Christine Gerrard offers a lively and engaging account of one of the most interesting yet neglected figures in the age of Pope. Theatre impresario, poet, and commercial entrepreneur, Aaron Hill was adored by Eliza Haywood, enjoyed a love-hate relationship with Pope, and a long and intimate friendship with Samuel Richardson.

What did it mean to be a `Patriot' during the Walpole administration? This is the first full-length study of the so-called Patriot opposition to Walpole which reached its height during the clamour for war against Spain at the turn of the 1730s. The book examines the interrelationship between patriotism, politics, and poetry in the period 1724-1742. Christine Gerrard investigates the growing Patriot opposition during the Walpolian oligarchy, and asks whether a broad credo united all of Walpole's political opponents, or whether there was a distinction between Whig and Tory Patriots. The role of Frederick Prince of Wales as the campaign's cultural and political figurehead (Bolingbroke's visionary `Patriot King') is discussed, as are the poetry and drama of such authors as James Thomson, Alexander Pope, and the young Samuel Johnson, who were all drawn to the heady idealism of the young Boy Patriots. Thomson's Rule Britannia and Johnson's London exploit the appeal to British history so central to the emotive propaganda of the Patriot campaign. Drawing on the literature, prints, architecture, and statuary of the 1730s, Christine Gerrard also discusses two of the decade's most powerful romantic patriotic myths - Gothic liberty, and Elizabethan greatness - and reveals that in its nationalistic emphasis upon Nordic and Celtic traditions, the figure of the ancient British Druid, and native `bards', Patriot literature anticipates the `Gothic' strain emerging in the poetry of Gray, Collins, and the Wartons only a few years later.

Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) was an established master printer when, at the age of 51, he published his first novel, Pamela, and immediately became one of the most influential and admired writers of his time. Not only were all Richardson's novels written in epistolary form: he was also a prolific letter-writer himself. This volume in the first ever full edition of Richardson's correspondence includes his letters to and from Aaron Hill, the poet, dramatist and entrepreneur (1685-1750). Hill was Richardson's earliest literary friend and advisor as he embarked on a new career as a novelist. This correspondence offers fascinating insight into the compositional processes not just of the two Pamela novels, but of Richardson's later novels Clarissa and The History of Sir Charles Grandison. The volume also contains Richardson's correspondence with Hill's three literary daughters, which forms an invaluable chapter in the history of women's writing and literary criticism.

Written by a combination of established scholars and new critics in the field, the essays collected in Circuit of Apollo attest to the vital practice of commemorating women’s artistic and personal relationships. In doing so, they illuminate the complexity of female friendships and honor as well as the robust creativity and intellectual work contributed by women to culture in the long eighteenth century. Women’s tributes to each other sometimes took the form of critical engagement or competition, but they always exposed the feminocentric networks of artistic, social, and material exchange women created and maintained both in and outside of London. This volume advocates for a new perspective for researching and teaching early modern women that is grounded in admiration. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.