edition, 2002], 50, 67).

Cisar reads Roland’s texts at face value. As has been shown by a number of scholars (e.g., Dorina Outram, The Body and the French Revolution, and Nicole Trèves, “Madame Roland ou le parcours d’une intellectuelle à la grande âme,” Femmes savantes et femmes d’esprit, ed. R. Bonnel and C. Rubinger [New York: Peter Lang, 1994], 321-40]), Roland’s writings are defensive, guarded, often disingenous to protect her, and contain a multiplicity of intellectual journeys, each fascinating and on the level of an original genius. Cisar does not cite Françoise Kermina’s Madame Roland ou la passion révolutionnaire (1957; rpt. Perrin: Librairie Académique, 1976), which is meant to reach a wide audience and based on thorough archival research of her subject’s life. Kermina shows Roland to have been intensely ambitious: Roland’s writings hide from view her frustration, two years of intense politicking, and “une amertume terrible” (the phrase is Trèves, 322).

I would add that, like many another woman, Roland’s writings reveal a woman who valued the friendships she managed to sustain. There is a set of touching letters between her and a good friend, Sophie Canet; she was close to her mother and meant to be devoted to her daughter, who remained loyal. I think Roland was throughout her life profoundly depressed. When she and her husband fell from power and she was anathematized (with salacious slander very like that directed at so many other ambitious intelligent women), a barely controlled hysteria and paralyzing trauma actuated her decision not to flee death. She kept herself sane and explored this trauma by writing the famous memoir.

I discovered an excellent Norton

The course will of course be but one quarter on Roland. If it goes well, perhaps another time I can try Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Sweden, and replace Johnson’s travel book with one of the era’s new biographies.

For the other three: I have not read Voltaire’s Candide in many years. When I did, I thought it was the 18th century equivalent of Primo Levi’s If this be Man and The Truce for the 20th century, a sina qua non of the 18th century.

We hear her shouting and then muffled

I read Diderot’s The Nun in French (La Religieuse) and watched the extraordinary 1966 film directed by Jean Rivette, screenplay Jean Gruault, produced by George de Beuregard, starring Anna Karina as Suzanne when I wrote my paper on rape in Richardson’s Clarissa. A study which illuminates much of the process Clarissa and Suzanne go through is Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The aftermath of violence – from domestic violence to political terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992). For my study of Johnson and Woolf I’ve begun listening to Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands (blended with Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides) on Recorded Books. The two readers do it very well.

Documents from the era in one of its new genres would make the point of what was the actuality of the era against its ideals more convincingly. I may add just snippets or excerpts on-line from the most famous books, Tom Paine’s Rights of Man, Rousseau’s Social Contract, Hume’s famous chapter on the argument for a belief in God based on miracles (in the Dialogues), and Beccaria’s against torture from his Crimes and Punishments.

I can Sontag’e Volcano Lover, an important philosophical book for our time rooted in the 18th century — with Daphne DuMaurier’s King’s General, in the spring. A reprise of the summer course I did at OLLI at Mason last summer.

An 18th century painting of “the Pont Neuf and pump house” (painter unnamed)

Ellen

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EC/ASECS 2015, Networks 2: Johnson circles; Revolutionary & emigrant women; journalists & libraries; mapping letters & Voltaire

View of the Temple of the Sybil, Tivoli by Louis Ducros and Giovanni Volpati

Dear friends and readers,

Herewith a 2nd report on the EC/ASECS conference held 12-14 November at West Chester University, Pa, with the broad topic of networks. I ended my 1st report with the lecture after the Friday business lunch (Sondra Jung’s talk on the chapbooks adapted from, and 18th to early 19th century history of illustrations for Richardson’s Pamela). There was a great variety in approach (from close-reading of a poem to wide-ranging discussions of archives), and kinds of topics (from building a park and landscape to writing an poignant epistolary novel whose places are mapped).

Johnson reading by Joshua Reynolds

My love of Samuel Johnson’s writing and interest in life-writing about him led me to choose “Samuel Johnson’s 18th century social and intertextual networks,” chaired by Anthony W. Lee, for the first Friday afternoon session (1:30-2:45 pm). I arrived late to William Coulter’s paper on Johnson’s “Lives of Dryden and Pope.” Prof Coulter suggested that Dryden aimed at making Homer easy to read, available while Pope was seeking intense respect for his finished polished (elegant) text. Dryden had cast his fate in the theater, then turned to journalism and at the last, translation. By contrast, Pope began with pastorals, translations of Pope’s earliest idyllic texts, moved to his translations from Homer. This is traditional, non-commercial (seemingly). Dryden was involved, while Pope existed at a distance from day-to-day raw politics. Prof Coulter felt that despite Johnson’s acerbic comments on Dryden’s career moves, he preferred Dryden’s poetry to Pope’s. In Christine Jackson-Holberg’s “Munich: Quixotic Encounters: James Elphinston and Charlotte Lennox and Johnson,” she showed an interplay of texts. Elphinston, still known for his attempt to establish a system of phonetic spelling, was an irascible man of undeviating rectitude who translated Johnson’s epigraphs; he was hypercritical and reviewed Lennox’s translations and editions of French writers’ correspondence in ways that infuriated her.

A later reprint of Lennox’s edition

Although Johnson promoted Lennox’s work, he remained loyal to Elphinston for the sake of their friendship. Anthony Lee discussed “the Johnsonian poems of Arthur Murphy.”

Arthur Murphy (1777) by Nathaniel Dance

Prof Lee quoted Arthur Sherbo on the value of Murphy’s lives, essays, verse, and translations and argued that there is strong intrinsic poetic merit in Murphy’s 1760 “Poetical Epistle to Samuel Johnson” where Murphy responded to an attack on him by Thomas Franklin who translated Sophocles’ tragedies. Murphy’s poem is about himself, uses Pope, Boileau and the dialogic form to defend and demonstrate Murphy’s writing characteristics. Prof Lee quoted from and close-read Murphy’s poem.

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For the second afternoon session I chose “Research in Progress” chaired by Jim May. Peter Briggs discussed John Dunton’s “Puzzling self-representations: Hidden in Plain Sight.”

One of John Dunton’s publications: The Night-Walker

In 1691 Dunton commenced publication of his Athenian Mercury, which was immensely popular; but he published other texts. In his oeuvre in general Dunton anticipated Tristram Shandy in his various zany voyages through space, time, including through his local neighborhood. Dunton had married Elizbeth Annesley and as long as she was alive, they stayed solvent, but not long after her death in 1696, the business collapsed.

Jack Fruchtman Jr discussed how Sophie de Condorcet and her work, especially “Letters on Sympathy” helped foster the development of moral and revolutionary sentiment.

Sophie argued people possess an innate moral sensibility which enables them to do “the right thing.” She disagreed with Adam Smith on the force and centrality of sympathy. the goal of education is to develop virtue, talent, enlightened values. She agrees with Rousseau that civilization has done more harm than good; she develops thought out of Locke: if a man already rich cultivates his wealth further, is he obliged to share his excess, she would say yes. In 1792 Condorcet called a national convention and was elected but soon after as a Girondist was expelled, and persecuted; she visited him, corresponded with him using a secret code. She saw that the revolution had gone all wrong, and tried to understand how and why. She rejected cold rationality and was appalled by Robespierre’s cults and processions.

In her “Making Do; Public History, Local Archives and Atlantic Print Works,” Emily Kugler told us about her exploratory adventures in fascinatingly diverse archives researching women migrants, servants, those sold into slavery, and those who published their writing. As her career took her from San Diego to Brown University, she attempted to follow women around the UK empire, to capture their everyday experiences. Emily was part of a Middle Passage project whose main focus was West Hampshire, and she helped build a website which enabled her team to better understand the people shaped by imperialism. She researched Mary Prince (an especial interest),

Susannah Moodie, Elizabeth Freeman, Catherine Sedgewick.

The abolitionist movement was transnational, and included women with literary ambitions: Eleanor Eldridge, Frances Green, Phyllis Wheatley; she discovered networks of widows, women having trouble obtaining their legacies or property, arising from issues of class, race. She wanted to locate the voices of such women

Wayne Hanley told us of his experiences researching archives in Paris one summer. His focus was Michael Ney, who rose to be one of the French Marshalls under Napoleon, and first Prof Hanley narrated Ney’s life and execution.

Bibliothèque Nationale de France

He then described the libraries he worked in, some of the difficulties modern procedures using the Net create. he went over problems of access, of permission, what can happen in the case of private family papers. Which reading room is the most comfortable, which archive set up most efficiently, which building most redolent of the century.

At this point the sessions were over for the day; there was a reception (coffee, snacks, and a cash bar for wine) and then people went out to dinner. I was happy to go to dinner with a friend to a local good restaurant.

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Hannah Webster Forster’s The Coquette, or the History of Eliza Wharton

The next morning, Saturday we began promptly at 9 at the university itself. The session was chaired by Ted Braun and was called “The Eighteenth-Century Version of Email and Social Networks.”

Leah Thomas discussed Hannah Forster’s 1797 American epistolary novel, The Coquette. Peter Sanford, a libertine male seduces Eliza Wharton, a flirtatious young woman; he has no intention of marrying her (as beneath him), marries someone else while as his mistress she is gradually isolated; she becomes pregnant, gives birth, and dies shortly thereafter; no one attempts to go to her to help her. Leah’s title included the phrase “Circumscribed Communities:” what she showed was the correspondences of the letters are situated in places along postal routes in New England. Leah showed how the postal routes improved over time, how many more places were included, how much more frequent the letters. If you map (draw graphs) and work out the percentage of letters between particular correspondents, you can gauge the importance of the place a character writes from and how it relates to other places in the story. Looking at the story from the perspective of who sent what, where and how many letters, you learn about the boundaries of the groups,and how Eliza’s community fails her. Only two of the letters have a day indicated — they are on a climactic final Tuesday. The novel is not long, it’s a sad affecting story, and is still read.

In “The Prince Franz Network: International Contacts in the Building of the Worlitz Palace and Park,” John Heins, himself a research librarian in the National Gallery of Art, took us on a journey through the life, friends and acquaintances of Leopold Friedrich Franz Anhalt-Dessau (1740-1817) as he built, developed and improved his extraordinary house, gardens and landscape in Germany. Franz had wanted to marry a woman for love, and retire from public life, but had been prevented and fulfilled himself through this building Prof Heins provided thumbnail portraits of all the people along the way: including Friedrich Wilhelm von Erdmansdorff (1736-1800), the great art critic Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68) with whom Franz spent and studied 13 years (the correspondence between these two men was destroyed by Leopold because Wincklemann was homosexual); Charles-Louis Clerisseau, a French draftsman (1721-1820); Bartolomeo Cavaceppi (1716-1799); Nelson and emma Lady Hamilton at Naples; Goethe (8 times) who said “the Gods allowed this prince to create a dream.” We learned of English and Italian influence; the specifics of their particular values, of agricultural and building techniques, how many years the building took, where he traveled to (Naples to see Vesuvius and Pompeii) and how long. It seems a huge number of people lived on his property whose fate he controlled. So there were multiple complex relationships behind this architectural masterpiece.

Theodore (Ted) Braun told us about a little corner and one aspect of Voltaire’s vast correspondence. Voltaire wrote untold numbers of letters of which over 10,000 have been preserved; there are over 70 volumes. By the time Voltaire was aged 40 to 44 he had produced a number of tragedies, written and published Le Henriade, Zaire and other tales, his philosophical letters, the Letters on England, to Newton; then two imprisonments in the Bastille led to Voltaire’s exile from France. Few critics have wanted to discuss how Voltaire was an envious man who prevaricated against his rivals to slander them. Among those he attacked was Jean-Jacques Lefranc, Marquis de Pomignan; Ted told of how Voltaire had never seen or read Pompignan’s play, Didon, and yet wrote a blistering critique of it. Ted then turned to Voltaire’s continual health problems: Voltaire’s letters are filled with a dread of coming death; he half mocks himself but he also thinks he is dying; and there are many ironic and metaphoric passages about his dying (piece by piece) and (great) suffering; he wrote his own epitaph at age 42.

There were a number of questions about Worlitz, Franz, and the people John Heins had discussed. People asked about the post office in the US and the maps Leah had used. I asked what was Voltaire’s illnesa and Ted said we don’t know.

It was then time for the first coffee break and some continental breakfast (juice, rolls, cakes, and fresh fruit too).

Jean Raoux, “A young woman reading a letter”

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