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John Tutchin
John Tutchin (c.1660 or 1664 – 23 September 1707) was a radical Whig controversialist and gadfly English journalist (born in Lymington, Hampshire), whose ''The Observator'' and earlier political activism earned him multiple trips before the bar. He was of a Puritan background and held strongly anti-Catholic views. The Bloody Assizes In 1685 he wrote ''Poems on several occasions. With a pastoral. To which is added, a discourse of life'' at the same time that he was beginning his agitation against the possible accession of James II of England. He joined in the Monmouth Rebellion that year and was tried by Judge Jeffreys during the Bloody Assizes. Jeffreys mocked Tutchin's verse from the bench and sentenced him to: #seven years in prison, #a fine of 100 marks, #a surety for a lifetime of good behaviour, #to be whipped through all of the market towns of Devonshire once a year. Tutchin, facing this sentence, appealed to be hanged, instead. His punishment became a ''cause célèb ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
British Whig Party
The Whigs were a political faction and then a political party in the Parliaments of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom. Between the 1680s and the 1850s, the Whigs contested power with their rivals, the Tories. The Whigs merged into the new Liberal Party with the Peelites and Radicals in the 1850s, and other Whigs left the Liberal Party in 1886 to form the Liberal Unionist Party, which merged into the Liberals' rival, the modern day Conservative Party, in 1912. The Whigs began as a political faction that opposed absolute monarchy and Catholic Emancipation, supporting constitutional monarchism with a parliamentary system. They played a central role in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and were the standing enemies of the Roman Catholic Stuart kings and pretenders. The period known as the Whig Supremacy (1714–1760) was enabled by the Hanoverian succession of George I in 1714 and the failure of the Jacobite rising of 1715 by Tory rebels. The Whigs ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The True-Born Englishman
''The True-Born Englishman'' is a satirical poem published in 1701 by English writer Daniel Defoe defending King William III, who was Dutch-born, against xenophobic attacks by his political enemies in England. The poem quickly became a bestseller in England. According to a preface Defoe supplied to an edition of 1703, the poem's declared target is not Englishness as such but English cultural xenophobia, against the cultural disturbance new immigrants from Continental Europe caused. Defoe's argument was that the English nation as it already existed in his time was a product of various emigrating European ethnic groups, from the Ancient Britons to Anglo-Saxons, Normans and beyond. It was therefore nonsensical to abuse newer arrivals since the English law and customs would assure their inevitable assimilation: Extract This extract was used by historian and political scientist Benedict Anderson as an epigram for his 1983 book '' Imagined Communities'' discussing the origins o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books by decree in 1586, it is the second oldest university press after Cambridge University Press. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics known as the Delegates of the Press, who are appointed by the vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford. The Delegates of the Press are led by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as OUP's chief executive and as its major representative on other university bodies. Oxford University Press has had a similar governance structure since the 17th century. The press is located on Walton Street, Oxford, opposite Somerville College, in the inner suburb of Jericho. For the last 500 years, OUP has primarily focused on the publication of pedagogical texts and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dictionary Of National Biography
The ''Dictionary of National Biography'' (''DNB'') is a standard work of reference on notable figures from British history, published since 1885. The updated ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'' (''ODNB'') was published on 23 September 2004 in 60 volumes and online, with 50,113 biographical articles covering 54,922 lives. First series Hoping to emulate national biographical collections published elsewhere in Europe, such as the ''Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie'' (1875), in 1882 the publisher George Smith (1824–1901), of Smith, Elder & Co., planned a universal dictionary that would include biographical entries on individuals from world history. He approached Leslie Stephen, then editor of the ''Cornhill Magazine'', owned by Smith, to become the editor. Stephen persuaded Smith that the work should focus only on subjects from the United Kingdom and its present and former colonies. An early working title was the ''Biographia Britannica'', the name of an earlier eighteen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dulness
Dulness is the goddess who presides over Alexander Pope's ''The Dunciad''. She is the central character, introduced at the start of the work. Dulness is the daughter of Chaos and "eternal Night", and her mission is to convert all the world to stupidity ("To hatch a new Saturnian age, of Lead"). Her triumph is part of the (the inverse of the ). As "enlightenment" moves ever westward, darkness follows behind. In Pope's poem, she already has control of all political writing and seeks to extend her reign to drama. Hence, she chooses as a champion Lewis Theobald (''Dunciad A'') and Colley Cibber (''Dunciad B''). Pope presents the power of Dulness as inexorable and irresistible, and in Book IV of the ''Dunciad B'' he asks only that she pause a moment to let him write his poem before she takes "the singer and the song" into her oblivion. She is not motivated by any particular malice, and she even shows mercy at one point, if being reduced to insensibility is mercy, for, when a deflowere ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edmund Curll
Edmund Curll (''c.'' 1675 – 11 December 1747) was an English bookseller and publisher. His name has become synonymous, through the attacks on him by Alexander Pope, with unscrupulous publication and publicity. Curll rose from poverty to wealth through his publishing, and he did this by approaching book printing in a mercenary and unscrupulous manner. By cashing in on scandals, publishing pornography, offering up patent medicine, using all publicity as good publicity, he managed a small empire of printing houses. He would publish high and low quality writing alike, so long as it sold. He was born in the West Country, and his late and incomplete recollections (in ''The Curliad'') say that his father was a tradesman. He was an apprentice to a London bookseller in 1698 when he began his career. Early hucksterism At the end of his seven-year apprenticeship, he began selling books at auction. His master, Richard Smith, went bankrupt in 1708, and Curll took over his shop at that ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Churchill, 1st Duke Of Marlborough
General John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, 1st Prince of Mindelheim, 1st Count of Nellenburg, Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, (26 May 1650 – 16 June 1722 O.S.) was an English soldier and statesman whose career spanned the reigns of five monarchs. From a gentry family, he served first as a page at the court of the House of Stuart under James, Duke of York, through the 1670s and early 1680s, earning military and political advancement through his courage and diplomatic skill. Churchill's role in defeating the Monmouth Rebellion in 1685 helped secure James on the throne, but he was a key player in the military conspiracy that led to James being deposed during the Glorious Revolution. Rewarded by William III with the title Earl of Marlborough, persistent charges of Jacobitism led to his fall from office and temporary imprisonment in the Tower of London. William recognised his abilities by appointing him as his deputy in Southern Netherlands (modern-day Belgium) be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Arbuthnot
John Arbuthnot FRS (''baptised'' 29 April 1667 – 27 February 1735), often known simply as Dr Arbuthnot, was a Scottish physician, satirist and polymath in London. He is best remembered for his contributions to mathematics, his membership in the Scriblerus Club (where he inspired both Jonathan Swift's ''Gulliver's Travels'' book III and Alexander Pope's ''Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry'', ''Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus,'' and possibly ''The Dunciad''), and for inventing the figure of John Bull. Biography In his mid-life, Arbuthnot, complaining of the work of Edmund Curll, among others, who commissioned and invented a biography as soon as an author died, said, "Biography is one of the new terrors of death," and so a biography of Arbuthnot is made difficult by his own reluctance to leave records. Alexander Pope noted to Joseph Spence that Arbuthnot allowed his infant children to play with, and even burn, his writings. Throughout his professional life, Arbu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Harley, 1st Earl Of Oxford And Mortimer
Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer, KG PC FRS (5 December 1661 – 21 May 1724) was an English statesman and peer of the late Stuart and early Georgian periods. He began his career as a Whig, before defecting to a new Tory ministry. He was raised to the peerage of Great Britain as an earl in 1711. Between 1711 and 1714 he served as Lord High Treasurer, effectively Queen Anne's chief minister. He has been called a ''prime minister'', although it is generally accepted that the de facto first minister to be a prime minister was Robert Walpole in 1721. The central achievement of Harley's government was the negotiation of the Treaty of Utrecht with France in 1713, which brought an end to twelve years of English and Scottish involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession. In 1714 Harley fell from favour following the accession of the first monarch of the House of Hanover, George I, and was for a time imprisoned in the Tower of London by his political enemies. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Parliament Of England
The Parliament of England was the legislature of the Kingdom of England from the 13th century until 1707 when it was replaced by the Parliament of Great Britain. Parliament evolved from the great council of bishops and peers that advised the English monarch. Great councils were first called Parliaments during the reign of Henry III (). By this time, the king required Parliament's consent to levy taxation. Originally a unicameral body, a bicameral Parliament emerged when its membership was divided into the House of Lords and House of Commons, which included knights of the shire and burgesses. During Henry IV's time on the throne, the role of Parliament expanded beyond the determination of taxation policy to include the "redress of grievances," which essentially enabled English citizens to petition the body to address complaints in their local towns and counties. By this time, citizens were given the power to vote to elect their representatives—the burgesses—to the H ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Libel
Defamation is the act of communicating to a third party false statements about a person, place or thing that results in damage to its reputation. It can be spoken (slander) or written (libel). It constitutes a tort or a crime. The legal definition of defamation and related acts as well as the ways they are dealt with can vary greatly between countries and jurisdictions (what exactly they must consist of, whether they constitute crimes or not, to what extent proving the alleged facts is a valid defence). Defamation laws can encompass a variety of acts: * Insult against a legal person in general * Defamation against a legal person in general * Acts against public officials * Acts against state institutions (e.g., government, ministries, government agencies, armed forces) * Acts against state symbols * Acts against the state itself * Acts against religions (e.g., blasphemy, discrimination) * Acts against the judiciary or legislature (e.g., contempt of court, censure) Histo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Dunciad
''The Dunciad'' is a landmark, mock-heroic, narrative poem by Alexander Pope published in three different versions at different times from 1728 to 1743. The poem celebrates a goddess Dulness and the progress of her chosen agents as they bring decay, imbecility, and tastelessness to the Kingdom of Great Britain. Versions The first version – the "three-book" ''Dunciad'' – was published in 1728 anonymously. The second version, the ''Dunciad Variorum'', was published anonymously in 1729. The ''New Dunciad'', in a new fourth book conceived as a sequel to the previous three, appeared in 1742, and ''The Dunciad in Four Books'', a revised version of the original three books and a slightly revised version of the fourth book with revised commentary was published in 1743 with a new character, Bays, replacing Theobald as the "hero". Origins Pope told Joseph Spence (in ''Spence's Anecdotes'') that he had been working on a general satire of Dulness, with characters of contemporary Grub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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