Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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).
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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.