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1720 In Literature
This article is a summary of the major literary events and publications of 1720. Events *September–October – The "South Sea Bubble", i.e. the collapse of the South Sea Company in England, affects the fortunes of many writers, including John Gay. It features in several works of literature. There are suspicions of complicity by Robert Walpole's government. *December 29 – The Haymarket Theatre in London opens with a performance of ''La Fille à la Morte, ou le Badeaut de Paris''. *''unknown date'' **Jonathan Swift begins major composition work on '' Gulliver's Travels'' in Ireland. **18-year-old London apprentice printer John Matthews is hanged for treason for producing the anonymous Jacobite pamphlet ''Vox Populi Vox Dei'', the last time a British printer suffers execution for his work. New books Prose *Thomas Boston – '' Human Nature in its Fourfold State'' * Jane Brereton – ''An expostulatory Epistle to Sir Richard Steele upon the Death of Mr. Addison'' * Thomas Br ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
South Sea Company
The South Sea Company (officially The Governor and Company of the merchants of Great Britain, trading to the South Seas and other parts of America, and for the encouragement of the Fishery) was a British joint-stock company founded in January 1711, created as a public-private partnership to consolidate and reduce the cost of the national debt. To generate income, in 1713 the company was granted a monopoly (the Asiento de Negros) to supply African slaves to the islands in the "South Seas" and South America. When the company was created, Britain was involved in the War of the Spanish Succession and Spain and Portugal controlled most of South America. There was thus no realistic prospect that trade would take place, and as it turned out, the Company never realised any significant profit from its monopoly. However, Company stock rose greatly in value as it expanded its operations dealing in government debt, and peaked in 1720 before suddenly collapsing to little above its ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Memoirs Of A Cavalier
''Memoirs of a Cavalier'' (1720) is a work of historical fiction by Daniel Defoe, set during the Thirty Years' War and the English Civil Wars. The full title, which bore no date, was: Nominal author The nominal author of the work was a 'Colonel Andrew Newport', a Shropshire-born soldier. He has been speculatively identified with the Andrew Newport (1622-1699). However the work was published over 20 years after the death of this Andrew Newport, who was only ten years old in the year the account begins (1632). Although of age (20 in 1642) to have served in the English Civil War, there is doubt about this due to the absence of any record that he did, and he appears in no list of Royalists fined by parliament for 'delinquency', unlike his father and elder brother. Literary influence Winston Churchill modeled his six-volume histories ''The World Crisis'' and ''The Second World War'' on ''Memoirs of a Cavalier''. Defoe's method "in which the author hangs the chronicle and discussion o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Sewell (physician)
George Sewell (died 1726) was an English physician and poet, known as a controversialist and hack writer. Life Born at Windsor, was the eldest son of John Sewell, treasurer and chapter-clerk to the dean and canons of Windsor. He was educated at Eton College: his poem of ''The Favorite, a simile'' embodies reminiscences of his Eton life. He then went to Peterhouse, Cambridge, and graduated B.A. in 1709; for a time he studied medicine under Hermann Boerhaave at the University of Leiden, and about July 1725 he took the degree of M.D. at the University of Edinburgh. Sewell practised at first in London, but little success. He then moved to Hampstead, but encountered competition from other physicians. Under financial pressure he became a booksellers' hack, publishing numerous poems, translations, and political and other pamphlets. Sewell died of consumption at Hampstead, in poverty, on 8 February 1726. On 12 February he was given a pauper's funeral. Works In early life Sewell incli ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Martha Sansom
Martha Fowke, later Martha Sansom, (1 May 1689 – 1736) was an English poet associated chiefly with the circle about Aaron Hill (writer), Aaron Hill. She was the daughter of Major Thomas Fowke, an army officer murdered in 1708,Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy, eds, ''The Feminist Companion to Literature in English'' (London: Batsford, 1990). p. 389.] and his wife Mary (née Cullen). Born in Hertfordshire on 1 May 1689 to a family of Roman Catholic gentry, she was educated at home and at boarding school. Her mother had been less supportive of her daughter's writing than her father. Fowke lived in London after her mother died in 1705, but moved to East Anglia in 1730 with her husband, Arnold Sansom, whom she had married around 1721. Their marriage was not a happy one. Literary life Fowke's work started to gain public attention notably with ''Clio and Strephon'' (1720), published anonymously and reprinted several times under various titles up to 1732. Clio was Fo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard Rawlinson
Richard Rawlinson FRS (3 January 1690 – 6 April 1755) was an English clergyman and antiquarian collector of books and manuscripts, which he bequeathed to the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Life Richard Rawlinson was a younger son of Sir Thomas Rawlinson (1647–1708), Lord Mayor of the City of London in 1705–6, and a brother of Thomas Rawlinson (1681–1725), the bibliophile who ruined himself in the South Sea Company, at whose sale in 1734 Richard bought many of the Orientalia. He was educated at St Paul's School, at Eton College, and at St John's College, Oxford. In 1714, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, where he was inducted by Newton. Rawlinson was a Jacobite and maintained a strong support for the exiled Stuart Royal family throughout his life. In 1716 was ordained as a Deacon and then priest in the nonjuring Church of England (see Nonjuring schism), the ceremony being performed by the non-juring Usager bishop, Jeremy Collier. Rawlinson was, in 1728, cons ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope (21 May 1688 O.S. – 30 May 1744) was an English poet, translator, and satirist of the Enlightenment era who is considered one of the most prominent English poets of the early 18th century. An exponent of Augustan literature, Pope is best known for his satirical and discursive poetry including '' The Rape of the Lock'', ''The Dunciad'', and ''An Essay on Criticism,'' and for his translation of Homer. After Shakespeare, Pope is the second-most quoted author in ''The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations'', some of his verses having entered common parlance (e.g. "damning with faint praise" or " to err is human; to forgive, divine"). Life Alexander Pope was born in London on 21 May 1688 during the year of the Glorious Revolution. His father (Alexander Pope, 1646–1717) was a successful linen merchant in the Strand, London. His mother, Edith (1643–1733), was the daughter of William Turner, Esquire, of York. Both parents were Catholics. His mother's sister was the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alexander Pennecuik
Alexander Pennecuik M.D. (1652–1722) was a Scottish physician and poet. Life He was the eldest son of Alexander Pennecuik of Newhall, Edinburgh, who had been a surgeon under Johan Banér in the Thirty Years' War, and afterwards in the Scottish army of the First English Civil War in England. After foreign travel, he cared for his father, who lived to age 90. Pennecuik was in practice as a physician in Tweeddale, and on good terms with a number of Scottish men of letters. In 1702 his elder daughter married, and Pennecuik gave with her the estate of Newhall. Her husband, however, got into debt, and in 1703 Newhall was sold to Sir David Forbes, father to John Forbes, Pennecuik's friend and Allan Ramsay's patron. Pennecuik lived at Romanno until his death in 1722. He was buried in the churchyard at Newlands, by his father's side. Works Pennecuik published poetical pieces: * ''Caledonia Triumphans'', broadside, 1699, reprinted in David Laing's ''Various Pieces of Fugitive Scotch ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Delarivière Manley
Delarivier "Delia" Manley (1663 or c. 1670 – 24 July 1724) was an English author, playwright, and political pamphleteer. Manley is sometimes referred to, with Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood, as one of "the fair triumvirate of wit", which is a later attribution. Some outdated sources list her first name as Mary, but recent scholarship has demonstrated that to be an error: Mary was the name of one of her sisters, and she always referred to herself as Delarivier or Delia. Early life and theatrical writings Much of what is known about Manley is rooted in her insertion of "Delia's story" in ''The New Atalantis'' (1709) and the '' Adventures of Rivella'' that she published as the biography of the author of the ''Atalantis'' with Edmund Curll in 1714. Curll added further details on the publication history behind the ''Rivella'' in the first posthumous edition of the quasi-fictional and not entirely-reliable autobiography in 1725. Manley was probably born in Jersey, the third of six ch ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Madame De La Fayette
Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, Comtesse de La Fayette ( baptized 18 March 1634 – 25 May 1693), better known as Madame de La Fayette, was a French writer; she authored ''La Princesse de Clèves'', France's first historical novel and one of the earliest novels in literature. Life Christened Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, she was born in Paris to a family of minor but wealthy nobility. At 16, de la Vergne became the maid of honour to Queen Anne of Austria and began also to acquire a literary education from Gilles Ménage, who gave her lessons in Italian and Latin. Ménage led her to join the fashionable salons of Madame de Rambouillet and Madeleine de Scudéry. Her father, Marc Pioche de la Vergne, had died a year before, and the same year her mother married Renaud de Sévigné, uncle of Madame de Sévigné, who remained her lifelong intimate friend. In 1655, de la Vergne married François Motier, comte de La Fayette, a widowed nobleman some eighteen years her ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hildebrand Jacob
Hildebrand Jacob (1692 or 1693–1739) was a British poet and playwright, whose major works include the epic poem ''Brutus the Trojan'' and the tragic verse drama ''The Fatal Constancy''. His collected works (entitled ''The Works of H. Jacob, Esqr.'') were published in 1735. Family His father was Sir John Jacob, third baronet of Bromley, Middlesex (c.1665–1740) and his mother was Dorothy (c.1662–1749). Sir John served in the army from 1685 to 1702, seeing action at the Battle of Killiecrankie and in Ireland. Following his father, Hildebrand served in the army until at least 1715, then in 1717 he married Meriel, daughter of another baronet, Sir John Bland of Kippax-Park, Yorkshire. They had a son, also Hildebrand, and a daughter, Anne They made their home at West Wratting, Cambridgeshire. He never succeeded to his father's seat, dying in 1739, a year before Sir John. His son Sir Hildebrand Jacob (1717 or 1718–1790) succeeded Sir John at his death on 31 March 1740, becomin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edward Hyde, 1st Earl Of Clarendon
Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon (18 February 16099 December 1674), was an English statesman, lawyer, diplomat and historian who served as chief advisor to Charles I during the First English Civil War, and Lord Chancellor to Charles II from 1660 to 1667. Hyde largely avoided involvement in the political disputes of the 1630s until elected to the Long Parliament in November 1640. Like many moderates, he felt attempts by Charles to rule without Parliament had gone too far but by 1642 felt its leaders were, in turn, seeking too much power. A devout believer in an Episcopalian Church of England, his opposition to Puritan attempts to reform it drove much of his policy over the next two decades. He joined Charles in York shortly before the First English Civil War began in August 1642, and initially served as his senior political advisor. However, as the war turned against the Royalists, his rejection of attempts to build alliances with Scots Covenanters or Irish Catholics led to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aaron Hill (writer)
Aaron Hill (10 February 1685 – 8 February 1750) was an English dramatist and miscellany writer. Biography The son of a country gentleman of Wiltshire, Hill was educated at Westminster School, and afterwards travelled in the East. He was the author of 17 plays, some of them, such as his versions of Voltaire's ''Zaire'' and ''Mérope'', being adaptations. He also wrote poetry, which is of variable quality. Having written some satiric lines on Alexander Pope, he received in return a mention in ''The Dunciad'', which led to a controversy between the two writers. Afterwards a reconciliation took place. He was a friend and correspondent of Samuel Richardson, whose ''Pamela'' he highly praised. In addition to his literary pursuits Hill was involved in many commercial schemes, usually unsuccessful. Hill was the manager of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane when he was 24 years old, and before being summarily fired for reasons unknown, he staged the premier of George Frideric Handel's ''Ri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
