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Malthus' very name is associated with pessimism-only somewhat undeservedly so. Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus' An Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in 1798, appeared toward the end of a tumultuous decade in Great Britain. Where Adam Smith, in his 1776 book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, had imagined a commercial society harmoniously regulated by the operations of a self-regulating market generating self-sustaining growth, the vision of the economy which Malthus presented some two decades later was rather more grim, at least for the poor majority. Lacking a theoretical rigor on par with his peers, Malthus' Essay was nevertheless soon recognized as the second foundational work of Political Economy behind Smith's Inquiry. This paper will seek to situate Malthus in his time and will argue that his popularity with ruling landed elites is can be explained by their need for a champion in the debates on economic theory and by his round condemnation of the poor as the agents of their own suffering by overpopulating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The education of children as future elites after the Restoration was a persistent concern for French émigrés after the Revolution of 1789. Focusing on discourse on émigré education and émigréschools in Britain and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, this article examines how, in the 1790s, the émigrés' rejection of the Republic and their quest for monarchical restoration resonated in pedagogical activities. Under difficult living conditions and unclear prospects of political exile, education became a consolidating strategy of combating the Revolution with pedagogical means. The social composition, educational programmes, and public representations of émigréschools reveal their pivotal role in émigré community life, involving priests, women, writers, politicians, local supporters -- and children. Comparison between Britain and the Holy Roman Empire allows for differentiating strategies of integration into the host societies and of immunization against revolutionary influences. Education contributed to strengthening the émigrés' identity and mobilizing their hosts for the ideological, military, and humanitarian struggle against the Revolution. The students' later careers call for reconsidering experiences of exile education among the elites of Napoleonic and Restoration France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writing in the fall of 1830, in the period immediately following France's révolution de juillet, Thomas De Quincey predicts the imminent breakdown of social order in Britain. In his political writing for Blackwood's Magazine over the course of this period, he consistently frames the threat of French-style revolution in terms of the body politic and its vulnerability to contagion, often playing on the meaning of a country's "constitution." In 1831, upon the introduction of the Reform Bill, his worst fears appear to have been confirmed, and he now presents the upcoming revolution almost as a fait accompli. De Quincey's dire predictions fit into a larger framework of nineteenth-century alarmism surrounding contagion, "sympathy," and the collective action of the mob. This article examines the presence and influence of these concepts in De Quincey's political writing for Blackwood's over the period of 1830 to 1832, the year the Bill was successfully passed.

The article profiles the life and literary career of the English writer Francis Wrangham. Focus is given to the influence of the "Reign of Alarm" under British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger on Wrangham's literary output. Topics addressed include Wrangham's connections to Cambridge University and William Wordsworth, controversy surrounding allegations of sedition in regard to his satirical work "Reform: A Farce," and additional poetic examples of his views of the French Revolution.

This article examines a series of English-language newspaper ventures produced in revolutionary France and largely aimed at export to Britain. These enterprises, chief among which was the Paris Mercury (1792), sought to profit from heightened British interest in French events by dispatching ready-printed newspapers directly from Paris, thus achieving news priority over the domestic British press. New French press freedoms also enabled claims to be made about the superior editorial qualities of such extraterritorial newspapers. This article reconstructs these newspapers' publication history, reviews their contents, discusses their commercial and political rationale and their precursors, and offers explanations for their failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a seminal study on the political uses of history during the French Restoration, Stanley Mellon showed in 1958 how history had then become the language of politics. Intense historical activity between 1815 and 1830 saw the publication of several major rewritings of the history of France but also, quite interestingly, a series of studies on Britain, notably by Francois Guizot and Augustin Thierry. The deep interest shown by French historians in the English revolution certainly stems from the contemporary concern to redefine the nation's relation to its pre-revolutionary past. It is also part of a wider European phenomenon of emerging national history-writing or rewriting. The perception French historians had of the English revolution as a socio-political conflict differs largely from the contemporary British interpretation of the same events as resulting essentially from religious divisions. The paper will explain the reasons for this new angle taken by early nineteenth-century French historiography of the English revolution. It will also explore the contacts between the two historiographies in the main cross-Channel circulated reviews and assess what impact, if any, French historians had on their contemporary British counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper underlines Vattel's commitment to maintaining the sovereignty of Europe's small states by enunciating the duties he deemed incumbent upon all political communities. Vattel took seriously the threat to Europe from a renascent France, willing to foster an equally aggressive Catholic imperialism justified by the need for religious unity. Preventing a French version of universal monarchy, Vattel recognised, entailed more than speculating about a Europe imagined as a single republic. Rather, Vattel believed that Britain had to be relied upon to prevent excessive French ambition, and to underwrite the independence of the continent's smaller sovereignties. Against those who saw Britain as another candidate for the domination of Europe, Vattel argued that Britain's commercial interests explained why it was a different kind of state to the great empires of the past. The paper goes on to consider the reception of Vattel's ideas after the Seven Years War. Although further research is required into readings of Vattel, especially in the smaller states of Europe in the later eighteenth century, the paper concludes that by the 1790s Vattel was being used to justify war to defeat the gargantuan imperialist projects of newly republican France, in order to maintain Europe itself, and the smaller states within it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1790s both the artist Henri-Pierre Danloux and the pianist-composer Jan Ladislav Dussek resided in London, having fled the turmoil of the French Revolution. The modestly sized cabinet portrait that resulted from theft encounter in 1795 is one of the most interesting and significant images of a musician from the end of the 18th century. The painting, now at the Royal College of Music in London, shows Dussek elegantly seated at a rather unusual keyboard instrument, which is most likely a harpsichord with some additional panelling depicted around the legs. The image contains a wealth of symbolism pertaining to the pro-Royalist sentiments of both artist and sitter, and forms one of a series of genre-style portraits of émigrés that Danloux undertook during the mid-1790s. These portraits are typified by the presence of objects that signify loss, compassion and hope. This particular portrait alludes to the sentiment felt by Dussek for the recent fate of the French royal family, and indicates the composer's musical response to it. Apart from its symbolism, the portrait also provides insights into the status and perception of Dussek in the highly competitive concert world of late 18th-century London, especially in suggesting the importance of the public's identification with the virtuo-so performer through the shared experience of sentiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]