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Correction to: Equiano, Sharp, Mansfield, and the Zong Massacre: History and Significance
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Conclusion: Revisiting the History of Abolition
The conclusion confirms the historical significance of the newly discovered Sharp manuscript at the British Library, arguing that it reminds us of Sharp’s importance for the abolition movement and provides vit...
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Introduction
The introduction details the circumstances of my discovery of Granville Sharp’s letter in the British Library, provides evidence that the British Library did not know of its presence there, and establishes the...
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The Provenance of the British Library Document
This chapter details the complex, difficult investigation into the provenance of the British Library document and provides the first examination of the relationship between different pieces of primary evidence...
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The Historical Significance of the British Library Document
This chapter shows how Sharp’s letter to the Admiralty came to be lost in the British Library by tracing its path through the libraries of two private collectors, the British Museum, and finally the British Li...
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Equiano, Sharp, Mansfield, and the Zong Massacre: History and Significance
This chapter provides a short recapitulation of the history of the Zong, especially the terrible events of 1781 aboard the slave ship and those that followed the massacre, including the insurance trial initiated ...
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The British Library Document: The Definitive Version of Sharp’s Letter on the Zong to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty
This chapter provides detailed evidence to prove that the Sharp letter in the British Library is a fair copy—and therefore the most definitive version—of Sharp’s letter to the Admiralty, while the National Mar...
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Romantic Suicide, Contagion, and Rousseau’s Julie
‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains’. The famous opening sentence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762) has contributed to the writer’s image as one of the most influential defenders...
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Nerve Theory, Sensibility, and Romantic Metrosexuals
Since G. S. Rousseau proposed the link between nerve theory and the literature of sentiment in his groundbreaking article from 1976, “Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility,” a.....
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John Ferriar’s Psychology, James Hogg’s Justified Sinner, and the Gay Science of Horror Writing
Such recent works as Frederick Burwick’s Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination, Jennifer Ford’s Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination, David Vallins’s Coleridge and the Psyc...
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Introduction
In his chapter for Northrop Frye’s Romanticism Reconsidered, published nearly fifty years ago, Lionel Trilling stresses the centrality of pleasure to definitions of Romantic aesthetics, beginning with Wordsworth’...
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Reconstructing the Classical Model: Pope’s Homer and Its Influence
Pope’s Homer, and especially his Iliad, was the foundation stone of his poetic reputation and, as is well known, of both his personal financial security and of the degree of independence he was thereafter able to...
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The Madness of a Multitude’: Insanity, People and Prose
‘Cowper came to me’, wrote William Blake in around 1819, nearly twenty years after the earlier poet’s death,
and said “O that I were insane always. I will never rest. Can you not make me truly insan...
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A Gendered Affliction: Women, Writing, Madness
In the eighteenth century, the realm of madness was a locus of intensity in terms of the perception of women. Characteristics that were attributed to women multiplied in degree when madness was on the horizon....
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Madness Itself: the Real Story
The search for ‘madness itself’, for ‘really’ knowing what madness is, or was, or will be, for the ‘truly insane’, in language, in appearance, in art, in behaviour, or for what I refer to earlier as ‘the whole...
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Speaking It Like a Horse: Gulliver’s Travels and the Contexts of Insanity
The history of insanity is full of dizzying paradoxes. Here, for example, is the nineteenth-century madhouse proprietor Thomas Bakewell, writing in 1815: ‘Inever sit at table’, he observes, ‘without a number o...
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‘Th’ Unbalanc’d Mind’: Poetry, Satire and the Assimilation of Madness
In reconstructing Homer’s Achilles, Pope not only wrote his own way out of a tricky moral dilemma, one that had the capacity to unsteady an entire neoclassical culture. He also created a model in which the men...
