Nineteenth Century Collections Online: European Literature, the Corvey Collection, 1790-1840

"The plot of Charlotte Smith's autobiographical first novel Emmeline (1788) includes the expected thrills of the eighteenth-century courtship novel: abduction, duels, and a "fairy-tale princess." At the same time, the novel satirically reworks such literary conventions by focusing on the dangers of early engagement and marriage, and challenges a social and legal system in which women are inherently illegitimate subjects." "This Broadview edition includes primary source material relating to the novel's reception; women, marriage, and work; and landscape in eighteenth-century fiction. Mary Hays's biographical writing on Smith is also included, as is selected correspondence."--Jacket.

A novel first published in 1830. It is the story of a man who leads a dual life as a highwayman and a society gentleman.

The Member has claims to be the first political novel in English language and is a tour de force of wit, observation, and a devastating critique of political self-seeking. Its hero is a Scot, newly returned from India, who purchases a seat in a rotten borough.

George Desmond's trip to Calcutta, India during the time of the British Raj. The book encompasses his views of the empire, including the native population. It is an excellent resource in studying the attitudes of the Victorian age.

"Hogg grew up in rural Ettrick Forest in a notable family of tradition-bearers, and in his first major poetry collection The Mountain Bard of 1807 he claims his rightful position at the centre of that culture. Whereas Scott collected the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border Hogg was the sole author of The Mountain Bard. He learned to negotiate the erudite print culture of Edinburgh with the literary ballad, sometimes helped and sometimes hindered by his powerful friend, shifting the shape of his earlier manuscript and periodical poems accordingly. Then in 1821, when he was an established literary man, he published a revised edition in keeping with his new professional status as Author of The Queen's Wake." "The present edition prints together, for the first time, the full 1807 collection, the surviving pre-1807 versions of poems included in The Mountain Bard, and the complete 1821 version. The Introduction (besides giving a full history of this complex, changing work) places it firmly within the eighteenth-century antiquarian projects of ballad-collecting and the intellectual currents of Romanticism, in particular the literary vogue for the ballad shown in works such as Lyrical Ballads (1798) by Wordsworth and Coleridge."--Jacket.

The entire focus of this novel rests on the determined though sometimes woefully mistaken efforts of three British families--the Moseleys, the Jarvises, and the Chattertons--to arrange suitable marriages for their respective sons and daughters. The bulk of the early-nineteenth-century action is therefore played out through dinners, social calls, visits to summer resorts, and development of various designs employed toward the end of matrimony. The "precaution" displayed by Mrs. Wilson in guiding her niece Emily Moseley through the treacherous shoals toward a sound Christian marriage furnishes the novel's title and indicates the author's moral and ethical position.