Enlightening Romanticism, Romancing the Enlightenment: British Novels from 1750 to 1832

Enlightening Romanticism, Romancing the Enlightenment

This collection is dedicated to my mother, Nancy Sidle Brett, who has always believed in the “advantages of education.”

Enlightening Romanticism, Romancing the Enlightenment British Novels from 1750 to 1832

Miriam L. Wallace New College of Florida, USA

© Miriam L. Wallace 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Miriam L. Wallace has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Enlightening Romanticism, romancing the Enlightenment : British novels from 1750 to 1832 1. English fiction – 18th century – History and criticism 2. English fiction – 19th century – History and criticism 3. Romanticism – Great Britain 4. Literature and society – Great Britain – History – 18th century 5. Literature and society – Great Britain – History – 19th century 6. Enlightenment – Great Britain I. Wallace, Miriam L. 823.6’09 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Enlightening romanticism, romancing the enlightenment : British novels from 1750 to 1832 / edited by Miriam L. Wallace. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-7546-6243-3 (alk. paper) 1. English fiction—18th century—History and criticism. 2. Romanticism—Great Britain. 3. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 4. Enlightenment—Great Britain. 5. Literature and society—Great Britain—History—18th century. 6. Literature and society—Great Britain—History—19th century. 7. Great Britain—Intellectual life—18th century. 8. Great Britain—Intellectual life—19th century. I. Wallace, Miriam L. PR853.E55 2009 823’.509—dc22 ISBN: 978-0-7546-6243-3 (HBk) EISBN: 978-0-7546-9464-9 (EBk.V)

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Contents Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements

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Introduction: Enlightened Romanticism or Romantic Enlightenment? Miriam L. Wallace

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1 Novel Romanticism in 1751: Eliza Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless Margaret Case Croskery

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2 The Melancholy Briton: Enlightenment Sources of the Gothic Peter Walmsley

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3 “Disagreeable Misconstructions”: Epistolary Trouble in Charlotte Smith’s Desmond Scott C. Campbell

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4 Reason and Romance: Rethinking Romantic-Era Fiction Through Jane West’s The Advantages of Education Daniel Schierenbeck

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5 The Politics of Masculinity in the 1790s Radical Novel: Hugh Trevor, Caleb Williams, and the Romance of Sentimental Friendship Shawn Lisa Maurer

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6 The “Double Sense” of Honor: Revising Gendered Social Codes in Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray Shelley King

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7 Reading the Metropole: Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah 131 Tara Ghoshal Wallace 8 The Woman of Genius: In Praise of the Inchoate Future Julie Shaffer

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9 Frances Trollope’s America: From Enlightenment Aesthetics to Victorian Class 163 Christopher Flynn

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Response Essay: How We See: The 1790s Patricia M. Spacks

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Response Essay: Cultural Transitions, Literary Judgments, and the Romantic-Era British Novel Stephen C. Behrendt

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Bibliography Index

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Notes on Contributors

Stephen C. Behrendt is George Holmes Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. Both a scholar and a poet, Professor Behrendt has published and spoken widely on William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Romantic women poets in particular. He is general Editor for a new electronic textbase project entitled “Irish Women Romantic Poets,” and his new book on Romantic-era British women poets is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press. He edited Romanticism and Women Poets: Opening the Doors of Reception (U Kentucky P) with Harriet Kramer Linkin, with whom he also co-edited Approaches to Teaching British Women Poets of the Romantic Period in the MLA Approaches to Teaching series. Professor Behrendt published an earlier volume in this series on Teaching Shelley’s Frankenstein. He also has edited editions of Shelley’s Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne (Broadview), and electronic editions of Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period; Richard Peake’s Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein; and Anna Maria Smallpiece’s Original Sonnets and Other Small Poems. His published poetry includes Instruments of the Bones (1992), A Step in the Dark (1996), History (2005). Professor Behrendt directed two summer NEH Seminars: “Rethinking British Romantic Fiction” in 2003, and “Genre, Dialogue, and Community in British Romanticism” in 2005. Scott C. Campbell is Assistant Professor of English and Writing Coordinator, Greater Hartford Campus, University of Connecticut. He has co-edited Making Sense (Houghton Mifflin), an anthology of selected texts for writing across the curriculum with chapters on making sense through writing and making sense through reading and research. His scholarly interests include eighteenth-century fiction, the Enlightenment, and theories of writing instruction.  Margaret Case Croskery received her Ph.D. in Literature from the University of Virginia in 2001. With Alexander Pettit and Anna C. Patchias, she is a co-editor of Fantomina and Other Works by Eliza Haywood (Broadview). Her primary areas of research are the rise of the novel, the eighteenth-century novel and popular culture. She was a participant in the 2003 NEH Summer Seminar “Rethinking British Romantic Fiction” led by Dr. Stephen Behrendt. Christopher Flynn is Associate Professor of English at St. Edward’s University. He is the author of Americans in British Literature, 1770–1832: A Breed Apart (Ashgate), as well as articles on Coleridge, Austen, Defoe and early novels representing the American Revolution. He also has published poetry and creative nonfiction. His essays have appeared in European Romantic Review, Symbiosis,

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and the Rocky Mountain Review. Professor Flynn is currently working on an edition of Daniel Defoe’s Review in an interactive blog and wiki format, along with a study of Defoe and the poetics of punishment. Professor Flynn was a participant in the 2003 NEH Summer Seminar “Rethinking British Romantic Fiction” led by Dr. Stephen Behrendt. Shelley King is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, where she teaches courses in nineteenth-century British literature and the history of children’s literature. She has published essays on Amelia Opie and Philip Pullman, and is co-editor with John B. Pierce of Opie’s Adeline Mowbray (Oxford World’s Classics) and The Father and Daughter with Dangers of Coquetry (Broadview). Shawn Lisa Maurer is Associate Professor of English and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. She is the author of Proposing Men: Dialectics of Gender and Class in the Eighteenth-Century English Periodical (Stanford) and articles on Wollstonecraft, Defoe, and eighteenth-century masculinity, including a study of Dryden’s AurengZebe in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. Dr. Maurer also is the editor of Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art (Broadview). Her current project examines representations of ideal masculinity in novels by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women writers. Daniel Schierenbeck is Associate Professor of English at the University of Central Missouri, where he teaches nineteenth-century British literature. He has recently published essays on the Lambs, William Blake, and Mary Shelley. He is currently working on a book-length project that examines the pervasive connections between religion, culture and aesthetics in Romantic-era literature. He was a participant in the 2003 NEH Summer Seminar “Rethinking British Romantic Fiction” led by Dr. Stephen Behrendt. Julie Shaffer is Associate Professor of English at the University of WisconsinOshkosh, where she specializes in Romantic-era British women novelists. Her scholarly work focuses on novelistic treatments of adultery, cross-dressing, incest and illegitimacy with attention to woman-penned novels that have by and large lapsed from critical attention. She edited Mary Robinson’s 1797 Walsingham for Broadview Press (2003). Her essays have appeared in Studies in the Novel, Criticism and in a number of essay collections, including Presenting Gender (ed. Chris Mounsey) and Lewd and Notorious: Female Transgression in the Eighteenth Century (ed. Katharine Kittredge). She also has posted about 300 contemporary reviews of Romantic-era British female novelists on Sheffield Hallam University’s website, Corvey Women Writers on the Web. Professor Shaffer recently published on Sophia Lee’s The Two Emilys in Women’s Writing, and her critical edition of this novel-length tale is forthcoming with Valancourt Press. She was a participant

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in the 2003 NEH Summer Seminars “Rethinking British Romantic Fiction” led by Dr. Stephen Behrendt. Patricia M. Spacks is Edgar Shannon Professor Emerita of English at the University of Virginia and author, most recently, of Novel Beginnings: Experiments in EighteenthCentury English Fiction (Yale UP). She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences in 1994. Professor Spacks is currently completing a study of eighteenth-century British poetry. Miriam L. Wallace is Associate Professor of British and American Literature at New College of Florida. She has published on Jacobin and anti-Jacobin novels, gender and masculinity in Tristram Shandy, Thomas Holcroft and the 1794 Treason Trials, Mary Hays’s “female philosopher,” and revolutionary elements in Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story. She edited Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney and Amelia Alderson Opie’s Adeline Mowbray, bound together for the undergraduate classroom (College Publishing). She received an NEH College Teacher Grant in support of her book, Revolutionary Subjects in the English “Jacobin” Novel 1790–1805 (Bucknell UP), and participated in the 2003 NEH Summer Seminar “Rethinking British Romantic Fiction” led by Dr. Stephen Behrendt. She is currently working on forms of treasonous, illicit or suspect speech and writing at the end of the eighteenth century. Tara Ghoshal Wallace is Associate Professor of English at George Washington University where she is currently Director of Graduate Studies. She also serves as Advisor to Enosinian Scholars, George Washington University. Professor Wallace writes on late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century novels with particular attention to the discourses of empire and the intersection of history and fiction. She has published: Jane Austen and Narrative Authority (Palgrave); “The Elephant’s Foot and the British Mouth: Walter Scott on Imperial Discourse.” ERR (2002); “Filming Romance: Persuasion,” in Jane Austen on Screen (2003); “‘... about savages and the awfulness of America’: Colonial Corruptions in Humphry Clinker” in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (2006); “Burney as Dramatist” in the Cambridge Companion to Burney, Ed. Peter Sabor (2007), and has forthcoming “Global Walter Scott,” in the MLA Approaches to Teaching Scott, Ed. Ian Duncan and Evan Gottlieb. Her current book project, Imperial Contradictions: Home and Periphery in Eighteenth-Century Literature, addresses uneasy articulations of empire in British texts from Aphra Behn to Walter Scott. Peter Walmsley is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University and one of the co-editors of Eighteenth-Century Fiction. He is the author of The Rhetoric of Berkeley’s Philosophy (Cambridge UP) and Locke’s Essay and the Rhetoric of Science (Bucknell UP), and has published articles in Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Journal of the History of Ideas. His current scholarship focuses on changing discourses of death in eighteenth-century British literature and art; he has completed articles on Joseph Addison’s graveyard writing and on the cadaver in Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic fiction.

Acknowledgements

By its very nature, an edited volume collects debts and relies upon the generosity of many—not least that of the contributors. I am privileged to have worked with those scholars who participated in this project and delighted to be associated with all of them. My thanks go first to New College of Florida, which provided summer salary support for this project in 2006 and 2007, and to my students who consistently challenge me to make sense of literary traditions. I would especially like to acknowledge the National Endowment for the Humanities, which sponsored the Summer NEH Seminar on “Rethinking British Romantic Fiction” at the University of Nebraska in 2003 that shaped and spawned this project. The seminar leader, Stephen Behrendt, and my colleagues from the seminar deserve special thanks for their engaging and challenging responses to my questions about “Romanticism” and the “long eighteenth century”: Margaret Case Croskery, Joy Currie, Chris Flynn, Anne Frey, Daniella Mallinick, Julie Shaffer, Daniel Schierenbeck, Sandra Sherman, Brian Trinque, Dawn Van Epp, Samantha Webb, Lisa Wilson, and Margaret Wye. Special thanks go to Margaret Case Croskery, whose positive energy and collaborative spirit influenced the direction and composition of this project at its conception. I am particularly grateful to the initially anonymous reader (now revealed as Robert Folkenflik), whose detailed and careful responses at both proposal and draft stages precisely balanced critique and guidance for each essay and helped to make this a better collection. I also would like to thank my editor at Ashgate, Ann Donahue, for her supportive, professional, and swift responses to my questions from the initial conception to the final realization of this collection; working with her has been a real pleasure. Thanks are also due to my senior colleagues at ASECS who supported the idea for this project and made suggestions for locating response essays, particularly Vivien Jones, Paula R. Backscheider and Susan S. Lanser. A very special thank you to Stephen Behrendt, who has consistently modeled what a generous and intellectually challenging senior colleague should look like. Heidi Taylor at the Ringling Museum of Art was, as always, friendly, efficient and gracious in helping secure the cover image by Joseph Wright of Derby. I thank the John and Mabel Ringling Museum of Sarasota for permission to reproduce one of my favorite images from their wonderful collection. Finally, a more personal debt of gratitude is due to R.L. Silver, Waffles, and Pesto, who provide affection, joy and the companionship that makes everything else possible.

Introduction

Enlightened Romanticism or Romantic Enlightenment? Miriam L. Wallace

As eighteenth-century scholarship has expanded its range, both historically and in its consideration of more popular and less elite cultural artifacts, so has what used to be known as “Romanticism.” As a consequence, novels from about 1750 to 1833 have become a rich and contested site of critical overlap, with the 1790s as a particular locus of important work among scholars. While many individual scholars do attend both kinds of conference and write for a crossover audience, the old canonical construction of “Enlightenment” versus “Romanticism,” “Age of Johnson” versus “Age of Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Blake, and Byron” potentially limits critical exchange. The exigencies of the profession and the job market only tend to reinforce such limitations, as do many anthologies and ensconced course curricula. This volume responds to this problem by inviting contributors who identify as scholars specializing in either the eighteenth century or in Romanticism, to address related writers and novels. This volume aims first, to open new and richer discussions of novels and novelistic concerns in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain. Secondly, by grounding our discussion in particular literary works, this volume acknowledges the necessity for dialogue across the scholarly boundaries of “eighteenth-century studies” and “Romantic studies.” Dominant narratives, critical approaches, and methodological assumptions may differ in important ways, but these differences also can reveal a productive tension. Rather than subsuming one into the other, this collection seeks to offer a model for augmenting each other’s work by placing into conversation essays on works legitimately incorporated under both “eighteenth-century studies” and “Romanticism.” The problems and possibilities of this dialogue are highlighted in this introduction, revealed in the essays’ engagement with each other’s concerns— including in some cases cross-references—, and augmented by two concluding responses to the collection from senior scholars. Long Centuries and Romanticism Some years ago the MLA Job Information List abandoned the designation “Romantic” and created an uproar on the NASSR (North American Society for



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the Study of Romanticism) listserv (see NASSR-L postings from October 1997, ). At the insistence of respected senior scholars, the designation was reinstated, but the episode highlights a major source of scholarly anxiety about territory and periodization. What happens if one’s specialty is absorbed into a larger period designation in this age of downsizing the university? What is lost when a conceptual organization such as “Romanticism” is elided into a diachronic period designation such as “the eighteenth century” or “the nineteenth century”? As Susan Wolfson and William Galperin argued in their polemical argument for a “Romantic Century” from 1750 to 1850: “We think it impoverishing of the field to have it treated as the end-point of the eighteenth century (in which it is by definition marginal or ancillary) or as the adolescence of the nineteenth century. … Rather, we must resist—or at the very least transform—these unsatisfactory impositions or annexations through an initiative of our own” (“The Romantic Century,” http://www.rc.umd.edu/reference/misc/confarchive/crisis/crisiisa.html, accessed May 24, 2006). They continue: The Restoration or High-Anglican hegemony that continues to inform eighteenth-century studies (and to underwrite, in the process, the long eighteenth century) is most evident in the way the “Age of Johnson” becomes an inevitable sub-division in the aftermath of Swift and Pope, obscuring the fundamental break that the year 1750 can be said roughly to demarcate. By mid-century, lest we forget, Young and Thomson were widely read and part of a climate of variousness, ranging from the Wartons (who, as Robert Griffin reminds us, actually anticipate the Romantics in declaring their independence from Pope and others) to the many women writers suddenly publishing—all of them part of a discursive field additionally thickened by developments in print culture and in movements of political unrest. Thus, the 50/50 area of concentration that we propose does more than simply contest the logic of the long eighteenth century and its reliance on the synecdochical and, from our position, arbitrary centrality of Samuel Johnson; it brings writing is (sic) the latter half of that century (in the manner of Marshall Brown’s recent Preromanticism) into productive relation with those writers, texts and discourses on which it bears and with which it maintains crucial and compelling affinities. (“The Romantic Century”)

Finally then, they propose a “Romantic Century” from 1750 to 1850, responding to their sense of being subsumed and simplified by seeking in turn to subsume and simplify. Curiously, similar arguments about the “long eighteenth century” have emerged in the past on the C-18thList—the discussion list for ASECS members—debating the beginning and end points of the period, the usefulness of designations such as “Enlightenment,” “Age of Johnson,” “long eighteenth century,” and even Georgian or Hanoverian. A concern that some designations might lead to reading an important literature as somehow a rehearsal for the real thing (for example,

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“pre-Romantic” or “pre-history of the novel” or even “proto-novel”) also can be located among eighteenth-century scholars. (Curiously, many of us who work on the late eighteenth-century novel are familiar with Cambridge University Press’s “Cambridge Studies in Romanticism” as a useful series that publishes both members of ASECS and members of NASSR, and few eighteenth-century scholars note the tag “Romanticism.”) Less discomfort is usually apparent within any field for progressivist views that see that field as somehow special, unique, or the pinnacle of a valued propensity. No one, it seems, is disturbed to find her or his own area of specialization celebrated as the most important or most advanced. Eighteenth-century studies has found itself occasionally at odds with proponents of movements—Augustanism, Age of Johnson, the Enlightenment, which seek to privilege certain kinds of writing or thought. But as a field defined by a historical century, however blurred the start and end dates may be, it suffers a milder identity crisis than Romanticism. With the expansion of the Victorian era backward to include the early nineteenth-century Chartist movement and pre-1837 reform bills, British Romanticism as a particularly short period risked disappearing altogether into merely authorial scholarship—the Wordsworth or Blake specialist—a subspecialty within the larger centuries to either side. Blake or Byron might safely be placed with other late eighteenth-century writers: Thompson and Cowper in poetry, or Godwin and Wollstonecraft in politics (and many anthologies in fact do this). Wordsworth, who was poet laureate under Victoria, and whose Prelude was only finally posthumously published, might be reclaimed as a kind of protoVictorian, or so the fear went. The real drive, of course, was that graduate students specializing in Romantic literature found they had better be sure to document training in their “real” field of hire—the eighteenth or nineteenth century. As universities and colleges nationally and internationally try to do more teaching with fewer faculty, few of us can afford to specialize solely in a period of some 30 years when others cover full centuries. (Of course, those of us at small liberal arts institutions or at small public institutions have long been expected to cover more historical terrain in our teaching and sometimes in our scholarship—but the Research University remains the standard definer of the field and point of aspiration.) An expanding British eighteenth century—no longer safely contained as Augustanism or Age of Johnson, and with the novel no longer solely mapped from Defoe through the twin poles of Richardson and Fielding, but including the Gothic novel and Jane Austen—seems to threaten even more directly the newlyfound territory of so-called “Romantic fiction.” But should the demands of the job market determine our defense of a distinction between literary periods? Though period designations are, of course, largely conveniences for institutionalizing teaching and scholarship, they importantly shape the kinds of knowledge that we produce and claim; they are not precisely arbitrary, but rather reflect thoughtful affiliations and associations. Most such terms also are given after the fact by philosophers or scholars, and reflect the thinking of their time about a previous age; thus they are doubly historically telling, reflecting both on the period they define and the era that identified and



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defined that period. The terms of literary period also carry with them their own ideological implications and shape our reading practices. The “Renaissance” means something different than either “the sixteenth century” or the “Early Modern period.” The “eighteenth century” replaces the “Enlightenment” as a way of both recognizing the continuities from the earlier seventeenth century through the 1780s and 1790s and casting suspicion on the teleology of progress embedded in the idea of “Enlightenment” itself. “Romanticism” too came under attack from internal critiques as “a discourse of false consciousness, of gender oppression, of an idealizing transcendence or self-blinding evasion of the political and social world, as a little too complacent in its aesthetics of complexity” (Susan Wolfson, “50–50? Phone a Friend? Ask the Audience?: Speculating on a Romantic Century, 1750–1850,” 5). Comparing the “long eighteenth century” to “Romanticism” is comparing deeply incommensurate terms, the one a more inclusive and historically demarcated term, and the other more deeply ideological and prescriptive, seeking to distinguish work that is “Romantic” regardless of publication date. By focusing on narrative fiction, a genre strongly associated with turn-of-the century British letters, but only recently emerging as engaged with a revised conception of “Romanticism,” in some sense we are seeking to create a conversation across quite different modes of categorization, and thereby implicitly examine principles of literary organization themselves. Enlightenment or Eighteenth Century? As undergraduate students learn, the “Enlightenment” marks an era marked by a growing sophistication in natural philosophy and politics, a high valuation for reason as the source of all knowledge and authority, and in Britain, the growth of middling-class dominance. The “eighteenth century,” by contrast, is messier and less invested in conventional notions of progress and rationality. The “eighteenth century” allows for more attention to the relation of discovery and exploration to colonization and slavery, to the limitations of reason and the inclusion of other kinds of knowledge, to the popular and common in broadsides and ballads, and to mass events from Bartholomew Fair to the Gordon Riots. A preference for the term “eighteenth century” over “Enlightenment” thus suggests a claim to a larger historical arena and some allegiance or at least sensitivity to the critical moves associated with cultural studies, new historicism, and cultural history. It is under the rubric of “the long eighteenth century” that we find included not just the Enlightenment and the Age of Johnson (ending ostensibly in 1784 with Samuel Johnson’s death), but also the Age of Sensibility. Usually associated with the latter half of the eighteenth century, particularly with the graveyard poets such as Thomas Gray and Edward Young and with the “man of feeling” exemplified in Sarah Fielding’s, Henry Mackenzie’s and Laurence Sterne’s work, sensibility is arguably found well before 1750. Many of its key elements appear fully formed

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in Samuel Richardson’s 1740 Pamela, in which the display of emotional internal states through external signs from blushes to upward rolled eyes and fainting fits constructs a language of feeling. One could argue that the embodied significance of nerves and sensibility begins even earlier, for example in George Cheyne’s 1725 “Essay on Health and Long Life” or his 1733 The English Malady, or even with the Earl of Shaftesbury’s 1711 “Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit” in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Times. By the 1780s and 1790s, many scholars agree, some forms of sensibility had moved from fashionable to laughable, yet much literature of the period continues to explore the function of nerves and nervous responses, the language of embodied emotions, and evidences a concern with the surface signs of interior experience. Much of 1780s–1800s abolitionist discourse and literature depends upon eliciting the emotional response of the reader as an ethical response, while also demanding the use of logic and reason to recognize the humanity of non-European peoples. Conjoining affective sensibility with human reason seems to be a pressing project well before the French Revolution. Scholars interested in the imbrication of feeling and sensibility throughout the second half of the eighteenth century might then reasonably object to beginning their investigations at the arbitrary date of 1785 (the date the current Norton Anthology gives for the beginning of English Romanticism), or 1789 (the beginning of the French Revolution). While the sensibilities evident in the works of Richardson, Fielding, Haywood, Smollett, Sterne, and Mackenzie differ in important ways from each other, there also are continuities from these writers through Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson, and William Godwin—even Wordsworth and P.B. Shelley. The advantage of thinking in terms of a “long eighteenth century” is that this implicitly encourages making these links and comparisons. Efforts to distinguish eighteenth-century sensibility from nineteenth-century sentimentality often make a break between a mid-nineteenth-century Victorian sentimentality and a late eighteenth-century philosophically-inflected interest in portraying internal subjectivity through external signs (see Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction, New York, Methuen, 1986). One implication then of the term “the eighteenth century,” as in the “American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies,” is a sense of some coherence and continuity across the period beginning as late as 1700 and ending as early as 1799. “Enlightenment,” “Age of Johnson” or even “Age of Sensibility” are more discrete and delimited categories, denominating not only a more modest chronological area, but also identifying particular aspects of interest: the progress of reason and knowledge, the impact and influence of Samuel Johnson and his coterie, or the valuation of feeling and affect evidenced in physical symptoms and external display. In this sense of expansiveness and inclusiveness, the “eighteenth century” is opposed to the more clearly ideologically and conceptually driven designation “Romanticism.” “Romanticism” in twentieth-century criticism has tended to distinguish a particular zeitgeist, from the inspirational sublime associated with the M.H. Abrams’s version (see The Mirror and the Lamp, and the Norton Anthology of English



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Literature up through the 6th edition of 1993 for the dominance of this view), to the changing ability to value and represent the poor and working classes found in E.P. Thompson’s lectures on the Romantics (see The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age, NY: New Press, 1997). These are older and overdetermined versions of Romanticism of course, but they still drive some undergraduate teaching and appear, if only to be questioned, in most literary anthologies aimed at classroom use (see the Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th–8th editions for an interesting shift from 1993 to 2005, Mellor and Matlak’s British Literature: 1780–1830, Wu’s Romanticism: An Anthology, et al.). “Is the Romantic sublime the fruition of eighteenth-century sensibility?” asks the “Dictionary of Sensibility” electronic project of the University of Virginia (, accessed 1/5/2006). This provocative question highlights both a sense of continuity and a sense of a period break. The developing and changing concepts of sensibility throughout the eighteenth century, from Shaftesbury’s conception of sympathy and Hume’s moral sensibility, to Richardson’s literary codification, to the weeping comedies of dramatists and the medical theories of nervous sympathies, find themselves anew in the emphasis on both the irrational passions of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and the rationally-balanced and communal responses of heroines in Ann Radcliffe’s novels. On the other hand, where eighteenth-century sensibility sought to theorize an internal subjectivity, evidenced by external signs or legibly written on the body in tears, blushes and fits, varieties of the Romantic sublime revel in the joining of apparently incompatible feelings (pleasure and pain, terror and beauty) or their excessive and inherently private nature (the reader can only catch sympathetically a shadow of the poet’s or writer’s sensations). Surely the answer is not merely to privilege a continuous and composite eighteenth century over a Romantic “turn,” but to put side by side the kinds of scholarship enabled by each approach and set them in dialogue. History of the Novel Has the returning interest in historically grounded scholarship and the growing attention to narrative literature at the turn of the eighteenth century eliminated the value or specific insights generated by scholars trained as eighteenth-century or Romantic specialists? These are the questions this collection opens and addresses through grounded textual analysis and examples of work done under the auspices of both the long eighteenth century and Romanticist scholarship. As the territories claimed by scholars of the British eighteenth century and by scholars of British Romanticism continue to overlap and intersect, it seems of growing importance to ask in what ways scholarly approaches grounded in either the eighteenth century or with an allegiance to the “Romantic” may be understood as distinct or identifiable. What are the real scholarly costs and benefits to those of us who read at least some

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of the same literature, but may or may not read the same scholarship, attend the same conferences, or publish in the same journals? Scholarship published under the rubric of the British eighteenth century has long tended toward historicism and shown some regular suspicion toward an oppositionally constructed “theory” (or “system” in eighteenth-century parlance). The view of what historically-informed work should look like has changed, as the writings and perspectives of women, non-Europeans, the middling or working classes, and other marginalized peoples have been increasingly incorporated into study of the period. Nevertheless, a strongly historicist, not to say classicist, predilection still pertains to eighteenth-century studies, even as greater attention is granted to writers popular in their own day, but long considered peripheral to the core great tradition. Moreover, the trajectory of the “novel” or of narrative prose has been central to contemporary study of the British eighteenth century, while a tendency to privilege lyric poetry has long defined British Romanticism. Because the novel is notoriously difficult to define, cannibalistic and open to including most forms of narrative (travel narrative, didactic tale, lives or histories), it is a fitting emblem of a period in which writing proliferated, and although poetry retained its value as refined and elite literature, prose came to dominate. Further, the novel as it develops across the eighteenth century is usually strongly related to the growing significance of the middling sort and the public sphere of letters. For Romanticism, where the innovations of lyric poetry are definitive, the novel presents special problems because though there are arguable “new” forms such as the Jacobin and anti-Jacobin novel, the national tale, Evangelical moral tales, and loyalist fictions, it does not fit well with the story of a dramatic turn in literary sensibility carved by attending to particular poets read in particular ways. A vein of historicism also is prevalent in Romanticist studies, but this has long been in strong tension with a dominant aesthetic that valued vision and inspiration, and particularly lyric poetry over narrative or historical writing. More politically and prose-oriented critics of Romanticism have often been the ones who invoked or called for historically engaged criticism (see E.P. Thompson, Marilyn Butler, Gary Kelly, Jon Klancher, et al.). Attention to work that appealed to a large and popular audience has also changed the face of Romantic studies, adding more work by women writers, more popular forms such as Gothic literature and narrative fiction, and incorporating other biographical modes to the conventions of the Romantic genius. Finally, the face of even high Romantic poetry has been dramatically changed by the advent of feminist and cultural criticism over the last 20 years. Not merely seeking to add “women writers” but to revision the world in which the poetry of Wordsworth and Shelley came into being and the “sublime” 

  The dominance of the novel as a defining genre of the eighteenth-century is clearly due to Ian Watt’s 1957 Rise of the Novel and its respondents, but even in Virginia Woolf’s Common Reader essays we find the eighteenth-century novel central to her understanding of the period.



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became a defining attribute, literary feminism began to reshape our understanding of Blake’s importance, of Charlotte Smith’s influence on Wordsworth, and of the significance of Della Cruscan poetry for the second generation Romantics, or even of the definition of the sublime itself (see Behrendt and Linkin, McGann, Wolfson, Mellor, et al.). Moreover, as the dominance of strict formalist approaches has waned, larger fields of writing and influence, of poetic and prose conversation hove into view. The “Romantic Novel” Recent scholarship has turned to the prose writing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and some scholars have claimed this as the “Romantic novel” (Gilroy & Verhoeven, Miles, Wolfson, Trumpener). As Amanda Gilroy and Wil Verhoeven point out: Ian Watt’s authoritative account of The Rise of the Novel bypassed the fiction of this period, and revisionist histories of the novel have not substantively changed the habitual subordination of Romantic fiction to either eighteenth-century or Victorian novels. Michael McKeon is … incurious about this era’s fiction; Homer Obed Brown disputes the premature “institutionalization” of the novel, claiming that Watt and McKeon’s work should be seen as “chapters in the pre-history of the novel” [xii]. But he, in turn, simply reverses the teleological narrative that drives most criticism of the novel by privileging Scott’s naming of Fielding as “the first of British Novelists” [138], a move that validated Scott’s own project. (Gilroy & Verhoven, “Introduction,” Novel 34.2 [Spring 2001]: 149–50)

Thus, where eighteenth-century scholars have long been able to claim the novel as a generic sign of their period’s importance and innovation, and Victorianists have countered by claiming their period as the natural apotheosis of the novel as a mature form, those interested in the novel between 1785 and 1832 have fallen between two stools. Claiming prose fiction produced in these years as “Romantic” raises as many questions as it answers: is Romanticism merely a period designation or does it indicate some set of criteria by which we might so identify some prose narratives and exclude others? Is it adequate to search for the same thematic content    In 1999 Wil Verhoeven and Amanda Gilroy organized a conference at the University of Groningen on “The Romantic-Era Novel” that explicitly sought to explore the idea of the novel as Romantic. This was followed by a special edition of Novel in 2001 (vol. 34, no. 2 Spring 2001).    See for extended discussion of this negligence on the part of both eighteenthcentury studies and Romantic studies Claudia Johnson’s “The Novel and the Romantic Century, 1750–1850,” in European Romantic Review Special Issue: The Romantic Century: A Forum, ed. Susan Wolfson. 11.1 (Winter 2000): 12–20.

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or linguistic styles associated with high Romantic poetry in these works? Or does the inclusion of prose writing revise our conception of “Romanticism” itself, and if so, does it bring the “Romantic” closer to the preceding period or enable more useful distinctions? I want to suggest that the essays in this volume do participate in an ongoing redefinition of British Romanticism, that the inclusion of not only prose fiction but other kinds of writing must enable us to rethink the salient and pressing features of literary culture, influence, and creation. Building upon the expansion of British Romanticism to include important but neglected poets, from Felicia Hemans, Mary Robinson and Charlotte Smith to John Clare, the turn to fictions is predictable. More novels were written in the late eighteenth century than ever before, and as feminist scholars have long argued, not all are so easily dismissed as in Gary Kelly’s fairly typical 1979 formulation: “There were no great novels published in England during the 1790s, but there were many interesting ones” (The English Jacobin Novel, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976, 1). From 1760 onward, Britain saw the expansion or emergence of the national tale, Gothic fiction, the political novel of purpose, didactic fictions, Jacobin and anti-Jacobin novels, religious fictions, romans á clef, the novel of manners, the historical novel, philosophical romances, travel narratives, and many narratives that could be listed under several of these categories at once. Students of the novel have long found this era puzzling in its wealth of fictions, tied to the rise of a market for fiction and the expansion of the circulating library. While for eighteenth-century scholars, this is seen as the continuing expansion of forms and genres with roots earlier in the century, for Romanticists this growth seems more significant. If not the birth of a completely new form of literary art, there are distinct developments and divergences that seem important under the Regency.    To be fair, Kelly does return to novels of this period in his later work, suggesting some revision of this position. See also J.M.S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 1770–1800, “Between the work of the four great novelists of the mid-eighteenth century and that of Jane Austen and Scott there are no names which posterity has consented to call great” (v). See Watt, 290, and Claudia Johnson, “‘Let me make the novels of a country,’: Barbauld’s The British Novelists.” (Novel 34.2 [Spring 2001]: 163–79). It is clear that it used to be de rigeur to open any discussion of 1790s novels and even early 1800s works other than those of Austen and Scott with an embarrassed disclaimer about their aesthetic failures. All further citations in this essay are to this edition.    Lawrence Lipking associates eighteenth-century emphases on continuity with what he terms “philosophical historians” (as opposed to antiquarians, who insist upon the pastness of the past). Lipking explains: “the period has always attracted intellectuals in search of the moment when the modern world came into being, when the force of skeptical philosophy, or capitalism, or political justice, or the common reader could no longer be resisted. Romanticists may perceive the age of revolution as a sudden dawn, but those who believe in continuities will turn inevitably to the preceding age—to Adam Smith, Sir William Jones, or Condorcet. A number of the most influential works of modern scholarship, The Great Chain of Being and The Mirror and the Lamp among them, pause in the antechamber of the eighteenth century so long that the Romantic movement, when it finally arrives, may seem

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In a simple sense, where eighteenth-century scholars see continuity and continuing development, Romantic scholars are often invested in the narrative of Romantic exceptionalism, a period of such rapid social and cultural change that literature bears the marks of a great cultural shift as well. An eighteenth-century scholar might read the novels of Jane Austen, placing particular emphasis on Austen’s debt to Frances Burney or Charlotte Lennox, on her extension of a vein of satire found in Augustan poetry, and on the way in which works like Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility both delight and instruct. An eighteenth-century scholar might focus, for instance, on how Elizabeth Bennet is ultimately rewarded for asserting her place as a gentleman’s daughter, for learning to recognize the ways in which not only her mother, but her father fail to fulfill their parental obligations, for discovering Darcy’s merit in the rational beauty and management of his estate, and for learning to balance her wit with a sense of gendered propriety. A Romanticist might, by contrast, attend to the ways in which the Napoleonic wars haunt the pages of Persuasion, that the nationalist Navy comes to seem more representative of British identity than the landed gentry, and how a deep feeling of melancholy is carefully delineated as signifying not only Anne’s interior psychological depth, but her own situated difference from her family’s celebration of surfaces. Both of these arguments have important explanatory force, and neither is simply and wholly satisfying, though both enable useful teaching. One hope is that while the essays in this collection show this divergence in interesting ways, they also show that a simple distinction between eighteenthcentury continuity and a Romantic turn is less evident than the freshman survey course or most survey-anthologies would lead one to expect. There is much to be gained from conversation and cross-publishing among long eighteenthcentury and Romanticist scholars. Not least, the tensions evoked on the one hand by a powerful commitment to seeing 1789–1820 as a moment of generational assertion of difference, and on the other an investment in reminding us that literary innovations are both rooted in the past and falsely confident in their own newness, seem helpfully corrective.

less a breakthrough than an afterthought. It is not accident that such works should have to think their way through the cogitations of eighteenth-century minds. Their very projects, their fascination with the way that ideas are modified, over the course of centuries, not only by individual thinkers but by something like a collective mind, derive from the philosophic historians who first began to grasp that ideas can have a history” (“Inventing the Eighteenth Centuries: A Long View,” in The Profession of Eighteenth-Century Literature: Reflections on an Institution. ed. Leo Damrosch, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992, 7–25, 16).

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History and Historicisms One important tension between scholars of the eighteenth century and Romanticists has long been in their engagement with history and historical approaches. Despite the traditions of aesthetic and transcendental Romanticism, there is a strongly historicist branch of Romantic studies, exemplified particularly by scholars engaged with the political novel and with the regional or national tale (Marilyn Butler, Gary Kelly, James Chandler, Katie Trumpener, Anne K. Mellor, et al.). However, the historicist approach in many ways predictably dominates scholarship of the eighteenth century and has done so even through the years of the “linguistic turn.” Turning for a moment to the over-determined association of the 1700s with Enlightenment, it stands to reason that students of a period of British literature that is powerfully tied to developments in philosophy and natural sciences that seek to enable human beings to negotiate their relations with the social and natural world would show a strong investment in the belief in Enlightenment. This is true, I suggest, even though the impact of critiques of “Enlightenment” such as Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment has been powerful. Such a critique is in fact only significant if scholars of the period have themselves remaining powerful investments in the principles and beliefs of the era that they study. Castigated as an academic area that remained largely untouched by the revolutions of structuralism and poststructuralism in the 1970s and 1980s, eighteenth-century studies was arguably strongly impacted by the advent of New Historicism and the shift of Renaissance studies to Early Modernism. If the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were now “early Modern,” then the eighteenth century was not simply Enlightenment, but the hey-day of modernity. (Not inconsequentially, both the Romantic and Victorian eras lay claim as well to being the foundations of modernity, and they do so often by repudiating the period that precedes them.) Historicist approaches to literature and literary studies take several forms. In the first, and perhaps the most common, history is treated as a kind of ground or context from which to examine the more elusive functioning of literature. This can be as simple as opening a text with a brief biography of the author, or as complex as choosing supplementary materials on important historical events and movements—as many literary anthologies seek to do with sections on “the woman question” or “the slave trade.” In this approach, history is treated as a matter of factual information, added to the study of literature to enable the reader to situate the artistic productions within their appropriate home. This kind of approach often makes important distinctions between the apparently stable period of Hanoverian 

  For discussion of the tendency for scholars of particular movements to share the biases and investments of those movements, and particularly for eighteenth-century studies’ investment in rational empiricism, see John Bender, “Eighteenth-Century Studies” in Redrawing the Boundaries, NY: MLA, 1992, 79–99.

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rule and the unstable Regency, between Enlightenment Whiggish Britain and the both radical and reactionary period following the French Revolution. Such oversimplified historical narratives are particularly useful for undergraduate surveys, hence the frequency with which they appear in anthologies, augmented by the practice of breaking anthologies into smaller “splits” edited by different scholars and frequently broken physically to mirror the “break” between eighteenthcentury literature and the Romantic era. Another way in which historicist approaches function is as a counter-balance to “theory.” In this situation “theory” is usually understood as twentieth-century high theory, informed by poststructuralism. Critics who identify as historicist often see themselves as battling against an overly systemic, speculative, and ahistorical group of “theorists” who engage in special pleading, read texts “against the grain,” and are overly invested in seeking out psychoanalytic, feminist, or race-inflected (i.e., “politically interested”) readings of works. In eighteenth-century studies theoretical approaches are strongly associated with Foucauldian arguments, feminist and queer theory approaches; fine distinctions between Foucauldian cultural historicism and other politicized cultural or historical approaches, varieties of feminism, or historically-grounded explorations of sexual history are often lost in the heat of these debates (an example of this kind of defensive elision was evident in Martin Battestin’s Plenary address on “Historical Criticism and the Question of Contemporaneity” given at the 30th Annual Meeting of ASECS, March 24–28, 1999). The anxiety elicited by a fear of overly speculative, abstract, or even French “theory,” and the need to protect eighteenth-century studies from such intrusions seems in part to be a resistance to the overly emotional, speculative celebration of inspiration that some eighteenth-century scholarship associates with Romanticism, and from which it seeks to keep the Enlightenment untainted.   The physical break between individual volumes of the Norton Anthology of English Literature and the Longman Anthology of British Literature are quite conventional in their placement of writers on one side or the other. By contrast, anthologies dedicated solely to one period or the other are instructive in which authors are included in both kinds of anthologies. For instance, shared between Robert DeMaria’s well-received British Literature 1640–1789 (2nd edition, 2001) and Duncan Wu’s Romanticism: An Anthology (1995, 3rd edition, 2005) are the commonly “Romantic” Cowper, Paine, Burke, Barbauld, More, Smith, Crabbe, Yearsley, Crabbe, Blake, and Burns. Curiously, DeMaria includes Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Man, while Wu includes William Godwin’s Political Justice—both clearly as more contextual material than properly literary. Romantic anthologies alone tend to include Charlotte Smith, Anna Seward, while eighteenth-century anthologies are more likely to include Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, James MacPherson, Henry Mackenzie, Frances Burney, and Thomas Chatterton. Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative does not appear in Wu’s anthology, though he does appear in others.    Since published in Age of Johnson 12 [2001]: 361–79.    For a useful exploration of the 1980 “theory wars” in the U.S. academy and the British reaction to the French Revolution’s celebration of “system” or “theory” as contrasted with a homegrown “commonsense,” see David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and 

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In Romantic scholarship a kind of comfort with poststructuralist approaches is more evident, sustained by the impact of Paul DeMan and his students on the field, though it is more commonly found in critics who work primarily with poetry or who work across national boundaries. The influence of Kantian aestheticism matters here too. For Romanticism, the turn to historicist approaches and away from formalist dominance or poststructuralist-inflected readings is suggestively laid out in the introduction to Ian Haywood’s and Zachary Leader’s Romantic Period Writings 1798–1832: The impetus behind the ‘return to history’ of much recent criticism of the period can be seen as a reaction in the North American academy to the perceived dehistoricizing tendencies not only of New Criticism but of post-structuralism and deconstruction. … Following McGann’s lead [in The Romantic Ideology], New Historicist critics have ingeniously—if sometimes tortuously—sought to reconstruct an absent or displaced historical content in canonical Romantic texts. … A somewhat less contentious aspect of the New Historicism, its recovery of repressed voices (as opposed to themes or content), is obviously forwarded by this book, with its selections from women writers, working-class poets and polemicists, and black radicals. All historicist approaches to literature of this period owe a debt to the work of Raymond Williams, in particular Culture and Society 1780–1850. … In this pioneering study of the evolution of the concept of culture over the last two centuries, Williams eroded the boundary between text and context, pushed the ‘big six’ poets to the margins of his discussion, and located the ‘Romantic artist’ as an aesthetic response to new modes of literary production—thus paving the way for more recent critical orthodoxies. (Note 5, 214)

This footnote reveals a nervousness about searching for historical (or political) content in Romantic verse, and settles on the “less contentious” effort to include more voices in anthologies and presumably the study of the period. Raymond Williams’s work is recontained as the founder of “critical orthodoxies” which attend to changes in literary production at the turn of the century. Certainly attending to the narrative fictions of 1780–1827 aims to create a larger view of the literary landscape of this era. Including women writers, non-European writers, and working class writers has begun to change the picture of the era in important ways, though in anthologies lyric poetry and some narrative poetry remain the dominant genres represented. However, refusing to examine the ways in which literary texts themselves participate in producing “history” and insisting on the externality of the historical and the political to literary work as this introduction does is not only the Revolt Against Theory. For related work on the changing significance and valuation of “imagination” and “fancy” see John Whale, Imagination Under Pressure, 1789–1832: Aesthetics, Politics, and Utility (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), and John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793–1796 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000).

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strongly formalist/aestheticist; it is troubling in its assumption that history is the empirical ground to the literary-creative, rather than itself a representational field, produced and constructed through myriad discursive modes. Since the 1990s, approaches associated with New Historicism or with Cultural History have become more dominant in both the long eighteenth century and in Romanticism. Critics affiliated with these approaches tend to emphasize material culture, print history, consumer culture and popular reception history in their work; not surprisingly, the novel as a largely realist form is more likely to be privileged in their writing. The impact of this turn in critical emphasis is particularly clear in the recent 8th edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature (general editor Stephen Greenblatt), most explicitly the Romanticism volume (Vol. D). This new stand-alone volume, edited by Deidre Lynch and Jack Stillinger, now begins not with Blake but with Anna Barbauld, Mary Robinson, and Charlotte Smith, and contains context sections on “The Revolution Controversy and ‘the Spirit of the Age’” and “The Gothic and the Development of a Mass Readership.” The online materials and quizzes for the whole edition are strongly oriented to cultural history and away from traditional emphases on formalist and aesthetic devices. Given the Norton Anthology’s status as the most commonly assigned anthology for undergraduate teaching in the U.S., and its tendency to reflect changes in academic scholarship only after they become well-established, this is more significant than the earlier efforts by competitor anthologies to include less-studied writers and more prose or historical material. This turn to historicist criticism, not merely as a kind of author-centered context of “life and times,” but as foundational to understanding the period’s literature, has the effect of drawing together critics specializing in the eighteenth century and/or the Romantic novel. Foregrounding issues of political upheaval and cultural debates, representing the materiality of changing cities, developments in philosophy and science, and the expansion of empire, the genre of the novel becomes more representative rather than less. This generic shift in literary studies of 1750–1832 makes a rapprochement between eighteenth-century scholars and Romanticists interested in narrative fiction more necessary than ever before. The Romantic Turn Duncan Wu wrote in 1998, “were one to point to what might be considered distinctive of the moment [of Romanticism], it would be this: that unquenchable aspiration for universal betterment, the reclaiming of paradise” (“Introduction” to Romanticism: An Anthology, Cambridge: Blackwell, 1998, second edition, xxxv). This association of Romanticism with revolution, human inspiration and aspiration, the noumenal and the transcendent, has long dominated the concept of “Romanticism” itself. Although this formulation is problematic for the study of the novel, leave alone the parodies, essays, political treatises, and literary criticism of the period, it must still be reckoned with. Robert Kiely’s 1972 The Romantic Novel

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in England argued that the novelists were problematically Romantic because: “they tried to introduce the unnamable into a genre which derived much of its strength from an insistence on naming names” (12). In other words, the novel is presumed to be fundamentally a realist form (following Ian Watt’s influential formulation in The Rise of the Novel): the problem of the Romantic novel is that after the Romantic turn, it becomes a genre working against its natural generic principles, hence the burgeoning Gothic, or the excessive sensibility of even political works. More recently Robert Miles adhered to the notion of a Romantic turn, even as he sought to identify the ideological functions of the Romantic novel. He gives three definitions for the Romantic novel, with the third suggesting that “the ‘Romantic novel’ refers to that subset of novels written during the period that somehow encode, in their form, in their textual marrow and sinews, the genetic material driving the period’s cultural transformation” (“What Is a Romantic Novel?” Novel 34.2 [Spring 2001]: 183). This investment in a cultural shift from something prior to something alternately identified as Romanticism (or sometimes simply modernity), has long been a defining feature of Romantic criticism and the Romantic era itself. Advocates for a strong “Romantic turn” often point to period writings which emphasize the “spirit of the age” or the sense of newness: “bliss it was in that dawn to be alive,/ But to be young was very heaven” (Wordsworth, Prelude, 10.693–4). The essays in this volume tread lightly on this assumption: the strength of this presumed shift, its location in time, its significance for the readings offered, and even its content vary widely among the critics writing here. Examining the range of novels published in Britain through the late 1700s and early 1800s reveals even more clearly than the poetry of the time strains of both a belief in living in a period of great change and fear that these changes represent as much a loss as a gain. Moreover, scholars focused on the novel are necessarily less clearly invested in a strong Romantic turn, and more attuned to the ways in which expanding concepts of readership, authorship, the popular, and the margins of the empire come to matter. One important shift from Kiely’s position appears here in the tendency not to assume Watt’s “formal realism” as the dominant identifier of the novel as a genre (see Helene Moglen, The Trauma of Gender, 2001). Instead, we find the assumption that novels are more heteroglossic, comfortably incorporating didactic instruction, fantastic and romance elements, psychological exploration, nationalist propaganda, and voicing that subverts their own purposes. Curiously, the essays in this collection do not engage with some of the most common representatives of the Romantic-era novel: Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Walter Scott, or even Jane Austen. Instead we find Eliza Haywood keeping company with Elizabeth Hamilton, Charlotte Smith together with Frances Trollope and Laurence Sterne. Jane West stands in for the more expected Mary Wollstonecraft, and Amelia Opie and Thomas Holcroft are both present. Thus, this collection expands the kinds of narratives we might consider as contenders for the “Romantic novel,” while insisting on the long eighteenth-century perspective that situates Smith, Holcroft,

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Hamilton, West, Opie, and Trollope with Haywood, Locke, Gray, and Sterne, as well as Burke in an ongoing cultural dialogue. The Essays This collection presents the reader with textually-focused essays, each written by a scholar primarily associated with the long eighteenth century or the Romantic period, and each engaged with its own terms of analysis and scholarly investments. Some of the essays reveal tropes that are recognizably “Romantic” much earlier than 1789 (Case Croskery, Walmsley), while others note the continuation of Enlightenment principles even in solidly nineteenth-century writings (King, Flynn). Moving roughly, but not entirely chronologically, these essays engage the eighteenth-century novel’s development of emotional interiority (including theories of melancholia), the troubling heritage of the epistolary novel for the 1790s radical novel, tensions between rationality and romantic affect in didactic traditions, generic hybridity and interpolation, and approaches to the burgeoning British empire that go beyond either Grand Tour self-congratulation or Romantic enthusiasm for the exotic. These essays refuse an easy opposition between an eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideology consisting of rationality, propriety and progress and a Romantic ideology identified by inspiration, heroic individualism, and sublime emotionality, tracing the putatively “Romantic” into the early 1700s and the long legacy of Enlightenment values and ideals into the nineteenth century. Although not all of the essays in this collection programmatically trace the persistence of eighteenth-century attitudes into Romanticism, or of Romantic sensibilities in the earlier eighteenth-century, through their sensitivity to the concerns of the “other” and their situated proximity between these covers, they do produce more flexible and nuanced readings of works that might have been engaged more narrowly. In so doing, these essays contribute to reconsidering the history of the novel beyond the local textual concerns of each. The collection opens with Margaret Case Croskery, a scholar of Eliza Haywood, who contentiously situates that contemporary of Defoe and Fielding as in tenor and feeling “Romantic” in her late novel, Miss Betsy Thoughtless. Along the way this essay rethinks the strong association between Romanticism and the post-French Revolutionary period. Peter Walmsley’s essay on “The Melancholic Briton” delves into the philosophical roots of the Gothic, uncovering the longstanding engagement in the 1700s with death and death-thoughts that precede the “invention” of the Gothic in Walpole’s Castle of Otranto or apotheosis in the works of Ann Radcliffe. Imagination and the mournful pleasures of contemplating death are revealed as deeply intertwined with a key strand of explicitly British nationalist identity. Scott Campbell’s essay touches upon problems of genre and mystery, the Gothic elements of textual art and of political contexts, and the lingering impact of epistolarity in Charlotte Smith’s revolutionary novel, Desmond. Genre-mixing again comes to the fore in Julie Shaffer’s examination

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of Elizabeth Lester’s The Woman of Genius, as both a sign of and tied to problems of gender and race/ethnicity through a focus on the newly defined “woman of genius.” Daniel Scheirenbeck turns to the deeply loyalist novelist Jane West, to show how her narratives reject romantic affect and embrace rational education, thereby rethinking what identifies “Romantic” fiction itself. Although women writers and female heroines tend to dominate scholarship on late century novels, two essays here turn instead to formulations of masculinity that are also under pressure in the 1790s. Shawn Lisa Maurer compares the functions of Enlightenment models of male friendship in Hugh Trevor and Caleb Williams, situating affective masculine affiliation in a long eighteenth-century tradition descended from Addison and Steele, while contrasting Holcroft’s affective tone with Godwin’s darker vision. Shelley King also engages neglected questions of masculinity by focusing on dueling as a parallel to the female marriage plot in Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray. The final essays examine narrative journeys beyond Britain. Christopher Flynn introduces the genre of travel narrative into his examination of the nineteenthcentury novel and travels of Frances Trollope, exploring how Burkean conceptions of the sublime and beautiful become associated with a British view of the new world landscape that the American heroine must interpolate. Tara Ghoshal Wallace examines Elizabeth Hamilton’s Letters of a Hindoo Rajah for the work’s expansionist imperialism, but also its incipient critique of British degeneracy, attending to the novel’s ventriloquized and doubled voicing. There are two major approaches represented here by these essays. Several essays show the value of approaching material strongly associated with one period through the lens of the other (Case Croskery, Walmsley, Maurer, Flynn). Others seek to engage the richness of this prose tradition, invoking subgenres, influences, marginalized and appropriated voices, and influences in their essays as pertinent, often without making strong period arguments (Schierenbeck, Campbell, King, Shaffer, Wallace). Several essays engage with ongoing public civil debates without arguing either for origin studies or late-century exceptionalism. Taken together, these essays all suggest that we need other ways of understanding the usefulness of terms such as “Romanticism” and “Enlightenment” if we are to develop an adequate appreciation for 1750–1830 British narrative fiction. The varieties of prose produced during these decades explode too easy categorization as “bourgeois,” “radical,” or “conservative,” leave alone “realist,” “Romantic,” “imperialist” or “Gothic.” Attending to the ways in which concern for imagination, the passionate, the melancholic, and the individual are significant throughout 1700s, the essays by Case Croskery and Walmsley implicate writers and works conventionally read in the context of the eighteenth century with tropes associated with Romanticism. Walmsley’s essay traces a particular construction of the British subject as melancholic, deeply Gothic in its anxiety about the linkage between the body and the mind, its Franco-phobia, and its sense that the dead haunt the passions of the living from writings by Addison, Young, and Sterne. The Gothic here, is not a new

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or breaking genre, but the logical outcome of a longer tradition at a moment of particular cultural crisis: “there is a wide vein of graveyard writing in eighteenthcentury Britain that can rightly be called Gothic” (52, this volume). On the other hand, some of these essays seek to challenge conventions associated strongly with one period or the other: the dominance of epistolary fiction, the emergence of the Gothic, didactic or conduct writing, travel narrative as both critique of the home country and as evidence of the speaker’s refined sensibilities. In Scott Campbell’s essay the problems of using fiction and fictional genres as vehicles for political truth are explored with Desmond as the key text. Campbell’s essay highlights the ways in which Smith’s novel is both attempting to move beyond traditions of epistolary genre and entrapped by those long eighteenth-century traditions. Daniel Schierenbeck’s essay on Jane West’s The Advantages of Education, situates West’s work both within a politically complex debate on educating women and as an effort to reject “romance” while critiquing non-religious “Enlightenment.” Shawn Lisa Maurer takes as given the long eighteenth-century tradition of male-friendship that can be liberatory for at least some men, rather than identifying passionate male friendships as part of a “Romantic turn.” Shelley King rereads Adeline Mowbray as more than a roman à clef about Godwin and Wollstonecraft, tracing a continuing concern with civility and gallantry in the practice of the duel. From Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison onward, the problems of gendered honor and the tradition of the duel formed a critical debate about gentlemanly behavior; King throws new light on this debate by reading the masculine problem of the duel against the feminine problem of marriage and chastity. Julie Shaffer’s approach to The Woman of Genius is more solidly Romanticist, but highlights the way in which a wide range of pressing issues from generic complexity to racial and ethnic identity are engaged in this late and obscure novel. This essay participates in the recovery of forgotten and popular novels, enabled by the increased attention to late eighteenth and early nineteenthcentury fiction on both sides of the period debate. Travel narrative is another key genre that spans the usual divide. While the Grand Tour, that locus classicus of elite enlightenment education, does not surface here, travel as both educational and as participating in the consolidation of the British empire does. Tara Ghoshal Wallace’s essay turns Scottish reformer Elizabeth Hamilton’s Letters of a Hindoo Rajah inside out, revealing not only the expected exoticization of India and the rational argument for “enlightened” British rule in India, but also revealing how the novel by giving the “hindoos” their own voices is able to represent Britain as the site of degeneracy as well. Cutting both ways and reflecting in both directions, Hamilton’s novel as Wallace reads it participates both in justifying Romantic imperial expansion and in Enlightenment critique of political corruption at home. Christopher Flynn’s essay on Frances Trollope’s travel narrative finds traces of conventionally Enlightenment tropes lingering in works produced long after the usual period distinction. This may be read in part as the long influence of the Enlightenment, lingering particularly in prose and philosophy through the early nineteenth century, and arguably in the familiar form

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of human rights arguments into our own twenty-first century. Certainly there is much evidence that changes in a zeitgeist or large cultural shifts do not simply take place overnight, and earlier systems tend to linger in ways that are welldocumented. These chapters reveal ways in which any strict distinction between eighteenthcentury literary traditions and Romantic literary traditions delimits the rich and complex readings of the works examined here. As Margaret Case Croskery writes, “Haywood’s novel thematizes an essentially Romantic stance to the absorptive pleasures of fiction at both the level of form and content” (23, this volume). This phrasing begs the question: what is it that we mean by “Romantic” and what does it mean if this is the best terminology that we can find to name the valuation and didactic significance of passion in Betsy Thoughtless? What is added here to the conventions of eighteenth-century scholarship on narrative tradition that is usually bracketed as “Romantic”? A concept of Romanticism marked by a “turn” or break from a past cast as eminently rational, neo-classical in its values, and restricted to polite society serves particular purposes for academic scholars. It serves, as Jerome McGann’s Romantic Ideology implied, Romantic scholarship itself, but perhaps also some kinds of Enlightenment scholarship, by setting aside texts and problems that demand a more complex and nuanced account of narrative literature. Retaining a strict eighteenth century/Romantic divide by constructing discrete and self-contained areas with their own anthologies, syllabi, conferences, journals, and curricular assignments may serve undergraduate education, but it cannot serve serious scholars of the British novel well. Placing these wide-ranging essays in direct conversation, this collection invites the reader to form her or his own judgment about the elucidating power of crossperiod scholarship or more simply reading across historical borders with period lenses. In either case, the essays in this volume unsettle any easy definition of the “Romantic novel” or the “long eighteenth century” novel tradition(s). Finally, they suggest that the metaphor of dialogue and conversation is productive for exploring the variety of British novels from 1750 to 1830, and more true to the struggles that produced this fiction. Concepts such as the long eighteenth century and the Romantic era are most useful when they remain suggestive, fluid, and open to revisioning, as they do here.

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Chapter One

Novel Romanticism in 1751: Eliza Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless Margaret Case Croskery

Modern readers accustomed to investing emotional energy in both character and plot expect that fiction will contain round characters from common life, and that such fiction will catalyze a valuable, empathetic, or powerful affective response. These now common traits, however, made the eighteenth-century novel’s quest for cultural respectability almost impossible. It is worth briefly recapping some of these difficulties in the early modern novel’s reception history, in order to suggest just how radical the novel was as an emerging form of media. While seventeenth-century romances (both narrative and dramatic) told absorptive stories of Alexander the Great, Almanzor, or Pericles, they elevated the mundane pleasures of fictional narrative within the sanctified realm of history. In contrast, eighteenth-century narrative fictions dared to feature the sometimes reckless adventures of fictional nobodies such as Moll Flanders, Pamela and Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones and Evelina. As allegory gave way to verisimilitude and the generalized to the particular, eighteenth-century novels were able to depict events not “wholly unusual or unpresidented [sic] ... which not being so distant from our Belief bring also the pleasure nearer us,” as William Congreve defines the task of the novel in his preface to Incognita. But herein lay the problem. The novel brings “pleasure nearer us,” but the process of bringing pleasures nearer to readers threatened to bring readers nearer to pleasures. Pundits and pulpits warned women and children away from the dangers inherent in the scandalous genre throughout the century, not only because the novel delighted in telling scandalous tales, but because they encouraged readers to engage emotionally with questionable characters and incidents. Many eighteenth-century writers defended their novelistic fictions with recourse to the Horatian dictum, defending fictional dulce by claiming it possessed a moral utile. Others borrowed the strategies of seventeenth-century romances— trying to avoid association with the novel, by claiming to be “histories.” Henry Fielding humorously goes one step further when he proposes that his History of Joseph Andrews belongs to an entirely new genre, the “comic epic poem in prose.” As Geoffrey Day reminds us, “The only great ‘novelist’ of the eighteenth century    For a focused overview on the reception history of the novel as a suspect form, see chapters 4–6 of Geoffrey Day’s From Fiction to the Novel.

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who ever admitted to writing a novel was Smollett” (22). Indeed, many writers of novelistic fiction felt the need to disassociate their texts from the taint of the increasingly popular and increasingly scandalous novel. Even as late as 1796, Thomas Holcroft asks in his preface to The Adventures of Hugh Trevor whether a novel is a “proper vehicle for moral truth” (qtd. in Day, 32). Holcroft answers his own question with a resounding yes, but the fact that this question was still being rehearsed at the end of the eighteenth century suggests how difficult it was to sanction a cultural commodity that encouraged affective involvement. The early modern novel thus found itself within a double bind. Its didactic social justification lay within its ability to instruct, while its aesthetic definition and popularity depended on its ability to delight. Unable to resolve the double bind, Samuel Johnson advised novelists to reshape the genre; he recommended a limited verisimilitude to avoid the presentation of mixed or round characters. He counseled novelists, There have been men indeed splendidly wicked, whose endowments threw a brightness on their crimes, and whom scarce any villainy made perfectly detestable, because they never could be wholly divested of their excellencies; but such have been in all ages the great corruptors of the world, and their resemblance ought no more to be preserved, than the art of murdering without pain. (Rambler No. 4, 158)

Like his famous advice not to “number the streaks of the tulip” his advice to avoid “mixed” characters is part of his larger agenda to limit affective engagement with the pleasures of narrative. Such engagement clearly troubled him; he warned that novels can take “possession of the memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the will” (158). Johnson’s objection was to a genre that commodified emotional investment by capitalizing on Shaftesburyean sensibility, as well as the Restoration celebration of licentiousness within the amatory novel—as it would later capitalize upon gothic terror and the Burkean sublime. These intense exercises in sensibility threatened to create an “enthusiasm” that would habituate the reading public to an acceptance of vicarious imaginative and emotional involvement. Whether it was recollected in tranquility or stormed across pre-Byronic seas, the danger was obviously both political and personal. Indeed, the novel demanded imaginative 

  Scholarly treatments of the rhetoric of sensibility in the eighteenth century as they relate to poetry and stagecraft are especially relevant to this study. I will single out three to which I am especially indebted: Rebecca Ferguson’s The Unbalanced Mind: Pope and the Rule of Passion, Paul Goring’s The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture, and Shaun Irlaum’s Elations: The Poetics of Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-Century Britain. All three works reveal why the “age of reason” might reasonably be renamed “the age of passion” by tracing depictions of passion across political, religious, philosophical and personal discourse during the eighteenth-century and suggesting the almost intractable

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involvement and empathetic engagement with the ordinary, long before Lyrical Ballads glorified that cause in poetry. The streaks of the tulip were increasingly numbered, dissected, and plated for microscopic viewing as the novel increasingly particularized material representation and verisimilitude. Likewise, the increasingly sophisticated depiction of psychological realism and altered states of imagination intensified sympathetic identification. As critics have pointed out, this cultural shift in reading habits expanded the range and intensity of identification across culture and nation. In Catherine Gallagher’s analysis of this dynamic, it is precisely through the process of identifying with the “nobodies” of fiction, that “someone else’s emotions become our own” (169). And as Deidre Shauna Lynch notes, such a change is not part of an autonomous or easily captured moment in literary history. Instead, it is a part of “the plural forces and rules that compose the field in which reading and writing occur” (11). Lynch argues that this changing relationship between readers and characters is part of a process that affected a culture at large within and across various fields of discourse, from commerce to nation building: What changes as the eighteenth century unfolds are the pacts that certain ways of writing character establish, at given historical moments, with other, adjacent discourses—discourses on the relations between different sectors of the reading public or discourses that instruct people in how to imagine themselves as participants in a nation or in a marketplace or as leaders of followers of fashion. (Lynch, 11)

Perhaps Samuel Johnson was right to worry. Practice “how to imagine themselves” through an affective suspension of disbelief was nothing less radical than practice in imagining new social and personal orders. In this respect, the novel might always/already be a fundamentally Romantic literary form. Revolutionizing Virtue Eliza Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1755) provides a particularly interesting case in point for this claim. Although it was written in the middle of the eighteenth century, Haywood’s novel thematizes an essentially Romantic stance to the absorptive pleasures of fiction at both the level of form and content. This achievement has gone largely unnoticed, perhaps because Haywood’s novels are usually read against the backdrop of her Restoration and tension between the suspicion of emotional enthusiasm and the profound understanding of the role of passion in motivating a meaningful life.    See Cynthia Sundberg Wall’s The Prose of Things (2006) for an account of convergent changes in culture that allowed the sometimes bumpy absorption of the descriptively particular into novelistic prose.

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amatory forbears and/or the novel of sensibility, instead of within the larger context of the Romantic movement. Whether or not one accepts the idea that the novel might be in essence a Romantic genre, recasting Eliza Haywood as a Romantic novelist provides another explanation for the constant tension between Haywood and her contemporaries. Alexander Pope’s animosity is perhaps the main reason Haywood has not fallen out of literary history all together, since he immortalized Haywood in The Dunciad (1728) as the prize novelist in the infamous pissing contest between two highprofile Grub Street publishers. Given the rate at which her publications sold, Haywood was indeed a prize novelist among Grub Street publishers. As William H. McBurney notes, Haywood’s prolific publications may have “contributed largely to the composition and mental attitude of the fiction-reading public.” This direct association between Haywood and the novel suggests why Henry Fielding had Eliza Haywood in mind when he wrote the unflattering character of “Mrs. Novel” for The Author’s Farce (1730). Such depictions also suggest that “Mrs. Novel’s” narratives might have been key to a narrative revolution. Perhaps in an attempt to define what was distinctly novel about “Mrs. Novel,” one of Haywood’s earliest critics, James Sterling, praised her as the “great arbitress of passion.” While modern critics have often focused on the role of passion in Haywood’s amatory novels, it is worth noting that Sterling’s oxymoronic hyperbole suggests an aesthetic mediation of pleasures that might well have been her distinctive—and distinctively Romantic—contribution to the burgeoning genre. In this sense, Sterling’s description is worth further examination. He notes the absence of shame in Haywood’s passionate heroines: when “The Face of Guilt a Flush of Vertue wears,” the flush is not a sign of sin, but of “Vertue’s” own selfconsciousness. Similarly, the “glow of Zeal” and “soft desires” do not mutate into shame; instead, they are “refined” in an “Elegance of Care.” Notably, according to Sterling, Haywood’s fictional portrayal of erotic desire does not produce similar desires on the part of the reader. The readers’ desires are instead sublimated into other, more amoral aesthetic desires, such as the desire to continue the pleasures involved in reading:



The charming Page pale Envy’s Gloom beguiles, She low’rs, she reads, forgets herself, and smiles. (Sterling, a1)

  For a comprehensive overview of Haywood’s publication history, see Patrick Spedding’s A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2004.    McBurney, unpublished dissertation (qtd. in Richetti’s Popular Fiction Before Richardson, 180).    James Sterling, introductory puff to the first edition of Eliza Haywood’s Secret Histories, Novels and Poems, Vol. 1, London, 1725, a1–a3.    See especially Ros Ballaster’s influential Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740.

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The experience of sexual passion is thus directly associated with a textual pleasure—that of reading for the plot. Using reading as a metaphor for what we might term sublimation, Sterling invokes an amoral, primarily aesthetic, paradigm to evaluate Haywood’s work:

Proportion’d to the Image, Language swells, Both leave the Mind suspended, which excells. (Sterling, a1)

In other words, reading might invoke vicarious sexual desires or pleasures, but that arousal exists outside the cognitive realm: Image and language “leave the Mind suspended,” just as fictional accounts of passion transform themselves into primarily readerly enjoyments. This, then, is one answer to Johnson’s worry about the powerful effects of fictions that propel their readers through plots producing “effects almost without the intervention of the will.” If the mind’s judgment is “suspended,” it is because the affective experiences produced in reading are by their very nature at one remove from actions prompted by the reader’s own agency. In effect, Sterling is arguing that the experience of passionate emotion produced by Haywood’s text cannot involve the reader in immoral vicarious passions because the mind cannot absorb fiction without the suspension of active will. Sterling’s logic may be specious and his praise is, of course, hyperbolic. Nonetheless, his attempt to describe the nature of Haywood’s “arbitration” of passion is worth noting, since his argument clearly turns on the idea that Haywood’s narratives mediate readerly absorption. Another clue to this novel “arbitration” occurs in Haywood’s first novel, Love in Excess (1719) where the narrator chastises readers who refuse to grant sympathy to those whose lives are ruined by passion. The pretext for this sympathetic involvement is neither Christian charity nor an appeal to Shaftesburyean sensibility. Instead, the narrator argues that unhappy lovers who are driven to commit sins through passion are “no more to be condemned, than poverty, sickness, deformity, or any other misfortune incident to humane nature” (Love in Excess, 205). Indeed, almost all of Haywood’s early works insist that love is “involuntary” and therefore outside the realm of moral judgment. This reformulation of the role of passions in the moral life, is remarkably similar to that of another Augustan pariah, David Hume. Hume also argues that reason cannot logically be applied to passions: “Where a passion is neither founded on false suppositions, nor chuses means insufficient for the end, the understanding can neither justify nor condemn it” (Treatise, 416). Hume’s revolutionary claim that “reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions” ran directly counter to the Enlightenment conception of the ruling passions. Likewise, Haywood’s revolution involves an equally disturbing (and essentially Romantic) reconception of the practice of reading affective fiction. The first part of that reconception involved an attack on eighteenth-century reading practices. The narrator of Love in Excess expresses contempt for those “wretches” or “insipids” who righteously condemn passions that are “elevated above their own” (205). Similarly, in the first paragraph of Betsy Thoughtless the narrator chides those “who behold,

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with indignation and contempt, those errors in others, which, happily, they are every day falling into themselves” and recommends that instead of responding with moral contempt, many readers would be better off if they spent their time “examining the heart, and what actions are most becoming of the character.” Here, Haywood eschews the pleasures of moral disapprobation in favor of a more empathetic understanding of “the heart.” Moral mistakes are important to Haywood, not because they reveal the consequences of sin, but because they provide affective education; “happily,” therefore, readers “are every day falling into” them. On this point, Eliza Haywood and Henry Fielding almost seem to agree. Fielding’s Tom Jones knows all about the educational power of such mistakes. His open-hearted impetuousness propels him from the home of the benevolent Squire Allworthy into jail. There, Tom reflects on his conduct and laments the “Follies and Vices” that have led him into misfortune (911). He blames his own actions as the “Cause of all my misery” (916). Allworthy also believes that despite his good nature, Tom has been led by his own imprudence into the dangers of vice and hopes his experiences have taught him the value of prudence (960). Convinced of his own guilt, Tom informs Mrs. Waters that he is resolved “to sin no more, lest a worse Thing should happen to him” (913). There are serious problems with Tom’s moral reform, however. It is not clear that Tom’s “Follies and Vices” have catapulted him into trouble, since his predicament has at least as much to do with the ill-will of others as it does with his own goodhearted imprudence. Moreover, Tom’s “most violent and frantic Agonies” of remorse are occasioned by his mistaken belief that he may have committed incest. It is worth noting, however, that Tom’s transformational remorse over his affair is instigated not by the sin of fornication (a sin he hardly seems to conceptualize as a sin), but by the sin of incest (which he has not actually committed). Tom’s repentance and desire for reform seem less motivated by the intrinsic attractions of virtuous behavior than by the rewards and punishments. His reform is predicated on the consequentialist fear that worse things might happen to him, just as they are predicated on the hopes of better things to come. Shortly after his moment of deepest horror, Tom’s violent agonies are replaced by an equally powerful hope—the chance to marry his beloved Sophia. It is at this point that Tom’s reformation seems to be complete. Indeed, it is a commonplace to note that this novel’s happy ending marries impulsive good nature to wisdom herself, as the name “Sophia” suggests. However, Tom Jones undermines its own attempt to marry dulce with utile. When Tom asks Sophia to marry him, she asks why she should trust in his newfound virtue; after all, his prior conduct suggests a problematic lack of constancy. Tom responds by asking Sophia to look in a mirror. In her reflection he claims to find:

a Pledge for my Constancy, which it is impossible to see and to doubt... . I will show you, my charming Angel. ... There, behold it there, in that lovely

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Figure, in that Face, that Shape, those Eyes, that Mind which shines through those Eyes: Can the Man who shall be in Possession of these be inconstant? Impossible! my Sophia. (973)

This passage might seem to indicate that love provides a necessary and sufficient motivation for virtuous behavior (the ultimate form of instruction in delight). Fielding, however, resists the full implications of this idea by raising doubt about the power of love to anchor Tom against the temptations of vice. As Sophia reminds Tom, “If I am to judge of the future by the past, my Image will no more remain in your Heart, when I am out of your Sight, than it will in this Glass when I am out of the Room.” Tom counters by claiming that her hold over him cannot be doubted: “I will be all Obedience to your Commands. I will not dare to press any thing further than you permit me” (973). As wholesome and comforting as this declaration might be, it is not true. Tom’s obedience to Sophia’s commands lasts only until the next sentence, when Sophia asks Tom to wait “a Twelvemonth” before marriage. Tom instantly objects that a year is an “Eternity” and then raises no objections when Squire Western forces Sophia into marrying him the following day. To be sure, Sophia later assures Allworthy that she is satisfied with the hasty marriage, and this scene is as deeply good-humored as the rest of the novel. But the point remains: Tom is unlikely to be ruled by Sophie’s wisdom, despite the authenticity of his love for her. Indeed, Tom’s impulsive marriage is so much in keeping with his earlier behavior that one wonders whether he has changed at all by the novel’s end (or whether he needed to reform in the first place). As a model of affective education, this novel is something of a disappointment. This fact in no way detracts from Tom Jones’s status as a sui generis masterpiece. Certainly, the ironic distance from Tom’s perspective provided in the first chapter of each of the novel’s 12 books establishes counterpoints to Tom’s story that might be said to mediate the novel’s absorptive tendencies within what Michael McKeon calls the “triumphant mind” of the author (Origins 419). For the purposes of this study, however, it is important to note that the constant distinction between the mind of the author and the narrative plot creates a disjunctive form of mediation— that is, by locating the anti-absorptive tendency within the narrator and deliberately interrupting the narrative to reflect upon the plot, Fielding separates the mediating tendency from the plot. Instead of modeling a narrative in which our hero learns to internalize the third person perspective Tom’s subjective perspective seems forever distanced from it. From a structural perspective, Fielding has relegated absorptive mediation to the status of digression (triumphant digressions, but digressions nonetheless). Perhaps this is why George Eliot notes in Middlemarch’s homage to the “great historian,” that future novelists “must not linger after his example.” Nor did they. In fact, future novelists and Romantic poets alike were much more likely to imitate mediating strategies pioneered in novels that trusted the absorptive power of plot and the affective educational power of emotion.

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Passions Ruling Passions In her study of the way moral and phenomenological knowledge cannot be conveyed through conventional philosophical or didactic media, Martha Nussbaum reminds us that Plato banned poets from his Republic because he did not consider it healthy to produce literature that “made its connection with the audience through emotions” (Nussbaum 17). Enlightenment pundits often echo this platonic suspicion of emotion, insisting that it must be subordinated to reason. The classic metaphor for this relationship occurs in the second epistle of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man: On Life’s vast Ocean diversely we sail, Reason the card, but passion is the gale. (Epistle II,iii, ll. 15–17)

What is revolutionary in both Tom Jones and Betsy Thoughtless, is the resistance to this idea, in favor of the essentially Romantic suspicion that emotions might play a more central role in a moral education. However, whereas Tom Jones only flirts with this tenet of Shaftesburyean sensibility, Betsy Thoughtless marries affective impulse with a Humean conception of passion. The similarities between Tom Jones and Betsy Thoughtless are too obvious to suppose that Haywood was not purposefully rewriting Fielding’s novel. Both Betsy Thoughtless and Tom Jones create eponymous good-hearted protagonists who love virtue but lack prudence. Both novels attempt to educate their main characters (and presumably, their readers). Both protagonists love virtue, but both are led astray, in part by their own follies and in part by the ill will of others. Like Tom, Betsy has an innate regard for virtue, but makes choices that put her virtue in peril. Both characters even share the same moral epiphany. Tom laments the “Follies and Vices” that have led him into misfortune and blames his own actions as the “Cause of all [his] misery.” Betsy echoes him when she too blames herself for her own misery: “In summing up this charge against herself, she found that all her faults and her misfortunes had been owing either to an excess of vanity;—a mistaken pride,—or a false delicacy” (558). Clearly, Haywood is using Fielding’s novel to reconstruct its argument. However, to describe Betsy Thoughtless, as one critic has done, as a “perfectly good imitation of Fielding” or even as “a Fieldingesque exercise,” is much like claiming that Fielding’s Joseph Andrews is a perfectly good imitation of Richardson’s Pamela. Betsy Thoughtless revises Tom Jones at both a phenomenological and an epistemological level. It weaves the meditating energy from omniscient digressions into an absorptive plot that complements the novel’s theme. At the same time, Haywood’s Humean paradigm undermines Fielding’s philosophical understandings about the nature of passion and reason. The role of the passions in the moral life was of course a central preoccupation in eighteenth-century belles lettres, often creating divisions in class and gender across a variety of political, religious and philosophical discourses, too involved to

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treat here. Suffice it to say for the purposes of this study that the debate over the relative roles of reason and passion permeated almost every aspect of culture. According to Michael McKeon, such intractable problems form the epistemological core of important narratives that provide “a conceptual framework for [their] mediation (if not the ‘solution’)” (Origins 20). Specifically, McKeon agrees with Frederic Jameson that the distinctive power of the novel is to formulate stories through “internalization or thematization of formal problems on the level of content” (266). Haywood performs precisely this radical internalization by referencing Rochefoucauld’s metaphor of the ruling passion early in her novel when the narrator informs the reader that Betsy “had a great deal of wit, but was too volatile for reflection, and as a ship, without sufficient ballast is tossed about at the pleasure of every wind that blows, so was she hurried thro’ the ocean of life just as each predominant passion directed” (32). Ostensibly, reason’s relationship to passion in this passage seems metonymous with the idea that “ruling passions” drive vessels off course unless they are guided by reason. Certainly the young Betsy is too volatile to allow reflection to temper her emotionally impulsive actions. Just as plots “take possession of the memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the will,” Betsy’s early response to emotional stimuli suggests that she is the slave of her passions, not their master. Betsy Thoughtless subtly undermines this paradigm, however, when it suggests that reason can neither justify nor condemn Betsy’s initial emotional responses. Instead, this novel argues both thematically and structurally that overwhelming emotions will best be ruled—not by reason—but by other emotions. In this sense, Haywood explodes the binary opposition that made it impossible for Tom Jones to be effectively guided by Sophia (i.e., reflective wisdom) by suggesting that passion carries meaning within absorption. In other words, her readers are meant to read for the plot in order to derive meaning, just as Betsy herself learns that a “ruling passion” is not one that overmasters reason, but one that can become the phenomenological basis of a moral education—what Nussbaum calls “love’s knowledge.” To argue that absorptive fictions allow the derivation of meaning through plot is not to argue that “plot is that which especially characterizes mass consumption literature” or that “plot is why we read Jaws, but not Henry James” (Brooks 4). Rather, as Peter Brooks suggests in Reading for the Plot, the absorptive function of plot is simultaneously “the organizing line and intention of narrative ... perhaps best conceived as an activity, a structuring operation” (Brooks, 37). Brooks argues that even novels by Henry James are meant to be read for their plots, positing a metonymy “as old as narrative itself” between narrative and sexual desire. As    For a useful discussion of this tension as it relates to class, see John D. Morillo’s Uneasy Feelings: Literature, the Passions, and Class (AMS Press, 2001).    Here it could be objected that Brooks’s model assumes what some critics have defined as a “male” model of sexual desire, structured around arousal and climax. I

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he describes it, “Desire is always there, at the start of a narrative, often in a state of initial arousal, often having reached a state of intensity, such that movement must be created, action undertaken, change begun” (Brooks, 38). According to Brooks, desire not only propels us through narrative, but it provides the structuring operation for the story of the story itself. Following up on this central insight as it is explored by Peter Brooks, Ross Chambers, and Renée Girard, among others, Patricia Meyer Spacks explores in Desire and Truth the way that plots actually encode the process of exegesis. That is to say, “people’s ways of telling their stories finally become recipes for structuring experience itself” (Jerome Bruner, qtd. in Spacks, 29). If this is true, it suggests that absorption is necessary for a mediated exegesis. Haywood was one of the few eighteenth-century novelists to thematize this idea, and to allow it to structure narrative form. Of all her novels, Betsy Thoughtless most fully integrates this metonymy between reading for the meaning and reading for the plot. In this sense then, Betsy Thoughtless provides a locus classicus for a shift in the development of novelistic narrative in which the intractable problem of instructing with delight is fully integrated at both the structural and the thematic level. Further, by deconstructing the binary opposition between reason and passion, this novel incorporates into “the novel” an essentially Romantic trust in affective education. The opening line of Betsy Thoughtless suggests a contest not between reason and passion, but between two passions (love and vanity): “fewer women were undone by love, than vanity” (27). Interestingly, it is neither of these passions that first leads Betsy astray. When Betsy’s best friend, Miss Forward, takes up with the young Master Sparkish, Betsy’s sexual innocence and her good-hearted faith fuel her benevolent delight in helping her friend: “quite charmed with being made the confidante of a person elder than herself, [Betsy] set all her wits to work, to render herself worthy of the trust reposed in her” (29). Eventually Miss Forward is discovered and both she and Betsy are severely reprimanded. Lacking the sexual or moral sophistication to understand why Miss Forward should not have been allowed to spend unchaperoned time with her beau, Betsy builds an early, unhealthy resentment towards the rigid codes of moral propriety that forbid what she assumes to be innocent pleasures. Betsy’s governess, the “good old gentlewoman,” is unable to teach Betsy the lesson that so many eighteenth-century fictional heroes and heroines (including Tom Jones) must learn—trust in one’s own virtuous inclinations is often as dangerous as vice. The narrator of the novel explains that the governess has no hope of teaching Betsy this lesson, paradoxically enough, because she herself was no longer within reach of temptation: “she had little remains of having ever have argued elsewhere that Haywood does not make this mistake. See Margaret Case Croskery, “Masquing Desire: The Politics of Passion in Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina” in The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood. Eds Kirsten T. Saxton and Rebecca P. Bocchicchio. Lexington, Kentucky: UP of Kentucky, 2000. 69–94.

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been capable of exciting those inclinations she so much condemned” (13). The good old gentlewoman’s moral lecture falls on deaf ears because Betsy suspects that she speaks “out of envy, or to shew her authority, rather than the real dictates of truth” (13). Haywood makes this case quite often in her fiction. The narrator of Love in Excess complains instructively about These insipids, who ... tell us very gravely, that we ought to love with moderation and discretion,—and take care that it is for our interest,—that we should never place our affections, but where duty leads, or at least, where neither religion, reputation, or law, may be a hindrance to our wishes. —Wretches! We know all this, as well as they; we know too, that we both do, and leave undone many other things, which we ought not. ... (205)

Here, the target of impatience is moral authority in all its righteous trappings— including the pious affirmation of the obvious truths of religion, reputation and law, all of which are so often ineffective against powerful emotion. By denying the undeniable and by assuming that there is no distinction between pleasure and sin, Betsy’s good old gentlewoman renders herself “insipid.” Worse, when she monopolizes the moral high ground, she stimulates precisely what she had hoped to quell: “Miss Betsy might, possibly, have sooner forgot the little artifices she had seen practised by Miss Forward, if her governess, by too strenuously endeavouring to convince her how unbecoming they were, had not reminded her of them” (13). The thorough failure of traditional sites of moral authority to capture the trust of the impetuously good hearted is a favorite refrain of the narrator of this novel: “I have often remarked, that reproofs from the old and ugly have much less efficacy than when given by persons less advanced in years, and who may be supposed not altogether past sensibility themselves of the gaities they advise others to avoid” (13). The suggestion operates as one of the more sophisticated arguments in favor of absorptive fiction: in order to counsel the young against forceful passions, the voice of moral instruction needs to engage the absorptive power of temptation. Betsy’s next guardian, Mrs. Trusty, instinctively understands this idea. She knows that “plain reproof” is “not the way to prevail on [Betsy Thoughtless] to reclaim the errors of her conduct” (36). Far too savvy to lecture Betsy, she begins a more scientific program of moral reform. She “came more often to Mr. Goodman’s than otherwise she would have done, on purpose to observe the behaviour of Miss Betsy” (36). Displaying a novel interest in the particular over the general, Mrs. Trusty observes her subject because she recognizes that generalized moral lessons must adjust themselves to particulars. She decides that since vanity has overmastered Betsy’s otherwise considerable powers of reason, Betsy “must be insensibly weaned from what, at present, she took so much delight in, and brought into a different manner of living, by ways which should rather seem to flatter than check her vanity” (36). She accordingly invites Betsy to join her for a while in the country, where she will not have so many suitors to inflame her vanity and where she can follow other, more productive passions. Much as Samuel Johnson

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attempts to remove readers from absorptive dangers by counseling novelists not to allow virtue to be mixed with vice, Mrs. Trusty hopes to create a virtuous Betsy by removing her from the dangerous confusions of real life. Later, Mrs. Trusty will repeat this mistake, when she becomes a forerunner of Persuasion’s Lady Russell by providing prudent but misguided advice to a heroine who would have done better to follow her own heart. Lady Trusty joins with the rest of Betsy’s family in counseling Betsy to marry Mr. Munden. In both instances, Betsy’s counselors attempt to remove her from “love’s knowledge”—precisely those intense affective experiences that will provide her moral education. Other sites of moral authority in this novel inspire even less confidence. Mr. Goodman (perhaps an homage to Fielding’s Squire Allworthy) is a good man, but he is oblivious to the villainy around him. He fails to recognize the true character of his wife, who breaks his heart, destroys his fortune and leads him uncomfortably close to moral despair, and he is utterly ineffectual as a moral guide. Meanwhile, both of Betsy’s brothers are as thoughtless as their sister. Thomas, the eldest, is compromised as a moral guide when he cannot invite Betsy to live with him. His absorptive passion for his French mistress has induced him to give her “sole command of his house and servants” (277). She is a wife “in all but name,” which makes it impossible for him to take Betsy in: “How could he therefore bring home a sister, who had a right to, and doubtless would have claimed all those privileges another was already in possession of” (277). Although he urges Betsy to follow the counsel of her family, Thomas Thoughtless also ignores Mr. Goodman’s excellent advice, and suffers the consequences when his French mistress proves unfaithful. Betsy’s younger brother, Francis, also demands that Betsy display more prudence and good judgment than he himself is able to muster. Perhaps most surprising of all is the failure of Mr. Trueworth, Betsy’s right-minded suitor to act as this novel’s moral center. In fact, however, he also compromises his integrity—in an illicit affair with Mr. Goodman’s stepdaughter Flora. Perhaps the central shared flaw of all of Betsy’s moral advisors (except Lady Trusty) is their attempt to substitute generalized moral advice for the reformative effects of experience. However, the text and the plot of this novel suggest that Betsy’s lack of passionate experience is more of an obstacle to her happiness than suitable role models or overruling passions. For example, many of Betsy’s early foibles arise because she is “altogether ignorant” of the type of misery she causes in her suitors when she encourages their hopeless suits. She regards “all [their] professions of love ... only as words of course,—the prerogative of youth and beauty in the one sex, and a duty incumbent on the other to pay” (142). Although she has a “softness in her disposition, which rendered her incapable of knowing the distress of anyone, without affording all the relief was [sic] in her power to give,” Betsy does not realize “how dear it may sometimes cost” her suitors to indulge her vanity (142). Here it is worth nothing that what at first seems a grievous sign of vain insensibility is in fact, a product of the fact that Betsy has not yet experienced the passions necessary for a full, sympathetic treatment of her suitors.

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It is only when she begins to acquire more affective experience that her reflective capacities can help her realize the particular relevance of generalized truisms. For example, Betsy’s first taste of moral chagrin occurs shortly after she receives “a little billet” from an unworthy suitor, Mr. Gayland, whom she had been treating “with the most peculiar marks of esteem” (41) in order to torment another suitor. She is pleasantly surprised, expecting to read a passionate declaration of love that will gratify her vanity. Instead, Gayland invites her to a clandestine meeting, assuming from her flirtatious behavior that her morals have already been compromised. Shamed for the first time, Betsy finally understands the particular force of Lady Trusty’s generalized caution that “the innate principle of virtue is not always a sufficient guard against the many snares laid for it” (37). Her remorse stems directly from a full understanding of her actions through a subjective lens: the “consciousness of having, by a too free behaviour towards [Gayland], emboldened him to take this liberty, involved her in the utmost confusion, and she was little less enraged with herself, than she had reason to be with him” (43). Vanity (not the moral counsel of pious authority figures) again provides ballast in Betsy’s next painful moment of moral consciousness. She finally begins to perceive how unattractive her own behavior might appear to others when she witnesses her guardian’s step-daughter, Flora, preening herself on Gayland’s false flattery. Betsy “saw, as in a mirror, her own late follies in those of Miss Flora, who swelled with all the pride of flattered vanity” (26, emphasis added). Thus, vanity becomes itself an agent of moral reform. The mirror that had encouraged her own vain absorption is the same vehicle that later allows her to see the error of her own behavior. Despite her trust in the educatory power of passions, Haywood is as unwilling as Fielding to embrace Shaftesburyean morality in toto. This novel recognizes that there is a problem in attempting to anchor virtuous behavior within the passions, just as it recognizes the dangers of unmediated absorption of amorous fiction. Short-lived moments of moral consciousness are not enough to steady Betsy against the delights offered by a seemingly unending string of suitors. Knowing that a marriage to her most eligible suitor, Mr. Trueworth, would put an end to a power she wields only during courtship, Betsy “could not bring herself to be content that [Mr. Trueworth] ever should be a husband” despite the fact that “she had seen nothing, either in his person or deportment, that was not perfectly agreeable” (71). These reasons for avoiding marriage to Trueworth are certainly rational: Betsy “had too much good sense not to know it suited not with the condition of a wife to indulge herself in the gaieties she at present did, which though innocent ... might not be altogether pleasing to one, who, if he so thought proper, had the power of restraining them” (71). She “therefore resolved not to enter into a condition, which demanded some share of [serious behavior], at least for a long time; that is, when she should be grown weary of the admiration, flatteries, and addresses of the men, and no longer found any pleasure in seeing herself preferred before all the women of her acquaintance” (71). Here, marriage is figured as equivalent to a restraint on the pleasures of absorptive pursuits—an altogether unwelcome

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mediator of other vastly preferable pleasures. Just as readers will read solely to find out what happens next, Betsy resists the mediation that threatens to put an end to her pleasurable pursuits. Haywood’s novel thus thematizes its own intractable problem. By creating a heroine who is oblivious to the dangers of her own absorptive desires, Haywood links successful resolution of the plot to the successful mediation of the pleasures inherent within that plot. In this sense, Betsy Thoughtless suggests that the absorptive quest for gratification provides its own education. This approach to storytelling privileges passion as a site (however dangerous) of psychological complexity and moral sophistication. Ultimately, Betsy will internalize a golden platitude: the loss of “true worth” is the loss of true pleasure. But she cannot internalize this concept until she has felt for herself the passionate regret that helps identify true pleasure. A series of misadventures including two near rapes, the near ruin of her own reputation, the mental and physical collapse of Mr. Goodman, Mr. Trueworth’s defection, and his subsequent marriage to another woman all combine to deepen Betsy’s affective experience. In many eighteenth-century novels, such misadventures traditionally crush the will of their “fallen” female protagonists where a woman’s moral education becomes complete only once she has experienced the shame (or simply the ill consequences) of her passions. In this novel, however, the point at which Betsy stops trusting herself is when she makes her worst mistake—when she listens to the traditional sources of moral authority (family and friends) and consents to marry Mr. Munden. Immediately after this decision, Betsy is pleased with her new-found obedience. She experiences “the joy she found her compliance had given all her friends,—the endearing things they had said to her on the occasion [of her upcoming nuptials], and the transport Mr Munden had expressed” (488). But these virtuous pleasures are short-lived. As the date of the marriage draws near, Betsy’s apathetic forebodings leave her “like one quite stupid and dead to all sensations, of every kind” (489). When she finally is able to sleep, she has premonitory nightmares. Betsy’s forebodings turn out to be a better indicator than her family’s insipid instruction that “we should never place our affections, but where duty leads.” Unbeknownst to Betsy, Mr. Munden courts Betsy primarily because he is in financial difficulties. After they are married, his ill-nature quickly reveals how unlikely it is that he can provide the moral ballast that Betsy’s brothers expect from “a different mode of life” where she will not be exposed to the “baseness of the world” and her own “inadvertency” (443). In fact, Mr. Munden exposes Betsy to the basest actions she has yet seen. Despite the fact that his marriage to Betsy has saved him from financial destitution, Mr. Munden asks Betsy to economize so that he may continue to remain profligate. In one of his rages, he hurls her favorite pet to its death. Later, when one of Mr. Munden’s benefactors attempts to rape Betsy, she resourcefully escapes. But instead of offering sympathy, Munden is furious because Betsy’s actions have ruined “all [his] expectations” (556). Finally, after he

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takes up with Thomas Thoughtless’s French mistress in his own house, Munden’s viciousness becomes transparent enough to convince Betsy’s own family that they were wrong to have advised her to marry him. During these troubles, Betsy achieves a sense of her own previous ignorance and vanity. This new humility makes itself fully felt only once Betsy recognizes her real passion for Trueworth: “Blinded by my vanity,—led by my mistaken pride,—I had not considered the value I ought to have set upon [Mr Trueworth’s] love.... I know not how it is, I did not then think him half so agreeable as I now find he is” (489). The emotion of humility arises from her new sentiments of sexual attraction and allows Betsy to experience a deeper level of reflection. In contrast to the questionable moral epiphany in Tom Jones discussed above, Betsy’s affective epiphany proves capable of influencing her future behavior. The narrator comments that the change in Betsy’s “humour, great and sudden as it was, did not however prove a transient one” (558). In fact, it enables her to check her own vanity when she hears her perfections “too lavishly extolled” (558). More tellingly, after Mr. Munden berates Betsy for her successful escape, Betsy wastes little effort in blaming him for a baseness she now recognizes as inseparable from his character. Instead, she reflects more seriously on her own behavior and “blushed to remember, that she had given herself leave to be pleased at the thoughts of appearing amiable in the eyes of that great man:—‘Good God!” cried she, ‘what infatuation possessed me!’” (557). Her sense of her own culpability provides another redemptive moment of self-recrimination. It is, however, a fully private moment, enforced not by conventional sources of moral authority, but by Betsy’s own growing conviction about the true source of her own happiness. This conviction allows her to pass further tests of resolve. For example, when Betsy receives a flattering billet from an anonymous suitor, she is able to reject the advance with generosity, despite her new found need for admiration and her unhappy marriage to Munden (559–61). Later, when Mr. Trueworth (now a widower) accidentally discovers that Betsy has a deep regard for him, he attempts to embrace her, and she virtuously resists. Her resistance does not stem from reason’s restraining force over passion; rather, it stems from Betsy’s own newfound realization of her own desires. The narrator informs us that “while she most resisted the glowing pressure of his lips, she had felt a guilty pleasure in the touch, which had been near depriving her of doing so, and that though she had resolved never to see him more, it would be very difficult to refrain wishing to be forever with him” (547). She acknowledges the power of her desires “to be forever with him” even as she resists the “guilty pleasure” of the “pressure of his lips.” Adulterous longing is here (quite radically) featured as another source of emotive education, which could be construed as an important phenomenological link between this novel and Haywood’s earlier amatory fictions, as well as a significant difference from the amatory fictions of Behn and Manley. Betsy’s resistance to the guilty pleasure she takes in discovering that she loves Trueworth is not simply an internalization of generalized moral principles (her obedience to such principles when she marries Mr. Munden amply illustrates this difference);

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instead, it is a response to her inherent understanding of the difference between satisfying a passion and being blinded by it. Instead of experiencing a sense of shame that cripples her desire to experience pleasure, Betsy learns to value passion. Just as she learns to recognize the difference between vanity and love, her pain refines her ability to experience sympathy for those she has hurt. Similarly, once she better understands her own character she is better able to assess the characters of friends such as Miss Forward and Mr. Trueworth. In fact, this novel suggests that without the stimulus of sexual attraction and the affective education that brought about their moral compatibility, an earlier marriage to Trueworth might not have succeeded.10 In this sense especially, Haywood’s affective position has far more in common with her Romantic descendents than it does with her 17th- and 18th-century precursors. An unlikely herald of Wordsworth, Haywood’s anti-enlightenment faith in the educational power of emotions is based on her understanding of the educational power of “sensations sweet, Felt in the blood.” In Tintern Abbey the speaker stresses the importance of transforming those sensations by “the power of harmony,” and looked fondly on his sister, whose “wild eyes” echo his own previously untamed experience. Likewise, the narrator of Betsy Thoughtless recognizes that early untamed passions are necessary for a sophisticated sensibility. This tenet is central to the Romantic movement and it is metonymous with the process of mediating absorptive fiction. Reading for the plot, one realizes that a happy ending in Tom Jones requires that others come to recognize Tom’s essential good nature (and Blifil’s treachery). In that sense, Fielding’s novel thematizes an epistemological question (how do we distinguish between good agents and bad?). Tom’s “happy ending” is coincident with his own sense of remorse, but not contingent upon it. Instead, it is largely dependent on certain pieces of information coming to light in time. In contrast, the successful outcome of Haywood’s plot is largely dependent on Betsy’s actual recognition of her own desires. This novel’s ability to weave its thematic content into a novel that is predicated on the importance of reading for the plot marks an important moment in the eighteenth-century debate over the relative roles of passion and reason. It shares with later Romantic poets, Gothic novels and Victorian sensation novels the tendency to undermine traditional sites of moral authority to portray psychologically complex emotional truths and to predicate this operation on an altered epistemological understanding of an emotional education. In so doing, novelistic narratives redefined the cultural practice of reading by emphasizing sympathetic identification, even as they redefined the human experience. Whether or not we accept current models of literary periodization that tend to make clear breaks between the Enlightenment and the Romantic movement (and that tend to 10   Limitations of space preclude a full examination of this claim and of the corollary claim that Trueworth’s own affective education also was necessary to his later highly compatible marriage to Betsy.

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elevate the study of poetry over the novel during the Romantic movement), the more clearly we understand the role that sympathetic pleasure plays in affective exegesis, the easier it should be to account for what Deidre Shauna Lynch describes as the “forces that compose the field in which reading and writing occur” including, I would argue, the (still under-explored) explosion of novelistic fiction during the Romantic movement and the possibilty that the affective engagement and readerly indentification required by absorptive narratives is an early, profoundly powerful, wave of the Romantic movement.

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Chapter Two

The Melancholy Briton: Enlightenment Sources of the Gothic Peter Walmsley

In eighteenth-century Britain there seems to be much cultural work devoted to death, and if this work is not as spectacular as in the Victorian period, it is interestingly less fully ritualized and containing. In particular, the fear of death and anxieties about the continued presence of the dead after burial are explicit and recurrent priorities of much writing of this period. That most English of modes, the Gothic, with its invitation to melancholia and its obsession with the undead, seems less a sudden craze of the literary marketplace of the century’s end—the Gothic novel as, say, E.J. Clery would have it, “the ultimate luxury commodity, produced by an ‘unreal need’ for unreal representations” (7)—and more but one expression of a wider discourse of death of some ancestry and addressing obviously core cultural concerns. Much criticism of the Gothic novel has tended to read it either generically—as generated only in response to other Gothic novels, reaching back to Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764)—or psychoanalytically—as the expression of repressed desires. Both approaches tend to divorce it from its wider history and the social work it, like any cultural production, accomplishes. I aim here for a reading of the emergent Gothic that seeks literary antecedents but is concerned also with the social pressures at play in eighteenth-century British culture. I will begin this search for the deeper roots of the Gothic by comparing how death features in the two dominant philosophical voices in France and England in the Enlightenment, Descartes and Locke, moving on to read Addison and Steele’s The Spectator (1711–12; 1714), Young’s graveyard poem Night Thoughts (1742–5) and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) as negotiating death and mourning in a post-Lockean world. But I want also to attend to how these texts repeatedly turn to ideas of nation in the midst of mourning. As Robert Miles and others have shown, the Gothic is about national selffashioning against a Continental and Catholic other. But the connection between 

  Many scholars have explored the Gothic novel’s commitment to articulating a shared national history. Thus Toni Wein, citing Deniz Kandiyoti, argues that “whether responding to fears of a lost British identity as the outline of the nation changed, or embracing the extended reach of British imperialism, Gothic novels reaffirm ‘authentic cultural values culled from the depths of a presumed communal past’” (4) —values Wein

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melancholy and national identity was of long standing. British writers had for centuries embraced rather than denied the Continental stereotype of Britons as a morose people. And where this had typically in the past been attributed to the island’s oppressive climate, in the eighteenth century more sociological explanations were sought. Thus George Cheyne, in The English Malady (1733), attributed the national propensity for “Spleen, Vapours, and Lowness of Spirits” to “the Richness and Heaviness of our Food, the Wealth and Abundance of the Inhabitants (from their universal Trade) the Inactivity and sedentary Occupations of the better Sort (among whom this Evil mostly rages) and the Humour of living in great, populous and consequently unhealthy Towns” (a1v). By thus implicating “Luxury and Laziness” as the causes of British melancholy, Cheyne connects the national malaise with those things that were thought to give Britain its greatness: its wealth, its sophistication, and its emergence as a world military and economic power (48). Linda Colley, showing how Britain defined itself in antithesis to France, paints a portrait of the ideal imagined Briton in this period as Protestant, pragmatic, and commercial, grasping and shaping a world future. For Gerald Newman, this heroic national character became distinguished, from mid-century on, by an exemplary “sincerity” expressed as “innocence, honesty, originality, frankness, and moral self-reliance” (127–33). Cheyne and the other authors I consider here turn a dark obverse of the national character to view: the Briton as pathologically melancholy, incapacitated, and finds embodied in characters that Gothic novelists tend to model on the heroes and heroines of the romance tradition. And Maggie Kilgour reads Gothic fiction of the 1790s as political in the deepest sense, pitting the values and demands of community against the liberty of the individual: “the rise of the gothic ... suggests a resistance to the ideas of rising, progress, and development, either historical or individual, which leads to the attainment of individuation and detachment” (37). Some stress the role of othering central to this process. Cannon Schmitt traces the xenophobia of Gothic novels to their “rise to prominence and solidity as a genre in the years immediately following the French Revolution. They belong to the tumult of the 1790s and participate in the intense struggle in England to distance all that was ‘English’ from the French and their debacle”; “Gothic fictions not only registered this work of nation-making but provided a glossary of figures and narrative conventions with which Englishness was defined and redefined” throughout nineteenth-century fiction (13–14). And for Robert Miles, Gothic nationalism needs to be re-read through Kristeva’s theory of abjection: “the supernatural arises with the violation of, not the laws of nature, but the ‘laws’ of nation, by which I mean breaches of the congruence between myths of national origin, and the constitution which is the guarantor of our national identity” (Abjection, 65).    In his essay “Of National Characters” (1748), Hume would argue that “physical” causes such as climate and air are of little or no influence in shaping a national character, which is the effect of “moral” causes: “Where a number of men are united into one political body, the occasions of their intercourse must be so frequent, for defence, commerce, and government, that, together with the same speech or language, they must acquire a resemblance in their manners, and have a common or national character, as well as a personal one, peculiar to each individual” (Essays, I: 248).

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obsessed about the past. In tracing the literary and social sources of the Gothic, I want to attend, in particular, to this connection between death, melancholy, and emergent ideas of nation. In so doing, in contrast to Dror Wahrman (189–91), I see in Locke’s inwardly turned writing something more than an ancien régime of identity, some space for the emergence of a singular and irreplaceable modern self, which will come to make its own demands for mourning. Addison, Young, and Sterne search for a way towards grieving this new kind of loss. Locke’s Moldering Tomb of Mind The curious interdependencies of discourses of death and nation in Britain find an early and authoritative articulation in the dominant competing national epistemologies of Europe in the period. Both Descartes and Locke created philosophical systems that engaged, in very different ways, with questions surrounding human mortality, and in consequence wrote volumes that return repeatedly to the evidence of the grave as they explore human mental life. At the same time, British philosophical discourse in particular foregrounded ideas of nation as it sought to forge an autonomous identity against the enormous intellectual and cultural authority of Descartes and his followers in France. It is clear that Descartes took the immortality of the soul as a sacred principle and working assumption in marking his radical distinction between body and soul. Dismissing the bi- and tri-partite souls of classical philosophy, he describes the soul as a singular immaterial substance whose distinctive property is to think. It is “of a nature entirely independent of the body,” he claims, “and consequently ... is not bound to die with it” (I: 141). But Descartes’s system nonetheless grants the body expanded powers, as he relegates to the internal economy of the body functions traditionally ascribed to the agency of the sensitive part of the soul. Descartes seems fascinated by how much of our activity can be accounted for wholly in terms of autonomic neural responses, leaving to the soul only the purer, higher activities of direct volition and reasoning—even to the point of granting it a body within the body, the pineal gland which mediates between matter and spirit and, seemingly, insulates the soul from the body’s corruptions. Under this radical division, animals as soulless bodies become, famously, mere machines. Death is central to Descartes’s revisionist metaphysics. He argues that much confusion has sprung from our unreflective observation of dead bodies: we see that the corpse, with the spirit fled, becomes cold and immobile, and we naively assume then that the soul was responsible for warming and directly activating all the parts of the body (I: 329). We need, we are told, to look at corpses in a new way, the way of anatomy, for the anatomists teach us that the body is nothing so much as a complex self-activating machine. Descartes assumes that his educated audience will have witnessed at least some dissections—indeed he makes explicit appeal to our experience of the scientific display of the dead. And he draws, like the physiologists of his generation, on mechanics and hydraulics to account for the

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functions of our bodies, likening our organs and systems to waterworks, church organs, clocks, and mechanical toys (I: 99–100). As Descartes would have it, death occurs not because an activating soul has chosen to depart, but because the machine itself breaks. Only when the body experiences a critical malfunction, does the soul leave. Few would dispute Descartes’s sustained impact on French Enlightenment thought through his various apostles and the integration of their writing into higher education in the eighteenth century. One need only ask La Mettrie, who casts himself in L’Homme machine (1747), 100 years on, as the philosopher Descartes desperately wanted to be, if only he had the nerve to dispense with the soul altogether. Even more than for Descartes, for La Mettrie anatomists, with their mechanical models, are the only guides able to bring us to a true knowledge of the human: “they alone have revealed the springs hidden under coverings which keep so many marvels from our gaze” (4–5). Like Descartes, La Mettrie privileges the evidence of corpses, offering us a gruesome list of “experiments” we could practice on the newly dead—how organs and muscles, still reactive after death, show how the innate forces, the springs of the human machine, are fully dispersed throughout the body (26–7). Similarly, one could consider the many busy bodies of Sade’s sexual fictions as, surely, yet further proof of the resilience of Descartes’s account of our mechanical lives. I am not arguing, of course, that La Mettrie or Sade were mainstream thinkers, but rather that their ways of thinking about the body show the reach of Descartes’s thought in the French Enlightenment. And I would venture that this tradition of thought, which privileges the anatomists’ mechanical view of the human body, has an impact on attitudes to death. Dissection familiarizes us with the dead, and as it reveals the hidden springs beneath the skin, it demystifies death. Corpses—made, under the anatomist’s knife, to explain the living body, to stand in for us—become less objects of horror than of wonder and curiosity. And as for the immortal soul of Cartesianism, its role in life is so rarified and its connection to the body so tenuous, that, as La Mettrie somewhat perversely recognized, its departure from this world is at once natural and easy. Cartesianism’s compelling and self-consciously modern account of the mind and the world met with resistance in Britain, and generations of philosophers made a concerted effort to lay claim to an indigenous national philosophical tradition, in which Bacon and Locke were each granted the status of patriarch. Thus Locke himself would, absurdly, deny the influence of Descartes on his own thought (Shapin and Schaffer 68), privileging instead Bacon’s authority; Hume, in introducing his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), made sure to write himself into the pantheon, as the heir of Bacon, Locke, and Shaftesbury (Treatise, xvii). In An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke adopts an aggressively antiCartesian stance. Indeed, there are a number of Cartesian positions Locke singles out for ironic treatment: he argues, for example, that animals are not machines— they are clearly capable of some kind of rationality; and that the mind is not always thinking—there seem to be considerable stretches of sleep time when we neither dream nor think. Moreover Locke mounts a general attack on the idea of substances,

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material and immaterial. Descartes’s fundamental account of the soul is simply, on Locke’s reading, unintelligible. In fact, Locke is not prone to talk of a soul at all, but of an understanding that is hard to disentangle from its perceptions. And he certainly resists physiological explanations. Where Descartes worked out much of our experience (our sensations and passions and memories) as happening within the body—as a matter of twanging fibres and pulsing tubes—Locke represents experience as more fully and consistently mental. Where Descartes turned to the anatomy of the body to explain thought, Locke creates a new anatomy of mental objects in and of themselves, and relegates their physiological causes, whatever they may be, to the margins as both unknowable and irrelevant. In general, Locke seems resistant to anything like Cartesian dualism, with its machine body/immaterial soul dichotomy. Couple this with Locke’s anti-innatist polemic, and it becomes a challenge to come up with a palatable account of what happens at death. I have suggested that for the Cartesian, as for the Cambridge Platonist, the soul is wholly and absolutely different in kind from the body, its departure from the broken machine a moment of liberty. Death is a return to God, to the womb of universal mind from whence it came. But Locke admits no notion of a soul distinct from mental experience. Our minds are the product of this one, short life—the accretions of thought and experience, stretching back to our earliest memories. For Locke personal identity is nothing more than a sense of continued consciousness—a hunch that the I that thinks today is more or less the same as the I that thought three years ago (335–6). But if we are built out of our experiences, what can we be after death, when the senses fail? Can we be selves without fresh, renewing simple ideas? After death, will our selves slowly dissolve, as memory fades? Locke obviously had no answers, but, unlike Descartes, he was willing to create an epistemology that did not take, as a necessary premise, the immortality of the human soul. Moreover he is fully conscious that memory, the glue that holds our admittedly shaggy mental selves together, is naturally weak. Angels, no doubt, have total recall, but human memories are porous, corrupted. Locke’s description of the association of ideas, so attractive to Sterne, shows how past experience can tyrannize the understanding with random and irrelevant connections. And memory is itself subject to time—like our bodies, in a constant process of decay. The mind, like the body, is fleeting and fragile, an accretion of discrete atoms, its form constantly subject to the ravages of time. And on this theme Locke writes in a way that foreshadows, momentarily, the Gothic both in mood and imagery: The Ideas, as well as Children, of our Youth, often die before us: And our Minds represent to us those Tombs, to which we are approaching; where though the Brass and Marble remain, yet the Inscriptions are effaced by time, and Imagery moulders away. The Pictures drawn in our Minds, are laid in fading Colours; and if not sometimes refreshed, vanish and disappear. (151–2)

Death seems to be, for Locke, of the mind as much as of the body. As our memories crowd one another out, we taste death every day.

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Addison and the Nation’s Dead Of the many authors who popularized Locke’s thought on understanding in early eighteenth-century Britain, none was so influential as Joseph Addison, who captured and conveyed to the wide and lasting readership of The Spectator Locke’s troubling sense of the thoroughly mediated character of experience. Addison’s most extended reading of Locke unfolds in the series of Spectators devoted to exploring the imagination (Nos 411–21), which attempt to build an aesthetic upon Locke’s distinctions between the primary and secondary qualities of objects and between real and nominal essences. In Spectator 413, for example, he explicates, in lay terms, Locke’s account of visual sensory impressions: “Namely, that Light and Colours, as apprehended by the Imagination, are only Ideas in the Mind, and not Qualities that have any Existence in Matter.” For Addison this epistemological insight is disorienting, rendering the familiar world strangely spectral: “In short, our Souls are presently delightfully lost and bewildered in a pleasing Delusion, and we walk about like the Enchanted hero of Romance, who sees beautiful Castles, Woods, and Meadows ... but upon the finishing of some secret Spell, the fantastick Scene breaks up, and the disconsolate Knight finds himself on a barren Heath, or in a solitary Desart” (III: 546). Elaborating on Locke’s melancholy monitions about the limitations of the understanding and on the “unreal” character of most sense impressions, Addison reaches for the imagery of the Gothic (imagery that will prove inspirational for Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci” 100 years later). Our minds are enchanted with a world that is not, strictly speaking, there, as if some false enchanter of romance is leading us astray. Not improbably, given Locke’s ambiguities about the life of the understanding after the death of the body, Addison leads us, anxiously, to think on the moment of death: “something like this may be the State of the Soul after its first Separation, in respect of the Images it will receive from Matter” (III: 546–7). Denied the customary mediation of the world by the senses, how will the soul possibly recognize the world, Addison wonders. In this way he pursues for his readers some of the most alarming consequences of Locke’s way of ideas. But in embracing Locke’s message about the centrality of imagination to thought, Addison also, curiously, finds a sanction for ways of thought typically dismissed as excessive and fantastic. Thus he can offer, in Spectator 419, the first fleshed-out theory of the Gothic, notably a half century before The Castle of Otranto appears. Here he considers, with special reference to Shakespeare as well as folk tales, the “pleasing kind of Horrour” stimulated by stories of “Fairies, Witches, Magicians, Demons, and departed Spirits” (III: 570–71). Building as he is on Dryden’s account of “the Fairie way of Writing,” Addison is fully conscious that this is a literary mode in which the English excel, as a people “naturally Fanciful, and very often disposed by that Gloominess and Melancholly of Temper, which is so frequent in our Nation, to many wild Notions and Visions, to which others are not so liable” (III: 572). To the careful reader of the Spectators on the imagination, “wild Notions and Visions” are not so far from

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our normal intercourse with the things of this world. Locke, here the emergent national philosopher, has sanctioned the national turn of mind. This confluence of concerns—death, imagination, and the nation—pervade The Spectator, as both Addison and Steele return, again and again, to themes of ghosts, the good death, and appropriate mourning. These concerns first converge in Spectator 26, Addison’s reflection on the tombs in Westminster Abbey. Here he records his visits to the Abbey, and observes of the monuments that line the walls, so many of which record simply dates of birth and death, that they are little better than “a kind of Satyr upon the departed Persons; who left no other Memorial of them, but that they were born and that they died.” He then offers this reflection on the legion bodies that lie beneath the Abbey’s stones: Upon my going into the Church, I entertain’d my self with the digging of a Grave; and saw in every Shovel-full of it that was thrown up, the Fragment of a Bone or Skull intermixt with a kind of fresh mouldering Earth that some time or other had a Place in the Composition of an humane Body. Upon this, I began to consider with my self what innumerable Multitudes of People lay confus’d together under the Pavement of that ancient Cathedral; how Men and Women, Friends and Enemies, Priests and Soldiers, Monks and Prebendaries, were crumbled amongst one another, and blended together in the same common Mass; how Beauty, Strength, and Youth, with Old-age, Weakness, and Deformity, lay undistinguish’d in the same promiscuous Heap of Matter. (I: 109–10)

Transforming, with his signature compression, Hamlet’s graveside musings on mortality, Addison explores this grave as an emblem of the anonymity and chaos of modern urban life, at once exhilarating and overwhelming. Here the press of London’s faceless multitudes becomes grotesquely literalized, evoking the disorientation that comes with the city’s erosion of kinship, guild, and family, and the displacements, geographic and social, that come with the instabilities of emergent capitalism, for the propertied as well as for the laborer. In the nostalgic fantasy of an older, rural, less mobile Britain, frequently painted throughout the century, your monument in the churchyard or adorning the church aisle would be passed and recognized, every Sunday, by those who knew you. Parish churches, with their clusters of family monuments and their vestries lined with records, were once appropriate repositories for a population largely rooted in the land, but now become inadequate in a culture perceived to be more socially and geographically mobile. Addison’s urban, middleclass readership are here reminded that they will have no such home in landscape or in memory. In choosing the Abbey, of course, Addison is contemplating not just the graveyard for the metropolis, but for the nation. Philip Connell has recently considered the Abbey, and particularly the Poets’ Corner, as a site “of collective memory, in which the past became spectacle, and in which ... the moral nostrum of memento mori found itself bound up with questions of national identity” (558). Connell reads Addison’s response to the Abbey as primarily religious, a gesture of

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simple “Christian sentimentalism”(564), but I would argue that Spectator 26 as a whole offers a message that is far more conflicted and, as I have suggested above, primarily social rather than religious. Unlike the bland and empty memorials of the Abbey’s aisles, the open grave speaks subversively of the land’s violent history—“Friends and Enemies, Priests and Soldiers, Monks and Prebendaries”— reminding us not just of our own mortality, but of the fragility of the nation and the persistent troublesomeness of its Catholic heritage. Addison, confronted with the nation’s nameless dead in the national church, voices, perhaps for the first time, modernity’s malaise with the process by which death will be, in Benjamin’s words, “pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living” (94). But the nation needs its dead; national identity is necessarily built upon history, upon a shared and often nostalgic embrace of the past. As Robert Pogue Harrison has observed, “humans bury not simply to achieve closure and effect a separation from the dead but also and above all to humanize the ground on which they build their worlds and found their histories” (xi). Faced with the failure of the urban graveyard, Addison points to the need for the nation to fashion a new repository of souls, a new site of mourning and memory. Young’s Melancholia In his The Complaint: or, Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality, Edward Young draws, as does Addison, on Locke’s uncertainties about eternity as he struggles to negotiate a troubled truce with death. Stephen Cornford, in his introduction to the Cambridge edition, has laid down an influential reading of Night Thoughts as a poem rational and assured in its piety, a reading which fails to account for the poem’s contradictions, its affective intensity, its obsession with the grave and, above all, its legitimation of and indulgence in the fear of death. The grave is truly horrific for Young, the body impossible to abandon. And though in many ways a conservative cleric, he has absorbed enough of the latitude of his generation to admit the painful difficulty of imagining a heaven or a hell. In his midnight musing, the poet seems, here, to be narrating mental life as Locke describes it—the flow of ideas upon the understanding, sometimes reasonable, sometime associative, at moments focused, at others lost in reverie, but shaded, at every turn, by the thinker’s melancholy. In his insomniac, darkling lucubrations, Young dramatizes the unstable character of mental life, sharing Locke’s intense consciousness of the limits of the understanding and of the mediated nature of our experience. We have no recourse to any certainties outside our own ideas, no appeal to the external substances that give Cartesian arguments 

  Mainstream Anglican thought in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as it distanced itself from Puritan literalizations of heaven and hell, came to accept the fear of death as a natural, even an inevitable, fear of the unknown. This is a central theme in William Sherlock’s much reprinted A Practical Discourse Concerning Death (1689). Ralph Houlbrooke explores these shifting attitudes to the afterlife (28–56).

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their solidity—angel souls and machine bodies. And if Night Thoughts indulges less in the horrific imagery of death than does Blair’s The Grave (1743), a good part of the affective impact of Young’s poem is that very Gothic feeling of claustrophobia, trapped as we are within this restless, grieving mind. Moreover, Young embraces Locke’s sense that our memories are weak and corrupted: “To the same Life none ever twice awoke” (V: 404; 127). For Young, as for Locke, our minds are subject to time; in the fading of our memories from day to day we taste our mortality: Is Death at a Distance? No: he has been on thee; And given sure Earnest of his final Blow. Those Hours, that lately smil’d, where are they now? Pallid to Thought, and ghastly! drown’d, all drown’d In that great Deep, which nothing disembogues. (II: 366–70; 60)

The poet’s struggle to grasp death is a struggle to master an unruly memory, to both remember and forget his grief, and victories of reason are followed by bitter relapses, as his mind relentlessly returns to the grave-sides of the ones he loved. For all its intense interiority and its exposure of affective turmoil, Night Thoughts does concern itself with nation; while centrally a poem about the Christian reconciliation with death, it is also deeply patriotic, explicitly anti-French and anti-Catholic. In the preface to Night VII, Young writes: “As we are at war with the Power, it were well if we were at War with the Manners, of France. A Land of Levity, is a Land of Guilt” (175). The problem of the national graveyard raised by Addison, of a growing scepticism about tombs as meaningful records of lives lived, finds acute expression in Night Thoughts. This is, famously, given dramatic shape in Night III’s tale of the death and burial of the young Narcissa, in which Young reworks in poetry his own experience of the death of his stepdaughter, Elizabeth Temple, at Lyons (Forster, 149–53). In the poem, the French deny Narcissa, as a Protestant, burial on hallowed ground, and the poet has to bury her at night in a stolen grave. In rendering the scene, Young uses this signal uncharitableness to say much about Catholicism’s dogmatism and zeal, but he also dwells on the horror of the furtive burial and the unmarked grave: Deny’d the Charity of Dust, to spread O’er Dust! A charity their Dogs enjoy. What cou’d I do? what Succour? What Resource? With pious Sacrilege, a Grave I stole; With impious Piety, that Grave I wrong’d; Short in my Duty! Coward in my Grief! More like her Murderer, than Friend, I crept With soft-suspended Step, and muffled deep In midnight Darkness, whisper’d my Last Sigh. I whisper’d what shou’d echo thro’ their realms; Nor writ her Name, whose tomb shou’d pierce the Skies. (III: 169–79, 77)

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This proto-Gothic scene of furtive midnight burial in foreign soil struck a nerve with Young’s readers, becoming the popular poem’s most-discussed passage, in part no doubt for its affirming contrast of genuine British sympathy with French obduracy. But Narcissa’s burial also figures the problem of the adequacy of tombs: what rites, after all, do echo through the realm, what tombs pierce the sky? Is Narcissa’s unmarked grave so much less meaningful than the empty epitaphs and jumbled bones Addison finds in Westminster Abbey? In such passages Night Thoughts offers itself as compensation for the significatory collapse of the national graveyard. With its extended memorials and mournings for Philander and Narcissa it seeks a fuller articulation and wider audience for grief. But it also explores the importance of negotiating one’s own death in this life: of self-memorial and self-mourning. Even as he tells of Narcissa’s fate, the poet foregrounds his own guilt, part of the rigorous Protestant accounting that informs the whole poem. As lives lived become less publicly legible, less reflected by the collective gaze of community and kin, modern subjectivity takes responsibility for shaping and articulating the self. Young’s compelling contribution to this process is his taking the responsibility for mourning his own death in print. Melancholy and foreboding about death is the performance of a subjectivity; as text replaces tomb—and this is, after all, the century in which the newspaper obituary establishes itself—a sustained sense of self and a more complex management of memory is possible. And by narrating, in Lockean fashion, the volatile flow of thought and feeling in the poet’s mind, the poem opens a space for bearing and managing its readers’ own fears of death, a dynamic thoroughly exploited by Gray in his Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard (1751) with its own portrait of the solitary subject lost amidst meaningless graves. Sterne’s Self-Memorialization Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy is unquestionably as death-obsessed a text as is Young’s Night Thoughts and equally devoted to rendering the mental life of the author in print. Sterne announces his “ill health” and his consequently tenuous hold on “this Fragment of Life” in his opening dedication to Pitt, anxieties he seems to work out through Tristram’s frequent references to his “vile cough” (575) and horrific bouts of consumptive bleeding. Sterne’s own flight to the south of France becomes Tristram’s strange dance with death in Volume VII, and he figures his book’s headlong narration and volatility as a defiance of the grave: “to stand still, or get on but slowly, is death and the devil” (593). Walter Benjamin observes that novels are inevitably about death, the punctuation that bestows form and meaning upon life (100–101). But Sterne seems to want to invert this truth: life in Tristram Shandy is bent on turning our 

  See Habermas on the emergence of this “audience oriented subjectivity” (43–51).   Thomas Keymer writes on death and the design of Tristram Shandy (137–47).



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minds towards death. Despite its title, the book is less autobiography than obituary, as Tristram lovingly evokes from his imagination Walter, his mother, Toby, and Yorick, characters we realize are all long dead. The narrative often stumbles upon a deathbed (Yorick’s, Le Fever’s), or breaks suddenly into eulogy and, seemingly, genuine grief (the picture of Toby’s hearse, the black page for Yorick). In all this, the final Christian consolations of Night Thoughts, its refined grief and masculine stoicism, give way to something much less certain, a secular brooding that points inevitably to the void that follows the last page of Volume IX. As for Addison and Young, death and the nation are interimplicated for Sterne, concerns he explores together in telling of the reactions to the death of Bobby. Eldest son and future squire of Shandy Hall, Bobby, otherwise a cypher in the text, seems to stand for the estate and the land itself at his passing. He, like the land, needs improving; he dies at the very moment when Walter has decided to spend Aunt Dinah’s £1000 on sending Bobby on the grand tour rather than on clearing the ancestral ox-moor. What follows seems almost a parody of natural sympathy and mourning. With his oratorical catalogue of ready aphorisms, Walter talks out, or rather around, his grief—a version, at least in its anxious volubility, of Tristram’s own oddly slant memorialization of the previous generation, his compulsive struggle to capture them all in words. Locke’s Essay, as many have recognized, is a sounding board for Sterne as he writes, the novel exploring the philosopher’s observations on the porousness of memory, the slipperiness of words, and the tyranny of the imagination, concerns that come to the fore at this moment for Tristram. Bobby’s death becomes an object lesson in Lockean psychology and the association of ideas, with Walter rummaging his storehouse of learning, Susanna fixating on the green satin nightgown that will fall her way as her mistress goes into mourning, and Obadiah bracing for the challenge of stubbing the ox-moor. And the various pressures of this complex pathetic passage converge on a simple, Lockean lesson in the power of sense experience, of things over words: Trim’s dropping of his hat as he pronounces, to those gathered in the kitchen, “Are we not here now ... –––and are we not—(dropping his hat to the ground) gone! In a moment!” (431). This flourish is not only apostrophized by Tristram as the most effective emblem of human mortality, but he goes on to insist, not a little mysteriously, on the larger cultural potency of this moment—that Trim’s hat holds a lesson tending to “the preservation of our constitution of church and state,” rephrased, more cynically, in his next breath as “the distribution and balance of its property and power” (431). Sterne is swiping, of course, at the politics that emerged in his generation—where a few ministerial jobbers were perceived to have engrossed power to themselves and the electorate is gulled into a sense of independence, while in fact being “driven, like turkeys to market” (433). But he also seems to be saying, here, that we need to think more on our own deaths, and that such a consciousness of mortality will make us better citizens—a connection that is far from transparent, but one which the novel as a whole, in its oblique fashion, seeks to puzzle out. While many have recognized and considered the melancholy of Tristram Shandy, fewer have attended to its reflections on nation, and none has asked

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how these two might be connected. According to John Croft, Sterne said that his initial plan for the novel involved a grand tour in which Tristram (“a compleat English Gentleman”), after exploring the failings of other nations, would return home with a celebratory “eulogium on the superior constitution of England” (819 n13). Tristram Shandy becomes, in the writing, something far different, but we do get an apostrophe (albeit an interrupted one) to England, “land of liberty, climate of good sense” (635), and Tristram is much devoted to providing us with a comparative anatomy of the national characters of the French and the English. Toby and his campaigns serve as constant, mock-heroic reminders of the historic and on-going hostility across the Channel. Moreover Sterne shares with Young a Whiggish aversion to Catholicism. An irritable bass-line thrumming through the text, it sounds in Walter’s baiting of Dr. Slop (whose subsequent defence of his religion has equal recourse to bigotry and illogic), in Yorick’s sermon condemning the “murders, rapine, [and] bloodshed” of the Roman Church, and in Trim’s tears for his brother Tom in the brutal hands of the Inquisition. All of which serves to imply, by antithesis, the desirable and familiar Anglicanism embodied by Yorick— rational, undogmatic, active, charitable, and capable of genuine sympathy. Walter’s violent Gallophobia—he “hated the very smell of a monk” (613)—is transmuted in Tristram into something more covert, but just as insistent: a love of salacious fabliaux of Catholic sexual hypocrisy (the Queen of Navarre, and the Abbess of Andouillets), and any and all “tawdry stories about monks and nuns” (576). Despite impulses towards the cosmopolitan in the book, where Tristram seems to want to claim the possibility of being a citizen of the world as he stages highly controlled moments of sympathy across national boundaries (towards, for example, mad, melancholy Maria), Tristram Shandy remains devoted to the more parochial task of particularizing Englishness. Tristram, seemingly happy with the readymade comic stereotype of the French as superficial, wanton and gay, is obviously only attracted to such conventions as an opportunity for self-portraiture. Thus the claim that French women love a maypole serves principally as a way of opening a discussion of English spleen. Certainly Walter with his “subacid soreness of humour” (757) and Tristram with his melancholy wit read like case-studies from the pages of The English Malady. If, like Cheyne, Tristram can attribute Britain’s “variety of odd and whimsical characters” to the “great inconstancy in our air and climate” (71), he is even more interested in the social and behavioral causes of depression Cheyne identifies. Walter as the retired Turkey merchant turned gentry capitalist and Toby as the wounded soldier, for all their seeming quaintness, together embody the two driving projects of modern Britain—the nation’s struggles for economic expansion and military supremacy. But Tristram lacks the rectitude of his “fathers”—he sees the emptiness both of Walter’s aggressive superiority and attachments to the “Squirality” (54), and of Toby’s naive conviction that his wars and his war games contribute to “the good and quiet of the world” (753). His incapacity clearly the consequence of the erosion of Whig values at mid-century, Tristram, bemused and purposeless, is strangely stranded in the world left to him by Walter and Toby. In all this Tristram seems to be writing himself as distinctively

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English, as the uncertain product of a place and a history where everything is “all ups and downs” (27). When Tristram comes to imagine his own death, he asks that it not be at home: I never seriously think upon the mode and manner of this great catastrophe, which generally takes up and torments my thoughts as much as the catastrophe itself, but I constantly draw the curtain across it with this wish, that the Disposer of all things may so order it, that it happen not to me in my own house——but rather in some decent inn——at home, I know it,——the concern of my friends, and the last services of wiping my brows and smoothing my pillow, which the quivering hand of pale affection shall pay me, will so crucify my soul, that I shall die of a distemper which my physician is not aware of .... (592)

Tristram fears the agony of leaving friends more than the agony of death itself. Here, as so often, he displays his exquisite sensibility and his powers of sympathy. But there is, at the same time, a deep irony in his wish to die alone, given the importance of friends as the necessary witnesses of the good death—think of the many good deathbed scenes Addison and Steele stage on the pages of The Spectator, or indeed the improving death of Addison that Young himself lays before the public in his Conjectures on Original Composition (1759). Sterne’s whimsical repudiation of the loving deathbed is resonant for the new mode of self-mourning he is fashioning. In Night Thoughts, Young seems to be writing both about and to “friends,” the poet modeling himself as guardian and monitor to those entering into this precarious life, and projecting a private circle of correspondence for his poem. By contrast Sterne—despite his asides to Jenny and Eugenius, and despite the intimacy of his musings—projects a national public readership, whether in defying the host of critics ready to descend on each brace of volumes as it appears, or courting us as “the gentry.” Tristram repudiates the deathbed scene, it seems, because he is intent on dying in print, capering in full public view. Sterne famously pronounced in a letter “I shall write as long as I live” (826). The abrupt ending of Tristram Shandy sorts well with this agenda, as with the whole story’s sense of the deep challenge of self-memorialization, of shaping and containing a life. Sterne denies us the deathbed with its appropriate mortal “catastrophe,” but he calls us nonetheless as witnesses to a death, a very slow death. And in the process he revises what it is about a life that needs memorialization: not, as with Addison, the pious composure of the Christian soul facing eternity, but a private life in all its lived complexity, bearing its overwhelming burden of memories. And here again, Locke seems to have had his say. Tristram observes, teasingly, that the Essay is a “history-book, Sir, (which may possibly recommend it to the world) of what passes in a man’s own mind” (98). The Essay’s minute observation of the passage of ideas    On the tradition of transforming the deathbed into a public stage, where the dying were expected to dispense final blessings and benefactions upon gathered friends and family, see Cressy 390–92.

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in the mind offers Sterne a new, if clearly unmanageable model for a life-writing that attends to the rapid flow of ideas of reflection and sensation coursing across the imagination. To capture a life is to witness the jumble of thought and experience, from the most serious musings on mortality to domestic experience and all the scrapes and contingencies of which a modern bourgeois existence is made. By dying in print, Sterne looks to the nation for memorial, asking it to remember, collect, and sustain the otherwise evanescent energies of the departed subject. Through print he reaches across space, to the very borders of the nation— the newly naturalized boundary to sympathy—to create a community of mourners. If Sterne shares with Addison and Young a sense that a good Briton lives life with death in view, he offers in the novel a new site and audience for mourning; Sterne brings the good death from the private to the public sphere, out of the bedroom and fully onto the national stage. *

*

*

This essay has explored how, in British writing of the early to mid century, ideas of national identity are caught up with those of death. The Act of Union of 1707 and the pressures of imperial and European wars quickened the project of imagining and articulating a distinctive moral and cultural Britishness, of being, as Young puts it, “at War with the Manners of France.” From this process emerges a figure of sympathy and melancholy, a Briton who is the antithesis of French levity. The texts I have examined here express a conviction that the national destiny depends on a fidelity to this indigenous character and to its history. As a result, much of this writing is primarily elegiac and nostalgic, validating community through an honoring of its dead. Yet despite this nostalgia, there is an immediacy to this work; continuity and community become urgent issues in a society in transition. Thus Addison, Young, and Sterne all express anxiety about memorialization; in their work print replaces the marble monument as the public testament to a life lived, and the work of mourning becomes a personal as much as a collective task. Implicit in my readings from Locke through to Sterne is an assumption that there is a wide vein of graveyard writing in eighteenth-century Britain that can rightly be called Gothic in its concerns, a discursive mode that is, as Addison pointed out, peculiarly British and inextricable from the melancholic national temperament. Given this tradition, it is far from surprising that in the wake of the French Revolution, with its attendant crisis in British political and national identity, there should be an efflorescence of Gothic thought and Gothic writing. The Gothic of the 1790s drew on the deep literary heritage traced here in a moment of extreme, growing, and possibly contagious political violence, harnessing the fear of death to an articulation of the nation and its destiny. All this finds its most explicit negotiation in Edmund Burke’s mournful Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), where, as ever, Britain emerges as a necessary repudiation of France, and the true Briton is ever mindful of the dead, “always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers” (121). The nation—its art, letters, law, forms

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of governance—is “an entailed inheritance” (118), and if there is a social contract, it is one that reaches across time, a partnership between “those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born” (194–5). But for all Burke’s veneration of ancestors, there are fully Gothic uncertainties haunting his text, specters of promises broken and heritages neglected. Burke is careful to remind his reader that Britain too has had its brutal revolutions and petty tyrants. The Gothic novel explores Burke’s urgent sense of the fragility of civilization and of the ghastly evidence, just across the Channel, of an utter betrayal of the dead. Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), with its unquiet graves, its terrors of entombment in a foreign land, and its complex negotiations with Catholicism, partakes of a tradition of nationalist discourse about death that reaches back through Sterne and Young, claiming the melancholy of the bereaved and the serious propensity to live with death in view, once again, as the peculiar property of the British psyche. Jane Austen’s ambivalent response in Northanger Abbey (1818) registers the Gothic’s commitment to the task of national mourning—a commitment far from uncongenial to Austen. Henry Tilney’s sensible riposte to Catherine Morland’s indulgence in horror—“Remember the country and age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians” (172)—is a practical assertion of a modernity that is, of course, as unsatisfactory, if not as brutal, as his father’s renovations of the abbey. Austen concedes that the purpose of Gothic obsessions with the dead and the past is to deepen our sense of nation, to remember what it is to be a Briton.

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Chapter Three

“Disagreeable Misconstructions”: Epistolary Trouble in Charlotte Smith’s Desmond Scott C. Campbell

Jacobins and Genre While it is commonly noted that British writers sympathetic with the revolutionary movement in France turned to literary genre as a tool for “clothing” their arguments for innovation and change, less is said about the ways that this practice of animating inherited forms created conflict for these same writers by invoking unsuitable precedents and fostering discordant expectations. Put more simply, we are faced with the question of why so many who hoped to “tear the veil off” custom and convention resorted to genre (itself a set of expectations, an aesthetic veil) to communicate this urgency. Writers, of course, always work with generic expectations, but what is especially interesting here is how the radicalized novel of the later eighteenth century, even when it aims to exploit the possibilities of literary form in the service of “innovation,” fails to escape fully the legacy of the novel’s conservatism. What we have come to call the “Jacobin” novel replayed this generic fort-da game countless times as it tried, with the tools of fiction, to represent a shifting epistemological ground. And yet, in significant ways, these failures of writers to find a discourse of the true, these novels which sometimes unexpectedly document their own reversals and limitations, enact a fascinating literary lesson: the novel’s quixotism, its ability to illustrate so ably and compellingly competing modes of thought, may best serve the goals of radical writers only when it fails to communicate a directly specific political purpose. Imagined only as a set of ideas enacted in fiction, the Jacobin novel might be expected to tend toward the smug, certain, and monologic. Indeed, the AntiJacobin movement mercilessly derided radical writers as doctrinaire plotters, unaffected by the matters of everyday life and unwilling to acknowledge the tested wisdom of accepted patterns of behavior. But the most compelling examples 

  The term “Jacobin” is problematic for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it begins as a rather broadly applied derogatory term. I use it here (as well as two other insufficient terms, “radical” or “political”) to refer more specifically to writers identified with what becomes the William Godwin wing of this cultural milieu.    See, for example, Thomas Mathias’s satirical poem, Pursuits of Literature: “Godwin’s dry page no statesman e’er believ’d, / Though fiction aids, what sophistry

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of Jacobin fiction rarely posit specific solutions to the web of problems they are inclined to illustrate. William Godwin’s Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), Mary Hays’s The Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798) are just three most prominent examples of novels that feature failure and the partial narration of crisis rather than the plain delineation of one stable truth or the enactment of unquestioned virtue. And, while literary critics today routinely examine the 1790s novel for its turn toward political content—its speeches and situations reflecting the polarized and turbulent political atmosphere of the times—they say less about the generic ruptures of these novels or, more precisely, the ways in which many of these texts tested the limitations of the novels which came before them. We may note that many of these novels draw from the conventions and plots of Richardson and Rousseau and even, more broadly, that they appropriate forms such as the epistolary novel or the picaresque tale. What is more interesting is the prevalence of self-conscious references to and deployments of flawed generic antecedents, the conspicuous fragments of outworn ways of seeing that litter many of the novels of the time. Novels that abound in this questionable material need not be dismissed as faulty remnants of an eighteenth-century genre in transition or as crude precursors of a more sophisticated Romantic or nineteenth-century novel form. It is possible to see the flawed, generically freighted 1790s-novel as a key to a cultural moment in which the unmasking of seductive fictions is a primary goal. Radical writers often worked negatively, rendering and then dismantling the ideas and actions of the characters. In her short piece “On Novel Writing” from 1797, Mary Hays, revises Samuel Johnson’s caveats about “mixed” characters and puts it this way: A more effectual lesson [for a novel] might perhaps be deduced from tracing the pernicious consequences of an erroneous judgement, a wrong step, an imprudent action, an indulged and intemperate affection, a bad habit, in a character, in other respects, amiable and virtuous, than in painting chimerical perfection and visionary excellence, which rarely, if ever, existed.

While works like Hays’s Emma Courtney might contain “authentic” texts and even heartfelt convictions, portraying these materials in the context of a “wrong step” led, it was theorized, to judgment, critique, and, at best, action. Ultimately, conceiv’d” (210). M.O. Grenby’s recent study, The Anti-Jacobin Novel, offers a remarkably complete portrait of the responses to radical fiction.    In the first edition of his Political Justice, Godwin would characterize truth as a more social than textual: “Indeed, if there be such a thing as truth, it must infallibly be struck out by the collision of mind with mind” (3 vols. Ed. F. E. L. Priestley, 1793, reprint 1969. All further citations in this essay are to this edition. 3: 240).    In Victim, ed. Eleanor Ty, Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1998, 243. All further citations in this essay are to this edition.

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the “errant” qualities of the Jacobin novel go hand in hand with its purpose to motivate readers to resist received ideas. For Charlotte Smith, who establishes her novelistic practice well before the explicitly political fiction of Hays or Wollstonecraft, the transition into a more overtly political form comes with some uncertainty. Smith is one of the first novelists to anticipate this Jacobin tendency toward autocritique, and her only epistolary novel, Desmond (1792), offers an almost “real-time” glimpse of this development in the radical novel. Caught as it is in a tangle of “truthful” reports of the French Revolution and parallel professions of letter writers unexpectedly bound to the teleology of the epistolary novel, Desmond illustrates the gaps between a reassuring discourse of virtuous truth and the growing doubts of a skeptical, gossiping public that has learned to read past romantic discourse. And as the relatively “unvarnished” discussions of French politics in the book’s first volume give way to a far more entangled web of deceit and personal politics in the novel’s latter half, we see that Smith’s transposing of political events to a domestic narrative only exacerbates an already partial account. Indeed, despite all the protests of propriety within the novel, Smith sees to it that this more radical subtext, this uncertainty about truth telling, is uppermost in readers’ minds. Though Smith writes in her preface to Desmond that she expects to be reminded of “the impropriety of making a book of entertainment the vehicle of political discussion” (47), it is the impropriety of extramarital attachments in the book’s second half that provides its true focus. Smith’s primary characters will insist that they act within the customary forms of love and marriage, but, knowing their politics, we must question their commitment to such “eternal” verities. Much of the critical notice given to this novel comments on its generic experimentation, and yet critics seem too willing to sidestep Desmond’s remarkable deployment of what Janet Altman calls “epistolarity”—“the use of the letter’s formal properties to create meaning” (4). In choosing the epistolary form for her depiction of a transforming France, Smith allows us to see the performed, theatrical dimension of letter writing as inseparable from its claims to intimacy. She therefore presents us with primary characters who are recognizable as flawed shapers—despite their rather persistent claims to virtue and truth. This tension between truthful assertion and the changing forms of reliable discourse allows   Gary Kelly’s foundational work, The English Jacobin Novel 1780–1805, which says rather little about Hays or Smith, emphasizes the “unity of design” of the Jacobin novel at the expense of considering the partial and fragmentary qualities of so many of these novels. Kelly argues, “The English Jacobin novels were doubly ‘philosophical’ therefore: they contained many dialogues, monologues, and ‘perorations’ on serious and weighty topics; and they were ‘philosophical’ in structure and technique” (16).    Chris Jones’s comments about the novel’s epistolary form are fairly typical: “The epistolary form allows a representation of competing views, and the novel carries such a weight of reported conversation that it has similarities with Bage’s novels of debate. The author’s point of view, however, is not in doubt” (166). 

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Desmond to reveal, perhaps in some ways against Smith’s wishes, the fragile condition of fiction’s explanatory power and the limits of narrators to contain their narration. In terms of literary ambition, then, Desmond is ultimately a most remarkable “failure,” a book that reveals a frustration with forms but also, for Smith, a reluctant willingness to retreat into them. For a variety of personal and political reasons, Smith would never attempt a novel as boldly experimental as Desmond—she herself describes it as “so unlike … my former writings” (45). Nevertheless this novel, which questions epistolary forms through epistolary forms, can be seen as a remarkable demonstration of an unfolding Jacobin literary practice. Smith’s Promising Early Novels Smith recognized this critical dynamic, this need to orchestrate the undertow of familiar generic energies, from her earliest writing. It is instructive to view Desmond, then, as both a significant formal update of the literary method of her previous work and a rumination on the correlations between her favorite narrative themes and the political rhetoric now emerging all around her. Desmond marks an attempt at a more polemical novel, and also it is an aesthetic response to the inherent limitations of the conventional novel. With Desmond, Smith experiments with ways to render the discourses of change and innovation as alternatives to what appear, even to her, to be fictional cul-de-sacs in her first three novels. These three early novels, Emmeline (1788), Ethelinde (1789), and Celestina (1791), all take place in remote and practically timeless locales—clearly the landscapes of romance more than “real life”—and the chief characters might be described as possessing a striking mix of romantic sentiments and unexpectedly frank thinking. The events of the novels draw mightily from the romance convention of what Mikhail Bakhtin calls “sudden and instantaneous passion” upon which follows an interruption of the love, a parting, and, eventually, the overcoming of obstacles. What is notable in Smith’s versions, however, is the critical, almost exasperated responses of her lead characters. These are not the typical responses of the pining heroine (although there is plenty of pining) but, rather, signs of a more modern irritation with custom and wariness of conventional endings. Bakhtin’s description of “adventure-time,” a narrative testing space still visible in these novels, points to the “static” quality of such texts: “In such a chronotope the world and the individual are finished items, absolutely immobile. In it there is no potential for evolution, for growth, for change” (110). Especially early in Smith’s career, the trial of the lovers—the parting and subsequent wandering—is then both a concession to expected romance convention and a product of a very real reluctance to complete the marriage cycle, endorse the “contract” of genre,    Bakhtin’s lengthy description of the Greek “adventure novel of ordeal” is an almost uncanny, note-for-note match for Smith’s (and, I might add, Ann Radcliffe’s) plots (87–8).

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and lock the heroines into the fate which, except to the most naïve of readers, is inevitable. These early novels—despite their many remarkable features—are long and wearying, and the repeated deferrals strain against the good sense of the primary characters and the patience of the reader. Walter Scott, commenting on the “melancholy” of Smith’s novels writes: “If there is a mental drudgery which lowers the spirits and lacerates the nerves, like the toil of the slave, it is that which is enacted by literary composition when the heart is not in unison with the work upon which the head is employed” (486). Mary Wollstonecraft, commenting on Smith’s third novel Celestina laments: “It were indeed to be wished, that with Mrs. S’s abilities, she had sufficient courage to think for herself, and not view life through the medium of books” (Works, vol. 7, 389). For Smith, this tension between serving up a familiar tale of trial and constancy and questioning the value of resignation to one’s fate produces an intense examination of that most important tool of the young woman—the promise. Promises and the breaking of promises are central to all of Smith’s novels and almost pathologically omnipresent in these first three narratives. In her featuring of deferred promises, Smith searches for a way to describe qualities like “faithful” and “true” without surrendering her heroines to binding contracts. Her first novel, Emmeline, is, for example, entirely preoccupied with questions of partnership, promises, and a woman’s desire for some kind of evolution or change of status. Here, in 1788, Smith examines the double-edged sword of “fidelity,” contributing to a still dormant critique of the marriage contract that would ripen in the work of Godwin and Wollstonecraft. This, in turn, would become arguably the most remarked upon feature of the later Jacobin writing. The “new philosophy” of the 1790s challenged all institutions that bound behavior to past precedent, finding an apt correlation between obedience to laws and government and personal pledges of fidelity. “Why should we observe our promises?” (1:195), Godwin would ask in Political Justice, adding that promises are, “absolutely considered, an evil, and stand in opposition to the genuine and wholesome exercise of an intellectual nature” (1:196). Godwin likens promises to the “wanton” amputation of a limb—sudden, permanent actions depriving us of possibilities, arguing, “There is but one power to which I can yield a heart-felt obedience, the decision of my own understanding, the dictate of my own conscience” (1:212). From this perspective, the true unlocking of human potential depends on each individual’s willingness to dismiss laws, contracts, and all obligations    The Eighteenth Century Collections Online searchable database allows me to interject an odd empirical claim about Smith’s conspicuous use of the word “promise” in her first three novels. Emmeline uses the word “promise” fully 103 times; Ethelinde 72, and Celestina 83, but, with Desmond, her fourth novel, the word drops out. Of other novels of the period (Zeluco, Simple Story, novels by Burney, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Radcliffe, Lewis, and others), only Mysteries of Udolpho, with 71, is in a similar range.    In The Romantic Performative, Angela Esterhammer has a more complete reading of Godwin’s connection of promises with amputation, tying it to speech act philosophy (290–98).

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that cannot at this very moment be justified. The argument was ingenious and, for many, compelling; but embedded in this hopeful claim was a counterclaim that no pronouncement, decision, or judgment could ever be permanent. For those without full autonomy (especially women), the consequences of this uncertainty could be disastrous. Jacobin fiction comes to explore this conflict between philosophy and matrimony in countless ways, and Desmond is Smith’s boldest contribution to the matter. Yet in Emmeline, published a full five years before even the first emergence of Godwin’s political philosophy, characters similarly swear allegiance to behaviors from which, in time, they wish they could extricate themselves.10 Emmeline Mowbray’s pledges of fidelity and constancy thwart her interest in revising her commitments once her experience has shown her more of the world. She is caught in a familiar bind for women of the time, sacrificing her judgment out of duty to her preconceived and dependent role; she “graduates” from a promise to obey her guardian to a promise to wed her cousin Frederic Delamere, and yet in Delamere’s absence she becomes fascinated by a third man, William Godolphin. Even when her suitors turn out to be honorable, and her fortune is made, Emmeline balks at playing the part of the lovestruck heiress: “It is my fixed intention, if I obtain, by your Lordship’s generous interposition, the Mowbray estate, to retire to Mowbray Castle, and never to marry at all” (375). Fidelity, though always presented as admirable in Smith’s novels, is laced with an unthinking, surrendering component, and Emmeline’s indecision and her willingness to revise her choices leaves her subject to criticism and rumor even as Emmeline explores the value of questioning faith or duty to an entity that may not be deserving. Throughout, promises are wielded like spells from which Emmeline must escape. She is finally released from her promise to marry the persistent Delamere when, because his waiting has left him distracted and practically mad, he sends her the actual signed contract in a letter, torn in half. This torn letter, this tangible evidence of Emmeline’s freedom from a man’s designs, becomes an epistolary cue that Smith, with Desmond, soon turns into a more prominent feature of her writing method. Yet even before this, Smith’s third novel, Celestina, only aggravates the Emmeline plot by following another thwarted couple that finds its first attachments aggravated by obligations that pull them apart. Again, the prolonged separation of the lovers raises questions of propriety and leads to rumors.11 Here, however, it is the male character, Willoughby, who constructs and then evades plots as he promises to marry a Miss Fitz-Hayman—then Celestina—then Miss Fitz-Hayman—and then Celestina, and who “in the mean time, continued to wander about Europe without any fixed plan, and merely flying from himself” (358). The patient Celestina, who nonetheless regularly voices a desire to choose her fate, can hardly be comforted by 10   The most celebrated portrait of the collision of radical philosophy and marriage, Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray (1804), draws its title character’s name from the two primary women in Smith’s first novel, Emmeline Mowbray and Lady Adelina. 11   In Celestina, it is a rumor of incest that keeps the lovers apart.

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her closest advisor, Lady Horatia Howard, who simply opines: “You must learn to be more of an Optimist, and to believe that whatever happens could not, nor ought not to have been otherwise” (439). Smith finally delivers the romantic ending, but not before she reveals, too, ambivalence about her protagonists’ options, and throughout it appears that, even though Celestina is fated to marry Willoughby, the romantic resolution will be shadowed by a growing presence of whispers, rumors, and scandal. “The general idea of the country” (214), “the gossip of the country” (225), the “politics” of the community (238), “those gossiping stories” (353), anonymous letters (464), and even “public prints” (466) entertain various “constructions” of the Willoughby-Celestina alliance that damage the pair’s credibility. The scandals are easily put to rest by the dominant narrative voice that attests to Celestina’s good character, but the novel sets the stage for the eruption of even more scandal in Smith’s next work, Desmond, and Smith’s decision to shatter the Optimist’s creed that things are only what they “ought” to be. Desmond Revises the Contract Desmond significantly revises the patterns of the first novels, introducing some major adjustments to a narrative that still shares a concern for the happy resolution of a deferred love relationship. Here, however, the heroine begins as a married woman; the title character and most dominant presence in the book is a man; the episodes of the novel occur alongside the recognizable and current political events in France; and, of course, the novel is told in letters. Critics have pursued a wide range of arguments about Desmond, and each of these elements plays a part, but the novel’s epistolarity stands out as its most remarkable feature and as a key to its newfound political content. Smith uses the epistolary novel to take the theme of revising promises to both a political and a formal level; in reading Desmond, we consider the letters between writers as themselves contractual, interpretable, and in need of endorsement or rejection. Smith’s epistolary experiment, like all epistolary novels, replaces a single narrator with a wider set of competing voices, taking us into the “to-the-moment” immediacy of letters between friends and lovers, but it is not always clear whether we are being invited into this intimate space as witnesses or as interrogators. From the very first letter, the title character, Lionel Desmond, presents himself as in an elaborate negotiation about how to interpret his actions. “Now, you will call this wrong, ridiculous, and romantic.— But spare your remonstrances” (51). How we read Desmond’s self-positioning— his acknowledgment but tactical denial of his “romantic” behavior—affects our judgment of his veracity and reliability.12 That he is an outspoken proponent of the French Revolution only adds to the dangers that Desmond’s letters seek to dispel. 12   Eleanor Ty’s “Revolutionary Politics: Domesticity and Monarchy in Desmond” offers several insights into Smith’s epistolary method but does not question Desmond’s motivation or reliability.

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We might expect Smith to turn to the epistolary form for a discussion of the French Revolution. The political letter, with Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France as the most obvious example, combines the rhetorical power of personal testimony with the staged intimacy of private disclosure. Responses to Burke often came in epistolary forms, and the most notable precedent to Smith’s project, Helen Maria Williams’s Letters Written in France, draws, too, on fictional devices and known sentimental plots to render counter arguments to Burke.13 Smith’s novelization of the political climate in Desmond and The Banished Man, said by one biographer to be the only English novels of the time to use the French Revolution as a backdrop (Fletcher 144), develops characters in a plot so that we see their words—their performances in letters—tested by their actions (and the reports of their actions). And, by placing the political letters amid personal letters, Smith can represent the reports of the “troubles” in France as partial, personally motivated, and incorrect. Her protagonists view the happenings in France as largely benign and even wondrous events that only seem dangerous through the distorting filter of the scheming British press. As Desmond puts it: That it has been an object with our government to employ such men; men, whose business it is to stifle truths, which though unable to deny, they are unwilling to admit; is a proof, that they believe the delusion of the people necessary to their own views; and have recourse to these miserable expedients, to impede a little the progress of that light which they see rising upon the world. (87)

If Burke and others are guilty of one thing, it is this misrepresentation, this attempt to obscure the “facts” of the matter. Desmond’s epistolary form is then not only a conscious echo of Burke’s project; it is also a way to pose reporting and conjecturing as in themselves part of the problem. And yet Desmond’s account of the accounts speaks transparently of the “real” truth of the matter. Smith, too, notes a distinction between the “faithful representation” she intends to provide with the “partial representation” of which some may accuse her. Indeed, the only critical accounts of the revolution come from comic and extravagant characters such as Lord Newminster or a woman referred to as “Lady Bab Frightful” (187). Despite this imbalance of voices, we might see Smith’s use of the epistolary form as an attempt at a more “democratic” form. The letters of the novel—discrete, individual accounts of complex human situations—allow us to see a range of responses and decide for ourselves. Potentially, the epistolary novel could be a model for dialogue and discussion, and, in the case of the revolution, the novel might serve as a forum for considering political solutions, the kind of “collision of mind with mind” that Godwin would favor (Political Justice, 21). Perhaps this is what Smith had in mind with these relatively plain (but quite sympathetic) accounts of French politics in the early parts of the novel and the long digressions away from the 13   Antje Blank and Janet Todd address the correlations between Smith and Williams in their introduction to the Broadview edition of Desmond.

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romance plot. Nonetheless, Smith’s unwillingness to include any true challenges to Desmond’s political reports suggests that she is concerned that the authority of her chief narrators might go unheeded, that the letters might be read incorrectly. And, moreover, this romance plot keeps surfacing, disturbing the letters with hints and suggestions that something more than political events is behind these declarations of Gallic enthusiasm. Ultimately, the debate about the Revolution provides a platform for corresponding challenges to custom in the domestic sphere, and, though Smith in the end denies Desmond’s domestic radicalism, the novel’s voicing of support for French progress offers a kind of narrative cue for re-imagining a woman’s fate. If the newer, more flexible institutions of government can provide liberty to citizens, perhaps the private institution of marriage can develop and change as well, offering hope for a resolution to the romantic, generic traps in Smith’s first novels. Indeed, the boldest claims in Desmond are of a sexual nature, but, unlike the relatively onesided political discussions, the disputed “truths” in these letters ignite a firestorm of speculation. And whereas Smith’s narrators remain firmly in control of the political debate, they are less able to rein in the “democratic” commentary otherwise known as gossip. The plot of the novel follows the fortunes of the two lovers, Geraldine Verney and Lionel Desmond. Geraldine has made a bad marriage; she is bound to a man represented here as a drunk, a scoundrel, and, not surprisingly, a counterrevolutionary. Her husband, Mr. Verney, even, at one point, offers to “sell” Geraldine to an unscrupulous French aristocrat. Like France itself, Geraldine is ruled by a tyrant, and though she speaks of loyalty and duty, she has been deeply impressed by Desmond, the handsome republican with a knack for being available. Though pledged to platonic love from the beginning, events in the novel bring the two closer, and, not surprisingly, the novel ends (after an elaborate series of fortuitous breaks—not the least of which is Mr. Verney’s repentance and death) with an assurance of their future married partnership. We are of course meant to see Geraldine’s private “revolution,” her cashiering of one man for another, as analogous to France’s peaceful transition to a more liberal and humane government, a just and natural transformation. And yet we see, too, that Geraldine’s extrication from Verney requires Desmond: his aid to her brother Waverly, the support of his surrogates Bethel and Montfleuri, his advice, his money, and, finally, his person. We see also that Geraldine’s contact with Desmond engenders some suspicion about the “benefits” she is receiving. Like the revolution, Geraldine and Desmond have their detractors, and as their platonic love becomes cemented in the letters, there is also increasing evidence of a skeptical alternative reading of the Geraldine-Desmond alliance. Desmond’s dominating presence in the novel—it is his letters to his mentor Erasmus Bethel that are our primary source for our knowledge of Geraldine’s virtues, Desmond’s blameless love, and, of course, the good tidings from France—matches his will to “manage” Geraldine’s affairs. Indeed, Bethel persistently refers to Desmond’s insatiable love as “quixotic,” “romantic,” and a “disease” in great need of a cure, and, as such, he recommends the trip to France, away from Geraldine and into the arms of amorous French women. “I doubt not, but that you will have

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begun to wonder how you could ever take up such a notion, as of an unchangeable and immortal passion, which is a thing never heard or thought of, but by the tender novel writers, and their gentle readers” (120). And while the married Geraldine and the intervening Desmond usually refer to their relationship as “sisterly”/ “brotherly,” the two correspondences that tell the story become increasingly concerned with the “disagreeable misconstructions” (280) that would see Geraldine and Desmond as sexual plotters with designs on each other. As events unfold, the gaps between letters, the uncertainty about the location of characters, and Desmond’s insistence on talking about public issues of France while eliding any reference to his personal predicament lead to such “misconstructions” as those of his Uncle Danby who at one point thinks Desmond has been “assassinated by a party whom [his] politics had offended” (164). Geraldine’s sister, in turn, expresses a frustration with the secrecy surrounding Lionel’s visits to Geraldine’s: [F]or though [Geraldine] assures me, (and she is truth and candour itself,) that in doing so, he was actuated by very different motives from those which my mother’s informer has dared to impute to him; yet assuredly, such a circumstance happening to a young and beautiful woman, apart from her husband, will receive, from the generality of the world, a very different interpretation. (286)

In the typical epistolary plot, the heroine endures delays and deferrals of her happiness and, by demonstrating her consistent, Pamela-like virtue, she is rewarded with a marriage to a deserving man or, in the Clarissa path, a tragic death with at least the knowledge of her superiority.14 Geraldine hopes to steer a trickier path: she wants to describe herself as faithful and dutiful, and yet she somewhat openly celebrates the virtues of another man. Though married, bound to Verney by a promise of fidelity, she describes her attachment to Desmond as wholly chaste: But why should it be wrong to admire and esteem an excellent and amiable man, from whom I have received more than brotherly kindness? —Why, indeed, should I question the propriety of this regard, because I am married? —Does that prevent our seeing and loving excellence wherever found? —and why should it? —To disguise these sentiments, would be to acknowledge them to be criminal (258).

Geraldine seems eager to seize the role of romantic heroine, but the circumstances of her marriage depend upon her promises of propriety and even require some flirtation with the language of concealment: “I will now own to you, that I have long been unable to conceal from myself, Desmond’s regard for me, though he 14   And there is no equivalent of Rousseau’s Wolmar in this story to allow for a chaste reunion of lovers. See Alison Conway’s “Nationalism, Revolution, and the Female Body: Charlotte Smith’s Desmond” for an account of the French influence on Smith’s novel.

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never avowed it … believe me when I declare to you, that never have I, even in thought, transgressed the bounds of that duty” (400). Geraldine’s protests against the growing rumors reveal a seed of doubt that her reliance on Desmond will save her, and, because she knows her arrangements with Desmond are unorthodox, her only rhetorical option is to avoid plain accounts of her whereabouts or activities. Despite the fact that, as Diana Bowstead argues, “Geraldine’s predicament is not at all the kind that sentimental heroines suffer” (255), Geraldine finds great comfort in literary representations. She at one point defends novel-reading, suggesting she had as a young girl “devoured … mawkish pages that told of a damsel, most exquisitely beautiful, confined by a cruel father, and escaping to an heroic lover” and would be better off now if her imagination had taken a “romantic turn” and kept her from marrying Verney. And later, Geraldine, like Celestina before her, writes an “impromptu” poem, “Ode to the Poppy” to dramatize her plight: “For, oh! thy potent charm,/ Can agonizing pain disarm” (339–40). The literary models ennoble Geraldine’s patience but provide only patterns of suffering and sacrifice. Smith’s novel, however, makes available an ironic and critical reading that questions the effects of this rhetorical balm. Constructions and Misconstructions Critics commonly accept the portrait of Desmond that is crafted by Geraldine and Desmond himself. Pat Elliott, though noting that Desmond is flawed, describes him as “an ideal of male behavior toward women and children, how men ought to be” (101), while Katharine Rogers writes of him as a “Romantic hero” (77). Even Eleanor Ty’s more cautionary reading sees Desmond as little more than a plot enabler, a handy device for the release of Geraldine’s desires. But perhaps we should listen to the rumors. Might Desmond, like Burke, be willing to foster “delusions” set in romantic terms to protect his cause? If we are suspicious of the mystifying “age of chivalry” paradigm on which Desmond and Geraldine rely (and, as sympathizers with the Revolution, we should be), we might choose to see things as Colonel Danby does, in the materialist, fact-based language of common reason: Why lookee, Bethel, when a young fellow lays down between three and four thousand pounds, to release from execution the effects of a man he despises and contemns; when he goes down incog. to the retirement of such a man’s wife, and stays near a month in her neighborhood; when he is known to have declined the most advantageous offers of alliance from the families of some of the finest young women in England on her account; and, when he is actually, at this time, gone abroad with her; or, however, concealed somewhere or other, how the plague can you suppose the world will not talk? It is well enough known that Verney is a savage and a scoundrel, who will sell his wife to the best bidder. —Why don’t Lionel offer him her price at once…? (349)

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Nothing Danby says is exactly factually off the mark and, sure enough, we find out in the novel’s final pages that Desmond has seduced and impregnated a woman during his disappearance—just not Geraldine. (It is Geraldine’s French double, Josephine de Boisbelle.) Clearly, Smith expects readers to forgive Desmond his French mistress and the excesses of his labyrinthine declarations of chaste love. But if Desmond is a statement on sexual possibility, it is hard to understand its rehearsal of eternal love verities that look phony even to the other characters and that, when connected back to political events, seem strangely immune to popular sentiment. For these narrators who champion the liberation of the French from the oppression of authority are terrified that readers might counter their portrait in letters with similarly bold interpretations and independent judgment. This book, which begins in confident self-assertion, becomes an exercise in dampening the rumors of scandal. Even Bethel follows concern, “Are you quite candid with me, Desmond?” (312), with a pronouncement that even the appearance of impropriety can be dangerous: “Dear Desmond! Behold the consequences of your indiscretion! —See what cruel (and as I am convinced) what unjust reflections you have been the means of throwing on the woman you love” (349). It is Smith of course who introduces these discordant elements, and I suspect that she means to illustrate the danger that comes to a woman who asserts her will, even while in good faith. After all, it is Geraldine’s predicament that the novel aims to address, and it is not all that surprising given the state of things in England that she needs a romantic deus ex machina to escape her bad marriage.15 But as our doubts about the events are dispatched by comedy and our trust in our primary narrators, the implications of the gossip remain and they, in turn, color our reading of the accounts of the Revolution.16 Smith’s capitulation, at last, to a conventional ending—Geraldine’s obstacles to a second marriage are removed with Verney’s death—stands in stark contrast to the unconventional political solutions set in place throughout France. In the end, a romantic plot that cannot yet endorse liberty from marriage compromises the novel’s analogous celebration of political liberty. Nevertheless, the unusual structure of the novel and the resulting 15   Smith’s own vexed marriage offered a parallel that many of Smith’s contemporaries would recognize. 16   Bowstead notes the gossip but is less concerned with it, calling it an “ironic corrective” (249). Nicola Watson’s powerful account of the fate of the epistolary text includes her claim that Desmond’s letters do prevail: Although in this novel the ‘truth’ of true feeling wins out over the libelous stories fabricated by the local gossips, that is to say, although the private letter circulated among the sentimental protagonists is authenticated over what is shown to be mistaken social consensus, that victory became increasingly fragile and finally untenable as the 1790s wore on. In its explicit yoking of the power of the sentimental letter and the enthusiasms of revolutionary politics, Desmond records perhaps the last moment at which that authentication seemed possible. (39)

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epistolary trouble fosters a discernible resistance to narrative authority. The novel supports a more “democratic” reading practice even while ultimately rejecting the full implications of this possibility. Desmond cautiously concludes with a full disclosure of the “proper” way to view this romance and, notably, some unkind words about what has been “exaggerated, falsified, distorted, and misrepresented” (412) in the stories that continue to swirl around the French political events. Still, the full disclosure of the Desmond-Geraldine relationship is late and swift, neatly placed at the very end of the novel when all suspense has passed. In fact, this penultimate letter describing Desmond’s actual whereabouts and the birth of his French child—a letter that declares “I will confide to you the truth” (410)—is actually written by Desmond’s friend, Montfleuri, at Desmond’s request, signifying, it seems, a required “French” explanation for the amorous indiscretions. Smith reverts to the authenticating discourse of permanence to “justify” the Desmond-Geraldine relationship while at the same time championing the innovations of French political and social structures. She likely reasoned that one cannot view a woman’s sexual alliances as, like French democracy, a product of reason, will, and choice, and yet her novel draws us toward this analogy. In a free society, misrepresentations and distortions and very real disputes about truth will happen; Smith puts vigorous debate into the center of all of her novels. Desmond is so powerful because it attempts to narrate a sexual alliance that extends beyond the forms of marriage. And yet, invoking the rhetoric of romance here leaves her vulnerable to charges that, when it comes to sexual politics, she is minimizing this conflict and using fiction in a more conventional, regulatory function. Smith did not write another epistolary novel and, in fact, events in France changed so rapidly and so completely soon after Desmond that Smith felt compelled to disavow the cheery sentiments of Lionel Desmond on “the real state of Paris”: “where the natural gaiety of the people now appears without any restraint, and yet, certainly without any disorder” (88). In writing, two years later, of the “Tyranny of monsters” that now rule France, she quotes Pope: “When a man owns himself to have been in error … he does but tell you that he is wiser than he was” (Banished Man xi, x). Even if Smith was to some extent disavowing Desmond, the book remains her most compelling novel today because of its troubled relationship with truth and truth telling. It is worth noting that Smith’s acknowledgement of her own error is a comment on the educative opportunity that error affords and a reinforcement of the very “lesson” of the Jacobin novel form, that all statements are provisional, contextual, and subject to change. The Jacobin novel that developed next to and through Smith’s work in the years to come continued to explore the error that makes us wiser by featuring fractured and failed versions of recognizable types from the eighteenth-century novel. This shift away from models of virtue and toward a highly self-conscious form in the writing of Smith, Godwin, Hays, Wollstonecraft, and others is not itself an innovation, for the eighteenth-century novel is of course all about selfconscious form. What was new to the Jacobins was this recognition that the practice

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of reading such texts engendered and championed could have overt political consequences. Charlotte Smith’s Desmond stops short of presenting its characters’ actions as error, and, in so doing, it cannot quite claim a fully realized Jacobin stance. Desmond remains, however, an early indicator that the political insights of the Jacobin novelists came less through a direct commentary on political events than through an enactment of the tangled relationship between claims of truth and the assertion of authority.

Chapter Four

Reason and Romance: Rethinking Romantic-Era Fiction Through Jane West’s The Advantages of Education Daniel Schierenbeck

A popular novelist of the Romantic era, Jane West has received little modern critical attention. West’s lack of popularity—as well as her treatment by modern critics—reveals some of the blinders under which contemporary criticism operates. In particular, West’s political and social conservatism has made her a less appealing figure for modern scholars. She falls on the unpopular side of the social debates that shaped the Romantic era and continues to shape its studies. Indeed, as Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace argues, “it is only natural that we would gravitate ... toward the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft,” for “it is far easier to identity with Wollstonecraft’s revolutionary sympathies” (5) than with conservative authors such as West. Furthermore, though recent work by Anne Mellor and Mitzi Meyers has demonstrated the importance of conservative women writers and their affinities with radical women writers, this reassessment has not included West. This neglect of West is further exacerbated due to her status as a novelist. Since critics of Romantic-era fiction are focused on the debates of the French Revolution, they typically have categorized novels as Jacobin or anti-Jacobin. 

  Myers mentions West, noting that “female educators of every stripe” all sought “to endow woman’s role with more competence, dignity, and consequence,” but she focuses on overturning scholarship that “myopically reproduce the anti-Jacobin opposition of More and Wollstonecraft” (“Reform or Ruin” 201). Mellor demonstrates how authors diverse as More and Wollstonecraft advocate similar notions of “the ideal wife and mother of the nation” (130). Both conservative and radical female authors are important, for she sees through them “the values of the private sphere associated primarily with women—moral virtue and an ethic of care—infiltrating and finally dominating the discursive sphere during the Romantic era” (Mothers, Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2000, 11). All further citations in this essay are to this edition.).    Gary Kelly’s The English Jacobin Novel, M.O. Grenby’s The Anti-Jacobin Novel, and Marilyn Butler’s Jane Austen and the War of Ideas are important studies that have helped create a deeper understanding of the Romantic-era novel through analyzing the philosophy and execution of conservative and radical fiction. Recent studies that demonstrate the overlapping the categories of Jacobin and anti-Jacobin fiction include Butler’s Jane Austen: Women Politics and the Novel, Eleanor Ty’s Empowering the Feminine, and Mellor’s Mothers of the Nation. Miriam Wallace also analyzes the inadequacy of viewing fiction

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Just as Wollstonecraft may be more engaging to feminist scholars, so the Jacobin novels of Mary Hays, Helen Maria Williams, and William Godwin appear more appealing for Romanticists. West, therefore, is doubly distanced from the concerns of many modern literary scholars; those who do study West tend to see her through the binary category of anti-Jacobinism. This essay seeks to complicate our understanding of West by removing her from the narrow categories that have defined her. To gain a broader perspective on West, I will foreground the importance of education in her fiction. Many of West’s novels highlight the theme of female education, and she also wrote two conduct books, Letters to a Young Man (1801) and Letters to a Young Lady (1806). West’s first novel, The Advantages of Education (1793), lends itself well to further examination because it is a critically neglected novel that explicitly highlights the educational theme. Situating this novel within the discourse of female education—rather than treating it as an example of didactic, conservative, or anti-Jacobin fiction—reveals that West’s model of female education in Advantages of Education demonstrates similarities not only with the writings of conservatives, such as Hannah More and Sarah Trimmer, but also with radical, rational educational reformers such as Wollstonecraft. Especially relevant to West’s educational fiction is her argument against romance and for rationality, for this argument, paradoxically, makes her more connected with traditional “Romantic” writers like Wollstonecraft. Furthermore, West’s rejection of romance participates in a larger debate about the role of fiction in an era of increased readership, particularly female readership. Focusing on how West’s anti-romance sentiments derive from educational theories that cross political divides helps foreground the complicated ideological valences of such a stance, thus destabilizing the categories of Romantic-era fiction by providing a more expansive view of what we generally consider “Romantic” novels. through the strict binaries of Jacobin and anti-Jacobin and demonstrates how overturning these categories leads to a “richer sense of how narrative fiction contributed to constructing an engaged and engaging public sphere of ideological debates” (18). Shelley King’s essay in this volume highlights how Amelia Opie’s “refusal to adopt unequivocally either a Jacobin or anti-Jacobin stance” reveals the “need to examine more closely the complexity with which writers of the period negotiated and critiqued opportunities they saw for both women and men in the radical and conservative ideologies of their time” (29).    West is vital to Lisa Wood’s “study of narrative authority in the fiction of conservative women” (97). Since she focuses on the links between conservative women writers, Wood does not explore how the narrative strategies and themes of these writers may overlap with radical writers. Johnson sees West as the “most distinguished” conservative novelist who “dramatize[d] Burkean fictions with little adulteration” (6). In Unsex’d Revolutionaries, Ty similarly sees West as conservative author who “supported the Burkean paradigm of the domestic monarch” (15), and thus she is contrasted with more radical authors such as Hays and Wollstonecraft. Ty’s discussion of West in Empowering the Feminine widens this view a bit, by exploring how West, Robinson, and Opie all “demonstrated that the ‘feminine,’ though of the utmost importance, was not a universal and permanent notion, but often a site of ideological contradiction” (8).

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Romance and Female Education At the close of the eighteenth century, the generic instability of romance allowed it to become a term that was co-opted in the heated political debates following the French Revolution. Indeed, the political connotations of romance have prompted critics to equate an anti-romance stance with anti-Jacobin fiction. For example, April London argues that “the anti-Jacobins condemned radical adaptations of romance structures ... for what they saw as their utopian future-mindedness” (“Novel and History” 71). Anti-Jacobins thus employ “romance” “as a term of opprobrium” and their novels included “censure of the various narrative forms through which radical principles are expressed” (“Novel and History” 73). Lisa Wood, building on London’s argument, contends that in West’s novels of the 1790s, “romance is a potential catalyst for moral, social, and national disorder”: “Heroines who are corrupted by ‘romance’ in antirevolutionary texts represent the corruption of unwary readers by radical and revolutionary discourses” (144). While London and Wood define how anti-Jacobin novelists link radical writing with the extreme improbability of romance, Jacobin fiction also defined itself in realistic rather than romantic terms through the necessitarian plot. As Gary Kelly observes, the Jacobin novelists’ “belief in ‘the doctrine of necessity,’” which builds on Godwin’s tenet “‘that the characters of men originate in their external circumstances,’ led them to consider the integration of character and plot as essential to the nature of the true novel” (15–16). Jacobin fiction, through its melding of character and plot, defines itself as a realistic novel rather than as romance, the category through which conservatives attempted to condemn them. The disparagement of romance by Jacobin and anti-Jacobin authors alike reveals the instability of this genre and its openness to critique rather than a fundamental distinction in narrative styles. To see how an anti-romance stance connects politically diverse authors, it is helpful to turn to educational tracts, especially since a substantial number of female novelists were also educational writers. Wollstonecraft, though, is an especially interesting example because she has been placed at the opposite end of the political spectrum from West, and London even cites Vindications of the Rights of Woman (1792) as a text that anti-Jacobin authors characterized as a romance (73). While Wollstonecraft is best known to modern readers through Rights of Woman, her earlier works, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), The Female Reader (1789), and Original Stories from Real Life (1788), may be characterized as fairly mainstream educational tracts. Vivien Jones has usefully investigated the relationship between these early texts and the Rights of Woman. Rather than seeing “Wollstonecraft’s story as one of ideological consistency” by finding “moments of radicalism” in her early works or attempting “to dismiss Thoughts as a politically naive potboiler,” Jones instead situates Wollstonecraft’s texts within the “wider tradition of advice literature” in which “particular textual and ideological allegiances” (122) are quite complex. Similarly, rather than searching for “ideological consistency,” this essay focuses on consistent themes,

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examining in particular Wollstonecraft’s arguments for reason and against romance in her educational writings. Such analysis demonstrates how Wollstonecraft’s anti-romance stance is driven by her theories on female education instead of a narrow political agenda and also provides a broader understanding of her reviews, which argue for probability and realism in fiction. Furthermore, this strand of Wollstonecraft’s thought provides a means to appreciate West’s similar stance in Advantages. My purpose, then, is not to reveal Wollstonecraft’s latent conservatism or West’s potential radicalism; rather, it is to uncover the shared tradition of female education that informs both authors’ texts and, therefore, undermines any easy characterization of them as either conservative or radical. It is not too surprising that Wollstonecraft emphasizes the importance of reason in her early works of education. More surprising, perhaps, is that for Wollstonecraft the importance of reason lies in its means of showing young women their duties in life. For example, in her preface to Original Stories, she argues that reason is necessary to break down bad habits and instill new ones, but goes on to note that “reason, with difficulty, conquers settled habits” (4:359). She writes that in fact, “Good habits, imperceptibly fixed, are far preferable to the precepts of reason” (4:359). Similarly, in Thoughts, Wollstonecraft points out the importance of reason in combating prejudice and “wrong impressions” (4:11): “As to prejudices, the first notions we have deserve that name, for it is not till we begin to waver in our opinions that we examine them – and then, if they are received, they may be called our own” (4:11). This point is then followed up with an example: “She who submits, without conviction, to a parent or husband, will as unreasonably tyrannize over her servants; for slavish fear and tyranny go together” (4:23). Wollstonecraft here argues not against submission, but against unreasonable submission. Furthermore, Wollstonecraft is careful to criticize the unregulated tendency of reason. As her comments on deism make clear, reason can be taken too far, since it can only “safely be trusted when not entirely depended on;” moreover “when it pretends to discover what is beyond its ken, it certainly stretches the line too far, and runs into absurdity” (TED 4:41). For Wollstonecraft, reason does not promote an unrestrained individual; instead, reason, by fostering a proper religious attitude,   See also Gary Kelly’s Women, Writing, and Revolution 1790–1827. Kelly analyzes how Elizabeth Hamilton’s educational, religious, historical, and fictional writing reveal affinities with the writing of Hays and Wollstonecraft, figures that Hamilton satirized in Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (esp. 265–304). Kelly concludes that “the work of writers such as Williams, Hays, and Hamilton, their complex, subtle, and shifting negotiations of class, gender, and writing in a age of revolutionary crisis, challenge not only the literary, cultural, and social history of their time, but the history and definition of women’s writing and feminism themselves” (304). Mellor argues: “Implicit both in More’s Strictures on Female Education and in her novel Coelebs is the argument that household management or domestic economy provides the best model for the management of the state or national economy” (28). For Mellor, More and Wollstonecraft shared a definition of “family politics: the model of the well-managed home and a family harmoniously united by the domestic affections as the paradigm for successful political government” (45). 

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helps women to understand and fulfill their duties. Near the close of her Preface to Original Stories, Wollstonecraft writes, “The tendency of reasoning [is] to fix principles of truth and humanity on a solid and simple foundation; and to make religion an active, invigorating director of the affections, and not a mere attention to forms” (4:360). Jones has pointed out Wollstonecraft’s debt to the Dissenting tradition (125, 127), but this passage aligns her as well with Angelical Evangelicals such as More, who advocated a “religion of the heart” instead of a cold, religious hypocrisy. Evidence of such active religion in women is seen not only in their duties as wives, but as philanthropists: “Active virtue fits us for the society of more exalted beings. Our philanthropy is proof, we are told, that we are as capable of loving our creator” (TED 4:24). Reason, directed by religion, leads to an active fulfilling of one’s duties, including charity, while unregulated passions prevent such action. As she writes in Thoughts, parents “never reflect that reason should cultivate and govern those instincts which are implanted to us to render the path of duty pleasant ... and strengthen the passions which are ever endeavouring to obtain dominion—I mean vanity and self love” (4:7). Whereas passion can lead to “vanity and self love,” reason directs these instincts toward “the path of duty” and even makes this path pleasant, once passions have “come under the subjection of reason” (TED 4:40). Passions are dangerous because they lead women to neglect the duties which should be encouraged by pursuing reason and religion. Wollstonecraft’s promotion of religion is also undergirded by a providential viewpoint that encourages the promotion of passive virtues. For Wollstonecraft, it is “natural” to turn to the next world when difficulties arise, for it is “the scheme of Providence, that our finding things unsatisfactory here, should force us to think of the better country to which we are going” (TED 4:37). In this perspective, “the sufferings of present life will work a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory” (TED 4:35). Wollstonecraft urges women to look beyond the present life to their future lives: Good must ultimately arise from every thing, to those who look beyond this infancy of their being; and here the comfort of a good conscience is our only stable support. The main business of our lives is to learn to be virtuous; and He who is training us up for immortal bliss, knows best what trials will contribute to makes us so; and our resignation and improvement will render us respectable to ourselves, and to that Being, whose approbation is of more value than life itself. (TED 4:26–7)

   Jones notes that “domestic advice literature draws constantly on religious traditions as a way of establishing the providential nature of the gender roles it advocates,” but she argues that “the Dissenting tradition, clearly identifiable in Thoughts, also pulls in a more disruptive direction” through its “stress on the independence of mind” and “in the way its human, rather than gendered, regime of spiritual self-discipline works in the service of a wider, communitarian, political ideal” (127).

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The difficulties in life require the passive duties of submission and “resignation,” and women can be comforted that good will come from the evils they endure in this world. Indeed, troubles in this life are required to create more virtue: “In the school of adversity we learn knowledge as well as virtue ... and never consider that our own wayward minds, and inconsistent hearts, require those needful correctives” (TED 4:36). Because of her providential worldview, Wollstonecraft’s emphasis on reason in her early educational writing produces neither the utopian romance criticized by anti-Jacobins, nor does it fully endorse the necessitarian, realistic view of Jacobin novelists. Instead, Wollstonecraft’s definition of reason and virtue leads to a worldview that is both necessitarian and utopian. The necessitarian aspect derives from a realistic view of how individuals are shaped by education and how they must deal with “things as they are.” Rather than providing a utopian solution to the ills of this world, Wollstonecraft directs the utopia to the afterlife. The result of such a providential scheme is a realistic vision of the world that provides a rationale both for submission and active duty. Wollstonecraft’s encouragement of duty may be more apparent in her early texts on education, but also it forms a substantial thread in Rights of Woman itself. Though this is a more politically charged text—especially with its delineation of the effects of rank and property and of gender differences as social constructions— Wollstonecraft still emphasizes the role of reason in women’s education to prepare them for their duties in life. Wollstonecraft argues that if educated correctly, “women would acquire sufficient to enable them to earn their own subsistence”— which is “the true definition of independence” (5:155)—and that “[i]t is vain to expect virtue from women until they are, in some degree, independent of men” (5:211). Rights of Woman, however, focuses not on this future state, but on social conditions as they are. Since reason creates virtue, men and women’s “virtues must be the same” (5:94–5), but “the two sexes, in the acquirement of virtue, ought to aim at attaining a very different character” (5:88). Women attain virtue through the fulfillment of their “relative duties” (5:211): “their first duty is to themselves as rational creatures, and the next, in point of importance, as citizens, is that, which includes so many, of a mother” (5:216). Since women are not independent, “their moral character” is “estimated by their manner of fulfilling those simple duties” as daughters, wives, and mothers, though “the grand end of their exertions should be to unfold their own faculties and acquire the dignity of conscious virtue” (5:95). Wollstonecraft thus highlights how women can become “chaste wives and sensible mothers” (5:160) through rational education: “make women rational creatures, and free citizens, and they will quickly become good wives, and mothers; that is–—if men do not neglect the duties of husbands and fathers” (5:250). Though Wollstonecraft envisions the potential for greater independence for women through rational education, she emphasizes that, for the present, women exercise virtue through their domestic duties as wives and mothers. As in her earlier educational writings, reason is still important for creating virtue, which is exercised through one’s duties.

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In Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft also provides the same providential outlook that informs her earlier texts. Arguing against Rousseau’s idea of the state of nature, Wollstonecraft asserts, “Firmly persuaded that no evil exists in the world that God did not design to take place, I build my belief on the perfection of God” (5:84). This assertion allows Wollstonecraft to build her argument for the improvement of women’s rational understanding, yet it also produces moments in the text when she employs a providential outlook to explain how behavior in this world should be governed by a future state. She argues that currently “man is prepared by various circumstances for a future state,” but people “constantly concur in advising woman only to provide for the present” (5:102). Woman is thus “incited by present gratification to forget her grand destination” (5:132), and the result of such preparation is that “[g]entleness, docility, and a spaniellike affection are ... consistently recommended as the cardinal virtues” (5:102) of women. Education should not be viewed “only as a preparation for this life” but “as the first step to form a being advancing gradually toward perfection” (5:122). With an outlook focused on the future life, struggles in life become positive because they “prevent” women from “becoming a prey to enervating vices” (5:124); furthermore, without such struggles they cannot “sufficiently brace their minds to discharge the duties of life” (5:124). Focusing on the future world is the best means “to ensure content,” and Wollstonecraft laments that “very few ... have sufficient foresight, or resolution, to endure a small evil at this moment, to avoid a great hereafter” (5:171). Vindications is not a wild, utopian romance; rather, Wollstonecraft’s providential outlook uses the idea of a future life to promote greater attention to the duties of life, which for women, can be best exercised through promoting rational understanding rather than being slaves of sensibility. The strands of Wollstonecraft’s educational theories that I have been tracing also pervade her reviews, which also stress the importance of preparing young women for their roles in life by providing them a rational, realistic view of life. The importance Wollstonecraft gives to reason and duty in her writings on education leads her to point out the dangers of women following their passion in ways of love, arguing instead for marriages that are based on a rational foundation of mutual esteem and friendship. The way novels can depict love thus can be dangerous for young women. Wollstonecraft, though, does not condemn all novels, but wants women to avoid “flimsy works” (VRW, 5:185), which “give a wrong account of the human passions” (TED, 4:20). In the Rights of Woman, she asserts: The best method, I believe, that can be adopted to correct a fondness for novels is to ridicule them; not indiscriminately, for that would have little effect; but, if a judicious person, with some turn for humour, would read several to a young girl, and point out both by tones, and apt comparisons with pathetic incidents    Myers’s “Sensibility and the ‘Walk of Reason’” focuses on Wollstonecraft’s literary reviews and elucidates how they “show affinities with the themes and language of the Rights of Woman” (122).

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and heroic characters in history, how foolishly and ridiculously they caricatured human nature, just opinions might be substituted instead of romantic sentiments (5:185).

As Myers has demonstrated, Wollstonecraft exemplifies this role as critic, as she “assumes a maternal stance toward the imagined girl readers of the fictions she considers” (“Sensibility,” 121). In particular, Wollstonecraft “defin[es] herself against debased or chauvinist romance, against the flood of anonymous cheap fiction and the tradition that Richardson and Rousseau embodied” (Myers, “Sensibility,” 124). She sets herself against “those mis-shapen monsters, daily brought forth to poison the minds of our young females” (7:20). She pokes fun at the popular ingredients of female novels, including their “unnatural characters” and “improbable incidents” (qtd. in Meyers 127), which violate her definition of realism. She rails against the “false expectations” that such novels raise because they “tend to debauch the mind, and throw an insipid kind of uniformity over the moderate and rational prospects of life, consequently adventures are sought for and created, when duties are neglected, and content despised” (7:26). Romantic novels lead women to neglect their duties: “Hunting after shadows, the moderate enjoyments of life are despised, and its duties neglected; and the imagination, suffered to stray beyond the utmost verge of probability ... soon shuts off reason, and the dormant faculties languish for want of cultivation; as rational books are neglected, because they do not throw the mind into an exquisite tumult (7:19). Wollstonecraft’s educational and critical writing thus merge in an encouragement of rationalism that promotes the accomplishment of duties. She advocates realism and probability in fiction precisely because they are able crush romantic expectations that lead away from these duties. The Advantages of Education In 1797, well after the publication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft wrote to Mary Hays, asking her to review West’s A Gossip’s Story for the Analytical Review, praising this novel’s “display of the small causes which destroy matrimonial felicity & peace” (Todd, Letters 393). Wollstonecraft’s praise of West may seem odd given the strong distinctions that critics have drawn between these two writers, especially in terms of their political allegiance. This opposition between Wollstonecraft and West derives, in part, from critics’ emphasis on how West and other anti-Jacobins use the form of the novel as an antidote against the radical fictions of the 1790s. The Advantages of Education may have escaped Wollstonecraft’s notice; however, it is clear that, as in Gossip’s Story, West’s anti-romance stance in Advantages is neither primarily conservative nor radical, but is rather intimately connected with the discourse of education, which provided common ground for female authors 

 

See Wood 15, and Grenby, Anti-Jacobin 13–27.

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who may have been politically opposed to one another. West’s Advantages of Education thus demonstrates strong affinities with Wollstonecraft’s theories of female education.  This is not to say that West’s novels are not political; in fact, they become increasingly so after her first two novels. The educational perspective, however, reveals the depths of West’s negotiations with contemporary fictional forms and demonstrates the complications for female authors writing fiction. West’s novel can be seen as “a thinly fictionalized conduct book” (Johnson 6), but this perspective should not denigrate her fiction; viewing it as such provides a greater understanding of the forms of Romantic-era fiction, for embodying the standards of female conduct while still providing marketable entertainment is no easy task. West’s emphasis on reason, her attacks on romance, and her providential worldview not only parallel Wollstonecraft’s ideas on education, but explain her choices in narrative voice, characterization, and plotting. The results, exemplified in Advantages of Education, demonstrate the importance of the cross pollination of educational and fictional discourse for the study of Romantic-era novels. In her preface to The Advantages of Education, West is very explicit about her purpose: her novel will be realistic, not romantic, and will provide sound advice for her young, “inexperienced” female readers (Preface). For such readers, West believes “it more advisable to describe life as they are likely to find it, than to adorn it with those gaudy and romantic colours in which it is commonly depicted” (Preface). Therefore, her readers are “not to expect extravagance of character or variety of incident” (Preface). This emphasis on realism continues in chapter one. Through the voice of her narrator, Prudentia Homespun, West declares her “intention to explode those notions which novel reading in general produces, by    Certainly, there are differences in West’s and Wollstonecraft’s theories of education. Indeed, in Letters to a Young Lady, for example, West attacks Wollstonecraft’s Vindications as “a book “which, by supereminent absurdity and audacity, exposed to profound contempt the principles that it meant to support” (1:199). Her objections, however, are political in nature. She is upset with Wollstonecraft’s “democratic principles” (1:200), but much of her conduct book accords with Wollstonecraft’s views. I simply wish to emphasize the affinities between these authors that have been overlooked and how educational principles help structure West’s novel.    See also Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction, which shows how novels “appropriated the strategies of conduct books” and traces this connection from Samuel Richardson’s Pamela through the Brontës. She suggests that “with Austen, if not with Burney before her, the novel supplants the conduct book as that writing which declares an alternative, female standard of polite writing” (158). Alan Richardson examines the connections between educational discourse and Romantic-era fiction and points out: “The infusion of the novel of female development with conduct book virtues—the domestication of the female Bildungsroman of the 1790s—can be seen most obviously in More’s Coeleb’s in Search of a Wife and West’s The Advantages of Education, works which are at once novel, conduct-books, and educational tract” (189–90). Richardson, however, sees much more distinction between conservative and radical writers and does not examine West’s novel to any great extent.

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delineating human life in false colours” (3). West, like Wollstonecraft, derides modern novels for raising false expectations through their emphasis on romance; such novels do not prepare young women for the lives they will face as wives and mothers. In fact, these romantic notions actually distract women from their duties in life. West “wishes to convince” her readers “that it is but seldom that they will be called forth to perform high acts of heroic excellence, but that they will be daily required to exert those humble duties and social virtues, wherein the chief part of our merit and our happiness lies” (Preface). By attempting “[t]o counteract the evils incident to the romantic conclusions to which youth are apt to form,” she hopes “to secure happiness, by removing those capricious desires which undermine content” (Preface). Both Wollstonecraft and West seek to prepare young women for lives that are anything but fairy tales, but their versions of realism also include a providential outlook that helps women to bear these ills. In providing what she sees as a realistic vision of life in fictional form, West wants to be sure that her readers get the correct moral, especially since novels can be open to different interpretations. One strategy that West employs is to include a fictional narrator, Mrs. Prudentia Homespun. Wood argues that by using Prudentia, an unmarried, older woman of independent means, West is able to present a narrator who is “autonomous and authoritative” (97); thus she is able “to access narrative authority without disguising or obscuring the author’s gender, while at the same time avoiding the radical implications of foregrounding a female voice” (97). Eleanor Ty similarly sees Prudentia as a defense against radical implications, arguing that an “old maid” helps to provide a “contrast with the lewd image of radicals such as Wollstonecraft and Hays” (Empowering 89). Prudentia’s status and authority, however, actually allows West to enact within her novel the same role Wollstonecraft performed as a reviewer. Prudentia is a “judicious person, with some turn of humor” who is able to “ridicule” other sorts of novels and, by doing so, substitutes “just opinions” for “romantic sentiments.” Though Prudentia’s observations are not as frequent as in West’s later novels, her comments do help regulate the lessons of the narrative and point readers in the right direction. For example, Prudentia explicitly highlights a key theme that is encoded through the various plots of the novel: “That philosophy which I wish my readers to posses is constantly occupied in assimilating our desires to our situations” (1:109). But beyond providing guidance within the text, Prudentia also figures importantly as a character herself. London traces Homespun back to Harriet Homespun of Samuel Jackson Pratt’s Pupil of Pleasure (1776), a reader who has a “credulous acceptance of sentimental fiction” (“Jane West” 59). Prudentia, though, “unlike her namesake ... is the controller rather than the victim of the text” (London, “Jane West” 59). Prudentia, then, becomes a model of how to read fiction as well as of how to take control of it. Furthermore, as an unmarried woman of independent means, she functions as an example of how education may prepare women to thrive without marriage, a theme that also runs throughout the novel. West focuses her narrative authority in Advantages not so much on controlling a conservative political message, but on ensuring that lessons on female education are not overlooked.

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West’s focus on education is seen as well in her plotting of the novel. West contrasts the good effects of the upbringing of Maria Williams by her mother, Amelia, with the deleterious effects of Charlotte Raby who is spoiled by her father. Patricia Meyer Spacks has shown how “sisters” plots are “versions of fairy tales” used by late eighteenth-century novelists such as West, Charlotte Lennox, and Jane Austen to “dramatize the absolute separation of virtue and vice” (“Sisters,” 137). As Alan Richardson notes, though, this “rigorously binary structure ... , demonstrating the effects of two educational modes by embodying them in opposed characters, is obviously indebted to Day’s Sanford and Merton” (187). In providing such structure in Advantages, West is able to foreground the importance of education; she indeed “embodies” opposing forms of education. Yet West also refines this structure by including Mrs. Williams’s own story and alluding to her friend, Mrs. Dudley. West structures her novel to provide counterpoints to her overall theme of female education, thus providing a more complex working of the neccesitarian plot, while at the same time avoiding a simple romantic, utopian plot. Mrs. Williams’s plans of education parallel the rational program that Wollstonecraft laid out. Instead of focusing on fashion and etiquette that work toward “introducing a young woman into the world,” Mrs. Williams “was assiduously employed in instructing her charge, to perform her part in it with consistency and comfort” (1:39). The “part” that a woman plays in the world indeed often included the role of wife, but Mrs. Williams does not center Maria’s education on creating an object of attention for males. In fact, her purpose of education is explicitly not to prepare Maria to be a wife, but to be a virtuous citizen. Mrs. Williams is “far from thinking that female happiness is of necessity connected with marriage,” and, therefore, in educating Maria, she “never ... held out a lover” as her “reward” (2:227). Instead, Mrs. Williams focused on “improving her understanding” and “elucidating her judgment” (1:124) so that Maria would be able to exercise her virtue in any station of life. The fruits of such education are seen when Stanley— who turns out to be the libertine villain Sir Henry Neville—proposes to Maria. Because Maria has been fortified with reason and shown the realities of life, Mrs. Williams leaves the decision to her. She tells Maria, “you are free; exercise the discretion and judgment you possess; examine your inclinations, and try them by the test of reason” (1:202). This speech is definitely not a typical love scene in a novel but rather fits more closely with Wollstonecraft’s presentation of marriage choice as crucial, and thus one that needs to be examined by the dictates of reason. Mrs. Williams knows that she could have forbade the marriage, and she “doubted not Maria’s dutiful acquiescence, but she feared that acquiescence would be attended by the silent consuming regret with which the imagination always adorns a prohibited object” (1:204). West presents in narrative form the important idea that Wollstonecraft expresses: a daughter has to make her convictions and principles her own rather than having them forced upon her. As Mrs. Williams earlier tells her daughter, “you must soon give up a passion which depends entirely upon the opinion of others” (1:119). West thus does not advocate unthinking submission to authority, but an examination of prejudices through rational thought. Such advice

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would prevent Maria—and, through her example, other young women—from falling in love too quickly or from forming an ill-advised early connection. For West, reason, which tears down prejudice, can be a formidable ally in a young woman’s life. To prepare her daughter to fulfill her duties in life rather than becoming an object for men’s affections, Mrs. Williams’s curriculum includes not just feminine accomplishments but “several branches of learning” (1:39–40). She finds that history is “most adapted to her purpose” (1:40) of providing a rational and realistic education. History becomes an “interesting narrative” that, unlike modern novels, is not dangerous. Historical texts are not “so marvellous, or so much addressed to the passions, as the stories Maria was accustomed to read; but they bore the stamp of truth” (1:40). For Mrs. Williams, “the plain and unornamented story is not so likely to mislead the judgment, or to inflame the passions” (1:170). Unfortunately, young readers are too often “taught to refer for moral improvement to fictitious compositions, and exhibitions of feigned incidents and non-existant characters” (1:170), so Mrs. Williams feels that novels should be replaced by a “narrative of real events” (1:170). Through the moral center of the novel, Mrs. Williams, West clearly advocates the cause of plain narratives and history; however, such a valorization of “real events” appears to undercut West’s novel, which advocates fiction’s role in educating young women. West, though, actually uses discussions of history in Advantages to justify and elevate the novel’s role in education, and her novelistic enterprise in particular. Maria is guided in her study by Mrs. Williams: history is “related in an agreeable manner, and enlivened by remarks judiciously adapted to her taste and understanding” (1:40). Mrs. Williams thus is a double of Prudentia; her narrative commentary “enlivens” events and “adapts” history for her young reader. Prudentia also points out that Maria’s study of history has further effects: “Religious principles too were strengthened by these discussions; as the narrator would frequently remark the visible interpositions of Providence, and the wonderful and seemingly impossible means, by which its great designs were accelerated” (1:41). History itself, then, does not necessarily provide the moral lessons; instead Mrs. Williams’s “discussions” make these lessons clear and also provide the key to understanding how the events of history are the unfolding of providential design. Even history may not have as salutary effect if a young woman is not guided in her study, since as Mrs. Williams points out, “narrative works too strongly on the fancy of most readers to permit their judgment to develop the chain of preceding causes” (1:169–70). History is no more “a narrative of real events” than fiction, but has to be constructed with a providential plotline, just as West constructs her novel. It should be noted that the full title of this novel is The Advantages of Education, Or, The History of Maria Williams, A Tale for Misses and Their Mamas. While the first and last titles emphasize the educational aspect of this book, the first subtitle, brings up the vexed relationship of fiction to history. This novel is a “history” of Maria Williams, but as a history it needs to be interpreted along the lines that West lays out within the novel itself. In addition to the comments of Prudentia

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Homespun, the plotting of the novel itself serves to make clear the connections between cause and effect as well as the providential force at work in Maria’s life. Indeed, Mrs. Williams’s comments on history come at key plot points in Maria’s narrative. When Maria is faced with the possibility of a clandestine correspondence with Stanley, we find Mrs. Williams’s discussing the morality of history and the importance of tracing effects to causes. Mrs. Williams also illustrates her point about the wholesomeness of history by telling Maria the story of Jane Grey, who “sacrificed her judgment and her life to oblige the parents whom she respected, and the husband whom she loved” (1:171). The effect of this narrative upon Maria is that she writes to Charlotte and breaks off any further conversations with Stanley: she forsakes “passion” and “imagination” in order to perform “virtue and duty” (1:174). When Neville (Stanley) kills himself, readers are able to see the foresight in Maria’s rejection of him and can trace these effects of Maria’s history back to the causes of her education. Thus, West’s narrative takes on a mirroring effect. Maria learns cause and effect and the intervention of Providence through history, while West integrates these lessons in a narrative that she hopes will cause readers to learn the same lessons. Like Wollstonecraft, West promotes a realistic education that also is linked to a providential outlook that inculcates that proper sense of virtue, both positive and negative. Mrs. Williams says, “The Supreme Being, who discriminates our merit according to our positive, not our negative qualities, will honour those with the most transcendent rewards, who have withstood the severest trials” (2:194). The “transcendent rewards” go to those who are able to withstand severe trials, but “merit” also derives from “positive qualities,” and West, like Wollstonecraft and other female reformers, urges charity as a positive female duty. Indeed, one of the indices of Maria’s well being throughout the novel is her charitable activities. Early on in the novel, West provides a description of Mrs. Williams visiting and helping the poor. When Maria becomes apprised of the existence of such poverty, she is able to understand why her mother was against her going to a ball with Charlotte. In fact, at her mother’s suggestion, Maria uses the money Charlotte was going to give her for a dress to relieve the poor. Charlotte even contributes two guineas and promises more. Charlotte, however, soon forgets the plight of the poor, while “Maria assiduously entered upon the active duties of social life” (1:69). Charlotte forgets about the poor, in part because of her education, but also because she is busy planning her wedding. Maria, though, is not distracted by the planning of the wedding, but dives even further into her activities. West provides here a strong example of how romantic concerns can hinder a woman’s performing the active duties of life. Maria is not married, but she is actively pursuing a role in the world that extends into the public sphere because her mother did not educate her for marriage but prepared her as a rational being with duties. Indeed, when Maria is deciding what to do about Stanley, she neglects her duties, even her charity (2:76). West’s novel may conclude with Maria’s marriage, but her depiction of active duty demonstrates that concerns of love and marriage may actually interfere with women’s potential role in society.

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West, however, also emphasizes the importance of negative virtues such as fortitude and resignation, both of which accord with her providential scheme. As Mrs. Williams explains to Maria: I try to teach you fortitude, by familiarizing to your mind objects of affliction, and I wish to convince you, that you belong to an order of beings, whose prescribed rule of duty supposes suffering. By convincing you of the existence of real misery, I endeavour to guard you against that chimerical phantom, which often interrupts the smoothest course of human happiness. (1:76)

Such realism, by granting the inevitability of “duty” involving “suffering,” prepares Maria to discharge her duties and accept with resignation the real trials that occur in life. Indeed, Mrs. Williams considers “fortitude as absolutely necessary in the catalogue of female virtues” (2:179) and “content” as an important “virtue” (2:193). Maria exemplifies these negative virtues, especially after Neville kills himself. Maria takes the news remarkably well, for she “looked up with humble resignation to heaven, and blessed the over-ruling Providence” (2:179) and is determined “to arm her soul with resignation and gratitude against contingent evils” (2:180–81). The end of the novel, which closes with Maria marrying Edmund Dudley, also emphasizes these negative virtues as being important in marriage. Mrs. Williams tells Maria that a wife must not “always expect the behaviour of a lover, even from an affectionate husband” (2:234). Her advice may seem degrading, and Ty reads the “lesson” as one of “female deference and respect to the husband, who is the acknowledged ‘monarch’ of the family” (Unsex’d 16). What West is emphasizing, though, is what she sees as a realistic view of marriage. Mrs. Williams knows that marriage is not romantic bliss and thus urges Maria to “have the fortitude to bear the common ills of life, as well as patience to endure its common provocations” (2:235). Maria’s married life will not consist only of the romantic “arcadian scenes of felicity”: “Trials must occur, even to the happiest. It is the part of reason and religion, to mitigate their severity. Humility, which inspires a lowly mind and moderate desires, is the surest road to content” (2:235). West’s novel, though ending in marriage, presents no romantic finale. Instead, it underscores the difficulties of marriage and the importance of women’s free choice in marriage. The two subplots of Charlotte and Mrs. Williams further strengthen the main narrative and its thrust of Maria’s story on the importance of education upon marriage choice. Charlotte’s life presents the negative effects of a poor education. Mrs. Williams admits to Maria that she and Charlotte’s father “proceed upon very different plans in our parental conduct” (1:76). While Mrs. Williams provides her daughter with a rational education that highlights the realities of life, Charlotte’s father gives her everything she wants. For example, when Charlotte spends her money promised for charity on a dress, her father gives her more, arguing that “she should never feel any unhappiness which money could remove” (1:74). Later, he tells Maria “never more to tell his poor daughter any melancholy stories,” for “he positively must not have her made unhappy” (1:75). By shielding Charlotte from

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the realities of life, he does not prepare her to have the fortitude and maturity to deal with such important decisions such as choice in marriage. Charlotte, driven by her passions rather than her reason, “decides too hastily, and reflects too little” (2:189), and it is “her imprudent and romantic attachment” which “urged her to marriage” (2:189–90). Later in her marriage, she assumes she is right in her domestic disputes because of her upbringing: “She knew that her desires were not unreasonable, for her father had always indulged them; and it pierced her very soul” that her husband “had infinitely less tenderness for her than her father” (2:185). Charlotte’s unrealistic view of life is furthered by her reading. Maria tries to “engage her [in] literary pursuits,” but “unless love was the subject, Charlotte turned away from the uninteresting volume” (1:88). Charlotte’s problem is that her “disposition was inclined to the marvellous” (1:185) and the romantic, and her unhappy marriage and life of dissipation demonstrate the ill effects of her education. Rather than just condemning women for making a wrong choice in marriage, by contrasting Charlotte with Maria, West also allows the possibility that Charlotte could have been happier and more productive to society if she had been driven by a rational education and even if she had remained single. Mrs. Williams’s own narrative provides a doubling of the lessons from Maria’s story. Educated by her widowed father, Amelia receives a masculine education, for her father did not focus on feminine accomplishments but instead taught her “the learned languages” and “insisted” that she “should think justly, and reason correctly” (2:97). Though she has this favorable upbringing, her early life is fairly secluded, and she soon becomes enamored by the fashions of Miss Thornville. Her father dies and leaves her without money, and she is forced to a life of dependence, which drives her to marriage. She “felt neither esteem nor love for” her husband, but because of the “terror of poverty” (2:113) she married him. Her husband forbids her to visit her newfound old friend, Mrs. Herbert, who soon leaves for Jamaica. She and her husband move in fashionable circles but are miserable, unlike Mrs. Herbert who is soon widowed but gives up her inheritance to marry for love. Mr Williams goes to debtor’s prison, but eventually gets out by selling all his property, save an estate in the West Indies, to which he departs. Amelia eventually leaves for the West Indies to straighten out her dissipated husband’s affairs. She helps by “introducing a degree of order and economy” (2:144) to his affairs, and he soon dies. Mrs. Williams tells Maria that her story “exhibits no uncommon portrait of the vicissitudes of human life” (2:145). She tells Maria the lesson: It teaches the importance of forming our early connections with propriety, and shews the insufficiency of human foresight. The marriage that I thought would preserve me from poverty, was the means of plunging me into the evil which I feared; and it is to the friend, whose society was once interdicted as a degradation, that I owe the peace and independence I now enjoy. (145–6)

Rather than showing the importance of love and marriage, Mrs. Williams’s narrative emphasizes the importance of “independence” for women. She is driven

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to her marriage to avoid dependence, but marriage is actually what thrusts her into poverty. She followed the shortsighted vision and was concerned about the present when she should have been looking to a providential view of the future. Now, without her husband, she is truly independent and happy. However, even though she had a rational education from her father, such education was not enough to save her. She lacked a maternal influence which could have helped her through the influences of the fashionable world. Her story ends happily, which again asserts that providential scheme, though in this world rather than a future one: good has come from bad for Mrs. Williams. Yet her example, as well as Charlotte’s, undercuts the idea that closing the novel with Maria’s marriage provides an uncomplicated romantic solution to the real problems faced by young women. Conclusion Focusing on the intersection of fictional and educational discourse in West’s Advantages of Education provides a broader perspective to view a novel that has simply been characterized as anti-Jacobin. Indeed, such an examination allows us to see important affinities among radical and conservative writers and greater complexities within their novels. This approach could usefully be applied to other West novels. West’s Gossip’s Story, the novel praised by Wollstonecraft, promotes an approach to female education similar to that of Advantages. By contrasting Louisa Dudley with her more romantic sister, Marianne, West provides the same emphasis on the necessity for rational, realistic education for women. West’s later novels, A Tale of the Times (1799) and The Infidel Father (1802) are decidedly more explicitly anti-Jacobin, yet even in these novels, West maintains elements from her previous fiction. In Tale of the Times, West employs the concept of Providence again, but this time to subvert radical interpretations of events which encouraged revolutionary changes to the status quo. Also, in The Infidel Father, West ridicules the new philosophies of education inspired by Rousseau and Godwin and emphasizes the religious aspect of education more, but the educational ideals she endorses do not conflict with her earlier novels. At the very least, what such study can reveal is that West’s brand of conservatism is not monolithic across all her novels. Variations in her conservatism may, in fact, be traced through her views on education. Finally, the advantages of education in re-thinking West’s novels are numerous, but many Romantic-era novels could benefit from such analysis. Moving beyond traditional labeling of authors and studying the various intersections among the discourses of fiction, religion, education, and politics allows us to see Romantic-era fiction in a new light. Removing for a moment the blinding binaries of Jacobin and anti-Jacobin allows us to see the complex shared traditions within these novels and refine our own definitions of what constitutes “Romantic” fiction.

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Notes I am grateful to the NEH Summer Seminar of 2002 that encouraged my interest in Jane West and gave me the time and access to resources and scholars who helped shape this essay.

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Chapter Five

The Politics of Masculinity in the 1790s Radical Novel: Hugh Trevor, Caleb Williams and the Romance of Sentimental Friendship Shawn Lisa Maurer

Of all the pleasures of which the soul is capable, those of friendship for man and love for woman are the most exquisite. —Thomas Holcroft, Hugh Trevor …there has never been a time when male intimacy was possible in a space untouched by power and politics, however much that was desired or rhetorically projected. —Alan Bray, The Friend

In the early modern period in England, works across a number of genres, including poetry, plays, essays, novels, and letters, build upon and revise earlier classical notions about ideal relationships between men. This emerging discourse, which finds particular expression during the eighteenth century in the periodical essays of Joseph Addison and Samuel Johnson, works in effect to privatize male friendship, transforming prior vicissitudes of often antagonistic political power into a narrative in which benevolence, succor, love, and mutual support become friendship’s highest achievements. This essay argues that William Godwin and Thomas Holcroft—radical writers who were themselves close friends, literary colleagues, and political compatriots—incorporate, criticize, and ultimately 

  For explorations of the classical legacy of idealized friendship in the medieval and Renaissance periods, see Laurens J. Mills, One Soul in Bodies Twain and Reginald Hyatte, The Arts of Friendship.    For comparative explorations of friendship, both male and female, see the “Politics of Friendship” Special Issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies (32.2 [Winter 1998–1999]), guest edited by Peter Fenves. For an analysis of the Enlightenment discourse of friendship in eighteenth-century France, see Joe Johnson’s essay “Philosophical Reflection, Happiness, and Male Friendship in Prévost’s Manon Lescaut.”    With the exception of a brief period near the end of Holcroft’s life, the two men were in constant contact and remained, as Godwin’s recent biographer, Peter Marshall, notes, “the firmest of friends” (74) from the time of their meeting in 1788. Marshall’s

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transform this Enlightenment ideology of male friendship as a wholly affective, personal, rational, and often familial phenomenon. In two novels from the 1790s— Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) and Holcroft’s Hugh Trevor (1794–7)—these writers uncover the political contours of these seemingly benign male relations to reveal, in turn, intransigent, immoral, and often psychologically damaging, structures of hierarchy and class. But when did friendship between men metamorphose from a relationship with clear public dimensions—whether with regard to wealth, business, political power, or general social standing—into one in which affective elements were not only present, but instead primary, even exclusive? According to Lawrence Stone, it was not until the middle of the eighteenth century that the word friendship “unambiguously” took on its modern and private meaning, a shift exemplified in Samuel Johnson’s definition of a friend as “‘one who supports you and comforts you while others do not,’ someone ‘with whom to compare minds and cherish private virtues’” (Stone 79). While earlier uses of the term may have included a loved one, a “dear” or “special” friend, friendship, according to Stone, “was also frequently used to mean not a person to whom one had some emotional attachment, but someone who could help one on in life, with whom one could safely do business, or upon whom one was in some way dependent” (79). Moreover, when used in the plural form, as “my friends,” the word prior to the eighteenth century “always meant no more than ‘my advisors, associates, or backers’” and was often used to describe significant relatives, household members such as chaplains or tutors, neighbors, political associates, or possible patrons (79). For Stone, this pronounced shift in the received meaning of friendship from an instrumental to an emotional relationship represents one example of the broader movement toward “affective individualism” that lies at the heart of his influential study, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800. While Stone’s work focuses on the transformation of patriarchal values within the family and hence on the changing relations between men and women, parents and children, my attention to explicit friendships between men seeks to challenge still prevailing dualistic models of gender formation in which masculinity is configured largely in opposition to femininity and to argue that ideas about men’s identity, role, and behavior—both social and sexual—were shaped primarily within the context of men’s relation to other men. As recent scholars of masculinity have noted, these relations can take a wide variety of forms, from the antagonistic to the sexual. By analyzing the discourse of sentimental male friendship that arose in the eighteenth century, I work both within and against the theoretical frameworks of such critics as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) catalyzed the study of male relations by demonstrating how male bonding consolidated itself through the triangulation of women, and comprehensive study provides a useful analysis of the personal, as well as philosophical and literary, interactions between Godwin and Holcroft. For examples of their correspondence see Kegan Paul.

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George Haggerty, whose Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (1999) focuses primarily on the erotic, although not necessarily the homosexual, dimension of love between men. In particular, I interrogate issues that have been lost or obscured by the eighteenth century—and subsequently, our own—privatization of the concept of friendship. Not only have women become ciphers—both necessary to, and absent from, the centers of power, meaning, and value—but the rhetoric of ostensible equality central to an ideology of sentimental friendship also constructs a class position that denies its own location within the structures of power. By uncovering the operations of class, status, and patronage, by depicting the presence of vulnerability and fear, the novels of the 1790s put the politics back into friendship. Yet before attending to the Jacobin writers’ engagement with the discourse of male friendship, we need to examine the very eighteenth-century paradigms their work operates to revise. From ancient Greece to Renaissance England, philosophical and literary depictions of male friendship had explicitly acknowledged the necessary entwinement of friendship with power and politics. As the valuable work of Horst Hutter on Greek and Roman antiquity, and of Alan Bray and Laurie Shannon on the English Renaissance has shown, discussions of ideal friendship always existed within a context of explicit engagement with an active public arena. Yet while writers from earlier periods fluidly negotiated, albeit in a variety of ways, the dynamic relations between emotion and action, affect and instrumentality, the tropes of friendship that emerged in the eighteenth-century position these components as inherently oppositional and mutually exclusive, both by redefining the qualities of ideal friendship—and the ideal friend—as exclusively personal and by constructing a clearly delineated “separate sphere” in which such friendship can flourish. Thus while earlier discourses of friendship emphasize what a friend can do for one and behavior he might, in turn, inspire, the mark of sentimental male friendship in the eighteenth century becomes simply how a friend makes one feel. Themselves adaptations of received ideas about friendship taken from ancient and modern sources, Joseph Addison’s Spectator essays (1711–12, 1714), as well as Samuel Johnson’s mid-century writings in   Horst Hutter’s Politics as Friendship: The Origin of Classical Notions of Politics in the Theory and Practice of Friendship seeks to challenge modern conceptions of friendship by historicizing the development of political structures, including democracy, as manifestations of the bonds of friendship. Focusing primarily on early modern England, Alan Bray’s study The Friend similarly explores the “distinctive place friendship occupied in a traditional society.” Bray contends that the “principal difference between the friendship of the modern world and the friendship described in this book is that, in the traditional culture that it explores, friendship was significant in a public sphere” (2). In Sovereign Amity, her study of male friendship during the Renaissance, Laurie Shannon argues that the period’s adaptations of classical friendship tropes offered, through representations of consensual friendship, “a sharp counterpart to the terms understood to hold in the hierarchical relations of a monarchical society” (7). 

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the Rambler (1750–1752) and Idler (1758–1760), chronicle this movement from action to sentiment, underscoring the significance of friendship by highlighting its personal, emotional, even therapeutic qualities. For Addison, “There is indeed no Blessing of Life that is in any way comparable to the Enjoyment of a discreet and virtuous Friend” (Spectator 93); for Johnson, friendship forms life’s highest and noblest “pleasure,” yet must end when “the power ceases of delighting each other” (Idler 23). In Spectator 68, Addison brings together ancient and biblical writers to position friendship as a means to psychological good health, whether in happiness or adversity. He begins by noting that Cicero’s observation, “Friendship improves Happiness and abates Misery, by the doubling of our Joy and dividing of our Grief,” is one that has been repeated “by all the Essayers upon Friendship that have written since his Time.” He goes on to find an even more pleasing formulation in Ecclesiasticus’s calling a Friend “the Medicine of Life, to express the Efficacy of Friendship in healing the Pain and Anguish which naturally cleave to our Existence in this World.” Addison extols the medicinal and healing qualities of ideal friendship while Johnson, in the Idler essay cited above, comes at the same topic from the opposite angle by seeing friendship’s “most fatal disease” in the “gradual decay” that occurs “when the desire of pleasing and willingness to be pleased is silently diminished.” Indeed a later Spectator paper, written by Eustace Budgell, defines friendship as “a strong and habitual Inclination in two Persons, to promote the Good and Happiness of one another,” and asserts that when supported by friendship, “a Soul … outdoes it self; whereas if it be unexpectedly deprived of these Succours it droops and languishes” (Spectator 385). With this exclusive emphasis on the emotional attributes of ideal friendship comes a corresponding transformation in the qualities a friend must possess. The need for similarity in rank or social position cited by classical writers as a prerequisite to ideal friendship becomes instead a correspondence in such personal characteristics as love or esteem: “Love and Esteem are the first Principles of Friendship, which always is imperfect when either of these two is wanting” (Spectator 385); moreover, it is these qualities, qualities that seemingly inhere in an individual rather than in his status, that become the focus of discussion. Thus while Spectator 68 might include “Equality in Age and Fortune” on its list of desirable attributes, every other term describes characteristics that are personal and behavioral rather than positional or financial: “Constancy and Faithfulness, … Virtue, Knowledge, Discretion, … Pleasantness of Temper,” and, Mr Spectator’s own addition, “a certain Æquability or Evenness of Behaviour.” Although Johnson may be considerably less sanguine than his periodical predecessor about the possibility of actually achieving ideal friendship, his essays on friendship continue, as we have seen, the emphasis on the personal, affective, and emotional. While Johnson claims in Rambler 64 that “Friendship is seldom lasting but among equals, or where the superiority on one side is reduced by some equivalent advantage on the other,” his is an equality of virtue rather than of wealth or social status. For Johnson, the “mutual complacency” of friendship depends on moral rather than

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material parity; such virtue must be “equal … on each part” as well as “virtue of the same kind” and “not only the same end must be proposed, but the same means must be approved by both.” Moreover, Johnson’s “candidates” for friendship must not only “gain the judgement” but also should “attract the affections; that they should not only be firm in the day of distress, but gay in the hour of jollity; … their presence should give chearfulness as well as courage, and dispel alike the gloom of fear and of melancholy.” Whereas for Johnson, the desirability of “mutual pleasure” may be continually undercut by friendship’s fragility, Addison constitutes the joys of friendship as conversational and situates them within a sphere removed from the constraints of social intercourse. He thus finds such pleasures far easier to obtain. Writing in Spectator 93 about various methods for filling up the “empty Spaces of Life,” he declares that “the Mind never unbends it self so agreeably as in the Conversation of a well chosen Friend.” Far more than simply a listener, the ideal friend’s very presence produces a powerful result in the speaker, as such conversation “eases and unloads the Mind, clears and improves the Understanding, engenders Thoughts and Knowledge, animates Virtue and good Resolutions, sooths and allays the Passions, and finds Employment for most of the vacant Hours of Life.” Mr Spectator’s catalogue of benefits seamlessly combines psychological with moral and intellectual effects, as conversation makes the friend a happier, smarter, and better person. Throughout Addison’s essays, the advantages of friendship take place passively, through the breakdown of barriers between self and other. Indeed a later essay transforms the ideal friend from an “other self,” an alter ego, into what is simply a projection of that self by contending that “the Talking with a Friend is nothing else but thinking aloud” (Spectator 225). In this astounding formulation, so close is the intimate conversational bond that differences between friends have all but disappeared. At the same time, the sympathetic emotional release made possible by friendship can only transpire in “retirement,” in a private and personal sphere removed from social action or duty. Thus in the same essay Addison clearly distinguishes between public settings, where a man must “pick and cull his Thoughts for Conversation, by suppressing some, and communicating others,” and “private Conversation between intimate Friends,” where this sort of discretion “has no place.” Even more broadly, Spectator 93 differentiates the “Enjoyment of a discreet and virtuous Friend” from the exercising of “Social Virtues,” such as charity and political involvement. These active employments, which range from, “reliev[ing] the Needy” and “comfort[ing] the Afflicted” to “mitigating the Fierceness of a Party” and “rectifying the Prejudiced,” operate within a clearly delineated realm of social duty. By contrast, a man’s ability to give “a Loose to every Passion and every Thought that is uppermost, [to] discover[ ] his most retired Opinions of Persons or Things” (Spectator 68), necessitates the “seclusion or quiet,” the ostensible “private” setting that is part of the very definition of “retired” (OED). Johnson, too, recognizes the need to separate friendship from social obligation, maintaining in Rambler 64 that “an uniformity of opinions,”

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religious as well as political, is “requisite” to the “mutual complacency” of friendship, as “It cannot but be extremely difficult to preserve private kindness in the midst of public opposition.” And yet, as the Jacobin novelists will later demonstrate, the very idea of an affective friendship freed from its political dimensions is itself a political act. These depictions of male friendship as necessarily removed from the public and social demands of eighteenth-century life contribute to the creation of a class position that can present itself as supposedly transcending class. Crucial to this ideology is the presentation of male friendship as a strictly voluntary tie, in contrast to earlier forms of friendship delineated by relations of power or patronage. We find this idea epitomized in Spectator 385, where Budgell writes that “We are in some measure more inexcusable if we violate our Duties to a Friend, than to a Relation, since the former arise from a voluntary Choice, the latter from a Necessity to which we could not give our own Consent.” By elevating the voluntary bonds of friendship over the ties of blood, Budgell’s essay participates in the broader middle-class critique of aristocratic honor and privilege that was at the heart of eighteenth-century representations of ideal masculinity and male friendship. The many pieces that constitute sentimental male friendship come together in remarkable fashion in Spectator 123, an extended narrative by Addison ostensibly designed to educate readers about the proper way to educate male heirs. This supposedly “true Story” describes two men whose lifelong friendship trumps the very boundaries of class and even erases the ties of biology: the two friends actually exchange, adopt, and raise each other’s infants. Although the men are initially possessed of disparate wealth and property—one friend’s farm brings in 300 pounds a year while the other’s estate “as many Thousands”—their “Exchange of Children” leads, in turn, to the leveling of any difference when those children eventually fall in love. As the wealthy heir learns industry by believing himself the son of the poorer but highly accomplished friend and the less affluent man’s daughter is raised as an heiress, the subsequent marriage of the second generation serves to secure and consolidate the bonds of friendship within the structures of family. Underscoring the power of male friendship, Spectator 123 concludes not with the wedding of the two children but with the, for all intents and purposes, comparable marriage of the two friends, who “passed the remainder of their Lives together.” Yet as this rhetoric of familialization, in which men’s friendship both exceeds and creates family bonds, functions to erase the reverberations of power by creating a discourse in which all friends are seemingly equal, it is, significantly, accompanied by a parallel rhetoric of “natural” and inevitable difference between women and men. Just as women are excluded by Aristotle from the capacity of a “true friend” (Hyatte 18), so too are women in the eighteenth century relegated    See Shawn Lisa Maurer, Proposing Men, particularly chapters 4, “Reconstructing Honor” and 8, “Multiplying Affinities: Economic Interests and Familial Passions,” and my “Masculinity and Morality in Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art.”

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to the margins of the discourse of friendship through an ideology of fundamental gender incommensurability, the “Sex in Souls” famously expressed in Richard Steele’s Tatler 172 (1710). For the Jacobin writers, on the other hand, the claim for female equality expressed most cogently in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, demanded, as a necessary but perhaps less overt concomitant, an equally radical rethinking of relations between men. As the English Jacobin political vision began to erode long-standing divisions between men and women (at least in theory), the unfinished business of patriarchy—namely, men’s relations to other men—began to emerge more clearly than ever before. Although Hugh Trevor and Caleb Williams take on those relations in different ways and through divergent generic paths—Holcroft offers a Bildungsroman, Godwin a reworking of the conventions of Gothic fiction—both have in common the attempt to challenge earlier configurations of male friendship as based on mutual trust and benevolence and to reveal the underlying foundation of friendship as status, hierarchy, and power. Moreover, and equally significant, each novel manifests the uncanny power of male relationships to disrupt, as well as subsequently to (re)define, the parameters of narrative convention, particularly as manifested in a romance or marriage plot. By revising the predominantly heterosexual paradigm that drives eighteenth-century novels, in which a bad man is reformed by his love for a good woman (Fielding’s Tom Jones) or a good woman destroyed by her love for a bad man (Richardson’s Clarissa), and instead imbuing their characters with the desire for powerful and lasting forms of male homosocial connection that at times overpower, indeed overwrite, heterosexual ties, these authors provide us with arresting alternate visions that challenge received ideas of masculinity and femininity, public and private. Political Friendship in Holcroft’s Hugh Trevor Although touted as “England’s first revolutionary novelist” (Baine 1) for his novel Anna St. Ives, published in 1792, Thomas Holcroft has, other than among scholars, slipped through the cracks of a wider reception. Holcroft’s penultimate, and possibly most egregiously ignored, work of fiction, The Adventures of Hugh Trevor, is a novel begun—and partly published—in the same dangerous climate in which Godwin released Caleb Williams and their friend and colleague Elizabeth Inchbald drafted, but did not yet issue, her second novel, Nature and Art. Indeed the unorthodox publication history of Holcroft’s novel—the first three volumes came out in 1794, and the last three not until 1797—reminds us of the author’s direct implication in the volatile circumstances surrounding England’s changing reaction 

  At the time of this writing, no new editions of Holcroft’s work had been published since 1980. In 2007, however, Pickering & Chatto issued a five-volume edition of The Novels and Selected Plays of Thomas Holcroft, edited by W.M. Verhoeven, as part of its Pickering Masters series.

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to the French Revolution. While the charges of High Treason against Holcroft were never proved—indeed he was released without trial after an eight week imprisonment in Newgate—the author was nevertheless branded an “acquitted felon,” a charge that dogged him for the remainder of his life and significantly affected his literary career. Hugh Trevor furnishes Holcroft’s most broad-based and radical social critique, as the eponymous hero’s search for a profession sparks a relentless attack upon the institutions of law, church, and politics, and condemns as well both the university system and the aristocracy. As I will argue, that broader social commentary is inseparable from Holcroft’s representation and exploration of the bonds of male friendship. Throughout the novel, friendship functions as the vehicle for social critique, the wedge with which to break open not only the professions that were Holcroft’s ostensible focus, but also the corrupt structures of power and privilege that underlay them. Thus for Holcroft’s young protagonist, Hugh Trevor, the ability to distinguish the false friend from the true exists in tandem with his increasingly powerful ability to discern such corruption, and to educate the reader along with himself. While employing, on the one hand, the sentimental conventions of Enlightenment male friendship—Hugh calls friendship the most “exquisite” pleasure of which a man’s soul is capable—Holcroft, on the other, consistently turns those conventions on their head by always locating them within a specific—indeed overt—social and political context. Holcroft’s broader political project of moral instruction and his desire to show through fiction the ways in which “Man becomes what the mistaken institutions of society inevitably make him” (66) means that there can be no “separate sphere” of friendship removed from the vicissitudes of power and privilege. To launch his explicitly political critique, Holcroft redeploys the conventions of affective male relations in the context of earlier (classical) models of more instrumental and/or antagonistic forms of friendship. The novel culminates not only in the protagonist’s own formation, but also in the reformation of key characters whose attitudes and behavior embody problematic aristocratic ideologies, including Hugh’s lineage-obsessed grandfather and the rake and gambler Wakefield/Belmont, Hugh’s stepfather and eventual friend. In addition,    In the preface to his final novel, Brian Perdue, Holcroft writes that each of his novels had “a specific moral purpose”; the purpose of Hugh Trevor was to “induce youths (or their parents) to inquire into the morality of the profession which each might intend for himself” (cited in Life of Thomas Holcroft, xxix). Godwin expresses similar reservations in his essay, “Of Trades and Profession,” published in The Enquirer in 1797: “To what calling or profession shall the future life of my child be devoted?—Alas! I survey them all; I cause each successively to pass in review before me: but my mind can rest upon none: there is not one that a virtuous mind can regard with complacency, or select with any genuine eagerness of choice!” (reprint, New York: Augustus Kelley, 1965, 213. All further citations in this essay are to this edition).    The Adventures of Hugh Trevor, ed. Seamus Deane (London: Oxford UP, 1973), 357. All further references to the novel will be included in the text.

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Holcroft seeks to transform the novel’s reader, whose own education through “moral instruction” (3) provides the ultimate focus of Holcroft’s fiction. Admittedly, Hugh’s love for Olivia Mowbray propels the novel’s plot, in that his search for a profession results from the need to earn her love, but she functions primarily as a dramatic foil, a stock character—namely, the idealized maiden who brings about Hugh’s early modern reworking of knight errantry: not the enemy, or the grail, but a successful career. Hugh’s attachments to men, by contrast, animate his soul: in a pronounced parallel to his own, more conventional, rescues of Olivia, he is himself rescued—physically, intellectually, morally, and financially—by other men. Thus while ostensibly retaining the traditional pretense of heterosexuality, Holcroft’s novel rather employs the romance plot as a kind of scrim, a façade behind which transpires the novel’s primary dynamic in which men’s feelings for each other, rather than for women, provide the novel’s greatest pleasure as well as its political valence. Attending to these bonds, I contend, allows us to re-view—and hence reclaim— Holcroft’s novel from those previous critical assessments that have granted it, at best, historical significance but little else. For example, Gary Kelly maintains that “in spite of its obvious historical importance, Hugh Trevor is a failure” (English Jacobin Novel 167), while Mona Scheuermann writes that “Holcroft’s Hugh Trevor is a novel entirely of its time, chronicling the abuses to which each of the professions is liable; it is little more” (119–20). Disappointed in the novel’s inability to provide, respectively, a satisfying rewriting of the picaresque genre or a sustainable political vision, these critics, I believe, fail to see the ways in which Holcroft depicts the complex networks of male friendship for explicitly political purposes, offering his reader both the utopian ideal of a homosocial “New Jerusalem” based on the principles of the “social affections, particularly brotherly love” (Baine 54) and an understanding of the sometimes insuperable impediments to such vision. To demonstrate the intricacy of Holcroft’s portrayal, let me begin by mapping out the grid of benevolent masculine relations within the novel. At the center stands, of course, Hugh Trevor, the novel’s protagonist and narrator, its moral picaro. Placed above Hugh on a vertical axis is his mentor and conscience, his Oxford friend Turl; below Hugh is the character Hugh will himself reform, Wakefield. If Turl serves as Hugh’s conscience, Hugh subsequently creates a 

  With the exception of the unimportant undergraduate with whom Hugh competes for Olivia’s affections (a competition significantly weakened by Holcroft’s repeated acknowledgement of her love for Hugh), the novel contains, pace Sedgwick, no triangulations of male desire. Men bond on their own terms, an attitude exemplified in the novel’s conclusion by Olivia’s own anticipation of the “pure pleasure” she will have in “a life spent with a partner like Mr Trevor, heightened by the intercourse of the generous, benevolent, and strong-minded men who share his heart” (393). In this representation of her love for Hugh, Olivia—herself a relative cipher—comes to mirror Hugh’s own self-image, to recreate the homosocial nexus that lies at the center of his emotional existence.

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sense of conscience in Wakefield, the character who had previously lived only “to gratify his desires” (195). (It is also worth noting that Turl, whose Christian name is Henry, shares the hero’s initials and is indeed his alter ego, just as Hugh’s initials reverse those of his author.10) On the way to his reformation of Wakefield, Hugh finds significant gratification in the generous camaraderie of the carpenter Clarke, his Sancho Panza figure and primary cross-class friendship. On an intersecting path—moving horizontally and thus chronologically—we find the men whom Hugh rescues, and who in turn effect significant changes in his life. Saving his grandfather the Rector in Volume I catapults Hugh from a life of poverty and fear to one of gentility and education; at the novel’s conclusion, saving his long-lost uncle Elford, whose estate he then inherits, enables him to wed Olivia despite his failure to find a desirable profession. In the very center of this network, Hugh’s relationship with Mr Evelyn, a man of science with an independent income, operates along both axes. Hugh’s instantaneously sympathetic soul mate, his “friend and brother” (303), Mr Evelyn also becomes Hugh’s patron, using his surplus income first to finance Hugh’s education in the law and later, when that effort has proved unsuccessful, to bankroll Hugh’s run for political office (a seat he will later give up). Hugh’s glowing account of their initial interaction, in which he finds Mr Evelyn’s “hopes, his fears, and his affections … so much in unison with my own” that “it was impossible for the heart not to open all its recesses” (302), employs the full range of sentimental conventions, as his story in turn elicits from Mr Evelyn a moving testimony to the power of communion between two liked-minded individuals: Do not consider me as the acquaintance of a day; for, by hearing your history, I have travelled with you through life, and seem as if I had been inmate of your bosom even from your years of infancy. No: far from being strangers, we have been imbibing similar principles, similar views, and similar affections. Our souls have communed for years, and rejoice that the time at length is come in which the individual intercourse for which they may most justly be said to have panted is opened. If you object, if you hesitate, if you suspect me, you will annihilate the purest sensations which these souls have mutually cherished: you will wrong both yourself and me. (303)

While Mr Evelyn’s impassioned offer seems to transport Hugh beyond the human realm—“He had borne me on his wings, and seated me among the Gods” (303–4)— it is vital to recall that despite its expressive terminology and emphasis on parity, the relationship between Hugh and Mr Evelyn actually contradicts the tenets of eighteenth-century sentimental friendship, both by calling explicit attention to their difference in socioeconomic status and by making Mr Evelyn’s financial offer the crux of their bond: “You have too little: I have too much. … if you consent, as I hope 10   See Kelly’s description of the significant autobiographical components of Hugh Trevor (English Jacobin Novel 149–50).

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and trust you will, it will be my supreme pleasure to supply the deficiency” (303). Thus in contrast to earlier eighteenth-century representations of patronage as a form of charity, acts of personal kindness that never question the class structure itself,11 Holcroft grants Mr Evelyn an explicit interest in reforming “‘the miserable moral system of society which, by giving legal possession of what is called property to the holders, puts it absolutely and unendingly at their disposal’” (299). In Hugh’s patron’s (Jacobin) political philosophy, the ability to share his property reflects both his belief in the power of sympathy and his critique of such aristocratic practices as conspicuous consumption: “‘Let the rich therefore awake: let them encourage each other to quit their pernicious frivolities, and to enquire, without fear or prejudice, how they may secure tranquillity and promote happiness’” (298). For Holcroft, how a friend makes one feel cannot be separated from what that friend can do for one, or from the broader structures and institutions in which those interactions take place. Moreover, by serving as a surrogate father, supporting Hugh both financially and emotionally in the way his own father never could, Mr Evelyn facilitates Holcroft’s critique of the corrupt and corrupting structure of familial relations.12 However, before Hugh can benefit from the sympathetic friendship—and generous patronage—of Mr Evelyn in the novel’s fourth volume, he must first traverse far muddier waters. Holcroft, in order to examine and attack, resurrects other less beneficent models for relationships between men, relationships in which “interest” played a leading—yet often unacknowledged—role. Buoyed by his own talents and hungry for advancement, Hugh finds two wealthy and powerful men who seemingly offer him their benefaction: a Bishop to whom he brings his sermons and a Lord, the Earl of Idford, who shows great interest in his political writing for the opposition. In accepting their patronage, Hugh suspends his moral conscience and allows them to claim his work for their own.13 In contrast to his involvement with these men, in which Hugh claims that “truth and falsehood were 11   These acts of generosity, particularly among tradesmen and merchants, fill the Tatler and Spectator. See, for example, the sentimental effusions of Spectator 248, described by Mr Spectator as a “City Romance,” in which one tradesman offers to loan another “the Sum of fifty Thousand Pounds” in order to “save an honest Man whom I love.” For a representative of such an ideology among the gentry, see Sarah Scott’s portrait of the exemplary Sir George Ellison, whose greatest pleasure is to relieve the suffering, and restore the fortunes, of worthy men. 12   As Scheuermann has noted, novels from the 1790s took on the family as one of many corrupt social institutions: “The basic forms of society are called into question in books such as Anna St. Ives and Hermsprong, and among the institutions which they examine, the family is found to be as corrupt as any. Like the Church, or politics, the domestic structure is seen to be in need of reform” (“Redefining the Filial Tie” 398). See also Baine, pp. 61–4. 13   See the comparable exposure of plagiarism in Nature and Art (1796), the second novel by Holcroft’s friend and contemporary, Elizabeth Inchbald. According to Gary Kelly, both Inchbald’s and Holcroft’s bishops, as well as the hateful Dr Blick in Bage’s Hermsprong,

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so mingled that, however inclined I might be, I knew not which way to do myself justice” (126), Hugh’s interactions with his Oxford friend Turl serve to flush out pretense and expose deceit. Known for being a “scholar, a good critic, and a man of strong powers of mind” (120), Turl plays an invaluable role in Hugh’s life, providing not the pleasures of unconditional approbation but rather the salutary pain of critical judgment.14 Under the tutelage of Turl’s “scrutinizing eye” and “firm understanding” (357–8) Hugh begins to see the inherent corruption of these so-called great men: “‘What is a peer of the realm,’” Turl informs Hugh, “‘but a man educated in vice, nurtured in prejudice from his earliest childhood, and daily breathing the same infectious air he first respired’” (158). At the same time, Turl teaches Hugh to understand how his own self-interest, his pride and vanity, have made him complicit in the duplicity of others: “‘What you have related of these lordly men does not in the least astonish me. Their vices are as odious as you have described them. Your great mistake is in supposing yourself blameless. You have chiefly erred in entertaining too high an opinion of your own powers, and in cherishing something like a selfish blindness to the principles of the persons, with whom you have been concerned’” (158). Of course the mirror that Turl holds up to Hugh contains as well the reader’s own reflection: throughout the novel, Holcroft emphasizes the necessity of vigilant attention to the links between corrupt institutions and the distorted individuals who inhabit them. A believer in “internal moral revolution rather than external political upheaval” (Deane x), Holcroft relies upon the sympathetic bonds of human relations, and particularly male friendship, to effect broader social change. Hugh rescues and reforms first his grandfather, the “rector of ***,” a man “as vain of his ancestry, as a German baron” (5) who had disowned Hugh’s mother when she married below herself, and then his nemesis, the protean gambler and seducer Wakefield, whose “wit and invention … are employed to entrap, humiliate, degrade and ruin all with whom he has intercourse” (195), from their respective aristocratic vices. Although Holcroft represents these emotional conversions in the most effusive terms,15 both interactions employ friendship as a political force, exposing were based upon the same man, the Rev. Samuel Horsley, Bishop of Rochester (English Jacobin Novel 157–8). 14   Turl’s painful candor here provides a revealing parallel to the practice of “perfect sincerity” between Holcroft and Godwin. See Marshall: “Each became the other’s most respected critic. They practiced perfect sincerity, and although it often led to ‘démêlés,’ as Godwin recorded in his diary, their friendship proved ‘a delightful mingling of souls’” (74). 15   Even before he knows that the person he has just rescued is his grandfather, Hugh feels “something much more exquisite than joyful” at the man’s promise to “take care of me as long as he lived”: “My heart melted when I heard him; I burst into tears, and replied, ‘I would willingly die to serve him’” (45). In the later interaction, Wakefield, having been incited to a “better passion” by the “brave” and “generous” behavior of Hugh, redeems Hugh from debt and offers him his friendship. Hugh writes that “I cannot describe the scene that passed. We did not embrace, for we were no actors; and as our passions for the time were too big for utterance, we were silent” (489). Recall as well the emotional recognition scene

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and then correcting the socially-sanctioned immorality of class pride and libertine behavior. Having become a wealthy man upon inheriting his uncle’s estate, Hugh ends his “Adventures” not with a depiction of married life with his long-sought Olivia, but rather with a description of the now reformed and married—to the woman he had earlier seduced and abandoned—Wakefield, “that man of brilliant and astonishing faculties … whom I am proud to say I love” (496). At first blush, the novel’s happy ending seems to reproduce the rural retreat of such politically conservative mid-century works as Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, whereby the orphaned protagonists find their proper parents, and thus their rightful place, in the both the family unit and the countryside. Yet for Hugh, the discovery of his uncle does not serve to create an identity, but rather to confirm the ethical and political subjectivity that is one of the novel’s central themes—a subjectivity that, as I have argued, is made possible only by the bonds between and among men. In the homosocial utopia of the novel’s conclusion, Hugh lives surrounded by the “splendid” virtues of his male friends, his “social hours … most beneficially and delightfully spent in their society” (496). Yet this idyllic community, which serves as the culmination of Hugh’s long process of education and development, exists not in some withdrawn and separate private sphere but rather in direct—and confrontational—relation to the very social, economic, and political structures that were the focus of Hugh’s Bildung. By teaching “‘the comprehensive principle of benevolence … individualized; and put into its utmost state of activity’” (357), friendship offers Holcroft’s characters, as well as his readers, a direct, yet necessarily idealistic path toward widespread social reform.16 Fatal Friendship in Godwin’s Caleb Williams Like Holcroft, with whom he was in close and important contact during the composition of Caleb Williams,17 William Godwin recognized the essential links between individual relations and broader social change. Yet whereas Holcroft between Hugh and his long-lost uncle, Mr Elford: “Mr Elford was almost overcome. In a moment he again cried—‘My saviour too! Still the same! Courageous, humane, generous! All that my soul could desire! Oh shield me, deliver me from this excess of joy!’” (494). 16   For a useful assessment of the controversial critical response to the novel’s ending, see W.M. Verhoeven’s introduction to the Pickering & Chatto edition of Hugh Trevor,. xvii–xix. 17   In their introduction to the Broadview edition of Caleb Williams, Handwerke and Markley note that “Godwin and Holcroft enjoyed almost daily interaction during the period when Godwin was writing Caleb Williams and commented extensively on each other’s narrative projects. Godwin’s diaries indicate that he read, critiqued, and often revised sections of the manuscript of Holcroft’s The Adventures of Hugh Trevor (1794) [sic] at precisely the time that he was finishing Caleb Williams” (34).

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concludes Hugh Trevor with the vision of a golden age of male friendship,18 Godwin posits that ideal not in his first novel, but in his theoretical writing. In his most direct discussion of the topic of friendship, the essay “Of Love and Friendship” published in Thoughts on Man in 1831, Godwin challenges the received idea that there can be no love—and hence no friendship—except among equals. In contrast to the conventions of affective friendship, which mask and even deny the very real structural inequalities of British society by attempting to posit a realm of human interaction freed from relations of power, Godwin’s essay brings difference to the fore by taking as the “great model of the affection of love in human beings” (274–5) the inherently asymmetrical relationship between parents and children; he then finds “the same inequality the inseparable attendant upon the most perfect ties of affection” between friends (286). For Godwin in his essay, the political potential of friendship lies precisely in its longed-for ability to identify and mediate, rather than erase, the conflicts that arise from difference. The essay thereby reconfigures the tropes of sentimental friendship for explicitly political purposes by showing how such unequal friendship might function to establish equality—and, by implication, abolish class structure: “In the union of which I am speaking, the demonstrative and ordinary appearance will be that of entire equality” (291).19 Indeed Godwin’s essay, which describes such classical friendships as those between Achilles and Patroclus or Orestes and Pylades, might seem to serve as a model for the relationship between the landed squire Ferdinando Falkland and his “obscure” (197) young employee, Caleb Williams. A man of education, wealth, power and privilege, as well as a “sublime mind” (212), Falkland clearly exemplifies the figure of the “magnificent personage” delineated by Godwin’s essay, while Caleb, an orphan possessed of neither money nor birth, enacts the part of his “modest and unpretending” friend: “In each of these the parties are, the true hero, the man of lofty ambition, the magnificent personage in whom is concentrated every thing that the historian or the poet was able to realise of excellence, and the modest and unpretending individual in whom his confidence was reposed” (Thoughts 286). Why, then, is their friendship doomed to failure? Why cannot Falkland repose “confidence” in Caleb? As with Holcroft, Godwin’s political critique is inextricably bound to his portrayal of impassioned male friendship. Yet Godwin’s relentless attention to “Things As They Are”—his earlier title for Caleb Williams— precludes his ability to eliminate from his narrative the “external circumstances” that shape his protagonists’ “characters.”20 While Holcroft’s hero Hugh Trevor can 18   Hugh claims that such male friendship “is the spirit that is to harmonize the world; and give reality to those ideal gardens of paradise, and ages of gold” (357). 19   See Hutter: “Class-structured societies usually exert strong social pressure designed to avert the formation of friendship between unequals. … The attempt to organize a society in accordance with the ideas of friendship would mean the abolition of the class structure of that society” (10, 11). 20   This idea provides the title for Chapter IV of Book I of Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (3rd edition), “The Character of Men Originate in their External

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successfully navigate the complex web of social inequity, Godwin’s Caleb Williams, no less than his employer Falkland, are increasingly ensnared by that web’s sticky strands. Despite its speculative attractions as adumbrated in the later essay, in the novel the balms of friendship cannot heal all wounds.21 By simultaneously upholding and dissecting the conventions of idealized friendship, Godwin’s novel lays bare the very structures of inequality that such friendship was ostensibly designed to address. Throughout Caleb Williams, Caleb’s overwhelming desire for, and inability to obtain, friendship comes to signify the lasting power of those structures and their devastating effects on personal as well as political and communal life..22 In addition, and even more radically than Holcroft, Godwin dispenses altogether with a heterosexual love plot, instead making the passionate relationship between the two men his focus—a relationship that, as critics have noted, is both sexualized and stigmatized.23 In the novel’s first volume, Godwin reverses the conventions of sentimental friendship by creating for Falkland a private sphere that is not conducive to, but rather forbidding of, the healing solace and exquisite pleasure of intimate conversation. When after the death of his own father, Caleb comes at the age of 18 to work as Falkland’s secretary, he sees a man who, despite his prolific natural and social endowments, has chosen to live as a recluse, “nor did he seem desirous to compensate for this privation by the confidence of friendship” (62). For Falkland, privacy has become “privation” and his puzzling withdrawal from society—the result, Caleb will eventually learn, of psychological torment—creates an atmosphere of fear and isolation in which Falkland “appeared a total stranger to everything which usually bears the appellation of pleasure” (62). Caleb becomes increasingly inquisitive about, and sensitive to, his employer’s deeply troubled emotional state, which vacillates between “gloom” and “frenzy” (63). After Circumstances,” in which Godwin argues that “the actions and dispositions of mankind are the offspring of circumstances and events, and not of any original determination that they bring into the world” (Ed. Isaac Kramnick, London: Penguin, 1985, 97. All further citations in this essay are to this edition). 21   In attending to the tensions between theory and practice in Godwin’s representation of male friendship, my argument parallels that of Eric Daffron, whose excellent essay analyzes the attribute of “imitative sympathy”—one of the essential qualities of idealized friendship—as “a particular strategy with both dominant and resistant tactical uses” (214). Daffron’s placement of the discourse of sympathy within the immediate historical context of the French Revolution and the subsequent English Jacobin response complements my own attempt to locate Godwin’s novel within an earlier discourse of sentimental friendship. 22   See William Brewer for an analysis of the significance of, and search for, male friendship in other novels by Godwin. 23   See the articles by Alex Gold, Robert Corber, and Daffron. The essay by Brewer, cited above, provides brief summaries of their positions and attempts to offer an alternate, “non-competitive” framework for assessing male relations in the novels that followed Caleb Williams (50). However, in reading the male friendship in Caleb Williams as operating within a model of equality, Brewer’s essay problematically ignores the significant differences between Caleb and his employer, differences that are at the center of this argument.

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being “terrified” by one especially “extraordinary” (64) and violent encounter with Falkland, whom Caleb has surprised in the act of closing a trunk, Caleb’s own “dejection and anxiety” draw the notice of Mr Collins, Falkland’s steward and Caleb’s original patron. Unable to connect with Falkland himself, Caleb determines that “there could be small impropriety” in making Collins his “confident in the present instance,” determining that “I was not anxious for myself; … I felt only for my patron, who, with every advantage for happiness, and being in the highest degree worthy of it, seemed destined to undergo unmerited distress” (65). Caleb wants, in other words, to be the kind of ideal—and idealized—friend that Godwin will later describe in his essay: one who can provide “the repose, the unbending of the soul” so desperately needed by his employer and thus “a true friend, one who sincerely loves, one who is attached to him, not for the accidents that attend him, but for whatever most strictly belongs to him, and of which he cannot be divested” (Thoughts 286, 287–8). Yet as Caleb will soon discover, Falkland cannot easily, or willingly, separate himself from “the accidents that attend him.” 24 There can be, in other words, no pure sphere of beneficent friendship; in addition, the language of “confidence” is itself continually tainted by fragmentation and untruth. Mr Collins thus responds to Caleb’s confidence with a seeming confidence of his own, proceeding to describe the injury to Falkland’s pride that turned him from a man who was once “the gayest of the gay” into a “tarnished” and “withered” recluse, “the mere shell of Falkand” (65–6). In relating this extensive history (a history that will comprise 11 chapters, a little less than a third of the novel25), Collins maintains that he is acting as Falkland’s surrogate, “thinking it not improbable that Mr Falkland, but for the disturbance and inflammation of his mind, would be disposed to a similar communication” (66). Yet for Caleb, Collins’s explanation, in which Falkland’s sufferings result from the “wound [to] his pride” (66) that can never, due to the death of Falkland’s neighbor and antagonist, Squire Tyrrel, be properly avenged, serves to obscure rather than clarify the “mysterious” nature of his master’s behavior. While finding in the narrative “a thousand fresh reasons to admire and love Mr Falkland” (174), Caleb nonetheless remains dissatisfied; still obsessed with Falkland’s emotional state, he must, like his employer before him, “brood” in isolation: “But the story I had heard was for ever in my thoughts, and I was peculiarly interested to comprehend its full import. I turned it a thousand ways, and examined it in every point of view. In the original communication it appeared sufficiently distinct and satisfactory; but as I brooded over it, it gradually became mysterious” (179–80). Indeed, Caleb increasingly suspects that Falkland might 24

  Making Falkland rather than Caleb the target of his essay, Andrew Schreiber usefully analyzes the tensions between Falkland’s “romanticized ideology”—his public reputation—and his private guilt. Indeed, as Schreiber notes, the distinction between public and private “is a moot one within Falkland’s system” (259). 25   For an insightful analysis of the “parallel reenactment” between Falkland’s own story in Volume I and Caleb’s subsequent history, see Robert Uphaus.

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himself be the murderer, for if not, “what was the meaning of all Mr Falkland’s agonies and terror?” (180). Although he cannot fully articulate this fact until the novel’s conclusion, it is not curiosity in and of itself that drives Caleb’s compelling desire to break open Falkland’s “iron chest” but rather the wish to discover the knowledge that might, in turn, bring succor. He desires, that is, to reach into his employer’s heart, to know what makes Falkland suffer: “He was unhappy; I exerted myself with youthful curiosity to discover the secret of his woe” (428). Yet rather than leading to the curative pleasures of sympathetic conversation, Caleb’s wish to be Falkland’s “true friend,” to serve, in the ironic words of Godwin’s essay, as “his consolation and pleasure, the safe coffer in which he reposits all his anxieties and sorrow” (Thoughts 289), results in frenzied pursuit and mutual destruction, as such desire, Caleb ruefully explains, “was the beginning of misfortune” (428). In a kind of toxic ripple effect, Falkland’s self-enforced isolation spills over onto Caleb who, thwarted in his efforts to understand Falkland, decides “to place myself as a watch upon my patron”; to become, in fact, “a spy upon Mr Falkland!” (180), just as Falkland will later become the surreptitious pursuer of Caleb. Like his employer, then, Caleb must, until the very end of the novel, paint the desire to “uncover” Falkland’s “secret wound” (182) in a negative, and often irrational, light. Attributing his behavior to his “ruling passion” of curiosity, Caleb describes his actions vis-à-vis Falkland as deriving from a “fatal impulse” (198), from “infatuation” (210), “uncontrollable passion,” and, most extremely, constituting “an act of insanity” (211). Indeed Caleb cannot himself offer a plausible explanation for his life-changing act: attempting to open the chest in which Falkland’s secrets supposedly reside.26 Thus even before Falkland’s irrevocable revelation of the true story—that he is indeed the murderer of Tyrrel, and by extension, the Hawkinses—we see Caleb himself tormented by the same internal frenzy that animates his employer.27

26   Caleb acknowledges that “I have always been at a loss to account for my having plunged thus headlong into an act so monstrous” (212). When he does attempt to explain his “unexplained” behavior, he calls it an act of “involuntary sympathy”—not as one would expect, as enacted by Caleb toward Falkland himself, but rather in terms of the way the fire affects Caleb: “This was the first instance in which I had witnessed a danger by fire. All was confusion around me, and all changed to a hurricane within. The general situation … became desperate, and I by contagion became alike desperate” (212). In this way, Caleb constitutes himself as a passive, even innocent victim of this irrational emotion: “At first I had been in some degrees calm and collected, but that too was a desperate effort; and when it gave way, a kind of instant insanity became its successor” (212). 27   While Uphaus’s detailed reading of both characters’ “obsession” with Falkland’s trunk suggestively explores the multiple internal parallels between Caleb and Falkland, his desire to see their conflict as predominantly psychological—namely, the wish “to imprison one another within their own consciousness” (284)—necessarily minimizes the significant social and political implications of their psychologically fraught encounters.

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With its powerful political reverberations,28 Caleb’s language of surveillance, his desire to “penetrate,” by any means, Falkland’s secrets and the mysterious trunk in which those secrets supposedly reside, betray not only, as critics have noted, a language of suppressed or repressed homoeroticism, but also a necessarily repressed awareness of the considerable benefits he would receive by becoming Falkland’s confidant. In his provocative reading of male relations within the novel, Robert Corber contends that Godwin employs the language of anti-sodomitical pamphlets to “stigmatize aristocratic patronage as an especially pernicious form of male bonding” (89). Yet while Corber reads Caleb’s “deeply ambivalent” feelings toward Falkland as representative of Caleb’s conscious attitude toward patronage itself—contending that Caleb “knows full well that his desire for more intimate relations with Falkland is inappropriate to the terms of patronage” (91)—I maintain that Caleb’s conflict results from his unsuccessful attempts to mediate between an ideology of affective friendship, in which “each party is necessary to the other” (Thoughts 289), and the challenge to aristocratic privilege that such friendship necessarily represents. He wishes, that is, for Falkland to perceive him as part of, rather than antagonistic to, his master’s sense of self: “The superior considers him towards whom he pours out his affection, as a part of himself. He cannot separate himself from him but at the cost of a fearful maim” (Thoughts 289). Falkland, as Eric Daffron notes, “finds this merger of consciousness so threatening … because that self distinction underpins his roles both as a member of the gentry and as a man” (220). Falkland’s masculine identity, that is, depends upon upholding the aristocratic “code of honor” that demands superiority at the cost of separation.29 Although Caleb desires, consciously at least, to operate out of the sentimental, and middle-class, ideology of friendship in which virtue leads to equality and the truth will supposedly set you free, he cannot fully ignore the political implications of his own behavior. Caleb, that is, finds himself both attracted to and terrified of the leveling that would be inherent in an intimate friendship with his employer and master. Unlike Falkland, who has been “educated in the prejudice of birth,” Caleb’s own class position enables him to stand outside of, even to “abhor,” that prejudice (385). At the same time, Caleb’s deep admiration, even worship of Falkland is founded upon the very aristocratic qualities that Falkland’s birth, education, and class position have made possible: “I could never enough wonder at finding myself, humble as I was by my birth, obscure as I had hitherto been, thus suddenly become of so much importance to the happiness of one of the most enlightened and accomplished men in England” (197). In this way, Caleb’s ambivalence exemplifies the paradox of political friendship. Although the conventions of sentimental friendship necessitate the denial of difference, 28

  See Daffron’s reading of the political circumstances and multiple implications of Caleb’s “spy tactics” (220–21). 29   For a perceptive analysis of the competing strands of masculine ideology within Elizabeth Inchbald’s first novel—a work that Godwin himself had read and edited—see Caroline Breashears, “Defining Masculinity in A Simple Story.”

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such difference must, as Godwin’s essay so astutely notes, be acknowledged and overcome in order for intimacy and “confidence” to take place. Thus here, and throughout the novel, Caleb’s own contradictory assessment of his motives toward Falkland—that they are both pure and irrational, selfless yet ultimately self-serving—works in tandem with Falkland’s own self-denial to deconstruct, while simultaneously aspiring to, the tenets of sentimental friendship.30 Although Falkland seems initially to warm to Caleb’s attentions, telling him that “You have a right notion of things, and I have great hopes of you” (192), his guilt seemingly distorts Caleb’s ostensibly sympathetic interest into attack and manipulation. Returning, like Anteus, to the solid ground of class hierarchy, he pushes Caleb away by drawing explicit attention to their social difference: “Who gave you a right to be my confident? Base, artful wretch that you are! Learn to be more respectful! Are my passions to be wound and unwound by an insolent domestic?” (193). In response, Caleb attempts to deflect Falkland’s wrath by making such difference the basis of his unconditional friendship, thereby attempting to epitomize Godwin’s expository portrait of the ideal friend who finds gratification in “being made the chosen companion and confident of him whom he so ardently admires” (Thoughts 290): “I love you more than I can express. I worship you as a being of a superior nature. I am foolish, raw, inexperienced,—worse than any of these;—but never did a thought of disloyalty to your service enter into my heart” (197). Yet as the “fool of fame” (215), victim of the code of honor that elevates reputation above morality, Falkland must necessarily sacrifice such friendship to its polar opposite, enmity. For Caleb, the desire to befriend Falkland results not in the creation of a homosocial utopia, but rather in his expulsion from the Eden of male friendship. Caleb, desperate to know the “truth” about Falkland, witnesses his master’s “horror and despair” during a court case with “sufficient resemblance” to his own situation (206–7), a case he is unable to adjudicate. Believing that he sees in Falkland’s behavior a clear confirmation of guilt, a Hamlet-like Caleb retreats to his master’s garden in a comparable state of physical and emotional agitation. There he experiences a “tempest and hurricane of the passions” that culminates in “the most soul-ravishing calm.” Standing, as it were, in the very eye of the storm as he proceeds “along the most secret paths” of Falkland’s garden and his psyche, Caleb revels in his state of extreme mental elevation: “I was never so perfectly alive as at that moment” (207). Knowledge, as the forceful language of this passage manifests, brings Caleb intense, indeed rapturous, pleasure. At the same time, his inability to use his knowledge in the service of his master, to

30

  My analysis of this section of the novel is indebted to Gary Handwerk’s complex reading of the contradictory forces at work in the novel’s ending in “Of Caleb’s Guilt and Godwin’s Truth.” See, in particular, Handwerk’s adumbration of the manifold tensions between Godwin’s political theory as expressed in Political Justice and the “narrative anomalies” of his fictional practice as embodied in Caleb Williams (939).

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provide, through mutual confidence, the solace of friendship, foreshadows such knowledge’s potent, and potential, danger.31 Indeed soon afterward, driven by an “idea … too powerful to be resisted,” Caleb gains access to his master’s study during a fire and attempts to break open Falkland’s trunk, so that “all I sought was at once within my reach” (211). Caleb wants to know the truth about Falkland, and ingenuously believes that such knowledge cannot tarnish either his master’s “sublimely beneficent” qualities or their relationship: “I will never become an informer. I will never injure my patron; and therefore he will not be my enemy” (217). While Caleb continues to retain a naïve faith in the power of his own sympathetic friendship for Falkland, claiming that “With all his misfortunes and all his errors, my soul yearns for his welfare” (217), Falkland’s driving need to “live the guardian of my reputation” (383), even at the cost of murder, means that he cannot expose himself to the vulnerability— and concomitant leveling effects—of confidence. Instead of exemplifying “the most perfect ties of affection” (Thoughts 287), the relationship between Caleb and his employer disintegrates into tyranny and terror when Falkland catches Caleb in the act of prying open the mysterious chest. In what amounts to a bitter reversal of Godwin’s subsequent essay, in which the “boundless confidence” between friends can only result from the belief that the stronger party will never use his power “ungenerously” (Thoughts 291), Falkland here tells Caleb that he divulges his secret not in the name of friendship, but rather as a means of protecting his reputation, that it is either confession or another murder: “I had no alternative but to make you my confidant or my victim” (215). Saying that “you shall continue in my service, but can never share my affection,” Falkland’s words reveal the powerful wish fulfillment implicit in his act of confession, even as he forecloses, seemingly for ever, the possibility of any “true friendship” between them: “My tongue has now for the first time for several years spoken the language of my heart; and the intercourse from this hour shall be shut for ever” (215). Rather than bound in the mutually protective ties of confessional friendship, in which “Each party is necessary to the other” (Thoughts 289), Caleb and his master become increasingly locked in the mutually destructive bonds created by Caleb’s aggressiveness and Falkland’s dread: “It was better to trust you with the whole truth under every seal of secrecy, than to live in perpetual fear of your penetration or your rashness” (215). From being a prisoner of his own desire for friendship—and thus for knowledge—Caleb becomes a prisoner of that very knowledge, in the form of 31

  My interpretation of this scene differs from that of Alex Gold. By consistently eliding love with friendship, Gold’s readings of both Godwin’s essay and Caleb Williams neglect the specific, and political, ways in which Godwin engages with the discourse of male friendship. Moreover, by placing Emily Melville into the center of his reading—seeing her as Caleb’s “emotional ‘double’” and, like Caleb, as a “wife” to Falkland (141–5)— Gold’s analysis, operating within the very heterosexual romance paradigm that I contend Godwin’s novel attempts to question, lessens the powerful male homosocial component of the relationship between Caleb and Falkland.

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Falkland’s despotic and inescapable vigilance: “a vigilance which is thus goaded by the most anxious passions of the soul” (218)—and from which he can never fully escape. For Caleb, cast out of Eden, knowledge brings not sympathetic connection but estrangement and isolation. However, while Falkland’s “love of fame” (215) causes him assiduously to resist, indeed fear, the “consolations of friendship,” Caleb, by contrast, continues actively to seek “the delicious gifts of confidence and sympathy” (353) through the remainder of the novel. Himself desperately in need of the succor and support he had earlier attempted to offer Falkland, expecting “In every fellow-being … to find a friend” (257), Caleb can, ironically, be no more successful than his master at achieving this hoped-for bond. Poisoned by Falkland’s relentless and indeed omniscient enmity, Caleb’s numerous attempts to “open [him]self up” (229) to others continually fail. Driven to the brink of insanity by a long course of persecution, imprisonment, escape, and disguise; unable to persuade his “best” and “oldest friend” Collins (415), recently returned from the West Indies, to intervene in his favor, Caleb resorts, in the last extremity, to openly accusing Falkland of the murder of Tyrrel, thereby attempting to obtain, in the public and legal sphere, the “equity and justice” (427) that had been previously, and privately, unattainable. Yet Caleb is “shocked” out of his desire to vindicate himself by exposing his employer when he sees Falkland enter the courtroom, appearing like a “corpse” who “seemed not to have three hours to live” (426). Recognizing his “dreadful mistake” (427) in bringing Falkland before this public tribunal, Caleb, his voice “suffocated with agony” (428), speaks a confession that operates as a mirror image of Falkland’s prior confession to Caleb. As Falkland has been haunted by his murder of Tyrrel, so too will Caleb be forever haunted by this public condemnation of Falkland, an act that he claims will “embitter every hour” of his existence by constituting him, like his employer, “a murderer” (431). In his impassioned speech Caleb sees himself as solely responsible for Falkland’s wretched state— “Never will I forgive myself the iniquity of this day”—and for the breakdown of friendship that led up to it. Caleb’s own confession, that is, should have transpired in “private”: “if I had opened my heart to Mr Falkland, if I had told him privately the tale that I have now been telling, he could not have resisted my reasonable demand.” Indeed Falkland’s “noble nature” would have made it impossible for him to “have resisted a frank and fervent expostulation, the frankness and the fervour in which the whole soul is poured out” (431). Opening the heart, pouring out the soul—Caleb here employs the familiar tropes of sentimental friendship, but with a twist. Now it is Caleb who becomes the friend in need, and Falkland the sympathetic listener. Yet Caleb’s attempt to take the blame wholly on himself is actually contradicted by an earlier passage in the speech. Retracing his thorny relationship with Falkland, Caleb holds responsible not his own behavior, but his employer’s own inability to trust: “Mr Falkland! … Did I ever prove myself unworthy of your confidence? The secret was a most painful burthen to me; it was the extremest folly that led me unthinkingly to gain possession of it; but I would have died a thousand deaths rather than betray it. It

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was the jealousy of your own thoughts, and the weight that hung upon your mind, that led you to watch my motions and to conceive alarm from every particle of my conduct” (428). Because Caleb’s behavior was merely “folly,” his information gained “unthinkingly,” it was Falkland’s own “jealousy,” not any action on Caleb’s part, which led to “betrayal.” Had Falkland only believed in Caleb—“You began in confidence; why did you not continue in confidence?”—things would have turned out differently, even after Caleb’s bad behavior: “The evil that resulted from my original imprudence would then have been comparatively little” (428). As these statements imply, Falkland’s own position necessarily forestalled any such “frank and fervent expostulations” on the part of Caleb by negating any possibility of a private, and ostensibly untainted, realm of interaction. While Caleb’s defensive attempts to minimize his own part in the “evil” may seem to sit oddly with his desire to take on responsibility for Falkland’s “murder,” his words nevertheless resonate powerfully for Falkland who can see, for the first time, his pernicious complicity within the code of honor he had, after all, killed to maintain. Caleb, “confess[ing] every sentiment of [his] heart” (428), belatedly convinces Falkland of Caleb’s own true worth: “‘Williams,’ said he, ‘you have conquered! I see too late the greatness and elevation of your mind. I confess that it is to my fault and not yours, that it is to the excess of jealousy that was ever burning in my bosom, that I owe my ruin’” (432). The complex reverberations of this scene—in particular, each man’s desire to elevate the other while simultaneously defaming himself32—reveal the ironic way in which Caleb finds his vindication, and Falkland his “true friend,” only in mutual guilt and eventual death. At the same time, their anguished attempts at self-immolation betray, by their very excess, each character’s deep longing for the unattainable ideal of sentimental friendship. Caleb, who concludes that he has “now no character that I wish to vindicate” (434), states that “I came hither to curse, but I remain to bless” (431) while Falkland echoes his benediction when he desires, in acknowledging Caleb’s “greatness,” to “bless the hand that wounds” him (432–3). Indeed their common loss—Falkland lives for only three days, while Caleb condemns himself to a living death—recalls an earlier moment of comparable failure: Caleb’s “ardent” but short-lived friendship with his “penetrating and manly” (278) fellow prisoner, the soldier Brightwel, also unjustly imprisoned. While Brightwel offers an “unreserved confidence in [Caleb’s] innocence” (279) which enables him to see “through the veil of calumny that overshades” Caleb—“he has understood, and he has loved me” (280)—Brightwel soon dies “of a broken heart” (279) just days before he would have been acquitted. Although Caleb pledges thereafter to live in hope of finding another such friend, so that he might “rest in the arms of friendship, and forget the malignity of 32

  Caleb “proclaim[s] to all the world, that Mr Falkland is a man worthy of affection and kindness, and that I am myself the basest and most odious of mankind” (431), while Falkland expresses the reverse: “‘My name will be consecrated to infamy, while your heroism, your patience, and your virtues will be forever admired’” (432).

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the world” (279), those hopes, as we have seen, are continually dashed. Deprived, again and again, of the “benefits and consolation” (410) of friendship, Caleb turns instead to the substitute satisfaction that is narrative. Absent the friend who can, like Brightwel, understand, love, and believe in him, Caleb describes his narrative as providing the possibility of both vindication and emotional release: “I am incited to the penning of these memoirs only by a desire to divert my mind from the deplorableness of my situation, and a faint idea that posterity may by their means be induced to render me a justice which my contemporaries refuse” (59). Through his memoir, Caleb attempts, in effect, to be his own friend, “to console myself in my insupportable distress” (200); at the same time, he believes that his narrative will contain precisely the “truth” that will make ideal friendship possible, by counteracting the “lie” that was first Falkland’s, and subsequently his own, life. Yet ironically, Caleb’s narrative, like the knowledge sequestered within the “fatal trunk,” cannot be shared between the two men: Caleb’s “last request” to Collins is that he will “Preserve these papers from destruction, and preserve them from Falkland!” (422). In the very next paragraph, Caleb pauses from his own act of writing to speculate on the exact contents of the “fatal trunk, from which all my misfortunes originated.” While he had earlier believed it to hold physical evidence of the murder of Tyrrel, he now believes that what it contained was Falkland’s own memoir: a “faithful narrative … written by Mr Falkland, and reserved in case of the worst, that, if by any unforeseen event his guilt should come to be fully disclosed, it might contribute to redeem the wreck of his reputation” (423). As the men become reflections of each other at the novel’s grim conclusion, so too do their narratives—one realized, the other existing only in Caleb’s imagination— combine as well: “If Falkland shall never be detected to the satisfaction of the world, such a narrative will probably never see the light. In that case this story of mine may amply, severely perhaps, supply its place” (423.).33 If Caleb’s memoir replaces the friendship he can never fully attain, the possibility of realizing that narrative’s promised objects—truth, justice, vindication, friendship—lies not in the novel’s characters but rather with its readers. In this way, the novel itself functions like a kind of Pandora’s Box—perhaps a better mythical underpinning than Godwin’s often-discussed allusion to Bluebeard34—releasing into the air the 33   See Jacqueline T. Miller, who sees such “replacement” as part of a “competition for verbal domination” between the two men (376). Miller views Caleb as a “man who never succeeds in becoming his own author” (372) and maintains that at the conclusion of the novel, Caleb “surrenders his claim to authorship. His narrative is no longer an assertion of self; his words no longer tell his own story” (379). By contrast, I contend that the failures— and consolations—of narrative are intricately bound to the failures of friendship. 34   Godwin’s Preface to the “Standard Novels” edition of Fleetwood (1832) describes the way in which the author’s composition process included “tracing a certain similitude between the story of Caleb Williams and the tale of Bluebeard”: “Falkland was my Bluebeard, who has perpetrated atrocious crimes, which if discovered, he might expect to have all the world roused to revenge against him. Caleb Williams was the wife, who in spite

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pestilence of “things as they are”—but leaving behind the “hope” that is male friendship. Throughout Caleb Williams, Godwin, even more than his close friend and colleague Holcroft, exposes the dangerous attractions of, and fatal flaws within, a vision of sentimental and privatized male friendship.

of warning, persisted in his attempts to discover the forbidden secret; and, when he had succeeded, struggled as fruitlessly to escape the consequences, as the wife of Bluebeard in washing the key of the ensanguined chamber, who, as often as she cleared the stain of blood from the one side, found it showing itself with frightful distinctness on the other” (cited in Caleb Williams 449). While critics have made much of the parallel’s “feminization” of Caleb, it is important to note that the wife in the story of Bluebeard does ultimately escape—if not the immediate “consequences” of her act, then at least her own murder. Bluebeard, we should recall, is himself killed by her two brothers, and she lives on in enjoyment of her husband’s immense wealth.

Chapter Six

The “Double Sense” of Honor: Revising Gendered Social Codes in Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray Shelley King

As a novelist, Amelia Opie has resisted easy categorization: neither quite so overtly radical as Wollstonecraft and Hays, nor so evidently conservative as Hannah More, her contemporary political affiliations are complex. Stylistically, however, she often seems anachronistic, endlessly employing elements long familiar to readers of the eighteenth-century novel: her tales are peopled with naive heroines and sentimental heroes, her plots driven by duels and seductions. Her careful deployment of these tired tropes marks her as a Romantic novelist, though her nuancing of familiar narrative elements is subtle, and at times Romantic innovation is in danger of being obscured by eighteenth-century derivation. Nowhere is this tendency more evident than in her use of the duel in Adeline Mowbray. That Opie’s novel features a duel is hardly extraordinary—so do dozens of eighteenth-century novels. Nor is the presence of a female protagonist over whose conduct the duel is fought a source of innovation. What does merit interest is her strategy of bringing these two staples of eighteenth-century fiction together in the context of the political discourses of 1790s Romanticism. Opie’s novel develops a clear but complex parallel between marriage and dueling as social institutions governing feminine and masculine honor respectively, and in so doing explores gendered social codes in ways that transform what might seem like eighteenth-century commonplaces into a Romantic political statement. Honor, by the close of the eighteenth century, was the subject of close scrutiny, not only in its private sense of the evaluation of individual character and conduct, but also in the broader public sense of its socio-political implications. To complicate matters further, the word “honor” itself had by this time come to be regarded as corrupt. Early in the century, opponents of dueling had been especially vocal in drawing attention to what they regarded as a false equation between honor and the duel. Robert South, in a sermon on “the mischievous Influence of Words and Names falsely applied” describes dueling as “an outragious, ungoverned, Insolence and Revenge, frequently passing by the name of Sense of Honour.” Hannah More echoes half a century of criticism when, in Strictures on the Modern System of    Bertrand Goldgar quotes South in his annotations to Fielding’s Covent Garden Journal. In No. 4, Fielding offers “A modern Glossary” which draws attention to the

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Female Education (1799), she digresses from her discussion of the importance to women of the “study of the precise meaning of words” to suggest that men, too, ought to consider carefully the importance of accurate meaning: “it might be well if young men, also before they entered on the world, were to be furnished with correct definitions of certain words, the use of which is become rather ambiguous”; they ought, she writes to “be instructed in the double sense of modern phraseology. For instance, they should be provided with a good definition of the word honour in the fashionable sense, showing what vices it includes, and what virtues it does not include ...” (vol.1:350a). “The double sense of modern phraseology” aptly expresses the ambiguity that had become associated with honor by the close of the eighteenth century, and in a key moment early in Adeline Mowbray, Opie plays on the contradictory meanings in contemporary usage in a scene that illustrates clearly the on-going cultural anxiety about the term expressed by More. The pivotal plot device of Opie’s novel is the duel between Frederic Glenmurray, Adeline’s philosopher-lover, and Sir Patrick O’Carrol, the Irish libertine intent on both marrying the mother and seducing the daughter; the event is precipitated by Adeline’s expression of her philosophical commitment to contemporary radical ideas concerning marriage and results in her decision to enact them with Glenmurray. Prompted by verbal ambiguity of the type pointed to by More, the initial conflict hinges on the phrase “the life of honour.” Adeline first reveals the full extent of her admiration for Godwinian social theories (and by extension Glenmurray himself) at a social gathering in her home in Bath: It so happened, also, that something was said by one of the party which led to the subject of marriage, and Adeline was resolved not to let so good an opportunity pass of proving to Glenmurray how sincerely she approved his doctrine on the subject. Immediately ... she began to declaim against marriage, as an institution at once absurd, unjust, and immoral, and to declare that she would never submit to so contemptible a form, or profane the sacred ties of love by so odious and unnecessary a ceremony. (23)

On hearing Adeline’s rejection of marriage as an institution, Sir Patrick suggests that she prefers “the life of honour” (24) to marriage. As Hannah More would have recognized, this phrase bears a “double sense.” In ideal terms, to live “the life of honour” is to conduct one’s self with virtue and responsibility: the phrase is often used this way and Adeline innocently asserts “the life of honour appears to me a very excellent name for the pure and honourable union which it is my wish to form” (29). In Sir Patrick’s fashionable aristocratic male usage, however, it is a euphemism for libertine sexual license. More importantly, the phrase links him closely to Lovelace, Samuel Richardson’s archetypal seducer, and to his debasement of terms of virtue by defining “gallantry” as “Fornication and Adultery,” and “Honour” as “Duelling” (36–7).    See Eberle for an excellent discussion of Sir Patrick’s role in the novel.

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literary descendants. Lovelace uses the phrase repeatedly, writing to Belford of his passion for Clarissa Harlowe in Letter XXXI of the first volume that “for this charming creature I think of foregoing the life of honour for the life of shackles” (144, emphasis Richardson’s), and later confiding: my principle design is but to bring virtue to a trial, that, if virtue, it need not be afraid of; and that the reward of it will be marriage (that is to say, if, after I have carried my point, I cannot prevail upon her to live with me the Life of Honour; for that thou knowest is the wish of my heart ... . (608)

In her imitation of Richardson, The History of Sir William Harrington, Anna Meades employs a similar vocabulary. When confronted by the aunt of his pregnant lover, Tom Craven asserts “Miss Freeman ... can’t, I am very certain, say that I deceived her upon a promise of marriage; for, if she speaks the truth, she must acknowledge, that love and honour was the plan we acted upon, scorning all ties” (vol. 1:47). For a man of the world, then, (and for readers of eighteenthcentury novels) there could be little doubt about the meaning of the phrase, and Sir Patrick’s use of it definitively places him in the long line of eighteenth-century libertines. For the sheltered and idealistic Adeline, unaware of the implications of “the life of honour,” the situation is rather different. To her understanding, formed in virtual isolation from the fashionable world, the phrase suggests a sexual attachment of the kind she had read about in Glenmurray’s treatises, pure in nature though outside of marriage. Significantly, just as Sir Patrick’s use of the phrase marks him as 

  Had Adeline been allowed to read fiction, she might, perhaps, have been aware of this second, sexually charged use of the phrase, but her inexperience with fashionable linguistic codes leads her to assume an idealized meaning. Later in the novel Opie suggests that the reading of fiction can help to educate both the sentiments and the morals of the woman reader. The narrator comments that Adeline’s understanding might have been improved by reading Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloise: “Had she read it, the sacrifice which the guilty but penitent Julia makes to filial affection, and the respectable light in which the institution of marriage is held up to view, would have strengthened, no doubt, Adeline’s resolution to obey her mother, and give up Glenmurray” (56). And given Richardson’s use of the phrase “Life of Honour” to describe Lovelace’s proposition for Clarissa, having read that novel might have helped Adeline to decode Sir Patrick’s meaning. By 1812, Opie had become somewhat more conservative in her views, and in her novel Temper addresses specifically the question of Clarissa as moral reading for young girls. Mr Egerton, the moral mentor to the young Emma, describes Clarissa as “a book which many years hence I wish you to read” (III: 111), and the discussion is taken up several pages later when Emma’s grandmother and guardian, Mrs Castlemain, points out to him that the novel is “a book ... most French mothers think it right, as one of the first sources of moral instruction, to put into the hands of their daughters at seventeen” (118). Egerton comments that “As this otherwise admirable work contains very improper descriptions, and scenes of infamy with which it must sully a young woman’s mind to be acquainted, I must think that putting

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consciously derivative, Adeline’s interpretation marks her as a new type, linked to contemporary novels associated with modern philosophy. When Adeline further develops the virtue of her proposed sexual liaison by discriminating it from simple promiscuity through arguing that “the individuality of an attachment constitutes its chastity” (25), she in turn uses a phrase that defines her own contemporary affiliations, placing her clearly in line with radical arguments advocating a redefinition of feminine honor. Mary Hays had used virtually the same wording nine years earlier in her controversial Memoirs of Emma Courtney. Emma writes to Augustus Harley: my confidence in your honour and integrity, my tenderness for you, added to my wish of contributing to your happiness, would effect, what no lesser considerations could have effected—would triumph, not over my principles, (for the individuality of an affection constitutes its chastity) but over my prudence ... you cannot suppose that a transient engagement would satisfy a mind like mine.

That the phrase possessed particular resonance is suggested through its subsequent use by Hannah More. When she urges her readers not to confuse worldly definitions of honor with genuine virtue, she invokes recent discussions of chastity, warning her readers against the works of such authors as Rousseau “who strikes at the very root of honour, by elevating a crime into a principle” and other “recent popular publications,” that “teach that chastity is only individual attachment; that no duty exists that is not prompted by feeling; that impulse is the mainspring of virtuous actions, while laws and religion are only unjust restraints” (vol. 1:318 a-b). More invokes Hays through the specific phrase “individual attachment,” as well as Wollstonecraft, who argues more generally in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman that “neither religion nor virtue, when they reside in the heart, require such a puerile attention to mere ceremonies, because behaviour must, upon the whole, be proper, when the motive is pure”. Thus in the prelude to the duel Opie brings together a stock eighteenth-century phrase associated with libertine this book in the hands of a girl, by way of improving her morals, is like giving a person a wound in order to bestow on them a plaister. Still, I consider the Clarissa of Richardson as a national boast ... ” (119). By 1812 fictions about the duplicity of libertines were regarded as more corrupting than cautionary.    It should be noted here that because her character has been shaped by her reading in isolation, Adeline may be seen as allied to figures like Lennox’s female quixote Arabella; however, Adeline’s reading of quasi-Godwinian philosophy rather than romances makes her the creature of a very specific political moment.    Ed. Marilyn L. Brooks, Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2000, 154, emphasis Hays’s. All further citations in this essay are to this edition.    Eds D.L. MacDonald and Kathleen Scherf, Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1997, 268. All further citations in this essay are to this edition.

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masculinity and the assault on feminine virtue with a phrase readily recognizable from contemporary discourse suggesting a reconfiguration of chastity, setting the stage for her examination of the collision of old values and new in the cultural construction of gendered honor codes. When Opie tackles the idea of honor, she engages with a subject that had preoccupied Britain for well over a century, and that has occupied cultural critics for almost as long. In rehearsing it once more in 1805, Opie may simply have been repeating a long-established literary pattern, but I believe there is more at stake. As Cynthia Herrup reminds us, honor was far from being a single unified concept in this period: rather, it was multiple and varied, inflected by both class and gender considerations (Herrup 137–8). Opie’s examination of honor, focusing pointedly on a comparison of masculine and feminine codes, gestures also to the cumulative gendering of eighteenth-century culture outlined by Thomas Laqueur. As Michael McKeon argues, drawing on the work of Laqueur, a new emphasis on sexual difference was central to understanding the changes taking place in a variety of key concepts: only with the modern system of sexuality—of sex and gender difference—is “gender” sufficiently separated out as a category from “sex” (from that which it defines itself against) to take on the familiar, differential function it performs in modern culture. This is a double function. In the modern system of sexuality, the category “gender” works to discriminate not only socialized behaviour from natural fact, but also masculinity from femininity (“Historicizing Patriarchy” 301).

For the purposes of our discussion, two critical factors emerge from this change: first, as McKeon expresses it, “the status assumption that birth automatically dictates worth was replaced by a class conviction that birth and worth are independent variables. The standard of class criticizes the biological essentialism that consists in locating personal value in the bloodline, demystifying the ‘naturalness’ of aristocratic honour as an arbitrary social construction” (303). Second, as McKeon points out, “‘honour’ became, over the course of the seventeenth century, a common term for designating female chastity in its moralized enlargement” (310). As the personal virtue previously associated with aristocratic masculinity was increasingly eroded, he writes, the inner feminine virtue of chastity became a “radical internalization of male honour” (313). McKeon places this shift in the context of the replacement of aristocratic concepts of worth based on blood by modern notions of value based in ability and conduct. Yet concomitant with the emphasis on the chastity of women as internalized honor was the continued deployment of the cultural markers of masculine honor found in the duel, which was undergoing its own evolution, as the emergence of a culture of civility effected a withdrawal from what was increasingly seen as an outmoded aristocratic model of masculine virtue. Thus when Opie foregrounds honor in 1805, she does so in the context not just of past literary uses, but also of an evolving assignment of specifically gendered value both to broad concepts and to specific social institutions.

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The social structures governing these gendered ideas of honor were, of course, widely recognized: the feminine virtue of chastity was managed through the institution of marriage, which authorized a socially sanctioned sexuality affirming the physical integrity that had come to constitute a woman’s honor, otherwise preserved through virginity; the masculine virtue of courage was governed by an equally strict set of social codes embodied in the duel, in which willingness to engage in combat served as the physical guarantee of a man’s honor. In Letters Addressed to a Young Lady, Jane West writes of “chastity” and its “male concomitant courage,” affirming that the quality defining female honor was sexual purity, while male honor was defined by personal valor (3: 146). Yet it is equally clear that by the latter part of the century both institutions, the duel and marriage, as well as their defining characteristics of male courage and female chastity, had become the subject of public debate. Through a series of parallel discussions, Opie establishes a comparison of masculine and feminine codes of honorable behavior, and in so doing suggests that while the revision of male honor and the duel might be attainable, the revision of female honor posed a far more complex social challenge, one that offered both positive and negative implications for women. Re-imagining Masculine Honor: Courage and the Duel It might be argued that to offer a critique of dueling in 1805 is both belated and derivative: surely Samuel Richardson had dealt with the issue definitively in Sir Charles Grandison half a century earlier? Certainly Richardson rehearses the key elements of early critiques of dueling in the combination of civility and Christian faith that characterize Sir Charles’s famous objections to the practice. But look closely at Opie’s duel, and you will find that the terms of the objections differ significantly, and in ways that reveal the novel’s Romantic affiliations. In the first instance, Glenmurray’s bases for rejecting dueling are Godwinian rather than Grandisonian, founded, as we shall see, on rational rather than religious grounds— indeed, Opie goes to considerable lengths to insist on Glenmurray’s scepticism.    The connection is culturally persistent: in 1984 Angela Carter’s redoubtable heroine Fevvers must still ask “Wherein does a woman’s honour reside, old chap? In her vagina or in her spirit?” (230).    When Glenmurray first anticipates receiving a challenge from Sir Patrick, we are told of his conflicted feelings. “To no purpose did he peruse and reperuse nearly the whole of his own book against duelling; he had few religious restraints to make him resolve on declining a challenge, and he felt moral ones of little avail ...” (31). When Adeline later prays for Glenmurray’s recovery, he comments “Sweet enthusiast! ... so, thus, when you are distressed, you seek consolation,” to which she responds “Sceptic, wouldst thou wish to deprive me of it?” (141). Only on his deathbed does he recover a glimmering of faith, which Adeline meets with pleasure: “O Glenmurray! there has been one thing only wanting to the completion of our union; and that was, that we should worship together” (156).

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In the second instance, and perhaps more importantly, if McKeon is correct in his assertion that the eighteenth century struggled with gendered codes of honor, Opie’s duel offers a prime site for the expression and negotiation of that anxiety, focusing in its treatment of the duel as much on issues of masculine identity as on those of social position and religious belief. Like honor more generally, the duel has been the subject of considerable critical interest. Recent scholarship has done an excellent job of tracing the complexities of the relationship of the duel to changing social and economic conditions. Most recently, Markku Peltonen’s splendid The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour offers an exhaustive survey of the cultural critique of dueling from Mandeville through to the nineteenth century. Peltonen opens his discussion by asserting that “duelling was closely entangled with the larger debate about civility and politeness in early modern England” (1). His study offers an elegant analysis of “the intellectual context, circumstances and conditions which created, spread and maintained the ideology of duelling in early modern England, and the various ways in which its opponents sought to undermine it” (2). But while Peltonen’s discussion deftly demonstrates the intricacies of political ideology affecting arguments concerning the nature of the duel, it downplays the gendered associations of honor associated with the practice. Similarly, in “The code of honour and its critics: the opposition to duelling in England, 1700–1850,” Donna Andrew argues, following E.P. Thompson, that eighteenth-century critiques of dueling were a challenge to the cultural hegemony of the aristocracy, and that ultimately commerce was to be credited with improving civility, not codes of honor. She comments that early criticism of the custom was ineffective, and that “major re-evaluation did not occur until the opponents of duelling realized that the practice would not disappear until the vision of society on which it was based could be overthrown and superseded” (410). While Andrew’s “vision” refers to the overthrow of a socio-economic system, it would also be accurate to note that change would require cultural constructions of masculinity based on courage to be superseded as well in order to effect a change in dueling culture. The discourse of the duel did indeed negotiate social status and civil reputation, but it also contributed to masculine identity. To find an account of dueling that addresses the issue of its relationship to masculinity head-on, we must turn to Ute Frevert’s Men of Honour: A Social and Cultural History of the Duel, in which the author notes, Concepts such as ‘masculinity,’ ‘male consciousness,’ ‘male pride,’ ‘male worth,’ ‘male dignity,’ and ‘male sanctity’ were always to the fore whenever it was a matter of delineating the identity and motives of duellists ... . the true purpose of duelling was to uphold ‘male dignity’ by demonstrating ‘masculinity, that is to say, the awareness of personal courage.’ (171)



 

See for example Baldick, Kiernan, Frevert, and Kelly.

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Frevert’s emphasis on the prime role of the duel in confirming masculine sexual identity offers a powerful rationale for the persistence of the practice well into the nineteenth century.10 It also explains why opponents of the duel are uniformly clear that the most effective means of extinguishing it is to delink masculine sexual and social identity from the institution which the fashionable world saw as central to its determination. In order to modify the institution governing masculine honor, it would be necessary to redefine the characteristic that governed it: courage. A brief survey of anti-dueling commentaries written in the two decades preceding Opie’s novel reveals that writers from both ends of the political spectrum recognized the need to assure men that their masculinity would be threatened neither by refusing a challenge nor failing to issue one. Richardson had managed this in a rather oldfashioned way, in keeping with one strand of aristocratic gentlemanly honor: as Mark Kinkead-Weekes points out, Richardson retains his protagonist’s heroic status by ensuring that despite his aversion to the practice, “Not only will Sir Charles defend himself with the sword against the sword, but he will meet physical insult with physical chastisement. So the hero is allowed to make it clear, with some emphasis, that though he is forbidden to kill, or engage in premeditated violence, he cannot be attacked or insulted with impunity” (307). Richardson articulates the idea through Sir Charles: “Something must be done by a man who refuses a challenge, to let a challenger see (such is the world, such is the custom) that he has better motives than Fear, for his refusal” (1:372). Grandison’s courage is preserved by marks of a martial prowess in keeping with his gentlemanly status. Later writers, however, work more explicitly to redefine what constituted manly courage. Thus Hannah More points out that, “it requires more real courage to refuse a challenge than to accept one” (1:317a), while Richard Hey holds up to admiration the man who: has not only the Courage requisite for fighting, but, if no other objection appeared than the mere Danger of himself losing his Life or suffering Pain from a Wound, would prefer it without hesitation to the consequences of refusing a Challenge: and yet, from a full conviction of the absurdity and guilt of Duels, he has the Courage to refuse. (47–8)

Charles Moore, writing from the perspective of Christian faith, ventures into even more radical revision in his treatise on dueling, part of A Full Inquiry into the

10

  Even in the early twentieth century, the dueling or bragging scar (the “renomier schmiss”) remained popular with upperclass Austrians and Germans as a badge not only of courage but of rank. So important was this mark that male students unwilling to face the duel itself were said to cut themselves deliberately with razors and irritate the wound to ensure a visible mark of their place and their desirability.

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Subject of Suicide (1790).11 While Hannah More and Hey still celebrate masculine courage but redefine it as the courage to refuse a challenge rather than the courage to meet one, Moore questions the very value of courage itself: Or even granting (what however is not always to be granted) that personal courage was wanting in a refusal of a duel, yet though bravery be a “necessary and professional” quality in the military order, when exerted against the public enemy, why the idea is from thence to be conveyed into the walks of private life and peaceable subjects, as the test of “their” honourable conduct, is not perhaps so easy to account for, and still less to justify. (262)

By discriminating between the courage requisite for a specific military profession and the qualities necessary to the private life of the citizen, Moore endorses the emergence of a civil society moving ever further from violent aristocratic values. As Moore explains, For when personal courage is not only deemed an excellent ingredient in the composition of honour, but in exclusion of every thing else is made to constitute its very essence, a part is certainly substituted for the whole. For why are the good qualities of the heart, which shine forth in the general conduct, to make no necessary part of the definition of a man of honour? (262)

Thus for Moore, even the man who might legitimately be charged with cowardice ought not to forfeit his social standing or reputation, because other “good qualities of the heart” might offer a better measure of male honor than the courage to participate in a duel. The opponent of dueling most immediately relevant to Opie’s novel, however, is William Godwin, the writer who served as a model for the modern philosopher Glenmurray, and whose arguments concerning reputation and the duel conform to rational rather than religious objections. Reviewers of Adeline Mowbray were clear on the connection to Godwin’s works: The General Review comments “A first-rate Theorist in the unqualified application of general deductions to the particular conduct of life, gave the world, a few years ago, his work on political justice, which shone 11   Moore’s objections to the duel as a species of both murder and suicide derive from a long tradition of Christian pacifism. Both Opie’s pacifism and her Christian faith predate her acceptance into the Society of Friends in 1825, and elsewhere in her works she specifically connects the rejection of duelling with religion: in Valentine’s Eve (1816), Lord Shirley reflects on the devout Catherine’s influence, remembering that “He had even bitterly repented having been led by an intemperate wish of revenge into the crime of duelling,—a crime, of the magnitude of which, in a professed Christian and sincere believer, she and she alone had taught him to be sensible’ (3:128), while in Illustrations of Lying in All Its Branches (1825), she refers to the duel as “that savage heathenish disgrace to a civilized and christian land” (2:83).

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for a moment, was taken up with ardour by a certain class ...” (22). Glenmurray’s treatise, as represented in Adeline’s comments, bears a remarkable resemblance to the appendix on dueling found in Godwin’s Political Justice and parts of the essay on personal reputation in The Enquirer.12 From his first appearance in the novel, Glenmurray is drawn as the perfect type of Godwin’s misunderstood moral philosopher. In “Of Personal Reputation,” Essay VII of The Enquirer, Godwin writes: It may be useful to enumerate some of those circumstances, by one or other of which, men in some respects of uncommon moral endowments, are usually found to forfeit, in the judgement of the mass of mankind, the most ordinary degree of moral reputation. First, men of uncommon moral endowments, may be expected to be men of uncommon intellectual powers. But such men, in some points at least, will be apt to think for themselves, to meditate profoundly, and, by an almost necessary consequence, to embrace some opinions that are not embraced by the multitude.13

This is certainly the case with Glenmurray, as the narrator comments: “But, alas! neither the blamelessness of his life, nor even his active virtue, assisted by the most courteous manners, were deemed sufficient to counteract the mischievous tendency of his works; or rather, it was supposed impossible that his life could be blameless and his seeming virtues sincere” (21). As one of Godwin’s “men of uncommon moral endowments,” Glenmurray has arrived at opinions other than those held by the fashionable world and thus is regarded with suspicion, relegated to the fringes of Bath society. The challenge, according to Godwin, was for such advanced thinkers to transcend their desire for public acceptance through distinguishing between reputation or apparent honor, based on the opinion of a fallible world, and intrinsic or real honor, based on the conviction of personal conscience: the man, whose opinions are the result of his own reflection, will often have an individual mode of acting, as well as of thinking. The cheapest plan for acquiring reputation will be found to consist in conforming ourselves to the prejudices of 12   It should perhaps be pointed out that in addition to being an intimate acquaintance and one familiar with Godwin’s writings in the 1790s, Opie purchased a copy of Political Justice in 1804, the year in which she completed Adeline Mowbray. Though far from being proof positive, the purchase does suggest the possibility of a very direct relationship between Glenmurray’s fictional politics and Godwin’s treatise. See Archives of the House of Longman. 13   Ed. Pamela Clemit, The Political and Philosophical Writings, London: Pickering, 1993, 5:193. All further citations in this essay are to this edition.

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others. He that acts in unison with other men’s sentiments and expectations, will be easily understood; they will find nothing ambiguous in the interpretation of his conduct, and nothing revolting in its tenour. The mass of mankind do not love, in the practise of human affairs at least, any thing that surprises or puzzles them. They are partial to things trite and plain; and no man is in more danger of missing their applause, than the man who takes extraordinary pains to deserve it. (5: 193)

The modern philosopher, in effect, must practice a special brand of courage— the kind required to “puzzle and surprize” social prejudices without regard to reputation or praise. Such general comments concerning reputation and personal honor or courage are given specific application in Book Two (Principles of Society) of Political Justice in Godwin’s Appendix “Of Duelling” which makes clear the necessity of rationally rejecting participation in the duel solely to preserve reputation, and of possessing the courage to act according to one’s inner convictions concerning true virtue: Men of the best understanding who lend [dueling] their sanction, are unwillingly induced to do so, and engage in single combat merely that their reputation may sustain no slander. Which of these two actions is the truest test of courage: the engaging in a practice which our judgement disapproves, because we cannot submit to the consequences of following that judgement; or the doing what we believe to be right, and chearfully encountering all the consequences that may be annexed to the practice of virtue? ... If there be any meaning in courage, its first ingredient must be the daring to speak the truth at all times, to all persons, and in every possible situation.14

Given this passionately ideal model, it becomes easier to understand Adeline’s disappointment when she learns that contrary to his published principles, Glenmurray has participated in a duel with Sir Patrick—in deciding to preserve his public reputation rather than his personal integrity, Glenmurray abandons the purity of his ideology and instead seeks the favor of a world whose opinion he has taught her to despise. Though possessed of the courage to speak the truth of his convictions through the publication of his treatises, Glenmurray has yet to develop the courage to act accordingly, in part because his growing attraction to Adeline leads him to believe that he must preserve his masculinity intact. When Adeline upbraids him following his injury in the duel with Sir Patrick, he first responds “But I should have been called a coward had I declined the challenge; and though 14   Ed. Mark Philp, The Political and Philosophical Writings, London: Pickering, 1993, 3:57–8. All further citations in this essay are to this edition.

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I can bear the world’s hatred, I could not its contempt” (36). Only when Adeline dismisses this as “the silly jargon of a man of the world,” does he reveal the issue at the heart of his acceptance of the challenge: “Alas, I am a man, not a philosopher, Adeline!” (36). Though in one sense he may mean that he is merely human in being provoked by Sir Patrick’s words, underlying the statement is surely a sense of the threat posed to his manhood by refusing a challenge. Opie presents the duel in this novel as a struggle between two versions of masculinity: on the one hand, Sir Patrick enacts a masculinity based on an earlier, unitary version of sex in which the female body (and by extension women) is seen as an inferior, subordinate version of the male; on the other, Glenmurray performs a masculinity more open to recognizing intrinsic value in woman. Sir Patrick is carefully drawn to emphasize the role of both class and gender identity in character: he impresses Adeline, for example, with his charitable works for the poor, acting as befits his station. Still, we learn from his own lips the value he sets on his male body—“I made up to the old duchess, but she nibbled the bait—deeming my clean inches (six feet one without shoes) well worth her dirty acres” (32)—and the narrator is careful to point out that his ideas of honor are gender specific: “In his dealings with men, sir Patrick was a man of honour; in his dealings with women, completely the reverse; he considered them as a race of subordinate beings, formed for the service and amusement of men; and that if, like horses, they were well lodged, fed, and kept clean, they had no right to complain” (26). Despite his treatment of both Adeline and her mother, he deals fairly with his opponent throughout the course of the duel, refusing to bring a second as required by protocol because he believes the friendless Glenmurray will be unable to procure one, and offering up his carriage to his wounded opponent following the contest. Opie shows him not as the complete villain, but rather as a man flawed in his perceptions of sexual distinction. Glenmurray’s embodied masculinity is more subtle. Already suffering from the effects of consumption when he first encounters Adeline, he is presented as handsome and certainly holds a physical attraction for her: “‘So then he is young and handsome too!’ said she mentally: ‘it is a pity he looks so ill,’ added she sighing: but the sigh was caused rather by his looking so well—though Adeline was not conscious of it” (23). Opie is careful to detail the blushes and sighs of physiological attraction, but nevertheless it is clear that Glenmurray’s fascination resides more in the qualities of his mind, a mind that regards women and their bodies with reverence and respect. Notice, too, that Glenmurray is not to be mistaken for a mid-century ‘man of feeling’—Opie’s characterization of Dr. Norberry as a man of extreme sensibility acts as a foil for Glenmurray’s sensitivity. Norberry is often a somewhat comic figure, with his ready tears whenever he encounters a moving situation. Glenmurray’s masculinity is a combination of reason and sensibility, embodied in what is clearly for Adeline an erotically charged physical being. Glenmurray is afforded another opportunity to test his masculine courage, to make his theory and his practice conform midway through the novel. He and Adeline, by now living abroad and engaged in a mutually satisfying though

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unmarried relationship, encounter Major Douglas, an old friend of Glenmurray’s. When he learns subsequently the nature of their relationship, the Major acts to avenge the insult offered to the virtuous women in his own household by their acquaintance with Adeline, writing to Glenmurray “For your conduct in introducing your mistress to my wife and sister, I demand immediate satisfaction” (80). In this instance, however, Glenmurray finds the courage to make his practice conform to his principles. He goes to visit his friend to discuss the issue and offers his reasons for refusing to fight: “hear my firm resolve. Let the consequences to my reputation be what they may, let your insults be what they may, I will not accept your challenge; I will not expose Adeline to the risk of being left without a protector in a foreign land, and probably without one in her own” (81). His argument from domestic responsibility echoes Charles Moore’s insistence that the true man of honor was the man who placed the ties of affection and personal commitment ahead of his public reputation. Godwin similarly insists that rational discussion is the only means of settling such disputes in civil society: “He, who comes forward with no idea but that of rectitude, and who expresses, with the simplicity and firmness which conviction never fails to inspire, the views with which he is impressed, is in no danger of being mistaken for a coward” (3:58). Sir Charles Grandison relied on his skill with a sword to vouch for his courage: Godwin requires only simplicity and firmness. The result of Glenmurray’s conversation is reconciliation rather than social ostracism, a demonstration that within a community of reasonable citizens, honor could be well satisfied with rational discussion rather than swords or pistols, and Glenmurray continues to be received within his community. Indeed, so persuasive are his explanations, and so honorable are Douglas’s female companions, that even though they disagree with Adeline’s philosophical opposition to marriage, they are convinced of her real rather than her apparent honor, and she is able to enjoy the company of virtuous women she so craves. Glenmurray’s development offers a model of hope for the renovation of social institutions reflecting the values of 1790s reformers, a glimpse of the possibility of a new masculinity based on reason, domestic affection and civil responsibility rather than physical courage and martial ability, of an honor established through words rather than weapons. This new man is short-lived, however, in the world as it is, and after Glenmurray succumbs to consumption, Adeline must face contemporary masculinity in the shape of Berrendale, Glenmurray’s cousin, to whose care he has consigned her. In its treatment of dueling, Adeline Mowbray represents the potential for redefining masculine honor according to the dictates of modern philosophy. This optimism is, however, balanced by the novel’s skepticism concerning equivalent changes in the understanding of feminine honor. Although exceptional women like Douglas’s wife and sister possess the ability to recognize in Adeline the female equivalent of Godwin’s man of “uncommon moral endowments,” society in general is unprepared to distinguish between the woman of loose morals who transgresses sexual codes of honor and the woman who consciously challenges those codes from the perspective of philosophical objection.

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Revising Feminine Honor: Chastity and Marriage Opie’s treatment of dueling offers an instance of the eighteenth-century revisited and revised, and serves as both a reminder of the socially destructive qualities of the traditional construction of masculine honor through its evocation of the familiar tropes of eighteenth-century fiction, and an exploration of the potential for a new masculinity rooted in the social changes advocated by modern philosophers. Her treatment of marriage traverses parallel territory as it juxtaposes a theoretical rethinking of the principles of feminine honor with the pragmatic challenges of enacting social change; Opie’s treatment of feminine honor, rather than looking back to the eighteenth century, points forward to the nineteenth-century novel by modifying the literary strategies of the partisan fiction of the 1790s. The defining characteristics of what have come to be known as Jacobin and anti-Jacobin novels have been delineated by Gary Kelly and Matthew O. Grenby, two critics who make clear that the highly politicized fiction produced during this short period made a significant contribution to the development of the novel as a genre. In The English Jacobin Novel 1780–1805, Kelly establishes two key features of the fiction produced by the proponents of modern philosophy: “The English Jacobin novels were doubly ‘philosophical’ ...: they contained many dialogues, monologues, and ‘perorations’ on serious and weighty topics; and they were ‘philosophical’ in structure and technique”—that is, “they tried to show how their characters had been formed by circumstances, and how character and incident were linked together like the parts of a syllogism” (16). Opie’s novel certainly fulfills these criteria: Adeline’s character is carefully constructed to reflect the specific circumstances of her experience, especially in her combination of domestic virtues learned from an attentive grandmother and political views acquired from a mother steeped in modern philosophy; throughout the novel Adeline offers lengthy philosophical reflections on the state of society and moral issues, both internally and in conversation with others. At the outset of the novel, she articulates values congruent with those expressed by Wollstonecraft and Godwin, demonstrating an enthusiasm for radical ideas much like that of the young Amelia Alderson. Deeply immersed in the Godwin-Wollstonecraft circle before her marriage to John Opie, the author knew well not only the theories but the difficulties of putting them into social practice.15 Adeline thus embodies the ardent, if somewhat optimistic, 15   Correspondence from the 1790s reveals the depth of Amelia Alderson’s engagement with Godwin’s ideas. She makes clear her awareness of a serious gap between Godwin’s political ideas and his personal practice. Significantly, her remonstrances arise over the treatment of a young woman:

Two days ago I received a letter informing me that Mr Holcroft had turned his eldest daughter out of doors, & Mr Godwin was the instigator of this cruel action. That Miss H & her father have quarreled is true in all probability ... but that you advised such a measure as her expulsion from the paternal roof I cannot believe

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idealism of early enthusiasts of radical or Jacobin politics of the 1790s. Yet in the end, Adeline advocates marriage as “a wise and ... sacred institution” (238); this ultimate rejection of her earlier beliefs leads most critics to conclude that Adeline Mowbray is not a Jacobin novel. Matthew Grenby follows A.D. Harvey in considering Adeline Mowbray rather as anti-revolutionary, writing: The novel itself returned a decisive verdict on both counts [the practicalities and morality of cohabitation and child-rearing], however tentative its author may have been about these conclusions. Such behaviour was iniquitous, Opie has Adeline reveal as part of her lengthy recantation, because ‘I am convinced that if the ties of marriage were dissolved, or it were no longer judged to infamous act in contempt of them, unbridled licentiousness would soon be general practice.’ 16

Yet despite this late advocacy of marriage, the novel lacks most of the key features central to the anti-Jacobin novel as described by Grenby. For example, he argues that anti-Jacobin writers felt that as a genre “the novel was evidently perfectly suited to presuming that new philosophy, Wollstonecraft included, would be merely a mask for traditional modes of sexual predation, the stock in trade, as Harvey rightly says, of the eighteenth-century novel (91). Unlike the fully antiJacobin The Infernal Quixote of Charles Lucas, Adeline Mowbray does not depict Godwinian values as salacious: Frederic Glenmurray is no Marauder, consciously employing the rhetoric of reason to seduce the unwary—that role is left to Sir Patrick as the representative of a decayed aristocratic culture. Opie’s protagonists are noteworthy not for their viciousness, but rather for their innocence or naiveté. And as Eleanor Ty points out, “Adeline may be naive and too literal in her eagerness to practise what Glenmurray has preached, but she is not depicted as a ‘prostitute,’ a word that the anti-Jacobins associated with Wollstonecraft” (Empowering 153). Grenby further notes, “Anti-Jacobins deplored any semblance of debate in fiction ... because it appears to me that judging you & Mr H by your own pure system, expelling even a criminal child from a society likely to amend her errors, is an act so contrary to Justice that it can only be excused by supposing it to have been the result of one of those impulses to anger to which we are all liable in our turn ... . And shall you preach what you do not practice? Shall the pupil illustrate while the preceptor violates his own rules? (A.A. to William Godwin, 5 Feb. [1796]; Oxford, Bodleian L, [Abinger] Dep.b.210/6)

This admonition sets the “pure system” and “Justice” of Holcroft and Godwin against the violation of those principles in their conduct towards Miss Holcroft. How could any young woman hope for understanding and rational treatment if the two leading proponents of radical philosophy in the nation still react with conservative values and measures? Like the young Adeline, Amelia Alderson argues that if abstract theory is to be respected, it must be practiced by its advocates. 16   Anti-Jacobin 89. All further citations in this essay are to this work.

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... . they felt that debate, questioning, and ratiocination, were the very tools of the Jacobins and the hallmarks of their new philosophy” (Historicizing 79). Yet as noted above, Adeline Mowbray is marked throughout by characters engaging in precisely this type of philosophical argument. If we read more closely, we find that Adeline Mowbray offers a complexity of both structure and argument that points beyond the partisan fiction of the 1790s to what the novel would become in the later nineteenth century. Grenby argues persuasively for the significance of these minor novels to the history of the genre, as their emphasis on the intersection of political ideology and individual experience prefigured the course the novel would take in the coming century. “The most significant legacy of anti-Jacobin fiction” he writes, was “based on the success of those conservative novelists who had imbued fiction with a sense of purpose acceptable to even the form’s sternest critics” (208). In its attempt to move beyond simplistic political partisanship in its discussion of issues of chastity and marriage, Opie’s novel offers a glimpse of what the novel was to become. Fable XV of Edward Moore’s Fables for the Female Sex (1744) opens, “’Tis said of widow, maid, and wife, / That Honour is a woman’s life” (1–2).17 The poem explores the permanent damage to a woman’s reputation brought by any lapse from chaste virtue: Polluted streams again are pure, And deepest wounds admit a cure: But woman no redemption knows; The wounds of Honour never close! (11–14)

The lines summarize neatly the centrality of chastity to feminine honor in eighteenth-century British culture. The localization of all female honor in chastity reflects its complex place in the social structure, where it functions both politically in ensuring the transmission of property in a patrilineal culture and religiously as an expression of the sexual continence encouraged by the Bible.18 Michael 17   I am indebted to the members of that amazing resource for scholars of the eighteenth century, Eighteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Discussion or C18-L. The contributions of Rictor Norton, Julie Schaffer, Roseanne Carrara, and McIntosh Byrd in July 2001 not only brought this poem to my attention, but worked through the knotty question of attribution, since the poem also appears under the authorship of Henry Brooke as “The Female Seducers” from Poetical Works (1792) in Chadwyk-Healey’s Literature Online, http://lion. chadwyck.com. 18   McKeon, in The Origins of the English Novel, summarizes the key features of early modern chastity for women:

In the English kinship system, one of the most important kinds of relation between men is the transmission of property by the direct descent of patrilineage. For this reason the English system stresses, as strongly as the prohibition of incest, the injunction of female chastity... .This injunction was overdetermined:

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McKeon argues that by the late seventeenth century, female chastity had become the nexus of wide-ranging social changes as Britain moved from a culture in which honor was equated with virtue dependent upon birth to one in which it was equated with individual character: “For as the progressive critique forces the detachment of ‘honor as virtue’ from male aristocratic honor, it simultaneously encourages its relocation within not only commoners but women, who increasingly come to be viewed not just as the conduit but as the repository of an honor that has been alienated from a corrupt male aristocracy” (Origins, 158). While there were, of course, some voices raised against this wholesale narrowing of all feminine virtue to the one point of sexual chastity, the association was widely accepted.19 In later years Opie herself would articulate a more conservative stance on the issue: in Temper, or Domestic Scenes (1812), for example, her moral protagonist Mr Egerton comments, “Besides, I am much of Dr. Johnson’s opinion. ‘Chastity,’ says that excellent moralist, ‘is the great principle which a woman is taught. When she has given up that principle, she has given up every notion of female honour and virtue, which are all included in chastity’” (3: 138). But in Adeline Mowbray her exploration of the relationship between ideas of chastity and the practice of marriage attests to a continued engagement with the radical philosophies that underpinned Romanticism in the 1790s. Like the duel, marriage as an institution of gendered virtue was the subject of serious re-evaluation among radical thinkers led by Godwin. Yet if Opie’s engagement with the duel initially seems outdated to modern readers, her engagement with Godwinian ideas of marriage was regarded as equally passé by contemporary reviewers, who seemed at a loss to decide whether the novel was a cautionary tale concerning the dangers of Godwinian co-habitation20 or a celebration of its felicities. The novel was criticized for raising the spectre of English radical, Jacobin politics in 1805 after its successful repression by Pitt’s government during the late 1790s. The British Critic, a staunchly conservative review founded to counteract more liberal periodicals, complained that radical thought “seems in our opinion to be altogether needlessly revived in the character patrilineal culture required chastity so as to ensure the direct transmission of the inheritance; Christian culture required it not only as a moral virtue but also to encourage, over all competing kinship ties, the “spiritual” kinship of the Church and its enrichment as alternative beneficiaries. As a contemporary critic of Samuel Richardson put it, there are two species of chastity, “political” and “religious.” (157) 19   McKeon cites Samuel Butler’s expostulation: “virtue, as it is commonly understood in women, signify’s nothing else but Chastity, and Honor only not being whores: as if that Sex were capable of no other morality, but a mere negative Continence” (Historicizing 158). 20   The Monthly Review; or Literary Journal notes “It is the intention of this work to portray the lamentable consequences, which would result from an adoption of some lax principles relative to a rejection of matrimonial forms, which have been inculcated by certain modern writers” (321).

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of Glenmurray, who, though avowedly without religion, or any fixed principles, except those of ‘love and honour,’ is yet represented as possessed of every virtue and accomplishment” (625). More troubling to some reviewers was the novel’s apparent critique of marriage. Opie provides a second telling structural chiasmus, for if Glenmurray is afforded the opportunity to move from abiding by the old dueling code of masculinity to successfully rejecting it on rational grounds, Adeline conversely moves from the rational rejection of the code of marriage to a dramatically failed acceptance of it. The “morality” of the story, in the words of the same reviewer is “materially injured ... by the comparative happiness of Adeline’s first union, which was illegal, with the misery of her second, which was sanctioned by human and divine authority” (626). The novel is unsettling precisely because it unmasks the hypocrisies underlying the social construction of feminine honor which could dictate that marriage to an abusive libertine was more “virtuous” than unwed co-habitation with a man possessed of true honor. Like Political Justice, Adeline Mowbray treats the chastity or sexual honor of the individual woman as separate and distinct from marriage. While this is certainly clear in the early phases of the novel, I would argue that the lines prefacing Adeline’s retraction are also designed to decouple chastity and marriage at this crucial juncture: It has been said, that, were we free to dissolve at will a connection formed by love, we should not wish to do it, as constancy is natural to us, and there is in all of us a tendency to form an exclusive attachment. But though I believe, from my own experience, that the few are capable of unforced constancy, and could love for life one dear and honoured object, still I believe that the many are given to the love of change;—that, in men especially, a new object can excite new passion. ... (237–8)

Paraphrasing Glenmurray’s Godwinian arguments,21 Adeline refuses to deny the possibility of an ideal heterosexual bond, conceding rather that as society was currently constructed, such relationships were rare. This continued belief in her own honor parallels Godwin’s frank account of Wollstonecraft’s life, Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which offers an important contemporary assessment of real and apparent chastity, asserting that while Wollstonecraft might have eschewed marriage in her relationship with Imlay, she nevertheless possessed a chaste and virtuous soul:

  In Political Justice, Godwin comments “It is a question of some moment whether the intercourse of the sexes, in a reasonable state of society, would be promiscuous, or whether each man would select for himself a partner to whom he will adhere as long as that adherence shall continue to be the choice of both parties. Probability seems to be greatly in favour of the latter” (VII.viii: 763). 21

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If there ever were any motives of prudence or delicacy, that could impose a qualification upon the story, they are now over. They could have no relation but to factitious rules of decorum. There are no circumstances of her life, that, in the judgement of honour and reason, could brand her with disgrace. Never did there exist a human being, that needed, with less fear, expose all their actions, and call upon the universe to judge them .... (148–9)

Chastity is determined not by “factitious rules of decorum” but rather by “the judgement of honour and reason”: by those standards both Wollstonecraft and Adeline remain women of honor, chaste though neither married nor virginal. Still, Adeline’s deathbed retraction of her early political beliefs forms the moral climax of the novel. Undoing Adeline’s earlier rejection of marriage becomes the ideological centre of the conclusion. However, this retraction does not constitute an unequivocal endorsement of traditional social values; rather, Opie presents a more nuanced argument for retaining marriage as an institution. Adeline comments, On this ground, therefore, this strong ground, I venture to build my present opinion, that marriage is a wise and ought to be a sacred institution; and I bitterly regret the hour when, with the hasty and immature judgment of eighteen, and with a degree of presumption scarcely pardonable at any time of life, I dared to think and act contrary to this opinion and the reverend experience of ages.... (238)

But to what ground does she refer? In fact, Adeline discriminates carefully between marriage as an institution instrumental in child-rearing and property transfer and as an institution necessary for the preservation of female sexual honor. To the end, she clings to her belief in the ideal potential for virtue unregulated by marriage, though experience has rendered her skeptical of its scope in society. In Adeline’s analysis, marriage becomes not an ideal guarantor of chaste feminine virtue, but rather a pragmatic disciplining of—especially masculine—desire. It offers benefits to society in terms of child-rearing and to the individual both in the elevation of domestic affections above the passions and in the safe-guarding of financial interest, but cannot of itself confer personal virtue or act as the sole arbiter of sexual honor. Conclusion Like many novels inspired by the social debates of the 1790s, Adeline Mowbray engages with contemporary social and political ideology in a complex fashion, emphasizing the instability of late eighteenth-century concepts of gender and identity, of public honor and private virtue. As Daniel Schierenbeck points out with regard to the works of Jane West in this volume, the binaries of Jacobin and anti-Jacobin fiction too often lead us to adopt reading strategies that over-

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simplify the ideological positions of Romantic writers—rather we must unravel the sophisticated web of textual affinities that mark their works. In the case of Jane West, that may mean teasing out the importance of educational and conduct writing to both Wollstonecraft and West to reveal unexpected similarities, as Shierenbeck has done; in the case of Holcroft and Godwin, it may, as Shawn Lisa Maurer demonstrates in the preceding chapter, involve looking back to an earlier eighteenth-century tradition of male friendship to understand how these authors both challenge and reconfigure those notions in the context of a radical understanding of the relationship between the individual and social institutions. In reading Adeline Mowbray, it means fostering an awareness of the way in which Opie balances the familiar and the new, the derivative and the innovative, to construct a text rich in allusion to both past literary tradition and present political discourse.

Chapter Seven

Reading the Metropole: Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah Tara Ghoshal Wallace

Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796) has been characterized as a novelistic reprise of her brother Charles’s defense of the British imperial project in India. Felicity Nussbaum has written that “Both books surreptitiously defend British Colonial interests in India,” (Torrid Zones 171), and Isobel Grundy has found that “Hamilton shares in the official colonialist agenda” (82) . Indeed, Hamilton does justify British rule in India, in part by demonstrating the inefficacy or malignity of indigenous powers and contrasting them to the beneficent effects of British intervention. At the same time, however, this text is deeply troubled by the consequences of the imperial mission, particularly when these are connected to moral and social corruption in the home country. Hamilton chooses Hindu spokesmen to articulate her critique of the metropole, in a kind of inversion of what Homi Bhabha defines as the aim of colonial discourse: “The objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types … . What is increased is the visibility of the subject as an object of surveillance, tabulation, enumeration, and indeed, paranoia and fantasy” (154–6). Of course, Hamilton does not pioneer the strategy of deploying “outsiders” to critique European culture. The popularity of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721) and Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World, undoubtedly influenced both the concept and the epistolary form of Hindoo Rajah, and certainly Zāārmilla’s disquisitions on British practices owe something to the observations of Usbek and Lien Chi Altangi. But Hamilton’s spokesmen occupy the special position of the occupied, and in conducting their own surveillance of the colonial power at home, Hamilton’s Hindus expose Britain’s lack of moral authority to govern other cultures. At the same time, however, this double-voiced text interrogates the seemingly superior standards of the critics themselves. Indeed, Hindoo Rajah’s complex imperial politics are evident in the multiplicity of social issues it addresses; ultimately, the novel enacts 

  Hamilton anticipates the effect Lisa Lowe attributes to Vasant A. Shahane’s 1975 anthology of Indian writings on E.M. Forster: “it poses the notion of a native point of view over and against the ruling British perspective that traditionally considered … Indians as peripheral objects to be colonized and scrutinized rather than as possessing a point of view themselves” (Lowe, 103).

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as well as represents an unstable and perplexed attitude toward the British Empire in India. Hamilton positions her Hindu Rajah Zāārmilla as a benevolent and enlightened ruler, in the tradition of Hindu Princes whose “right of sovereignty bore the mild aspect of parental authority,” but he appears to be the exception among a group of native despots. Zāārmilla himself describes the brutal rule of Beass Raye, and indignantly berates this “pious Hindoo who had shed so many tears over the misfortunes of his country” under Afghan control and who proves, once in power, to possess “a heart so steeled by avarice, as to be impervious to every sentiment of humanity” (57). Meeting Chait Singh, the Rajah of Benares, he finds an ambitious upstart, criminally ungrateful to his patron Warren Hastings—“the height of his elevation has made him giddy; he wishes to quit the staff which hitherto supported him … ” (154). Zāārmilla welcomes a visit from the rulers of Lolldong, only to find them obsessively and solipsistically lamenting that the English have not protected their villages from the Afghans; he begins by sympathizing with their distresses, “But when I found them obstinately persist in cherishing the feelings of selfish regret, for their own particular misfortune, while the miseries of thousands, who, on the same occasion, had lost their all, found no entrance into their hearts, I could no longer listen to their complaints with the semblance of attention … ” (98). Hamilton saves her most bitter denunciation of native rule for the Mughal conquerors; her “Preliminary Dissertation” spells out, with Burkean intensity, the horrors visited on Hindus by their Muslim masters. These tyrants impose Muslim laws on their Hindu subjects, exacting crippling fines “by bigoted and venal judges”; they suppress Hindu commerce; and, “In the effusions of their barbarous enthusiasm,” they demolish the ancient and beautiful temples and monuments of the Hindu religion (68–9). Having enumerated the ravages of Muslim rule, Hamilton extols the virtues of British government, in a passage worth quoting at length because of its unproblematized comprehensiveness: In those provinces which … have fallen under the dominion of Great Britain, it is to be hoped that the long-suffering Hindoos have experienced a happy change … in those provinces, the horrid modes of punishment, inflicted by the Mahommedans, have been abolished; the fetters, which restrained their commerce, have been taken off; the taxes are no longer collected by the arbitrary authority of a military chieftain, but are put upon a footing that at once secures the revenue, and protects the subject from oppression … . That unrelenting persecution, which was deemed a duty by the ignorant bigotry of their Mussulman rulers, has, by the milder spirit of Christianity, been converted into the tenderest indulgence. Their ancient laws have been restored to them; … Agriculture has been encouraged by the most certain of all methods—the security of property; and all these advantages have been rendered doubly valuable, by the enjoyment

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of a blessing equal, if not superior, to every other—the Blessing of Peace, a blessing to which they had for ages been strangers. (70)

The novel itself starkly contrasts Muslim India, with its “ruined villages,” to “the flourishing state of the country” under British governance; in British territories, the peasant can work his land, confident that his produce will not “be wrested from him by the open violence of the spoiler, or seized by the hard hand of rapacious avarice” (156–7). Here, Hamilton echoes William Hodges (traveling through India during the 1790s) and William Carey (residing in Calcutta in 1793), who both attest to agricultural success in Bengal, due in part to the end of military conflict and in part to Cornwallis’s experiments with a new system of tenant-farming. Hamilton’s praise for the fruits of Pax Brittania, as well as her disdain for most non-British powers in India, seems to confirm her role as apologist for colonial power. Undoubtedly, Hamilton aims to defend the British, and particularly Warren Hastings, from charges of participation (or at least complicity) in the massacre of Afghans who survived the Rohilla war. In this, she follows the lead of her brother, who begins his history of the Rohillas with a strongly worded refutation of such accusations: “God forbid that British troops should ever be employed in acts of such detestable atrocity! … it may with confidence be affirmed, that, however high their sense of subordination, however ready at all times to obey the most perilous orders of their superior, had such a service been allotted to them, they would have 

  Historians and literary critics agree that imperial expansion in India depended on this liberational discourse. Paul Keen, in The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere suggests that guilt about conquest “could be overshadowed by an alternative stress on the importance of introducing liberty in an area that had been enslaved by centuries of less enlightened conquerors” (225). See also Nigel Leask’s British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire, which points to the general consensus which “maintained that British power sought to liberate Hindus from the Islamic yoke of the Mughal empire” (72).    Katake Kusheri Dyson, in A Various Universe: A Study of the Journals and Memoirs of British Men and Women in the Indian Subcontinent, 1765–1856, says that Hodges “was eager to point out that people were doing well in the areas under British management” (137). In The Life of William Carey, D.D.: Shoemaker and Missionary, Professor of Sanskrit, Bengali, and Marathi in the College of Fort William, Calcutta, George Smith points out that Carey goes “to the one province which was almost entirely British … the British peace, in Bengal at least, had allowed abundant crops …” (67). The experiments of General Charles Cornwallis (Governor-General of India from 1786 to 1793) are described by George D. Bearce in British Attitudes toward India, 1784–1813: “He supposed that he could develop Indian landlords who would be English in character … .The upshot … was the establishment of the zamindari system in Bengal, whereby local tax-collectors became a landholding class, and in return for the land they would assure a permanent revenue to the Government and have surplus with which to improve and develop their holding” (45). The system failed quickly.

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turned from it with abhorrence!” (C. Hamilton xiv). Hindoo Rajah figures British intervention as “the auspicious arms of the sons of mercy … [which] checked the fury of the Afgan Khans, who have so long oppressed our unhappy country …” (78). In this text, genocidal attacks against Afghans are perpetrated entirely by Hindus seeking revenge for years of such brutal oppression that they act contrary to the “patience evinced by this mild and gentle race under the severest suffering” (62). Zāārmilla alone refuses to participate in this communal act of vengeance, moved to forgiveness by seeing the Afghans flee in despair and terror: “While I contemplated their present calamity, the remembrance of their former tyranny passed into the bosom of oblivion” (79). As if to excuse, to some extent, this uncharacteristic ferocity of Hindus, Hamilton carefully describes the cruelty of Afghans even in defeat: Zāārmilla’s messenger, carrying tidings of the war to his friend Māāndāāra, is “seized and cut in pieces” by a band of brutal Afghans; another group kidnaps and starves Captain Percy, then forces “him to accompany their flight, in hopes that he might be the means of procuring them terms with the English …” (81). Not only does the text exculpate the British from any blame in the Rohilla war, but it also demonstrates the manifest need for British intervention and mediation among hostile factions of Indians. At the same time, however, as Perkins and Russell point out in their introduction to the Broadview edition, Hamilton has grave doubts about the fitness of Britain to govern the subcontinent: “… Hamilton satirically presents [Britain] as a country sliding into a confused morass of legal and cultural practices which, unlike India’s, lack even the virtue of being true to the values preached and at least nominally accepted by its rulers” (18–19). But the neat dichotomy of Hamilton the apologist versus Hamilton the critic of empire keeps breaking down in this text; even as she deploys the subaltern voice, Hamilton seems to be shocked by her own alignment with her Hindu protagonists, moving to subvert the authority of her spokesmen even as she lets stand their indictments of British society. Hamilton’s portrait of British society constitutes a veritable litany of sins in the eyes of her pious and moral Hindus. Zāārmilla deplores the grossness of English appetites, especially: [t]hat custom of devouring the flesh of so many innocent, and unoffending animals, whose lives are daily sacrificed in order to procure a short-lived, and inelegant enjoyment, to the vitiated palates of these voluptuaries. The injustice done to these animals, is however, amply revenged, by the quantities of liquors, which it is the custom to swallow as the conclusion of their cruel feasts; and which, when taken in great quantities, seldom fails to pervert the senses, and to reduce the reason to a temporary level with the victims of their gluttony. (170) 

  His account is confirmed by Dean Mahomet, who describes the victory and praises the gallantry of British soldiers (The Travels of Dean Mahomet: An Eighteenth-Century Journey through India, ed. Michael H. Fisher, 89). Dyson cites a dissenting opinion from George Forster, who “was ashamed of the role played by the British in the Rohilla War” (142).

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These appetitive excesses, which lead Goldsmith’s Lien Chi to contrast Europeans to “ye simple, honest Bramins of the east, ye inoffensive friends of all that were born to happiness” (59), are congruent with general frivolity and extravagance. For example, Zāārmilla and the Brahmin Sheermaal find the European passion for cards beyond comprehension, so much so that Sheermaal believes that card-playing must be a religious rite— “And to this Poojah of idols, termed CARDS, do the major part of the people devote their time; sacrificing every enjoyment of life, as well as every domestic duty to the performance of this singular devotion” (114–15). In fact, cards represent the only devotion indulged in by the British ruling class, whose members exhibit a disrespect for religion which shocks the devout Zāārmilla and infuriates Sheermaal. Hamilton wishes to expose the discrepancy of Christian doctrine and the actual behaviour of European Christians, and her method consists of a fairly heavy-handed irony. Once he has read the Bible (glossed by his friend Captain Percy), Zāārmilla immediately assumes that its precepts must dictate the “government, laws, and manners of this highly favoured nation” (84); he indignantly rejects Sheermaal’s contention that in “ten years” residence in Europe he never saw or heard of the Bible. The Rajah confidently asserts that European laws and customs must be based on Biblical directives: “The Mussulman fasts, and the Hindoo performs Poojah … and can we believe that the Christian alone treats with contempt the authority of his God?” (140–41). Hamilton sustains this vein of sarcasm, having Zāārmilla ascribe Christians “blasphemy” to “a consciousness of their own superior piety which they, doubtless, imagine, entitles them to this degree of familiarity with their Maker” (162). The Brahmin, of course, frankly despises people his patron Māāndāāra labels “infidels, and impious eaters of blood” (101), especially condemning their indifference to clergymen; as Zāārmilla notes, the good minister Morton fulfills his duties conscientiously, “never molested by the offer of what is called preferment, but … permitted to exercise his talents and virtues in a state of poverty, equal to that of the first teachers of Christianity” (177). In contrast to British neglect of worthy clergymen, Indian custom pays extraordinary homage to priests, who, Hamilton explains in her “Preliminary Dissertation,” deserve respect because of their “peace, self-restraint, patience, rectitude, wisdom, and learning” (59). Indeed, Hamilton censures “Those who take pleasure in pointing the shafts of sarcasm against the order of the Priesthood” in India. In this dialogic text, however, the novel speaks back to the preface: Hamilton’s Brahmin is an irascible and intolerant character whose hyperbolic diatribes against the English are unconvincing (even when accurate) until confirmed by Zāārmilla’s own observations. Sheermaal himself validates the accusation that Brahmins keep the masses ignorant when he boasts that “it is doubtless from this wise example of our ancient Brahmins, that the priests of all religions have learned the art of concealing the simplicity of truth, under the dark and impenetrable cloud of symbolical mystery, which none but they themselves can fully explain” (114). In a text which contrasts British indifference to Christian worship with Hindu reverence for established ritual, such self-professed priestcraft undermines the Brahmins’ virtuous authority.

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A similar ambivalence manifests itself in Hamilton’s criticism of the British legal system. Both Sheermaal and Zāārmilla express contempt for a system which flogs a soldier for “purloining a few rupees from one of his officers,” yet punishes adultery with “no other consequence than compensatory payment” (104–5), and Sheermaal is shocked when he discovers that country magistrates consider the killing of game birds a more heinous crime than beating a wife “almost to death” (120). Zāārmilla’s own encounter with the legal system produces a far more comprehensive and caustic judgment. Visiting a prison in London, he is horrified by conditions there, which recall to this mind the dungeons in which Muslims “confine their malefactors … to pine in all the miseries of disease and famine. He recoils from a system that punishes petty theft more severely than large-scale fraud and that houses brutal murderers with those who are incarcerated for debt; like Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, this text points out that such proximity, together with despair, turns the neophyte offender into a hardened, depraved criminal. Part of Hamilton’s agenda here is to validate the project put forward by Hastings and Sir William Jones—to govern India by Indian laws. If British laws are exposed as arbitrary, inequitable and immoral, the argument for retaining indigenous laws gains strength. Indeed, Zāārmilla extols Hastings for restoring Hindu laws: “The pious Hindu, no longer forced to submit to laws, that are repugnant to the spirit of his faith; no longer judged by the unhallowed ordinances of strangers, beholds with extactic [sic] gratitude, the holy Shaster rising … ” (163). He lauds the benevolence that extends this privilege even to Muslims, so that “the haughty Mussulman will receive, from Christian magnanimity, a degree of favour and protection, which the laws of his Prophet never taught him to bestow!” (164). Hamilton seems to be extolling, without reservation, this particular aspect of the Orientalist project. But a second look at Sheermaal’s criticism of English laws complicates this reading, and indicates that Hamilton was less than sanguine about the Brahminical judicial system. His indignation at the discrepancy in punishments seems at first to be humane and moral—after all, who would want to argue for property being more valuable than honor? But while the flogging remains repulsive, Sheermaal’s horror is compromised by what he believes should befall the adulterer—“the sacrifice of his life, and the degradation of his family” (104). The juxtaposition of wife-beating and shooting partridges makes (and is meant to make) the English magistrate seem barbaric. Note, however, that Sheermaal, believing that birds are England’s sacred cows, expects “to have heard the irrevocable mandate of immediate death; and knowing how vindictive the priests of all religions usually are toward those who have treated with contempt the objects of their superstitious veneration, I should have been well pleased to have compounded for his simple death, unattended by the 

  Modern commentators have been more suspicious about this seeming act of cultural respect. C.A. Bayly and Ania Loomba point out that Hindu laws as established by the British were overtly elitist, consolidating a classist and patriarchal system. See C.A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire, 76; Ania Loomba, Colonialism/ Postcolonialism, 167–8.

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tortures which I feared might be inflicted upon him …” (121). If the consequences of establishing Hindu laws as promulgated by Brahmins leads to executing seducers and torturing those who accidentally commit sacrilege, then Indians are better off under British justice. Hamilton both distinguishes and conflates her representation of the two judicial systems: she writes in favor of a Hindu ideology based on religion and morals rather than on property; but she collapses the distinction when she exposes arbitrary and intemperate punitive practices in both cultures. So while her conservatism aligns itself with the theology-based, non-materialist laws of the Hindus, her Scottish Enlightenment perspective deplores the excessive zeal of that ideology. The reference to wife-beating argues that European gender relations leave much to be desired, and the text portrays most British women as superficial, selfish and wrongheaded. The one exception is Lady Gray, who embodies the standard against which the insipid Lady Ardent and the repulsively masculine Miss Ardent are judged and found wanting. To some extent, Hamilton extenuates the faults of these inadequate women: Dr. Severan and Zāārmilla both attribute women’s deficiencies to faulty education and insufficient opportunity to live rationally in a culture that values women for their looks and superficial charms. But interestingly, India offers no corrective paradigm. The unreconstructed sexist Māāndāāra, who has already returned one wife to her father because he was “disgusted with her peevishness, and still more, with the plainness of her countenance,” dismisses the notion that women should be educated: To what purpose should they have judgment or understanding? Were they not made subservient to the will of man? If they are docile, and reserved, with enough of judgment to teach them to adorn their persons, and wear their jewels with propriety, and never presuming to have a will of their own, follow implicitly the direction of their husband … it is all that can be wished for. (105)

Māāndāāra’s contempt for women is exceeded by that of Sheermaal, who praises “the institution of Brahma, by which creatures, incapable of acting with propriety for themselves, are effectually put out of the way of mischief, by being burned with the bodies of their husbands … . Laudable practice! By which the number of old women is so effectually diminished!” (129). Given these articulations of gender ideology, one may wonder how Isobel Grundy can claim that Hamilton shows in India “a possibly less sexist culture, and a certainly less sexist male individual” (Grundy 83). Grundy alludes, of course, to Zāārmilla, who may participate in the Indian custom of arranged and early marriages (after praising “the innocent and playful vivacity of the little Zamarcanda,” he offers his sister as wife to the misogynistic Māāndāāra), but also looks forward to a companionate marriage with Māāndāāra’s sister (138) and later sincerely mourns her death—“She, who was the companion of my days, the friend of my heart, whose gentle manners, and prudent counsels, smoothed the rugged path of life, and gave value to every blessing” (146). In Zāārmilla, Hamilton

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embodies her ideas of (and hopes for) Hinduism enlightened by contact with Christian values. Imperial contact has not, however, improved the moral or social character of Britons. Not only does the peripheral vision detect the decay in British society, but also, Hamilton suggests the rot within originates in imperial ambitions and practices. The most obvious example of the brutal consequences of empire is, of course, institutionalized slavery, and Hamilton writes a scorching indictment of it. When Sheermaal visits a slave ship, he finds “some hundreds of the most wretched of the human race” cowering under “the savage looks of the white barbarians.” His wrath is compounded by the fact that this brutality is perpetuated “to procure a luxurious repast to the pampered appetites of these voluptuaries … to cultivate sugar-cane.” Sheermaal compares the benevolent, almost familial relationship between Indian masters and their slaves (who have “bartered their liberty for protection”) to the miserable condition of African slaves, “doomed to suffer all that cruelty, instigated by avarice, and intoxicated by power, can inflict” (111–12). However problematic the concept of a “benevolent” system of slavery might be, Hamilton, like other abolitionists of her time, excoriates the European version, which dehumanizes both sides of the power divide. Moreover, Sheermaal specifically connects English cruelty to English ideologies of race and color: “Had a ray of knowledge enlightened their understanding, through the tawny hue of the unlettered savage, they would have recognized the emanation of the creating Spirit…” (111). Desensitized to the humanity of slaves by the driving needs of the colonial economy, participating in an emerging ideology of colour hierarchies, the servants of the empire become no better than the Mughals Hamilton attacks in her Preliminary Dissertation. Slavery is only the most egregious example of the corrosive effects of empire. Hamilton also targets that species of intra-national enslavement, the press-gang. As their ship approaches the coast of England, Zāārmilla is astonished to see among the sailors not joy at homecoming but “consternation, terror, and dismay!” (198), and speculates that such terror can be inspired only by an infernal sea-monster. That monster turns out to be a press-gang, which conscripts 30 of the crew, leaving Zāārmilla to mourn the fate of “those brave fellows, whose useful labors have conduced to the enrichment, and prosperity of their country; who after an absence of twenty months, hoped to reap the reward of their toils, by returning to its bosom, were dragg’d reluctant victims to the infernal demon of power!” (199). That last 

  Nussbaum finds that “‘Complexion’ in this period serves to isolate and exclude the human from the subhuman, the beautiful from the ugly, and the metropole from the periphery … ” (“Women and Race: A Difference of Complexion,” 84). V.G. Kiernan, in The Lords of Human Kind: Black Man, Yellow Man, and White Man in an Age of Empire, connects English slaving practices in Eastern and Western empires: “The later eighteenth century being the heyday of English slave-trading and slave-owning in Jamaica, English standards of conduct in India could hardly be elevated. Slaves were bought and sold for domestic service in Calcutta too” (34).

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phrase is crucial, for Hamilton is pointing out governmental oppression, decreed by British naval authority. As Daniel James Ennis explains, “The practice of pressing men from homeward-bound ships was actually preferred to the use of press-gangs on shore. The navy was virtually guaranteed to get an experienced seaman …” (Ennis 67). British state power is deployed to kidnap British men and force them into service, an oppression engendered by the needs of empire. Hamilton also directs her satiric scorn at another domestic abuse arising from the imperial project: the depredations of Custom-house officers who “rifle, rob and plunder” ships coming from the colonies. Her caustic description of them recalls Swift’s Yahoos, for “these savages bear so strong a resemblance to the English, that they might, at a slight view, be mistaken for the same; but, on a more accurate examination of their countenances, evident traces of their savage origin, may easily be discerned” (200). Press-gangs and Customs officers constitute part of the apparatus of the imperial state; they, like slave-traders, enforce a coercive system required by global political and commercial ambitions. The conflation of state and commerce is emphasized by the fact that the ship Zāārmilla takes to England sails “in company with many floating fortresses of superior size, sent by the king of England, to protect the fleet of the Company” (188). Sheermaal’s earlier voyage proceeds on board a warship—“a huge edifice, whose sides were clothed with thunder,” visibly embodying British naval and imperial power (110). In Hindoo Rajah, Pope’s prophecy in Windsor-Forest fulfills itself, as British trees leave their woods to “Bear Britain’s Thunder, and her Cross display,/To the bright Regions of the rising Day” (II: 387–8) If there exists a justification for engaging in imperial expansion that produces such deleterious effects both at home and abroad, it lies in the project to rescue and conserve a culture which is valuable in itself and for what it can teach the West. Kate Teltscher says, “For Hamilton, Britain’s role is the same in India and Europe: to protect traditional cultures against the dangerous innovations of both Islam and the French Revolution” (139). She echoes here Nigel Leask’s formulation that “… Eliza Hamilton built her argument on an analogy between the Islamic conquest of large parts of Hindu India and the impact of the French Revolution on Europe. In both cases it was the role of Britain, as the leading counter-revolutionary power, to redress the wrongs done to a traditional culture by newfangled ideas, whether based upon the Koran or the Rights of Man” (101). In order to preserve Indian culture, of course, the British have to learn about it, and the considerable body of scholarship on eighteenth-century Orientalism agrees that Hamilton and other admirers of William Jones’s Orientalist project were striving to make India intelligible to Europe. In her “Preliminary Dissertation,” Hamilton deplores British “ignorance, and apathetic indifference with regard to the affairs of the East” despite “elegant translations” as well as the exegeses produced “by the labours of men who have enjoyed the first rank in literary fame” (55–6). In the novel itself, Sheermaal inveighs against uninformed English people who do not know “whether the great city of Canouge was founded by a Hindoo or a Mussulman” (134). Among Sir Caprice Ardent’s imbecilities is his conflation of India with

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China, and Hindu with Muslim, while the problematically intellectual Miss Ardent wins Zāārmilla’s heart by being the first Briton to initiate a conversation on “the delightful subject of my dear native country” (226). Hamilton enthusiastically sets out to combat British ignorance, not only in the background provided in the “Preliminary Dissertation,” but also through the numerous references to Indian literature, mythology, history and geography scattered throughout the novel. As Perkins and Russell point out, “… Hamilton was assembling and popularizing a mass of scholarship and literature which would perhaps not normally have found its way beyond a specialist audience” (31). Recent scholars, following Edward Said’s lead, have tended to see in Jones and his fellow Orientalists a covert arm of imperialism, no less violent in their effects than press-gangs and naval armaments. The work of translation and interpretation has been characterized as both a kind of stealthy conquest and as a sop to guilty European consciences. Hamilton herself, however divided she may be regarding the imperial project (as well as about certain aspects of Hindu culture), commits herself wholeheartedly to bringing knowledge of India to Britain. Her dedication to Hastings specifies his role “AS THE DISTINGUISHED PATRON OF SHANSCRIT, AND PERSIAN LITERATURE” (54). Like an energetic and creative teacher of recalcitrant students, Hamilton finds multiple ways to interest her audience: Sheermaal’s and Zāārmilla’s familiarity with the Bible might induce some to aim for a reciprocal knowledge of Indian religious writings; those with scientific inclinations might be attracted by “the astronomical apparatus still extant in the Tower of the Stars” in Benares, instruments whose functions were lost to memory until a visit from English scientists (154–5); literary-minded people might be piqued by Zāārmilla’s assertion that “the Mahhabaret was superior to the Iliad of Homer: or that Calidas was a dramatic Poet equal in excellence to Shakespeare” (227). In any case, Hamilton offers her text as a gateway to a fund of knowledge; not everyone can travel to India 

  Edward W. Said charges Jones with aiming “to subdue the infinite variety of the Orient,” “to gather in, to rope off, to domesticate the Orient and turn it into a province of European learning” (78). Balachandra Rajan, in Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay, provides a somewhat milder assessment, suggesting that Jones’s desire to reinstate Indian customs was “an important part of his troubled justification of the right of the British to govern India” (87). Bayly points to a generational shift: “The rediscovery of classical Indian languages and translation of modern texts was initiated by the savants of the Enlightenment, but its ‘practical’ purpose was soon emphasized” by Wellesley and his administration (150). Raymond Schwab’s monumental and indispensable book, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880 ascribes the Romantic attraction to India to “the fact that it posed, in its totality, the great question of the Different” (6). Schwab does not deny the imperial uses of scholarship, but praises the “extraordinary undertaking” of Hasting and Jones, reserving his scorn for nineteenthcentury interventions: “It was England’s great disgrace to be too self-seeking in India to avoid violent reactions. … in order to protect those who followed Jones from certain of those who followed Hastings, the scholars were obliged to struggle against conspiracies of narrow-mindedness” (43).

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to experience its culture, but all can read books and gain real imperial wealth by asking the question Ania Loomba poses as essential to postcolonial studies: “What indigenous ideologies, practices and hierarchies existed alongside colonialism and interacted with it?” (Loomba 17). In the end, Hamilton’s mixed feelings about the British Empire may turn out to originate in her depreciation of ignorance rather than colonialism; if British citizens fail to profit from the intellectual treasures of India, if they remain indifferent to the rich culture of a subcontinent they are about to rule in entirety, they are doomed to become a very tight little island indeed.

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Chapter Eight

The Woman of Genius: In Praise of the Inchoate Future Julie Shaffer

In The Woman of Genius (1821–1822), Elizabeth B. Lester takes on the question of what form of prose fiction is best for representing a female author with a transcendent imagination—for representing her characteristics, life, and place within her world. How can one, Lester’s novel asks, picture forth the mind and life of a woman whose genius isolates her from the mundane-minded who people her world? As a provisional answer, The Woman of Genius suggests that multiple narrative forms must be enlisted—most notably the Gothic and the realist marriage plot novel form, as well as the Künstlerroman, which in this period generally takes the form of narrative poetry—The Prelude, for instance—to convey a male’s development as a poet. Lester shows that none of these genres is adequate for communicating the nature and experiences of her female protagonist, Edith Avondel, but by bringing them all to our attention, Lester suggests we might begin to imagine how such a life might be represented. Given Lester’s treatment of narrative genres, we might expect her book to provide a new narrative form and force us to expand the categories of Romanticera fiction or even to redefine Romanticism as a whole. Yet The Woman of Genius seems most interested in questioning the value of categorization altogether and the illusory purity on which categories, and the boundaries between them, rely. As it does so, The Woman of Genius reads as though presciently written not only to address the central issues of this essay collection, but also to validate recent discussions of Romanticism. It addresses the question of which genres of literature produced in the period merit attention, for instance, and it asks whether there is a substantial link between authors’ sex, the kinds of texts they write, and the attitudes they espouse. It asks whether there is a feminine and a masculine Romanticism— recently gendered Romanticisms I outline and discuss later in this essay—and what the result is when an author breaks authorial gendering norms.    Garside, Raven, and Schőwerling convincingly argue that the novel is by Lester rather than Mrs. Ross, to whom it was earlier attributed. They base their argument in part on letters from Longman et al., publishers to Lester that establish Lester as the author of The Bachelor and the Married Man and on an advertisement at the back of Fire-side Scenes, a book written “by the Author of ‘The Bachelor and the Married Man,’” which identifies The Woman of Genius as having been written by the same author (448–9, 521).

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Much of this novel’s boundary breaking occurs in the person of Edith Avondel, whose identity draws on many categories. She has both masculine and feminine attributes; she is, by heritage, both British and non-British; and she is both Christian and non-Christian. As multiply hybrid, she can claim status in no category. Much of the boundary breaking also occurs through the form Edith’s genius takes; it fits better into masculine Romanticism, as that term has been defined, although it appears in a woman whose womanliness is never questioned, despite her “masculine energies of mind” (II: 66). The novel’s boundary breaking also occurs in the very form the novel takes, which at first glance seems deeply flawed, bringing together as it does jarringly different novel genres, the mundane marriage plot and the Gothic, and then interrupting its prose with occasional long passages of lyric poetry delivered by the narrator and characters and by ruminations in elevated poetic language by the male and female protagonists. Through the story of Edith Avondel, The Woman of Genius examines categories for defining not only genre, valuable literature, and gendered writing but also race, nationality and nationhood itself. Through this wide-ranging focus, Lester’s novel interrogates the usefulness of categories not just for ordering and comprehending the messiness of life but, ultimately, for enabling the literature and very life-blood of England to survive and thrive. Few readers can be expected to be familiar with this novel, which proceeds thus: Celebrated author Edith Avondel has been traveling in Europe as subordinate companion to the Countess of Athol. Sir Adelmar Fitzelm meets the Countess in Athens and becomes her accepted lover. At the Parthenon, he notices Edith when she bursts forth into poetry on the solitary position of the individual without any kindred spirit, the “natural language of every imaginative heart” (III: 15), and quickly falls in love with her. He ceases his attentions to his titled lover, who whisks Edith away and sends Sir Adelmar a letter saying that Edith has no right to her name, implying that Edith is illegitimate. Sir Adelmar tries to trace them and is intercepted by a Jew, Zimri, who claims to be Edith’s father. Zimri suggests that Edith has been married, has left her marriage, and, after having been taken away by Lady Athol, has died (III: 110). Sir Adelmar’s friend Rashleigh, however, writes that Edith is at the Parsonage on Sir Adelmar’s estate, visiting the rector and his wife, the Balladons. When Sir Adelmar returns, Edith will not clear up the mysteries in her background. Zimri kidnaps her, but is intercepted and fatally wounded; he then clears Edith’s name, admitting that she is not illegitimate and that he is no relation. Her mother was Jewish and designated as Zimri’s future wife but fell in love with Avondel Lisle, married him, and converted. Edith was raised Christian. Edith is in fact the true Countess of Athol; the woman who has been



  The only two extant copies of Lester’s novel, not to be confused with Mary Hunter Austin’s 1912 A Woman of Genius, can be found at Cambridge University and in the German Princely Library of Corvey Castle. It also is available on microfiche at the few libraries that own Belser Verlag’s microfiche edition of the Corvey collection. I use the Corvey copy.

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using this title is her uncle’s widow, the dowager countess. Edith and Sir Adelmar wed. Much of the novel concerns Edith’s isolation and the question of whether a woman of genius can find her place in the world. To an extent, her isolation is caused not by her genius but by mysteries in her background that lead Sir Adelmar to question whether she can be absorbed into the social institution of marriage— specifically, whether she is legitimate and therefore fit to be his wife, a question that dogs earlier heroines as well, including, for instance, Frances Burney’s Evelina. Like Evelina, Edith does not believe aspersions on her mother’s chastity but shuns exposing her mother’s name to the inquiry that must follow were such accusations made public; she therefore remains silent rather than providing Sir Adelmar with explanations that will allay his doubts and allow him to marry her. Her isolation also is caused, however, by the nature of her genius, which fits better into the category of masculine rather than feminine Romanticism, as these categories were originally defined in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Although masculine and feminine Romanticism are heuristic categories, early discussions suggest that they usually correspond to the differing approaches used by male and female Romantic authors; they are, further, useful categories to enlist here, given that Edith is treated as transgressive precisely because she fits best into the category of masculine Romantic, making her a female masculine Romantic—a woman whose imagination and language fit into the category of masculine Romanticism. As it has been defined masculine Romanticism focuses on an autonomous, questing, visionary self-creating subject, capable of powerful feelings, and makes celebration of the self its theme. Women or femininity are frequently allied with inspiring or solace-providing nature; in this schema, women also provide the comfort to which the (male) poet returns after his poetic, visionary exertions. Masculine Romanticism has, in fact, historically defined Romanticism as a whole. Feminine Romanticism, on the other hand, subordinates the writing subject to community, downplaying the importance of the authorial persona or diffusing that subject in a community that can share communal or poetic vision. The work of female Romantics shows a “preoccupation … with mundane daily life and the domestic, [and a] refusal of the visionary and transcendent” (Lokke 159). The feminine sublime differs from the more familiar “masculine” sublime in rejecting mastery (Yaeger, Freeman), and feminine Romanticism “contest[s] ... the hegemonic construction of gender, ... insist[ing] on the equal value and rational capacities of women” (Mellor, Mothers, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980, 210). While masculine and feminine Romanticism might best be viewed as authorial subject positions that both sexes can inhabit through “ideological cross-dressing” (Mellor 171), they do so with only moderate success. As Marlon Ross explains,    See Stuart Curran. Curran does not use the terms feminine and masculine Romanticism, but he sees particular female Romantic authors as taking this focus that he sees no male Romantic using.    All further citations in this essay are to this edition.

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women writers could not present themselves as what Harold Bloom would call “strong” poets like their male counterparts, who troped power in terms of quest and conquest, because male poets did so specifically to reclaim masculinity as it was defined by Enlightenment and Romantic period gender codes. Were women to present their objectives similarly, they would not only present themselves in a paradigm that made no sense, they would also put into question their femininity and ability to take up any approved position for women in early nineteenth century British culture. Authorial roles cannot depart successfully from conventional nonauthorial gender roles because it is by the latter that humans understand ourselves and by which our communities judge us. Nevertheless, Edith’s visionary genius fits her into masculine Romanticism. That her genius transcends the mundane world is acknowledged by Rashleigh, who remarks that “there is something more celestial than beauty, something intellectual and divine about [Edith], which at once enraptures and elevates” (II: 42–3). The narrator too situates her proper realm as transcendent, stating that Edith generally looks grave unless encountering “a sentiment uttered by equal genius. ... Then her soul appeared ... to soar from the ungenial earth to its native seat, the abode from which she had been but shortly exiled;—the parent of vitality, the centre of light, ... whose very rays ... produce the brightest gem inclosed in the caves of the earth—the Sun” (I: 185–6). This passage also links her genius to reason, traditionally a male attribute: the sun conventionally signifies masculine reason; the moon (and lunacy) being more traditionally linked to women. Interestingly, the earth too is traditionally linked to women in its fecundity; here it is described, however, as “ungenial”—barren—hence less responsible for producing Edith than the masculine, rational sun. Edith’s genius also is linked to a Promethean flame. When she encounters an equal genius—a rare event—“her [soul] beamed gloriously in her face, lighting up every feature with intelligence, whilst that celestial fire, stolen by daring man from heaven’s own storehouse, streamed over her as the light of a meteor flashing across ‘the clear blue serene’” (I: 185–6). Her fire within also points to her strong feeling: “the lightening flash ever and anon bursting from her deep black eye seemed to indicate a feeling within ‘that passed show’” (I: 190). Departing as it does from conventions of soft female feeling, this fiery emotional depth fits her in everything but her gender to be the subject of masculine Romanticism. Her Promethean flame also links her to P.B. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, published the year before The Woman of Genius; this link highlights Edith’s role as questor, typically males’ role in masculine Romanticism. Edith presents herself thus when she suggests that her ability to rise beyond the mundane world links her not only with Icarus, but with questing (male) heroes in general: 

  Ross makes this argument throughout “Romantic Quest and Conquest.”   “Clear blue serene”: Source not found.    “that passed show”: A misquote of Hamlet’s reference to his feelings as that “which passeth show” (Hamlet I: 2.85). 

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If, with an eagle eye, [woman] gazes on the sun; if she trims her plumage, and dares to soar to a point at which she would look down on yonder clouds; if she aims at entering the bright empyrean, where imagination holds her court, and receives her tribute from every nation ... from Indus to the Pole; thither must she win her way through obstacles as numerous, and not less difficult than those surmounted by the hero of old, ere he reigned a god among yon starry host. (II: 68–9)

Sir Adelmar corroborates that she is a questor seeking transcendence, at points repeating Edith’s own vocabulary: “Her’s was the eagle eye of towering genius, piercing into the empyrean ... . [H]er contemplations were not bound down to the limits of this span in space which we inhabit; they ranged through eternity” (III: 23–4). To stress her special status, the novel suggests that it is her unusual mental qualities that are responsible for her isolation. Sir Adelmar notes, for instance, that “She appeared isolated [in part by] genius, finding fellowship with none, and having no communion with any” (III: 28). The narrator attributes that isolation specifically to Edith’s transcendent intellect, describing her as “gathered in herself; in all the intellectual supremacy of solitary genius ... She was ... like a wanderer parted on his exile from home, who ... when ... cast on a strange shore, ... will feel himself completely outcast” (I: 34–5). Edith herself notes her poor fit with the world in which she moves when she asks, What is the situation of that woman who has penetrated into the arcanum of science? whose daring hand has torn away the veil that shrouds her mysteries? ... Unhappy female, she has soared for a moment from the earth to which she was imprisoned; and, like the bird of Eden, she must wander above, whilst yet her soul shall be embosomed in a mortal form; the world is no longer a home for her, she finds no place of rest or repose in it. (II: 70–71)

Such women “are separated from the world [and] … walk as strangers amongst our brethren” (II: 79) Edith’s lack of fit with her world is caused by a break in gender norms; female genius is defined by most in her world to be undesirable, a contradiction in terms. Edith recognizes that were she different, she would more easily find a suitable husband; as she is, most men would flee the intensity of her emotions. The typical man, she says, desires that [woman’s] love should burn like the mysterious fire of Rosycrucius, through an eternity: but it must burn in a cave, it must flash beneath an icy surface, transparent but to him alone; and if even he detects the whole force and splendour and intenseness of that fire, he turns from it, faithless, perchance dreading the violence of that flame which himself only had power to kindle. (II: 73–4).

In fact Edith Avondel does not go wholly unappreciated and solitary. While Lester never specifies precisely the kind of literature Edith writes and never gives samples

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of Edith’s writing—a point to which I shall return later—her characterization of Edith as a female drawing on tropes linked to conventional masculine Romanticism might prepare us to expect that she would be rejected as a literary gender outlaw. When she “commenced [her] literary pursuits,” however, “[she] was beyond hope successful in them” (III: 170), “enjoying very high celebrity, [and] having obtained the most extensive literary fame” (II: 46) as a “distinguished, … celebrated” genius (II: 36) whom “all the world is supposed to know” (II: 37). Even in her reclusion on the Fitzelm estate, “her conversation was sought and appreciated by men of talent and celebrity” from “the philosopher [to] the poet” (I: 185, 184), arguing against complete isolation of any kind. Her work is thus valued even though it breaks authorial gender norms by having been written by a woman. Despite the public nature of Edith’s role as published author, she shuns having attention drawn to her. Lester develops this point when Lady Athol and Captain Fitzelm, one of Sir Adelmar’s younger brothers, encourage Edith to turn actress. Even though Captain Fitzelm tells her that “we no longer exist in an age of prejudice, when an actress was necessarily supposed to be infamous,” he also characterizes acting as a mode of performance that can buy women titles through marriage—as a profession in which women display and sell themselves to the highest bidder (I: 49). He says, “I would venture to ensure you a coronet; I am convinced that many would be offered to you. Your graces, your charms, your talents, would render you an object of competition to the highest” (I: 49–50). She unsurprisingly “revolts from a profession in which delicacy ... must be sacrificed” (I: 50–51). Her reaction is vindicated by Sir Adelmar’s views; to him, the acting career he is led to believe she has had is the most insurmountable obstacle separating them. Edith shuns fame even for her writing itself, which, although bringing her before the public, at least does not rely on bodily display, practiced as it is in private. Although willing to exercise her genius (in writing) and to converse with appreciative men of talent, Edith suggests both that all women prefer domesticity to public attention and acclaim and that renown keeps her from having that domesticity. She asks, Who would not gladly relinquish the admiration and applause obtained by enterprise, talents, and masculine energy of mind, for the happiness, the secure respectability, the loveliness of domestic privacy? Who that has been 

  She is not alone in viewing acting as indelicate; Austen’s Fanny Price, from Mansfield Park (1814), sees acting in even a private theatrical as indelicate, and in Frances Burney’s The Wanderer (1814), Miss Ellis likewise shuns acting. Although acting became an increasingly respectable profession over the course of the eighteenth century, few women could appear on stage without sexualization, the assumption that they exhibited themselves to gain titled lovers, the result for Mary Robinson, for instance, whose affair with Prince George in the 1780s began after he saw her in the role of Perdita in A Winter’s Tale. There is a vast body of critical literature on acting in eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; see, for instance, Straub.

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shipwrecked by the gale of public life, longs not after the quiet of retirement, as the weary pilgrim fixes his eye on the shrine towards which his devoted zeal is carrying him? (II: 66–7).

A contemporary review in The Monthly Censor echoes her, stating, “Genius in a woman is a more dangerous possession than in a man; inasmuch as its display has less of propriety in it, and the singularity which it too frequently assumes to itself is repugnant to the best feelings of a female, which bid her shrink from the eye of observation, and concentrate her happiness in retirement.” The question that remains is where a woman like Edith may speak with minimal risk of “shipwreck” and how she might fit into her community. The novel offers a possible answer to this question through incorporating and rejecting two eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury plot forms—the marriage plot and the Gothic—and through offering a corrective on one more typically linked to Romanticism—the Künstlerroman. The marriage plot is generally assumed to be written and consumed by women in the period and viewed as particularly appropriate for narrating what was considered to be the most important epoch of women’s lives—the time between becoming marriageable and finding (or failing to find) safe haven within marriage. The Woman of Genius evokes this form in part through burlesqued treatment of it, doing so to condemn marriage plotting, characters’ attempts to orchestrate marital matches regardless of whether love is present. Here that role is taken by Sir Adelmar’s second oldest sister, Ann. Much of the first half of The Woman of Genius concerns the tireless and tiresome efforts of this indefatigable woman to get her female relatives married to men with titles and money. While such characters appear in any number of marriage-plot novels, The Woman of Genius most obviously calls to mind marriage plotting in Pride and Prejudice, not only by reminding us of that novel’s marriage-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, but also through its treatment of eldest daughter Jane Fitzelm, who has been engaged in marriage to Rashleigh by their parents. Jane is a caricature of the even-tempered, minimally demonstrative Jane Bennet. In The Woman of Genius, Ann fears, with good reason, that Rashleigh will break off the engagement if Jane does not show enough affection, just as Charlotte Lucas suggests to Elizabeth that if Jane Bennet does not adequately show that she favors Bingley above all other men, Bingley will decamp—which he does, of course, at Darcy’s instigation.10 It is not only marriage plotting that Lester criticizes through her treatment of Ann’s efforts to bring about the match between Jane and Rashleigh; Lester likewise criticizes other forms of writing, specifically conduct books for women. In a passage that reveals both Ann’s attempts at micromanaging others’ behavior   Miller addresses this throughout The Heroine’s Text; see also King on marriage and female honor, this volume (123–9). 10   Lester’s allusions to Austen’s novels, including not only Pride and Prejudice and Emma but Mansfield Park as well, are complex. It lies outside the aim of this essay, however, to identify and develop these allusions in full. 

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for the purpose of match promotion and the mundane concerns that comprise the totality of interests about which she waxes poetic, she instructs Jane to use her eyes to captivate Rashleigh. She reminds Jane that even the finest eyes, as Jane’s are, may be passed over in favour of a girl’s, not having a fiftieth part of the pretensions to notice which your’s possess, admitting always that they are not grey, merely for want of address, of skill, of management. Fine eyes, which are continually mute, are of no ... value to the possessor.... They must have expression, they must have music, they must have eloquence. There must be an alternate rising and drooping of the lid, softness, ardour, and even hauteur succeeding each other with varying change. You must endeavour at this, Jane; without it, you will appear uninteresting and insipid. (I: 219–20)

Such instructions parody advice such as Dr. John Gregory provides in his 1774 A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters. He explains that feminine “Modesty ... will naturally dispose [women] to be rather silent in company... .People of sense and discernment will never mistake such silence for dulness. One may take a share in conversation without uttering a syllable. The expression in the countenance shews it” (28). Ann further advises Jane to have an air of extreme and even anxious attention whenever Mr. Rashleigh converses with you. I am confident that it must please him. This will even supersede, in a very great degree, the necessity of your replies being diffuse .... [A]n air of deference and attention is the best possible means of covering a deficiency of idea from the person who converses with you. (II: 13–14)

Dr. Gregory similarly advises women not to “shew the full extent of your knowledge ... . [I]f you ... keep [it] secret, [men] will probably give you credit for a great deal more than you possess. … You will more readily hear than talk yourselves into their good graces” (32–3). Jane Fitzelm, however, is not only incapable of showing complimentary attentiveness; she can barely bring herself to appear to be alive at all. Even Ann’s “very electrifying look” is “scarcely sufficient to reanimate [Jane]” (II: 7), so Jane, with her “dull, inanimate countenance” (II: 97) fails to show Rashleigh that “the sparks of Promethean fire were indeed kindled” (II: 4) in his torpid intended. Because Jane does not disguise that she is the “automaton” (II: 29) that others think she is, Rashleigh, like Bingley before him, withdraws his courtship. My point is not that Lester’s portrayal of Jane Fitzelm should make us question Austen’s treatment of Jane Bennet and her love for Bingley, nor that Lester’s treatment of these characters comprises a rejection of the marriage-directed plot line as a whole; instead, Lester attacks the scheming of marriage-obsessed female

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characters both in Austen’s and in others’ marriage-plot novels.11 In fact, Lester’s treatment of Ann’s plots exposes the machinations that such novels suggest women—females characters or readers—feel they must take to catch their man, the amount of scheming that goes into making a match. Lester thereby attacks the notion that marriage should be such a be-all and end-all of women’s existence that they should expend all their mental energy on catching a man. Lester’s satire on ambitious marriage plotting offers a counterplot to Edith’s more complex plot, in which courtship and female Bildung seem at odds. Although Edith’s superiority to other women in the novel makes her the ideal female protagonist to deserve the hand of a loving (wealthy and wellborn) man who recognizes her value, there are few candidates worthy of her. And in a world in which marriage is trivialized as it is in Ann’s mind, it is hard to imagine Edith wanting to insert herself into the institution. The lack of fit between Edith and the typical marriage plot becomes obvious from the radical disjunction not only in focus but in style between these two elements of Lester’s novel—a disjunction evident by comparing passages I have quoted thus far from parts of the novel involving Ann and those involving Edith. This disjunction enables Lester to highlight and reject the conventional ambitious marriage plot’s stress on economic and social gains as alien to women whose interests go beyond gaining a coronet, leaving open the possibility that women’s plot lines might include the development and valorization of women’s talents. Furthermore, Lester notably does not reject the possibility for romantic union for the creative woman; bringing in the (debased) marriage plot enables her to suggest that it needs to be re-envisioned, purified of ambition—of plots, or plotting—altogether. To enable its readership to imagine what a novel uniting visionary female Bildung and romance might look like, The Woman of Genius first shows us what it can not include by incorporating and denigrating another form unfit for representing Edith’s characteristics and aspirations: the Gothic. The novel does so through its treatment of Zimri. When he notes that he is one of “a nation without a home, scattered amongst the Gentiles, the enemies of Zion, reviled, trampled on, and mocked” (III: 104–5), Zimri links himself to Wandering Jews that appear in other Gothic novels such as Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796). Zimri’s Gothicism is underlined by his fantastic eastern garb, his “Asiatic costume” with its “white turban with red folds surmount[ing] the thick black clustering curls that mingled with his raven beard” (I: 198–9). Such a description exoticizes him, aligning him with villains including Charlotte Dacre’s African Zofloya, William Beckford’s Arab Vathek, 11   It is worth noting that Austen makes the same point about marriage-obsessed characters; her portrayals of Mrs. Bennet and Emma, for instance, criticize these women’s activities. Other marriage plot novels with such characters function similarly; in Belinda, (1801) for instance, Maria Edgeworth criticizes the protagonist’s aunt for purveying her nieces on the marriage market by showing that the aunt’s reputation compromises Belinda’s ability to find a husband. Frances Burney is equally critical of such characters in Cecilia (1782).

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and the brooding Mediterranean Catholics in the novels of Ann Radcliffe and her imitators. The biblical language in which Zimri delivers his messages of doom further exoticizes him, making him fit in the realist novel as poorly as, or indeed worse than, Edith, whose poetic speech is itself so stylistically different from that of conventional realist female-centered novels. When Edith tells Zimri that if actions define the parent, his damaging behavior towards her makes him no father to her, for instance, he responds, My nation’s iniquities have fallen on me with a double curse! ... there is no need that the “memory of the desolation” should be inscribed on my walls. Thou, thou, art a withered branch, lopt off from the trunk that gave the life ... whose dropping and shrivelled leaves continually recall to me that Zion still mourneth! Let the dews of prosperity fall around me; still like Gideon’s fleece the burning spot thou hast made in my heart, rejects their moisture. Thou hast deserted me as Absalom deserted David. (III: 59–60)

While Jews derided in popular culture were frequently made comic and disarmed of their threat by being presented as speaking in broken Yiddish-inflected English (Page 23–34), the force of Zimri’s language and its rootedness in biblical style, even with his “peculiar Hebraic pronunciation” (III: 105), makes him threatening rather than laughable, eternal or at least empowered by his “nation’s” history, rather than rooted in the debased quotidian.12 Zimri’s biblical language also calls up Zimris in the Hebrew Bible. The most pertinent of these is a regicide, a man who ascends to the throne by killing King Elah. This Zimri rules for only seven days; the army chooses Omri as its leader and then marches on Zimri, who retreats to the palace, sets fire to it, and dies in the flames (1 Kings xvi.9–20).13 Zimri’s plots against Edith, really vengeance against Avondel Lisle, his competitor for the hand of Edith’s mother, might be considered an evocation of the murder of a king the biblical Zimri treated as his competitor for the throne. Lester’s Zimri’s desire to undermine Edith’s happiness might be equated to the biblical Zimri’s bringing down the palace when assailed. While such an equation seems a stretch, Lester’s Zimri’s evoking a regicide by name heightens the odiousness with which is connected. Zimri’s name also links him to Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel (“Zimri” is the name Dryden gives

12

  See Page on the ambivalence that enables rejecting contemporary Jews while admiring ancient Jews. 13   The other is an Israelite who has sexual relations with a Midianite woman, for which nation-breaking he is slain (Num. xxv. 6–14). The overlap here might consist of Zimri’s alliance with the dowager Countess of Athol, or his desire to be united to Edith’s mother, who, by converting, cut her linkage to his “nation.”

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George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham [lines 544–68]).14 Dryden’s poem is also about the deposition of a king, and Lester invites the connection by Zimri’s mention of Absalom in this passage. This link only further heightens the negative connotations readers would associate with Lester’s Zimri. While Zimri’s physical appearance links him with Gothic villains and his name enhances his connection to the unsavory, Zimri’s appearances further fit him more for a Gothic than a realist novel, and the language with which his abrupt appearances are described demonize him. We first view him when he mysteriously appears briefly outside the Parsonage; he seems to have “risen in that precise spot, like a dark spectre blasting those he looked on with destruction and [to have then] sunk into the abyss from which he had momentarily escaped” (I: 199). When Sir Adelmar is returning to England via the Alps, Zimri appears in a scene characterized not by the masculine Romantic sublime typically linked to such topography but by the (Mary Shelleyian) Gothic sublime. He explains, “Before me, immediately before me,” he tells Rashleigh, “that Jew stood!” He responded with “unutterable astonishment! ... [that Zimri, as though demonically omniscient,] was aware precisely whither my movements were directed, although they had been so little ascertained by myself” (III: 84). Sir Adelmar pursues Zimri in hopes of finding Edith, but, he says, Zimri “constantly ... evaded my pursuit, sometimes rising on my view as a spectre of evil tidings, always … eluding my efforts to detain him” (III: 95–6).15 Sir Adelmar asserts that “the chief of Pandemonium-hall might have been [the] archetype” of this “damned spirit” (III: 50, 49) and he tells Zimri that his attempts to keep Edith hidden will prove fruitless, even were Zimri to “take on [him]self the semblance of the master demon, [or to] call legions of infernal spirits to [his] aid” (III: 108). Zimri is most extensively, imagistically linked to the demonic, however, by his appearance in a scene to which I shall later return. On Good Friday, Sir Adelmar is in the Basilica of St Peter’s where, “Amidst a gloom which the imagination seemed to realise as an universal darkness” (III: 101), he regards the “red light streaming from the Madre di Pieta.” Suddenly, “a dusky shadow fell on it. ... A dark figure in a peculiar costume stood before me. The light was full on the dark black eye, reddening the swarthy hue of the countenance” (III: 102). Zimri’s “reddened” swarthiness and his casting a shadow on the Christ in this scene heighten his connection with the demonic. Zimri is the better able to fill this role in part because traditionally, Jews have been seen as responsible for Christ’s death; Zimri’s casting a shadow on Christ here metaphorically alludes to such a belief. 14   As Jack Lynch points out, Dryden uses both referents for Zimri, depicting the Duke thus as a “lecherous murderer” and a “murderous usurper”; by extension, Lester’s Zimri would convey both meanings. 15   I refer to this as the Mary Shelleyian Gothic sublime because while Lester does not allude explicitly to Frankenstein, the resemblance between the scenes in the two novels is notable. It lies outside the subject of this essay to pursue Lester’s evocation of Frankenstein more fully.

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In his malevolence, Zimri evokes other stereotypical negative depictions of Jews, for instance when he threatens and mocks Sir Adelmar by saying that when Jews return to “their own land … the spoiler shall exchange the song of triumph for the wail of captivity [and] judgment shall overtake the wicked” (III: 105) i.e., Christians. As a hater of Christians, Zimri raises the specter of Jews as murdering and cannibalizing Christians, the “ancient and still-repeated lie that Jews murder Christians because they need the blood for Jewish ritual” (Rosenberg 213 n24). Zimri’s link to the demonic, his attitude towards Christians that calls up beliefs that Jews killed Jesus, and his inexplicable and uncanny ability to appear from and disappear into hell or thin air, constitute him as the “Anti-Christ [and] black magician” that anti-Semites believed Jews to be (Rosenberg 11). As such, he is the ultimate Gothic adversary. Zimri’s link to Edith through race, as the period (and this novel) would call it, and, Sir Adelmar thinks, through religion, is problematic not only because Sir Adelmar cannot imagine marrying a woman with different religious practices, but also because it seems responsible for a trait that links Zimri to the Gothic—an intensity that Sir Adelmar remarks Zimri and Edith share. This intensity, if not based in blood relation, must be racially and/or generically based—based, that is, in their Jewish blood and, hence, in the Gothic. In the scene in St Peter’s, Sir Adelmar notes that the expression of Zimri’s eye “was like that wild-glancing fire which I had seen, on peculiar occasions, sparkle in that of Edith” and he therefore concludes, “their resemblance in so singular a point staggered me. It was a deadly conviction of their affinity. I forgot that Edith had allowed a relationship, which although more remote than that the Jew claimed, might account for the existence of a stronger likeness than this transient expression of countenance” (III: 107–8). Their similar intensity and internal fire, along with Zimri’s appearing as stock Gothic demonic villain, suggests that the visionary Edith more properly belongs to Gothicism than to Romanticism, to mystery and denigrated race and religion than to transcendent imagination, to degraded rather than valorized genre. Her isolation then takes on a different meaning; it may indeed stem from Edith’s being what Sir Adelmar calls “one of that outcast exiled race” (III: 52). But Edith is not entirely like Zimri, and her Jewish mother’s softer emotions compromise any ability to base Edith’s intense passions or her isolation on race. Zimri acknowledges that Edith’s mother “trembled before the agony of [his] passion” and that “a love like [his would] ... have destroyed every other feeling in the violence of its own fire” (III: 184). That Edith’s mother is frightened by the strength of Zimri’s feelings implies they are foreign to her, and while the novel suggests they may be linked to Jewish blood, they are thus treated as no necessary part of female Jews. This difference between male and female Jews is based in stereotype, in which the male Jew is unreclaimable and utterly Other, while the female Jew is amenable to conversion, usually by a Gentile male she then marries, leading to the erasure of her Otherness and her absorption into non-Jewish culture (Rosenberg 34). Even though Edith recognizes that most men would flee women

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whose passions are as strong as hers, her being a female with Jewish blood enables her, by stereotype, to be less entirely, permanently Other. Edith problematizes any easy link between herself, Zimri, and the Gothic in other ways as well. She does so in part by deriding the Gothic and thereby distancing herself from it. In fact, Gothic literature—specifically, the Gothic novel—is the only literary form overtly addressed in The Woman of Genius. Although Edith admits to having enjoyed “all the delights of expectation and horror wound up to the highest pitch,” she claims that novels by Radcliffe and those “writ[ing] in her style” give no “new perception of the intricacies of the human heart, [no] new shade of passion.” Instead, “they contain exaggerated portraitures of humanity, or rather they are representations of nature in the broadest caricature. Sentiments are heightened into something which man never was made to feel; ... there is no shade, no repose, and consequently no truth” (I: 192). Such a description fits Zimri’s exaggerated emotions and single-minded drive for revenge, but Edith’s feelings are more complex: they smolder, burn, flash, or become absorbed by melancholy. As we have seen, she also longs for the restful domestic realm more typically found in a realist novel or in feminine Romanticism. Her rejection of both Zimri and the Gothic constitutes a containment or balancing in herself of elements she shares with him. Edith also is differentiated from Zimri by being only partly Other, being British on her paternal side. Lester represents Britons as phlegmatic and, with the exception of Sir Adelmar, as lacking imagination. Given that no other character has genius like Edith’s, Lester implies that the intensity fueling that genius must typically be based in race, in the Jewish blood that sets her apart. The novel and stereotype suggest that Jewish women need not experience passion like Zimri’s, however, the implication is that Edith’s intensity derives from masculine Jewish blood—a recessive trait perhaps that should not appear in a (Jewish) woman. This is perhaps tempered by her British side, but the fact that these traits nonetheless do appear in Edith furthers the idea that she is scandalously unfeminine—but not so in a way that links her to the Gothic. Demonized as Zimri is within the novel, and horrified as Sir Adelmar is to hear that Edith is from that “outcast exiled race,” however, it is notable that while Edith’s difference from Zimri is made clear, her Jewishness heritage is retained;16 it is visible through her not-strictly-English appearance, which reminds us that her genius is linked to her racial Jewishness. Lester must in fact insist on Edith’s retention of Otherness if Edith is, counter logically, to give Britain, her home, its literary hope and future. By the nature of her rejection of the Gothic, Edith 16   Here Lester certainly alludes to Maria Edgeworth’s Harrington (1817), in which Christian female protagonist Berenice Montenero also has one parent who is Jewish and another who is English. That she does so is signaled in part by inclusion in both novels of a performance of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice that causes the female protagonists’ distress and outs them as Jewish in heritage. There are significant differences, but exploring these novels’ relation further lies beyond the purview of this essay.

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suggests that for a woman to have complex, heightened emotions is both realistic and capable of teaching us new truths, perhaps about emotions women can, with propriety, experience. By rejecting the version of the Gothic that Zimri represents, while not rejecting her (masculine) Jewish Promethean flame, Edith helps us imagine the new form of genius and writing with which she might be connected— a form we might call, for lack of a better term, female masculine Romanticism. Lester has a precedent for a novelistic visionary female character: the eponymous protagonist of Germaine de Staël’s Corinne (1807), the most significant of this period’s woman-focused Künstlerromanen, the third genre Lester incorporates to show its inadequacy for depicting her female artist.17 Like Lester, De Staël explores whether a female genius can have both public fame and women’s more typical reward, domestic love.18 Corinne, De Staël’s “poëte, écrivain, improvisatrice” (49)—poet, author, and extempore composer and reciter of poetry—is as famous for her talents within Corinne as Edith is in The Woman of Genius; when we first encounter Corinne, she is being crowned poet laureate in Rome. Like Edith, Corinne is half British and half Other; both have English fathers, and while Edith’s mother is Jewish, “racially” non-English, Corinne’s is Italian. Like Edith, Corinne loves and is loved by a Briton, Lord Nelvil. Both male protagonists are hesitant to marry the female protagonists both because of mysteries in the women’s background regarding their parentage and legitimacy and because the two women are reluctant to clear up these issues. Misjudgments about these women’s exercise of their talents are also similar. Just as Captain Fitzelm has suggested that Edith act to gain a coronet, De Staël’s French Count d’Erfeuil wants to encourage Corinne “jouer plus souvent la tragédie: c’est un moyen sûr pour sa faire épouser par quelque étranger de distinction qui passera par ici” (203).19 Just as public opinion supports Edith’s talents, the initially condemnatory Lord Nelvil eventually defends Corinne’s public fame, saying that she is “la femme du monde la plus justement célèbre par ses admirables talents en tout genre”20 and that her talents are linked with “le caractère le plus élevé” and “la bonté” (458)—the highest character and goodness. It is equally the role of fathers and father-figures that impede these novels’ matches. While Zimri’s interference and assertions that Edith is Jewish, illegitimate, 17

  The connection between the two novels’ protagonists was in fact noted in an early review of Lester’s novel, which said that Edith “might prove to be another Corinne.” This review posits Maria Edgeworth’s Manoeuvering (1809) as an influence as well (The Literary Gazette). 18   For a different focus on the relation between these two texts, see my “Rejecting Rome.” 19   “to act in tragedy more often: it is a sure way to get herself married to some distinguished foreigner who comes this way.” Translations from the French are my own, with the input of Chloe Chard, whom I thank for her assistance. 20   “the most rightfully famous woman in the world for her admirable talents in every genre [of art].”

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and dead make problems seem insurmountable to Sir Adelmar, in Corinne, it is the role of Lord Nelvil’s father whose voice, even from beyond the grave, presents obstacles to Lord Nelvil’s relationship with Corinne—obstacles that finally are insurmountable. Late in the novel, Corinne admits that Lord Nelvil’s father met her years earlier, hoping to find her a suitable future spouse for Lord Nelvil. Instead, he disapproved of her eagerly performing her talents for him. Lord Nelvil then learns that marrying Corinne “serait une offense mortelle à [la] memoire [de son père]” (468),21 so he turns to the woman his father preferred for him—Corinne’s reserved half-sister Lucile. The two women share a father, but Lucile’s mother, Corinne’s father’s second wife, is British. The despairing Corinne then dies. Despite Corinne’s death, De Staël’s novel, at least at the outset, seems more hopeful than The Woman of Genius, at its outset, in suggesting that a woman of genius can thrive: Corinne is being crowned poet laureate before an adulating crowd when we first see her, after all. In contrast, even though we later hear of Edith’s fame, in the first narrated scene in The Woman of Genius, Lady Athol treats Edith as a fallen woman, telling her, “you cannot sink much lower, even if you fall into the deepest abyss of the ocean ...You [are] overwhelmed with contemned love, and a blighted name, outcast and despised! ... Your genius is become a curse to you, plunging you deeper into darkness and despair” (I: 27–8). To Edith, genius is a sort of curse; it keeps her, she believes, from the domesticity she craves. The initial optimism in Corinne and much grimmer view in The Woman of Genius are stressed in parallel scenes that most obviously link the two novels in which each male protagonist seeks his beloved at St Peter’s on Good Friday. In Corinne, Lord Nelvil waits to be joined by Corinne, who has retreated to a convent for the week. At St. Peter’s, “on éteint les flambeaux; la nuit s’avance. ... Le silence est profound, la parole ferait un mal insupportable dans cet état de l’âme où tout est intime et intérieur” (267).22 The church is then “éclairé ... par une croix illuminée; ce signe de douleur, seul resplendissant dans l’auguste obscurité de cet immense édifice, est la plus belle image du christianisme au milieu des ténèbres de la vie” (267).23 The Catholic Corinne and Protestant Lord Nelvil go to St. Peter’s Square on Easter Sunday and then “sentirent ... que tous les cultes se ressemblent. Le sentiment religieux unit intimement les hommes entre eux... Prier ensemble ... dans quelque rite que ce soit, c’est la plus touchante fraternité d’espérance et de sympathie que les hommes puissent contracter sur cette terre. (277).24 21

  “would be a mortal insult to [the] memory [of his father].”   “the lights are extinguished; night approaches. ... The silence is profound, words would be an unbearable pain in that state of the soul in which everything is private and inward.” 23   “lit by an illuminated cross; this sign of grief, shining alone in the august obscurity of that immense building, is the most beautiful image of Christianity in the midst of the life’s shadows.” 24   “felt that all forms of worship are alike. Religious feeling binds men closely together ... Praying together, ... in whatever rite, is the most touching fraternity of hope and fellow feeling that men can develop on this earth.” 22

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In The Woman of Genius too, “the ... lamps ... gradually expired” and “The triumphant cross generally darting luminous rays around it, now was obscure ... [Six tapers] before the Madre di Pieta... and the last dimly red rays penetrating through the dome ... were the only remnants of light amidst a gloom which the imagination seemed to realise as an universal darkness” (III: 100–101). Then, however, Lester darkly parodies Lord Nelvil and Corinne’s moment of religious and emotional rapture. In place of a female protagonist exalted by Christian sentiments, the demonic Zimri appears, casting his “dusky shadow” on the “Madre di Pieta” (III: 102). Sir Adelmar then recalls that Zimri was “the father, perchance” of Edith (III: 103), making her too one of that “outcast ... race” (III: 52). The discordance between the expected religious exaltation and the horror of Zimri’s appearance and what it suggests about Edith implies that the kind of union Corinne promises between lovers of different religious practices is impossible; the gap between Edith and Sir Adelmar’s religions is too great. It is perhaps significant that Edith repudiates the evil father figure and is able to marry Sir Adelmar and thrive, while Corinne falls victim to the opinions of Lord Nelvil’s father and to the land that produced him, making marriage to Lord Nelvil and continued genius in his country impossible. That land already has been presented as intolerant of Corinne’s flights of fancy. When Corinne is 17, her mother dies and she moves to England, to her father’s home; then, the community demands her self-effacement. Later, when Englishman Mr. Edgermond sees Corinne perform in Italy, he tells Lord Nelvil, “tout aimable qu’est Corinne, je pense comme Thomas Walpole, que fait-on de cela à la maison?” (204)25—that is, in Great Britain. It is Corinne’s Italian side—perhaps her Italian blood—that enables her voice, and it is only by returning to her motherland—the home of her late mother—that she can exercise and be appreciated for her talents. Corinne must choose between the voice-enabling motherland and the silencing land of her own and her beloved’s father; when she allows herself to be susceptible to Lord Nelvil, with his subordination to his father, she is indeed silenced. Given that it is Lord Nelvil’s father who in many senses is responsible for Corinne’s demise, “what ... become[s] of Corinne’s literary discourse is the result of the enforcement of patriarchal authority at the site of public voice” (Whitman 67).26 Or, arguably, surrendering to love silences her; as soon as she gives herself up to love for Lord Nelvil, she performs less and less, preparing us to see her silenced when that

25   “However lovable Corinne is, I think like Thomas Walpole, What does one do with that at home?” 26   Ellen Peel argues that it is women in England, and gossip among women, which make England stifling for the female creative voice (102–3); it is her stepmother, after all, who enforces Corinne’s silencing and thereby drives Corinne from England. These women have internalized and enforce the law of the father, however. England is, in any event, the land of Lord Nelvil’s father, and his rejection of Corinne for his son, along with the son’s aligning himself with the father, is what drives Corinne into her final silence.

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love fails. She might be equally silenced were she to have wed Lord Nelvil and accompanied him to England. De Staël offers some hope for the continuation of Corinne’s voice; before Corinne dies, she shares some of her skills with Juliet, daughter of Lord Nelvil and Lucile. The link between the two females, Juliet’s role as Corinne’s protégée, is corroborated by Juliet’s inexplicably looking more like Corinne than her own parents. Given the novel’s treatment of England’s response to the female artist, however, it is doubtful that Juliet can retain an artistic voice there any more than her aunt could. Corinne also had an afterlife as model to female British and American authors from “Felicia Hemans ... to ... Willa Cather” (Lokke 159),27 but with mixed results; emulating Corinne “exposed British women writers such as Hester Lynch Piozzi, Mary Robinson, and Letitia Landon to accusations of immorality and enthusiasm” (Orianne Smith)—the same response Corinne received within de Staël’s novel. Lester does not treat England thus, so Edith need not choose between voice and country. As with Corinne, Edith’s genius derives from her non-English side; she draws on the talent that comes from the Jewish blood that she gets from her mother, responsible for that spark of passion and brilliance that Zimri too exhibits. She can reject the false father and blend maternally-derived genius with paternal land (and religion). She thus retains both the maternal and the paternal in her genius and in the realm in which she exercises that genius. Furthermore, in The Woman of Genius, love between a woman of genius and an Englishman can forward poetic talents. Sir Adelmar finds her “the echo of my own soul; the being to whom I had clung in the visions of the night; the reviver, the expresser of my feelings” (III: 17). For Edith, love to an intellectual equal expands her reason, which elevates her imagination, which identifies it with all that is great and sublime, which prepares her for the enjoyment of a higher rank in eternity. ... It is the ray of morning-light falling on the statue, and calling forth its music and its melody; it is the home of her soul. ... It becomes to her a present, a visible demonstration of eternal life, a pledge of immortality. (II: 74–5).

With such a man, a woman “enters into a new, a richer world of intellect; she acquires a fresh source of ideas” (II: 74). Such a marriage should serve both: “Possessing minds cultivated to the highest pitch of refinement,—capacities for intellectual enjoyment;—equal genius;—his superiority appearing in a knowledge of the world, and in those attainments which afford him additional sources of bliss, as they elevate him to be her instructor;—unbounded, mutual love” (III: 206) for them both. It is unclear, however, that Edith practices her art once married; then, the novel’s last lines tell us, 27

 

See also Moers (173–210), Gutwirth (28–30), and Naginski (186–7).

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Sir Adelmar, who has proved all that results from successful ambition, from high reputation, from consummate talent, exults in the superior felicity conferred on him by her, His likeness, his fit help, his other self, His wish exactly to his heart’s desire. (III: 207).28

In a novel about a woman of genius, it is disturbing that it is her husband’s success and happiness, rather than her continued artistry from within marriage that is stressed. More positive is that in the England Lester depicts, Edith is allowed to practice and publish the works of her genius as long as she wishes. Her expression of her genius is not represented as so scandalously unfeminine that it “shipwrecks” her, making her as unmarriageable as the most arrant fallen woman. Her love for Sir Adelmar, even when she doubts his response, does not silence her, as Corinne’s love for Lord Nelvil arguably does. Edith’s community celebrates her genius, and there is nothing to suggest that marriage forces Edith into silence. As in Corinne, the female artist’s voice promises to continue in a younger woman. We do not know whether her and Sir Adelmar’s “lovely children” inherit their parents’ genius. We are invited to believe, however, that Edith’s voice continues in the Fitzelms’s illegitimate cousin, Mary Bodell. Interestingly, Mary is presented as crossing gender lines, as does Edith, who has “masculine energy of mind” (II: 66) and is “almost too tall, nearly masculine” (II: 182), according to Ann Fitzelm. Mary is likewise described in a manner that highlights her near masculinity: her eyes are “so piercingly black that a person disposed to be fastidious might, perhaps, call them masculine” (II: 35). Mary also is the only female character treated as capable of understanding Edith. The suggestion then is that Edith’s androgynous nature and talents will get carried on by someone likewise androgynous in looks and mental capabilities. This androgyny is a scandalous crossing of borders that is furthered by both women’s blend of racial heritage. Edith’s is more scandalous a blend than Corinne’s dual nationality, given views on Jews in Edith’s world as racially different; even a Jew who converted “supposedly maintain[ed] telltale signs of Jewishness despite the rejection of Judaism: [not only] mannerisms, speech, ‘physiognomy’” ... but also “customs” and “character” (Ragussis 19).29 This scandalous hybridity is even more   An altered form from Milton’s Paradise Lost, which reads, “Thy likeness, thy fit help, thy other self, / Thy wish exactly to thy heart’s desire” (Book 8, lines 450–51), words Raphael uses to describe to Adam the match God has created for Adam in Eve. By use of this (altered) passage from Paradise Lost, Lester implies that Sir Adelmar and Edith’s relationship places them in a prelapsarian edenic state. The reference does not clarify whether Edith is subsumed in Sir Adelmar, given that it is a point of scholarly debate whether Adam and Eve are created as equals. 29   Such recidivism was especially common among those converted by the London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews, which frequently “bought” temporary or false converts such as “rogues and opportunists” and “offer[ed]to the Jewish poor … 28

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pronounced in Mary Bodell. She is the illegitimate daughter of an Englishman— Sir Adelmar and his siblings’ paternal uncle—and a West Indian princess. Mary is therefore obviously racially mixed and her masculine eyes, according to Ann, are “peculiar characteristics of her maternal country” (II: 35)—a country that itself is here androgynized, being identified as maternal, producing Mary’s mother and her masculine looks. If Edith is the primary genius in the novel and Mary is her evident heir(ess)—if Sir Adelmar is the sole Briton who shows potential genius, suggesting that genius is unlikely to survive in Britain without new lifeblood— then British literature can only survive through incorporation of the Other that cannot be wholly colonized and assimilated and whose Otherness is perhaps the source of her genius. In fact, it is apparently only by marrying those at least partly Other that Britons can hope to perpetuate genius. And it is only those who have genius in this novel who show signs of life that suggest that they would be able to produce progeny lively enough to support Britons’ lifeblood. Only through crossing borders, muddying “pure” bloodlines, and destroying such categories, the novel suggests, can the nation find its own blood renewed enough to enable it to thrive. And the novel suggests that such practices are indeed possible. I stress these two characters’ scandalous border-crossing because bordercrossing, or category-destroying, is actualized in the genre in which The Woman of Genius is written—ostensibly, we might conclude, the form in which an author with transcendent genius might write, a novelistic/poetic example of the cross-raced, cross-ethnic, cross-national egotistical sublime. We cannot be sure that the form is the one that Edith uses, as we never see her poetic products; in the Parthenon, she in fact recites lines from Byron’s Childe Harold.30 We must therefore accept hearsay evidence that she is a genius. In this, Lester follows the model that de Staël sets in Corinne, where the reader is given only the general outline of Corinne’s improvisations. Both authors thereby suggest that their female protagonists are such geniuses that representation of their work must prove inadequate. Lester implies that her own work, however—this novel—may inaugurate the new form in which female genius might clothe itself. The novel is unabashedly literary and allusive. There are references to Pliny and Sterne, lines from Proverbs, poems from or allusions to Akenside, Armstrong, Byron, Camoens, Campbell, Coleridge, Davies, Dryden, Milman, Milton, Montgomery, Pratt [Samuel Jackson], Rokeby, and Young, as well as lines from plays by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare, Otway, and Beaumont and Fletcher. The inclusion of these male authors suggests that a woman’s literary form can and will include male forefathers, that it will draw on traditions of different lands (her sources are English, French, Italian, and Latin), and, further, that it will be a mixed genre, narrative and poetry. This new form will have novelistic foremothers as well: most obviously but not limited to de Staël, Austen, Mary Shelley, and Edgeworth. The debased in the female-identified little more than a bribe to comply with the outward forms of Christianity” (Endelman 74). See also Ragussis (17–19). 30   She recites Canto II, on Greece, verses xxv–xxvi.

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marriage plot and the Radcliffe-style Gothic, however, will have no place in this new form. Finally, Lester celebrates a crossing of boundaries, an embrace of what all geniuses, genres and lands have to offer. By presenting us with a protagonist of mixed heritage, and by making that protagonist’s protegée also of mixed heritage, stemming from two continents, Lester also suggests that this new genre must embrace the whole world. Through writing this novel itself, Lester shows that England must foster mixed heritage and the (masculine) female voice in whatever new forms it takes.

Chapter Nine

Frances Trollope’s America: From Enlightenment Aesthetics to Victorian Class Christopher Flynn

Frances Trollope’s personal and professional histories place her on the fault lines of the debates this collection enters. Born within 10 years of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, she might have belonged to what was once called the first generation of Romantics. But since she was just five years younger than Jane Austen and concerned with many issues similar to those we find in Austen’s works, we might also see her as a belated eighteenth-century social novelist. She could belong to the period that some critics have tried talking into existence, the “Romantic Century,” stretching from 1750–1850. If we consider Blake’s birth in 1757 and Wordsworth’s death in 1850, such periodization makes as much sense as most and more than others. Trollope could also belong to the long eighteenth century, whether it ends in 1815 or 1832. But since she did not publish her first book, Domestic Manners of the Americans, until the latter date, when she was in her early fifties, and since she consciously timed the book’s publication and shaped its argument to influence the Great Reform Bill, and finally, since she continued publishing travel books and novels into the 1860s, we classify her as an early voice in the Victorian period, rather than one of the culminating ones of the period she was born into or as one of the middle ones in the period in which she grew up. Despite Trollope’s mixed, but clear enough place in the same period to which her son Anthony belongs, her eighteenth-century social and intellectual background and her Romantic-era experiences find their way into her Victorian writings too clearly to be ignored. This essay argues that Trollope relies on an aesthetic vocabulary derived mostly from the Rev. William Gilpin and Edmund Burke to try to reinforce social distinctions that seemed in danger of disappearing as the rise of the middle class continued in a way that became too clear to ignore. Her use of this vocabulary should not be seen, however, as a simple application of eighteenth-century ideas to nineteenth-century experiences. Trollope’s works abound in border crossings—between the U.S. and British Canada, and the U.S.   See William Galperin and Susan Wolfson, “The Romantic Century,” on the Romantic Circles website (http://www.rc.umd.edu/reference/misc/confarchive/crisis/crisisa.html). Wolfson has regularly advocated this reformulation of Romanticism in talks and on the NASSR listserv. 

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and Britain; between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and finally, and most complicatedly, between the eighteenth-century traveler, the Romantic adventurer, and the Victorian tourist. This final matrix of crossings is never discretely laid out, but all of these identities function dialectically to generate a conversation across all of these boundaries. While I would argue that Domestic Manners of the Americans, and Trollope’s first novel, The Refugee in America, both published in 1832, are primarily about the contributions class distinctions make to a civilized society—and Trollope makes it clear that she considers such contributions considerable and crucial—the frame of the Englishwoman on tour in the United States allows these works to lean on nationalism rather than on class. Since nationalism was considerably less contentious than class was in early nineteenth-century England, at least in the context of the Anglo-American comparisons these works make, this approach undoubtedly made these works more palatable and entertaining to a broader section of the English reading public. This is not to say, however, that Trollope hides her views concerning the desirability of a hierarchical class structure. She makes it clear that she sees the democratic nature of early nineteenth-century America as a warning to England. As she writes (in the third person) in her preface to Domestic Manners: the chief object she has had in view is to encourage her countrymen to hold fast by a constitution that ensures all the blessings which flow from established habits and solid principles. If they forego these, they will incur the fearful risk of breaking up their repose by introducing the jarring tumult and universal degradation which invariably follow the wild scheme of placing all the power of the state in the hands of the populace. (7–8)

Trollope is perhaps best known for her authorship of Domestic Manners. This opinionated and entertaining diatribe against the citizens of the United States oscillates between framing picturesque and sublime scenery, and archly describing American culture. Unlike many Romantic writers, Wordsworth most famously, Trollope rarely peoples her picturesque and sublime with the “lower orders,” those exemplars of rustic simplicity. The American people only become elements in her pictures to spoil them, and the picturesque almost never shows up as a background for American manners. From the earliest pages of the book we see an America that fails every aesthetic test of the European observer. “New Orleans,” we are told, “presents very little that can gratify the eye of taste” (12). One of the first juxtapositions of Americans with the natural world is a story of a Louisiana family eaten by crocodiles, the husband waking up to a vision of “relics of three of his children scattered over the floor, and an enormous crocodile, with several young ones around her, occupied in devouring the remnants of their horrid meal” (22). After this,    I exclude English nationalism in the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-Scottish cases from this claim.

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it is not surprising that her attempt to practice her aestheticism on the landscape faces significant obstacles. The horror she discusses, while largely in tune with what Burke had in mind when he lists “serpents and poisonous animals of almost all kinds” as inspirers of sublime thoughts, is a far cry from the aestheticized terror of a cataract or an abyss that Romanticism had made so familiar by the time she traveled to America (Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 53). In this account of her travels, Trollope uses the border between Canada and the U.S. at Niagara Falls to engage the Burkean sublime, particularly its linkage of beauty with terror. Her account of a trip from the U.S. to British Canada and back equates moving into new territory with a shift in her aesthetic outlook. Canadians behave with decorum and complement her viewing experiences. Americans only hinder her ability to see nature’s best attributes. She sees the effects of such border crossings plainly enough. But she fails to see how her crossings from city to valley to cataract, from the picturesque into the sublime, are limited by her preconceptions. Whether in Canada or the U.S., as she travels, the apparatuses of tourism shape, control, and ultimately diminish her connection to what she sees in ways that alter the aesthetic itself away from one in which the tourist actively participates towards one that understands the aesthetic as a consumer product. Trollope published a novel just a few months after Domestic Manners appeared, probably in an attempt to capitalize on the travel book’s immediate popularity. The Refugee in America (1832) covers much of the same ground, but provides Trollope with an imperialistic solution to the aesthetic quandary she finds in North America. In Domestic Manners, the Americans who Trollope encounters perversely resist learning from her superior example. But in The Refugee in America Trollope is able to invent an American who can learn English ways of seeing the New World. This way, the Victorian project of civilizing the natives through Anglicization succeeds in bringing eighteenth-century aesthetic concepts united with Victorian manners to bear on at least one American. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century articulations of the sublime, particularly those by the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, John Dennis and Burke, and, in the later part of the period, Gilpin, Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price, while consciously revised by writers and artists, are also caught up in the changes from a preindustrial world to a heavily industrialized one through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Tourism becomes as much an industry as an activity. This happened earlier in some places than others, of course: Bath already had a well-developed tourist industry when Tobias Smollett sent Matthew Bramble and his entourage there in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771). But Niagara    See Samuel H. Monk’s classic study, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (New York: MLA 1935) for an overview of Shaftesbury, Dennis and Burke’s ideas. For a concise look at Gilpin, Knight and Price, Mavis Batey, “The Picturesque: An Overview” Garden History (1994): 22.2, 121–32, and Dabney Townsend, “The Picturesque” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (1997): 55.4, 365–76, are helpful sources.

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Falls, while a popular sight, was not readily available to the average tourist until at least the last decade of the eighteenth century, and arguably not until the 1820s, when rail travel and accommodations for those who could not mount their own expeditions were in place. But since earlier European visitors had declared Niagara sublime, and later ones had reinforced that reputation, by 1830, when Trollope visited Niagara, tourists came ready to apply an eighteenth-century aesthetic to a nineteenth-century landscape. This combination can help us examine justifications for thinking of the eighteenth century as longer than others, and particularly, what happens to a Romanticism caught between the cannibalistic period that precedes it and the imperialistic one that follows. Trollope herself in Domestic Manners and her characters in The Refugee approach the sublime through the mediation of the already extensive North American tourist industry: steamboats in the Mississippi, and hotels, touring boats, viewing platforms, stairs and platforms offering closer access to the Falls and sanctioned spots for viewing them at Niagara. Throughout all this, Trollope delivers responses informed by eighteenth-century versions of the sublime and emergent Victorian attitudes towards manners and class distinctions, all imbricated in the various ways of seeing that characterize her texts. Border Crossings in Domestic Manners Trollope’s first border crossing in Domestic Manners of the Americans sets the tone for the rest of her book in many ways. She narrates a trip from the sublime Atlantic into the stagnant, muddy Mississippi, and a trip upriver from Natchez to New Orleans. The Americans she meets on the riverboat are an unfeeling people, coarse and vulgar, intellectually limited, intolerant of the social distinctions that she sees as necessary to a civilized existence, and blind to the natural beauties that surround them. These ideas frame her trip to Niagara Falls, which comes at the end of the book. Trollope leaves New York for Niagara, narrating a series of expectations and relieved satisfaction of those expectations as she heads up the Hudson. Social encounters dominate her discussions of New York, with physical description limited to a few descriptions of shops, streets and squares. Such scenes give way to a vaguely peopled, highly picturesque landscape that leads towards the sublime. A reverse aesthetic chronology from Gilpin to Burke underscores this part of her trip through the picturesque Hudson Valley to the sublimity of the Falls. “How quickly weeks glide away in such a city as New York,” she writes, “especially when you reckon among your friends some of the most agreeable people in either hemisphere. But we had still a long journey before us, and one of the wonders of the world was to be seen” (284). Such expectations of natural sights characterize Trollope’s touristic practices, much as they do those of the tourists in Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature,” which discusses the challenges facing all those who visit a sight already imbedded in a discourse. Writing of another natural

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wonder, the Grand Canyon, Percy argues that authentic experience of such sights “is almost impossible”: [T]he Grand Canyon, the thing as it is, has been appropriated by the symbolic complex head on … [It] has already been formulated—by picture postcard, geography book, tourist folders, and the words Grand Canyon … [T]he sightseer measures his satisfaction by the degree to which the canyon conforms to the preformed complex. If it does so, if it looks just like the postcard, he is pleased; he might even say, “why it is every bit as beautiful as a picture postcard!” (47)

Similarly, Linda L. Revie has shown that a discourse about Niagara that dated back about 150 years so shaped travelers’ expectations of what they would see when they arrived that many artists who sketched or painted the Falls after Louis Hennepin’s celebrated sketch in 1697 often repeated Hennepin. In representing the Falls themselves, tourists rendered as their own background mountains and a third waterfall that are not really there, but that Hennepin had included. Trollope, aware of the likely disconnect between expectations and experience, manages to enjoy what she sees by turning it into a Gilpinesque picturesque tour. “On the 30th of May,” she writes: we set off for Niagara. I had heard so much of the surpassing beauty of the North River, that I expected to be disappointed, and to find reality flat after description. But it is not in the power of man to paint with a strength exceeding that of nature, in such scenes as the Hudson presents. Every mile shews some new and startling effect of the combination of rocks, trees, and water; there is no interval of flat or insipid scenery, from the moment you enter upon the river at New York, to that of quitting it at Albany. (284)

Here the Hudson River, from about modern-day midtown Manhattan north, offers her a version of the picturesque with its pleasantly broken “uniformity” and the requisite evidence of human habitation amidst the natural scene. Then, as she progresses upriver, rural scenes mix with the rougher aspects: “After passing Manhatten [sic] Island the eastern shore gradually assumes a wild and rocky character, but ever varying; woods, lawns, pastures, and towering cliffs all meet the eye in quick succession” (284). Finally she encounters ruins, something she found lacking during her voyage east on the Ohio River. The sight validates her assessment of the Hudson as picturesque: “the voyage,” she writes, “passes many points where important events of the revolutionary war took place. Several forts, generally placed in most commanding situation, still shew by their battered ruins, where the struggle was strongest, and I felt no lack of that moral interest … without which no journey can, I think, continue long without wearying the spirits” (285). All of this adds up to evidence that Trollope has read her Gilpin and accepted his eighteenth-century aesthetic sensibility. In “On Picturesque Beauty” (1792), Gilpin had famously praised the charm a battered ruin adds to a picture, or a

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picturesque view of a landscape. “[A]mong all the objects of art, the picturesque eye is perhaps most inquisitive after the elegant relics of ancient architecture; the ruined tower, the Gothic arch, the remains of castles, and abbeys. These are the richest legacies of art. They are consecrated by time; and almost deserve the veneration we pay to the works of nature itself” (93). We might see Trollope as a Romantic at this moment, like Wordsworth at Tintern Abbey or Peele Castle, and in a way she is performing a similar gesture by remembering and reproducing the scene. But she remains an observer rather than a communicant. And, as if following Gilpin’s advice in “On Picturesque Travel,” she seems to take greater “pleasure in recollecting, and recording, from a few transient lines, the scenes we have admired” (107) because of the “calmer” experience such recollection gives. Like Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey with Gilpin as her guide in place of Henry Tilney, she sees “beauty in everything admired by him,” and shows such “earnest” attention that we become “perfectly satisfied of her having a great deal of natural taste” (87). Continuing up the river, she conducts her own picturesque tour, with judicious remarks upon the scenery: About forty miles from New York, you enter upon the Highlands … The beauty of this scenery can only be conceived when it is seen. One might fancy that these capricious masses, with all their countless varieties of light and shade, were thrown together to shew how passing lovely rocks, and woods, and water could be. (285)

Niagara takes Trollope from the picturesque to the sublime in ways that echo almost exactly Burke’s views of its workings on human ideas and emotions. “[W]onder, terror, and delight completely overwhelmed me,” she writes upon first sight of the Falls. I wept with a strange mixture of pleasure and of pain, and certainly was, for some time, too violently affected in the physique to be capable of much pleasure; but when this emotion of the senses subsided, and I had recovered some degree of composure, my enjoyment was very great indeed. (295–6)

But the structures of tourism frame every step—quite literally—of this transition from the picturesque journey to the sublime encounter. Trollope hears the Falls before seeing them, and she does so when “very near the hotel,” meaning William Forsyth’s Pavilion Hotel on the Canadian side, looking directly out to the Horseshoe Falls. She follows the sound of the Falls through the hotel, first seeing the sublime sight from inside a building constructed precisely for tourists visiting Niagara, and placed where they would see it from the vantage point that nearly 150 years of discourse in the form of travel narratives, engravings, paintings, novels and poetry, and, increasingly, guidebooks, had deemed the best spot. “As you enter the door,” she writes, “you see beyond the hall an open space, surrounded by galleries, one above another, and in an instant you feel that from

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thence the wonder is visible” (295). The whole approach to this first sight of the Falls is mediated by the hotel and by its staff: “We encountered a waiter,” she writes, “who had a sympathy of some sort with us, for he would not let us run through the hall to the first gallery, but ushered us up stairs, and another instant placed us where, at one glance, I saw all I had wished for, hoped for, dreamed of” (295). Despite all this framing, or perhaps because of it, Trollope finds the sublimity she’s supposed to find and feels it the way she’s supposed to feel it. She trembles, as she should, and feels the danger of the experience. She sees and hears the Falls as an example of the infinite, as a manifestation of God, just as Burke suggested one should experience an immense cataract. “The noise of vast cataracts … awakes a great and awful sensation in the mind,” Burke argues (75), and Trollope agrees: “[I]t seems like awful daring to stand close beside it, and raise one’s eyes to its immensity,” she writes. “[I]t gives an idea of irresistible power, such as no other object ever conveyed to me” (296). This is a consistent application of Burke’s theories to the natural world. But the touristic frame that has controlled so much of this first sight controls, to a great degree, Trollope’s access to the sublime and experience of it in ways that mark her as a nineteenth-century consumer as much as an eighteenth-century aesthete. In many ways she cedes her right to describe the sublime to the touristic frame and to other tourists. Her anticipation helps set up her surrender of “sovereignty,” as Percy terms this acceptance of the framed experience. Her remark on leaving New York that she was going to see “one of the wonders of the world” (285) is just one example of how pre-conceptions control her experience of the sublime. She continues to frame her experiences before she has them as she nears the Falls: “At length we reached Niagara. It was the brightest day that June could give; and almost any day would have seemed bright that brought me to the object which, for years, I had languished to look upon” (295). These and other remarks set up Trollope’s acceptance of her experience through nineteenth-century touristic structures that relate to eighteenth-century assessments. In other words, her vocabulary for describing the Falls may be Burkean, but her experiences are examples of consumerism developed after the fact in a world aestheticized according to eighteenth-century theories. Her surrender of aesthetic judgment, of a sovereignty over her own perception, anticipates the response Percy’s twentiethcentury tourists have to the Grand Canyon: The highest satisfaction of the sightseer … is that his sight should be certified as genuine … A poor man may envy the rich man, but the sightseer does not envy the expert. When a caste system becomes absolute, envy disappears. Yet the caste of layman-expert is not the fault of the expert. It is due altogether to the eager surrender of sovereignty by the layman so that he may take up the role not of the person but of the consumer. (54)

Trollope’s performance as an eighteenth-century traveler masks her experience as early Victorian tourist-as-consumer. This overt performance and its consumerist

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subtext usually manages to jump past Romantic revisions of the sublime as something that, while often inexpressible, is also tied to inspiration and to the individual’s unique experiences. Ironically, Trollope gets closest to a Romantic approach to the Falls when she describes the failure of an American group of tourists to exhibit proper feelings in the midst of such sublimity. She narrates a scene where her party looks at the Falls from the edge of a cliff near the ferry landing. Most of her group sits on blankets, shaded against the sun by parasols. One of them, presumably the French painter Auguste Hervieu, who accompanied Trollope to the United States, sketches the view. “A large party who had crossed from the American side,” she writes, wound up the steep ascent from the place where the boat had left them; in doing so their backs were turned to the cataracts, and as they approached the summit, our party was the principal object before them. They all stood perfectly still to look at us. This first examination was performed at the distance of about a dozen yards from the spot we occupied, and lasted about five minutes, by which time they recovered breath, and acquired courage. They then advanced in a body, and one or two of them began to examine (wrong side upwards) the work of the sketcher, in doing which they stood precisely between him and his object … [W]e learnt that they were just arrived; yet not one of them … ever turned the head, even for a moment, to look at the most stupendous spectacle that nature has to shew. (299–300)

One might recognize the American response to the sight as a novel way to view the Falls that so many representations had turned into a hyper-mediated instance of the sublime. Instead of watching the Falls, they watch how others watch the Falls. Percy describes an almost identical strategy for seeing the Grand Canyon and marks it as a way of recovering an original vision of a place (48–9). One can imagine a trip to a tourist sight to look at the tourists as an example of Romantic irony. It is a way of seeing a sight one recognizes as compelling, but simultaneously acknowledging that the possibilities for pure, unmediated viewing have disappeared, shaping an irony that accepts the paradox in order to retain the experience. But Trollope’s views are so thoroughly controlled by eighteenth-century dictates to the tourist, gleaned from Burke, Gilpin and others, that she cannot imagine other ways of seeing as valid. She seems blind to the significance of all the framing devices the tourist industry has erected to facilitate her view of the same sublime that all    “[A] man may deliberately seek out the most beaten track of all, the most commonplace tour imaginable … Our complex friend stands behind his fellow tourists … and sees the canyon through them and their predicament, their picture taking and busy disregard.”    See Anne Mellor’s English Romantic Irony, esp. 3–30, for a discussion of romantic irony and its distinction from what she calls “modern deconstruction,” but what I would probably term postmodern irony.

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the other tourists see, and in her blindness convinces herself she has experienced the true thing. The fact that she sees the Falls as connected to Canada, which she considers thoroughly British, facilitates her conviction. Trollope engages in what Dean MacCannell calls a “dialectic of authenticity,” where “artificial society” in one place makes the notion of an “authentic society” elsewhere possible (155). The failure of the Americans to see the sublime feeds Trollope’s belief that she has experienced it. Gilpin advocates intentional framing in order to shape land into the landscape, scenery into a scene. Framing a section of scenery with a Claude Glass may make the late eighteenth-century aesthetic practices of some travelers seem similar to the framed version of the Falls that Trollope experienced. But it is important to emphasize that in the case of the Niagara Falls of the late 1820s, the tourist industry has done the framing for the tourist. This makes Trollope the consumer of the industry’s framed view, not the framing observer Gilpin had in mind, or the active communicant Wordsworth becomes. Trollope offers no visions rising like “unfather’d vapours,” but rather delivers us the type of a Victorian tourist using the vocabulary of the late eighteenth century while accepting a pre-packaged version of the sublime. Fictional Tourism The Refugee in America repeats much of Trollope’s appraisal of the natural wonders of North America through eighteenth-century aesthetic ways of seeing, but tends to use these more as a way of moving from Enlightenment aesthetic to Victorian class concerns, as I suggested earlier. As in Domestic Manners, Trollope sets up her ability to see nature more artfully than those around her through extended observations of manners, from the table to the Congress to Niagara, which arrives near the end of both books. This movement links manners to class, and through juxtaposition, to an ability to appreciate natural beauty. Throughout this novel, American table manners are a constant source of disgust, and sometimes amusement, to the cultured English travelers. “It was hardly possible,” Trollope’s narrator remarks, “for the easy graceful manners of Miss Gordon, or the polite vivacity of her father, to overcome the cold silence of an American dinner-table” (I: 142). Miss Caroline Gordon is a vivacious young woman who sees much to laugh at in the American character, but the meals have a depressing effect even on her. “She talked … yet, still Mr. Warner replied by three words at a time, and his sons continued to feed with ravenous rapidity, and imperturbable gravity of countenance … the Warner family seemed to have no 

  A Claude Glass is a slightly tinted, convex mirror, often equipped with a frame, which was used to view a landscape in order to try to reproduce the effects of the paintings of seventeenth-century landscape painter Claude Lorrain. The viewer stood with the landscape behind her, framing a section of it with the aid of the mirror and its border.

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other object in sitting down to dinner than to swallow their food” (I: 142). As a result, meals are fast. Breakfast at the Warner house in Rochester, a more civilized place than most in this novel, does not “last long; though, as it occupied twenty minutes, it was at least double its ordinary duration in any American family; which waste of time was not indeed to be avoided, from the ‘national slowness’ of the English at table” (I: 174). At Washington, where the traveling English party goes near the end of its ordeals in the new republic, the members of Congress dine like pigs at a trough. Congress breaks for the day at about four p.m.: “[I]t therefore often happens that half an hour afterwards five hundred of the most eloquent mouths in the Union are open to receive the restoratives of sturgeon and shad, roast beef and turkey, canvass-backs and custards” (III: 59–60). The linkage of poor American table manners to poor American governance is clear. Trollope includes many scenes of the business of the nation being conducted with a surprising lack of ability. Captain Basil Hall, whose Travels in North America (1829) cover similar ground to that discussed in Domestic Manners, also refers to the failure of American republicanism in terms that conflate national greatness with domestic politeness. “These gentlemen,” Hall writes of the members of the New York legislature, “were described to me as being chiefly farmers, shopkeepers, and country lawyers, and other persons quite unaccustomed to abstract reasoning …” Many of the legislators, “not having made public business a regular profession or study, were ignorant of what had been done before—and had come to the legislature, straight from the plough—or from behind the counter—from chopping down trees—or from the bar, under the impression that they were at once to be converted into statesmen” (II: 35–6). Social class tends to predict social behavior, as is clear by Hall’s last remark: the “bar” he refers to is that of a saloon, not the legal profession. The conversation-free American table remarked upon by Trollope, Hall and other English visitors to the United States, is one place where a lack of manners is in evidence. Two other habits remarked upon by most English travelers during this period are more actively offensive. Hall and Trollope, as well as William Cobbett and, a few years later, Charles Dickens, find Euro-Americans and Native Americans indistinguishable in their intemperance. Hall writes that a deeper curse never afflicted any nation. The evil is manifested in almost every walk of life, contaminates all it touches, and at last finds its consummation in the alms-house, the penitentiary, or the insane institution; so that, while it threatens to sap the foundation of every thing good in America—political and domestic— it may truly be said to be worse than the yellow fever, or the negro slavery, because apparently more irremediable. (II: 84)

Like Trollope, Hall ascribes the evils of widespread drinking to the leveling affects of the equality that pervades social as well as political society in America. “[I]n a country where all effective power is placed,” he writes, “not indirectly and for a

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time, but directly, universally, and permanently—in the hands of the lowest and most numerous class of the community, the characteristic habits of that class must of necessity predominate, in spite of every conceivable device recommended and adopted by the wise and the good men of the nation” (II: 85). Hall complains that bars are everywhere—in museums, theaters, and at natural sights. “[A]t the Cauterskill Falls we saw two; one on each side of the cataract, to the utter ruin of the unhappy sublime and beautiful” (I: 126). As is seen in Hall’s gesture towards the aesthetics of the natural world, and the ruinous affect of the signs of this “national evil” on the landscape, one of the main problems with such a habit is its destruction of the sensibilities of the more refined classes to see and appreciate natural beauty. Hall’s fear of depraved tastes is linked directly to Trollope’s complaint that higher pursuits could make no progress in America because social equality tended to prevent anyone from becoming susceptible to polite virtues and aesthetic accomplishments, including viewing waterfalls as an example of the sublime in nature. In Hall’s view, the result of this alcohol-induced dullness—and throughout his work and Trollope’s drinking is depicted as just as unsociable a pastime as eating—is that Americans are “nearly as insensible to the beauties of nature as we had reason to fear, from their public exhibitions, they were to the graces of art” (I: 124). Both authors follow this reasoning, suggesting Romanticism’s influence on the eighteenth-century aesthetic. Nature can be framed into art by the refined eye, and art is at least as natural as it is artificial. We see this move throughout Domestic Manners and The Refugee in America, especially in moments where the main English character, Caroline Gordon, realizes that Emily, her American protégé, draws better because she is less artful, more natural. We can see such distinctions akin to examples of late 18th-century aesthetic views of the landscape and their development into Romantic depictions of the natural world. Tobacco chewing and spitting are the third much lamented American pastime. Trollope asserts that this habit alters the physiognomy of the Americans. The lips of American males “are almost uniformly thin and compressed,” and Trollope can arrive at no explanation other than the “universal” practice of “expressing the juices of this loathsome herb,” which she claims “enforces exactly that position of the lips, which gives this remarkable peculiarity to the American countenance” (Domestic Manners 177). An American farmer in upstate New York is similarly disfigured by tobacco in Trollope’s Refugee in America. She describes Silas Burns as “a tall stout man, about forty, [who] would have been handsome, had not his mouth been rendered unseemly by the hue of tobacco, and his eyes sunk, as if out of health” (I: 60). Later she describes a scene at a theater in Washington, where those in the first rows sit with their legs across the seats in front of them, spitting “incessantly” (321). Spitting is a constant theme throughout Domestic Manners, Cobbett’s A Year’s Residence in America and Hall’s Travels. It amounts to a significant trope in the English definition of Americanness in the early nineteenth century.

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Trollope, in The Refugee in America, introduces one tolerable American character in the boorish cast who makes it possible to argue that while the people as a whole, conditioned as they are by their economic, natural and moral climate, are irretrievably Other, individuals may be reclaimed for civility. The crucial factor in this project of reclamation is that the American in question must not be “bred” to Americanness, despite being born to it. An exposure to European, specifically English culture, and a sympathetic identification with it, places even Americans reared in unfavorable surroundings in a redeemable state. But this redemption of individuals makes the characterization of the general population as a breed apart an even more firmly embedded part of the English discourse on Americans by the early 1830s. If there can be exceptions, there must be a rule. Trollope’s exception in The Refugee is Emily Williams of Rochester, the daughter of a former secretary of state. The noble Lord Darcy, still fearing he has murdered a man in England, comes to Rochester under the care of Edward Gordon. Gordon’s daughter Caroline also is with them. They take a house in Rochester to await news from England that will either determine a time for the House of Lords to try Lord Darcy for murder, or for evidence proving the man he supposedly murdered is still alive. They keep the reason for their travels secret, inspiring gossip that accuses them of much more serious offenses, including multiple murders and sexual depravity involving Caroline and the two men. Emily Williams is the only one in Rochester not convinced that the Gordons and Darcy are depraved criminals, with some terrible secret they refuse to reveal. Emily’s mother, the widow of a former secretary of state, has the highest claim in the book to anything approaching social status, or rank. But Trollope only elevates her position to denigrate her worthiness of it, along with the notion of any form of nobility or merit existing in a country whose republican manners and government bring everything down to the lowest common denominator. Mrs. Williams is described as “well dressed,” with “nothing that deserved the epithet of vulgar in [her] appearance or manner” (I: 149). But despite this tepid praise, Caroline Gordon can find nothing impressive about her, nothing that might be expected in the widow of a secretary of state. She reflects that “there existed a something sufficiently unlike the air, look, manner, and tone of persons in a similar station in Europe, to set Caroline’s mind to work to define in what it consisted. Had she been obliged to characterise it by one word, she would have used homeliness … She felt that it could not be the effect of that republican simplicity so often vaunted” (I: 149). But despite this belief that it could not be “republican simplicity,” subsequent experiences in Washington make it clear that this young English girl feels completely competent to judge affairs of state as well as manners and taste. And America fails each of her tests. She finds Mrs. Williams’s grace a manner which “made one feel more inclined to yawn than to bow before it” (I: 150). Emily, being young and untutored, becomes Caroline’s reclamation project. Her humility is a significant qualification for her eventual ascent to an English version of civility. Caroline’s first task is to fix Emily’s speech, and Emily is an abjectly willing pupil. When Emily asks Caroline to “learn” her to speak English

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as she does, Caroline replies, “‘I will teach you, Emily; and it is you who must learn. Try to remember that, dear. Do you not see that it is nonsense to talk of my learning, where it is I who am to teach?’” (I: 179). Emily does not see this at first, but eventually will. What she knows at this early point is that those among whom she has grown up speak incorrectly, while Caroline’s proper speech is a measure of her civility. When Caroline asks her why she wants to speak like her, Emily explains by asking if Caroline had ever heard a book using “the same words and expressions that you hear us use?” (I: 179). Part of Emily’s preparation to become civil has come from “listening” to the English authors she has read. Caroline and her father speak, in her view, the language of the books she has read. “[A]nd you look exactly like the beings I have read of in them” (I: 180), she says. Those books are “Cecilia, and Belinda, and Tremaine, and Granby …” (I: 180). Her literary listening has been largely in popular, but respectable novels, such as Frances Burney’s Evelina, Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda and Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison. Emily also has read Shakespeare, but would not dream of speaking like the characters there, “‘because my thoughts would not be great enough for such words. I expect it would be like serving up corn cakes in golden dishes’” (I: 180). Caroline, who is repeating all these words of humble wisdom from Emily concerning her deficiencies in her journal, lets them stand with no contradiction, despite her affection for this one sensible friend among the barbarians. The result of this is that Emily joins Caroline, her father, and Lord Darcy in a sort of drawing room culture the English refugees set up in Rochester. She learns to speak proper English, to carry on conversations during meals, and to recognize the bad manners of her mother and other family and friends. Caroline views her tutelage of Emily as a community service for all of Rochester, if not for the republic as a whole. “I will confer an inestimable blessing on the Rochester community, by adopting little Emily Williams as my particular friend,” she claims, “developing all her talents, and teaching her to speak English; and then, you know, when we depart, we shall leave them a glass by which to dress themselves” (I: 200–201). But she recognizes that Emily’s society might not appreciate the change Caroline seeks to bring about. This makes her decide not just to appropriate Emily’s education, but Emily herself. If the Americans do not approve of her product, “if they do not all fall down and worship her, I will pack her up and carry her” back home—like a possession and specimen in the tradition of explorers who brought impressive Indians such as Pocahontas back to England to place on display (I: 201). Later when Emily is singing at the Gordon’s house and the refugees are impressed with the loveliness of her voice, Caroline asks her father: “‘Are we not fortunate to have found such a singing bird in the wilderness?’” (II: 100).

   Emily is most likely referring to Frances Burney’s Cecilia (1782), Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801), and the Silver Fork novels Tremaine (1825) by Robert Plumer Ward, and Granby (1826) by Thomas Henry.

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The insistence that even an American city like Rochester is still a wilderness, and that Emily is a specimen who can be appropriated and transplanted in English soil—a singing bird in the wilderness—brings the language and activity of the ethnographic text into Trollope’s novel. Later, when Lord Darcy falls in love with Emily, it is remarked that “[l]ovely as she was,” her true qualities would not have been noticed “had she only appeared to him surrounded by her kinsfolk and acquaintance” (II: 293). Environment is everything. “But in Caroline’s little drawing-room, she seemed like a delicate flower that they had found in the forest, transplanted and cherished, till it had become fairer than any the garden could offer” (II: 293). English agency is indispensable in the creation of the superiority of the only American character worth noticing, whether flora or fauna. In the end, Lord Darcy’s supposed victim is found to be alive, partially through the heroic agency of Emily, who brings the supposedly dead man’s wife to testify at the last minute in front of the House of Lords. Emily then becomes Lady Darcy. By this point her non-Americanness has become complete. Her daringness in crossing the ocean in defiance of her family is a declaration of independence of her own, this one from the stultifying manners and society of Rochester in favor of the greater breeding of the English. Her natural nobility shows in her willingness to face hardships to rescue the man she loves. In the end, the one worthwhile American in Trollope’s novel becomes so only by leaving her Americanness behind and embracing Englishness. Throughout the novel, Americans are derided for adhering to a rigid social code that keeps women sequestered and chaperoned. Emily’s adventure is much more in the spirit of Caroline’s trek through America, or akin to the action of characters like Fielding’s Sophia Western, than the performance by a respectable American woman according to Trollope’s representations. Before the refugees’ departure for England and Emily’s heroic journey, there are thoughts of bringing Lord Darcy’s mother to him in America. But Caroline absolutely rejects this idea. “The Countess would die,” she says, “if she were to sojourn in this land of whiskey, and equal rights. With such a mind as my father and Edward describe, she would weep at what makes me laugh. No, it must not be here that we restore her Edward to her” (II: 186). So, in order to become a part of the Darcy family, Emily must cease being an American altogether. This, it seems, is no great sacrifice, at least for Caroline, who assures Emily she does not belong in America. The scene that shows us most clearly that Emily has been educated out of her Americanness takes place, perhaps ironically, at Niagara Falls. She has gone down to the Falls from the hotel to see them alone and experience their sublimity when she sees her uncle, an English emigrant to the United States who has long since become Americanized, attempting to murder Lord Darcy. She surprises her uncle before he can proceed and he gives up the attempt. But the fact that she can see the beauty of the setting and the value of an English lord all at once, and that her uncle can see neither, shows us how proper behavior and elevated ways of seeing in the midst of the sublime are attributes of superior culture, figured in this novel as Englishness. In a novel meant to influence the debate on the Great Reform

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Bill, just as Domestic Manners was, this version of Englishness is persistently associated with the upper classes, while the dangers of a leveling social structure that America exemplifies comes from those who democracy can elevate, but aesthetics cannot affect. After one of many scenes of American rudeness and crassness, Caroline tells Emily that “you must not live and die where such things be!” Emily, resignedly, protests that “I am born to it, Miss Gordon.” Caroline counters by telling her that, while “born” to Americanness, she is “hardly bred to it; we caught you young, and we have spoiled you for ever as an American lady” (III: 90). Her lessons in civility, it seems, have been lessons against Americanness. “Emily,” she tells her pupil, “you are no more fit to sit at the head of a table with a dozen lengthy republicans round it, drawling out the praises of your canvass-back ducks, and carving every dish within your reach, with the same spoon, and perhaps the aid of your own knife, than—than I am, Emily” (III: 90). Finally, the most proper education a young American lady can receive, is to be taught to be a young English lady, like Caroline Gordon. America, Nationalism and Class I suggested at the beginning of this essay that Trollope’s border crossings, both literal and metaphorical, help us see the challenges in assigning works from this contested period in British literature to a single category. Her debt to eighteenthcentury aesthetic ideas is unmistakable. At least a little Romantic adventurism runs through her texts as well. America was hardly on the eighteenth-century Grand Tour, but with Coleridge and Robert Southey seeking out the banks of the Susquehanna River for their poets’ utopia, and many looking to the New World as a place of natural wonders free of the corruptions of Europe, Trollope’s travels must be seen as a Romantic adventure in many senses. Joseph Priestley found a Romantic home for his Enlightenment radicalism in Pennsylvania, but Trollope was driven more by financial need than ideological incompatibility with England’s governing and social systems. Trollope initially went to America to find a desirable economic situation for her son Henry, who seems to have been unplaceable at home. The family finances were in serious disrepair, and Trollope spent much of her time in America trying to make money and failing. Despite her air of social superiority and Old World refinement in Domestic Manners and The Refugee, she was shunned as un-genteel by Cincinnati society. As Pamela Neville-Sington puts it in her introduction to her edition of Domestic Manners, starting with a quote from a friend of Trollope’s: “Had she come with numerous letters [of introduction], and been an elegant figure dressed in the most approving fashion, there is no doubt, that she would have made her way in every circle.” Instead, she struck the curious Cincinnati residents as “a short plump figure, with a ruddy, round Saxon face of bright

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Whether or not she wanted to be accepted by Cincinnati society, the evidence that she was not, and the fact that she wrote herself out of the role of adventurer and into that of social critic marks these early works as commentaries on early nineteenth-century class and social structures. As I have argued, Frances Trollope does not see the natural world as a place to develop a greater imaginative faculty the way Wordsworth or Coleridge would have, or as a metaphor for revolutionary change or human connectedness. She feels no West Winds, sees no “Intellectual Beauty,” no “One Life, here and abroad,” no skylarks or nightingales, no “food for now and future years.” In her ways of seeing, then, she is no Romantic. So, like a Gilpinesque eighteenth-century traveler, she stands apart and exercises her eye. She is always an observer, never an artist foregrounding the symbiosis between the natural world and the creative power. But she is also something apart from an eighteenth-century traveler. She is a middle-class person as the middle class’s rise is becoming threatening to those whose sensibilities had previously set them apart. She desperately wants to portray herself as a “traveler” rather than as a “tourist,” as someone on a rustic Grand Tour who can use her ironic eye to make her trip into an art form, rather than as a tourist or an emigrant. As such, a clear class-consciousness and strategy informs her looks at the landscape. It is through such looks that she places others who cannot see properly, as she can, into an inferior class. As such, Trollope uses her eighteenth-century aesthetics as they were taught by Gilpin to the traveler to create an aristocratic sensibility in a world that is moving towards a less clear structure. The Romantic view—the artist’s viewpoint—is unusable for her. The Romantic has a place in the leveling social environment of America that she does not want. Trollope uses her ability to observe as a way to deny others of similar economic means access to her social position. In Domestic Manners and The Refugee, these others are Americans. But in both cases she has the middle class of her own country firmly in mind.

Response Essay

How We See: The 1790s Patricia M. Spacks

Although literary history may be impossible (see Perkins), we keep imagining just such history. We divide the sweep of time into manageable segments; investigate the rise, fall, and transmutation of genres; probe the effects of cultural change on literary artifacts. To make sense of our mass of printed records demands— alternately, and sometimes simultaneously—magnifying lenses and strategic blinders, and historians have proved ingenious in providing both. The stories of development that appear plausible keep shifting; still, we rely on them to navigate. Periodization, a vital tool of literary history, supplies one useful lens, as well as a set of blinders. Like literary theories, period divisions offer ways of seeing, determining both what we discern and what remains invisible in a given body of literature. About 20 years ago, teaching at Yale, I offered a graduate course in what I then called The Age of Johnson during the same semester that a distinguished colleague taught a graduate course in Romantic poetry. The poets William Collins and Thomas Gray figured prominently in both syllabi. Two students in my class also had elected the other course. Alternately bemused and excited, they reported that the poets seemed altogether different in their different contexts, as did their works’ defining characteristics. The two classes assessed the literary quality of the poems in different terms, with different results. Moreover, the students who had participated in both claimed to find the contrasting judgments equally persuasive. The enterprise of this volume bears some resemblance to that of the two Yale courses in conjunction—although the courses had not been undertaken with the intention of raising questions about literary history. Nor is that the announced purpose of the present volume. The result of reading this collection of essays, however, may well be the same kind of enlightenment that my students found in their simultaneous encounter with different period perspectives on identical poems. The diverse essays do not focus on the same texts, but they demonstrate how varying perspectives can illuminate a period in dissimilar ways. The salutary reminder of how greatly interpretation depends on classification gains power by its embodiment in specific critical analyses, and without polemics this collection of essays enforces an important argument. It also raises troubling questions about what periodization really means. Christopher Flynn speaks of “the cannibalistic period that precedes [Romanticism] and the imperialistic one that follows” (166, this volume). One might wonder whether all periods are not cannibalistic, imperialistic or both—and, more

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importantly, whether cannibalism is not an appropriate response to the dilemmas of periodization. Or should we wish, rather, for suicide? Consider, in this connection, Margaret Case Croskery’s thoughtful essay on Eliza Haywood’s mid-eighteenth-century novel, Betsy Thoughtless. Case Croskery argues for “essentially Romantic” qualities in Haywood’s work, pointing out how deftly the novelist treats emotion, making her protagonist’s emotional development central to her moral education and privileging “passion as a site (however dangerous) of psychological complexity and moral sophistication” (this volume, 19 and 34). The affective involvements of character and reader alike play crucial roles in Haywood’s undertaking—as in that of the Gothic novel and of Romantic poetry. To recognize this fact blurs conventional period distinctions, Case Croskery points out: a blurring that may presage a shift in definitions. This revealing reading of a Haywood novel in fact suggests the possibility that the period division between “the eighteenth century” and “the Romantic period” makes no sense at all. Throughout the novel’s eighteenth-century development, fiction writers typically experimented with the dynamics of feeling as a mode of engagement and of education for readers and characters alike. Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, the most massive and most ambitious novel of sentiment, preceded Betsy Thoughtless in its detailed investigation of learning through emotion. Its heroine, a paragon from the outset, may appear to need no education, but in fact her painful experience teaches her a great deal. She learns that she can rely, finally, only on God. Her progress eventuates not in marriage but in transfiguration—death with the confident prospect of immortal life—as inevitably as the countervailing emotional education of her persecutor, Lovelace, results in a demise with little hope of salvation. The reader’s education, stubbornly resisted by early readers who corresponded with Richardson, and doubtless by many readers since, demands yielding the satisfactions of romance and the expectation that heroines will find happiness through marriage for the more abstract pleasures of witnessing religious faith in action. The second half of the century saw the proliferation of sentimental fiction, sometimes dismissed by later critics as a predictable and superficial mode, the province of women. Actually, men wrote the best-known novels of sentiment (Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling; Henry Brooke, The Fool of Quality; Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey ...), and in the hands of men and women alike, the form revealed subtlety and complexity of purpose. It allowed room for penetrating social criticism and for philosophical reflection. Most important, perhaps: it dramatized and enforced the doctrine of “sympathy,” memorably articulated by Adam Smith in his 1757 work, The Theory of Moral Sentiment. According to Smith, moral decisions develop from the human capacity to feel into the emotional situations of others. He called this capacity sympathy; we label it empathy. Whatever its name, the quality enabled its possessors (and Adam Smith believed it the universal possession of humankind) to comprehend and compassionate other people’s sufferings. It also might allow individuals to see

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themselves as though from another’s point of view and thus to understand and to remedy their own moral flaws. Sentimental fiction, showing the operations of sympathy in action, ideally trained its readers to recognize and to use the capacity in themselves. Although at least one early practitioner of the mode (Henry Mackenzie, author of The Man of Feeling) and a number of early critics worried lest the reader’s sympathy exhaust itself in responses to unreal rather than actual persons, novelists continued to rely heavily on this particular variety of feeling as an inlet to moral education. Nor were such novelists necessarily “sentimental.” Caleb Williams, for instance, reiterates the importance of sympathy, although no one to my knowledge has accused it of sentimentality. The protagonist’s isolation, his lack of sustained human connection, seems to him his greatest burden; his realization of sympathy’s urgency drives him toward the fiction’s denouement. Shawn Lisa Maurer, in the present volume, calls attention to the “masculine attachment” between Caleb and his persecutor, and that attachment indeed functions importantly in Godwin’s novel. The text itself, however, suggests the vital importance of other kinds of attachment as well, as venues for sympathy, that vital human gift. In their treatments of sympathy, novelists continued the project Case Croskery identifies in Betsy Thoughtless— uniting pleasure and instruction and educating readers and characters by means of feeling—to the end of the century and beyond. I dwell on this form of the novel because it calls attention to one problematic issue of classification. Case Croskery suggests that we customarily connect reliance on emotion with Romanticism, and so we often do. But even a cursory survey of eighteenth-century sentimental fiction suggests that such reliance marks many novels from early in the genre’s modern development. To retrospectively declare it peculiarly characteristic of something we call Romanticism falsifies and simplifies history. Feeling as education remained a powerful novelistic theme at least until the advent of Modernism, and beyond, although it has devolved into a concern perhaps more obvious in popular fiction than in works that make serious claims on the reader. But it originated as a developed idea early in the eighteenth century. Romanticism changed the terms of some educational endeavors in fiction, but Middlemarch, like The Man of Feeling, instructs its readers in the intricacies and the importance of sympathy. To claim the eighteenth-century origins of an important “Romantic” idea does not necessarily involve cannibalism: I would not argue that the “eighteenth century” extends through the time of George Eliot and Dickens. The point is, rather, that eighteenth-century, Romantic, and Victorian literary production share crucial attitudes toward emotion. That fact makes it misleading to claim emphasis on emotion as a special property of Romanticism—or of its predecessor or successor among literary movements. A more productive point of view would encourage investigation of how such emphasis ramified in different periods, or in the course of a single period. To ponder the subject of emotion further might lead to a claim that the quality particularly conspicuous in many novels of the 1790s, on the very cusp of

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Romanticism, is in fact glorification of reason rather than feeling. This possibility, too, confuses the conventional sequence of dominant attitudes. The function of reason and the implicit attitude toward it in the late eighteenth century differ markedly from their counterparts in the period of Pope and Swift, but the power itself assumes a newly conspicuous place as the century nears its end, particularly in novels of political intent—which compose a considerable proportion of fictional production in this era. I have argued elsewhere (Spacks, “Novels”) that emphasis on energy, in rhetoric and in action, marks the period’s fiction. Some of that energy is physical: Thomas Holcroft’s Anna St. Ives climbing a wall, for instance, and pointing out that anything men can do, women can do too. But many fictional protagonists, male and female, display striking intellectual energy, evidence of reason in action. Moreover, intellectual energy characterizes the construction and the development of these novels. Mary Wollstonecraft provides a case in point—one of many cases. She lacks what one might ordinarily understand as a fictional imagination, but both The Wrongs of Woman and Mary: A Fiction are marked by their passionate commitment to ideas as motivating force. Maria’s courtroom speech in The Wrongs of Woman, in which she pleads for her own divorce, is only one instance in which the novelist demonstrates the imaginative power of ideas, making an eloquent, if futile, case for the right of women to control their own destiny. Mary Hays, in her preface to Memoirs of Emma Courtney, maintains that “Every writer who advances principles, whether true or false, that have a tendency to set the mind in motion, does good”. Many novels of the 1790s conspicuously aspire to set the mind in motion, and they explicitly and implicitly glorify motions of the mind. Wollstonecraft and Hays are both “Jacobin” novelists, concerned to uncover corruption in existing social arrangements and to argue for political change. The revelation of social ills in fiction was not in itself a new thing: such “sentimental” novels as The Man of Feeling and Sarah Fielding’s David Simple (as well as, more emphatically, its sequel, Volume the Last) had exposed multiple instances of social injustice, which the novels’ central characters typically attempt to alleviate by individual acts of compassion, and finally to escape by retirement and seclusion. Late-century novelists more fully understood the systemic nature of injustice, which they saw as inherent in the class system and in society’s gender arrangements, as well as in individual institutions. They no longer believed that individual charity had significant impact on social problems, although such figures as Robert Bage’s Hermsprong and Godwin’s Falkland (Caleb Williams’s nemesis), like novelistic heroes before them, display their sympathy by their acts of benevolence. As for what could resolve social problems: 1790s novels prove singularly reticent on this point. One strain of idealistic fiction, exemplified by Anna St. Ives and Hermsprong, substitutes often vague visions of a glorious future for suggestions about how to achieve it. Hermsprong feels not the slightest doubt about what’s wrong with Britain as it is (he has been reared by American Indians, 

 

London: Pandora, 1987, xvii. All further citations in this essay are to this edition.

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devoid of corruption, so he has high standards), and he opposes misdoing when he encounters it, but he offers no program. Anna and her fiancé alike on the slightest pretext burst into rhapsody about their visions of social good, but their most significant progressive act is to marry one another across class barriers. Another group of political novels exposes the evils of the present with no apparent hope of a better future. Caleb Williams provides the most familiar example of this mode, meticulous in its account of prisons and social outcasts and of the power of wealth and rank, but suggesting no remedy for “Things As They Are” (the book’s original title). The subtitle of Hermsprong is Man As He Is Not; Bage also published a darker novel called Man As He Is. The conservative novelist Mary Ann Hanway supplied Ellinor; or, The World As It Is. In each of these instance, “the world” and “things” and “man” as they are turn out to be unsatisfactory; the contrasting vision of man as he is not offers glorious possibilities. But Caleb Williams emphatically suggests the impossibility of achieving improvement. Novels by radical women are likewise consistently discouraged and discouraging. Frequently focusing on gender arrangements (as well as, often, on consequences of the class system), such writers as Wollstonecraft and Hays delineate a world of female subordination in which a woman’s talent and determination count for nothing in the face of institutional obstacles. Mary: A Fiction concludes with its protagonist’s wistful imagining of the afterlife as a state in which there is no marrying or giving in marriage: marriage exemplifies society’s impositions on women. Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice reports, in the first person, the career of a gifted woman who suffers rape, betrayal and prison with no recourse except, on occasion, the sympathy and financial resources of friends. Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art, concentrating mainly on the stories of two brothers, shows the inevitable and horrifying degradation of the woman one of those brothers has seduced and abandoned. A Simple Story, Inchbald’s novelistic masterpiece, explores the power dynamics between men and women and dramatizes the necessity of women’s utter submission. Although the term “gender politics” belongs to the twentieth century, vivid perception of the concept’s reality had emerged at least two centuries earlier. “Vivid perception” in a sense supplies the point of all these novels. Although their authors do not advocate specific solutions for the problems they observe, they consider it their obligation to make readers see those problems as distinctly and dramatically as possible. Such perception, the implicit argument goes, provides the necessary first step to reformation. Predicated on the necessity for reform, these fictions continue to educate their readers by emotional means, inviting them to experience vicariously the horror of various forms of social degradation and inspiring outrage—anger as well as pity. Emotional means, however, aspire to rational ends: inculcating understanding of what’s wrong with existing social arrangements. The novels mentioned in the preceding paragraphs can all be characterized as novels of ideas. Each passionately pursues a set of reasoned convictions about the immediate state of society. Reasoned convictions passionately pursued, emotional

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means for rational ends: such paradoxical formulations suggest a new imagined relation between the century’s polar opposites, reason and passion. As Case Croskery rightly points out in her essay on Haywood, at mid-century it could be assumed that reason ideally controls passion, channeling emotional energy in appropriate directions. By the century’s end, reason appears to be understood as itself a form of energy, with passion its coadjutor. Ideas excite characters and writers alike. Their power to excite makes them appropriate material for fiction that works through emotion. The view that history, both literal and fictional, of nations or of individuals, provided vicarious experience was well established. Such experience was both especially valuable and especially dangerous to those destined by circumstance to enjoy little variety of immediate direct experience: women and young people. Commentators had noted the moral dangers for such audiences of encountering “mixed” characters, neither dependably virtuous nor entirely evil, and perhaps all too attractive, as well as the possible imaginative contamination of love stories that could encourage sexual fantasy. Novels of the 1790s, however, threatened a new kind of danger. The reader of Caleb Williams or The Victim of Prejudice would be encouraged to turn a critical eye on society, to question the wisdom of the great, possibly to make demands of the government. The didactic force of fiction assumed new importance as imaginative literature presumed to argue for political as well as moral change. Almost as vital as political novels to the literary texture of the late eighteenth century was the efflorescence of Gothic fiction. Peter Walmsley calls attention to the importance of ideas about death and about nation, ideas established early in the eighteenth century or before, to the imagining of the Gothic novel. He emphasizes the heightened importance of nationalism in the era of the French Revolution, when the stability of the British political system could no longer be taken for granted and therefore needed to be asserted ever more emphatically; and he calls attention to precedents for the intertwining of death and nationhood as concerns. The Gothic does not typically deal explicitly with ideas, but often complicated ideas lie in the background of its insistent emotionalism. Take the matter of “the nation,” for example. Inasmuch as the typical Gothic locale of Italy, or occasionally France, emphatically figures as not-England, Walmsley is surely right in pointing out how the contrast enforces a notion of England’s comparative worthiness. Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian makes the point explicit, with an untitled section preceding the first chapter, in which English visitors to a cathedral see with horror an assassin who has taken sanctuary there and listen with horror to two Italians defending this arrangement. Not Catholic, not accustomed to assassination as a mode of solving problems, not given to frequent abductions, England in its orderliness and rectitude could stand in opposition to the dangerous lands across the Channel. Yet such a figure as Emily St. Aubert, heroine of The Mysteries of Udolpho, and her father, with his warnings about the dangers of sensibility, seem English in all but name. Their articulated values and assumptions celebrate domesticity,

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conventional gender assignments and integrity. They seem unlike the other French characters, as well as radically unlike the Italian ones. As the novel’s plot develops, however, they turn out to be implicated in a family rich in dark secrets and unexpected connections. Like the families in other Gothic fictions, the St. Auberts gradually reveal unanticipated flaws. Their façade of propriety conceals turmoil. The metaphorical connection between family and state has a long history. Troubled families provide a central subject for Gothic fiction. The mysteries at the center of virtually every family insist not only that things are seldom what they seem but, more specifically, that harmony hides potential chaos. It hardly seems farfetched to connect this insistent theme to anxieties about national order. England, with its unwritten constitution and its political repressiveness (in the 1790s), might also be less stable than it appeared. An atmosphere of anxiety permeates the Gothic fiction of the century’s final decade. Radcliffe makes her heroines anxious almost to the point of parody and implicates her readers in anxiety by enmeshing them in narrative uncertainties. M.G. Lewis, author of The Monk, piles up horrors to a point likely to induce extreme unease. William Beckford, in Vathek, makes his horrors yet more unsettling by treating them in a mode close to the comic. All depict troubled or troubling families, concerning themselves with disturbances where order might be assumed. They suggest a background of troubled states. When the subject of national arrangements comes closest to the surface, in The Italian, the plot asserts the restoration of order: the state executes the villain Montoni for political crimes. Domestic politics also work themselves out in plots: typically evil characters die, with or without repenting, and youthful protagonists enter on the marriages they want. Yet the level of disturbance that has been established does not readily dissipate with the easy resolutions of conventional comic fiction: a residue of unease may remain. Gothic novels do not lend themselves to description as novels of ideas. If ideas exist in their substructures—ideas, say, about the instability of all apparent order—the fictions translate them into emotional equivalents, inviting feeling rather than thought as response. Indeed, Gothic fiction of the 90s often actively repels thought: its constructions operate more associatively than logically. Bring logic to bear on a Radcliffe novel, and it turns to claptrap. Its power has sources different from logic. Yet it may be useful to acknowledge the possibility that the period’s political fiction and its Gothic share a common sense of national difficulty, articulated in different terms. Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House, the work that followed Desmond in the sequence of her novels, suggests the overlap. Sometimes described as a Gothic novel, presumably because the big old aristocratic house of the title, full of dark passageways and of danger for the female protagonist, resembles both literally and metaphorically the sinister castles of Gothic, The Old Manor House also makes daring political suggestions. In the course of its narrative, the young man loved by the heroine goes off to fight in the American Revolution. Gradually he comes to realize that the poor fight the battles of the rich, that the

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side of the British is not necessarily that of the right, and that wealth distorts all human relations. Although the resolution of Smith’s novel does not squarely face the implications of the soldier’s insights, the implicit equation between the dangers of domestic and of national tyranny has daring implications. The 1740s had been a previous decade of precariousness for the country, with the question of royal succession still alive and with the 1745 invasion of Scotland by Bonnie Prince Charlie. Tom Jones, published in 1749, alludes to that invasion, but Fielding’s novel reflects no grave doubts or worries about the country. During the 1740s, novelists made no claim of political authority. Many novels, to be sure, as I have already suggested, delineated social evils. Fielding jokes about doctors and lawyers; Richardson takes on the matter of dueling and raises questions about money as motivation; sentimental novelists, in the 1740s and after, attack sociallysanctioned self-interest, miscarriages of justice, the unfairness of the army, the exploitation of women, and other social problems. Only in the 1790s, though, did a significant body of fiction manifestly concern itself with the state of the nation, enlarging the scope of the novel’s typical preoccupations by means of the questions it raises about the nature of good government as well as good society— questions even, as Tara Ghoshal Wallace reminds us, about the proper reach of imperialism. Although they treat only a few of the many texts published in the 1790s, the essays here collected suggest the variety of literary production, even within a single genre, that marked the period. In subject, technique, and thematic concern, the decade’s novelists ranged widely. When we look for what is new in their novels, however, we may be struck first of all with how much is not new. Novelists of the 1790s do not, for the most part, pursue formal innovation. Several use the epistolary mode hallowed by Richardson, although to new purposes. Many rely heavily on the loose episodic structures common earlier in the century. The patterns of romance remain compelling. Although many novels do not find resolution in happy marriage, female characters often believe in the marriage-happiness equation. The doctrine of sympathy continues to assume an important place, in radical as well as conservative texts. In other words, novels of the century’s final decade sustain traditions established through the century. They also, however, convey a new sense of possibility, and not only through their willingness to confront political issues, directly and indirectly. That willingness itself reflects a wider tendency to take risks. For instance, sentimental fiction had long encouraged exploration of emotional nuance. Now concern with the ramifications of feeling extended to interest in pathological or near-pathological states, often attended by suggestions that social causes bear on individual pathology. The obsessiveness of Caleb Williams and Falkland, each the other’s nemesis, each the product of a system of class relations, exemplifies the pattern. Less widely known, perhaps, is the case of Emma Courtney, who narrates her own story in Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney, of lifelong obsession with an unattainable man. Reflective, intellectually curious, and intelligent, Emma, a young woman of limited financial means, has few choices available to her. The record of her

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letters, in this epistolary novel, demonstrates how a woman of high capacity and restricted opportunity inevitably turns to—and clings to—fantasy. She recognizes and acknowledges her own obsession and its relation to the inequities of women’s lot, but she claims her passionate attachment as strength rather than weakness. It has, she argues, intensified her powers of reason and given her clarity of mind— and she indeed writes powerful letters, about the condition of women as well as about her own state of mind and feeling. At the novel’s end, long after the death of her beloved, Emma has transferred her obsession to his son, for whom she writes the story of her life. Surely the strangest of the 1790s novels experimenting with new emotional issues is Mary Robinson’s Walsingham; or, The Pupil of Nature. Yet another epistolary tale, this bears little relation to previous novels in letters. Walsingham, with his own kind of obsession, complains endlessly about his cousin Sidney, who, he believes, has seduced the affections of the woman he himself loves. Eventually that woman marries someone else altogether, leaving Walsingham to marry—of all people—Sidney, who turns out to be female. She has been reared as a boy because her mother wanted the fortune she would inherit if she gave birth to a male child. Implausible as this plot is, it enables Robinson to explore gender possibilities and implicitly to argue for the value of the androgyne. Sidney, about whom Walsingham, once he’s stopped complaining, rhapsodizes, combines male and female virtues with the weaknesses of neither sex. In comparison with Sidney, the titular hero appears weak and petty. Walsingham resembles earlier novels of sensibility in its concentration on ebbings and swellings of emotion. Its resolution, however, in effect makes a joke of Walsingham’s earlier suffering. Although that suffering attests to the delicacy of the protagonist’s sensibility, the novel also hints the possibility that suffering may be largely self-induced. Walsingham does not stand alone in its “strangeness.” The fictions of the 1790s often veer far from the predictable: in plot, as in Walsingham and Anna St. Ives; in tone (consider the insouciance of Bage’s political observations in Hermsprong); in social passion (The Wrongs of Woman, The Victim of Prejudice); in intellectual drive (Caleb Williams). Their lack of formal innovation should not blind the reader to the other sorts of innovation that mark them. They stake new claims for the novel as genre, redefining the classical union of pleasure and instruction to allow for a kind of instruction consisting mainly in intellectual stimulation—stimulation that often depends on emotion. The reader’s capacity for sympathy now may lead to identification with the thought processes of such characters as Emma Courtney or Wollstonecraft’s Mary or Caleb Williams, characters trying to figure out the workings of the social systems that envelop them. The far-fetched plots typical of many 90s novels provide means to a serious end. In short, a lot goes on in fiction of the 1790s: the decade contains riches. So provocative is the reflection aroused by contemplating the essays in this volume that one might be tempted to conclude that literary history should focus, at least in part, not on artificially designed periods but on arbitrary, limited stretches

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of time. (If I taught an “Age of Johnson” course now, it would be called “The Mid-Eighteenth Century.”) Close examination of any 10-year sequence would no doubt reveal variety comparable to that of the 1790s, comparable evidence of tendencies conventionally assigned to different periods, comparable adherence to and deviation from tradition. To examine short chronological periods as well as longer ones helps us realize that even “periods” necessarily contain contradictory trends, literary projects that we associate with earlier periods, those that will bear more fruit in the future, and some that will go nowhere. Christopher Flynn’s essay on Frances Trollope claims its subject as belonging to the Enlightenment, the Romantic Period, and the Victorian Age—not just because of her life span, but because of the nature of her literary production. His argument provides a salutary reminder that to fit writers into exclusive classifications makes them less interesting than they are. We think of Alexander Pope as a satirist: to do so requires forgetting that he wrote Eloisa to Abelard. Dr. Johnson was a poet of note as well as a maker of pronouncements and a master of prose. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote children’s books as well as revolutionary tracts. We need classifications; we need literary history; but we need also to see outside the boxes we construct. This volume helps to enable such seeing.

Response Essay

Cultural Transitions, Literary Judgments and the Romantic-Era British Novel Stephen C. Behrendt

Rethinking Matters When scholars discuss the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novel today, few dispute that something dramatic happened to the novel as a genre at about the time of the French Revolution. Nor is there much disagreement, either, that the novel had by then already begun to separate into several discrete “tracks,” tracks that are sometimes treated as genre-specific (like the Gothic novel or the sentimental novel) and at other times as ideologically differentiated (like what are called the Jacobin and the anti-Jacobin novels). In their excellent and succinct introductory essay to the 2001 special issue of Novel dedicated to the Romanticera novel, Amanda Gilroy and Wil Verhoeven described the penchant for literarycritical and literary-historical classification as “the Linnaean-Darwinian desire to categorize the species that subtends writings of the period and the relation between the novel and the public sphere, including the material technologies of circulation” (Gilroy and Verhoeven 147). Categorizing in this fashion has always been convenient, but like most exercises in determinate taxonomy, it typically creates more problems than it solves, and not just at the level of nomenclature or aesthetics, to name but two critical axes. It misses, elides, or simply chooses to ignore not just the diversity of literary characteristics like style, rhetoric, and generic convention but the diversity as well of extra-literary characteristics that include the particular and localized historical, cultural, and economic conditions among which novels were written, read and discussed by a broad and diverse array of consumers or readers. Some two centuries later, much of this should be so obvious as to require no comment. But it has not always turned out so, in part because literary criticism (like literary history) tends itself to be a factional activity that for complex reasons often neglects or ignores what is inconvenient, what is inconsistent, what seems not to “fit” the pre-existing categories and criteria that the critical historian customarily brings to her or his task. Perhaps mindful of M.H. Abrams’s classic caution against “hardening of the categories” (Abrams 35), voiced more than    Abram’s full statement is “The endemic disease of analogical thinking ... is hardening of the categories.”

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half a century ago, recent scholarship has moved away from the sort of cut-anddried categorizing of the English novel that we associate with the work of an Ian Watt, an Arnold Kettle, or, more recently, a Gary Kelly (English Fiction of the Romantic Period). In its place have come more nuanced studies like those by Cheryl Turner and G. Gabrielle Starr, for example, as well as Dale Spender’s 1986 canon-expanding Mothers of the Novel, and also a welcome revisiting of J.M.S. Tompkins’s inexplicably little-noted 1932 classic study, The Popular Novel in England, 1770–1800. Studies like Turner’s and Starr’s in particular involve qualitative criteria that are on the one hand more intellectually generous and on the other more culturally (and demographically) expansive than the ones we encounter in those earlier studies that reflected the gender and class biases of post-Augustan criticism, first as it emerged two centuries ago, and then, subsequently, as it took root in institutionalized academe. Happily, recent revisionist assessments of eighteenth-century and Romanticera literary and cultural history have begun to expose and address the failings both of earlier critical nomenclature and of the ideological assumptions that have historically informed the taxonomy of literary studies. Some of the most telling changes have occurred as the result of the work of theorists like Jürgen Habermas, whose analysis of what he called the “public sphere” has proved controversial on the grounds of both gender and class, and Clifford Siskin, who has encouraged us to think of the “work” of “writing” in more expansive terms that include also the activities of printing (as “publishing” process) and reading (including both silent reading and reading aloud as a group activity). Their work, and that of dozens of others writing in their wake, has required us to think anew about the writing, the physical production, the reading, and the “reception” (including both formal and informal reviewing) of novels in ways that force us to regard fictional texts not as static museum specimens but rather as dynamic, interactive sites of collective activity. At the same time, other scholars have forced us to reformulate our understanding of the novel as a literary genre (and as a field of discourse) in light of a variety of other cultural factors, from gender and gender politics (as Anne K. Mellor and Adriana Craciun have shown), to class politics (Jon Klancher and Don Herzog), sociological forces (Nancy Armstrong and William Stafford), and national cultural identity (Katie Trumpener and Ina Ferris). This work has   See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1991), Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain 1700–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998).    See Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830, 2nd edition (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000), Adriana Craciun, British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2005), Don Herzog, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998), Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford UP, 1987), William Stafford, English Feminists and Their Opponents in the 

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been enhanced (and complicated) still further by important recent bibliographical studies of Romantic-era fiction (like the comprehensive bibliographic survey of British novels edited by Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling) and by demographic studies (like those by William St. Clair and, from a more theoretical perspective, by Franco Moretti) of the emerging bourgeois reading class as an identifiable (and “targetable”) body of consumers, and of the protean publishing industry that arose to exploit this increasingly lucrative market. Thus when Patricia Meyer Spacks discusses how we look at these novels today, in her response essay in this collection, her comments remind us how the evolution of these assessments over time itself reflects a history of changing tastes, changing values, and changing critical and theoretical models. The novels do not change: our “eyes” do. Even so, historical surveys of British fiction have typically skipped over the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as though that era was a literary desert, leaping—as both Ian Watt and Michael McKeon do—from Henry Fielding to Jane Austen with only a contemptuous glance at the remarkable body of writing to be found there. Gary Kelly only grudgingly acknowledged the novels of the 1790s, for example, refusing to call any of them “great,” even while granting that at least “there were many interesting ones” and thereby artificially decoupling artistry and ideology (Kelly, Jacobin Novel 1). And yet the Garside-Raven-Schöwerling bibliography demonstrates beyond argument just how prolific were the period’s novelists, while the splendid introductory essays to those two volumes, by James Raven and Peter Garside respectively, testify compellingly to the absolute centrality to British cultural life—at all social and economic levels, and across political and ideological lines—of the novels that were being produced in ever greater quantities and read by ever growing numbers of readers. The advent of on-line resources like the Chawton House Library “Novels On Line” textbase (http://www. chawton.org/) and the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) textbase has 1790s: Unsex’d and Proper Females (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002), Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997), Ina Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002).    Peter Garside, James Raven and Rainer Schöwerling, The English Novel 1770– 1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000). Volume I: 1770–1799. Eds James Raven and Antonia Forster and Volume II: 1800–1829, William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms (London: NLB, 1983) and Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005).    See Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987) 290. Although it is Watt who most blatantly tags the period a novelistic wasteland, McKeon’s account of developments in the novel between Fielding and Scott indicates that in his opinion nothing of intrinsic merit was published in that rich interval.

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facilitated worldwide electronic access to historically rare and inaccessible texts. Moreover, archival resources like the astonishing cache of Romantic-era materials in the “Corvey Collection” (http://extra.shu.ac.uk/corvey/catalog/) have opened still other avenues for research that has in turn generated a variety of scholarly and bibliographic apparatus like the University of Cardiff’s project to document the production and reception history of Romantic-era novels: British Fiction, 1800– 1829: A Database of Production, Circulation & Reception (http://www.britishfiction.cf.ac.uk/). Additional websites at Sheffield Hallam University (http:// www2.shu.ac.uk/corvey/CW3/) and the University of Nebraska (http://www.unl. edu/Corvey/html/Projects/CorveyNovels/CorveyNovelsIndex.htm) are making available other apparatus, including synopses and transcriptions of contemporary reviews. Indeed, some contributors to the present collection, like Julie Shaffer and Margaret Case Croskery, also have participated in these web-based projects. These important initiatives have at last begun to address the paradoxical situation to which Siskin called attention a decade ago when he observed that the historical moment at which the British novel reached its fullest popular development—the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—has customarily been almost precisely “the moment that we have paid it relatively little attention” (Siskin 155). But we are paying attention now, as the present volume attests. Each of the essays contained here sifts some portion of the great mass of the era’s prose fiction, and each offers revealing insights into the range and diversity of that fiction. Moreover, the essays’ authors have deliberately approached their material as scholars and teachers who work in both these two interpenetrated historical eras and whose work consequently constitutes a site of intersecting critical assumptions, theoretical paradigms, and historical frameworks that differ depending upon the particular era in which one specializes. The resulting productive dialogue underscores how and why the same materials may look quite different to different scholarly and pedagogical “eyes,” and it also yields interesting new insights about the individual novelists (and their works), but also about the trajectory of British fiction during this volatile period during which the future of Europe (and the West) was widely understood to be uncertain, given the effects on both sides of the English Channel of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. In a very real sense, Britain’s novelists were engaged in shaping the nature both of the nation-state and of the new citizenry of the post-enlightenment world in which power would be radically redistributed. At the same time, though, these essays also serve notice that much remains to be done, because for every author treated in detail in them there remain many dozens of others whose works need to be revisited and reassessed. This is not to say that we shall now witness vast numbers of heretofore unrecognized geniuses elevated to the pantheon of British fiction. Not at all. It may well be that following further study we will again concur in many of the judgments that have relegated these novelists to obscurity. Tracing literary and cultural history is, after all, a matter of continual sifting and winnowing. But also it is about rethinking the criteria upon which we found our aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural judgments in the

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first place. Aristotle’s Poetics notwithstanding, there is no universal yardstick by which to measure artistic production. What a strict formal analysis assesses in one way may be judged entirely differently when one approaches the same work from a sociological or gender-studies perspective, for example, and literary and cultural theory read and value literary works in diverse and frequently contradictory ways, depending upon the particular theoretical model or ideological agenda being applied. Especially when we acknowledge that the “text” includes more than just the “work” itself (as Roland Barthes’s famous formulation asserts), we need to consider whether it may be time for some sort of “flexible aesthetic” that may permit us to accommodate in our judgments factors and circumstances that lie outside the static printed pages (the “work”) and that have affected in measurable ways the more dynamic and multidimensional nature of the “text” as a site of cultural interaction. The past several decades have witnessed the rise of the term “the long eighteenth century,” within which term scholars seem at times to include just about everything from the Puritan Revolution through the Crystal Palace exhibition. As Miriam Wallace explains in her Introduction to the present volume, while the expression has proven both convenient and congenial to many eighteenth-century scholars, it has understandably nettled Romanticists, who have not taken kindly to being annexed by the adjoining period. Thus her useful suggestion that we return to the more expansive umbrella term “Enlightenment” and think of that era less as a chronological (or cultural) “period” than as a “movement,” much as Romanticists used to talk about the era that succeeded the Enlightenment in Europe. Indeed, as Wallace further explains, for every advocate of “the long eighteenth century” there is at least one ready to counter-attack by defining “the long Romantic period,” whose parameters may presumably be pushed back to Addison’s observations on the imagination and forward at least through Dickens’s David Copperfield. In fact, this fuss over names exposes the fallacy of periodization generally. Periodization dismisses the complexity of historical and cultural change—including changes that occur at the level of the artifacts of art—and substitutes a simplistic, reductive illusion, as if on the morning of 14 July 1789 Parisians rose, threw up their windows, and announced ecstatically to one another that it was now (then) the Romantic period. The fact is, of course, that at any historical moment the ideological spread is always great, and remarkably few works of art (whether literary, visual, dramatic, or musical) slavishly embody any single political, spiritual, or intellectual agenda. This is one reason why a flexible term like “movement” is in many respects preferable to an ossifying one like “period.” What makes art “art,” after all, has much to do with its resistance to cultural or aesthetic reductivism. While propaganda may serve its master’s agenda in order to mold and manipulate the public consciousness, as Jacques Ellul

   See Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” trans. Stephen Heath, Image – Music – Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977).

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argued, art and propaganda are not the same, even when they share much on both sides of the equation. But at close range, the novel’s critics have often struggled to tell one from the other—or to portray the former as the latter. How It Looked from Up Close During the first full century—the eighteenth—of its young life, and indeed in its even more formative stage in the seventeenth century, the novel excited suspicion among some of its public critics, distaste among others, and real alarm among still others. For many who objected, the novel’s danger lay in its seeming nature as a distraction. If reading fiction could not be portrayed as an actual (or even a figurative) “sin,” in social, intellectual, and spiritual terms, it could nevertheless be branded as a dissipation, in the sense both of illness and of dilution and dispersal. By titillating its readers with mere shadows, unlike its more respectable cousin, history (which claims its shadows are of real, not imaginary objects), fiction seemed to many of its eighteenth-century critics to distract its readers from their proper duties, which these critics assumed to be essentially moral or spiritual in nature, on one hand, or eminently “practical” (and therefore economic or socioeconomic), on the other. Because the contemporary critical establishment was so evidently and predominantly male (and masculinist)—Anna Barbauld, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Hays notwithstanding—its strictures fell with particular force upon women, who constituted a large segment of the consuming readership and who represented an increasingly large segment of the producers of novels as well. Its less visibly erudite (or scholarly) format and subject matter, coupled with its nature as prose discourse (rather than classically-inflected poetry), seemed to many to make the novel more congenial to female readers, who were largely excluded from formal classical education and its associated fields of discourse. The rise of the novel of sentiment in the later eighteenth century seemed to many to cement the genre’s bond with women, whom the culture routinely castigated for cultivating sentimentality even as it paradoxically encouraged that cultivation. Reading (and writing) sentimental novels constituted a sort of imaginative dalliance that “serious-minded” (and usually male) members of society regarded with a mixture of distaste and outright horror. At the same time, male critics worried more seriously about novels’ real and potential effects upon male readers, often calling their effect “enervating.” Coleridge viewed the novel in exactly this way, accusing novelists (and their readers) of courting a morally dangerous mental laziness: reading novels, he argued, constituted “a sort of beggarly daydreaming, during which the mind of the dreamer furnishes for itself nothing but laziness and a little mawkish sensibility” (Coleridge, “Biographia Literaria” 48).

   See Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, trans. Konrad Kellen and Jean Lerner (New York: Knopf, 1964).

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Nor was Coleridge alone in his opinion. In Morality of Fiction (1805), an extensive survey of fiction dating back to the classics, the Scottish geographer and sometimes novelist and critic Hugh Murray had already expressed much the same sentiment, writing that “excessive indulgence in this kind of reading, tends, indeed, to counter [the beneficial effect of holding up exemplary models of human nature and action] by deadening those sentiments of interest and admiration which it at first excited. In consequence of impressions being made too often, the mind becomes gradually callous to them. ... It seems to occasion, then, only a lamentable waste of time and corruption of taste” (Murray). Murray, who assumed the editorship of The Scots Magazine in about 1808, is neither unique nor even unusual in his opinions. Indeed, the fact that his views are so representative makes them a useful measure of the contemporary critical discourse. While Murray laments the public tolerance of—indeed its taste for—the “paltry performances” represented by the bulk of contemporary novels, he attributes this failing, as Coleridge does later, to the unsophisticated and undiscriminating nature of the reading public(s): “they are resorted to as an amusement by a multitude of persons devoid of taste, and who cannot submit to the labour of thinking.” The malady nevertheless strikes Murray as a dangerously contagious one: the willingness to indulge in promiscuous novelreading “does not the less hold good in regard to those whose minds are better cultivated, and whose time is too valuable to be wasted on productions altogether insignificant” (Murray 46). Two points strike the modern reader about Murray’s observations. First, one wonders to whom he is referring when he identifies those readers “whose time is too valuable to be wasted” on frivolous fiction. The implications about class status embedded in the comment trump even gender ones, and they anticipate, too, the comparable distinction that Coleridge drew ten years later, in the Statesman’s Manual, between “a promiscuous audience” and “men of clerkly acquirements” (Coleridge, “The Statesman’s Manual,” Coleridge’s emphases, 36). Clearly, those (principally men) who were destined to serve in prominent public positions had better things to do with their time. But wasn’t this always the case? Or is Murray implying that women, widely held to be the primary consumers of novels, might also possess minds that are “better cultivated” and that therefore suit them for public service? That belief surely informed what activist women like Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson and Mary Hays were writing about the education of women. Either way, Murray’s comments make it clear that for him and for many of his contemporaries novel-readers (of both sexes) constituted a lesser-educated

   On the title page Murray is identified as “Author of the ‘Swiss Emigrants.’” Interestingly, Garside, et al., note that authorship of The Swiss Emigrants (published anonymously in 1804) was subsequently claimed by Louisa Theresa Bellenden Ker, who also claimed the anonymous 1814 novel Corasmin which Garside attributes with some certainty to Murray; all three works were published by Longman and associates. The English Novel II:197, 402.

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audience whose time (and presumably potential cultural or social contribution) was of little value. The second point, which is related, arises from Murray’s apparent conviction about the susceptibility of the individual mind to both the positive and the negative effects of novel reading during its most formative years. This period he identifies as that age “which immediately precedes and follows the entrance into active life” and during which “those habits are formed which generally continue through life without any great variation” (Murray 47).. On this point Murray’s rhetoric overlaps that of many of his contemporaries who (themselves following Edmund Burke and his allies a decade earlier) had begun to brand all oppositional thought and expression—not just “Jacobin sentiments”—as poisonous, as a dangerous contagion that threatened the body politic and that required “inoculation,” presumably in the form of strong doses of reactionary political and moral correction. Always wary of the fragile state of (British) civilization, Burke had seen in revolutionary politics the “plague” of precipitous change that could ruin everything by seducing the masses who were unprepared to resist (because they were not inoculated against it) the poison of republicanism that seemed to threaten Britain’s hereditary institutions. Don Herzog has reminded us that the image of venom coursing through the body politic, which image recurs widely and insistently in reactionary rhetoric of the 1790s, is itself strongly inflected with issues of class, for “it’s especially the lower orders that these political toxicologists inspect and find wanting” (Herzog 100)..What makes this “poison” so frightening to the social and political establishment is clear: “the venom in question is the noxious substance that dissolves prejudice or unthinking loyalty, that leaves the minds of the people ‘sore and ulcerated,’ that irritates the stout bellies of English subjects” (Herzog 100). As Herzog demonstrates, the reactionary forces found it convenient to try to deprive the “lower orders” of any legitimate agency in their own ideological and socio-political reorientation, portraying their “poisoning” less as a deliberate choice than as a catastrophe that has befallen them. The paradigm of disease, infiltration, and alien occupation achieved considerable currency during the 1790s and immediately afterward, as is evident not just from literary documents but also from the other arts: many caricature prints exploit the tropes of disease, “bleedings,” surgery, amputation, and inoculation. This cultural preoccupation with infection and disease no doubt colored Murray’s concern over protecting and guiding the minds of vulnerable readers during that period when they were entering public life, and for precisely that reason: they were about to become players on the public stage of national society and its attendant politics. Referring to what he calls “the more ordinary novels, which are poured forth in such multitudes, and read with such eager avidity,” Murray observes that “works so extensively circulated, and which form the principal, if not the sole, reading of a great variety of persons, can hardly fail to have a considerable influence on national manners” (Murray 113). Not just national manners, I would argue, but also national matters. That is Murray’s unstated point, and the point assumes particular resonance when we recall that Murray was writing in the wake of the failed Peace

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of Amiens when the renewed threat of Napoleonic France was coupled with a growing internal threat (which was also regularly troped in the Tory press in terms of “disease”) posed by the steadily increasing demands for parliamentary (and other) reform. These demands were being advanced by a newly literate public (and their leaders) who seemed particularly susceptible to the influence of print materials. Indeed, it is hard to read Murray’s complaint about the number of materials being “extensively circulated” without thinking of the many circulating libraries that had increased the number of readers in exponential fashion. As Gilroy and Verhoeven note, because it cultivated the bourgeois reading class as a consumer group and in the process engendered among them a distinctive class consciousness, “the proliferation of the novel ... had an essentially democratizing impact on British society” (Gilroy and Verhoeven 151). That this democratizing impact was on the minds of reactionary commentators is evident from Murray’s comment, early in his book, on what he calls “philosophical romances,” or “a very late invention” that “have not been always employed for the best of purposes.” “Some of the first, indeed, which made their appearance, were written with the view of supporting some very ill-founded and dangerous principles” (Murray 8). As April London has written, the very term “romance” was during the 1790s “a term of opprobrium,” a kind of shorthand among conservative critics for narratives that expressed socially or politically radical principles (London 71). Without naming them, Murray points toward Jacobin novelists like Holcroft, Godwin, and the Smith of Desmond. But as M.O. Grenby and others have remarked, many ideologically conservative novelists were skilled at appropriating the generic and rhetorical vehicles and conventions of Jacobin fiction and turning them to distinctively anti-Jacobin ends, as Hannah More had successfully done with tract literature. When she objected to morally reactionary sentimental novels crafted for women and dedicated to reinforcing masculinist status quo at their expense—novels that Mitzi Myers called “debased or chauvinist romance[s]”—Mary Wollstonecraft herself adopted the tropes of poison and disease, calling them “mis-shapen monsters, daily brought forth to poison the minds of our young females.”10 Murray himself was well aware of this propagandistic practice, of course, and he heartily approved: “several very ingenious works have been produced, with the 

  See, for instance, M.O. Grenby, “The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Fiction, British Conservatism and the Revolution in France, ” History: the Journal of the Historical Association 83 (1998). 10   See Mitzi Myers, “Sensibility and the ‘Walk of Reason’: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Literary Reviews as Cultural Critique, ” Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sentiment from the Augustans to the Romantics, ed. Syndy Conger (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1989) 121. For Wollstonecraft’s comment from The Analytical Review, see vol. 7 of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, eds Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 7–20. In his essay in this volume, Daniel Schierenbeck also discusses Wollstonecraft’s choice of terminology and reasons behind it.

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view of counteracting the bad effects of those above alluded to.” He continues in a note: These may perhaps be justified, even supposing us to form an unfavorable opinion of this mode of writing in general. The works, against which they are directed, were written with great ability, and were addressed to a class of readers, who would not have attended to any other mode of refutation. It became necessary, therefore, to combat them with their own weapons, without inquiring very minutely how far those weapons were lawful. (Murray 151)

Fight fire with fire, in other words, which helps to explain the interesting—and complicating—phenomenon that William Stafford has discussed: the tendency of novels of the 1790s (and early 1800s) frequently to exhibit their authors’ deliberate mixture of Jacobin and anti-Jacobin sentiments and to portray the spokespersons for those ideas and principles sometimes in negative and sometimes in positive terms within the same work.11 Before the period of the French Revolution (and indeed the American a decade and half earlier) the dissipation that moralistic cultural critics associated with reading novels could still be tolerated, even when they nevertheless felt called upon to condemn it, for the eighteenth-century novel of sentiment seemed to them to be an essentially self-indulgent and therefore largely private reading experience. Whether it took the form of a formulaic romance, a sensational Gothic, or a piteous tale of abandonment and fatal desolation, the sentimental novel resulted in little more than a thorough exercise of the affections—of individual “feelings.” The sentimental novel was grounded in a notion of “feeling” as both the means and the end of the reading experience and thus as an end unto itself. What posed a danger to the cultural establishment, and what prompted to the novel’s critics to unsheathe far sharper blades against it—became evident in what came to be called the Jacobin novel, which introduced a determined, often gritty, realism to the genre that militated against the dreamy fantasies and wish-fulfillment of escapist sentimental fiction. Terry Eagleton views this alternative variety of narrative as a “disenchanted” romance that offers its readers “a changing, concrete, open-ended history rather than a closed symbolic universe” (Eagleton 3). This was a novel firmly rooted in the volatile public world actually inhabited by its readers. It is not surprising, then, that both the Jacobin novel and the anti-Jacobin novel that sought to apply a caustic of its own set out to harness that powerful feeling not to something that might be recollected privately and in tranquility (as Wordsworth put it about poetry) but rather to something that would be played out as public action in the real, temporal world. The Jacobin and the anti-Jacobin novel both aimed to transform and energize the readerly consciousness, often through the vehicle of sentimental writing and the exercise of the affections it produced to 11

 

See Stafford, English Feminists esp. Chapter 2.

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generate social and political acts performed in the public sphere.12 If the end of sentimental fiction was individual, personal indulgence within the private sphere, the end of the Jacobin (and anti-Jacobin) novel was collective, shared action within the public sphere. That is where the danger to the establishment lay, and that is why the Jacobin novel (Godwin’s Caleb Williams is widely regarded as prototypical in its announced objective of literally transforming the reader into a different social creature) alarmed so many. It also is why the anti-Jacobin novel adopted narrative, thematic, rhetorical, and generic techniques analogous to those of the Jacobin novel in its attempt to checkmate that genre’s strategies. Put another way, the novel was by the 1790s entering the social and political arenas not as a relatively refined (albeit morally suspect) vehicle of private dalliance or genteel dissipation but rather, and more dangerously, as a deliberately activist vehicle for a public transformation that placed the social, political, economic, and religious status quo directly in the cross-hairs. The novel was moving from a genre dedicated to awakening, cultivating, and refining “feeling” among its readers to one that sought to apply that awakened and sharpened “feeling” to direct action in the temporal world. As Eagleton writes, “the novel fostered a resistance to authority at the very time that it was becoming a resourceful medium of middle-class cultural power” (Eagleton 20). Making the feeling reader also a feeling actor, therefore, meant disturbing the order of things in ways that were not without analogies in the revolutionary upheavals in France. This is one reason why the British government tried so hard to restrict, to suppress, and to criminalize opposition within the print medium, and why its spectacular failure in the Treason Trials of 1794 proved to be a landmark not just for freedom of the press but also, more important, for freedom of expression—including the freedom to read and to act upon what one reads. The end of the eighteenth century was marked by the historical convergence of Enlightenment idealism (in abstract philosophy and in the concrete application of political theory), radical disaffection with an unreformed government, a rapid expansion of literacy and public activism, and a parallel explosion of print materials, both literary and extra-literary. This was a volatile mix, and the reactionary establishment in particular appreciated the jeopardy in which it could be placed when literally masses of readers might be prompted to act in their own interests by rhetorical vehicles (like novels, but also like poems, broadsides, public speeches, and even caricature prints) that mounted their appeals in large measure in terms of the conventions of sentimental fiction, with its emphasis on affective motivation. Radical writers had already learned how devastatingly effective was the device of the “negative definition,” in which a term (like liberty) would be defined at length in terms of what it was not, so that the audience is reminded again and 12

  Even Jane Austen, who is not usually regarded as a “political” novelist, may nevertheless be seen in this fashion, as we see, for example, in Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Clarendon P, 1975), and Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988).

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again of what its members are being denied by the prevailing establishment. The deliberately orchestrated pathos that characterizes much of the eighteenth-century novel’s rhetoric transferred easily and successfully to the fiction of revolutionaries, radicals, and reformers, who set out to use it as a rhetorical and emotional lever against the establishment’s fierce (and often paradoxically unreasoned) demand for reason, rationality and conformity in response to its social, political, economic and cultural dicta. As the essays contained here remind us, though, those same rhetorical engines could be— and were—put to the service also of conservative, reactionary writing; the Jacobins were not the only ones who knew which buttons to press in order to jolt readers into action. If troubled times produce troubled citizens, both the extent and the depth of that trouble may be measured by the stridency of the rhetoric, whether the vehicles are proactive or reactive. New Cases, New Histories The moment of transition between these two paradigms of the novel, then, was in fact not a moment at all, but rather a prolonged, gradual shift that moved the novel toward the greater complexity and ambivalence that characterizes what we now think of as “modern” fiction. The essays in this volume open new perspectives upon this transitional period. Daniel Schierenbeck’s analysis of Jane West, for example, reveals not a knee-jerk anti-Jacobin but rather an author of critical and cultural complexity and discrimination whose fiction effectively manipulates materials and conventions from other genres (like education tracts). West’s literary output reflects its demarcation on the one hand by the literary and rhetorical conventions of the novelistic genre and on the other by the growing class and cultural consciousness of the evolving bourgeois reading public, readers who expected to be addressed on their own level and in their own terms, and in ways that were visibly both meaningful and meant for them. Consequently, West relied heavily upon formulas, for her plots and characters as for her opinions and rhetorical techniques: while their characteristic conventionality and inherent conservatism has lowered her in the estimate of subsequent academic commentators, she was not writing for postmodern academics, after all, but for her contemporaries. She was read for a reason, and while today we may not like that reason (or those reasons), we need to disentangle our biases from the biases of the Romantic era. Acknowledging the former may help us to understand the latter, and this should in turn make us both more perceptive and more generous critics. The same point might be made about Shelley King’s assessment of Amelia Alderson Opie, the success of whose The Father and the Daughter (1801) was a measure of Opie’s skill at accommodating the conventions of the sentimental narrative to the needs of social reformist fiction. Opie’s Adeline Mowbray refuses to offer its reader an easy way out of the novel’s complexities and contradictions, forcing readers to reassess what they thought they knew about codes of male and female honor by acknowledging how often the attributes that were customarily

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held as praiseworthy also were those that were most undermining and destructive to humanity and basic decency. Perhaps we need to take King’s argument further and see Adeline Mowbray as a fictional version of the skeptical debate, that rhetorical form that was so popular during the era, especially among reformist thinkers writing in all genres. In the skeptical debate, each side constructs so effective a position that it demolishes the other side; from the two sets of ruins the readerauditor must construct a new, third position that accommodates the best of the two while jettisoning everything else. Opie refuses to take an unflinching Jacobin or anti-Jacobin stance, but instead presents both positions through characters, situations, and speeches that reveal the best and worst of each. The emerging “modern” novel whose roots we see in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is “realistic” precisely to the extent that it moves toward a world-view characterized by unresolved inconsistencies, contradictions, ambivalences, and “dead ends” of all sorts. This is the way the world is, such novels begin to say, and instead of trying any longer to teach us to choose one world-view definitively over another, the new novel sought to teach critical thinking, moral and intellectual discrimination and readerly self-sufficiency among its consumers. In fact, in many respects the Romantic-era novel’s diversity and resistance to easy categorizing hints at the encyclopedic nature of the sort of writing we associate with Byron’s poetry. Often the novels seem to be trying to get literally everything in—as indeed ought to be the case in any realistic fiction. Life is not the neatly sorted and sequenced parade of events that novels (and their descendants, movies and TV series) too often imply. As Virginia Woolf observed, life “is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged” but is, rather, “a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” (Woolf 150). Narrative was invented to keep everything from happening at once, as it tends to do in our minds, where everything is a swirl that demands continual organization. Dissatisfied with the too-formulaic nature of her first three novels, Charlotte Smith created in her only epistolary novel, Desmond (1792), a novel whose critics recognized the social and political threat posed by its “unfiltered” presentation of the letters of correspondents from across the social and political spectrum. As Scott C. Campbell demonstrates, the novel’s particular power—and its subversive potential—arises from the inconsistency of discourse contained in its letters. Indeed, Desmond is most effective (and affective) when it is the least ideologically consistent, because the juxtaposition of ideas and values (and characters and settings) forces upon the reader an active rather than a passive role. In some respects one cannot label Desmond as a “Jacobin” or an “anti-Jacobin” novel, because the letters articulate both ideologies without any seeming authorial commentary. But in fact it is precisely this refusal to provide authorial guidance that marks the novel as—if not Jacobin, then certainly as generically radical. By eschewing overt authorial comment on any of the novel’s acts or utterances, Smith forces the reader to judge: the reader must assess the characters’ opinions and must decide also about the “character” of each character as part of analyzing those views. In other words, the absence of any intrusive

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moral or ideological referee empowers the reader. This is one reason why some chastised Smith: as most politicians know (often to their chagrin), trust the public to make a correct decision and they just might do so. And the representatives of the status quo may not like the result. There were—and are—political consequences for writing and reading texts like Desmond. If this is true for Desmond, then how much more true it is for a still more unconventional (and later) work like The Woman of Genius (1821–1822), which is the subject of Julie Shaffer’s essay. The Woman of Genius is a bravura performance that tests the limits of genre and gender, of race and colliding cultural value systems, and of philosophical world-views. The novel’s female protagonist, Edith Avondel, is a worldly, dynamic author of great power and fluctuating gender identification whose nonconformity to prevailing cultural paradigms tests both her own mettle and the values (and criteria) of her cultural milieu. Interestingly, Edith’s own mixed “racial” background (her mother is Jewish), coupled with the novel’s recurrent celebrations of her literary success and greatness, suggests that Britain’s future lies not with the customary line of “purebred” males but rather with a racially mixed line of the sort represented in this singular woman who in her life and art bridges (or simply abrogates) many familiar conventions of gender, race, class, ideology and national or cultural identification. Several essays point to the origins in Romantic-era fiction of the critique of imperialism that has seemingly peaked in recent years. If Kipling (for instance) offers a notorious example of British imperialist contempt for indigenous peoples and cultures, Elizabeth Hamilton and Frances Trollope, nearly a century earlier, present a more mixed—and culturally alert—picture. As Tara Ghoshal Wallace shows us, Hamilton saw already in 1796 that the imperialist enterprise constituted very much a mixed blessing for both parties. If an imperialist Britain brought “civilization” to a culture that it regarded as inferior (because “foreign” in so many respects), it brought, too, the baggage of that “civilization,” a set of institutions and behaviors that often damaged the indigenous culture as much as they supposedly improved it. At the same time, the process did have benefits for both cultures, at least in terms of normative behaviors (in the colonized state especially) and in terms of the sort of reciprocal transfer of culture that could enrich both. It is not so much the imperialist enterprise itself, Wallace seems to say, as the thinking behind it that makes it so often a thoroughly bad experience for those on the receiving end. When the imperialist culture acknowledges and actually assumes the responsibility to know and to learn from the culture being colonized, as Hamilton argues through her Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, the result need not be mere exploitation: it also can serve to preserve that culture and what Wallace calls its “intellectual treasures,” ensuring both the survival and the ennobling of the latter. Christopher Flynn’s essay applies this lesson with particular aptness to the New World. His discussion points up how Frances Trollope’s treatment of America in The Refugee in America (1823) both reinforces and redirects familiar eighteenthcentury British aesthetic and cultural assumptions. In her fictional account of the young and previously untutored Emily Williams, an American who learns to

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“read” the New World with Old World (and therefore European and especially British) eyes, Trollope engages in a sort of cultural nationalism by showing the rough, crude American sensibilities come gradually and increasingly under the sway of the more refined and traditional taste of the British cultural tradition. As happens in Hamilton’s account of Anglo-Indian cultural exchange, in Trollope’s novel the British cultural tradition “civilizes” the indigenous citizen and culture by subsuming them within the familiar conventions of the real or ostensibly dominant (or “parent”) culture. Two other essays examine unexpected reciprocal cultural relations. Peter Walmsley argues that the English Gothic arises from the eighteenth-century tradition of sobriety that the nationalistic British believed distinguished them from their French contemporaries, to whose “levity” and moral laxity they objected. Cultivating instead the habits of mind associated with the Gothic and the “graveyard school,” sympathy and melancholy chief among them, the British crafted for themselves a (largely self-defined) tradition that by century’s end, seemed to many to render Britain largely impervious to French republican politics. Hence the fondness for Burke (especially he of the essay on the Sublime), for graveyards and ruins (which latter fondness Anne Janowitz has examined perceptively13), and for images of death generally. Walmsley sees in the Gothic novel evidence of Burke’s characteristic sense of civilization’s fragility and of how the noble dead are betrayed by callous republicans. Walmsley’s revisionist analysis thus further expands our appreciation of the broad cultural dimensions of the Gothic, reminding us in the process of how much more immensely complex the novel as a genre was becoming by the 1790s. Shawn Lisa Maurer applies a comparable complicating lens to the subject of male friendships in radical novels of the 1790s, arguing that novels like Holcroft’s Hugh Trevor (1794–1797) and Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), redefine male relationships by visibly situating politics at the center of those relationships. Such novels use these male relationships to trope larger social and political relationships and to reveal the considerable part played in the politicized world of the 1790s by fear and vulnerability as aspects of class and other power hierarchies. Central to these relationships is a new variety of “affective friendship.” Addison, Pope and later Johnson suggested that the most fruitful male friendships occasionally required what they called “retirement,” since the sustained high visibility of public relationships could be inhospitable to both genuine and socially performed “feeling.” But Holcroft and Godwin invoke these culturally familiar materials— social relationships long associated with the genteel traditions of Enlightenment fiction—to distinguish between what such relationships once were and what they now are and must be for modern citizens in a differently configured and unavoidably public world in which “retirement” is no longer a viable option for most citizens, male or female. At the same time, in helping their contemporary readers to 13   See Anne Janowitz, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990).

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recognize how familiar relationships shape and condition social behavior, they illustrate the pernicious capacity of unscrupulous (or simply indifferent) parties to manipulate those relationships to affect the status of hierarchies of class, gender, belief and social attitude. Indeed, in employing what Margaret Case Croskery calls “affective involvement,” real-life individuals no less than those in novels demonstrated the Romantic era’s growing sense of the malleability of interpersonal relationships, and the social and political consequences for those who are so manipulated without their knowledge. This is one reason why her comparative examination of Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless (1751) and Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) raises such interesting issues (and critical eyebrows) by reminding us that novels (and their implied novel-reading practices) grounded in affective involvement considerably predate what we normally think of as “modern,” psychologically complex fiction. Conventional critical constructions of “Romanticism” routinely regard the feelings—or affections—as avenues to moral education, much in the ways in which we see poets like Wordsworth and Bloomfield using them, but it has been less clear how the affections figure in the novel as education or entertainment. Conservative eighteenth-century thinkers worried about those dilatory, distracting, “delightful” aspects of prose fiction even as they insisted on the necessity of clear didactic import. Haywood’s and Fielding’s novels, Case Croskery shows, stage the uncomfortable “fit” between entertainment and instruction that comes when the subject matter reflects the complexity of human interaction in an increasingly complicated and ambiguous world. For Case Croskery, these two novels (and other less well-known novels from mid-century as well) suggest ways of mediating the disjunction between the delightful dangers of “absorptive fiction” and the familiar truisms of moral instruction. They require the sort of retraining of the reader that we have historically associated with a later era, a retraining that requires that the reader participate willingly and knowingly in the staged—or mediated— affective, emotional process of imaginative reading while still maintaining the intellectual detachment required for judging and evaluating character, situation, and dialogue. While critics of such fiction (and the reading it teaches) worried aloud at the time about the questionable morality of reading that was too enjoyable—too much fun—because it struck them as a sort of orchestrated fantasizing, their criticisms often masked their deeper fear about the growing empowerment of the individual (and the collective) reader that was the inevitable product of a reading curriculum so clearly allied with critical thinking. Although a variety of culturally generated taboos existed to perpetuate the exclusion of many citizens from the institutions of prestige and authority (the government, the clergy, the academy), novels posed a new and dangerous threat because access to them depended almost exclusively upon literacy, especially once the sheer numbers of books had begun to multiply as they did by 1790. Case Croskery reminds us that the “anti-enlightenment faith in the educational power of emotions” is often regarded as one of Romanticism’s hallmarks. To find this fact playing so central a role in the popular fiction of some

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half a century earlier is immediately to complicate what we have thought we knew about both eras. More important, its presence there testifies further to our need to think again about the fiction of this entire transitional period in terms of a shifting scale of literary and cultural valuation rather than as a more static, incremental body of documentary evidence. Indeed, thinking and rethinking are fundamental to the continuing reassessment of British fiction in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The scholars whose work appears in this volume are well launched on this project, both individually and collectively, but, as noted earlier, much remains to be done. We have acquired more and increasingly sophisticated critical and theoretical equipment for assessing the novels that were produced and read during this protean period. We have gained access to unprecedented numbers of novels themselves, many of them long neglected and even unknown. And we have begun to generate sophisticated tools for evaluating and contextualizing those novels in a number of ways. What Milton wrote at the end of Paradise Lost about what Adam and Eve faced as they looked forward from Eden applies with no less relevance to scholars of the Romantic-era novel at the present historical moment, which offers so much promise, so many opportunities: “the World was all before them.”

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Index Abrams, M.H., 15, 199 Addison, Joseph, 17, 39, 41, 44–6, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 87, 89, 90–92, 193, 203 Adorno, Theodor, 11 Age of Johnson, see Johnson, Samuel Age of Sensibility, see sensibility Age of Shelley, see Shelley, P. B. Altman, Janet G., 57 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), 2, 3, 12 Andrew, Donna T., 117 anti-Jacobin; see novel, anti-Jacobin Armstrong, Nancy, 77n9, 161, 190 Augustan or Augustanism, 3, 10, 190 Austen, Jane, 3, 9, 9n4, 10, 15, 53, 77n9, 79, 148n8, 149n10, 150, 151, 151n11, 161, 163, 191, 199n12 Bakhtin, M.M., 58, 58n7 Batey, Mavis, 165n3 Baine, Rodney, 93, 95, 97n12 Barthes, Roland, 193 Battestin, Martin C., 12 Bayly, C.A., 136n5, 140n7 Bearce, George D., 133n3 Behrendt, Stephen C., 8 Benjamin, Walter, 46, Bhabha, Homi, 131 Blake, William, 1, 3, 8, 12n7, 14, 163 Bowstead, Diana, 65, 66n16 Bray, Alan, 87, 89, 89n4 Breashears, Caroline, 104n29 Brewer, William D., 101n22, 101n23 Britons, 40, 138, 155, 161 Brooks, Peter, 29, 29n8, 30 Brown, Homer Obed, 8 Brown, Marshall, 2 Burke, Edmund, 12n7, 16, 70n3, 203; see also sublime Philosophical Enquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, A, 163, 165, 165n3, 166, 168, 169, 170 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 52, 53, 62, 65, 132, 196

Butler, Marilyn, 7, 11, 69n2, 199n12 Butler, Samuel, 127n19 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 1, 3, 22, 161, 201 Campbell, Scott C., 16, 17, 18 Carey, William, 133, 133n3 Case Croskery, Margaret, 16, 17, 19, 29n9, 180, 181, 184, 192, 204 Carter, Angela, 126n7 Chandler, James, 11 Cheyne, George, 5, 40, 50 Claude Glass, a, 171 Clery, E.J., 39 Cobbett, William, 172, 173 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1, 161, 163, 177, 178, 194, 195 Colley, Linda, 40 Congreve, William, 21 Connell, Philip, 45 Conway, Alison, 64n14 Corber, Robert J., 101n23, 104 Cowper, William, 3, 12n7 Craciun, Adriana, 190 Cressy, David, 51n6 Curran, Stuart, 145n3 Daffron, Eric, 101n21, 101n23, 104, 104n28 Day, Geoffrey, 21, 21n1, 22 Day, Thomas Sanford and Merton, 79 Descartes, René, 39, 41–3 Dryden, John, 44, 161 Absalom and Achitophel, 152–3, 153n14 dueling, 17, 18, 111–30, 186 Dyson, Kataki Kusheri, 133n3, 134n4 Eagleton, Terry, 198, 199 Eberle, Roxanne, 112n2 (long) eighteenth century, the, 2, 4,5, 6, 10, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 163, 166, 193 Elliott, Pat, 65

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Ellul, Jacques, 193 empire, 14, 15, 16, 18, 131–41 Endelman, Todd M., 160n29 Enlightenment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 11, 22, 16, 17, 18, 19, 25, 28, 36, 49, 87n2, 88, 94, 140n7, 146, 177, 188, 193, 199, 203 French, 42 post-enlightenment, 192 Scottish, 137 Ennis, Daniel James, 139 evangelicals, 7, 73 feminist scholarship, 7, 8, 9, 12, 70, 72n4 Ferguson, Rebecca, 22n2 Ferris, Ina, 190, fiction; see novel Fielding, Henry, 3, 8, 16, 21, 24, 26, 33, 182, 186, 191, 191n5 Covent Garden Journal, 111n1 Joseph Andrews, 28, 99 Tom Jones, 21, 26–8, 29, 30, 32, 35, 36, 93, 99, 176, 186, 204 Fielding, Sarah, 4, 5 David Simple, 182 Flynn, Christopher, 16, 17, 18, 179, 188, 202 Forster, E.M., 131n1 Forster, George, 134n4 Freeman, Barbara Claire, 155 Frevert, Ute, 117–18 friendship, male, 17, 18, 87–110, 130, 203 in marriage, 75 Gallagher, Catherine, 23 Galperin, William, 2, 173n1 Garside, Peter, 143n1, 191, 195n8 gender and androgyny, 187 arrangements, 182, 183 and authorship, 78, 146, 148 and class, 28, 190, 195 difference, 73n5, 74, 93, 111, 115, 116, 117, 122 and Enlightenment, 115, 146 European relations of, 137 formation, 88 identity, 122, 129, 202 negotiations, 72n4 oppression, 4 politics, 183, 190

problems of, 17, 18, 28, 72n4, 145, 147, 148, 160, 185, 202, 204 and race or ethnicity, 17 roles, 73 Romanticism, 143, 146 sex, relation to, 115 and virtue, 127 and writing, 144 Gilpin, William, 163, 165, 165n3, 166, 180, 178 and the picturesque, 167, 168, 171 Gilroy, Amanda, 8, 189, 197 Godwin, William, 3, 5, 55, 59, 60, 67, 70, 71, 84, 87, 87n3, 94, 98n14, 99n17, 104n29, 112, 113, 116, 124, 124n15, 125, 127, 130, 197, 203 Caleb Williams, 17, 56, 88, 93, 99–110, 181, 182, 199, 203 Enquirer, The, 94n7, 120 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 12n7, 56n3, 59, 63, 100n20, 105n30, 119–20, 120n12, 121, 123, 128n21 Fleetwood, Preface to, 109n34 Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 128 relationship with Wollstonecraft, 18 Thoughts on Man, 100, 102, 103, 105, 106 Wollstonecraft circle, 124 Goldsmith, Oliver, Citizen of the World, 131, 179 Goring, Paul, 22n2 Gothic; see novel, Gothic Grand Tour, 50; see also fiction, travel narrative Gray, Thomas, 4, 16, 48, 137 Gregory, Dr. John, 150 Grenby, M.O., 55n2, 69n2, 124, 125, 126, 197 Grundy, Isobel, 131, 137 Habermas, Jürgen, 48n4, 190 Haggerty, George E., 89 Hall, Basil, 172–3 Hamilton, Charles, 133–4, Hamilton, Elizabeth, 15, 16, 17, 18, 72n4, 202, 203 Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, 17, 18, 131–41

Index Handwerk, Gary, 99n17, 105n30 Harrison, Robert Pogue, 46 Harvey, A.D., 125 Hastings, Warren, 132, 133, 136, 140, 140n7 Haywood, Eliza, 5, 15, 16, 19, 24, 24n4, 25, 26, 28, 29n9, 30, 36, 184 and amatory fiction, 35 in The Dunciad, 24 History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, 21–38, 180, 204 Love in Excess, 25, 31 as Mrs. Novel, 24 Haywood, Ian, 13 Hays, Mary, 57, 57n5, 67, 70, 70n3, 72n4, 76, 78, 111, 182, 183, 194, 195 Memoirs of Emma Courtney, 56, 114, 182, 186 “On Novel Writing,” 56 Victim of Prejudice, 183 Herrup, Cynthia, 125 Herzog, Don, 196 Herzog, Roy, 190 Hey, Richard, 118, 119 Hodges, William, 133, 133n3 Holcroft, Thomas, 15, 17, 87, 87n3, 99, 99n17, 101, 124n15, 130, 197 Anna St. Ives, 182 Bryan Perdue, 94n7 Hugh Trevor, 22, 87–99, 100, 100n18, 101, 110, 203 and Treason Trials of 1794, 94, 199 honor; see also dueling aristocratic, 92, 104, 105, 108, 118 feminine, 111, 114, 115, 116, 123, 124–9, 149n9, 200 gendered, 18, 111–30 “life of,” 112, 113 masculine, 111, 115, 116–23, 200 opposed to property, 136 Horkheimer, Max, 11 Houlbrooke, Ralph, 46n3 Hume, David, 16 “Of National Characters,” 40n2 Treatise of Human Nature, 25, 28, 42 Hutter, Horst, 89, 89n4, 100n19 Hyatte, Reginald, 87n1, 92 imperialism, British, 17, 39n1, 140, 186, 202 Inchbald, Elizabeth, 93

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Nature and Art, 92n5, 93, 97, 183 Simple Story, 104n29, 183 India, 18, 69, 131–41, 203 Indians, West or American, 161, 175, 182 Irlaum, Shaun, 22n2 Jacobin; see novel, Jacobin Jameson, Frederic, 29 Janowitz, Anne, 203 Johnson, Claudia, 8n3, 9n4, 70n3, 77, 199n12 Johnson, Joe, 87n2 Johnson, Samuel, 22, 23, 25, 31, 56, 87, 88, 89, 89, 188, 203 Age of, 1–5, 179, 188 Idler, 90 Rambler, 90, 91 Jones, Chris, 56n6 Jones, Vivien, 71, 73, 73n5 Jones, William, 9n5, 136, 139–40, 140n7 Kant, Immanuel, 13 Keats, John, 1, 44 Keen, Paul, Kegan Paul, C., 87n3 Kelly, Gary, 7, 9, 9n4, 11, 57n5, 69n2, 71, 72n4, 95, 96n10, 97n13, 117n9, 124, 190, 191 Kettle, Arnold, 190 Keymer, Thomas, 48n5 Kiely, Robert, 14, 15 Kiernan, V.G., 117n9, 138n6 Kilgour, Maggie, 39n1 King, Shelley, 16, 17, 18, 69n2, 149n9, 200, 201 Kinkead-Weekes, Mark, 118 kinship, 45, 126n18 Klancher, Jon, 7, 190 Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth, 69 Leader, Zachary, 13 Leask, Nigel, 133n2, 139 Lester, Elizabeth, 27, 143–62 versus Mrs. Ross, 143n1 Linkin, Harriet, 8 Locke, John, 16, 39, 41–8, 49, 51, 52 Lokke, Kari, 145,159 London, April, 71, 78, 197 Loomba, Ania, 136n5, 141 Lowe, Lisa, 131n1

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Lynch, Deidre Shauna, 14, 23, 37 Lynch, Jack, 153n14 MacCannell, Dean, 171 McGann, Jerome, 8, 13, 19 McKeon, Michael, 8, 27, 29, 115, 117, 126n18, 127, 127n19, 191, 191n5 Mackenzie, Henry, 4, 15, 12n7 Man of Feeling, 180, 181, 182 Mahomet, Dean, 134n4 man of feeling, 4, 122; see also Mackenzie, Man of Feeling Marshall, Peter H., 87n3, 98n14 Mathias, Thomas James, 55n2 Maurer, Shawn Lisa, 17, 18, 92n5, 130, 181, 203 Meades, Anna, History of Sir William Harrington, 113 melancholia, 10, 16, 17, 39, 40, 41, 44, 46, 48, 49, 50, 52, 59, 82, 91, 155, 203 Mellor, Anne K., 6, 8, 11, 69, 69n1, 69n2, 72n4, 145, 170n5, 190, 190n3 Mettrie, Julien Offray de la, 42 Miles, Robert, 8, 15, 39, 39n1 Miller, Jacqueline T., 109n33 Miller, Nancy K., 149n9 Mills, Laurens J., 87n1 Moglen, Helene, 15 Monk, Samuel H., 165n3 Moore, Charles, 118, 119, 119n11, 123 Moore, Edward, 126 More, Hannah, 12n7, 69n1, 70, 72, 72n4, 73, 77n9, 111, 112, 114, 118, 119, 197 Moretti, Franco, 191, 191n4 Morillo, John D., 29n8 Murray, H[ugh], 195, 195n8, 196, 197 Myers, Mitzi, 69n1, 75n6, 76, 197, 197n10 Newman, Gerald, 40 North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR), 1, 2, 3, 163n1 novel: of the 1790s, 56, 88, 89, 97n12, 126, 129, 182, 184, 186, 187, 191, 198, 203 amatory, 22 anti-Jacobin or loyalist, 17, 69, 69n2, 71, 76, 84, 124, 125, 189, 198, 199, 201 didactic or educative, 28, 49, 77, 77n9, 78, 151

epistolary, 16, 56, 57, 57n6, 58, 61, 67, 186, 187, 201 Gothic, 3, 36, 39, 39n1, 53, 151, 153, 155, 180, 184, 185, 189, 203 generic variations of, 9, 144, 161, 190, 200, 203 history of, 6–8, 126 historical, 9 or “history,” 21, 80, 102 versus historical text, 80 of ideas, 183, 185 Jacobin; 55, 57, 57n5, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 74, 92, 124, 125, 182, 189, 197, 198, 199, 201 Künstlerroman, 149 national tale, 9 pre-romantic, 3 political or radical, 9, 11, 55, 56, 57, 62, 87, 93, 182, 183, 184, 199n12 “rise of, ” 8, 15, 194 realist, 14, 15, 71, 152, 153, 155, 201 romance conventions of, 58, 76, 78, 79, 149, 151, 186, 197 Romantic or Romantic-era; 3, 8–16, 17, 19, 23, 24, 56, 69, 69n2, 70, 84, 111, 155, 189, 191, 192, 201, 205 scandal, 22 Silver Fork, 175n7 of sensibility or sentiment, 24, 180, 182, 186, 187, 189, 194, 197, 198 and travel narrative, 7, 9, 17, 18, 140, 163, 165, 168 Victorian, 8, 36, 124, 126 Nussbaum, Felicity, 131, 138n6 Nussbaum, Martha, 28, 29 Opie, Amelia Alderson, 15, 16, 70n3, 119n11, 120n12, 200 Adeline Mowbray, 17, 60n10, 69n2, 111–30, 200, 201 Father and Daughter, The, 200 Temper, 127 Opie, John, 124 Page, Judith W., 152, 152n12 Peel, Ellen, 158n26 Peltonen, Markku, 117 Percy, Walker, 166, 167, 169, 170 Perkins, David, 179

Index Perkins, Pamela, 134, 140 Piozzi, Hester Thrale Lynch, 12n7, 159 Pope, Alexander, 2, 22n2, 24, 28, 67, 139, 182, 188, 203 race; see also slavery and Afghanis, 134 and criticism, 12 and class, 202 and gender, 17, 122, 202 ideology of, 138, 138n6, 202 Jewish, 18, 154, 155, 158 and nationality, 144 Radcliffe, Ann, 6, 15, 16, 58n7, 59n8, 152, 155, 162, 185 Italian, The, 184 Mysteries of Udolpho, 53 Ragussis, Michael, 160, 160n29 Rajan, Balachandra, 140n7 Raven, James, 53n1, 191, 191n4 Regency, 9, 12, Restoration, 2, 22, 23 Revie, Linda L., 167 Richardson, Alan, 77n9, 79 Richardson, Samuel, 3, 5, 6, 56, 76, 126n18, 186 Clarissa, 93, 112, 113, 113n3, 180 Pamela, 28, 77n9 Sir Charles Grandison, 18, 116, 118, 185, 186 Rogers, Katharine, 65 “Romantic Century,” 2, 4, 163 Romantics, 6, 8, 12n7, 27; see also Romanticism and genius, 7 ideology of, 16 and literature, 1, 3, 7, 13, 19, 179, 180 and movement, 24, 36, 37 scholars or specialists, 6, 10, 11, 13 and studies, 1, 7, 11 and “turn,” 6, 10, 14–16, 18, 19 Romanticism, 1–20, 143, 154, 165, 166, 179, 181, 204 and the 1790s, 111, 127 and emotion, 181 “female masculine,” 156 feminine, 145, 155 and French Revolution, 16 as historicist, 11, 13, 14

227

influence on eighteenth-century aesthetic, 173 and literary period, 2, 4, 11, 12, 15, 16, 19, 69, 146, 163, 180, 188, 193, 200, 204 masculine, 143, 144, 145, 146 and novel genres, 149 pre-romanticism, 2, 3 Rosenberg, Edgar, 154 Ross, Marlon B., 145, 146n5 Ross, Mrs.; see Lester, Elizabeth Russell, Shannon, 134, 140 Said, Edward, 140, 140n7 Schaffer, Simon, 42 Scheuermann, Mona, 95, 97n12 Schierenbeck, Daniel, 17, 18, 129, 197n10, 200 Schmitt, Cannon, 39n1 Schreiber, Andrew, 102n24 Schwab, Raymond, 140n7 Scott, Sarah, 97n11 Scott, Walter, 8, 9n4, 15, 59, 191n5 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 88, 95n9 sensibility, 5, 6, 7, 15, 22n2, 24, 31, 36, 51, 184, 187, 194 aesthetic, 167 Age of, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 15, 22, 24, 25, 28, 31, 32, 36, 51, 75, 76, 122, 167, 178, 184, 194, 197 aristocratic, 178 and reason, 122 and Shaftesbury, 22, 25, 28 in women, 75, 122, 187; see also sentimentality sentimentality, 62, 65, 66, 67, 70, 76, 87, 121, 132, 146, 155, 157, 158, 195 Christian, 46, 158 exaggerated, 155 in friendship (male), 88, 89, 92, 94, 96, 97n11, 100, 101, 101n21, 104, 105, 107, 108, 110 in heroines or heroes, 65, 66n16, 111 Jacobin, 196, 198 nineteenth-century, 5 in novels, 62, 78, 180, 181, 182, 186, 189, 194, 197, 198, 199, 200 in the woman reader, 113 Shaffer, Julie, 16, 17, 192, 202

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Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of, 5, 6, 22, 25, 28, 33, 42, 165, 165n3 Shannon, Laurie, 89, 89n4 Shapin, Steven, 42 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 15, 161 Gothic sublime of, 153, 153n15 Shelley, P.B., 5, 7, 146 Age of, 1, Sherlock, William, 46n3 Siskin, Clifford, 190, 192 slavery, 4, 138 (Indian), 138n6, 172 Smith, Adam, 9n5 Theory of Moral Sentiments, 180 Smith, Charlotte, 8, 9, 12n7, 14, 15, 186 Banished Man, The, 62 Celestina, 58, 59, 59n8, 60 Desmond, 16, 18, 55–68, 197, 201–2 Emmeline, 58, 59n8, 60n10 Ethelinde, 58, 59n8 Old Manor House, 185 Smith, George, 133n3 Smith, Orianne, 159 Southey, Robert, 187 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 30, 79, 182, 191 Spedding, Patrick, 24n4 Spender, Dale, 190 St. Clair, William, 191 Staël, Germaine de, Corinne, 156–61 Stafford, William, 190, 198, Starr, G. Gabrielle, 190 Steele, Richard, 17, 39, 45, 51, 93 Sterling, James, 24, 25 Stone, Lawrence, 88, Straub, Kristina, 148n8 sublime and Burke, 17, 22, 165, 203 as cultural signfier, 169, 176 and the feminine, 145, 159 and feminism, 8 and the Gothic, 153 and landscape, 164, 165, 166, 168, 170, 171, 173 and the masculine, 100, 106, 145 and Romanticism, 5, 6, 7, 16, 153, 153n15, 161, 170 Teltscher, Kate, 139 Thompson, E.P., 6, 7, 117

Thompson, James, 3 tourism, in literature, 165, 168, 171–7 Townsend, Dabney, 165n3 travel narrative; see novel, and travel narrative Trollope, Frances, 15, 16, 17, 18, 163–78, 188, 202, 203 Domestic Manners of the Americans, 163–71, 177, 178 The Refugee in America, 164, 165, 166, 171–7, 177, 202 Trumpener, Katie, 8, 11, 190, 190n3 Turner, Cheryl, 190 Ty, Eleanor, 61n12, 65, 69n2, 70n3, 78, 82, 125 Uphaus, Robert, 102, 103n27 Verhoeven, W. H., 8, 93, 99, 189, 197 Victorian era, 3, 5, 8, 11, 36, 39, 163, 164, 165, 166, 171, 181, 188 Wahrman, Dror, 51 Wall, Cynthia Sundberg, 23n3 Wallace, Miriam L., 69n2, 193 Wallace, Tara Ghoshal, 17, 18, 186, 202 Walmsley, Peter, 16, 17, 184, 203 Walpole, Horace, 16, 39 Walpole, Thomas, 158 Watson, Nicola, 66n16 Watt, Ian, 7n1, 8, 9n4, 15, 190, 191, 191n5 Wein, Toni, 39n1 West, Jane, 15, 16, 17, 85, 129, 130, 200 Advantages of Education, 18, 69–84 as anti-Jacobin, 70, 84 Gossip’s Story, A, 76, 84 Infidel Father, The, 84 Letters to a Young Lady, 70, 77n8, 116 Letters to a Young Man, 70 Tale of the Times, A, 84 Whitman, Vincent, 158 Wolfson, Susan, 2, 4, 8, 163n1 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 5, 15, 57, 59, 59n8, 67, 70, 72n4, 76, 125, 128, 130, 182, 194; see also GodwinWollstonecraft circle, and, Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Index as critic, 59, 75n6, 76, 197, 197n10 and educational theorist, 69n1, 70, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 77n8, 78, 79, 81, 84, 188, 195 Female Reader, The, 71 and Godwin, 3, 18, 59, 124 Maria; or the Wrongs of Woman, 56, 182 Mary: A Fiction, 182, 187 Original Stories from Real Life, 71, 72, 73 as radical writer, 69, 70, 70n3, 75n6, 78, 111, 124, 182, 183, 188 and religiousity, 73, 74, 75 and sexual relations, 128–9

229

Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, 71, 72, 73, 74 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 71, 74, 75, 77n8, 93, 114 Vindication of the Rights of Man, 12n7 Wood, Lisa, 70n3, 71, 78 Woolf, Virginia, 7n1, 201 Wordsworth, William, 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 15, 36, 163, 164, 168, 171, 178, 198, 204 Wu, Ducan, 6, 12n7, 14 Yaeger, Patricia, 145 Young, Edward, 2, 4, 17 Night Thoughts, 39, 41, 46–53, 161