Main description:

This multi-disciplinary essay collection explores the controversial life and achievements of Sir John Hill (1714-1775), a prolific contributor to Georgian England's literature, medicine and science. By the time he died, he had been knighted by the Swedish monarch and become a household name among scientists and writers throughout Britain and Europe. In 1750s London he was a celebrity, but he was also widely vilified. Hill, an important writer of urban space, also helped define London through his periodicals and fictions. As well as examining his significance and achievements, this book makes Hill a means of exploring the lively intellectual and public world of London in the 1750s where rivalries abounded, and where clubs, societies, coffee-houses, theatres and pleasure gardens shaped fame and fortunes. By investigating one individual's intersections with his metropolis, Fame and Fortune restores Hill to view and contributes new understandings of the forms and functions of eighteenth-century intellectual worlds.

Contents:

1 Introduction; Clare Brant and George Rousseau.- I HILL & LIVES.- 2 The Biographer's Tale: Second Thoughts of a Biographer; George Rousseau.- 3 The Propagation of Lives: Sir John Who?; Clare Brant.- 4 Sir John Hill and Friendship; Emrys Jones.- II HILL & LITERATURE.- 5 John Hill and Mary Cooper: A Case Study in Eighteenth-Century Publishing; Beverley Schneller.- 6 "The Ravished Organs of the Attentive Audience": John Hill and Christopher Smart; Min Wild.- 7 "Unassisted Hill": Churchill's Satire and the Fate of the Virtuoso; Adam Rounce.- 8 The Erotic Satires of Sir John Hill; Julie Peakman.- III HILL & PUBLIC PLACES.- 9 The Doctor as Man of Letters: mid-Georgian Transformations; George Rousseau.- 10 Coffee-house Sociability, Science and Public Life in John Hill's The Inspector; Markman Ellis.- 11 The Inspector at Large: Sir John Hill's Interrogation of London Space; Chris Ewers.- IV HILL & SCIENCES.- 12 A Dwarf on Giant's Shoulders: Hill the Geologist; Christopher J. Duffin.- 13 Sir John Hill as Botanist: The Vegetable System; Brent Elliott.- 14 John Hill, Exotic Botany and the Competitive World of Eighteenth-Century Horticulture; Sarah Easterby-Smith.