Thomas Elfe Thomas Elfe Elfe was born in 1719 in London, England. He was an accomplished and prolific furniture and cabinet craftsman of the American colonial period. Elfe, a contemporary of Thomas Chippendale, was considered Charleston's best furniture craftsman of the eighteenth century. His working career spanned almost thirty years from about 1746 to 1775. At one point in his career his personal worth was a fortune of over 6,200 English pounds. Local Charleston historian and one time director of the Charleston Museum, E. Milby Burton (1889–1977), attributed Elfe as the craftsman of some of the finest nationally acclaimed furniture produced. Burton's
18th-century French literature 18th century saw innovations in form and content which opened the way for the modern novel, a work of fiction in prose recounting the adventures or the evolution of one or several characters. In the 18th century the genre of the novel enjoyed a great increase in readership, and was marked by the effort to convey feelings realistically, through such literary devices as first-person narration, exchanges of letters, and dialogues, all trying to show, in the spirit of the lumieres, a society which was evolving. The French novel was strongly influenced by the English novel, through the translation of the