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Richard Lovelace is the best-known ‘Cavalier’ poet. He was a relative and close friend of Thomas Stanley; he was friends with both John Hall and Marvell. This chapter offers a revisionist interpretation of several of his most acclaimed lyric poems, including ‘The Grasshopper’, by placing them in the context of royalist disillusionment in the aftermath of the king's defeat but also of the cultural activities of the Stanley circle. These readings of Lovelace's verse show how his post-war lyrics dwell on the collapse of Stuart court culture and patronage. Lovelace looks rather to a recreation of the sort of literary circle over which Ben Jonson presided in pre-war London for the preservation of literary values against what he perceives as Puritan philistinism.

This chapter sets Marvell's two of published occasional poems of 1648–9 in the context of the literary community around Stanley in London. The first section examines John Hall's career as a Parliamentarian propagandist and shows how he followed Milton in seeking to convince his literary friends to support a royalist–Independent alliance against the Presbyterians. The second section reads Marvell's An Elegy Upon the Death of My Lord Francis Villiers as concerned with similar themes of Lovelace's post-war verse––the destruction of court culture and the future for poetry and wit in a Puritan society. The third section is the most extensive interpretation to date of Marvell's verse epistle ‘To His Noble Friend Mr Richard Lovelace’, a poem which brings together central themes of the previous chapters and reveals Marvell's allegiance to the cause of wit above the defeated cause of the king.

The concluding chapter focuses on Marvell's satire ‘Tom May's Death’, the allegiance which has long puzzled scholars given its apparently royalist sentiment but date of composition after the ‘Horatian Ode’. It is argued that the poem is written in the cause of wit, rather than royalism or republicanism, and so appropriate for an audience composed of former members of the Stanley circle. May's betrayal is of the muses; Marvell fears the same charge may be levelled at him. The echoes of the poem in the 1650s verse of Lovelace and Alexander Brome, another ‘Cavalier’ poet involved with the Stanley circle, offer suggestions as to how ‘Tom May's Death’ was read by royalist contemporaries, and how they reacted to Marvell's own pro-Cromwellian verse.

Sudden deaths were deemed as bad deaths by Christian standards because they do not allow time for spiritual preparation and repentance for sins committed in life, while suicides are seen as terrible and appalling deaths as they are seen as a moral crime against the law of God and the common law. For the early and middle Victorian Christians, bad deaths and suicides were primarily of spiritual concern because of the fear of judgement and the fear of hell enforced by Evangelical doctrine. This chapter discusses bad deaths, sudden deaths, and suicides. The death cases of Ada Lovelace, Lucy Cavendish, the Lyttletons, and the Gladstones are analyzed as these all illustrate how the early and mid-Victorians dealt with sudden deaths and suicides as well as how they managed to cope with these death in terms of their strong ideals for a good Christian death and their strong belief in religion and the teachings of Christianity.

This chapter recovers Herrick’s association with a formidable, secretive, and almost unknown literary circle which formed in London in the aftermath of the first Civil War, and whose raison d’être was to encourage translation and imitation of classical, neo-Latin, and continental verse. I suggest that when Herrick prepared Hesperides for publication, he was close to, or was perhaps even a member of the poetic community that gathered in the Middle Temple rooms of Thomas Stanley and included prominent royalist writers such as Richard Lovelace and James Shirley.

This chapter looks at the reception of Edwards among self-professed “experimental Calvinists” such as Richard Lovelace, John Piper, Tim Keller, John Gerstner, and the Banner of Truth Trust. It also contrasts this theological and devotional use of Edwards to the scholarship produced by evangelical academics on Edwards and his followers, such as Mark Noll, Allen Guelzo, George Marsden, and Douglas Sweeney. Although the religious and scholarly uses of the New England theology differed, they also reveal how Edwards continued to sustain certain evangelical hearts and minds.

Calculating machines around 1700 served as something “good to think with” in the major early modern debate about what sorts of causes were philosophically licit in explaining the creation and emergence of the ordinary phenomena of nature. The idea of such machines helped Leibniz and others to think through both the power and limitations of matter in motion as invoked in the mechanical philosophy and to distinguish sharply the appearance of reasoning in existing complex material systems from the initial creation of complex organizations of matter. Far from leading to atheism, from Leibniz to Babbage and Lovelace, the machine helped specify the necessity of divine origination of organized matter.

In designing his foundational test of AI, Alan Turing refers to Ada’s Lovelace’s Victorian pronouncement that a machine cannot be intelligent because it only does what it is programmed to do. This idea continues to shape the field of computational creativity as the ‘Lovelace objection’. This chapter, however, argues that the term is a misnomer; Lovelace actually proposes a much more nuanced understanding of human–machine collaboration. Returning to Lovelace’s 1843 essays, I situate them within broader Victorian debates about originality in literary realism, especially in relation to Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope’s fictional uses of ‘mechanicity’. This chapter hopes to intervene in contemporary discussions of computational creativity, which continue to invoke the Lovelace objection as a means to focus on a human-centred definition of ‘creativity’. Seeing computational creativity as the outgrowth of a long history of human–machine originality may open up the field to that history’s creative symbiosis.

Caribbean texts from the 1950s both articulated the promise of an independent nation-state and foreshadowed the potential problems it might encounter. This chapter explores the materialization of those problems. Focusing in particular on Wilson Harris’ The Secret Ladder (1963) and Earl Lovelace’s The Wine of Astonishment (1982), it considers how the transformations and difficulties experienced by the body politic are not only registered in these works through the image of the physical body but also shown to be connected materially to its dispositions and inculcated behaviors. The chapter argues that the crisis of political representation finds its literary corollary in a crisis of aesthetic representation, figured most notably through the malfunctioning of the topos of the tragic sacrifice.

This chapter examines the increasingly fraught representations of individuals and communities in the 1970s and 1980s, as the shortcomings of various national projects became ever more apparent or, as in the case of the French départements, the possibility of even obtaining independence seemed to recede. Through an analysis of novels by Lovelace, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Luis Rafael Sénchez, it explores themes of language, madness, folklorization, and commodity fetishism. The chapter argues that despite the strangulation of cultural and political expression these texts document, they nevertheless imply that new social relations and forms of collectivity can be articulated.

This chapter examines how stylistic innovations and glimpses of utopian potential are extended by authors such as Partrick Chamoiseau, Earl Lovelace, and Erna Brodber into whole aesthetic programs that flesh out projected new modes of collectivity. These writers fashion a new kind of epic form that draws on Caribbean religio-cultural practices centered on possession rites and ego displacement, and refracts the potential lineaments of a reconfigured nation-state.

Chapter One examines the representation of village and small-town rural communities in Olive Senior’s Summer Lightning and Other Stories (1986) and Earl Lovelace’s A Brief Conversion and Other Stories (1988), reading these story collections alongside anthropological studies of rural communities in Jamaica and Trinidad. The chapter explores how the style and narrative structure of these texts reflects their writers’ indebtedness both to a Euro-American modernism and to a Caribbean oral storytelling tradition. By adopting narrative strategies from both traditions, it argues, Senior and Lovelace develop a mode of writing appropriate for articulating the collective voice of a community.

This chapter narrates the re-entry of Andrew Marvell in England in the year 1647, where the outbreak of the Second Civil War occurred in the summer of 1648. Amidst this tumultuous context, Marvell also found himself deeply embedded within the much disturbed literary culture of London. During this time, however, several firm Royalist poets were publishing their work, such as Abraham Cowley—Marvell's senior at Trinity College— and Oxford's Richard Lovelace. Marvell paid close attention to these poets, which led him to think about a vocation as a poet in a war-torn England—a vocation that would lead to the reverence of his works long after his death. The chapter then looks at the influences that moved Marvell to form and create his own poems—both the environmental and literary influences which stirred the thought and opinions contained in his writing.

Chapter 3 tells the story of the visionaries that first imagined the computer. In the 19^th century, Charles Babbage invented a mechanical computer but failed in his attempts to build it. He and Ada Lovelace wrote a series of programs for the proposed machine. These programs were the first transcriptions of algorithms into sequences of machine executable instructions. After Babbage’s failure, the idea of building a real computer was abandoned for fifty years. As a young PhD student, Alan Turing forever defined the relationship between algorithms and computers. According to his definition, a computer is a machine that performs algorithms. He devised a theoretical computer that allowed him to investigate the limits of computation. This, before a single computer was ever built. Turing went on to work as a cryptographer during World War II. Turing outlined the future of computing but tragically died at the age of 41.

Digital computers are “protean” in that they can become almost anything through software. Their basic design elements came from a 19th-century British tradition in logic, exemplified by Boole and Babbage. It seemed natural to have logic realized in hardware. This tradition culminated in the work of Alan Turing who proposed a universal computing machine, now called a Turing machine, based on logic. Although hardware that computes logic functions lies at the core of digital hardware, low-level practical machine operations are grouped together in “words.” Programs are based on hardware operations controlling computation at the word level. This chapter presents a detailed example of what a computer does when it actually “computes.” Because human cognition finds it hard to use such an alien device, there is a brief discussion of how programming became “humanized” with the invention of software tools like assembly language and FORTRAN.

Chapter 8 introduces the prison amoureuse topos featuring the enslavement of the Petrarchan lover to his innamorata. The chapter opens with a reading of Mary Cholmondeley’s Prisoners (1906) as an instance of a juxtaposition of literal and metaphorical imprisonment. The following section introduces the medieval prison amoureuse trope (Boethius, Froissart, Diego de San Pedro, Charles d’Orléans, James I), and its Renaissance repercussions in the work of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Lovelace. This leads on to a consideration of masochism and bondage, with Angela Carter’s short story ‘The Bloody Chamber’ as an illustrative example. John Dryden’s play All for Love with its opposition of love and duty as bondage concludes the chapter.

The polymathic Charles Babbage—mathematician, engineer, systems analyst, economist, computer pioneer—has rarely been associated closely with statistics. But he was so proud of his role in founding the Statistical Movement in 1833-4 that he left four published accounts of it, and he made contributions to the Statistical Society of London on several occasions over the next three decades. This chapter examines Babbage’s role in the movement and those contributions to statistics, and it links Babbage to his friend and confidant Ada Lovelace, who acted as the interpreter of his statistical ideas. As far back as 1822, when explaining his concept of a mechanical calculating engine, Babbage had seen the requirement for machines capable of processing very large sets of numbers, what we would now call ‘Big Data’. In her exposition of his work, published in 1843, Ada Lovelace returned to this theme, foreseeing an age when large-scale numerical analysis would require mechanization. The concept of the computer is not a direct outcome of the Statistical Movement, but must be related to Babbage’s interest in ‘number’ and his foresight in envisaging a future age when science would not be able to accomplish its aims without the means to analyse numbers on a grand scale. This chapter sets Babbage in a statistical context and shows how much he took from and contributed to the Victorian statistical movement.