Sociable Places
Locating Culture in Romantic-Period Britain

This collection explores how location shaped sociability in the Romantic period.

Kevin Gilmartin (Edited by)

9781107663749, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 11 July 2019

281 pages, 12 b/w illus.
23 x 15.3 x 1.5 cm, 0.4 kg

Ranging across literature, theater, history, and the visual arts, this collection of essays by leading scholars in the field explores the range of places where British Romantic-period sociability transpired. The book considers how sociability was shaped by place, by the rooms, buildings, landscapes and seascapes where people gathered to converse, to eat and drink, to work and to find entertainment. At the same time, it is clear that sociability shaped place, both in the deliberate construction and configuration of venues for people to gather, and in the way such gatherings transformed how place was experienced and understood. The essays highlight literary and aesthetic experience but also range through popular entertainment and ordinary forms of labor and leisure.

Introduction Kevin Gilmartin
Part I. Print Relations: 1. Recovering the country book club Ina Ferris
2. 'Bread and cheese and porter only being allowed': radical spaces in London, 1792–5 Jon Mee
3. Piccadilly booksellers and conservative sociability David Fallon
Part II. Sociable Spectacle: 4. Proxy Israelites: staging ethnic violence in the ring and the pit Daniel O'Quinn
5. Fashionable subjects: exhibition culture and the limits of sociability Paul Keen
Part III. Interior Places: 6. 'The place is not free to you': the Georgian assembly room and the ends of sociability Gillian Russell
7. Unconventional calling: Godwin, women and visiting in the 1790s Mark Philp
Part IV. Traveling Sociability: 8. Sociability among the ruins: the Colosseum by moonlight, circa 1820 Christopher Rovee
9. Sociability by the sea side: Margate before 1815 Harriet Guest
10. Lower deck narratives and sociability in the British Navy, 1750–1815 Nicholas Rogers.

Subject Areas: Educational: English literature [YQE], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]