Birkbeck Eighteenth-Century Reading Group
When:
—
Venue:
Online
This reading group session focuses on the following Magdalen Narratives, selected and introduced by Eleanor Franzen:
Primary/essential: An Account of the Rise, Progress and Present State of the Magdalen House Charity, 4th ed., p. 1-32 (Preface/Introduction and "Original Letters from Magdalens, &c."). Scan free to read via Hathi Trust: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433082231204&seq=1
Secondary/optional: The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House: Preface (p. 1-xxiv), I.i (p. 1-7)and I.xii (p.120-127). Scan free to read via Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_the-histories-of-some-of_1760_1/mode/2up
An Account of the Rise, Progress and Present State of the Magdalen House Charity (1763) documents the founding and work of London’s Magdalen Hospital, an institution established in 1758 to reform and rehabilitate “fallen” women. As both a moral and social artifact, the text reflects eighteenth-century anxieties surrounding female virtue, class, and public morality. The section titled “Original Letters by Magdalens,” which reproduces correspondence supposedly written by the hospital’s inmates, is particularly significant for my thesis, which examines changing literary roles available to women with histories of selling sex from about 1750-1830. Though they claim to be genuine, these letters are likely mediated by editors—probably William Dodd, chaplain of the charity and author of An Account—and reveal tensions between authorial authenticity, moral didacticism, and the emergent sentimental discourse that began to reshape the cultural representation of the prostitute in eighteenth-century British literature. The anonymous novel The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House (1760) extends this ideological project by fictionalising the inmates’ experiences to produce a sentimentalised, morally reassuring narrative. Deploying the tropes of repentance, virtue-in-distress, and providential redemption, it tends to replace the complex, often harsh realities of confinement and reform with propagandistic fantasies of rehabilitation, offering philanthropists an emotionally palatable vision of the Magdalen House to legitimise and sustain their charitable enterprise.'
Eleanor Franzen is writing a PhD thesis at Birkbeck under the title Marketing Narratives of Transactional Sex in Britain, 1759-1830.
Contact name: Luisa Cale
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