Johnson wrote out her “fairy-tale” for her daughter and eldest son, and bound it like a proper book, about five or six years after the little Barbara had looked like herself rather than like her relations. This is startlingly early, before the late-eighteenth-century wave of professional writers for children, at about the same time as John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, 1744, which is generally presented as a first … Johnson’s manuscript is now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and it finally, in 2001, reached print as a Bodleian publication …
Category: Blog
The Women’s History Network blog
Realigning political and personal selfhood: narratives of activist women in the late 1960s and 1970s
The small consciousness-raising groups that characterised the early Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) underlined the political and psychological importance socialist feminists attached to process and affect when it came to redefining the concept of politics. Instead of a left politics that…
Love, Power & Abandonment
Is all this suitable for soap opera rather than the seriousness of ‘true’ historical research and inquiry? The number of books, films and television hours made on the subject confirm its popularity so far as a general readership is concerned. Someone must be buying the books and the cinema tickets, and watching at home! Is it material for historians?
Prostitution and Police in a Port City during the French Revolution
Nantes prostitutes in the eighteenth century were on average twenty-five years old and single. Usually coming from a poor background, they received very little training in their youth and described themselves as seamstresses, thread and needle makers or laundresses. They…
Historical Lessons from the Worsley Case
The last two posts at the blog have told the story of the Worsley scandal. This post explores some of the press reactions to the case and thinks about what sort of emotions it produced it eighteenth century audiences and…
Seymour Dorothy Fleming (1757-1818), part 2
Richard’s vengeance had badly backfired. He and his sexual proclivities were now the talk of London society. For the press, Richard’s hobby of collecting ancient art and showing it off to the public, gave rise to the question of whether…
Seymour Dorothy Fleming (1757-1818), part 1
Born in October 1757, Seymour Dorothy Fleming was the fourth of five children of Irish career soldier, Sir John Fleming and his wife, Jane Colman, granddaughter of the Duke of Somerset. Seymour was the surname of the Somerset dynasty and…
Are Women People?
Women (With rather insincere apologies to Mr. Rudyard Kipling.) I went to ask my government if they would set me free, They gave a pardoned crook a vote, but hadn’t one for me; The men about me laughed and frowned…
Women’s History: Approaches from the History of Emotion
At particular moments in history, women have thought to be more emotional than men. The Victorians thought women were more emotionally unstable and inclined to hysteria. As late as 1912, one prominent doctor in the UK was arguing that women…