Pleasing Spectacles and Elegant Dinners

Conviviality, Benevolence, and Charity Anniversaries in Eighteenth-Century London

Datos Bibliográficos

ID10065690
AutoresSarah Lloyd (0000-0002-7622-8525, autor de correspondencia)
Año2002
Volumen41
Número1
Páginas23-57
Fecha de publicación2002-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of British Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0021-9371 • E-ISSN: 1545-6986
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1086/386253
OpenAlexW1981008177
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas11
Referencias citadas53

As the number and interests of charitable institutions expanded throughout Britain during the eighteenth century, so special fund-raising events, anniversary celebrations, and meetings multiplied. During 1775, for example, the major metropolitan charities and a plethora of minor benevolent societies courted middle- and upper-class Londoners with invitations to concerts and exhibitions. Men could support various hospitals and other good causes by dining in taverns and City Livery Halls in company with civic and ecclesiastical dignitaries, even noble and royal dukes. Both men and women might attend charities' anniversary services, ornamented with special music and a sermon, choosing among dispensaries, hospitals, lying-in charities, religious societies, and various efforts to reform and reclaim the poor for public benefit. On Sundays, armed with tickets, special prayer books, and even keys to their rented pews, women and men might attend the chapel of a philanthropic institution. Alternatively, they could listen to a fund-raising sermon and watch charity-school children arrayed in the gallery of a parish church. Toward the end of the year, they might pay half a guinea each to hear Handel's Messiah in the Foundling Hospital Chapel or go to Covent Garden and Drury Lane to watch tragedies and farces. Charitable activity thus extended beyond churches, alms, and sermons into the theater. It spilled onto the streets as gentlemen processed to dinner; it accompanied art and music. Conversely, waves of fashion drove visitors to one philanthropic institution or another to see deserving recipients, hear a particularly popular preacher, or to be observed themselves

Art · Art history · Chapel · Exhibition · Institution · Media studies · Messiah · Political science · Prayer · Sermon · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment · Religious studies