Allegories of Abstraction: Retirement in Britain, 1660-1830

Abstract

Covering nearly two hundred years, from the rise of Dissenting rituals of <&ldquo;>abstraction<&rdquo;> after the Restoration to the eclipse of John Locke's theories in the mid-1820s, <&ldquo;>Allegories of Abstraction<&rdquo;> explores changing concepts of abstract thought in relation to the practice and poetry of retirement. Although the term abstraction today evokes disembodied concepts, abstraction in long-eighteenth-century Britain was often viewed as an embodied practice, specifically a bodily withdrawal or retirement from sense impressions and material objects. Chapter 1 challenges the assumption that British poems celebrating a retirement from the city to the countryside imitate Latin poems, positing instead that they manifest attitudes derived from the Protestant ritual of abstraction--i.e., the withdrawal from worldly affairs for the purposes of spiritual reflection. Chapter 2 argues that British poets, in the wake of Locke's 1690 redefinition of abstraction as an intellectual process, i.e., abstract thought, utilized retirement as a metaphor to help grasp this new, hard-to-understand definition. Poets including James Thomson, William Cowper, and Elizabeth Carter used the topos of retiring from the city to the countryside to represent an intellectual <&ldquo>retreat<&rdquo;> from bodily sensations to abstract ideas, the dream of a rural simplicity doubling as a fantasy of conceptual simplification. The last two chapters trace how the tropes desseminated in retirement poetry altered both social practices and reading habits in the wider British culture. From the emergence of a taste for the <&ldquo;>retired sociability<&rdquo;> offered by small social groups such as the Kit-Kat Club to the rise of the idea that reading enabled retreat, retirement verse and the retirement-is-abstraction metaphor worked far-reaching changes in the lives of long-eighteenth-century men and women.