Jinner, Sarah. An Almanack and Prognostication for the year of our Lord 1659. Company of Stationers.
end pages
215 results for smallpox
1658
Sarah Jinner, Student in Astrology, published...
ECCO has four issues of this serial. It covers the law courts' and universities' terms, the influence of astrology over dates and parts of the body (with an illustration showing Man's Body which is clearly female), the phases of the moon, calendar of the church, and weather forecasts (in June 1658 cold and dark weather with showers of rain will give way to a wholsome air with some gentle showres). Jinner added new features from time to time. From 1659 she appended an address To the Reader. The first of these expresses regret that people are often too embarrassed to be clear when consulting a doctor about sexual problems. She recommends further reading matter about health and fertility (and how to conceive either a boy or a girl); she desires that our Sex may be furnished with knowledge: if they knew better, they would do better. In 1660 this address refers darkly to political events both past and to come; this year Jinner's expanded almanac lists the dates of monarchs' reigns since the Norman Conquest, and adds recipes for medicines of all kinds, and detailed prognostications for each month, not only on agricultural matters but for instance, for April, a probability of revolution for princes and states, with public affairs ill-joynted and discomposed. Jinner adds wryly: I know not what this Moneth is good for else, than to marry in it: the Woman will be fruitful, and the Man more constant than ordinary. She then says that July will be worse, with miscarriages, deaths in childbed, smallpox, and suicides.
Anne Wharton
's father,
of Ditchley Park, about four miles from Woodstock, Oxfordshire, died of smallpox before she was born. His family had connections with
,
, and
.
Anne Killigrew
died of smallpox at her
's lodgings near Westminster Abbey.
Elizabeth Burnet
Gilbert Burnet's second marriage, in late May 1687 to
, was also a love match (though she was rich). She died of smallpox on 18 June 1698, having borne seven children during her eleven years of marriage, and lost two of them (both sons) to death.
Sarah Savage
was attacked by smallpox in 1688, but survived. As she grew older her sight deteriorated until she could not read a word without glasses (which made her consider that she ought to spend more time in prayer and meditation instead of reading).
Delarivier Manley
When they parted she fell gravely ill. Possibly this was the occasion in her youth when she had smallpox. This left her badly marked, though she said later that she had little beauty to spoil.
Bathsheba Bowers
had a brother who died of smallpox when she was eighteen. Her first response to his illness was terror; only when he died was she plunged into grief.
Edmund Curll
Curll was apprenticed sometime around 1697 to 1699, and set up in business for himself by early 1706. He became a particularly agile entrepreneur with a nose for new market niches and an absence of moral scruple. He also held auctions of books, sold patent medicines at his shop, and published works on smallpox and venereal disease. He was known for publishing pornography (often misogynist), inaccurate statements, deliberately false attributions, and material acquired against the wishes of the author. He also published religious works, and respectable authors like the poet
; but it was probably his perception of the publicity value of female names which led him to publish work by a number of serious women writers, like
,
, the mysterious, Irish
, and (without authority) the pious
. His recent biographers call him an eccentric outsider in the world of publishing.
Catharine Burton
At the age of sixteen
survived an attack of smallpox, but the year after that she fell seriously ill again (having just been practising severe religious abstinence). She was ill for seven years, with all kinds of symptoms including giddiness, spots on the skin, stomach pains, failure of appetite, shaking fits, and, she says, her bones moving out of their proper places. Her account of the remedies used on her is painfully vivid: bitter potions, sweats, vomits, bleeding, and Spanish flies, as well as vinegar on her blisters. She recovered immediately when she vowed to become a nun, and found that, for instance, her previously rigid fingers were now pliable. She therefore attributed her cure to a miracle, and thought all I could do for God too little. It does not appear that she was ever ill again, unless perhaps trivially, until shortly before her death.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Lady Mary's much-loved brother died of smallpox on 1 July 1713, not yet twenty-one, leaving a wife (not chosen by himself) and two small children.
1690
A satire on women, Mundus Muliebris: or,...
Mary Evelyn (1665-85), daughter of the diarist and virtuoso John Evelyn and of
(a letter-writer of note, who declined to branch out into other authorship), was regarded as a prodigy of learning, but died young of smallpox. Manuscript writings by her and her mother, on deposit among other Evelyn papers at
, include her Rules for Spending my Pretious Tyme Well.
Eliza Haywood
It was advertised as intended for the younger and politer Sort of Ladies, though the reader is conventionally referred to as he. Advertising and other publicity was on a larger scale than for any other of Haywood's works. It ran for two years: twenty-four numbers. Publishing anonymously,
claimed to chair a committee of women: several members of one body, of which I am the mouth. Doubt that this could really be women's writing is voiced more than once, over the name of male correspondents. A frontispiece depicts the authors gathered at a tea-table (the sign of Fame visible behind them in the top of the picture). The editor is a sober, middle-aged woman who was a coquette in her youth. Others in the club include Mira, a society widow (wearing black in the illustration), and Euphrosine, a merchant's daughter who after losing her beauty to smallpox (as
's Victoria does in a fiction of a few years later) has acquired intellectual interests (thereby allowing her sister to take over the role of their mother's favourite).
28 December 1694
Queen Mary died of smallpox during a severe...
died of smallpox during a severe epidemic, leaving her husband,
, to reign alone.
Anne Irwin
's first husband,
, died of smallpox before the couple could sail, as planned, for Barbados.
Mehetabel Wright
The Wesley family suffered from smallpox.
Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford
At some time before she was married, Frances Thynne suffered from smallpox, which left her a little marked.
July 1700
William Duke of Gloucester, born in 1689,...
, born in 1689, longest-surviving child of the future
, died of smallpox.
Sophia Hume
was a leading
pamphleteer of the mid eighteenth century. She published religious and moral exhortations, an anthology, and a diatribe against smallpox inoculation, in England and America.
Judith Cowper Madan
Pattison died of smallpox in July this year, aged about twenty-one. Subscribers to his posthumous poems included
,
,
,
,
, and
. This text of Abelard to Eloisa is slightly garbled in the Pattison volume, presumably in transcription from manuscript. A better text is the one reprinted with Madan's name to close the 11th edition of
's translated Letters of Abelard and Heloise, 1773. The phrase glowing Heart (1773) clearly fits the mood of the poem better than gloomy Heart (1727), and rack'd Soul in the final line is a better reading than wreck'd Soul. Pope's poem had been added to Letters of Abelard and Heloise in the edition of 1760, and that and Madan's were reprinted in later editions both English and Latin. Other writers (at least four of them) responded to Pope's poem with independent compositions sharing the same title as
's. Hers is shaped in part by her relationship with
, in which she combined the roles of protégée, disciple, and admirer. Madan's poem circulated widely in manuscript. Among those who collected it was someone in the family of the seventeenth-century poet
, who copied most of it into the album containing Pulter's surviving poetic oeuvre.
Laetitia Pilkington
survived smallpox as a small child.
Samuel Johnson
Misella (one of many women whose struggles are foregrounded in the Rambler though the medium of fictitious female correspondents) was first seduced by a man she trusted, and has since known the depths of poverty. She proposes that London prostitutes should be shipped to the colonies to make a fresh start. Another imaginary correspondent, Victoria, who loses her beauty by smallpox after being brought up by her mother to value herself exclusively on that, is finally reasoned out of her despair by another woman, who convinces her that she is a being born to know, to reason, and to act. The Victoria papers were later reprinted by
in The Female Reader.
Margaret Calderwood
's brother, another
, was educated at school and university and on the Grand Tour. He married
in 1743, and two years later, because she was ill with smallpox, did not (like more cautious propertied men) leave Edinburgh when
, had occupied the city and established his court there. The result was that after the second Jacobite Rebellion Sir James was excluded from the Bill of Indemnity (though he insisted that he would never have taken up arms against the Hanoverian line). Standing accused of high treason and having left Britain, he was unable to return with safety. He and his wife and son became exiles abroad. Sir James studied political economy and published a book that became important to
among others: An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy, 1770. He and his wife became close friends of
, who addressed to them some of the finest of her late letters.
Mary Collyer
The story enforces the view that love comes but once in a lifetime (like smallpox, commented the Critical Review). Having lost her only love, the heroine is doomed to remain forever in the cloister.
Elizabeth Montagu
Elizabeth Robinson (later
) was sent away from home to protect her from catching smallpox from her sister,
.
Sarah Scott
The fame of
's elder sister,
, later eclipsed her own. They enjoyed a very close relationship while they were growing up. Their nickname the two Peas suggests how they were regarded as a matched pair. In 1734 Elizabeth entered London society as companion to her friend
, leaving Sarah behind on the family estate. Sarah felt deeply the loss of her sister's companionship. After Elizabeth married George Montagu in August 1742, Sarah stayed with her sister at various times until she moved in with Lady Barbara Montagu. Elizabeth also supplemented Sarah's income on many occasions. The two sisters maintained a close relationship throughout their lives.
suggests that Sarah's relationship with her sister was a compelling preoccupation in her life, and that she never forgave Elizabeth for abandoning her. She also suggests that the smallpox which ruined Sarah's beauty set the two sisters on different courses: Elizabeth as a bluestocking in the social limelight, and Sarah as a social activist.