The Little Everyman

Stature and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century English Literature

Deborah Needleman Armintor

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780295990873
• eBook ISBN: 9780295801643
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Eighteenth-century English literature, art, science, and popular culture exhibited an unprecedented fascination with small male bodies of various kinds. Henry Fielding's Tom Thumb plays drew packed crowds, while public exhibitions advertised male dwarfs as paragons of English masculinity. Bawdy popular poems featured diminutive men paired with enormous women, and amateur scientists anthropomorphized and gendered the "minute bodies" they observed under their fashionable new pocket microscopes. Little men, both real and imagined, embodied the anxieties of a newly bourgeois English culture and were transformed to suit changing concerns about the status of English masculinity in the modern era. The Little Everyman explores this strange trend by tracing the historical trajectory of the supplanting of the premodern court dwarf by a more metaphorical and quintessentially modern "little man" who came to represent in miniature the historical shift in literary production from aristocratic patronage to the bourgeois fantasy of freelance authorship. Armintor's close readings of Pope, Fielding, Swift, and Sterne highlight little recognized aspects of classic works while demonstrating how the little man became an "everyman."

INDEX

The index that appeared in the print version of this title was intentionally removed from the eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below

a

Addison, Joseph

dismissal of microscope

The Spectator

The Tatler

Adelson, Betty

Alcott, Louisa May

Alpers, Svetlana

animalcule theory

Anscomb, Lisa

The Arabian Nights

Arbuthnot, Dr. John

aristocracy: decline of

as dwarfs

as spectators

Armstrong, Nancy

Ashton, John

Atherton, Herbert M.

automata. See also dildo poems; dildos

b

Bacon, Francis: connection to Hooke

“On Deformity” (1625)

Bailey, Anne Hall

Baker, Henry (microscopist)

Baker, Sheridan

Barker-Benfield, G. J.

Barnett, Louise K.

Barnum, P. T.

Barrell, John

“The Bauble: A Tale” (Anonymous, 1721)

Beckford, William: Vathek (1786)

Behn, Aphra: The Rover (second part, 1681)

Benedict, Barbara

Bentley, Thomas: Letter to Mr. Pope, Occasioned by Sober Advice from Horace (1735)

Berg, Maxine

Berkeley, George: Alciphron: Or, the Minute Philosopher (1732)

Bermingham, Ann

Bhattacharya, Nandini

Bickham, George: The Stature of a Great Man or the English Colossus (1740)

Bienville de, D. T.: Nymphomania (1775)

Bindman, David

Blackwell, Bonnie

Blair, Thomas (dwarf)

Bonaparte, Napoleon

Boruwlaski, Josef

depiction in frontispiece of autobiography

Memoirs of the Celebrated Dwarf (1788)

Boucé, Paul-Gabriel

bourgeoisie

and effect on culture

identifying as “little man”

rise of women in

and sentiment

as spectators. See also companionate marriage

Bowden, Martha F.

Boyle, Robert

Brewer, John

Brinks, Ellen

Brown, Bill

Brown, John: An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757)

Brown, Laura

Buchinger, Matthew (dwarf)

Burkhart, Dagmar

Burney, Frances: Camilla (1796)

Bute, Third Earl of (John Stuart)

Butler, Judith

Butler, Samuel. See dildo poems

c

Campbell, Jill

cannibalism. See female consumption

Carlos, Prince Baltasar

Caryll, John

Cavendish, Margaret

The Blazing World (1666)

Celia (Charlotte Cradock)

“Celia poems”. See also Fielding, Henry

Centlivre, Susannah: The Basset Table (1705)

Charles I

Charles II

Chartres, Bernard de

children: literature for

as little men and women

Chudleigh, Lady: “To the Ladies” (1703)

Cibber, Colley

A Letter From Mr. Cibber, To Mr. Pope (1747)

Clark, Paul Odell

Cleary, Thomas R.

Colclough, Stephen

The Colossus (Anonymous)

commodification: as feminizing

of literature

of the microscope

of science. See also female consumers

commodity fetishism. See Marx, Karl

companionate marriage

and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• One A Visual Prehistory
• Two The Dwarfing of Little-Man Pope
• Three The Little Man–Microscope in Brobdingnag
• Four The Labor of Little Men
• Five The Little Man of Feeling
• Six Josef Boruwlaski’s Memoirs of the Celebrated Dwarf
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index