Suffering and Happiness in England 1550-1850: Narratives and Representations A collection to honour Paul Slack

Suffering and Happiness in England 1550-1850 pays tribute to one of the leading historians working on early modern England, Paul Slack, and his work as a historian, and enters into discussion with the rapidly growing body of work on the 'history of emotions'. The themes of suffering and happiness run through Paul Slack's publications; the first being more prominent in his early work on plague and poverty, the second in his more recent work on conceptual frameworks for social thought and action. Though he has not himself engaged directly with the history of emotions, assembling essays on these themes provides an opportunity to do that. The chapters explore in turn shifting discourses of happiness and suffering over time; the deployment of these discourses for particular purposes at specific moments; and their relationship to subjective experience. In their introduction, the editors note the very diverse approaches that can be taken to the topic; they suggest that it is best treated not as a discrete field of enquiry but as terrain in which many paths may fruitfully cross. The history of emotions has much to offer as a site of encounter between historians with diverse knowledge, interests, and skills.

1 - The Invention of 'Happiness'
2 - The Happiness of Suffering: Adversity, Providence and Agency in Early-Modern England
3 - Happiness and the Theology of the Self in Late Seventeenth-Century England
4 - Happiness Contested: Happiness and Politics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth centuries
5 - The Sufferings of John Lilburne
6 - Writing Petitions in Early Modern England
7 - The Body in the Workhouse: Death, Burial and Belonging in Early Eighteenth-Century St Giles in the Fields
8 - The 'Highest Roade to Happiness': the 'Active Philosophy' of James Boevey (1622-1696)
9 - The Wretch of Today, may be happy Tomorrow: Poverty and Happiness in England c. 1700-1840
10 - Happiness in Things? Plebeian Experiences of Chattel 'Property' in the Long Eighteenth Century
11 - The Pleasures and Pains of Breast-Feeding in England, c.1600-c.1800

After taking his BA and PhD at Cambridge, Michael J. Braddick worked in Alabama for two years, before coming to Sheffield in 1990. He has written extensively on the social and political history of seventeenth century England, Britain, and the Atlantic world. More recently he has been working on the English revolution and has written a monograph, several journal articles, and edited a number of edited collections in this field. An element of his abiding interest in popular politics has been research on print culture, particularly cheap print and newsbooks. Joanna Innes was educated in Britain and the United States. She was an undergraduate, graduate student, and research fellow at Cambridge, and has been employed at Somerville College, Oxford since 1982. She is broadly interested in political culture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Much of her research has focussed on English social policy, in British and European comparative context; she also co-organizes an international collaborative project on the re-imagining of democracy as a modern form in Europe and the Americas between the mid eighteenth and mid nineteenth centuries.