From the 1750s to the 1830s, numerous British intellectuals, novelists, essayists, poets, playwrights, translators, educationalists, politicians, businessmen, travel writers, and philosophers brooded about the merits and demerits of the French language. The decades under consideration encompass a particularly tumultuous period in Anglo-French relations that witnessed the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), the American War of Independence (1775-1783), the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792-1802 and 1803-1815, respectively), the Bourbon Restoration (1814-1830), and the July Revolution (1830) - not to mention the gradual expansion of the British Empire, and the complex cultural shifts that led from Neoclassicism to Romanticism. In this book, Marcus Tomalin reassesses the ways in which writers such as Tobias Smollett, Maria Edgeworth, William Wordsworth, John Keats, William Cobbett, and William Hazlitt acquired and deployed French. This intricate topic is examined from a range of critical perspectives, which draw upon recent research into European Romanticism, linguistic historiography, comparative literature, social and cultural history, education theory, and translation studies. This interdisciplinary approach helps to illuminate the deep ambivalences that characterised British appraisals of the French language in the literature of the Romantic period.

Highlighting the remarkable women who found ways around the constraints placed on their intellectual growth, this collection of essays shows how their persistence opened up attributes of potent female imagination, radical endeavour, literary vigour, and self-education that compares well with male intellectual achievement in the long eighteenth century. Disseminating their knowledge through literary and documentary prose with unapologetic self-confidence, women such as Anna Barbauld, Anna Seward, Elizabeth Inchbald and Joanna Baillie usurped subjects perceived as masculine to contribute to scientific, political, philosophical and theological debate and progress. This multifaceted exploration goes beyond traditional readings of women’s creativity to add fresh, at times controversial, insights into the female view of the intellectual world. Bringing together leading experts on British women’s lives, work and writings, the volume seeks to rediscover women’s appropriations of masculine disciplines and to examine their interventions into the intellectual world. Through their engagement with a unique perspective on women’s lives and achievements, the essays make important contributions to the existing body of knowledge in this important area that will inform future scholarship.

This volume offers a revaluation of the work of Romantic-era Scottish writer John Galt. Galt traveled throughout the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds and founded the Canadian city of Guelph while remaining in touch with local cultures and politics in Scotland and England. He wrote fiction, drama, and biography based on his personal observations of life and in ways that associated him with the “theoretical” or “conjectural” methods of Scottish Enlightenment historiographers. Galt’s insights into the societies he inhabited and visited, his perceptions of political extremism and class conflict, his attitudes toward community building and progress, his convictions about determinism and historical revisionism, his strategies for manipulating literary genres and readers’ responses, and his ambivalence about the value of literature deserve consideration in light of new thinking in our own fields about what constitutes social knowledge and viable ways to represent it. The essays in this volume examine Galt’s work in light of the convergence of literature, history, and social theory in Scottish Enlightenment and Romantic-era culture and in our own interdisciplinary environment. Discussing Galt’s work and significance in the many areas, genres, and contexts in which he figures, they broaden the circle of contacts with whom we associate Galt, moving from expected comparisons with contemporaries Walter Scott and James Hogg to unexpected links with such later authors and social thinkers as George Douglas Brown and Harriet Martineau. Moreover, these essays expand the repertoire of works studied, offering the first extended analyses of Eben Erskine, Rothelan, and the Travels and Observations of Hareach, the Wandering Jew along with new readings of Annals of the Parish, Bogle Corbet, and Ringan Gilhaize. Overall, the essays draw out the implications of Galt’s practices and relations as a journalist, dramatist, critic, biographer, and novelist, developing grounded conjectures about their significance in Galt’s time and our own.