Enfilade

Jonas Hanway, Thoughts on the Plan for a Magdalen-House for Repentant Prostitutes, second edition (London, 1759). The first edition was published anonymously in 1758.

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From Yale’s Lewis Walpole Library, in connection with the exhibition From ‘Knight Errant of the Distressed’: Horace Walpole and Philanthropy in Eighteenth-Century London:

Andrew Rudd | Print Philanthropy in the Age of Horace Walpole
Online, 28 October 2022, 12.00pm EST

Eighteenth-century England witnessed a remarkable flowering of philanthropic activity as society wrestled with problems such as poverty, disease, mental illness, vice, and suffering caused by war. Walpole boasted in 1760 of what he called “our noble national charity.” While many aspects of philanthropy remain similar today, this lecture will explore how the print culture of Walpole’s era was central in driving charitable behaviour, particularly in terms of creating philanthropic networks and framing relationships between donors and beneficiaries. The talk will showcase the sheer range of printed text and images—fundraising prospectuses, sermons, topographical views of hospitals, tickets to benefit concerts and dinners, and celebratory odes—mobilised in service of good causes during this period, as well as highlight examples of Walpole’s own support for, and portrayals of, philanthropic causes during his lifetime.

Registration is required»

Andrew Rudd is Senior Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Exeter. He researches and teaches British literature of the eighteenth century and Romantic period. His monograph Sympathy and India in British Literature 1770–1830 (Palgrave Macmillan) was published in 2011, and he is currently writing a cultural history of charity in the eighteenth century. This builds on experience he acquired as Parliamentary Manager at the Charity Commission for England and Wales before joining Exeter in 2013. Dr. Rudd holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, and he has studied at the University of Durham, Trinity College, Cambridge, and Yale University. He has held numerous fellowships—most recently at Yale’s Lewis Walpole Library and the School of Advanced Studies in English, University of Jadavpur. Since 2015, he has been a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Peer Review College.