BARS Blog

Julia Banister is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Leeds Beckett University. She is an interdisciplinary literary scholar with particular interests in bringing literary texts together with other forms of writing and in exploring the relationship between texts and historical contexts. Her research specialisms include gender and the body; war and military service; disability studies; and travel writing. She has published on authors including William Falconer, Laurence Sterne and Jane Austen. Her monograph Masculinity, Militarism and Eighteenth-Century Culture, 1689–1815, which we discuss below, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018.

1) How did you first become interested in military masculinities?

My interest began with the study of masculinity, which I can trace to studying women’s writing when I was an undergraduate. When I started my doctoral research, I turned to the study of masculinity, which was then a comparatively new field. It might seem odd now, but early scholars of masculinity (many of whom were sociologists) worried about turning the critical spotlight to men, or rather, turning it back to men: what might that mean for gender studies more broadly? Would the new focus on men undermine efforts by feminist scholars to bring to light women’s gendered experiences? The study of masculinity has since shown that we can’t really get to grips with, for example, the social performance of gender or lived experience of gender inequality, without acknowledging that masculinity is as much a construct as femininity. In my study of ‘military’ masculinity, I examine a particular construction of masculinity that is hidden in plain sight.

2) Your book covers a period stretching from the Glorious Revolution to the Battle of Waterloo.  What do you consider to be the main changes in how military men were seen over the course of this span?

We all know the cliché that the Romantic period was a time of great change, but this well-worn idea is as useful a starting point for understanding military service in the eighteenth century as it is for understanding, say, the consumer or industrial revolutions. Military historians employ the term ‘military revolution’ to describe the process of change in the way wars were fought which occurred, roughly, between 1500 and 1800. By the early eighteenth century, it was apparent to many commentators that theirs was an age of ‘modern’ warfare; the vassals of the medieval world, like the heroes of the ancient world, could be said to have put down their weapons and picked up their ploughshares as circumstances demanded, but modern wars required modern military forces. In my book, I contrast the decline of ‘old’ notions of military service as the exercise of aggression and bravery, selflessness and patriotism, with the emergence of a ‘new’, professional military man, who calculates risk, acts in accordance with (externally imposed) codes of discipline, and hopes for financial reward. It is not the case that old ideals were simply replaced by new ones, however. After all, the tussle between old and new ideas of military service was also a tussle between old and new ideas about the (physical) matter and meaning of masculinity. In other words, the stakes for the debate were much higher than they might seem.

3) Your chapters move between considerations of major debates and trials and discussions of Augustan attitudes, the Gothic, the Culture of Sensibility and nascent Romanticism.  How did you come to choose these points of focus, and how important to your design was combining perspectives from different modes, genres and social forms?

My ‘home’ discipline is literary studies, so when I started working on military masculinity I thought a lot about methodological issues for gender history, such as how gender ideals relate to lived experience, which is hard for historians to access. By studying the records of five trials of naval officers accused of wrongdoing in active service, I hoped to hear from at least some individuals about their lives and experiences. That said, the questions posed by the naval courts—about what should be expected of a senior military man—were also questions that concerned society more broadly. In my chapters, I aim to show that the answers given to those questions in a wide range of printed texts are inflected by the values and commitments which characterise phases or periods, such as the culture of sensibility.

4) What do you think that a renewed attention to military contexts might help us see in Romantic-period literature?

The study of military matters has traditionally been the preserve of military historians, but in the last two decades literature scholars have really taken on war and militarism as subjects. Romanticists have been at the forefront of this, and so it is right to be asking ‘what next’. The close connection between the core decades of the Romantic period and two decades of conspicuous, wide-spread warfare means that scholars of Romantic-period literature are particularly well placed when it comes to uncovering new connections between war and culture. In addition, the complexity of the wars in this period means that we should keep looking at texts we know well. For example, in my book, I write about Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Captain Wentworth is not just a generically ‘military’ character; as a sailor in the Napoleonic Wars, he has had particular military experiences, which reinforce his particular understanding of his military role, notably his interest in financial reward. Looked at in this way, Persuasion is not simply ‘about’ the military; rather, the novel intervenes in debates about the military that were current in the period.

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

I’m sticking with the military. My interests in masculinity, gender and the body remain important to me, but my current work is focused on the relationship between the military and one of the most characteristic, and controversial, literary genres of the eighteenth century and Romantic period: the gothic. Like my first book, my new project on military gothic covers the long eighteenth century, but the new project has a narrower, or rather deeper, focus on traditionally ‘literary’ texts. It may sound contradictory, but I think there’s a direct relationship between my enthusiasm for interdisciplinary study and my turn to literary genre. To think about this new project in terms of the broader context, it is hard for those of us working in universities in the UK not to be aware that the value of the humanities is, increasingly, a matter of politicised public debate, and so it also seems to me that this is a very good time to celebrate our discipline.

Jennie Batchelor is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Kent. Her research interests include women’s writing; authorship and anonymity; periodicals and women’s magazines; representations of gender; the politics and practices of work; sexuality and the body; book history; material culture studies; and the eighteenth-century charity movement. Her books include Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690s-1820s (co-edited with Manushag N. Powell; Edinburgh University Press, 2018), Women’s Work: Labour, Gender and Authorship (Manchester University Press, 2010) and Jane Austen Embroidery: Authentic Embroidery Projects for Modern Stitchers (Pavillion, 2020). She recently gave the Marilyn Butler Memorial Lecture at BARS/NASSR 2022; her excellent talk drew on the research that fed into her newest monograph, The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832) and the Making of Literary History (Edinburgh University Press, 2022 – freely available via open access), which we discuss below.

1) How did you first become interested in the Lady’s Magazine?

My fascination with the Lady’s Magazine began in 1998 when I was in the early stages of my PhD dissertation on dress and the female body in eighteenth-century literature and culture. One of the chapters was about the periodical press, and I knew that the Lady’s Magazine included fashion reports and plates and carried essays on dress, too. So, I went to the British Library to consult the copies that had survived the aerial bombing that destroyed much of the collection in the 1940s and naively thought I would spend a couple of weeks consulting everything the magazine printed on the subject in those volumes. Three months later, I came up for air. I became completely immersed in the magazine in all its unapologetic miscellaneity. And while I tried to be disciplined and stick only to articles and images that specifically addressed matters of dress and appearance (and there are more than enough of those), I could not help but be drawn in by the advice columns, recipes, trial reports, travel writing, biographies and essays on science, geography, history and philosophy it contained. In short, I was hooked.

2) What were the major challenges you faced in getting to grips with a run of issues covering over fifty years and containing millions of words?

I am so glad you inserted the word ‘major’ into this question to prevent me from having to recount all of them. Suffice it to say, there were a lot. The first was access. No copyright library has a full run of the periodical, a fact that is surely in part to blame for the scholarly neglect of the publication. That challenge was resolved when I approached Adam Matthew Digital to enquire if they would be interested in digitising the periodical and, to my eternal gratitude, they said yes. The result was published as Eighteenth-Century Journals V in 2013. But other challenges remained. The magazine is a glorious miscellany, with articles in every genre you can imagine and covering almost every topic you can conceive. Some of the articles (particularly those on science) lay far beyond my expertise. My GSCE French and A-Level German were also not up to the challenge of the periodical’s multilingual content.  

As your question implies, though, the biggest problem was the size of the run. I wanted to read it all and I wanted to read it chronologically. (When I say ‘read it all’ I have to admit that I skim read lots of articles in the interests of time.) Reading consecutive issues chronologically was the only way that made sense to me to read the magazine, but at the same time I realised this was actually a completely nonsensical approach. We know from recent work by the likes of Eve Tavor Bannet, Christina Lupton and Abigail Williams that readers in this period often read discontinuously, and magazines, of course, are not and never have been designed to be read from cover to cover. I like to think that putting the book together and organising material in it around the issues that structure each chapter allowed me to read it discontinuously after the fact. 

3) How does the Lady’s Magazine serve to challenge default assumptions about Romantic-period authorship and literary history?

When I first read the magazine in the 1990s, I simply couldn’t fathom why it was all but invisible in literary historical scholarship. While this oversight could be explained by some of the challenges I have mentioned above, when I delved into the matter further, I was confronted by a range of prejudices against the magazine, its contributors and readers that simply did not align with my experience of reading it. The Lady’s Magazine, I learned, was ephemeral, trivial and fashion obsessed. It amounted to little more than a training guide in the arts of womanhood. It envisaged readers as consumers rather than readers. Worst of all, given that most of its original copy was provided gratis for the much of the magazine’s history by volunteer reader-contributors, its encouraged literary amateurism. As a cultural document, the magazine might be interesting, but as ‘Literature’, I was assured, it was lacking. Only a very partial account of the magazine, I concluded, can prop up such arguments.

In the book, I track the process by which the periodical was systematically written out of literary history from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. I argue also that that it is precisely the magazine’s failure (and sometimes its active refusal) to conform to what would become normative categories of literary analysis that makes it so important. There are so many narratives we have told ourselves about Romantic literary history that simply don’t hold up after reading this incredibly popular magazine. Narratives about the rise and fall of particular genres like the sonnet, oriental tale or epistolary novel, to take just a few examples, come under strain. So too does our sense of who was being read at specific moments in time. The Lady’s Magazine, I contend, understood itself as an agent in literary history and the writers and figures (women and men) they acknowledged, published, reprinted or commemorated present a very different canon to any taught in classrooms today.

Uncovering the identities and reconstructing career biographies for the periodical’s contributors also offers a very different sense of what it means to be an author in this period. In the book, I reconstruct career biographies for several of the magazine’s most interesting and important contributors. None are amateurs in the pejorative sense of the term, even if some or all of their work for the magazine was unpaid. (Unpaid does not equal amateur.) Writers like the prolific translator, poet and essayist Radagunda Roberts, Mary Pilkington, George Crabbe, Thomas Chatterton and Catherine Day Haynes (later Golland) – all of whom published in the magazine and elsewhere – were determinedly professional writers, albeit ones whose lives as authors were characterised by precarity. At the same time, it is worth noting also that these writers achieved audiences that many of the more famous writers of the day could have only dreamed of achieving through volume publication alone. With an estimated monthly circulation of around 15,000 copies a month at its height, more people would likely have been reading and talking about the wonderful fiction of Elizabeth Yeames of Norwich in 1811 than an anonymous novel called Sense and Sensibility printed in a standard run of 750 copies. I could go on, but it is all in the book. I might just add that Jane Austen read the Lady’s Magazine, too.

4) How much did the Lady’s Magazine change over the course of its run, and what were the most important turning points?

The magazine changed quite a lot over time, but the majority of these changes happened in the second half of its 62-year run. In its first two years – during which time there were two versions of the magazine – a lot of thought was given to working out the right formula for the magazine’s audience. Once settled, that formula stayed relatively steady until 1800, when the magazine introduced its first price hike from 6d to 1s, to accommodate regular hand-coloured fashion plates to allow it to compete with rival, The Lady’s Monthly Museum (1798–1828). A second set of changes followed in the run up to the launch of the magazine’s new series in 1820, when it was under the editorship of its long-time printer, Samuel Hamilton. Lengthy, illustrated reviews were introduced for the first time, and reader-authored content was marginalised. Those authors who did write for the magazine (like Mary Russell Mitford, Barbara Hofland and Thomas Noon Talfourd) were now paid. The illustrations and production values improved under the subsequent editorship of Charles Heath and the magazine started forming alliances with other periodical forms, such as the fashion journal and the newly devised annuals. By the end of its run, the magazine was a very different proposition again. It was less miscellaneous and more conservative. Nevertheless, it was an important bridge to the women’s magazines that followed, many of whose editors harked back to Lady’s Magazine’s earlier issues (to its popular serial fictions, advice columns, reader dialogue and needlework patterns) when fashioning their own titles.

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

I am currently working on a few projects. I have a longstanding interest in women’s labour and its devaluation. One of the ways that this interest connects with my work on the Lady’s Magazine is via the needlework patterns for ornamenting clothes and household objects that it issued monthly from 1770 to the end of 1819. For many years, I have been building up a collection of these patterns (most of which were disbound from monthly issues of the magazine and have been scattered to the winds) and, in addition to making these available to the public via a searchable website, I am writing a journal article on the patterns, women’s needlework and the circulation of craft knowledge. This, in turn, relates to a longer project I am currently working on about the craft of writing, which looks at eighteenth-century women writers who were also makers and the intersections between writing and other forms of creative making practice. I have some tentative ideas about further work on Romantic periodicals and magazines that I would dearly like to do some day, but having spent so much of the last decade immersed in those millions of words in the Lady’s Magazine, I may leave that for a little while.

Laura Kirkley is a Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at Newcastle University. Her research interests include cross-cultural exchange and women’s writing in the eighteenth century and Romantic period, as well as editing and the digital humanities. Her publications examine subjects including Mary Wollstonecraft’s translations and translational afterlife, Wollstonecraft and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and transnational literary networks, particularly in the context of women’s writing. Her edition of Thomas Holcroft’s translation of Isabelle de Montolieu’s Caroline of Lichtfield (discussed here) was published in hardback in 2013 and reissued in paperback in 2016. She is also one of the team behind The Gothic Women Project. Mary Wollstonecraft: Cosmopolitan, her new monograph, which we discuss below, has just been published by Edinburgh University Press.

1) How did you first encounter Mary Wollstonecraft?

I was supposed to be writing an essay about Austen in my second year as an undergraduate at Exeter College Oxford, and I got distracted by references to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in Marilyn Butler’s Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Marilyn was my tutor and she was very encouraging when I went down a Wollstonecraft rabbit-hole in my Austen essay. I didn’t know at the time that she’d worked with Janet Todd to put Wollstonecraft’s collected works back in print in the 1989 Pickering and Chatto edition, so I didn’t fully appreciate my good fortune until Marilyn ended up supervising my final-year dissertation on Wollstonecraft and Rousseau. I’ve been a Wollstonecraft obsessive ever since.

2) How does your previous work on translation inform your monograph’s focus on Wollstonecraft’s cosmopolitanism?

I define Wollstonecraft as a cosmopolitan partly because she spent so much of her career as a translator of European literature and a reviewer of foreign works for the Analytical Review. I’ve previously published on French and German translations of her works, but those translations were directly influenced by the transnational networks she established through Joseph Johnson’s publishing house, which had strong links with Continental Europe and America. It’s clear from her surviving letters that she tried to make contact with the French and German authors she translated. For instance, when she translated Christian Gotthilf Salzmann’s Moralisches Elementarbuch (1782; extended edition 1785), the overlap between their educational philosophies resulted in Salzmann and his son-in-law translating and editing some of Wollstonecraft’s works for their German readership. In her advertisements, Wollstonecraft also makes it clear that she is a creative translator whose naturalised English versions constitute critical commentaries on her source texts as well as attempts to convey their moral and cultural importance to her British audience. In short, Wollstonecraft’s translations inform and contribute to her engagement with other cultures. They tend to reflect her cosmopolitan belief that there are broadly universal values which are best instilled with sensitivity to local contexts and practices, and they often mount a subtle challenge to the misconceptions that divide people across false barriers of race, class, religion, and nation.

3) Which authors, events and experiences do you see as most strongly influencing Wollstonecraft’s thinking on cosmopolitanism?

Wollstonecraft was driven by British anti-Jacobinism and legally sanctioned misogyny to prefer Revolutionary France to her mother country. Having said that, I don’t define her as a cosmopolitan simply because she rejected blinkered national allegiances. I define her as a cosmopolitan because she espoused an ethical model of patriotism that incorporated world citizenship, and because her works are shaped by transnational literary exchanges as well as her experiences of travel and expatriation. I show that she was influenced by several Continental European writers, including the French educationalist Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis, the German pedagogue Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, and the French Revolutionary orator Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau. But the book puts two figures centre-stage: Wollstonecraft’s Newington Green mentor, Dr Richard Price, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Price was a rationalist theologian who supported the American and French Revolutions and, in his Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789), he put forward a model of patriotism that incorporated world citizenship. Rousseau might seem a surprising choice: most people know that she attacks his gender politics in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and he’s also often considered a proto-nationalist philosopher, the quintessential anti-cosmopolitan. But Wollstonecraft read every work of Rousseau she could get her hands on, and she once confessed that she had ‘always been half in love with him’. I argue that she drew on his philosophy to showcase her dilemma about how best to refine private affects into a cosmopolitan love of humankind, and that she was inspired by his work to foreground subjective responses with potential philosophical significance.

Equally important, though, are Wollstonecraft’s life experiences. As part of cosmopolitan circles in radical London and Revolutionary Paris, she rubbed shoulders with writers like Tom Paine and Helen Maria Williams, whose support for the Revolution stemmed from their embrace of world citizenship over national loyalties. She never made it out of Europe (despite plans to go to America) but even so, her travels confronted her with different political systems, social mores and literary traditions. She was often out of her comfort zone and forced – with varying success – to confront and revise her prejudices. With every border crossing and culture shock, she re-examined her cosmopolitan ethic, and, in Scandinavia particularly, she developed an anti-imperialist preference for cultural authenticity and diversity. I suggest that she struggled towards the end of her life to square that preference with her philosophical universalism.

4) Which works by Wollstonecraft do you think make the most distinctive contributions to advancing or interrogating cosmopolitan discourses?

Wollstonecraft expresses a universalist cosmopolitan ethic in her first published work, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, which came out in 1787. This is clearest when she advocates philanthropy – in the sense of charitable giving but also in the root sense of ‘love of humankind’. Other early works such as Original Stories from Real Life and Mary, A Fiction appropriate and transform foreign-language source material, reiterate the emphasis on philanthropy, and express a cosmopolitan belief in the underlying commonality of human nature. Having said that, from 1790, Wollstonecraft’s response to the French Revolution amplifies the cosmopolitanism of her early works. I argue that, in both Vindications, she promotes an ethical form of patriotism compatible with world citizenship. She also considers what nurtures public-spirited virtues within the bounds of a nation, and how national loyalties can further or frustrate the claims of justice and philanthropy. I devote two chapters to the much-neglected An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, and I argue that, for Wollstonecraft, political justice depends on channelling the human instinct for compassion towards a principled commitment to universal benevolence. This means wrestling with the paradox that human sympathies are both essential to benevolence and liable to corrupt it. In Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, Wollstonecraft tries to resolve that paradox. She does this by identifying her personal suffering with the suffering of female outsiders from unfamiliar cultures. In this way, she constructs an epistolary voice that is compassionate, solidaristic, and distinctively gendered, embodying an ‘ethic of caring’ that distinguishes her from the detached, elitist Grand Tourist. Crucially, Wollstonecraft’s ethic of caring entails a philanthropic commitment to the well-being of others that grows out of her feelings for her lovers and her daughter. In the spectacular natural world of the Scandinavian fjords, her erotic and maternal sentiments inspire imaginative connections with a pantheistic nature as well as intense compassion for a boundless community of strangers whose pain she longs to relieve. I therefore argue that her epistolary persona enacts a cosmopolitan ethic of caring which is driven by heartfelt sentiments but which can also be reconciled with the principles of justice.

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

I’m currently editing Wollstonecraft’s translations for the Oxford University Press scholarly edition of The Collected Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, which is contracted under the General Editorship of E. J. Clery. As part of the team behind the Gothic Women Project, which runs monthly online seminars on underappreciated works by Gothic women writers, I’m also researching connections between Wollstonecraft’s cosmopolitanism and the works of Mary Shelley. Others have remarked on Shelley’s transnational outlook, but I’m especially interested in her examination of cosmopolitan and republican modes of thought in the contexts of war and trenchant nationalism, and in connections between her works and those of Germaine de Staël and Sydney Owenson.