1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (Volume 24) 9781684480760

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1650–1850

EDITORIAL BOARD Theodore E. D. Braun University of Delaware Samara Anne Cahill Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Kathryn Duncan Saint Leo University James T. Engell Harvard University Scott Gordon Lehigh University Paul Kerry Christ Church, Oxford Colby H. Kullman University of Mississippi Mark Pedreira University of Puerto Rico Cedric D. Reverand II University of Wyoming Howard D. Weinbrot University of Wisconsin

1650–1850 IDEAS, AESTHETICS, AND INQUIRIES IN THE EARLY MODERN ERA

KEVIN L. COPE, Editor BÄRBEL CZENNIA, Book Review Editor

LEWISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA

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VOLUME

ISBN 978-1-6844-8073-9 ISSN 1065-3112 This collection copyright © 2019 by Bucknell University Press Individual chapters copyright © 2019 in the names of their authors All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Bucknell University Press, Hildreth-­Mirza Hall, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837-2005. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www​.­bucknell​.­edu​/­UniversityPress Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMER­I­CA

CONTENTS ix

Foreword by Kevin  L. Cope

ESSAYS Edited by Kevin  L . Cope “A Picture of My Mind, My Sentiments All Laid Open to Their View”: Lady Chudleigh’s Printed Verse, the Coterie Reader, and the Modern Editor IGOR DJORDJEVIC

3

Addison’s Anglican Rationalism, Cato’s Tragic Flaw, and Stoicism MORGAN STRAWN

32

Robert Harley and the Politics of Daniel Defoe’s Review, 1710–1713 ASHLEY MARSHALL

54

“All for Duty”: Dryden’s Critical Agenda in All for Love PETER BYRNE

98

William Congreve as Satirist PATRICIA GAEL

120

Classical Example and Gospel Rhe­toric in the Sermons of In­de­pen­dent Preacher Thomas Brooks KEVIN JOEL BERLAND

145

Expanding Identity through Imagination; or, How Thomas Tryon Becomes the Marginalized N. S. BOONE

167

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Contents

Johnson and China: Culture, Commerce, and the Dream of the Orient in Mid-­Eighteenth-­Century ­England GREG CLINGHAM

178

Technofacts: Christopher Smart and the Curiosity Cabinet WILLIAM HALL

243

Catesby’s Eclecticism and the Origin of His Style ALEX SELTZER

263

SPECIAL FEATURE Sacred Spaces and Spirituality in the Long Eigh­teenth C ­ entury Edited by William Stargard Introduction to Special Feature WILLIAM STARGARD

289

Portuguese Religious Architecture, Beliefs, and Practices in Northern Eu­ro­pean Travel Accounts, 1750s–1850s MARIA CLARA PAULINO

292

Ascetic Cosmopolitanism: Imagining Religious Retreat in Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Parts I and II and Letters Concerning the Love of God DONOVAN TANN

305

Convent and Crown: Redecorating Santa Chiara in Naples, 1741–1759 ROBIN  L. THOMAS

328

BOOK REVIEWS Edited by Bärbel Czennia Lisa Forman Cody and Mark Ledbury, eds., Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Culture, vol. 41 Reviewed by CHRISTOPHER  D. JOHNSON 355 Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor, eds., Shakespeare in the Eigh­teenth ­Century Reviewed by JAQUELYN  W. WALSH 358 John  B. Radner, Johnson and Boswell: A Biography of Friendship Reviewed by MARTINE W. BROWNLEY 363

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Contents

Jack  M. Armistead, Otherworldly John Dryden: Occult Rhe­toric in His Poems and Plays Reviewed by ANNE BARBEAU GARDINER 366 Jonathan Lamb, The ­Things T ­ hings Say Reviewed by LYNN FESTA 370 Tim Fulford, The Late Poetry of the Lake Poets: Romanticism Revised Reviewed by BRIAN GOLDBERG 374 Fayçal Falaky, Social Contract, Masochist Contract: Aesthetics of Freedom and Submission in Rousseau Reviewed by JASON  A. NEIDLEMAN 378 Daniel  P. Watkins, Anna Letitia Barbauld and Eighteenth-­Century Visionary Poetics Reviewed by ELIZABETH  A. HAIT 383 Michael Griffin, Enlightenment in Ruins: The Geographies of Oliver Goldsmith Reviewed by R.J.W. MILLS 389 Michael Austin, New Testaments: Cognition, Closure, and the Figural Logic of the Sequel, 1660–1740 Reviewed by KEVIN  L. COPE 392 Audrey T. Carpenter, John Theo­philus Desaguliers: A Natu­ral Phi­los­o­pher, Engineer and Freemason in Newtonian E ­ ngland Reviewed by BÄRBEL CZENNIA 396 Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Enlightenment’s Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism Reviewed by DAVID  A. REID 403 Lisa Forman Cody, ed., Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Culture, vol. 42 Reviewed by CHRISTOPHER  D. JOHNSON 407 Timothy Erwin and Michelle Burnham, eds., Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Culture, vol. 43 Reviewed by CHRISTOPHER  D. JOHNSON 411 Robert Zaretsky, Boswell’s Enlightenment Reviewed by PAUL J. DEGATEGNO 415 Howard D. Weinbrot, ed., Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New ­Century Reviewed by PAUL J. DEGATEGNO 418

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Contents

Samuel Richardson, Pamela in Her Exalted Condition, ed. Albert J. Rivero Reviewed by KIT KINCADE 421 Lyndon J. Dominique, Imoinda’s Shade: Marriage and the African ­Woman in Eighteenth-­Century British Lit­er­a­ture, 1759–1808 Reviewed by ELLEN MOODY 424 Marilyn Francus, Monstrous Motherhood: Eighteenth-­Century Culture and the Ideology of Domesticity Reviewed by MEREDITH  A. LOVE 429 Teresa Barnard, ed., British W ­ omen and the Intellectual World in the Long Eigh­teenth ­Century Reviewed by ELLEN MOODY 432 Stephen Bending, Green Retreats: ­Women, Gardens and Eighteenth-­Century Culture Reviewed by R.J.W. MILLS 437

441

About the Contributors

viii

FOREWORD KEVIN L. COPE

First ­imagined only a few floors below the pent­house of a Seattle conference

­ otel, 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era began h the first quarter ­century of its ­career in view of the grassroots while looking up to unexplored heights. Twenty months a­ fter its somewhat aerial conception, 1650– 1850 appeared on library shelves, presenting a suite of essays that ranged from the earthy po­liti­cal discourse of Thomas Hobbes to the peat-­striding heroes in Ossianic verse, and on up the ladder of creation to high-­church utopianism and the cultivation of the “beauties.” More than a few colleagues expressed skepticism about the prospects for an annual journal that seemed to compete with the established “omnibus” vehicles for scholarship on the Enlightenment. Yet, a­ fter only one issue, this budding annual had captured its first prize and had built up a robust inventory of essays, special features, and reviews. If t­ here w ­ ere any secret to the early success of 1650–1850, it was surely its bold interpretation of what should be included in the “full range” of long-­ eighteenth-­century studies. 1650–1850 and its editorial board avoided defining that range with re­spect to the usual obvious landmarks, ­whether famous or canonical figures such as Voltaire or Samuel Johnson or Joshua Reynolds; or ­whether classic topics such as the ­battle between Whigs and Tories or the status of the Defoe canon; or w ­ hether popu­lar ideological movements such as deconstruction, feminism, or new historicism. 1650–1850 published essays concerning, if not exactly the rank-­and-­file members of Enlightenment society, but rather a piebald ensemble of versifiers, chiselers, projectors, phi­los­o­phers, and minstrels

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Foreword

who formed a cultural brigade for a period given to wittily fighting culture wars with light infantry. Thus began a period of showcasing writers and scholars who had both the capacity and the confidence to address difficult prob­lems, questions, and issues in unexpected, unpre­ce­dented, offhand, sometimes startling ways. The likes of Anne Yearsley, vegetarian Presbyterians, and Johann Georg Sulzer appeared alongside more familiar ­faces such as Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, or Phyllis Wheatley. 1650–1850 celebrated all language traditions, providing a needed alternative within a field of study that, ­until now, has been heavi­ly populated by scholars who mainly focused on the English-­speaking world. Over the years, a plethora of special features assembled by guest editors allowed for the highlighting of diverse language traditions, events, productions, and other phenomena—­for placing Enlightenment studies in a burgeoning series of new frames. With issue twenty-­four of 1650–1850, this annual enters its second quarter ­century with a new publisher, a new look, a new editorial board, and a new commitment to intellectual and artistic exploration. As the diversely inventive essays in this first issue from the Bucknell University Press demonstrate, the energy and open-­mindedness that made 1650–1850 a success continue to intensify. This first Bucknell issue includes a special feature that explores the use of sacred space in what was once incautiously called “the age of reason.” A suite of book reviews renews the 1650–1850 legacy of full-­length and unbridled evaluation of the best in con­temporary Enlightenment scholarship. ­These lively and informative reviews celebrate the many years that book review editor Bärbel Czennia has served 1650–1850 and also make for an able handoff to Samara Anne Cahill of Nanyang Technological University, who ­will edit the book review section beginning with our next volume. Most impor­tant of all, this issue serves as an invitation to scholars to offer their most creative and thoughtful work for consideration for publication in 1650–1850.

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1650–1850

“A PICTURE OF MY MIND, MY SENTIMENTS ALL LAID OPEN TO THEIR VIEW” LADY CHUDLEIGH’S PRINTED VERSE, THE COTERIE READER, AND THE MODERN EDITOR IGOR DJORDJEVIC

Over the past twenty-­five years, many hitherto “lost” or merely underappreci-

ated works by seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century authors of both sexes have been recovered from the obscurity imposed on them by the long-­absolute rule of the canon. Roger Lonsdale’s two authoritative anthologies, The New Oxford Book of Eigh­teenth C ­ entury Verse and Eighteenth-­Century ­Women Poets, are the products of such monumental efforts to rescue authors and works from oblivion. The lasting effects of such scholarship can be mea­sured by ­today’s virtual ubiquity of some of t­ hese formerly unknown authors in nonspecialist anthologies, such as the Norton Introduction to Lit­er­a­ture, commonly used in undergraduate introductory En­glish courses.1 Among the authors who find their place in both types of anthologies is Mary, Lady Chudleigh, whose writing c­ areer consists—­typically for w ­ omen authors of the late seventeenth and early eigh­teenth centuries—­first of a long period of manuscript circulation in a coterie, perhaps dating as early as the 1670s, before the works’ ultimate emergence in print in the last de­cade of her life.2 The anthologist’s task is on the one hand guided by a rhetorical motive—­ Kenneth Burke’s term3 in this case implying a value judgment of what is relevant to the conception of the anthology—­and on the other limited by the restrictions of physical space in the planned volume. In addition to ­these two ­factors that shape to a very large extent the reader’s understanding of the texts presented, the final product may shape the reader’s understanding in a third, and perhaps most decisive, way, for which the anthologist is not responsible, since the resolution of the prob­ lem lies beyond the limits of the anthology in a consultation of the anthologized

3

1650–1850 author’s complete oeuvre. As a result of the physical limitations imposed on the anthologist’s choice of any author’s work, the rhetorical thrust of the poems that do find their place in an anthology may be too easily misunderstood as the stance of the author on any given issue, ­because the poems ­will inevitably be read outside the original context of the volume in which they first appeared, and most prob­ably without a complete awareness of the place of the expressed ideas in the wider context of the author’s history of ideas.4 In short, some poems do not bear anthologizing well. Two impor­tant questions ­will shape the following argument. The first, as Isobel Grundy puts it, is “a question . . . ​worth raising about any edition: as whom is the author constructed?”5 Margaret J. M. Ezell implies a corollary to this idea when she inquires, “Does the media—­manuscript or printed page—­determine the audience, or does the author?” 6 Both questions are relevant to this discussion of Lady Chudleigh’s verse, and both have quite specific answers. In the case of an author such as Lady Chudleigh, the prob­lems resulting from a se­lection of her poems for an anthology are of no small consequence, as they relate to the sensitive topics of marriage and gender relations, which have in our times become the focal point of much heated polemic. Her poem “To the Ladies” is a crucial case in point. “To the Ladies” is certainly Chudleigh’s most anthologized poem,7 often considered her “signature poem,”8 and it is prob­ably not a gross exaggeration to add that it is ­today one of the most anthologized poems by any eighteenth-­century female author.9 Whereas Lonsdale’s New Oxford Book of Eigh­teenth C ­ entury Verse contains only this poem by Chudleigh, his other gender-­specific anthology contains three: “To the Ladies,” an excerpt from the long The Ladies Defence, and “The Resolve.” The latter choice is almost identical to an earlier anthology that had a clear theoretical, if not a revisionist “Whig,”10 approach to literary history: Moira Ferguson’s First Feminists: British W ­ omen Writers, 1578–1799, which pres­ents the long poem in its entirety and has “To Lerinda” instead of “The Resolve.” To Lonsdale’s credit, in an effort to minimize “misrepre­sen­ta­tion,” which he suggests is unavoidable in any anthologist’s work,11 in Eighteenth-­Century ­Women Poets he prefaces each author’s se­lection with a biographical headnote. But this is not the case in the Norton Introduction to Lit­er­a­ture, where Chudleigh’s “To the Ladies” appears in a section of the poetry unit entitled “Practicing Reading: Some Poems on Love,” in the com­pany of individual poems by W. H. Auden, Anne Bradstreet, William Shakespeare, Sharon Olds, Aphra Behn, Denise Levertov, and W. B. Yeats.12 Such an editorial grouping of texts has a very clear and valuable ped-

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“A Picture of My Mind"

agogic purpose, but it also quite clearly suggests to the readers—­even before they arrive at the “suggestions for writing”—­that the poem is meant to be read as a diatribe against marriage and, in this anthology’s context, possibly as a foil for “conventional” expressions of female marital bliss, presumably to be read in Anne Bradstreet’s “To My Dear and Loving Husband.” One might even read Chudleigh’s piece as a protofeminist roar, anticipating Denise Levertov’s narrator in the “Wedding-­Ring,” who complacently comments on the object’s lying “in a basket / as if at the bottom of a well”—­a “situation” that the question for study leads the student to interpret symbolically.13 Such reader responses not only “construct” an author in a way that unambiguously answers Grundy’s question but also illustrate perfectly what Arthur Marotti terms “literary recontextualization” by an interpretive community that is “disengaged” from the original “coterie context” of a work.14 While it is certainly not the anthologist’s responsibility to prevent misconceptions on the part of the reader who does not treat an anthology as a first step to a better acquaintance with the complete works of an author, something must be said for the type of lit­er­a­ture that does not bear anthologizing well and whose apparently “straightforward” ideology becomes considerably more complicated when it is considered in its original context with an awareness of the exegetical practices of its original audience. “To the Ladies,” when read outside the context of Poems on Several Occasions (1703), where it first appeared in print, or indeed of the broader context of Chudleigh’s complete works, suggests an impression that she was a militant protofeminist opposed to the institution of marriage.15 In the speaker’s apparent opposition to marriage due to the misery resulting from a husband’s tyranny and mistreatment, Chudleigh’s anthologized poem may resemble the work of Mehetabel Wright, but the similarity is deceptive and purely coincidental. While only one poem by Chudleigh betrays this antagonistic stance, virtually all of Wright’s poetry on the theme is uniformly opposed to marriage; therefore, Wright’s anthologized pieces could be said to accurately reflect an author’s general attitude, while Chudleigh’s do not. Furthermore, while Wright’s contempt for the institution is most definitely rooted in her most deplorable marital life, Chudleigh’s biographers are not nearly so certain that her own marriage was miserable.16 Indeed, if one is to judge an author’s ideological stance by her works, it appears that Chudleigh was not at all the radical her one poem suggests her to be, even though most modern readers have understood her poem in precisely this way. Ezell has confronted the editorial and hermeneutic prob­lems resulting from many

5

1650–1850 feminist critics’ adherence to ­Virginia Woolf’s “Myth of Judith Shakespeare,” whereby “we are encouraged to read the se­lections as autobiographical statements about the author’s personal experiences as a ­woman, to evaluate her responses as if she ­were our con­temporary.”17 Similarly, Valerie Rumbold explains our tendency to (mis)read this way rather well: In reading the w ­ omen poets of the time we . . . ​need to be particularly wary of any rush to assimilate their constructions into our own. W ­ omen poets of earlier centuries often began to be rediscovered and anthologized in the l­ater twentieth ­century as part of an explic­itly feminist quest for subversive foremothers as role models, which attached par­tic­u­lar value to ele­ments that could be construed as re­sis­tance to gender and class oppression.18 While the feminist po­liti­cal agenda of the second half of the twentieth c­ entury certainly has much to do with the desire of many of Chudleigh’s modern readers to behold themselves in her works as in a mirror, in this chapter I would like to suggest that much of our misconception of her ideas arises out of our reading of the poem with an ignorance of the hermeneutic f­actors that s­ haped its first reception. First, we should never forget that Chudleigh was for much of her life—­and perhaps primarily—­a coterie poet, one who circulated her manuscripts among intimates who knew her as a person and as a writer,19 and only in the last de­cade of her life became one who crossed over into the world of print. Such a dynamic affects not only the physical form of Chudleigh’s text but also the exegetical strategies expected from her reader. Ezell’s negotiation of Jürgen Habermas’s notions of the public and private spheres in light of our awareness of seventeenth-­century manuscript circulation—in Harold Love’s terms, “scribal publication” 20 —­indeed leads us to “rethink” our idea of “authorship” and to resist collapsing the “public” into “publication”; 21 but it should also urge us to reconsider what we mean by “readership.” B ­ ecause Chudleigh occupies the cusp between two distinct worlds of publication, each governed by a distinct hermeneutic, we need to read her works with an awareness of the hermeneutics of both worlds, and Ezell’s own lucid study of Alexander Pope’s early writing is an instructive model to follow.22 Second, we should not ignore the ideological and stylistic contexts of Chudleigh’s other verse and especially the poetry that appeared beside “To the Ladies” when it was first published in Poems on Several Occasions.23 Lonsdale’s caveat regarding textual and stylistic “misconceptions” resulting from anthology-­making thus needs to be tempered by a hermeneutic caution regarding anthology-­reading generally and particularly in reference to the reading of poetic works whose

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“A Picture of My Mind"

origins lie in the much-­older world of textual circulation. To further borrow some useful terminology, I would like to suggest that we need to be aware of Chudleigh’s “per­for­mance” in “To the Ladies” and to understand the ways in which her printed volume reproduces the “unenduring pre­sen­ta­tion” of a coterie manuscript.24 In this way Chudleigh proves to be another example of a female author from the late seventeenth and early eigh­teenth centuries who manipulates the printed text for her own ends by incorporating into it some of the dynamics of manuscript culture.25 The critical attention that Chudleigh’s work has received to date almost exclusively has been dedicated to her first printed work, the famous long poem The Ladies Defence (1701). It is, very likely, her finest piece, and t­ hose who have studied it have contextualized it within the broad frame of ­women’s lit­er­a­ture of the Restoration and early eigh­teenth ­century, as well as in relation to its relevance to con­temporary critical discourse. It is perhaps no accident that the masterful rhe­toric of The Ladies Defence has almost hypnotically attracted the critics’ attention, and not Chudleigh’s less dramatic, and certainly less radically polemical, second publication, entitled Poems on Several Occasions. Alone among the critics of Chudleigh’s first publication, Janine Barchas notes that the Ladies Defence “is representative of a fundamental juxtaposition of the coterie (displaying oral and manuscript features) and print culture throughout Chudleigh’s work.”26 Her observation and Ezell’s question “What happens to our perception of texts and writers who participated in both practices, such as Pope?”27 provide a fitting starting point for my own reading of Chudleigh’s verse. The poem “To the Ladies” at first glance pres­ents a complement to the argument of The Ladies Defence, and one could easily see it as a militant but logical conclusion of ideas developed in the earlier work. However, when the poem is considered in relation to the poetic, rhetorical, and philosophical contexts of the verse that appears beside it—­and with which it is in a constant dialectic through the recurrent use of common themes and motifs, observations that a coterie reader may have been expected to make—it soon becomes clear that such a straightforward reading of its militant stance against marriage is at best unlikely. Indeed, Chudleigh appears to be more in f­ avor of a via media than any extreme, and in this sense she seems to be typical of the age she lived in.28 Rebecca Mills, in cautioning against the autobiographical (mis)readings of the poem as “Chudleigh’s personal mantra,” comes closest to the mark when she suggests that the poem may have “other contexts” in which it can be read: “polemical and satirical convention rather than personal anguish may be at work in ‘To the Ladies.’ ”29 Such

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1650–1850 readings may indeed be pos­si­ble and may well have been the responses of ­those who read the poem in manuscript. But since we do not have access to Chudleigh’s manuscript and do not have enough evidence to reconstruct its original reception,30 I would like to suggest that the total text containing a collection of verse—­ whether an anthology of vari­ous authors or a manuscript collection circulating in coterie or a printed volume of verse by one author—­teaches its reader how to read its entries. In this sense, we must look at the poem as one of many in a specific printed volume. To date, most scholarship of coterie verse (with a few notable exceptions) has been devoted to sixteenth-­and early seventeenth-­century authors such as John Donne and George Herbert and, of the poets a­ fter the Restoration, almost exclusively to the works of Katherine Philips.31 Even though it is well known that Chudleigh was for much of her life a coterie poet, she and her works have hitherto been treated by critics solely in light of her membership in the first generation of published female poets and the fact that she was the first ­woman poet published in the eigh­teenth c­ entury. When Chudleigh’s dissatisfaction at her treatment by the printers is mentioned,32 this observation appears tangential ­because her words are almost uniformly interpreted as evidence proving the “print culture watershed” brought about by the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695.33 If we keep in mind the work of critics who studied the coterie verse of Donne, Herbert, and Philips, we should have no trou­ble identifying aspects of typical coterie verse in Chudleigh’s printed poems. As a result, we ­will be able to see an in­ter­est­ing moment in the history of reading, when we can identify an aristocratic coterie writer on the cusp of the print age transferring her strategies of dealing with a coterie audience of familiars intact to a new readership of complete strangers who w ­ ere originally “dis34 engaged” from the coterie context. In short, we ­will be able to see “how the ‘presence’ of the writer is projected through the two media.”35 Chudleigh’s verse contains the typical signposts of female coterie poetry recognizable since the time of Katherine Philips, such as her use of a pastoral nom de plume as well as pastoral pseudonyms for the poems’ dedicatees or interlocutors in the verse dialogues,36 the evidently occasional character of many poems, and the prevalent friendship theme that permeates much of the verse in the 1703 volume. In this sense, ­because Philips as the “Matchless Orinda” was a model for female poets for a ­century a­ fter her death,37 some of Chudleigh’s readers almost certainly would have recognized in her poetry a decorous and highly commendable imitation of the queen of coterie verse.

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“A Picture of My Mind"

­ hese characteristics of what I consider to be typical of female coterie verse T do not include the motif of authorial didacticism aimed at female m ­ ental improvement that Ezell considers indivisible from her notion of the “female text.”38 The coterie relationship between an author and her reader is one between equals, and it would have been profoundly indecorous to see one side lecturing the other’s ignorance. An intellectually patronizing attitude by one correspondent can easily have adverse effects in a social circle whose successful existence relies on a careful balance between the divergent motivational poles for interaction: belonging, politeness, exhibitionism, and voyeurism.39 Ezell’s notion of the “female text” is typical of printed female verse, aimed at the new audience of “­silent, non-­writing ­women readers,” 40 and we can see it in Chudleigh’s printed text as well; but it is not a conditio sine qua non of female coterie texts. However, Chudleigh is not Philips, and her verse is not typical coterie verse, even though she, like Philips, is influenced by Donne and deals with identical themes, such as the favorite theme of seventeenth-­and early-­eighteenth-­century female writers: friendship.41 In an impor­tant contrast to Philips, Chudleigh has willingly expanded her original audience by venturing into print, claiming it by virtue of poetic merit and without regard to financial profit,42 and she clearly cares how even the anonymous reader ­will read her work. This is why she proposes a meticulous set of exegetical instructions for her readers at the start of her preface to the Poems on Several Occasions: The following Poems w ­ ere written at several Times, and on several Subjects: If the Ladies, for whom they are chiefly design’d, and to whose Ser­ vice they are intirely devoted, happen to meet with any ­thing in them that is entertaining, I have all I am at. They ­were the Employment of my leisure Hours, the innocent Amusement of a solitary Life: In them t­hey’ll find a Picture of my Mind, my Sentiments all laid open to their View; ­they’ll sometimes see me cheerful, pleas’d, sedate and quiet; at other time griev’d, complaining, struggling with my Passions, blaming my self, endeavouring to pay a Homage to my Reason, and resolving for the f­ uture, with a decent Calmness, and unshaken Constancy, and a resigning Temper, to support all the Trou­bles, all the uneasiness of Life, and then by unexpected Emergencies, unforeseen Disappointments, sudden and surprizing Turns of Fortune, discompos’d, and shock’d, till I have rallied my scatter’d Forces, got new Strength, and by making an unweary’d Re­sis­tance, gain’d the better of my Afflictions, and restor’d my Mind to its former Tranquillity.43

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1650–1850 Although it may sound like a conventional “aristocratic” apology for poetry as the product of “leisure Hours” and an “innocent Amusement,” Chudleigh lets her reader know that her poems are not the “toys” that Re­nais­sance poets feigned not to care about. Chudleigh informs her (preferably) female reader that if the latter decodes her poetic conceits correctly, she ­will be able to behold a “Picture” of the poet’s “Mind.” The proper interpretive prism ­will thus lay open to the reader’s view all of Chudleigh’s “Sentiments.” The postmodern reader, treading in the shadow of Roland Barthes, is accustomed to acknowledging the “death of the author” 4 4 and routinely avoids the interpretive fallacy of seeking to uncover authorial intentions, but in Chudleigh’s preface we are treated to a very living authorial presence that insists that it be recognized and its ­will be respected, even though we neither know it personally nor wish to see it reflected in the verse. To that effect, Chudleigh continues to lay out for her female reader the sequence of emotional states that she may see in her poems: how the poet’s persona can be “cheerful, pleas’d, sedate and quiet” or “at other time griev’d, complaining, struggling with [her] Passions, blaming [her]self.” Chudleigh thus appears to fashion her printed collection almost as a narrative sequence of an emotional and contemplative life, each poem presenting a ­mental state, each a step in the rhe­toric of a protracted psychomachia. But this is not Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella. Chudleigh’s concluding paragraph of the preface, where she mentions the importance of opening the volume with the elegy “On the Death of his Highness the Duke of Glocester,” together with the appearances of similarly po­liti­cal poems of courtship (both entitled “To the Queen’s most Excellent Majesty”) in the very ­middle of the volume45 and at its end, may suggest an authorially determined symmetry in the dispositio of the printed volume. However, I am not convinced that the placement of the rest of the poems in the collection conforms to any recognizable patterning as a narrative sequence, nor does it at all times reveal a chronological order of identifiable temporal occasions. A chronological narrative of sorts is discernible in the ordered sequence of poems prompted by the deaths of the poet’s ­mother and ­daughter, which come in rapid succession, followed by a c­ ouple of poems (“The Offering” and “The Resolve”) that contemplate a Stoic ac­cep­tance of Divine ­Will and express courage in the face of death. But the very next poem, “Song,” breaks this logical and thematic sequence by concerning itself with amorous courtship. What is clear, nevertheless, is that Chudleigh’s preface is intended for a reader who has not read the verse in manuscript and about whose lack of knowledge

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regarding the relationship between the author’s mind and the ideas expressed in the verse she seems more than a l­ittle anxious.46 In order to help her readers understand the collection, she asserts her exegetical control over the reading pro­cess by essentially converting ­every unknown reader into a coterie reader. She accomplishes this initiation of strangers into a very privileged interpretive community by revealing to them the “culturally encoded language” and the “time and occasion that generated the poems.” 47 The preface points out the personal nature of the poems and suggests that they should not be taken in isolation but as testaments of the moments of her life. It thus suggests that even the poet’s most troubling or objectionable sentiments o ­ ught to be taken as stages in that spiritual journey to its teleological conclusion, in which she manages to restore her mind to its former “Tranquility.” In this way, reading Chudleigh’s collection with a coterie frame of mind not only allows a perfect stranger to take part in the “shared language” of coterie verse48 but also resembles Stanley’s Fish’s famous reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost,49 whereby the poet, the characters, and the reader together are able to arrive at the consolation of emotional and psychological Tranquility as a kind of Paradise Regained that transcends all temporal limitations—­including t­ hose of the text itself. As a result, the “ladies” reading Chudleigh’s printed volume and the poems in it are inducted into a privileged circle that formerly may have contained only “­family and close friends, readers who knew the author, shared her religious and social beliefs, and needed no glosses or guides to reading.”50 We are already familiar with the ways in which some works, such as Sidney’s 1593 Arcadia, retained their coterie aura even as printed texts, thanks to the printer’s interventions.51 But the case of Chudleigh’s printed verse is dif­fer­ent ­because ­here the author herself appears to control the crossing over from manuscript to print rather than the printer’s marketing motives. If ­there is a difference between the author’s relationship with a coterie reader and a print reader, Chudleigh’s preface effaces it. B ­ ecause the poet exercises such complete control over the printed product and takes the reader u ­ nder her exegetical wing, the reader of the printed collection effectively becomes a coterie reader. This simply is not pos­si­ble for a reader of any modern anthology, nor would it have been pos­si­ble ­either for an eighteenth-­century reader of any one of the popu­lar miscellanies such as Robert Dodsley’s. From this point on, when I mention Chudleigh’s “coterie reader,” the term o ­ ught to be understood to refer—­perhaps primarily—to the reader of Chudleigh’s Poems on Several Occasions, ­because the two have very much become the same for the author as a result of her exegetical intervention in

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1650–1850 the preface. The induction of Poems’ readers into a privileged circle of soul mates by the author herself virtually guarantees that their response to the text of “To the Ladies” would be far dif­fer­ent from the interpretive reaction of one reading the poem in isolation, outside the collection in which it plays a crucial part. In short, if unattended by the preface and the other poems in the collection, it is difficult to see the “Picture” of the author’s “Mind” in this poem. Thus, Chudleigh’s preface answers Ezell’s question with which we began: in this case, both the media and the author determine the audience. ­There is no doubt about the identity of the ostensible audience of the poem “To the Ladies,” ­because the poem’s title and the author’s preface to the ­whole volume identify “Ladies” as ­those “for whom they are chiefly design’d, and to whose Ser­vice they are intirely devoted” (PPC, 44). The poem, addressed to readers of a single sex, upon a first reading seems clear and unambiguous: it appears to be an epistle against marriage. The opening lines of the poem introduce the argument: “Wife and Servant are the same, / But only differ in the Name” (PPC, lines 1–2). From that point, the argument marches in a straight line to the predictable as well as logical conclusion, which urges ­women not to marry but to “shun that wretched State” (line 21), to “Value [them]selves, and Men despise” (line 22), and to be “proud”52 if they be “wise” (line 23). This logical conclusion is deduced from the exempla of the vilest marital abuse by a husband. Interestingly, Chudleigh constructs her proof through po­liti­cal topoi that would have struck a specific cord with her audience in 1703, a mere fifteen years ­after the Glorious Revolution.53 The characterization of the husband is consistently dyslogistic. The married man lays aside all that is kind, and all that remains is “State and Pride” (PPC, line 8). He is “Fierce as an Eastern Prince” (line 9). He governs like a tyrannical Jove with a “Nod” and must be feared by the wife as “her God” (lines 15–16). He is the “haughty Lord” (line 19) into whose hands all control is surrendered upon the ­woman’s uttering of the ritualistic word “obey” (line 5) from the religious wedding ser­vice, but the two lines taken together possibly even suggest a veiled allusion to the feudal act of liege homage sworn to an absolute ruler. All the topoi invoked ­here are distinctly “un-­English” in the post-1688 scheme of ­things. Eastern despots ­were a commonplace reference for tyranny in con­ temporary po­liti­cal discourse, and the characteristics of such government could easily conjure up memories of the past be­hav­ior of James II, whose eulogistic antithesis would have been the rule of law and the contractual relationship between the king and Parliament established by the Glorious Revolution. The wife’s surrender of her personal liberty and her freedom of speech to the husband ­after utter-

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ing the fateful formula of “obey” initiates a new ­legal status based on a “Nuptial Contract” (line 12) that in Chudleigh’s rhe­toric smacks of royal absolutism and Divine Right and hence revives memories of En­glish woes ­under absolute tyrants. By playing the po­liti­cal card in her choice of topoi, all of which represent tyrannical “Custom,”54 Chudleigh ensures the clarity of her message and appears to deny any possibility of a dif­fer­ent interpretation. Although Chudleigh’s system of proof is logical and leads to the only pos­si­ble conclusion derived from her exempla, her argument is based on a single thread of evidence, and her oration does not contain the almost-­mandatory refutation of an anticipated counterpoint. By leaving her argument open to a rebuttal due to a seemingly dilettantish fallacy of m ­ atter in her premise—­whereby one could object that she has only considered an extreme case b ­ ecause not all men are tyrants—it is pos­si­ble that part of Chudleigh’s point lies precisely in that anticipated, but unstated, ­silent point. Chudleigh seems not to be arguing against marriage as an institution or exclusively against marital abuse; she appears to be arguing in f­ avor of an ideal equality and cooperation in marriage by using an extreme form of ellipsis. The rhetorical structure of her other verse dealing with the themes of love, friendship, and marriage, where the refutation always plays a prominent part in the overall system of proof, suggests that the absence of a refutation in this poem’s argument is not accidental or the product of authorial carelessness. On the contrary, it seems to be entirely intentional, and it seems that the final turn in the argument depends on the audience’s objection to the glaring omission in it. Therefore, to understand the poem simply as a militant feminist indictment of marriage as an institution of female bondage may in fact ignore a more complex message contained in its rhetorical form. As I ­shall show, Chudleigh’s other verse on related topics makes it highly doubtful that this one poem stands as a curious exception to an other­wise meticulous system of thought about the world and the meaning ­behind the ­human relationships in it. The coterie reader, familiar with Chudleigh’s style and personality, as well as the anonymous reader of the printed volume who is attuned to the exegetical matrix outlined in the preface, would both recognize the dissonance of this poem from Chudleigh’s dominant stylistic and thematic patterns and see a connection between the pres­ent silence of her pen and her preface’s appeal issuing from the ­silent solitude of a ­woman’s heart. If we concede the possibility of such a reading, we w ­ ill indeed realize that in female texts silence does not “signal only absence or lack, but can instead eloquently mark unheard voices, muted groups, or quiet possibilities.”55

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1650–1850 Walter J. Ong’s understanding of the relationship between the author and reader in manuscript culture as being “closer to the give-­and-­take of oral expression” may be useful in dealing with the works of authors such as Donne, whose works survive in multiple manuscript forms that are dif­fer­ent from the “finality” of their printed versions,56 but it does not help with an author such as Chudleigh, whose creative strategies owe every­thing to the restricted world of coteries but who is conceived in our time solely as a pioneer of the printed page. She may well be representative of a new paradigm yet to be explored by critical theory. Similarly inadequate are the attempts critics have made to propose a “female rhe­toric” that is less “agonistic,” in Ong’s terms, than the male.57 A rhetorical analy­sis of Chudleigh’s verse reveals a penchant for debating, a use of partitio, as well as a considerable “agonistic” streak that seeks to destroy opposing views. To be sure, ­women authors ­were educated differently from their male peers and often expressed themselves in dif­f er­ent ways from the men; but they also employed the same rhetorical devices as their male compeers, and their differences certainly cannot be reduced to the binary opposition between aggression and passivity.58 The vitriolic invectives of Rachel Speght, Ester Sowernam, and Constantia Munda against Joseph Swetnam in the first half of the seventeenth ­century surely put that fanciful notion to rest.59 If ­there is indeed a “female rhe­toric,” ­future rhetorical scholarship needs to define it much more clearly. In the meantime, however, we must grant that Chudleigh’s rhetorical structure resembles that known to classical rhetorical theory with minor discrepancies and that her “rhe­toric of silence” in this case fits into the “vexed and complex” early modern usage by both sexes and should neither be conflated with “chastity and obedience” nor reduced to the site of patriarchal “gendered oppression.” 60 As a conscious rhetorical strategy, this kind of silence is indeed “eloquent” and transcends gender binarism; but ­because it is unstable, it must be interpreted, which makes it the “property of the interpreter.” 61 In attempting to recover the content of the ­silent refutatio of “To the Ladies,” we need to consider the other poems in whose com­pany it appeared in Poems on Several Occasions. Regardless of ­whether ­there is any authorial intention in the dispositional sequencing of the poems in the volume, the ones relevant to this undertaking fall into roughly three categories, according to their thematic focus: the philosophical poems, the personal or friendship poems, and the courtship poems discussing gender relations. The system of thought that emerges out of the three groups is coherent and relies on the same clusters of topoi and thematic motifs. In fact, ­there seems to be a gradual development of the system, as the more general contemplation of the world is first internalized and taken as the founda-

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tion for personal relationships and then transformed into the ideal of social and gender relations. The coherent system of thought that emerges out of ­these three groups shapes the final message of “To the Ladies.” This philosophical system would certainly have been familiar to members of Chudleigh’s coterie who knew her personally, but it is also easily grasped by anyone who reads the entire printed collection of Chudleigh’s verse. A “coterie reader” in Chudleigh’s case, therefore, is not defined strictly by the reader’s physical proximity to the author or the social and other dynamics that shape an exclusive group’s transmission of texts; more importantly, he or she is characterized by an awareness of the inner workings of the author’s mind. Chudleigh’s philosophical outlook on the world that emerges from her verse is clearly Neoplatonic, but it also contains admixtures of Stoicism, which she got from reading Epictetus, and Epicurean thought, which she derived from Lucretius; however, her rendering of Epicurean atomism is not at all atheistic, as many ­people in the period tended to consider it.62 In fact, Chudleigh is traditionally Christian in adopting and reconciling ­these philosophical schools. Furthermore, it is impor­tant to note that her emphasis on the primacy of Reason and her philosophical outlook not only resemble Katherine Philips’s views but also prove to be traits that characterize other ­women’s poetry of the period, in her circle and beyond.63 Chudleigh treats life and its material trappings as a transitory phase before the eternal bliss of Heaven. Her Pindaric “Ode on the Vanities of this Life” is a perfect illustration of her ethical Stoicism and provides the full roster of motifs that recur in virtually all her poems. The first three stanzas of the poem portray exemplars of the types of lives (the soldier, the rich man, and the “­Great” prince) and the meaning of happiness for each type. Chudleigh questions the pageantry of each life, the material signifiers, and takes us ­behind the show to reveal the abstract signifieds, or the hidden motives of each life. She suggests that t­ hese paragons of humankind are just as susceptible as the common man to base emotions as well as ­human fears and hence are more deserving of our pity than of our admiration and emulation: But cou’d they search into the Truth of T ­ hings, Cou’d they but look into the Thoughts of Kings; If all their hidden Cares they knew, Their Jealousies, their Fears, their Pain, And all the Trou­bles of their Reign, They then wou’d pity ­those they now admire; And with their h ­ umble State content, wou’d nothing more desire. (PPC, lines 61–67)

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1650–1850 The fourth stanza proposes a replacement for the worldly models whose ethos was undermined in the first part of the poem. Chudleigh introduces several Platonic images that she uses interchangeably to define the type of life that is worthy of emulation. The Soul “cleans’d from all the Dregs of Sin” (PPC, line 73) is shown through a metallurgical meta­phor to be f­ ree from “base Alloys” (line 76). It is a “holy Breast” (line 77), an equivalent of the “spotless Mind” (line 78), and only such a one can achieve “Happiness” (line 68) that comes from an internalized experience of divinity or, as she puts it, from being a host “fit to harbour that Celestial Guest” (line 75). The purity of such an ideal essence needs no “Helps of Art” (line 82) in constructing its external signifier. The mastery of Chudleigh’s poetry in this stanza lies in her reversal of the conventional Platonic and Aristotelian semiotics; instead of looking from the outside in to find the correspondence between signifier and signified, she reverses her perspective inside out to show the construction of a “true” signification of ideal “Innocence” (line 84). The rest of the poem amplifies this view but becomes more exclusively Christian in its approach and planes of reference. It also introduces a very impor­tant philosophical motif that recurs in most of Chudleigh’s verse. As Heaven becomes the destination of the soul that has shed its mortal coil, the inadequacy of earthly linguistic signifiers to denote the true essence of the scene is emphasized, in an apparent echo of Locke’s notion of the difference between the “nominal” and “true” essence of t­ hings:64 Whate e’er we can of Friendship know, What e’er we Passion call below, Does but a weak Resemblance bear, To that blest Union which is ever t­ here, Where Love, like Life, do’s animate the ­whole, As if it w ­ ere but one blest individual Soul. (PPC, lines 115–120) I ­shall return to this motif of Love and Friendship as aspects of Divine ­union. Chudleigh shows that resisting such a final heavenly destination is not only foolish but also the unnecessary cause of misery. In the poem’s penultimate stanza, she constructs a refutatio—­a rhetorical device absent in “To the Ladies”—by changing perspectives and now imagines the viewpoint of one who is guided entirely by Reason. Through this persona of the rationalist, the ac­cep­tance of death’s inevitability is shown to be insufficient, and mere Reason akin to Pride (PPC, line 164). Chudleigh ­here clearly endorses the via media of Anglican orthodoxy to establish the ideal balance of Faith and Reason that ­will lead one to accept the inevitability of death but also to see the transcendent meaning of all. The last stanza of

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the “Ode” affirms the possibility of knowledge and defines such a knowable, transcendent Truth in Platonic semiotic terms: The Phoenix Truth wrapt up in Mists does lie, Not to be clearly seen before we die; Not till our Souls f­ ree from confining Clay, Open their Eyes in everlasting Day. (PPC, lines 195–198) The philosophical poem “The Observation” relies on the same rhetorical method and reinforces the same conclusion. In it, Chudleigh shows life to be composed of stages in an intellectual journey that comes to terms with death. ­After another brief refutation, she applies the same Platonic system to confirm the folly of trusting in the “heavy Lump” (PPC, line 59) of the body and all ­things material that do not last but fall into “Oblivion’s everlasting Night” (line 61). Such consistency in thought and style, I believe, would have been easily recognizable for any reader of Chudleigh’s collected verse and not just her coterie of closest intimates. The poem “To Eugenia” 65 is one of the poems that forms a kind of bridge between the philosophical poems and the friendship group. On its most basic level, the poem is a compliment to Eugenia as a writer and a friend. Rhetorically, it is an argument about the state of the fallen world, developed through antithesis and divided into two equal parts, each twenty-­eight lines long. The first half of the poem describes the Golden Age in pastoral terms echoing Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as a time when Kings w ­ ere shepherds, and with equal Care ’Twixt men and Sheep, did their Concernments share: ­There was no need of Rods and Axes then, Crooks rul’d the Sheep, and Virtue rul’d the Men. (PPC, lines 3–6) Chudleigh’s emphasis on the bliss resulting from the supreme government of virtuous spiritual values (lines 7–10) is an echo of the ideas developed in the “Ode on the Vanities of this Life” and their application to a social context. The second half of the poem provides the antithesis to the Golden Age: the fallen modern world of vice and folly, governed by Interest, “That pow’rful God by all Mankind obey’d” (PPC, line 36). The conventional neoclassical escape to the countryside as the last refuge of pastoral “Innocence” (line 39) and a ­simple life is refuted ­because “The Country too does with the Pressure groan” (line 38), and it is clear that ­there is no escape from the “mad World” (line 49). Even Chudleigh’s own retirement to “some obscure Recess” (line 49) in Devon appears not to be far enough, as the conclusion of the poem leaves the prob­lem unresolved just how

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1650–1850 one may return to the Golden Age beyond such a futile attempt at escape. ­Perhaps the members of Chudleigh’s coterie, privy to information about her real life, did not need her to spell it out for them. But even for the reader of the Poems, the answer begins to emerge out of the group of personal poems expounding Love and Friendship. “To Clorissa” applies Chudleigh’s philosophy from the “Ode” to her own life. She rejects Fortune’s powers since they are established as rulers of the material world. Her joys are abstract and internal. She absorbs the vis­i­ble pageantry of life and the world and internalizes the knowledge from her books to give birth to her ideas, which teach her to transcend earthly existence and to “scorn t­ hose Trifles which [she] priz’d before” (PPC, line 44). This metaphysical notion is further developed in the last two stanzas as she follows a series of steps in her argument that gradually bring her ideas into the concrete realm of h ­ uman relationships. Chudleigh begins by declaring Love as the guiding force of her existence through superlative ethereal topoi and then defines divine glory as a combination of wit and virtue (PPC, lines 45–52). She then recognizes the two in her friend Clorissa, in whom are “united all the Graces of the Female kind” (line 61). While we still do not know the identity of “Clorissa,” a secret the members of Chudleigh’s coterie would surely have known, the poem outlines the author’s exegetical expectation from Clorissa as a reader and reflects the interpretive matrix outlined by the preface. The poetic voice prays, “let our Thoughts and Interests be but one, / Our Griefs and Joys, be to each other known”; as a result, poet and reader meta­ phor­ically “live in one another’s Breast,” so that even when they are “absent” from each other, poems such as this one can poet and reader’s “tender Thoughts convey” (lines 66–73). Chudleigh treats her friend Clorissa, a true coterie reader, in the same manner she treats the anonymous reader of her printed collection; both readers are expected to discern the poet’s thoughts and emotional life in her verse. The last stanza arrives at the final, logical step of elevating their friendship to a transcendent level and describing it through purely spiritual topoi.66 The friendship achieves its apotheosis ­after death, in the “Realms of Light,” where they ­will “in each other eternally delight” (lines 76–77). The brief “Song: To Lerinda” is similar not only in its reinforcement of the Platonic and transcendent vision of Friendship but also in the sexually suggestive imagery of the apotheosis of the relationship: Let us our inward Joys increase: And still the happy Taste pursuing, Raise our Love and Friendship higher,

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And thus the sacred Flames renewing, In Extasies of Bliss expire. (PPC, lines 8–12) The sexual connotation suggested by the images of the friends’ eternal “delight” in each other, the “sacred Flames” they renew, and their expiration in “Extasies of Bliss” in the two poems may resemble Donne’s metaphysical conceits, but Chudleigh’s consistent dyslogistic repre­sen­ta­tion of the material aspects of existence, and hence of the carnal appetites, does much to refute the plausibility of any such reading. However, despite the fact that the system of proof used by the two authors is dif­fer­ent, the point of Chudleigh’s argument is similar to Donne’s: Love and Friendship are indeed a part of Divine Glory; the intensity of the experience and a complete surrender to it ­will lead to transcendence. Nevertheless, if ­there is an indecorous suggestion of desire between two beings in ­either of ­these poems, the same suggestion should be understood as entirely appropriate when Chudleigh applies the full context of her idea of “Friendship” thus defined to the ideal relationship between a man and a ­woman. Identical in its message is “The Choice: A Dialogue between Emilia and Marissa.” Two friends love each other for the virtue they see in each other, and the true enjoyment of the relationship w ­ ill come when the earthly “Clay” is shed and their respective Virtues ascend to “Realms Divine” (line 105) and unite in “One steady, bright, immortal Flame” (PPC, line 110): ­There, t­ here our Friendship ­we’ll improve, Together tast the Sweets of Love; Still in each other’s Bliss rejoice, And prove one Soul, one Thought, one Voice; In nothing ever disagree, Throughout a blest Eternity. (PPC, lines 111–116) It is true that “friendship” sometimes could be taken for a trope signifying patronage in early eighteenth-­century female writing, as in Elizabeth Thomas’s and in her relationships with her social superiors and “established” writers such as Chudleigh,67 but this sociohierarchical dimension appears to be absent in Chudleigh’s own use of the “friendship” meta­phor. Chudleigh’s “friendship” clearly connotes a transcendent ­union of two equals. It should be fairly obvious by now that Chudleigh sees one’s personal ethical conduct and the meaning of relationships in the world through the same prism, of Christian Neoplatonic philosophy. It is also impor­tant to repeat that such a conclusion is pos­si­ble only for a “coterie reader”: one who has been inducted by Chudleigh herself to see her personality in ­every line. The following two “courtship” poems

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1650–1850 illustrate the application of this system to the plane of the relationship between the sexes, the original context of the poem “To the Ladies” that has often been misunderstood in our time. “The Inquiry: A Dialogue between Cleanthe and Marissa” provides a satirical dialogue of two w ­ omen on the topic: “By what Rule / May I judge who’s the greatest Fool?” (PPC, lines 1–2). Their debate provides the analy­sis of several types—or stereotypes—of men that w ­ omen know in their roles as courtiers: the gallant who has been on the Tour, the Country Squire, an armchair politician reading newspapers, and a poet. The answer turns out to be “an awkward, whining Lover” (line 148), and the description of such a character is accomplished through an emphasis on linguistic and visual signifiers: It is an awkward, whining Lover; Who talks of Chains, of Flames and Passion, And all the pretty Words in Fashion; Words, which are still as true a Mark Of an accomplish’d modish Spark, As a long Wig, or powder’d Coat: Like A, B, C, ­they’re learnt by rote; And then with equal Ardor said, Or to the Mistress, or the Maid. (PPC, lines 148–156) The fash­ion­able, empty, courtly rhe­toric of beaus is a linguistic reflection of their appearance in wigs and powdered coats, the signifier of artifice that does not have a corresponding true signified. This satirical exemplar epitomizes the degeneration of courtship by the beginning of the eigh­teenth ­century into a series of ritual gestures and verbal formulas devoid of substance—­a drastic change from the transcendent, ritualistic meaning that propped up much high-­Renaissance courtly verse.68 Chudleigh’s description of the conventional superior position of the ­woman over the male courtier, who is a “Slave . . . ​to [her] ­Will, / And whom [she] with a Frown may kill” (PPC, lines 161–162) provides an in­ter­est­ing counterpoint to the argument of “To the Ladies” and once again poses the question about the rhetorical structure of the latter poem. What is the ideal relationship, then, between men and ­women in marriage? The pastoral “A Dialogue between Alexis and Astrea” provides the answer through an application of all of Chudleigh’s philosophical notions discussed earlier. Put quite succinctly, it is a blend of the virtuous life with the ideals of Friendship and Love. To pres­ent Astrea’s rejection of Alexis’s initial proposal, Chudleigh employs the full battery of topoi we saw used in the other poems and to the same effect.

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The true c­ auses of Astrea’s rejection of Alexis’s courtship are the fallen state of the world, humanity’s elevation of material over spiritual values, and the false signs in the con­temporary culture of courtship: Astrea: But Men, false Men, take Plea­sure to deceive, And laugh, when we their Perjuries believe; Their Languishments, and all their other Arts, Their Sighs, and vows, are only Snares for Hearts. Alexis: Think not, unjust Astrea, all are so, Alexis ­will a deathless Passion show. (PPC, lines 7–12) In t­hese lines we, as coterie readers, recognize not only the substance of the dialogue between Cleanthe and Marissa, defining the “whining Lover” whose empty rhe­toric now appears to be an act used to abuse ­women, but also Chudleigh’s ability to state the counterpoint, or refutation, so explic­itly ignored in “To the Ladies,” through Alexis’s words. Indeed, the rest of the poem constructs the proof for this untypical, and hence ideal, male ethos that Alexis introduces in his retort to Astrea. If ­there is any antithesis to the character of the tyrannical husband in “To the Ladies,” it would be one that conforms to the type known in female writing of the period as “The Good Husband.” 69 In “The Inquiry,” it is certainly Alexis, and a reference to one like him would be as good a refutation to fill in the void in “To the Ladies” as any other. Chudleigh’s coterie reader as well as one reading the 1703 printed collection would have been almost expected to consider Alexis or at the very least to pose the question of how Alexis is related to her antimarital argument in “To the Ladies.” But if Alexis is the ­silent exemplum of the refutation, then Astrea is the exemplar of the narrative voice of “To the Ladies.”70 She embodies the feminist critique of the tragic material state of love and marriage in the period and is a persona translating Chudleigh’s philosophy into the theme of gender relations. Her supreme desire is for “Virtue and Love” (PPC, line 45), and she describes the nature of the perfect relationship: When Humors are alike, and Souls agree, How sweet! how pleasant must that Union be! But oh! that Bliss is but by few possest, But few are with the Joys of Friendship blest. (PPC, lines 25–28) The topical echoes from the group of friendship poems introduce the same transcendent values into the discussion of the meaning of marriage. Love and Virtue, which Chudleigh had shown to be at the foundation of Friendship as a celestial ­union of two pure souls, resurface now as the desired basis of marriage, and even marriage itself is defined as a Friendship in its ideal form.

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1650–1850 Alexis is the ideal lover who is content with Astrea’s definition of the relationship, but it must be noted that he is not Astrea’s intellectual peer. When he begins to lament parting, she has to teach him that the Platonic essence of their love eliminates all need for sorrow. Astrea’s conclusions cement the Platonic philosophy of love, as the spiritual is extolled over the carnal as boundless, eternal, and virtuous: Astrea: Cease ­these Complaints; while you possess my Heart, While t­ here you live, can we be said to part? Our Thoughts ­shall meet, they ne’er can be confin’d, ­We’ll still be pres­ent to each other’s Mind: I’ll view you with my intellectual Sight, And in th’indearing Object take Delight: My faithful Mem’ry ­shall your Vows retain, And in my Breast you ­shall unrival’d reign. . . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . .​ . . . . . . . . . . . . . What tho’ by Fate our Bodies are confin’d, Nought can obstruct the Journies of the Mind: A virtuous Passion w ­ ill at distance live, Absence to that ­will a new Vigor give, Which still increases, and grows more intense, The farther ’tis removed from the mean Joys of Sense. (PPC, lines 61–68, 77–82) ­Because Astrea uses the same topoi that Chudleigh had earlier employed to define Heaven as the scene of the blissful ­union of two souls, it appears her view of marriage is an extension of her view of Friendship into the realm of gender relations. Interestingly enough, the short poem “Friendship” illustrates the converse of this intertextual dialectic. In this poem, Friendship is defined through topoi conventionally reserved for marriage and an ideal love between the sexes. It seems to define the kind of relationship about which Astrea was teaching Alexis: Friendship is a Bliss Divine, And does with radiant Lustre shine: But where can that blest Pair be found That are with equal Fetters bound? Whose Hearts are one, whose Souls combine, And neither know or Mine or Thine;

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“A Picture of My Mind"

Who’ve but one Joy, one Grief, one Love, And by the self same Dictates move; Who’ve not a Frailty unreveal’d, Nor yet a Thought that is conceal’d; Who freely one another blame, And strive to raise each other’s fame; Who’re always just, sincere, and kind, By Virtue, not by Wealth combin’d; Whose Friendship nothing can abate, Nor Poverty, nor adverse Fate, Nor Death it self: for when above, ­They’ll never, never, cease to love, But with a Passion more refin’d, Become one pure celestial Mind. (PPC, lines 1–20) It is difficult to ignore the echoes of the conventional wedding vows and the commonplaces related to an ideal marriage in the poem’s formulas of sharing, understanding, support in adversity, and an emotional attachment that transcends death. The further explicit identification in the poem “The Wish” of the male pronoun “he” with the desired “kind, and faithful Friend” (e.g., PPC, line 2) certainly shows that Chudleigh’s most commonly expressed view is not the one most commonly extrapolated from her works by twentieth-­century feminist critics. Marriage in Chudleigh’s system is clearly based on companionship, not domination, and as such resembles the view in much late-­seventeenth-­century and early- ­eighteenth- ­century female poetry.71 Chudleigh’s coterie reader, one aware of the range of her philosophical system presented in her verse, would certainly have grasped this idea. Friendship and Marriage (as an ideal relationship between a man and a w ­ oman) are clearly related ideas in the system of thought argued by the corpus of Chudleigh’s verse. Even though “Marriage” and “Friendship” are dif­fer­ent as signifiers, they most certainly point to the same transcendent signified. It is unlikely, therefore, that a late-­seventeenth-­or early-­eighteenth-­century female “coterie reader” would have understood “To the Ladies” as a textually symbolic act of personal rebellion, nor would she have seen in it Chudleigh’s repudiation of men and the institution of marriage. And she most certainly would not have referred to it as a “notorious anti-­marriage poem.”72 Rather, she would have seen in it an attack on the abuses and perversions of the ideal institution by a certain type of men, made very obvious

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1650–1850 by Chudleigh’s exempla of worldly corruption. In short, such a reader would have been able to see the invisible essence and to hear the ­silent refutatio of Chudleigh’s oration. Chudleigh’s coterie reader and the reader of the printed Poems on Several Occasions are exegetical twins. The induction of the latter reader into a privileged circle of soul mates by the author herself virtually guarantees that her response to the text of “To the Ladies” would be far dif­fer­ent from the interpretive reaction of one reading the poem in isolation, outside the collection in which it plays such a crucial part. If the poem is unattended by the preface and the other verse, it is very difficult for the reader to see in it the “Picture” of Lady Chudleigh’s “Mind.”

Notes 1. ​I use the term “nonspecialist” to designate postcanonical anthologies geared ­toward a general reader, one who is neither enrolled in nor teaching a literary history course. 2. ​Chudleigh had a rather “typical” pattern of authorship, beginning with a period of twenty years of coterie writing before turning to print; ­there is evidence that the circle of ­people who read Chudleigh’s verse before it was printed included John Dryden, William Wycherley, John Norris of Bemerton, Mary Astell, and Elizabeth Thomas, through whom she is indirectly linked even to Alexander Pope. See Margaret J. M. Ezell, introduction to The Poems and Prose of Mary, Lady Chudleigh, ed. Margaret J. M. Ezell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), xvii–­ xxxvi; Ezell, “From Manuscript to Print: A Volume of Their Own?,” in ­Women and Poetry, 1660–1750, ed. Sarah Prescott and David E. Shuttleton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 140–160; Janine Barchas, “Before Print Culture: Mary, Lady Chudleigh, and the Assimilation of the Book,” in Eighteenth-­Century Genre and Culture: Serious Reflections on Occasional Forms: Essays in Honor of J. Paul Hunter, ed. Dennis Todd and Cynthia Wall (Mississauga, ON: Associate University Presses, 2001), 18. 3. ​See Kenneth Burke, A Rhe­toric of Motives (New York: Prentice-­Hall, 1950). 4. ​For a discussion of editorial theory, see Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1991); regarding the audience’s role, see Morris Eaves, “ ‘Why ­Don’t They Leave It Alone?’ Speculations on the Authority of the Audience in Editorial Theory,” in Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning: The Page, the Image, and the Body, ed. Margaret J. M. Ezell and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 85–99. 5. ​Isobel Grundy, “Editing Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,” in Editing W ­ omen: Papers Given at the Thirty-­First Annual Conference on Editorial Prob­lems, University of Toronto, 3–4 November 1995, ed. Ann M. Hutchison (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 55.

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“A Picture of My Mind"

6. ​Ezell, “From Manuscript to Print,” 140. 7. ​Ezell, introduction to The Poems and Prose of Mary, Lady Chudleigh, xvii. 8. ​Rebecca M. Mills, “Mary, Lady Chudleigh (1656–1710): Poet, Protofeminist and Patron,” in Hutchison, Editing ­Women, 55. 9. ​A s academia evolves in the Age of the Web, when new generations of undergraduate students increasingly consider the internet not only as the ­Great Repository of Knowledge but also as the G ­ reat Anthology of World Lit­er­a­ture, the availability of an author’s works inevitably shapes the web surfer’s understanding of his or her oeuvre. “To the Ladies” was ­until very recently the only poem by Chudleigh available (without subscription) on the internet, in only in two places: on the Representative Poetry Online website, affiliated with the University of Toronto (http://­rpo​.­library​.­utoronto​.­ca​/­poet​/­64​.­html), and a page linked to Rutgers University (http://­andromeda​.­rutgers​.­edu​/­~jlynch​/ ­Texts​/­ladies​.­html). ­Today, it is joined by three o ­ thers on ­free sites such as http://­famouspoetsandpoems​.­com​ /­poets​/­lady​_­mary​_­chudleigh​/­poems or http://­w ww​.­poemhunter​.­com​/­lady​-­mary​ -­chudleigh (all accessed April 6, 2018). 10. ​Margaret J. M. Ezell takes the Norton Anthology of Lit­er­at­ ure by ­Women: The Tradition in En­glish as a typical example of the tendencies in Anglo-­American feminist scholarship to see an evolutionary narrative in female literary history and the didactic “unstated goal” of such anthologies “to provide ‘appropriate’ role models for ­women writers and readers” (Writing ­Women’s Literary History [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993], 40–42). She also notes the feminist school’s tendency to see the presence of “anger” as a criterion of eligibility for including a work in an anthology (64). If she is correct, this may explain why only Chudleigh’s poems understood to be hostile to men have been anthologized most commonly. 11. ​Roger Lonsdale, introduction to Eighteenth- ­Century ­Women Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), xliv. 12. ​The Norton Introduction to Lit­er­a­ture, 9th ed., ed. Alison, J. Booth, Paul Hunter, and Kelly J. Mays (New York: Norton, 2005), 225–310. 13. ​Booth, Hunter, and Mays, The Norton Introduction to Lit­er­a­ture, 829. 14. ​Arthur F. Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 13, 11. I use the term “interpretive community” in the sense developed by Stanley Fish in Is T ­ here a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). 15. ​Feminist critics have traditionally seen Chudleigh convey a “radical” stance against marriage in this poem, sometimes even ­going so far as to extrapolate a biographical framework for its sentiments; see Hilda L. Smith, Reason’s Disciples: Seventeenth-­Century En­glish Feminists (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 163–169. Danielle Clarke usefully suggests that the poems reveal a mediated persona that should not be understood autobiographically (“The Poems and Prose of Mary, Lady Chudleigh,” Review of En­glish Studies, n.s., 48 [1997]: 250). Carol Barash does attempt to derive a more accurate reading of Chudleigh’s

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1650–1850 stance in the poem by considering it in a broader context of Chudleigh’s works, but she uses only the very small group of po­liti­cal poems addressed to Queen Anne instead of the much-­larger thematically related social/love poems (“ ‘ The Native Liberty . . . ​of the Subject’: Configurations of Gender and Authority in the Works of Mary Chudleigh, Sarah Fyge Egerton, and Mary Astell,” in ­Women, Writing, History, 1640–1740, ed. Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman [London: B. T. Batsford, 1992], 67). Valerie Rumbold observes the ideological ambivalence of Chudleigh’s works, but she still insists on reading “To the Ladies” as a univocal indictment of marriage (“Rank, Community and Audience: The Social Range of ­Women’s Poetry,” in Prescott and Shuttleton, ­Women and Poetry, 1660–1750, 127–129). 16. ​See Lonsdale’s headnote to Mehetabel Wright’s poems (Eighteenth- ­Century ­Women Poets, 110–111). Wright’s contemporaries provide evidence to this effect, while no such documentation exists for Chudleigh. A series of scholars reading Chudleigh’s poetry in the 1980s and 1990s believed her to have had a “joyless” marriage (Lonsdale, introduction to Eighteenth- ­Century ­Women Poets, xxii); to some it resembled an “unhappy prison,” living with “a man she did not love” (Smith, Reason’s Disciples, 163), and this “despair” earned her the right to join a famous “suffering . . . ​trio of tilted ­women” poets (Moira Ferguson, introduction to First Feminists: British W ­ omen Writers, 1578–1799, ed. Moira Ferguson [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985], 18). Ezell’s research in par­tic­u­lar decisively puts such myths to rest. 17. ​Ezell, Writing ­Women’s Literary History, 61. For the complete discussion of the “Myth of Judith Shakespeare,” see Ezell, Writing ­Women’s Literary History, 39–65. 18. ​Rumbold, “Rank, Community and Audience,” 121. 19. ​Face-­to-­face meetings w ­ ere not a necessary aspect of coterie manuscript circulation; however, even as “loose epistolary ‘networks,’ ” they implied a personal acquaintance between writer and reader (Dustin Griffin, “The Social World of Authorship 1660–1714,” in The Cambridge History of En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, 1660–1780, ed. John Richetti [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005], 47). 20. ​See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). For excellent in-­depth studies of coterie writing and manuscript circulation, see Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-­Century ­England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); and Margaret J. M. Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). In responding to, as well as continuing, Love’s proj­ect, Ezell notes that we still “have no sense of a­ ctual scale of w ­ omen’s literary participation in manuscript culture apart from a few celebrated examples” (Social Authorship, 22–23), among which she does not include Chudleigh. Also see Griffin, “Social World,” 52–55, for a concise response to Habermas’s understanding of the En­glish public sphere, especially regarding coffee­houses.

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“A Picture of My Mind"

21. ​Ezell, Social Authorship, 37–39. 22. ​Ezell, Social Authorship, 61–83. 23. ​For the sake of clarity and ease, I use the term “published” in its conventional sense of appearing in print, but I do not dispute Love’s point that manuscript circulation as well should be considered a form of “publication.” 24. ​Ted-­Larry Pebworth, “John Donne, Coterie Poetry, and the Text as Per­for­mance,” SEL: Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, 1500–1900 29, no. 1 (1989): 64–65. 25. ​See Leigh A. Eicke, “Jane Barker’s Jacobite Writings,” in ­Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in E ­ngland, 1550–1800, ed. George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 137–157; and Kathryn R. King, “Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s Tactical Use of Print and Manuscript,” in Justice and Tinker, ­Women’s Writing, 158–181. 26. ​Barchas, “Before Print Culture,” 21. 27. ​Ezell, Social Authorship, 141. 28. ​Ricardo Quintana recognized the via media in Jonathan Swift’s ideological and po­liti­cal attitudes; the notion lies at the root of early eighteenth-­century En­glish culture and is pres­ent in virtually all aspects of con­temporary thought: from Locke’s philosophy to the orthodox Anglican merger of Faith and Reason to the lay appeals to “reasonableness,” “common sense,” and other synonymous terms referring to the force that mediates between extremes and discovers the m ­ iddle ground or the “normal” (Swift: An Introduction [Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1955], 38). Martin Battestin debates the errors of New Historicism and argues convincingly that shared common attitudes such as this one lay at the foundations of eighteenth-­century society and s­ haped the attitudes of most authors (“Historical Criticism and the Question of Contemporaneity,” Age of Johnson 12 [2001]: 361–379). 29. ​Mills, “Mary,” 55. 30. ​The surviving correspondence between Chudleigh and Elizabeth Thomas, published in Whartoniana (1727), Pylades and Corinna (1731), and The Honourable Lovers (1732), ­will remain im­mensely useful for ­future studies of Chudleigh’s work, but ­because it covers the years 1701–1706—­essentially the very years when Chudleigh became a poet published in print—it is of ­little use for attempts to postulate the dynamics of the Chudleigh coterie of the preceding two de­cades. Margaret J. M. Ezell responds forcefully to critical approaches (such as Ferguson’s introduction to First Feminists and Smith’s Reason’s Disciples) that take the print-­publication date as the date of inception of a literary work and that ignore manuscript circulation entirely (The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the ­Family [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987], 64–66). For a discussion of the relationship between Chudleigh and Thomas, also see Rebecca  M. Mills, “ ‘ To Be Both Patroness and Friend’: Patronage, Friendship, and Protofeminism in the Life of Elizabeth Thomas (1675– 1731),” Studies in Eigh­teenth-Century Culture 38 (2009): 69–89.

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1650–1850 31. ​See Arthur F. Marotti, John Donne; and Marotti, “Donne as Social Exile and Jacobean Courtier: The Devotional Verse and Prose of the Secular Man,” in Critical Essays on John Donne, ed. Marotti (Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada, 1994), 77–101; Pebworth, “John Donne”; Cristina Malcolmson, “George Herbert and Coterie Verse,” George Herbert Journal 18, nos. 1–2 (1994–1995): 159–184; Paul Trolander and Zeynep Tenger, “Katherine Philips and Coterie Critical Practices,” Eighteenth- ­Century Studies 37, no. 3 (2004): 367–387. For discussions of Philips’s coterie writing and her verse generally, also see Love, Scribal Publication; Jeslyn Medoff, “The ­Daughters of Behn and the Prob­lems of Reputation,” in Grundy and Wiseman, ­Women, Writing, History, 33–54; Catharine Gray, “Katherine Philips and the Post-­Courtly Coterie,” En­glish Literary Re­nais­sance 32, no.  3 (2002): 426–451. 32. ​Ezell, “From Manuscript to Print,” 154. 33. ​Barchas points out that the “watershed moment” is unsubstantiated by any kind of “print explosion” at the start of the ­century (“Before Print Culture,” 15–16). 34. ​Marotti, John Donne, 11. 35. ​Love, Scribal Publication, 33. 36. ​Margaret  J.  M. Ezell suggests that the very presence and abundance of such names proves a readership and “literary exchanges” that precede publishing (“Chudleigh, Mary, Lady Chudleigh,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, May 6, 2008, http://­w ww​.­oxforddnb​.­com​/ ­view​/­article​/­5383). 37. ​Medoff, “­Daughters of Behn,” 35. 38. ​Margaret  J.  M. Ezell, “The Politics of the Past: Restoration W ­ omen Writers on ­Women Reading History,” in Pilgrimage for Love: Essays in Honor of Josephine A. Roberts, ed. Sigrid King (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Re­nais­sance Studies, 1999), 29. 39. ​I see the dynamic between members of a coterie being very similar to the present-­day relationships on the social networking website Facebook. ­There one’s own management of one’s own online “profile” is a form of exhibitionism matched by one’s “friends’ ” voyeurism of ­every posted item and photo­graph and participation in “private” conversations posted on public “walls,” while the number of friends in one’s “network” and/or the presence of certain individuals in it may si­mul­ta­neously help to construct one’s online persona and to reflect the “quality” of the group. In such an environment, as in a coterie, t­ hose who transgress the group’s codes of be­hav­ior and the norms of social interaction may be “unfriended” or “blocked” entirely out of the network. 40. ​Ezell, “Politics of the Past,” 26. 41. ​Ferguson, introduction to First Feminists, 12; Paula R. Backscheider, “Eighteenth-­ Century W ­ omen Writers,” in Richetti, The Cambridge History of En­glish Lit­er­a­ ture, 228. In contrast to Chudleigh’s persona in her friendship verse, Philips’s is frequently more possessive or jealous, and t­ here are hints of lesbian homoeroti-

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cism (Gray, “Katherine Philips,” 445–446), which are entirely absent in Chudleigh. For similarities between the two, see Barash, “Native Liberty,” 61–63. 42. ​Ezell, “From Manuscript to Print,” 153. 43. ​Ezell, The Poems and Prose of Mary, Lady Chudleigh, 44. All textual citations of Chudleigh’s verse and prose refer to this volume (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as PPC, by page number or line number). 44. ​See Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, M ­ usic, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1988), 142–148. 45. ​It is the sixteenth of thirty-­four poems. 46. ​Philips too was distressed by the awareness of being read by readers outside her coterie, an “alternative literary society” (Ezell, The Patriarch’s Wife, 86–87, 100). 47. ​Marotti, John Donne, 13. 48. ​Marotti, John Donne, 13. 49. ​See Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in “Paradise Lost,” 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1997). 50. ​Ezell, “From Manuscript to Print,” 144. 51. ​Margaret P. Hannay, “The Countess of Pembroke’s Agency in Print and Scribal Culture,” in Justice and Tinker, ­Women’s Writing, 29–30. 52. ​Mills reads “pride” as signifying self-­respect (“Mary,” 55–56). 53. ​For Chudleigh’s pos­si­ble po­liti­cal stance, see Barbara Olive, “A Puritan Subject’s Panegyrics to Queen Anne,” SEL: Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, 1500–1900 42, no. 3 (2002): 475–499. 54. ​Rebecca Mills, “ ‘ That Tyrant Custom’: The Politics of Custom in the Poetry and Prose of Augustan W ­ omen Writers,” ­Women’s Writing 7, no. 3 (2000): 393. 55. ​Ezell, “Politics of the Past,” 40. 56. ​Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Routledge, 2002), 130. 57. ​Ong, Orality and Literacy, 108–109. Most critics have only considered the difference between prose texts by ­women and men but have ignored verse: for female texts based on historical reading, see Ezell, “Politics of the Past,” 34–38; for biographical prose, see Patricia A. ­Sullivan, “Female Writing beside the Rhetorical Tradition: Seventeenth ­Century British Biography and a Female Tradition in Rhe­ toric,” International Journal of ­Women’s Studies 3, no. 2 (1980): 143–160. 58. ​Ferguson notes that Chudleigh’s reactive and intermittent polemic is “frequently couched in recognizably persuasive rhetorical strategies” (introduction to First Feminists, 31), while Olive points out Chudleigh’s appropriation of what would be considered the “male” lexicon related to the memory of the Civil War (“Puritan Subject’s Panegyrics,” 476–478); Smith discusses the rhetorical skills of several female authors since the Restoration, including Mary Astell (Reason’s Disciples, 91–92, 102–105, 130).

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1650–1850 59. ​See Joseph Swetnam, Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant ­Women (London, 1615); Rachel Speght, A Muzzle for Melastomus, the Cynical Baiter of, and Foul Mouthed Barker against Eve’s Sex (London, 1617); Ester Sowernam, Ester Hath Hanged Haman: An Answer to a Lewd Pamphlet, Entitled the Arraignment of Lewd W ­ omen (London, 1617); and Constantia Munda, The Worming of a Mad Dogge (London, 1617). 60. ​Christina Luckyj, “A Moving Rhetorique”: Gender and Silence in Early Modern ­England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 7–8. 61. ​Luckyj, “A Moving Rhetorique,” 23, 39. For an in-­depth discussion of the uses of silence in early modern rhe­toric, especially for connections to gender, see 42–77. 62. ​The poem “The Resolution” provides a long cata­logue of authors and works that have delighted and influenced Chudleigh, among whom is Lucretius, whom she chastises for his atheism (PPC, lines 348–380). Olive argues that Chudleigh’s Neoplatonism may be linked to her “Puritan” f­amily and regional origins (“Puritan Subject’s Panegyrics,” 478–479). For discussions of Chudleigh’s reading and influences, also see Ezell, “Politics of the Past,” 30; Olive, “Puritan Subject’s Panegyrics,” 479–480; and Gillian Wright, “­Women Reading Epictetus,” ­Women’s Writing 14, no. 2 (2007): 321–337. 63. ​Catherine Sharrock theorizes that for female authors such as Mary Astell (known as “Almystrea,” in Chudleigh’s coterie), the emphasis on the primacy of the “non-­ gendered nature” of the intellect reveals their changing perception about “what is available to them and, . . . ​lift[s] them beyond the confines of their pres­ent existence” (“De-­ciphering W ­ omen and De-­scribing Authority: The Writings of Mary Astell,” in Grundy and Wiseman, ­Women, Writing, History, 116). 64. ​For the importance of Locke’s po­liti­cal thought for early feminist authors see Mills, “That Tyrant Custom,” 396. 65. ​This poem is possibly addressed to the same “Eugenia” who wrote The Female Preacher (1699), also called The Female Advocate (1700), a prose rebuttal of Sprint’s sermon The Bride-­Woman’s Counsellor: Being a Sermon Preached at a Wedding (London: Bowyer, 1699), to which Chudleigh’s The Ladies Defence was also a response. 66. ​Although this kind of transcendence of the self may resemble the manifestations of yearning for a transition to a “state of grace” in mid-­seventeenth-­century ­women’s writing, by Chudleigh’s time the “annihilation of self” was no longer “a necessary precondition for a w ­ oman’s appearance in print” (Elaine Hobby, “ ‘Discourse So Unsavoury’: W ­ omen’s Published Writings of the 1650s,” in Grundy and Wiseman, ­Women, Writing, History, 30–31). 67. ​Mills, “To Be Both Patroness and Friend,” 69–70. 68. ​Barchas observes a similar vilification of “the romantic talk of man” in Chudleigh’s Ladies Defence (“Before Print Culture,” 27). The de­cadence of courtship and the material nature of love—­especially marriage for economic reasons—­are a commonplace in the lit­er­a­ture of the first half of the eigh­teenth c­ entury. For

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“A Picture of My Mind"

a discussion of Jonathan Swift’s similar verse approach to the same issue in his long poem Cadenus and Vanessa (1712), see Igor Djordjevic, “Cadenus and Vanessa: A Rhe­toric of Courtship,” Swift Studies 18 (2003): 104–118. Kenneth Burke’s A Rhe­toric of Motives provides a seminal discussion of the rhe­toric of courtship: he recognizes the cultic importance of Baldesar Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier to the culture of courtship in the sixteenth ­century but broadens the meaning of the term “courtship” to imply a fundamental social phenomenon involving erotic, social, and transcendent meanings, derived from its rhe­toric. 69. ​For a discussion of the ideal male mate constructed by female writers, one who is “both a friend and a lover,” see Ezell, The Patriarch’s Wife, 101–107; ironically, Ezell includes Chudleigh in a group of authors who “did not accept this picture of domestic bliss” (106–107). 70. ​It is more than a ­little ironic that in this sense Chudleigh’s two poems appear to be reversing the quintessentially feminist notion about the “silencing” of the female in patriarchal discourse; ­here the male is routinely silenced or voices a perplexingly aty­pi­cal attitude. 71. ​Smith, Reason’s Disciples, 115. 72. ​Mills, “That Tyrant Custom,” 402.

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ADDISON’S ANGLICAN RATIONALISM, CATO’S TRAGIC FLAW, AND STOICISM MORGAN STRAWN

Joseph Addison, like many of his contemporaries, revered the literary achieve-

ments of the Romans. He enthusiastically explored Italy as part of the G ­ rand Tour, and when he returned home he commemorated his journey by publishing it as Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705), a travelogue larded generously with classical quotations.1 Not content merely to read Latin poetry, Addison also wrote his own, as did other contemporaries such as Matthew Prior and Samuel Johnson.2 Addison also displayed his admiration for classical culture in the play Cato (1713), in which he celebrates the Roman patriot for his defense of liberty. The play depicts Cato’s last day leading the re­sis­tance to Julius Caesar’s monopolization of Rome’s po­liti­cal power. At the recent ­battle of Pharsalus, Caesar had vanquished Pompey, his last formidable adversary, and had begun marching ­toward Utica, where Addison sets the play. T ­ here the remnants of the Roman Senate debate how to proceed. Some urge capitulation, but Cato’s speech on po­liti­cal liberty inspires his confederates to fight for their freedom, notwithstanding the improbability of their success. When Caesar arrives on Utica’s doorstep, Cato rejects the reprieve he offers in return for surrender. Rather than forfeit his liberty, Cato kills himself, an act in which some ­people detected the Stoic self-­mastery for which he was renowned. In the play, such selfless patriotism earns Cato numerous comparisons to the gods, including one drawn by Alexander Pope, the author of the prologue.3 Some scholars have inferred from such passages that the play is an unqualified paean to its title character. M. M. Kelsall deems Addison’s Cato “an ideal repre­sen­ta­tion of

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Addison’s Anglican Rationalism

the highest virtues.” 4 According to Milton Waldrop, he is “a martyr and a model, the beau ideal for republican virtues.”5 Candy B. K. Schille concurs with this sentiment and argues that in Addison’s play “every­thing joins to make the hero impressive.” 6 ­These commentators exaggerate the fictional Cato’s virtue and reflect a broader assumption about the popularity of the Stoic values he represented during the eigh­teenth ­century. From the perspective of some scholars, Stoicism’s eighteenth-­century fortunes ­rose with the cultural imperative to manage the passions, ­those wellsprings of motivation that ­were channeled from external stimuli and personal desires. Phi­los­o­phers such as Francis Hutcheson, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, and Adam Smith identified social advantages in the activity of the passions, but most p ­ eople remained concerned about the dangers t­ hese passions posed when not governed properly. According to a variety of scholars, this concern pop­u­lar­ized the ancient Stoic teachings and the emotional self-­mastery they championed.7 The Stoics certainly had their admirers among Addison’s contemporaries, but the example set by ­these ancients had a limited appeal. Many eighteenth-­century En­glishmen perceived a discrepancy between their own confrontation with the passions and that which the classical world had undertaken. From the perspective of men like Addison, Chris­tian­ity gave them a ­great advantage in moderating the intemperance of the passions, reflecting a belief in Christian exceptionalism that Cato shared. Though the play reveals a g­ reat deal of admiration for antiquity, it also reveals a preference for many of the values promoted by con­temporary Chris­tian­ity and more specifically the Church of ­England. This value system idealized a form of rationality that Cato flouted in ways that contribute to his tragic undoing in the play. In Addison’s rendering, the Roman patriot exhibits the symptoms of disordered passions that include melancholy, monomania, and a flawed awareness of the motives for his own actions. Cato is not a faultless exemplar but an imperfect hero who dramatizes the ­mental liabilities of a pagan psy­chol­ogy.8 Like many eighteenth-­century interpreters of classical history, Addison admired Cato’s po­liti­cal character but disapproved of his Stoic piety’s excessive severity. Nathaniel Wolloch has drawn attention to Addison’s Christian disapproval of Cato’s suicide, but he has not explored the playwright’s implicit critique of the Roman patriot’s disordered passions.9 From Addison’s Anglican perspective, Cato’s extreme austerity reflected a misplaced devotion whose psychological consequences w ­ ere akin to t­ hose suffered by ­England’s religious nonconformists. ­Whether one actively rejected the Church of ­England like Dissenters or, like Cato, lacked access to its wisdom by virtue of historical circumstance, one was at

33

1650–1850 risk of dangerous ­mental disturbances. Addison’s Cato is a hero but the hero of a tragedy, and his tragic flaws are precisely the flaws in judgment that the Church of ­England prided itself on preventing and correcting.10 Thus Cato encouraged Anglicans to admire the title character’s po­liti­cal virtue but used the Roman patriot’s shortcomings to dramatize some of the dangerous psychological disorders that Anglicanism guarded against most vigilantly. We should not be surprised to find the church’s fingerprints on Addison’s play, for his religion was an impor­tant part of his literary reputation. During the eigh­ teenth c­ entury Addison was known not only as an elegant stylist and an astute critic but also as a moralist. Samuel Johnson credited him with “having turned many to righ­teousness,” entitling him to a “literary character, above all Greek, above all Roman fame.”11 As much as Addison admired the artistic achievements of the classical world, he would have agreed that Chris­tian­ity gave modern Eu­ro­pe­ans the chance to excel it. In his essay Of the Christian Religion (1722) he characterizes the faith’s founding as one of the most transformative moments in the history of ­human beings. It inspired not only “a strict purity of heart, and an unbounded love,” but also a “rational devotion” that sharply contrasted the “vicious” practices of pagans. Critics of Chris­tian­ity might charge the faith with superstition, but from Addison’s perspective it elevated the intellectual character of religion, shaming the alternative forms of worship that had previously been available. Indeed, Chris­tian­ ity’s elevating influence was so profound that it “seemed to change mankind into another species of Beings.”12 Addison’s specific brand of Chris­tian­ity was devotedly Anglican. His f­ ather, Lancelot Addison, was a clergyman who ­rose to the deanery of Lichfield, where he boasted that, with few exceptions, he “had so throwly punished the Dissenters, as to bring them all to the Holy Communion.”13 As a young man, Joseph planned on following his f­ ather into the clergy, and he retained his ­father’s Anglican chauvinism even ­after his literary c­ areer began in earnest. The advent of Chris­tian­ity may have enabled a positive transformation in humanity, but Addison claimed that few heirs to the primitive church had been able to maintain the rational integrity of their devotions as well as the Church of ­England did. In The Spectator Addison explains that both Roman Catholics and non-­Anglican Protestants, such as Quakers and Presbyterians, betray their intellectual inheritance as Christians: “Most of the Sects that fall short of the Church of ­England, have in them strong Tinctures of Enthusiasm, as the Roman Catholick Religion is one huge overgrown Body of childish and idle superstition.” Whereas Catholics placed an uncritical trust in the fanciful traditions passed down by church authorities, non-­Anglican Protestants

34

Addison’s Anglican Rationalism

placed too much trust in their own reason, which passions such as pride could distort surreptitiously. ­Under such circumstances, non-­Anglican Protestants fell ­under the influence of “enthusiasm,” which Samuel Johnson defines as a “vio­lence of passions” and a “Heat of imagination” that could reflect “a vain confidence of divine favour or communication.” According to Addison, superstition and enthusiasm “are the Weaknesses of H ­ uman Reason, that . . . ​sink us even below the Beasts that perish.”14 Addison’s judgment illustrates the intellectual chauvinism that many Anglicans shared: he alleges that by distorting reason, Catholics and enthusiasts revert to a pre-­Christian mentality that is so primitive, it travesties their humanity. Anglicanism, on the other hand, envisioned itself as a via media that balanced the need to be critical of both received wisdom and one’s own in­de­pen­dent reason. For centuries, the two-­pronged critique of sectarian enthusiasm and Catholic superstition was a common feature of En­glish religious thought: it was developed by sixteenth-­century Anglican leaders like Richard Hooker, passed on to eighteenth-­ century polemicists like Jonathan Swift, and could even be ­adopted by a Scottish skeptic like David Hume.15 Cato borrows one prong of this critique. The play implicitly boasts Anglicans’ sense of intellectual superiority over non-­Anglicans by giving its title character many of the attributes that Addison associated with religious enthusiasm, to which extremists in both the Christian and pre-­Christian eras w ­ ere susceptible. The most prevalent eighteenth-­century ste­reo­t ype of religious enthusiasts represented them as ecstatic ranters like the ones featured in Swift’s A Tale of a Tub (1704), and it is figures such as this that primarily engross researchers when they examine literary repre­sen­ta­tions of enthusiasm.16 The histrionics of t­hese caricatured figures had l­ittle in common with the Stoics’ popu­lar image; however, enthusiasm took more forms than scholars commonly emphasize, and eighteenth-­ century writers believed that it was also manifest in the excessive self-­denial for which the Stoics ­were known. ­Because asceticism’s association with enthusiasm receives so l­ittle attention, vari­ous con­temporary examples may be necessary to make my claim about Cato less counterintuitive. From the perspective of Addison’s contemporaries, ascetic enthusiasm was common enough that a variety of faiths ­were guilty of producing examples of it. Catholics, for instance, could suffer from this form of enthusiasm, as the Frenchman Bernard Picart suggested when he observed that the monks of medieval Catholicism ­were “as austere as could possibly be in­ven­ted by the wildest Enthusiast.”17 Accusations of enthusiasm more commonly sprang from Anglicans criticizing other Protestants. Writers invoked the disorder when describing the ascetic

35

1650–1850 lifestyles of heterodox Christians in both the primitive and modern church. In The Spirit of Enthusiasm Exorcised (1709), George Hickes described the second-­century Christian heretic Montanus as “a Preacher of Mortification and Self-­denial” whose followers embraced “Philosophick severities” and “Austerities” that ­were “almost incredible.”18 Some more recent sectarians seemed to emulate such ascetic be­hav­ ior. Charles Owen compared the “old Prophetic Enthusiasts” with heterodox contemporaries and found both groups distinguished by “Mortification and Self-­denial.”19 Gordon Thomas painted a similar picture of the Interregnum’s puritans, interpreting their “Austere Holiness” as evidence of their “Enthusiasm.”20 According to other observers, this type of religious extremism survived even in the eigh­teenth c­ entury. The Methodists earned their reputation for enthusiasm not only with their reports of ecstatic religious experiences but also with their practices of self-­denial. A December 1732 letter to Fog’s Weekly Journal alleged that they “avoid, as much as pos­si­ble, e­ very Object that may affect them with any pleasant and grateful Sensation.” Moreover, they “afflict their Bodies” and “Blood let once a Fortnight to keep down the carnal Man.” The author concludes by wondering facetiously if the next step in the Methodists’ program of self-­perfection ­will be to castrate themselves.21 Such ste­reo­t ypes did not vanish as the ­century proceeded. John Garnett prob­ably had Methodists in mind in 1745 when he accused “enthusiasm” of having “placed the ­whole of religion in an austere and rigid piety.”22 George Lavington explic­itly blamed the Methodists’ “Austere Reformation” for making them easy prey for “Superstition and Enthusiasm.”23 The ­people most frequently accused of enthusiasm w ­ ere Protestant Dissenters and liminal members of the Church of ­England, such as Methodists; however, the Judeo-­Christian world was not the only culture in which an austere enthusiasm was alleged to have flourished. The Stoics with whom Cato was often associated ­were renowned for a rigid morality that could distract them from more ­wholesome forms of piety. T ­ hese traits could produce psychological conditions akin to the ones commonly attributed to eighteenth-­century religious enthusiasts. Stoicism emerged in the third ­century B.C. when the Greek thinker Zeno began developing his school in Athens. Stoics believed in a materialistic and deterministic universe in which ­human beings retained ­free ­will, but the outcomes of events ­were s­ haped by the inexorable laws of physical nature. Stoics adapted to this universe by discouraging emotions, which predicated one’s happiness on external stimuli that w ­ ere beyond one’s control. Instead, Stoics prioritized virtue, believing that although events ­were beyond one’s control, one always had the power to respond virtuously to them. Many ­people viewed Cato as an exemplar of the

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extreme self-­discipline needed to put the Stoics’ demanding ethics into practice. His ability to control his emotions gave him an uncanny ability to make personal sacrifices for the sake of ostensibly virtuous goals. For instance, when Cato learned that his ally Hortensius was pining for his wife, Marcia, he divorced her so his friend could marry her. Even more impressively, he took his own life with g­ reat equanimity rather than relinquish his po­liti­cal freedom to Caesar a­ fter the military leader consolidated his power over the Roman Empire. Such feats had long inspired ambivalence, so that when Addison brought Cato to the eighteenth-­century stage, he was not reincarnating a figure who had ever elicited universal and unqualified accolades. Classical admirers of Cato, such as Cicero, Lucan, and Plutarch, tempered their praise by acknowledging Cato’s extreme severity.24 In the first c­entury A.D., Velleius Paterculus argued that Cato’s virtuous activity expressed personal compulsion more than a desire to aid ­others and that he could “almost be charged with eccentricity in the display of it.”25 Early Christians joined in the critique and challenged the Roman’s m ­ ental fitness. Augustine concentrated his attack on Cato’s suicide, arguing that the act reflected “a feeble rather than a strong mind.”26 Like many of ­these earlier authors, most eighteenth-­century writers held a view of Cato and the other Stoics that was largely positive but also alive to their excesses. When ­these l­ater writers voiced reservations about Cato and the Stoics, they often focused on the vices of intellectual intemperance and misguided devotion, which, as we ­shall see, Addison incorporated into his portrait of the Roman patriot. Meric Casaubon examined the Stoics in his Treatise Concerning Enthusiasme (1655) and argued that they ­were deluded by “phansie,” which misled them into voluntary sufferings in order to gratify a chimerical pride in their own powers of endurance.27 According to ­others, the Stoics’ disorder produced other malign symptoms besides an insensibility to their own sufferings. Anthony Horneck criticized them for discouraging pity for ­others and alleged that they “talk’d like Madmen more than Phi­los­o­phers.”28 Thomas Gale accused the Stoics of “Phrensies” and “incredible Rants” and deemed their doctrines “an Axe laid at the Root of all Vertue.”29 Samuel Acton believed that the Stoics’ effort to anaesthetize themselves to the difference between good and bad fortune resulted in an inhumanity akin to the one Addison alleged against enthusiastic non-­Anglicans. According to Acton, this excessive self-­denial reflected such “senseless stupidity, that they ­were some kind of Animals, Dif­fer­ent from Mankind.”30 Acton prob­ably made his remarks in the same year that Addison published Cato, but the prejudices he expressed displayed a striking durability. Like

37

1650–1850 ­ asaubon in 1655, the author of Enthusiasm Explained (1739) classed the Stoics as C “Enthusiasts” on the basis of their foolhardy efforts to ignore pain.31 William Guthrie was even more admonitory. When he translated Cicero into En­glish, his preface argued that the Stoics’ princi­ples imperiled not only themselves but also ­others. He warned that the Stoics behaved with a “Ferocity which tended to abolish all the Civil Duties in Life,” explaining that “their Enthusiasm for Virtue left out of their System all the lesser Chains, which link Order to Society, and Humanity to Virtue.” This extreme and single-­minded pursuit of personal piety ignored the commonweal and could result in “an Inversion of all Civil and Social Duties.”32 Samuel Johnson did not detect as extreme a danger to society as Guthrie had, but he also deemed the Stoics “wild” and “enthusiastick” for imagining themselves insensible to suffering.33 David Hume would have agreed and faulted the Stoics for “philosophical enthusiasm.”34 James Balfour blamed this philosophical zeal on the Stoics’ infamous efforts to suppress compassion, speculating that “the enthusiasm of the Stoics” resulted from ignoring the pain of pious sufferers and focusing only on their virtue.35 Thomas Francklin interpreted the Stoics’ efforts at moral self-­perfection as a reflection of their vanity, speculating that “the stoic enthusiasm did perhaps inspire men with too high an opinion of [­human] nature.”36 At times, discussions of the Stoics’ extreme be­hav­ior focused on Cato and particularly on his suicide. According to legend, Cato was so determined to die that he tore out his own entrails ­after a physician tried to sew up his initial self-­inflicted sword wound. The sixteenth-­century writer Michel de Montaigne lauded the act, describing it as “furieux,” a word that a 1700 dictionary defined as “Furious, raging, mad, frantick” and that Montaigne’s modern translator renders as “ecstatic.”37 Not all Frenchmen agreed with Montaigne in admiring this enthusiastic be­hav­ior. Jacque Esprit argued that Cato’s suicide reflected a “passion” that behaved like “contagious Feavers.”38 Despite the discrepancy in the value judgments, Montaigne and Esprit shared a perspective in which febrile passions could manifest themselves in an act of self-­abnegation as well as in more conventionally ecstatic be­hav­ior. When En­glishmen focused on Cato’s suicide, they ­were more apt to agree with Esprit than with Montaigne. William Ayloffe described his suicide as a “furious Act” but without intending any of the praise of Montaigne’s remarks.39 Ambrose Phillips blamed Cato’s suicide on “a savage, brutal, and sullen spirit” and faulted Addison for making such a man the protagonist of his tragedy, an art form intended for “the Improvement of ones Countrey.” 40 Henry Grove attributed the suicide to “passion,” specifically that of “pride, and sullenness.” 41 John Henley

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joined in the psychological autopsy and blamed Cato’s suicide on “Delusions of Fancy, or a distemper’d Reason.” 42 Other writers accused Cato of ­mental imbalance without directly invoking his suicide, highlighting some of the general character traits the Roman patriot would exhibit in Addison’s play. The Anglican clergyman Zacharriah Mudge detected “Weaknesses in his Understanding,” which he blamed on a variety of “Passions.” 43 M. P. Macquer was disappointed by Cato’s immoderation. When comparing the virtue of vari­ous ancients, he observed that “Cato carried his to excess.” 44 Macquer’s opinion would have found a sympathetic ear in Messalla, a character in George Lyttelton’s Dialogues of the Dead (1760). In Lyttelton’s work, Messalla encourages Cato to “Moderate,” alleging, “­There has always been too much Passion mixed with your Virtues. The Enthusiasm you are possessed with is of a noble kind; but it disturbs and blinds your judgment.” 45 Edward Gibbon expressed a similar ambivalence. He admired Cato’s defense of liberty but also detected a cautionary tale in his personal conduct: “We may learn from the example of Cato, that character of pure and inflexible virtue is the most apt to be misled by prejudice, to be heated by enthusiasm.” 46 Even some non-­Anglicans would have agreed with this critique of Cato. The abbé Claude François Xavier Millot contended, “If Cato had not been an enthusiast in virtue . . . ​his patriotism and greatness of soul might have effected much good.” However, his superhuman severity was “seldom useful, sometimes hurtful.” 47 Some p ­ eople suggested that the Stoic’s zeal even infected his f­ amily. For instance, Jonathan Richardson contended that the ­mental imbalance that so many ­people alleged against Cato also afflicted his d ­ aughter, Portia, who had “a  48 head turned . . . ​with stoic enthusiasm.” Such criticisms did not reflect a stable eighteenth-­century consensus. Many critics, such as John Mason, ­were so far from identifying Stoicism with enthusiasm that they regarded its effort to suppress emotion as enthusiasm’s diametric opposite.49 Some seemed to change their views over time. Though Lyttelton’s character Messalla accused Cato of enthusiasm, thirteen years earlier Lyttelton himself had included Cato among ­those men “who ­were undoubtedly not enthusiasts.”50 ­Others offered Cato high praise, even in religious forums.51 Such variety and even apparent inconsistency should not surprise us; the eigh­teenth c­ entury was a polyphonous intellectual world and made room for more than one view of the ancient Roman patriot. Such a diversity of opinions on Cato gave Addison a warrant for his repre­sen­ta­ tion of the Roman patriot as a hero, but a hero with impor­tant psychological shortcomings. Into his largely positive portrait, Addison integrates the characteristics

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1650–1850 that the Roman Stoic shared with religious enthusiasts, which so troubled some of the playwright’s contemporaries. From Addison’s perspective, the protagonist’s flaws w ­ ere essential to the proper functioning of tragedy. If the hero was to elicit pity, he could not be a paragon of virtue, for no audience member could identify with such a perfect moral specimen. On the contrary, Addison agreed with Aristotle’s belief that this tragic hero needed to be “a Man of Virtue mixt with Infirmities.”52 In the case of Addison’s Cato, ­these infirmities ­were of a psychological variety and included melancholy, monomania, and an imperfect knowledge of the motives for his own actions. Though Anglicans certainly could be guilty of t­ hese shortcomings, they viewed them as hallmarks of religious enthusiasm, as Addison illustrates in his other writings. B ­ ecause heathens and sectarians lacked the rational faith that Chris­tian­ity ushered into the world and the Church of ­England sustained, they ­were both particularly susceptible to misguided and immoderate devotions.53 As a patriot, Cato could be a paragon of po­liti­cal virtue; however, his resemblance to religious enthusiasts demonstrates that, as a pagan, he could not embody the psychological values that Anglicans like Addison deemed normative. One characteristic of enthusiasm that had survived from the first ­century B.C. till the eigh­teenth ­century A.D. was melancholy. When Addison describes the archetypal Presbyterian in The Tatler, he represents her as “a peevish Figure, sowred with Discontent, and overcast with Melancholy.”54 As Addison explained in The Spectator, such gloomy devotees misapprehended their religion’s elevating message. He insisted to other Christians, “Our Idea of the supreme Being is not only Infinitely more ­Great and Noble than what could possibly enter into the Heart of an Heathen, but filled with e­ very t­ hing that can raise the Imagination, and give Opportunity for the Sublimest Thoughts and Conceptions” (4:95). A Presby­ terian’s insensibility to her Christian faith’s uplifting spirit diminished her mind to pagan proportions. Nor did such a Dissenter hamper only her own spiritual fulfillment. On the contrary, she impeded ­others’ as well; for “­those who represent Religion in so unamiable a Light, are like the spies sent by Moses to make a Discovery of the Land of Promise, when by their Reports they discouraged the ­People from entering upon it” (4:254). From Addison’s perspective, a person’s demeanor was the ambassador of his or her princi­ples and was obliged to represent them in the most positive light. Without the benefits of Christian revelation, Cato lacked the pious cheerfulness of Addison’s ideal and represented his moral princi­ples in an “unamiable” light. Stoics commonly faced such charges of petulancy in the late seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries. According to Edward Stillingfleet, the onetime Bishop of

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Addison’s Anglican Rationalism

Worcester, the stoics much “lamented the degeneracy of the world.”55 Richard Theed’s Sacred Biography (1712) attributed a similar bleakness to the Stoics’ worldview and alleged that they ­were “over-­run with Sullenness.”56 In The Spectator Addison accuses Cato of a similar uncongeniality when he describes the Roman as “rather awful than amiable” (2:266). The adversity that Cato ­faces in the play does not improve his disposition. Rather than taking satisfaction in his commitment to virtue and his solidarity with other dedicated freedom fighters, Cato frequently expresses peevish discontent and world-­weariness. He professes himself “sick of this bad world,” believes he has “no business in it,” and looks forward to the moment when he w ­ ill “get loose / from this vain world” (Cato, 2, 50). From Addison’s perspective, the Roman’s fatalism suggests the psychological defects of his pre-­Christian mind-­set. Addison suggests a Christian foil to this pagan be­hav­ior. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Sir Thomas More, exhibited a demeanor very dif­fer­ent from Cato’s when he accepted his death sentence for opposing the annulment of Henry VIII’s marriage. More was a Catholic, but Addison still acknowledges him as a “­great and learned Man” and praises him for maintaining “the same Chearfulness of Heart upon the Scaffold, which he used at his ­Table.” More’s good humor reflected his confidence in Chris­tian­ity’s promise of immortality. He “thought any unusual degree of Sorrow and Concern improper on such occasion as had nothing in it which could deject or terrifie him.” An ancient such as Cato might meet his death with grave equanimity, but More’s cheerfulness illustrated the elevating character of a Christian outlook (Spectator, 3:300–301). The discontent of Protestant Dissenters and pagans like Cato was due in part to their reductive view of morality; both types of ­people pursued their devotions with an unhealthy, monomaniac fervor. Addison ste­reo­types sectarian monomania in a letter that he included in one of his Spectator papers. Addison’s contributor “R.G.” relates the difficulties that a Quaker in his h ­ ouse­hold had caused, complaining, “I am one of ­those unhappy Men that are plagued with a Gospel-­Gossip, so common among Dissenters (especially Friends). Lectures in the morning, Church-­ Meetings at noon, and Preparation Sermons at Night, take up so much of her Time, ’tis very rare she knows what we have for Dinner, ­unless the Preacher is to be at it” (Spectator, 1:198). Religion so absorbs this “Gospel-­Gossip” that even her appetite fails to hold her attention u ­ nless her meal somehow pertains to her devotions. Such repre­sen­ta­tions of Dissenters w ­ ere the boilerplate of Anglican polemic. Jonathan Swift gave the satire on sectarian monomania one of its most vigorous and hyperbolic expressions in A Tale of a Tub. ­There he likens falsely inspired Dissenters to a cult of “Aeolists” who worshiped wind so single-­mindedly that they

41

1650–1850 regarded it as “the Original Cause of all ­Things” and “the ruling Ele­ment in ­every Compound.” T ­ hese devotees reveal their beliefs’ intellectual toxicity when they treat their belches as philosophical disquisitions. As their reductive syllogism would have it, “Words are but Wind; and Learning is nothing but Words; Ergo, Learning is nothing but Wind.”57 Like Addison’s “Gospel-­Gossip,” ­these Aeolists fixate on a single facet of the world and ignore all o ­ thers, plunging into an obsession that distorts their view of real­ity. In The Spectator Addison faults Stoicism for a similar monomania, referring to it as the “Pedantry of Virtue” (2:444). In an earlier paper, he clarifies the nonacademic applications of the word “pedantry,” explaining, A Man who has been brought up amongst Books, and is able to talk of nothing ­else, is a very indifferent Companion, and what we call a Pedant. But, methinks, we should enlarge the Title, and give it every­one that does not know how to think out of his profession, and par­tic­u­lar way of Life. Addison then offers several examples of this kind of monomania, including “the State-­Pedant [who] is wrapt up in News and lost in Politicks” and “the Military Pedant, who always talks in a Camp” (Spectator, 1:437–438). Similarly, a pedant of virtue makes a misguided vision of moral purity the object of his single-­minded absorption. Addison typifies the Stoics’ delusion with the be­hav­ior that Cicero alleged against Cato, who carried M ­ atters so far, that he would not allow any one but a virtuous Man to be handsom [sic]. This indeed looks more like a philosophical Rant, than the real Opinion of a wise Man: Yet this was what Cato very seriously maintained. In short, the Stoicks thought that they could not sufficiently represent the Excellence of Virtue if they did not comprehend in the notion of it all pos­si­ble Perfection; and therefore did not only suppose, that it was very transcendently beautiful in it self, but that it made the very Body amiable, and banished ­every kind of Deformity from the person in whom it resided. (Spectator, 2:444) Just as Swift’s Aeolist-­Dissenter reduces all wisdom to a single fanciful princi­ple, Addison’s Stoic reduces all beauty to a similarly fanciful conception of virtue. The Aeolist is much uglier and more parodic, but each man demonstrates what happens when “Fancy gets astride on his Reason,” to borrow a line from Swift.58 Addison’s play conveys a similar impression of Cato’s monomania when it dramatizes his reaction to his son’s death. When Marcus falls in a valiant defense of Utica, Cato responds with relief rather than sorrow, confessing, “I should have blush’d if Cato’s h ­ ouse had stood / Secure, and flourished in a civil war.” Indeed, he

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delights in his son’s body, taking time to examine it “at leisure” so he can admire “the bloody corse, and count ­those glorious wounds.” This version of Cato exhibits an even more extreme “pedantry of virtue” than the figure who appears in The Spectator. In his eyes, virtue beautifies not only the ugly man but also the mangled body of his own son. Though Cato’s fellow Romans try to condole his misfortune, the ­father attempts to convince them “How beautiful is death, when earn’d by virtue” (Cato, 43). According to many Anglicans, a monomania like Cato’s might give the appearance of extreme piety but was often deceptive. Like eighteenth-­century Dissenters, Stoics ­were disposed to prideful self-­delusion, which, as we s­ hall see, Addison’s play dramatizes. Such delusions w ­ ere particularly objectionable to Anglicans. The Church of E ­ ngland frequently reminded its members that passions such as self-­ interest could pollute a person’s motivations and cloud his or her self-­awareness. Sermons on the fallibility of conscience can be found in the collected works of many of the church’s most famous preachers. In John Tillotson’s sermon “A Conscience Void of Offense t­ owards God and Men,” the bishop warned that “men may be guilty of the most heinous Sins in following an erroneous Conscience” for “Men may neglect and abuse themselves so far, as to do some of the worst and wickedest ­things in the World with a perswasion that they did well.” According to Tillotson, such a crippled self-­awareness was a symptom of a mind congested with self-­regard. He explained that “pride and fullness of a man’s self does keep out knowledge, and obstructs all the passages by which wisdom and instruction should enter into men.” So that readers may detect a false conscience in themselves and ­others, Tillotson advised careful psychological inspection, urging them to be vigilant against “turbulent passion and a furious zeal,” for ­these w ­ ere signs that a 59 “man’s conscience is not settled upon clear reason.” From Tillotson’s Anglican perspective, delusive passions such as pride posed grave dangers to personal morality, but dangers the believer could avoid with the assistance of sober rationality. Nor was Tillotson’s opinion an outlier; his views w ­ ere shared by many clergy­ men, including the church’s men of letters such as Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne.60 The cautions of t­ hese religious authorities ­were not always hearkened nor heeded, and even when they ­were, eighteenth-­century Anglicans may not have achieved a greater degree of moral self-­awareness than Christians of other denominations did. However, the advice that Tillotson, Swift, and Sterne offered their Anglican audience complemented a tradition that alleged varying degrees of hy­poc­ risy and cognitive dissonance against non-­Anglican Protestants. This polemical

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1650–1850 tradition reflected resilient memories of the previous c­ entury’s civil wars. In The Freeholder, Addison harked woefully back to “the Extream of Cant and Hypocrisie, which had taken Possession of the P ­ eople’s Minds in the Times of the G ­ reat Rebellion, and of the Usurpation that succeeded it. The Practices of t­ hese Men, u ­ nder the Covert of a feigned Zeal, made even the Appearance of sincere Devotion ridicu­ lous and unpop­u­lar.” 61 From Addison’s perspective, the sanctimony of t­hese seventeenth-­century sectarian warriors was merely a smokescreen that concealed their po­liti­cal ambitions. The memories of t­ hese hypocrites w ­ ere so ­bitter that they had discredited sincere religious devotion for almost a ­century and had received contemptuous commemoration in satires such as Samuel Butler’s Hudibras (1663–1678). However, not all misplaced devotions ­were equally cynical. Some enthusiasts did not perpetrate willful religious hy­poc­risy but merely suffered from cognitive dissonance. In The Guardian, Addison implicitly concurred with Tillotson and argued that some passions could convince a man that his self-­ interested actions actually sprang from a pious conviction; for “­There is no Passion which steals into the Heart more imperceptibly and covers itself ­under more Disguises, than Pride.” 62 Cato is the central canvas on which Addison sketches his moral critique, but the playwright also uses auxiliary characters to dramatize admonitions like the one that Tillotson offered. The miscibility of motives that so concerned Anglicans such as the Archbishop of Canterbury flies into bold relief in the play’s love plots, in which Addison highlights the delusive power of the passions.63 Though Cato commands the moral re­spect and military allegiance of a number of young followers, an alloy of romantic self-­interest complicates their attachment to the Roman patriot’s cause. Filial piety urges Cato’s son Marcus to emulate his f­ ather’s seemingly selfless commitment to Roman liberty, but his desire for Lucia distracts him even as Caesar closes in on Utica. His ­brother attempts to excuse his distracted be­hav­ior by explaining, “His passions and his virtues lie confused, / And mixed together in so wild a tumult, / That the w ­ hole man is quite disfigured in him” (Cato, 31). The lines evoke an inner conflict that also afflicts Juba. The Nu­mid­i­an prince perseveres in his devotion to Cato even a­ fter his f­ather dies supporting their Roman allies in the re­sis­tance to Caesar. The prince claims that his loyalty reflects his admiration for Cato’s self-­denying virtue, but he also confesses a “flame” he “would fain conceal” (Cato, 15). His fellow Nu­mid­i­an, Sy­phax, exposes the prince’s true motive when he alleges, “Marcia’s charms / work in your heart unseen” (Cato, 14). Juba’s devotion to Roman liberty appears to stem from an earnest reverence for Cato but derives its secret strength, as well as its fitful lapses,

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from his romantic desire for Cato’s ­daughter. He all but admits an ulterior motive for his alliance with Cato when he declares to Marcia, “That Juba may deserve thy pious cares, / I’ll gaze forever on thy godlike ­father” (Cato, 16). However, Marcia’s influence does not strengthen Juba’s martial resolve as reliably as he pretends. As he admires her during the same scene, he confesses to himself, “I feel a dawn of joy break in upon me, / And for a while forget the approach of Caesar” (Cato, 16). The confession suggests that the gratification of Juba’s romantic desire would compensate him for Rome’s fall—­a fact he ­later confirms. In the fourth act, when Juba fi­nally learns that Marcia reciprocates his affection, he momentarily disavows the ideals that ostensibly bind him to his Roman allies, declaring, “Let Caesar have the world, if Marcia’s mine” (Cato, 41). Duped by his passions, the young warrior provides an object lesson in just the sort of self-­delusion that eighteenth-­century Anglican authorities cautioned their followers to avoid. Cato does not betray any of the younger generation’s carnal weakness, but his virtuous devotion to Roman liberty is compromised by a hidden pridefulness akin to the one that Tillotson, Swift, and Sterne cautioned against. When Decius criticizes Cato in the play, his words ring true, despite the fact that they are spoken by one of Caesar’s collaborators. As an envoy, he attempts to negotiate Utica’s surrender and even offers Cato a position as “the second of mankind,” inferior only to Caesar in the remodeled state. When Cato refuses t­ hese generous conditions, Decius accuses him of a “high, unconquered heart,” an allegation of pride that many eighteenth-­century commentators seconded (Cato, 21–22).64 Elsewhere in the play Cato’s be­hav­ior lends credence to Decius’s allegation. When Juba urges a prudent retreat from Utica to search for allies in North Africa, he elicits a testy reply from Cato: “And canst thou think / Cato w ­ ill fly before the sword of Caesar! / Reduced, like Hannibal, to seek relief / From court to court, and wander up and down / A vagabond in Afric?” (Cato, 24). Though Cato declares that he would risk almost any fate for even “an hour, of virtuous liberty,” he reveals that his vanity trumps even that high-­minded objective when he spurns a plan that would accomplish it (Cato, 20). He would rather hurry the eclipse of Rome’s democracy than beg for assistance from strangers. A number of Cato’s remarks suggest that another potential outcome of the republic’s collapse menaces his pride even more than the thought of an itinerant life in Africa. When Cato’s companions urge him to seek a rapprochement with Caesar, he retorts, “Caesar s­ hall never say, I conquered Cato,” suggesting that his real fear is a humbling submission to his adversary (Cato, 44). Cato reinforces this impression as he foreshadows his suicide. Rhetorically, he bids Caesar to siege Utica

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1650–1850 and haughtily insists, “Cato s­ hall open to himself a passage / And mock thy hopes” (Cato, 47). A ­ fter impaling himself on his sword, Cato uses one of his d ­ ying breaths to boast a defiance of his ­enemy yet again: “Caesar, thou canst not hurt me.” The self-­defeating pride that motivates Cato’s suicide flies into bold relief in the play’s closing moments. Immediately before the suicide is revealed, Portius reports that Pompey’s son has just arrived with the reinforcements that may allow them to successfully repulse Caesar’s army. Addison thus implies that Cato’s overhasty desire to avoid a humiliating submission to Caesar may have cost Rome the staunch defense of liberty that Cato professed to be his principal goal. From an eighteenth-­century Anglican perspective, such cognitive dissonance reflected a lack of the moral self-­awareness that the Church of ­England worked so hard to instill in its adherents. Though Addison gives Cato some unflattering psychological traits, he also extenuates the circumstances of his death, which could have alienated an orthodox Christian audience altogether. In the play, the Roman patriot reconciles himself to suicide by reading what Addison’s stage directions identify as The Immortality of the Soul, which was a subtitle traditionally appended to Plato’s Phaedo. The work gives Cato the assurance he needs to follow through with his suicide by convincing him of a “divinity that stirs within us,” for which heaven “points out an hereafter” (Cato, 45). Thus, Addison recasts the despair that motivates Cato’s suicide into an affirmation of dimly perceived Christian wisdom. ­These intimations of immortality do not redeem the suicide, but they blunt its rough pagan edges. Cato thus remains a heroic figure, with many virtues that demanded admiration and several shortcomings whose cautionary example offered instruction. Such a mixed character would not have troubled an eighteenth-­ century audience, which, like Aristotle and Addison, expected infirmities of its tragic heroes. When Cato uses his ­dying breath to exclaim, “the best may err,” he was expressing a commonplace of the theater (Cato, 50).

Notes 1. ​For an account of Joseph Addison’s travels in Italy, see Peter Smithers, The Life of Joseph Addison, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 45–90. 2. ​For background and analy­sis of Addison’s Latin poetry, see Leicester Bradner, “The Composition and Publication of Addison’s Latin Poems,” Modern Philology 35, no. 4 (1938): 359–367; as well as Estelle Haan, Vegilius Redivivus: Studies in Joseph Addison’s Latin Poetry, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, ser. 2, 95, pt. 2 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2005).

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3. ​Joseph Addison, Cato, in Eighteenth-­Century Plays Selected by John Hampden (1928; repr., London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1946), 5, 13, 16. All citations refer to the 1946 reprint (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Cato, by page number). For an analy­sis of the play that pays special attention to Pope’s prologue, see Jorge Bastos da Silva, “Cato’s Ghosts: Pope, Addison, and Cultural Opposition,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 38, no. 1 (2005): 95–115. Da Silva argues that both Addison and Pope wished the play to resonate with the politics of many dif­fer­ent Britons and that Pope’s prologue allowed Jacobites as well as Whigs to sympathize with the play’s values. Despite Addison’s efforts not to offend, some modern critics have taken issue with the play’s politics. Laura J. Rosenthal argues that Cato represents a stiflingly insular brand of nationalism, in “Juba’s Roman Soul: Addison’s Cato and Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 32, no. 2 (1999): 63–76. 4. ​M . M. Kelsall, “The Making of Addison’s Cato,” Review of En­glish Studies, n.s., 17, no. 66 (1966): 150. 5. ​Milton Jeffrey Waldrop, “The Apotheosis of the Hero in Eigh­teenth ­Century Tragedy: A Look at Addison’s Cato and Home’s Douglas,” University of Mississippi Studies in En­glish 11–12 (1993–1995): 100. 6. ​Candy B. K. Schille, “Now Cato: Addison, Gender, and Cultural Occasion,” Restoration and 18th ­Century Theatre Research 18, no. 1 (2003): 35. 7. ​Julie Ellison has argued that Stoic Roman heroes like Cato, who channeled their affections away from the ­family and instead directed them ­toward the state and its defenders, provided a social template for bonding among po­liti­cally elite Whigs during the late seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries. Other scholars have not placed po­liti­cal par­ameters on Stoicism’s popularity. According to Roy Porter, the British desire to avoid the “snares of the senses” made Stoicism “widespread in appeal” during the Enlightenment. Geoffrey Sill argues that the management of the passions promoted by eighteenth-­century fiction “originates” in Stoicism and its sibling schools of ancient philosophy, though he acknowledges that Christian clergymen as well as physicians and phi­los­o­phers offered instruction in this therapy. See Ellison, Cato’s Tears: The Making of Anglo-­American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2001), 158; and Sill, The Cure of the Passions and the Origins of the En­glish Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 23–24. 8. ​Our awareness of eighteenth-­century ­England’s ambivalence t­ oward the classical tradition owes much to the work of Howard Weinbrot. In Augustus Caesar in “Augustan” ­England: The Decline of a Classical Norm (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1978), Weinbrot illuminates the moral critique that writers like Alexander Pope leveled against the emperor and his poets. In Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Lit­er­a­ture from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) he charts the development of a British literary tradition

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1650–1850 that grew increasing in­de­pen­dent of classical norms during the eigh­teenth ­century. 9. ​Nathaniel Wolloch, “Cato the Younger in the Enlightenment,” Modern Philology 106, no. 1 (2008): 60–82. Stephen L. Trainer detects an even more trenchant critique of classical attitudes ­toward suicide in George Lillo’s The Fatal Curiosity, in “Suicide and Seneca in Two Eighteenth-­Century Tragedies,” in Drama and the Classical Heritage: Comparative and Critical Studies, ed. Clifford Davidson, Rand Johnson, and John H. Stroup (New York: AMS Press, 1993), 227–240. O ­ thers have argued that plays with classical values helped extenuate the crime of suicide that Chris­tian­ity condemned. Catherine Edwards, “Modelling Roman Suicide? The Afterlife of Cato,” Economy and Society 34, no. 2 (2005): 200–222. 10. ​James S. Malek and J. M. Armistead have noted some of the intellectual errors that Cato commits in the play but have not explored their root in paganism. Malek has observed that Cato’s attempt to second-­guess the intentions of providence is “ironically shortsighted.” More recently, J. M. Armistead has pointed out Cato’s “exaggeration of philosophical, at the expense of practical ethics.” Malek, “The Fifth Act of Addison’s Cato,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 74 (1973): 517; Armistead, “Drama of Renewal: Cato and Moral Empiricism,” Papers on Language & Lit­er­a­ture: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language & Lit­er­a­ture 17, no. 3 (1981): 272. 11. ​Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent En­glish Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 3:22–23. 12. ​A s Addison was on his deathbed, he entrusted his then-­unpublished essay to Thomas Tickell, who saw it into print as part of his friend’s collected works. For the quotations, see The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, Esq., vol. 2 (London, 1722), 456. 13. ​Alastair Hamilton quotes Lancelot’s letter to William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, in “Lancelot Addison (1632–1703),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 1, Aaron–­Amory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 331. 14. ​Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald  F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 2:289–290 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Spectator, by volume number and page number); Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the En­glish Language, 2 vols. (London, 1755), s.v. “enthusiasm.” 15. ​For Richard Hooker, see Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and En­glish Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 157–160. For Swift, see Phillip Harth, Swift and Anglican Rationalism: The Religious Background in “A Tale of a Tub” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). Harth also examines Hooker’s contribution to this current of thought (24–30). For Hume, see “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm,” in Essays Moral, Po­liti­cal, and Literary, ed. Thomas Hill Green and Thomas Hodge Grose, 2 vols. (1882; repr., Darmstadt, Germany: Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1964), 1:144–150. 16. ​Recent scholarship has devoted considerable attention to repre­sen­ta­tions of enthusiasm. Michael Heyd has traced the evolving relationship between the med-

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ical and theological conceptions of enthusiasm in the seventeenth and early eigh­teenth centuries. Other researchers have concentrated on enthusiasm’s place in the period’s literary culture. Clement Hawes interprets the literary repre­sen­ta­ tions of enthusiasm as a smoldering expression of socioeconomic tensions. Shaun Irlam detects a less confrontational form of enthusiasm in ­later eighteenth-­ century poets such as James Thomson and Edward Young. According to Irlam, ­these writers a­ dopted the conceptions of subjectivity implicit to religious enthusiasm and adapted it for their own brand of personally expressive poetry. Jon Mee argues that Irlam exaggerates the degree to which such poetry rehabilitated enthusiasm. He contends that many Britons remained uneasy with its potential excesses and demanded that it be closely regulated by lit­er­a­ture and other disciplinary discourses. I hope this essay can contribute further to this stimulating body of work by illuminating one relatively underresearched variety of enthusiasm. See Heyd, “Be Sober and Reasonable”: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eigh­teenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1995); Hawes, Mania and the Literary Style: The Rhe­toric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Irlam, Elations: The Poetics of Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-­Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); and Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 17. ​Bernard Picart, The Ceremonies and Religious Customs of the Vari­ous Nations of the Known World, 7 vols. (London, 1733), 4:6. 18. ​George Hickes, The Spirit of Enthusiasm Exorcised (London, 1709), 84. 19. ​Charles Owen, The Scene of Delusions Open’d, in an Historical Account of Prophetick Impostures in the Jewish, Christian, and Pagan World (London, 1712), 86–87. 20. ​Gordon Thomas, An Examination of the Facts and Reasonings in the Lord Bishop of Chichester’s Sermon Preached before the House of Lords on the 31st of January Last, 5th ed. (London, 1732), 46. 21. ​Fog’s Weekly Journal, no. 214 (December 9, 1732). 22. ​John Garnett, A Sermon Preached before the University of Cambridge, during the Rebellion, at Saint Mary’s Church, on Sunday, October 27, 1745 (Cambridge, 1745), 4. 23. ​George Lavington was particularly concerned about the effect of Methodism’s austerity on ­women, whom he calls “the weaker-­Vessels.” The Enthusiasm of Papists and Methodists Compared, 5th ed. (London, 1751), 193. 24. ​Cicero praised Cato on a number of occasions but also criticized his moralistic severity. For example, see Pro Murena, in Cicero in Twenty-­Eight Volumes, vol. 10, In Catilinam I–­IV; Pro Murena; Pro Sulla; Pro Flacco, trans. C. Macdonald (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 270–271, lines 60–66. W. R. Johnson has argued that Lucan represented Cato not only as a hero but also as a caricature of quixotic virtue (Momentary Monsters: Lucan and His Heroes [Ithaca, NY:

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1650–1850 Cornell University Press, 1987], 35–66). For a specific example of Cato taking virtue to an extreme that could appear ludicrous, see The Civil War, trans. J. D. Duff (London: William Heinemann, 1928), 534–535, bk. 9, lines 379–410. Plutarch gives a balanced portrait of Cato in his biography but also compares him to fruits out of season: “For, as we look upon ­these with delight and admiration, but do not use them, so the old-­fashioned character of Cato, which, ­after a long lapse of time, made its appearance among lives that ­were corrupted and customs that ­were debased, enjoyed ­great repute and fame, but was not suited to the needs of men b ­ ecause of the weight and grandeur of its virtue, which ­were out of all proportion to the immediate times” (Plutarch’s Lives in Eleven Volumes, vol. 8, Sertorius and Eumenas, Phocion and Cato the Younger, trans. Bernadotte Perrin [London: William Heinemann, 1919], 151). I am happily indebted to Nathaniel Wolloch for my awareness of this ambivalence in the classical rec­ord and owe ­these references to his valuable study “Cato the Younger in the Enlightenment,” 62–64. 25. ​Velleius Paterculus, Compendium of Roman History, trans. Frederick W. Shipley (London: William Heinemann, 1924), 151. 26. ​Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, trans. George E. McCracken, vol. 1, Books I–­III (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 101. 27. ​Meric Casaubon, A Treatise Concerning Enthusiasme (London, 1655), 119–120. 28. ​Anthony Horneck, Several Sermons upon the Fifth of St.  Matthew, 2 vols. (London, 1706), 1:135. Horneck died in 1697; this work collects some of his seventeenth-­century sermons. 29. ​Thomas Gale, Sermons Preached upon Several Holy-­Days (London, 1704), 157– 158, 386. 30. ​S[amuel] A[cton], A Sermon Proving Slowness to Anger, the Truest Gallantry (Salop, ­England, [1713?]), 9. 31. ​[Henry More?], Enthusiasm Explained (London, 1739), 24. The En­glish Short-­Title Cata­logue alleges that this work is an abridged variant of Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, first published in 1662 as part of A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings of Dr. Henry More. My own spot-­checking has not been able to verify this conclusively. 32. ​William Guthrie, preface to The Morals of Cicero (London, 1744), xxxv. My quotations from this work reverse roman and italic type. 33. ​Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, vol. 3 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht Strauss (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969), bk. 1, 174. 34. ​David Hume, The Natu­ral History of Religion, ed. H. E. Root (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957), 63. 35. ​James Balfour, Philosophical Dissertations (Edinburgh, 1782), 77. 36. ​Thomas Francklin, Sermons on Vari­ous Subjects, and Preached on Several Occasions (London, 1790), 91–92.

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37. ​Michel de Montaigne, “De juger de la mort d’autrui,” in Essais de Michel de Montaigne, vol. 2, ed. André Tournon ([Paris]: Imprimerie Nationale Éditions, 1998), 447; Montaigne, The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Allen Lane, 1991), 691. For the eighteenth-­century definitions of “furieux,” see Abel Boyer, The Royal Dictionary Abridged (London, 1700). 38. ​[Jacques] Esprit, Discourses on the Deceitfulness of ­Human Virtue (London, 1706), 317, 322. 39. ​W[illiam] Ayloffe, The Government of the Passions (London, 1704), 99. 40. ​Ambrose Phillips, The Free-­Thinker, vol. 1, From Lady-­Day to Michaelmas, 1718 (London, 1722), 37–38. 41. ​Henry Grove, A System of Moral Philosophy, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1755), 2:188. 42. ​John Henley, Cato Condemn’d: Or, the Case and History of Self-­Murder Argu’d . . . ​ (London, 1730), 14. 43. ​Z[achariah] Mudge, Sermons on Dif­fer­ent Subjects (London, 1739), 270. 44. ​M. P. Macquer, A Chronological Abridgment of the Roman History, trans. Thomas Nugent (London, 1760), 440. 45. ​George Lyttelton, Dialogues of the Dead (London, 1760), 69. 46. ​Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley, 3 vols. (Harmonds­worth, UK: Penguin, 1994), 2:552. Gibbon also mentions Cato in a more positive light; for examples, see 1:62, 605; 2:429. 47. ​Abbé [Claude François Xavier] Millot, Ele­ments of History, 2 vols. (London, 1778), 2:104. 48. ​Jonathan Richardson, Richardsoniana; or, Occasional Reflections on the Moral Nature of Man (London, 1776), 150. 49. ​John Mason, The Lord’s-­Day Eve­ning Entertainment, 4 vols. (London, 1752), 4:312. 50. ​George Lyttelton, Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of St. Paul (London, 1747), 69. 51. ​For examples, see Isaac Ambrose, The Compleat Works of the Eminent Minister of God’s Work, Mr. Isaac Ambrose (London, 1701), 504; John Kelsey, Sermons upon Several Occasions (London, 1703), 63; and William Stephens, An Account of the Growth of Deism (London, 1709), 309–310. 52. ​Addison did not insist on flawed heroes with dogmatic rigor. He urged the princi­ ple’s importance during a discussion of epic poetry in which he acknowledged the characters in Paradise Lost as notable exceptions. Addison and Steele, The Spectator, 2:265–266. The flaws in the protagonist of Addison’s own play attracted ­little con­temporary attention. Instead, critics showered Cato with abundant praise, albeit for diametrically opposed po­liti­cal values, claiming him as an exemplar of Whig or Tory princi­ples depending on their own po­liti­cal persuasion. John Dennis was one of the few critics who did find fault with Cato, but he carried his analy­sis to the opposite extreme, alleging that Cato inspired too ­little admiration to excite sympathy. For Whigs’ and Tories’ shared embrace of Cato, see Alexander Pope’s letter to John Caryll, April 30, 1713, in The Correspondence of

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1650–1850 Alexander Pope, vol. 1, 1704–1718, ed. George Sherburn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 1:175. For an example of the Whiggish interpretations of the play, See The Unfortunate General: Or, the History of Life and Character of Cato (London, 1713). For an example of the Tory interpretations, See Mr. Addison Turn’d Tory: Or, the Scene Inverted: Wherein it is Made to Appear that the Whigs Have Misunderstood that Celebrated Author in His Applauded Tragedy  (London, 1713). For Dennis, see “Remarks upon Cato, a Tragedy,” in The Critical Works of John Dennis, vol. 2, 1711–1729, ed. Edward Niles Hooker (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1943), 47–48. 53. ​Though Anglicans propounded this view, non-­Anglicans published their own works that suggested a similar concern with the proper regulation of the passions. See, for instance, the Congregationalist Isaac Watt’s Doctrine of the Passions Explain’d and Improv’d (London, 1732). 54. ​Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 3:305. My use of the female pronoun is not malicious. In The Tatler Addison represents Presbyterianism allegorically with a female figure. 55. ​Edward Stillingfleet, Originae Sacrae: Or, a Rational Account of the Grounds of Christian Faith (London, 1662), 509. According to the En­glish Short-­Title Cata­logue, Stillingfleet’s work remained in print well into the eigh­teenth ­century, with republications in 1701, 1702, 1709, and 1724. 56. ​Richard Theed, Sacred Biography (London, 1712), 131. 57. ​Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, in Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, vol. 1, A Tale of a Tub with Other Early Works, 1696–1707, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939), 95–97. 58. ​Swift, A Tale of a Tub, 108. 59. ​John Tillotson, The Works of the Most Reverend Dr. John Tillotson, 5th ed. (London, 1707), 446–449. 60. ​In Swift’s sermon “On the Testimony of Conscience,” he warned that “very often, through the Hardness of our Hearts, or the Fondness and Favour we bear our selves, or through Ignorance, or Neglect, we do not suffer our Conscience to take any Cognizance of several Sins we commit.” Laurence Sterne published a sermon on the similar topic of “Self-­Knowledge” and led his audience to similar conclusions. He asked his readers, “How hard do we find it to pass an equitable judgment in a m ­ atter where our interest is deeply concerned?” He urged them to answer his rhetorical question with a somber “very,” warning them that “the heart of man is treacherous to itself.” Like Tillotson and Swift, he identifies pride as the ­great impediment to self-­awareness, declaring that from the earliest days, “the reformation of mankind was guarded against on all sides by self-­love.” See Swift’s homiletic remarks in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, vol. 9, Irish Tracts 1720– 1723 and Sermons, ed. Louis Landa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), 150; Sterne, The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, vol. 4, The Sermons of

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Laurence Sterne: The Text, ed. Melvyn New (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 31–33. 61. ​Joseph Addison, The Freeholder, ed. James Leheny (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 202. 62. ​Joseph Addison, The Guardian, ed. John Callahan Stephens (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), 499. 63. ​The play’s love scenes have attracted the notice of other scholars as well. Lisa Freeman analyzes the con­temporary hostility to them as symptomatic of the belief that only male characters w ­ ere proper agents for tragic action, which, according to Freeman, the love scenes violate (“What’s Love Got to Do with Addison’s Cato,” SEL: Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, 1500–1900 39, no.  3 [1999]: 463–482). Richard Terry argues that the love scenes urge the audience to reject a form of Stoicism whose emotional repression would preclude romance (“Revolt in Utica: Reading Cato against Cato,” Philological Quarterly 85, nos. 1–2 [2006]: 129–134). 64. ​For a few examples of eighteenth-­century writers who criticized Cato for pride, see Esprit, Discourses, 309, 311; Phillips, The Free-­Thinker, 1:37; Louise Du Pin, A New Ecclesiastical History of the Seventeenth ­ Century . . . ​ Volume the First (Oxford, 1725), 75; Thomas Newcomb, The Manners of the Age (London, 1733), 38–39; Richard Lucas, An Enquiry a­ fter Happiness, 2 vols. (London, 1734), 1:201; Mudge, Sermons, 282; and John Brown, An Essay on Satire (London, 1749), 11.

53

ROBERT HARLEY AND THE POLITICS OF DANIEL DEFOE’S REVIEW, 1710–1713 ASHLEY MARSHALL

From February  1704 through June  1713, Daniel Defoe wrote some four million

words as Mr.  Review, the moralizing commentator on the state of the En­glish nation and on the balance of power in Eu­rope. Over the course of t­ hese nine years, the Review unceasingly championed “PARTY-­PEACE ” at home,1 the Protestant ­Succession in ­England, the toleration of dissent, and the Protestant interest in Eu­rope; equally consistent are Defoe’s encouragement of trade and impatience with the landed gentry’s insularity and his pontifical sponsorship of the “Reformation of Manners.” What is not stable over the life of the Review is its essential po­liti­ cal outlook: Defoe’s paper begins as moderate Tory and ­until 1708 preaches against party warfare, scarcely mentioning “Whigs” and “Tories”; between 1708 and 1710, Mr. Review is aggressively anti-­Tory and anti–­high church; a­ fter 1710, according to the standard account, Defoe writes as an apologist for his benefactor Robert Harley, which means recommending Tory policies out of sync with his own values. Scholars have explained t­ hese changes in fairly straightforward ways. Much of the best work on the Review is that of J. A. Downie, whose characterization of the journal still represents the consensus: Defoe “consistently propounded the government line, however obliquely,” even when that meant endorsing views other than his own.2 Defoe, in other words, was always writing a pro-­government journal but had to change his emphasis as the makeup of Anne’s administration shifted from moderate to Whig to Tory. Before 1710, ministerial advocacy posed l­ittle prob­ lem for Defoe, who merely had to promote first moderation (­until 1708) and then

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his ­actual, aggressively Whig views. ­After 1710, however, as Harley’s ministry became more and more Tory, Defoe found himself very awkwardly situated, a spokesman for ­causes that in his heart of hearts he opposed: “he had burnt his boats to embark with Harley,” said James Sutherland, “and he must stick to him now what­ever course the minister might steer.”3 This last period of the Review, the problematic Harleyite phase of 1710– 1713, is my principal concern in this chapter. Downie describes the Review as a ministerial organ ­under Harley, addressed to a Whig audience and therefore complementing the Tory-­oriented Examiner, of which Jonathan Swift was in charge from November 1710 to June 1711. In Downie’s telling, the Review was sponsored and often supervised by Harley: it “was the embodiment of Harley’s desire for a periodical that would disperse Government propaganda.” 4 Defoe was, Maximillian E. Novak says, “led gradually to defend all of the government’s actions” and thus “lost ­every princi­ple except defending what must have seemed to him the indefensible actions of his government.”5 For Downie, Novak, and o ­ thers—­including John McVeagh, editor of the only scholarly edition of the Review—­Defoe was Harley’s man, and his journal was chiefly devoted to supporting Harley’s ministry. This consensus has been politely questioned in recent review essays by Nicholas Seager and Brian Cowan,6 and I wish to extend their challenge. A fresh look at Defoe’s Review suggests that it is a good deal more ambivalent t­oward Queen Anne’s last ministry than characterizations of it tend to indicate and that the description of its outlook as pro-­government obscures its author’s increasing caginess and the radicalness of his Whig ideology. What follows begins with an account—­much indebted to Downie—of Defoe’s Review between its inauguration and Harley’s return to power. Subsequent sections focus on the major events and debates of 1710–1713, from the ministerial change and general election of 1710 through the (clandestine and controversial) peace negotiations to end the War of the Spanish Succession. In con­temporary journalists’ discussions of war and peace, they had to take a stand on the Harley ministry, and Defoe’s oblique reflections are impor­tant to how we assess his relationship to that ministry. By way of conclusion, I w ­ ill situate Defoe’s Review alongside Swift’s Examiner; both papers w ­ ere, according to the critical consensus, ministerial mouthpieces, but reading them side by side illuminates their rather considerable ideological differences. Swift was Harley’s man, and he serves as a useful foil to Mr. Review, whose position vis-­à-­vis the incumbent ministry seems much more complex, more shifting, and more ambivalent.

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1650–1850

Mr. Review and the Ministries, 1704–1710 The Review would not have started ­were it not for Robert Harley. On August 9, 1702, Harley—­then Speaker of the House of Commons—­wrote to Lord Trea­surer Godolphin, suggesting the wisdom of “hav[ing] some discreet writer of the Government[’s] side, if it ­were only to state facts right; for the Generality err for want to knowledg[e], & being impos[e]d upon by the storys rais[e]d by ill designing men.”7 Four months ­later, Defoe would publish his inflammatory pamphlet The Shortest-­Way with the Dissenters, sufficiently toxic as to land him in the jug. In April 1703, Defoe appealed to William Paterson, a po­liti­cally connected London merchant: “If you Should Find Room for my Name in your Conversation with the Gentleman I Mention’d, I Suppose I Need Not Name him, If you Find him Enclin’d to have Compassion for One who Offended him Onely b ­ ecause he Did Not kno’ him, Venture in My Name in the Humblest Terms to Ask his ­Pardon,” and so on.8 The “Gentleman” is Harley, who—­very happily for the destitute author of the ill-­advised Shortest Way—­ intervened. The “ambitious” Speaker, as P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens explain, “had realized the potential usefulness of such a skilled writer and, with the assistance of . . . ​Godolphin, he secured his release from Newgate and engaged him as an unofficial agent and adviser.” One component of the deal they struck “was that Defoe should launch a po­liti­cal journal”—­and thus the Review was born.9 Downie was the first to point out, however, that the “discreet writer” whom Harley had in mind, in 1702, was almost certainly not Defoe but his acquaintance William Paterson. Not u ­ ntil the following year did “Harley fi­nally manage . . . ​to convince a reluctant Godolphin that Defoe should be employed by the government,” and even then the role Harley envisioned for Defoe was that of intelligence agent, not writer.10 At some point, Harley clearly changed his mind, and when Mr. Review commenced his journal on February 19, 1704, he intimates that he is beholden to t­ hose above: This Paper is the Foundation of a very large and useful Design, which, if it meet with suitable Encouragement, Permissu Superiorum, may contribute to Setting the Affairs of Eu­rope in a Clearer Light, and to prevent the vari­ous uncertain Accounts, and the Partial Reflections of our Street-­Scriblers, who Daily and Monthly Amuse Mankind with Stories of ­Great Victories when we are Beaten, Miracles when we Conquer, and a Multitude of Unaccountable and Inconsistent Stories, which have at least this Effect, That ­People are possest with wrong Notions of ­Things, and Nations Wheedled to believe Nonsense and Contradiction. (Review, 1:6)

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Defoe’s ­c areer as a journalist, then, began at Harley’s behest and no doubt represented payback for Defoe’s liberation. Upon his release from Newgate, Defoe had addressed himself gratefully to Harley, beseeching his benefactor to make use of him: “It Remains for me to Conclude my Pres­ent Application with This ­Humble Petition that if Pos­si­ble I may By Some Meanes or Other know what I am capable of Doeing” (Letters, 10). In May 1704, three months into his time as Mr.  Review, Defoe would still be expressing his desire that ­Harley e­ ither “find this Neglected fellow Servicable, or at least Make him So” (Letters, 14). The nature and degree of ministerial subsidizing of the Review remain vague. Downie concludes, “It seems virtually indisputable that Harley and Godolphin subsidised the Review through four successive ministries, if only indirectly in that they supplied money by which Defoe was able to placate his creditors.”11 Though other scholars have concurred that Harley “must have” provided funds to launch and maintain the Review, no extant documentation proves this (admittedly likely) conjecture.12 Seager has echoed the consensus that the ministry was “funding the Review; or at least it was funding Defoe, enabling him to keep his creditors at bay.”13 That we lack specific information about the funds Defoe received is unfortunate. The paper we now think of simply as the Review first appeared u ­ nder the title A Weekly Review of the Affairs of France,14 and it was, initially, “a tory organ,” designed “to cajole the moderate tories into maintaining their support for the government’s war-­effort,” partly by “build[ing] up an ‘official’ picture of the might of France.”15 Defoe’s emphasis on “French Greatness” and “French Grandeur” was intended to prove the necessity of defeating this “Terrour of Eu­rope,” but readers ­were alarmed by what seemed like adulation of the ­enemy (Review, 1:22).16 As Godolphin wrote to Harley in June 1704, the author of the Review had to be punished: “this magnifying of France is a ­thing so odious in ­England, that I c­ an’t think any jury would acquit this man if discovered.”17 The Review for July 4th makes clear that Harley had communicated t­ hese anx­i­eties to Defoe; in this apologia, Mr. Review insists that w ­ ere his paper complete, no one would be able to “say I was in the French Interest, or Magnify’d the E ­ nemy too much” (1:220). In a July 7 letter to Harley, Defoe conveys his eagerness to hear “from your Self, that I had Explain’d the Review to your Satisfaction” (Letters, 26). Defoe was duly sanctioned, which meant, Downie suggests, that “Harley had acquired a propagandist and a paper that . . . ​would effectively spearhead the government’s election campaign in 1705.”18

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1650–1850 The contents of the Review between its inception and 1710 are not my concern h ­ ere, but Defoe’s evolving position vis-­à-­vis the p ­ eople in power does need brief summary. The major issue of the 1704–1705 parliamentary session was a new occasional conformity bill, which the high Tories wished to “tack” onto a money bill so as to prevent otherwise-­certain rejection in the House of Lords. Harley enlisted moderate Tories to join with Whigs against this maneuver, and throughout the election campaign of 1705, Defoe championed Harley’s cause, attempting to alienate moderate Tories from the high-­Tory Tackers. Defoe was fiercely opposed to occasional conformity, a ploy he called “playing-­Bopeep with God Almighty,”19 and as Mr.  Review he gleefully, relentlessly, denounced the Tackers, whose “Vile” stratagem was “a most Contemptible, Blind, Ridicu­lous Proj­ect” (Review, 2:175). He encouraged the electorate to not “Choose a Tacker, ­unless you ­will Destroy our peace, Divide our Strength, Pull Down the Church, let in the French, and Depose the Queen.”20 Whenever the ministry benefited from the savaging of high-­flyers, of course, Defoe could oblige with no crisis of conscience. In 1706, Downie maintains, “Defoe was disseminating Harleyite views,” which “­were not shared by his fellow ministers,” and a break with t­ hose ministers was imminent. Though Downie considerably overstates Defoe’s expressed eagerness for “a speedy settlement” of the war—on which more l­ater—he is correct in pointing out that Defoe follows Harley in emphasizing “that the war had been undertaken only to reduce ‘the exorbitant power of France,’ not France itself.”21 While Defoe was promulgating (some of) Harley’s ideas in 1706–1708, he was also serving as an intelligence agent in Scotland and finding his employer frustratingly noncommunicative. Seager’s conclusion seems accurate: “Defoe, not Harley, dictated the content of the Review in volumes three and four [1706–1707], even if he had an eye on ministerial developments and wrote with t­ hese in mind. As much as enemies liked to depict Defoe as the government’s tool, very l­ittle guidance was forthcoming from Harley.”22 In January 1707, Defoe asks his boss to command him “when to Leave this place or how to Govern” himself; the next month, he worries that he has been “Dropt”; in late March, he repeats his desire to know “what Course [he] s­ hall steer next”; in early April, he crossly declares, “I s­ hall no more Afflict you with Sollicitations for your Ordrs. I proceed by my Own Undirected judgemt, Giveing you a Constant Account, and Am forced to take your Long Silence for a Tacit professing your Satisfaction” (Letters, 190, 202, 212, 213, 231). In May, however, he continues his complaint, and on July 19, he dolefully describes

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himself as “One Entirely forgott” (Letters, 225–226). Harley’s only instructions had come on June 12: “write a Letter to Ld Trea­surer [Godolphin] (inclose it to me) proposing Your own Ser­vice & where You can be most usefull” (Letters, 228). Downie ventures that “Godolphin had deprived Harley of his personal propagandist more out of spite, than out of an urgent desire to employ him on his own behalf,” but what­ever the motivation, “For the time being, the relationship between Harley and Defoe was over.”23 So, for a while, was Harley’s government ser­vice; having fallen out with Godolphin and Marlborough, he resigned in February 1708. With Harley gone, Defoe continued to write as a ministerial agent; but now the ministry was Whig all the way, and Mr. Review could be unequivocally Whig in his pronouncements. This indisputably Whig phase of the Review lasted u ­ ntil Godolphin’s fall in August 1710. The new party politics of the Review are clear, as Downie has shown, if one compares Defoe’s election propaganda in 1708 to that of 1705.24 In the previous election, he had carefully distinguished between moderate Tories and extremist Tackers, looking to deprecate the high-­flyers while still appealing to their more reasonable counter­parts. In 1708, ­under the aegis of the Whig junto, he vilified the entire Tory party sans qualification, branding all Tories to be peace-­destroying, union-­breaking, credit-­ruining, queen-­insulting, church-­ threatening, nation-­spoiling, tyranny-­championing, would-be Jacobitical rogues. On May  22, 1708, Mr.  Review ironically instructs his gentlemen readers to vote “­these honest Sort of Folk into this Parliament,” and “you s­ hall soon come to the Perfection of your Endeavours; a Tory Parliament, a Tory Ministry, a Tory Administration, a Tory Peace, a Tory Successor, and Hey Boys up go we; the Revolution, the Succession, the Union, the Toleration, ­shall all receive their due Regulations, and this Nation s­ hall arrive to its immediate State of Bliss THE SHORTEST WAY ” (Review, 5:130). Unlike before 1708 and a­ fter summer 1710, h ­ ere the distance between Mr. Review and Daniel Defoe is largely non­ex­is­tent: the government’s man is ­free both to inveigh against the church party and also to cast aspersions on the notions of a Tory peace while extolling “the ­Thing we call Glory in this War” (Review, 5:119). To “Act Legally,” Mr. Review matter-­of-­factly declares, “is to Act Whiggishly” (Review, 7:388). With Harley’s return to power in August 1710, Defoe was compelled to “make his final and most decisive volte-­face of Queen Anne’s reign.”25 The change in the po­liti­cal landscape necessitated another transformation of the po­liti­cal persona of Mr. Review, and to that shift we need now turn.

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1650–1850

Harley’s Return: Mr. Review on the Ministerial Change By the late spring of 1710, the Whig ministry had become so unpop­u­lar as to make a change inevitable. The duumvirate of Marlborough and Godolphin was determined to continue fighting, but oppressive taxes and the bloodbath at Malplaquet left a war-­weary populace even more fatigued. The bill for the naturalization of foreign Protestants had increased anti-­Whig sentiment, and the queen had lost faith in her counselors. Godolphin fell in August; by September, the dismissal of his ministry was complete; and the Tories routed the Whigs in the October general election. Thus commenced Harley’s tenure as “prime minister,” lord trea­surer, and leader of what he hoped would be a moderate, nonpartisan cohort. In July 1710, obviously anticipating some kind of alteration in the po­liti­cal landscape, Defoe appealed to Harley. He insists on the need for moderation—­“Now is The Time to find Out and Improve ­Those blessed Mediums of This Nations happyness, which lye between The wild Extremes of all Partyes”—­and hails Harley as the man who can “bring . . . ​Exasperated Parties and the Respective Mad-­Men to Their Politick Sences” and heal “the Breaches on both Sides.” He vows to “be Usefull” in this moderating proj­ect if he can, a resolution he would repeat in September (Letters, 270, 271).26 At this point, most scholars have concluded, the Review ceased to be the Whig paper it had been from 1708 to 1710, and its author committed himself wholly to Harley’s cause. Furbank and Owens described the Defoe of fall 1710 as “a would-be Whig and praiser of the old ministry” who found himself “serving the Tories and being swept along with them,” occupying a position that was “hopelessly false.”27 Between 1710 and 1713, as since the beginning of the Review, Downie concludes, “Defoe defended and justified the conduct of the government at all times.”28 What I wish to show is that Mr. Review’s politics u ­ nder the queen’s last ministry are more complicated than t­ hese characterizations suggest. About the ministerial change itself, Mr. Review is ambivalent. What Defoe thought is impossible fully to know. He gave his support to Harley in letters, but when Sunderland was dismissed as secretary of state in June 1710, he was very unhappy indeed about the removal of a man “with the most unblemish’d Character that ever [he] read of any Statesman in the World” (Review, 7:181). On that occasion, Mr. Review voiced his anxiety about further dismissals, and in July he ­professed “the Sense of the Nation” to be against a ministerial change (Review, 7:233). Days before promising his support to Harley, in other words, Defoe—in his capacity as Mr. Review—­was raising alarm about the impending alteration of the

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po­liti­cal situation. Days ­after Godolphin’s fall, Mr. Review seems uneasy but not despairing: “The Government has made Alterations, the Queen is Changing Hands for the Administration, some go out, some come in—­We say, we are sure Honest Men go out—­It is our Business to hope, and Time must Answer, for ­those that come in” (Review, 7:293). He confesses himself “as much concern’d at Change, as any Body” but says that nothing is to be done, and he “­shall therefore say nothing to ­these Changes, on one side nor on the other” (Review, 7:294), except to encourage his readers not to assume the worst and to continue to support credit. Mr.  Review could not, realistically, simply throw his lot in immediately with the incoming ministry; to do so would be thoroughly to alienate his Whig readers and to suggest that he was too much Harley’s man. We cannot, then, conclude much from his unenthusiastic response to the ministerial alteration. The nature of the Review ­after that change is more suggestive. U ­ nder the Whig junto, Defoe was able to write as an antichurch Whig, deeply suspicious of and hostile to Tories of all stripes—­something that he was, significantly, slow to abandon ­after Harley’s reinstatement. As Cowan has rightly noted, “Harley and Defoe ­were perhaps never so far apart as they ­were immediately ­after Harley’s triumphant return to power in the wake of the ministerial revolution and the resounding Tory victory at the polls of the general election in 1710.” Harley was “head of the newly ascendant Tory co­ali­tion,” which meant, among other t­hings, that he “had to embrace the Church of ­England (and hence distance himself from an overly lenient policy ­toward Protestant dissent).”29 As the Tory party took power ­under Harley, Mr. Review was still loudly warning his readership about the dangers of Toryism: on August 15, 1710, a week ­after Godolphin’s dismissal, Defoe bluntly reflected, “I should be very sorry, to see a Tory Administration; I should think it a Melancholy View of ­Things to see the old Game of Persecution, reviv’d among us” (Review, 7:298). Defoe’s Protestant zeal is a crucial component of the ideology of the Review, and his interpretation of the new regime was clearly influenced by his concerns about toleration of dissent. A few days ­later, he directly addressed the ministerial change, holding forth on his expectations about “the New Ministry.” They ­will be, he avers, “of the Queen’s Party”: “The Nature of ­Things is such, the Constitution and setled Stream of our Government is such, they ­shall all be Whiggs in the Management” (Review, 7:305).30 This is a theme for Defoe in the fall of 1710, and his reminders that a just ministry ­will necessarily be a Whig one often read like advice for Harley and his incoming administration. He also wishes, presumably, to assuage fears about the incoming ministry, w ­ hether to please Harley or in the name of fostering peace at home.

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1650–1850 What Defoe does not do, in the fall of 1710, is leave off vilifying the Tories. Downie describes his 1710 election propaganda as “decidedly neutralist”: he “attacked bribery and corruption, lecturing on the abuse of electoral practices in general, rather than spreading the propaganda of one side [or] the other. His stance was Harleyite, as Harley’s scheme necessitated only a marginal election result between the numbers of the two parties.” Mr. Review, he concludes, could not “openly attack the Tories.”31 But in the run-up to and aftermath of the election, Defoe seems anything but neutral. His first direct reference to the elections is on October 5, 1710 (Review, 7:390), and he does appear to be attacking widespread corruption. But what might look nonpartisan in an issue ­here or t­ here reads very differently in context: Mr. Review is unrelenting, in August and September, in his condemnation of the Tories. On September 16, taking no pains to discriminate between moderates and high-­flyers, he defined the opposition thus: “A Tory is a Plunderer of his Country, a Persecutor for Religion, a Bloody Destroyer without Law, a Betrayer of Liberties, and one that w ­ ill give us his Nation to Popery and Arbitrary Power, ­under the pretence of Passive Obedience and Non Re­sis­tance,” he explains, as though supplying a dictionary entry (Review, 7:360). Throughout September, Defoe spills a lot of ink—­with fewer digressions than usual on subjects such as trade and credit—­denouncing the clergy and the “Tory” princi­ples of hereditary succession and passive obedience. And in early to mid-­October, Mr. Review’s pre-­election harangues on bribery and corruption have a distinctly partisan slant, as for example when he expresses his hopes that the Whigs never practice “the abhorr’d Method of the Degenerate Tory” (Review, 7:408). When Defoe sneers at t­ hose who are “on the Dev­il’s Side,” he need not name the party he has in mind: no reader of the Review could be in any doubt (Review, 7:407). In the same issue, he flatly proclaims, “The Tories stick at nothing; they Bribe, Feast, make Drunk, and Debauch the ­People,” and “they regard no Justice, no Truth of Fact” (Review, 7:409). Three days l­ater, he appears to backtrack, condemning both “a Tory, High-­flying Parliament” and “a Hot Whig” one (Review, 7:412), but this quasi-­moderate issue is not typical of the Review in the fall of 1710. As late as the end of November, Defoe could still declare, decisively, that “the natu­ral tendency of Toryism” is “to St. Germains” (Review, 7:486). While Harley is building a Tory—­a moderate Tory, perhaps, but still a Tory—­administration, Mr. Review is routinely proclaiming that the Whigs and only the Whigs are defenders of the Revolution of 1688,32 and the Tories are enemies to it and to the constitution.33 Downie identifies Defoe’s Review and Swift’s Examiner as two periodicals “preaching moderation” in the ser­vice of Harley’s “non-­party” scheme.34 To the

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relationship between Mr. Review and Mr. Examiner we ­will return. For now, I wish simply to point out that to call the Review of the fall 1710 “moderate” is misleading. As scholars routinely observe, Defoe’s “moderation” ­under the Whig junto was immoderate Whiggism, and that did not dis­appear immediately upon Harley’s triumphant return. Throughout the last years of the Review, 1710–1713, as we s­ hall see in due course, Defoe continues to promulgate key Whig notions about power and politics. Where he appears to move more and more in Harley’s direction is on the question of war and peace—­but just how unambiguously supportive of ministerial goals was Mr. Review on this subject?

Mr. Review on War and Peace The Review’s position on the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1713), and the controversial treaty that ended it, is of enormous import: the war dominated En­glish politics from the beginning of Defoe’s journal to the very end. Downie has described the “purpose” of the Review in t­ hese terms: it was meant “to influence En­glish public opinion on the question of the War. . . . ​As t­ here w ­ ere differing views both on the war’s military objectives, and on how ­those objectives might best be achieved, it was crucial that . . . ​the nation should pres­ent a unified front to the threat posed by France. The Review’s task, then, was to support the government line on the war without revealing it to be such.”35 More than half a ­century ago, Lawrence Poston III attempted to offer a more nuanced discussion of Defoe’s take, in the Review, on Harley’s peace campaign, though as far as I can tell, Poston’s analy­sis was mostly ignored by l­ater scholars.36 What exactly does Mr.  Review have to say about the war—­and, eventually, the peace—­and to what extent do his arguments support Harley’s objectives? When Defoe took up his pen as Mr. Review in February 1704, E ­ ngland was three years into the War of the Spanish Succession, which began ­after the death of Charles II of Spain. Charles named as his successor the French prince Philip of Anjou, grand­son of Louis XIV, and Louis proclaimed Philip king, vowing that France and Spain would be united. Fearing a virtually unbeatable Catholic empire, ­England joined the ­Grand Alliance with Holland, Prus­sia, and Austria, all determined to install the Austrian archduke (Charles) as king of Spain. That state of affairs continued ­until the sudden death, in April 1711, of the Austrian emperor Joseph I, Charles’s older b ­ rother. Charles succeeded Joseph as emperor, which meant for many Eu­ro­ pe­ans (including Defoe) that he should not be allowed to take possession of the

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1650–1850 Spanish throne as well. To give Charles both Austria and Spain would—­many thought—be ­every bit as destructive to the balance of power in Eu­rope as a Franco-­ Spanish u ­ nion; earlier advocates of Charles’s accession began instead to clamor for a partition. The Treaty of Utrecht (1713) that ended the war for all allies but Austria—­achieved via clandestine negotiations between ­England and France—­ stipulated that Philip should, ­after all, inherit the Spanish crown, but only on the condition that France and Spain never be united. Our principal focus concerns the period a­ fter Harley’s return to power in summer 1710, but some characterization of Mr. Review’s position on the war before then is useful contextualization. By the time Defoe commenced the Review, ­England was already feeling the effects of the costly conflict, and one of the key aims of the journal at the outset was to remind readers of the dangers of French power in an attempt to renew commitment to the war. Especially in 1704–1705, Defoe is in rallying mode, emphasizing the “mighty Victories” that “have Crown’d [En­glish] Armies” (Review, 1:697) and highlighting the need to thwart France’s desire for “Universal Monarchy” (Review, 1:703). The prevailing theme of the Review, in its first half-­dozen years, is peace at home now and peace abroad no sooner than it can be safely and honorably achieved.37 France, Mr. Review repeatedly warns his readers, ­will not be “soon Conquer’d” or “Easily beaten”: the “French ­will not fly any faster than they are driven; they ­will collect all their Strength to make a Stand, they ­will defend their Frontiers, lose their Ground by Inches” (Review, 2:284, 3:446). Defoe maintains that the object of the war is not to depose “the Government of France, as a Kingdom” (Review, 3:496), but he absolutely supports beating France and beating it roundly. Though he never suggests that the Allies might lose the war, he does frequently caution his readers not to be too confident: “Security in War is the most certain Fore-­runner of Disaster,” and “nothing can be yet certain” in ­these affairs (Review, 4:48). The Allies have been successful, and their conquests must continue: “FRANCE is to be reduc’d by nothing but by Blows” (Review, 4:424). The Allies w ­ ere defeated at Almansa in April  1707 and at Toulon in August, in response to which Mr. Review tries to revive En­glish spirits (Review, 4:473, 492, 497–499, 525). “The t­ hing is plain,” he insists, “have we lost our Men, we must raise more, what should we do? Have we lost our Ships, we must build more? Have we spent the last Years Funds, we must find new Ones?—­The pres­ent War is a just Necessity” (Review, 4:650).38 On the need for “the vigorous Prosecution of this War,” Defoe is emphatic (Review, 4:693). Like most of Defoe’s contemporaries, he wanted a good peace; but he continually warns that peace must not come too quickly, and he glorifies the war in no uncertain terms. To “ruin France,” he decrees, “you must push at him by Land”

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(Review, 4:749). In the run-up to the 1708 elections, Mr. Review speaks ironically of “the wonderful Advantages of a Tory . . . ​Parliament,” which “would put a Speedy End to this cruel War,” insinuating that the peace secured by the high-­flying party would be far from honorable (Review, 5:116–117).39 Elect Tories, only “IF you would make a Peace with France, Higle de Pigle de, as they call it, on French Terms” (Review, 5:139). Throughout the 1708–1710 period, Defoe continues his warmongering, assuring readers that God “smiles upon the Design” of the war and that the ­favor of Providence “should encourage” the En­glish “to go on with it” (Review, 5:465). The war has been bloody, destructive of life and trade, but, he says, “­after all our Thirst of Peace, let me put in one Caution,” namely, that the peace must be both safe and honorable (Review, 4:687). If the Allies cannot yet ensure the “entire Reduction of Exorbitant Power,” then the En­glish “must not be uneasie at carry­ing on the War” (Review, 6:53). On June 2, 1709, Mr. Review eloquently summarizes his position: “we may still carve for our selves” advantageous terms. “And if we cannot do it by a Treaty, we may do it by the Sword—­And we must do it by the Sword” (Review, 6:142).40 Such is Defoe’s stance on the war on the eve of Harley’s return to power. Downie has contended that as Mr. Review, “Defoe urged a speedy settlement” of the war: “The answer was peace. ‘The honest end is peace, and the best reward of victory is peace,’ he advised, ‘an honourable, safe, and lasting peace, which I believe ­every honest man w ­ ill join with me in a petition for.’ ” 41 To believe that the war should end in a good peace is hardly distinctly Harleyite: on November 29, 1710, the very Whiggish Observator, ­after insisting that the queen herself “recommends the carry­ing on the War in all its parts,” also said that vigorous prosecution of that war was the way “to procure a safe and honourable Peace.” Defoe called for eventual peace, but Downie’s quotations, out of context, are unrepresentative and hence misleading. In July 1710, Mr. Review opines, “I do not see us in any Condition for Peace,” and as “it has not been in the Queens Hand to make A PEACE, that is A SAFE Peace. . . . ​Then we must carry on the War” (Review, 7:258).42 In the Review for January 27, 1711 Defoe is adamant: You must not be discourag’d, the War must not be given over—­We are in the War as if it ­were but just now begun, we must not give it over in its beginning, let the P ­ eople that manage it do as they w ­ ill, the War must be carried on, the Quarrel must be pursu’d, the ­Enemy must be push’d to the last Gasp; no Arms can be laid down, no Agreement can be made without Honourable Conditions, and the Time of the Enemies Advantages, is not a Time to expect ­those Conditions. (Review, 7:590)

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1650–1850 This does not exactly sound like urging a speedy settlement. The pamphlet that does the most to push for a quick end to the war is Reasons why this Nation O ­ ught to put a Speedy End to this Expensive War, which appeared on October 6, 1711, and which no contemporaries associated with the Review. Furbank and Owens regard it as “prob­ably” Defoe’s. Abel Boyer thought it to be Swift’s work, and Arthur Maynwaring refused to believe “the author to be a pensioner to the ministry, ‘notwithstanding all ­those airs he is pleas’d to give himself of a familiar Correspondence with them.’ ” 43 Despite some resemblances to the Review,44 with regard to fundamental arguments t­ here are significant differences. The author opens with an emotional plea, a vivid evocation of the “Sufferings and Distresses of [our] Native Land.” Any lover of the country must feel how desperately peace is needed and must lament how the country has “above Twenty Years groan’d u ­ nder a Long and Bloody War.” 45 Such an “incisive and grim” picture of “the plight of the nation a­ fter nine years of war” is poignant46 and entirely unmatched in the Review. Mr.  Review consistently downplays the horrors of war, repeatedly reminding his readers that the price—in blood and in dollars—­has been utterly necessary to pay. The “Bloody War, Heavy War, Chargeable War, Dangerous War” of Reasons is hardly the glorious, worthwhile cause of the Review.47 If this pamphlet is Defoe’s work, then nowhere ­else does he so dwell on the h ­ uman cost of war, the “Many Thousands . . . ​kill’d and wounded,” or on the “Millions of Trea­sure expended.” 48 Missing in Reasons, moreover, is the patriotic swagger of the Review. ­Here, the land wars are described as “trifling Exploits,” which “please” the Allies when they win “a few Inches of the Enemies Ground, bought too dear.” Even some of the “Victories” celebrated by Mr.  Review are described in Reasons as “ruin[ing] us.” 49 In the Review, Defoe is often in rallying mode; ­here, ­England’s forces are depicted as cowardly, so “intimidated” by “the apprehensions of another Autumn Siege . . . ​that the Desertion is as ­great as ever.”50 Though Defoe is cautionary in the Review, reminding readers of France’s might, he never suggests that the Allies cannot carry the day; in Reasons, En­glanders are chastised for having “all along deceiv’d [them]selves with Hopes from the weakness of the French” and for “entirely overlook[ing] [their own] Decay.”51 Downie describes Reasons as complementary of the Review with regard to making a case for peace. “Defoe stressed that peace was the solution,” he concludes, and he “­adopted a variety of personae to drive home the same argument [made in the Review] in a . . . ​number of tracts treating the same theme.”52 But in Reasons as in the Review, the argument for peace is qualified: “Peace is the ­Thing we want,”53 we are told, which is consistent with what all En­glanders believed by

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1711. More contentious w ­ ere the timing and the terms of that peace, as well as the pro­cess by which it was achieved. Reasons reads like the Review in its affirmation that to say that the war should end is not to encourage E ­ ngland to sue France for peace. Neither does it mean that the Allies should “take such Conditions as [France] ­shall impose” on ­England. Instead, the attempt to conclude the war should merely involve “listening to a Treaty with a sincere Desire and Resolution.”54 If France does not offer decent terms, then obviously peace w ­ ill have to wait. Another key stipulation is the partition: “the Author of this believ[es],” he says, “that ­every one ­will grant a Partition of the Spanish Monarchy, appears much more reasonable than ever it did before.”55 My own sense is that Reasons, if it is Defoe’s work, does in fact complement the agenda of some of the Review, though not necessarily in fighting the ministerial fight. Defoe’s primary agenda seems to have more to do with persuading his readership of the wisdom—­indeed, the necessity—of the partition of Spain. That readership is diverse, and his dif­f er­ent personae could conceivably have less to do with Harley than with a desire to convince Whig and Tory audiences alike of the prudence of partitioning Spain. If Reasons ­were written not for the Whiggish audience of the Review but for Tories even more keen for peace, then that would explain the discrepancies between the pamphlet and the journal. Nowhere e­ lse does Defoe belabor the suffering of a war-­torn ­England; nowhere e­ lse does he sneer at ­those who behave as if “Britain was ­under the Tutelage of the Dutch,” as if Holland’s “Politicks w ­ ere the Standard, by which e­ very Step” the En­glish took “was to be tryed.”56 Novak describes Reasons as “intended to give the impression of a national opinion on the side of Harley’s decision to end the war at all costs.”57 I disagree. In neither Reasons nor the Review do we find Defoe urging peace at any cost. In the pamphlet, he seems likelier to be preaching to a choir with whom he does not necessarily agree: he presses for a quick peace as a way of courting readers who want to hear that, in order to make them receptive to what he has to say about the nature of the settlement terms. In the Review, Defoe does not go as far and does not suggest that peace should be secured sooner rather than ­later. The cumulative effect of the Review, at least ­until the publication of peace preliminaries, is to suggest that ­there is glory in war and that France is not yet in a position to offer terms sufficiently advantageous to the Allies. In late January 1711, Defoe explains, “God forbid, tho’ I do not applaud the Method, I should attempt to Discourage the War in General” (Review, 7:592). On February 8, he declares simply, “Taxes are absolutely Necessary to be rais’d; the carry­ing on the War makes that Necessity plain,” and two days ­later he insists

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1650–1850 that he “could easily Convince the World, that this Nation is far from being Exhausted of Funds upon which to raise large Summs of Money” to support the efforts abroad (Review, 7:609, 613). Throughout the winter, he continues to urge En­glanders to take care of national credit, and he clearly links this advocacy with support of the war, reminding his readers of the high stakes involved: “Money is the Sinews of the War; Credit is Money—­Money is the Life and Soul of all our Opposition to Popery, of all our Alliance against France” (Review, 7:626). Mr. Review’s state politics often seem driven by his church politics, and he manifestly read the war as an utterly necessary b ­ attle of Protestant good against Catholic evil. On the subject of the war in general, then, Mr. Review does not exactly do a complete volte-­f ace; the same cannot be said about his position on Spain. The Whigs w ­ ere committed to “no peace without Spain”—no treaty that allowed Philip of Anjou to retain his right to the Spanish throne—­and ­until 1711, Defoe endorsed that proviso unequivocally. In late November  1707, he insisted, “it would be intollerable . . . ​to leave Spain in the Hands of the French, it must not be, cost what it ­will, and hazard what we ­will, we must make no Peace till that be settled” (Review, 4:652). On July 26, 1709, he was just as definitive: “Spain is the only ­Thing we fight for” (Review, 6:255). What is consistent from the beginning of the Review to the end is Defoe’s commitment to the balance of power in Eu­rope, and his demand about the utter necessity of controlling the Spanish succession has every­thing to do with the fear of France’s disproportionate influence. On September 1, 1711, Mr. Review mocked t­ hose who, “Clamouring at the Expence of the War,” propose that the Allies “give up Spain, as a ­Thing not worth the Blood and Trea­sure we expend for it.” To give up “Spain to the House of Bourbon, is a ­Thing so absurd, so ridicu­lous, you ­ought as soon to think of giving up Ireland to them” (Review, 8:325–326). By the end of 1711, however, Mr. Review had changed his mind, arguing not “no peace without Spain” but “no peace without partition”—­ a transformation brought on by the death of the Austrian emperor. On October 23, he asserted, ­“Providence . . . ​­will not permit any other End of this War to be ever made in the World, but that of a PARTITION ” (Review, 8:414). Whereas he had earlier, like most Whigs, unwaveringly demanded that Philip of Anjou be blocked from the Spanish throne, now he argued that “If any of the Spanish Monarchy should be given to King Philip, it should be such Parts, as most interfere with the Interest of France, and serve to make ­those two Monarchies uneasie to one another” (Review, 8:455). Defoe had shifted his position drastically, and the opposition noticed: “they say the French and I argue for the same T ­ hing; the Tory Interest is wrapt up in my Argument” (Review, 8:468). Instead of the old admonitions about French exorbi-

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tance, Defoe begins to sound the alarm about Austria, keen to “prov[e] the Danger of giving the Spanish Monarchy to the [Austrian] Emperor” (Review, 8:472). What had happened to alter his position, Mr. Review recurrently reminds his readers, was that Joseph had died (to the “Surprize of Eu­rope”; Review, 8:84). In his April  28, 1711, issue, he reflects on the prob­lems introduced by Joseph’s death. Charles’s claim to Spain is legitimate, but “if he Enjoys [that] Crown . . . ​and is made Emperor at the same Time, Then that Exorbitant Power” Austria previously enjoyed—­a power that “cost Eu­rope so much Blood and Trea­sure to pull down”—­ will be “at once Erected again” (Review, 8:85). To take Spain from Charles is to “wrong him,” but to give Spain to him and also allow him to be emperor, “you Endanger Eu­rope”; and Defoe’s solution is clear: “If . . . ​you decline all manner of Partition, you resolve never to make Peace, not knowing for certain, that you can always make War” (Review, 8:86).58 Defoe’s advocacy of this strategy is not, in one sense, surprising: the First Partition Treaty of 1698, dividing the Spanish empire, was the (temporary) achievement of Defoe’s hero-­king, William III. If Defoe’s principal concern was Eu­ro­pean balance of power, then his explanation was perhaps honest: circumstances had changed abroad, and the po­liti­cal calculus shifted with that transformation. As Mr. Review counseled on November 13, 1711, “since the Spanish Monarchy is the ­Thing that turns the Scale of Power in Eu­rope, let us tear it in as many pieces as we can” (Review, 8:454). Defoe was hardly alone, among ­those paying attention to the Eu­ro­pean situation, in ceasing to wish to win Spain for Austria in the wake of Joseph’s unexpected demise. As Charles W. Ingrao has shown, the death of the emperor “confront[ed] the monarchy’s allies with the resurrection of the Eu­ro­pean empire of Charles V. Faced with this alternative to a Bourbon succession in Spain, most of its allies lost their enthusiasm for the Habsburg cause in the peninsula.” Even Charles, the Allies’ initial chosen one to succeed in Spain, recognized upon his ­brother’s death that Spain was lost to him.59 Mr. Review’s conversion might well be a ­matter of his (characteristic) adaptation of his arguments to what looked like real­ity. Throughout the Review, Defoe strikes the “what’s done is done” note, and such pragmatic resignation could conceivably be ­behind his reversal on Spain. Mark Kishlansky points out that, by 1711, “war fever had run its course in ­England,” and “the military situation in Spain continued to deteriorate.” The Whigs had wanted “no peace without Spain,” but— he continues—­“ they could not achieve it ­either by arms or by diplomacy.” 60 Mr. Review’s conversion is usually explained, however, not as a genuine reassessment of Eu­ro­pean affairs or as accepting an unsatisfactory new real­ity but in relation to Harley and Defoe’s commitment to advocating the prime minister’s

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1650–1850 preferred policies. Defoe’s response matched the ministry’s, at least that of the more moderate figures within it: ­after Joseph’s death, the queen called an emergency meeting, and the administration “saw an immediate argument for concluding peace without further trying to obtain Spain for the ­future Emperor.” 61 Joseph’s demise was, in some ways, a stroke of good luck for Anne’s ministers, who w ­ ere by the spring of 1711 in secret negotiations with France and increasingly aware that Spain was not to be had for the Allies: “To gather popu­lar support for the eventual abandonment of Spain, the Tory press . . . ​made maximum use of the threat to the balance of power that would be posed by Charles’s succession to both the Spanish and Danubian monarchies.” 62 When Mr.  Review underscores the imminent danger of an Austrian superpower, is he acting as Harley’s man against his own better judgment? Perhaps. Or maybe his recognition of the new real­ity allowed him more comfortably to alter his position, to support the government line without perjuring his immortal soul. A change closer to home no doubt also, eventually, influenced Mr. Review’s stance on Eu­ro­pean affairs. Late in 1711, Defoe was given more reason not to join with the Whigs and endorse their increasingly untenable desire for Spain. In December, says McVeagh, “when the Whigs betrayed the Dissenters over occasional conformity,” Defoe “moved further away from them and their immovable policy of no peace without Spain” (introduction to Review, 8:xviii). The Review for December 20, arguing for a peace that does not turn Austria into a superpower, begins—­ tellingly—­with a rant about occasional conformity, and Defoe associates the persecutors with t­ hose who want foolishly to continue the war (Review, 8:530). But Defoe had become pro-­partition months earlier, a­ fter Joseph’s death, and he did not waver from that position. On September 6, 1712, he asserted “That no Treaty can be carried on, or Peace made by the Parties now in War . . . ​but on the Foot of a Partition of the Spanish Monarchy” (Review, 9:43). Or, as he had observed elsewhere in the fall of 1711, he hoped that “­every one w ­ ill grant a Partition of the Spanish Monarchy, appears much more reasonable than ever it did before.” 63 Furbank and Owens suggest that Defoe’s “attitude had never been the extreme Whiggish one of demanding total victory for the Archduke Charles” and that “he had consistently argued” that the war “must inevitably end in a partition.” 64 But this seems to understate the degree to which Mr. Review’s outlook shifted in the wake of Joseph’s death. He was never gung-ho about Charles, just as he never waxes enthusiastic about the partition or about the treaty that fi­nally ended the war for ­England. Mr. Review is, about the war and the peace at least, eventually more sensitive to what is necessary than futilely clamoring for ideals.65

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Before continuing with changes in the arguments of the Review, something needs to be said about An Essay at a Plain Exposition of that Difficult Phrase A Good Peace (1711). This essay is attributed to “the Author of the Review” on its title page, and its arguments are mostly in line with ­those of the Review. Unlike Reasons why this Nation, it corresponds with Defoe’s known analyses of the war and the prospects for peace. As in the Review, ­here the author emphasizes, “if France does not come up to reasonable ­Things” in ­future peace discussions, then “we are where we ­were. The War goes on, nothing is abated of the Vigour of our Armies.” 66 The confidence of the Review is on display h ­ ere: “The French are not so considerable an ­Enemy, that we should be afraid to Engage with them any farther in the War.” 67 The Essay is not about defending the ministry, and it is definitely not about promoting a speedy peace; it is concerned to champion the partition treaty first made u ­ nder William III. ­Whether or not Defoe was responsible for this pamphlet, it includes some passages that are unlikely to have helped Harley’s cause in 1711. Given the secret negotiations with France, and the need therefore to downplay the French threat to E ­ ngland, Harley could not have been e­ ager to see anti-­French biases inflamed in government propaganda. The author of this piece reminds readers that “The New War began purely on the French side, who made himself Aggressor” and acted “to break [the] Peace” by “Seizing and Taking Possession of the ­whole Spanish Monarchy.” 68 The En­glish had reason to be particularly aggrieved by “the Affront put upon their King, in the King of France setting up a Pretender against him.” 69 If the author of the Essay ­were simply writing on Harley’s behalf, he also made an odd choice in defining the “Foundation for . . . ​a Good Peace” as a commitment to acting in complete concert with all Allies.70 As the pamphleteer insists, “it is not in the Power of any of the Confederates, legally to make Peace, or treat of Peace, without common Consent” of the other Allies.71 At the time this piece was penned, Harley and his ministers w ­ ere of course carry­ing out precisely t­hese secret dealings; e­ ither the author is not trying to downplay the dangers of clandestine dealings, or he is not in the know. What is clear is that the writer responsible for the Essay is not ­doing the minister’s bidding, except in maintaining that “a Peace may be Honourable, tho’ some part of the Spanish Monarchy should remain to the House of Bourbon.”72 As far as we know, this conviction—­that a partition was made necessary by Joseph’s death—­w as genuine, and Defoe’s advocacy of it corresponds with his unqualified worship of William III and that king’s policies. Of course, the promotion of the partition was, ultimately, also de facto a defense of the Treaty of Utrecht, but in 1711, Defoe evidently did not know the precise nature of the negotiations or even that they w ­ ere already taking place.

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1650–1850 One of Defoe’s new arguments, in 1712, does seem to represent a surprising change and cannot ­really be explained except by ministerial advocacy and/or his acute resentment (in the wake of December 1711) of the Whigs. Throughout the life of the Review, and especially as rumors of a separate peace began to circulate, Defoe defended the Allies and insisted that British and Dutch interests had to remain “fast together.” The Dutch, he maintained in April 1709, “have given manifest Proof of their Fidelity to the ­grand Alliance” and ­will “continue so” (Review, 6:62). By February 1712, however, he sounds a lot like Swift had in The Conduct of the Allies, declaring, “It is high Time that we ­either put an End to the War, or that all the Allies oblige themselves to carry it on with us on a more equal Foot” (Review, 8:622). Defoe matches Swift’s authoritative incredulity: “Whoever he is that would have us carry on the War upon any other Foot than this, I confess I cannot Understand him, and would be glad of some of our Wise Politicians, who daily Encourage us to carry on the War, would prescribe some Way how it s­ hall be Rational for us to carry it on, without t­ hese T ­ hings” (Review, 8:624). Some background on what prompted Swift’s and Defoe’s criticism of the Allies is in order. Harley and the equally moderate Duke of Shrewsbury, along with the Jacobite Earl of Jersey, spent the winter and spring of 1710–1711 in preliminary peace discussions with the French minister Jean-­Baptiste Colbert, Marquis de Torcy. Though St. John was long seen as a principal engineer of secret peace, he was in fact kept in the dark for quite a while, chiefly ­because Harley wanted Dutch cooperation and knew that his hot-­headed rival would be disinclined to placate any of the Allies.73 In April 1711, ­after five months of clandestine conversations, the ministry communicated “a skeleton agreement” to the Dutch,74 including only selected details. Harley’s plan was to “pres­ent the Dutch with a fait accompli,” and that their internal difficulties meant he could ignore them throughout the summer of 1711 was a happy con­ve­nience. Meanwhile, Matthew Prior was in Paris proposing peace terms; in mid-­August, he arrived back in London along with the French diplomat and did not go unnoticed. It incited angry suspicions and considerable outcry at home and abroad. Harley met the crisis with composure and characteristic evasion, offering “a guarded and incomplete account” of the proceedings in the hopes that he might “stave off enquiries ­until the preliminaries ­were signed.”75 Only ­those preliminary terms that related to all Allies w ­ ere revealed: the par­tic­u­lar benefits to E ­ ngland w ­ ere left undisclosed, which made the treaty look less advantageous than in fact it was. The Allies w ­ ere outraged. On October 13, the Austrian envoy Count de Gallas published the preliminaries in the (Whiggish) Daily Courant, which predictably incited much activity from opposition pens. The ministry was roundly

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abused for its dirty dealings and betrayal of the Allies, and though Oxford remained cool, some of his colleagues ­were justifiably anxious about the fate of their peace. In November, the situation became more tense, when the Hanoverian adviser published the Elector’s unequivocal protest against the peace preliminaries. Swift’s Conduct appeared in November 1711, in the wake of the Hanoverian memorial against the preliminaries, and his “major task . . . ​was to depict the Allies’ demands in an unfavourable light.”76 Defoe never joins with Swift in blaming the previous ministry (of Godolphin and Marlborough) for mismanagement, but the Review in the fall of 1711—­along with Reasons why this Nation ­Ought to put a Speedy End to this Expensive War—­does reaffirm a number of impor­tant points made in Conduct. Both men accuse the Austrian emperor of selfishly preventing the peace: “the Emperor,” says Defoe, “not the Queen, breaks the Alliance,” selfishly refusing to treat “­unless he obtains all the Spanish Monarchy” (Review, 8:519). Charles, he continues l­ater, “­will part with nothing, and we must fight on till we get him all” (Review, 8:527).77 Like Defoe in the Review, Swift insists that ­those “who are against any Peace without Spain” have simply not considered or in partisan spirit refuse to acknowledge “that the Face of Affairs in Christendom, since the Emperor’s Death, hath been very much changed.” Both Swift and Defoe contend that winning Spain for Austria has become utterly “impracticable.”78 But t­ here are impor­tant differences between Swift’s arguments in Conduct and Defoe’s in the Review. Downie posits that Swift’s influential pamphlet “stimulated a lengthy controversy . . . ​which was carried on for the government chiefly by Defoe,” who not only “prepared the way for the publication of the Conduct” but also “cleared up the mess afterwards.”79 I am not entirely persuaded that Defoe was paving the way for Swift’s anti-­Dutch polemic: three days before the appearance of Conduct, Mr. Review repeated his conviction that “No Breach has ever been made in the Friendship and good Understanding between the En­glish and the Dutch, but it has been a Judgment upon the Protestant Interest in general, a Wounding both Sides, and a Rejoycing to the Popish Interest of Eu­rope” (Review, 8:481). Defoe’s (very occasional) kvetching about the Dutch is swamped by his repetition of their crucial significance to E ­ ngland and to Eu­rope. On February 21, 1712, he refers to “this New Discovery of the Mis-­behaviour of our Allies,” but in the next paragraph he emphasizes that “on a good Understanding between Britain and Holland, depends the Safety of the Protestant Interest in Eu­rope” (Review, 8:643). In June, ­after mentioning the “­great variety of Notions fluttering in the Heads” of the En­glish p ­ eople “about the Dutch,” he concludes resolutely, “it is our Undisputed Interest to maintain a constant, steady Union” with them (Review, 8:831). Defoe

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1650–1850 spends much of the summer warning about a break with the Dutch and about the prospect of war with them, which he feels would be catastrophic.80 He explic­itly addresses the conflict between ­England and Holland, which “set out this Journey together” but now “differ about several T ­ hings, such as the length of the Way, the Expence of Travelling, the Hazards of the Road, the Gain of the Journey, and the like.” Perhaps with Conduct in mind, he concludes that ­those are not “much the wiser, who have spent so much of their Time, and vented so much of their Spleen” on the subject: “their Arguments hav[e] principally serv’d only to exasperate and provoke one Side against another; widen that Breach which t­hese ­Things have made, in the Peace and good Neighbourhood of our ­People at Home, one Side against another, and to raising Feuds, Heats, and Animosities among us” (Review, 8:845). Swift has no use for the Dutch; Defoe highlights the necessity of an alliance with Holland but eventually disparages Austria. Both men denigrate the Allies, but in several re­spects their missions seem dissimilar, partly ­because Defoe’s ultimate commitment is to Eu­ro­pean Protestantism and Swift does not share his terror of Catholic rule. A key disparity between Conduct and the relevant issues of the Review has to do with Defoe’s multiplicity of interests. Swift is calling for peace and attacking the previous ministry for not achieving it and the Allies for not footing more of the bill. He complains that the En­glish “engaged in this War as Principals, when [they] o ­ ught to have acted only as Auxiliaries,” 81 something Defoe—­ convinced that ­England must safeguard the Protestant interest in Europe—­ would never do. Whereas Swift laments that E ­ ngland has “been squandring away [its] Mony upon the Continent,” Defoe never hesitates in his confidence that the funds—­where they could be raised—­were well spent, however high the sum. Swift spills a lot of ink on Dutch failures to contribute money and men to the war cause, zealously detailing “that ­whole Chain of Encroachments made upon [the En­glish] by the Dutch.”82 Defoe makes the point (quoted earlier) that the Allies need to do their part, but that charge never becomes a dominant theme in the Review; and when he does target the Allies, he does so without singling out Holland. When Swift censures the Dutch, moreover, he does so to point out the necessity of peace; Mr. Review, on the contrary, says that ­either ­England must “put an End to the War” or the Allies have to increase their support (Review, 8:622). Defoe repeatedly asserts that to refuse to give Spain to Austria does not mean giving it to France, which would be ­every bit as “Ruinous and Destructive” (Review, 8:435). His bottom line is that the Allies are ­under no “Necessity . . . ​to give the ­whole Spanish Monarchy ­either to one or other of the two Competitors” (Review, 8:493).

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Swift says l­ittle about France or about the danger of French power. What he does suggest, blandly, is that “To have a Prince of the Austrian ­Family on the Throne of Spain, is undoubtedly more desirable than one of the House of Bourbon”—­not Mr.  Review’s position by any means.83 The forceful final pages of Conduct are devoted to disproving the arguments made by the “no peace without Spain” Whigs: Swift is principally concerned to show that ­England should have peace, period, and that winning Spain for Austria is simply impossible. Defoe’s mission is quite dif­fer­ ent: he contends, at length, that “no peace without Spain” cannot mean relinquishing another throne to the emperor, and the dominant theme of the Review in t­ hese months is the need to prevent an indomitable Austrian empire. Defoe advocates ­either acceptable partitioning now or the continuation of the war ­until such is pos­si­ble—­a continuation that would appall the author of Conduct. Mr. Review’s criticism of the Allies, then, seems almost incidental in context, and though he does argue that ­England should listen to France’s peace terms, he constantly reminds readers that to hear France out is not to accept its terms. On January 1, 1712, he remarks, “­Those who think ­every Man that Argues for a Treaty, Argues for a Peace; and e­ very Man that argues for a Peace, Argues to give Spain and the Indies to King Philip, are meer Mad-­Men” (Review, 8:552). Defoe concedes that the Allies should treat with France, in other words, but never without also observing that treating is a pro­cess and that to treat is not to make a truce. To describe Conduct and the Review as serving the same cause is misleading. As Downie observes, moreover, Defoe sometimes “deliberately wrote against the government, especially ­after the appearance of the Conduct of the Allies,”84 a fact that should give us pause if we are trying to read Mr. Review as mere ministerial mouthpiece. Defoe’s response to the Treaty of Utrecht is also revealing. Triumph ­there is none, which is surprising, if we understand him as one who “pleaded for peace with the air of an enthusiast.”85 He is resigned, perhaps relieved, but more clearly regretful and revealingly noncommittal: “I do not say in all this, that I approve or disapprove of the Peace, and tho’ it be not to the purpose, I am very ­free to say, I wish the Scheme of Peace could have been made on better Terms, yet am glad it is not made upon worse” (Review, 8:888). In March 1713, he avows that he “aim’d at a another kind of Peace than ­either is made, or ever was a making,” and that last phrase seems impor­tant (Review, 9:279).86 In An Appeal to Honour and Justice, his apologia pro vita sua published in 1715, he reflected in similar terms: “No Man can say that ever I once said in my Life, that I approv’d of the Peace. . . . ​I did not like the Peace, neither that which was made, nor that which was before a making; . . . ​I

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1650–1850 thought the Protestant Interest was not taken care of in e­ ither. . . . ​[T]he Peace I was for, was such as should neither have given the Spanish Monarchy to the House of Bourbon, or the House of Austria.”87 Novak concludes that, though “Defoe was eventually to write anti-­war propaganda for Harley, he was certainly not convinced of its wisdom.”88 This is true, and we can go further: Mr. Review seems committed to the war effort u ­ ntil late in the game and is never comfortable with or hopeful about the peace t­ oward which the queen’s last ministry was working.89 Throughout the clandestine peace negotiations and during the public proceedings, both Mr. Review and Mr. Examiner address the charges against the ministry, accusations of abandoning E ­ ngland’s allies, conceding too much to France, and being in league with the Pretender. Swift is in defense mode, contemptuously mocking the Whig notion that the new ministers are “Jacobites and High-­flyers, who are selling us to France, and bringing over the Pretender.” He brands the rumors about “the pres­ent Ministry” to be “rude Invectives,” partisan and patently false, and he affirms Harley’s “Flourishing Ministry” to be “belov’d by the P ­ eople” as well as approved by the queen.90 Swift is relentless in his abuse of the Whigs, and he ridicules all accusations against the current administration to be entirely baseless, even preposterous. Mr. Review’s responses to antiministerial objections are of another sort. He never definitively denies allegations about clandestine dealings, for example, but he continues an interrogative tone. “­Were t­ here any vis­i­ble appearance of a such a Treaty on Foot; ­Were we in any danger of taking this Scandalous Step,” he opines, “I might enter a l­ittle into the Dishonourable part of it, and shew how nothing but Treachery to the Government, and a vis­i­ble Partiality to France, could bring us to any such ­Thing” (Review, 8:186). H ­ ere as elsewhere, Defoe might well be exhorting the ministers themselves, warning them of how perfidious such secrecy would be. In any case, the effect of this kind of statement is not to suggest ministerial innocence but to highlight the dishonor involved. He l­ater maintains, still somewhat provisionally, “if the pres­ent Ministry, together with Her pres­ent Majesty, are unfeignedly in the Interest of the Protestant Succession, and should go on to make it clear . . . ​past the Cavils of the Town, that they are so, as I own I always believ’d they would,” then the government’s opponents w ­ ill have to admit their error (Review, 9:329). On January 5, 1712, Mr. Review is at his most defensive: “This Clamour of a Separate Treaty with France, is Calculated to answer abundance of Ends among the common P ­ eople.” What follows, though, is a rather feeble claim that t­ here could not be “Separate Engagements of any kind” b ­ ecause the queen promised t­ here

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had not been (Review, 8:560). When, ­later, he once more denies secret negotiations, he repeats that Anne had given her word, defending monarch, not ministry. He uses questions, not statements: “­Will you believe . . . ​that your Queen can Lye unto God?” and—in the next issue—­“Do you imagin[e] she believes t­ here is a God, a Sovereign Judge, to whom Kings and Queens must Account?” (Review, 8:576, 581). Again, Mr. Review sounds not so much like he is vindicating Anne but like he is putting her and her ministers on notice: to enter into closet dealings with France is to betray E ­ ngland and the Almighty Himself. Another line of defense is equally noncompelling and also reads like admonition: “One of the Reasons why I cannot be afraid of the Terrible Ideas some P ­ eople have form’d to themselves, that this Treaty ­shall Issue in a betraying us to France, is this; I do not see the Advantage any Ministry can propose by Concessions to France, when they may have Peace without them” (Review, 8:569). What Mr. Review does not do, on any occasion, is proclaim the ministry to be faithful guardians of the Protestant Succession protecting the Allied cause. Defoe cannot, of course, make any allegiance to the pres­ent ministry too clear, and he never writes against Harley or lends credence to imputations of mismanagement or treason. In late May 1712, moreover, Mr. Review nominally defends the ministry in the wake of a particularly controversial maneuver, one that bothered even the government’s defenders. Convinced that a peace agreement was imminent, St. John (prob­ably along with Harley) had issued the so-­called restraining ­orders, directing the Duke of Ormonde—­Marlborough’s successor—to refuse to engage in offensive combat against the French army. The o ­ rders ­were, in Edward Gregg’s phrasing, “tantamount to a British desertion of the allies in the field.” 91 The cumulative result was a French victory at Denain that effectively ended Dutch re­sis­tance to the Tory peace. Defoe is characteristically cautious in his report: As it is said, our General has positive O ­ rders not to Fight—­Or, as it was better expressed in the Parliament-­House, not to act offensively. . . . ​For my part, this is a ­Thing I ­shall meddle ­little with it, at least yet. . . . ​You say the Peace is made, you are satisfied it has been Sign’d a ­great while ago, and the like—­Well, and supposing that to be true, Would you have had the Queen then have Murther’d Ten Thousand Men in a B ­ attle?” (Review, 8:828) This is a defense of sorts, though a cagey and qualified one; “at least yet” seems a telltale addition. Defoe cannot, given his Whig audience, go as far as Swift in warmly absolving the ministry of all wrongdoing—­but the tepidity of his defenses does need to be acknowledged.

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1650–1850 When Mr. Review addresses the disturbing rumors about Harley’s administration, the effect of his remarks is never to diminish suspicions. He instead has a tendency to cata­logue the charges in a way that calls them back to mind, a tendency that has the same effect as apophasis. Though he nominally rejects the accusations, his rejection is usually tentative, and the memorable part of his discussion is not denial but the description of what he is putatively denying. Take this short example, from the last volume of the Review: “I do confess I do not see the Danger of French Tyranny, French Management, and a French Pretender in the pres­ent Peace;—­I do not say it may not be so, but I do not see it” (Review, 9:195). What Defoe actually thought is another ­matter. As Seager has recently argued, Defoe could perform “incredulity” about the Tory ministry’s Jacobite leanings that he did not actually feel: “he evidently had his doubts about Anne’s intentions,” Seager suggests, and even “urged Harley to request the queen to discourage the Jacobites” publicly. Defoe not only worried about their position vis-­à-­vis the Jacobites but also felt “­eager to push his po­liti­cal masters, including the queen, to more explicit positions.” 92 In t­ hese last years of the Review, Defoe often adopts a “what do I know” pose incongruous with the swagger he displays elsewhere. In January 1712, he reflects, not cheerfully, “The Treaty is now begun, what the Terms ­shall be, I ­shall no longer Debate” (Review, 8:598); in June, he writes, “it is not for me, or any in my Station, to meddle with the Articles” of peace (Review, 8:842). At the end of the summer, he continues his show of ­humble unexamining: “I do not enquire why we have drawn out of the War, or w ­ hether we have done well or ill in it: I thank God that is none of my Province” (Review, 9:17). The impression one gets from t­ hese passages is that Defoe feels comfortable neither defending nor attacking the peace terms, and this reluctance to swing one way or the other is odd. ­Either he felt that—­because of his Whig audience—he could not indulge in too much vindication, or he was constrained by his position vis-­à-­vis the government from expressing overmuch dissatisfaction. What does all of this suggest about Mr. Review’s position on war and peace? Though Defoe repeats the cliché that the end of war is peace, he never seems to waver from the position that the war should be carried on—­with more allied assistance—­until suitable terms can be secured. When the treaty is fi­nally signed, his response is a combination of muted disapprobation and telling disengagement. At no point does he target the ministry—­that is clear. His gratitude ­toward Harley and his desire for any government subsidy he could get no doubt prevented him from voicing serious reservations even when he felt them. But one has to won­der,

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given the qualifications and the omissions, w ­ hether Defoe was not, in the Review of t­ hese years, playing a very characteristic double game. Could he conceivably have been saying what he could in ­favor of the ministry while also communicating the (not unreasonable) charges against them? Or paying lip ser­vice to the need for peace while urging ­England to fight on? Seager describes the author of the Review as “ingenious but dependent,” and that strikes me as exactly right.93 His volte-­face on the Allies and his fearmongering about Austria led the opposition to brand him a turncoat, and ­those charges have encouraged scholars to regard Mr. Review as an unprincipled ministerial pen.94 What I wish to suggest is that, though Defoe prob­ably did serve Harley’s cause when he could do so without totally abandoning his principal commitments, he was not simply a groveling hack robotically endorsing the government line.

Swift versus Defoe: The Ideology of the Review The differences between Swift and Defoe are a good deal more obvious than their similarities. Defoe, among the most out­spoken Whigs and dissenters, was a ­family man, a champion of William III, bankrupt more than once, and a defender of the Scottish presbytery who wrote vehemently against toleration of Scottish Episcopalians. Swift, the Tory churchman, denounced dissenters of all stripes, maintaining that the Presbyterians and other non-­Anglican Protestants w ­ ere more dangerous to E ­ ngland than even the Catholics; his attitude t­oward William was lukewarm at best; he was prob­ably never married and did not reproduce; he prided himself on being able to save money and in fiscal terms lived comfortably. In temperamental, partisan, ideological, and authorial terms, the two are radically unalike. Only at the end of Anne’s reign are they ever described as (uncomfortable) bedfellows, both agents of Harley: Mr. Examiner and Mr. Review, as Downie and ­others have described them, ­were spokesmen for the ministry, addressing distinct audiences in complementary ways. In 1715, the Whig historian John Oldmixon reflected that “Foe and Swift [­were] fellow Labourers, in the Ser­vice of the White-­Staff,” 95 a conclusion that follows Oldmixon’s account of France, Austria, and the Spanish crown. Swift’s Examiner and the Review overlapped between early November 1710 and June 1711. What is the relationship between ­these two “ministerial” papers? Writing as Mr. Examiner in the wake of the ministerial change, Swift made no secret of his country Tory allegiances and appealed without exception to the landed gentry. At this time, Mr. Review is supposedly in his most Tory guise, attempting to

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1650–1850 make Harley’s case on war, peace, and debt to an unreceptive Whig audience. Defoe was, in the run-up to the 1710 general election, sounding alarms about the dread prospect of Tory dominance and complaining bitterly about the days of “Slavery and Subjection to t­ hese Men of Land” (Review, 8:100). Swift was triumphantly branding the Whigs “the declining Party,” “Peevish” and “Splenatick” ­because utterly “ruin’d” (Examiner, 1, 3). While Mr. Review is assuring his readers that the ministry ­will “act . . . ​as Whigs” and mocking Tory attacks on the Whigs (Review, 7:449), Mr. Examiner is drubbing all Whigs and particularly t­ hose who claim to be moderates (Examiner, 22). In Swift’s telling, the Whigs “endeavour . . . ​to ruin the Credit of the Nation” (Review, 8:179)—­exactly the reverse of Mr. Review’s position, which has the high-­flyers largely responsible for this decline. Swift’s principal aim was to defend the new ministry and denounce the Old Whig one led by Godolphin. A significant part of his role is to vindicate the ways of Anne to Whigs—­“ they charge upon the Qu[een], for changing Her Ministry in the Heighth of a War” (Review, 78:377)—by depicting Harley’s regime as protective of monarch and subjects and country. Reading the Examiner for t­ hese months alongside the Review makes con­spic­u­ous how reticent Defoe is on the virtues of the new guard. On February 1, 1711, Mr. Examiner boasts about “a Flourishing Ministry, in full Credit with the Q[uee]n, and belov’d by the P ­ eople,” who act “with no sinister Ends or dangerous Designs, but pursue with Steddiness and Resolution the true Interests of both” (Examiner, 211). This kind of unequivocal affirmation is characteristic of the paper, and—­partly ­because Defoe had to appease a more Whig audience—­entirely absent from the Review. ­There are some similarities between the Review and Swift’s Examiner, though the correspondences have been overstated. Nominally, Swift and Defoe do Harley’s work of “moderation”—­though Swift does so very briefly. Even where they seem to marginalize extremes on both sides of the party divide, neither man strikes one as middle-­of-­the-­road. Both depict Anne in a favorable light, but Defoe’s insistence to his readers that she is “a Revolution Queen,” committed to protecting the constitution, sounds as much like a warning to her as it does warm reassurance to her p ­ eople (Review, 7:551). Defoe agrees with Swift in endorsing “the general Notion, that standing Armies in Time of Peace, are dangerous to the Liberties of the Country they are maintain’d in,” but unlike Mr. Examiner, he accepts that ­England needs to maintain some “Regular Forces” or risk being “quite naked to the Insults of [its] Enemies.” Swift would never subscribe to the notion that “SOME FORCE—is as necessary to secure a Kingdoms Property, as too much is dangerous to its Liberty” (Review, 5:11). Mr. Examiner and the Mr. Review of spring 1711 concur

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that Spain is no longer winnable for the Allies, though Swift has less to say against Austrian power than does Defoe. Swift is also ­eager to end the war at any cost, whereas Defoe, as we have seen, is prepared to fight u ­ ntil optimal terms can be achieved. On several issues, Mr. Examiner and Mr. Review clash.96 Defoe tirelessly makes his case for the naturalization of foreign Protestants, maintaining that “Opening the Nations Doors to Foreigners has been the most direct and immediate Reason of [its] Wealth and Increase” (Review, 5:669). “Are ­there,” he asks, “no Protestants in the World but of the Church of ­England?” (Review, 8:703). Defoe always argued that “the Encrease of Hands in a Nation is [its] Wealth and Strength” (Review, 6:198). Swift mocks this view, noting the folly of ­those who “take it into their Imagination, that Trade can never flourish u ­ nless the Country becomes a common Receptacle for all Nations, Religions and Languages” (Examiner, 129–130). Swift takes pains to distinguish between the Old Whigs and their corrupt “new” counter­ parts, a differentiation to which Defoe takes furious exception: “this is to make an irreconcilable Breach among the Whigs as [the Tories] call them, upon a new Notion of Old Whig and New Whig” (Review, 6:504). The distinction is merely a partisan attempt “to dissolve [the] Confederacy” of Whigs: “It must be for a Lamentation, that ­these Distinctions have prevail’d so far, and that some are so warm upon the Division, that they cannot see the Hand that divides it.” But the Tories’ efforts ­will fail, since “Old Whig and Modern Whig . . . ​­will upon all Occasions joyn against Tackers and High-­Flyers” (Review, 6:506). His repeated complaint about “the scandalous and foolish Terms of Old Whig and New Whig” (Review, 6:517) represents a suggestive context for Swift’s efforts in the Examiner to separate the good Old Whigs from the villainous new ones. A distressing event occurred on March 8, 1711, and the differences in Mr. Examiner’s and Mr.  Review’s reports on it are worth noting. During a Privy Council meeting on that day, the French refugee the Marquis de Guiscard—­there to be interrogated on suspicion of treason—­stabbed Harley with a penknife. Swift recounted the event of the “Assassin” at ­great length on March 15, in hyperbolic fashion declaring it “not to be parallel’d by any of the like kind we meet with in History,” including the murder of Caesar (Examiner, 298). Problematically, Swift added that Guiscard had “confessed in Newgate, that his chief Design was against Mr. Secretary St. John” (Examiner, 303)—­a lie, the source of which was almost certainly St. John himself, emerging as a rival to the lord trea­surer and resentful of his celebrity in the wake of the stabbing.97 Swift’s naïve falsehood has puzzled scholars, who tend to imagine Mr.  Examiner more devoted to the moderate

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1650–1850 Harley than the hot-­headed high Tory St. John. Defoe was certainly more on Harley’s side, and though he almost never mentions St. John by name, he does attack the October Club, of which St. John was a prominent member. The October men ­were Harley’s high-­church enemies, hostile to his moderation and keen to bring him down. On April 14, 1711, Defoe rebuked the “Gentlemen of October” and branded “Count Guiscard . . . ​an October Man.” As Guiscard stabbed Harley, “so t­ hese would stab . . . ​the ­whole Nation” (Review, 8:57, 59). In the immediate wake of the near murder, Mr. Review had also associated “French Assassinators” with “French-­October Men,” linking the attack on Harley with “an Attempt upon the Queen, and an Insult upon the ­whole Nation” (Review, 7:664). The Whig Defoe, in other words, capitalizes on the stabbing to continue his assault on the high-­flyers. Conceivably, Swift—­ the Tory Mr. Examiner—­was tempted to identify St. John as the intended victim as a way of responding to such anti-­Tory interpretations of the crisis. More in­ter­est­ing than Swift’s and Defoe’s disagreements about specific issues is the more fundamental difference in the po­liti­cal ideologies of the Review and the Examiner. Seager has described Defoe as having “had run-­ins with the Examiner,” 98 but “run-­ins” does not do justice to the conflict between their views of power and authority. Mr. Examiner is emphatically Tory, unwaveringly authoritarian; his paper defends the royal prerogative against incursions from below. In number 36, striking a familiar note, he deems the Whigs dangerous precisely ­because they “do not think the Prerogative to be yet sufficiently limited” (Examiner, 345). Throughout the Examiner, as elsewhere in Swift’s pre-1714 canon, he places a premium on obedience; he takes for granted that subjects should obey except in the most extreme cases, and he underscores, dramatically, “the dismal Consequences of Re­sis­tance” (Examiner, 404). He often faults the Whigs for believing that “the Person of the Prince may, upon many Occasions, be resisted by Arms,” blaming this mind-­set for po­liti­cal instability and other forms of decline (Examiner, 345). For Mr. Examiner, good Tories—­the true “Friends to the Constitution”—­recognize “a supream, absolute, unlimited Power, to which Passive Obedience is due” (Examiner, 457, 317). Mr. Examiner, in short, scorns civil liberties, preaches the dangers of popu­lar encroachments on the royal prerogative, celebrates obedience, and insinuates the wisdom of the maxim that the king can do no wrong. Defoe, of course, was appalled by all of ­these notions. The Review promulgates a po­liti­cal vision that is always Whig in its essentials: the queen is admired as long as she operates within the bounds of the constitution, parliamentary prerogative is invoked repeatedly, and passive obedience is deplored as blasphemous, a

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“Cheat with which [Tories] have mock’d God and . . . ​King.” Defoe ridiculed the Tories for their “abject Slavish Princi­ples,” their “Non-­Resisting Banter,” their “Passive Subjecting the Laws to the W ­ ill and Lust of a Tyrant,” and so on (Review, 7:618). In March 1711, Mr. Review takes issue with t­ hose who “deny Parliamentary Limitation of the Crown,” a limitation he never tires of reaffirming (Review, 8:14). Defoe’s belief that “It is the Undoubted Right of the Parliament of ­Great Britain, to Limit the Succession of the Crown” is not surprising (Review, 9:55). What is worth noting is how often he feels the need to remind his readers of this truth and just how keen he is to protect parliamentary prerogative. In this re­spect, he resembles Mr. Examiner not a whit. Defoe repeats his point about the bounds of royal power e­ very bit as often as Swift maintains the criminality of t­ hose who think the p ­ eople have a right to direct their queen (see, e.g., Examiner, 375). “Passive-­Obedience, Non-­Resistance, and the Divine Right of Hereditary Succession,” Mr. Review forcefully concludes, “are inconsistent with the Rights of the BRITISH NATION , (not to examine the Rights of Nature) inconsistent with the Constitution of the BRITISH GOVERNMENT, inconsistent with the Being and Authority of the BRITISH PARLIAMENT, and inconsistent with the declar’d essential Foundation of the BRITISH MONARCHY ” (Review, 6:592). Defoe obsessively denounces hereditary succession and “the Clan of Jure Divino Bigotts” who defend it (Review, 7:331). He repeatedly and passionately criticizes the idea that “Submission to the Absolute W ­ ill of the Prince is our Duty”; if it ­were, he asks, why bother to “Choose Representatives,” and “Of what use is a Parliament?” (Review, 7:428). Taking exactly opposite the view of the Examiner, he declares “it Criminal for any Man to assert, The Illegality of Re­sis­tance on any Pretence what­ever” (Review, 6:593). Over and over again, Defoe expresses his incredulity that an “Age should be doz’d with the Witchcraft of a Party, to deny the Lawfulness of Re­sis­tance in Cases of Tyranny and Oppression” (Review, 6:605). He impugns the “High-­Flying Party,” who so zealously preach “the Doctrine of Re­sis­tance . . . ​that nothing but Resisting them, ­will Answer them” (Review, 7:137). Defoe’s notions about re­sis­tance ­were not middle-­of-­the-­road but radical. Cowan’s conclusion seems spot-­on: “Defoe’s fervent defense of re­sis­tance theory in his journalism, especially during the excited debates on the topic during the Sacheverell crisis of 1709–1710, has not received as much attention from historians of po­liti­cal thought as one would expect. Nor is it compatible with a picture of Defoe as a po­liti­cal ‘moderate’: his views of re­sis­tance and revolution w ­ ere much more radical than ­those of many Whigs.” Cowan explains that Defoe believed not only that the “re­sis­tance shown in 1688 was legitimate” but also that “it could be

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1650–1850 used again,” whereas even a good Whig such as Robert Walpole tended “to define the Glorious Revolution as an exceptional, almost unique and unpre­ce­dented event.” 99 Swift became much more negative about the Revolution and its effects ­after the Hanoverian accession—­but, as I have argued elsewhere, his comments on 1688–1689 are almost invariably unenthusiastic or ambivalent.100 In the Examiner, he is characteristically tepid about the results of the Revolution: “when the Crown was new settled” in 1688–1689, “it was hoped at least that the rest of the Constitution would be restored. But this Affair took a very dif­fer­ent turn” (Examiner, 358). Swift’s grudging commentary on the Revolution runs directly c­ ounter to Defoe’s take, which his contemporaries found—­says Cowan—­“one of the most shocking and salient aspects of his writing.”101 In ideological terms, if not always in topical ones, the Review shares nothing with the Examiner beyond ­those commonplace convictions that all of Defoe’s contemporaries accepted. This is not surprising, of course: no one has suggested that Defoe’s and Swift’s politics are similar. But the tendency has been to connect the po­liti­cal missions of the Review and the Examiner, and d ­ oing so obscures the drastic discrepancies between the outlooks they reflect. The characterization of Swift as an Old Whig who “accepted that the ‘­people’ had the right to resist tyrants, and professed to believe in the contractual theory of monarchy” has to some extent enabled scholars to read the Examiner and the Review as complementary components of Harley’s impressive propagandistic machine.102 So has the usual description of Mr. Review as Harley’s pen, a sellout who ­after 1710 abandoned his princi­ples to help his benefactor’s cause. What reading the Review alongside the Examiner demonstrates, among other t­ hings, is that though Defoe does occasionally do the ministry’s work, he does so rather by the way, while also promulgating theories of power that are decidedly and radically Whig. Another conclusion to be drawn is that Harley was apparently counting on his propagandists to champion specific issues of policy, not to disseminate ideology. Reading the Examiner along with the Review brings another impor­tant quality of the latter into sharp relief: the consistent centrality of religion to its mission. Mr. Review sees himself as a guardian of toleration (for Protestant dissenters only) at home and of the Protestant interest abroad, both of which he apparently perceived as threatened u ­ nder the Oxford regime. Cowan usefully highlights Defoe’s and Harley’s “differences on religious policy” and Defoe’s sense of betrayal over the Occasional Conformity Act, passed ­under Harley in November 1711.103 Defoe had further cause to feel disaffected from the Harley ministry ­after the Tories succeeded in repealing the bill for the naturalization of foreign Protestants (1711).

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­ ngland’s attitude ­toward Protestantism was of the utmost importance to Defoe, E and ­these changes in policy ­under his patron surely rankled; from Defoe’s point of view, such changes w ­ ere dangerous, weakening the Protestant cause in Eu­rope and strengthening the Catholic one. Add to this Defoe’s obvious anx­i­eties about Harley’s peace settlement and all it left to France, and the view of the Review as unproblematic government mouthpiece looks less and less plausible.

Defoe and Harley’s Ministry What, then, was Defoe’s role vis-­à-­vis Harley’s ministry? Exactly what he was trying to accomplish throughout t­ hese nine, ever changing, po­liti­cally fluctuating years is very difficult to say. Results are easier to characterize than intentions. The cumulative effect of the Review ­after 1710, I have tried to demonstrate, is not resoundingly defensive of the ministerial cause. To some extent, as Downie reminds us, Defoe could not afford too obviously to promote Harley’s cause without discrediting himself and rendering him propagandistically useless. But the assumption that Defoe was simply trying, subtly and covertly, to win the Whigs over to Harley’s cause is not as compelling, fi­nally, as the conclusion that he was making concessions to that cause while also working to achieve his own polemical ends. The passage of the occasional conformity bill in 1711; Defoe’s veneration for the old ministry supplanted by Harley’s new one; and his oft-­repeated desire to give France such a thumping as to guarantee good terms for the Allies—­all of ­these make his total, unwavering support of Harley highly unlikely. He was no doubt sincerely grateful to the G ­ reat Trickster, and naturally he would have been delighted to continue to take payments for his efforts; but Defoe did not share Harley’s politics, especially circa 1710–1711.104 To call the Review oppositional would be wrong, but to call it a clear-­cut ministerial organ is nevertheless misleading. Mr. Review is much cagier than one would guess from reading most discussions of his paper during its last phase. Defoe’s liking and admiration for Harley has been sometimes overstated. Novak takes issue with the “odd notion” that “Harley and Defoe got along well ­because they w ­ ere very much alike,” and rightly so. Defoe, he continues, “prob­ ably felt grateful for Harley’s decision to f­ ree him from prison, but he could not have been entirely happy with his subservient position and with having to beg Harley for his secret ser­vice money. Their relationship always had a certain edge to it.” Novak describes Defoe as “play[ing] the card of sincerity” with Harley, a

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1650–1850 reading that entirely corresponds with what we know about this slippery, zealous, skillful prevaricator, the man whom the nineteenth-­century biographer William Minto styled, with reason, “perhaps the greatest liar that ever lived.”105 Defoe’s public and private writings do not reflect a uniformly positive attitude ­toward Harley’s ministry. I have already discussed his doubts about Anne’s intentions—­vis-­à-­vis the Pretender—­and about the administration. In a September 20, 1712, letter to Harley, Defoe expressed his alarm at the Whigs’ rumors against the government: What Strange ­Things they are Made to believ[e], what wild Inconsistent Notions they have Infused into the Minds of One Another, what preposterous, Ridicu­lous, Incongruous ­things Take up their heads, is Incredible, and but for the Novelty of Them Are not worth Repeating. Such as, That The queen is For The Pretender, The Ministry U ­ nder The Protection of France, That Popery is to be Tollerated, That as Soon as a Peace is Declared The War with the Dutch ­will be proclaimed, That The French are to keep their Trade to the South Seas, That the p ­ eople ­will be brought to address the Queen Not to Interrupt the Heredetary Right of The Royall Line Since The Heir is willing to Abjure popery, and The like. (Letters, 386) On October 3, he repeats his frustration with the “Inumerable Storys Spread . . . ​in Prejudice of the Queen and of the pres­ent Mannagemt as to the Peace” and complains that the Jacobites have “Terrefye[d] the poor ­people with the Apprehensions of the pretender.” Although every­one should “See That the queen and the Ministry are the Onely Security they have left against the Jacobite Faction, yet the Other party . . . ​perswade Them, that The Queen and The Ministry are Their Enemies” (Letters, 388). Despite Defoe’s incredulous pose, as Furbank and Owens discerningly note, “one seems to detect, in his alarmist tones, the hint of a challenge to Harley: it had better none of it be true.”106 Several of his letters from 1711 through early 1713 implicitly or explic­itly invite Harley to mend the breaches between the parties and, perhaps more significantly, to convince Defoe that the fearsome rumors are merely that. As McVeagh suggests, Defoe seems in some instances clearly to be “asking Harley to clarify where he stood” (introduction to Review, 8:xi). Harley’s agent was manifestly not convinced of the government’s innocence in this regard. Defoe’s implicit request that Harley explain (or vindicate) himself corresponds with the broader advisory role Mr. Review clearly wanted to play. I discussed earlier his comments about the ministerial change in 1710, in which he appears to be warning his incoming masters to behave Whiggishly. Defoe frequently reminds

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Harley that he—­Defoe—­feels well within his rights offering honest council, even to his boss: “The Freedome you Allwayes gave me . . . ​Oblidges me to Talk to you, in Terms Too Course for the Distance between your Character, your Person, your Merit, and Me” (Letters, 65). But Defoe did more than simply whisper in his employer’s ear: he used the Review not only to reflect on policies but also, as Seager says, to attempt “to shape the direction of policy.”107 Mr. Review is far more than Harley’s mouthpiece; he sometimes seems to imagine himself as Harley’s watchman. He almost certainly, moreover, enjoyed and wanted to take advantage of the fact that he had access to one of the country’s most impor­tant leaders. Defoe was clearly trying in the Review not only to render government policy acceptable to a Whig audience but also—­especially a­ fter 1710—to sway an increasingly Tory ministry t­ oward satisfactory Whiggish courses of action. Defoe’s warmest defenses of Harley tend to be responses to the October Club, made up of high-­Tory ministers of Parliament, and they reflect his approval of Harley’s relative moderation over Bolingbrokean extremism. In Defoe’s attacks on the October Club, he represents Harley as “a true moderate,” as compared to the “militant Tory right wing” of St. John et al.108 The “October-­Men Revile [Harley] with acting upon damn’d Whiggish Princi­ples,” Defoe complains, “and then themselves fall in with the Whigs to reduce him” (Review, 8:557). To find Defoe criticizing the Whigs might seem surprising, but the Whigs in power had sold out the dissenters on the occasional conformity issue in late 1711 and in any case, in joining with the high-­flyers whom Defoe despised, had (from his point of view) abandoned their Whiggish princi­ ples completely. The October Clubbers, Mr. Review reports, want to depose Harley primarily for “acting upon Princi­ples less Violent than they expected” (Review, 8:559). At this time, Swift—­particularly in the Four Last Years of the Queen—is trying to build Tory unity, fabricating an image of the rivals Harley and Bolingbroke working together ­toward the same ends. Defoe, crucially, is d ­ oing the opposite. Though he never mentions Bolingbroke by name, he does highlight the fundamental conflict between the October men and the prime minister, accentuating the breach that was to ruin the Tory party. In the Secret History of the White-­Staff (1714), Defoe provided a “lucid and accurate picture of the power strug­gle between Oxford and Bolingbroke,” trying among other ­things to persuade the new Whig regime that Harley had been lenient ­toward them and moderate in his politics.109 However keen Defoe was to attack Harley’s opponents, he offered his own challenges to his employer. In the Review, as we have seen, he can be conspicuously lukewarm in his remarks on the ministry, and within and outside that

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1650–1850 paper—as Seager reminds us—­“Defoe wrote against Harley’s policies.” Seager cites Defoe’s polemical skirmishing with the Examiner; his “apparent disagreements over the Treaty of Commerce and the establishment of the South Sea Com­pany”; and his “imprudent . . . ​libel[ling of] Chief Justice Parker.” Throughout the Review, Seager concludes, Defoe was “prone to ‘­going rogue.’ ”110 Furbank and Owens describe “a curious episode,” one “very revealing as to Defoe’s relations with his employer,” from the winter ­after Harley’s return to power.111 On December 26, 1710, Defoe writes his employer, unhappy about “Two Vile Ill Natur’d Pamphlets,” still in manuscript, which had fallen into his hands. One (“Calld the Scots atalantis”) is “full of Invectives Against the Queen and Governmt.” The other pamphlet (Atalantis Major) “is a ­Bitter Invective against the D of Argyle, the E of Mar, and the Election of the Peers.” Defoe boasts that he has ensured that “it ­will be Impossible for them” to be printed, promises Harley a copy of the second, and hopes his actions w ­ ill be well regarded. A week ­later, Defoe reports that he has “with Some Difficulty . . . ​prevented [Atalantis Major] goeing to the press” (Letters, 306–307). Despite ­these assurances, Atalantis Major did appear in print, and it might even have been the work of Defoe himself. George Harris Healey justly brands Defoe’s tale one of “outrageous equivocations” (Letters, 307n1). We have no evidence that Harley ever discovered Defoe’s deception, but that late in 1710 Defoe could publish an attack on the government that the Review was nominally devoted to defending is impor­tant. This episode does not prove that Defoe was, in his capacity as Mr. Review, as subversive or disloyal as I have suggested—­but it does suggest that Defoe was quite comfortable double-­dealing with a benefactor to whom he had reason to be grateful and of whose moderation he basically approved. The Secret History of the White-­Staff, though nominally a defense of Harley, is hardly glowing in its account. John Richetti’s characterization is accurate: “Strategic cunning rather than moral or po­liti­cal integrity is what Defoe credits the Tory Ministry with. . . . ​One won­ders what his ministerial masters made of this defense, since Defoe’s satiric narrative reduces po­liti­cal life to a riotous game, and the ministry is no better than their opponents, just smarter.”112 Part I of the Secret History appeared in September 1714, part II a month ­later, and it describes Queen Anne’s last lord trea­surer as moderate but cunning, outmaneuvering his enemies and enlisting the unwitting Jacobites and high Tories to serve his own ends. What­ever Defoe’s intentions ­were, Harley was “embarrassed by the Secret History,” which “contains a good deal of clever invention.” Aware of Harley’s discomfiture, the story goes, Defoe published a third part, The Secret History of the Secret History (January 1715), in which he “argues that the Secret History was a

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baseless fabrication, with no real relation to fact and no po­liti­cal purpose.”113 The Secret History of the Secret History is puzzling. Did Defoe intend seriously to negate his earlier “defense,” to appease Harley’s unhappiness? Was he for some reason trying simply to confuse the issue, to muddy the ­waters of judgment in the wake of Harley’s fall? Was this trilogy a genuine attempt to clear his old master’s name as the new Whig regime increased the vio­lence of its be­hav­ior ­toward Anne’s erstwhile servants and the Tories? Was Defoe hoping that by demonstrating Harley’s innocence he would effectively exculpate himself as well? In Defoe’s retrospective accounts of Queen Anne’s last ministry, he was compelled to be cautious, to defend himself without too warmly defending the men whom George I regarded as traitors. In his 1715 Appeal to Honour and Justice, Defoe does acknowledge that he felt himself to be “Obligated” to the queen and to Harley, which left him “at least obliged not to act against them even in ­those ­things which [he] might not approve.”114 His denial that he worked for Harley is disingenuous, but his insinuated disapproval of some of the ministry’s ­doings is sincere enough.115 His verdict on the ministry, though, is as equivocal as some of his comments in the Review: It is none of my Work to enter into the Conduct of the Queen or of the Ministry in this Case, the Question is not what they have done, but what I have done? And tho’ I am very far from thinking of them as some other ­People think, yet for the sake of the pres­ent Argument, I am to give them all up, and Suppose, tho’ not Granting, that all which is suggested of them by the worst Temper, the most censorious Writer, the most scandalous Pamphlet or Lampoon should be true.116 He maintains his innocence, swearing that if the ministry ­were for the Pretender, he “did not see it” or “ever see Reason to believe it,” and that certainly he “never took one step in that kind of Ser­vice.” Defoe admits his self-­interest: “It may be Objected to me, That they might be in the Interest of the Pretender for all that: It is true they might; But that is nothing to me, I am not Vindicating their Conduct, but my own.” The bottom line, for the Defoe of the Appeal, prob­ably represents his a­ ctual mind-­set during 1711–1714: enemies accused the ministry of being for the Pretender, and “God forbid this should be true.”117 One final piece of evidence is impor­tant in judging Defoe’s attitude ­toward the Harley ministry—to wit, his role in the Whig journal The Flying Post and Medley. The paper was launched on July  27, 1714—­the day of Harley’s dismissal—­and was “the first outlet for Defoe’s pen ­after the fall of the Tories.” Furbank and Owens describe it as “a vigorous and trenchant Whiggish journal, highly censorious about

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1650–1850 the ousted ministry.” The Flying Post went ­after Ormonde and commended Marlborough, and its verdict on Anne’s last ministry is clear. What it does not do, however, is “attack Lord Oxford personally.”118 ­Whether that is owing to Defoe is impossible to guess, but his restraint is in keeping with his other pamphlets, in which he contrasts Harley’s moderation with noxious high Toryism. ­ here is no reason to believe that Defoe hero-­worshiped Harley; we know from T his panegyrics on William III what his idolatry sounds like, and even at the height of Harley’s power, Defoe never acclaims him with similar passion. The two men ­were very dif­fer­ent in a number of re­spects, though Defoe does share something with the man who earned the epithet Robin the Trickster. Both ­were sneaky, secretive, and coy, prepared to manipulate ­others to achieve the ends they thought noble. A distinct possibility is that Defoe ­imagined himself able to use his proximity to Harley to influence the ministry. The Review was extremely wide-­ranging in its coverage, both more multidimensional and more global than Swift’s Examiner, which is by comparison narrow and single-­minded. Defoe covers all kinds of issues related to partisan politics, the war, Eu­ro­pean balance of power, the Union with Scotland, and religious controversy; he also deals with moral reform, Presbyterian baptism, African trade, the treatment of insolvents, and the la­men­ta­ble shortage of engineers in ­England. To describe his paper as a ministerial organ devoted to upholding and promulgating Harley’s policies is misrepresentative. In the overwhelming expanse of Mr. Review’s prose, what­ever pro-­government work is being done never looms large. Novak’s conclusion is fair: “Harley, Godolphin, and Sunderland allowed [Defoe] to say what he wanted on most issues, but now and then they wanted a par­tic­u­lar viewpoint expressed.”119 Quite prob­ably, Defoe was prepared to make concessions to the government’s agenda, to support ­those positions he could support in order to keep the ministers’ occasional payments coming in. Even more impor­tant than the subsidy, moreover, is that the Review represented a power­ful outlet for Defoe, a widely read paper in which he could argue his vari­ous c­ auses and through which he might imaginably influence his respective employers and have an impact on policy. What­ever support he lends to the ministry’s cause, Mr. Review always seems to have his own agenda—­and ­there is more work to be done to explicate and contextualize his topical and ideological interventions in the high-­stakes po­liti­cal controversies of the reign of Queen Anne.

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Notes 1. ​Defoe uses this phrase frequently (e.g., Review, 2:2). All references to the Review are to Daniel Defoe, Defoe’s Review, ed. John McVeagh (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003–2011), published in nine two-­part volumes (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Review, by volume and page number). 2. ​J. A. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 64. 3. ​James Sutherland, Defoe (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1938), 188. 4. ​J. A. Downie, “Daniel Defoe’s Review and Other Po­liti­cal Writings in the Reign of Queen Anne” (MLitt thesis, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1973), 52. I am grateful to Downie for generously loaning me a copy of his thesis. 5. ​Maximillian E. Novak, Daniel Defoe, Master of Fictions: His Life and Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 395. 6. ​Nicholas Seager, “ ‘He Reviews without Fear, and Acts without Fainting’: Defoe’s Review,” Eighteenth- ­Century Studies 46, no. 1 (2012): 131–142; Brian Cowan, “Daniel Defoe’s Review and the Transformations of the En­glish Periodical,” Huntington Library Quarterly 77, no. 1 (2014): 79–110. Seager’s conclusion is right: “A fresh look complicates the still-­prevalent view that Robert Harley simply dictated what Defoe wrote ­after the then Speaker brokered his release from prison in late 1703” (“He Reviews without Fear,” 132). 7. ​Robert Harley to Lord Trea­surer Godolphin, August  9, 1702, quoted in J.  A. Downie, “Stating Facts Right about Defoe’s Review,” Prose Studies 16, no. 1 (1993): 8. Downie is quoting from British Library, Add. MS 28055, f. 3. 8. ​Defoe to Paterson, in The Letters of Daniel Defoe, ed. George Harris Healey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 6 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Letters, by page number). 9. ​P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, A Po­liti­cal Biography of Daniel Defoe (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006), 24, 25. 10. ​Downie, “Stating Facts Right,” 8. 11. ​Downie, “Daniel Defoe’s Review,” 52. Elsewhere Downie discusses the “extensive secret ser­vice payments . . . ​made to Defoe in return for his efforts in espionage,” speculating—­plausibly—­that “it would be reasonable to assume that Defoe was paid regularly throughout the period 1710 to 1714” (“Secret Ser­vice Payments to Daniel Defoe, 1710–1714,” Review of En­glish Studies, n.s., 30, no. 120 [1979]: 437, 441). 12. ​See Ruth Beeler White, The Activities of Defoe Relating to the Act of Union, 1706– 1707 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 172. David Harrison Stevens also discusses the likely subsidization of the Review, in Party Politics and En­glish Journalism, 1702–1742 (1916; repr., New York: Russell and Russell, 1967). Despite the fact that some of Defoe’s requests for funds w ­ ere obviously ignored, “he seems to have found some encouraging signs, for he kept up the Review without a break”

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1650–1850 (Stevens, Party Politics, 49). Stevens’s account, however, pres­ents Defoe—­ convincingly—as financially strapped and importunate, appealing to Harley for assistance that ­either did not come or amounted to too l­ittle (49–50). 13. ​Seager, “He Reviews without Fear,” 134. 14. ​Defoe dropped the “Weekly” a­ fter seven issues. In February  1705, the name changed to a Review of the Affairs of France, with Observations upon Transactions at Home; in 1707, it became A Review of the State of the British Nation. 15. ​Downie, Robert Harley, 65. 16. ​As Defoe explained, not without reason, in no. 4, “Methinks having the true Picture of our Adversary should be useful to instruct us in our needful Preparations” (1:30). 17. ​Letter, Godolphin to Harley, June 1704, quoted in Downie, Robert Harley, 66. 18. ​Downie, Robert Harley, 66. 19. ​Daniel Defoe, A Collection of the Writings of the Author of the True-­Born English-­ Man (London, 1703), 146. 20. ​Defoe, A Collection, 147. See also in the same volume 140, 155, 162, 186, and 403. Defoe was, as Downie explains, “backing the Governmental policy of censuring the Tackers without alienating the other Tories” (“Daniel Defoe’s Review,” 84). In the Review for April 17, 1705, Defoe “penned what amounted to Harley’s election manifesto,” figuring “the General Election as a strug­gle between the Tackers and the rest” (Downie, “Daniel Defoe’s Review,” 90). 21. ​Downie, Robert Harley, 75. 22. ​Seager, “He Reviews without Fear,” 138. 23. ​Downie, Robert Harley, 78. 24. ​Downie makes this point very effectively in “Daniel Defoe’s Review,” 177–178. 25. ​Downie, “Daniel Defoe’s Review,” 210. “­Under the Junto-­based Government from 1708 to 1710 [Defoe’s] ‘moderation’ corresponded with extreme Whiggery, veering increasingly away from the line he had taken in supporting Harley, so that during one or other period he must have been prostituting himself in writing the Review. A more serious anomaly took place a­ fter 1710 when Defoe reverted to the incoming Harley ministry” (Downie, “Daniel Defoe’s Review,” 57). 26. ​On September 2, 1710, Defoe wrote, “I Perswade my Self Sir it ­shall be in My Power to assist the honest, but prejudiced p ­ eople of both Kingdomes, to kno’ Their Intrest, and Their Friends, better Than Hitherto They have done” (Letters, 275). 27. ​Furbank and Owens, A Po­liti­cal Biography, 124. 28. ​Downie, Robert Harley, 133. 29. ​Cowan, “Daniel Defoe’s Review,” 85. 30. ​In August  1710, Defoe insists that ­England must and ­will play “the Old Whiggish Game still” (Review, 7:309) to keep the Pretender out. “The Revolution is a Whig Settlement, the Confederacy is a Whig Alliance, the Government is a Whig Government,” he asserts, and the management must also be Whig (Review, 7:319); “the New Ministry, if they would Manage Honestly, would be all Whigs” (Review, 7:357). 31. ​Downie, “Daniel Defoe’s Review,” 230.

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32. ​See for example Review, 7:306, 7:458. 33. ​On October 26, 1710, Mr. Review prophesied, hopefully, that “the Tory, High-­flying Party ­will be Disappointed in the pres­ent Administration,” since “their Aim is over-­ throwing the Constitution, restoring Tyranny, and Dissolving the Union with Presbyterians,” none of which can “be done by the Parliament” (Review, 7:430). 34. ​Downie, Robert Harley, 129. 35. ​Downie, “Stating Facts Right,” 12–13. 36. ​Lawrence Poston III, “Defoe and the Peace Campaign, 1710–1713: A Reconsideration,” Huntington Library Quarterly 27, no. 1 (1963): 1–20. Poston is principally interested in showing Defoe’s consistency about the balance of power in Eu­rope and about Austrian power in par­tic­u­lar. He does, however, quietly question the degree of Defoe’s sycophancy to Harley: Defoe would come to “hint that the war might have been better conducted by Harley’s pre­de­ces­sors” (4), the Whigs whose fall from power Mr. Review hardly celebrated. 37. ​“If they have any regard to the Honour of God, the Good of Religion, their Safety from Foreign Invasion, the Security of a Protestant Succession, the Glory of a Protestant Queen, the Success of a Just War, the needful Preservation of Trade, the flourishing of useful Manufactures,” and so on, En­glanders “would STUDY PEACE ” (Review, 2:109). 38. ​Defoe made a similar point in October 1709: “Loss of Men must not dispirit us; we must lose Men, and we must lose them on ­every Occasion; and let the Number be what they w ­ ill—­they are to be lost—­It is the War we seek in order to Peace; and tho’ other­wise Mens Lives are of infinite Value, yet in this Case we must not value them” (Review, 6:389). 39. ​He continues, equally ironically, “We [Whigs] have certainly, if the Tories are in the Right, been mad in prosecuting the T ­ hing we call Glory in this War” (Review, 5:119). 40. ​Earlier, Defoe had warned against “being in too much Haste for Peace—­It is true we want Peace, but we do not want a Truce” (Review, 6:56). 41. ​Downie, Robert Harley, 75. 42. ​On November 16, 1710, Defoe highlights the necessity of Parliament “find[ing] MONEY to Support the War” (Review, 7:468). 43. ​Quoted in Furbank and Owens, A Po­liti­cal Biography, 122. 44. ​P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens detail ­these in A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998), 116–117, where this pamphlet is no. 128(P). 45. ​Daniel Defoe, Reasons why this Nation O ­ ught to put a Speedy End to this Expensive War, 2nd ed. (London, 1711), 3. 46. ​Furbank and Owens, A Po­liti­cal Biography, 121. 47. ​Defoe, Reasons, 4. 48. ​Defoe, Reasons, 13. 49. ​Defoe, Reasons, 6. 50. ​Defoe, Reasons, 8.

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1650–1850 51. ​Defoe, Reasons, 14. 52. ​Downie, Robert Harley, 141. 53. ​Defoe, Reasons, 15. 54. ​Defoe, Reasons, 10. 55. ​Defoe, Reasons, 43. 56. ​Defoe, Reasons, 37. 57. ​Novak, Daniel Defoe, 397. 58. ​Defoe repeats this argument frequently throughout 1712 (see for example Review, 9:43). In An Essay at a Plain Exposition of that Difficult Phrase A Good Peace (London, 1711), prob­ably Defoe’s, the partition is defended unequivocally: “­There is not one Word of Recovering all the Spanish Monarchy, out of the Hands of the House of Bourbon, in all the G ­ rand Alliance” (23). 59. ​Charles W. Ingrao, In Quest and Crisis: Emperor Joseph I and the Habsburg Monarchy (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1979), 218. “The ease with which the archduke was elected to succeed his b ­ rother in October 1711 as Emperor Charles VI,” continues Ingrao, “attested to the fact that Spain was no longer within the dynasty’s grasp.” 60. ​Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603–1714 (1996; repr. New York: Penguin, 1997), 332. William Roosen notes that Defoe’s arguments throughout the war tended to reflect his “concern for what was pragmatic, pos­si­ble, and moderate”; the third term is problematic, but the first two are exactly right. See Roosen, Daniel Defoe and Diplomacy (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1986), 95. 61. ​Brian  W. Hill, Robert Harley: Speaker, Secretary of State and Premier Minister (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 151. 62. ​Ingrao, In Quest and Crisis, 219. 63. ​Defoe, Reasons, 43. 64. ​Furbank and Owens, A Po­liti­cal Biography, 117. 65. ​In the Review, November 8, 1711, Defoe asks, skeptically, “Are we likely if we did carry on the War, to gain our End, viz. The Spanish Monarchy; or in short, Are we likely to obtain better Conditions than we may now have by a Treaty?” The most “Power­ful” of the “Arguments for Peace” is “That we see no other End of the War in our View” (8:445). 66. ​Defoe, Essay, 37–38. 67. ​Defoe, Essay, 39. 68. ​Defoe, Essay, 14, 15. 69. ​Defoe, Essay, 17. 70. ​Defoe, Essay, 18. 71. ​Defoe, Essay, 19. 72. ​Defoe, Essay, 24. 73. ​See Geoffrey S. Holmes, Politics, Religion and Society in ­England, 1679–1742 (London: Hambledon Press, 1986), 146–147.

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74. ​Keith Feiling, A History of the Tory Party, 1640–1714 (1924; repr., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950), 440. 75. ​Hill, Robert Harley, 163–165. 76. ​Bertrand A. Goldgar, introduction to En­glish Po­liti­cal Writings, 1711–14: “The Conduct of the Allies” and Other Works, by Jonathan Swift, ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar and Ian Gadd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 4. All quotations from Swift’s “The Conduct of the Allies” are from this edition. 77. ​Swift is much less interested in blaming Austria than Defoe is, and Swift is more focused on the Dutch. For his comments on Austria, see Swift, “The Conduct of the Allies,” 76–77. 78. ​Swift, “The Conduct of the Allies,” 93, 48. 79. ​Downie, Robert Harley, 147. Defoe, Downie continues, “was the ministerial whipping-­boy, shielding Swift from the party hacks who ­were a­ fter the blood of the man who had written the Conduct” (148). 80. ​See for example Review, 8:873–875, 880–882, 884, 898–899, 905–907. 81. ​Swift, “The Conduct of the Allies,” 57. The subsequent quotations are at 64 and 83. 82. ​Swift, “The Conduct of the Allies,” 83. 83. ​Swift, “The Conduct of the Allies,” 93. 84. ​Downie, Robert Harley, 133. 85. ​Downie, “Daniel Defoe’s Review,” 195. 86. ​Defoe would repeat the point several times: “I wish the Peace had been of another kind” (Review, 9:336). 87. ​Daniel Defoe, An Appeal to Honour and Justice (London, 1715), 23. 88. ​Novak, Daniel Defoe, 372. 89. ​The paper The Mercator (launched May 1713) was meant “to defend the government over criticism about the abortive bill of commerce” (Downie, Robert Harley, 171). Defoe almost certainly wrote for this government journal (see Furbank and Owens, A Critical Bibliography, 250–251). The Mercator began in the immediate wake of Defoe’s controversial publication of three pamphlets relating to the succession: Reasons against the Succession of the House of Hanover; And what if the Pretender should come?; and An Answer to a Question that No Body Thinks of, viz., But what if the Queen should die? Two of the three w ­ ere completely ironic, but Defoe was nevertheless arrested. Harley arranged for Defoe’s release on bail; he was arrested again a week ­later; and then he was released for good ­after a public apology. Defoe had good reason to want to support the government in late spring 1713. 90. ​Jonathan Swift, Swift vs. Mainwaring: “The Examiner” and “The Medley,” ed. Frank H. Ellis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 165, 185, 211. All references to the Examiner are from this edition (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Examiner, by page number). 91. ​Edward Gregg, Queen Anne (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 357.

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1650–1850 92. ​Nicholas Seager, “ ‘She W ­ ill Not Be That Tyrant They Desire’: Daniel Defoe and Queen Anne,” in Queen Anne and the Arts, ed. Cedric D. Reverand (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2015), 48, 49. 93. ​Seager, “He Reviews without Fear,” 135. 94. ​“Undervalued or not, Defoe served Harley’s cause faithfully in the Review” of 1711–1712 (McVeagh, introduction to Review, 8:x). 95. ​[John Oldmixon], The Life and Posthumous Works of Arthur Maynwaring, Esq. (London, 1715), 276. As I have shown elsewhere, however, Oldmixon’s pairing is anomalous: contemporaries almost invariably link Mr. Examiner to Abel Roper and the high-­Tory Post-­Boy. See Ashley Marshall, “Swift, Oldisworth, St. John, and the ‘Orthodox Libel’: The Examiners, 1710–14,” unpublished manuscript. 96. ​C . John Sommerville describes the Examiner as designed “to answer Defoe’s Review,” as well as the Observator (The News Revolution in ­England: Cultural Dynamics of Daily Information [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996], 128). 97. ​See Ellis’s notes to lines 110 and 113–124 in Examiner, on St. John’s fabrications about this episode. As Irvin Ehrenpreis observes, “Harley was unlikely to feel consoled for his near-­murder by an assurance that the intended victim was his hated rival” (Swift: The Man, His Works, the Age, 3 vols. (London: Methuen, 1962–1983), 2:470). 98. ​Seager, “He Reviews without Fear,” 141. 99. ​Cowan, “Daniel Defoe’s Review,” 87. 100. ​Ashley Marshall, Swift and History: Politics and the En­glish Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 162–172. 101. ​Cowan, “Daniel Defoe’s Review,” 88. Continues Cowan, “The notions of popu­lar sovereignty and the legitimacy of revolutionary re­sis­tance to tyranny advanced . . . ​ in the Review ­were highly controversial when they appeared.” Sacheverell’s ­lawyers “­were able to score major points in the doctor’s defense by claiming that his infamous sermon . . . ​was not aimed against dissenters and the Whig ministry but against such scandalous writers as Defoe in the Review,” and several “objectionable passages . . . ​­were read aloud to the audience at the trial in order to drive home the point” (88). 102. ​J. A. Downie, “Swift’s Politics,” in Proceedings of the First Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, ed. Hermann J. Real and Heinz J. Vienken (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1985), 51. 103. ​Cowan, “Daniel Defoe’s Review,” 85. 104. ​Manuel Schonhorn concludes that “Defoe had chosen to form a deep allegiance and began a lifetime of loyalty with a statesman with whose po­liti­cal ideas he could not have been more compatible” (Defoe’s Politics: Parliament, Power, Kingship, and “Robinson Crusoe” [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 101). I disagree about both the depth of Defoe’s allegiance and the compatibility of his politics with Harley’s.

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105. ​Novak, Daniel Defoe, 196, 197, 447. William Minto, Daniel Defoe (New York: Harper and B ­ rothers, 1879), 165. 106. ​Furbank and Owens, A Po­liti­cal Biography, 123. For another example, see Letters, 353. 107. ​Seager, “He Reviews without Fear,” 135. 108. ​Novak, Daniel Defoe, 392. Defoe was prob­ably responsible for The Secret History of the October Club (London, 1711), which defended Harley’s moderation while also denouncing “the hot High Flying hair Brain’d Tories” with whom the nonpartisan lord trea­surer felt compelled to cooperate when he took power in 1710 (45). 109. ​Downie, Robert Harley, 186. 110. ​Seager, “He Reviews without Fear,” 141, 135. Seager also cites an earlier example: “Defoe even covertly launched another periodical u ­ nder Harley’s nose, Master Mercury (8 August to 25 September 1704), whose main purpose was to lampoon [Admiral] Rooke, covering his tracks by having the Review and the Master Mercury attack one another” (135). 111. ​Furbank and Owens, A Po­liti­cal Biography, 112. 112. ​John Richetti, The Life of Daniel Defoe (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 133. 113. ​Furbank and Owens, A Po­liti­cal Biography, 143. 114. ​Defoe, An Appeal, 38, 17. 115. ​The Appeal is printed by Furbank and Owens in A Po­liti­cal Biography; quotation at 209 and denial of having been in Harley’s pay or having “written [by] his Direction” at 210. 116. ​Defoe, An Appeal, 38. 117. ​Defoe, An Appeal, 41, 43. 118. ​Furbank and Owens, A Po­liti­cal Biography, 138. 119. ​Novak, Daniel Defoe, 211–212.

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“ALL FOR DUTY ” DRYDEN’S CRITICAL AGENDA IN ALL FOR LOVE PETER BYRNE

Obey’d as Soveraign by thy Subjects be; But know, that I alone am King of me. I am as ­free as Nature first made man, ’Ere the base Laws of Servitude began, When wild in woods the noble Savage ran. —­John Dryden, The Conquest of Granada

The critical tradition of reading Dryden’s All for Love in unfavorable tandem with

Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra dates almost from the former play’s first per­ for­mance. Drawing hostile attention to Dryden’s criticism of Shakespeare’s erroneous composition and emotional excess, Dryden’s earliest critics accused him of a hypocritical failure to enact his critical princi­ples, pointing out the abundance of ­these “errors” within the body of All for Love. Gerard Langbaine’s 1691 Account of the En­glish Dramatick Poets, for instance, tasks Dryden sharply for neglecting to perform that which the author finds wanting in his pre­de­ces­sor, All for Love singled out as a play in which, of a certain scene, “­there are some Criticks who are not yet satisfied, that it is agreeable to the Rules of Decency and Decorum.”1 A ­century ­later, Samuel Johnson accuses Dryden of attempting to achieve an emotional affect that transgresses the bounds of commendable conduct, allowing his poetic license to subjugate his ethics2—­precisely the be­hav­ior that Dryden accuses Shakespeare of committing. The fundamental conceit of such criticism (which

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finds significant con­temporary repre­sen­ta­tion in critics such as Hazelton Spencer and Ruth Wallerstein) is that Dryden’s play is self-­consciously Shakespearean, in tenor or vehicle or both, and that consequently Dryden’s criticism of Shakespeare ­ought to be reflected consistently in composition of the play—­that, in short, Dryden the critic must jibe with Dryden the artist on the subject of Shakespeare. And given Shakespeare’s canonical supremacy, t­ hose critics who begin with this a priori, traditionally argue for All for Love’s inferiority.3 Recent criticism has begun to challenge this approach, arguing that All for Love is something more and other than a revision of Antony and Cleopatra. Richard Kroll, following the lead of Maximilian Novak, asserts that inasmuch as neither Shakespearean tenor nor vehicle is apparent in Dryden’s play—­that it is essentially ­Racinian in mode and self-­consciously addresses the dramatic heritage of William Davenant and John Fletcher—­one need not make an irrelevant comparison.4 Kroll’s premises are sound and mesh well with Novak’s point that Antony and Cleopatra went unperformed in the Restoration and would therefore be, at least theatrically, of scant familiarity to its original audience (thus diminishing the probability that the play was meant to be experienced in tandem with Shakespeare’s version of the narrative).5 But I must disagree with his ultimate assessment that Dryden’s introductory analy­sis of Shakespeare is “a red herring.” 6 However unfavorable the outcome to Dryden, comparison with Shakespeare is appropriate ­because Dryden explic­itly invites it: “In my Stile I have profess’d to imitate the Divine Shakespeare; which that I might perform more freely, I have dis-­incumber’d my self from Rhyme. Not that I condemn my former way, but that this is more proper to my pres­ent purpose” (California Dryden, 13:18). It is the nature of this “pres­ent purpose,” which Dryden leaves unspecified, that has allowed ­those who are biased against him to proj­ect a pejorative intention into the work, but a more considered approach may produce a reading favorable to Dryden and his accomplishment. ­Here and throughout Dryden’s c­ areer, he grapples with the achievements of Shakespeare and the prob­lems of his artistic heritage. All for Love, the first play in which he a­ dopted the retrograde use of blank verse and which falls in his canon amid a series of revisions of other authors (Milton and Sophocles/Seneca, in addition to Shakespeare), is an artistic creation of a period of in which he was both revising his critical and artistic princi­ples and revisiting the works of other authors in seeking to apply t­hese revised princi­ples.7 I must therefore be retrograde myself, aligning with the earlier critical tradition that links the two plays and their authors. However, this tradition assumes that Dryden’s enactment of what he deems Shakespeare’s errors and his “failure” to achieve what he identifies as

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1650–1850 Shakespeare’s virtues is evidence of the inferiority of All for Love. I contend that this imitation of Shakespeare’s “Stile,” complicated by Dryden’s critical portrait of Shakespeare as a troubling but attractive source of dramatic heritage, acts as the rhetorical framework of All for Love’s argument about the Shakespearean method and its infective mimesis of passion. The view of Dryden as a man divided between his artistic impulses and his critical acumen is a reasonable one. But if we can give credit to Dryden’s judgment, we cannot simply assume that the extensive critical remarks that he attaches to his own plays are somehow isolated from their composition. If ­these works contain violations of the decorum he advocates in his criticism, we need not conclude that t­ hese transgressions are evidence of incompetence or hy­poc­risy. This reading is par­tic­u­lar to ­those who reify his asserted “errors” of Shakespeare. His work as a poet in All for Love is likely to be consistently reflective of his criticism, since how a play is composed must substantially alter its effect and thus its intended purpose. Since Dryden links that purpose to the heritage of Shakespeare, we must conclude that that heritage is, at least in part, his motivation in adopting this new, self-­confessedly Shakespearean mode of passionate expression. But Dryden’s version of the Shakespearean appears not to be an unselfconscious attempt to achieve his pre­de­ces­sor’s accomplishments in emotional mimesis but is instead the product of what Frank J. Kearful calls “a sensitively complex historical self-­consciousness involving both elegiac nostalgia and evolutionary progressivism.”8 This reading is clarified by his further introductory remarks: I hope I need not to explain myself, that I have not copied my Author servilely: words and phrases must of necessity receive a change in succeeding ages, but ’tis almost a Miracle that much of his language remains so pure, and that he who began dramatic Poetry amongst us, untaught by any and, as Ben Johnson tells us, without Learning, should by the force of his own Genius perform so much that in a manner he has left no praise for any who come a­ fter him. (California Dryden, 13:18) ­These passages suggest that the play’s evocation of Shakespeare is less a revision than a critical examination of the Shakespearean mode of dramatic composition in which affectively emotional mimesis surmounts the demands of social decorum. As shown by the introduction to All for Love and Dryden’s criticism elsewhere (most fully in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy and the introduction to his revision of Troilus and Cressida), Dryden is drawn to the image of Shakespeare as the natu­ral genius. Per Dryden, Shakespeare’s untaught individuality is the basis for his revolutionary brilliance, his rejection of pre­ce­dent or affinity the source of his perspec-

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tival in­de­pen­dence and consequential transcendence.9 Dryden’s criticism is therefore as much a response to Shakespeare’s enacted work as a theorist as it is to Shakespeare’s poetry. For Dryden, the excess of passion to which Shakespeare’s characters are prone, and the degree to which they express and justify this ­passion, is linked to t­ hese self-­same excess in Shakespeare’s compositional habits. Dryden suggests a link between the emotionally affective expression of passion to which Shakespeare’s characters are prone and the degree to which t­ hese portraits of passion appear to reflectively alter our experience of their author as one who endorses ­these passions by such portraiture. Even though Shakespeare often portrays this emotional excess in critical terms, Dryden suggests that he has allowed his talent to overrun the demands of his responsibility. In the case of Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare offers the ethos of Octavian and Rome as a balance to that of Cleopatra and Egypt, suspending Antony in an undecided agon throughout the play. In d ­ oing so, Shakespeare—­like Dryden—­may simply be seen to follow the narrative as outlined by Plutarch. But whereas the victory of Rome has traditionally caused historically minded Western readers to regard the resolution of the clash between Rome and its Orient as a salutary one (certainly the occupants of Dryden’s era would do so), Shakespeare’s play is less conclusive. Antony’s death in act 4 transfers the clash between Egypt and Rome from one contained within the tragic hero to one divided between an increasingly sympathetic and dynamic Cleopatra and the relentlessly pragmatic figure of Octavian, and the conclusion of the play therefore seems to mourn the loss of the passion of the lovers as much as it depicts their deaths as the inevitable outcome of that passion. To judge by the version of the Antony narrative in All for Love, Dryden appears to view Shakespeare’s approach as too sentimentally permissive. By restraining the drama within the unity of place, Dryden eliminates the sweep of location that allows Shakespeare to give us as much of Rome as of Egypt, and he entirely removes Octavian as a complicating presence and perspective. Instead, Rome is represented by Octavia, Ventidius, and Dolabella, none of whom can match Antony’s theatrical authority. The play’s entirely Egyptian milieu forces the audience’s attention squarely on Antony’s internal strug­gle between his desires and his duties, a strug­ gle that is one-­sidedly represented by his occupation of the environment entirely associated with Cleopatra and the passion she engenders. The rigorous discipline of the play reveals, with clocklike precision, that Antony’s decision to be guided by his passion acts as the tragedy’s hamartia, and his choice of Cleopatra over Octavia results in its peripeteia. Given Dryden’s admitted awareness of Shakespeare in

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1650–1850 composing All for Love and the degree to which he foregrounds ­these compositional priorities, it would seem that for Dryden, Shakespeare’s erratic magnificence of composition, which occludes t­ hese tragic components, reveals him to have been “of the dev­il’s camp” with regard to Antony’s similarly erratic magnificence of passion. We may regard Dryden’s repre­sen­ta­tion of Shakespeare’s dramatic priorities as unjust, but such objection is irrelevant in evaluating Dryden’s criticism of the play. All for Love suggests Dryden’s critical view of the effect of Shakespeare’s heritage on the Restoration, not of the man himself. What is most pertinent for Dryden, as revealed in both the introduction of All for Love and in the play itself, is that if Shakespeare’s art is dominated by the prioritizing of mimetic passion over compositional discipline, his works are dangerously unsuitable for imitative study.10 Such emotionalism creates an inescapably polemic attitude, w ­ hether for the character who expresses and justifies it or for the author who composes it in opposition to the traditions of drama. The work of Shakespeare, then, must be necessarily exclusive in its methodology; based as it is on rejection as much as redefinition, it cannot accommodate ­those ele­ments that a more ecumenical perspective might wish to include. And for Dryden, the strug­gle between his awe of Shakespeare and his recognition of the dangers of Shakespeare’s pre­ce­dent appears in his own version of Antony as a tragic hero. The pleasures of this type of character and this style of drama are undeniable, and Dryden wisely never attempts to argue other­wise. But a cursory glance at the po­liti­cal turmoil of Charles’s midreign—­the Titus Oates hysteria, the Exclusion crisis, the dismissal of Parliament—­reveals an era of deep anxiety, for which the rush to neoclassical artifice is both symptom and solution. Dryden recognizes that the Restoration theater, as an institution in which the passions and the conscience of society are s­ haped,11 is too influential to allow itself the rebellious freedom of Shakespearean drama. While the magnificence of Antony and his passions are symptomatic of the pleasures of Shakespearean achievement in drama, Dryden’s artistic portrait of one and critical portrait of the other reveal their fundamental unsuitability for the drama of a period when “the fury of a Civil War, and Power, for twenty years together, abandon’d to a barbarous race of men, Enemies of all good Learning, had buried the Muses u ­ nder the ruins of Monarchy” (California Dryden, 17:63). Motivated, then, by the public-­minded spirit of détente, Dryden’s neoclassical method increasingly takes Ciceronian reconciliation rather than Longinian sublimity as its guiding perspective, a choice derived from Dryden’s recognition of

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the power and importance of the poet in an era in which the theater is as much a sphere of the po­liti­cal and social as it is of the aesthetic. This socially reformative impulse is first reflected in his “heroic” plays such as The Conquest of Granada and Aureng-­Zebe, which conclude with the avoidance of the apocalyptic results of classical or Shakespearean tragedies. In All for Love, he invades his opponent’s camp, adopting Shakespeare’s style as a means of illustrating its dangers as well as an experimental use of that style in a more decorous mode. His goal is not, however, to equal, much less surpass, his pre­de­ces­sor’s achievement, as his critics have often claimed. As his discussion of the Re­nais­sance playwrights makes clear, Dryden knows this task to be impossible: It is to raise envy to the living to compare them with the dead. They are honour’d and almost ador’d by us, as they deserve; neither do I know any so presumptuous of themselves as to contend with them. Yet give me leave to say thus much without injury to their Ashes, that not only ­shall we never equal them, but they could never equal themselves, ­were they to rise and write again. We acknowledge them our F­ athers in wit, but they have ruin’d their estates themselves before they came to their c­ hildren’s hands. T ­ here is scarce an Humour, a Character, or any kind of Plot which they have not us’d. All comes sullied or wasted to us, and w ­ ere they to entertain this age, they could not now make so plenteous treatments out of such decay’d Fortunes. This therefore ­will be a good Argument to us e­ ither not to write at all or to attempt some other way. (California Dryden, 17:72–73) Dryden’s is the fundamental dilemma faced by the occupants of the pres­ent, confronted by the accomplishments of the past.12 To ignore them is to reject the timeless lessons—­and pleasures—­contained in them; to adhere too closely to their example is to ignore the gap between the values of their time and ours. This choice, which he pres­ents in introducing the agon of Antony, must resonate with the consequences of that agon. Antony must ultimately choose between two ­women and the values they represent—­Octavia, dull but fruitful; and Cleopatra, delightful but barren—so Dryden offers his poetic contemporaries a choice between the limited pleasures of progressive discipline and the self-­injurious joys of Shakespearean sentimentalism. Antony, a Shakespearean figure in his priorities, chooses poorly and reminds his audience to prefer the virtuous path. That the stakes of this dilemma appear inordinately high is resolved by a reading of the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, itself a pointedly dramatized dialogue between opposing viewpoints; just as the Platonic or Ciceronian argument is often framed as a drama, so too does Dryden’s criticism h ­ ere reflect his theatrical

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1650–1850 examination of similar princi­ples. Reading the Essay, we should pay par­tic­u­lar attention to the narrative setting Dryden creates for the debate of the four gentlemen. The civility and beauty of subject and speakers are comically contrasted with what reads almost like a parody of social instability: a small boat in the flow of a river and an unseen, receding ­battle of momentous and undecided consequences—­even the air is “perceiv’d . . . ​to break about them” (California Dryden, 17:9). It is within this shaky setting that Dryden’s quartet engages in what might consequentially seem a trivial aesthetic treatment of dramatic evaluation. But the true import of the subject is revealed in Crites’s comment that “if the concernment of this b ­ attle had not been so exceeding ­great, he could scarce have wish’d the victory at the price he knew he must pay for it, in being subject to the reading and hearing of so many ill verses . . . ​on the subject” (17:9). The aesthetic recasting of an event into a poetic narrative is potentially so transformational that, as Crites suggests, it can turn martial victory into an object of distaste. The degree to which the phenomenological is dependent on an interpretation guided by aesthetics is therefore at the root of Dryden’s anxiety, and the importance of the modern poet’s duty is not ironized by the warlike setting but clarified. If art is an interpretive and exemplary imitation of nature—if a play is, in fact, “a just and lively Image of Humane Nature, representing its Passions and Humours, and the Changes of Fortune to which it is subject; for the Delight and Instruction of Mankind” (California Dryden, 17:15)—­then to cede dramatic victory to the ancients (as Crites does) or to the French (as Lisideius would) is to allow the En­glish to have their humanity defined by the temporally and culturally alien. And the logical extrapolation of this axiom is that to cede dramatic standards to the extravagantly undisciplined is to invite chaotic conduct and self-­centered priorities that extend beyond the stage. This danger is revealed primarily in the conflict between Lisideius and Neander, in which the latter, speaking on behalf of the legacy of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher, is forced to concede the problematic nature of their works insofar as they often allow “tumult” and neglect the “decorum of the stage” (17:41–44). This section of the essay articulates the advantages and risks of the comparatively erratic mode of En­glish composition, and Dryden notes that Shakespeare’s is the least regular canon of the three. He therefore raises the possibility of a more fully dramatized argument on the same topic, within the context of the subject itself: the En­glish drama. Such a conjunction of criticism and art is typical of Dryden; Kroll notes that for Dryden, the En­glish drama is closely aligned with the Roman satura, “a mixed body of discourse with its own internal metabolism, and whose effects on the body politic are . . . ​medicinal or therapeutic.”13 If Shakespeare’s priority as a

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dramatist is to create a mode of passionate expression unbounded by pre­ce­dent, then for Dryden he must be a figure for whom decorum and the social responsibility it reflects and sustains must yield to a solipsistic vision of art’s creation and its goals. It is unlikely that Dryden’s criticism w ­ ill not find expression in an artistic effort so closely allied to Shakespeare and the Shakespearean mode. And Dryden’s concern with the influence of Shakespeare is substantial enough to seek expression; from Dryden’s “medicinal” standpoint, the Bard is an attractively toxic influence on his audience and his artistic heritage. Dryden’s assessment that “in our own language, we see Ben Johnson confining himself to what ­ought to be said” (California Dryden, 17:68) argues that the freer Shakespeare often says what ­ought not to be said, a judgment Dryden confirms in his epilogue to The Conquest of Granada: Shakespear, who many times has written better than any Poet, in any Language, is yet so far from writing Wit always, or expressing that Wit according to the Dignity of the Subject, that he writes in many places, below the dullest Writer of ours, or of any pre­ce­dent Age. Never did any Author precipitate himself from such heights of thought to so low expressions, as he often does. He is the very Janus of Poets: he wears, almost e­ very where two f­ aces: and you have scarce begun to admire the one, e’re you despise the other. (California Dryden, 11:212–213) The polarized image of Janus—­si­mul­ta­neously occupying two discordant perspectives—­suggests that Dryden’s objection to Shakespeare is not simply predicated on occasional moments of dullness. Recalling the Ciceronian need for decorum, we see that Dryden seems equally disturbed by the Bard’s moments of greatness; for Dryden, the danger of Shakespeare derives both from his erratic and careless composition and his overwhelming powers as a poet and the fact that the latter appears to derive from the former: “The Fury of his fancy often transported him beyond the Bounds of Judgment, e­ ither in coyning of new words and phrases or wracking words which ­were in use into the vio­lence of a catachresis” (California Dryden, 13:244). If Shakespeare’s genius inevitably leads him to reject convention in his attempts to reforge language in order to achieve full expression of his fancy, then t­ hose who follow his example must be led to regard the satisfaction of self-­expression as the end of dramatic poetry. Such poetic disciples thus reject the fundamentally communal vision of medicinal responsibility proffered by Dryden as the dramatist’s role. At the same time, Dryden is aware of the cost of this communal decorum. His praise of Jonson’s compositional regularity, for instance, cannot help but

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1650–1850 acknowledge that such regularity prevented him from reaching t­ hose moments of g­ reat passion achieved by Shakespeare: “You seldom find [Jonson] making love in any of his scenes or endeavouring to move the passions; his genius was too sullen and saturnine to do it gracefully, especially when he knew he came ­after t­hose who had performed both to such an height” (California Dryden, 17:57; emphasis added). Even Jonson, Dryden’s self-­claimed model—­the poet responsible for offering Dryden’s contemporaries “the pattern of a perfect play” (17:55)—­f inds himself circumscribed by the emotional achievements of Shakespeare. Dryden, then, has created a portrait of Shakespeare as an innovative but dangerously solipsistic force, a figure who is able, by sheer talent, to transform his audience into a reflection of his unlearned, often erroneous desires: “When he describes anything, you more than see it, you feel it too” (California Dryden, 17:55). In an Epicurean universe—­and Dryden’s Ciceronian skepticism naturally led him ­toward this epistemological view of the world14—­where the senses are the only arbiters of real­ity, the ability to replicate feeling, both of sense and of emotion, is an essentially godlike power, especially in a theater: “In a Play-­house e­ very t­ hing contributes to impose upon the Judgment; the Lights, the Scenes, the Habits, and, above all, the Grace of Action . . . ​surprize the Audience, and cast a mist upon their Understandings” (14:100). That Shakespeare is portrayed as a careless, erratic figure, unconcerned with the consistency or consequences of his achievements, makes him precisely the wrong kind of poet for an era in need of a decorous reconstruction of its values. But while this choice is easy for the critic to make, it is difficult for the artist to fulfill. As a critic, Dryden may deplore the worship of Shakespeare; as a poet and reader, he appears helpless to resist it, as Neander’s famous remark about his love for Shakespeare reveals. And again, we must remember that the Ciceronian in Dryden must attempt to reconcile—or at least accommodate—­the contrary impulses aroused by Shakespearean drama. The Essay and All for Love provide complementary, dramatized examinations of the prob­lem of Shakespeare’s heritage, in which “love” is the temptation that must be rejected for the greater good. But Dryden’s essay can, in Ciceronian fashion, allow both sides to speak without coming to any absolute conclusion. The move from theory into practice in ­composing a tragedy that revisits this argument must be exclusive. Within tragedy, action is choice made irretrievably manifest and necessarily requires the elimination of alternative. In All for Love, Dryden revisits the contention over the appeal and the danger of the prob­lem he associates with Shakespeare: the priori-

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tizing of emotional inspiration and satisfaction over the necessity of decorous conception and conduct. This examination is indicated by Dryden’s per­sis­tent introduction of Shakespearean indices in his own play. Besides his admitted imitation of Shakespeare’s subject and style, Dryden evokes not simply Antony and Cleopatra but multiple ele­ments of other Shakespearean plays. Wallerstein notes references to Othello, Richard II, Twelfth Night, and As You Like It in the first act alone,15 and we might add the armed ghost appearing in both Hamlet and Serapion’s introductory vision and the image of the dolphins stranded by the Nile’s recession, recalling Shakespeare’s Antony, whose “delights / ­Were dolphin-­like.”16 Any reasonably literate audience of Dryden’s time must have recognized the degree to which the Shakespearean idiom was an emphasized topic of Dryden’s piece. If the Shakespearean style is Dryden’s subject as well as his mode, his choice of narrative and hero appears rhetorically shrewd. The character of Antony—­ whether the Antony of Shakespeare or of Plutarch—is fundamentally anarchic. He is a figure memorable primarily for achieving “greatness” through his unyielding passion and for his refusal to submit to his civic responsibilities in the face of an all-­consuming private desire. Moreover, given his status as an inescapably “public” man, this refusal must inevitably take the form of a performative display of such passions—an attempt to portray himself and the world as a justification for his desires. The bombast of Shakespeare’s Antony, alternately magnificent and pathetic, is the conscious per­for­mance of a man for whom the world is quite literally a stage. It is this extremity of character that draws Dryden’s critical attention. His portrait of Antony is one of excess in both virtue and vice, as the analy­sis of his lieutenant Ventidius reveals: Virtue’s his path; but sometimes ’tis too narrow For his vast Soul; and then he starts out wide And bounds into a Vice that bears him far From his first course, and plunges him in ills: But when his danger makes him find his fault, Quick to observe, and full of sharp remorse, He censures eagerly his own misdeeds, Judging himself with malice to himself, And not forgiving what as Man he did ­Because his other parts are more than Man. (California Dryden, 13:1, ll. 125–133) Readers of the Essay must immediately note that both Shakespeare and Antony share the same essential characteristic; if Antony’s soul is “vast,” Shakespeare’s is

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1650–1850 “the largest and most comprehensive” (California Dryden, 17:55). Like Shakespeare, who in Dryden’s criticism careens from heights of passionate perfection to depths of banality, Dryden’s Antony is excessive in all ­things, overcorrecting for his careless flaws. T ­ here appears no m ­ iddle ground for Antony, and the structure of the play, which ends each of the first four acts with a thorough reversal of decision from its hero, is reflective of this polemical nature. Antony’s chief interpreter and perspectival opponent, Ventidius attempts throughout to check this pendulous motion (like Dryden’s Neander, he is inclined to emphasize the degree to which the positive balances out the negative). But even he admits ­here that absolutism is Antony’s essential nature. One cannot isolate his greatness from his vice, since both derive from this same quality: “His Virtues lye so mingled with his Crimes, / As would confound their choice to punish one / And not reward the other” (California Dryden, 13:3, ll. 49–51). Dryden’s Antony is not his version of Shakespeare but embodies the prob­lem of the Shakespearean perspective, just as his quartet of critics in the Essay embody their own biases. In Antony, Dryden creates a tragic character who shares the flaws of Dryden’s critical view of Shakespeare. He is thus able to achieve a portrait whose rhetorically pertinent qualities overlap ­those of his subject (a typically Drydenian literary device, familiar to readers of “Absalom and Achitophel” and “MacFlecknoe”). A portrait of erraticism in a play so faithful to the neoclassical unities reveals the clash between forms and eras under­lying the play.17 Within a decorously neoclassical context, Antony’s passionately individualistic impulse is essentially perverse. ­After Cleopatra has announced that the entire Egyptian court w ­ ill stand in joyous cele­bration of Antony’s birthday, he enters, determined to bear out a contrary mood: “They tell me ’tis my Birth-­day, and I’ll keep it / With double pomp of sadness. / ’Tis what the day deserves, which gave me breath” (California Dryden, 13:1, ll. 203–205). As much if not more than Shakespeare’s Antony, Dryden’s is emotionally demonstrative to the point of objectifying his own per­for­mance. He does not so much reveal his emotions as proclaim them, creating what Eugene Waith, in his analy­sis of Dryden’s heroes, calls “the impression . . . ​that the characters have stepped out of themselves to comment in the fashion of a presenter . . . ​discussing the emotions they feel rather than presenting them.”18 But while this tendency has become yet another excuse for criticism to prefer Antony and Cleopatra, it also shows an astute realization on Dryden’s part: in the theater, unlike life, ­there are no private emotions. On the contrary, the theater is arguably the location where emotions are most communal in nature—­the actor expresses feeling that inspires sympathetic emotion in the audience. Classically speaking, it is the goal

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of playwrights to create works that inspire a universal emotional reaction, and therefore the pretense of “private” sentiment within the drama is more artificial than the acknowl­edgment of the inherently public nature of theatrical passion. Such, then, is the parallel flaw of Dryden’s Antony and Dryden’s Shakespeare: Shakespeare could not or would not subject his personal genius to the demands of communal decorum, and Antony refuses to acknowledge that as the leader of one half of the Roman world, he is not, and cannot be, a private man, entitled to private emotion. His combination of perspectival opposition to the world and inevitable recourse to hyperbole reflects both the heroic and the corruptive qualities of Shakespeare’s dramatic priorities; the refusal to submit to self-­discipline prompts an infatuated response in his followers. Antony cannot feign that which he does not truly feel, but his admirably honest nature is mixed with an inability to make concessions ­toward the demands of context—in par­tic­u­lar, the needs of ­others. For all of Antony’s addictive dependence on Cleopatra, he is an isolated figure, a prisoner of his own sentimentally justified self-­conception: “Stay, I fancy / I’m now turn’d wild, a Commoner of Nature; / Of all forsaken, and forsaking all” (California Dryden, 13:1, ll. 231–233)—­yet another description that makes him sound like Dryden’s image of Shakespeare. Antony’s wildness, like Shakespeare’s “unlearned” poetic self-­expression, appears as both explanation for his greatness and, less admirably, excuse for his failures. And in failure, his defiance becomes a petulant contempt for what he cannot arbitrarily command: “When I found all lost / Beyond repair, I hid me from the World, / And learnt to scorn it ­here; which now I do / So heartily, I think it is not worth / The cost of keeping” (13:1, ll. 323–327). This would be a fine sentiment for a stoic phi­los­o­pher, but the presence of Ventidius and Octavia reminds us that Antony is not entitled to such self-­chosen freedom. Rome feeds on Egyptian grain; Rome’s imperial lifeblood depends on the circulation of Eastern trade, and ­these provinces fall ­under Antony’s command. As Dolabella ­later points out, his own loss of honor in loving Cleopatra was less shameful than Antony’s: “the loss was private that I made; / ’Twas but myself I lost: I lost no Legions; / I had no World to lose, no p ­ eoples love” (13:3, ll. 199–201). A public man with public duties, Antony can no more resign the world than he can resign himself; to pretend other­wise is to invite the contempt of the virtuous. His love for Cleopatra—­his one constant source of identity and one that Dryden is careful to portray as primarily narcissistic rather than erotic—­has blinded him to the countless innocents who suffer for his self-­indulgence. What Dryden pres­ents in his Antony is a figure whose mingled greatness and selfishness create consequences (and, in ­those who, like Ventidius and Dolabella,

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1650–1850 succumb to Cleopatra’s charms, values) that corrupt the world. This dynamic is precisely that which Dryden identifies in the Shakespearean mode of dramatic composition: its overvaluation of innovative and affective portraits of passion. Such priorities disrupt the artistic community and the audience that derives its own values from its experience of ­these works. As pleas­ur­able as the sublimity of Shakespearean drama is, Dryden condemns it as the wasted product of a bygone era. Instead, he demands of himself and his peers a communal responsibility in producing works that sustain an ordered self and society. And h ­ ere the seemingly secondary role of Ventidius assumes greater prominence in the play. Just as Antony provides a vehicle to express the Shakespearean mode, so Ventidius is, at least initially, a means of offering a Drydenian response to that mode. Ventidius’s arguments with Antony are the arguments of lieutenant with general and friend with friend, but they are also the conflict between Rome and Egypt, between the demands of the community and ­those of the individual. In this latter re­spect, Ventidius’s frustration with Antony echoes that of Dryden with his pre­de­ces­sor: “I think the gods are Antony’s, and give, / Like Prodigals, this neather World away / To none but wastful hands” (California Dryden, 13:1, ll. 373–375). The old soldier’s words echo the frustrated clash between worship and dismay that marks the Drydenian reading of Shakespeare; in the same breath, Antony is equated with the gods’ supremacy but chastised for being, like them, carelessly unworthy of his power. For Dryden, the poet’s and the tragic hero’s choice is between individual and community—­between one’s self-­definition and the identity created by the rest of the world. It is small won­der that though Antony feels the conscientious pull ­toward the cause of Ventidius and Octavia—­toward his duties as a public man of responsibility—he cannot concede the pre­ce­dence of conscience over desire. And when Ventidius attempts to argue against the validity of that desire, he enables Antony to justify it with magnificent eloquence. When Ventidius attempts to stop him from returning to Cleopatra’s embrace at the climax of act 2 (“And what’s this Toy / In balance with your fortune, Honour, Fame?”), Antony redefines the external demands that would divert him from his passion: What is’t, Ventidius? It outweighs ’em all; . . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . . . . . . . . Faith, Honour, Virtue, all good t­ hings forbid That I should go from her who sets my love Above the price of Kingdoms. (California Dryden, 13:2, ll. 429–443)

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Antony’s tragic inability to endure the confinement of a modified set of priorities or conduct raises the issue of ­whether this quality reflects Dryden’s conception of Shakespeare—­whether the Shakespearean mode of dramatic composition is an “all-­or-­nothing” prospect for the artist. While his self-­stressed adoption of Jonsonian regularity (and its consequentially muted emotional mimesis) would suggest as much, Dryden’s proclaimed “imitation” of Shakespeare appears to argue other­wise. He may be attempting a reconciling adoption of a partially Shakespearean mode in order to preserve the virtues of that mode (the “just and lively” qualities he so admires) while eliminating the vices. But in considering this latter option, we must consider the final product of the play and its infamous “failure” to produce ­those virtues. I contend, then, that the Shakespearean ele­ments that Dryden includes in the work—­the subject ­matter, the idiom, the versification—­are ultimately t­ here to identify the topic of discussion, rather than re-­create the emotional effect. His portrait of Antony suggests precisely that destructive exclusivity of perspective that Dryden’s criticism deplores, and so too must his view of Shakespeare as an object of literary imitation, a reading confirmed by Dryden: “We who ape his sound words, have nothing of his thought, but are all outside; ­there is not so much as a dwarf within our ­Giants cloaths. Therefore, let not Shakespear suffer for our sakes; ’tis our fault, who succeed him in an Age which is more refin’d, if we imitate him so ill, that we coppy his failings only, and make a virtue of that in our Writings, which in his was an imperfection” (California Dryden, 13:247). Dryden’s Antony inspires nothing but self-­ destructive be­hav­ior in his environment; Dryden’s Shakespeare does likewise.19 In Antony’s contemptuous reading of the advancing Octavian, we may also see one of Dryden’s cleverest—­and most Ciceronian—­critical conceits: he has allowed his opponent to make a case for himself. Recalling Neander’s clash with Lisideius in the Essay, we must remember that Dryden’s endorsement of neoclassicism is modified significantly by his preference for the mixed mode of the En­glish stage and his sharp criticism of what he depicts as the bloodless perfection of the French drama. And surely, for the Shakespearean artist, the drama of Dryden’s era must err far too much t­ oward such unsatisfying formality. Antony’s scorn for Octavian echoes Dryden’s concessions of the weakness of the Jonsonian mode of drama, in which greatness is sacrificed to regularity: Oh, ’tis the coldest youth upon a Charge, The most deliberate fighter . . . . . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . . . . . .

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1650–1850 Oh Hercules! Why should a Man like this, Who dares not trust his fate for one ­great action, Be all the care of Heav’n? (California Dryden, 13:2, ll. 113–133) Critically, this salvo demands what seems like an exclusive commitment, one that suggests that ­either passion and its heights or order and its dependability must be a priority. If one commits entirely to the latter, one aligns oneself with ­those French whom Dryden himself castigates in the introduction: “All their Wit is in their Ceremony; they want the Genius which animates our Stage. . . . ​As the civilest man in the com­pany is commonly the dullest, so ­these Authors, while they are afraid to make you laugh or cry, out of pure good manners, make you sleep” (California Dryden, 13:12). In the best Ciceronian tradition of in utramque partem, Dryden reminds his audience of the cost of decorum, even as he urges its necessity.20 But it is precisely this Ciceronian devotion to conciliation that moves Dryden to reject Antony’s priorities and, by extension, Shakespeare’s artistic pre­ce­dent. In a twist of logic that may subject Dryden to accusations of hy­poc­risy, he categorically rejects the Shakespearean mode ­because of its exclusivity. His portrait of Antony as a figure who disdains Rome’s values b ­ ecause they demand moderation is appealing, but if Antony rejects reconciliation b ­ ecause of what he perceives as Rome’s vices, he must also reject Rome’s profound virtues, embodied in Octavia and in his potential identity as Roman husband and f­ ather. His rejection of her reveals that he cannot distinguish between mutual compromise and self-­compromise: Octavia, I have heard you, and must praise The greatness of your Soul, But cannot yield to what you have propos’d; For I can ne’er be conquered but by love: And you do all for duty. (California Dryden, 13:3, ll. 313–337) An absolutist and a narcissist, Antony can only perceive o ­ thers as absolutists. And Ventidius, attempting to resolve the agon of the play by means of sentiment—­ hoping that Antony’s love for his ­family ­will overcome his passion for Cleopatra—­ has yielded victory by choosing the wrong battleground. Read symbolically, of course, ­there is nothing to choose between the two; Octavia has the virtue of Rome, of marriage, and of motherhood on her side, while Cleopatra has only the allure of private and erotic desire. But by bringing Octavia onstage, Ventidius has also allowed Antony to confuse the choice between virtue and self-­indulgence with that between a w ­ oman he does not love and a w ­ oman he does: “That Antony is easily moved by the appeals made to him by t­ hose t­ oward

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whom he feels a degree of love and affection is an indication of where he must ultimately turn—to his greatest passion.”21 Like the sophistic dichotomy of virtue and wit offered by Alexas in the wake of this scene, the demands of Octavia and Cleopatra as w ­ omen allow Antony to frame his choice between duty and passion, between the world and himself. Antony, murderer of Cicero, cannot think in terms of reconciliation of contrary impulses; for him, it must be all or nothing. Without the ability to perceive a ­middle course, Antony ­will inevitably make the choice that enables his selfish extremity: Cleopatra. The allure of emotional self-­gratification is too much for him to resist, and the disastrous results of this decision trigger the remainder of the tragic plot. Dryden does not ignore the magnetism of heroic passion and its dangerous tendency to inspire imitators, and once again Ventidius serves as an object lesson to ­those who would embrace passion as a means of attempting to shape character or conduct. Ventidius dramatizes the final movement of the play, creating both spectacle and audience in an attempt to achieve a reformation of Antony. Spying Dolabella’s as-­yet-­undecided deliberations over his conduct with Cleopatra in their imminent interview, Ventidius claims, “This happens as I wish, / To ruine her yet more with Antony” (California Dryden, 13:4, ll. 61–62). H ­ ere he abdicates the moral authority he has held so fiercely throughout the play. Like Alexas, who advises Cleopatra to feign interest in Dolabella to arouse Antony’s jealousy, Ventidius is not content to let the situation speak for itself. Instead, he elects to characterize it, presenting it as an emotionally manipulative appeal. Moved by Antony’s pre­ce­dent and Antony’s demands as his audience, Ventidius has allowed his own conduct to be corrupted. The truth no longer sufficient for his needs, he resorts to a willful distortion of his staged observations in order to further his own agenda, forsaking virtue for the rhe­toric of sentimental ­theatricality. He first summons Octavia to be the audience of the supposed interlude, con­ve­niently missing the chaste reconciliation between Dolabella and the queen. He then attempts, despicably, to engage Octavia in his scheme, using the figure he has portrayed as that of true Roman piety as a pawn in his drama. Chorus-­like, he offers her his own reading of Cleopatra’s reaction to their entrance: “She look’d methought / As she would say, Take your old man, Octavia; / Thank you, I’m better h ­ ere” (California Dryden, 13:4, ll. 228–230)—­a reading that Dryden has anticipated by Cleopatra’s shrewd comment a few lines earlier: “With how much ease believe we what we wish” (13:4, l. 193). When Ventidius probes Octavia, “what use / Make we of this discovery?” she answers, with s­ imple virtue, “Let it die” (13:4, ll. 230–231). But Ventidius cannot, and now this Drydenian figure reveals

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1650–1850 his unsurprising secret—­that b ­ ehind his virtuous ideals lurks a weakness for that very ­thing he has claimed to deplore: I pity Dolabella; but she’s dangerous . . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . . . . . . . . Even I who hate her, With a malignant joy behold such beauty; And while I curse, desire it. (California Dryden, 13:4, ll. 233–243) Worse, he succeeds in drawing Octavia into his plan; arousing her feminine jealousy, he taints her by association with his manipulative, sentimental agenda. He no longer can claim to be serving an objective sense of honor, for now it is his own individual perspective, rather than that collective repre­sen­ta­tion of Roman virtue, that he attempts to impose on the scene. As a Drydenian argument against Shakespearean drama, then, All for Love is as much Ventidius’s tragedy as it is Antony’s, and for essentially the same reason: Ventidius succumbs to the temptation of using passion’s anarchy to achieve personal satisfaction (­under the self-­deluding guise of communal ends). His attempts to save Antony from Cleopatra are motivated as much by envy as they are by honor. From such false premises, no virtuous action can derive, and so it proves when Ventidius descends to exaggerating per­for­mance in order to ensnare the man he claims to admire. Dryden reinforces this portrait of corruption by having Ventidius quote, aptly enough, Shakespeare in his attempt to whip Antony into resentful fury. To Antony’s “My Cleopatra?” he replies, “Your Cleopatra; / Dolabella’s Cleo­ patra; / ­Every man’s Cleopatra” (California Dryden, 13:4, ll. 296–299), echoing the words of the villainous Don John, deceiving Claudio into thinking Hero unchaste.22 Alexas earlier paraphrases Richard of Gloucester and in ­doing so brands himself a villain;23 Ventidius’s use of Don John’s verbal trickery can do no less. Indeed, the parallel ends not with Don John but with Iago, for Antony’s rage at the false accusation of infidelity by his trusted lieutenant must remind us of that identical dynamic in Othello. In stooping to the Shakespearean use of passion, Ventidius has plunged to the moral depths of the worst of Shakespeare’s villains.24 ­Here we have the play’s most explicit reference to the Shakespearean mode—­a character adopts that mode in constructing his dramatic tableaux and, in d ­ oing so, becomes corrupted into the darkest version of the Shakespearean character. If the play is a warning against the dangerously infectious nature of Shakespearean art on the character, Ventidius is the strongest instance of that warning. But Ventidius has forgotten that which Dryden does not: passion, once aroused, is not controllable by reason or even by desire. Antony’s reaction is as

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excessive as all his other emotional movements. From monarch to misanthrope, he swings around once again, revealing his inherently unstable nature; when he dismisses the attempts of Cleopatra and Dolabella to excuse themselves with the defiant cry, “I am not to be mov’d” (California Dryden, 13:4, l. 577), it is a moment of ­bitter comedy. Antony, for all of his self-­determinist impulses, is ultimately a victim to the manipulative emotional wiles of Ventidius, Cleopatra, and, at the last, Alexas, who thinks to save himself by telling Antony of Cleopatra’s supposed suicide. A character who derives his magnificence from passion, who is not rooted in the objective demands of reason, who can look only to his own emotions as a guide to conduct, must be capable of as much folly as greatness. And it is folly that must ultimately triumph, since it leads to irrecoverable destruction, t­ oward which the final act drives us in Antony’s receipt of the false news of Cleopatra’s death. The lesson of the unpredictable nature of provoked passion is repeated once more, to its logical, catastrophic outcome: the dual suicide of the lovers. And while the conclusion of the play appears to justify Johnson’s claims of the glorification of its lovers, a closer reading reveals that Dryden introduces this temptation in order to rebut it. Antony’s self-­destruction does not ennoble him with any final enlightenment; it is merely the self-­consumption of the solipsist who succumbs to the demands of his perspective. Deceived by the emotionally provocative lies of Alexas, he expires in a false triumph of passion, exulting in his past: “Ten years love, / And not a moment lost, but all improv’d / To th’utmost joys: what Ages have we lived” (California Dryden, 13:4, ll. 391–393). It then falls to Cleopatra to consummate this final self-­centered act, to create with her own corpse a tableau of idyllic passion, inviting the audience’s approval and imitation. But as Dryden illustrates in his warnings to Shakespeare’s admirers, the full lesson of this pre­ce­ dent must be a warning against the consequences of imitation. Serapion’s valediction, then, is no s­ imple encomium but a double-­edged warning to the spectators: See, see how the Lovers sit in State together, As they w ­ ere giving Laws to half Mankind! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sleep, blest Pair, Secure from humane chance, long Ages out, While all the Storms of Fate fly ­o’er your Tomb; And Fame, to late Posterity, s­ hall tell, No Lovers liv’d so ­great, or dy’d so well. (California Dryden, 13:5, ll. 508–519) Rendered an effigy—­and thus deprived of that vigor that caused our frustrating adoration in the first place—­Antony is already the subject of a revisionist portrait

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1650–1850 that forgets his faults and extols his virtues, ignoring the necessary link between the two. To a succeeding age in which Antony’s passion is replaced by the cold Augustus, it is easy to fall prey to nostalgia. But by inviting us to worship the two dead lovers, Serapion invites us to worship passion without reason, desire without limit, and sensation without structure—in short, to worship the very errors tragedy should correct. In imitating and examining the Shakespearean mode in the play, Dryden tempts us to ignore the costs of Shakespearean drama and Shakespearean passion and to dissolve into selfish approval of emotional satisfaction. But in the truest fashion of Drydenian drama, the play relies on the responsibility of reaction on its viewers. It demands their recognition of the allure, but the ultimate need for rejection of the passion of its protagonist and, with him, the drama of the author he represents.

Notes Epigraph: John Dryden, The Conquest of Granada, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. H. T. Swedenberg Jr. et al., 20 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956–2000), 11:1, ll. 205–209. All references to Dryden’s writings ­will be to this edition (hereafter cited as California Dryden, identified parenthetically by volume and act, scene, and line number or by page number where appropriate). 1. ​Gerard Langbaine, An Account of the En­glish Dramatick Poets (1691; repr., Los Angeles: UCLA, Augustan Reprint Society, 1971), 153. 2. ​“It has one fault equal to many, though rather moral than critical, that, by admitting the romantick omnipotence of Love, he has recommended as laudable and worthy of imitation that conduct which, through all the ages, the good have censured as vicious, and the bad despised as foolish” (Samuel Johnson, “Life of Dryden,” in Lives of the En­glish Poets, in Works of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., 2 vols. [New York: Harper and ­Brothers, 1854], 2:85). 3. ​T. S. Eliot, Hazelton Spencer, Arthur Sale, R. J. Kaufmann, and Ruth Wallerstein represent a small sampling of impor­tant Dryden scholars who have, in reading Dryden’s professed debt to Shakespeare too literally, been led to regard All for Love as, at best, a faint echo of a masterpiece. See T. S. Eliot, John Dryden: The Poet, the Dramatist, the Critic (New York: Haskell House, 1966); Hazelton Spencer, Shakespeare Improved: The Restoration Versions in Quarto and on the Stage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927); Arthur Sale, introduction to All for Love (London: University Tutorial Press, 1957); R. J. Kaufmann, “On the Poetics of Terminal Tragedy: Dryden’s All for Love,” in Dryden: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Bernard N. Schilling (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1963); Ruth Wallerstein, “Dryden and the Analy­sis of Shakespeare’s Techniques,” Review of

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En­glish Studies: A Quarterly Journal of En­glish Lit­er­a­ture and the En­glish Language 74 (April 1943): 165–185. 4. ​Richard Kroll, Restoration Drama and “The Circle of Commerce” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 257–258. 5. ​“ ­There is no rec­ord of a Restoration stage per­for­mance of Antony and Cleopatra before Dryden wrote All for Love and none afterward u ­ ntil 3 January 1758.” Maximillian E. Novak, commentary on All for Love, in California Dryden 13:365. 6. ​Kroll, Restoration Drama, 258. 7. ​Of course, many critics, such as Everett  H. Emerson, Harold  E. Davis, and Ira Johnson, and Bruce King, have simply dismissed the relevance of Dryden’s self-­ commentary to the play, a position I likewise cannot agree with. Dryden’s ­career, and in par­tic­u­lar his lengthy critical attempts to recount his creative pro­cess, suggests an assiduous, often experimental application of his critical ideas to his dramatic writing; as the rest of this essay ­will argue, one cannot dissociate Dryden the critic from Dryden the artist. ­These critics’ contrary opinion is that Dryden could not reconcile his moral disapproval with his poetic sympathies, which endorsed the supposedly erroneous choice of the lovers of passion over reason, and that the work is therefore rhetorically compromised. My argument ­counters this claim, illustrating that the corrupting self-­delusion of passion is something of which Dryden was well aware and is included in the play so as to illustrate the difficulty of conquering it. See Everett H. Emerson, Harold E. Davis, and Ira Johnson, “Intention and Achievement in All for Love,” College En­glish 17, no.  2 (1955): 84–87; and Bruce King, “Dryden’s Intent in All for Love,” College En­glish 24, no. 4 (1963): 267–271. 8. ​Frank J. Kearful, “ ‘ ’Tis Past Recovery’: Tragic Consciousness in All for Love,” Modern Language Quarterly 34, no. 3 (1973): 228. 9. ​This view links Shakespeare to the critical evaluation of Longinus’s insistence on the sublime; Michael Werth Gelber notes that Dryden’s access to Boileux’s translation of On the Sublime led him to revise much of his critical and artistic attitudes, though as I ­will argue, at the time of his composition of All for Love, he was not an enthusiast of the socially and artistically irresponsible privileging of sublimity that Longinus advocates and that Dryden’s estimation of Shakespeare clearly indicates he found in his pre­de­ces­sor. 10. ​Though Dryden invariably portrays Shakespeare’s individual achievements as inimitable, he shows that Shakespeare’s methodology—­that of allowing the raising and indulging of the passions to be the dramatic raison d’être, to the exclusion of a sustained moral and intellectual argument—is not, and the tendency of the professional playwrights of his era, such as Nathaniel Lee, to show their strengths in their ability to achieve the former is, I contend, his motivation for urging the necessity for the latter. 11. ​Kroll, Restoration Drama, 24.

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1650–1850 12. ​Certainly Dryden is not suggesting that the passions evoked by t­hese authors have been wholly evacuated, merely the means by which they have raised them. It is entirely pos­si­ble for present-­day authors to move their audiences to emotional heights, but not by the means by which Shakespeare, Fletcher, and ­others have done so. Again, Dryden concedes that the Shakespearean achievement is absolute but that the mode of Shakespeare—to move without the let of morality—­ remains quite feasible, and dangerously so. 13. ​Kroll, Restoration Drama, 24. 14. ​The influence of Epicurus (and Epicurus-­cum-­Hobbes) on Dryden’s work has long been established. See Derek V. Hughes, “The Significance of All for Love,” En­glish Literary History 37, no. 4 (1970): 540–563; Edward N. Hooker, “Dryden and the Atoms of Epicurus,” En­glish Literary History 24 (1957): 177–190; and John A. Winterbottom, “The Place of Hobbesian Ideas in Dryden’s Tragedies,” Journal of En­glish and Germanic Philology 57, no. 4 (1958): 665–683; as well as Richard W. F. Kroll’s analy­sis of the Epicurean ele­ment of “Absalom and Achitophel,” in The Material Word: Literate Culture in the Restoration and Early Eigh­teenth ­Century (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1991), 305–321. 15. ​Wallerstein, “Dryden,” 558–559. 16. ​William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 5:2, ll. 110– 111. All quotations from Shakespeare are from this edition. Frank Kearful has noted this parallel too, as well as the overall tendency of the play to emphasize, meta-­theatrically, a self-­conscious and uncomfortable relationship to Shakespeare: “Before we read the play, it is set before us by the author as a created object, furthermore as a re-­created object of a prior object familiar alike to author and reader” (Kearful, “ ’ Tis Past Recovery,” 235). 17. ​Kroll’s point about the Racinian nature of the play is well taken; in the fundamentally static mode of French neoclassicism—of which Dryden did not approve but adopts h ­ ere as a kind of decorous extremity to counterbalance the excessive passion of Antony—­the Shakespearean hero’s flaws are accentuated to strong rhetorical effect. 18. ​Eugene M. Waith, The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare and Dryden (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 173. 19. ​This criticism of passion raises the inevitable question of Dryden’s intention regarding the secondary title of the play, The World Well Lost, and w ­ hether this sentiment is endorsed or ironized. Both sides have their critical defenders; Johnson thinks it an undisguised expression of Dryden’s priorities, and Bruce King too regards the sentiment as sincere. But Dryden’s portrait of the passion of the central lovers is one that does not so much transcend the world as reject it, a priority we can ascribe to Dryden himself only by arguing that he believes that personal gratification trumps the requirements of community, a possibility for which ­there is far too much contrary evidence. Dryden’s title, then, is not ironic; it simply

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“All for Duty”

expresses both the lovers’ perspective and, in a twist of black humor, the good fortune of the world itself, which is indeed “well lost” by ­these two, whose misrule has been averted. 20. ​Of course, Octavian’s ruthlessness notwithstanding, his imperial rule rebuilt and glorified a shattered Rome, unifying a divided empire and ushering in the fabled age of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. The parallel between the Roman need for such constructive, public-­minded leadership and the conditions of the En­glish state in Dryden’s era is obvious, and Dryden clearly tips his interpretive hand in ­favor of that figure who places the needs of the nation over the promptings of his libido. We might also note the equally obvious hortatory suggestion to Charles to emulate the Augustan rather than the Herculean figure of the play. 21. ​Novak, commentary on All for Love, in California Dryden 13:385–386. 22. ​William Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing, III:ii, ll. 94–95. 23. ​Alexas: Plea­sure forsook my early’st Infancy The luxury of o ­ thers robb’d my Cradle, And ravish’d thence the promise of a Man: Cast out from Nature, disinherited Of what her meanest ­Children claim by kind (3, ll. 381–385) Compare to Richard: Why, love forswore me in my m ­ other’s womb; And, for I should not deal in her soft laws, She did corrupt frail nature with some bribe . . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . .​ . . . .​ . . . .​ . . . . To disproportion me in e­ very part (William Shakespeare, Henry VI, III:ii, ll. 153–160) 24. ​The parallels with the Shakespearean would have been heightened by the fact that Michael Mohun, who originally played Ventidius, had also played Iago to Charles Hart’s Othello. Hart, of course, originated the role of Antony. See H. Neville Davies, “ ‘All for Love’: Texts and Contexts,” Cahiers Elisabéthains 36 (1989): 63.

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WILLIAM CONGREVE AS SATIRIST PATRICIA GAEL

Congreve is a satirist. Yet the slippery meaning of “satire” has obscured his use

of that mode for many critics. T ­ hose who believe that “satire is hostile by nature” or that “the satirist is destructive” can only deny Congreve’s implementation of it.1 William Archer, for example, argues, “Satire seeks, even if it be despairingly, to make the world better; whereas no such dream, as­suredly, ever flitted through Congreve’s brain.”2 But this interpretation is too narrow to include many works best understood as satires. Not all satire is designed to condemn its targets or praise its heroes. As a recent critic demonstrates, satire is best understood as a form of critique;3 it can most broadly and usefully be defined as by the Oxford En­glish Dictionary—­a composition “in which prevailing vices or follies are held up to ridicule” but not necessarily with an intent to condemn or reform.4 Congreve—­ whose comedies show communities in varying degrees of disorder and distress—­ critiques without calling for change. But this method did not prevent him from viewing his works as satires. Ample evidence exists to suggest that Congreve considered his comedies satiric. In the dedicatory letter to The Double-­Dealer, he refers to the “Satyr of this Comedy.”5 The prologue of Love for Love also clearly states that satire would be found within, and although that of The Way of the World claims that the audience would find no satire, the ironic basis of the declaration suggests other­wise.6 Characters in the plays also comment on the satirical content of their own conversations: Mirabell, for example, declares that Sir Willful “so passionately affects the Reputation of understanding Raillery; that he ­will construe an Affront

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into a Jest; and call downright Rudeness and ill Language, Satyr and Fire” (Congreve, 401, 1.1). The Double-­Dealer’s Brisk proclaims of his own amorphous verse, “I ­don’t know what to call it, but it’s Satyr” (Congreve, 166, 3.1). Granted the qualities that can make Congreve’s meaning difficult to establish (his love of irony and tongue-­in-­cheek criticism), the frequency with which he applied the term “satire” to his comedies suggests that his claims ­were serious.

Congreve’s Comments on Satire in Comedy When Congreve used the term “satire,” he did so with a knowledge of its classical heritage: he was well-­read in the Roman satirists. As David Thomas and ­others have accurately explained, his “­whole approach to playwrighting was based on an intimate acquaintance and profound sympathy with the classical tradition and its values of subtlety, decorum and precision.”7 The Roman satirists do not seem to have been far from his mind when he was writing his comedies. Congreve translated Juvenal’s eleventh satire for Dryden’s 1693 edition of the works of that poet, and his library contained multiple editions of Juvenal’s and Horace’s works (both in Latin and in translation).8 Herbert Davis speculates that Congreve may have received inspiration for The Old Batchelour from a line in Juvenal’s sixth satire: “That he to Wedlock, dotingly betrayed, / Should hope, in this lewd Town, to find a Maid! / The Man’s grown Mad” could easily be a summary of Heartwell’s strug­ gles. Davis also suggests that the title for that play may have been taken from Dryden’s translation of t­hose lines, which describe the character in question as “the rich Old Batchelour.” 9 The title pages of Love for Love and The Way of the World imply that ­those plays too may have been connected to classical satires in their author’s mind: they contain quotations from Horace’s second and first satires, respectively. And the title pages of The Old Batchelour and The Double-­ Dealer, while not paired with quotations from satires, included lines from Horace’s epistles and Ars Poetica, respectively. Congreve’s consistent references to Horace and Juvenal, prominently displayed directly u ­ nder his own name on the comedies’ title pages, suggest their importance to the author. And Congreve also used examples both from Juvenal and from Horace to support his arguments for the proper content and construction of plays.10 His extensive knowledge and application of the Roman satirists indicates a conscious attempt to adapt their style to his own work. “Adapt” is, of course, the key word; Congreve was not resurrecting Horace or Juvenal. He had his own ideas about the implementation of satire in comedy.

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1650–1850 His definition of satire therefore becomes a fundamental issue. What, if anything, did he seek to accomplish through his use of the mode? Critics often limit the pos­ si­ble effects of satire to moral reform.11 Congreve’s contemporaries certainly argued that satire should improve its audience: Dryden calls it “that sharp, well-­ manner’d way, of laughing a Folly out of Countenance”; John Dennis says, “the Satyr of Comedy falls not upon the order of men, out of which the Ridicu­lous Characters are taken, but upon the persons of all ­orders who are affected with the like follies”; and the anonymous author of A Vindication of the Stage explains that “in the Play-­House you see the meanness and folly of your Vices, and by beholding the frightful Image, you grow asham’d, and perhaps may Reform.”12 In letters, prefaces, and critical commentary, Congreve himself declares (usually defensively) his intention to use satire to impart lessons in morality to his audience, for “as vicious ­People are made asham’d of their Follies or Faults, by seeing them expos’d in a ridicu­lous manner, so are good ­People at once both warn’d and diverted at their Expence” (Amendments, 8).13 What remains is to ascertain, to the extent pos­si­ble, how much Congreve actually believed that satire should be reformative. Did Congreve think a playwright held a responsibility to attempt to improve his or her audience? On this point—­crucial to our understanding of Congreve’s designs for his satiric comedies—­critics have not agreed. Some deny that Congreve had moral intentions for his plays.14 ­O thers seem convinced ­either that Congreve himself was a devoted moralist15 or, more specifically, that his plays upheld par ­tic­u­lar princi­ples.16 Most examinations of Congreve’s morality rely heavi­ly on his reaction to the theatrical controversy roused by Jeremy Collier. James Sutherland states flatly in his study of En­glish satire that “neither Congreve nor Vanbrugh had given serious thought to discouraging vice . . . ​­until Collier had put it into their heads.”17 He refers of course to Collier’s A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the En­glish Stage (1698), which, though prob­ably not entirely responsible for Congreve’s consideration of morality in drama, created turmoil in dramatic circles at the end of the seventeenth ­century.18 Collier argues that plays should serve an edifying purpose for audiences, recommending virtue and condemning vice. He writes, “To treat Honour and Infamy alike, is an injury to Virtue, and a sort of Levelling to Morality,” and he accuses playwrights of profaning the stage through their use of improper language and depiction of rogu­ish characters who are seemingly rewarded for their lascivious be­hav­ior.19 A Short View is essentially a close reading without exact citations, which Collier claims would be too tedious. Collier analyzes scenes from numerous plays and, based on his religious views as a nonjuring clergyman, concludes that characters’ comments

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and actions are reprehensible. He criticizes many playwrights (Dryden, William Wycherley, John Vanbrugh, and Thomas D’Urfey are common targets), but much of his harshest censure is reserved for Congreve. For example, Collier complains of Congreve’s use of religious language: “Lætitia when her Intrigue with Bellmour was almost discover’d, supports her self with this Consideration. All my Comfort lies in his impudence, and Heaven be prais’d, he has a Considerable Portion. This is the Play-­house Grace, and thus Lewdness is made a part of Devotion!”20 The comments ­were sharp enough to provoke a response from Congreve. Congreve’s reply to Collier was quick and angry. His Amendments of Mr. Collier’s False and Imperfect CITATIONS was published only three months a­ fter A Short View, in spite of Congreve’s claim that he was “tax’d of Laziness, and too much Security, in neglecting thus long to do [him]self a necessary Right” (Amendments, 2). In harsh and somewhat unpolished language, Congreve aims to “restore ­those Passages to their primitive Station, which have suffer’d so much in being transplanted by him” (3–4). Congreve was extremely offended that Collier had taken his words out of context; he claims that “Mr. Collier’s many false Citations, make his true suspected; and his misapplication of his true Citations, very much arraign both his Judgment and Sincerity” (104–105). In Congreve’s point of view, understanding a play requires consideration of the entirety of its characters’ situations and motivations. Congreve also argues that his alleged profanity was the result of Collier’s smutty interpretation rather than the implications of the work itself. Readers have long derided the Amendments as crude: Colley Cibber claims that Congreve “seem’d too much hurt, to be able to defend himself”; Samuel Johnson gives Congreve “his antagonist’s coarseness, but not his strength”; and Rose Snider calls the reply “weak and half-­hearted.”21 ­These criticisms are reasonable—­ the pamphlet r­ eally is not up to the standards set by his other work—­but dismissing the Amendments as an emotional rant disregards one of the best sources for Congreve’s thoughts on his own work. In spite of Congreve’s often-­cited declaration that men of loose morals “must be exposed a­ fter a ridicu­lous manner: For Men are to be laugh’d out of their Vices in Comedy” (Amendments, 8), his response to Collier may be one of the most power­ful indications that he did not intend his comedies to be moral commentary. Examination of the Amendments provides l­ittle further support of the early assertion that a play should act as an improving influence. Rather, Congreve focuses his defense on the careful craftsmanship and literary merit of his plays. The question is, why? Scholars have suggested that his ability to address Collier’s moral concerns was somehow restricted by his profession as a writer or his background.

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1650–1850 Alexander Lindsay and Howard Erskine-­Hill, for example, propose that “an all-­out secular and rationalistic defense, which could challenge all Collier’s assumptions, must have seemed a good deal more convincing to the modern reader” but that Congreve, as a product of the age, could not write such a ­thing.22 Maximillian Novak more particularly argues that Congreve was not able to respond adequately to Collier ­because the men w ­ ere writing at cross-­purposes—­Congreve as a playwright and Collier as a member of the clergy—­though he does not suggest that Congreve’s position was a conscious choice.23 Was the case presented in the Amendments the only argument Congreve could make? Congreve was an educated man who almost certainly understood the intent and background of Collier’s attack; in all likelihood, he was capable of responding to Collier in the clergyman’s own terms. Although Congreve did not have Collier’s theological background and expertise, he was not ignorant about religion and Chris­tian­ity. Even beyond the common knowledge that would have been the result of the late seventeenth-­century Christian milieu,24 Congreve evidently had a base of religious knowledge; at Trinity College, he would have been expected to attend chapel and prayers each morning,25 and his possession of a number of religious books in l­ater years implies at least a passing knowledge of and interest in religion.26 He could have defended his work on the basis of its Christian morality had he believed it to be an impor­tant or effective argument against Collier’s criticism. Aubrey L. Williams’s elaborate case for the presence of Chris­tian­ity in Congreve’s work at least proves that the argument could have been constructed.27 Or Congreve could have responded by satirizing A Short View as D’Urfey did, asking “whither he [Collier], tho a happy member of the aforesaid Adorable Church, does not come in for fair share of Immorality, and other frailties; and consequently is not as fit to be detected, by the Wit of a Satyrical Poet, as the Poet by the positive Authority of an Angry Malecontent, tho in the garb of an h ­ umble Churchman.”28 But Congreve did not enter the moral debate. Instead, he attacked Collier’s failure to understand his plays not as moral artifacts but as drama. Congreve was concerned about his plays’ reputation. He often complained that audiences and readers failed to appreciate the nuances of tone and characterization that he believed essential to forming an accurate impression of his satire. Collier was particularly guilty of this type of misreading. Congreve argued (as did, for example, Vanbrugh and Dryden) that Collier misrepresented and oversimplified the interpretation of the works he analyzed.29 He pleads for readers of his Amendments “not to consider any Expression or Passage cited from any Play, as it appears in Mr. Collier’s Book; nor to pass any Sentence or Censure upon it, out of its proper

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Scene, or alienated from the Character by which it is spoken; for in that place alone, and in his Mouth alone, can it have its proper and true Signification” (Amendments, 9–10), and he seems to expect (or at least hope for) an intelligent and engaged readership. Ever the careful craftsman, he encouraged deducing meaning on the basis of the entire work rather than focusing on the pieces that best suited the readers’ own interests or arguments. Real­ity was evidently a disappointment. In the epilogue to The Double-­Dealer, Congreve explains the difficulty a playwright faced in attempting to please all members of a diverse audience. Affecting a resigned attitude ­toward the inevitable criticism his play would receive, he pleads for the importance of understanding a work’s content: “But tho’ he cannot Write, let him be freed / At least from their Contempt, who cannot Read” (Congreve, 204). How did Congreve want audiences to react to his comedies? What effect did he think his satire could have on readers or theatergoers? He does not seem to have been attempting to effect ­great social or po­liti­cal change. Rather, he provides entertainment to t­ hose who could recognize their own world in his plays, even if they could not fully comprehend the implications of his satire. Reformation may not have been his goal, but the depiction of an ailing society was. He expected his audience to be amused and argued that “where the business is to expose and reprehend Folly and Vice in general, no par­tic­u­lar person o ­ ught to take offense” (Amendments, 64). His harshest versions of con­temporary society, however, do not seem to have been palatable to theatergoers. Congreve predicted, for example, that The Double-­Dealer would meet with at least as much praise as The Old Batchelour (if not more). He was disappointed to find the play rather coolly received and attributed the play’s reputation to the hurt feelings of the audience. “I hear a ­great many of the Fools are angry at me, and I am glad of it; for I Writ at them, not to them,” Congreve declared.30 The distinction implies that he believed the audience incapable of properly understanding his satiric point. His attitude ­toward his audience casts further doubt on claims that he “obviously thought that an exposure to ­great comedy could be an urbane preparation for life.”31 Yet Congreve evidently believed that satire was a potentially power­ful tool for critique. In his analy­sis of a quotation from Juvenal, he explains that the author “by the help of an Irony, has in ­these three Lines, lash’d the Vices of ­great Persons with more Severity, than he could have done by the means of a direct and point-­ blank Invective” (Amendments, 20). Congreve’s own satiric critiques are broad and nonspecific; they offer not observations on one person or event but expansive mockeries of par­tic­u­lar be­hav­iors and character traits. In the epilogue to The Way of the World, Congreve defends his strategy:

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1650–1850 ­ hese with false Glosses, feed their own Ill-­nature, T And turn to Libel, what was meant a Satire . . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . .​ . . .​ . . .​ . . . . For well the Learn’d and the Judicious know, That Satire scorns to stoop so meanly low, As any one abstracted Fop to shew. (Congreve, 479) His goals w ­ ere larger than slander or defamation. Congreve was concerned with and disgusted by the state of En­glish society. He concludes his response to Collier with a description of the age: “Is t­ here any where a ­People more unsteady, more apt to discontent, more saturnine, dark, and melancholick than our selves?” (Amendments, 108). Satire was his means of expressing his discontent. His characters may have been humorous, but he took his plays seriously. Congreve can be distinguished from his contemporaries by what Thomas calls his “pursuit of stylistic purity and satiric honesty.”32 Although Congreve’s plays contain satiric characters and discussions, ­these are not the thrust of his satire. His meaning is conveyed only through interpretation of the plays in their entirety. When examined in this way, one finds satire that denounces society without demanding—or expecting—­change. Relying on Congreve’s epilogues, prologues, letters, and response to Collier to characterize his intentions as a comic playwright, however, is fraught with numerous obvious prob­lems. Determining tone is one of the greatest challenges. How seriously was Congreve taking himself in his Amendments? How soberly ­were readers intended to approach his animated, vituperative denunciations of Collier’s work? He writes, for example, “in some Places of his Book he [Collier] criticizes more like a Pedant than a Scholar; argues more like a Sophister than a right Reasoner, and rallies more like a Waterman than a Gentleman” (69). Such language is hardly indicative of a solemn argument. Interpretation of the comments Congreve appended to his plays is even more complicated. When in his prologue to The Way of the World he asks the audience to remember the playwright’s suggestion that “Satire, he thinks, you o ­ ught not to expect, / For so Reform’d a Town, who dares Correct?” (Congreve, 393), we can safely assume a tongue-­in-­cheek attitude. But what of his claim in the prologue to Love for Love that Since the Plain-­Dealers Scenes of Manly Rage, Not one has dar’d to lash this Crying Age This time, the Poet owns the bold Essay, Yet hopes t­ here’s no ill-­manners in his Play. (Congreve, 214)

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Even if Congreve’s commentary could be taken at face value, the exposure of vice and the reformation of the audience that he claimed to have been attempting in his plays and the impression the works leave on audiences and critics have been shown to be quite dif­fer­ent.

Congreve’s Satiric Practice In practice, Congreve’s satire does not suggest societal improvement or moral reform. Emmett L. Avery finds that con­temporary productions of his plays ­were often criticized for their lack of morality—­and when they ­were praised, l­ittle justification was given for their appreciation.33 Congreve’s characters are not concerned with the virtue of their actions but with the effects their actions ­will have on their immediate ­futures. They worry not w ­ hether a proposed course of action is “right” or “wrong” but w ­ hether its results w ­ ill be agreeable to the p ­ eople involved. For example, when Fondlewife warns his wife about the sin of adultery, he demonstrates a complete lack of concern for its potential impact on the salvation of her soul by declaring simply, “although it may lie heavy upon thee, yet thy Husband must also bear his part: For thy iniquity w ­ ill fall upon his Head” (The Old Batchelour, in Congreve, 77, 4.1). And Congreve passes up other obvious opportunities to question Christian morality in his depictions of the clergy. Even Collier could evidently find ­little fault with him on that front: Congreve observed about Collier’s chapter on the abuses of the clergy, “He quotes me so l­ittle . . . ​and has so ­little reason even for that ­little, that it is hardly worth examining” (Amendments, 57). Although many marriages (both real and feigned) take place in the comedies, the only officiants onstage are impostors who have taken the robes of the clergy (e.g., Bellmour disguised as the parson Spintext in The Old Batchelour or Mellefont dressed in Saygrace’s habit in The Double-­Dealer). The lone ­actual clergy member in Congreve’s comedies is The Double-­Dealer’s Saygrace, who is rather too foolish to pose a serious threat to morality. Comments on the clergy are more illustrative of ­those who make them than of any par­tic­u­lar religious views. For example, the pimp Setter describes the parson’s habit this way: “the large sanctified Hat . . . ​with a swinging long Spiritual Cloak, to Cover Carnal Knavery” and a “Black Patch, which Tribulation Spintext wears as I’m inform’d, upon one Eye, as a penal Mourning for the ogling Offences of his Youth” (Congreve, 64, 3.1). The libertine Bellmour won­ders “why all our young Fellows should glory in an opinion of

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1650–1850 Atheism; when they may be so much more con­ve­niently lewd, u ­ nder the Coverlet of Religion” (Congreve, 75, 4.1). The gossip and lewd assumptions of men such as ­these can bear l­ittle reflection on the clergy in the world of the play. Is their piety to be mistrusted? Are they to be mocked for their faith or upheld as an example of morality that contrasts that of the play’s main characters? A consistent attitude ­toward religion is impossible to determine. If Congreve was not concerned with exposing t­ hose who fall short of an ideal Christian morality, what ­were his satiric targets? A few answers are obvious. Congreve satirizes, for example, romantic love, lust, strained familial relationships, low levels of intelligence, and the follies of old age. If one delves deeper, more specific targets can be determined. For instance, on occasion he satirizes not just love but the value of fidelity between lovers, not just ­family but the obligations owed between parents and ­children. Characters’ names offer further clues.34 Fondlewife is impotent, Brisk boasts a remarkably slow wit, and Foresight cannot see what is right before his eyes. Congreve’s satiric targets are varied both within each play and across all of his comedies. Many of Congreve’s comedic characters are exaggerated depictions of their worst flaws. In The Old Batchelour, Vainlove is such a deci­ded libertine that he finds ­women themselves less in­ter­est­ing than chasing them; Heartwell’s professed honesty (he claims, “My talent is chiefly that of speaking truth, which I ­don’t expect should ever recommend me to ­People of Quality” [Congreve, 45, 1.1]) and aversion to marriage are contrasted with his concealed marriage to Silvia; and impotent Fondlewife is too foolish and powerless to stand up to his wife even when faced with conclusive evidence of her wrongdoings. The Way of the World’s Lady Wishfort lays paint on thick to conceal her fifty-­five years, and her pride and vanity inform e­ very decision she makes. The foolish Brisk in The Double-­Dealer is certain of his own genius, yet his jests are so obvious to the genuinely witty that to refrain from mocking him is painful for Careless. Foresight in Love for Love is perhaps one of Congreve’s best satiric characters—an amateur astrologer so fixated on the interpretation of signals (“I stumbl’d coming down Stairs, and met a Weasel; bad Omens ­those” [Congreve, 236, 2.1]) that he does not notice his wife being seduced. Congreve expands on the targets established by earlier playwrights. For example, although none of his plays take place in the country, each contains at least brief commentary on country manners. Love for Love’s Miss Prue is the quin­tes­ sen­tial country cousin; she horrifies Mrs. Frail by referring to her linen as “Smocks” and charms the lustful Tattle with her fresh innocence.35 In The Old Batchelour—­a

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play with no characters from the country—­Belinda’s lengthy description of two young country girls whom she saw at the Exchange seems out of place (“fat as Barn-­door-­Fowl: But so bedeck’d, you wou’d have taken ’em for Friezland-­Hens, with their Feathers growing the wrong way” [Congreve, 84, 4.3]). Belinda’s story is only an anecdote, and ­there is no plot-­based reason that ­these characters should be from the country. Congreve could have mocked appearances and style of dress ­were they from out of town or simply young and unfashionable. Many more examples of particularized satire could be found—­Ursula Jantz filled a book with examinations of satiric attacks on, for example, hy­poc­risy, affectation, materialism, sex, gender, and religion—­but what can we gain by studying ­these small, specific instances of satiric hits?36 Only support for the basic claim that Congreve was a satirist. Listing the butts of his jests does not, however, facilitate the overall interpretation of his plays. If Congreve’s satire ­were limited to passing references to social norms, his comedies could not themselves fairly be called “satires,” and his status as a satirist would not be subject to debate. An analy­sis of his comedies demonstrates that Congreve experimented with his satire, varying its tone and the severity of his critique, without straying from his uniquely understated and dispersed implementation. The Old Batchelour (1693) follows patterns established by earlier playwrights. The plot includes a cuckolding scheme and a number of seductions among a small set of characters.37 The play’s principal story concerns Vainlove, a libertine rake who is only attracted to ­women ­until he can count them among his conquests, and Araminta, the love interest who hides her regard for Vainlove to hold his attention. The title refers to the play’s best-­defined character, Heartwell—an old, avowed woman-­hater who lusts ­after Vainlove’s spurned mistress, Silvia. What general impressions would con­temporary audiences have had of The Old Batchelour? The play might have been considered a new spin on the cheerful comedies common to the late seventeenth ­century, which, like Thomas Shadwell’s Squire of Alsatia (1688), often had a clear, didactic purpose. The characters are similar to ­those found in the comedies of the 1680s, and questions of marriage (what are the motivations to wed?) and age (how does the passage of time affect one’s priorities?) are central to the plot. As Robert D. Hume notes, The Old Batchelour “clearly shows that the young author had done plenty of reading in Carolean comedy.”38 Congreve was prob­ably not yet living in London when he wrote the play, and his limited theatrical experience lent itself to the creation of what Novak explains “may be read as a digest of the themes, characters and techniques of Restoration comedy.”39 Brian Morris posits a plausible earlier source of inspiration for the

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1650–1850 tone of The Old Batchelour: “Congreve follows Jonson’s example in using the satiric tenor of the dialogue to form and control our attitude to the characters and episodes ahead.” 40 Editorial involvement from Dryden and Thomas Southerne might also have contributed to the play’s similarities to its pre­de­ces­sors.41 Yet The Old Batchelour is far from a resurrection of earlier comedies. Congreve satirizes dramatic convention, and breaking with that convention creates tension. As Norman N. Holland explains, “The action and language pull against each other, giving dif­fer­ent, even inconsistent, points of view on the t­ hings a par­tic­u­lar individual does.” 42 The play’s conclusion is a particularly jarring breach of custom: The Old Batchelour ends neither with the marriage of its central figure nor with the reformation or repentance of any of its fools. Heartwell narrowly escapes marriage, two weddings and an engagement take place, and Vainlove and Araminta agree to continue their relationship on a probationary basis. Although the play’s cheerful tone has led some p ­ eople to call its ending happy or instructive, Congreve provides no suggestion of real or lasting joy.43 The audience can only assume that, in spite of the events of the past few hours, each character w ­ ill carry on much as he or she always has. Novak’s account of the conclusion is correct: “no sufficient evidence is given to make us expect that the lovers w ­ ill have greater success in their  44 marriage than ­those who have gone before.” The final relationships (or, in Heartwell’s case, lack of relationship) reward sympathetic characters with their heart’s desires, but the conclusion is not about their happiness. Rather, audiences are left with a harsh critique of both dramatic convention and the institution of marriage. The similarities between The Old Batchelour and other con­temporary plays highlight its departures from convention, helping to emphasize the satiric message of its conclusion. The Old Batchelour plays with the standards of an earlier class of comedy, but The Double-­Dealer (1693) is a more direct revival; Hume calls it “no less than a deliberate resurrection of Wycherley, with obvious reference to The Plain-­Dealer.” 45 Thanks perhaps in part to its connection with Wycherley, the satire in The Double-­Dealer is harsher and more direct than in Congreve’s first play. Congreve himself claimed to have “design’d the Moral first”: “and to that Moral I in­ven­ted the Fable.” 46 Consequently, The Double-­Dealer has a heavy-­handed, exemplary tone. The play follows Mellefont’s attempts to see his marriage to Cynthia through and to keep the lecherous Lady Touchwood at bay. The villainous Maskwell proves the play’s most in­ter­est­ing character. He convinces ­others that he is acting in their best interests, though the audience knows he works only for himself. The Double-­Dealer is considered a study in villainy and a biting satire.47

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Duplicity is a par­tic­u­lar target. Morally upright characters are as likely as villains to engage in deception and are distinguished only by their intentions. Though Mellefont and Cynthia do not create the plans and their actions are necessitated by their love for each other, they are just as guilty of dishonesty as Maskwell and Lady Touchwood are. At the play’s conclusion, Maskwell is caught in his schemes and carried away by the angry mob. His fate is somewhat unsatisfactory, however—­ not only ­because it is inconclusive (what happens to Maskwell once he is offstage?) but b ­ ecause the dishonesty that led all the characters to participate in elaborate deceptions has not been addressed. In the play’s final lines, Lord Touchwood advises the newlyweds, Let secret Villany from hence be warn’d; Ho­we’re in private, Mischiefs are conceiv’d, Torture and shame attend their open Birth: Like Vipers in the Womb, base Trech’ry lies, Still gnawing that, whence first it did arise; No sooner born, but the Vile Parent dies. (Congreve, 203, 5.1) Concealment of one’s plans is thus condemned more than the motivations for the action are. Though ultimately the “good” characters are rewarded and the “bad” punished (on which evidence Snider preemptively claimed that Congreve was “not the playwright to allow a play to end unhappily”), the cele­bration is an uneasy one.48 The play’s melodramatic tone, which John C. Ross explains is an effect of the blend of tragedy and comedy, makes the concluding marriage a somewhat remorseful and gloomy affair, and the cumulative effect of the satire is to suggest that deceit and hy­poc­risy are inevitable.49 Although The Double-­Dealer specifically and directly addresses moral concerns, and although the play is widely understood to reflect, as Sutherland ­suggests, “the vigorous satire of The Plain-­Dealer,” few critics have treated it as a satire.50 Novak proposes a likely reason for this critical perspective: “the real difficulty was that Congreve was trying to encompass too much. In addition to creating a comedy of the ridicu­lous which contrasted fools and knaves, he also attempted a correct neo-­Classical comedy and a witty satire.”51 The tragic overtones of the comedy distract from the ridicu­lous be­hav­ior of its characters: one can easily forget that Mellefont is engaging in deceptive be­hav­ior when faced with the horrific thought that he w ­ ill be accused of adultery with his aunt or that his fiancée ­will be stolen by the man he has trusted above all ­others. Likewise, the play’s farcical humor softens its hard-­line moral critique. Most audiences would understandably fail to recognize the satire in The Double-­Dealer. The mix of dire and

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1650–1850 tragic consequences with outlandish schemes overshadows the irony through which the play’s satiric message would ideally be imparted. Although a combination of tragedy and comedy prob­ably more closely resembles real life than does an emphasis on one or the other, to approach real­ity the characters would have to be similarly nuanced. The satire of The Double-­Dealer fails ­because its characters are incapable of appreciating their situation. Love for Love (1695) is distinctly more lighthearted than The Double-­Dealer. The central figures of the play are Valentine (a young man heavi­ly in debt) and Angelica (Valentine’s sharp-­witted love interest). Angelica’s u ­ ncle Foresight, a superstitious amateur astronomer, is largely responsible for one of the comedic subplots, as he searches for mystical meaning and repeatedly misses impor­tant information relevant to his own concerns. Angelica spends most of the play trying to determine w ­ hether Valentine’s love for her is genuine—­a difficult task, especially when he feigns madness. Once she decides to trust him, she wastes no time in securing his financial security by pretending to love his f­ ather, Sir Sampson, and wheedling that gentleman’s fortune out of him. The conclusion of Love for Love provides balance: each of the characters seems to have received the sort of love that he or she gave. Valentine and Angelica are true to each other and end up together; Sir Sampson is selfish and treats his sons cruelly and thus is justly duped. Mrs. Frail and Tattle are each schemers, and their separate failed schemes culminate in their marriage to each other; and Mrs.  Foresight cuckolds her husband, who is in turn too foolish to realize what has occurred. The ac­cep­tance of inevitable depravity or depression found in Congreve’s earlier plays and l­ater perfected in The Way of the World is absent h ­ ere. The satire in Love for Love is lighter, more frivolous, and more apparent in the treatment of par­tic­u­lar characters and issues than in the play as a w ­ hole. Congreve does not condemn the world of this play but mocks its characters in good humor. Some critics have confused the lighthearted tone with an inability or unwillingness to condemn.52 But Congreve was certainly capable of bite in other comedies. More likely, then, he was simply trying something dif­f er­ent in Love for Love. Novak compares the plot to a story from Boccaccio’s Decameron, arguing that “the details are very dif­fer­ent, but the substance, with its emphasis on true gentility, is the same; the resemblance suggests the romance foundation on which Congreve is ­constructing his satire.”53 The play certainly has a fairy-­tale feel; Peter Holland comments that “old men try to be young rakes; ­women rule the men; the world is topsy-­turvey.”54 Love for Love’s satire is scattered and has been accurately described as direct invective, consisting of what Hume calls “routine hits at the

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usual obvious targets.”55 The world of the play prob­ably would have been satisfying to both Congreve and his audiences: the characters are fully drawn, and the society has clear social and behavioral standards without too directly referring to con­temporary E ­ ngland. Far from leaving audience members perplexed about a moral quandary or social norm, Love for Love ends joyously, by celebrating the discovery of “A Lover true” (Congreve, 314, 5.1). Congreve’s masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), is also his most subtle satire. The action primarily follows Mirabell, a young man popu­lar with every­one but Lady Wishfort, who is of course responsible for the inheritance of his love interest, the beautiful and intelligent Millamant. A counterplot follows Fainall and his mistress, Mrs. Marwood, who scheme to ruin Mirabell’s reputation. Eventually, the lovers’ plan is foiled, and Lady Wishfort, to save her own reputation, agrees to allow Mirabell and Millamant to marry. The Way of the World is a darkly realistic play and offers serious, sharp critique of the importance of appearances and the power­ ful influence held by p ­ eople with money and property. Of all Congreve’s plays, The Way of the World is perhaps most often referred to as a satire, although what that term is intended to mean is typically left undefined.56 The Way of the World is certainly not a biting attack. Neither is it a condemnation of par­tic­u­lar traits or be­hav­iors—­the characters are not ste­reo­t ypes or exaggerated virtues or follies, as critics such as Jean Gagen have suggested.57 Nor is The Way of the World a call to action. Congreve does not suggest that e­ ither the characters in the play or the members of the audience can reform. Nonetheless, the play offers a satiric critique of con­temporary society. Novak’s argument that “in spite of Congreve’s refusal to acknowledge the relationship between his plays and the real world, they are very much about a world—­ one which is ­here and now”—is especially applicable to The Way of the World.58 The play centers on topical issues of inheritance and social reputation. Richard Braverman claims that the primary economic and po­liti­cal concern is “the nature of sovereignty, the ultimate locus of power in the civil state.”59 Charles H. Hinnant argues that Congreve’s use of wit in the play is intended to call attention to “serious social and moral concerns”—­though what Hinnant believes t­ hose concerns to be is less clear.60 And Kevin J. Gardner sees the play as a reflection of con­ temporary gender and power structures: “The shift in patrician authority ­under scrutiny in this play is also a shift ­toward patriarchal authority.” 61 Although the fact that each of ­these critics has found vastly dif­fer­ent social commentary calls the validity of their individual claims into question, their mutual recognition of The Way of the World as a play that critiques society can be seen as further appreciation

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1650–1850 of its obvious but complex satire. To call The Way of the World the culmination of Restoration drama, as many critics have done, is too limited, but to appreciate it as the most polished example of Congreve’s work as a satirist is fitting. Although The Way of the World is Congreve’s most sophisticated and successful satire, it cannot by itself represent his practice as a satirist. Most critics examine his plays individually. Isolating the plays in this way precludes an accurate study of the playwright’s technique. Each of the comedies implements a dif­fer­ent degree of satire, and only when all four are considered together can we r­ eally understand what Congreve was attempting as a comic playwright.

Understanding Congreve as a Satirist What does the assessment of satire across Congreve’s comedies tell us about the playwright? By comparing the comedies, one finds a playwright who was experimenting with the effect that satire could have on the tone of a play. The Old Batchelour and Love for Love are fun and lighthearted, while The Double-­Dealer is snarling and angry, and The Way of the World is dejected. Congreve’s use of satire is influential in constructing t­ hese differences. While the satire in The Double-­ Dealer and The Way of the World is easy to recognize, The Old Batchelour’s relies more heavi­ly on the play’s original dramatic context, and Love for Love’s is gentle and dispersed. Gradually, and inconsistently, Congreve’s comedies became closer to his conceptions of effective comedy and satire; he was improving his art, creating more realistic and nuanced plays as he progressed. His experimentation also served a practical purpose—­Congreve needed to keep his audiences entertained. And while he seems to have taken a certain amount of professional pride in his plays, he primarily wrote to support himself financially rather than to fulfill artistic or ideological goals. The variations in the styles of his comedies may therefore be the result of attempts to suit the preferences of his audience. Seventeenth-­century critics and audiences would have approached Congreve’s plays with a knowledge of many of the other plays produced during their lifetimes. Some modern critics find his practice difficult to characterize ­because they do not take into account, or misrepresent, the context in which he was writing.62 As Shirley Strum Kenny shows, Congreve’s work does not neatly fit into the long-­established modern categories—­namely, comedy of manners or sentimental comedy. Kenny’s classification of Love for Love and The Way of the World as humane comedies (by which she refers to a subset of late seventeenth-­century

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plays characterized by good nature and “a combination of robustness and energy”) is more accurate but does not ultimately aid their interpretation.63 Hume argues that Congreve’s comedies can be defined as “critical comedy, or ‘serio-­comedy,’ in which ideas and attitudes are impor­tant, but are not allowed to outweigh action, character, and comic entertainment,” offering a more plausible explanation of the type of play audiences might have associated most closely with Congreve.64 Regular theatergoers in the late seventeenth ­century might have been better prepared to recognize his satire than many modern scholars are. Congreve’s employment of satire is to a certain extent consistent with the work of his contemporaries. As A. H. Scouten effectively demonstrates, the last de­cade of the seventeenth ­century saw a cluster of comedies of manners with content similar to Congreve’s.65 Of his immediate pre­de­ces­sors and contemporaries—­ the playwrights of the late 1680s through the 1690s—­Congreve was far from alone in his use of satire. Thomas Shadwell’s Bury-­Fair (1689), for example, is a lighthearted satire in which ­simple values are upheld against the temptations of fash­ ion­able life. Dryden’s Amphitryon (1690) is a farce that conceals a sharp critique of the abuse of power in a familiar Greek myth. Thomas Southerne’s The Wives Excuse (1691) focuses on the troubled marriage of the Friendalls. At the play’s conclusion, the Friendalls agree to separate, a development that invites audiences seriously to question marriage conventions. Vanbrugh’s Relapse (1696) responds to and satirizes the conclusion of Cibber’s Love’s Last Shift, questioning the likelihood of a truly reformed rake. Vanbrugh’s The Provok’d Wife (1697) is a scathing satire that condemns common reasons for marriage. George Farquahar’s Love and a ­Bottle (1698) casts a hard eye on rakish be­hav­ior and ultimately suggests that the prospect of marriage is dismal among such characters. The last de­cade of the seventeenth ­century was, as Novak writes, “a period of satire, lampoon, and libel,” and its dramatic satires ranged from cheerful exemplary tales to dejected ac­cep­ tance of the ills of society.66 Given this milieu, Congreve’s audiences might well have anticipated satire in his plays, but the variety of satire onstage at the time suggests that their expectations would not have led to a single definition of that mode. In “Discourse concerning the Original and Pro­gress of Satire” (1693), Dryden argued that writers must experiment in order to make their work fresh and relevant: “The Majestique way of Persius and Juvenal was new when they began it; but ’tis old to us. . . . ​Why shou’d we offer to confine f­ ree Spirits to one Form, when we cannot so much as confine our Bodies to one Fashion of Apparel?” 67 Pointing to the array of plays produced at the end of the seventeenth c­ entury, Scouten noted that “the creative

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1650–1850 writers in the Restoration w ­ ere engaged in experimental work and w ­ ere bringing  68 out new types of drama.” Audiences, then, would have been accustomed, and potentially receptive, to experimentation. But no expectations could have prepared ­those used to farce or exemplary comedy for the subtlety of Congreve’s satire or the unique combination of cold cynicism and joyful humor in his l­ater plays. Congreve relied on the expectations of a knowledgeable audience when casting his comedies; the actors chosen for key roles in the original productions had strengths that would have allowed them to reinforce the satiric impact of the plays. Some players w ­ ere chosen b ­ ecause their par­tic­u­lar talents or appearances suited them to the descriptions of the characters; in the roles of Araminta, Cynthia, Angelica, and Millamant—­all young ­women considered highly desirable within the context of their plays—­Anne Bracegirdle was able to put her considerable personal charms to good use.69 But Peter Holland points out in his examination of the casting and staging of Congreve’s comedies that the first productions depended on “a tension between the audience’s presuppositions and the events of the play themselves.”70 When the aging Thomas Betterton (then nearly sixty) was cast as the embittered Heartwell in The Old Batchelour, he could startle audiences that would have associated the actor with his previous roles as a successful rake (for example, as Dorimant in George Etherege’s Man of Mode more than fifteen years earlier);71 when cast as Maskwell in The Double-­Dealer, the same actor would have shocked audiences that had only ever seen him in sympathetic roles. Edward Kynaston, well known for evoking awe and admiration, cast as the oblivious Lord Touchwood in The Double-­Dealer would have been equally jarring. ­Because the three comedies Congreve wrote while living in London ­were almost certainly composed with par­tic­u­lar actors in mind for many of the roles (and The Old Batchelour may have been tailored to suit its cast once the playwright arrived in London), he could structure his work around what Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume call “punctiliously calculated character contrasts.”72 In the first productions, then, his characters would have gained depth and nuance from the actors portraying them. Con­temporary interpretation would have also been influenced by expectations set by the work of other playwrights. When compared with other comedies of the period, Congreve’s appear quite dif­fer­ent—­his satire was both more restrained and more dismal. Peter Holland offers an impor­tant explanation: “Congreve’s plays pose par­tic­u­lar prob­lems for the audience in per­for­mance. . . . ​The audience is deliberately confused, refused the security of expectation of what a play o ­ ught to do.”73 We can deduce that, particularly in Congreve’s two l­ater comedies (Love for Love and The Way of the World), he aimed to create a society on

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the stage that more closely resembled real­ity than parodied it. Novak has suggested that “writers like Congreve, Southerne, and Vanbrugh aimed their comedies at the audience that read The Gentleman’s Journal, an audience that wanted entertainment but also liked serious dialogue on con­temporary prob­lems.”74 ­Those who ­were seeking plays that encouraged the examination of society should have been satisfied with Congreve’s satire, which was connected to serious real-­world prob­lems. His conviction was that satirical humor was most effective when the audience could find it probable. In a letter to John Dennis concerning the nature of comedy, Congreve derided the use of the burlesque: “When a Poet brings a Character on the Stage, committing a thousand Absurdities, and talking Impertinencies, roaring Aloud, and Laughing immoderately, on ­every, or rather upon no occasion; this is a Character of Humour. Is any t­ hing more common, than to have a pretended Comedy, stuff’d with such Grotesques, Figures, and Farce Fools?”75 Rather than fill his plays with the ridicu­lous, Congreve created finely drawn roles. His characters are not simply humorous; they are individuals capable of saying humorous ­things (as he believed every­one was).76 His comedies are based in believable situations, and he argued that exaggeration was essential to comedy, p ­ rovided it did not render its sources unrecognizable. The distinction between real­ity and a realistic repre­sen­ta­tion that would be effective on the stage is impor­tant.77 His satire, then, functioned not as a tidy denunciation of a few remediable faults but as a despondent repre­sen­ta­tion of a society in turmoil. W ­ hether he truly believed, as he claimed, that his satire could be an improving influence on his audience is impossible to determine, though the chance seems slight. What is more apparent is that Congreve’s realistic satire allowed l­ittle hope for the redemption of his characters. The lack of critical consensus about Congreve’s comic strategy is easy to understand: the differences between his plays are more readily apparent than their similarities. Disparities in content and tone may account for the narrow focus of most recent Congreve scholarship but should not be thought to preclude a broader characterization of his method. Understanding Congreve as a satirist allows us to appreciate him as a passionate playwright with a consistent technique and a steady vision. Close comparison of the plays yields impor­tant parallels that allow us to understand the nature of his satiric approach. Ambiguity is central to his satire—­ most characters are neither wholly likeable nor entirely despicable, and the conclusions leave audiences more uneasy than contented. Congreve was commenting on real­ity, not suggesting that it could be improved. His comedies suggest a writer who, far from being detached, was deeply frustrated by the prob­ lems of con­temporary society.

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1650–1850 Notes For helpful advice and critiques of earlier drafts, I am grateful to Julian Fung, Robert  D. Hume, Ashley Marshall, Leah Orr, Jonathan Pritchard, and David Wallace Spielman. 1. ​P.  K. Elkin, The Augustan Defense of Satire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 1; James Sutherland, En­glish Satire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 1. 2. ​William Archer, William Congreve (New York: American Book Com­pany, 1912), 37. 3. ​For a refutation of the view that satire must attack, see Ashley Marshall, “A Taxonomy of Satire: Aristophanes to The Daily Show,” unpublished manuscript. Marshall proposes that satire “is inherently purposive and judgmental” and “readily applicable to the real world.” 4. ​Oxford En­glish Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1989, s.v. “satire, n.” 5. ​William Congreve to Charles Montagu (­Later Earl of Halifax), ca. December  7, 1693, in William Congreve: Letters and Documents, ed. John C. Hodges (New York: Harcourt, 1964), 168. All quotations from Congreve’s plays come from this ­edition (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Congreve, by page number, act, and scene). 6. ​Congreve to Montagu, ca. December 7, 1693, in Hodges, Congreve, 168. The prologue to Love for Love promises, “We’ve something too, to gratifie ill Nature, / (If ­there be any h ­ ere) and that is Satire.” William Congreve, Congreve, 213. The Way of the World’s prologue claims, “Satire, he thinks, you ­ought not to expect, / For so Reform’d a Town, who dares Correct?” (Congreve, 393). 7. ​David Thomas, William Congreve (Houndmills, UK: Macmillan, 1992), 51. 8. ​John C. Hodges provides a list of the holdings of Congreve’s library in The Library of William Congreve (New York: New York Public Library, 1955). 9. ​Herbert Davis, introduction to The Old Batchelour, in The Complete Plays of William Congreve (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 24. 10. ​See for example William Congreve, Amendments of Mr. Collier’s False and Imperfect CITATIONS , &c (London: J. Tonson, 1698), 19–20, 82 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text). 11. ​Elkin argues that for writers and critics in the late seventeenth and early eigh­ teenth centuries, “Nothing could have been easier . . . ​than to defend satire on the grounds of its moral utility. It was the obvious line to take, for a­ fter all, to the moralist, satire is the most patently moral of all literary modes” (The Augustan Defense of Satire, 73). For a thorough refutation of Elkin’s claim that satire in the period was consistently devoted to moral reform, see Ashley Marshall, The Practice of Satire in ­England, 1658–1770 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Marshall cites more than one thousand works across all genres and finds a g­ reat variety of satires and many disparate views of that mode.

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12. ​For Dryden’s extended discussion of satire, emphasizing poetic satire, see “Discourse concerning the Original and Pro­gress of Satire,” in The Works of John Dryden, ed. H. T. Swedenberg Jr. et al., 20 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956–2000), 4:81. John Dennis was responding to Collier’s accusations that the nobility was unfairly attacked by satire on the stage (The Usefulness of the Stage, To the Happiness of Mankind. To Government, and Religion. Occasioned by a late Book, written by Jeremy Collier [London, 1698], 111). See also A Vindication of the Stage, With the Usefulness and Advantages of Dramatick Repre­sen­ta­ tions (London: Joseph Wild, 1698), 15. 13. ​In defense of The Double-­Dealer, Congreve also argued that ­women “who are Virtuous or Discreet, I’m sure cannot be offended, for such Characters as t­ hese distinguish them, and make their Beauties more shining and observ’d: And they who are of the other kind, may nevertheless pass for such, by seeming not to be displeased, or touched with the Satyr of this Comedy” (Congreve to Montagu, ca. December 7, 1693, in Hodges, Congreve, 168). 14. ​Rose Snider characterizes Congreve’s comedies as lighthearted satires and suggests that he “was not seriously concerned about society’s ‘­going to the dogs’ ” (Satire in the Comedies of Congreve, Sheridan, Wilde, and Coward [Orono: University of Maine Press, 1937], 2). Richard W. F. Kroll claims that Congreve was cynical about the possibilities of morality and “[did] not dogmatically or unthinkingly believe that ­every person ­will obey his or her conscience or sense of duty” (“Discourse and Power in The Way of the World,” En­g lish Literary History 53, no. 4 [1986]: 753). 15. ​In the 1950s, many critics seemed to find Congreve to be a man of good princi­ ples. Thomas H. Fujimura, for example, calls him “warm-­hearted and moral” (The Restoration Comedy of Wit [Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1952], 157). Norman N. Holland asserts that “virtually all Restoration writers seem to have taken it for granted that lit­er­a­ture, including drama, should in some sense teach” (The First Modern Comedies: The Significance of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959], 114). Most ­later critics resist the temptation to sketch Congreve’s character, pleading lack of evidence. 16. ​Charles O. McDonald claims that Congreve and other Restoration dramatists ­were engaged in “a fully adult form of satiric and comic art” with “complex under­ lying moral assumptions” that ­were “stifled by the Sunday-­school sort of pietism demanded by Collier and other ‘moralists’ ” (“Restoration Comedy as Drama of Satire: An Investigation into Seventeenth ­Century Aesthetics,” Studies in Philology 61, no. 3 [1964]: 523). Aubrey L. Williams takes the argument a step further with his statement that Congreve and his audience shared “a fundamentally Christian, vision of ­human existence” (An Approach to Congreve [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979], x).

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1650–1850 17. ​Sutherland, En­glish Satire, 9. 18. ​The best examination of Collier’s influence on London theater is Robert  D. Hume’s “Jeremy Collier and the F­ uture of London Theater in 1698,” Studies in Philology 96, no. 4 (1999): 480–511. Hume argues that Collier’s moral-­reform movement ultimately failed in its attempts to censor the stage and that the backlash against this failure led to the Licensing Act of 1737. 19. ​Jeremy Collier, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the En­glish Stage (London, 1698), A6. 20. ​Collier, A Short View, 63. 21. ​Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, ed. Robert W. Lowe, 2 vols. (London: John C. Nimmo, 1889), 1:274; Samuel Johnson, “Congreve,” in The Lives of the Most Eminent En­glish Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 3:68; and Snider, Satire, 2. 22. ​See Alexander Lindsay and Howard Erskine-­Hill, introduction to William Congreve: The Critical Heritage, ed. Alexander Lindsay and Howard Erskine-­Hill (New York: Routledge, 1989), 18. 23. ​Maximillian E. Novak, “The Artist and the Clergyman: Congreve, Collier, and the World of the Play,” College En­glish 30, no. 7 (1969): 555. 24. ​As J.C.D. Clark explains, although religious beliefs in the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries w ­ ere diverse, nearly all of the En­glish adhered to some form of Christian faith, and ­those beliefs helped to shape most aspects of their daily lives (En­glish Society, 1660–1832 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], 26–34). 25. ​For details about daily life at Trinity College in the seventeenth ­century, see W. Macneile Dixon, Trinity College, Dublin (London: F. E. Robinson, 1902), 72–93. 26. ​The cata­log of Congreve’s library lists a number of books on Chris­tian­ity and the Church of E ­ ngland—­including, for example, Thomas Rogers’s The Faith, Doctrine, and Religion, Professed, and Protected in the Realm of E ­ ngland . . . ​in Thirty-­ nine Articles (1661), Mary Astell’s The Christian Religion, as Profess’d by a ­Daughter of the Church of ­England (1705), and Anthony Collins’s A Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (1724). See Hodges, Library of William Congreve. 27. ​Williams, for example, argues that Congreve’s plays demonstrate the presence of an under­lying moral “order of justice” (Approach to Congreve, 18). Harold Love’s review of Williams’s book provides good evidence for discounting many of Williams’s claims (“Was Congreve a Christian?,” Themes in Drama 5 [1983]: 293– 309). Harriett Hawkins calls Williams’s An Approach to Congreve a “preposterous approach to Restoration drama.” See her review of Williams’s work in Review of En­glish Studies 32, no. 125 (1981): 80. For a refutation of the argument that seventeenth-­century audiences and playwrights shared a view of providence that affected their interpretation of comedies, see Derek Hughes, “Providential Justice and En­glish Comedy 1660–1700: A Review of the External Evidence,” Modern Language Review 81, no. 2 (1986): 273–292.

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28. ​Thomas D’Urfey, preface to The Campaigners (London: A. Baldwin, 1698), 1–2. 29. ​John Vanbrugh explains, “[Collier’s] accusations against me run almost always in general Terms, he scarce ever comes to Particulars” (“A Short Vindication of The Relapse and The Provok’d Wife, from Immorality and Profaneness,” in The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh, ed. Bonamy Dobrée and Geoffrey Webb, 4 vols. [London: Nonesuch Press, 1927–1928], 1:197). Dryden claims of Collier, “it ­were not difficult to prove, that in many Places he has perverted my Meaning by his Glosses; and interpreted my Words into Blasphemy and Baudry, of which they ­were not guilty” (see his preface to Fables Ancient and Modern, in The Works of John Dryden, 7:46). 30. ​Congreve to Montagu, ca. December 7, 1693, in Hodges, Congreve, 168. 31. ​Novak, “The Artist and the Clergyman,” 561. 32. ​Thomas, William Congreve, 64. Although Thomas does not specifically focus on satire, his conclusions about Congreve’s literary theory provide a good overview of the playwright’s view of his own work. Thomas argues that “what ­Congreve sees himself as offering in his comedy is a work of subtlety and complexity” (57). 33. ​Emmett  L. Avery found that “before the death of Congreve in 1729 t­here had been l­ittle save moralistic denunciation or brief praise of his works” (Congreve’s Plays on the Eighteenth-­Century Stage [New York: Modern Language Association, 1951], 5). See Avery’s discussion of the comedies’ stage reputation on 1–24. 34. ​For an extended study of the import of characters’ names in drama, see Anne Barton, The Names of Comedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990). 35. ​“Smocks” was a word used to refer to “a w ­ oman’s undergarment; a shift or chemise.” See Oxford En­glish Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1989, s.v. “smock, n.” The context of Love for Love implies that the term was considered vulgar. 36. ​Ursula Jantz, Targets of Satire in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1978). Snider also examines the satire in Congreve’s plays for its par­tic­u­lar targets, including gender roles, lack-­wits, marriage, religion, and the foibles of par­tic­u­lar characters (Satire, 1–40). 37. ​The dates given for plays reflect the year of their first per­for­mance. For a thorough explanation of the connections between The Old Batchelour and earlier comedies, see Maximillian E. Novak, “Congreve’s The Old Batchelour: From Formula to Art,” Essays in Criticism 20, no. 2 (1970): 182–199. 38. ​Robert D. Hume also suggests that the play “may have been written as early as 1689,” when Congreve would have been just nineteen (The Development of En­glish Drama in the Late Seventeenth ­Century [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976], 388). 39. ​Novak, “Congreve’s The Old Batchelour,” 183. 40. ​Brian Morris, “Congreve’s The Old Batchelour and the Jonsonian Comedy,” in William Congreve, ed. Brian Morris (London: Ernest Benn, 1972), 10.

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1650–1850 41. ​For an account of the development of Dryden’s relationship with Congreve, including his pos­si­ble involvement in editing The Old Batchelour and arranging for its production, see Julie Stone Peters, Congreve, the Drama, and the Printed Word (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 44–50. 42. ​N. Holland, The First Modern Comedies, 148. 43. ​Optimistic readings of the conclusion of The Old Batchelour include Harold Love’s claim that “the aim and end of its action, as the term is conventionally conceived, is to establish a ranking among the characters on the basis of their capacities for survival in a testing and combative world” (Congreve [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974], 29). W. H. Van Voris argues that at the conclusion of the play “he [Heartwell] has chosen one extreme view, real­ity; Bellmour, the other extreme, illusion. In his dramatization of the festive, Congreve has suggested the happier mean” (The Cultivated Stance: The Designs of Congreve’s Plays [Dublin: Dolman Press, 1967], 55). 44. ​Maximillian E. Novak, William Congreve (New York: Twayne, 1971), 88. 45. ​Hume, The Development of En­glish Drama, 389. 46. ​Congreve to Montagu, ca. December 7, 1693, in Hodges, Congreve, 165. 47. ​For an explanation of the play as a study in villainy, see Hume, The Development of En­glish Drama, 389. Novak calls The Double-­Dealer “a brilliant satire” (William Congreve, 106). Norman N. Holland combines the two views: “The comic plot satirizes folly in the usual Restoration way; the serious plot, however, attacks villainy in a manner quite unusual for a Restoration comedy” (The First Modern Comedies, 149). 48. ​Snider, Satire, 12. 49. ​John C. Ross has recently demonstrated convincingly that in The Double-­Dealer, Congreve relied heavi­ly on his con­temporary audience’s knowledge of tragedy in order to create a hybrid tragic-­comedy (“ ‘Comedy Raising Its Voice’: Tragic Intertextualities in Congreve’s The Double-­Dealer,” Restoration: Studies in En­glish Literary Culture, 1660–1700 28, no. 2 (2004): 19–30. 50. ​James Sutherland, En­glish Lit­er­a­ture of the Late Seventeenth ­Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 147. The Double-­Dealer is often instead considered a moral treatise (see B. Eugene McCarthy’s argument that the play is based on a secular poetic justice, in “Providence in Congreve’s Double-­Dealer,” Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture 19, no.  3 [1979]: 407–419) or an experiment in combining tragic and comic ele­ments (see Bryan Corman’s argument that the play is a “synthesis of the Jonsonian and Fletcherian comic traditions,” in “ ‘ The Mixed Way of Comedy’: Congreve’s The Double-­Dealer,” Modern Philology 71, no. 4 [1974]: 357). 51. ​Novak, William Congreve, 103. 52. ​Of Love for Love, Bonamy Dobrée claims that “Congreve from the first had not been altogether averse from satire, and could make excellent thrusts, but his hand was too light for a ­whole ‘essay’ in this kind” (Restoration Comedy, 1660–1720 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924], 133).

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53. ​Novak, William Congreve, 108. 54. ​Peter Holland, The Ornament of Action: Text and Per­for­mance in Restoration Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 230. Holland provides convincing readings of Congreve’s plays by examining the implications of the casting and staging of their original productions. 55. ​Hume, The Development of En­glish Drama, 110; see also Novak, William Congreve, 108–109. 56. ​In 1708, John Downes claimed the play was “too Keen a Satyr” for its first audiences. (Roscius Anglicanus, ed. Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume [London: Society for Theatre Research, 1987], 95). Clifford Leech argues that “most often he lacks the animus of the satirist” (“Congreve and the C ­ entury’s End,” Philological Quarterly 41, no. 1 [1962]: 283). Love suggests that “to restrict one’s consideration to the critical and satiric aspects of the play—­the vision of a world in which only a restricted range of h ­ uman possibilities can be allowed realization—is to omit something which is equally vital to its effect as a work of art” (Congreve, 106). Thomas writes, “In this his final play, Congreve blends together satire and thoughtful comedy” (William Congreve, 89–90). Kevin J. Gardner suggests that “much of the satire in The Way of the World is directed at the vain efforts of the older social order at preserving its authority” (“Patrician Authority and Instability in The Way of the World,” South Central Review 19, no. 1 [2002]: 71). James E. Evans posits that the play is Congreve’s method for “revising the form of dramatic satire” (“The Way of the World and The Beau Defeated: Strains of Comedy in 1700,” South Atlantic Review 68, no. 1 [2003]: 29). 57. ​Jean Gagen argues that “Mirabell is an embodiment of the ideal of the gentleman which prevailed in Congreve’s lifetime”—­disregarding Congreve’s own explanation of the nuanced nature of his characters in his dedicatory letter to the Earl of Montagu (“Congreve’s Mirabell and the Ideal of the Gentleman,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 79, no. 4 [1964]: 422); William Congreve to Ralph Montagu, First Earl of Montagu, March 1700, in Hodges, William Congreve, 207–210. 58. ​Novak, William Congreve, 157. 59. ​Richard Braverman, “Capital Relations and The Way of the World,” En­glish Literary History 52, no. 1 (1985): 134. 60. ​Charles H. Hinnant, “Wit, Propriety, and Style in The Way of the World,” Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture 17, no. 3 (1977): 386. 61. ​Gardner, “Patrician Authority,” 54. 62. ​For example, many scholars (including Thomas H. Fujimura and ­Virginia Birdsall) distort Congreve’s dramatic contexts by placing him at the end of an Etherege-­ Wycherley-­Congreve progression, which spans more than three de­cades and has ­little connection to the plays being written during Congreve’s ­career. For a more accurate and helpful description of Congreve’s plays in their historical context, see Avery, Congreve’s Plays.

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1650–1850 63. ​Shirley Strum Kenny, “Humane Comedy,” Modern Philology 75, no. 1 (1977): 30. 64. ​Hume, The Development of En­glish Drama, 147. 65. ​A . H. Scouten, “Notes ­toward a History of Restoration Comedy,” Philological Quarterly 45, no. 1 (1966): 66. 66. ​Maximillian E. Novak, “Love, Scandal, and the Moral Milieu of Congreve’s Comedies,” in Congreve Consider’d, ed. Aubrey Williams and Maximillian E. Novak (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1971), 27. 67. ​Johan Dryden, “Discourse concerning the Original and Pro­gress of Satire,” in The Works of John Dryden, 4:78. 68. ​Scouten, “Notes ­toward a History of Restoration Comedy,” 69. 69. ​For information about Congreve’s casts and the implications they held for original audiences, I am indebted to Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume’s discussion of the early performers in “Early Performers,” in The Works of William Congreve, vol. 1, ed. D. F. Mc­Ken­zie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 547–568. 70. ​P. Holland, The Ornament of Action, 206. 71. ​For a list of Betterton’s per­for­mances, see Judith Milhous, “An Annotated Census of Thomas Betterton’s Roles, 1659–1710,” Theatre Notebook 29 (1975): 33–43, 85–94. 72. ​Milhous and Hume, “Early Performers,” 548. 73. ​P. Holland, The Ornament of Action, 205. 74. ​Novak, “Love, Scandal, and the Moral Milieu,” 34. 75. ​William Congreve to John Dennis, July  10, 1695, in Hodges, William Congreve, 178. 76. ​Congreve to Dennis, July 10, 1695, in Hodges, William Congreve, 174–186. Congreve argued that “the saying of Humorous ­Things, does not distinguish Characters; For ­every Person in a Comedy may be allow’d to speak them” (178). 77. ​Congreve to Dennis, July 10, 1695, in Hodges, William Congreve, 174–186. Congreve posited that “the distance of the Stage requires the Figure represented, to be something larger than the Life” and argued that comic characters must possess traits in excess (180–181).

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CLASSICAL EXAMPLE AND GOSPEL RHE­TORIC IN THE SERMONS OF IN­DE­PEN­DENT PREACHER THOMAS BROOKS KEVIN JOEL BERLAND

Thomas Brooks (1608–1680) matriculated as a pensioner of Emmanuel College

on July 7, 1625, left the college without taking a degree, served as chaplain to the parliamentary fleet u ­ nder Admiral Rainsborough, was twice invited to preach before the House of Commons, preached at St. Martin Orgar in the 1640s, served for some time as a “Preacher of the Gospel” at St.  Thomas the Apostle, was elected minister in the parish of St.  Margaret’s New Fish Street in 1648, and was ejected from this benefice in 1662. He spent the remainder of his life preaching in an In­de­pen­dent chapel in Moorfields and publishing profusely.1 Brooks first appeared in print in 1648 with The Glorious Day of the Saints Appearance, a sermon preached at the funeral of the New Model Army’s Col­o­nel Thomas Rainsborough and dedicated to General Fairfax. In the same year, he preached a fast sermon before the House of Commons; this sermon was published as Gods Delight in the Progresse of the Upright. Especially, in Magistrates Uprightnesse and Constancy in Wayes of Justice and Righ­teousnesse, in ­these Apostatizing Times, Notwithstanding all Discouragements, Oppositions, &c. Again, in 1650, he preached before Parliament on the occasion of a day of thanksgiving for the defeat of the Scottish Army at Dunbar; this sermon was published as The Hypocrite Detected, Anatomized, Impeached, Arraigned, and Condemned Before the Parliament of E ­ ngland.2 Sermons delivered in such contexts combined both homiletic text and po­liti­cal event. In this sense, Brooks began his ­career by participating in the public staging of Puritan ideology, recapitulating the princi­ples by which leaders of a religious commonwealth should conduct themselves.3

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1650–1850 Brooks was sufficiently well-­known—­especially for his 1648 sermon urging members of the House of Commons to “execute their just judgment” to expiate the blood guilt of the king and thus to deflect God’s judgment on the nation—to attract strong anti-­Puritan hostility.4 Samuel Butler, for instance, included Brooks among the targets in a satirical pamphlet announcing the foundation of a commission to regulate the “Farming of Liberty of Conscience,” to be overseen by forty-­ two dissenting divines as “­Grand Commissioners.” Butler ironically maintained that such a body was needed to continue the good work of the interregnum: Nothing can be dearer unto poor Christians, then Liberty, for the ­Free Exercise of their Iudgments and Conscience, which hath kindled that Fire in the Bowels of the three Kingdoms which all the pretious Blood that hath been shed, during t­ hese late Trou­bles, hath not been able totally to extinguish: And since many of us, whose Names are affixed, w ­ ere so profitably Instrumental in t­ hese late Combustions, as appears all along in our Sermons before the Honorable House of Parliament, in the Years, 1642, 43, 44, 45, 46. in exciting the good P ­ eople of this Nation, to seek and maintain their Christian Liberty, against all Prelatical and Antichristian Imposition whatsoever.5 In the 1650s, Brooks began refashioning his preaching and publication, turning from the public forum of parliamentary political-­religious discourse to a select audience, his own London congregation, and reaching out to a community of coreligionists. He published several works expanding on funeral sermons and dedicated them to specific members of his congregation, and he dedicated Precious remedies against Satans devices to his congregation as a w ­ hole: “To His Most Deare and Precious ones, The Sons and ­Daughters of the most High God, over whom the Holy Ghost hath made him a Watchman.” 6 The full impact of this repositioning is best seen in the revision a­ fter the Restoration of his dedication to Heaven on Earth. In the original 1654 publication, Brooks’s republican allegiance was clear: To the Right Honorable The Generals of the Fleets of the Commonwealth of ­England, And to t­ hose Gallant Worthies (my much Honored Friends) who with the Noble Generals have deeply jeoparded their Lives unto many deaths upon the Seas, out of love to their Countreys good, and out of re­spect to the Interest of Christ, and the faithful p ­ eople of this Commonwealth, Such Honor and Happiness as is promised to all that Love and Honor the Lord Jesus.7 In Brooks’s “Farewell Sermon” on his ejection from St. Margaret’s New Fish Street a­fter the Restoration, he offered a warning about the dangers that threatened a p ­ eople “when the gospel goes” from them. According to biblical pre­ ce­dents, “Peace, Plenty, and trading goe,” as well as “Safety and security,” “Civil

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Liberty,” and “the honour and glory, splendour and beauty of a Nation.”8 Brooks had once praised the parliamentary regime as righ­teous magistrates, characterizing its rule as “Uprightnesse and Constancy in Wayes of Justice and Righ­ teousnesse.” But in his dedication to the 1664 edition of Heaven on Earth, Brooks no longer addressed the nation’s leaders. Rather, he directed his sermons to an implicit community of believers: “To all Saints that Hold to Christ the Head, and That walk according to the Laws of the New-­Creature. Grace, Mercy, and Peace be multiplied from God the ­Father, through out Lord Jesus Christ.” 9 In publishing sermons originally delivered to his own congregation, Brooks followed the pattern recommended by many authorities. Richard Baxter declared, “The Writings of Divines are nothing ­else but a preaching the Gospel to the eye, as the voice preacheth it to the ear.” Baxter conceded that “vocal preaching” best moves the affections, but he added that the printed sermon has certain advantages. ­Every Congregation cannot hear the most judicious or power­ful Preachers: but ­every single person may read the Books of the most power­ful and ­judicious; Preachers may be silenced or banished, when Books may be at hand: Books may be kept at a smaller charge than Preachers: We may choose Books which treat of that very subject which we desire to hear of; but we cannot choose what subject the Preacher s­ hall treat of. Books we may have at hand ­every day and hour: when we can have Sermons but seldom, and at set times. If Sermons be forgotten, they are gone. But a Book we may read over and over till we remember it: and if we forget it, may again peruse it at our plea­sure, or at our leisure.10 Brooks was appreciated among his peers for his learning and persuasiveness.11 According to the Presbyterian minister and historian Edmund Calamy, Brooks was especially well-­known for delivering moving sermons: “He was a very affecting preacher, and useful to many. Tho’ he used many homely phrases, and sometimes too familiar resemblances, which to nice critics might appear ridicu­lous, he did more good to souls than many who deliver the most exact composures. And let the wits of the age pass what censures they please, ‘He that winneth souls is wise.’ ”12 In focusing on the “homely” and personal in his published sermons, Brooks implicitly extended his preaching from his home congregation to the communion of “Saints” at large, thereby refashioning his role as preacher from militant urgency to pastoral care. In so ­doing, he refashioned his audience as well. It could be argued that this sort of inclusiveness—­especially among a minority group of believers—­collapses the distinction that recent theorists have made between the communal act of listening to a “vocal” sermon and the private act of reading the sermon in print.13

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1650–1850 Through all ­these changes, Brooks appears to have been doctrinally consistent; his most recent biographer notes his firm adherence to radical In­de­pen­ dent theology: “He always stressed that true religious knowledge must be inward, experimental, and even mystical, not merely external, notional, and formal.”14 Brooks designed the “homely phrases” that struck Calamy to stimulate an inward motion in his congregation and his readers. The phrases illustrate key moral points by connecting them with images that function emblematically: An honest Traveller may step out of the Kings Highway into a ­house, a Wood, a Close, but his business is to go on in the Kings Highway. So the business, the work of an upright man is to depart from evil; ’tis pos­si­ble for an upright man to step into a sinful path, or touch upon sinful facts; but his main way, his princi­ple work and business, is to depart from iniquity: As a Bee may light upon a Thistle, but her work is to be gathering at Flowers; or as a Sheep may slip into the dirt, but its work is to be grasing upon the Mountains, or in the Meadows.15 Brooks’s figures w ­ ere sufficiently attractive to warrant anthologizing in con­ temporary collections such as John Spencer’s 1658 Kaina Kai Palaia. T ­ hings New and Old.16 They ­were popu­lar in ­later years as well; a sample from C. H. Spurgeon’s 1860 collection, quaintly entitled Smooth Stones Taken From Ancient Brooks, ­will suffice: “Impunity often c­ auses impudency, but forbearance is no acquaintance. . . . ​ The longer the hand is lifted up, the heavier ­will be the blow at last. . . . ​O f all metals, lead is the coldest, but being melted, it becomes the hottest. ­Humble souls know how to apply this, and proud souls s­ hall sooner or l­ater experience this.”17 If modern readers w ­ ere to come to Brooks with Calamy’s reference to the operation of homely aphorisms in mind, and perhaps with an expectation of the pared-­down gospel simplicity ordinarily found among Puritan and In­de­pen­dent divines, they might be surprised by the richness of Brooks’s writing. Intermixed with pious, quaint aphorisms and figures and scriptural explications are a ­great many classical anecdotes and allusions. The homiletic tradition of the Puritans and their nonconformist successors deliberately focused on scripture and textual explication to the exclusion of other forms of learning; thus, the presence of such material in Brooks’s sermons is noteworthy. In fact, Emmanuel College, where Brooks had studied, was the site of a famous controversy over the content of religious study and discourse. Emmanuel was a Puritan stronghold, but it was not untouched by the liberalizing humanistic trend that produced the Cambridge Platonists.18 In 1651, the Puritan viewpoint about secular learning was proclaimed by the master of Emmanuel, Anthony Tuckney, in

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a public exchange of letters with his former pupil and colleague Benjamin Whichcote, provost of Kings College and one of the founding Cambridge Platonists. Tuckney accused Whichcote of abandoning the true course of divinity for the pursuit of lesser, profane knowledge: Whilest you w ­ ere fellow ­here, you ­were cast into the companie of very learned and ingenious men; who, I fear, at least some of them, studyed other authors, more than the scriptures; and PLATO, and his schollars, above o ­ thers: in whom, I must needs acknowledge, from the ­little insight I have into them; I finde manie excellent and divine expressions: and as we are wont more to listen to and won­der at a Parrot, speaking a few wordes; than a Man, that speaks manie more, and more plainlie; and all intelligibly: so that whilest we find such gemmes in such dunghills, where we less expected them; and hear some such divine ­things from them; wee have bin too much drawen-­away with admiration of them.19 Puritans and their nonconformist successors held that the rational ethics of the heathen phi­los­o­phers had ­little to offer Christians, for unassisted reason was incapable of arriving at the essential truths provided by revelation. Whichcote, in the vanguard of humanistic Anglicanism, considered that t­here was room for many effective forms of discourse: “Men may preach Christ though they do not name Christ in ­every sentence or period of words.”20 Tuckney, in his letters to Whichcote, his sermon None But Christ (1654), and elsewhere, disagreed. He objected to the new “kinde of Moral Divinitie minted; onlie with a ­little tincture of Christ added.”21 Tuckney’s argument is characteristic: certainly t­ here are fine t­ hings to be found in the writings of the pagan wise men. But why accept an inferior substitute, when the genuine article is readily available for Christians in scripture? The wise heathens came close to some of the basic Christian teachings but not close enough. The “verie good m ­ atter, in many of the Heathens’ writings” is relatively ineffectual, Tuckney continues, since “they want such miracles, and other testimonies, to ratifie them; which the truth of scripture and Christian religion is honoured and confirmed by.”22 Indeed, early Puritans argued that ­there is ­really nothing in the virtuous lives of the g­ reat men of classical antiquity completely admirable or worth emulating. William Perkins outlined the distinction between good acts and the good acts of good men: “In themselves alone some ­things be morally good: for example, when a wicked man gives an almes, it is a good worke only in it selfe, but not good in the doer, b ­ ecause it is not done in faith, and from a good conscience: and so are all the vertues of the heathen morally good in themselves, but they are

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1650–1850 not good in heathen men; for in them they are but beautiful sins (splendida peccata).”23 The virtues practiced by the best heathens, then, ­will not serve as examples for Christian practice, even though they may well have been indirectly “the gifts of God.” Ultimately, pagan virtues are at best misleading b ­ ecause they are “not parts of regeneration and new birth.” T ­ here is nothing of value t­here for Christians, who must rely on grace, to learn from ­those who place their “happinesse in civill vertue out of Christ” and who follow the “received errour” of philosophy that virtue is no more than “a habit of minde, obtained and confirmed by custome, use, and practice.”24 Curiously enough, even a hard-­liner such as Perkins did not impose an absolute moratorium. In his influential treatise on the sermon, The Art of Prophesying, Or, A Treatise Concerning the Sacred, and Onely Manner and Method of Preaching (1631), Perkins allowed sermon writers to make use of their humane education—­even including classical eloquence and rhe­toric—in the construction of sermons, so long as such material was used sparingly as a means t­ oward the proper end. Perkins’s strictures illustrate what John Morgan has identified as the pattern of seventeenth-­century Puritan practice, “the attainment of ­great learning followed by close restriction on its demonstration to the populace.”25 “Humane wisdome must be concealed, w ­ hether it be in the ­matter of the sermon, or in the setting forth of the words: ­because the preaching of the word is the testimony of God, and the profession of the knowledge of Christ, and not of humane skill: and againe, ­because the hearers ­ought not to ascribe their faith to the gifts of men, but to the power of Gods word.”26 However, since ­there is no single ­human virtue discussed by pagan authors or exemplified by virtuous heathens that is not more completely handled or better represented in scripture, any reference to the exemplary lives and wise teachings of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, or Seneca is inherently superfluous. ­Those who fill their sermons with such glosses are guilty of attempts at false eloquence: “The Minister may, yea and must privately use at his libertie the arts, Philosophy, and variety of reading, whilest he is framing his sermon, but he ­ought in publike and to conceale all ­these from the ­people, and not to make the least ostentation.”27 Apparently classically learned ostentation was not uncommon. Edward Reynolds, in his Sermon Touching the Use of Humane Learning (1658), warned against the danger: “Use it not proudly with contempt and disdain of the Word of God like that prophane Wit, who did not dare to read the Scripture for fear of spoiling his stile. I have heard of some wretches even amongst us in our days, who presume to magnifie Socrates above Moses or Paul.”28 Socrates, in his traditional capacity as f­ ather of moral philoso-

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phy, was of course the most frequently adduced exemplar of reason’s scope. Reynolds wittily trivialized classical learning by relegating it to ­matters of mere form and style and inveighed against the vanity of ostentatious learning. In the mocking tone of Reynolds’s comment, we can see at work the polemic against ­those divines who emphasized the role of reason in religion. Nonetheless, in at least one part of the Puritan and In­de­pen­dent sermon ­there seemed to be room for the use of traditional humane knowledge without concealment. Preaching was conceived as primarily a m ­ atter of explication of scriptural texts. According to Perkins, the preacher must first give the sense and understanding of the passage, explain what points of doctrine are entailed by the passage, and apply ­these points to the day-­to-­day lives of his auditors.29 One of the most effective methods of demonstrating practical applications of doctrine is to show it in the lives of historical figures. Thus, for instance, the familiar stories of Job’s ­trials or Moses looking across the river to the promised land might be introduced to embody the lesson of patient reliance on Providence and the w ­ ill of God. In this sense, then, history became a part of the educative thrust of preaching. Richard Baxter explained: Of all waies of Teaching, history is accounted one of the most effectual; ­because it hath the g­ reat advantage on our apprehensions, as setting our lesson before our eyes in the ­great character of Example, and not only in the smaller letter of a naked precept. And of all History, What can be more power­ ful, then 1. Where one of the actors is the eternal son of God . . . ​2. And the other actors are such as most fitly represent the dif­fer­ent actions of all the world.30 This is the oblique approach to teaching that gave rise to the use of parable, the story that must be opened to reveal the kernel of affective truth within. Though Baxter does not dismiss ancient wisdom out of hand, he does advise sermon writers to consider that examples from scripture are necessarily fitter and more power­ ful than are examples from pagan antiquity such as t­ hose that fill early modern conduct books and the sermons of many learned churchmen. Notwithstanding the widespread objections to overfavoring the teachings of mere pagans, virtuous heathens continue to appear as useful examples in sermons for many years. In an age when most Puritan and In­de­pen­dent preachers concentrated on biblical examples, Thomas Brooks displayed in his writings a range of classical reference most often associated with the learned style of the established church from which he had been forcibly excluded. In one work alone, An Arke for All God’s Noahs (1662), Brooks refers to authors as vari­ous as Plutarch, Athenodorus, Plato,

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1650–1850 Isocrates, Cicero, Horace, Aristotle, Ammianus Marcellus, Tacitus, Aulus Gellius, Xenophon, Varro, Caesar, Pliny, Diogenes Laertius, Athenaeus, Diodorus Siculus, Lucian, Themistocles, Homer, Seneca, and Suetonius.31 Such a range is perhaps not surprising from a man educated at Cambridge, but it ­will certainly strike students familiar with Puritan rhe­toric as unusually rich.32 It must be noted that Brooks himself sometimes advocated simplicity in preaching: “First, Jesus Christ must be preached plainly, perspicuously, so as the meanest capacity may understand what they say concerning Christ; they must preach Christ for edification, and not to work admiration, as many do in ­these days.”33 Brooks also advised preachers to study scripture more than “humane” histories: they “must study Gods Book more then all other Books. The truth and antiquity of the Book of God finds no companion, ­either in Age or Authority. No Histories are comparable to the History of Scriptures.”34 ­These two passages—­one recommending simplicity and the other ­disapproving excessive attention to secular texts—­come near the end of a volume that is in point of fact far from s­ imple or exclusively scripture oriented. Rather, The Unsearchable Riches of Christ contains a formidable array of classical and historical teaching and example. Brooks in all his works mixed what appear to be the classical contents of a commonplace book together with parallel references to Old Testament figures, Greek and Roman poets, kings and other early modern historical figures (Cesar Borgia, Charles IV of France), and early modern divines, all in the ser­vice of the homiletic message at hand. In Apples of Gold, Brooks urged young men to use their time wisely and to consider the ever-­present prospect of death, telling his readers that King Philip of Macedon paid a courtier to remind him of his mortality ­every day at dinnertime. Life is short and uncertain, and one never knows how death ­will take us: “Death suddenly arrested David’s Sons, and Job’s Sons; Augustus died in a Complement; Galba, with a Sentence; Vespatian, with a Jest; Zeuxis died laughing at the Picture of an old ­Woman, which he drew with his own hand; Sophocles was choaked with the stone in a Grape; Diodorus the Logician died for shame, that he could not answer a joculary question propounded at the ­table by Stilpo.”35 Brooks then closed the paragraph with the death of the Dutch preacher Joannes Measius shortly a­ fter he had given a sermon on Jesus raising the dead.36 Similar cata­logues of examples support passages about the fickle nature of fate, the dangers of pride or excesses of plea­sure, and the ephemeral nature of most worldly rewards. An examination of the way Brooks uses his classical citations suggests a range of fairly conventional rhetorical motives. First, Brooks shows himself quite willing to take ethical wisdom wherever he can find it, often mixing pagan instances with

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acts and sayings from the Old Testament, New Testament, and classical and Protestant history. Sometimes ­these materials appear in a cloud of witnesses or a rambling series of illustrations of the teaching ­toward which his sermons or tracts are directed. Reflecting on the instability of ­human status, Brooks wanders at random through historical periods: “Plutarch wittily compareth ­great Men to ­Counters, which now stand for a thousand pound, and anon for a farthing; this was Haman’s case: And so Sejanus, the same Senatours who accompanied him to the Senate, conducted him to Prison.”37 From the ­great classical biographer and moralist, Brooks takes an aphorism and illustrates it by adducing two cases of power­ful men who fell dramatically: Haman from the book of Esther and Sejanus from Roman history. Brooks goes on to elaborate on the way the wicked are “caught in their own net,” so that their downfall springs from their own actions, as happened to Henry III and Charles IX of France, Pha­raoh, Jabin, Sisera, Senacherib, Antiochus Epiphanus, Maxentius the Tyrant, the Spanish Armada, and Guy Fawkes—­“ ­there is no end of stories of this nature.”38 ­There is no schematizing such a ­jumble of exemplifying, and such ­jumbles appear constantly throughout Brooks’ sermons and tracts. Nonetheless, certain distinct patterns occur. One of Brooks’s favorite techniques is to pair pagan and Christian instances, usually in support of elaborate old/new analogies: Some say that King Midas had obtained of the gods, that whatsoever he touch’d should be turn’d into gold. I am sure that what­ever faith toucheth, it turneth into gold, that is, to our good.39 Pliny writes of the Crocodile, that she grows to her last day; So aged Saints grow rich in spiritual experience to the last. . . . ​Socrates preferred the Kings Countenance before his Coyn; and so must you prefer the favour of God, the countenance of Christ and the t­ hings of eternity, above all the favour and friendship of all the men in the world.40 Implicit in such formulations is a kind of analogy, using classical and historical examples to demonstrate that the practical moral lessons taught by the heathens are not any less vital and appropriate for Christians. Brooks often a­ dopted this approach to illustrate the benefits of certain Christian practices. Discussing the need for contemplation and self-­examination, Brooks first credited Chilo (one of the Seven Sages) with the injunction, “Know thyself,” and then stressed that this is still a home truth for Christians.41 Similarly, recommending self-­control in adversity, Brooks tapped into the traditional identification of the phi­los­o­pher Socrates as a model of patience and placid forbearance.

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1650–1850 According to Xenophon, Socrates considered impatience and anger a disruption of the soul; Brooks offered classical and scriptural examples of p ­ eople who similarly refused to be provoked: “When one wondered at the patience of Socrates ­towards one who reviled and reproached him, if we should meet one, saith he, whose body w ­ ere more unsound than ours, should we be angry with him, and not rather pitty him? why then should we not do the like to him whose soul is more diseased than o ­ thers?” 42 In t­hese two extracts, Brooks introduced the stories to furnish his auditors or readers with the basic ethical precept they embody. ­There was no reservation about the heathen source of the precept, no suggestion that without grace the precept would be pointless, no indication that this wisdom had been preempted in any way by the new law. Most often ­these analogical passages functioned like fables, stories to which moralizing tags can be appended. The scope of the tag is usually more comprehensive (i.e., more doctrinally Christian) than that of the original story. Thus, the logical structure of the analogy works something like this: just as A is to B, so is C to D—­only much more so. When Alcibiades was proudly boasting of his lands that lay together, Socrates wittily rebukes his pride by bringing him a map of the World, and wishing him to shew him where his lands did lie; his lands would hardly amount to more than the prick of a pin; ­England, Scotland, and Ireland are but three ­little spots, to the vast Continents that be in other parts of the world; and what then is thy palace, thy lordships, thy mannors, thy farm, thy ­house, thy cottage, but a ­little minum, a prick of a pin to God, who is so ­great, so vast a portion? Oh Sirs, had you the understanding of all the Angels in heaven, and the tongues of all the men on earth, yet you would not be able to conceive, express, or set forth the greatness or largeness of a Saints portion.43 The classical exemplum introduces the princi­ple of contrasting an individual’s property with the scope of the entire world as an object lesson in humility. Brooks allowed that ethical lesson to stand, but then he multiplied its scope by comparing an En­glishman’s status and material belongings with the “portion” of the elect—­ salvation and heaven. “Artaxerxes the Persian Monarch, was famous for accepting of a l­ittle w ­ ater from the hand of a loving Subject. God makes himself famous, and his grace glorious, by his kind acceptation of the weakest endeavours of his ­people.” 4 4 The ­little anecdote about Artaxerxes does more than serve the usual function of such tales, that is, to furnish an example of conduct for the reader to emulate. Rather, it introduces a concept, the gracious overcoming of the dispro-

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portion between king and subject, and then develops a weightier parallel, God’s merciful disregard of the disproportion between the giver and receiver of grace. For Brooks, figures from ancient history could still at times provide Christians with examples worthy of emulation. Generally Brooks conjoined exemplary narrations from classical tradition with parallel scriptural stories or, as we have seen, with moral commentary. For instance, he recommended believers afflicted with persecution to consider “that all the afflictions that do befall the saints, do only reach their worser part; they reach not, they hurt not, their nobler part, their best part. All the arrows stick in the target, they reach not the conscience: 1 Peter iii. 13, ‘And who s­ hall harm you, if ye be followers of that which is good,’ saith the apostle. That is, none ­shall harm you. They may thus and thus afflict you, but they ­shall never harm you.” What is truly striking in this passage is that Brooks then reverses the movement ordinarily employed (up from pagan darkness into Christian light). ­After the quotation from Peter, he moves from the gospel precept back to pagan examples: It was the speech of a Heathen, when as by the Tyrant he was commanded to be put into a Morter, and to be beaten into pieces with an Iron pestell, he cryes out to his persecuters, You doe but beat the vessel, the case, the husk of Anaxarchus, you do not beat me; his body was to him but as a case, a husk; he counted his soule himselfe, which they could not reach. . . . ​Socrates said of his Enemies, They may kill me, but they cannot hurt me. So afflictions may kill us, but they cannot hurt us; they may take away my life, but they cannot take away my God, my Christ, my crown.45 ­Here the stories of Anaxarchus and Socrates provide extra illustrations of the precept initially set forth in a Christian context. Then Brooks loops back again, emphasizing how well the precept fits the life and ­trials of a Christian; he ­pointedly advises his readers, “You are wise, and know how to apply it.” Once again, though Brooks turns away from the classical exemplars, he evidently sees no need to diminish the stature of Anaxarchus and Socrates or to suggest that their moral heroism has been supplanted by the Christian dispensation. A third reason for turning to classical tradition is that the virtuous heathens provide an implicit rebuke to Christians who—­though provided with a vastly superior source of wisdom in revelation—­failed to lead a worthy life. Brooks related many such tales. The phi­los­o­pher Cleanthes, asked why he spoke chidingly sometimes when nobody was around, answered humorously that he rebuked himself for lacking the understanding and prudence appropriate to one of his age and gray

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1650–1850 hair. When Brooks embedded this story in a sermon, he directed this lesson in self-­ knowledge to “the gray heads and gray beards of our time” who have ­little to commend them but t­ hese marks of age.46 Brooks’s retelling of the peaceful reconciliation between the rival phi­los­op ­ hers Aristippus and Aeschines served to rebuke the doctrinal wranglers in his own age: “My prayer s­ hall be, that this Heathen may not rise up in judgment against the flourishing professors of our times.” 47 Ancient phi­los­o­phers learned to be content with very l­ittle, whereas Christians are not often sufficiently grateful for God’s rich gifts: “­Shall Diogenes (a Heathen) be more content with his Tub to shelter him, and with his dish to drink in, than Alexander was with all his conquests; and s­ hall not a Christian sit down contented and satisfied in the enjoyment of God for his portion, though he hath but a Tub to shelter him, Bread to feed him, and a dish of ­water to refresh him.” 48 ­Here Brooks’s forceful analogy sets the example of the moral heathens against complacent Christians, exclaiming, “Oh let not nature do more than grace; Oh let not this Heathen put Christians to a blush!” 49 It would be shameful if heathen virtue, springing from the light of natu­ral religion alone, ­were to outshine Christian conduct despite the superior helps of revelation and grace. Similarly, to enforce a warning about the perils of bad com­pany and moral contagion, Brooks provides a classical example intended to shame his readers into compliance: “Bias a Heathen man, being at Sea in a ­great storm, and perceiving many wicked men with him in the ship, calling upon the Gods; Oh saith he, forbear prayer, hold your tongues, I would not have the Gods take notice that you are ­here, they w ­ ill sure drown us all, if they should. Ah Sirs! Could a Heathen see so much danger in the society of wicked men, and can you see none?”50 ­These purposeful analogies tend to follow the same pattern, first a story of exemplary heathen conduct and then an appeal to the reader along t­ hese lines: if Cleanthes, Socrates, Diogenes, Bias, and so on pursued wise and virtuous courses, why should Christians not do as well or better? Interestingly, this was one use of pagan antiquity to which the puritan Tuckney had no objection; he assured Whichcote, “Your both reading and making use of Phi­los­o­phers; especially on shaming loose and scandalous Christians with their better princi­ples or practises; I do not remember, that . . . ​I ever did blame in you.”51 Brooks shared t­ hese rhetorical patterns with many other seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century divines. But beyond t­ hese common tropes, Brooks’s practice was extraordinarily diverse. Sometimes, as if he found it advisable to join his fellow nonconformists in delimiting the range of heathen knowledge, he took a far less tolerant approach than we have seen thus far. His occasional disavowal of

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the value of humane wisdom could be as stringent as any found in the Puritans of a previous generation. Varro reports of 388 several Opinions that w ­ ere among the Phi­los­o­phers, about the compleat happiness of man, but they w ­ ere out in them all, one judging his happiness lay in this, and another in that. They caught at the shadow of happiness, but could not come at the Tree of Life, the Lord Jesus Christ, who is weak Saints compleat happiness.52 Aristotle, that g­ reat Sectary of Nature being not able to comprehend the reasons of the Seas ebbing and flowing, cast himself into it; Oh how much less able was he to comprehend God, blessed forever.53 Brooks ­here marshaled classical examples—­the chaos of heathen philosophy, the radical limitations of Aristotle’s knowledge—to demonstrate the deficiency of the merely rational path to wisdom and true belief. How much of divine wisdom did the heathen wise men r­ eally know? This question raises a fascinating prob­lem of historiographical interpretation among early modern thinkers. Many divines outside the Puritan tradition followed Erasmus in attributing to some heathen wise men distinctly proto-­Christian tendencies. For instance, Meric Casaubon praised Plato in terms that clearly indicate that he was being judged with regard to the proximity of his teachings to Christian doctrines: “Plato, hee was altogether for Divinitie, it was true; the immortalitie of the soule, and the rewards of a godlie life in the world to come, and the like, being his chiefest subject in almost all his Treatises: for which, as hee was much admired by the ancient ­Fathers of the Church, so in all ages hee hath ben knowne by the Title of Divine Plato.”54 ­There was one drawback to the discovery of proto-­Christian doctrines in ancient writings: early modern writers seeking ancient pre­ce­dents sympathetic with Christian teachings found that such pre­ce­dents ­were rarely stated very clearly. Some maintained that this lack of clarity resulted from the limited nature of heathen wisdom. ­Others took a more suspicious view. The ­great phi­los­o­phers had indeed made discoveries that elevated them above their contemporaries (though not as much as revelation has granted the simplest of Christians). However, the opacity of their discourse meant that they lacked the faith and courage to make their convictions public, rendering them doubly reprehensible. Thus Brooks could maintain, Plato knew much of God, but (as Josephus shews) durst not set it down for fear of the ­people; and Lactantius charges the same upon Tully: Thou darest not (saith he) undertake the Patronage of truth, for fear of the prison of Socrates; and Augustine doth as much for Seneca. . . . ​Though ­these wise men

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1650–1850 saw the vanity of the Heathenish Deities, and the worship that was given to them, and looked upon them as utterly unworthy of re­spect from wise and sober men, nay secretly scorned and derided them; yet would they not openly declare against them, and that for fear of the ­people who so much doted upon them.55 Thus the extensive efforts made by sympathetic authors to apply classical wisdom to the support of Christian teaching ended up undermining the humanist argument. Generally, then, Brooks employs figures from classical antiquity ­either to provide pithy sayings or to serve as historical examples dressing up naked precepts. He uses humane wisdom liberally, but he never rises to the enthusiastic approval of Erasmus and his humanistic followers. Socrates had something to offer, but he is no saint. “They love not their lives that love Christ and his truth more than their lives,” Brooks declares. “In ­these words you see that the Saints by d ­ ying do overcome: They may kill me, said Socrates of his Enemies, but they cannot hurt me; A Saint may say this, and more.”56 The basic stance of princi­ple—­contemning mere earthly life when put in the balance with conscience—is common to Socrates and the saints, but Brook insists that the saints r­ eally do know more. Significantly, as we have already seen on several occasions, Brooks carefully links most classical references with Christian teachings and scriptural references. He progresses from Greek and Roman philosophy to biblical teachings and church ­fathers, as if he w ­ ere moving forward from a lesser dispensation to a greater. Consider the progression of references in this passage, which treats of Christians’ duty to communicate their knowledge of Christian truth: Utterance is a gift; and dumb Christians are blameworthy, as well as dumb Ministers. We should all strive to a holy ability and dexterity of savoury discourse. If Christ should come to many of us, as he did to his two Disciples . . . ​ and say to us, as to them, What manner of communication had ye, or have ye? Oh! with what paleness of face and sadness of countenance should we look! The story of Loquere ut videam, is common. Speak that I may see thee, said Socrates to a fair Boy. When the heart is full, it overfloweth in speech. We know Metals by their tinkling, and men by their talking. Happy was that tongue in the Primitive time, that could sound out Aliquid Davidicum, anything of Davids ­doing; but how much more happy is he that speaks out Aliquid Christi, anything of Christ from experience.57 Brooks h ­ ere inserts the aphorism and anecdote from classical tradition into the midst of a treatise on Christian discourse. He elaborates on the idea first with

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figurative explication and then extends it to Old Testament and then to New Testament applications. The doctrine that the Christian dispensation supplants Jewish and Gentile wisdom is built into the very rhetorical structure of the passage. Similar progressive demonstrations recur from time to time. In a discussion of the last judgment, Brooks asserts, “The bringing into judgment is a t­ hing which is known by reason, and is clear by the light of nature.” Thus, phi­los­o­phers such as Plato and Cicero “had some dreams of a severe day of accounts.” Brooks then reaffirms this point by using a biblical argument: “the Heathens themselves had some dread and expectation of such a day; and therefore, when Paul spake of judgment to come, Foelix trembled, though a Heathen.”58 In passages such as this, Brooks drew on the trea­sury of history, both sacred and secular, both Christian and heathen, suggesting that ­human nature is everywhere and always the same. He employed references to humane wisdom in nearly ­every way practiced by his contemporaries of vari­ous theological camps. He could be generous in allowing heathen wise men to have been truly wise, but on the other hand, he could also emphasize the severe limitations of their wisdom. In ­either case, his years at Emmanuel College are evident, both in the Puritan tenets of much of his writing and in his attempts to use historical examples of men guided by the light of nature, attempts that perhaps indicate the warming influence of the Cambridge Platonists. Significantly, it is the context—­preaching to an audience in need of religious renewal—­that enriches the material: “Certainly if Ennius could pick out Gold out of a Dunghil, I may, by Divine Assistance, much better pick out golden ­matter out of such a golden Myne as my Text is—to enrich the souls of men withall.”59 This examination of Brooks also indicates that (pace Perry Miller)60 it is not always so easy to distinguish the partisan sympathies of a minister by the form and technique of his sermons. Brooks’s sermons do not fit into the comfortable categories that critics have devised. His doctrine was not heterodox for an In­de­pen­dent minister, but his sermon-­making featured many of the characteristics we have come to expect not to find in Puritan and In­de­pen­dent sermons: ornate, periodic sentences; a profusion of classical references; and most of the flowers of eloquence. But Brooks’s ornate classical reference is not merely a ­matter of style. The rich array of his allusions, quotations, and brief exemplifying tales acknowledged the existence of wisdom—­more or less limited—­outside the circle of Christian revelation. However, for Brooks this acknowl­edgment nearly always leads into a discussion of the superiority of Christian wisdom. If this pattern appeared more consistently in Brooks, it might be argued that the reduction of humane wisdom was a key component in a sermon-­based

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1650–1850 elenchus—­a dialogic method designed to bring the auditor or reader to reject commonly accepted notions to prepare for a new, deeper understanding. In fact, Brooks and M. Barker did recommend elenchus in their “Approbation” prefacing a 1653 collection of the sermons of John Everard. Such a method, they commented, could provide readers “much sweetness.” By leading them through a negative movement, examining and rejecting widely accepted but false opinions, the elenchus would bring them to “rejoyce to be laid low, and made nothing, that God may be exalted and made all in all.” 61 In Brooks’s own published works, however, he did not consistently rein in his classical references to serve the laying low of humane wisdom. The occasional classical anecdote or saying just as often functioned to sweeten the discourse for the sake of sweetening, rather than turning the discourse t­ oward the abjection of the sinful reader. Still, an inclination t­ oward the method he professed to admire in Everard—­perhaps no more than an elenctic tendency—­may go some way ­toward explaining why Thomas Brooks did not follow the homiletic austerities of the “plain and profitable way,” instead choosing to work with the materials of humane learning, unlike most other preachers of the In­de­pen­dent Protestant church.

Notes 1. ​Sources for Brooks’s life include Tai Liu, “Brooks, Thomas (1608–1680),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://­w ww​.­oxforddnb​.­com​/ ­view​/­article​/­3 567 (accessed September 10, 2016); and Rev. Alexander Balloch Grosart, “Memoir of Thomas Brooks,” in The Complete Works of Thomas Brooks, 6 vols. (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1866), 1:xx–­x xxvii. On the placement of Puritans and In­de­pen­dents in London parishes, see Liu, Puritan London: A Study of Religion and Society in the City Parishes (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986). 2. ​Thomas Brooks, The Glorious Day of the Saints Appearance; Calling for a Glorious Conversation from all Beleevers (London: Printed by M. S. for Rapha Harford and Matthew Simmons, 1648); Brooks, Gods Delight in the Progresse of the Upright. Especially, in Magistrates Uprightnesse and Constancy in Wayes of Justice and Righ­teousnesse, in ­these Apostatizing Times, Notwithstanding all Discouragements, Oppositions, &c. (London: Printed by M. S. for R. Harford and Thomas Brewster, 1649); Brooks, The Hypocrite Detected, Anatomized, Impeached, Arraigned, and Condemned before the Parliament of ­England (London: Printed by Fr. Neile for Hanna Allen, 1650). No evidence remains to indicate how Brooks may have changed his sermons to move them from oral delivery to print. For a technical discussion of the shift of sermons to print, see G. M. Story, “The Text of Lancelot Andrewes’s Sermons,” in Editing Seventeenth ­Century Prose, ed. D.I.B.

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Smith (Toronto: Hakkert, 1972), 11–23. For a discussion of the transition of sermons into a wider public sphere, see James Rigney, “ ‘ To Lye upon a Stationer’s Stall, like a Piece of Coarse Flesh in the Shambles’: The Sermon, Print, and the En­glish Civil War,” in The En­glish Sermon Revised: Religion, Lit­er­a­ture and History, 1600– 1750, ed. Lori Ann Ferrell and Peter McCullough (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 188–207. 3. ​On the importance of preaching in the study of early modern politics, see John Frederick Wilson, Pulpit in Parliament: Puritanism during the En­glish Civil Wars, 1640–1648 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1969). Wilson refers specifically to Brooks’s “per­for­mance” at the fast sermon as a counterbalance to the unwelcome criticism of Parliament in the other sermon delivered that day (94n101). James C. Spalding has characterized the Parliament sermons as a public form of the private accounting of moral failures and successes of the Puritan diary; “Sermons before Parliament (1640–1649) as a Public Puritan Diary,” Church History 36, no. 1 (1967): 24–35. Recent studies of seventeenth-­century sermons emphasize the essential links between po­liti­cal and religious experience; on the possibilities of combining historical and literary analy­sis, see Mary Morrissey, “Interdisciplinarity and the Study of Early Modern Sermons,” Historical Journal 42, no. 4 (1999): 1111–1123. 4. ​Thomas Brooks, Gods Delight in the Progresse of the Upright, 14. On the argument of expiation to deliver a nation from God’s disfavor, see Patricia Crawford, “Charles Stuart, That Man of Blood,” Journal of British Studies 16, no. 2 (1977): 41–61. 5. ​Thomas Brooks, A Proposall Humbly Offered, for the Farming of Liberty of Conscience (1662), 1, 3. The satire is reprinted in Wit and Loyalty Reviv’d, In a Collection of some smart Satyrs in Verse and Prose on the late Times (London: W. Davis, 1682). According to Sir Roger L’Estrange, in The Dissenter’s Sayings . . . ​ published in Their Own Words, for the Information of the P ­ eople (London: Printed for Henry Brome, 1681), dissenting ministers such as Brooks created the atmosphere of crisis in which execution of the king was pos­si­ble: “And what was it, but the Dissenting Pulpits that put t­hese Diabolical Thoughts into their Hearts; ­These Bloody Words into their Mouths; and the very Swords into their Hands? Who but the Godly, Peaceable Ministers, the Zealous Protestants, (as They make bold to call themselves) and just such Protestants, as Ministers, to a Scruple. Murther, Blood, Cruelty, Tyranny, says Brooks, and see then how this Parricidal Evangelist bellows for the Execution of Justice; which was, in En­glish, the King’s Murther” (45). 6. ​Thomas Brooks, Precious Remedies Against Satans Device; or, Salve fore Believers & Unbelievers Sores, 3rd ed. (London: Printed by M. Simmons for John Hancock, 1656), sig. A3r. 7. ​Thomas Brooks, Heaven on Earth or a Serious Discourse Touching a Well-­ grounded Assurance of Mens Everlasting Happiness and Blessedness (London:

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1650–1850 Printed by R. I. for John Hancock, 1654). The dedication remained substantively unchanged in the 1657 edition. 8. ​Thomas Brooks, The Second and Last Collection of the Late London Ministers Farewel Sermons (London, 1663), 54–55. 9. ​Thomas Brooks, Heaven on Earth or a Serious Discourse Touching a Well-­ grounded Assurance of Mens Everlasting Happiness and Blessedness (London: Printed by M. S. for John Hancock, 1664). 10. ​Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory; or, A Summ of Practical Theologie and Cases of Conscience (London: Printed by Robert White for Nevill Simmons, 1673), 60. 11. ​See, for instance, Thomas Hall, writing against the “Cavils raised against sanctity by the world, the flesh, and the devil,” in The Beauty of Holiness (London: Printed by Evan Taylor for John Browne, 1655): “Since I finisht this Tract, t­ here came to my hands an excellent piece stiled Precious Remedies against Satans devices, by M. Brooks; where you have many more Cavils fully and learnedly answered” (146). 12. ​Edmund Calamy, The Nonconformist’s Memorial, ed. Samuel Palmer, 2 vols. (London: W. Harris, 1775), 1:123. Calamy appears at the head of Samuel Butler’s satirical list of “Liberty of Conscience” commissioners. 13. ​See Rigney on Chartier and Roche (“To Lye upon a Stationer’s Stall,” 200). The efficacy of Brooks in using printed sermons to build the community of the faithful may be seen in a funeral sermon of 1762 preached to mark the death of a pastor in the congregation Brooks founded: “It is now more than a c­ entury since this congregational Church was first gathered and formed, according to the order of the Gospel, ­under the ministry and assistance of that judicious and godly Divine Mr Thomas Brooks, several of whose plain but highly edifying tracts are yet in the hands of many, and have been greatly blessed to multitudes, for their spiritual establishment and comfort.” John Conder, The Duty of a ­People’s remembring their deceased Pastors, represented and enforced: in a Sermon Preached . . . ​ Subsequent to the Funeral of the late Reverend Mr Thomas Hall (London, 1762), v. 14. ​Liu, “Brooks, Thomas.” 15. ​Thomas Brooks, A Cabinet of Choice Jewels; or, A Box of Precious Ointment (London: John Hancock, 1669), 97–98. 16. ​John Spencer, Kaina Kai Palaia. T ­ hings New and Old; or, A Store-­house of Similies, Sentences, Allegories, Apophthegms, Adagies, Apologues, Divine, Morall, Po­liti­call, &c. With their severall Applications (London: Printed by W. Wilson and J. Strearer for John Spencer, 1658). Spencer does not identify collected material by author. 17. ​Rev. C. H. Spurgeon, ed., Smooth Stones Taken From Ancient Brooks (New York: Sheldon, 1860), 16–17. Spurgeon updated Brooks’s aphorisms by translating classical quotations, excising citations, and simplifying expressions and syntax. 18. ​Patrick Collinson has noted, “Many flowers could bloom in this soil,” in A History of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, by Sarah Bendall, Christopher Brooke, and Patrick

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Collinson (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1999), 205. See Collinson’s account of the flourishing of the “latitude men” in Emmanuel and Christ’s College (256–264). 19. ​“Eight Letters of Dr. Antony Tuckney, and Dr. Benjamin Whichcote,” in Moral and Religious Aphorisms, by Benjamin Whichcote, rev. ed., ed. Samuel Salter (London: J. Payne, 1753), 38. Tuckney too was included in Samuel Butler’s satirical list. For the theological background to the Tuckney-­Whichcote dispute, see Robert A. Greene, “Whichcote, the Candle of the Lord, and Synderesis,” Journal of the History of Ideas 42, no. 4 (1991): 617–644. 20. ​W. Fraser Mitchell, En­glish Pulpit Oratory from Andrewes to Tillotson (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1932), 375. For a highly literate Puritan approach to ancient authorities, see how John Milton, in Christian Doctrine, supplements one of his own theological demonstrations with this cursory note: “The same fact could be easily demonstrated by a host of other examples and proofs from the pagan writers.” In Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–1982), 6:387. The tone of this reference suggests that such testimonies are not ­really corrupt, but neither are they necessary. 21. ​“Eight Letters,” 38. 22. ​“Eight Letters,” 39, 71–72. 23. ​William Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (London: Iohn Legatt, 1631), 2. The designation of works without faith—­i.e., heathen virtues—as splendid sins is Saint Augustine’s. The reasons for this exclusion are well defined by Antony Burgess, who explains that good works unaccompanied by faith may have “restrained many from gross sins, and kept them in the exercises of temperance and justice, and such Moral vertues; which though named vertues by Aristotle, yet the ­Fathers did upon Scripture-­grounds call them vices and splendida peccata, glistring sins; for so indeed all that Piety and Morality which is out of the Church of God, is a Sodom apple, fair to the eye, and inwardly nothing but ashes; for t­ here is no true Sanctification, no true and right princi­ples of holiness, but within the Church of God” (693). 24. ​Perkins, The Whole Treatise, 334, 133. 25. ​John Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes ­towards Reason, Learning, and Education, 1560–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 125. 26. ​William Perkins, The Art of Prophecying; or, A Treatise Concerning the Sacred and Onely True Manner and Method of Preaching, trans. Thomas Tuke, in The Whole Treatise, 668–669. On the influence of this work, see Mitchell, En­glish Pulpit Oratory. 27. ​Perkins, The Art of Prophecying, 670. 28. ​Edward Reynolds, A Sermon Touching the Use of Humane Learning (London: by T. N. for George Thomason, 1658), 21. As John Morgan explains, “­Human learning in the pulpit was not only proud, it was superfluous, given the clarity of the message itself” (Godly Learning, 127). Ironically, Reynolds himself had a reputation for excessive quotation; see Mitchell, En­glish Pulpit Oratory, 104.

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1650–1850 29. ​Perkins, The Art of Prophecying, 668–669. 30. ​Richard Baxter, A Saint or a Brute: The Certain Necessity and Excellency of Holiness (London: Printed by R. W. for Francis Tyton and Nevil Simmons, 1662), 3. 31. ​Thomas Brooks, An Arke for all Gods Noahs In a gloomy stormy day; Or, The best Wine reserved till last. The Transcendent Excellency of a Believers Portion above all Earthly Portions whatsoever (London: Printed by R. I. for Henry Cripps, 1666). 32. ​One pos­si­ble source of Brooks’s show of erudition has been suggested by Robert  A. Greene and Hugh MacCallum, in the introduction to their edition of Nathaniel Culverwell’s An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971). They claim that Brooks “plundered the Discourse and the commonplaces published with it” for his own publications (xi). Though they do not document Brooks’s thefts in detail, the few examples they furnish suggest that their theory may be well grounded. The charge is repeated in Greene’s essay “Whichcote, the Candle of the Lord, and Synderesis,” 640. On the other hand, much of the material Brooks uses is easily found in popu­lar and accessible texts such as Diogenes Laertius, Plutarch, and Thomas Stanley. Maintaining a commonplace book was standard practice among fellows at Emmanuel; Bendall, Brooke, and Collinson, History of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 72–75. Though Brooks must have kept one himself, no commonplace book identifiable as Brooks’s own has been discovered. 33. ​Thomas Brooks, The Unsearchable Riches of Christ, or Meat for Strong Men, and Milk for Babes, 4th ed. (London: Printed for John Hancock, 1671), 296–297. Cf. Brooks, Cabinet of Choice Jewels, in which Brooks quotes Tertullian: “This we believe, when we first begin to believe, that we ­ought not to believe anything beyond Scripture” (20). 34. ​Brooks, The Unsearchable Riches of Christ, 311. 35. ​Thomas Brooks, Apples of Gold for Young Men and W ­ omen, and a Crown of Glory for Old Men and ­Women (London: Printed by R. I. for John Hancock, 1657), 51–52. 36. ​Brooks, Apples of Gold, 50. 37. ​Thomas Brooks, A Word in Season To this Pres­ent Generation; or, A Sober and Serious Discourse (London: Printed for Dorman Newman, 1675), 50. 38. ​Brooks, A Word in Season, 50–52. 39. ​Brooks, The Unsearchable Riches of Christ, 255–256. 40. ​Brooks, Apples of Gold, 65, 311. Brooks expands on the crocodile-­Christian analogy in An Ark for All Gods Noahs, 413. 41. ​Brooks, Apples of Gold, 224. T ­ hese words ­were legendarily inscribed on the portal of the Delphic Oracle’s ­temple. Diogenes Laertius credited the saying to Thales (1:39) but also noted that Antisthenes attributed it to Phemonoë, from whom Chilon appropriated it (Lives of the Ancient Phi­los­o­phers, trans. R.  D. Hicks, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library [1925; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966], 1:41). Brooks added that Demonicus traced the time he

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began to be a phi­los­o­pher to the time he began to know himself (Apples of Gold, 225). 42. ​Brooks, Apples of Gold, 324. This anecdote originates in Xenophon, Memorabilia 3.13.1. 43. ​Brooks, An Arke for all Gods Noahs, 17–18. The story of Alcibiades and the map originates with Aelian. 44. ​Brooks, The Unsearchable Riches of Christ, 82. 45. ​Brooks, Precious Remedies, 101–102. Brooks employed the same argument in Heaven on Earth (1654, 109) and in Word in Season, where Brooks starts with Socrates, moves on to Anaxarchus, and then introduces Saint Paul (61–62). For the death of Anaxarchus, see Diogenes Laertius 10.59. For the Socratic paradox (that his accusers could kill him but not harm him), see Plato, Apology 30c–­d. 46. ​Brooks, Apples of Gold, 58. 47. ​Brooks, Precious Remedies, 306. On the reconciliation of Aristippus and Aeschines, see Diogenes Laertius 2.82–83. 48. ​Brooks, An Ark for All Gods Noahs, 152. 49. ​Brooks, An Ark for All Gods Noahs, 152–153. 50. ​Brooks, Precious Remedies, 128. 51. ​“Eight Letters,” 92. 52. ​Brooks, The Unsearchable Riches of Christ, 88. 53. ​Brooks, An Arke for All Gods Noahs, 67. For the legend of Aristotle’s despair and suicide, see Richard Culverwell’s address to the “Courteous Reader” prefacing his ­brother Nathaniel’s Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature (1652): “As for the bosome-­secrets of God, Gospel-­mysteries, the Mercy-­seat it self into which the angels desire [to look], Reason’s plum-­line ­will prove too short to fathome them; h ­ ere we must cry with the Apostle ϖ βαθος [O the depths]! Reason may not come into ­these Seas, except she strike her top-­saile; ­here we may say with Aristotle, at the brinke of Euripus, not being able to give an account of the ebbes and flowes, If I ­can’t comprehend thee, thou shalt me” (8–9). Cf. Nathaniel Culverwell’s comments on the heathen wise men’s sense of the limitations of their knowledge, a recitation of the regrets expressed by phi­los­o­phers. “You may hear Aristotle bewailing himself thus, that his νους εν δυναμει [potential reason] ­will so seldome come into act, that his abrasa tabula has so few, and such imperfect impressions upon it, that his intellectuals are at so low an ebbe, as that the motions of Euripus ­will pose them” (108). On Brooks’s pos­si­ble use of material from Culverwell, see note 32 above. 54. ​Meric Casaubon, A Treatise of Use and Custome (London: I.  L., 1638), 166–167. Note, however, that Casaubon adds that Plato himself acknowledged that his understanding of ­these ­things was not certain. 55. ​Brooks, A Word in Season, 20. 56. ​Brooks, Heaven on Earth (1654), 109. Socrates denied that his accusers had any power to hurt him in Plato’s Apology 30c–­d. Although at first sight, Brooks’s

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1650–1850 reference to the heroism of Socrates might appear to be analogous to Erasmus’ cry, “Sancte Socrate!” it proves other­wise. In fact, Brooks mentions the (pagan) ethical response only to move on to the (Christian) saintly response that supplants it. Elsewhere Brooks followed the Protestant condemnation of Erasmus for supposedly turning back from reform. He cautioned against the profane world’s approbation of evil men, citing Luther’s comment, “I would not . . . ​have the glory and fame of Erasmus; my greatest fear is the praises of men.” The Mute Christian ­Under the Smarting Rod with Soveraign Antidotes against the Most Miserable Exigents (London: Printed for John Hancock, 1669), 315. 57. ​Brooks, Unsearchable Riches of Christ, 246–247. The saying Loquere ut [te] videam originates in Apuleius and is ubiquitous in early modern treatises of morality; for instance, Richard Brathwaite, in The En­glish Gentleman, 2nd ed. (London: Felix Kyngston, 1633), calls this the “old proverb used by Socrates, and approved by ancient Phi­los­o­phers” (77, 81–82). 58. ​Brooks, Apples of Gold, 148. H ­ ere Brooks refers to Acts 24:25. 59. ​Brooks, An Arke for All Gods Noahs, 1. Brooks apparently has misremembered the proverbial story of the ­great Virgil reading the lesser poet Ennius to discover gold in his dunghill. 60. ​Perry Miller, “The Plain Style” (1939), in Seventeenth-­Century Prose: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Stanley E. Fish (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 147–186. 61. ​Thomas Brooks and M. Barker, “Approbation,” in Some Gospel Trea­sures Opened, by John Everard (London: Printed by R. W. for Rapha Hanford, 1653), sig. 2r.

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EXPANDING IDENTITY THROUGH IMAGINATION; OR, HOW THOMAS TRYON BECOMES THE MARGINALIZED N. S. BOONE

Paul Ricoeur has made one of the most cogent cases for the role of imaginative

lit­er­a­ture in deepening ethical consciousness, in his essay “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation.” He argues that style, especially in imaginative works of lit­er­a­ture, is an opacity, an otherness that one can still yet understand ­because it is an opacity constituted in and through language, words we can cognitively understand. Yet the style of the work is still an otherness that we do not completely absorb or associate with as an aspect of our own identity. By interacting with the otherness of style, especially in imaginative works, the self enters a world, and through this entrance into an “other” world, the self is distanced from its usual real­ity and is able to achieve a critique of that real­ity. Ricoeur writes, “The world of the text is therefore not the world of everyday language. [Instead] it constitutes a new sort of distanciation which could be called a distanciation of the real from itself. . . . ​Through fiction and poetry, new possibilities of being-­in-­the-­world are opened up within everyday real­ity. Fiction and poetry intend being, not u ­ nder the modality of being-­given, but u ­ nder the modality of power-­to-­be.”1 Exposure to imaginative texts creates “an enlarged sense of self” that is able to enact a kind of self-­reflection that enables critique of custom and tradition.2 We tend to credit reason for our ability as ­human beings to advance in our thinking, especially regarding the holding of prejudiced positions. We can come out from ­under traditional ideas, we can become enlightened to new viewpoints, through our use of reasoned dialogue or other exposure to rational arguments. However, Ricoeur’s essay helps us to see that imagination is prob­ably more often than reason the way

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1650–1850 by which we are able to see the other side of an argument or are able to change our minds from a previously held position. In the remainder of this chapter, I would like to partner this idea of Ricoeur’s with the writings of a largely forgotten writer of the long eigh­teenth ­century, Thomas Tryon, who, if he is studied at all t­ oday, is studied largely on the basis of his progressive views on slavery, vegetarianism, the treatment of the insane, and religious tolerance. However, I believe Tryon has more to offer than just progressive stances on ­these issues. Through analyzing his writings, I hope to demonstrate that Tryon is able to construct a sense of identity that allows for an expansive self that is able, through imagination, to distance the self from societal “tradition and custom” in order to critique the dominant culture from the position of the socially marginalized. Among the most in­ter­est­ing of Tryon’s many works is his A Discourse of the ­Causes, Natures, and Cure of Phrensie, Madness, or Distraction,3 which appends his longer A Treatise on Dreams and Visions. In this work, as usual for Tryon, he pres­ents madness in a more sympathetic light than most of his contemporaries did, and his ideas on treatment for madness are much more humane.4 He even includes a condemnation of the increasingly popu­lar tourist attraction that Bedlam was becoming, stating that the best cure for the insane would include keeping them away from onlookers and allowing them to be visited only by close friends and f­ amily while keeping them clean and well cared for.5 This is the policy Tryon advocates in Phrensie, but, as is always the case in Tryon’s works, the policy claim is built on a larger philosophical speculation about the nature of ­human identity—­ and Tryon renders identity in peculiarly linguistic terms. In Madness and Civilization, Foucault writes, “Language is the first and last structure of madness, its constituent form; on language are based all the cycles in which madness articulates its nature.” He goes on to state that madness as a discourse is not merely psychological but has “a hold over the totality of the soul and body” and that it speaks not only through words but through bodily movements as well.6 Interestingly, Tryon sees madness in much the same way. In fact, Tryon not only sees the identity of madness as a product of language or discourse, he also understands linguistic discourse as formative for the identity of sanity. The identity of sanity is produced when the language of the imagination (a kind of creative princi­ple in h ­ umans) is brought up against the language of reason. In the discourse that occurs between the languages of imagination and reason, reason acts as a censor, a check on what the language of the imagination has created. Out of this discourse is produced the words and actions of the sane

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person. On the other hand, the identity of madness is produced when the language of the imagination overrides the language of reason and goes unchecked: Now when the five inward senses of the soul [­these produce the language of reason] are weakened or destroyed, then they can no longer pres­ent before the Judge [reason itself] the Thoughts, Imaginations or Conceptions, but they are all formed into words as fast as they are generated, ­there being no controul or room for Judgment to censure what are fit, and what are unfit to be coyn’d into Expressions: For this cause Mad P ­ eople, and innocent ­children, do speak, forth what­ever ariseth in their Phantasies.7 This quotation most explic­itly explains Tryon’s linguistic concept of identity. First of all, the unchecked imagination is seen as a kind of uncontrolled word generator. Second, then, the censorious quality of reason must form a counterdiscourse in order to put a check on the word-­generating imagination. The dialogue between the two (or lack thereof) results in outward expression (which can be words or actions; Foucault says this explic­itly, Tryon implicitly) that is, in turn, given an identity by society—­sane or insane. This peculiarly linguistic conception of the identities of sanity and madness, and the idea that ­these identities are socially constructed, prompts Tryon to see madness as essentially neutral in the spiritual sense. In other words, the condition of madness is not necessarily a sinful condition. This view enables Tryon to take a more humanitarian position in his proposed treatments of madness than most of his contemporaries; but, moreover, it gives him room to critique society—­which he does rather harshly. Tryon’s conception of the “mad innocent” is the means by which he carries out his critique of “sane” society: “Therefore it is not perhaps always so very deplorable an estate, as some suppose, to be deprived of common Sense and Reason (as they call it) especially, to be a mad innocent.”8 The mad innocent, according to Tryon, is essentially a madman who still acts in accordance with the most obvious Christian virtues (i.e., he is kind and friendly instead of slanderous and cruel) even though he is devoid of his reasoning faculties. Unlike “mad innocents,” Tryon states that sane p ­ eople employ the reasoning faculties to act as a “Vail or Figg-­leaves” 9 that hide their true feelings or intentions as they are generated by the imagination. In other words, sane p ­ eople are often duplicitous and equivocal in their very constitution. Tryon goes on to say that this “sane” existence is itself madness, and he then lists common practices that he equates with a kind of spiritual insanity. Of course, lying, flattery, and slander head the list of ­these “insane”

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1650–1850 common practices, but he soon delves into less obvious “sins” that are at the core of society, such as ambition for titles and a ­great name, as well as the desire for wealth and the storing up of wealth to pass on to progeny. Tryon states that ­these are nothing less than “the daily imployments of many” and that this represents a kind of insanity that is worse than a naked man who uses straws to build a c­ astle of which he imagines himself the emperor.10 ­These condemnations of common practice lead Tryon to make a fantastic claim. He says, “To speak Truth, the World is but a ­great Bedlam, where ­those that are more mad, lock up t­ hose that are loss [less].”11 With this statement, Tryon turns his world upside down. He takes an essential, legitimate societal division—­sane over insane—­and inverts it, thereby disrupting cultural conceptions at their very basis. Also, by valorizing an innocent madness above an inauthentic, duplicitous sanity, Tryon validates the imagination as a method of escaping repressive societal forces. This view of Tryon’s conception of the imagination contrasts markedly with that of Nigel Smith, who asserts that Tryon sought “the obliteration of the imagination, the source of all sin.”12 In fact, Tryon sees the imagination as the key source of creativity. As it has already been described ­here, the imagination, in Tryon’s scheme, is necessary for the formation of words and action. It may contrive of sinful action, but that does not mean Tryon would advocate obliterating it. In fact, in Phrensie, Tryon states that “the Imagination and the Desire have a most wonderful deep and hidden original” and that “it would do won­ders” if it w ­ ere not for the 13 sinfulness of “the outward and corporeal nature.” Even though Tryon validates turning to the imagination instead of reason by his inversion of the binary social division of sane over insane, he does not necessarily advocate the idea that ­people should live solely through this language of the imagination. Obviously, in Tryon’s thought, this would lead to madness, and his discourse on madness is written, in part, to provide a cure for madness. Though in Phrensie Tryon does not discuss the subject, in his other works he mentions a third language (other than ­those of the imagination and reason) through which one can live and escape the conforming and spiritually insane “reason” of society yet still maintain one’s sanity. He calls this language the “Voice of Wisdom.” ­Later I ­will demonstrate the significance of this language more thoroughly.

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The Language of Reason, Custom and Tradition, and the Voice of Wisdom Tryon often takes a polemical stance against the customs and traditions of the larger society. Mostly this is evinced in his condemnation of eating meat, as he asserts that the killing and eating of animals stirs the divine wrath.14 In his memoirs, Tryon says that one of the greatest dangers ­people face is in being “fettered in the Chains of Tradition and Custom.”15 He asserts in The Way to Health that war is more an adherence to “Custom” than anything ­else.16 This distrust for customary or traditional practices even shows up in Tryon’s discussions of religion. He gives more credence to an individual’s own personal beliefs than to the “outward Forms and Modes of Religion.”17 At one point, Tryon makes “Custom and Tradition” synonymous with “Ignorance and Error.”18 In Phrensie, Tryon takes the abstract concepts of custom and tradition and locates them within the body as the language of reason. The rational, censorious property of reason is what places itself in discourse with the language of the imagination and censors it, represses it, and as a result, ­causes a person to act in accordance with societal norms, w ­ hether the norms make sense or not. The reasoning faculties in man are what, in Tryon’s words, have made the world into “a ­great Bedlam.” The language of reason, which censors the imagination, is actually tradition and custom internalized into an individual’s mind. It produces the “common-­sense” that Tryon says is not always bad to be devoid of.19 This common sense, this language of reason, this internalized concept of custom and tradition, is itself a structure that structures an individual’s view of real­ ity.20 It then produces commonsense actions that are in accordance with that view of real­ity. Through the language of reason alone, one is ­under control of the “Mighty Tyrant Custom,”21 but in turning solely to the imagination, one becomes mad. But if we should not obey the language of reason, and if the language of imagination, alone, leads to madness, how does Tryon say that ­people should live? Tryon’s strategy for escaping repressive social “custom” is to hearken unto yet another, deeper language within one’s self, which he names “the Voice of Wisdom.”22 This language seems to serve as a kind of guiding inner light, or even an inner law (hence one of Tryon’s titles, Wisdom’s Dictates), that always generates good, sane be­hav­ior, unlike the imagination, which generates both good and bad be­hav­ ior. And wisdom, according to Tryon, can only be found “within a man’s self”: 23 “For

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1650–1850 the Fountain of all Wisdom and Right Knowing is within, in our own Apartments.”24 Again, his denouncement of custom and tradition can be seen in the following statement in which he indirectly validates looking inward for Wisdom: “But nothing hurts and hinders man from obtaining the true Knowledge of God and Nature in himself, imagining that Wisdom and understanding is to be found and learned in and from some other ­thing.”25 Indeed, for Tryon, looking inward is an absolute necessity, for in his scheme, man, as the image of God, contains the totality of the universe within himself (what Tryon calls the “Microcosmical City”).26 Therefore, by hearkening to the “Voice of Wisdom” that enables a person to turn inward and know oneself, one can have the “knowledge of God” and, indeed, of anything. For this reason, Tryon, at the end of his most popu­lar work, says that the w ­ hole purpose of his book is to “promote such self-­study and Heart-­Knowledge . . . ​which being once attained unto, a man may be able to correct himself, and Tune his own Instrument, whence ­will proceed Concord, Love and Harmony, without which ­there is no Satisfaction ­either in this World, or that which is to come.”27 Similarly, Tryon ends his discourse on madness with much the same admonition of self-­reflexivity: Therefore, O Man! consider what is before mentioned, keep thy self to thy self; turn thy Eye of the Understanding inward; observe thy own Center, and learn to understand with David, That thou art Fearfully and Wonderfully made, and so by the Conduct and Guidance of the Divine Light and Love thou shalt come to know the wonderfull Power of God in thy own Soul, which ­will open unto thee both the Mysteries of Nature, and the Trea­sures of Eternity.28 It is through a turning inward, a self-­reflexivity, that Tryon mediates between the states of madness and inauthentic, duplicitous sanity. By listening to the “Voice of Wisdom” and turning inward, one can escape the repressive nature of custom and tradition, which has a tyrannical, conforming power over individuals. What Tryon calls for is the perspective of an outsider looking in on the larger society. By escaping the language of reason and the dross of custom that comes with it, one escapes to the margins of society—­one can actually become one of the marginalized.

Expanding Identity through Imagination: Becoming the Marginalized So far, one can easily discern that Tryon values the insight of the individual person over the conforming societal norms. In fact, one could make the claim that Tryon

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is against society in almost ­every way. He thinks ­people are healthier, physically and spiritually, when they remove themselves from cities and towns.29 Of course, a common treatment for disease was to go out to the country, but Tryon seems to condemn all large communities as being unhealthy places to live.30 This antisocial attitude can also be seen in his idea that c­ hildren should be educated at home instead of at a school.31 Perhaps he has in mind the corrupting influence that his schoolmates had on him when he mentions this.32 It is impor­tant to see the emphasis Tryon places on escaping society, both physically and spiritually, to understand how he seeks to reform it. For Tryon does have a vision for society. It is an ethical vision—­a more egalitarian and ecumenical ethical vision that would include more tolerance ­toward other religions and other cultures or indeed any Other that is confronted by the dominant culture. In recent scholarship, Tryon has been given the honorable credit of having been the first writer to critique the institution of slavery from the point of view of a slave.33 Indeed a section of Tryon’s Friendly Advice to the Gentlemen-­Planters of the East and West Indies has been anthologized in a collection of works on the Ca­rib­ bean from the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries. In Friendly Advice, Tryon sets up a dialogue between a West Indian slave and the slave’s master. The dialogue essentially consists of Sambo, the slave, asking his master “what a Christian is, or ­ought to be.”34 The master replies by laying down a variety of tenets (fourteen, to be exact) that one must conform to if one is to be called a Christian. Once he is finished, Sambo repeats each of t­hese tenets back to the master, each one appended with a comment on how the Eu­ro­pean Christians do not, through ­either the institution of slavery itself or other common practices, conform to ­those tenets of Chris­tian­ity. This leads Sambo to a harsh conclusion: “in all the particulars by you mentioned, the generality of you Christians do act the clean contrary; what then do you boast of, and wherein are you better than we? Only that you pretend to understand more and do less, and so deserve the greater Condemnation.”35 Amazingly, the master is convinced by the slave and is converted to Sambo’s perspective: Sambo! I have hearkened attentively, and well considered your Discourse, which carries with it such Evidence and Reason, that I must acknowledge I am convinced that our former Conduct ­towards you, has not been agreeable to our Religion, or common Equity; therefore for my own part, you ­shall see by ­future Usage, what Impression your Words have made upon me, nor ­shall I be wanting to acquaint ­others with what you have offered.36 Tryon’s purpose for this dialogue is clearly articulated by the master: he wants word of the spiritual illegitimacy of slavery to spread to ­others. The result of

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1650–1850 Tryon’s ethics is clear: more tolerance would be extended to ­people of other races, cultures, and religions. To achieve this ethical vision, one must escape the “Chains of Tradition and Custom,” by listening to the “Voice of Wisdom,” which allows one to know oneself. Through this self-­reflexive turning inward, one escapes the bounds of the dominant society and can expand one’s identity to become one of the marginalized. From this outsider perspective, one can more intimately understand the Other and therefore is in the position to more correctly judge how this Other should be treated within the dominant society. This, I believe, through Ricoeur’s more sophisticated explanation, is essentially the way any of us achieve a more enlightened understanding of otherness, a more tolerant, more reasonable position in any political-­social-­ethical situation. We do not become sociologists, and we do not, typically, reason deductively from certain premises to achieve a more reasonable outlook. Instead, through the ethically informed world of the imagination, through a writer bringing us characters we can identify with, as Tryon does in his dialogues, our selfhood is enlarged, and we are distanced from a former position and can usefully critique it. Friendly Advice is not the only place where Tryon assumes the identity of the marginalized. In A Dialogue Between an East Indian Brackmanny or Heathen Phi­ los­o­pher, and a French Gentleman Concerning the Pres­ent Affairs of Eu­rope, Tryon assumes the identity of the East Indian phi­los­o­pher who not only convinces the Frenchman of the absurdity and sinfulness of war but also is able to convince him of the verities and benefits of the “heathen” religions of the East.37 Another instance of Tryon’s assuming the identity of the marginalized occurs in his popu­lar The Way to Health, wherein he actually assumes the identities of vari­ous farm animals and articulates their concern over the burdensome employment and cruel treatment they are subjected to. Tryon’s mechanism of escaping tradition by exploring the self (which, for him, is a microcosm of all t­ hings created) allows him to go so far as to articulate the otherness of nonhuman beings. Though he was accused by a con­temporary of writing “fictious Tittle-­Tattle”38 in articulating the complaints of the animals, Tryon saw his assuming their identity as a way to communicate an incomprehensible truth by confronting society with a clarified, articulate identity of marginalized ­O thers. At one point, Tryon (speaking as the ­horses) says, “and though we are dumb, and cannot call to our Creator ­after the manner of men, with dissembling Hearts and lying Tongues, yet we send up our Petitions to him a­ fter another Method, and in a natu­ral way, and are sure to be heard.”39 Tryon, as he does in his discourse on madness and as he does with his East Indian phi­los­o­pher and his West Indian slave, is, through imagination,

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shattering a fundamental binary division of society that works to keep t­ hose who are on the margins marginalized. H ­ ere he shatters the division of h ­ uman over animal, and in the other works he shatters master over slave, sane over mad, and Occidental over Oriental. By d ­ oing this, Tryon attempts to make room for society to incorporate the marginalized into its notions of legitimate identities, thus allowing society to accept a more tolerant, egalitarian ethical system. Philippe Rosenberg’s recent article on Tryon’s antislavery position does a good job of positioning him within his time and place in the seventeenth c­ entury.40 He shows how we can make better sense of Tryon when we see him implicated in a variety of social discourses, not the least of which includes his publishers and their target audience (which Rosenberg implies may have influenced Tryon’s writings).41 However, the historicist renderings of the most recent work on Tryon, I believe, tend to overhistoricize him. By focusing only on how writers are enmeshed in the vicissitudes of their time, scholars often miss the opportunity to demonstrate how and why they are relevant to our own era. What makes a writer fit for study (historical or other­wise) is how vitally he or she engages readers’ imaginations—in any time period. Tryon’s strategy for communicating his vision relies on the imagination rather than reason, and I believe his complex notion of identity, reason, imagination, and tradition succeeds in proffering fecund material for further explorations into his writings. Perhaps he can yet be a man of our time as well as his.

Notes 1. ​Paul Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” in From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 86. 2. ​Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” 88. 3. ​Thomas Tryon, A Discourse of the C ­ auses, Natures, and Cure of Phrensie, Madness, or Distraction (1689; repr., Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1973) (hereafter cited as Phrensie, by page number). 4. ​See Michael V. DePorte, introduction to Tryon, Phrensie, viii. 5. ​Tryon, Phrensie, 290–293. 6. ​Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1965), 100. 7. ​Tryon, Phrensie, 258. 8. ​Tryon, Phrensie, 261. 9. ​Tryon, Phrensie, 261. 10. ​Tryon, Phrensie, 266. 11. ​Tryon, Phrensie, 266.

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1650–1850 12. ​Nigel Smith, “Enthusiasm and Enlightenment: Of Food, Filth and Slavery,” in The Country and the City Revisited: ­England and the Politics of Culture, 1550–1850, ed. Gerald MacLean, Donna Landry, and Joseph P. Ward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 116n5. 13. ​Tryon, Phrensie, 260–261. Also, Jacob Boehme’s conception of the imagination may shed light on Tryon’s thought. Andrew Weeks states that in Boehme’s thought, the imagination effected the “Creation, Fall, and Regeneration.” Thus, when Nigel Smith states that Tryon thinks of the imagination as “the source of all sin,” he may be right. He is wrong to say that Tryon seeks its obliteration, though, since that would effectively end h ­ uman creativity—­just as Boehme sees the imagination as effecting the “Creation” and “Regeneration,” as well as “the Fall.” See Andrew Weeks, Boehme: An Intellectual Bibliography of the Seventeenth-­Century Phi­los­ o­pher and Mystic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 151. 14. ​Thomas Tryon, The Way to Health, Long Life, and Happiness (London, 1683), 345. 15. ​Thomas Tryon, Some Memoirs on the Life of Mr.  Thomas Tryon (London, 1705), 36. 16. ​See Tryon, The Way to Health, 378–449. 17. ​Tryon, The Way to Health, 360. 18. ​Thomas Tryon, preface to The Good House-­wife Made a Doctor (London, 1692), n.p. 19. ​Tryon, Phrensie, 261. 20. ​I have borrowed the notion of a “structuring structure” from Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus as he describes it in The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 52. 21. ​Tryon, “To the Reader,” in The Way to Health. 22. ​Tryon, Memoirs, 32. 23. ​Tryon, The Way to Health, 46. 24. ​Tryon, The Way to Health, 101. 25. ​Tryon, The Way to Health, 45. 26. ​Thomas Tryon, A Treatise on Dreams and Visions (London, 1689), 101. 27. ​Tryon, The Way to Health, 669. 28. ​Tryon, Phrensie, 298–299. 29. ​Tryon, The Way to Health, 249. 30. ​Tryon, The Way to Health, 249. 31. ​Thomas Tryon, A New Method of Educating ­Children (London, 1695), 91. 32. ​See Tryon, Memoirs, 8. 33. ​Ca­rib­be­ana: An Anthology of En­glish Lit­er­a­ture of the West Indies 1657–1777, ed. Thomas W. Krise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), includes Tryon’s Friendly Advice to the Gentleman-­Planters of the East and West Indies and states that Tryon was indeed the first to criticize slavery from the slave’s perspective (51). For more praise for Tryon’s critique of slavery, see also Michal  J. Rozbicki, “ ‘Extravagant Excesses’: Negative British Opinions about Colonial American

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Gentry,” American Studies (Poland) 10 (1991): 85–91. Also, Nigel Smith’s article “Enthusiasm and Enlightenment” speaks to this subject. 34. ​Tryon, Friendly Advice, 54. 35. ​Tryon, Friendly Advice, 64. 36. ​Tryon, Friendly Advice, 76. 37. ​Thomas Tryon, A Dialogue Between an East Indian Brackmanny or Heathen Phi­ los­o­pher, and a French Gentleman Concerning the Pres­ent Affairs of Eu­rope (London, 1683). 38. ​John Field, The Absurdity and Falseness of Thomas Trion’s Doctrine (London, 1683). 39. ​Tryon, The Way to Health, 513–514. 40. ​Philippe Rosenberg, “Thomas Tryon and the Seventeenth-­Century Dimensions of Antislavery,” William and Mary Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2004): 609–642, The History Cooperative, http://­www​.­historycooperative​.­org. Daniel Carey’s essay “Sugar, Colonialism and the Critique of Slavery: Thomas Tryon in Barbadoes,” also from 2004, makes a similar point about Tryon’s attitude ­toward slavery (in Interpreting Colonialism, ed. Bryon R. Wells and Philip Steward [Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2004], 303–321). 41. ​Philippe Rosenberg pres­ents Tryon’s ties to Quaker interests, most importantly through his publishers. Thus, Rosenberg implies that some of Tryon’s rhe­toric was intended to please his Quaker audience. See especially Rosenberg, “Thomas Tryon,” 617–619. Note how Rosenberg puts it that Tryon “courted the Quakers” (617).

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JOHNSON AND CHINA CULTURE, COMMERCE, AND THE DREAM OF THE ORIENT IN MID-­EIGHTEENTH-­CENTURY ­ENGLAND GREG CLINGHAM

In 1984, Paul J. Korshin published an essay titled “ ‘Johnson and . . .’: Conceptions

of Literary Relationship,” in which he discusses Samuel Johnson’s many relationships with ­others.1 Recently, Jack Lynch’s Samuel Johnson in Context reminds us how engaged Johnson was with many impor­tant issues in eighteenth-­century life, from “Amer­i­ca” and “Anglicanism” to “war” and “­women writers.”2 Johnson had something to say, usually something memorable, about virtually e­ very aspect of the public and intellectual life of his time. China, however, seems to have largely eluded his attention. While the fashion of chinoiserie raged in mid-­eighteenth-­century ­England, while trade with China became increasingly impor­tant to the British government and the East India Com­pany, and while some of Johnson’s friends and associates ­were writing about China, Johnson himself seemed relatively disengaged. Scholars, however, have noted a number of Johnsonian aperçus about the subject of China, such as the recommendation to James Boswell to visit the ­Great Wall of China: “Sir . . . ​by d ­ oing so, you would do what would be of importance in raising your c­ hildren to eminence. ­There would be a lustre reflected upon them from your spirit and curiosity. They would be at all times regarded as the ­children of the man who had gone to view the wall of China.”3 In 1945, Fan Tsen-­Chung attempted to describe Johnson’s scattered remarks on Chinese lit­er­a­ture and culture and to account for their mingled delight and disdain.4 No one, however, has considered the possibility that China held a strategic place in Johnson’s thinking, nor has anyone attempted to elicit the under­lying logic of Johnson’s seemingly random engagements with China—or the idea of China. “Eighteenth-­century

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consumers in E ­ ngland w ­ ere,” remarks David Porter summarizing Charles Lamb, “infatuated with Chinese and Chinese-­styled goods, even as they w ­ ere amused, perplexed, or troubled by the alien aesthetic sensibility ­these goods embodied.”5 In a sense, the British eigh­teenth ­century might be called the “Chinese”—or perhaps the “Oriental”—­century in En­glish cultural history. What did Johnson, whose name has been given to the time in which he lived, make of China? Should China have a settled place in our understanding of Johnson’s interest in travel and his increasingly recognized cosmopolitan approach to other cultures? Does it tell us anything about his approach to other nations, especially Eastern ones? What role does China play in Johnson’s critical thinking about the Oriental tale and the genre of romance? How does China leaven Johnson’s thinking about commerce, national identity, and empire? It has long been accepted that the British eigh­teenth ­century’s fascination with the Orient—­whether with India or China or other kingdoms of the Far East or with the Ottoman Empire or the Islamic Near and M ­ iddle East—­was part of a culture-­wide appropriation of Oriental images and tropes into narratives of national and imperial identity. For Edward Said, of course, Orientalism situates the Eu­ro­pean subject in a position of intellectual, material, and racial dominance with regard to the culturally “foreign,” which is then “Orientalized” and made to satisfy aesthetic, historical, po­liti­cal, and cultural needs. This Orientalism does not interest itself in the intrinsic qualities of Eastern cultures but rather works on the supposition that as a Eu­ro­pean discourse, it enables the West to “manage—­ and even produce—­the Orient po­liti­cally, so­cio­log­i­cally, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-­Enlightenment period.” 6 Recent cultural and economic history—as well as more nuanced notions of postcoloniality—­have explored ways in which early modern hostility to Islam and the Ottoman Empire was absorbed into a broader imaginative fascination with ­those cultures.7 Srinivas Aravamudan has broadened and humanized Said’s terms by demonstrating Enlightenment Orientalism to be a fecund and multigeneric form of transcultural fiction that challenged settled assumptions, “circulating images of the East that ­were nine parts in­ven­ted and one part referential.”8 ­These ­were not necessarily ideological or hegemonic images of the East but ways of diversifying and deepening aesthetic and cultural experience, tapping sources of cosmopolitan fluidity and won­der in fictional works, such as the Arabian Nights, that lie outside the tradition of the realist novel and the nation-­based concept of literary history. Enlightenment Orientalism, says Aravamudan, is “a fictional mode for dreaming with the Orient—­dreaming with it by constructing and translating

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1650–1850 fi­ ctions about it, pluralizing views of it, inventing it, by reimagining it, unsettling its meaning, brooding over it.” 9 Eu­ro­pean dealings with China during the eigh­teenth ­century have become part of t­ hese broader theoretical and cultural considerations, for they are related to Britain’s po­liti­cal, commercial, and imaginative relations with its colonies, especially India and North Amer­i­ca. This chapter does not aim to cast Johnson as a cultural theorist in conversation with Said and other postcolonial critics, nor does it aim to recapitulate the arguments, well proffered by Clement Hawes among o ­ thers, for 10 Johnson’s enlightened cosmopolitanism. It is my proposition, however, that a fuller appreciation of Johnson’s far-­reaching and subtle engagement with Chinese history, language, and culture—or the idea thereof—­provides us with a fuller picture of his intellectual profile and of his contribution to the question of British Orientalism. Clearly, Johnson is not one of the leading sinologists or Orientalists of the eigh­teenth c­ entury—he has neither the linguistic and philological abilities in Eastern languages of Sir William Jones, Rev. Robert Morrison, or Sir George Thomas Staunton nor the philosophical interests in China of Leibnitz or Voltaire. He wrote no major work about China and would seem to contribute l­ittle to the history of En­glish interest in China and its culture from the beginning of the Qing dynasty (1644) to the Macartney embassy (1792–1794) that is the subject of recent scholarship.11 However, insofar as he has something to say, Johnson brings his characteristic skeptical thinking to bear on Sino-­British cultural relations, to the vari­ous incarnations of chinoiserie, to ideas of Chinese history and government, and to ­matters of international trade, and he does this in detailed, thoughtful, and synthetic ways. He thereby makes his own distinctive contribution to our understanding of the Enlightenment dream of the Orient.

Some Contexts When Johnson begins The Vanity of ­Human Wishes with the invocation to “Let Observation with extensive View, / Survey Mankind, from China to Peru,”12 “China” seems to be l­ittle more than an empty sign for a faraway place, without geo­ graph­i­cal or cultural content. But China runs through Johnson’s thought as a fine but circuitous thread, as the following summary suggests. In conversation with Boswell, Johnson admires ancient Chinese philosophy and government and longs to see the G ­ reat Wall; he “extracted” and also reviewed (1742) Jean-­Baptiste Du Halde’s widely read Description . . . ​l’empire de la Chine (1735), praising the phil-

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osophical and cultural achievements of the Chinese; he contributed to a striking preface to Sir William Chambers’s Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils (1757); he translated a life of Confucius from Du Halde for the Gentleman’s Magazine (1742); he was taken in by George Psalmanazar’s “Chinese” persona and prob­ably met the young Chinese man Huang Ya Dong (Wang-­ y-­Tang) at the home of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1776); and was differently impressed by Lien Chi Altangi, Goldsmith’s Chinese protagonist in the Chinese Letters (1760). Two other close friends of Johnson wrote popu­lar works about China, Sir Arthur Murphy’s Orphan of China (1759) and Rev. Thomas Percy’s Hau Kiou Choaan (1761) and Miscellaneous Pieces Relating to the Chinese (1762). Johnson was also friends with Sir George Leonard Staunton (1737–1801), Sir George Macartney’s chief secretary on the 1792–1794 embassy to China (and produced the “official” account of that embassy, An Au­then­tic Account of an Embassy from the King of ­Great Britain to the Emperor of China, 2 vols. [1797]), and Macartney himself became a member of Johnson’s Club. Fi­nally, Johnson argued against protectionist economic mea­sures advocated by Jonas Hanway in A Journal of Eight Days’ Journey (1757), which would restrict the trade in tea with China; and he was even interested in Chinese porcelain and En­glish china as beautiful forms of domestic utensil. When on the tour of Wales with the Thrales in 1774, they visited the “China Ware­house” at Worcester (founded in 1751);13 in 1777, Johnson and Boswell visited the Derby china factory on route to Kedleston Hall, the home designed by Robert Adam for Lord Scarsdale (Life, 3:163), and like many ­others, Johnson owned his bit of porcelain: his black earthenware teapot, made in Staffordshire, was decorated with Chinese figures, birds, and extravagant fo­liage and echoes the earlier undecorated red stoneware from Yixing arriving in Britain in the late seventeenth ­century.14 Johnson had, of course, also written major work in an Orientalist vein (if not on China), most obviously Irene (1749), Rasselas (1759), and the translation of ­Father Jerome Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia (1735), and t­ hese all engage with Ottoman history. He had also written a sketch of the life of Nadir Shah (1740),15 one of the last Persian invaders of India, and essays that take their settings from Indian (Rambler, nos. 38, 65), Chinese (Rambler, no. 120), and Abyssinian (Rambler, nos. 204, 205) myth and history, which treat questions of happiness, power, plea­sure, time, and natu­ral transformation, all part of the subject m ­ atter of the eighteenth-­ century Oriental tale. Scholars have discussed Johnson’s imaginative engagement with Oriental scenes and motifs in t­hese works; Amiya Bhushan Sharma has detailed Johnson’s extensive knowledge of India (which he had never visited), and

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1650–1850 Thomas M. Curley has argued for Johnson’s involvement in “Asiatick lit­er­a­ture” by way of his personal and intellectual support of the work of Sir Robert Chambers, Warren Hastings, and Sir Williams Jones in India.16 When in 1774 Johnson recommended Robert Chambers—­then Vinerian Professor of Laws at Oxford and newly appointed as chief justice in Bengal—to Warren Hastings, governor general of Bengal, he urges on Hastings a program of research into Indian history and language that suggests Johnson’s intellectual interest in distant, ancient cultures, including that of China: I can only wish for information, and hope that a Mind comprehensive like yours w ­ ill find leisure amidst the cares of your impor­tant station to enquire into many subjects of which the Eu­ro­pean world ­either thinks not at all, or thinks with deficient intelligence and uncertain conjecture. I s­ hall hope that he who once intended to increase the learning of his country by the introduction of the Persian language, ­will examine nicely Traditions and Histories of the East, that he ­will survey the remains of its ancient Edifices, and trace the vestiges of its ruined cities; and that at his return we ­shall know the arts and opinions of a Race of Men from whom very l­ittle has been hitherto derived. You, Sir, have no need of being told by me how much may be added by your attention and patronage to experimental knowledge and natu­ral history. ­There are arts of manufactures practiced in the countries in which you preside which are yet very imperfectly known h ­ ere e­ ither to artificers or phi­ los­o­phers. Of the natu­r al productions animate and inanimate we have yet so ­little intelligence that our books are filled, I fear, with conjectures about ­things which an Indian Peasant knows by his senses. (Letters, 2:136–137)17 Likewise, when George Leonard Staunton departed for Guadeloupe in 1762 to practice medicine, Johnson urges him to apply a critical, inquiring, and categorical mind to his new environment: In Amer­i­ca t­ here is l­ittle to be observed except natu­ral curiosities. The new world must have many vegetables and animals with which Phi­los­o­phers are but ­little acquainted. I hope you ­will furnish yourself with some books of natu­ ral history, and some glasses and other instruments of observation. Trust as ­little as [you can] to report; examine all you can by your own [senses]. I do not doubt but you ­will be able to add much [to] knowledge, and perhaps to medicine. Wild nations [trust] to ­simples, and perhaps the Peruvian Bark is not the only specifick which ­those extensive regions may [afford us]. (Letters, 1:203)

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­ hese expressions of intellectual, scientific interest in non-­European geograT phies and histories are widely echoed in Johnson’s writings and conversations, albeit sometimes ironically, as when reviewing Thomas Grainger’s Sugar Cane, a Poem (1764), Johnson remarks, “The qualifications of an American traveller are knowledge of Nature, and copiousness of language, acuteness of observation, and fa­cil­i­t y of description. It is therefore with that plea­sure which ­every rational mind finds in the hope of enlarging the empire of science, that we see ­these enlightened regions visited by a man who examines them as a phi­los­o­pher, and described them as a poet.”18 In short, all of t­ hese remarks on other cultures and geographies indicate the earnestness with which Johnson sought knowledge, both ­human and scientific, from travel and from travel writing.19 Hester Lynch Thrale reports that Johnson became angry at a dinner guest at Streatham, who had visited Bohemia, for being bad com­pany. “Surely,” Johnson remarked, “the man who has seen Prague might tell us something new and something strange, and not sit s­ ilent for want of m ­ atter to put his lips in motion” (Life, 3:459).20 The traveler’s prob­lem, however, was not just a ­matter of reporting but of perceiving and inquiring; for, as Johnson says in Idler no. 97 (1760), “the greater part of travellers tell nothing, ­because their method of travelling supplies them with nothing to be told.”21 Hence Johnson’s advice to Hastings and Staunton to prepare themselves intellectually for travel to exotic places; for, as he reasons in Idler no. 97 (anticipating his words to Hastings fourteen years l­ater), “­Every nation has something peculiar in its manufactures, its works of genius, its medicines, its agriculture, its customs, and its policy. He only is a useful traveller who brings home something by which his country may be benefited; who procures some supply of want or some mitigation of evil, which may enable his readers to compare their condition with that of ­others, to improve it whenever it is worse, and whenever it is better to enjoy it” (300). Works such as the introduction to the World Displayed (1759), An Introduction to the Po­liti­cal State of ­Great Britain (1756), and Observations on the Pres­ent State of Affairs (1756) reflect Johnson’s abhorrence of the vio­lence, greed, and bigotry that litter the history of Eu­ro­pean exploration when used to imperialistic ends. But even this history did not dampen his desire to visit and to learn about Eastern climes. ­After his tour of the Highlands, Johnson spoke enthusiastically of taking a “ramble this autumn” with Boswell to “some part of Eu­rope, Asia, or Africa” (Letters, 3:303). To Hester Thrale, he wrote (July 11, 1775), “If I had money enough what would I do. Perhaps if You and Master did not hold me I might go to Cairo, and down the Red Sea to Bengal, and take a ramble in India. Would this be better

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1650–1850 than building and planting. It would surely give more variety to the eye, and more amplitude to the mind. Half fourteen thousand would send me out to see other forms of existence and bring me back to describe them” (Letters, 2:243). In short, as Paula McDowell remarks, “Johnson is a humanist traveler who is interested in mankind and manners but, in contrast to earlier humanists (such as Bacon, who advised focusing on courts of princes), he is most interested in what he calls ‘the state of common life.’ ”22

The Aesthetics of Re­sis­tance I The correspondence with Hastings and Staunton indicates the kind of knowledge Johnson seeks from dif­fer­ent cultures—­factual, scientific, critical, historical, and that pertaining to common life. It also introduces the idea of re­sis­tance as a critical, epistemological ele­ment in Johnson’s thinking about China and other “exotic” cultures. I ­shall argue that this re­sis­tance was part of Johnson’s general skeptical approach to the report of cultural or natu­ral won­ders and his recognition that few Eu­ro­pe­ans (including Johnson himself) knew much about China or Chinese arts. But chinoiserie was not an aesthetic of fact but of fancy, “a Eu­ro­pean fantasy vision of China and the east,”23 what David Porter describes as “ineluctably foreign,” a glamorization of the unknown and the unknowable for its own sake—­a pastiche of original cultural objects for commercial consumption.24 Writing from within this cultural moment, Johnson is largely resistant to the fantastic, exotic images of China that w ­ ere popu­lar and stimulated En­glish and Eu­ro­pean arts from Athanasius Kircher’s quasi-­mythical China monumentis (1667) to William Alexander and George Henry Mason’s domestic scenes in The Costumes of China (1804–1805) to the outrageous splendor of the Royal Pavilion (1815–1823). The Jesuits—­whose influence in China extended from Matteo Ricci’s residence in Peking (1583–1610) to the 1740s—­had taken an archaeological approach to Confucianism, excavating the classical canon in search of primitive origins and the deep structure of mono­the­ism that enabled them to find points of identity between Catholicism and Confucianism.25 However, the consumer taste for Chinese porcelain, h ­ ouse­wares, garden designs, and architecture between the 1670s and 1770s celebrated the surface and the play of pattern, not without some lasting effect on taste and thought. Chinese garden princi­ples and designs influenced the aesthetics and practice of En­glish garden designers, 26 and interests in the Orient underpinned real social and po­liti­cal changes.27 As Porter notes, “the

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widespread consumption of chinoiserie . . . ​signals the consolidation in the first half of the eigh­teenth c­ entury of a distinctive new form of aesthetic subjectivity in ­those oppositional spaces defined and defiled by the reigning discourses of classical taste and polite bourgeois culture.”28 Oliver Goldsmith’s Chinese Letters, initially published serially in the Public Ledger in 1760–1761 and then as The Citizen of the World; or, Letters from a Chinese Phi­los­o­pher (1762), generates much of its traction from the popularity of Chinese kitsch. It uses the framework of a foreigner resident in a Eu­ro­pean city—­ exemplified by Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), George Lyttleton’s Letters from a Persian in E ­ ngland (1735), and the Marquis de Argens’s Lettres Chinoises (1739)—to satirize the fashion for all ­things Chinese and the tendency in this metro­ politan society to treat other cultures as objects of consumption. Lien Chi Altangi is Goldsmith’s Chinese persona recording his reception into polite society by the London beau monde, which stubbornly imposed on Lien Chi exaggerated constructions of what they expected from a Chinese person. He says, I yesterday received an invitation from a lady of distinction, who it seems had collected all her knowledge of eastern manners from fictions ­every day propagated ­here, ­under the titles of Eastern Tales, and Oriental Histories: she received me very politely, but seemed to won­der that I neglected bringing opium and a tobacco box; when chairs ­were drawn for the rest of the com­ pany, I was assigned to my place on a cushion on the floor.29 Lien Chi tries to persuade his fash­ion­able interlocutor that as a real Chinese person, he knows his own lit­er­a­ture and culture: Sir you must not expect from an inhabitant of China the same ignorance, the same unlettered simplicity, that you find in a Turk, Persian or native of Peru. The Chinese are versed in the sciences as well as you, and are masters of several arts unknown to the ­people of Eu­rope. Many of them are instructed not only in their own national learning, but are perfectly well acquainted with the languages and learning of the West. If my word, in such a case, is not to be taken, consult your own travellers on this head, who affirm, that the scholars of Pekin and Siam sustain theological t­ heses in Latin. (Citizen, 113) Goldsmith’s is a subtle account that sets up the “foreign” Chinese and the “native” En­glish as exemplars of dif­fer­ent yet similar cultural formations. The editor’s preface to the work both observes the remoteness of Eu­ro­pe­ans from China and also suggests, “the Chinese and we are pretty much alike. Dif­fer­ent degrees of refinement, and not of distance, mark the distinctions among mankind” (Citizen, 23). The linchpin around which this cultural sameness-­in-­difference

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1650–1850 revolves is the implied identification of Lien Chi with Confucius, for Lien Chi casts himself as a figure (unlike Eu­ro­pean travelers to China) who is more interested in philosophical inquiry than in natu­r al science, “desirous of understanding the ­human heart,” the “men of ­every country,” in order to “discover ­those differences which result from climate, religion, education, prejudice and partiality” (40–41). Confucius’s legendary purity and wisdom—­developed without revelation; as Voltaire observes, with “none of t­hose dogmas that insult reason and nature”30—­gives Lien Chi a perspective from which to highlight the compromised religion and moral be­hav­ior of the British. However, while “Chineseness” becomes, as Michael Griffin observes, “as fungible as clothing” from the smug and superior perspective of the En­glish,31 the Chinese themselves do not escape a potentially debilitating self-­absorption in Goldsmith’s depiction. Lien Chi’s correspondent is Fum Hoam, who celebrates Chinese paternalism as self-­evidently superior to the liberal values of London society: “When I compare the history of China with that of Eu­rope, how do I exult in being a native of that kingdom which derives its original from the sun. Upon opening the Chinese history, I ­there behold an antient extended empire, established by laws which nature and reason seem to have dictated” (Citizen, 132). ­These words could have been spoken by a mid-­eighteenth-­century Briton. The absoluteness of the key terms—­empire, law, nature, reason—­suggests their transferability but also their relativity, yet their force and meaning depend on context and usage. In relation to the real but comic prejudice that Lien Chi experiences at e­ very turn in his London sojourn, the large terms invoked by Fum Hoam in defense of China serve to suggest the relativity of both aesthetic and moral judgments and the possibility that Chinese and British socie­ties are to be found at dif­fer­ent stages on the same continuum.

Biography As Goldsmith suggests, perspective does not come easily to ­those who are engaged in t­ hese Orientalist discourses b ­ ecause of the virtual absence of personal experience and historical knowledge of China, as well as the absence of reliable ways of thinking about the East. Johnson’s thinking about China inevitably relies on printed sources, anecdote, and conversation, as it did for most contemporaries. He supports the intellectual proj­ect (as opposed to the bureaucratic undertakings) of Hastings, Chambers, and Jones in India by invoking the language of scientific

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discovery and humanistic purpose. But other tools w ­ ere needed to deal with George Psalmanazar (1679?–1763). Much has been written about Psalmanazar’s extraordinary fabrication of a Chinese identity, but what should we make of Johnson’s response to Psalmanazar? Johnson was especially alert to the fictional and forged nature of historical truth and to the possibilities of abuse implied therein—as witnessed by his critique of the forgeries of James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton.32 But Johnson enjoyed Psalmanazar’s com­p any and thought highly of him; he tells Boswell, “I sought ­after George Psalmanazar the most. I used to go and sit with him at an ale­house in the city” (Life, 3:314). Boswell notes that “once talking of George Psalmanazar, whom he reverenced for his piety, he said, ‘I should as soon think of contradicting a Bishop’ ” (Life, 4:274). While Psalmanazar’s pseudo-­ethnological work An Historical and Geo­graph­ i­cal Description of Formosa (1704) persuaded the reading public of the authenticity of his supposedly firsthand (yet fabricated) account of the island of Formosa (now Taiwan), he went further by re-­creating himself as an ethnic Chinese person. Psalmanazar’s Description depicted the ­people, customs, and geography of Formosa and “in­ven­ted” a Chinese language, including a grammar and alphabetic writing system. He presented himself as a Chinese convert to Chris­tian­ity, and ­people w ­ ere willing to believe his assertions ­because his abuse of the Jesuits excused his anomalies and ­because, as Chi-­ming Yang observes, of “the general skepticism over the reliability of travelers’ reports.”33 At the same time, as Susan Stewart notes, the circumstantiality and ethnographically au­then­tic quality of Psalmanazar’s account satisfied ­people’s historical expectations vis-­à-­vis a place and culture that virtually no British person had seen: “Psalmanazar’s brilliant move was to forge an entire social world. . . . ​If this was the dream of Enlightenment reason, it was also the dream of Enlightenment authorship: to usher in what­ever is necessary to make the world, as a textual ­whole, cohere.”34 Few historiographically reliable ways of rendering and evaluating the textual repre­sen­ta­tion of such distant locations as Formosa ­were available to readers in the early eigh­teenth ­century. If the account reproduced generic and stylistic qualities associated with what Ralph Rader calls “factual works,” it sounded probable and was deemed to be true.35 A similar uncertainty attached itself to the epistemological evaluation of racial identity, as Jack Lynch explains, and enabled the Caucasian Psalmanazar to pass as ethnic Chinese without challenge.36 Given the prevalence of Lockean ideas of personal identity in the early eigh­teenth ­century—­ideas that located personal identity in the continuity of personal consciousness and memory rather than in

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1650–1850 externally verifiable criteria—­there was no completely secure ground on which Psalmanazar’s claims to Chinese ethnicity and identity could be falsified. If knowledge is empirical and based in the comparison of ideas, how, Lynch asks, “are we to make any judgments about Psalmanazar’s claim without empirical data, without having perceived a Formosan? . . . ​A claim to Oriental identity . . . ​w as unimpeachable ­because inscrutable.”37 Michael Keevak has argued that Johnson’s interest in Psalmanazar lies mainly in the extraordinary “regularity” of his religious character, the integrity of which survived the pro­cess of fabrication underpinning his vari­ous identities (Chinese, Japa­nese, Jew, Grub Street writer, outsider) and his subsequent repentance for the deception (known as early as 1747 and recorded in his Memoirs [1764]).38 This religious character, says Keevak, enabled Psalmanazar to “play the part of the dispassionate, inscrutable, but morally superior East Indian visitor to Eu­rope, ­later typified (in E ­ ngland) by such fictional characters as Lien Chi Altangi, the narrator of Goldsmith’s epistolary novel, The Citizen of the World (1762), but also clearly patterned a­ fter travel books and anecdotes of a­ ctual Asian visitors who had occasionally turned up in the West.”39 Johnson does not comment on Psalmanazar’s text or his claims to Chinese ethnicity, and it not pos­si­ble to say how aware Johnson was of Psalmanazar’s acts of fabrication in admiring Psalmanazar’s moral character. It may be that Johnson’s general interest in the Orient, and his willingness to learn what he could about China, persuaded him to embrace the hybrid creation that was Psalmanazar. Sir John Hawkins comments on Psalmanazar’s “­great learning and endowments” that enabled both his “pretense” and his penitence, both of which Johnson “would frequently mention, with g­ reat energy and encomiums.” 40 The theme of devout admiration is echoed in Hawkins’s note to his edition of Johnson’s works: “He was very well acquainted with Psalmanazar, the pretended Formosan, and said, he had never seen the close of the life of any one that he wishes so much his own to resemble, as that of him, for its purity and devotion.” 41 But, adds Hawkins, “when he [Johnson] was asked w ­ hether he [Psalmanazar] had ever mentioned Formosa before him, he said, he [Psalmanazar] was afraid to mention even China.” 42 If Psalmanazar was a Frenchman passing as ethnic Chinese in Johnson’s society, the young man Huang Ya Dong (ca. 1753–1784) was in fact a native of Canton. One won­ders what Johnson made of Huang Ya Dong, also known as Wang-­y-­ Tong, whom he prob­ably met at Sir Joshua Reynolds’s home and studios in the 1770s. Huang came to ­England in 1774 through the good offices of John Bradby Blake (1745–1773), a “supercargo” (official trader) with the East India Com­pany and resident in Canton since 1770. Blake was a keen natu­ral scientist involved in

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obtaining Chinese seeds and plants for food, medicine, manufactures, and other economic uses for propagation in Britain, Ireland, and the colonies. He was reportedly interested in Huang’s knowledge of Chinese plants for medicinal purposes. Huang became a minor celebrity in ­England, advising Mrs. Delaney and the Duchess of Portland on Chinese plants, Josiah Wedgewood on porcelain manufacture, and the physician Andrew Duncan on acu­punc­ture.43 Huang also became a page at Knole House in the f­amily of John Frederick Sackville, 3rd Duke of Dorset (1745– 1799), a school friend of Blake, and while at Knole, he attended Sevenoaks School. It was for Dorset that Reynolds painted Huang in 1776, a portrait—­titled Wang-­y-­Tong and still hanging at Knole House (though unavailable on the National Trust website)—­featuring a young Chinese man dressed in traditional Chinese dress, holding a fan, and sitting cross-­legged on a Chinese bench (figure 1). The little-­known Reynolds portrait of Huang most obviously invites comparison with his more heroic, better-­known depiction of the Tahitian Omai (also 1776), the elegance of whose manners impressed Johnson and whose com­pany he enjoyed in 1776 (Life, 3:8) (figure 2). Pat Rogers oddly finds Johnson’s remarks on Omai to be comic and dismissive. Of the passage in Boswell’s Life that recounts Johnson’s appreciation of the “elegance” of Omai’s “behaviour,” when at dinner with Lord Mulgrave and Johnson himself at Streatham on April 3, 1776, Rogers remarks, “This indicates a degree of amused surprise at the rapid acculturation of Omai. It naturally does not involve any admission on Johnson’s part of innate civility in the Tahitian islander. In this moment of commendation, Johnson seems to stand at his farthest from Omai; the very terms of his praise reflect a distance and a lack of real affinity.” 44 That Johnson finds Omai’s manners to have been cultivated in and learned from the society in which he finds himself is surely natu­ral and to be expected: how e­ lse does anybody, ­whether native Briton or visitor from the Orient, becomes acculturated? Johnson simply does not think of civility as innate or essential.45 Other mid-­eighteenth-­century repre­sen­ta­tions of “Oriental” figures form a context for Reynolds’s portrait of Huang. The most notable of ­these are William Parry’s heroic depiction of Omai in com­pany with Sir Joseph Banks and Dr. Daniel Solander (ca. 1775–1776);46 the picture of the Chinese artist Tan-­Che-­Qua (or Chitqua)—­w ho exhibited at the Royal Acad­emy in 1770—by John Hamilton Mortimer (1740–1779) and exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1770–1771;47 and Johan Zoffany’s depiction of Tan in The Portraits of the Academicians of the Royal Acad­emy (1771–1772).48 Huang and Omai are both depicted in non-­Western dress, but the more modest and restrained portrait of Huang has raised questions about Reynolds’s

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Figure 1. ​Sir Joshua Reynolds, Wang-­y-­Tong (1776) at Knole House. Oil on canvas. Image h ­ ere known as Portrait of a Young Chinese Man in E ­ ngland, by permission of Bridegman Art Gallery.

conception and artistic purpose. Of Huang’s posture and ethnicity in the portrait, Emile de Bruijn observes, Reynolds’s portrait of Huang reflects his ambiguous position. On the one hand, it is a clearly a portrait of an individual, not a caricature. On the other hand, the Chinese dress and accoutrements [the fan, the hat, the posture]

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Figure 2. ​Sir Joshua Reynolds, Omai, a South Sea Islander who traveled to ­England with the second expedition of Captain Cook (1776). Oil on canvas. Collection of John Magnier. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

1650–1850 obviously and self-­consciously mark the sitter as an exotic subject. The portrait cannot quite be characterised as “chinoiserie,” as it does not pres­ent an overtly fantastical or escapist image of China. But equally ­there is something odd about the pictorial language of the image, as Reynolds strug­gles to fit Huang into one of the accepted categories of British portraiture.49 ­There is l­ittle doubt that Reynolds’s portrait of Huang is carefully considered, and perhaps he was attempting to represent the incorporation of the “exotic” into refined British society. What­ever the Duke of Dorset’s motives ­were in including Huang in his ­house­hold, Reynolds’s portrait makes its own artistic statement. That the depiction of Huang’s Oriental posture and accoutrements are anomalous may not be a sign of Reynolds’s cultural insensitivity so much as of his attempt to deliberately render the coming together of the two cultures, in an awareness of cultural difference. “While the generic signs of chinoiserie taste are pres­ent,” Ong notes, “Reynolds’ close attention to Wang’s facial likeness and his unusual sitting posture emphatically underlines the absolute otherness of its subject.”50 One might argue that Reynolds’s rendition of Huang and the objects of Chinese culture—­the fan, the hat, the bench, the posture, the facial appearance—is highly conscious of difference. Reynolds was given to choreographing his sitters. As Richard Wendorf remarks, “within the studio and without we . . . ​find the painter functioning as stage man­ag­er or director: defining the setting, establishing the appropriate pose and choosing the most suitable costume, rehearsing with his subject as sitting follows sitting, and occasionally . . . ​capturing spontaneous gestures and attitudes before they entirely dis­appear.”51 Indeed, according to Joseph Farrington in 1819, Reynolds’s “house in Leicester Fields was resorted to by the most distinguished characters in the country. . . . ​He kept what might be called an open t­ able, at which w ­ ere daily seen in large numbers, poets, historians, divines, men celebrated for their scientific knowledge, phi­los­o­phers, lovers of the Arts, and o ­ thers”—­including David Garrick, Edmund Burke, the Burneys, Johnson (who “soon became almost a daily visitor at dinner”), and Goldsmith.52 It is not unreasonable to suppose that Huang, a real-­life Lien Chi Altangi, would have been the subject of conversation at t­hese dinner parties, that during 1775 and 1776 Huang himself was pres­ent, just as Omai frequented the drawing rooms of the intelligent­sia in the same year, and that Johnson met Huang at Reynolds’s dinner ­table just as he met Omai at Streatham. Huang seems to have been more successful in his adventures in Britain than was the Chinese Catholic John Hu, who spent three fruitless years in France in

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1722–1725.53 Reynolds had an early appreciation of Huang’s qualities and interest: in a letter of February 18, 1775, he describes Huang this way: He is a young man of twenty-­two, and an inhabitant of Canton, where having received from Chit-­qua [i.e., the Tan-­Che-­Qua represented by Zoffany], the Chinese figure maker, a favourable account of his reception in E ­ ngland, two or three years ago, he determined to make the voyage likewise, partly from curiosity, and a desire of improving himself in science, and partly with a view to procuring some advantages in trade, in which he and his elder ­brother are engaged. He arrived h ­ ere in August, and already pronounces and understands our language very tolerably, but he writes it in a very excellent hand. . . . ​He has a g­ reat thirst a­ fter knowledge, and seems to conceive readily what is communicated to him.54 ­After returning to Canton in the early 1780s, Huang was consulted in 1784 by Sir William Jones, whom he had met at Reynolds’s home, about translating the Confucian Shi King, or Book of Poetry, into En­glish, but nothing came of the consultation.55 Huang seems to be exactly the kind of young man in whom Johnson would have been interested. He was intellectually inquiring, hungry for knowledge, able, quick-­witted, and socially engaging; he was a real citizen of the world to complement Goldsmith’s fictional protagonist, and perhaps he regaled the com­pany with tales from the Far East.

The Aesthetics of Re­sis­tance II One of the travelers referred to by Lien Chi Altangi in The Citizen of the World is Jean-­Baptiste Du Halde (1674–1743), a Jesuit compositor entrusted by his superiors with editing and publishing the accounts of seventeen Jesuit travelers in China. Though Du Halde himself had not traveled to China, since the time of Ricci the Jesuits had acquired substantial firsthand experience of the M ­ iddle Kingdom, including knowledge of the Chinese language, and during the course of the seventeenth c­ entury they ­were largely responsible for changing the way in which China was depicted in western Eu­ro­pean books and maps. As Robert Markley remarks, “If narratives of New World colonization reinforced Eurocentric beliefs in national greatness, universal monarchy, and Christian triumphalism, the experience of Eu­ro­ pe­ans in China, Japan, and (before 1716) Moghul India radically challenged all of ­these ideological constructions.”56 Eu­ro­pe­ans realized that they ­were faced with an autonomous, ancient culture. While scholars such as Athanasius Kircher

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1650–1850 attempted to use the discovery of the Nestorian Stele (in 1625) to appropriate Chinese my­thol­ogy for Christian purposes, in his monumental China monumentis (Amsterdam, 1667), Eu­ro­pe­ans quickly realized that China could not easily be used to reinforce beliefs of national greatness, universal monarchy, and Christian triumphalism. To speak of the Far East in the early modern imagination was to recognize the shaping significance of ­those cultures on Eu­ro­pean identity. Expelled from China in the early years of the reign of the Qianlong emperor (1735–1796), the Jesuits nonetheless continued to be a main source of knowledge about China throughout the eigh­teenth c­ entury. Du Halde’s lavishly illustrated and encyclopedic Description geographique, historique, critique, chronologique, politique, et physique de l’empire de la Chine (four volumes, 1735) was supplemented ­later in the ­century by other Jesuit collections, including Memoires concernant l’histoire, les sciences, les arts, les mœurs, les usages, &tc. des Chinois (sixteen volumes, 1776–1814) and Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, écrites des missions étrangères (twenty-­six volumes, 1780–1783). Of Du Halde’s work, Fan Tsen-­Chung remarks, “historically, this book must be regarded as a monumental one. Its strength lies not in the strict accuracy of information, nor in the orderly pre­sen­ ta­tion of facts, but in the vast amount and variety of in­ter­est­ing details, which must have given its readers an impression of the magnificence of the Chinese Empire and the wide range of achievement of the Chinese ­people in lit­er­a­ture, science, philosophy, and art.”57 Du Halde’s vast work conveyed an idea of China as an ancient place of g­ reat variety and plenitude. In 1738, Edward Cave published an En­glish translation of Du Halde’s work by William Guthrie and John Green, in two folio volumes, titled A Description of the Empire of China and Chinese-­Tartary. Johnson reviewed the translation for the Gentleman’s Magazine and also published extracts of the work for the same magazine in 1742. Johnson thought Guthrie was “a man of parts, . . . ​a man who deserves to be respectably recorded in the literary annals of this country” (Life, 2:52; also 1:116). The review of Guthrie’s translation takes the form of a “letter” to “Eubulus”; it considers Du Halde’s curious insights into Chinese life; it reflects on the plea­sure of reading about the manners of such geo­graph­i­cally and culturally remote p ­ eoples, while also criticizing British ignorance of China, which had a tendency to exaggerate their greatness: “The confus’d and imperfect accounts which travelers have given of their [the Chinese] grandeur, their sciences and their policy, have hitherto excited admiration, but have been insufficient to satisfy even a superficial curiosity.”58 Instead of valorizing or exoticizing the Chinese, however, Johnson argues two views in his review that are indicative of his general cosmo-

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politanism: (1) writing about distant cultures needs to be informed by personal experience, and (2) it needs to resist the rhetorical and stylistic indulgence commonly associated with the Orient. It is noticeable that the terms “Oriental” and “China” have no ideological content in Johnson’s dictionary. Both as adjective and noun, “Oriental” refers simply to something or someone who proceeds from the East or “the eastern parts of the world,” though Johnson does illustrate the noun by quoting one Grew: “They have been of that ­great use to following ages, as to be imitated by the Arabians and other orientals.” “China” is simply porcelain: “China ware; porcelain; a species of vessels made in China, dimly transparent, partaking of the qualities of earth and glass. They are made by mingling two kinds of earth, of which one easily vitrifies; the other resists a very strong heat: when the vitrifiable earth is melted into glass, they are completely burnt.”59 In this objective vein, Johnson’s review of Guthrie and Green’s version of Du Halde resists the temptation to sacrifice knowledge to admiration. Johnson’s own translation of ­Father Jerome Lobo’s A Voyage to Abyssinia (1735) strikes a similar tone, for in presenting “Oriental” culture to the reader in that work, Johnson deliberately resists (as he ­later does in Rasselas) the temptation of the fabulous and the exotic: “The Portuguese traveller, contrary to the general vein of his countrymen, has amused his reader with no romantick absurdities or incredible fictions; what­ever he relates, ­whether true or not, is at least probable, and he who tells nothing exceeding the bounds of probability has a right to demand, that they should believe him, who cannot contradict him.” 60 “Re­sis­tance” might sound like an odd methodology by which to appreciate the uniqueness of other ­peoples, but this point of view informs a style that aims to turn “incredible fictions” into a more calculated and credible critical knowledge. Such a mode of skeptical thinking is more than a gesture that sees the compromised pres­ent as less au­then­tic than the distant and virtually unknowable Eastern cultural object—an easy option for ­people seeking the exotic East. Du Halde pres­ents images of what Johnson describes as the “magnificence, power, wisdom, peculiar customs, and excellent constitution” of “that remote and celebrated p ­ eople” (Po­liti­cal Writings, 15). But Johnson articulates t­ hese qualities within the context of a re­sis­tance to Du Halde’s world and especially to Du Halde’s inclination to collapse the historical and cultural distance between China and Britain. A similar skeptical re­sis­tance characterizes much of Johnson’s thinking about ­human, historical, and scientific subjects. For example, he demonstrates such re­sis­tance in his contribution to Sir William Chambers’s Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils (1757). Chambers (1726–1796),

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1650–1850 the ­great architect and landscape garden theorist, had worked in China and had seen the imperial gardens at Jehol that inspired his garden theory and his work at Kew Gardens.61 Chambers’s gardening and architecture made a significant contribution to the popularization of chinoiserie in Britain. If Sir William T ­ emple had first introduced the princi­ples of Chinese gardening to E ­ ngland in The Gardens of Epicurus (1692), by questioning the strict formality of French neoclassicism and promoting the idea of variety and surprise (sharawadgi) as an appeal to the imagination. Then Chambers pushed the aesthetics of garden design much further, by embracing the idea of disorderly and irregular beauty and the necessity of surprise in order to challenge the staid and predictable effects of the gardens of Capability Brown and other formalists of the mid-­eighteenth ­century.62 The common thread r­ unning through Chambers’s 1757 publication Designs of Chinese Buildings, his Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772), and the Explanatory Discourse (1773) is the vision of the Chinese garden as a vast plea­sure ­house of the senses, but one that challenges and expands the mind. The Chinese artists, knowing how powerfully contrasts operate on the mind, constantly practice sudden Transitions, and a striking opposition of forms, colours, and shades. Thus they conduct you from limited prospects to extensive views; from objects of horror to scenes of delight; from lakes and rivers to plains, hills, and woods; to dark and gloomy colours they oppose such as are brilliant, and to complicated forms s­ imple ones; distributing, by a judicious arrangement, the dif­fer­ent masses of light and shade, in such a manner as to render the composition at once distinct in its parts, and striking in the w ­ hole.63 In such formulations, and in the creation of a landscape containing such structures as the Pagoda, the Mosque, and the Alhambra at Kew Gardens (figure 3), Chambers challenges the very idea of what it meant to imitate nature in a garden and breaks the restraint that characterized the aesthetic theories of Shaftesbury, the poetic example of Alexander Pope in the Epistle to Burlington (1731), and the gardening practice of Capability Brown. Pope and other eighteenth-­century writers had discussed the need for genius to test and to transcend the bound­aries of thought, for “True Wit is Nature to advantage dress’d / What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d.” 64 But in thinking about the Orient, Chambers breaks from the rationalist critics of chinoiserie by embracing the polytheistic, bacchanalian tendencies that Westerners had long denounced in Chinese culture and calling them instead among “the g­ reat productions of ­human understanding.” 65 This power­ful reimagining of the

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Figure 3. ​William Marlow, View of the Wilderness at Kew (1763). Pagoda, Alhambra, and Turkish Mosque designed by Sir William Chambers. Watercolor. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

“Chinese” features of landscape gardening, in the words of Elizabeth Hope Chang, “offers a model of diversity within singularity that betokens the viewing experience of the modern subject, able to occupy more than one perspective at the same time.” 66 Johnson’s engagement with Chambers’s Orientalism is instructive. According to Boswell, Chambers “submitted the manuscript of his ‘Chinese Architecture,’ to Dr. Johnson’s perusal. Johnson was much pleased with it, and said, ‘It wants no addition nor correction, but a few lines of introduction; which he furnished, and Sir William ­adopted’ ” (Life, 4:188). Johnson’s “few lines” ventriloquize Chambers’s voice to highlight the difficulty of acquiring a balanced judgment of the strangeness of Chinese life and art: It is difficult to avoid praising too l­ittle or too much. The boundless panegyricks which have been lavished upon the Chinese learning, policy, and arts, shew with what power novelty attracts regard, and how naturally esteem swells into admiration. I am far from desiring to be numbered among the exaggerators of Chinese excellence. I consider them as ­great, or wise, only in

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1650–1850 comparison with the nations that surround them; and have no intention to place them in competition ­either with the antients or with the moderns of this part of the world; yet they must be allowed to claim our notice as a distinct and very singular race of men: as the inhabitants of a region divided by its situation from all civilized countries, who have formed their own manners, and in­ven­ted their own arts, without the assistance of example. (Life, 4:188)67 In this passage, Johnson notably identifies the excellence of the Chinese not by exaggeration or in the reflection of Chambers’s extraordinary mind but by comparing Chinese culture with other cultural and literary artifacts over time and then by recognizing its difference and authenticity. Johnson’s language anticipates Henry Dundas’s characterization of China in 1792 when writing to Macartney as he prepared for his embassy to China. The Chinese, writes Dundas, are “a ­People perhaps the most singular upon the Globe among whom civilization has existed and the arts have been cultivated with fewer Interruptions than elsewhere.” 68 When Macartney visited the gardens at Yuan-­ming-­Yuan in Peking and the imperial gardens at Jehol in 1793, he was deeply impressed by both their beauty and sublimity. Of the “wonderful” east gardens at Jehol (figure 4), for example, Macartney writes, We rode about three miles through a very beautiful park, kept in the highest order, and much resembling the approach to Luton in Bedfordshire; the grounds ­g ently undulated and chequered with vari­o us groups of well-­ contrasted trees in the offskip. As we moved onward an extensive lake appeared before us, the extremities of which seemed to lose themselves in distance and obscurity. . . . ​It would be an endless task w ­ ere I to attempt a detail of all the won­ders of this charming place. ­There is no beauty of distribution and contrast, no feature of amenity, no reach of fancy which embellishes our plea­sure grounds in ­England, that is not to be found h ­ ere. Had China been accessible to Mr. Brown and to Mr. Hamilton I should have sworn they had drawn their happiest ideas from the rich sources which I have tasted this day.69 To balance the beauty of the east gardens, Macartney writes as follows of the sublimity of the west gardens at Jehol: It is one of the finest forest scenes in the world, wild, woody, mountainous and rocky, abounding with stags and deer of dif­fer­ent species, and most of the other beasts of chace not dangerous to man. In many places im­mense woods, chiefly oaks, pines and chestnuts grow upon perpendicular steeps and force their sturdy roots through ­every re­sis­tance of surface, and of soil, where vegetation would seem almost impossible. T ­ hese woods often clamber over

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Figure 4. ​William Alexander, View of Eastern Side of Imperial Park Gehol. One of thirty-­ seven watercolor drawings, made for the most part in 1792–1793 on Lord Macartney’s embassy to China. British Library Add MS 35300 (in public domain).

the loftiest pinnacles of the stony hills, or gathering on the skirts of them, descend with a rapid sweep, and bury themselves in the deepest valleys. ­There, at proper distances you find palaces, banqueting ­houses and monasteries . . . ​ adapted to the situation and peculiar circumstances of the place, sometimes with a rivulet on one hand g­ ently stealing through the glade, at o ­ thers with a cataract tumbling from above or silently engulfed in a gloomy pool or yawning chasm. . . . ​The radius of the horizon, I should suppose, to be at least twenty miles from the central spot where we stood, and certainly so rich, so vari­ous, so beautiful, so sublime a prospect my eyes had never beheld. I saw every ­thing before me as on an illuminated map, palaces, pagodas, towns, villages, farm ­houses, plains and valleys watered by innumerable streams, hills waving with woods and meadows covered with ­cattle of the most beautiful marks and colours. All seemed to be nearly at my feet and that a step would convey me within reach of them. (Embassy to China, 132–133) A private enclosure in the west gardens leads Macartney to invoke Chambers. This private garden combines the beauty of the east and the sublimity of the west

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1650–1850 gardens, but, speculates Macartney, “from every­thing we can learn, it falls very short of the fanciful descriptions which F­ ather Attiret and Sir William Chambers have intruded upon us as realities” (Embassy to China, 133).70 In 1757, Johnson of course did not have Macartney’s firsthand experience of the gardens at Jehol with which to compare Chambers’s more exotic and more confined (­because limited to Canton) view of the Chinese garden. Still, even when Chambers’s Orientalism is ridiculed by William Mason, with the support of Horace Walpole, in An Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers (1773),71 Johnson stands by his initial support of Chambers. Boswell rec­ords Johnson as invoking Chambers to illustrate an extraordinary observation on Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742–1745) that many ­people at the time would have seen as transcending the strict par­ameters of Johnson’s critical ideas. “In his [Young’s] ‘Night Thoughts,’ he has exhibited a very wide display or original poetry, variegated with deep reflections and striking allusions; a wildness of thought, in which the fertility of fancy scatters flowers of ­every hue and of ­every odour. This is one of few poems in which blank verse could not be changed for rhime but with disadvantage.” And afterwards, “Par­tic­u­lar lines are not to be regarded; the power is in the ­whole; and in the ­whole t­ here is magnificence like that ascribed to Chinese plantation, the magnificence of vast extent and endless diversity.” (Life, 4:60) The reference to a “Chinese plantation” is an allusion to Chambers’s vision of the Oriental garden—­prob­ably as articulated in the Dissertation on Oriental Gardening—­ and its transgressive aesthetic, which Johnson h ­ere favorably associates with the wild and profuse garden that is Young’s blank verse. Chambers, by articulating the princi­ples of the Chinese garden as he did and by embodying them at Kew for En­glish clients and consumers, challenges the commonplaces of the Eu­ro­pean encounter with the Orient. Though his “fanciful descriptions” are not comparable to the real Jehol, Chambers nonetheless asserts an imaginative continuity between Chinese and En­glish gardens and articulates an experience of cultural difference as instructive, power­ful, and au­then­tic.72 Such aesthetic princi­ples, I suggest, appeal to Johnson, whose manner of realizing the authenticity of cultural difference per se in his preface to Chambers’s text and his review of Du Halde is commensurate with Chambers’s view, if not identical. Indeed, in similar vein to Reynolds’s portrait of Huang Ya Dong (figure  1), Johnson’s insistence on the difficulty of knowing China paradoxically affirms an imaginative responsiveness to the Chinese. ­O thers in the eigh­teenth ­century ­adopted a similar methodology in approaching the strangeness and distance of

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China. In Macartney’s highly nuanced narrative account of the embassy to China, he also adopts an aesthetic re­sis­tance to the Chinese as a way of recognizing their difference and staking out the common ground they might share: From my not knowing the language, from sometimes misconceiving ­those who did, from misinterpreting looks and gestures, where our hands and our eyes ­were to perform the offices of our tongues and our ears, I may have formed wrong judgments and have deceived myself; but as I do not mean that ­others should be deceived, I fairly own my disadvantages, and give previous notice of the nature of the information that may be expected from me. It w ­ ill be chiefly the result of what I saw and heard upon the spot, however imperfectly, not of what I had read in books or been told in Eu­rope. (Embassy to China, 221)73 In conversation with Bennet Langton and Boswell in 1778, Johnson may have referred to the “East-­Indians,” including the Chinese, as “barbarians,” and found the “written characters of their language” to be inadequate ­because “they have not an alphabet[;] they have not been able to form what all other nations have formed” (Life, 3:339). Yet in Rambler no.  19, he acknowledges the impenetrability of the Chinese language, and he welcomes what he learned about China from Du Halde and from Chambers. In reviewing Du Halde, he concludes, apparently without irony, that the reader “­will be amazed to find that t­ here is a country [China] where nobility and knowledge are the same, where men advance in rank as they advance in learning, and promotion is the effect of virtuous industry, where no man thinks ignorance a mark of greatness, or laziness the privilege of high birth” (Po­liti­cal Writings, 16). And when Boswell asked Johnson in 1768 w ­ hether he should read Du Halde, Johnson responded, “Why yes, . . . ​as one reads such a book; that is to say, consult it” (Life, 2:55).

Fictions of Enlightened Orientalism The dialectical terms of re­sis­tance and admiration are integral to Johnson’s understanding of China and to his enlightened way of thinking about the Orient, and they invite further elucidation. A dif­fer­ent from of admiration is to be found in Johnson’s Life of Confucius, which appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1742, translated and adapted from Du Halde.74 O. M. Brack and Robert DeMaria note that Johnson “does not follow the order of the material as he finds it in Du Halde but rearranges, condenses, omits, dramatizes, and adds his own comments. The

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1650–1850 result can almost be considered an original contribution on the subject” (Biographical Writings, 222). Though largely formulaic and following the structure of Johnson’s other biographies published in the Gentleman’s Magazine—­the lives of Sarpi, Boerhaave, Drake, Blake, Morin, and Burman—­the Life of Confucius nonetheless enables Johnson to articulate general observations about Confucius’s moral wisdom and impressive intellectual personality: “Confucius, say his disciples, had three contraries in his character, which scarcely any other man has known how to reconcile. He had all the graces of politeness with all the awefulness of gravity; uncommon severity of countenance, with ­great benignity of temper; and the most exalted dignity, with the most engaging modesty in his air” (Biographical Writings, 227–228). Like other g­ reat writers and intellectuals admired by Johnson—­Milton and Socrates, for example—­Confucius is distinguished for his ability to embody the highest intellectual and moral princi­ples in his actions: “His w ­ hole doctrine tends to the propagation of virtue, and the restitution of ­human nature to its original perfection, and it is related that his precepts always received illustration from his example, and that in all conditions of life, he took care to prove by his conduct, that he required no more from o ­ thers, than he thought it his own duty to perform” (Biographical Writings, 229). Johnson’s admiration of Confucius is personal and moral, and also religious and po­liti­cal, and has every­thing to do with the constancy with which Confucius translated his standards into public and private life. Brack and DeMaria point out that Johnson added the following words to Du Halde’s text: “This constancy cannot raise our admiration a­ fter his former conquest of himself; for how easily he supports pain, who has been able to resist plea­sure” (Biographical Writings, 226). In this, Johnson taps into an ele­ment in Confucius’s life that many other eighteenth-­ century thinkers also sought to access.75 For example, in Novissima Sinica (1697), Leibniz sees Confucius as the embodiment of “practical philosophy,” that is, “the precepts of ethics and politics adapted to the pres­ent life and use of mortals,” in which China is in advance of Eu­rope.76 And while Goldsmith associated Lien Chi Altangi with Confucian qualities, he also saw himself as a Confucian figure. Writing to his cousin Robert Bryanton in 1758, Goldsmith conjures up the following futuristic vision of himself: “Oliver Goldsmith flourished in the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries. He lived to be an hundred and three years old, [and in that] age may justly be styled the sun of [lit­er­a­ture] and the Confucius of Eu­rope.”77 Yet taking Confucius as a universal moral standard does not prevent Johnson from engaging with very dif­fer­ent aspects of the eighteenth-­century “Oriental”

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experience. Antoine Galland’s 1704–1717 French translation of the One Thousand and One Nights—­and subsequent En­glish versions of the Indian, Syrian, Persian, and Arabic tales that went by the name of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments—­ popularized a mode of fiction associated with the Orient that was overtly emotional, exotic, and marvelous. ­These tales created images of Eastern socie­ties in which government was tyrannous, justice arbitrary, punishment cruel, love a  sudden power­ful physical passion, and fate able to reverse the best of ­fortunes.78 As Ros Ballaster remarks, they generate a static temporal state in order to ensure Scheherazade’s survival. In t­ hese narratives, spatial and temporal amplification and metamorphoses provide endless variations on a theme, the conditions of life s­ haped by the capacity to tell a story that captivates the listener.79 In contrast to the realistic novels of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Eliza Haywood, Laurence Sterne, and Fanny Burney, the Arabian Nights are not interested in interiority and the autonomous self; rather, they offer the opportunity to imagine oneself in the place of the “other,” especially the Eastern “other,” and thus through plea­sure and fantasy they dramatize the reading experience by abandoning rather than reinforcing sovereignty. As Srinivas Aravamudan argues, the Arabian Nights enables the transgression of bound­aries and brings together two spaces and separate temporalities, East and West, ancient and modern.80 Such Oriental tales informed the interest in metempsychosis in the eigh­teenth ­century and other forms of transformative, transhistorical experience, such as poetic translation, chivalric romances, gothic fiction, and even travel writing. The idea of the transmigration of souls, for example, posits the organic community of all living t­ hings and a movement between species that leaps the gulf between ­human and animal, registered by the theory of the ­Great Chain of Being. Chi-­ming Yang argues that the Enlightenment inquiry into the foundations of rationality was supplemented by the absorption of the Arabian Nights into En­glish a­ fter its translation in 1704, for it furnishes hybrid notions of the soul, which then surface in such popu­lar publications as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters (1763), Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Spectator (e.g., nos. 111, 195, 535), and John Hawkesworth’s Adventurer (e.g., nos. 20–22). The notion that the soul thwarts death by passing into another body—­human or animal—­allows us to ascribe reason to reincarnation and to believe experience can be transmitted across time, space, and species. Chi-­ming Yang suggests, “The form of the Oriental fable . . . ​utilizes the possibilities for infinite memory and multiple lives punished and rewarded as an effective didactic as well as narrative device.”81

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1650–1850 ­ hese notions do not at first seem to be pertinent to Johnson’s thought, yet T he has a clear interest in translation, which might be called his master narrative in the Lives of the Poets, for it is a literary mode, both poetic and critical, capable of transforming the natu­ral into the strange and the strange into the natu­ral.82 Johnson is also interested in such fabulous experiences as metempsychosis, which he illustrates in his Dictionary by quoting a passage from Sir Thomas Browne’s Vulgar Errours about Orpheus becoming a swan, b ­ ecause ­human souls migrate into beasts “most suitable unto their humane condition.” When defining “transmigration” as a “passage from one place or state into another,” three of Johnson’s six illustrative quotations address metempsychosis, such as the following lines from Sir John Denham’s “On Mr.  Abraham Cowley” (lines added to Denham’s poem in the 1668 edition of Cowley’s Works): ’Twas taught by wise Pythagoras, One soul might through more bodies pass: Seeing such transmigration ­there, She thought it not a fable ­here.83 Pythagoras is impor­tant in the history of metempsychosis, and one recurrent source of his transmigrational fables—­one used by Addison in Spectator no. 211, for example—is the fifteenth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, “Of the Pythagorean Philosophy,” as Dryden called it in his translation of Ovid’s fifteenth book in Fables (1700). Johnson loves the Pythagorean side of Dryden—­especially as mediated through Ovid—­and the Pythagorean vision of life as a series of interconnected, natu­ral, and fluid forms in which the life spirit is “always another and the same” is Johnson’s governing meta­phor for Dryden’s translations and for all of his writing, regardless of genre: “Dryden is always another and the same; he does not exhibit a second time the same elegances in the same form, nor appears to have any art other than that of expressing with clearness what he thinks with vigour. His style could not be imitated, ­either seriously or ludicrously; for, being always equable and always varied, it has no prominent or discriminative characters” (Lives, 2:123).84 In writing thus about Dryden’s peculiar genius as “always another and the same,” Johnson echoes Dryden’s vision of an ever-­changing, interrelated world in his version of Ovid’s “Of the Pythagorean Philosophy” (ll. 239–242, 672–673). Thus all ­things are but alter’d, nothing dies; And h ­ ere and ­there th’ unbodied spirit flies, By time, or force, or sickness dispossest, And lodges, where it lights, in man or beast. (Poems, ll. 239–242)

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Many of Johnson’s pronouncements would seem to contradict his interest in ­these modes of fanciful, “Oriental” fiction. For example, his account of the new novelistic realism in Rambler no. 4 (March 31, 1750) is often taken to indicate a suspicion and moral disapprobation of fiction per se. What the essay actually offers, however, is a multilayered insight into the nature of the Richardsonian novel. The new realism draws on common modes of life, and a novelist such as Richardson is “engaged in portraits of which every­one knows the original”;85 its effects on the reader can thus be very power­ful. When novelists write in the realist vein as persuasively as Richardson does, then the “power of example is so ­great, as to take possession of the memory by a kind of vio­lence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the ­will” (Rambler, 1:22). To “take possession of the memory as if by vio­lence” is, for Johnson, a statement about how imaginatively power­ful the novel can be, how it may create a sense of social and personal real­ity stronger than the real. It also raises a moral question—­associated with Johnson’s understanding of the memory and the ­will as the locus of moral consciousness— of the effect of fiction on the mind of the reader. “The young, the ignorant, and the idle” (Rambler, 1:21) are ­those who are usually overimpressed by books, ­because they have l­ittle grounding in the real world and less experience of bringing experience of life to bear on their reading. It is their ­wills that are most likely to be circumvented by the seeming-­reality of a Richardsonian novel. Though the young and inexperienced are targeted, the princi­ple pertains to all readers, no ­matter how experienced, and it points not to Johnson’s dislike of fiction but to his appreciation of its power. This princi­ple also raises the question of the proper function of fiction. In highlighting the seriousness of new realist fiction, Rambler no. 4 seems to dismiss an older, more established popu­lar form of narrative, chivalric romance. In the romances formerly written, e­ very transaction and sentiment was so remote from all that passes among men, that the reader was in very l­ittle danger of making any applications to himself; the virtues and crimes w ­ ere equally beyond his sphere of activity, and he amused himself with heroes and with traitors, deliverers and persecutors, as with beings of another species, whose actions w ­ ere regulated upon motives of their own, and who had neither faults nor excellences in common with himself. (Rambler, 1:21) Certainly, Johnson’s impatience with works of lit­er­a­ture (­whether in prose or verse) that fail to generate substantive, “real” experience is well-­known. Iconic in that vein of critical impatience is his observation about Milton’s Lycidas: “Passion plucks no

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1650–1850 berries from the myrtle and ivy, nor calls upon Arethuse and Mincius, nor tells of rough satyrs and fauns with cloven heel. Where t­ here is leisure for fiction ­there is ­little grief” (Lives, 1:278; emphasis in the original). What is in play h ­ ere is not merely Johnson’s dislike of the pastoral form but his response to a style—­with its own history in the Renaissance—­that fails to engage with and to embody the poet’s own proffered subject. It is on this basis, presumably, that Johnson concludes of Lycidas, “In this poem t­ here is no nature, for t­ here is no truth; t­ here is no art, for ­there is nothing new” (Lives, 1:278). Nature is the product of art: without the proper art, the poem, in Johnson’s view, fails to animate and to renew the other­wise derivative classical imagery; it remains mere fiction and thus fails to be true to its purpose.86 This simple-­seeming but large critical thought animates much of Johnson’s best criticism.87 It also underpins his response to the Romantic, “Oriental,” neo-­Miltonic verse of some mid-­ eighteenth-­century poets, such as Lyttleton, Thomas Gray, and William Collins. For example, Collins’s Persian Eclogues and his odes exemplify the disjunction between style, diction, and experience that Johnson identifies as “fiction” rather than “art.” Collins is “a man of extensive lit­er­a­ture, and of vigorous faculties,” but he had employed his mind chiefly upon works of fiction, and subjects of fancy; and, by indulging some peculiar habits of thought, was eminently delighted with t­ hose flights of imagination which pass the bounds of nature, and to which the mind is reconciled only by a passive acquiescence in popu­lar traditions. He loved fairies, genii, ­giants, and monsters; he delighted to rove through the meanders of inchantment, to gaze on the magnificence of golden palaces, to repose by the waterfalls of Elysian gardens. (Lives, 4:121) Johnson was never much given to the “passive acquiescence in popu­lar traditions,” but Collins’s Oriental flights of imagination elicit Johnson’s chastened appreciation rather than strong denunciation ­because of Collins’s intellectual predicament. His Oriental flights of imagination describe the inclination rather than the realization of Collins’s genius: “the grandeur of wildness and the novelty of extravagance ­were always desired by him, but w ­ ere not always attained” (Lives, 4:121). Furthermore, the structure of Johnson’s Life of Collins suggests a parallel association between the unrealized poetic aspiration and the madness that Collins suffers, and this to Johnson touches a tragic nerve: “He languished some years ­under that depression of mind which enchains the faculties without destroying them, and leaves reason the knowledge of right without the power of pursuing it” (Lives, 4:122). “Oriental” imagery and subject m ­ atter, therefore, tend to attract Johnson’s opprobrium only when they fail to establish a real relation to the world,

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what­ever form that might take. Every­thing depends on the kind of fictional repre­ sen­ta­tion in question, as we see in the example of Johnson’s involvement with Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752). ­Whether or not Johnson ghostwrote book 9, chapter 11 of Lennox’s novel—­ and it is now accepted that he did not88—­the Doctor’s discussion with Arabella is one with the critical views I am describing ­here. The Doctor’s purpose at the end of the novel is not to discredit Arabella but to enable her to appreciate the fictional rather than the literal truth of the old romances on which she is fixated. The Doctor holds romance to have a lesser impact on the mind than realism does, yet Arabella’s yearning for experience and personal significance forces a literal construction from a genre that declares its own fictitiousness. This persuades the Doctor, in turn, to depict the deleterious moral effect of romance, but only when it is taken literally, as a model for personal be­hav­ior. This is a version of Johnson’s argument in Rambler no.  4. Arabella’s assertion about authorial intention—­“he that writes without Intention to be credited, must write to l­ittle Purpose”—­elicits the Doctor’s proposition about the relation between truth and fiction: “Truth is not always injured by Fiction. An admirable writer of our own Time [i.e., Richardson], has found the Way to convey the most solid Instructions, the noblest Sentiments, and the most exalted Piety, in the Pleasing Dress of a Novel.”89 It is significant (yet seldom noticed) that Arabella’s response to this idea not only reveals her critical awareness but echoes one of the main operational princi­ ples of early realist novels: the fables of Aesop, she says, “are among ­those of which the Absurdity discovers itself, and the Truth is comprised in the Application; but what can be said of ­those Tales which are told with the solemn Air of historical Truth, and if false convey no Instruction?” 90 Arabella eventually cuts the Gordian knot that binds truth and fiction to each other; she recognizes that the truth-­effect of the fiction is enhanced by the artifice, when artifice operates within a narrative context in which “absurdities” are read (“applied”) against other events, as well as against a normative sense of life, in order to arrive at trustworthy “instruction.” Not only was Johnson not dismissive of the Female Quixote or the romances read by Arabella—he thought very highly of Lennox (Life, 4:275) and wrote the dedication for the novel (and for other works by Lennox; Prefaces and Dedications, 89–117)—­but he was also an avid reader of romances himself.91 Thomas Percy informed Boswell “that ‘when a boy [Johnson] was immoderately fond of reading romances of chivalry, and he retained his fondness for them through life; so that . . . ​ spending part of a summer at my parsonage-­house in the country, he chose for his regular reading the old Spanish romance of Felixmarte of Hircania, in folio, which

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1650–1850 he read through’ ” (Life, 1:49). Percy refers h ­ ere to Johnson’s eight-­week visit to his home, Easton Maudit, in the summer of 1764.92 During the summer, Percy advised Johnson about his edition of Shakespeare, and Johnson advised Percy about the organ­ization of the Reliques of Ancient En­glish Poetry (1765) and the “Essay on the Ancient Minstrels in ­England” that prefaces that work. This too was when Johnson wrote the dedication of the Reliques, addressed to the Countess of North­umberland.93 Percy’s preface to the work acknowledges the “importunity” of “the Author of the ‘Rambler’ ” and “the friendship of Dr. Samuel Johnson [to whom] he owes many valuable hints for the conduct of this work.” 94 Nick Groom and Bertram Davis have argued that Percy was instrumental in creating a proto-­Romantic literary history in the Reliques by weaving together two contiguous discourses. One was the relocation of nature, as an aesthetic category expressive of simplicity and sentiment, in works of the northern bardic cultures and the Anglo-­Saxon minstrels. Thus, in the preface to the Reliques, Percy writes in terms that w ­ ere l­ater rearticulated by William Words­worth in his preface to the Lyrical Ballads: “In a polished age, like the pres­ent, I am sensible that many of t­ hese reliques of antiquity ­will require ­great allowances to be made for them. Yet they have, for the most part, a pleasing simplicity and many artless graces, which, in the opinion of no mean Critics, have been thought to compensate for the want of higher beauties; and, if they do not dazzle the imagination, are frequently found to interest the heart.” 95 The second discourse governing the Reliques in Groom’s view is the idea that the native, En­glish poetic tradition, grounded in the simplicity of nature and continuous over time, is something that has been created by Percy out disparate fragments scattered across antiquity. Yet not only has Percy retrieved ­these obscure and half-­forgotten manuscript fragments from the distant past, but in the Reliques he has also translated them; and barbarous ideas have been refined whose simplicity appeals to con­temporary enlightened readers. Percy thus attests both to the ancient origins of En­glish lit­er­a­ture and also to its evolving historical development. In the dedication, Johnson points to Percy’s interweaving of t­ hese two discourses: ­These poems are presented to your Ladyship, not as l­abours of art, but as effusions of nature, shewing the first efforts of ancient genius, and exhibiting the customs and opinions of remote ages: of ages that had been almost lost to memory, had not the gallant deeds of your illustrious ancestors [i.e., Percy himself] preserved them from oblivion. No active or comprehensive mind can forbear some attention to the reliques of antiquity. It is prompted by natu­ral curiosity to survey the pro­gress

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of life and manners, and to inquire by what gradations barbarity was civilized, grossness refined, and ignorance instructed. (Prefaces and Dedications, 167) Johnson’s brief remarks nicely echo Percy’s historiographical and scholarly poise. While Johnson’s dedication may be an exercise in generic imagination—­not necessarily implying uncritical ac­cep­tance of Percy’s literary princi­ples96—he may not have been entirely unsympathetic to Percy’s proj­ect in cultural politics. For, as David Porter and Eun Kyung Min argue, the Reliques are involved in developing a native En­glish literary tradition to contest Ossian’s Celtic revival by opposing but also appropriating views of China presented in Percy’s Chinese books, Hau Kiou Choaan; or, The Pleasing History, four volumes (1761), and Miscellaneous Pieces Relating to the Chinese (1762).97 Like the Reliques, ­these “Chinese” works are also hybrid creations—­edited, translated, and mediated by the presiding consciousness of the compiler, Thomas Percy. Hau Kiou Choaan contains the translation of a novel of the same title, putatively found in manuscript by Percy but suspected of being his own invention.98 It also contains the argument of a Chinese play, a collection of Chinese proverbs, fragments of Chinese poetry, and substantial interpretive footnotes. The Chinese miscellanies grew out of Hau Kiou Choaan and include translations from the Jesuit Lettres édifantes and curieuses (1702– 1776), plus works of and commentaries on Chinese lit­er­a­ture and descriptions of gardens, palaces, and ceremonies. For Percy, Chinese culture is dialogically related to En­glish culture, as he understands it in the Reliques, by virtue of the formality and antiquity of its social and po­liti­cal forms and the barbarity and backwardness of its lit­er­a­ture, in which oral speech and written language are radically disjunct. In the Miscellaneous Pieces, Percy develops a theory of the Chinese language, to paraphrase Min, divided between an underdeveloped orality and an overdeveloped script,99 a prob­lem rooted in the pictorial, hieroglyphic nature of Chinese signs, which is indicative of primitive socie­ties but inadequate to meet the needs of more advanced, civilized socie­ties, which use alphabetic language. The difficulty and richness of the Chinese script was legendary; but without this source to enrich it, Chinese life remained barbarous and incapable of refinement. While t­ hese ­were common notions among the Jesuits and seventeenth-­century phi­los­o­phers, the Reliques consciously aims to transcend the gap between oral and written language that Percy highlights in Chinese culture, by discovering a “native eloquence” in a distinctly fragmented, preliterate En­glish culture, comparable to but qualitatively dif­fer­ent from the Chinese.100 The view that a cultivated written language is the precondition of a ­great lit­er ­a­ture as well as of civilized talk (conversation) is shared by Johnson with

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1650–1850 Percy, who was a member of the Club and spent a lot of time in conversation with Johnson. On one occasion, Johnson called the Chinese “barbarians,” ­because “they have not an alphabet. They have not been able to form what all other nations have formed,” and he identified the difficulty associated with the Chinese script from its “rudeness” rather than its signification (Life, 3:339). This idea of language enabled Johnson to resist Macpherson’s claims of having discovered a finished literary masterpiece that predated both print and educated conversation. And it is an idea of language that permeates his understanding of a ­great national lit­er­at­ ure animating the Dictionary and the Lives of the Poets. If Percy uses “China” as a foil to develop an idea of a national En­glish lit­er­a­ture from a series of northern, gothic, lyric fragments, then in the Dictionary Johnson turns to the writers of the age of Elizabeth and James I for the same purpose; ­there he finds “the wells of En­glish undefiled, . . . ​the pure sources of genuine diction.”101 In the Lives of the Poets, it is in the writers of the Restoration, especially Dryden, where Johnson finds what he calls “the improvement, perhaps the completion of our metre, the refinement of our language, and much of the correctness of our sentiments” (Lives, 2:155). At the center of Johnson’s view of a vibrant and expressive national lit­er­a­ ture—as embodied by Shakespeare and Dryden, for example—­was an idea of a language that is connected to its cultural and literary past even while it is responsive to historical and social change. The social and intellectual ossification that Percy discovers in the Chinese language—­a notion of language that Johnson did not endorse—­stand in marked contrast to the idealism with which the Chinese language was regarded for most of the seventeenth ­century. Matteo Ricci’s work on the primacy of the Chinese language, published in Rome in 1615 and excerpted by Samuel Purchas in En­glish in Purchas His Pilgrims (1625), lent themselves to the universal-­language movement’s quest for authoritative forms of repre­sen­ta­tion and ideas.102

Language, Commerce, and Orientalism John Webb’s Historical Essay Endeavouring a Probability that the Language of the Empire of China is the Primitive Language (London, 1669) takes the Chinese character as a model of Adamic language spoken by all humankind before the fall. According to Webb, the original groundedness and authenticity of Chinese characters gave them a privileged place among ­human writing systems:

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The Chinois have been a p ­ eople ever since the flood of Noah and before the Confusion of Tongues; that their language both continually in all times, from their first beginning to be a Nation, been preserved in written books; that the Characters wherewith t­ hose books be written, are the selfsame, which from all Antiquity w ­ ere extracted from the Original Hieroglyphicks: That in t­ hose Characters their Language hath ever since constituted, and according to them, is at this pres­ent day spoken purely: and That by the same Characters their Language is generally and universally understood throughout the ­whole Chinique World, we may safely conclude that the MOTHOR or NATU­R AL Language of the Empire of China, perdures in its Ancient purity without any change or alteration.103 A ­simple correspondence between a character and the object it designated—­free from the complications of grammar, rhe­toric, and logic—­marked the transhistorical and universal nature of the Chinese character. For Francis Bacon, Thomas Sprat, John Wilkins, John Webb, Jonathan Swift, and o ­ thers, Chinese was seen as a culturally resonant ideograph, a symbol capable of expressing complex ideas about the historical continuity of En­glish culture. They variously countered the Babelian confusion of languages by insisting on the existence of a privileged site of genealogical legitimacy to counteract what they saw as the deleterious effects of figuration. They sought a way, such as the Chinese language was seen as offering, in which the myriad signs and symbols that constitute culture could be grounded in a fixed, originary source of meaning and not be corrupted by the vicissitudes of common speech, meta­phoric usage, and temporal change.104 John Locke’s Essay on H ­ uman Understanding (1690) signals the decline of the universal-­language movement by arguing that words referred not to ­things in themselves but to arbitrary ideas in the minds of individuals. By accepting the intrinsic semiotic deficiencies in language and focusing on the necessity of embracing historical change and social flexibility, Locke (and Johnson) developed a notion of linguistic legitimacy that emphasized the paradoxical coexistence of stability and change. In the preface to the Dictionary (1755), Johnson sometimes hankers for an ideal, pure language, fixed in its lexical origins and secure from historical or capricious influences; but he knows this is neither truly desirable nor pos­si­ble, ­because a living language, imaginatively responsive to social and personal experience, cannot be arrested: ­Those who have been persuaded to think well of my design ­will require that it should fix our language, and put a stop to ­those alterations which time and

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1650–1850 chance have hitherto been suffered to make in it without opposition. With this consequence I ­will confess that I flattered myself for a while; but now begin to fear that I have indulged expectation that neither reason nor experience can justify. When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one a­ fter another, from ­century to ­century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their works and phrases from mutability s­ hall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature, or clear the world at once from folly, vanity, and affectation. (JEL, 104–105) As many ­people have noticed, this preface paradoxically draws on the inclinations of a lexical purist and the critical judgment of a historical realist. In describing the difficulty, near impossibility, of making a dictionary, Johnson articulates the temporal nature of language and (paradoxically) at the same time also embraces the historical inevitability of linguistic change.105 For Johnson, the efforts of the French and Italian academies to guard their languages from foreign influences, in the way in which Webb and Wilkins thought of the Chinese language, are vain. For a living language in a populous nation, unlike “some of the Mohometan countries,” is u ­ nder construction from both internal and external sources. In a polished, socially diversified nation, where “one part of the community is sustained and accommodated by the l­abour of the other,” language is constantly changing: “­Those who have much leisure to think w ­ ill always be enlarging the stock of ideas; and e­ very increase of knowledge, w ­ hether real or fancied, w ­ ill produce new words, or combinations of words” (JEL, 106). ­There is thus no sustained notion in the preface to the Dictionary that English—or indeed any modern language—­could be a universal language in the way seventeenth-­century phi­los­op ­ hers thought of Chinese. Instead, commerce was thought of as a potentially universal system of ­human signification and communication. In a General History of Trade (1713), Defoe sees commerce as supplying the world’s desires “to the increase of Wealth, the Encouragement of Art, Science, and ­Human Wisdom in the World.”106 For Johnson, in turn, commerce exercises a power­ful external force for change on language: Commerce, however necessary, however lucrative, as it depraves the manners, corrupts the language; they that have frequent intercourse with strangers, to whom they endeavour to accommodate themselves, must in time learn a mingled dialect, like the jargon which serves the traffickers on

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the Mediterranean and Indian coasts. This w ­ ill not always be confined to the exchange, the ware­house, or the port, but w ­ ill be communicated by degrees to o ­ thers ranks of p ­ eople, and be at last incorporated with the current speech. (JEL, 106) Though the tone of this observation might be ironic, when taken in relation to the idea of linguistic purity, Johnson’s repre­sen­ta­tion of the impact of commerce on normative language and culture should not obscure the attractions of commerce for him. Commerce is both “necessary” and “lucrative” and, indeed, inextricably linked with the polished, expressive, and historically evolved language that Johnson celebrates in the Dictionary and that is the object of Percy’s Reliques of Ancient En­glish Poetry. The commercial and cultural influences that Johnson mentions in the preface to the Dictionary are precisely ­those to which China was (largely) immune during the eigh­teenth c­ entury, when trade with China and India (and North Amer­i­ca) became increasingly impor­tant to Britain’s colonial enterprise. From the time of the first tea shipments in 1689, the East India Com­pany had transacted an increasingly growing volume of trade in China, British India, and South East Asia through the ports in southern China. But this trade, huge in tea but also in chinaware, porcelain, furniture, paper goods, animal skins, gold, and opium, was limited to Canton by the restrictive imperial government. Eu­ro­pean traders ­were confined within government-­sanctioned hongs, subject to heavy taxes, bureaucracy, prohibitive internal transportation conditions, a mercantile exchange system (that was draining British coffers of its gold and silver), and an arbitrary-­seeming l­egal system that led to violent altercations between the hong merchants, imperial officials, and En­glish traders.107 A growing trade in opium, cultivated and manufactured in Bengal and delivered to the Chinese markets by the ships of the East India Com­pany as well as by private traders, though of po­liti­cal and social importance to ­either side, did ­little to address the trade imbalance. The Macartney embassy of 1792–1794 and the Amherst embassy of 1816 both tried to negotiate more open and reciprocal international trading terms with the Chinese government, which could have entailed the reduction or even cessation of opium imports, and also to establish a permanent diplomatic mission in Peking for the purposes of cultural and scientific exchange. But both embassies failed diplomatically, and it was partly ­because the Chinese ­were so successful in confining the “intercourse with strangers,” as per Johnson’s formulation, to the port of Canton and to the island of Macau that the British turned from diplomacy to military action in the 1830s to force concessions from and to impose a Eu­ro­pean system on the Chinese.

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1650–1850 It is against ­these historical conditions—­including the association of commerce with a thriving, cultivated, and flexible national language—­that Johnson’s review of Jonas Hanway’s An Essay on Tea (1756) should be read. Published on the eve of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763)—­a war to secure and expand Britain’s trade in North Amer­i­ca and in India—­Hanway’s argument against the tea trade with China invokes an insular, anticosmopolitan sentiment to enforce a martial and insular idea of national character. By gendering the “Oriental” as female and associating the drain on British bullion when used to pay the Chinese with the dangers of infection, pollution, addiction, and emasculation, Hanway argues that Britain needs to cut its dependence on “the produce of so remote a country as China.”108 Johnson’s response to Hanway makes several telling points. Most immediately he strikes an ironic, self-­deprecating tone, offering himself—­the very bulk and bodily habits of the legendary tea-­drinking Dr. Johnson—as bulwark against the deleterious moral effect of drinking tea. He declares himself to be a “hardened and shameless tea-­drinker, who has, for twenty years, diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant, whose ­kettle has scarcely time to cool, who with tea amuses the eve­ning, with tea solaces the midnights, and, with tea, welcomes the morning.”109 At the same time, the economic implications of Johnson’s review challenge what Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins calls the “dream logic of orientalism”110 engendered by Hanway’s nightmare vision of a weak and vulnerable Britain. This aspect of Johnson’s review suggests his support of freer trade relations with China. We need to pause h ­ ere to recall that Johnson’s economic views are usually equated with his Tory politics. Donald Greene remarks, “With what may be called the economic isolationism of the Old Tories (which they shared to some extent with the Old Whigs of the Walpole tradition), Johnson was much more consistently in sympathy. Like theirs, his economic views w ­ ere based on the conception of a small, isolated, eco­nom­ically self-­contained state, its economy kept in balance by careful government control.”111 Greene sees Johnson’s valuation of agriculture in a prosperous British economy as standing in opposition to international trade, which is tainted by the evils of imperial expansion, which Johnson condemns. In short, Greene’s reading is that agriculture is local and uncontaminated by the injustices associated with British territorial and economic expansion in the aftermath of the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739–1748) and the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). By contrast, in Nicholas Hudson’s account, Johnson is an ambivalent but positive advocate for empire—as witnessed, for example, by his unwavering support of Warren Hastings’s governorship in India—­but a­ fter the Seven Years’ War, John-

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son ceases to identify empire with the growth in British trade and commerce and to emphasize rather its moral and educational imperatives. “During the final years of the 1750s,” Hudson argues, “Johnson’s stand was less against ‘empire’ tout court than against the avarice and viciousness of ­those who colonized and conquered only for wealth.”112 A growing distrust of corrupt traders fuels Johnson’s critique of Eu­ro­pean imperialism in his introduction to The World Displayed (1762) and runs through several of his publications. The idea of greatness—­spiritual, intellectual, literary, national, and militaristic—is one that Johnson wrestles with throughout his life.113 Hudson argues that Johnson’s view of the nature and responsibilities of the evolving British Empire is an expression of that idea: “the crucial switch in Georgian attitudes exemplified by Johnson’s ideological development, the transition from an economic justification of colonial policy to a belief in E ­ ngland’s ‘Providential’ duty as bringer of light and salvation, prefigures closely the so-­called ‘New Imperialism’ that reared up, in all its mustachioed vanity, ­under Disraeli’s administration in the 1870s and 1880s.”114 Arguing dif­fer­ent ideological outcomes, Greene and Hudson identify an anticommercial attitude as essential to Johnson’s broader po­liti­cal thought. Certainly, in Further Thoughts on Agriculture (1756) and Considerations on Corn (1766), Johnson, like ­others at the time, ­favors corn subsidies, but not for ideological reasons but rather as a practical way of increasing local production and lowering prices. As Aaron Stavisky points out, “Lower food prices raise workers’ real income, something mercantilists oppose. This sounds like a defense of agribusiness, not feudal subservience. The reason why Johnson supports a subsidy [is] . . . ​ ­because trade has inevitably raised the risk ­factor . . . ​in the economy.”115 Johnson’s support of local agriculture, and, indeed, his horror of imperial cruelties perpetrated in the name of economic expansion, are established positions; but they are not necessarily based on what Greene calls Johnson’s “conception of a small, isolated, eco­nom­ically self-­contained state [with an] economy kept in balance by careful government control”116 Johnson’s advocacy for agriculture would seem to have more to do with the need to balance an economy that is becoming more diversified and more volatile b ­ ecause of the g­ reat increase in international trade and commerce. Other lines of demarcation in Johnson’s thinking about politics, agriculture, and commerce are worth noting. John Cannon notes that while Johnson was a defender of the superiority of the landed interest—­a widely remarked conser­ vative aspect of Johnson’s Toryism—he “was not hostile to the commercial and industrial changes that ­were transforming his country, and he did not believe in a

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1650–1850 rigid economic and social structure.”117 John Middendorf draws attention to the moral and purely humane aspect of Johnson’s economics: “When his deeply generous sympathy was not stirred by immediate events, his generalizations assume that what­ever contributes to increased production and wider distribution and consumption of wealth is commendable.”118 Hence Johnson’s recognition that the benefits of trade, like other aspects of a complex economy (and like a national language), are not fixed once and for all. Markets, like life itself, ­will fluctuate ­under both local and global pressures; as Johnson says in Further Thoughts on Agriculture, “Commerce . . . ​is one of the ­daughters of fortune, inconstant and deceitful as her m ­ other. . . . ​It is apparent, that ­every trading nation flourishes, while it can be said to flourish, by the courtesy of ­others. We cannot compel any ­people to buy from us, or to sell to us” (Po­liti­cal Writings, 122). Like Defoe, Addison, David Hume, and Adam Smith, Johnson has an organic notion of commerce in a prosperous, liberal, and cultivated nation.119 For Addison, in Spectator no. 69 (May 19, 1711), the activities at the Royal Exchange are particularly pleasing ­because of the “Assembly of Country-­men and Foreigners consulting together upon the private Business of Mankind, and making this Metropolis a kind of Emporium for the ­whole Earth.”120 Trade enables a Miltonic vision of the bounty of the earth and of the potential for cooperation and mutual sustainability: Nature seems to have taken par­tic­u­lar Care to disseminate her Blessings among the dif­fer­ent Regions of the World, with an Eye to this mutual Intercourse and Traffick among Mankind, that the Natives of Several parts of the Globe might have a kind of Dependence upon one another, and be united together by their common Interest. Almost e­ very Degree produces something peculiar to it. The Fruits of Portugal are corrected by the Products of Barbadoes: The Infusion of a China Plant sweetened with the Pith of an Indian Cane. (Spectator, 1:428) Hume’s essays (1741–1742) on trade are historically and psychologically shrewder than Addison’s postlapsarian idyll to the commercial spirit: In “Of Commerce,” he writes, If we consult history, we ­shall find, that in most nations foreign trade has preceded any refinement in home manufactures, and given birth to domestic luxury. . . . ​Thus men become acquainted with the pleasures of luxury, and the profits of commerce; and their delicacy and industry being once awakened, carry them on to further improvements in ­every branch of domestic as well as foreign trade; and this is perhaps the chief advantage which arises from a commerce with strangers.121

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­ hese could have been Johnson’s words, whose preface to Richard Rolt’s A New T Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (1756) is underplayed by both Greene and Hudson. Yet the views expressed in this little-­regarded work are indicative of Johnson’s general economic theory, articulated not only in the po­liti­cal pamphlets on corn and agriculture but also in the moral essays, the sermons, and the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. When Boswell mentioned The Wealth of Nations (1776) to Johnson, his response was, “Trade procures . . . ​the reciprocation of the peculiar advantages of dif­f er­ent countries” (March 16, 1776; Life, 2:430). He expands on this idea of reciprocal benefits in the preface to Rolt’s work: The knowledge of trade is of so much importance to a maritime nation, that no l­abour can be thought g­ reat by which information may be obtained. . . . ​ [T]­here never was from the earliest ages a time in which trade so much engaged the attention of mankind, or commercial gain was sought with general emulation. . . . ​The merchant is now invited to e­ very port, manufactures are established in all cities, and princes who just can view the sea from some single corner of their dominions, are enlarging harbours, erecting mercantile companies, and preparing to traffick in the remotest countries. (A1) In the case of Britain’s trade with China, however, the cultural and economic benefits recognized by Addison, Hume, Johnson, and Smith had not materialized. The Qianlong emperor was largely resistant to the “advantages” that might be derived from trade with Britain and other Eu­ro­pean countries.122 By the 1750s, the  rage for chinoiserie in Britain and the growing importation of Chinese goods made for a lopsided trade arrangement between the two countries. In Macartney’s 1793 essay on Chinese trade and commerce, appended to his Journal of an Embassy to China, he lists the ratio of East India Com­pany trade with China as being three to one in ­favor of the Chinese (Embassy to China, 256–263). Unofficial trade favored the Chinese balance of payments even more. Hume noted that “China is represented as one of the most flourishing empires in the world, though it has very l­ittle commerce beyond its own territories.”123 But according to Smith, the almost-­exclusive concentration of the Chinese economy on local markets had led to cultural stagnation. While he recognized that China had l­ittle economic need for foreign products, his idea of economics as the engine driving social pro­gress sees constraints on foreign trade as unnatural: “The wealth of antient Egypt, that of China and Indostan, sufficiently demonstrate that a nation may attain a very high degree of opulence, though the greater part of its exportation trade be carried on by foreigners. . . . ​The modern Chinese, it is known, hold it [foreign commerce] in the utmost contempt, and scarce deign to afford it the decent protection of the laws.”124

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1650–1850 For Smith—­whose views underpinned the Macartney (1792–1794) and the Amherst (1816) embassies—­economic and ­legal restrictions and obstructions ­were directly related to po­liti­cal and social stagnation and injustice. “Foreign trade,” reports Smith, “is e­ very way confined within a much narrower circle than that to which it would naturally extend itself, if more freedom was allowed to it” (Wealth of Nations, 1:159–160). What Macartney found in Peking in 1793 was a populous and ­grand city, “justly to be admired for its walls and gates, the distribution of its quarters, the width and allineation of its streets, the grandeur of its triumphal arches and the number and magnificence of its palaces,” but one in which trade was confined to two streets “that are chiefly inhabited by merchants and traders, whose shops and ware­houses are most profusely decorated with ­every ornament that colours, gilding and varnish can bestow” (Embassy to China, 157–158). In Macartney’s account, the tinsel suggests the superficiality and inadequacy of the undertaking. By contrast, commercial cooperation had turned London into a global city and sustained its plentiful and fascinating life, as Johnson remarks in Adventurer no. 67: He that contemplates the extent of this wonderful city, finds it difficult to conceive, by what method plenty is maintained in our markets, and how the inhabitants are regularly supplied with the necessaries of life; but when he examines the shops and ware­houses, sees the im­mense stores of e­ very kind of merchandise piled up for sale, and runs over all the manufactures of art and products of nature, which are everywhere attracting the eye and soliciting his purse, he w ­ ill be inclined to conclude, that such quantities cannot easily be exhausted, and that part of mankind must soon stand still for want of employment, till the wares already provided ­shall be worn out and destroyed. (Adventurer, 384) This vision of the interconnected, organic, and abundant life of London is reminiscent not only of Addison’s idea of the Royal Exchange but also of Johnson’s own vision of the interconnected h ­ uman world opened up by Shakespeare’s dramas, which exhibit “the real state of sublunary nature,” and by Dryden’s version of the fifteenth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as described earlier.125 In economic and psychological terms, however, Adventurer no. 67 suggests that modern commercial socie­ties ­will always want more and that for a time more ­will continue to be supplied, to the benefit of both individual and society. Inevitably, however, Johnson’s skeptical turn of mind questions the efficacy of the commercial creation he is celebrating. He contrasts the “opulence” of London’s

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multitudes (Adventurer, 384), dependent on each other for the satisfaction of all manner of artificial desires, with the ­simple life of the “rude Indian” of Mexico or Peru who “supplies himself with all the necessaries of life” (388). But he quickly acknowledges the unfairness of the comparison, for even though “this picture of a savage life . . . ​shews how much individuals may perform, [it] shews likewise how much society is to be desired” (388). Two general ideas underpin the attendant view of society, and they surface and resurface in Johnson’s discussion of the nature of commerce. One proposition implies the moral benefits of an interconnected society, what Johnson calls “the secret concatenation of society, that links together the ­great and the mean, the illustrious and the obscure,” so that, in a commercially or­g a­nized society, “no man, ­unless his body of mind be totally disabled, has need to suffer the mortification of seeing himself useless or burdensome to the community” (Adventurer, 386). A second proposition finds a philosophical value in the social connectedness and relatively greater affluence that is enabled by commerce, for the participant ­here “gains leisure for intellectual pleasures, and enjoys the happiness of reason and reflection” (389). Practically, this economic view envisages full employment for ­those who ­labor and intellectual pleasures for the leisured classes. In short, while commerce makes for individual wealth, it also—in conservative, supply-­ side fashion—­benefits society, for expenditure by some ­people circulates money in the economy for use by o ­ thers: laborers, farms, shops, manufacturers, and tradespeople (Life, 2:55–56). At the same time, commerce makes for greater social refinement. In a well-­known conversation with General Oglethorpe, Johnson defends “luxury” by saying, “Depend upon it, Sir, ­every state of society is as luxurious as it can be. Men always take the best they can get. . . . ​To be merely satisfied is not enough. It is in refinement and elegance that the civilized man differs from the savage” (Life, 3:282). In the 1750s, tea drinking is still a form of “luxury,” and in Johnson’s response to Hanway’s attack on the tea trade, Johnson is working within the larger social and economic contexts just described: I have no desire to appear captious, and ­shall, therefore, readily admit that tea is a liquor not proper for the lower classes of the p ­ eople, as it supplies no strength to ­labour, or relief to disease, but gratifies the taste, without nourishing the body. It is a barren superfluity, to which t­ hose who can hardly procure what nature requires cannot prudently habituate themselves. Its proper use is to amuse the idle, relax the studious, and dilute the full meals of ­those who cannot use exercise, and ­will not use abstinence. That time is lost in this

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1650–1850 insipid entertainment cannot be denied; many trifle away at the tea t­able ­those moments which would be better spent; but that any national detriment can be inferred from this waste of time does not evidently appear, ­because I know not that any work remains undone for want of hands. Our manufactures seem to be limited, not by the possibility of work, but by the possibility of sale.126 By the early nineteenth c­ entury, tea ­will have become the staple drink of the working class in industrial E ­ ngland, as well as in the countryside; its cost w ­ ill have come down greatly, and the En­glish w ­ ill have acquired the widespread habit of adding sugar (and milk) to tea to provide the nourishment and “strength to ­labour” that the leisured classes of the mid-­eighteenth ­century did not need from it.127 The preceding passage on the luxuriousness of tea may reveal a smugness in Johnson’s class consciousness; yet his conservative, economic analy­sis is sound, and it assumes a division of l­abor that is also central to Smith’s Wealth of Nations, which has it that “the division of l­abour is in this, as in all other cases, advantageous to all the dif­fer­ent persons employed in the vari­ous occupations into which it is subdivided” (2:376). As Johnson understands Hanway’s argument, the prob­lem is not social (the luxuriousness of tea) but economic (the structure of the market); he address the possibility that manufacturers (including tea manufacturers) cannot find a way of getting their product to buyers at a price they can afford. The same pragmatism governs Johnson’s economic theory in Journey to the Western Islands (1775), which sees the necessity of the “tacksman” (middleman) for the health of the Highland economy. Without middlemen or traders, Johnson points out, goods often cannot find their way to ­those who need or desire them; and then “all must obey the call of immediate necessity, [and] nothing that requires extensive views or provides for distant consequences w ­ ill ever be performed.”128 Commercial activity, with the wide circulation of goods and the exchange of money it implies—­with a related rise in the standard of living—­was not abundant in the Scottish Highlands when Boswell and Johnson visited in 1773. The Highland economy was still too closely linked to older agricultural models that, to Johnson’s dismay, forced many Highlanders to emigrate to escape the “perpetual want of ­little ­things.”129 In writing thus, Johnson looks to Locke’s po­liti­cal philosophy, in the Two Treatises of Government (1690), and to the jurisprudence of William Blackstone, in the Commentaries on the Laws of ­England (1765–1769), for whom, in Blackstone’s words, “­there is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property.”130 Johnson’s idea of the

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modern nation invariably links commercial activity with property, “liberty,” and the rule of law, as he writes in Sermon no. 24: “In a country like ours, the g­ reat demand which is forever repeated to our governors, is for the security of property, the confirmation of liberty and the extension of commerce. All this we have obtained, and all this we possess, in a degree which perhaps was never granted to any other ­people.”131 In the 1790s, En­glish readers would learn from the Macartney embassy that no such relationship existed in China, where “the interests of the Emperor are always the first consideration, [and] no property can be secured against his claims” (Embassy to China, 242). In Sir George Thomas Staunton’s translation of the basic documents of Qing law, Ta Tsing Leu Lee; Being the Fundamental Laws, and a Se­lection from the Supplementary Statutes of the Penal Code of China (London, 1810)—­the equivalence of Blackstone’s Commentaries for the Qing dynasty—we find no mention of ­either private property or international commerce.132 Johnson’s assessment of the civilizing effects of commerce draws on wide experience and practical thinking in economics and social policy. He knew trade personally. Like Johnson’s fictional character Imlac, he might be said to have come to consciousness as a young man in a commercial environment in his f­ ather’s book shop and printing business in Litch­field. L­ ater in life, he befriended Henry Thrale and had a long professional association with the brewing business. But Johnson also had a theoretical grasp of the ways in which the economic life of the nation affected the happiness of ­people. True, the lines he added to Goldsmith’s The Traveller (1764) describe one view of the relation of the individual to politics: How small, of all that h ­ uman hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure. Still to ourselves in e­ very place consign’d, Our own felicity we make or find. (Poems, 438, ll. 429–432) However, Johnson’s views about commerce ­were inseparable from his broader moral and po­liti­cal thought. They touch on a number of the large questions that challenged him throughout his life: poverty, wealth, leisure, time, work, moral purpose, regularity of character. While understanding the moral implications of imperialism and making an attempt to see war from the perspective of the indigenous communities that suffer ­under foreign incursion, as he does in Idler no.  81 (1759), Johnson is also aware of the relationship between national greatness, prosperity, and trade. In the Dictionary, he defines the noun “trade” as “Traffick; commerce; exchange of goods for other goods, or for money,” and he quotes Sir Walter Raleigh to illustrate: “Whosoever commands the sea, commands the trade;

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1650–1850 whosoever commands the trade of the world, commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.”133 This declaration has the optimistic ring of the Elizabethan Age, and Johnson’s economic views are more mea­sured than this; but a work such as Rasselas, written at the height of the Seven Years’ War, clearly accepts trade and commerce as integral aspects of modern civilization. Still, while An Introduction to the Po­liti­cal State of G ­ reat Britain (1756) sees the French settlements in North Amer­i­ca as a provocation and a justification of war in defense of British trade, Rasselas takes a broader, more skeptical view of the global distribution of power. As Thomas Keymer remarks, “far from being ‘orientalist’ in the Saidian sense, one for whom lush new worlds w ­ ere alluring fair game, Johnson was notorious in the year of Rasselas—­ the ‘Year of Victories,’ in which the war turned decisively in Britain’s favour—as a prophet against empire, doggedly resistant to the opportunities for domination of the globe from Asia to Amer­i­ca that w ­ ere suddenly opening up.”134 In Rasselas, the journey through Abyssinia and Egypt undertaken by a group of inquiring, educated, and privileged young Africans (for the location of the action in Abyssinia makes the characters African) is conspicuously ­free of the  Orientalization—­and “othering”—of Eastern cultures that is indicative of George Anson’s (and Richard Walter’s) Voyage Round the World (1748) or Hastings’s severe methods of governing Bengal (1772–1785).135 In Imlac’s account of his travels through Syria, Palestine, and Ottoman territories (in chapters 8–12), he describes the shock of meeting ­people from western and northern Eu­rope, and he reflects on the discrepancy between Eu­ro­pean influence and power and the ways of his own African culture. Imlac is educated and well traveled, yet he is struck by the superiority of the West. But as Hawes points out,136 Johnson does not make Imlac explain this superiority in racial or essential terms but rather as a product of historical, technological, and commercial circumstances: “When I compared ­these men,” Imlac says, “with the natives of our own kingdom, and ­those that surround us, they appeared almost another order of beings. In their countries it is difficult to wish for any ­thing that may not be obtained: a thousand arts, of which we never heard, are continually labouring for their con­ve­nience and plea­sure; and what­ever their own climate has denied them is supplied by their commerce.”137 According to Imlac, knowledge ­will always trump ignorance, just as “man governs other animals” (Rasselas, 47), and thus the superiority of Western technology makes Westerners seem superior. James Watt in turn draws attention to the commercial associations of Imlac’s journey, which begins in the Gujarati port of Surat, the location of the East India

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Com­pany’s first trading post, established in 1608. “The specificity of this reference to Surat,” Watt argues, “solicits critical attention . . . ​since it suggestively connects Imlac’s cosmopolitan past, along with the expedition he goes on to lead, to a larger commercial and colonial history.”138 That cosmopolitan perspective informs Imlac’s observation on the history of technology and affirms Johnson’s broad recognition of the importance of a commercial culture for intellectual refinement and advancement. Certainly, as a repre­sen­ta­tion of a mid-­eighteenth-­century Eu­ro­pean historical real­ity, Imlac’s explanation is unexceptional. One historical narrative of the development of East and West in relation to each other is indeed that of the growing dominance of Western technology and power and of an attendant claim to moral authority.139 This is Said’s Orientalism. However, this is not the ­whole of Johnson’s argument, nor does he rest on the “providential” explanation for Eu­ro­pean superiority that Nicholas Hudson implausibly finds to be the point of ­these sections of Rasselas.140 Instead, the logic of Johnson’s unfolding narrative in Rasselas deliberately questions ­every single-­ minded declaration and definitive historical judgment in the text in order to clear the way for a more pluralistic, comprehensive, flexible notion of what knowledge looks like in a world in which our existence depends on trade with our global neighbors. We are alerted thus to the dangers of thinking that Western technology, however power­ful and alluring, can solve all ­human prob­lems. Recollecting the terms Johnson used in the Highlands and in the moral essays to describe the benefits of a modern commercial society, he has Imlac articulate an especially stark contrast between East and West. In enumerating the par­tic­u­lar comforts of life we ­shall find many advantages on the side of the Eu­ro­pe­ans. They cure wounds and diseases with which we languish and perish. We suffer inclemencies of weather which they can obviate. They have engines for the dispatch of many laborious works, which we must perform by manual industry. T ­ here is such communication between distant places, that one friend can hardly be said to be absent from another. Their roads cut through their mountains, and bridges laid upon their rivers. And, if we descend to the privacies of life, their habitations are more commodious, and their possessions more secure. (Rasselas, 50) This view of the superiority of British technology could easily have been lifted from any of the accounts of the diplomats on the Macartney embassy to China in 1792– 1794. ­There may be some historical truth in the contrast Imlac draws. But in response to Rasselas’s expression of awe at Eu­ro­pean superiority, Imlac utters a crucial corrective: “The Eu­ro­pe­ans . . . ​are less unhappy than we, but they are not

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1650–1850 happy. ­Human life is ­every where a state in which much is to be endured, and ­little to be enjoyed” (Rasselas, 50). This utterance is impor­tant not so much for its positive content or its rhetorical flourish, for in itself it is l­ittle more than a Johnsonian commonplace, even a ruse. It is more impor­tant as a corrective invoking a longer historical perspective whose discursive function is felt beyond the confines of its moment in the unfolding narrative of Rasselas.141 In that perspective, the “Eu­ro­pe­ans” encounter disappointment; and despite all of the characters’ efforts to locate happiness in a single choice or place, they also encounter disappointment. In this discourse of disappointment, dismissive historical judgments—­such as the notion that the pyramids “seem to have been erected in compliance with that hunger of imagination which preys incessantly upon life” (Rasselas, 118)—­are exposed as a false (or at least a superficial) morality, an exceptionalism designed to benefit the arguer. Out of such easy, inadequate moral responses to the complexity of life—­“­Human life is e­ very where a state in which much is to be endured, and l­ittle to be enjoyed”—­Johnson develops a flexible idea of knowledge and responsibility that requires subjects to open themselves to the unknown and the foreign, a willingness to cultivate and understand o ­ thers, and the knowledge of the very in­de­pen­dence of the world and the ­peoples in it. “To know any ­thing [says Imlac] . . . ​we must know its effects; to see men we must see their works, that we may learn what reason has dictated, or passion has incited, and find what are the most power­ful motives of action. To judge rightly of the pres­ent we must oppose it to the past; for all judgment is comparative, and of the f­ uture nothing can be known” (Rasselas, 112). Read in this way, Rasselas reveals itself as a comparative, skeptical, liberal argument vis-­à-­vis its “Oriental” subject m ­ atter. Against the commercial preoccupations of British colonial enterprise and expansion in the 1750s, Rasselas is a reminder of the humanizing possibilities of commerce. For not only does Britain’s growing commercial empire enable superior technologies, but it also contributes vitally to the h ­ uman complexity of British society in its relations with its colonies and also with China.

Conclusion When Sir George Macartney is waiting for his embassy to depart from Canton in January 1794, he reflects on the failure to achieve his diplomatic aims—­the institution of a more liberal international trade agreement, the setting up of a perma-

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nent mission in Peking, scientific and cultural exchange—­and reasons about the Chinese as follows: The Chinese, it is true, are a singular p ­ eople, but they are men formed of the same materials and governed by the same passions as ourselves. They are jealous of foreigners; but are they jealous of us without reason? Is ­there any country on the globe that En­glishmen visit where they do not display that pride of themselves and that contempt of o ­ thers which conscious superiority is apt to inspire? Can the Chinese, one of the vainest nations in the world, and not the least acute, have been blind and insensible to this foible of ours? And is it not natu­ral for them to be discomposed and disgusted by it? But a better knowledge of the better parts of our character w ­ ill calm their disquiets, weaken their prejudices and wear away their ill-­impressions. (Embassy to China, 215) In finding a common character, if not a common purpose, with the Chinese in this reflection on h ­ uman weakness, Macartney attempts to place himself between the contending interests and the dif­fer­ent cultures. Occupying what Haun Saussy identifies as a third position, between more absolute attitudes in the West t­oward China that had occurred at vari­ous points in history,142 Macartney’s diplomacy and the intelligence of his writing in Narrative of an Embassy to China attempt to mediate, to translate between, the contending parties and pressure groups. Johnson was no diplomat, but his commentary on and engagements with China and its traces in British culture are characterized by a similar skeptical intelligence that sees Britain’s relationship with China in a comprehensive, historical perspective. What I have called Johnson’s aesthetics of re­sis­tance is a tool by which he attempts to leverage that perspective, to fill it with more reliable evidence than was readily forthcoming. For Voltaire and Montesquieu, China was a countercosmos to Eu­rope. Early appreciation of the Chinese script as an Adamic language, representing a linguistic ideal ­toward which the fallen modern languages had to strive, changed as philosophies of language and culture themselves changed, and China became subject to criticism and appropriation in the British imagination. As Saussy remarks, “China was no longer a high civilization with much to offer but a society seriously deficient in the virtues that the West saw itself as possessing. What had been the bountifulness of the Chinese language now appeared to be a lack.”143 Unlike Hegel, in whose philosophy of history China is a primitive civilization, less spiritually realized than Eu­ro­pean nations,144 Johnson never refers to China (or India for that ­matter) as existing in anything other than the same historical temporality as Britain. Although Johnson’s view of India’s social and po­liti­cal institutions

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1650–1850 ­ nder British rule prompted him to say that a despotic governor would suit that u country best and make for better government for Indians (Life, 4:213–214), t­ here is no suggestion in his writings and conversations that India does not partake of the same historical real­ity as Britain. In the case of China, cultural differences ­were real, but Johnson’s sense of the experiential distance between the two nations, like Macartney’s ­later in the ­century, does not mean that he does not seek commercial and cultural exchange with China. For with commerce came the circulation of ideas and knowledge and the benefits of social organ­ization and civilization that Johnson, Smith, and o ­ thers valued. It is precisely China’s difference that piques the enterprise for the inquiring Briton in the l­ater eigh­teenth c­ entury. Having struck a note of commonality with the Chinese, Macartney closes his extraordinary narrative by declaring the difficulty of knowing them: “Should any accident throw this Journal ­under the eyes of a stranger unacquainted with me and the country I am now quitting, he might possibly imagine that I had too much indulged myself in local description and po­liti­ cal conjecture. But nothing could be more fallacious than to judge of China by any Eu­ro­pean standard” (Embassy to China, 219). Johnson, for his part, is aware of the gulf between China and Eu­rope that runs through Macartney’s narrative, and he attempts to negotiate it in his own way. But, as David Porter says, “China, as a construct of the Western imagination, has always been colored by the historical situation of its observers.”145 And not having any clearly developed anthropological and historical grounds on which to “judge of China,” grounds that are not “fallacious,” Johnson’s skeptical re­sis­tance to idealized images of the Orient recognizes both how foreign China feels to him and his contemporaries and how necessary it is as a source of imaginative stimulation and commercial transaction. Certainly, Johnson has a lot invested in the notion of national greatness, and his support for empire is real, but not at any cost; and Rasselas is a wake-up call from the dream of empire, even before the imperial proj­ ect has fully got ­under way. As we know, the ground note of Johnson’s analy­sis of ­human enterprise, including politics and economics, is moral and historical. It looks to the end of t­ hings (to consequences and to time) in order to frame and narrativized the “heroic” aspirations of Alexander, Caesar, Catiline, Xerxes, Swedish Charles, Peter the ­Great, and the modern perpetrators of imperialist expansion—­all of whom Johnson “would wish . . . ​huddled together in obscurity and detestation” (Adventurer no. 99, 435). Thus, like Macartney again, Johnson’s subject position in ­these “Oriental” discourses is not aloof or judgmental but h ­ uman, implicating

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himself in the imperfections of his own perception and the incompleteness of his own knowledge. Ironically, in one way Johnson’s life reflects the presence of China as it affected the lives of many p ­ eople in eighteenth-­century E ­ ngland. Two Chinese products ­were essential to his personal needs: tea and opium. The place of tea in Johnson’s social routine is well known; but the use of opium in the management of his health and his consciousness, especially ­toward the end of his life, is seldom noticed. Modern biographers and critics have not yet assimilated what Hawkins has to tell us about how impor­tant opium was to Johnson. The general miseries of life (“sickness, sorrow, and want”), Hawkins writes, account for the general use of narcotics in all parts of the world, as, in the east, and southern countries, opium; in the west, and northern, spirituous liquors and tobacco. . . . ​To the use of the former of ­these, himself had a strong propensity, which increased as he advanced in years; his first inducement to it was, relief against watchfulness, but when it became habitual, it was the means of positive plea­sure, and as such was resorted to by him whenever any depression of spirits made it necessary. His practice was, to take it in substance, that is to say, half a grain levigated with a spoon against the side of a cup half full of some liquid, which, as a vehicle, carried it down.146 What­ever Johnson’s opium use may come to mean for our understanding of his life, at pres­ent it simply serves to suggest a link to yet a further and darker dimension of Chinese experience—­one that becomes much more impor­tant for Sino-­British relations in the fifty years ­after Johnson’s death—­and it serves too to round out a consideration of Johnson’s surprisingly diverse and extensive thinking about China. China clearly touched Samuel Johnson’s life and mind at vari­ous points. Though Johnson’s enlightened Orientalism is unsystematic and modest in its explicit claims, it is a useful corrective to chinoiserie—an intellectual and consumer fashion that appropriates images of China as part of an Anglicized cultural aesthetics—­but it also thoughtfully engages with issues in literary history and politics in which China, the Orient, and the growing British empire are impor­tant.

Notes The research for this chapter has been facilitated by a fellowship from the James Smith Noel Foundation at Louisiana State University, Shreveport, in the summer of 2012, for work in the Noel Collection, as well as a semester’s sabbatical from Bucknell University in 2013, for both of which I am grateful. The work and conversation of my

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1650–1850 former student W. Kang Tchou have—­while a master’s student at Bucknell and then a doctoral student at St.  Catherine’s College, Cambridge (my old college)—­informed and stimulated my own arguments in this chapter and elsewhere. Kang included me in a conference on new directions in the humanities that he or­g a­nized in Beijing in 2009 for Common Ground; he brought an enchantingly fresh perspective to the conjunction of Johnson and China at the tercentenary conference at Pembroke College, Oxford, in the same year; and in general he has taught me much about China during the Qing dynasty. 1. ​Paul  J. Korshin, “ ‘Johnson and . . .’: Conceptions of Literary Relationship,” in Greene Centennial Studies: Essays Presented to Donald Greene in the Centennial Year of the University of Southern California, ed. Paul J. Korshin and Robert R. Allen (Charlottesville: University of ­Virginia Press, 1984), 288–306. 2. ​Jack Lynch, ed., Samuel Johnson in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 3. ​James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LLD, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–1950), 3:269 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Life, by volume and page number). 4. ​Fan Tsen-­Chung, “Dr. Johnson and Chinese Culture,” in The Vision of China in the En­glish Lit­er­a­ture of the Seventeenth and Eigh­teenth Centuries, ed. Adrian Hsia (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1998), 263–282. This article was a lecture delivered to the China Society, London, on December  15, 1944, and published in the Quarterly Bulletin of Chinese Bibliography 5 (1945): 1–17. 5. ​David Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-­Century E ­ ngland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 4. 6. ​Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 3. 7. ​ See, for example, Kumkum Chatterjee and Clement Hawes, eds., Eu­rope Observed: Multiple Gazes in Early Modern Encounters (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2008); Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Matar, Turks, Moors, and En­glishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Gerald MacLean, Looking East: En­glish Writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Ziad Elmarsafy, The Enlightenment Qur’an: The Politics of Translation and the Construction of Islam (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009); and Humberto Garcia, Islam and the En­glish Enlightenment, 1670–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). 8. ​Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 4. 9. ​Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism, 8. 10. ​Clement Hawes, The British Eigh­teenth ­Century and Global Critique (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), esp. chaps. 1, 2, and 7. 11. ​See especially Robert Markley, The Far East and the En­glish Imagination, 1600– 1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); David Porter, Ideographia:

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The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Eu­rope (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Porter, Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-­Century E ­ ngland; Chi-­ming Yang, Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-­Century ­England, 1660–1760 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); and Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins, A Taste for China: En­glish Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). For an informative older (1941) survey, see Ch’ien Chung-­Shu, “China in the En­glish Lit­er­a­ture of the Eigh­ teenth C ­ entury,” in Hsia, The Vision of China, 117–213. 12. ​Samuel Johnson, The Poems of Samuel Johnson, ed. David Nichol Smith and Edward L. McAdam, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 115, ll. 1–2; emphasis in the original (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Poems, by page and line number). 13. ​Samuel Johnson, A Journey into North Wales in the Year 1774, in Life, 5:456. Unlike the Thrales, he did not buy a set of En­glish china ­because it was too expensive: he wrote to Hester Thrale in 1777, “The Derby China is very pretty, but I think the gilding is all superficial, and the finer pieces are so dear, that perhaps the silver vessels of the same capacity may be sometimes bought at the same price, and I am not yet so infected with the contagion of Chinafancy, as to like any t­ hing at that rate, which can so easily be broken.” In The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bruce Redford, 5 vols. (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1992–1994), 3:70–71 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Letters, by volume and page number). 14. ​An image of Johnson’s china teapot may be seen on the website of Dr. Johnson’s House, London, http://­w ww​.­drjohnsonshouse​.­org ​/­, and on its Facebook page, https://­w ww​.­facebook​.­com​/­drjohnsonshouse​/­. For the craze for china in Johnson’s social world, see Lars Tharp, “ ‘The Contagion of China-­Fancy’: Ceramics in ­England up to the Time of Johnson,” in Tea and Coffee in the Age of Dr. Johnson, ed. Stephanie Pickford (London: Dr. Johnson’s House Trust, 2008), 31. 15. ​The History of Tahmas Kuli, Khan, Shah, or Sophi of Persia Extracted from the French (London, 1740), attributed to Johnson by Frederick V. Bernard in “The History of Nadir Shah: A New Attribution to Johnson,” British Museum Quarterly 34, nos. 3–4 (1970): 92–104. 16. ​Amiya Bhushan Sharma, “Samuel Johnson’s Image of India,” Age of Johnson 15 (2004): 121–139; Thomas M. Curley, “In Memory of Johnson and India,” chap. 10 in Sir Robert Chambers: Law, Lit­er­a­ture, and Empire in the Age of Johnson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 369–400. 17. ​In this letter, Johnson recalls Hastings’s abortive effort to establish a chair of Persian at the University of Oxford, for which he sought Johnson’s assistance in 1766; see Letters, 2:136n9; and Curley, Sir Robert Chambers, 380. In an essay on Hastings, Thomas Macaulay writes, “An endowment was expected from the munificence of the Com­pany [the East India Com­pany]; and professors thoroughly competent to interpret Hafiz and Ferdusi w ­ ere to be engaged in the East. Hastings

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1650–1850 called on Johnson, with the hope, as it should seem, of in­ter­est­ing in this proj­ect a man who enjoyed the highest literary reputation, and who was particularly connected with Oxford. The interview appears to have left on Johnson’s mind a most favourable impression of the talents and attainments of his visitor. Long ­after, when Hastings was ruling the im­mense population of British India, the old phi­los­o­pher wrote to him, and referred in the most courtly terms, though with ­great dignity, to their short but agreeable intercourse” (Macaulay’s Essays, ed. Hugh R. Trevor-­Roper [London: Collins, 1965], 408–409). 18. ​Samuel Johnson, Samuel Johnson’s Prefaces and Dedications, ed. Allen T. Hazen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937), 170–171 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Prefaces and Dedications, by page number). 19. ​See Thomas M. Curley, Samuel Johnson and the Age of Travel (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976), esp. chap. 7, “The End of a Journey,” 220–252. 20. ​G. B. Hill compiles a list of passages from Johnson’s conversation to challenge Macaulay’s contention that Johnson had no interest in travel. See appendix B in Life, 3:449–460. 21. ​Samuel Johnson, The Idler and The Adventurer, ed. W. J. Bate, John M. Bullitt, and L. F. Powell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 298 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as e­ ither Idler or Adventurer, by issue and page number). 22. ​Paula McDowell, “Travel,” in Lynch, Samuel Johnson in Context, 383. 23. ​Chinese Whispers: Chinoiserie in Britain 1650–1930 (Brighton, UK: Royal Pavilion and Museum, 2008), 13. The scholarship on chinoiserie in Britain is prodigious, but Chinese Whispers is an accessible and informative account, produced from an exhibition at the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery and the Royal Pavilion, May 3–­November 2, 2008. 24. ​Porter, Ideographia, 134–135. 25. ​See R. Po-­chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci 1552–1610 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), esp. chap. 10, “The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven,” 224–244. 26. ​See Elizabeth Hope Chang, “Garden,” chap. 1 in Britain’s Chinese Eye: Lit­er­a­ture, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-­Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 23–70. 27. ​See Jenkins, “The Chinese Touchstone of the Imagination,” chap. 2 in A Taste for China, 66–103. 28. ​David Porter, “Eighteenth-­Century Fashion and the Aesthetics of the Chinese Taste,” in Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-­Century E ­ ngland, 20. 29. ​Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World; Or, Letters from a Chinese Phi­los­o­pher residing in London to his Friends in the East (1762; repr., London: Folio Society, 1969), 111 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Citizen, by page number). 30. ​Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, ed. and trans. Theodore Besterman (London: Penguin Books, 1988), 115. See also David E. Mungello, The ­Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 91.

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31. ​Michael Griffin, Enlightenment in Ruins: The Geographies of Oliver Goldsmith (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013), 91; and see 92–112 for Griffin’s full discussion of the politics of Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World in relation to China. See also Jenkins, “How Chinese ­Things Became Oriental,” chap. 5  in A Taste for China, 147–187. 32. ​See, for example, Thomas M. Curley, Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud, and the Celtic Revival in ­Great Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Nick Groom, Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture (London: Macmillan, 1999). 33. ​Yang, Performing China, 94. According to Yang, “Psalmanazar challenged the very possibility of verifying the characteristics of an unseen place through textual proof alone” (95), and his performativity “displaced the quality of inconsistency onto the East itself” (97). See also Michael Keevak, The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar’s Eighteenth-­ Century Formosan Hoax (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004); and Jack Lynch, “Forgery as Per­for­mance Art: The Strange Case of George Psalmanazar,” 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 11 (2005): 21–35. 34. ​Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Prob­lems in the Containment of Repre­sen­ta­ tion (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 55. 35. ​See Ralph Rader, “Literary Form in Factual Narrative: The Example of Boswell’s Johnson,” in Boswell’s “Life of Johnson”: New Questions, New Answers, ed. John A. Vance (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 25–52. On the relationship between evidence, narrative, and historical truth, see Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-­Century E ­ ngland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Jack Lynch, Deception and Detection in Eighteenth- ­Century Britain (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 53–70; Greg Clingham, “Chatterton, Ackroyd, and the Fiction of Eighteenth-­Century Historiography,” in Making History: Textuality and the Forms of Eighteenth-­Century Culture, ed. Clingham (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1998), 35–58; and Clingham, “Introduction: The Question of History and Eighteenth-­Century Studies,” in Questioning History: The Postmodern Turn to the Eigh­ teenth ­Century, ed. Clingham (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1998), 11–20. 36. ​Lynch, Deception and Detection, 145–148. 37. ​Lynch, Deception and Detection, 147. 38. ​Michael Keevak, “Johnson’s Psalmanazar,” Age of Johnson 15 (2004): 97–120. 39. ​Keevak, “Johnson’s Psalmanazar,” 110. 40. ​Sir John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D., ed. O. M. Brack Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 329. 41. ​Sir John Hawkins, “Apophthegms, Sentiments, Opinions, & Occasional Reflections,” in Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), 2:12. Robert Adams Day discusses the importance of Psalmanazar’s and Johnson’s both owing their religious conversion to William Law’s

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1650–1850 Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life; see “Psalmanazar’s ‘Formosa,’ ” in Exoticism in the Enlightenment, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 214. 42. ​Hawkins, “Apophthegms,” 2:13. 43. ​See Linda L. Barnes, ­Needles, Herbs, Gods, and Ghosts: China, Healing, and the West to 1848 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 143–144. 44. ​Pat Rogers, Johnson and Boswell: The Transit of Caledonia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 96. For Reynolds’s portrait of Omai, see Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity, ed. Martin Postle (London: Tate Publishing, 2005), 218–219. 45. ​See also Hester Thrale’s admiration of Omai: “Baretti was obliged to admit that, when Johnson died, they ­were not on speaking terms. His explanation is that Johnson irritated him by an allusion to his being beaten by Omai, the Sandwich islander, at chess.” Her marginal note on Omai is, “When Omai played at chess and at backgammon with Baretti, every­body admired at the savage’s good breeding and at the Eu­ro­pe­an’s impatient spirit”; Hester Lynch Piozzi (Thrale), Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale), ed. A. Hayward, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1861), 1:171. See also the following from Hester Thrale: “Somebody observed when he [Baretti] play’d at Chess with Omiah, You would [have] thought Omai the Christian, and Baretti the Savage”; Hester Lynch Piozzi (Thrale), Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale (­Later Mrs. Piozzi), 1776–1809, ed. Katharine C. Balderston, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), 1:48. Fanny Burney concurs with Johnson and Thrale. She unfavorably compared that “pedantic Booby” “Mr Stanhope, trained by his natu­ ral f­ ather, Lord Chesterfield, to comply with the manners of polite society,” with the natu­ral grace of Omai, who “appears in a new world like a man [who] all his life studied the Graces”: “I think this shews how much more Nature can do without art, than art with all her refinement, unassisted by Nature” (The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, vol. 2, 1774–1777, ed. Lars E. Troide [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990], 63). 46. ​See “Omai,” Wikipedia, last edited March  3, 2018, http://­en​.­wikipedia ​.­org ​/ ­wiki​ /­Omai. 47. ​The portrait may be seen in room 12 of the National Portrait Gallery, London, but the image is unavailable on the gallery’s website due to copyright reasons; National Portrait Gallery, “Chitqua (Tan- ­Che- ­Q ua),” https://­w ww​.­npg​.­org​.­uk​ /­collections​ /­s earch​ /­p ortrait ​ /­m w277978​ /­C hitqua​ -­Tan- ­C he​ - ­Q ua​ ?­L inkID ​ = ­m p​ 04412&role​=­sit&rNo​=­3 (accessed March 27, 2018). 48. ​See The Academicians of the Royal Acad­emy (1771–1772), at Royal Collection Trust, https://­w ww​.­royalcollection​.­org​.­uk ​/­collection​/­400747​/­the​-­academicians​-­of​ -­the​-­royal​-­academy (accessed April 8, 2018). 49. ​Emile de Bruijn, “An 18th-­Century Ornamental Adventurer: The Enigmatic and Ambiguous Portrait of Huang Ya Dong at Knole,” Arts, Buildings, Collections Bulletin (National Trust), Summer 2011, 10–11, http://­www​.­nationaltrustcollections​.­org​

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.­uk​/­object​/­129924 (accessed March 27, 2018). See also Michael M. Keevak, Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2011), 66–67; and Seng Ong, “Wang Y Tong,” Old Sennockian Newsletter, Easter 2006, 17. The Orientalist aspects of Reynolds’s painting of Huang have occasioned extensive conversation in the blogosphere; see, for example, “A Chinese Celebrity at Knole,” Trea­sure Hunt National Trust Collections, May 13, 2011, http://­ nttreasurehunt​.­wordpress​.­com​/­2011​/­05​/­13​/­a​-­chinese​-­celebrity​-­at​-­knole​/­. 50. ​Ong, “Wang Y Tong,” 17. 51. ​Richard Wendorf, Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Painter in Society (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1996), 131–132. See also Derek Hudson, Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Personal Study (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1958), 85, 161. 52. ​Joseph Farrington, Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1819), with an introduction by Martin Postle (London: Pallas Athene, 2005), 87, 63. 53. ​Jonathan D. Spence, The Question of Hu (New York: Vintage Books, 1988). But see Ronnie Po-­chia Hsia, “The Question of Who: Chinese in Eu­rope,” in Chatterjee and Hawes, Eu­rope Observed, 83–102. 54. ​Quoted by David Clarke, Chinese Art and its Encounter with the West (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011), 82. For Huang in London, see also Peter Kitson, “ ‘ The Kindness of My Friends in E ­ ngland’: Chinese Visitors to Britain in the Late Eigh­teenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries and Discourses of Friendship and Estrangement,” Eu­ro­pean Romantic Review 27, no. 1 (2016): 55–70. 55. ​T. C. Fan, “Sir William Jones’s Chinese Studies,” in Hsia, The Vision of China, 330; Michael J. Franklin, Orientalist Jones: Sir William Jones, Poet, ­Lawyer, and Linguist, 1746–1794 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 21. 56. ​Markley, The Far East and the En­glish Imagination, 3. 57. ​Fan Tsen-­Chung, “Dr. Johnson and Chinese Culture,” 265. 58. ​Samuel Johnson, “ ‘Eubulus’ on Chinese and En­glish Manners,” in Samuel Johnson: Po­liti­cal Writings, ed. Donald J. Greene (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 15 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Po­liti­cal Writings, by page number). 59. ​­These quotations all taken from Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the En­glish Language, 2 vols. (London, 1755). 60. ​Samuel Johnson, preface to A Voyage to Abyssinia, by Jerome Lobo (1735), ed. Joel J. Gold (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 3. 61. ​See John Harris, Sir William Chambers: Knight of the Polar Star (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1970); Harris, “Sir William Chamber and Kew Gardens,” in Sir William Chambers: Architect to George III, ed. John Harris and Michael Snodin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; London: Courtauld Institute, 1996), 55–67. 62. ​See David Porter, “Cross-­Cultural Aesthetics in William Chambers’ Chinese Garden,” in Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-­Century ­England, 37–54; and Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye, 28–37. For Chambers’s place in the history of eighteenth-­century

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1650–1850 landscape gardening, see John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis, eds., The Genius of the Place: The En­glish Landscape Garden, 1620–1820 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988). 63. ​William Chambers, Designs of Chinese Buildings (1757), in Hunt and Willis, Genius of the Place, 284. 64. ​Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism, ll. 297–298, in Poetical Works, ed. Herbert Davis (London: Oxford University Press, 1967). 65. ​Chambers, Designs of Chinese Buildings, 63. 66. ​Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye, 32. 67. ​On May 29, 1792, Chambers wrote to Boswell, “I have looked over my part of the preface, and think it mediocre enough, notwithstanding Johnsons approbation. You ­will see at once where he left off, and where I begun. . . . ​If You mean to put it among his Works in Your publication, You must do me the Justice to say that I my Self pointed it out to you, and mentioned it as his”; in Boswell, The Correspondence and Other Papers of James Boswell Relating to the Making of the “Life of Johnson,” 2nd ed., ed. Marshall Waingrow (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 373. 68. ​Henry Dundas to George Macartney, July 1792, Wason Collection, Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; “Original manuscripts, papers, and letters relating to Macartney’s mission to China, 1792–1794,” bound for the Private Library of Charles W. Wason, 10 vols. (Cleveland, 1917), doc. 4, fol. 155, 3v. 69. ​Sir George Macartney, An Embassy to China Being the Journal Kept by Lord Macartney during his Embassy to the Emperor Ch’ien-­lung, 1793–1794, ed. J. L. Cranmer-­Byng (London: Longmans, Green, 1962), 125–126 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Embassy to China, by page number). Macartney refers to landscape designers Capability Brown (1716–1783) and Charles Hamilton (1704–1786). 70. ​Jean Denis Attiret (1702–1768) was a French missionary employed by the Chinese emperor to paint the apartments in the plea­sure garden at Yuan ming Yuan. His letter on Chinese gardening was translated by Joseph Spence as A Par­tic­u­lar Account of the Emperor of China’s Gardens near Pekin (London, 1752) and was l­ater printed in French in Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, 24 vols. (Paris, 1780–1782), 22:490. 71. ​Walpole remarks in his note to Mason’s preface, “Sir William Chambers, who was far from wanting Taste in Architecture, fell into the m ­ istake of the French, who suppose that the Chinese had discovered the true style in Gardens long before Kent; and in order to deprive Him and ­England of the Honour of originality, the French call our style the Anglo-­chinois Garden: whereas the Chinese wander as far from nature as the French themselves, tho in opposite extremes. . . . ​The imitation of Nature in Gardens is indisputably En­glish”; Satirical Poems Published Anonymously by William Mason with Notes by Horace Walpole, ed. Paget Toynbee (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), 42.

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72. ​Yu Liu argues that Macartney’s descriptions of Jehol recognize the princi­ple of irregularity as commonly shared by both En­glish and Chinese garden designers and that in d ­ oing so Macartney takes up a m ­ iddle, ameliorating position in the debate between Horace Walpole and William Chambers about British taste and Oriental aesthetics; see Seeds of a Dif­fer­ent Eden: Chinese Gardening Ideas and a New En­glish Aesthetic Ideal (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008), 6–20. On Chambers’s discursive intelligence, see David Porter, “Beyond the Bounds of Truth: Cultural Translation and William Chambers’s Chinese Garden,” Mosaic 37, no. 2 (2004): 41–58. 73. ​See Greg Clingham, “Cultural Difference in George Macartney’s An Embassy to China, 1792–94,” Eighteenth- ­Century Life 39, no. 2 (2015): 1–29. 74. ​Gentleman’s Magazine 12 (1742): 353–357. The work has now been edited for volume 19 of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson: Biographical Writings: Soldiers, Scholars, and Friends, ed. O.  M. Brack  Jr. and Robert DeMaria  Jr. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 220–229 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Biographical Writings, by page number). For Johnson and Du Halde’s life of Confucius, see Tsen-­Chung, “Dr.  Johnson and Chinese Culture,” 271–274, and esp. the headnote to the Yale edition just mentioned (220–222). 75. ​For the culturally multivalent way in which Confucius was understood in the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries, starting with the Jesuits Matteo Ricci and Michele Ruggieri, see Lionel  M. Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), esp. 31–147. 76. ​Quoted in Jonathan D. Spence, The Chan’s ­Great Continent: China in Western Minds (New York: Norton, 1999), 85. See also Spence, “­Matters of Enlightenment,” chap. 5 in Chan’s G ­ reat Continent, 81–100; and David E. Mungello, Leibniz and Confucianism: The Search for Accord (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii Press, 1977). 77. ​Oliver Goldsmith, The Collected Letters of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Katharine C. Balderston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), 40. 78. ​See Frances Mannsåker, “Elegancy and Wildness: Reflections of the East in the Eighteenth-­Century Imagination,” in Rousseau and Porter, Exoticism in the Enlightenment, 183–185 in par­tic­u­lar and 175–196 in general. 79. ​Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in E ­ ngland 1662–1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 11 (and 1–17 for narrative function in the Arabian Nights). For the story of Sheherezade’s storytelling, see Andrei Codrescu, What­ ever Gets You through the Night: A Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2011). 80. ​Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism, 17. 81. ​Chi-­ming Yang, “Gross Metempsychosis and Eastern Soul,” in ­Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-­Century British Culture, ed. Frank Palmeri (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 24.

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1650–1850 82. ​See Greg Clingham, “Translation and Memory in the Lives of the Poets,” chap. 5 in Johnson, Writing, and Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 122–157. 83. ​The full title of Denham’s poem is “On Mr. Abraham Cowley His Death and Burial amongst the Ancient Poets.” The added lines are not pres­ent in all posthumous editions of Cowley’s works. For example, they are not pres­ent in the 1688 folio or in the 1707 12mo edition of the Works. The full passage in which the lines appear is quoted ­here from John Denham, Poems and Translations with the Sophy (London, 1703): My Muse her Song had ended ­here, But both their Genii strait appear, Joy and amazement her did strike, Two Twins she never saw so like. ’Twas taught by wise Pythagoras One Soul might through more Bodies pass Seeing such Transmigration t­ here. She thought it not a Fable ­here, Such resemblance of all parts, Life, Death, Age, Fortune, Nature, Arts, Then lights her Torch at theirs, to tell, And shew the World this Parralel, Fixt and Contemplative their looks, Still turning over Natures Books. (89–90) Roger Lonsdale notes that in writing the Life of Cowley Johnson used the 1668 edition of The Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley, which contained the life of Cowley by Thomas Sprat. Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent En­glish Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works, 4 vols., ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1:307 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Lives, by volume and page number). Memoranda on blank leaves of a 1681 12mo edition of Cowley’s Works indicate that Johnson also consulted this edition in writing Cowley’s life; see J. D. Fleeman, A Preliminary Handlist of Copies of Books Associated with Dr.  Samuel Johnson (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1984), 13, entry no. 48. At the time of Johnson’s death, his library also contained a copy of Abrahami Couleij angli poemata Latina (London, 1668), Cowley’s Latin verse edited by Sprat; see Donald Greene, Samuel Johnson’s Library: An Annotated Guide (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria En­glish Literary Studies, 1975), 51. 84. ​For Dryden and Ovid, see David Hopkins, “Translation, Metempsychosis, and the Flux of Nature: Of the Pythagorean Philosophy,” in Dryden and the World of Neoclassicism, ed. Wolfgang Görtschacher and Holger Klein (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 2001), 145–154; Cedric D. Reverand II, Dryden’s Final Poetic Mode: The Fables (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 164–184; and for Johnson, Dryden, and Ovid, see Greg Clingham, “Another and the Same: John-

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son’s Dryden,” in Literary Transmission and Authority: Dryden and Other Writers, ed. Jennifer Brady and Earl Miner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 121–159. 85. ​Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, 3 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969), 1:20 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Rambler, by volume and page number). 86. ​Johnson’s comments on Lycidas have attracted extensive commentary, but see particularly Warren Fleischauer, “Johnson, Lycidas and the Norms of Criticism,” in Johnsonian Studies, ed. Magdi Wahba (Cairo, 1962), 235–256; and James L. Battersby, Rational Praise and Natu­r al Lamentation: Johnson, “Lycidas,” and the Princi­ples of Criticism (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980), chap. 6. 87. ​See G. F. Parker, Johnson’s Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 18–34. 88. ​The attribution was accepted for 165 years and supported in J. D. Fleeman’s A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 1:323–333, but it has been convincingly challenged by Norbert Schürer in his edition of Charlotte Lennox: Correspondence and Miscellaneous Documents (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2012): “the first eleven items of correspondence collected ­here between Richardson, Johnson, and Lennox specifically concerning the publication of FQ (only six of which ­were known to Isles and the editors of the Oxford edition of FQ) prove beyond doubt that Lennox did indeed write the chapter herself” (xxxiii). The letters in question are on pages 3–33 of Schürer’s edition. The attribution was originally made by Rev. John Mitford in the Gentleman’s Magazine, n.s., 20 (1843): 132; and n.s., 21 (1844): 42. See Duncan Isles, “Johnson and Charlotte Lennox,” New Rambler 3 (June  1967): 34–48; and his appendix to the World Classics edition: Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote, ed. Margaret Dalziel, intro. Margaret Anne Doody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 419–422. See also Carey McIntosh, The Choice of Life: Samuel Johnson and the World of Fiction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), 14–23. Critics have used Johnson’s pos­si­ble coauthorship to attack his supposed patriarchal attitude t­ oward fiction; see, e.g., Doody’s introduction to the edition above (xi–­x xii); and Patricia Meyer Spacks, Desire and Truth: Fictions of Plot in Eighteenth-­Century En­glish Novels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 20–24. 89. ​Lennox, The Female Quixote, 376. 90. ​Lennox, The Female Quixote, 377. 91. ​See Eithne Henson, “The Fictions of Romantick Chivalry”: Samuel Johnson and Romance (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992). 92. ​In a letter of March 6, 1787, Percy identifies the visit as taking place in “the Summer of 1764,” but Boswell omits the date in the Life; see Boswell, Correspondence and Other Papers . . . ​Relating to the Making of the “Life of Johnson,” 161. For a full discussion of Johnson’s visit to Percy, see Bertram H. Davis, “Johnson’s 1764

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1650–1850 Visit to Percy,” in Johnson ­after Two Hundred Years, ed. Paul J. Korshin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 25–41. 93. ​For the bibliography of Johnson’s involvement with Percy’s Reliques and his authorship of the dedication, see Prefaces and Dedications, 158–168. For the biographical and literary contexts of the association between Johnson and Percy, see Bertram H. Davis, Thomas Percy: A Scholar-­Cleric in the Age of Johnson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), esp. 120–127; and Nick Groom, The Making of Percy’s Reliques (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), esp. 220–224. 94. ​Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient Poetry, ed. Robert Aris Willmott (London: George Rutledge and Sons, 1865), xliii. 95. ​Percy, Reliques of Ancient Poetry, xxxviii. 96. ​Boswell notes that Johnson “wrote a very ­great number of Dedications for ­others. . . . ​It was indifferent to him what was the subject of the work dedicated, provided it w ­ ere innocent” (Life, 2:1–2). 97. ​David Porter, “Thomas Percy’s Sinology and the Origins of En­glish Romanticism,” in Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-­Century ­England, 154–183; Eun Kyung Min, “Thomas Percy’s Chinese Miscellanies and the Reliques of Ancient En­g lish Poetry (1765),” Eighteenth- ­Century Studies 43, no.  3 (2010): 307–324. My brief comments on Percy’s China work rely on the findings of Porter and Min. See also Che’ên Shou-yi, “Thomas Percy and His Chinese Studies,” in Hsia, The Vision of China, 301–324. For Johnson’s collaboration with Percy on the Reliques in the context of the Ossian controversy, see Curley, Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud, 64–72. 98. ​Min, “Thomas Percy’s Chinese Miscellanies,” 311. 99. ​Min, “Thomas Percy’s Chinese Miscellanies,” 315. 100. ​Min, “Thomas Percy’s Chinese Miscellanies,” 316. 101. ​Samuel Johnson, preface to the Dictionary, in Johnson on the En­glish Language, ed. Gwin J. Kolb and Robert DeMaria Jr. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 95 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as JEL, by page number). 102. ​See Robert Markley, Fallen Languages: Crises of Repre­sen­ta­tion in Newtonian ­England, 1660–1740 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), esp. chap. 2, “ ‘Babel Revers’d’: Real Characters, Philosophical Languages, and Idealizations of Order,” 63–94; and Richard W. F. Kroll, The Material Word: Literate Culture in the Restoration and Early Eigh­teenth C ­ entury (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). 103. ​John Webb, Historical Essay Endeavouring a Probability that the Language of the Empire of China is the Primitive Language (London, 1669), 189–190. 104. ​See Porter, Ideographia, 9; and Ch’en Shou-yi, “John Webb: A Forgotten Page in the Early History of Sinology in Eu­rope,” in Hsia, The Vision of China, 87–114. 105. ​See, for example, Robert DeMaria Jr., Johnson’s Dictionary and the Language of Learning (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), chaps. 6 and 7;

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and Jack Lynch, The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 103–105, 110–114. 106. ​Daniel Defoe, A General History of Trade, and Especially Consider’d as it Re­spects the British Commerce, As well at Home, as to all Parts of the World (London, 1713), 24. 107. ​For the eighteenth-­century China trade, see, for example, H. N. Morse, Britain and the China Trade, 1635–1842, 2 vols. (1926; repr., London: Routledge, 2000), esp. vol. 2; D. E. Mungello, The ­Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 1–12; and Jonathan  D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: Norton, 1990), 117–123. The trade between China and Eu­ro­pean countries in Canton in the late eighteenth-­and early nineteenth-­centuries is recorded in many paintings by the En­glish artist George Chinnery. See Patrick Conner, George Chinnery, 1774–1852: Artist of India and the China Coast (Woodbridge, UK: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1993). 108. ​Jonas Hanway, A Journal of Eight Days Journey from Portsmouth to Kingston Upon Thames . . . ​To which is Added, An Essay on Tea (London, 1756), 243. For a discussion of Hanway’s essay (and Johnson’s review) in the context of national identity, opium, and taste, see Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins, “Tea and the Limits of Orientalism in De Quincey’s Confessions of an En­glish Opium-­Eater,” in Writing China: Essays on the Amherst Embassy (1816) and Sino-­British Cultural Relations, ed. Peter J. Kitson and Robert Markley (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016), 105–131; and Jenkins, A Taste for China, 153–158. 109. ​Samuel Johnson, “Review of A Journal of Eight Days Journey . . . ​and An Essay on Tea” (1757), in Samuel Johnson: The Oxford Authors, ed. Donald Greene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 509. Johnson thought well of Hanway’s own travel work, Historical Account of the British Trade over the Caspian Sea with a Journal of Travels from London through Rus­sia into Persia (1753). He told Boswell, “Jonas . . . ​acquired some reputation by travelling abroad but lost it by travelling at home” (Life, 2:122). 110. ​Jenkins, A Taste for China, 158. 111. ​Donald J. Greene, The Politics of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960), 237. 112. ​Nicholas Hudson, Samuel Johnson and the Making of Modern E ­ ngland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 206. 113. ​The scholarship on Johnson and the idea of greatness is large, but see Isobel Grundy, Samuel Johnson and the Scale of Greatness (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1986). 114. ​Hudson, Samuel Johnson, 208–209. 115. ​Aaron Stavisky, “Samuel Johnson and the Market Economy,” Age of Johnson 13 (2002): 86. 116. ​Greene, Politics of Samuel Johnson, 237.

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1650–1850 117. ​John Cannon, Samuel Johnson and the Politics of Hanoverian E ­ ngland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 171. 118. ​John H. Middendorf, “Johnson on Wealth and Commerce,” in Johnson, Boswell and Their Circle: Essays Presented to Lawrence Fitzroy Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 57. 119. ​For the place of trade in the development of a national lit­er­a­ture in the eigh­ teenth ­century, see Howard D. Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Lit­er­a­ture from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 257–275. 120. ​Joseph Addison, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 1:428 (hereafter cited as Spectator, by volume and page number). 121. ​David Hume, “Of Commerce,” in Essays Moral, Po­liti­cal, and Literary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 270. 122. ​For the China trade, taking into consideration the China journals of George Macartney, George Staunton, John Barrow, and Henry Ellis—­members of the Macartney (1792–1794) and the Amherst (1816) embassies—­see Porter, Ideographia, chap. 4, “Commercialist Legitimacy and the China Trade”; Peter J. Kitson, “The Dark Gift: Opium, John Francis Davis, Thomas De Quincey, and the Amherst Embassy to China of 1816,” in Kitson and Markley, Writing China, 56–82; and Robert Markley, “The Amherst Embassy in the Shadow of Tambora: Climate and Culture, 1816,” in Kitson and Markley, Writing China, 83–104. 123. ​Hume, “Of Commerce,” 270. 124. ​Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and C ­ auses of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R.  H. Campbell, A.  S. Skinner, and W.  B. Todd, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 1:379, 495 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Wealth of Nations, by volume and page number). 125. ​Samuel Johnson, Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo, 2 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), 1:66. 126. ​Johnson, “Review of A Journal of Eight Days Journey,” 515–516. 127. ​For the story of tea in eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century E ­ ngland, see Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton, and Matthew Mauger, Empire of Tea: The Asian Leaf That Conquered the World (London: Reaktion Books, 2015); and Sarah Rose, For All the Tea in China: How ­England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History (New York: Penguin, 2010). For the history of the use of sugar in tea, see Sidney  W. Mintz, “Consumption,” chap. 3  in Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985). For Johnson’s use of milk and sugar in his tea, see Elizabeth Emerson, “Land of Milk and Sugar,” in Pickford, Tea and Coffee, 35–47. 128. ​Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, ed. Mary Lascelles (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), 72. For further useful analy­sis of Johnson’s economic theory in the Journey, see Stavisky, “Samuel Johnson and the Market Economy,” 83.

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129. ​Johnson, A Journey, 108. 130. ​William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of ­England, facsimile 1st  ed. (1765–1769), 4 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 2:2. 131. ​Samuel Johnson, Sermons, ed. Jean Hagstrum and James Gray (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 254. 132. ​George Thomas Staunton (1781–1859), Member of Parliament and distinguished sinologist, was the son of Sir George Leonard Staunton, principal secretary on the Macartney embassy, and accompanied his f­ ather as a twelve-­year-­old to China. Even then, young Staunton was the best speaker of Chinese among the British diplomats (he had two Chinese tutors, Jesuits from the Chinese College at Naples, who traveled with the embassy), and he had a short, famous conversation with the Qianlong emperor; see George Staunton, An Au­then­tic Account of an Embassy from the King of ­Great Britain to the Emperor of China, 2 vols. (London, 1797), 2:234. 133. ​Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the En­glish Language, 4 vols., 9th  ed. (London, 1805), 4: no pagination. 134. ​Thomas Keymer, introduction to The History of Rasselas Prince of Abissinia, by Samuel Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), xxviii. 135. ​For an excellent account of Johnson’s response to the attack on Hastings’s governorship of Bengal, see Hudson, Samuel Johnson, 210–220 (“Burke, India, and the Rise of the Second Empire”). 136. ​Clement Hawes, “Johnson and Imperialism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, ed. Greg Clingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 114–125, esp. 116–117. 137. ​Samuel Johnson, Rasselas and Other Tales, ed. Gwin J. Kolb (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 46 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Rasselas, by page number). 138. ​James Watt, “ ‘What Mankind Has Lost and Gained’: Johnson, Rasselas, and Colonialism,” in Reading 1759: Literary Culture in Mid-­Eighteenth-­Century Britain and France, ed. Shaun Regan (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013), 30. 139. ​See, for example, David S. Landes, “Celestial Empire: Stasis and Retreat,” chap. 21 in The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: Norton, 1998), 335–349; and Michael Adas, “The Ascendency of Science: Shifting Views of Non-­Western ­Peoples in the Era of the Enlightenment,” chap. 2 in Machines as the Mea­sure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 69–121. 140. ​Hudson, Samuel Johnson, 183. Hudson sees Johnson’s view of empire as an anticipation of that of the Victorian historian J. R. Seeley. 141. ​For a fuller discussion of the narrative of Rasselas from this point of view, see Clingham, Johnson, Writing, and Memory, 70–77. 142. ​Haun Saussy, ­Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 76–77. 143. ​Saussy, ­Great Walls of Discourse, 76.

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1650–1850 144. ​Saussy, ­Great Walls of Discourse, 94–97. 145. ​Porter, Ideographia, 15. See also Robert Batchelor, “Concealing the Bounds: Imagining the British Nation through China,” in The Global Eigh­teenth ­Century, ed. Felicity A. Nussbaum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 79–92. 146. ​Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 193. Hawkins also mentions Johnson’s use of opium on pages 273, 324, and 354. For Johnson’s use of opium, see Tim Aurthur and Steven Calt, “Opium and Samuel Johnson,” Age of Johnson 17 (2006): 85–100. John Wiltshire notes that Johnson wrote a history of his taking of the drug to placate the fears of his friend John Ryland; Samuel Johnson and the Medical World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 68.

242

TECHNOFACTS CHRISTOPHER SMART AND THE CURIOSITY CABINET WILLIAM HALL

Christopher Smart has long been a difficult, and perhaps for that reason

attractive, figure in literary history. Summarizing the burst of Smart scholarship following Karina Williams and Marcus Walsh’s The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, Christopher Mounsey writes, “all in all the work on Smart since 1980 proffers a view of an eclectic man made up of contradictions.”1 In addition to the complex man, Alan Liu has suggested that Smart’s “poetic spirit” is a j­umble of contradictions: si­mul­ta­neously “­humble, vainglorious, scholarly, and humorous.”2 Yet this very mutability has made Smart an attractive figure in consideration of the conceptual formations that shape literary and intellectual histories of the eigh­teenth ­century. Clement Hawes, for instance, has argued that Smart’s poetry provides a win­dow on the eigh­teenth ­century that allows for a “fresh understanding of Smart’s moment and milieu in all their heterogeneity.”3 That is, Smart’s poetry allows literary historians an access point from which to delineate “a more subtle eigh­teenth ­century than is often found in the literary periodizations of certain widely cited cultural historians and literary theorists.” 4 It would seem that for the past thirty years Smart’s life and poetry have supplied literary historians of vari­ous persuasions with a fertile site for the cultivation of an eigh­teenth ­century that goes beyond the totalitarian dialectic of the Enlightenment and its rigid taxonomic structure, as theorized most famously by Ernst Cassirer, Peter Gay, Theodor Adorno, and Michel Foucault. In a paradigmatic case, Hawes and the contributors to Christopher Smart and the Enlightenment see the conjunctive “and” in their title as an essential linkage between Smart and Enlightenment that recovers

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1650–1850 Smart’s poetry and poetics from the pre-­Romantic/Romantic divide of literary history and links him to a richer and more nuanced conceptualization of the Enlightenment. In addition to the fruitful work of t­ hose past three de­cades, recent conjunctions of literary and media studies have signaled once again a significant shift in how literary historians are thinking about the intellectual history of Enlightenment. Bruno Latour’s actor-­network theory, for instance, and his thesis that we have never been modern poses difficult questions to what he calls the modern constitution that has for so long figured as a proj­ect of Enlightenment.5 Picking up on the implications in Latour, the power­ful work of mediation that brings science, culture, ­human and nonhuman into the same constellation, Clifford Siskin and William Warner have made the remarkable claim that to fi­nally answer the Gordian knot of modernity, “Was ist Aufklärung?” one need turn to the history of mediation, that is, that the Enlightenment is an “event in the history of mediation.” 6 The intersection of literary studies and media studies that informs many of the essays that constitute This Is Enlightenment has narrowed the gap (arguably first opened in the eigh­teenth c­ entury) between science and culture, machines and poetry. This newly energized relation of art and machine opens space for asking not what a poem is, or what it means, but what a poem can do. Rather than operating u­ nder the assumption that a poem is for instruction and delight or acts as a delivery mechanism for historical and cultural information, it returns poetry to the space of the technofact—­objects forged by the craftsperson and bearing the marks of techne. Understanding a poet’s techne, as Henry Staten has recently reminded us, “requires an understanding of what a device is supposed to do, as well as the history of its pre­de­ces­sor machines and the techniques involved in their creation.”7 In Staten’s words, techne “is the socially accumulated, impersonal, productive knowledge of how to produce a specific kind of object.”8 One way of thinking about the Enlightenment as an event in the history of mediation, then, is to consider a poem’s techne to understand how the poem does not simply reflect a historical mode of thought but embodies of a way of thinking. Given this shift in literary histories of Enlightenment ­toward mediation and in literary theory to consider the techne of lit­er­a­ture, the question arises, once again, what do we do with the problematic that is the poetry of Christopher Smart? What follows is a comparative media study that sketches the lineaments of Smart’s poetry as it intersects with the world of Enlightenment technics, specifically with the curiosity cabinet. That is, rather than explore an interpretive question about what Smart’s poetry means, or ontological questions about the nature of poetry,

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I examine what the Jubilate Agno teaches us about Smart’s working through what poetry might do in an age of Enlightenment mediation. In the Jubilate, Smart places himself u ­ nder strict constraints in order to explore poetic techne and the limits of what a poem could do as a technofact. My argument is twofold in that, while I suggest we can better understand Smart’s place in the Enlightenment through his relation to other Enlightenment knowledge technologies, I also suggest that the co-­evolution of poetry and technics embedded in Smart’s Jubilate Agno suggests a way of tracking the unfolding event in mediation called Enlightenment into the twenty-­first ­century.

Wunderkammer as Tool-­to-­Think-­With One of the key critiques of totalitarian versions of Enlightenment turns on the notion of a universal mathesis—­the tendency to see Enlightenment’s taxonomic thrust as an effort to create a single, closed system. Smart’s place in relation to this concept of Enlightenment is, to say the least, complicated. As Scott Cleary has recently reminded us, Smart’s poetry was once tied to this negative characterization of Enlightenment by its attempt to change Enlightenment systems from without. He argues that this critical tendency “refuses to understand that ‘Jubilate Agno’ itself is a system; and no s­ imple, but a master system seeking totalizing knowledge of nature in its multiple manifestations.” 9 Smart’s master system is rife with “internal bickering” as the lines of Jubilate Agno “talk to each other” both within individual lines and across lines, both horizontally and vertically, and even across the fragments. From a systems theory point of view, this internal tension produces the stability of the system as opposing forces continually war with one another. In this way, Smart is less a figure of opposition to totalizing Enlightenment and advocate for a subtly heterogeneous eigh­teenth c­ entury than he is the embodiment of all that is problematic with Enlightenment. In Cleary’s words, “Smart’s attempts at describing, critiquing, and challenging other systems becomes his means of enacting and reiterating the very same master system’s inclusive impulse: its need to incorporate all prior systems into its own systemization for the sake of ‘comprehension.’ ”10 Cleary’s systems-­theory-­based reading of Smart’s Jubilate is in­ter­est­ing in how it links the Enlightenment intellectual history to the very con­temporary work of systems theorists attempting to grasp how we might understand and critique a formation such as Enlightenment. For Cleary, it would seem that the earlier critics who saw Smart as an unacknowledged Shelleyian

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1650–1850 poet legislator failed to understand that ­there is no escaping system. While I find Cleary’s argument compelling, I think ­there is another way of understanding the internal bickering of Smart’s poetry and the cultural moment to which it belongs that also ties the intellectual history of Enlightenment to pres­ent concerns. The Enlightenment had an information-­overload prob­lem that was a direct result of advances in science, imperial expansion, and the rapid growth of commercial enterprise.11 Moreover, this information-­processing prob­lem was matched with what J. L. Heilbron has called a “quantifying spirit” or “passion to order and systematize as well as calculate.”12 ­These two facts have often led to the theorization of a taxonomic Enlightenment or, in the case of Smart’s Jubilate Agno, the reflection of an esprit de système in the material artifact. However, Barbara Maria Stafford has suggested that two competing epistemological models typify the eigh­ teenth c­ entury. In Artful Science, she teases out a “tension between an aggregate of information, predicated on an optic-­based epistemology permitting surface connections to be made across many fields, and deep systems analy­sis.”13 Stafford ‘s dialectical model places in tension a combinatorial epistemology, which uses tools that promote knowledge production across taxonomic borders, and a “deep systems analy­sis” driven by the desire to analytically reduce and systematically order the material objects of knowledge as well as the methodological pro­cesses of knowing. In contrast to a totalizing system of the scientific treatise stands the combinatorial mode of the curiosity cabinet—­a tool that operates according to a logic of polyvalent aesthesis rather than universal mathesis.14 “As a modern-­day figure of speech,” Arthur MacGregor suggests, “the cabinet of curiosities conjures up pictures of irredeemable quaintness, of random conjunctions of unrelated specimens brought together by chance and in an essentially haphazard manner.”15 However, as a historical and conceptual artifact, that is, from what McGregor calls a “structural point of view,” the “cabinet collections ­were not merely the products of con­temporary styles of thought but represented, rather, their physical embodiment.”16 On the one hand, the drive to order and classify the eclectic, chaotic displays and promiscuous juxtapositions of artificialia and naturalia maps onto an Enlightenment typified by the analytic power of taxonomic systems to reduce and differentiate. On the other hand, ­there remains a latent dynamic in Enlightenment epistemology that emerges from the synthetic and combinatorial logic of the curiosity cabinet that resists a deep systems analy­ sis model. It is in this par­tic­u­lar form—as an impor­tant early modern conceptual, historical, and material artifact—­that the cabinet of curiosity has recently come

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to represent a significant locus for an exceptionally wide range of historical and theoretical inquiries.17 Although early instances of the curiosity cabinet exhibit a cosmological bent—an attempt to render the macrocosmic in the microcosm of a small piece of furniture—by the eigh­teenth ­century this cosmological plan began to give way to a more scientific and field-­specific ethos.18 At this transitional point in the decline of the curiosity cabinet, Smart’s poetics, as the embodiment of a combinatorial and open-­ended Enlightenment technics, continues the conceptual under­pinnings of the curiosity cabinet and expands them into the textual sphere that was supposed to preclude them. Barbara Maria Stafford’s work suggest that the conceptual world of the curiosity cabinet marks a tension between a combinatorial baroque oral-­visuality and a divisive philosophical skepticism that eventually, as the subtitle to her Artful Science suggests, eclipsed visual education.19 This tension stems from a conceptual opposition between a baroque oral-­visuality characterized as an “aggregate of information, predicated on an optic-­based epistemology permitting surface connections to be made across many fields” and a textually based classificatory rigor.20 According to Stafford, this earlier epistemological model did not discount seeing and visuality as a legitimate way of producing knowledge, nor did the visuality need to be transferred into text. Rather the visual aggregation, especially in the curiosity cabinet, gives material form to the “jumps in logic and disconcerting omissions [that] resembled the apparent disor­g a­ni­za­tion of talk.”21 Nor did this oral-­visual mode feel the classifying drive that characterizes the latter part of the Enlightenment, as visual and oral “jumps” in logic allowed for a more flexible combinatory logic. So, for instance, in opposition to the late eigh­teenth ­century’s taxonomic knowledge driven by a new professional class of scientists, Stafford summarizes the aesthetic and combinatorial logic that animates Salomon Kleiner’s 1751 watercolor paintings of the central cabinet of curiosities for the “Red Crayfish” pharmacy (figure 1): The dexterous, indeed acrobatic distribution of stony irregularities into apparently haphazard juxtapositions not only enticed the eye but stimulated conversation. Crumbling shells, clumps of madrepores, coral branches, miniature busts, Chinese porcelain teapots, small medals, intaglio gems, pottery shards, drawn and engraved portraits, masks, carved ivory, pickled monsters, religious utensils, and multicultural remains cacophonously “chatted” among themselves and with the spectator. . . . ​Delighting the amateur while defying the classifier, t­ hese collections ­were anamorphic. Perplexing contents awaited resolution in the delectating vision of the beholder.22

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Figure 1. ​Salomon Kleiner, unpublished drawing of front section of open display cabinet from Chirstophori de Pauli Parmacopoei Camera Materialium (1751). Courtesy of the Getty Research Institute.

Two key features of the curiosity cabinet as a “tool-­to-­think-­with” emerge from this description to which we ­will return when thinking about how to read or, as the case may be, activate Christopher Smart’s poetry in connection to the conceptual and technical world of the “polymathic cabinet of curiosities.” First, the Wunderkammer operates by a combinatory pro­cess of visual linkages across seemingly disparate and chaotic collections of material objects. Second, observers activate the cabinet’s potential linkages as they make jumps across an inchoate visual field and fills in the conceptual gaps between vari­ous curios that make up the collection. For Stafford, however, the analytic, reductive, and mathematical system of taxonomic knowledge that seemed to dominate the last years of the eigh­teenth ­century foreclosed the epistemological model of curiosity cabinet. Near the m ­ iddle of the c­ entury, the cabinet of curiosity underwent a significant change of purpose that paralleled wider social and epistemic transformations. As the increase in infor-

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mation streaming in from imperial and commercial ventures intensified, the role of the observer shifted from the aristocratic and leisured classes to the technical specialist and professional scientist. “The superficial exhibitionism of acquisitive virtuosi,” Stafford writes, “allied to equally suspect chiromancy, geomancy, magic, and hermeticism, was to be unseated by deeper methods of ordering.”23 ­Here was a classic repre­sen­ta­tion of the strug­gle between the drive to rationally or­g a­nize an increasingly unmanageable amount of information and the desire to cross borders and make provocative, if somewhat esoteric, connections and interpretations of data.24 Moreover, for Stafford, an increasingly power­ful philosophical skepticism drove increasing suspicion of the cabinet’s combinatorial hermeneutics. The prob­lem that philosophical skepticism posed the curiosity cabinet, and by extension a baroque oral-­visuality, is that it undermined the validity of the kind of visual networking and speculative connections that typify speech as well as the curiosity cabinet. David Hume articulates succinctly the weakness of observation as a stable ground for knowledge that, for Stafford, signaled the decline of polymathic oral-­visuality. In section 5 of An Enquiry Concerning H ­ uman Understanding, Hume writes, All belief of ­matter of fact or real existence is derived merely from some object, pres­ent to the memory or sense, and a customary conjunction between that and some other object. Or in other words; having found, in many instances, that any two kind of objects, flame and heat, snow and cold, have always been conjoined together; if flame or snow be presented anew to the senses, the mind is carried by custom to expect heat or cold, and to believe, that such a quality does exist, and ­will discover itself upon a nearer approach. . . . ​ All t­ hese operations are a species of natu­ral instincts, which no reasoning or pro­cess of the thought and understanding is able, ­either to produce or to prevent.25 When faced with a collection of objects—­whether physical ­things or experiential phenomena—­our habit or custom of thinking is to draw connections and inferences across the literal or figurative space or, in the case of history, time. However, for the skeptic such as Hume, this combinatory pro­cess has only a limited truth-­value hemmed in by the very unstable and unreasoned leap from cause to effect. That is, ­because all knowledge is ultimately experiential, the truthfulness of that knowledge is subject to and complicated by the habitual pro­cess of connection that is not governed by reason and that ultimately lies beyond ­human understanding. Pattern recognition and jumps across the space of material objects have ­little legitimacy b ­ ecause they parallel the dangerous jumps of habit and custom

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1650–1850 that led h ­ umans to believe something without grounding that belief in a priori understanding. For Hume, the curiosity cabinet, like witty conversation, might represent a pleasant experience, and even one with a very small degree of truth-­ value, but as a grounds for knowledge it remains exceptionally dubious. By the end of the eigh­teenth ­century, the increased desire to rationally or­g a­ nize information, coupled with a skeptical epistemology, completed the movement from an oral-­visual to a textual mode of organ­ization. This textual turn exemplifies the “shift from sensory to a rationalizing nomenclature” that corresponded to an epistemological valuation of the “ordinary over the extraordinary.”26 In Stafford’s narrative, by the end of the eigh­teenth ­century, rational archaeology stood in stark contrast to polymathy’s shallow accumulations. The power of the mind supplanted the gullibility of the eye. . . . ​Individual components w ­ ere ranked and graded according to an architectonic. Cabinets of curiosities, once socialized through spatial relationships prompting conversation, ­were demoted to being merely instrumental, functioning now as low-­grade compendia of externally and mechanically related pieces.27 Again, Stafford’s narrative of the decline of the curiosity cabinet seems to follow the temporal and conceptual schema of Foucault’s “taxonomic knowledge.” By privileging the specialist who ­orders and classifies using a textual nomenclature that taxonomizes and drains individuality from the material world of artifacts, Enlightenment rationality killed the concepts of demo­cratic, aesthetic, and oral-­visual epistemology that the curiosity cabinet embodied. While the curiosity cabinet’s pride of place may have declined, the combinatorial epistemology that it rests on does not give way to the pressures of textuality and specialization. Despite Hume’s distrust of visuality, his skeptical epistemology, and especially his aesthetics, remains deeply implicated in the kinds of logical jumps and combinatorial connections that underwrote the Wunderkammer. The curiosity cabinet’s method of linkages between objects also continues in the associationist psy­chol­ogy of David Hartley and the theories of imagination it inspired. That is, the curiosity cabinet’s function as a “tool-­to-­think-­with” extends beyond the oral-­visuality of the early Enlightenment and, in dif­f er­ent forms, into the latter de­cades of the eigh­teenth c­ entury and well beyond. This is especially impor­tant for the textual world of poetry and Smart’s seemingly misfit Jubilate Agno. That is, the combinatorial epistemology of the Wunderkammer helps to overcome some of the barriers and assumptions about how to read or, in this case, how to think with Smart’s poem. As an embodiment of an Enlightenment epistemology that

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values a combinatorial and networked aggregation of information, Smart’s strangely fascinating poem represents less a precursor to a Romantic ethos or poetical critique of Enlightenment than a slippage in the dominant conceptual modes of Enlightenment knowledge production. The Jubilate Agno, as we ­will see, asks us to reflect not only on our critical assumptions about poetry but also on the continuing role of Enlightenment in our information-­rich digital pres­ent.

Smart’s Technofact Of the many challenges and difficulties one encounters in Smart’s Jubilate Agno, perhaps the thorniest stems from the way in which, as a historical and material artifact, it resists classification within the history of eighteenth-­century verse. Harriet Guest describes the prob­lem this way: “Jubilate Agno is so unlike anything ­else written in the eigh­teenth c­ entury that critics, baffled by the strangeness of the text, have frequently tried to make sense of it by treating it as though it ­were part of the lit­er­a­ture of the seventeenth c­ entury, or of the Romantic period, or, more simply, by treating it as an aberration occasioned by Smart’s m ­ ental 28 ­ill-­health.” Guest correctly points out the strangeness of Smart’s poem as well as its critical reception. However, her claim that the poem is “unlike anything e­ lse written in the eigh­teenth ­century” only works if we assume that a set of common conventions about form, special use of language, and content circumscribe poetry as a taxonomic category. The poem is in­ter­est­ing for what it means, but it is especially attractive for what it does. More specifically, the meaning of Jubilate Agno reflects or emerges not simply from its historical, theological, personal, scientific, esoteric, and mundane content but from its status as an experiment with the limits of what it can do as a poem. In contrast to hermeneutics, critics repeatedly ask of the Jubilate Agno not what this poem means but, as W. H. Bond puts it, “What was Smart trying to do in Jubilate Agno?”29 Answers are, of course, varied and plentiful. Bond, for instance, connects Jubilate Agno’s antiphonal structure to Robert Lowth’s Hebraic poetics, Daniel Ennis reads the poem as articulating Smart’s commitment to the ars poetica tradition, and Cleary sees it as an effort at building a master system.30 Each of ­these attempts to decipher the poem, however, returns to a notoriously unstable site: the mind of the poet. At least since William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley wrote “The Intentional Fallacy,” deciphering authorial intent has been a dicey affair at best. The fact that

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1650–1850 Smart wrote the Jubilate while confined to Potter’s mad­house only amplifies the dangers inherent in decoding the author’s psychological intention. However, Henry Staten’s recent return to the concept of techne suggests a way around a narrow, psychological notion of authorial intent. His notion of techne, as we have already seen, reflects the current critical interest in what David Wellbery calls a work’s mediality: “the general condition within which, ­under specific circumstances, something like ‘poetry’ or ‘lit­er­a­ture’ can take shape.”31 That is, if we account for the technical constraints imposed on a poet by the “general technology of literary production and the laws that govern it,” then we need to tweak Bond’s question.32 It is not what Smart was trying to do but what could Smart think poetry might do as a knowledge-­producing machine given the epistemological framework of Enlightenment technics. As Guest points out, the traditional concept of poetry does not map very well onto Smart’s material artifact. However, if we broaden the scope of poetry to include other knowledge-­producing devices, Smart’s poem fits squarely into the epistemological model of Enlightenment technics exemplified in the curiosity cabinet.33 This wider perspective on Smart’s poem as a material technofact aligns Jubilate Agno with the conceptual world of the Enlightenment machines. That is, by approaching the poem as a tool-­to-­think-­with fashioned both by a craftsman and by the cultural memory that informs his techne, the poem embodies two impor­ tant features of the cabinet of curiosities. The first is the material framework of the cabinet. Referring to the affordances an observer enjoys when exploring the chaotic assemblage of the display cabinet, Stafford argues that the “stability of the frame, coupled with a tiered internal configuration inviting analogical juxtapositions, gave users the double freedom of maneuvering and experimenting through the distribution of mutable contents.”34 That is, the form of the curiosity cabinet promotes a synthetic and analogical model of thinking, and, as we ­will see shortly, this formal feature of the cabinet resonates with the Jubilate Agno’s chaotic and nonlinear form. A second and related feature of the cabinet-­instrument that links to Smart’s poem is how both depend “on the user for activation . . . ​to experiment with order and disorder,” which produces a range of meaning-­effects—­the sense of connection between objects or ideas that emerges out of apparent randomness.35 In this sense, a reader/user does not interpret through an intensive reading strategy that plumbs the poem’s semantic and symbolic depths but, rather, elicits meaning-­effects through a combinatorial tracing of pos­si­ble connections across the larger network of verses that constitute the four poetic fragments. If we approach the poem as a technofact, Jubilate Agno not only aligns with an alter­

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native conceptualization of the Enlightenment but also expands our notion of poetry and reintegrates poetics with techne. In opposition to Hannah Arendt’s conception of poetry as the most useless of tools and the reification of thought, the poem as technofact provides for poetry a mediating role within the relational networks of the ­human and nonhuman lifeworld. At the poem’s widest level of overall structure, it conceptually mirrors the cabinet of curiosities in its loose agglomeration of fragments. Although Smart never finished or revised the poem, and perhaps never intended to complete or polish it, his editors have or­ga­nized the Jubilate in both chronological and formal schemas. In its two most impor­tant editions, the poem’s fragments have been labeled ­either A, B1, B2, C, and D (Bond 1954) or A, B, C, D (Williamson 1980) and or­g a­ nized according to a rough chronology based on personal and historical evidence within the verses.36 However, t­ here is nothing that requires this kind of temporal constraint.37 ­There is no evidence that Smart would have authorized such a schema, and while it is a useful rendering of the poem, it is conditioned by traditional assumptions about what a poem should be and do. Since t­ here is no narrative framework to structure the fragments, it is just as likely as not that Smart intended the earthy and historical compendium of Fragment D to open the poem before ascending to the complex heights of his theory of knowledge and fi­nally to the metaphysics of praise. He might have or­ga­nized the poem in any number of other ways, or he might just as well have left the poem as it is to suggest a new way of understanding the role of poetry in the Enlightenment. Like the chaotic surface of the curiosity cabinet, on the surface the Jubilate Agno confronts the reader with a collection of four or five large groups of text-­objects that more or less act as both self-­contained units and interrelated parts of one larger system or object. At the highest level of form, the fragmented components of this poem suggest both linkages within each fragment and connections across textual distance. If we move from the larger text fragments to the level of line grouping, the formal structure suggests that the lines constitute text-­objects to be explored and activated by a user creating meaning-­effects out of textual intermingling. In Karina Williamson’s edition, she uses typographical marks rather than spatial arrangement to indicate a fairly tight relationship between the “Let” and “For” lines. So the opening of Fragment B in her edition looks like this: (1) Let Elizur rejoice with the Partridge, who is a prisoner of state and is proud of his keepers. For I am not without authority in my jeopardy, which I derive inevitably from the glory of the name of the Lord.

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1650–1850 (2) Let Shedeur rejoice with Pyrausta, who dwelleth in a medium of fire, which God hath adapted for him. For I bless God whose mane is Jealous—­and t­ here is a zeal o deliver us from everlasting burnings. Given Williamson’s arrangement, Smart’s poem looks, and to some extent feels, more familiar and operates according to more traditional reading protocols—­ moving from left to right and progressing down the page. In this way, Williamson promotes a sense that the “Let” and “For” lines should be read as two parts of a singular semantic unit.38 Moreover, where ­there are both “For” and “Let” verses, Williamson’s editorial choice strengthens Bond’s antiphonal theory that connects Smart’s poetics to the antiphonal ele­ments of Hebrew poetry that Robert Lowth proposed in his Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews. For example, in the preceding lines, the For/Let structure associates Smart’s captivity in the asylum to that of the partridge’s status as a “prisoner of state.” Additionally, the bird’s “proud” disdain of his captors reflects Smart’s being “not without authority in [his] jeopardy.” Williamson’s pre­sen­ta­tion has its advantages in making Smart’s poem more accessible as a poem. However, this coupling and vertical arrangement also lend an ordered and hierarchically standardized unity to the Jubilate Agno that obscures the singularity of each individual line-­unit as well as the cross-­ linkages that emerge across several lines and even between fragments. That is, by continuing and intensifying the antiphonal structure, Williamson formalizes the poem in a way that dissolves the singularity of each line into a larger system of meaning, or at least meaningful relations. W. H. Bond’s earlier edition, again based on the notion that Smart’s intent was to experiment with the “antiphonal and responsive character” of Hebrew poetry, provides a closer textual analogue to the multivalent and tiered curiosity cabinet. Where ­there are both “Let” and “For” lines, Bond sets them facing each other on opposite pages “so that the identity of each portion is preserved while its relation to the other is plainly revealed.”39 So the opening of what he calls B1 looks roughly like this: Let Elizur rejoice with the For I bless God whose name is Jealous— Partridge, who is a prisoner of state and t­ here is a zeal to deliver us from Let Shedeur rejoice with Pyrausta, For I am not without authority in my who dwelleth in a medium of fire, jeopardy, which I derive inevitably

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Bond’s formal choice promotes a visual cue for reading both vertically down the chain of “Let” or “For” lines as well as horizontally, in which another set of relations is “plainly revealed.” We have already seen one of the ways of connecting the “Let” and “For” of verse 1. However, Bond’s arrangement, which parallels the manuscript, also encourages other pathways of reading, trajectories that generate a series of meaning-­effects rather than a singular interpretive stance. For instance, moving vertically from “Let” to “Let,” we find a father-­and-­son relation as Elizur is introduced in Numbers 1:5 as the son of Shedeur. Given Smart’s theology, in which father-­and-­son relations are of signal importance, the vertical pairing of Elizur and Shedeur produces the effect of some meaningful connection: (1) a literal connection between Elizur and Shedeur; (2) a personal connection between Smart and his f­ ather, or Smart and his son; or (3) any number of pos­si­ble symbolic relations. It is pos­si­ble to read vertically as indicative of a theological paralleling of the partridge’s captivity to Jesus’s, the son’s, captivity and eventual execution—­both have figured in ritual sacrificial offering: the partridge in Hebrew theology and Jesus in Christian. Moreover, the linking of f­ ather of B2 and fire effects a meaningful, if meta­phorical, turn from Shedeur to God the f­ather, who dwells in a heaven and is often symbolized by light and fire. That is, in the Elizur/Shedeur pairing, the meaning-­effect gestures t­ oward Christian eschatology that grows out of a more or less random pairing and interpretive framework. But one is not limited to s­ imple horizontal or vertical pairing. A reader might work in diagonals so that the captive of B1 “Let” links to the deliverance of B2 “For.” Or, as is the case with Smart’s “spiritualization” of Isaac Newton, links between verses might move between disparate verses within a given fragment or even across dif­ fer­ent fragments. If we track verses across the surface of the poem, as opposed to searching out sustained argument in coherent poetic sections, a striking, if circular, argument against Newton begins to emerge: For ignorance is a sin ­because illumination is to be obtained by prayer (B421) For ignorance is a sin, ­because illumination is to be had by prayer (B570) For the method of philosophizing is in a posture of Adoration (B258) For by the grace of God I am the Reviver of ADORATION amongst ­ NGLISH-­MEN (B332) E For Newton’s notion of colours is αλογος unphilosophical (B648) For the colours are spiritual (B649) For Newton nevertheless is more of error than of truth, but I am of the WORD of GOD (B195)

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1650–1850 And the lone “Let” verse in this grouping: Let Barsabas rejoice with Cammarus—­Newton is ignorant for if a man consult not the WORD how should he understand the WORK (B220) Smart’s poem, when conceived as a loose collection of singular objects and suggestive of a combinatorial logic, produces an enormously flexible system of meaning-­effects that a user/reader may choose to explore or ignore. If we zoom in even closer to the level of diction and grammatical constraints, we find an eccentric and seemingly chaotic collection of t­ hings, animals, and proper nouns. In Fragment A, for instance, a “Chamois,” “Pygarg,” “Coney,” “Sable,” and “Hare” jostle against “Eleazar,” “Ithamar,” “Gershom,” “Merari,” “Kohath,” and “Jehoida” and mingle with “rock,” “sand,” and “ornaments of the t­ emple” (A17–22). The reader is left to his or her own ingenuity to discover and explore the relations between ­these “unclean” animals, impor­tant Levitical priests, and their vari­ous artifacts and activities. However, ­those kind of emergent meaning-­ effects only occur as one traverses and loops back over the surface of verses. For example, Let Ishmael dedicate a tyger, and give praise for the liberty, in which the Lord has let him at large. (A10) Let Balaam appear with an Ass, and bless the Lord his p ­ eople and his creatures for a reward eternal. (A11) Let Joshua praise God with a Unicorn—­the swiftness of the Lord, and the strength of the Lord, and the spear of the Lord mighty in ­battle. (A6) The sense that this seemingly disparate collection of verses might have networked meaning turns, half jokingly, half seriously, on the “Ass” that makes the connections. A playful reader moves from Ishmael, who in Genesis 16:12 is described as a “wild man” (but the Hebrew term is “wild ass”) to Balaam, who in Numbers 22:21– 30 is not only saved by an ass but also talks to it. And fi­nally, the same Balaam who talked to the ass foretold Joshua’s military victories over the descendants of Ishmael. The point is that when the words of the poem are left to mingle and jostle against one another, what often emerges are not deeply symbolic and meaningful connections, although that happens as well, but just as often the connections are drawn, sometimes with humorous effects, by the user skimming over and looping back through verses. Smart has suggested this kind of combinatorial work in the way individual lines have been constructed to suggest playful pairings and connections between p ­ eople

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and animals, plants, and rocks and minerals that semantically may seem disparate. ­These pairing range from the rather obvious: Let Abraham pres­ent a Ram, and worship with the God of his Redemption. (A5) to the richly allusive: Let Machir rejoice with Convolvulus, from him to the ring of Saturn, which is the girth of Job; to the signet of God—­from Job and his d ­ aughters BLESSED BE JESUS . For ­there is a blessing from the STONE of JESUS which is founded upon hell to the precious jewell on the right hand of God 40 (B31) and the comparatively banal: Let Heron, h ­ ouse of Heron rejoice with the Tunal-­Tree on which the Conchineal feeds. (D213) The Jubilate Agno, from the most surface level of form and line groupings down to the construction of lines and even the ­things and p ­ eople, promotes a conceptual structure of combinatory logic and pattern recognition where meaning-­effects are built on or emerge from the mutable relationships of objects, ­people, themes. Moreover, this combinatory logic, analogous to the structural logic of the curiosity cabinet, loosens the Jubilate Agno from the traditional constraints of literary texts and refuses to limit itself to the reading strategies and conventional methodologies of literary studies. It is perhaps not surprising that I have argued that Smart’s most enigmatic and possibly most famous poem presses against the bound­aries of eighteenth-­ century poetry and poetics. However, when considered in the broader context of Enlightenment technics, and particularly ­those devices of won­der that explore the contentious ground of knowledge formation in the eigh­teenth ­century, Smart’s poem displays a conceptual imbrication of poetics and technics too often obscured by literary-­historical narratives of madness, sensibility, mirrors and lamps, polite neoclassicism, and Romantic genius. Clement Hawes’s point is a good one, namely, “if we allow ourselves to imagine Smart afresh—­neither as a Romantic genius regrettably trapped in the historical antechamber of the ‘pre-­ Romantic,’ nor as a mere martyr to the birth pangs of a brutal modernity—­then he can represent one impor­tant site from which a necessary rethinking of literary history can take place.” 41 Together with Siskin and Warner’s argument for a reimagining of Enlightenment as an event in the history of mediation, Hawes’s linkage of Smart and Enlightenment suggests a number of pos­si­ble ways in which

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1650–1850 literary history can be written anew to account for mediation and textual mediality in the eigh­teenth ­century. And yet, and perhaps this is always the case, ­there is something more in Smart’s poem. Smart was nothing if not a poet keenly attuned, even obsessively so, to language—­its limits but also its potentialities. This is not to say that he was solely interested in transmitting a message in his poem but that the difficulty of his poetry suggests a fretting over the very mechanisms that mediate communication. Alexander R. Galloway has pointed out that “any mediating technology is obliged to erase itself to the highest degree pos­si­ble in the name of unfettered communication, but in so d ­ oing it proves its own virtuosic presence as technology thereby undoing the original erasure.” 42 Smart’s Jubilate refuses the original erasure ­because ­after all the play, the puns and the jokes, the oddities and seriousness, we are left with a poet eschewing meaning in a traditional sense to explore the engineering of poetry’s communication mechanisms. Smart’s poem points to a poet exploring the limits of what poetry could do in the very articulation of the question, what does it mean to ask what poetry can mean? And that is precisely the kind of question that media and literary studies are asking now.43 Under­neath the newness of new media poetry, for instance, lie old questions: What is the relation between poiesis and techne? What does the category of poetry teach us about homo faber? What kind of knowledge do we find in poetry? Viewed from the perspective of new media poetics, Smart’s poetry seems less the detritus of an evolutionary cycle in literary history and more an articulation of the most per­sis­tent and difficult questions that theorists and critics can ask about the category known as poetry. Reflection on poetry, Smart suggests, along with a host of twenty-­first-­ century theorists, is a reflection on the conditions of the h ­ uman embedded in a social and historical context that has always been tied to the world of the nonhuman machine.

Notes

1. ​Christopher Mounsey, Christopher Smart: Clown of God (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001), 14. 2. ​Alan Liu, “Christopher Smart’s ‘Uncommunicated Letter’: Translation and the Ethics of Literary History,” boundary 2 14, nos. 1–2 (1985): 115. 3. ​Clement Hawes, introduction to Christopher Smart and the Enlightenment, ed. Clement Hawes (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 1. 4. ​Hawes, introduction to Christopher Smart, 1.

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5. ​See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-­Network-­ Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 13–15. 6. ​Clifford Siskin and William Warner argue, By apprehending Enlightenment as an event in the history of mediation, we are arguing that one cannot disentangle the phenomenon called Enlightenment from the history of mediation as it unfolds in the par­tic­u­lar forms and genres, the associational practices and the protocols first developed in the long eigh­teenth ­century. Therefore, our use of the copula—­Enlightenment is an event in the history of mediation—­radicalizes the intimacy of Enlightenment and mediation, so as to catch their Möbius-­strip-­like co-­implication. If Enlightenment and mediation are understood in this way, then mediation is the condition of possibility for Enlightenment—­and Enlightenment mediations become the condition of possibility for the many other discursive, material, and intellectual transformations that often become the focus of Enlightenment studies, including, in the collections we have just discussed, ­those falling u ­ nder the rubrics of gender, the sciences, and postcolonial politics. (Siskin and Warner, “This Is Enlightenment: An Invitation in the Form of an Argument,” in This Is Enlightenment, ed. Siskin and Warner [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010], 22.) 7. ​Henry Staten, “Art as Techne, or, The Intentional Fallacy and the Unfinished Proj­ ect of Formalism,” in A Companion to the Philosophy of Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Garry L. Hagberg and Walter Jost (Chichester, UK: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2010), 422. 8. ​Staten, “Art as Techne,” 422. 9. ​Scott Cleary, “­Castles in the Air: Christopher Smart and the Concept of System,” Eighteenth- ­Century Studies 43, no. 2 (2010): 198. 10. ​Cleary, “­Castles in the Air,” 198. 11. ​Paula Findlen, in “Inventing Nature: Commerce, Art, and Science in the Early Modern Cabinet of Curiosities,” in Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Eu­rope, ed. Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge, 2002), 297–323, suggests that commerce—­the “trafficking in nature”—­ drove the “the new material abundance that flowed into Eu­ro­pean cities from all corners of the world” (301). See also Mark A. Meadow, “Merchants and Marvels: Hans Jacob Fugger and the Origins of the Wunderkammer,” in Smith and Findlen, Merchants and Marvels, 182–200. 12. ​According to J. L. Heilbron in the “Introductory Essay” to (as well as the other contributors to) The Quantifying Spirit in the Eigh­teenth ­Century, ed. Tore Frängsmyr, J. L. Heilbron, and Robin Rider (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 1760 marks a crucial point in the birth of modernity as a form of thought predicated on the “application of mathematical methods” (2). For Heilbron, this

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1650–1850 form of thought can be characterized by its “quantifying spirit,” by which he means “the passion to order and systematize as well as mea­sure and calculate” (2). The instrumental use of mathe­matics, Heilbron argues, and the methods of geometry that allowed for the taxonomic ordering and tabulation of every­thing from physical geography to meteorology to ­people in the form of census taking characterized the mid-­to late eigh­teenth c­ entury. Outstanding examples of this systematizing drive include Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1735) and Philosphia Botanica (1751), as well as the encyclopedia proj­ects of Ephraim Chambers and the quin­tes­sen­tial Enlightenment text, Jean le Rond d’Alembert and Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1751). See also Richard Yeo, “Classifying the Sciences,” in The Cambridge History of Science, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 4:241–266; Yeo, Encyclopedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Gunnar Broberg, “The Broken Circle,” in Frängsmyr, Heilbron, and Rider, The Quantifying Spirit, 45–71; and John Lesch, “Systematics and the Geometrical Spirit,” in Frängsmyr, Heilbron, and Rider, The Quantifying Spirit, 73–111. 13. ​Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 220. 14. ​Johanna Drucker argues for a twenty-­first-­century version of this shift to aesthesis in the context of media studies and aesthetics, in SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Proj­ects in Speculative Computing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 127–132. 15. ​Arthur MacGregor, Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth C ­ entury (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 11. See also R. J. W. Evans and Alexander Marr, eds., Curiosity and Won­der from the Re­nais­sance to the Enlightenment (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006). 16. ​MacGregor, Curiosity and Enlightenment, 11. 17. ​Even a partial list of the fields and approaches to unpacking the curiosity cabinet provides a small sense of this range and critical depth: the history of curiosity and won­der; commercial expanse in the Re­nais­sance and Enlightenment; the place of artisans and workers in the early modern period; the history of early modern science; transformations in the concept of nature; the origins of the museum; the history of esoteric, occult, and hermetic knowledge; and the history of taxonomy. For a general overview of the curiosity cabinet in recent scholarship, see Alex Marr, introduction to Evans and Marr, Curiosity and Won­der, 1–20. 18. ​See McGregor, Curiosity and Enlightenment, 11–69. 19. ​Stafford’s work on the history of science and visual epistemology in the early modern period in many ways provides a material historiography to the totalitarian and taxonomic interpretations of Enlightenment. However, she consistently seeks to overcome the taxonomic spaces that divide ­things from one another through what she calls a pro­cess of “reenlightenment.” This reenlightenment draws on concepts from early phases of Enlightenment to articulate a position

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that views synthesis and unification without Adorno’s apocalyptic pessimism. In addition to Artful Science, see her Devices of Won­der: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen, with Frances Terpak (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001); Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); and more recently Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 20. ​Stafford, Artful Science, 220. 21. ​Stafford, Artful Science, 238. 22. ​Stafford, Artful Science, 238. 23. ​Stafford, Artful Science, 252. 24. ​For a broader analy­sis of this “birth” of the scientific spirit near the end of the eigh­teenth c­ entury, see Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007). Daston and Galison argue convincingly, if counterintuitively, that objectivity is a romantic phenomenon tied to the emergence of a new scientific ethos and facilitated by technological innovation such as photography. 25. ​David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning ­Human Understanding, ed. Tom Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 123–124. 26. ​Stafford, Artful Science, 266. 27. ​Stafford, Artful Science, 266. 28. ​Harriet Guest, A Form of Sound Words: The Religious Poetry of Christopher Smart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 123. 29. ​W.  H. Bond, introduction to Jubilate Agno, by Christopher Smart (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), 20; emphasis added. 30. ​Bond, introduction to Jubialte Agno; Daniel Ennis, “Christopher Smart’s Cat Revisited: ‘Jubilate Agno’ and the ‘Ars Poetica’ Tradition,” South Atlantic Review 65, no. 1 (2000): 1–23; Cleary, “­Castles in the Air.” 31. ​David Wellbery, foreword to Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, by Friedrich Kittler, trans. Michael Metteer with Chirs Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), xii. 32. ​Peter Steiner, Rus­sian Formalism: A Metapoetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 65, quoted in Staten, “Art as Techne,” 422. 33. ​One might include other devices ­here, the encyclopedia being the most obvious or more recently the diagram as theorized by John Bender and Michael Marrinan, in The Culture of Diagram (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). 34. ​Stafford, Devices of Won­der, 7. 35. ​Stafford, Devices of Won­der, 7. 36. ​Smart, Jubilate Agno; Christopher Smart, The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, ed. Karina Williamson and Marcus Walsh, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980–1996). 37. ​Karina Williamson acknowledges as much in her note on the text: “While the fragments are obviously all pieces of the same jigsaw, it does not follow that the

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1650–1850 order in which they w ­ ere composed represents the order in which they would fi­nally have stood if Smart had completed the work” (introduction to Smart, Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, 1:xxvi). 38. ​ Williamson does, however, acknowledge the sometimes tenuous relation between the cross-­links of the “Let” and “For” lines; see her introduction to Smart, Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, 1:xxvi. 39. ​Bond, introduction to Jubilate Agno, 39. 40. ​See Williamson’s note to this verse in Smart, Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, 1:17. 41. ​Hawes, introduction to Christopher Smart, 21. 42. ​Alexander R. Galloway, The Interface Effect (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 62. 43. ​Consider the issue of New Literary History dedicated to the question of interpretation: New Literary History 45, no. 2 (2014).

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CATESBY’S ECLECTICISM AND THE ORIGIN OF HIS STYLE ALEX SELTZER

T­here is a striking dichotomy in the styles of the bird illustrations of Mark Cates-

by’s Natu­ral History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands (1729–1747), which pictorially introduced American flora and fauna to an elite British audience. Catesby was a self-­trained artist, and most of the bird prints are static profile poses, which ­were typical of British eighteenth-­century bird illustrations.1 But a significant minority of Catesby’s birds ­were presented in dynamic postures that anticipate the vitality of Audubon’s prints done a ­century l­ater.2 The question raised h ­ ere is how to account for the disparity between the majority of Catesby’s rather humdrum poses and ­those that are so lively that they seem to be by another artist. The short answer is that he copied them. It has long been known that he  copied at least seven designs of animals drawn by John White (governor of Raleigh’s “Lost Colony” of Roanoke in the 1580s), plus a few examples by other artists.3 But the extent of his copying was much greater. The real surprise are some of the sources he chose as models—­and the implications this may have for his style as a ­whole. Before laying out the main argument, a capsule introduction to Catesby is in order for ­those who are unfamiliar with his work. ­After spending seven years (1712– 1719) in the recently founded capital of Williamsburg, ­Virginia (a period he never accounted for), Catesby returned to London with the goal of producing an illustrated natu­ral history of the relatively unexplored region of South Carolina.4 As an amateur botanist, he was able to enlist the support of a dozen key patrons, such as Sir Hans Sloane (soon to be president of the Royal Society). Using Charleston

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1650–1850 as his base for four years (1722–1725), Catesby explored dif­fer­ent regions of the wilderness at vari­ous times of the year to gather specimens and make watercolor studies. On his return voyage, he made an extended layover in the Bahamas, where he continued his collecting and recording of plants and animals. Relying on his watercolor studies (most preserved in the Royal Library, Windsor ­Castle), Catesby ­etched and hand colored plates for an illustrated book sold by subscription to a small group of aristocrats, botanists, and Royal Society members.5 The volume of the first hundred plates consisted of birds and plants (completed by 1732), while the second volume, consisting of another one hundred plates, published in the 1730s to the mid-1740s, illustrated sea life and other animals and plants.6 An appendix of twenty additional plates (many designed by other artists) appeared from 1743 to 1747. The plates ­were issued irregularly in sets of twenty prints for a limited edition of about 155 copies costing twenty-­two pounds—­arguably the single most expensive book published in eighteenth-­century Britain. Catesby initiated an unusual visual format of presenting a single plant and bird paired together. Often t­ here was a valid ecological relationship between the paired plant and bird or other animal, but sometimes he juxtaposed organisms in combinations that strike us as completely arbitrary (a bush with a fish).7 Other plates presented birds and plants from entirely dif­fer­ent regions (South Carolina and the Bahamas). As an untrained artist, Catesby’s illustrations of plants and animals have a naive quality due to the flattened pre­sen­ta­tion of his subjects, whose shapes w ­ ere sometimes repeated to create harmonious compositions. The Catesby scholar Amy Meyers designated this stylistic method of combining subjects as “mirroring,” and this is a hallmark of his work.8 Was this mirroring an intuitive innovation by a talented but untrained artist (a general assumption that I once shared), or did Catesby build on an unrecognized framework? The origin of this idiosyncratic and skillful visual integration has remained a mystery, but some of his sources may pres­ent a solution. Catesby claimed in the preface to his book, “In designing the Plants, I always did them while fresh and just gather’d: And the Animals, particularly the Birds, I painted them while alive (except a very few) and gave them their Gestures peculiar to e­ very kind of Bird, and where it would admit of, I have adapted the Birds to ­those Plants on which they fed, or have any Relation to.” 9 He reiterated this point about bird “gestures” in apologizing for working from a stuffed specimen of the Parrot of Paradise (vol. 1, plate 10): “as all dif­fer­ent Birds have gestures peculiar to them, it is requisite that they should be drawn from the living Birds, other­wise it is impractical to give them their natu­ral air.” However, Catesby’s animals ­were generally drawn from dead specimens, which indeed posed a prob­lem of imparting

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Figure 1. ​Mark Catesby, The Bald Ea­gle with Osprey, in The Natu­ral History, vol. 1, plate 1. Courtesy of The Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections at the Library of the University of V ­ irginia.

lifelike poses.10 Evidence presented ­here demonstrates that copying other artists rather than observing live specimens was his method for introducing naturalistic poses for his birds. This is consistent with the fact that Catesby scrupulously copied his own drawings (with occasional minor modifications) for his ­etchings. His reliance on “visual facts” and his limited training make it unlikely that he was capable of effectively depicting “birds on the wing.” Naturalistic models solved this prob­lem, and the newly discovered sources fall into two distinct groups. One could not pick a more con­spic­u­ous candidate for Catesby to copy than Francis Barlow (d. 1704), who was the most prominent graphic artist in ­England of the late seventeenth ­century. Barlow was a specialist in animal subjects in paintings and prints and is best known for his illustrations of Aesop’s Fables (1687).11 Barlow introduced more naturalistic poses of animals, bringing En­glish illustration in line with Continental artists. The very first print published in Catesby’s Natu­ral History, The Bald Ea­gle (vol. 1, plate 1) (figure 1), was undoubtedly based on an untitled compilation a­ fter Barlow, designated h ­ ere as Birds in Flight (figure 2).12

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Figure 2. ​­After Francis Barlow, untitled (birds in flight), in Vari­ous Birds and Beasts Drawn from Life (1710). Tate Museum T11285. Courtesy of the Tate Museum.

Catesby’s ea­gle is the reverse of the bird in the m ­ iddle of the left column in figure 2, with minor changes in the shape of the tail and extended wings. Furthermore, the hapless osprey in the background that surrendered its fish to the ea­gle is identical to the bird in the upper right of Barlow’s print. Catesby’s text indicated that the ea­gle has forced an osprey to drop its catch and is about to grasp the fish in midair.13 By cleverly juxtaposing two of Barlow’s birds of prey, Catesby illustrated this narrative of aerial thievery. Incidentally, Barlow’s ea­gle appears to have been based on a painting by the Flemish animalier Paul de Vos.14 Catesby also utilized another print ­after Barlow, An Owl Being Mobbed by Other Birds (figure 3), for his animated Blew Jay (vol. 1, plate 15) (figure 4)—­perhaps his single most accomplished naturalistic bird print and certainly his most popu­ lar.15 The prob­lem ­here is that Catesby’s jay is similar to both birds in the lower portion of Barlow’s print. The magpie on the right has the same general pose (and protruding tongue), while the Eu­ro­pean jay on the left has legs more similar to Catesby’s bird. It appears that Catesby’s jay is a hybrid of Barlow’s two birds. The

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Catesby’s Eclecticism and His Style

Figure 3. ​­After Francis Barlow, untitled (an owl being mobbed by other birds), in Multae et diversae avium . . . ​(1694). Tate Museum T11268; and in Vari­ous Birds and Beasts Drawn from Life (1710). Courtesy of the Tate Museum.

diagonal of the leafy plant stem parallels the thrust of the bird’s body, and the large lower leaf on the left repeats the shape of the wing—­subtle examples of mirroring. Barlow’s print was a fanciful variation on the bird concert, a popu­lar subject among seventeenth-­century Flemish and Dutch artists.16 In fact, Barlow’s magpie matches one in a Bird Concert of 1682, a favorite subject by the prolific Dutch bird specialist Melchoir de Hondecoeter (seen h ­ ere in a nineteenth-­century copy) (figure 5).17 Due to prob­lems in dating Barlow’s prints, the direction of the proposed influence is unproven. However, this potential connection is worth noting b ­ ecause Catesby’s print of the Yellow Breasted Chat (vol. 1, plate 50) (figure 6) is quite similar to a bird about to take flight on the lower right of this very same painting. Catesby was incapable of executing the dramatic foreshortening of the bird’s outspread wings, a pose that was a recurrent feature in many of Hondecoeter’s bird paintings. Furthermore, Hondecoeter had numerous imitators and copyists including Pieter Casteels, who was active in London in the 1720s. This par­tic­u­lar

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Figure 4. ​Mark Catesby, The Blew Jay (with greenbrier), in The Natu­ral History, vol. 1, plate 15. Courtesy of The Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections at the Library of the University of ­Virginia.

picture’s provenance and pres­ent whereabouts are unknown, but if Barlow copied Hondecoeter’s magpie, then this painting may also have been available to Catesby in London.18 Several more birds ­were derived from Barlow’s prints (space does not permit comparison of t­ hese illustrations; see the University of V ­ irginia’s Catesby web19 site for images of the following prints). Catesby’s Tropick Bird (Ap., plate 14) was clearly based on a bird from Barlow’s print Bass Island.20 The gull or gannet from the upper-­right corner was the model for Catesby’s backward-­glancing bird with added tail feathers. Another was The Round-­crested Duck (vol. 1, plate 94), with its head twisted around, which was loosely derived from Barlow’s print of Egyptian geese.21 Other likely matches are Catesby’s Brown Bittern (vol. 1, plate 78), based on Barlow’s Grebe and Gannets and perhaps his Soree (vol. 1, plate 70), which

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Catesby’s Eclecticism and His Style

Figure 5. ​­After Melchoir de Hondecoeter, Bird Concert (1682). Gathering of Bird Life (nineteenth-­century copy). Courtesy of Galerie Koller, Zu­rich (auction A172, lot 3061; March 27, 2015).

is similar to a small wading bird (a rail?) tucked in the corner of an untitled Barlow print of a spaniel pursuing a heron about to take flight.22 This correspondence between Catesby and Barlow is so obvious that it is remarkable that no one has previously noticed the connection. However, another group of sources is so unexpected that it comes as a shock: recurring motifs in Oriental export porcelain from both China and Japan offer appropriate models for other highly distinctive bird poses. Chinese export porcelain was known from Portuguese and Dutch trade by the early seventeenth ­century but only became available to the En­glish market in the late seventeenth c­ entury. Not u ­ ntil 1710 did the China trade ­really thrive.23 However, Japa­nese decorated porcelain was prevalent during the late seventeenth c­ entury and first three de­cades of the eigh­teenth ­century. The East India Com­pany acquired Japa­nese porcelain through the Dutch East India Com­pany (VOC) and also through Chinese merchants in the southern

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Figure 6. ​Mark Catesby, Yellow Breasted Chat (with trillium), in The Natu­ral History, vol. 1, plate 50. Courtesy of The Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections at the Library of the University of V ­ irginia.

Catesby’s Eclecticism and His Style

Chinese port of Amoy (present-­day Xiamen) and other ports.24 Japa­nese ceramics filled a void caused by the curtailment of Chinese porcelain production due to the fall of the Ming dynasty (1644), which brought exports to a complete halt from the 1650s ­until the 1680s.25 When Chinese manufacturing resumed ­under the Qing dynasty, the more expensive and smaller-­scale Japa­nese porcelain works could no longer compete, and exports ceased by 1730. This relatively brief win­dow of opportunity in the late seventeenth and early eigh­teenth centuries coincided with the high point of Japa­nese porcelain production in the Genroku era (1688–1703). During the early eigh­teenth ­century, the highly naturalistic designs of the colorful Japa­nese Kakiemon style of export porcelain, featuring birds and plants, offered potential models just as Catesby was preparing his Natu­ral History.26 Coincidentally, Catesby may well have been copying Barlow’s prints from Hans Sloane’s collection upon his return from Amer­i­ca in 1726 while Sloane’s assistant, J.  G. Scheuchzer, was translating Englebert Kaempfer’s account of Japan that Sloane published as The History of Japan (1727). Catesby, who had lived in a provincial town and then spent most of the previous de­cade in Amer­i­ca, may have been suddenly exposed to Oriental design, which was fash­ion­able among the London elite by the late 1720s. A one-­to-­one correspondence between Catesby’s birds and porcelain models is not pos­si­ble, as was the case with Barlow’s prints. Instead I must rely on comparisons drawn from recurring types of poses from export porcelain. Perhaps the most easily recognizable reference to the Orient was the contorted pose of Catesby’s almost hidden Golden-­crowned Kinglet (Ap., plate 13) (figure 7)—­a late addition to his book. A Meissen-­w are vase from the 1730s is a near match ­(figure  8), suggesting that both designs w ­ ere based on similar Oriental models. Meissen-­ware production in Dresden (starting in 1710) was a direct manifestation of Polish King Augustus the Strong’s obsession for collecting Oriental porcelain. Some Meissen designs ­were so technically accomplished that they are difficult to distinguish from the Oriental originals. En­glish imitations of Oriental porcelain (Chelsea, Bow) did not commence ­until the mid-­eighteenth c­ entury, too late to influence Catesby. However, Chinese blue and white porcelain was extensively copied in Delft ware pottery. The En­glish appetite for export porcelain swelled to such an extent that by the early eigh­teenth c­ entury some aristocrats devoted special porcelain rooms to display their collections. Five porcelain rooms ­were installed in William and Mary’s refurbished Ken­sington Palace in the 1690s, and the ­Water Gallery of Hampton Court also contained Oriental porcelain.27 Queen Mary, who had spent a de­cade

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Figure 7. ​Mark Catesby, Golden-­crowned Kinglet (with stewartia), in The Natu­ral History, appendix, plate 13. Courtesy of The Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections at the Library of the University of V ­ irginia.

Catesby’s Eclecticism and His Style

Figure 8. ​Meissen vase by Johann Horoldt (1725–1730). Rikjsmuseum Amsterdam, BK-17459. Courtesy of the Rikjsmuseum Amsterdam.

in Holland, rapidly spread the Dutch taste for porcelain among the En­glish aristocracy.28 Catesby had numerous aristocrats and wealthy merchants as patrons and subscribers, including the trea­surer of the East India Com­pany (Charles Dubois), but none of ­these individuals is known to have owned a substantial porcelain collection.29 By the 1720s, even middle-­class collectors could visit the shops of

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1650–1850 “chinamen” offering Oriental porcelain that one estimate has placed at a level of two million pieces imported per year.30 All told, northern Eu­ro­pean countries (excluding Holland) imported over thirty million pieces of porcelain over the course of the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries.31 The rise in the consumption of tea and coffee greatly increased the demand for porcelain vessels and ser­vice, but it is impor­tant to distinguish between the mass of everyday tea cups and the much rarer high-­end platter or vase that was suitable for display in an aristocrat’s porcelain room and that bore the sorts of designs that served as models for Catesby.32 Although the East India Com­pany imported cheap tableware by the ton, it was the private trade of its administrators (“supercargoes”) who actually exceeded their employer’s shipments with regard to both quantity and particularly quality.33 An Oriental pedigree lies ­behind the oddly twisted pose of Catesby’s Blue Gross-­beak (vol. 1, plate 39) (figure 9), perched in a sweet flowering bay tree. The form of the bird’s body mimics the seed heads, while the wing echoes the shape of the leaves, in this classic example of mirroring. The unusual contorted feeding position bears a striking resemblance to a bird with its head twisted around 180 degrees from a late seventeenth-­century Japa­nese blue and white apothecary b ­ ottle made for the Dutch trade (figure  10). Similar designs are known from other examples of Arita-­w are export porcelain.34 The pose can be traced back to Ming-­era China in the early fifteenth ­century.35 A crude version served as an illustration in John Stalker and George Parker’s A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing (1688).36 Therefore, this pose was somewhat emblematic of Japan. Catesby’s dynamic The Red-­wing’d Starling (vol. 1, plate 13) (figure 11) strongly resembles a diving bird from a mid-­seventeenth-­century Kyoto tea-­leaf jar by the master potter Nonomura Ninsei, illustrating mynah birds in aerial combat (figure 12).37 Kyoto ware was not exported, so it may be rightfully objected that this type of pottery was unavailable to the West. However, Ninsei derived this par­tic­u­lar pose, as well as the w ­ hole fighting scene, from one of two sets of panel-­ screen paintings by the Momoyama-­era artist Hasegawa Tohaku (late sixteenth ­century).38 It therefore had some diffusion, and this same pose reappeared as a tiny detail in the design of three pots with flowers from a polychrome Imari-­ ware dish done in imitation of chinoiserie style.39 ­There is also an imperial Chinese “gall bladder” vase, decorated with a diving mynah bird with ­others perched on branches, from the Ch’ien-­kung reign dating to the early 1740s.40 Perhaps from ­later in the eigh­teenth c­ entury is a Japa­nese a­ lbum illustrating a warrior in

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Figure 9. ​Mark Catesby, Blue Gross-­beak (with sweet flowering bay), in The Natu­ral History, vol. 1, plate 39. Courtesy of The Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections at the Library of the University of V ­ irginia.

1650–1850

Figure 10. ​Arita-­ware apothecary ­bottle, blue and white porcelain (1650–1700). Victoria and Albert Museum C.6-1920. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Chinese armor gazing up at a similar diving bird.41 Catesby’s coupling of the disarray of the broad-­leaved bayberry leaves with his red-­winged blackbird reflects the bird’s agitation—­another example of Catesby’s clever mirroring. Catesby’s ­Little Sparrow (vol. 1, plate 35) (figure 13), precariously balanced on a bindweed vine, is a close match to a bird found on a so-­called Chinese Imari plate

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Catesby’s Eclecticism and His Style

Figure 11. ​Mark Catesby, The Red-­wing’d Starling (with candle-­berry myrtle), in The Natu­ral History, vol. 1, plate 13. Courtesy of The Albert and Shirley Small Special ­Collections at the Library of the University of V ­ irginia.

(figure 14) done in imitation of Japa­nese porcelain. While Japa­nese artisans ­were often influenced by Chinese models, this Chinese rendition of Japa­nese decoration illustrates that ­there was copying in both directions between Chinese and Japa­nese manufacturers. This par­tic­u­lar pose was one of the most frequently repeated types found in Japa­nese Arita ware (blue and white) as well as Imari ware (polychrome) and the refined Kakiemon style (overglazes).42 Several more Catesby birds, such as the upside-­down Tyrant (vol. 1, plate 55), correspond to models in Chinese scroll painting, though no specific sources in export porcelain have been found.43 His Cat-­bird (vol. 1, plate 76), pursuing an insect, is similar to a bird pose in a woodcut in the Japa­nese edition of a painting manual, Hasshu gafu (based on a Chinese original).44 More impor­tant than nailing down ­every one of Catesby’s borrowings from the Far East is the ­matter of addressing the broader issue of ­whether such exposure could possibly have had an influence on Catesby’s own idiosyncratic style of mirroring.

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Figure 12. ​Tea-­leaf jar by Nonomura Ninsei (ca. 1574–1666). Kyoto Prefecture, Japan, Edo period (1615–1867), mid-­seventeenth ­century; stoneware painted with overglaze enamels and silver (Kyoto ware). Courtesy of the Asia Society of New York (Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rocke­fel­ler 3rd Collection, 1979.251). Photo by Lynton Gardiner.

It has already been noted that Catesby’s unique manner of mirroring, evident in many of his prints, has no apparent pre­ce­dent. Mirroring appeared full-­blown in his early prints and declined in his more mature work, perhaps ­under the influence of the naturalism inspired by his close association with the botanical artist Georg Ehert. His innovation is quite remarkable for an artist who was not only self-­ trained but fixated on painstakingly copying his own work.45 Furthermore, he displayed a penchant for repeating the same formulaic treatment of birds (and fish) over and over again. Whence this burst of originality that is so out of character with the bulk of his work? Where ­else can be found a visual model of integrating plants and animals in compositions in which the forms resemble each other?

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Figure 13. ​Mark Catesby, The L­ ittle Sparrow (with purple bindweed), in The Natu­ral History, vol. 1, plate 35. Courtesy of The Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections at the Library of the University of V ­ irginia.

1650–1850

Figure 14. ​Chinese Imari plate, Plum, Bamboo and Bird Clinging to Stem (ca. 1730). Peabody Essex Museum E82513. Courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum.

Although ­there is nothing Oriental about the pair of feeding birds in Catesby’s The Rice-­Bird (vol. 1, plate 14) (figure 15), the mimicking of the contour of the birds’ backs by the lone rice stem and the underside of the serpentine leaf has its counterpart in an Arita-­ware dish of quail beneath a single stalk of millet (figure 16). Similar arcs of the leaves are repeated in the backs of the quail. Pairs of quail foraging ­under vari­ous types of plants ­were such a common subject in Japa­nese porcelain that it is known as the “two quail pattern.” The same motif appeared in Chinese porcelain of the early eigh­teenth ­century. I am not suggesting that Catesby strictly copied similar models when he created his compositions. Rather, I am proposing that exposure to similar objects dis-

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Catesby’s Eclecticism and His Style

Figure 15. ​Mark Catesby, The Rice-­Bird (with rice), in The Natu­ral History, vol. 1, plate 14. Courtesy of The Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections at the Library of the University of V ­ irginia.

playing an Oriental aesthetic of repetitive forms may well account for Catesby’s highly innovative style of mirroring. Indeed, the Japa­nese school of Rinpa painting and decorative art, which emphasized the repetition of forms, underwent a revival at this very period, and its dissemination extended to ceramic decoration. Likewise, the bird and flower scroll painting of the Tosa school (late seventeenth ­century) also offered a format of a single bird and plant that also inspired ceramic decoration. The potential of such “high art” penetrating into more commercial porcelain production is tantalizing as a means of transmission to the West. Catesby’s eclectic sourcing suggests that he was an opportunist, surreptitiously drawing on readily available sources from Western and Oriental models. My focus has been restricted to export porcelain, but other decorative arts such as fabrics, wall­paper, and lacquer ware (often incorporated into Eu­ro­pean

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Figure 16. ​Arita-­w are plate, Two Quails beneath Millet (1681–1687). Kurita Museum Japan, 73. Courtesy of the Kurita Museum.

cabinetry) w ­ ere other pos­si­ble ave­nues of transmission for Oriental design. Catesby could have seen such luxury items in the homes of wealthy patrons and subscribers, but ­there is no reason to suppose that he expected his clientele to recognize ­these sources. Indeed, he successfully eluded detection for almost three hundred years, so his affinity with Chinese/Japa­nese designs r­ eally cannot be considered as belonging to the category of chinoiserie, for which the references w ­ ere pointedly obvious. This was the case of a bird illustration from the 1740s by Catesby’s associate George Edwards, who posed a Chinese painted pheasant perched on a tree improbably intertwined through Chinese “scholar’s rocks.” My hope is that this chapter comes to the attention of scholars of export porcelain, who would be better able to offer additional connections to strengthen the hypothesis that

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Catesby’s mirroring style and format of pairing plants and birds derived from Oriental models. I invite their further investigations.

Notes 1. ​Compare to ornithological prints by contemporaries Eleazar Albin and George Edwards (mostly) or even many by l­ater illustrators such as Thomas Bewick and Alexander Wilson. 2. ​­These dichotomies w ­ ere noted by David Wilson: “Some plates strike one as symmetrical, ordered, static . . . ​; ­others as dynamic, asymmetrical and active” (In the Presence of Nature [Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 1978], 142). 3. ​Catesby copied or utilized the work of the following artists: John White, George Edwards, Maria Merian, Everhard Kick, and Georg Ehert, plus a few designs attributed to unknown followers of Ehert. See Amy Meyers, “The Perfecting of Natu­ral History,” in Mark Catesby’s Natu­ral History of Amer­i­ca, ed. Henrietta McBurney (London: Merrell Holberton, 1997), 17, 20–22. 4. ​For Catesby’s American visits, see George Frick and Raymond Stearns, Mark Catesby: The Colonial Audubon (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), chaps. 2 and 3. More current information appears in essays in Charles Nelson and David Elliot, eds., The Curious Mister Catesby (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015). 5. ​On Catesby’s subscribers, see David Brigham, “Mark Catesby and the Patronage of Natu­ral History in the First Half of the Eigh­teenth ­Century,” in Empire’s Nature: Mark Catesby’s New World Vision, ed. Amy Meyers and Margaret Pritchard (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 91–146. 6. ​Mark Catesby, The Natu­ral History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands: Containing the Figures of Birds, Beasts, Fishes, Serpents, Insects, and Plants, 2 vols. plus appendix (London, 1729–1747). Catesby’s plates are identified by the volume number, followed by the plate number; “Ap.” stands for appendix. 7. ​On Catesby’s bizarre combinations, see my “Catesby’s Conundrums: Mixing Repre­sen­ta­tion and Meta­phor,” British Art Journal 16, no. 3 (2015): 82–92. 8. ​Amy Meyers, “Picturing a World in Flux: Mark Catesby’s Response to Environmental Interchange and Colonial Expansion,” in Meyers and Pritchard, Empire’s Nature, 235. 9. ​Mark Catesby, preface to The Natu­ral History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, 2 vols. (London: Innys and Manby, 1731), 1:xi. 10. ​McBurney, Mark Catesby’s Natu­ral History, 115. 11. ​Catesby owned a copy. Charles Nelson, “The Truly Honest, Ingenious, and Modest Mr. Mark Catesby, F.R.S.,” in Nelson and Elliott, The Curious Mr. Catesby, 10. 12. ​Published posthumously in Francis Barlow, Vari­ous Birds and Beasts Drawn from Life (London, 1710). Barlow’s ea­gle is similar to one by a follower of Jan Weenix the Younger, Christie’s, London, July 5, 2006, lot 57. Barlow used the same ea­gle

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1650–1850 in other prints; see Tate Museum cat. nos. T11265 and T11235. The dating of the print is problematical; the heron in the lower-­left corner is from Barlow’s painting of The Decoy, late 1670s, Clandon Park, Surrey. The ea­gle on the top left appeared in Barlow’s Aesop, no. 30, “De Avibus et Quadrupedibus.” 13. ​Catesby’s description follows Robert Beverley, History and Pres­ent State of ­Virginia (London, 1705), bk. 2, 35. 14. ​See for instance Paul de Vos, Hens and cockerels before a hen h ­ ouse with a bird of prey swooping, Bonhams auction 20613, London, October  30, 2013, lot 140. The cata­logue notes that ­there are several de Vos paintings with a similar diving bird. 15. ​Barlow’s untitled print was loosely based on his painting at Ham House, Surrey, dated 1673. The print was e­ tched by Francis Place and published in Multæ et diversæ avium species multifarijs formis & pernaturalĕbus figuris (London, 1671) and again in Barlow, Vari­ous Birds and Beasts. The diving crow(?) on the upper left also appears in his Birds in Flight. 16. ​The subject also relates to the Aesop fable “The Owl and the Other Birds.” 17. ​I could not obtain permission to print an image of the original, which is in a private collection. This painting can be found on the website Pubhist​.­com; also reproduced in Joy Kearney, “Ornithology and Collecting in the Dutch Golden Age: The Collecting of Exotica and Captured Specimens,” in Collecting Nature, ed. Andrea Gáldy and Sylvia Heudecker (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2014), 60, titled Long live the King (William of Orange, ­later King William III) ­because of the script on the scroll held by the owl. 18. ​Catesby’s patron Richard Mead owned a Hondecoeter painting (title unknown). Catesby prob­ably had access to his collection. Catesby subscriber Thomas Coke, Lord Lovel, ­later the Earl of Leicester, owned two Hondecoeter paintings of fighting birds at Holkam Hall, Norfolk. 19. ​See “Mark Catesby’s The Natu­ral History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands,” University of ­V irginia, http://­xroads​.­virginia​.­edu​/­~ ma02 ​/­amacker​/­etext​ /­home​.­htm (accessed September 28, 2018). 20. ​­After Francis Barlow, Bass Island, published in Vari­ous Birds and Beasts, Tate Museum, T11223. This and other Barlow prints are available online from the Tate Museum website. 21. ​From Barlow’s Set of Birds Dedicated to Lord Maitland (1686). Thanks to the Barlow scholar Nathan Flis, who made this association. 22. ​From Barlow’s Vari­ous Birds and Beasts, Tate Museum, T11547. 23. ​Geoffrey Godden, Oriental Export Market Porcelain and Its Influence on Eu­ro­ pean Wares (London: Granada, 1979), 19. 24. ​Godden, Oriental Export Market Porcelain, 28–29; C.J.A. Jorg, Porcelain and the Dutch China Trade (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 93. 25. ​Tadkeshi Nagatake, Classic Japa­nese Porcelain: Imari and Kakiemon (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2003), 61.

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26. ​See Oliver Impey, Chinoiserie: The Impact of Oriental Styles on Western Art and Decoration (New York: Charles Scribner, 1977), 93. Kakiemon-­s tyle porcelain entailed colorful enamel overglazes on a white ground. 27. ​Menno Fitski, Kakiemon Porcelain: A Handbook (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2012), 31. 28. ​Miki Sakuraba, “The Chinese Junks’ Intermediate Trade Network in Japa­nese Porcelain for the West,” in Chinese and Japa­nese Porcelain for the Dutch Golden Age, ed. Jan van Campen and Titus Eliens (Zwolle, Netherlands: Waanders Uitgers, 2014), 180. 29. ​For a list of Catesby’s subscribers (found at the beginning of vol. 1), see David Brigham, “Mark Catesby and the Patronage of Natu­ral History in the First Half of the Eigh­teenth C ­ entury,” in Meyers and Pritchard, Empire’s Nature, 141–146. 30. ​David Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-­Century E ­ ngland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 63, 139. 31. ​Robert Finlay, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 168. 32. ​Stacey Pierson, Collectors, Collections and Museums: The Field of Chinese Ceramics in Britain, 1560–1900 (Bern: Lang, 2007), 34. 33. ​Godden, Oriental Export Market Porcelain, 55–56. 34. ​See Japa­nese apothecary ­bottle of Arita export ware of the late eigh­teenth ­century, repeating a design from the late seventeenth c­ entury, reproduced in 200 Years of Japa­nese Porcelain (St. Louis: City Art Museum of St. Louis, 1970), 46, cat. no. 33; see also cat. no. 152. Other examples are a late seventeenth-­century Arita-­ware apothecary ­bottle from the Cleveland Museum of Art, cat. no. 1966.514; and another from the Chicago Art Institute, cat. no. 1985.628. 35. ​The nineteenth-­century Japa­nese artist Kan Tsen Nakanobu copied a mynah bird twisting its head in the same manner ­after an original by the acclaimed Chinese bird and flower painter Bian Jingzhao. See British Museum, cat. no. 1881.12-10.0155. 36. ​John Stalker and George Parker, A Treatise on Varnishing and Japanning (Oxford, 1688), opposite 84. 37. ​Maria Merian portrayed an indigo bunting in a similar diving pose in a watercolor on velum done ­after 1705 in the Sloane collection, British Museum, Sloane ­Album 5276.89. 38. ​A six-­panel screen of mynah birds (and its companion of egrets) by Tohaku is at the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, Chiba, and a similar pair of screens (which I have not seen) is at the Idemitsu Museum. 39. ​Arita Museum, reproduced in Takeshi Nagatake, Imari, Famous Ceramics of Japan 6 (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1982), plate 31. 40. ​Pair of porcelain vases with mynah birds and sparrows decorated in fa-­lang-­ts’ai enamels (Western technique), National Palace Museum, Taipei. 41. ​Anonymous Japa­nese artist, Chinese warrior gazing at crow, eigh­teenth ­century. ­Album leaf painting on paper with ink, mineral and gold pigments. Gallery L’Asia

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1650–1850 Exotique, New York, item no. UH11009, accessed 2013, http://­w ww​.­lasieexotique​ .­com​/­. 42. ​See for instance a Kakiemon-­style polychrome bowl, in 200 Years of Japa­nese Porcelain, 110, cat. no. 99. Although the terms are often used interchangeably, I follow the usage of “Arita” and “Imari,” in Impey, Chinoiserie, 93. Arita was the site of manufacture, and Imari was the port from which export goods ­were shipped. 43. ​See the eighteenth-­century scroll painting by Zheng Pei, Magpie on a Flowering Branch, The Johnson Collection, Cornell University Museum, 79.068.02. 44. ​Hasshu gafu, Japan, woodblock book, ca. 1670. British Museum, 1979,0305,0.17.4. (vol. 4, image 43). At least one of ­these woodcuts of birds is known to have been reproduced on export porcelain. 45. ​Catesby may have traced many of his designs onto the copper plates. See Meyers, “Perfecting of Natu­ral History,” 27n65.

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INTRODUCTION TO SPECIAL FEATURE WILLIAM STARGARD

The following essays together form an in­ter­est­ing and significant contribution to

the subject of sacred space as a defining and enhancing ele­ment for spirituality from approximately 1650 to the early 1800s. The authors of t­hese three articles ask us to consider spirituality in terms of the type of physical or ­imagined sacred space as well as the individual or collective experience of that sacred space as a framework for spiritual concerns. Their findings lead us to consider the impor­tant role that sacred spaces and spirituality played in early modern Eu­rope. Research on topics involving sacred spaces and spirituality has grown significantly over the course of the past de­cade. Most notable are W ­ ill Costner and Andrew Spicer’s edited collection of articles on Reformation Eu­rope (2005);1 the articles on medieval and early modern Eu­rope edited by Andrew Spicer and Sarah Hamilton (2005);2 and David Warren Sabean and Malina Stefanovska’s edited collection of articles on the subject of space and self in early modern Eu­rope (2012).3 The authors represented in all three books owe a considerable debt to the pioneering work of Henri Lefebvre (1974), who advanced the idea of understanding space according to physical, m ­ ental, and social typologies.4 Building on the work of Lefebvre, the authors contained in the aforementioned collections have helped frame the discussion on sacred spaces and spirituality, most notably in discussing the relationship, and often fluidity, that existed between sacred and profane space, personal and communal space, and religious and social experience. In addition, the emotional or psychological dimensions of space have also formed an impor­tant topic for study.

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1650–1850 The range of topics, themes, and geographic areas covered in the articles contained in this issue add significantly to the scholarship on sacred spaces and spirituality. Maria Clara Paulino in “Portuguese Religious Architecture, Beliefs, and Practices in Northern Eu­ro­pean Travel Accounts, 1750s–1850s,” considers how and why foreign travelers responded to the churches, convents, and monasteries they visited in Portugal. The spaces and decoration of ­these Portuguese buildings ­were often criticized by their foreign visitors ­because of their under­lying Catholic beliefs and practices. Paulino, in her historical analy­sis, places ­these foreign reactions in the context of a growing resentment ­toward Catholicism and a rising interest in the concept of purity and the Enlightenment. In “Ascetic Cosmopolitanism: Imagining Religious Retreat in Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Parts I and II and Letters Concerning the Love of God,” Donovan Tann examines a late seventeenth-­century literary description and explanation of a retreat for ­women. The author of this work is Mary Astell, who paradoxically writes of her retreat as helping w ­ omen to draw their attention away from the material world and to a higher state of ­mental virtue, even though the retreat is placed within the material world. Tann, in his literary analy­sis, examines the broader context for this paradox, including the impor­tant connections to con­ temporary religious practice and devotion in ­England. In “Convent and Crown: Redecorating Santa Chiara in Naples, 1741–1759,” Robin Thomas focuses his attention on the redecoration of this large Neapolitan convent church. His detailed art-­historical analy­sis is based on the connection he makes between the iconographic program, including paintings of biblical kings, and the court politics of the day. Thomas illuminates the redecoration as marking an impor­tant alliance between the nuns and the crown, whereby the nuns could claim special privilege as the crown asserted its royal dynasty. At Santa Chiara, spirituality was seen to have both an ecclesiastical and a po­liti­cal underpinning. All three authors examine the context for how sacred space was experienced and who experienced it. Paulino examines ecclesiastical space as it was experienced by foreign visitors. Depending on w ­ hether the church in Portugal was part of an enclosed community of nuns or monks, the public might be removed from the religious community. By contrast, Tann’s study of Astell’s retreat focuses on the solitary experience of space, where the only separation occurring is that of ­women from the material world. Thomas explains how space in the convent church of Santa Chiara in Naples was experienced by both the nuns and the public, includ-

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ing the royal ­family on special occasions. However, the nuns’ vow of enclosure precluded them from sharing the same space as the public. While t­ here is a considerable range of subjects discussed by the three authors, they all share a common theme of ­women and enclosure. The convents examined by both Thomas and Paulino ­were designed as communities for ­women removed from the mainstream of society. W ­ hether t­ here was a strict physical separation between nuns and public, as at Santa Chiara in Naples, or simply a community of nuns who could move freely in and around the public domain, ­these convents ­were designed as structures for communal living and contemplative prayer. Tann observes similar ele­ments of segregation and enclosure in Astell’s retreat, where removal from the material world was designed to be morally rejuvenating for a ­woman. All three authors directly or indirectly connect physical separation and contemplation with enhancing spirituality. In this regard, the three authors’ work connects with the pioneering research on ­women and enclosure in early modern Eu­rope by Helen Hills5 and Marilyn Dunn.6 The three articles in this section advance our understanding of sacred spaces and spirituality in the long eigh­teenth c­ entury. The geo­graph­i­cal range of their topics as well as the variety of disciplines and methodologies used make for an in­ter­est­ ing and provocative study on this subject. The work of ­these three scholars stand as a model for ­future work on sacred spaces and spirituality.

Notes 1. ​­Will Costner and Andrew Spicer, eds., Sacred Space in Early Modern Eu­rope (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 2. ​Andrew Spicer and Sarah Hamilton, eds., Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Eu­rope (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005). 3. ​David Warren Sabean and Malina Stefanovska, eds., Space and Self in Early Modern Eu­ro­pean Cultures (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). 4. ​Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-­Smith (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991). 5. ​Helen Hills, Invisible City: The Architecture of Devotion in Seventeenth-­Century Neapolitan Convents (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 6. ​Marilyn Dunn, “Spaces S­ haped for Spiritual Perfection: Convent Architecture and Nuns in Early Modern Rome,” in Architecture and the Politics of Gender in Early Modern Eu­rope, ed. Helen Hills (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 151–176.

291

PORTUGUESE RELIGIOUS ARCHITECTURE, BELIEFS, AND PRACTICES IN NORTHERN EU­RO­PEAN TRAVEL ACCOUNTS, 1750s–1850s MARIA CLARA PAULINO

A body of texts on Portugal written by visitors from Britain, the German States,

the Netherlands, Poland, and Sweden between the mid-­eighteenth and the mid-­nineteenth centuries offers volumes of description and commentary on the country’s art, architecture, urban planning, geography, landscape, popu­lar festivities, royal pageantry, private and public institutions, and social customs. Among the visitors ­were courtiers, spies, merchants, soldiers, artists, writers, and ­those in search of a kinder climate. The forty-­six sources consulted comprise texts in many dif­fer­ent genres, including journals, letters, memoirs, short accounts, long narratives, and hybrid forms that defy classification.1 Inevitably, much of the commentary is imbued with the observers’ own cultural expectations and perceptions, which come through clearly when attention falls on religious buildings. This chapter contributes to a discussion about the extent to which ­ these authors’ judgments on architectonic and aesthetic aspects are ­shaped by concepts of purity of style, by a certain gaze on religious beliefs and practices, and by notions of Pro­gress, Enlightened Governance, and North and South. This chapter also draws attention to the value of t­ hese texts as win­dows into Eu­ro­pean geopolitics and Portugal’s historical role as a peripheral country. In spite of a few isolated efforts from Portuguese scholars and, recently, a more sustained effort by the National Library of Portugal to publish a collection of translated and annotated foreign travel texts, a wider national discussion on the information they convey has been lacking. Given the negative tone of much of the commentary, one

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might not find this too surprising. However, the under­lying reasons for the relative silence are rather complex. The dictatorial regime that dominated the country for more than forty years of the last ­century curbed cultural and educational ventures, vigorously discouraged translations of foreign texts, and deemed anything throwing negative light on the nation as treasonous. It was only in 1974, with the “Carnation Revolution,”2 that a modern, demo­cratic Portugal emerged, and it took years to rebuild the cultural infrastructure and heal the national psyche. However, the time has come to engage in this discussion. Even though Portugal was not included in the ­Grand Tour, and accounts of it ­were relatively few in the Eu­ro­pean lit­er­a­ture of travel of the time ­under analy­sis, ­there is still no shortage of written material to explore. ­After a sharp decrease in travel accounts from the late sixteenth c­ entury to the 1750s,3 the number increased sharply from the year 1755. On November 1 of that year, most of Lisbon was destroyed by the ­Great Earthquake. The devastation aroused Eu­rope’s imagination and led to a renewed interest in the country,4 which was particularly evident in the German States. In the Staatsarchiv der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg, one finds much correspondence about the tragedy and a report of the assistance given by the city of Hamburg to the ­people of Lisbon between 1755 and 1757.5 In 1756, several German texts ­were published describing the ravages caused by the earthquake, which was followed by a tsunami and fires that raged for weeks.6 The descriptions ­were often illustrated with engravings,7 some of which ­were clearly the product of the engraver’s imagination.8 According to the literary historian Castelo Branco Chaves, who dedicated his life to studying and translating travel writing on Portugal, not only did the number of publications increase sharply, but the literary quality of the descriptions did too.9 The number of visitors continued to increase through the m ­ iddle of the nineteenth c­ entury. The number of accounts peaked between 1807 and 1810, written mostly by foreign military men, mostly British, involved in the fight against Napoleon’s three invasions of Portugal. In the 1830s, increased mobility and the rise of tourism changed the culture of travel and marked clear changes in authorial voice and diversity of approaches. By the ­middle of the ­century, a­ fter the upheavals that had plagued Portugal since the conflicts with Spain in the 1760s and 1801, the French invasions a few years ­later, the Liberal Wars that lasted from 1828 to 1834, and two coups d’état from opposing po­liti­cal factions in 1842 and 1851, the country embarked on a period of stability; this was supported by industrial and agricultural development and increased general literacy, which brought the country closer to its Eu­ro­pean counter­parts.

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1650–1850 Throughout this time, accounts of Portugal and its architecture are intimately bound with religious questions. Already in 1755, the fact that the earthquake struck on the Catholic holiday of All Saints’ Day increased the impact of the event on the minds of Enlightenment writers and phi­los­o­phers, as irrefutable evidence in ­favor or against God’s benevolence and intervention in ­human affairs. In December 1755, Voltaire wrote Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne, in which the disaster was presented as evidence against Leibniz’s Théodicée and the belief in the existence of a benevolent God; the same subject surfaced ­later, in Candide. In 1756, Kant wrote a description of the earthquake10 and two seminal essays11 that eventually led to his theory of earthquakes as natu­ral phenomena caused by physical forces. In Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe confessed that the destruction of Lisbon sparked in him the first serious doubts regarding God’s benevolence.12 Religious questions ­were also on the mind of common ­people. Edward Thompson, an En­glish sailor on board a ship docking in Lisbon three years ­after the disaster, hinted at the religious controversy in his description of the city: The greatest curiosities w ­ ere confined to the churches, convents and nunneries, of which t­ here w ­ ere forty-­five parish churches, twenty-­two convents of monks, friars and Jesuits, with their churches, and twenty nunneries with their peculiar churches. ­These churches, in general, ­were elegant and richly adorned, and many of the altars w ­ ere of porphyry, gold, or silver; but of t­ hese surprising edifices, with all their wealth, t­ here is now but two churches standing. The edifices of the Dutch and En­glish have received the least damages, but the Portuguese priests ­were very assiduous to destroy them, by declaring to the king of Portugal that the God of Heaven had afflicted his ­people with this calamity for the sins committed by the heretics he admitted to reside in his city. . . . ​The pen of immortal Dryden could not convey ­those terrible scenes we are presented with ­here: such havoc, such devastation and ruin, the eye never beheld; and yet Lisbon may with propriety be called lovely even in death. . . . ​The old city is entirely demolished!13 The city was eventually rebuilt by the Marquis of Pombal, secretary of state to King Joseph I from 1750 to 1777, who used the authority that the situation afforded him to strike against the power­ful clergy. His decision to expel the Jesuits from the country in 1759 again struck a chord with Enlightened Eu­rope; much was written about it in the German States.14 Temporarily weakened by this blow, the clergy nevertheless remained numerous. As the city was rebuilt, so ­were many of its churches, to the amazement of the visitors. In 1796, the German-­born Danish royal counselor and court ambassador J. P. Texier remarked that not only had the

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destroyed churches been immediately repaired, but new and large ones had been added; with their patios, courtyards and gardens, they occupied about a third of the city’s grounds. He pointed out that in the Buenos Aires area, in Lisbon’s higher grounds, one of the few convents left untouched by the earthquake, the St. Benedictine convent, which had been completed in 1598, and the convent of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, whose construction had begun in 1779, ­were so close together that they formed nearly one ­whole.15 ­There is striking consensus among ­these sources as to the excessive number of convents and churches in Portugal’s cities and towns. The number was, indeed, high. Although t­ here are no exact figures, it has been estimated that in 1750, t­ here ­were 1,129 convents and 308 monasteries for a population of around 2.1 million. In 1810, William Eliot, a British soldier fighting Napoleon’s troops, wrote, “Of the clergy ­little is to be said, except that, if we include the religious o ­ rders, they are too numerous for the population of the country. The population of Portugal is estimated at two millions; the monks, nuns, and priests from two hundred thousand to two hundred and fifty thousand.”16 In the early nineteenth c­ entury, t­ here w ­ ere 17 thirty-­nine regular convents in the greater area of Lisbon. Carl Israel von Ruders, a Swedish chaplain between 1798 and 1802, mentioned the existence of 300 churches and chapels in the city’s forty parishes; in 1841, the German Prince Felix von Lichnowski declared that number to be 240. Joaquim Antonio de Macedo, the Portuguese vice consul at Leeds, wrote that “Lisbon is divided into 35 parishes, each with its parish church; besides which t­ here are many t­emples devoted to public worship, which do not form part of the parochial system, . . . ​and in addition to ­these, the churches attached to the convents, and numerous private chapels called ermidas, so that altogether ­there are not fewer than 200 places of worship in the capital.”18 Opinion on the architectural merit and ornamentation of ­these buildings was overwhelmingly negative. Even though visitors tended to admire the roofs of convents and churches lending their charm to the landscape as they traveled up the river Tagus t­ oward the city, once they arrived, they w ­ ere struck by the overwhelming presence of such buildings and the wealth and ornamentation of their interiors; while t­ hese w ­ ere often praised for beauty and craftsmanship, they w ­ ere seen as a symptom of the mismanagement of the country’s financial resources. With a few exceptions, of which the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos (Hieronymite Monastery), in Lisbon, and the Mosteiro da Batalha (Batalha Monastery), in Batalha, are good examples, ­there did not seem to be much to admire. A good representative of the spirit of the Enlightenment, the German botanist and scientist

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1650–1850 Heinrich Friedrich Link declared that in the ­whole of Portugal, which he toured between 1797 and 1799 to study flora and geologic formations, all churches ­were small and aesthetically unpleasing due to overornamentation.19 Carl Israel Ruders claimed that all churches and chapels in Lisbon ­were large but architecturally uninteresting, and their dark interiors, although sumptuous and filled with priceless objects, could hardly be seen or admired.20 Richard Barnard Fisher, a British army officer engaged in the Peninsular War between 1808 and 1810, also commented negatively on the religious buildings’ grandiose exteriors, often wholly in marble, and the exceedingly wealthy interiors that included altars covered in gold, silver, and precious stones.21 In 1836, the German writer Gustav von Heeringen, personal assistant to Ferdinand von Saxe-­Coburg, lamented that no religious building in Lisbon could be classified as a work of art, even though all the churches had been rebuilt ­after the earthquake with good masonry work and application of many ornaments in marble.22 The artwork was generally considered poor. In 1841, the German aristocrat Alfred von Bergh wrote a letter to his ­sister in which he described the churches in Lisbon as places where no image, painting, or architectural feature of interest was to be found, only poor sculpture and ­women praying on their knees.23 The Prus­ sian officer Prince Felix von Lichnowsky was also of the opinion that Portuguese churches w ­ ere not worth much attention; they did not have “one single painting or sculpture rising above the most deplorable mediocrity.”24 It is in­ter­est­ing to note very similar observations by the Portuguese vice consul Macedo: The ecclesialogist ­will be sorely disappointed with the churches of Lisbon, especially if he have [sic] visited the Eternal city, gazed upon the wonderous fabrics of Spain or feasted his eyes on the stately minsters of E ­ ngland, France and Germany. With the single exception of the Jeronymite convent at Belem ­there are none which possess any feature in their exterior architecture to excite e­ ither admiration or won­der. ­There are some fair imitations of the Italian style such as the Estrella and Memoria, the rest are common place buildings devoid of elegance, more attention evidently having been given to internal decoration than to external beauty.25 Indeed, according to Link, not one church in the country was “in good style.”26 The question of the purity of the style—­a term consistently used by t­ hese authors—­ was a m ­ atter of concern to many. Observations fell on the side of disapproval of that which was perceived as e­ ither an undefined or a hybrid style. The description of the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos is illustrative of the travelers’ gaze. Classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983, the monastery is one of the most promi-

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nent monuments of the Manueline architecture, a uniquely Portuguese late-­Gothic style. Begun in 1459 during the reign of King Manuel I, construction was largely financed by proceeds of the spice trade with Africa and India. The Manueline style was strongly influenced by the voyages of discovery of Portuguese navigators, from the coastal areas of Africa to Brazil and the ocean routes to the Far East. It is a sumptuous, composite style, which drew heavi­ly from the style and decorations of East Indian t­ emples and incorporated maritime ele­ments and repre­sen­ta­ tions of the period of the discoveries; it further synthesized aspects of late Gothic with influences of the Spanish Plateresque, Italian urban architecture, and Flemish ele­ments. In the context of ­these sources, the monastery constituted an exception, as it was admired by all visitors and described in ­great detail. The cloisters w ­ ere wonderfully fine, the church portal magnificent, the pillars elegantly light and lofty, the altars magnificently gold and silver gilt, and the pulpits made of beautiful marble. However, the style was confusing; it had many unfamiliar ele­ments to which a Moorish origin was generally ascribed. Definitions w ­ ere attempted in multiple variations of “Moresque or gothic,” “arabesque gothic,” or “peculiar, neither gothic nor Italian.” Questions of taste and aesthetic appeal w ­ ere tightly bound with views on religious beliefs and po­liti­cal and financial responsibility and must be seen in the larger context of a Eu­rope divided. While Eu­ro­pean powers considered the continent to be the most civilized in the world and its population racially superior to that of all other regions, not all Eu­ro­pe­ans shared in this superiority to the same degree. The Reverend William Kinsey, for example, assured his readers that no nation could ever compete with E ­ ngland for its “liberal and enlightened institutions,” the dignity and integrity of its national character, and the purity of its religious creed.27 One should note ­here that other aspects of Portuguese life and customs ­were thought to show disturbing signs of impurity, such as religion and race. As far as race was concerned, the swarthy appearance of the population was interpreted as an indication of lack of restraint and an absence of racial pride; ­there must have been much breeding with the black slaves in the colonies. Thus, ­there was not one Eu­rope but “dif­fer­ent Europes where the pro­cesses of Othering paralleled that directed at other continents.”28 The “other” within Eu­rope was to be found in the southern countries. The line between north and south was defined clearly by Gustav von Heeringen in the journal of his journey from northern Germany to Lisbon in 1836. Even within Germany, he claimed that ­people in the north showed self-­restraint, whereas in the south he found “­needless

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1650–1850 opulence.” As he traveled beyond national borders, ­these differences became more pronounced. Between Holland and France, he felt he had crossed a clear line, and when he fi­nally reached Portugal, he was overwhelmed by “the foreign ele­ment,” which he defined in opposition to “the Christian ele­ment.”29 ­There was a general belief among the authors of t­ hese texts that Southern Europe—­Portugal, Spain and Greece—­had fallen from a more affluent past; this fall was the outcome of a deterioration in national character, which in turn resulted from God’s disapproval of the ways of ­these nations. One finds frequent references to the loss of Portugal’s enterprising spirit, once evinced in commerce, discovery, and navigation, to the moral decline brought about by the wealth from Brazil, to the general mismanagement of resources, and to an excess of influence on the part of religious authorities over social and economic ­matters, which impeded the country’s path to pro­gress. Economic decline was a sign of God’s punishment.30 More specifically, to the historian Thomas Macaulay, “the decay of the Southern countries of Eu­rope is to be mainly ascribed to the G ­ reat Catholic Revival.”31 Belief in saints, including the super­natural powers of relics and images, was deemed hostile to pro­gress,32 and one finds much criticism aimed at Portuguese religious practices, generally seen as idolatrous and superstitious. From 1796 through 1797, the evangelist Francis Collins was struck by the number of images of saints and the Virgin in streets and churches and by the “strange and amazing” devotion paid them. He deplored the sight of blood in sculptures of Christ and martyrs, the tears painted on female religious figures, the abundance of crosses, and religious pro­cessions that attempted to obtain alms by arousing emotion. “Why is this mendacity grown into a system?” he asked, and he answered, “­Because true religion and industry are wanting. The Roman Catholic is the only religion all over Portugal, and its inhabitants are generally deeply immured in its superstitions.”33 Collins’s position is representative of most other travelers’ views. Friedrich von Weech, passing through Lisbon in 1823 on his way to Argentina, felt that even the churches built in the Italianate style w ­ ere not suited to the devotion and elevation of the spirit that arose spontaneously in “the ideal House of God,” namely, an old German ­temple.34 He was not alone in thinking that overly ornamented architecture was improper for the purposes of a h ­ ouse of worship. In 1812, the banker John Milford observed a man by the main altar of the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos: he was on his knees, arms extended and eyes shut, and he occasionally kissed the ground and read from a prayer book. “The infatuation of this devotee, I presume,” Milford wrote, “must have been an act of penance for some crime of

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unusual magnitude.”35 Perhaps not surprisingly, only one of our sources, the Catholic German pedagogue Alexander Wittich, extolled the poetic symbolism of Catholic churches and the believers’ diligent efforts to make the interiors beautiful and pleasing to God. Protestant ­temples, he argued, did not reveal such care, neither in structure nor in decoration; the Protestant faithful ­were confronted with naked, cold buildings, “prosaic compositions which reveal a petty, bourgeois intellect.”36 The weight of the clergy in almost e­ very area of public and private life was seen as compounding the country’s prob­lems. In 1810, William Eliot wrote, It has been for some time a subject of discussion with vari­ous authors, ­whether the almost uncontrolled sway maintained by the clergy over the minds, I might perhaps say, over the persons and property of the lower ­orders of society, has been mostly effected by the force of enlightened education and superior intellect, or by means of low cunning and superstitious infatuation. I am inclined to think, that the former may have their due weight, but that the latter certainly preponderate; for when we consider the number of religious ceremonies, conducted with the utmost pomp and grandeur, handed down from generation to generation, and some of them so truly absurd, we may infer, that they themselves are equally the dupes of their own credulity.37 A large part of the responsibility for this sorry state of affairs was placed on the monks. Except for Sir George Cockburn, who, in 1811, defended their contribution to the general good through the caretaking of large tracts of land and keeping the country’s libraries in good condition, most visitors viewed them as indolent and useless, an inexplicable burden on the country’s resources. William Eliot referred to Portuguese convents as “­castles of indolence. . . . ​The monks’ cells are not the narrow and dreary mansions of meditation . . . ​; but, on the contrary, consist of a tolerably well-­furnished bed room and sitting room. The larder and cellar are always well stored, and the inhabitants of the mansion live in indolence on the fat of the land, riding about the country in their carriages, or on mules, with their attendants.”38 ­After the extinction of the religious ­orders in 1834, travelers’ notes acknowledged a decrease in the monks’ numbers and power, but the attacks did not abate. In 1851, Lady Emmeline Stuart-­Wortley made a sarcastic comment on the monks’ attention to material comfort. On being told that t­ here w ­ ere twenty-­ six statues in the herb garden of the Convent of Mafra—­a garden that was then celebrated in the ­whole country for the quality of its herbs and that, as a ­woman, she was not allowed to visit—­she exclaimed,

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1650–1850 The kitchen-­garden:—of course, ­there is a capital one ­here! Every­thing that aids to produce good cheer is sure to be found where monkish establishments have flourished—­ça va sans dire. T ­ here are said to be six-­and-­twenty statues in this kitchen-­garden of whom I know not, and such artistical [sic] works seem works of supererogation in a kitchen-­garden. Venus rising from a bed of cabbages would be certainly out of place, or Alexander the G ­ reat bounded by a border of spinage [sic], or Julius Caesar smothered in onions, or Bacon recumbent amid beans, or St. Anthony himself (if the statues ­were of an ecclesiastical description) surrounded by clouds of cauliflowers.39 In 1827, the British cleric William Morgan Kinsey declared the monks and priests responsible for the moral and religious degradation of the Portuguese and ultimately, together with the nobility, responsible for their suffering and abject misery.40 It was, indeed, for the monks that the court created magnificent constructions, including the Convent, Basilica, and Palace of Mafra. A monumental baroque and neoclassical building, its construction began during the reign of King John V (1707–1750) as a result of the monarch’s vow to build a convent when his wife, Mary Anne of Austria, gave him a descendant. The architectural complex occupies twenty-­three square miles and has 1,200 rooms and 4,700 win­dows and doors. Construction was funded with gold from Brazil. The sharp contrast between the magnificence of the monument and the poverty of the surrounding village gave rise to overt social criticism by the visitors, directed against the clergy and the king. Texier in 1796, Link in 1797–1799, the Jewish German writer Esther Bernard in 1801, and the British soldier Adam Neale in 1808 ­were the first authors in this body of sources to attack the immoral squandering of public money on such a large monastery and on the seventy indolent monks who inhabited it, who spent their lives “performing mass and prying on female peasants who went to them for confession.” 41 Bernard summarized the general stance on Mafra by declaring that the aesthetic plea­sure afforded by the building, on which the vain King João V had spent too much money trying to imitate El Escorial and St. Peter’s Basilica, was marred by the sight of the monks, ridiculously dressed in long, brown capes, kneeling in prayer all day, impervious to the plight of the destitute p ­ eople in the nearby village.42 The futility of such constructions was further highlighted by Stuart-­Wortley’s response in 1851: To what vari­ous purposes might, and prob­ably would, this colossal pile be applied in dif­fer­ent countries! In Amer­i­ca, it would most likely be a mammoth ­hotel; in ­England, a manufactory, if it escaped being baths and a huge wash-­house; in Rus­sia, a barrack; in Bavaria, a national gallery; in Ireland, a poor-­house; in Western Africa, a big barracoon; in Austria, perhaps, it would

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be made a prison; in California, a gigantic gambling-­house; in France, a vast dancing-­academy for the million; in utilitarian Holland it might be turned into a madhouse,—if the sober, phlegmatic Dutch, ever do go mad; in Italy, into a monster opera-­house—or rather three or four opera-­houses rolled into one,—(the Scala at Milan would indeed have to hide its diminished head!—­ but, in Portugal, it is simply—­nothing.43 None of t­ hese travelers approved of such investments. So much money, they all agreed, would have been better used in improving the living conditions and general education of the population, building roads and other transport infrastructure, and making government and public institutions more efficient. Specifically, they criticized the contrast between the opulence of the buildings and the poor conditions u ­ nder which Portugal’s population lived and worked. Specifically as regards Mafra, Wittich lamented the medieval mentality still pres­ent in Portugal, as illustrated by the combination of convent, palace, and church, and the equally medieval ­labor conditions of its construction: trucks, load-­bearing animals, and workers had been brought from all over the country to work on the building; with them had come seven thousand soldiers, whose task was to make sure the workers would not run back to their families and to the occupations from which they had been forcefully taken.44 Construction had lasted fifteen years. In all of ­these assertions, Wittich was correct. The building complex was declared complete in 1730, but many architectural details w ­ ere concluded only during the reign of the following three monarchs. Similar feelings w ­ ere expressed by the Portuguese Romantic writer Ramalho Ortigão (1836–1915), who lamented that for a period of ten years, twenty-­five thousand workers w ­ ere employed in this construction in conditions that ­were dismal even for the time. Food and lodgings ­were very poor, and disease was rampant. In four years, 1,338 workers died.45 To some extent, it may be fitting that, to ­these travelers, the palace, basilica, and convent of Mafra ­were a symbol of all that was unwise and ultimately self-­destructive in Portugal’s religious and financial affairs. It seems clear, then, that the architectonic and aesthetic aspects of Portugal’s religious buildings ­were informed, to a large extent, by deep-­rooted views on Roman Catholicism, on the perceived decline of Southern Eu­rope, and on the notion of purity or, in this case, impurity in its many manifestations. The perceived impurity was recognized in spatial organ­ization, architectural ornamentation, religious practices, and financial and po­liti­cal management. The richness of ­these sources, both as historical documents and as discourses in dynamic relationship with the pres­ent time, invites sustained interdisciplinary analy­sis and debate. The

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1650–1850 time has indeed come to invest in Portugal’s linguists and scholars to look into ­these and other foreigners’ accounts. They unquestionably deserve the nation’s attention.

Notes 1. ​For a complete list of the sources consulted and a discussion on the information they provide on vari­ous aspects of Portuguese art and architecture, see Maria Clara Paulino, Uma torre delicada: Lisboa e arredores em notas de viajantes, ca. 1750–1850 (Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 2013). 2. ​The Carnation Revolution (Revolução dos Cravos), begun on April 25, 1974, overthrew the authoritarian, corporatist regime of fascist contours that had ruled Portugal since 1926. It began with a military coup that was immediately supported by the vast majority of the Portuguese, who, in the days following the coup, placed red carnations in soldiers’ gun barrels. 3. ​Marion Ehrhardt, “As primeiras notícias Alemãs acerca da cultura Portuguesa,” in Portugal-­Alemanha: Estudos sobre a recepção da cultura e da língua Portuguesa na Alemanha, ed. Marion Ehrhardt, Rainer Hess, and Juergen Schmidt-­Radefelt (Coimbra: Editora Almedina, 1980), 22–27. 4. ​On this topic, see Ana Cristina Bartolomeu de Araújo, “O desastre de Lisboa e a opinião pública Europeia,” in Estudos de história contemporânea Portuguesa: Homenagem ao Professor Victor de Sá (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 1991), 93–107. 5. ​António de Oliveira Marques, “Documentação sobre Portugal em arquivos Hanseáticos Alemães,” in Actas do III Colóquio Internacional de Estudos Luso-­ Brasileiros, Lisboa, 1957, vol. 2 (Lisbon, 1960), 338. 6. ​Most successful among the many volumes of collected works published on the topic ­were Schrecklisches Erdbeben und Untergang von Lissabon: Nebst dabei stattgehabten sechstaegigen furchtbaren Brande (Hayn, 1755); and Christian Samuel Ulber, Die Canzel Gottes auf dem Steinhaufen zu Lissabon: Bey Veranlassung des dasigen grossen Erdbebens (Leipzig: Liegnitz, 1756). For more bibliographic information, see Ehrhardt, “As primeiras notícias,” 61. 7. ​Many of ­these illustrations are included in Maria Leonor Machado de Sousa, “Lisboa vista pelos estrangeiros (levantamento bibliográfico até ao fim do séc. XIX),” Lisboa Revista Municipal (1983): 58–64. 8. ​On this topic, see Nuno Saldanha, “Memórias de viagem: Um olhar Europeu sobre o Portugal do século XVIII,” Catálogo da Exposição (2000). 9. ​Castelo Branco Chaves, O Portugal de D. João V visto por três forasteiros (Lisbon: Biblioteca Nacional, 1983), 9. 10. ​Immanuel Kant, Geschichte und Naturbeschreibung der merkwuerdigsten Vorfaelle des Erdbebens, welches an dem Ende des 1755sten. Jahres einen grossen Theil der Stadt erschuettert hat (Königsberg: Johann Heinrich Hartung, 1756).

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11. ​Immanuel Kant, “Fortgesetzte Betrachtung der seit einiger Zeit wahrgenommenen Erderschütterungen” (1765), in Werke, Akademie Textausgabe I: Vorkritische Schriften 1747–1756 (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1968), 465–472. 12. ​For a discussion on this topic, see Ehrhardt, “As primeiras notícias,” 27–28. 13. ​Edward Thompson, Sailor’s Letters: Written to His Select Friends in ­England, during His Voyages and Travels in Eu­rope, Asia, Africa, and Amer­i­ca, from the year 1754 to 1759, 2nd ed. (London: T. Becket and P. A. de Hondt, 1767), 66–67, 70–78. 14. ​Examples of this interest are collections of essays, such as Sammlung merkwuerdiger Nachrichten und Briefe den abscheulichen in Frankreich und Portugal vorgehabten Koenigs-­Mord betreffend sammt beygefuegten Manifeste Sr. Koenigl. Majestaet in Portugal, worinnen die irrigen Lehren derer Jesuiten dem Publico bekannt gemacht warden (Frankfurt, 1759); and Urbano Tosetti, Sammlung der neuesten Schrifften, welche die Jesuiten in Portugal betreffen (Frankfurt, 1760). 15. ​Joseph Peter Texier, Reise durch Spanien und Portugal und von da nach ­England (Hamm: Schulz und Wundermann, 1825), 129. 16. ​William Granville Eliot, A Treatise on the Defence of Portugal, with a military map of the country: to which is added, a sketch of the manners and customs of the inhabitants and principal events of the campaigns ­under Lord Wellington, in 1808 and 1809 (London: T. Egerton, Whitehall, 1810), 117. 17. ​Francisco José Magalhães, John Cam Hob­house e Portugal: Diário de viagem 1809 (Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 1993), 219. 18. ​Joaquim Antonio de Macedo, A Guide to Lisbon and Its Environs, Including Cintra and Mafra: With a Large Plan of Lisbon (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1874), 112. 19. ​Heinrich Friedrich Link, Bemerkungen auf einer Reise durch Frankreich, Spanien und vorzueglich Portugal (Kiel: C. G. Fleckeisen, 1801–1804), 97, 176, 219, 367. 20. ​Carl Israel Ruders, Reise durch Portugall von C. I. Ruders, Koeniglich-­Schwedischen Gesandschaftsprediger in Lissabon, ­after the Swedish original, ed. H.G.A. Gerken (Berlin: Bossischen Buchhandlung, 1808), 263. 21. ​Richard  B. Fisher, A Sketch of the City of Lisbon, and Its Environs: With Some Observations on the Manners, Disposition, and Character of the Portuguese Nation (London: J. Ridgway, 1811), 48. 22. ​Gustav von Heeringen, Meine Reise nach Portugal im Fruehjahre 1836 (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1838), 249. 23. ​Alfred von Bergh, Letzte Reisebriefe über Portugal und Spanien (Berlin: Becke, 1850), 238. 24. ​Felix von Lichnowski, Portugal: Erinnerungen an dem Jahre 1842 (Mainz: Victor von Zadern, 1843), 107. 25. ​Macedo, Guide to Lisbon, 112. 26. ​Link, Bemerkungen auf einer Reise, 226. 27. ​William Morgan Kinsey, Portugal Illustrated: In a Series of Letters (London: Treuttel, Würtz, and Richter, 1828), 143.

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1650–1850 28. ​Glenn Hooper and Tim Youngs, introduction to Perspectives on Travel Writing: Studies in Eu­ro­pean Cultural Transition, ed. Glenn Hooper and Tim Youngs (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 7. Hooper and Youngs point specifically to British travel accounts of Britany as examples of the ideology under­lying the Victorians’ gaze on their “social/colonial ­Others,” even when ­those o ­ thers ­were not, strictly speaking, British colonies. 29. ​Heeringen, Meine Reise nach Portugal, 33. 30. ​John Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 228–234. 31. ​Thomas Macaulay, “Von Ranke’s History of the Popes,” in Critical and Historical Essays (London: Longman, 1851), 66. 32. ​Rev. M. Vicary, Notes of a Residence at Rome, in 1846 (London: R. Bentley, 1847), 166. 33. ​Francis Collins, Voyages to Portugal, Spain, Sicily, Malta, Asia-­Minor, Egypt, &c. &c. from 1796 to 1801: with an historical sketch, notes and reflections by Francis Collins (London: Printed for the author, 1807), 17. 34. ​Friedrich von Weech, Reise über ­England und Portugal nach Brasilien und den vereinigten Staaten des La-­Plata-­Stromes waehrend den Jahren 1823 bis 1827 (Munich: Fr. X. Auer, 1831), 133. 35. ​John Milford, Peninsular Sketches, during a Recent Tour (London: T. Davison, 1816), 166. 36. ​Alexander Wittich, Erinnerungen an Lissabon: Ein Gemaelde der Stadt nebst Schilderungen portugiesischer Zustaende, Bestrebungen und Fortschritte der neuesten Zeit (Berlin: Druck und Verlag von G. Reimer, 1843), 108. 37. ​Eliot, A Treatise on the Defence of Portugal, 120–121. 38. ​Eliot, A Treatise on the Defence of Portugal, 118–119. 39. ​Lady Emmeline Stuart-­Wortley, A Visit to Portugal and Madeira (London: Chapman and Hall, 1854), 123. 40. ​Kinsey, Portugal Illustrated, ix. 41. ​Adam Neale, Letters from Portugal and Spain; comprising an account of the operations of the armies u ­ nder their Excellencies Sir Arthur Wellesley and Sir John Moore from the landing of the troops in Mondego Bay to the ­battle at Corunna (London: Richard Phillips, 1809), 79. 42. ​Esther Bernard ( geboren Gad ), Briefe waehrend meines Aufenthalts in E ­ ngland und Portugal an einen Freund (Hamburg: August Campe, 1802), 363. 43. ​Stuart-­Wortley, Visit to Portugal and Madeira, 118–119. 44. ​Wittich, Erinnerungen an Lissabon, 55. 45. ​Ramalho Ortigão, Eça de Queiroz, As Farpas: Chronica mensal da politica das letras e dos costumes, ser. 3, no. 3 (Lisbon: Typ. Universal, May 1875), 68–69.

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ASCETIC COSMOPOLITANISM IMAGINING RELIGIOUS RETREAT IN MARY ASTELL’S A SERIOUS PROPOSAL TO THE LADIES, PARTS I AND II AND LETTERS CONCERNING THE LOVE OF GOD DONOVAN TANN

In the late seventeenth c­ entury, Mary Astell famously sought to establish an inno-

vative school to enrich the minds of young En­glish ladies. In A Serious Proposal to the Ladies: For the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest, first published anonymously in 1694, Astell outlines her seemingly contradictory plan to build a material space of learning to facilitate the explic­itly immaterial activity of the mind. The second part of A Serious Proposal (1697) explains Astell’s epistemological framework and articulates her conviction that the mind can only obtain knowledge of the material world through God’s constant mediation. Astell’s educational program relies on a pro­cess of ascetic cosmopolitanism that uses a dedicated religious space to alert the mind to its own immateriality. This educational method is ascetic in its explicit rejection of the world and its values and cosmopolitan in its cultivated attitude of disinterest ­toward the material world and the customs that inhere in its spaces. Astell’s proposal for a new approach to w ­ omen’s education depends on her assumption that h ­ uman reason can apprehend religious truth in an immediate and reliable way. In order to justify her proposed space of religious retreat, Astell distinguishes between religious and secular spaces on theological and philosophical grounds. This justification participates in an ongoing conversation with con­ temporary thinkers such as René Descartes about knowledge, belief, and the material world. Most broadly, Astell’s arguments for the symbolic significance of religious spaces and the incontrovertible persuasion of religious knowledge play a previously unacknowledged role in the long eigh­teenth ­century’s developing

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1650–1850 distinction between the interior spaces and interiority of religious belief and the public world of social and po­liti­cal interests, which Michael McKeon traces at length in The Secret History of Domesticity.1 In order to improve ­women’s intellectual and religious selves, Astell situates her educational program in a near-­monastic retreat away from the world’s distractions: “Now as to the Proposal it is to erect a Monastery, or if you ­will . . . ​we ­will call it a Religious Retirement, and such as ­shall have a double aspect, being not only a Retreat from the World for t­ hose who desire that advantage, but likewise, an institution and previous discipline, to fit us to do the greatest good in it.”2 I characterize her proj­ect as a retreat (in contrast with modern connotation of permanence in the term “retirement”) in order to capture the word’s modern senses as both a noun and a verb—­a bounded, physical space and an active, reflective pro­cess. Astell’s Serious Proposal relies on a dichotomy between religious space and the ordinary world analogous to the Christian liturgical calendar’s distinction between the sacred seasons and Ordinary Time. Both sets of terms are only comprehensible in their role as part of a theologically grounded w ­ hole, and this under­lying theological ­wholeness undergirds Astell’s account of religious knowledge. A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Parts I and II relies on Astell’s distinction between the space marked as religious—­a term in her system of thought that encompasses religious belief and the practices that support and express that belief—­and the unmarked ordinary world against which this space stands. The distinction between this proposed space of religious retreat and the rest of the material world plays a significant role in Astell’s educational pro­cess. The contrast between religious and ordinary space is ultimately more useful to her model of mind than are the par­tic­u­lar cultural practices that her text prescribes. Astell contrasts her methodological realignment of w ­ omen’s m ­ ental powers with the ste­reo­t ypical interests of her contemporaries: “Your Glass ­will not do you half so much ser­vice as a serious reflection on your own Minds; which ­will discover Irregularities more worthy your Correction.”3 In imagining a space of religious retreat, Astell must articulate the relationship between the spatial part and ­whole and explain how a material space can instruct an immaterial, rational mind. By examining how Astell’s stated religious commitments inform her imaginative construction of her proposed school as a space of religious retreat, I ­will explain how Astell’s final reliance on the idea of the pres­ent world as symbolically significant fails to overcome the disillusionment of religious disagreements that emerge from an individualistic model of knowledge. As in John Locke’s Reasonableness of Chris­ tian­ity, a text founded on premises that Astell that vehemently opposed, Astell’s

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Serious Proposal allows her readers to distinguish the private ways of knowing associated with religious knowledge from the forms of knowledge ­under debate in public, po­liti­cal life.4 Although Astell’s Serious Proposal produces an i­magined acad­emy rather than a material, architectural structure, her proposal appears to have contributed to the founding of at least one school. Florence Smith, in her foundational early twentieth-­century study, situates t­ hese works in the context of Astell’s l­ater “so­cio­ log­i­cal efforts t­ owards the establishment of a charity school for girls in Chelsea.”5 Smith notes that this school, established “by the group of friends closest to Mary Astell” in 1729, operated continuously ­until the nineteenth ­century.6 Astell’s arguments about the foundations of religious knowledge, however, extend beyond her neighborhood in her tracts’ reception and broader influence as devotional and conduct lit­er­a­ture. By describing Astell’s educational institution as a space of religious retreat, I distinguish the abstract concept of space from Astell’s par­tic­u­lar articulation of a constructed space with bounded interior and excluded exterior spaces.7 In contrast with the abstract, geometric accounts of space that Henri Lefebvre associates with modernity’s violent, dominating attitude t­oward space, Astell’s educational program engages with the cultural ideas and practices that inhere in spaces.8 In for space, the geographer Doreen Massey explains how “implicit conceptualisations of space . . . ​are a crucial ele­ment in our ordering of the world, positioning ourselves, and ­others ­human and nonhuman, in relation to ourselves.” 9 For Astell, understanding the relationship between self and space is essential to understanding the rational basis of religious knowledge. Rather than choosing to avoid the potentially suspect Catholic connotations of “monastery,” Astell distances herself from the term by acknowledging that the “scrupulous” reader might take issue with the word. The critic J. David Macey Jr. observes, “Convents did not exist in E ­ ngland during the seventeenth and eigh­ teenth centuries, and any serious discussion of a ‘Religious Retirement’ for ­women had to take En­glish anti-­Catholicism into account” by drawing a stark contrast between the Catholic monastery and the ­imagined one.10 As Macey notes, Astell’s emphasis on the freedom within the “institution and previous discipline” of her monastery by eliminating monastic vows might have provided a clear distinction for her audience.11 Something implied by the word “monastery” remains impor­tant to Astell beyond an aesthetic affinity based on her well-­known sympathy with conservative po­liti­c al and religious ideas. Nicole Pohl suggests that Astell and writers like her appropriate “traditional preconceptions about

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1650–1850 enclosed and all-­female spaces” for their own purposes.12 Astell’s reference to the cultural power that the Catholic monasteries and convents once held in E ­ ngland suggests that ideally constructed spaces can oppose negative cultural practices and nurture individual and institutional religious practices. The cultural type of the recusant Catholic ­women in the seventeenth-­century Stuart court and in the rest of En­glish society may have also presented Astell with a model of w ­ omen’s religious opposition to prevailing social norms. Astell contextualizes her proposal by arguing that a dedicated space of religious retreat is necessary to improve the lives of all w ­ omen. Astell contends that ­women—­especially ­those with sufficient standing to qualify as ladies in particular—­ need a robust education for life in the pres­ent world in addition to the eschatological f­uture ­because this form of education produces spiritually competent ­women suited to the complex task of managing an estate.13 She retrospectively describes her text as a s­ imple request for “a reasonable provision for the Education of one half of Mankind, and for a safe retreat so long and no longer than our Circumstances make it requisite.”14 Astell eschews aristocratic vanities and courtly dalliances for an educational model that nurtures the mind and spirit. In contrast with ladies who seek social status through marriage, Astell dedicates her work to her female readers in search of something to “improve [their] Charms and heighten [their] Value” with “something more truely illustrious, than a sounding Title or a ­great Estate.”15 In her Serious Proposal, this “truely illustrious” profit consists of ­women’s intellectual and spiritual development. The text maintains that a properly ordered religious space can shape the willing subject by facilitating the mind’s complete freedom. In the first part of A Serious Proposal, then, Astell argues that young ladies must learn to recognize their true worth within a society that values them as aesthetic objects rather than as possessors of eternal souls. Her solution is an educational program of ascetic cosmopolitanism—­a systematic engagement with the ­whole of the material world that allows the subject to comprehend the epistemological limits of that world from a position of renunciation—as the remedy to this social distortion. Astell contends that ­women ­will see religious issues more clearly at a distance: “From this sacred Mountain where the world ­will be plac’d at our feet, at such a distance from us, that the streams of its corruptions ­shall not obscure our eye-­sight; we ­shall have a right prospect of it.”16 Like Astell’s proposed monastery, her allusion or meta­phor connects her proj­ect with the idea of a sacred space that is marked as distinct from the rest of ­human life but nevertheless remains embedded within the world that it seeks to transcend.17 Astell’s

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i­magined mountaintop vantage point reveals the nature of the material world that it surveys and f­ rees its inhabitants from the destructive habits of custom associated with the world below. Astell’s image of the sacred mountain articulates the seeming paradox at the center of her proposal and its epistemological model. How can one construct a religious retreat within the pres­ent world and nevertheless expect that space to yield knowledge of the world beyond? Astell addresses this question by discussing two distinct theological approaches to space. The first appears in Astell’s discussion of the space of the body and its relationship to the inward self. Sharon Achinstein identifies Astell’s ascetic attitude ­toward ­matter within Astell’s more famous polemic against the gendered inequalities of marriage: “[Astell’s] approach was surely ascetic, and as such a brace against the controlling structures of marriage and patriarchal authority. It was, nonetheless, a revolutionary assault on m ­ atter tout court.”18 Achinstein’s analy­sis rightly characterizes Astell’s rejection of the idea of the female body as a material space capable of limiting the mind’s absolute freedom. This account of the inward soul has biblical pre­ ce­dent in the image of the Holy Spirit’s dwelling within the redeemed subject. By locating the soul and God’s presence within the believing subject, Astell asks her readers to think about the spirit and the self as physically inward and separate from the body.19 Astell’s second theological approach to space—­and the subject of this study—­ addresses the role of external spaces in the formation of religious and secular knowledge. In addition to her description of the thinking, rational self within the physical or meta­phorical body, Astell addresses the mediating forces of customs and social institutions such as university learning and marriage that mediate how ­people interact with ­these socially marked spaces. In her most familiar tract, Some Reflections Upon Marriage (1700), Astell considers the effects of this social and religious institution on the female subject and the ­house­hold. In the case of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Parts I and II, Astell focuses most directly on custom’s interference in the formation of religious knowledge. The broadly negative attitude ­toward ­matter that Achinstein identifies in Astell’s philosophy is a prominent characteristic of space’s role in Astell’s educational curriculum. In order to challenge the idea that the material world is significant in and of itself, Astell’s model of religious learning requires a negative space capable of opposing custom’s destructive force by means of contrasting social or ritual practices. In Part I, Astell describes her institution as a space within the ordinary world devoted to challenging that world’s harmful intellectual habits. Her

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1650–1850 description draws on the familiar biblical language of ritual purification: “did we rightly consider [God’s] Nature, we shou’d neither dare to forget him, nor draw near to him with unclean hands and unholy hearts.”20 Astell links the practice of ceremonial cleansing with appropriate religious observance and, in d ­ oing so, implicitly argues for a limited connection between the material world of clean hands and the eternal real­ity of God’s presence. Her comparison suggests that believing subjects can understand spiritual m ­ atters clearly from within the material world with the aid of a rightly ordered material space. Her directions for this ordering, however, are almost wholly negative. When Astell lists the advantages of retired living, she sets her ­imagined space in contrast with the rest of the ordinary world. Life “in the world” is full of dangers such as “a constant Scene of Temptations and the infection of ill com­pany” that threaten w ­ omen’s virtue.21 Although willing to concede that “it is indeed more glorious to conquer than to fly,” she counsels ­women to retreat as far as pos­si­ble from the ordinary world for their spiritual welfare.22 ­Here, Astell’s retreat functions as an active pro­cess of fleeing the world rather than a fixed destination in space. She emphasizes the positive educational value of her retreat as the motivation for escape: “So much for the inconveniencies of the living in the World; if we enquire concerning Retirement, we s­ hall find that it does not only remove all ­these, but brings considerable advantages of its own.”23 This material space of retreat offers positive benefits for ­women’s true selves. It is con­ve­niently “out of the road of temptations” and capable of “furnishing” its inhabitants “constantly with good employment.”24 Astell’s interest in removing the worldliest aspects of the material world at first resembles the privation of Christian ascetic practices and radical monasticism, such as that of the Desert ­Fathers. The idea that “good employment” within the material world can be good spiritual employment, however, reveals Astell’s interest in articulating a tenuous but critical relationship between the rational self and the material universe. In fleeing the world’s dangers, Astell’s ladies come to understand the limitations of the material world more generally. Astell expands on this account of religious knowledge in her complementary second part of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. ­After considering why her contemporaries failed to build her monastic acad­emy immediately, she sketches a model of knowledge and learning that articulates space’s educational function more fully. This concentrated examination of the foundations of ­human knowledge continues to rely on the space of religious retreat to remove the shackles of custom in intellectual ­matters. Not content with merely tearing down cultural conventions, an impulse she criticizes based on the princi­ple that “it requires no g­ reat

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skill to Object,” Astell intends to challenge custom with an explic­itly religious model of knowledge.25 While Astell does not intend to provide a comprehensive model of reason’s operation, she consistently explains reason through the religious framework that she develops in her explic­itly theological writings. ­Because Astell maintains that religious belief is essential to the construction of ­human knowledge, her educational proposal is most clearly legible in light of the theological claims that motivate and support this learning pro­cess. In recent years, Astell’s critics have begun to recognize and explore the religious ideas that inform Astell’s account of reason and the mind. In the invaluable essay collection Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, editors William Kolbrener and Michal Michelson document this growing appreciation of “the full range and details of Astell’s learning and commitments” and of Astell’s “engagement with all aspects of the intellectual world she inhabited,” inaugurated by Ruth Perry’s foundational biography.26 Kolbrener and Michelson observe that this more nuanced understanding of Astell’s participation in debates about knowledge and ­women’s value improves on Astell’s earlier, less consciously methodological criticism that focused more narrowly on “the ways in which she anticipated more con­temporary feminist educational and social agendas” or critiqued liberal accounts of individual rights.27 Astell explains that religion is her primary motivator: “We have hitherto consider’d our Retirement only in relation to Religion, which is indeed its main, I may say its only design; nor can this be thought too contracting a word, since Religion is the adequate business of our lives.”28 Her interpretation of “religion,” in conscious opposition to contemporaries who already consider it “too contracting a word,” suggests that the scope of religious ideas is ­under debate. Astell’s proposal for a space dedicated to the religious instruction of w ­ omen participates in the formation of modern bound­aries that separate religious knowledge and practices from public life, but it does so in dialogue with con­temporary intellectual and theological questions.29 While I recognize that Astell’s theological ideas have impor­tant social valences, I also seek to attend to the fact that her texts consistently treat religious concerns as the primary end ­toward which her program of social reform leads. ­After all, Astell’s proposal is not simply an act of wish fulfillment based on ­women’s economic and social marginalization. Astell’s concern for the condition and status of con­temporary ­women extends from her concern that ­people throughout En­glish society would have access to the knowledge required for all to possess intellectually sound religious convictions. She speculates, “The Ladies, I’m sure, have no reason to dislike this Proposal, but I know not how the Men ­will

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1650–1850 resent it, to have their enclosure broke down, and ­Women invited to tast of that Tree of Knowledge they have so long unjustly monopoliz’d.”30 As a retreat from the economy of ordinary life, this space certainly opposes the damaging intellectual habits of that life. Nevertheless, Astell’s primary concern is with the spiritual and intellectual well-­being of all ­people, and her solidarity with ­women, while impor­ tant, derives from this original commitment.31 Her works take aim at the spiritual ignorance that threatens to empty even the well-­managed and well-­educated life of meaning, and knowledge is her weapon. Astell’s intent is to wake the subject’s sleeping intellectual faculties: “And by the Learning which ­will be ­here afforded, and that leisure we have, to enquire ­after it, and to know and reflect on our own minds, we s­ hall rescue our selves out of that woful incogitancy we have slipt into, awaken our sleeping Powers and make use of that reason which GOD has given us.”32 Astell imagines an escape within an escape—­from the ordinary world and from the unthinking, unreasoning state of “incogitancy” that most resembles it. She seeks to improve the eternal, reasoning self with a material space that embraces the true value of the self and rejects the everyday world’s illusions and distortions. Astell implies that a sanctified space can draw p ­ eople’s attention to the soul and the mind by dispelling the customs that blind h ­ umans to their true nature. She promises of her institution, “It ­shall not so cut you off from the world as to hinder you from bettering and improving it, but rather qualify you to do it the greatest Good, and be a Seminary to stock the Kingdom with pious and prudent Ladies” as examples for the rest.33 Astell argues that ­women can achieve this goal by establishing a space of religious retreat that ­frees its inhabitants from the “enchanted Circle” of custom: “one g­ reat end of this institution, s­ hall be to expel that cloud of Ignorance, which Custom has involv’d us in, to furnish our minds with a stock of solid and useful Knowledge, that the Souls of W ­ omen may no longer be the only 34 unadorn’d and neglected t­ hings.” The link between spaces devoted to religious retreat and the transformation ­these spaces might effect in the minds of the ­people within that space is distinct from the assumptions implied in ceremonial religious spaces instituted earlier in the ­century. Rather than expecting the raised altar or the beauty of holiness to draw p ­ eople t­oward the divine, Astell’s dedicated religious space banishes the “cloud of Ignorance” that lends inherent value to a single form of religious space. Like other seventeenth-­century Arminians, Astell accepts the idea that ­human reason and nature are reliable guides when unfettered by sinful customs rather than imagining the fall as wholly corrupting the judgment and w ­ ill of humankind.35 For Astell, however, the space of religious retreat chal-

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lenges custom’s dominance by cultivating a rational, cosmopolitan attitude t­ oward space in general that restores intellectual freedom. The curriculum that Astell proposes for her acad­emy clarifies the role of immediate rational knowledge in shaking the shackles of custom. She explains that received knowledge can be misleading for uneducated ladies who lack the education necessary to judge between competing opinions: Thus Ignorance and a narrow Education, lay the Foundation of Vice, and Imitation and Custom rear it up. Custom, that merciless torrent that carries all before. And which indeed can be stem’d by none but such as have a ­great deal of Prudence and a rooted Vertue. For ’tis but Decorous that she who is not capable of giving better Rules, shou’d follow ­those she sees before her, lest she only change the instance and retain the absurdity.36 Only t­ hose who develop “Prudence and a rooted Vertue” can avoid being caught up in changing, unreliable customs. In the first part of the Serious Proposal, Astell eschews extensive curricular planning and simply outlines the most general activities that young ladies would perform in her space of religious retreat. She imagines that her residents would perform “the Publick Offices a­ fter the Cathedral manner, in the most affecting and elevating way,” participate in “a course of solid instructive Preaching and Catechizing,” and freely choose to follow the traditional feast and fasting days to set “an admirable pattern of Obedience.”37 Astell explains that she preserves the traditional church seasons and rites only ­because this “pattern of Obedience” opposes the seated habits of the fallen, material self. This logic of countering custom with another set of rites demonstrates Astell’s ascetic cosmopolitanism. The ­imagined monastery’s emphasis on ceremony unsettles custom’s hegemonic power, and Astell’s hy­po­thet­i­cal votary gains intellectual virtue from this freedom rather than from the objective value of the liturgy. Astell’s meta­phor of l­abor further articulates how the pres­ent world influences the spiritual self: “But having long since laid the Ax to the root of sin, and destroy’d the ­whole body of it, they ­will look upon ­these holy times of recollection and extra-­ordinary Devotion . . . ​as excellent means to keep it down.”38 While Christian justification eradicates sin, “extra-­ordinary” acts of devotion resemble the disciplined maintenance of an artificial garden or lawn. This laborious, ascetic pro­cess is characteristic of Astell’s understanding of her religious retreat as both a physical space and an active pro­cess of keeping down the weeds of custom. Her emphasis on devotion as the means of countering the insidious growth of sin involves the ongoing pursuit of religious knowledge that her retreat facilitates.

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1650–1850 Astell’s space of religious retreat eliminates the barriers to reason’s operation by separating ­women from the customs associated with the spaces of their ordinary lives before confronting them with a contrasting set of experiences. This space defamiliarizes the ordinary world for its residents in order to encourage them to make a principled rejection of the material world. In Part II, Astell writes, “We must therefore withdraw our Minds from the World, from adhering to the Senses, from the Love of Material Beings, of Pomps and Gaieties.”39 ­Here, Astell appears to describe a goal at odds with her monastery’s daily devotional offices, or­ga­nized church calendar, and prescribed moderation in diet and living arrangements. ­Because of her fundamentally ascetic strategy, Astell echoes common nonconformist and iconoclastic complaints against ceremonial church spaces and practices in spite of their utility within her educational pro­cess. Astell’s language draws on an existing discourse of Protestant iconoclasm that Achsah Guibbory describes as a “suspicion of external, corporeal forms of worship” as potentially idolatrous.40 ­Women in Astell’s space of religious retreat learn to abandon the love of “Pomps and Gaieties” through a set of contrasting sensory experiences capable of unseating the hidden assumptions and prejudices that obscure reason itself. In the ascetic cosmopolitanism of Astell’s school, it confronts its residents with a radically dif­fer­ent material space and radically dif­fer­ent religious practices in order to encourage ­women to think beyond their immediate sensory environment. Like Montaigne’s educated youth who travels to dramatically dif­f er­ent lands and cultures to challenge childhood biases and indulgences, Astell’s student thinks about materiality in general by living in a space consciously opposed to her ordinary experience of the world.41 Astell frequently uses the language of freedom to describe the proper operation of reason and describes an attachment to pre-­ existing knowledge as captivity. She claims, “As Prejudice fetters the Understanding so does Custom manacle the W ­ ill,” and she questions the masses’ allegiance to the names and authorities associated with knowledge without relying on reason’s evidence.42 The ascetic privation in her space of religious retreat provides its students with the requisite physical and meta­phorical distance from the distractions of their ordinary lives. Astell’s implicit argument that a dedicated space of religious retreat rejuvenates the powers of reason and f­ rees the self from the distortions of custom develops out of René Descartes’s account of reason in A Discourse on the Method. In his radically new methodological approach t­ oward knowledge, Descartes describes the individual’s immediate experience of knowledge as a reliable guide that can f­ ree ­people from scholastic and philosophical baggage that is more likely to obscure

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real­ity than to explain it.43 In part 4 of his Discourse, Descartes writes, “examining attentively what I was, I saw that I could pretend that I had no body and that t­ here was no world or place for me to be in,” but he finds, “it followed incontrovertibly and certainly that I myself existed. . . . ​I thereby concluded that I was a substance whose ­whole essence or nature resides only in thinking, and which, in order to exist, has no need of place and is not dependent on any material ­thing.” 44 For Descartes, “reason or good sense” offers incontrovertible proof—­external to the material world—­that allows individuals to escape from custom’s enchanted circle and to challenge received knowledge from a new epistemological ground.45 Descartes’s model of reasoning operates like Astell’s space of religious retreat b ­ ecause it strips away custom’s distortions in order to ­free reason. Both assume that the universal reliability of the mind’s immaterial reason can solve the prob­lems of custom and received knowledge. By connecting the pro­cess of reasoning with an attitude of skepticism t­ oward received knowledge, Astell imagines that ­women could attack the habits of custom with the aid of religious instruction and ceremony. Like Descartes, Astell argues that reason’s proofs are incontrovertible and universal by dissociating reason from the ­labor of interpreting the material world. Astell’s reason acts directly and immediately on the properly receptive mind: “Reason ­wills that we shou’d think again, and not form our Conclusions or fix our foot till we can honestly say, that we have with our Prejudice or Prepossession view’d the m ­ atter in Debate on all sides, seen it in ­every light, have no bias to encline us ­either way, but are only determined by Truth it self, shining brightly in our eyes, and not permitting us to resist the force and Evidence it carries.” 46 Truth, without the barriers that obscure it, pres­ents itself to reason without the need for ­human intervention. Astell’s program of study rejects the deferential study of foreign languages and reputable authors ­because t­ hose who seek to learn must “Disengage our selves from all our former Prejudicies, from our Opinion of Names, Authorities, Customs, and the like, not give credit to any ­thing any longer ­because we have once believ’d it, but ­because it carries clear and uncontested Evidence along with it.” 47 Astell characterizes reason as willing that its admirers adequately prepare themselves to search for it directly. Only then does Truth appear, so persuasively and incontrovertibly that its “force and Evidence” are irresistible.48 This account of reason is inseparable from Astell’s broader religious model of learning and knowing. Astell’s belief in the efficacy of material spaces in facilitating a Cartesian re­sis­ tance to custom and received knowledge falls within her Occasionalist account of religious knowledge. Astell attributes agency to reason in the second part of

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1650–1850 A Serious Proposal ­because of her belief that God operates as the mediating force between the material world (the “occasion”) and the subject’s immaterial mind. Astell’s epistolary correspondence with the theologian John Norris in Letters Concerning the Love of God (1695) explores their shared understanding of God’s role in mediating the function of the senses and generates Astell’s contention that the material world is a symbolic analogue to spiritual real­ity. In their letters, Astell and Norris seek to reconcile the world of the senses as a source of knowledge with a rigidly immaterial theory of mind. By affirming the material world’s providential basis as a symbolic repre­sen­ta­tion of divinely revealed truth, Astell justifies her proposal for a physical space of religious retirement and si­mul­ ta­neously maintains her distinction between the materiality of the body and the immaterial world of the mind and soul.49 Following the prefatory materials in which Norris claims to have convinced the reluctant Astell to publish their correspondence, Astell takes up a question sparked by the third volume of Norris’s Practical Discourses.50 Her letter explains her interest in Norris’s argument “That GOD is the Efficient Cause of our Sensations, Pain as well as Plea­sure.”51 Much of the conversation between the two in Letters therefore addresses the relationship between the physical sensations of pain and plea­sure. Their conclusions develop out of Nicholas Malebranche’s contention that the efficient cause of ­human experience is God’s modification of the soul rather than the direct effects of material real­ity. As Lefebvre succinctly describes it, “For Descartes and the Cartesians, God never rested.”52 In this theological system, God’s intermediary role allows for the coexistence of a material world and an immaterial spirit without robbing the material world of its meaning. In Malebranche’s philosophy in par­tic­u­lar, God is both the creator of the material world and the effective cause of sensation in the necessarily immaterial soul. Although Astell’s religious epistemology relies on divine revelation, she contends that other forms of knowledge are likewise divided from the body and its senses ­because the thinking self remains separate from the material world. In the case of both God’s revelation to the soul and the information available to ordinary ­human reason, Astell characterizes reason as the sensory organ of the immaterial soul. She makes a similar assertion in the appendix of her 1717 second edition of The Christian Religion, in which Astell writes that Locke (“the ­Great Mr. L.”) and other proponents of thinking-­matter theories must “excuse” her “from allowing it Pos­si­ble for Body in general, or for any Parcels of ­Matters to Think” ­until she has been convinced of it.53 Thought and reason are, for Astell, qualities of the soul and are therefore distinct from “Body in general.” For this reason, she

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concludes that “it is not Body that Thinks, but the Mind that is United to it, Body being still as incapable of Thought as ever it was.”54 Convinced that thinking ­matter is a contradiction in terms, Astell associates thought and reason with the mind rather than the body. The writers’ agreement on a fundamental distinction between the mind and body is intimately connected to the recurring idea of retirement that appears throughout Letters. Their discussion of the division between an ideal space and the ordinary world allows us to understand Astell and Norris’s overarching conversation about causation and knowledge more fully. Imagining a space of religious retirement tests their theological and philosophical conclusions with the question of practical application. Astell’s argument that the providential order of the material world is legible, meaningful, and not simply an occasion for divine causation begins to explain how she can valorize their shared desire for a quiet, retired space. At the end of Astell’s introductory letter to Norris, she wishes him “a quiet con­ve­ nient Retirement, which is indeed all the Happiness that can be had on this side Heaven.”55 In light of Astell and Norris’s shared assertion that God mediates the ­human subject’s full experience of the material world, the suggestion that one kind of space is superior to another is surprising. Understanding Astell’s account of the significance of retired spaces and their opposition to the values of the world in general clarifies her account of the providential, symbolic relationship between the material and spiritual worlds. Norris similarly praises the solitude of the state of nature as “such an one as that of Moses upon the holy Mount, when he withdrew from the P ­ eople to enjoy the Converse of GOD: As that of our Saviour, when he tells his Disciples that they should all desert and leave him alone, and yet that he was not alone b ­ ecause his 56 ­Father was with him.” ­There is a profound resonance between Norris’s rejection of Hobbesian pessimism and Astell’s argument for a retreat that equips its students with the knowledge necessary to reevaluate the ordinary world. For Norris, God makes Moses from the p ­ eople in order to provide the guiding social and religious teachings that formed the basis for the shared life of a community. Norris’s description suggests that the isolation ­imagined by t­ hose who imagine life wholly outside ­human society would, in real­ity, allow the believing subject to see the world aright. In the appendix to Letters, Astell seeks to address objections that their theology “renders a g­ reat Part of GOD ’s Workmanship vain and useless.”57 Astell entertains the objection that placing the ­w hole of ­human experience outside the material world necessarily empties the pres­ent world of any meaning: “if the Objects of our Senses have no natu­ral Efficiency ­towards the producing of ­those

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1650–1850 Sensations which we feel at their Presence, if they serve no further than positive and arbitrary Conditions to determine the Action of the true and proper Cause, . . . ​ to what end do they serve?”58 If the material world is indeed an utterly “arbitrary” occasion for the action of God on the soul, it might therefore fail to dislodge the mind’s reliance on settled custom. Astell posits that ­there must necessarily be a correspondence between the material world and the ­human senses in what she describes as a “sensible congruity” between the mind and the material world, based on an idea proposed by the Cambridge Platonist Henry More.59 Kenneth Hylson-­ Smith remarks in his longitudinal study of En­glish Chris­tian­ity that the Cambridge Platonists are the “most influential” participants in an emphatically rational turn in “academic philosophy . . . ​in the last half of the seventeenth ­century.” 60 Astell’s appropriation of this approach to mind and ­matter plays a central role in her rational approach to religious space. Astell speculates that the material world operates as a mechanical rather than voluntary instrument of God’s causation and that this relationship invests the world with a providential resemblance to its external source of meaning.61 Norris qualifies this idea by suggesting that an “antecedent Aptness or Reason” invests the material world with meaning despite the fact that the action of God directly on the soul remains the effective cause of all sensation.62 Norris’s language of aptness and Astell’s language of congruity share the simultaneous valuation and devaluation of the material world pres­ent in Astell’s vision of religious retreat. Having severed attachments to the world that can distort one’s awareness of the divine order, Astell’s believing subject glimpses immaterial realities through the symbolic meaning that God’s providence invests in the world. E. Derek Taylor has argued that Astell ultimately conflates ­matter and spirit at the end of Letters in a temporary philosophical “flirtation with Lockean materialism” in spite of her ­later rejection of the same position.63 While Astell’s critics have contrasted her discussion of this sensible congruity with her ­later account of the mind in The Christian Religion, my interest lies in the methodological affinity between Astell’s reliance on a Cartesian approach to mind and ­matter and her rational approach to religious space.64 The discourse of religious retreat in Astell’s Serious Proposal and the epistemological model that Norris and Astell share in Letters reflect Astell’s continuous stance t­ oward the material world as a symbolic repre­sen­ta­tion of eternal truth. Astell’s educational program in A Serious Proposal, Part II draws on this account of the world as a providentially ordered sign of immaterial real­ity. She argues that the material world’s design instructs t­ hose who study it: “­There is no Object, no Accident of Life but affords us ­matter of Instruction. GOD has so dispos’d

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all the Works of his Hands, all the Actings of his Providence, that e­ very one of ’em ministers to our Improvement, if we ­will but Observe and Apply them.” 65 Astell argues that material objects and ordinary events reflect God’s providential design and that studying the world allows the subject to discover the immaterial world of the spirit. God’s providence guarantees the congruity between the sign and truth, while the sign has no meaning outside that guarantee. Understanding how Astell’s model of ­human knowledge develops out of her theological conversation with Norris clarifies how her valuation of the mind can coexist with her interest in the knowledge available to the senses. What initially appears to be a contradictory dependence on and dismissal of material spaces reflects assumptions that are not immediately apparent to Astell’s modern readers. The religious retreat’s symbolic function only reaches reason’s faculties through God’s active mediation. As a result, its inhabitants learn to recognize that the religious retreat is reliably aligned with but not ultimately derived from the material world. God’s active role in providentially ordering the world and mediating between m ­ atter and spirit and the reasoning participation of the ­human stand in stark contrast with the static, symbolic nature of the material world through which this communion occurs. To investigate religious ideas effectively, h ­ uman reason must reply on divine revelation b ­ ecause ­these ideas do not emerge directly from the bodily senses. In the unique case of theological truths, Astell argues that reason cannot function as the master within, but God instead provides reason with adequate evidence and proof based on the limits of its capabilities. She draws an analogy between this inner prompting and a sensory organ in the body: “as Light is always vis­i­ble to us if we have an Organ to receive it, if we turn our Eyes t­ owards it, and that nothing interpose between it and us; so is Truth, we are surrounded with it, and GOD has given us Faculties to receive it.” 66 ­Because Astell understands truth to be a concept separate from the body and materiality, she argues that ­humans must have a matching faculty in order to perceive truth. In order to demonstrate her method, Astell takes on a con­temporary theological debate about the doctrine of the Trinity, which she describes as a methodological prob­lem.67 She concludes, “we take a wrong method, and wou’d make that the Object of Science which is properly the Object of Faith, the Doctrine of the Trinity.” 68 This “Spiritual Sensation” is the means by which ­people are able to perceive the truth, and this means is separate from the sensory means required for “the Object of Science.” Echoing Descartes’s methodological criteria of clear and distinct ideas, Astell maintains that God provides reason with a clear idea of the Trinity: “Revelation which is but an exaltation and improvement of Reason has told us That the ­Father

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1650–1850 is GOD, the Son is GOD, and the Holy Ghost is GOD, and our Idea of the Godhead of any one of ­these Persons, is as clear as our Idea of any of the other.” 69 To extend the logic of Astell’s assertion, God reveals the traditional theological concept of the Trinity by heightening the abilities of reason, while more mundane concepts require that God interact with reason’s ordinary powers. Astell supports traditional religious authority and most traditional theological concepts ­because she believes they are supported by revelation, which she understands as a heightened form of reason.70 Astell, perhaps anticipating objections that her methodology would be contradictory if it fails to question the authority of the established church, counsels caution over skepticism in religious ­matters. Although she criticizes ­those who lean on an idea’s reputation, she is equally critical of t­ hose who rush to dismiss all preexisting knowledge without contradictory evidence. In ­doing so, Astell dismisses skeptical attitudes ­toward religious authority that treat religious knowledge as the product of ordinary reason. If Astell seeks to accord a special status to religious knowledge, she must defend its reliability in light of the fact that religion remained a source of considerable con­temporary debate and contributed to serious conflicts throughout the seventeenth ­century. In the second part of A Serious Proposal, Astell first divides religious knowledge from other kinds of truth on the basis of its universality. While philosophical knowledge and other kinds of learning may not be essential for ­human life, she believes that religious knowledge is necessary for all ­people: The Articles of our Faith and the g­ reat Princi­ples of Christian Morality are of another Nature, GOD wou’d have all Men to be sav’d and to come the Knowledge of ­these Truths, tho he did not design ’em all for Phi­los­o­phers, and therefore they carry a Proof and Evidence to the very Vulgar, which he who runs may read, which ­every one ­ought to acquiesce in, though according to their leisure and capacity ’tis fit they inquire why.71 ­Because the knowledge of salvation is necessary for all p ­ eople, Astell separates foundational religious truths from the more arcane forms of philosophical knowledge. To make this knowledge available to ­people of all social strata, Astell relies on the tradition of the En­glish church. In disputable points of religion, for example, Astell counsels “a quiet submission to the Voice of the Guides, whom Modesty ­will incline us to think have greater Abilities and Assistances, as well as more Time and Opportunity to find out the Truth than we.”72 While p ­ eople in highly privileged positions might be able to consider difficult theological questions in their leisure time, basic theological necessities are m ­ atters in which the “very Vulgar”

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might reasonably “acquiesce in the Authority of the Church.” 73 This “quiet submission” to ecclesial teachings and authority is a strategic concession to the demands of ordinary callings.74 It is impor­tant, however, that ­these teachings are supported by the reason of p ­ eople with religious vocations and t­ hose who are able to dedicate the time and space necessary to investigate religious ideas. ­Because Astell divides the kind of knowledge offered by the church from her Cartesian skepticism t­ oward received knowledge, she is able to justify her firm allegiance to her national church: “when I speak of the ­little deference that is to be given to Names, Authorities, and receiv’d Opinions, I extend it no farther than to ­matters purely Philosophical to mere Humane Truths, and do not design any Prejudice to the Authority of the Church which is of dif­fer­ent consideration.”75 While willing to permit a certain degree of individualized experimentation and exploration in m ­ atters “purely Philosophical,” Astell leans on tradition for guidance in theological m ­ atters ­because religious truth derives from revelation rather than more fallible sources. In this way, Astell seems to make separate humane, philosophical truth subject to public debate and religious truth the domain of the individual’s revelatory reason. B ­ ecause Astell believes that religious truth reaches reason through God’s intervention, a properly ordered space of religious retreat should unseat any distortions of custom and thereby facilitate immediate and incontrovertible religious guidance for the inquiring. Astell argues that each individual’s reason w ­ ill guarantee ­these universal, eternal religious truths in a situation of ideal intellectual freedom. She explains that ­people learn God’s ­will “by Reason which is that Natu­ral and Ordinary Revelation by which he speaks to e­ very one; and by that which is call’d Revelation in a stricter Sense, which is nothing e­ lse but a more perfect and infallible way of Reasoning. Whereby we are Clearly and Fully instructed in so much of GOD’s ­Will as is fit for us to know.”76 The evidence of this revelatory reason might therefore legitimate a universal religious authority with evidence as unquestionable as mathematical proof. I contend that Astell’s readers reinterpret the proposal for a radical expansion of religion’s institutional authority as an argument for religion’s individual, private character that merits consideration apart from humane, philosophical knowledge. Sarah Apetri observes, “[Astell’s] Second Part was kept alive . . . ​as part of the conduct lit­er­a­ture targeted at polite female readers throughout the eigh­ teenth ­century” rather than as an educational program or theory of mind.77 This textual appropriation downplays the role of space in the formation of knowledge and limits the reach of the Astell’s promised consensus.

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1650–1850 What caused this dramatic shift away from a theory of knowledge that promised verifiable, universal religious truth? One answer may be that in the period following the Revolution of 1688, large segments of En­glish society simply failed to reach the religious consensus that this model of knowledge promises. In light of the po­liti­cal turmoil and religious conflict of the seventeenth ­century, one might understand the appeal of a rationally founded universal religious truth that could definitively resolve lingering theological conflicts. The religious spaces and practices that Astell describes therefore become associated with the kind of private, individual belief that her educational proj­ect opposes. When her seemingly universal, rational ground of faith fails to yield a universally shared, incontrovertibly proven religion, Astell’s intellectual program begins to resemble an individualist faith rather than a unifying force that would unite the world ­under the wing of ­England’s existing religious institutions. A second and perhaps more satisfying answer may be that Astell’s Serious Proposal to the Ladies, when appropriated as conduct lit­er­a­ture, ultimately contributes to a discourse that characterizes an individual’s religious faith as private and undermines its claims to universal religious truth. By focusing on the operation of reason and its ability to set aside the distorting nature of traditional learning and dangerous customs, Astell imagines that her proposed space could give ­women the opportunity to embrace a ­free use of the ­will and mind necessary to properly interpret the material world’s symbolic character. When Astell’s readers reinterpret her proposal as a guide to quiet, genteel conduct away from the public eye, they fail to distinguish her means—­the ascetic practices and spaces of her religious retreat—­ from her intellectual program of ascetic cosmopolitanism that uses religious space to dispel the distortions of custom. As a result, Astell’s discourse of the individual’s unmediated encounter with truth then becomes part of an increasingly private account of humanity’s encounter with the divine rather than the epistemology that sought to unite the world u ­ nder the mathematical proof of the En­glish church.







Notes 1. ​Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 42–43. 2. ​Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part I, in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Parts I and II, ed. Patricia Springborg (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002), 73. 3. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part I, 52.

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4. ​Michal Michelson writes of Astell’s opposition to the Locke’s ideas, “[Astell] agreed in essence with the conservative Anglican cleric Charles Leslie, . . . ​who saw the theological postulations in Locke’s The Reasonableness of Chris­tian­ity (1695) . . . ​as deifying reason rather than using it to uphold faith”; Michelson, “ ‘Our Religion and Liberties’: Mary Astell’s Christian Po­liti­cal Polemics,” in Virtue, Liberty, and Toleration: Po­liti­cal Ideas of Eu­ro­pean W ­ omen, 1400–1800, ed. Jacqueline Broad and Karen Green (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 123–136. 5. ​Florence Smith, Mary Astell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1916), 33. 6. ​Smith, Mary Astell, 33–34. 7. ​Astell’s proposal for a religious retreat is par­tic­u­lar insofar as it configures a single ­imagined, bounded partition among other potentially competing spaces in this world. With the retreat seen as a culturally constructed part of a larger w ­ hole, Astell creates a distinction but not a separation between her monastic community and the ordinary world. 8. ​Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-­Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 289. 9. ​Doreen Massey, For Space (Los Angeles: Sage, 2005), 105. 10. ​J. David Macey Jr., “Eden Revised: Re-­visions of the Garden in Astell’s Serious Proposal, Scott’s Millennium Hall, and Graffigny’s Lettres d’une péruvienne,” Eighteenth-­ Century Fiction 9, no. 2 (1997): 174. 11. ​Macey, “Eden Revised,” 174. 12. ​Nicole Pohl, ­Women, Space, and Utopia, 1600–1800 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 95. 13. ​On the relationship between Astell’s school and the socioeconomic changes that affected the role of ­women in managing estates and that produced the cultural type of the “spinster,” consult Bridget Hill, “A Refuge from Men: The Idea of a Protestant Nunnery,” Past & Pres­ent 117 (November 1987): 107–130. 14. ​Mary Astell, appendix to The Christian Religion, As Profess’d by a ­Daughter of the Church of E ­ ngland, 2nd ed., in Letters Concerning the Love of God, by Mary Astell and John Norris, ed. E. Derek Taylor and Melvyn New (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 235. 15. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part I, 51. 16. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part I, 97. 17. ​Astell’s image of the “sacred Mountain” may refer to the biblical Mount Sinai, where Moses receives the Ten Commandments directly from God, or the meta­phoric mountain of progressively attained knowledge in texts such as Dante’s Purgatorio. John Norris uses a similar image in Letters Concerning the Love of God, discussed ­later. 18. ​Sharon Achinstein, “Mary Astell, Religion, and Feminism: Texts in Motion,” in Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, ed. William Kolbrener and Michal Michelson (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 26.

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1650–1850 19. ​We see clear examples of this type of language in Astell’s exhortation to her fellow w ­ omen who are distracted by the demands of fashion. She exclaims, “We wou’d never be so curious of the House, and so careless of the Inhabitant, whose beauty is capable of g­ reat improvement and w ­ ill endure for ever without diminution or decay!” (A Serious Proposal, Part I, 66). ­Here, Astell contrasts “the House” of the material body, which is subject to “diminution or decay,” with the immortal beauty of its “Inhabitant.” She values the eternal soul or self over the material body and describes it through the familiar spatial meta­phor of the ­house and its inhabitant. This discourse tenuously links the soul to body through its i­magined inwardness but maintains that the soul is distinct from the body in nature. 20. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part I, 96–97. 21. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part I, 93. 22. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part I, 93. 23. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part I, 94. 24. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part I, 95. 25. ​Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part II, in Springborg, A Serious Proposal, 199. 26. ​William Kolbrener and Michal Michaelson, “ ‘Dreading to Engage Her’: The Critical Reception of Mary Astell,” in Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, ed. William Kolbrener and Michael Michaelson (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 5. 27. ​Kolbrener and Michaelson, “Dreading to Engage Her,” 3. 28. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part I, 76. 29. ​Some of Astell’s critics have cited the specific institutions and beliefs that limited ­women’s agency and opportunities in ways that minimize Astell’s emphasis on the theological justifications that motivate her social criticism. My reading therefore differs from readings such as that of J. David Macey Jr., who prioritizes social and psychological concerns over religion qua religion in his assertion that Astell imagines “communities of ­women in order to fill a psychological and social void” (“Eden Revised,” 174). Understanding context’s shaping role in the production of imaginative lit­er­a­ture is crucial to literary and cultural analy­sis, but my proj­ect asserts that this context necessarily extends to the religious ideas that motivate Astell’s critique of En­glish society. 30. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part I, 83. The fact that Astell chooses a common proof-­text from debates about ­women’s supposed theologically subordinate status suggests her keen awareness of the gendered subtext of this biblical image. 31. ​In this re­spect, my argument diverges from that of Barbara Brandon Schnorrenberg, who asserts that Astell did not “[envisage] changing the w ­ hole of society”; Schnorrenberg, “A Paradise like Eve’s: Three Eigh­teenth ­Century En­glish Female Utopias,” ­Women’s Studies 9, no. 3 (1982): 271. Astell’s focus on ladies as the origin point of her intellectual program does not thereby imply that Astell is less concerned for the ­people outside her social class, as her l­ater involvement with her

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Chelsea charity school illustrates. Astell’s focus on the role of noble ladies as the origin point for this transformation is certainly predicated on an outmoded perspective on social class, but her ultimate vision remains universal. 32. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part I, 95. 33. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part I, 76. 34. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part I, 55, 77. 35. ​The Arminian theological position contends that the h ­ uman w ­ ill is not in a state of total depravity and can be assisted—­though not coerced—by the aid of ceremony, sacrament, and ritual. 36. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part I, 67. 37. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part I, 84, 85. 38. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part I, 85. 39. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part II, 161. 40. ​Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Lit­er­at­ ure, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-­Century ­England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 55. 41. ​Michel de Montaigne characterizes travel in the world as a technological apparatus capable of giving the student a clearer glimpse of the individual’s place as a small part of a larger world full of divergent customs and ideas. He writes, “This ­great world of ours (which for some is only one species within a generic group) is the looking-­glass in which we must gaze to come to know ourselves in the right slant”; Montaigne, “On Educating ­Children,” in The Complete Essays, ed. and trans. M. A. Screech (New York: Penguin, 2003), 177. Like Astell’s ascetic cosmopolitanism, the ultimate goal is disabusing the learning subject of a provincial form of knowledge. 42. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part II, 139. 43. ​It should not be surprising that Astell takes a fundamentally Cartesian approach to custom ­because, as Patricia Springborg argues, “Descartes is the single most impor­tant philosophical figure Astell encountered, and it is largely in Cartesian terms that she responded to Hobbes, Locke, and Malebranche”; Springborg, Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 39–40. 44. ​René Descartes, A Discourse on the Method, trans. Ian Maclean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 29. 45. ​Descartes, Discourse, 5. 46. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part II, 135. 47. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part II, 133. 48. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part II, 135. 49. ​­Because of the role that material space plays in the facilitation of knowledge, Astell’s position differs from reductive caricatures of Cartesian dualism, and Descartes notably spends considerable energy in book 5 of his Discourse differentiating rational h ­ uman souls from the material, mechanistic operation of animals. He

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1650–1850 concludes that the soul, while immaterial, is closely intertwined with the motions of the material part of humanity (Discourse, 48–49). In Milton among the Phi­los­o­phers (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), Stephen Fallon has discussed Descartes’s interest in the relationship between the immaterial mind and the mechanistic body at length, including the phi­los­o­pher’s interest in the pineal gland as a pos­si­ble interface between the two. 50. ​Mary Astell and John Norris, Letters Concerning the Love of God, ed. E. Derek Taylor and Melvyn New (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 69. 51. ​A stell and Norris, Letters, 70. 52. ​Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 283. 53. ​Astell, Christian Religion, 241. 54. ​Astell, Christian Religion, 241. 55. ​A stell and Norris, Letters, 70. 56. ​A stell and Norris, Letters, 122. 57. ​A stell and Norris, Letters, 131. 58. ​A stell and Norris, Letters, 131–132. 59. ​Astell and Norris, Letters, 132. Astell’s interest in reason as the guarantee ­behind religious teaching and authority also connects her with the theological commitments of the Cambridge Platonists. Graham Parry describes the Cambridge ­Platonists’ understanding of reason: “the exercise of reason at its highest level ­will seek the utmost knowledge of what is good and true, aspiring to know its own source in the Creator”; Parry, “Va­ri­e­ties of Religious Experience,” in The Seventeenth ­Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, 1603– 1700 (London: Longman, 1989), 201. This belief functioned in part as an effort to bridge the religious differences of the period by focusing on reason, which Parry characterizes as “the faculty that discovered the presence of God within the creation” and “the spark of the divine mind that ­every ­human mind contained” (The Seventeenth ­Century, 201). Reason still depends on its Creator b ­ ecause of its limitations, however much it reflects the ­free ­will of the h ­ uman subject. 60. ​Kenneth Hylson-­Smith, The Churches in ­England from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II, vol. 1, 1558–1688 (London: SCM, 1996), 295. 61. ​A stell and Norris, Letters, 132–133. 62. ​A stell and Norris, Letters, 137. 63. ​E. Derek Taylor, “Mary Astell’s Ironic Assault on John Locke’s Theory of Thinking ­Matter,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63, no. 3 (2001): 522. 64. ​See Patricia Springborg’s description of the contrasting approaches of E. Derek Taylor and Sarah Ellenzweig to the issue of Astell’s sensible congruity (Mary Astell, 61–63). 65. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part II, 175. 66. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part II, 174. 67. ​Patricia Springborg observes in her edition of Astell’s text that Astell is prob­ably referring to the theological controversy between Locke and Stillingfleet about the

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Trinity in 1696–1697, in which Locke questions the orthodox understanding of the Trinity. See Springborg’s note in A Serious Proposal, Part II, 147n2. 68. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part II, 147. 69. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part II, 147. 70. ​A stell’s distinction between theological knowledge and other forms of knowledge differs from a Baconian rejection of metaphysics ­because Astell is convinced that p ­ eople have access to reliable religious teachings guaranteed by the highest form of rationality. 71. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part II, 139. 72. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part II, 139. 73. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part II, 139. 74. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part II, 139. 75. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part II, 138. 76. ​Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part II, 208. 77. ​Sarah Apetri, ­Women, Feminism and Religion in Early Enlightenment ­England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 273.

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CONVENT AND CROWN REDECORATING SANTA CHIARA IN NAPLES, 1741–1759 ROBIN L. THOMAS

The redecoration of Santa Chiara in Naples from 1742 to 1755 was one of the

largest artistic endeavors of its time (figure 1). At the hands of the city’s greatest artists, the church was clothed in marble, plaster, and paint, leading contemporaries to remark on it as the most impressive church of its epoch in the capital.1 Tragically, the bombardment of 1943 destroyed their work, and rather than an attempt being made to restore it, the church was returned to its gothic appearance, stripped of baroque encrustations (figure 2). Largely ­because of the loss of ­these decorations, they have been almost unstudied. ­There is another reason that the decorations have been ignored, namely, historical prejudice against religious art of the eigh­teenth c­ entury.2 Historians of Naples instead focused on art production for the Bourbon court.3 Founded by King Charles of Bourbon in 1734, this new dynasty built civic structures and royal palaces while centralizing power at the expense of ecclesiastical foundations. Lavish church interiors w ­ ere viewed as eddies in the historical stream, decorative commissions distinct from the main courtly currents. In this chapter, I aim to correct the oversight by discussing the renovation of Santa Chiara in light of con­ temporary politics to show that the iconographic program of its decorations connected the church with the nascent monarchy. In ­doing so, I hope to offer a more nuanced view of the interaction between the church and crown, in which alliance through imagery buttressed the church’s claim of special privilege within the context of diminished ecclesiastical autonomy.

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Figure 1. ​Interior of Santa Chiara in Naples prior to the bombardment of 1943. Photo by Alinari/Art Resource, New York.

1650–1850

Figure 2. ​Interior of Santa Chiara in Naples. Photo by the author.

When the Clarissans began to redecorate and restore Santa Chiara in 1742, they knew their church was one of Naples’s most storied.4 Queen Sancia of Minorca and her consort, Robert of Anjou, initiated construction of the church in 1310, quickly followed by the foundation of a Clarissan convent (1311) and Franciscan monastery (1317). Though inscriptions credit both king and queen, papal bulls and written correspondence make clear that the queen held it more dear, eventually choosing to leave her husband for the strict enclosure of its convent. Likewise, nuns rather than friars dominated, and though dedicated to the Corpus Domini, the church became known by the name of the Clarissan found­er.5 Santa Chiara rivaled the largest Franciscan churches in Eu­rope and counted among the most prominent structures in Naples. Marveling at the size of the church and convent, the Neapolitan guidebook author Carlo Celano proclaimed it “half a city.” 6 Yet while it was large, its appearance was plain. Reflecting the queen’s embrace of an ascetic movement within the mendicant order, its interior was like a g­ iant barn. A roof supported by ­giant timber beams sheltered a single unadorned nave, with side chapels arrayed along it like stalls within a stable. An end wall separated the nave from the cloistered world of the nuns, who gathered in an ample choir space

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­ ehind the altar to hear the mass through win­dows and a grate. Architectural b simplicity, however, was contrasted by some of the most sumptuous funerary sculpture in Italy. ­These ­were the tombs of the Anjou dynasty, and the most imposing monument, of King Robert, lorded over them all from the altar wall. Through subsequent centuries, the church remained one of Naples’s most impor­tant and its nuns among the city’s wealthiest. As in most Neapolitan convents, the s­ isters of Santa Chiara w ­ ere not as poor as their stated vows. Aristocratic w ­ omen filled its cloister. T ­ hese noble w ­ omen ­were barred from matrimony by the economic dictates of feudal inheritance laws, and their coercion into convents was sweetened by bequests of land and property.7 Such gifts enabled convents to grow, absorbing adjacent parcels of land in a phenomenon that Franco Strazzullo termed “fare l’isola,” or making an island.8 As physically expanding cloisters encroached on the city, their high walls closed out its noise and activity to offer tranquil shelter to educated and aristocratic inhabitants. Though writers in the seventeenth ­century boasted the financial and structural security of Santa Chiara, by the 1740s the structure was in need of repair.9 Stability had been a concern since at least 1726, when an account of festivities held in the church noted the need for restoration. The author of the report, ­Sister Antonia Sánchez de Luna, debated the best approach. She wanted the interior transformed to meet the standards of “good taste of modern beauty.” At the same time, she recognized that the building itself was a relic, and so might it not be better to leave the chaste interior unadorned in veneration “of such a marvelous royal antiquity”?10 The Neapolitan architect Ferdinando Sanfelice shared her concern and proposed a way to update the church with applied ornament while maintaining its original bays and structure.11 The ­sisters’ solution followed Sanfelice’s advice, if not his specific plans. They chose to redecorate the interior radically without altering the structure at all. Beneath marble facing, stucco, fresco, and a reed vault, the Angevin walls would remain largely untouched. Supervising the entire proj­ect was the energetic nun Delia Bonito.12 Given her many roles of leadership, she was prob­ably born to a noble ­family, possibly to the Bonito Marquis of Petruro. First mentioned as prefect of the choir, she composed a mass for the church in 1723. By 1738, she was among the most impor­tant nuns in the convent, signing an account of its triennial audit. At the same time, her name appears in payment documents for renovations of the altar. Throughout the 1740s and 1750s, Bonito pushed renovations of the convent and church ahead, earning her peers’ re­spect in the pro­cess. In 1751, they elected her abbess and reelected her for an extraordinarily rare consecutive three-­year term in 1754. Abbess Bonito

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1650–1850 retained control over the church’s transformation as a signal of its importance to her. Unfortunately, too l­ittle is known about this intelligent and determined nun to flesh out her role fully.13 While Bonito commissioned the works, she did not hatch the commissions unaware of the court’s interests. Indeed, as the Clarissans sought to preserve and update their church, they si­mul­ta­neously strove to maintain and strengthen their po­liti­cal presence. The monarchy had upended the ecclesiastical landscape by ending long-­standing privileges, taxing church property, and suppressing a handful of religious ­orders.14 Some religious h ­ ouses vigorously resisted, but the savvy nuns sought to ally themselves with the monarchy and particularly with Queen Maria Amalia. The nuns of Santa Chiara had a history of trimming their opinions to ally with queens and vicereines. They fashioned themselves Naples’s regal order, had a crown-­appointed deputy as their protector, and guarded their church’s “royal” designation.15 The abbess also held an honorific title of “Queen of Pozzuoli” and donned a mantle, crown, and scepter during solemn functions. Reflecting the nuns’ special status, their cloister was courtly, with lavish banquets and masquerades, and operettas performed in its largest rooms.16 Given the long-­standing ties to royalty, the ­sisters made certain to solidify their connection with the Bourbons. Soon a­ fter Charles’s conquest of Naples, they welcomed one of the king’s most impor­tant advocates, Cardinal Troiano Acquaviva, to their convent.17 As cardinal protector of the Two Sicilies in Rome, Acquaviva also fulfilled an impor­tant cultural role by suggesting artists working in the holy city for posts in Spain and Naples, including Sebastiano Conca, who would be employed at Santa Chiara.18 For Acquaviva’s visit, the nuns hastened to clean and repair the cloister. It was this renovated cloister that Maria Amalia saw when she visited in 1738. Yet she was unimpressed and suggested that the nuns remake it with manicured parterres and majolica tile decorations so that strolling in the garden would be more delightful. The nuns sprang into action, commissioning Domenico Antonio Vaccaro to carry out the suggested transformations before 1742 (figure 3). The result was one of the most beautiful cloisters in Eu­rope, whose tile decorations still delight visitors.19 Po­liti­cally, the new cloister was the Clarissans’ effort to attract the queen’s advocacy. As an instrument of such policy, it succeeded, for even when Maria Amalia had left Naples for Madrid in 1759, she wrote letters that expressed specific concern for Santa Chiara.20 The redecoration of the nave likewise shows how events at court sparked action from the cloister. In April 1742, Princess Maria Giuseppa Antonia died. Before the year was out, her elder ­sister also passed away, leaving Charles and Maria Ama-

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Figure 3. ​Domenico Antonio Vaccaro, cloister of Santa Chiara (1739–1742). Photo by the author.

lia childless. Anxious to produce an heir and establish a dynasty, the grieving ­couple was also presented with a predicament about where the princesses should be buried. The kingdom lacked the single royal mausoleum that St. Denis provided for the French, the Escorial for the Spanish, or the Capuchin Church for the Austrians. Nor did they intend to build a new mausoleum, as Victor Amadeus II did with the monastery of La Superga outside Turin. In their kingdom, five churches ­were the final resting places of previous royals. Palermo’s Cathedral contained the porphyry sarcophagi of the Norman and Swabian kings, while in Naples the Cathedral, Santa Chiara, and San Giovanni a Carbonara all boasted Angevin tombs. The Aragonese kings chose San Domenico, where their ­simple coffins ­were gathered in the sacristy rather than commemorated in monuments of stone. The choice that Charles and Maria Amalia now made would be read as the election of their own mausoleum. When the royal ­family deci­ded that the princesses’ coffins be placed in Santa Chiara, the nuns perceived their chance to become that Bourbon pantheon. Renovations immediately began to remake the church into a worthy resting place for the entire dynasty.

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1650–1850 In late 1742, the Clarissans entrusted the transformation of the nave to Vaccaro, Gaetano Buonocore, and Giovanni Del Gaizo (figure  1).21 Like plastic surgeons, they ­were careful not to harm the underlining structure as they renewed its interior skin. They nestled a low reed vault beneath the g­ reat tie beams of the roof. With plaster frames, they divided the lancet win­dows of the nave into large rectangular win­dows surmounted by round ones. Above the win­dows they inserted a plaster cornice, and at the base of them they encased the nuns’ gallery within gilt wood gelosie. Below the gallery, plaster and wood gave way to fine stone. The chapel openings ­were faced with patterned marble revetment and outfitted with newly crafted bronze gates. As t­ hese transformations ­were made, Francesco De Mura, Nicola Maria Rossi, Sebastiano Conca, and Giuseppe Bonito w ­ ere commissioned to make six large paintings, four in fresco on the vault and two on canvas for the altar wall and counterfaçade. Oil sketches for paintings by Bonito, Conca, and De Mura suggest that the s­ isters approved compositions before they w ­ ere translated to a larger scale.22 As we w ­ ill see, this did not ensure that all of the finished works met their expectations. The nuns also commissioned the paintings in two distinct phases. The first works, for the presbytery, date to the 1740s, while the second phase, for the nave paintings, came in the 1750s. As time separates them, so too does iconography. The earliest paintings depict subjects relating to the church’s history and dedication, while the latter images allude to the monarchy. Though the paintings ­were divided by t­ hese differences, the nuns ensured stylistic harmony by hiring paint­ ers who w ­ ere born in the kingdom and had all trained u ­ nder Francesco Solimena. Francesco De Mura received the first commission, for the painting above the altar (figure 4).23 Like his teacher, De Mura favored grandly theatrical compositions that prioritized figures over setting. Yet De Mura’s palette was paler and his figures more classicizing. ­These qualities earned him ­great renown, and his prolific brush fulfilled commissions for numerous Neapolitan churches. An early favorite of the Bourbon court, he executed frescos for the king’s apartment in the Palazzo Reale, and his close relationship with the crown may explain why the nuns chose him. The nuns’ choice was a wise one. His Adoration of the Eucharist with St. Claire and Other Saints, unveiled for the feast of the Corpus Christi in 1746, dramatically emphasized the original dedication of the church.24 Angels raise a monstrance in the ­middle of the canvas amid an eruption of cloud and light. Above it, more angels and putti support Mary, Christ, and God the ­Father as the dove of the Holy Spirit wings its way between them. Flanking the monstrance are Claire and Francis, while

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Figure 4. ​Francesco De Mura, Adoration of the Eucharist with St. Claire and Other Saints, oil on canvas (1742–1746) (destroyed). Photo by Alinari/Art Resource, New York.

1650–1850 beneath them are Saint Louis of Toulouse and Saint Anthony of Padua on the left and Saint Louis IX, Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, and Saint Bonaventure on the right. All the saints have Franciscan or Clarissan connections, and the church possessed relics of most of them.25 Notably abundant ­were relics of Louis of Toulouse, the ­brother of King Robert of Anjou. Robert could also boast ­family ties to Saint Elizabeth and Saint Louis IX. Being royalty, Louis IX and Elizabeth could stand in as spiritual doppelgangers for Charles and Maria Amalia. Indeed, contemporaries prob­ably knew that Charles’s title of King of Jerusalem kept alive the memory of the crusader states for which Louis IX battled. Meanwhile, the parents of Queen Maria Amalia ruled over the old landgrave of Thuringia, where Elizabeth reigned. ­These two saints therefore established a subtle connection to the reigning sovereigns. The image in the vault above the altar, executed at some point between 1742 and 1745, reinforces the Eucharistic theme but undermines a royalist reading (figure 5).26 ­There, De Mura frescoed St. Claire Repelling the Saracens. According to Thomas of Celano’s life of the saint, in 1240 Saracen mercenaries employed by the king of Sicily, Frederick II, attacked Assisi and threatened Claire’s monastery of San Damiano. An enfeebled Claire ordered that she be carried out to meet them accompanied by the host. Coming before their ranks, she prayed to God for protection. With divine aid, her bravery struck fear into the Saracens, who fled, sparing the city and convent.27 De Mura’s Claire is energetic rather than ill as she emerges from the church with a com­pany of nuns. One ­sister shelters the monstrance beneath an umbrella, while the saint lifts the host t­ oward heaven. Secure in the outcome, Claire looks away from the action and down t­ oward the viewer. God, meanwhile, turns ­toward her to offer his benediction. The artist shows the ­enemy in full retreat, as panicked soldiers tumble off their fallen ­horses and turn to flee. Their disarray contrasts markedly with the Clarissan ­sisters, and through such dramatic opposition De Mura emphasized the power of the Eucharist by wedding its miraculous history to the story of Saint Claire. This focus on Claire and the Eucharist changed a de­cade l­ater to a more overtly royalist program. Part of the reason for the alteration must have been the increased po­liti­cal security of the monarchy. In 1742, when the renovations began, the nuns might have questioned Charles’s longevity. In July of that year, a British squadron had humiliated the monarch by sailing into the bay to force his neutrality in the War of Austrian Succession. Over the following years, he would become embroiled in the war and fight to retain his crown, but at its end in 1748 he emerged strengthened in power and security.28 The monarchy of 1750 thus seemed more perma-

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Figure 5. ​Francesco De Mura, St. Claire Repelling the Saracens, fresco (1742–1745) (destroyed). Photo by Alinari/Art Resource, New York.

nent than the one of 1742. So too did the dynasty, for in 1747 the royal c­ ouple produced an heir in Prince Philip. ­Because of the changed fortunes of the dynasty, between 1751 and 1754 De Mura was commissioned to paint a scene of a king: Solomon Directing the Building of the ­Temple for the counterfaçade (figure 6).29 A less felicitous composition than the altar, it shows the king directing construction with his right arm amid a rush of masons, who cut, carry, and hoist stones into place. H ­ ere, the biblical builder-­king created a parallel with Charles, who had begun, in the same years, a massive new poor ­house (Albergo dei Poveri) and an enormous palace at Caserta, both among the largest architectural proj­ects in Eu­rope.30 The regal theme of De Mura’s canvas continued in Sebastiano Conca’s fresco of David Accompanying the Ark to Jerusalem (1752–1753) within the large central frame above the nave (figure 7).31 Conca was more famous than De Mura.32 Rather

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Figure 6. ​Francesco De Mura, Solomon Directing the Building of the ­Temple, oil on canvas (1751–1754) (destroyed). Photo by Alinari/Art Resource, New York.

Figure 7. ​Sebastiano Conca, David Accompanying the Ark to Jerusalem, fresco (1752– 1753) (destroyed). Photo by Alinari/Art Resource, New York.

1650–1850 than remain in Naples, he had forged a ­career in Rome, where he ­rose to be principe of the Accademia di San Luca. In 1752, he had returned south, and his painting for Santa Chiara marked this homecoming. He was deft in composing g­ rand baroque scenes, and his painting for Santa Chiara was a remarkably dramatic work of stunning visual effect. Drawing on the story in 2 Samuel 6:12–16, Conca pres­ ents David at the head of a pro­cession arriving at a monumental gateway into Jerusalem. In steep foreshortening, stacks of stairs lead our gaze up to David, who plays a harp and dances. While his dance is mentioned in the biblical passage, Conca inserts the harp as both an iconographic prop for the musical king and as a way to embed m ­ usic into the pro­cession. Indeed, to David’s right, trumpeters, as specifically described in the scripture, herald the arrival of the ark. Equally accurate, David wears a priestly linen ephod as described in the account, and Coca painted Queen Michal, who would ­later chide David for this attire, on a balcony watching her husband. ­Behind David, four priestly figures bear the ark aloft. Clouds silhouette its mercy seat, which is illuminated by rays of divine light streaming down from the figure of God. The dramatic centerpiece of the church, the fresco also provided a tidy narrative antecedent to De Mura’s scene on the counterfaçade. Such narrative unity was interrupted in the smaller frame in the vault between De Mura’s and Conca’s works. ­There, Rossi painted a scene of the Brazen Serpent in 1752.33 Rossi, like De Mura and Conca, was a pupil of Solimena and ­adopted the compositional and coloristic approaches of the elder artist so well that his works ­were often mistaken for t­ hose of his teacher.34 Rossi too helped decorate the royal apartments in the Palazzo Reale, yet he never achieved De Mura’s fame. Indeed, his image for Santa Chiara did not satisfy the nuns, who had it replaced. No evidence for his composition survives, leaving us uncertain about which aspect of the story he chose to depict. According to Numbers 21:4–9, Moses erected the brazen serpent on God’s command in order to heal the repentant Israelites, who ­were punished with a plague of snakes for losing faith during their years wandering the desert. From a subsequent passage in Kings (18:4), we learn that this bronze or brass serpent was placed in the ­Temple in Jerusalem, and Christ referred to it as a foretelling of his crucifixion (John 3:14–15). Most likely Rossi illustrated the passage from Numbers, which had been a common subject for paint­ers. Yet even if he showed this episode, the serpent’s simultaneous connection to the ­temple and Christ’s sacrifice helped provide a thematic link to the respective Solomonic and Eucharistic imagery of the two end walls. The nuns must have questioned such an erudite linkage, ­because in 1755 they had it replaced with an entirely new subject: Solomon Receiving the Queen of

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Figure 8. ​Sebastiano Conca, Solomon Receiving the Queen of Sheba, fresco (1755) (destroyed). Photo by Alinari/Art Resource, New York.

Sheba (1755; figure 8).35 Interestingly, Paolo de Matteis had painted the same scene in the cupola of the nearby Gesù Nuovo between 1713 and 1717.36 The Gesù was Santa Chiara’s nearest neighbor and urbanistic adversary, and by copying the subject the nuns established an artistic rivalry as well. Conca’s composition bears out the supposition of competing imagery. He ­adopted the same frieze-­like arrangement and followed de Matteis by showing Solomon at left rising from a throne with a shell-­ shaped back. At the same time, his composition feels more intimate than his pre­de­ ces­sor’s, since Conca’s king steps forward to greet the queen as she returns his salutation by offering gifts. In addition, Conca took greater care with the background by inserting two spiral columns between Solomon and Sheba that he echoed at the fresco’s edge. Yet rivalry alone cannot explain the choice of subject. Thematically, this image built on t­hose of biblical kings within the nave. It also related the Old Testament story to the church, since this biblical episode was interpreted as foreshadowing the mystical marriage between the church and Christ.37 Given that the

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1650–1850 Queen of Sheba was chaste, it is also pos­si­ble that the nuns saw her as a spiritual example. Completing the narrative scenes in the vault was Solomon Dedicating the ­Temple (1752–1753), by Giuseppe Bonito, set within a smaller frame near the presbytery (figure 9).38 What distinguished Bonito from the other artists working alongside him in Santa Chiara was his skill as a portraitist.39 Also significant was the fact that he shared a name, and possibly a blood connection, with the abbess of the convent. His scene of Solomon is shown in steep di sotto in su perspective, with steps rising t­ oward the figure of Solomon like the tiers of a cake. The king, his hands outstretched in prayer, gazes upward. He has just concluded his prayer, which we know from 2 Chronicles 7:1 to be the moment that fire came down from heaven to consume the offerings and consecrate the ­temple. Bonito shows the flaming altar opposite the king as rays of light emanate from a source outside the picture frame. Bystanders gaze in amazement, much as they do in Conca’s central image. Indeed, given the dramatic foreshortening of both scenes, and the similar dramatic moments, Bonito and Conca cohere on a compositional level. Bonito’s coloring was also highly praised, and this fresco was among his most lauded works. In addition to this scene, he and Paolo de Majo ­were commissioned to fresco images of saints, prophets, angels, and virtues in the spandrels surrounding the main narrative scenes of the nave (figure 10). Interestingly, the terms of de Majo’s contract specify that Abbess Bonito’s ­brother, Ludovico Bonito, a Dominican ­father about whom we know nothing, would judge the quality of his work. Thus, while the abbess maintained her primary role for the major works, she depended on o ­ thers to see the less essential parts of the redecoration to satisfactory completion. De Majo’s work pleased the ­father, ­because the artist subsequently decorated the vault of the nun’s choir with a scene of St. Claire in Glory (1763–1766).40 By refocusing the decorative program on scenes of biblical kings, the nuns aimed to consolidate their association with the crown. David and Solomon ­were often cast as spiritual forbears of Christian monarchs and w ­ ere favored subjects for royalty. In fact, Conca had produced a four-­painting cycle of biblical kings for Carlo Emanuele III of Savoy, which included an image of David Accompanying the Ark to Jerusalem (1733). Also relevant for the Neapolitan court was Conca’s painting of Alexander the G ­ reat in the T ­ emple of Jerusalem (1735–1736), which Filippo Juvarra requested for the throne room of La Granja of San Ildefonso, the principal palace of Charles’s parents in Spain.41 Evoking David, Solomon, and the ­Temple

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Figure  9. ​Giuseppe Bonito, Solomon Dedicating the ­Temple, fresco (1752–1753) (destroyed). Photo by Alinari/Art Resource, New York.

tapped an impor­tant Spanish pre­ce­dent. The Escorial, the monastery, palace, and mausoleum where Charles and Maria Amalia ­were ultimately interred, was explic­ itly likened to Solomon’s ­Temple and featured statues of David and Solomon on its church façade.42 In aspiring to be the Bourbon mausoleum, Santa Chiara could boast its own claim as a successor to the biblical t­ emple, and not just in paint. The church’s founder, Robert of Anjou, was King of Jerusalem, as all his Neapolitan successors would be. The heritage of biblical kings was reinforced within the church by two precious spiral columns, believed to come from Solomon’s T ­ emple. Originally incorporated into a baldachin over the altar, ­these columns ­were moved in the eigh­teenth ­century to ­either side of the choir, where they stood like sentinels.43 Though dating to the third ­century and brought from Castel del Monte in Apulia, their similarity with the spiral Solomonic columns within St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome convinced contemporaries of their provenance. Indeed, Conca depicted

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Figure 10. ​Paolo de Majo, Ezechiel and St. Augustine, fresco (1755) (destroyed). Photo by Alinari/Art Resource, New York.

similar columns backing the biblical king in his scene of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Biblical kings helped tie the imagery to the reigning monarchs, yet so too did pro­cessions. Con­temporary viewers of Conca’s central image would have known that the biblical event echoed the annual Neapolitan pro­cession of the Corpus Christi. Charles, as the kings and viceroys had done before him, proceeded into the heart of Naples b ­ ehind a monstrance displayed beneath a canopy held aloft by civic representatives and ambassadors. According to Caracciolo, this pro­cession was instituted by Robert of Anjou himself and sanctioned by a papal bull.44 The route changed over the centuries but always departed from the cathedral and wound its way through each district of the city ­until it culminated at the Neapolitan church dedicated to the host, Santa Chiara. Placing the monstrance on the church’s altar, the archbishop said a benediction before leading the pro­cession back

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to the cathedral. Such festivals ­were of critical importance in Neapolitan civic and po­liti­cal life, and Charles’s appearance on this day was fundamental to his sovereignty.45 Since he conformed to rigid Spanish etiquette that kept him from view, it was one of the few times each year when the populace could see their king.46 Indeed, travelers reported the special significance of sighting him. In 1740, Thomas Gray wrote, “We happened to be at Naples on Corpus Christi Day, the greatest feast in the year, so had an opportunity of seeing their Sicilian Majesties to advantage. The King walked in the ­grand pro­cession, and the Queen (being big with child) sat in a balcony. He followed the Host to the church of St. Clara, where high mass was celebrated to a glorious concert of m ­ usic.” 47 Through pomp and m ­ usic, the event also sacralized the king’s relationship to the host and confirmed his divine right as sovereign. Indeed, as Gabriel Guarino has shown, the pro­cession of the Corpus Domini and royal entries w ­ ere modeled on each other, with the only significant difference being that the religious pro­cession featured the host rather than the king beneath a baldachin.48 Conca’s fresco likewise represents a religious pro­cession that highlights the instrumental role of the sovereign. David’s relationship to the ark thus echoes the king’s connection to the Eucharist. The ceiling fresco not only creates thematic parallels but also re-­creates a sense of the spectacular. Sound, movement, the stage-­like architectural backdrop, and the preponderance of spectators revivify the sort of experience that accompanied the pro­cession through Naples. Most importantly, the ark was regarded as the symbolic precursor to the host, since it contained, in addition to the tablets bearing the commandments and Aaron’s budded rod, a golden pot of manna. Beyond feeding the Israelites, manna was interpreted as an analogue for the miraculous bread of Christian spiritual sustenance. This connection between the host and manna led writers such as Gulielmus Durandus to regard church altars as the ark’s sacred successors. In Durandus’s Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, he explic­itly likened the altar to the ark and the mercy seat to the tabernacle above it.49 Durandus’s text was one of several that articulated clear analogies between the Hebrew t­ emple and the Christian church.50 Learned Neapolitans prob­ably understood such symbolic associations with the Eucharist ­because their city played an impor­tant role in the development of the Catholic teachings surrounding it. It was Saint Thomas Aquinas, born in the kingdom, who best articulated the theology of the host. ­After he returned to Naples from Paris in 1272 to found a studium, or college, at the church of San Domenico, he turned his efforts to reshaping profoundly the Eucharistic canon. The third

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1650–1850 part of his Summa Theologica, written while in Naples, contained his highly significant articles concerning the host. ­Because of it, Thomas was erroneously believed to be the author of the liturgy for the Corpus Christi feast itself.51 God also rewarded Thomas for writing it. In 1273, a witness saw the saint levitating before an icon of the crucifixion in San Domenico. Thomas was in tearful prayer as the crucifix spoke: “You have written well of me, Thomas. What reward would you have for your l­abor?” To which Thomas replied, “Nothing but you, Lord.”52 The Dominicans subsequently dedicated a chapel to the speaking crucifix in their church and converted Thomas’s former cell into a chapel in the 1720s. All Neapolitans knew of this famous chapel, and given that Delia Bonito’s b ­ rother was a Dominican ­father and that the Bonito f­ amily chapel of San Bonito was connected to San Domenico, the nuns w ­ ere certainly aware of it.53 Thus, the significance of the host on liturgical and theological levels held special local significance, a fact also evinced by a number of books published in Naples on the subject.54 Reading the Old Testament images of Santa Chiara as meta­phors for the ­actual church and living sovereigns transforms their significance. The church itself symbolizes the ­Temple since it sheltered the Corpus Christi in the same way that the ­Temple did the ark. Its life in the city is renewed through the pro­cession of the host, just as David brought spiritual vitality to Jerusalem by bringing the ark through its gates. Its king, as King of Jerusalem, was spiritually descended from the biblical kings and pro­cessed with the host, as David had with the ark. The biblical past thus cements associations between the crown and the church. In vying to remain Naples’s royal order, the Clarissans succeeded. According to a guidebook, upon walking into the church one’s eyes w ­ ere surprised by the “royal magnificence” of its interior.55 Though Charles and Maria Amalia w ­ ere buried in Spain, where they reigned ­after 1759, Santa Chiara also became the Bourbon mausoleum. To mark this role openly, in 1761 a new stone pavement was commissioned. Designed by Ferdinando Fuga, it bore a large Bourbon crest at its center and is the only part of the eighteenth-­century redecoration that was restored ­after the war (figure 2).56 Thus, the church still bears the heraldic imprimatur of the dynasty that its redecoration was meant to attract. In this way, the nave of Santa Chiara was neither a superficial nor purely decorative space but rather the venue for an impor­tant meta­phorical dance between the sovereigns and the s­ isters.

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Notes I would like to thank Stephanie Swindle, Christian Kleinbub, Anthony Cutler, and Daniela Langusi for their vari­ous help in the research, writing, and editing of this chapter, which is published with support from the George Dewey and Mary  J. Krumrine Endowment. 1. ​See Charles-­Nicolas Cochin, Voyage d’Italie, 2 vols. (Paris: Jombert, 1769), 1:165; Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, Voyage d’Italie, ed. Maurice Lever, 2 vols. (Baume-­les-­Dames, France: Fayard, 1995), 1:200–201. 2. ​For an overview of this historiography, see Aston Nigel, Art and Religion in Eighteenth- ­Century Eu­rope (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 7–18; Nicola Spinosa, Pittura sacra a Napoli nel ‘700, exhibition cata­log (Naples: Società editrice napoletana, 1981), 3–19. 3. ​See for example the two exhibits Civiltà del ‘700 a Napoli 1734–1799, ed. Raffaello Causa, exhibition cata­log, 2 vols. (Florence: Centro DI, 1979–1980); and The Golden Age of Naples: Art and Civilization u ­ nder the Bourbons, 1744–1805, exhibition cata­log, 2 vols. (Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1981). 4. ​On its history, see Cesare d’Engenio Caracciolo, Napoli sacra (Naples: Beltrano, 1624), 234–252; Pompeo Sarnelli, Nuova guida de’ forestieri e dell’istoria di Napoli (Naples: Saverio Rossi, 1772), 106–112; Carlo Celano, Delle notizie del bello, dell’antico, e del curioso della città di Napoli, 3rd ed., 4 vols. (Naples: Gianfrancesco Paci, 1758–1759), 2:57–81; Tomaso Gallino, Il complesso monumentale di Santa Chiara in Napoli (Naples, 1963); and Caroline Bruzelius, The Stones of Naples (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 132–150. 5. ​Stressed by Bruzelius, The Stones of Naples, 137–143. 6. ​“Sembra una mezza città” (Celano, Delle notizie del bello, 2:58). 7. ​See Helen Hills, Invisible City: The Architecture of Devotion in Seventeenth ­Century Neapolitan Convents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 62–119. 8. ​Franco Strazzullo, Edilizia e urbanistica a Napoli dal ‘500 al ‘700 (Naples: Berisio, 1968), 205–239. 9. ​Celano hyperbolically claimed that not a single crack could be found in the church’s thick walls (Delle notizie del bello, 2:58). 10. ​“Se sia maggior pregio il venerare sì prodigiosa reale antichità, o pure compiacere al buon gusto della moderna vaghezza.” The relevant lines from her Relazione delle divote pompe festive (Naples, 1726), are quoted in Gallino, Complesso monumentale di Santa Chiara, 72. 11. ​Bernardo De Dominici, Vite de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti napoletani, ed. Fiorella Sricchia Santoro and Andrea Zezza, 2 vols. (Naples: Paparo, 2008), 2:1238. For Sanfelice’s proposal, see I disegni di Ferdinando Sanfelice al Museo di Capodimonte, ed. Rossana Muzii, exhibition cata­log (Naples: Electa Napoli, 1997), 6, 17. 12. ​See Gallino, Complesso monumentale di Santa Chiara, 72; Raffaele Mormone, “Il rifacimento settecentesco nella chiesa di Santa Chiara a Napoli,” in Studi in onore

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1650–1850 di Riccardo Filangieri (Naples, 1959), 85–102; and Vincenzo Rizzo, “Notizie su artisti e artefici dai giornali copiapolizze degli antichi banchi pubblici napoletani,” in Le arte figurative a Napoli nel Settecento, ed. Nicola Spinosa (Naples: Società editrice napoletana, 1979), 228, 256. 13. ​Gallino, Complesso monumentale di Santa Chiara, 78; Gioacchino Francesco D’Andrea, “Delia Bonito nella storia del complesso monumentale S. Chiara di Napoli,” in All’ombra della chiara luce, ed. Aleksander Horowski (Rome: Istituto storico dei Cappuccini, 2005), 201–232. 14. ​Romeo De Maio, Società e vita religiosa a Napoli nell’età moderna (Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1971), 190–331. 15. ​Caracciolo, Napoli sacra, 238. 16. ​Guido Donatone, Il chiostro maiolicato di Santa Chiara, 2nd ed. (Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 2009), 43. 17. ​On Acquaviva, see Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 1:198–199. On his visit, see Gaudenzio dell’Aja, Per la storia del monastero di Santa Chiara in Napoli (Naples: Giannini editore, 1992), 32–33. 18. ​See Robin L. Thomas, “Building the Monarchy: The Teatro di San Carlo in Naples,” Court Historian 17 (2012): 57; Filippo Juvarra a Madrid (Madrid: Istituto italiano di cultura, 1978), 145, 150, 152. 19. ​On t­ hese, see dell’Aja, Per la storia, 33–71; and Donatone, Chiostro maiolicato di Santa Chiara, 57–43. 20. ​See her letter of January 29, 1760, published in Carteggio San Nicandro-­Carlo III: Il periodo della Reggenza (1760–1767), ed. Carlo Knight, 3 vols. (Naples: Società napoletana di storia patria, 2009), 1:11. 21. ​See Mormone, “Rifacimento settecentesco nella chiesa di Santa Chiara,” 85–103. 22. ​See Sebastiano Conca (1680–1764), exhibition cata­log (Gaeta: Centro Storico Culturale, 1981), 328–332; Christie’s Old Master Pictures, Milan, May  2011, auction cata­log; Museo e gallerie nazionali di Capodimonte: Dipinti del XVIII secolo, ed. Nicola Spinosa (Naples: Electa Napoli, 2010), 17, 38; Nicola Spinosa, Pittura napoletana del settecento: Dal barocco al rococò (Naples: Electa Napoli, 1986), 161, 347. 23. ​On his ­career, see De Dominici, Vite de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti napoletani, 2:1320–1338; David Nolta, “Francesco de Mura, 1696–1782,” in A Taste for Angels: Neapolitan Painting in North Amer­i­ca 1650–1750, ed. Judith Colton and George Hersey, exhibition cata­log (New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery, 1987), 251–268. 24. ​For payment to De Mura, see Rizzo, “Notizie su artisti e artefici,” 228. 25. ​Celano rec­ords relics of Claire, Louis of Tolouse, Anthony of Padua, and Elizabeth of Hungary (Delle notizie del bello, 2:76). 26. ​On its date see Gallino, Complesso monumentale di Santa Chiara, 74–75. 27. ​Tommaso da Celano, Vita di Chiara d’Assisi, ed. Giovanni Casoli (Rome: Città nuova, 1996), 32–33.

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28. ​See Michelangelo Schipa, Il regno di Napoli al tempo di Carlo Borbone, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Milan: Società editrice Dante Alighieri, 1923), 1:328–396. 29. ​On the date, see Gallino, Complesso monumentale di Santa Chiara, 75. See also Nicola Spinosa, “Francesco de Mura and Eighteenth-­Century Neapolitan Painting: Between Classicism and Rococo,” in In the Light of Naples: The Art of Francesco de Mura, ed. Arthur R. Blumnethal (London: D Giles, 2016), 37. An oil sketch for this composition is preserved in the Museo della Badia Benedettina della SS. Trinità di Cava, Cava de’ Tirreni. 30. ​See Robin L. Thomas, Architecture and Statecraft: Charles of Bourbon’s Naples (1734–59) (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013). 31. ​Rizzo, “Notizie su artisti e artefici,” 230; Mormone, “Rifacimento settecentesco nella chiesa di Santa Chiara,” 101. 32. ​Olivier Michel, “Vita, allievi e famiglia di Sebastiano Cona,” in Sebastiano Conca, 35–46. 33. ​Mormone, “Rifacimento settecentesco nella chiesa di Santa Chiara,” 101. 34. ​See De Dominici, Vite de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti napoletani, 2:1309–1318; and Spinosa, Le arte figurative a Napoli nel Settecento, 97. 35. ​Mormone, “Rifacimento settecentesco nella chiesa di Santa Chiara,” 103. 36. ​The fresco was destroyed by an earthquake in 1776 but is known through a surviving oil sketch now in a private collection. On it, see Settecento napoletano: Sulle ali dell’aquila imperiale 1707–1734 (Naples: Electa Napoli, 1994), 154. 37. ​This was argued as early as the seventh c­ entury by Isidore of Seville. See Paul F. Watson, “The Queen of Sheba in Christian Tradition,” in Solomon and Sheba, ed. James B. Pritchard (London: Phaidon, 1974), 115–117. 38. ​Gallino, Complesso monumentale di Santa Chiara, 75. An oil sketch of this painting survives in Capodimonte. See Museo e gallerie nazionali di Capodimonte: dipinti del XVIII secolo, ed. Nicola Spinosa (Naples: Electa Napoli, 2010), 17, 38. 39. ​On his ­career, see Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 12:238–241. 40. ​Mormone, “Rifacimento settecentesco nella chiesa di Santa Chiara,” 101; Gallino, Complesso monumentale di Santa Chiara, 78; Maria Alberto Pavone, Paolo de Majo: Pittura e devozione a Napoli nel secolo dei “lumi” (Naples: Società editrice napoletana, 1977), 38–41, 120–121. 41. ​On ­these, see Sebastiano Conca, 214–217, 222–225. 42. ​George Kubler, Building the Escorial (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1982), 42–43. 43. ​This tradition was upheld in numerous guidebooks. According to Carlo Celano, “si ha con certissima tradizione che siano state del Tempio di Salomone, di là venute in dono al Re Roberto” (a very secure tradition holds that [they] came from the T ­ emple of Solomon and ­were brought from ­there as a gift to King Robert) (Celano, Delle notizie del bello, 2:63). See also Caracciolo, Napoli sacra, 235; Pierluigi Leone de Castris, Arte di corte nella Napoli angioina (Florence: Cantini, 1986),

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1650–1850 143–153; and Stefania Tuzi, Le colonne e il tempio di Salomone (Rome: Gangemi editore, 2002), 75–98. 44. ​Caracciolo, Napoli sacra, 236–238; on the festival more generally, see Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Eu­rope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 67–70. 45. ​On local festivities, see Vittorio Gleijeses, Feste, farina e forca (Naples: Libreria scientifica, 1972); Gabriel Guarino, Presenting the King’s Splendour: Communication and Reception of Symbolic Forms of Power in Viceregal Naples (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010); John A. Marino, Becoming Neapolitan: Citizen Culture in Baroque Naples (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); and Mélanie Traversier, “Fêtes urbaines et cérémonies du pouvoir à Naples, 1734–1815,” in Le destin des rituels: Faire corps dans l’espace urbain, ed. Gilles Bertrand and Ilaria Taddei (Rome: École française de Rome, 2008), 291–316. 46. ​On the court ceremonial, see Pablo Vázquez Gestal, “ ‘ The System of This Court’: Elizabeth Farnese, the Count of Santiesteban, and the Monarchy of the Two Sicilies, 1734–1738,” Court Historian 14 (2009): 23–47. 47. ​Thomas Gray, The Works of Thomas Gray, ed. J. Mitford, 2 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1835), 2:118; see also Jean-­Honore Fragonard’s description of the event in Bergeret et Fragonard: Journal inédit d’un voyage en Italie 1773–1774, ed. Albert Tornezy (Paris: Libraries-­imprimeries re­unites, 1895), 340. 48. ​Guarino, Presenting the King’s Splendour, 56. For theoretical works on the subject, see Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 259–267; David I. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 1–56; and Kristiaan P. Aercke, Gods of Play: Baroque Festive Per­for­mances as Rhetorical Discourse (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 1–95. 49. ​Guilielmus Durandus, The Rationale Divinorum Officiorum (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2007), 28–31. 50. ​See Germanus of Constantinople, On the Divine Liturgy, trans. Paul Meyendorff (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984), 59–61; John Wilkinson, From Synagogue to Church: The Traditional Design (London: Routledge, 2002), 146–147. 51. ​See Rubin, Corpus Christi, 181–189. 52. ​This incident is reported in multiple biographies. I draw on Pietro Aretino, Le vite dei santi, ed. Flavia Santin (Rome: Bonacci Editore, 1977), 300–301. 53. ​The Bonito chapel was located in the ancient church of San Michele Arcangelo a Morfisa, which was incorporated as a part of the right transept of San Domenico. See Vincenzo Maria Perrotta, Descrizione storica della chiesa, e del monistero di S. Domenico Maggiore di Napoli (Naples: Torchi di Saverio Giordano, 1828), 1, 28–32, 47–55. 54. ​Among them, see Gennaro di Vivi, Ragionamenti della sagra eucaristia (Naples, 1654); Officia de Sanctissimo Eucharistiae Sacramento (Naples, 1715); Federico

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Granvosca, Dissertatio theologica de potissimo effecta sacramenti eucharistiae (Naples, 1732); Francisco de Rávago y Noriega, Christus hospes (Naples, 1732); and Gian Francesco Durazzo, Le grandezze dell’augustissima eucaristia (Naples, 1754). 55. ​“ Vi si osserva una regal magnificenza, che fa restar l’occhio sorpreso”; quoted in the l­ater edition of Celano, Delle notizie del bello, 2:77. 56. ​Mormone, “Rifacimento settecentesco nella chiesa di Santa Chiara,” 103.

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BOOK REVIEWS EDITED BY BÄRBEL CZENNIA

Lisa Forman Cody and Mark Ledbury, eds., Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Culture, vol. 41. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Pp. xii + 266. 33 b/w illustrations. REVIEWED BY CHRISTOPHER D. JOHNSON

Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Culture, volume 41, begins with Michael Yonan’s

engaging discussion of the Wieskirche, an extravagant rococo church in Bavaria. Noting that for many observers such a building might “confirm German bad taste” and “reveal a Teutonic obsessiveness with detail” (1), Yonan argues instead that the church is a masterpiece of design and that its “spatial permeability advances an eschatological theology related both to the church’s function as a pilgrimage destination and as a modification of Enlightenment conceptions of sensation and knowledge” (3). Yonan compares the Wieskriche’s structure to that of the more famous Salon de la Princesses in the Hôtel a Soubise and demonstrates that the church’s architect transformed the experience of walking through the church “into a meta­phor for Christian faith and its relationship to a partially discernable, yet unquestionably confirmed divine” (12). Yonan’s essay is followed by Sandro Jung’s discussion of Thomas Stothard’s illustrations for The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas, which capture scenes from En­glish lit­er­a­ture and comprise “significant paratextual interpretations” of both canonical and emerging texts (40). More particularly, Jung shows how Stothard’s depictions from George Crabbe’s The Village “eliminated any controversial messages from the poem” and offered instead “a visual narrative that featured pastoral and Georgic ele­ments” (43). Through t­ hese essentially “conservative vignettes,” Stothard effectively removed the “offensive exhortative tone” that would other­ wise define Crabbe’s poetry (44).

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1650–1850 Jennifer Germann provides a detailed biographical sketch of Marie-­Eléonore Godefroid, an artist who seems to have lived on the edges of the Davidian school. Germann demonstrates through her skillful interpretation that “Godefroid’s connection to elite ­women in Napoleonic France can enrich our understanding of the ways that w ­ omen . . . ​utilized homosocial relationships to survive and, at least in a sense, prosper” (55). Moving from the historically obscure to the mythologically famous, Marc H. Lerner examines the William Tell legend during the Age of Revolution. The Tell story, Lerner posits, is “especially striking in its flexibility and ability to articulate divergent po­liti­cal arguments” (85). At times, Tell “symbolized an older virtue and purity that had since been corrupted” (93); at other times, he became a repre­sen­ ta­tion of “liberty, fraternity, and the sacred inalienable rights of man” (97). Lerner concludes, “­these varied uses of the story of Tell reflect a rapidly changing po­liti­ cal culture during a transformative period” (105). In one of the collection’s most carefully reasoned essays, Katrin Berndt interprets Sir Walter Scott’s Redgauntlet “as an allegorical repre­sen­ta­tion of Adam Ferguson’s . . . ​rejection of the idea of moral pro­gress . . . ​and his veneration of civic virtues such as friendship, courage, civic passion and eloquence” (115). Berndt usefully distinguishes Ferguson’s ideas from ­those of Adam Smith and David Hume and in so ­doing challenges the assumption that Scott’s fiction promotes “the Whig view of history” (116). Danielle Spratt explores the economized body in Gulliver’s Travels. Defining Gulliver as an “economic projector in line with the modest proposer and the Drapier,” Spratt argues that “Gulliver’s body mirrors his own economic and scientific theories, ultimately making him both a culprit and a victim of colonial practices” (138–139). Spratt’s analy­sis makes welcome connections between Swift’s text and Sir William Petty’s The Po­liti­cal Anatomy of Ireland. In the end, Gulliver “represents both the problematic logic of the colonizer and the problematic effects of projection on the colonized” (152). Julie Henigan considers the print and oral cultures of the eighteenth-­century Irish ballad and challenges the commonplace understanding that “the educated classes and the peasantry inhabited two wholly discrete cultural worlds, one literate and the other oral” (161). Irish ballads, Henigan convincingly shows, “reflect both British influence and native linguistic, metric or thematic influences” (173). ­These hybrids, formed by both print and oral cultures, ultimately added “richness and complexity to the singing traditions of the English-­speaking world” (179).

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As with the fine essays by Spratt and Henigan, David A. Brewer seeks to lead his reader past s­ imple binary oppositions that limit critical perspective, Brewer’s target being the novel/theater duality. Through an informed, judicious reading of George Colman’s Polly Honeycombe, Brewer shows how the play’s delightful quixoticism originates in the characters’ simultaneous appropriation of novelistic and dramatic discourses. In the world of the play, Brewer concludes, “the relationship between print and per­for­mance . . . ​is nothing if not reciprocal” (190). Investigating the works of Antoine François Prévost and Pierre de Marivaux, Zeina Hakim suggests that “the claim to truthfulness expressed at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eigh­teenth centuries must be understood as a ‘game’ and the relationship between the author and reader considered playful” (195). Hakim unpackages the rhetorical conventions of early modern fiction—­ notably the trick of the discovered manuscript—in ways that w ­ ill be equally valuable to readers of British fiction. Dorothee Birke discusses the chapter titles in representative midcentury novels by Henry Fielding, Sarah Fielding, and Charlotte Lennox, arguing that the titles do much more than summarize content. They also “negotiate the relations between author and reader and reflect on the functions of fictional readings at a par­tic­u­lar (and particularly in­ter­est­ing) point in literary history” (212). Using Gérard Genette’s paratextual theory, Birke concludes that chapter titles become a “place where the pervasive character of commercialism not only becomes apparent, but is self-­ consciously addressed” (217). The volume concludes with Catherine Keohane’s reading of Ann Yearsley’s “Clifton Hill.” Keohane’s subtle, nuanced interpretation reveals that the poem challenges both Hannah More’s characterization of Yearsley as an “appealing member of the ‘uneducated’ poets” and repre­sen­ta­tions of experience in James Thomson’s Winter (235). With frequent reference to Thomson’s work, “Yearsley pres­ents a perspective on winter that reflects her experience as a member of the laboring classes” and instructs the reader “in empathetic responses to need” (241). Yearsley’s “most striking revision of Thomson” involves the famous passage on the  red-­breast robin, which she transforms from “a demonstration of ­people’s bounty into an illustration of their cruelty” (242). For more than forty years, Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Culture has provided useful, accessible scholarly explorations from a variety of disciplines and theoretical approaches. Volume 41 continues this impor­tant legacy with eleven outstanding essays.

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Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor, eds., Shakespeare in the Eigh­teenth ­Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. xiii + 454. 17 b/w illustrations. REVIEWED BY JAQUELYN W. WALSH

In the early eigh­teenth c­entury, William Shakespeare shared space on the

En­glish stage fairly equally with Ben Jonson and John Fletcher, often via adaptation. By the end of the c­ entury, Shakespeare was “the most frequently performed dramatist on the eighteenth-­century stage” (6), as Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor have pointed out in their introduction to Shakespeare in the Eigh­ teenth ­Century. The editors and authors attribute the c­ entury’s growing estimation of Shakespeare to several c­ auses, including a publishing price war, the “vigorous advocacy of ­women” (6), and a growing nationalism. The sixteen substantive and engaging essays in this collection explore the evolution of Shakespeare plays during the eigh­teenth ­century in almost ­every area pos­si­ble—in print, as lit­er­a­ture, on the stage, through memorialization, and in the wider world—­and the volume ends with an extremely useful and in­ter­est­ing reference guide by Frans De Bruyn. Although the early eighteenth-­century stage perpetuated many of the adaptations of Shakespeare’s works produced during and a­ fter the Restoration, eighteenth-­century publishers of Shakespeare’s plays for the most part attempted to print the most definitive versions pos­si­ble of the original plays, despite the editors’ own beliefs that what they had to deal with w ­ ere fragmented texts. Beginning with Nicholas Rowe’s edition of 1709, Marcus Walsh examines the high and low points of the most impor­tant editions (out of roughly sixty-­five) produced during the c­ entury, focusing on t­ hose of Alexander Pope, Lewis Theo-

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Book Reviews

bald, Samuel Johnson, and Edward Capell. Edmond Malone’s 1790 octavo edition represents for Walsh the crowning achievement of Shakespearean editions during this ­century, bringing “a new emphasis on primary documentary evidence and a new determination in its pursuit; a new awareness of the historical context of Shakespeare’s drama; a rigorous and innovative investigation of biographical, chronological, and so­cio­log­i­cal issues; and a focused and selective interpretive method of real theoretical self-­consciousness and cogency” (34). Jack Lynch surveys the critical reception of Shakespeare from Thomas Rymer’s 1693 attack on Shakespeare’s neglect of morality, a “defect” confirmed by Samuel Johnson and first contested by Elizabeth Montague in 1769. From this point on, Lynch sees a redirection of negative criticism previously leveled at Shakespeare’s works to critiques of the critics themselves. Locating the modern review between Warburton’s 1747 and Johnson’s 1765 editions, Antonia Forster moves from the critics to the reviewers, seeing their influence in the way the reviews contextualized dif­fer­ ent “editions, numerous commentaries and interpretations” (61). Brean Hammond’s essay “Shakespeare Discoveries and Forgeries” studies in some detail the complicated case of Double Falsehood, a play that Lewis Theobald attributed to Shakespeare and that even the meticulous Malone could not totally discount. Hammond then moves to Ireland’s Vortigern, which opened onstage the night ­after Malone “destroyed its credibility by exposing all of the supporting documents as fakes” (91). Per­for­mances also gave away the deception, Hammond adds, immediately with regard to Vortigern and eventually with regard to Double Falshood, as neither was able to “survive the scrutiny of the three-­dimensional stage” (94). Shakespeare’s influence on eighteenth-­century lit­er­a­ture is examined in essays on poetry (by David Fairer), the novel (by Thomas Keymer), and the drama (by Tiffany Stern). While all three essays illuminate Shakespeare’s impact on eighteenth-­ century genres in in­ter­est­ing ways, Keymer’s essay is perhaps the most entertaining and far ranging. Beginning with a brief look at Shakespeare quotations and allusions to his plays in many eighteenth-­century novels (the most frequently quoted passage in the sentimental/gothic realm appears to have been “like patience on a monument” from Twelfth Night), Keymer then moves on to explore what seems to be implicit “Shakespearean resonance” (120) in the moral and neopo­liti­cal ambiguities of works by Daniel Defoe. Keymer finds the most intriguing, effective, and complex Shakespeare allusions in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Cla­ris­sa, and Sir Charles Grandison, especially in Richardson’s delvings into the innermost recesses of the h ­ uman heart. Keymer questions Robert Gayle Noyes’s

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1650–1850 “low” estimate that “one novel in e­ very seven” written from 1740 to 1780 refers to Shakespeare in some way (132). According to Keymer, the Twelfth Night allusion alone appears, more or less directly, in more than half the novels published between 1760 and 1780. Taking the theatrical season of 1747 as a turning point in Shakespeare’s presence on the London stage, Robert Shaughnessy surveys changes of theatrical conventions before and ­after that date, including the use of scenery, the reduction of the platform stage, the wearing of wigs, the “ad hoc and opportunist” repertory system (166), and the increasing importance of ­women performers. Jenny Davidson’s examination of Shakespeare adaptations includes a look at the critical reception of twentieth-­century adaptations, for instance, ­those written by Hazelton Spencer, David Nicol Smith, and Michael Dobson. This brings Davidson to the central question of how “­these radical alterations” could be “so popu­lar during exactly the period in which Shakespeare was coming to be canonized as not merely a ­great, but rather the ­great En­glish author” (188–189). Davidson also spends some time discussing acting, noting that George Steevens once wrote to David Garrick, praising the actor’s ability to convey an interpretation to an audience with a “single look, or par­tic­u­lar modulation of voice.” This “infusion of a new acting style” (191), she contends, brought perhaps as much vigor and freshness to Shakespearean productions in the eigh­teenth c­ entury as the alterations to the text did. Michael Burden includes a chart of all Shakespearean operas before 1800 (beginning with Henry Purcell’s The Fairy- ­Queen in 1692) in an essay examining the controversies over the “growing hegemony” of Italian opera and the “fundamental strug­gle . . . ​between Shakespearean drama and the eighteenth-­century forms of aria and recitative” (221). Broadening the scope to art, jubilee, and a nascent nationalism, the section on memorializing Shakespeare begins with Shearer West’s look at engravings, prints, and paintings of Shakespearean subjects and the ensuing transformation as artists began to work out their own artistic interpretations rather than simply rendering theatrical scenes. Inspired by Sir Joshua Reynolds, who encouraged artists to engage in history painting, the period from 1760 to 1786 saw the exhibition of more than a hundred paintings on Shakespearean subjects. West finds, however, the creation of an iconography for Shakespeare’s works best realized in the imaginative renderings of the Swiss artist Henry Fuseli. Kate Rumbold looks at the “protean” nature of Garrick’s Stratford Jubilee in 1769 (during which no play by Shakespeare was performed), finding in it a commixture of the folksy and the commercial and “a turning point in Shakespeare’s status” (265). Kathryn Prince con-

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tinues the discussion of Shakespeare’s canonization in her essay on nationalism. ­After expressing fears that Voltaire’s disparagement of Shakespeare’s disregarding of the neoclassical unities and of neoclassical decorum would “scuttle his incipient deification in E ­ ngland,” Prince claims that this antipathy, along with burgeoning nationalism, rather led to the popu­lar and patriotic characterization of Shakespeare as “the glory of the nation” (281). De Bruyn takes up the topic of Shakespeare and the French Revolution in the next section, noting that, while Shakespeare’s plays always existed within a po­liti­ cal context, during the po­liti­cal atmosphere of the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries they became partisan and polemical tools. Although the history plays w ­ ere used extensively in this po­liti­cal fashion, De Bruyn argues that the staging of Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth was even more politicized. Performed fifty-­six times in a row ­after the death of Louis XVI, the play was most explic­itly instrumentalized to instruct eighteenth-­century audiences about the dire consequences of regicide. The German reception of Shakespeare gained strength in the same period that saw the canonization of Shakespeare in ­England, 1760–1775, so much so that Shakespeare became the “most-­performed dramatist on the stages of the German-­ speaking lands” and was “declared to be the third German ‘classic’ along with Goethe and Schiller” (326), Roger Paulin contends. In an extremely in­ter­est­ing essay on Shakespeare and philosophy, Philip Smallwood examines the relationship of Shakespeare to eighteenth-­century (and even twentieth-­century) philosophy. The paradox of Shakespeare as a thinker, so many critics have maintained throughout the ages, according to A. D. Nutall, is that we “have no idea what Shakespeare thought, fi­nally, about any major question” (333). Smallwood dedicates most of his essay to looking at Shakespeare through the lens of eighteenth-­century phi­los­o­phers, including Voltaire, Johnson, Pope, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Johann Gottfried Herder. Smallwood finds “the link between the two worlds” most “specifically comprehended in the role Kant accorded to the judgement of the aesthetic,” adding that “for all their reservations, the eighteenth-­century phi­los­o­phers open ave­nues for the cultural penetration of Shakespeare beyond popularity . . . ​to the intellectual centres of the succeeding generation” (341). The essay collection is rounded out by De Bruyn’s wide-­r anging reference guide. In addition to extensive bibliographic sources, it also contains information-­ packed thumbnail biographies of Shakespeare’s editors, critics, and eighteenth-­ century actors as well as a section on staging and adaptation that notes both the relative popularity and number of per­for­mances of each. A cover-­to-­cover

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1650–1850 reading of Ritchie and Sabor’s extensive collection w ­ ill convince most readers that, despite the differing worldviews of the eigh­teenth ­century and of Shakespeare’s time, the neoclassical era regarded Shakespeare as, if not transcendentally impor­tant, at least greater than cultural or temporal contexts, thus conferring on Shakespeare the literary-­historical equivalent of an apotheosis.

362

John B. Radner, Johnson and Boswell: A Biography of Friendship. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. Pp. xii + 415. REVIEWED BY MARTINE W. BROWNLEY

John B. Radner’s learned and engaging study offers new perspectives on one of the most illustrious of En­glish friendships, a notable achievement given how often and how thoroughly Johnson and Boswell’s famous relationship has been analyzed before. Focusing on the friendship as “an evolving, multifaceted collaboration” (6), this book meticulously traces its development through twenty-­eight years, from the famous first meeting on May 16, 1763, to Boswell’s publication of the Life of Johnson on the same date in 1791. This study combines close readings of the primary texts, often analyzed comparatively, with careful reconstructions of relevant historical and literary contexts. Radner concentrates on how the friendship was individually experienced by each man at the time events occurred and when accounts of them ­were written and rewritten, avoiding teleology as he shows how the connections forged between the two changed over the years. Johnson and Boswell is a long book. Its eigh­teen chapters proceed chronologically, providing detailed consideration of the major ongoing issues as well as more ephemeral concerns that ­shaped the relationship. Most chapters cover two or three years, although the first meeting and its aftermath in 1763 and Boswell’s 1772 London visit, particularly transformative for the friendship ­because of the forms of collaboration that developed at the time, each receive a chapter. The Hebrides adventure is covered in two chapters, one on the trip as a w ­ hole and one on each man’s narrations of the journey, followed by a third chapter on Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Three concluding chapters, one on the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and two on the Life, trace Boswell’s

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1650–1850 reconfigurations of the relationship a­fter Johnson’s death, a pro­cess that involved rescripting both the friendship and himself. The aim of Johnson and Boswell is to show the relationship as more volatile and conflicted than both men represent it in their writing on the Hebrides tour and as Boswell depicts it in Life. Thus analyses highlight the changing investments of the two in the friendship that ­were s­ haped by anx­i­eties, guilt, and jealousies, along with considerable re­spect and admiration (originally on Boswell’s part but ultimately on Johnson’s side too). Collaboration was central in the friendship, but so ­were anx­i­eties. The result is a detailed mapping of the continuing negotiations and renegotiations of a friendship between two very dif­fer­ent men, who nevertheless shared impor­tant affinities. Radner delineates a relationship in which the two competed and cooperated, asserted autonomy and encouraged intimacy, and exercised control and sought reciprocity. Throughout the friendship each one mea­sured himself in certain ways against the other, as each si­mul­ta­neously constructed the self and the other over almost three de­cades. Radner deals adeptly with the complicated textual amalgams of biography and autobiography that both men produced. His account tracks how Boswell’s desire to write Johnson’s biography and Johnson’s ac­cep­tance of this undertaking enriched and complicated the myriad existing connections between the two, while creating new ties. Johnson’s efforts, both subtle and overt, to prepare and direct Boswell in the proj­ect are particularly compelling. The chapter “The Lives of the Poets and Johnson’s (Auto)biography,” for example, examines vari­ous ele­ments in Johnson’s last ­great work that suggest he had Boswell in mind as his primary audience: “Johnson wrote in part to guide and constrain, to challenge and tease Boswell” (233). Boswell, too, found that becoming Johnson’s biographer gave him unexpected leverage along with escalating conflicts. The explications of the many ways Johnson and Boswell learned to work out collaborations textually are high points of this study. From the beginning Radner does an exemplary job of emphasizing the limitations of the evidence on which he depends. With the exception of the Hebrides jaunt, much less information is available about Johnson’s perspectives on the friendship as opposed to the plethora of Boswellian documentation. (For example, Johnson’s letters contain no references to Boswell u ­ ntil 1772, nor was Boswell mentioned in Johnson’s ­w ill [9, 300]). Radner’s solution to this evidentiary discrepancy—­trying “to use Boswell’s often-­full entries without being seduced by them” (9)—­generally works well. In addition, even Boswell’s massive accounts are necessarily selective or other­wise incomplete, leaving parts of the story that have

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to be reconstructed despite significant textual silences and gaps. Many episodes, notably Boswell’s failure to write to Johnson during his final illnesses and death, remain enigmatic. The analyses of ­these kinds of hiatuses is one of the strengths of this study. The subject makes speculation inevitable, but Radner’s conjectures tend to be persuasive ­because of the full explanations he provides about how he reached his conclusions. The book is not without occasional prob­lems. Although Radner is a generous critic who writes of his debts to the phalanx of scholars, editors, critics, and biographers who have analyzed and interpreted both Johnson and Boswell, the impressively inclusive citations of primary texts are not matched by the coverage of secondary sources. The strengths of this study can at times morph into weaknesses through excess. For instance, although plentiful detail is crucial to support the complex arguments, in places some pruning would not have been amiss, especially when repetitions follow within pages of each other. With this kind of material, ­every reader w ­ ill inevitably encounter what she or he may judge to be overreadings. For me, the claims for Boswell’s ultimate maturity remain questionable, as does the amount of equality that actually characterized the relationship. To be fair, however, most of the occasional excesses also reflect both Radner’s mastery of an im­mense amount of detail and his obvious plea­sure in sharing that knowledge with his readers. Johnson and Boswell offers new insights and a variety of pleasures for neophytes as well as for longtime Johnsonian and Boswellian scholars. Radner is an effective stylist and narrativist; writing without jargon, he makes the most of the stories that he recounts. In his introduction he writes that in Boswell and Johnson’s many varied interactions, they “brought each other to life” (6). That is a good description of what Radner himself does for both men in this study, through his encyclopedic knowledge of his subject and his indefatigable zest for it.

365

Jack M. Armistead, Otherworldly John Dryden: Occult Rhe­toric in His Poems and Plays. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014. Pp. x + 187. REVIEWED BY ANNE BARBEAU GARDINER

In the seventeenth c­ entury, learned men, including members of the Royal Soci-

ety, engaged in serious discussions of alchemy, astrology, magic, and demonology. Robert Boyle, for instance, exchanged alchemical secrets with Newton and Locke. In a book that takes an original and highly rewarding approach to Dryden, Jack Armistead, in Otherworldly John Dryden, shows him using the language and phenomena of the occult in his poems and plays to show a large pattern in con­ temporary history. In Dryden’s works we find “intelligences” in nature who can “assume elemental shapes” and predict, but not control, ­future events. Instead, what governs history is divine Providence and ­human freedom. The poet whittles down occult power to visionary insight and puts in its place “a more empirical effort to understand and cooperate with God’s w ­ ill as revealed in the book of nature.” Even so, he insists, as did Henry More and Joseph Glanvill, t­ here are spiritual, not just material, forces working ­behind history. This review ­will give a simplified version of the theme that Armistead develops with much erudition throughout the book. In the early poems (1649–1663), astrological language shows that both ­Cromwell and Charles II are providential rulers, but the first is earthbound, while the second is heavenly; alchemical language shows that the Puritans are deluded, while Clarendon and Monck are clear-­ eyed and operate without the occult. In the American plays The Indian Queen and The Indian Emperour (1664–1665), Dryden blends the occult with the “empirical” in super­natural episodes in which elemental spirits invoked by Indian priests

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have lost all power over fate but are “reliably prophetic.” T ­ hese episodes represent a shift from the Interregnum to the Restoration, from a “power-­centered society to one centered on love, forgiveness, and reasoned order.” In Annus Mirabilis (1667), the rhe­toric of astrology, alchemy, and demonology connects the events of 1665–1666 to invisible forces: “the absence of super­natural access to invisible energy is compensated for by a new relation between h ­ umans and heaven, a relation which confers on the king the power to detect and cooperate with the natu­ral operations of Providence.” At the end of this poem the Fire is “an alchemical ‘flame’ purging London and distilling from it ‘a City of more precious mold.’ ” Likewise, in The Tempest (1667) magical power is weak and limited compared to ­human desires and is renounced as part of “man’s prideful effort to appropriate nature to his own ends.” Armistead remarks that Dryden never “so carefully integrated the occult episodes with the main plot” as in Tyrannick Love and The Conquest of Granada (1669–1671), in which “magicians and daemons deepen and enrich meaning.” In the first play, “the metaphysical dimension” is complicated by the use of an “angel and legions of ­middle spirits.” The magician Nigrinus discovers that the “earthy Fiend” he invokes has very limited power: he cannot “generate love,” can dimly foresee the f­ uture, and, when he tries to tempt the saint, is easily foiled by her angel. H ­ ere “outmoded wizardry” gives way to “a new form of magic, one both more natu­ral and more potently super­natural,” namely, “Christian love functioning through the Providential alchemy of ­human feelings.” In Conquest of Granada, Dryden again employs the language of sorcery, this time to destroy the illusion “that love is a private, possessive act, and that real­ity can be subjected to ­human w ­ ill.” He distinguishes Almanzor’s lust and power-­mongering from Boabdelin’s by means of “occult phenomena and language,” as in the ghost of Almanzor’s ­mother. A shift occurs in 1675 when the occult material in Aureng-­Zebe fails to “deepen the significance of the play.” The Emperor and Morat embrace a Hobbist idea of nature and cannot perceive Providence acting “through natu­r al phenomena, including h ­uman passion.” Dryden’s sidelining of the occult h ­ere “roughly coincides” with his more modest view of “how far poetry can penetrate into the hidden dynamics of ­either nature or h ­ uman nature.” Both Aureng-­Zebe and All for Love (1677) are about “the isolation of private life from public responsibility” and the “dangers of royal weakness and self-­indulgence,” with a glance at Charles II. In All for Love the words of the priest-­poet Serapion carry a “profound authority” as he “correctly interprets prodigies and takes a cosmic view of history.”

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1650–1850 ­ here is a lack of a “clear occult rhe­toric” in Oedipus, Troilus and Cressida T and The Spanish Fryar (1678–1680), even though ­these plays contain references to dreams, stars, prophecies, daemons, and angels. In Oedipus Tiresias is another clear-­visioned Serapion; while Creon lacks any sense of the super­natural, and Oedipus, like Charles II, is engrossed in “self-­serving politics” and “personal pleasures.” In Troilus the occult is found in dreams and omens (as in Andromache’s forebodings); the royal b ­ rothers perish partly b ­ ecause of their lack of “metaphysical awareness.” In ­these plays, which reflect the con­temporary exclusion crisis, Dryden seems unable “to find a detailed heavenly plan,” yet he also shows a “renewed trust in Providence,” affirming that invisible forces are involved in history, even if they cannot be plainly discerned. In Absalom and Achitophel, The Medall, The Duke of Guise, and Albion and Albanius (1681–1685), the poet displays a “resurgent confidence in ­England’s Providential ­future.” In Absalom, in which the occult is used “only in a pejorative sense,” the Whigs are shown employing the black arts for “purely earthbound motives.” In The Duke of Guise (1682) occult language and phenomena “underline the diabolical nature of treason” and reveal its ultimate lack of power, as when Malicorne summons a hellish spirit and deludes himself into thinking he controls it. In Albion “meaning is conveyed almost entirely through occult materials”: h ­ ere characters from the invisible world can only watch, not act, while the king is saved “by a direct action of Providence” in the Newmarket fire. Dryden now sees an ongoing war between heaven and hell in E ­ ngland, with the Whig rebels acting as “self-­centered materialists who pervert astrology and dabble in black magic.” In Britannia Rediviva (1688), for example, the newborn prince embodies “a mystical power” to resist their diabolical arts. Dryden’s ­later poems depict a “widening gulf between the vis­i­ble and invisible worlds.” And yet, while he no longer shows “invisible forces purposefully guiding the details of con­temporary life,” he remains hopeful that the En­glish w ­ ill learn how to perceive the truth about their history. In King Arthur (1691), a play rich in occult material, the poet links the mission of E ­ ngland to the kind of visionary insight that penetrates “the material phenomena of history.” In this play “the relation between vision and delusion is expressed in terms of magic, demonology, and prophecy,” and the story culminates in Merlin’s restoring “full sight” to Arthur and causing him to see with “the eyes of the mind” and a “redeemed perception.” In Otherworldly Dryden Armistead succeeds in revealing how the poet uses occult materials as a way of reading history. The poet shows that the designs of

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Providence can be discerned in a nation’s history and that spiritual or even elemental entities can communicate ­these designs to ­human beings to help them perceive time in the light of eternity. However, Dryden makes it clear that such entities have no power over the ­future and that only ­human beings are ­free to choose ­whether to cooperate with Providence in the shaping of history.

369

Jonathan Lamb, The T ­ hings T ­ hings Say. Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2011. Pp. xxix + 275. REVIEWED BY LYNN FESTA

The title of Jonathan Lamb’s The ­Things ­Things Say contains a telltale repetition,

a stutter that verges on tautology or solipsism, a strange stammering redundancy: ­things say t­hings. Inanimate, implacable, literally dispassionate, t­hings in Lamb’s account speak themselves and nothing but, in defiance of all efforts to harness them to h ­ uman uses and values, economic or symbolic. Lamb’s electrifying book traces what happens when we encounter not “the objects that serve h ­ uman purposes” but “the ­things that ­don’t” (xi). He explores a dazzling array of eighteenth-­ century texts—­literary, po­liti­cal, philosophical, ­legal—­that exploit viewpoints that depart from the h ­ uman to show how t­hings become authors of accounts that challenge the fictions we use to impose order on an unruly, recalcitrant world. Chief among t­hese fictions is “the person,” that artificial repre­sen­ta­tion of coherent continuous identity (po­liti­cal and personal) that Lamb draws from readings of Hobbes and Locke. Serving as a “fictive repre­sen­ta­tional synthesis,” “the person” confers identity on the discontinuities of the empiricist self and on the precarious civil subject that holds a warlike state of nature at bay (23). Lamb’s chapters explore what happens when “the bound­aries between what deserves to be represented by a person and what d ­ oesn’t” are breached, when h ­ umans are degraded to the status of beasts or ­things, or when t­ hings cease to act as property, obedient to the ­will and desires of h ­ umans (23). Lamb’s argument finds its anchoring examples in the minor but significant eighteenth-­century genre of the it-­narrative—­those peculiar tales recounted by inanimate objects and animals—as well as in a cluster of kindred texts, including

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fables, romances, advertisements for stolen objects, slave narratives, and canonical texts by Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, John Gay, and ­others. Emerging in dark counterpoint to the novel’s emphasis on the possessive individual and the deep psychological self, ­these “non-­personate” accounts give voice to positions or interests that fall beyond the pale of civil society and its fictions of coherent autonomous subjectivity. ­These accounts emerge out of states of extremity—­slavery, war, madness—in which the fictions that secure the relation of property to personality or of cause to effect falter (and although Lamb has l­ittle interest in psychoanalytic language, t­here are shades ­here of Lacan’s “real”). When ­things are out of joint or the irruption of an unforeseeable event shatters reasoned causality, writers have recourse to fictions and tropes such as personification, figures in which t­ hings take the place of persons: “Fear does not represent itself; it is what it does, the author of itself” (25). The personification serves as a credible fictive agent able to bridge unaccountable relations between cause and effect. Personifications become necessary at moments when the fictions of civil society give way, when “sudden emergencies capsize the hierarchy of ­things and ­people, elevating the former to the condition of gods and depressing the latter to the condition of animals” (4). At the agonized moment of Ovidian metamorphosis or in the brutalized state of slavery, categories rupture (their fragile fictive status becomes apparent) as entities are violently hijacked from the classes to which they ostensibly belong. Cut off from civil society, ­human beings cannot uphold their coherent fictive forms (as “persons” able both to own property and to own their own stories), while ­things seem possessed of value and power that are in no way indentured to the ­human and thus come to appear as “authors” of their own accounts. At such moments, Lamb argues, repre­sen­ta­tion (understood in both the po­liti­cal and literary senses) fails, as entities that looked meaningful turn out to stand for nothing. Refusing to be assimilated to ­human systems of meaning or to offer any kind of surplus significance, ­things speak obstinately and recalcitrantly only of themselves. Lamb traces the ways h ­ umans seek to gain dominion over t­ hings and the ways ­things escape from our grasp and “gain in­de­pen­dence when their ­owners desire to possess them uncontrollably” (78). The entail that seeks to secure absolute control over an estate, for example, renders the current owner a mere tenant for life, while the “crying” or advertisement of stolen goods that allowed them to be redeemed summons the enthralled owner to resume possession by inciting desires that drive him or her beyond the law. On ­these terms, Lamb argues,

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1650–1850 property is “never . . . ​thoroughly owned at all,” and the effort to own it absolutely leads to states of transport and delirium (7). Thus, in a compelling reading of Captain Cook’s South Seas journals, Lamb shows how Cook’s meticulous accounting for the property of the Crown breaks down in cultural encounters in which ­things move according to princi­ples and impulses ungoverned by the rules of exchange or naval authority. The extraordinary magnetism of t­ hings reverses the power of subjects and objects, leading to Cook’s frenzied deification, his murder, and the distribution of his body parts among the islanders. The ungovernable fancies excited by exotic ­things, Lamb argues, elevate them to the status of “idols” that “stand . . . ​­really for nothing at all,” a revelation that alternately leads ­humans ­either to deride the ­thing as empty or to worship its plenitude (its ability to be exactly what it is), investing it with h ­ uman passions, personifying it, making it into a god or an idol (55). T ­ hese tensions are likewise on display in poems such as Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, in which the inexplicable but overwhelming allure of Belinda, which Lamb provocatively compares to a still life or a trompe l’oeil, issues from the surface itself—­“color, sound, or volume”—­not from depth or hidden meaning (xv). The desire to make the lock or Belinda into something that can be interpreted slams up against the fact that “­there is nothing ­there but what is vis­i­ble” (102); indeed, the destructive ele­ments in Pope’s poem, Lamb argues, arise from the vio­lence of trying to make something mean when it simply does not. The t­ hing—­and the body made up out of t­ hings—is not representative of anything; it is what it is. Among the entities that cannot be represented (although they create repre­ sen­ta­tions) are authors, a term that Lamb appropriates from Hobbes. Like t­ hings, authors function on their own account, anterior to civil society and to personate repre­sen­ta­tion: “Authors are to the civil subject what t­ hings are to objects” (xv). If persons are a kind of po­liti­cal “object,” refashioned ­after the demands of civil society, then authors, by contrast, are unmoored from both the privileges and the constraints of personhood. Inasmuch as authors lie beyond the regulation of civil society and its fictions of “personhood,” h ­ umans—­Defoe’s Roxana, Swift’s mad hack in A Tale of a Tub, the unknown author of the 1850 The Bondswoman’s Narrative—­who have lost their place in ­these categories may lay claim to authorship as a way of acquiring a voice without acceding to personhood. Indeed, inasmuch as the category of the person becomes yet another implement of oppression for the slave (who only attains personhood, for example, as a criminal in a court of law), the enslaved h ­ uman must seek purchase not from the “person” but from the “author” at the far side of civil society. On ­these terms, the disenfran-

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chised ­human attains speech not through the fictions of personhood but through the authority of the ­thing—­the author—­that lies beyond it. That ­humans may, in moments of extremity, capitalize on their status as ­things as the best—­perhaps only—­way to regain authorship snatches a certain affirmation from states of degradation and checks the argument from falling into an ethically troubling romance of dispossession, in which the capacity to speak from the nonhuman “other” side of civil society, by acquiring what might be called the glamour of the t­ hing, effaces or circumvents real h ­ uman suffering. In this regard, Lamb’s argument underscores the way some recent t­hing theory, in its attention to the material world, circumvents the specificity of decidedly ­human ­causes such as gender or race that govern which bodies are relegated to the status of t­ hings and how that violation is visited upon them. It is part of the originality of Lamb’s argument that it moves so readily and rapidly beyond ­these other registers of explanation, and yet ­these more familiar historical-­materialist and po­liti­c al accounts complement the literary history that Lamb describes, with its self-­fulfilling personifications in which ­things come to be b ­ ecause that is what they are. The T ­ hings T ­ hings Say ranges widely across disciplines (lit­er­a­ture, law, rhe­ toric, philosophy of mind, the history of science, art history, and po­liti­cal theory), geographies (Britain, the South Seas, the U.S. South), periods (from Apuleius to London Review of Books personal ads), and genres (fable, still life, novel, slave narrative). Notwithstanding Lamb’s comprehensive knowledge of the eigh­teenth ­century, such sweep makes some of the book’s claims seem curiously timeless, and the very capaciousness of the argument at times pulls away from the narrower parsing of terms undertaken by some of the phi­los­o­phers from whom Lamb draws. Although the affinities Lamb uncovers between thinkers and texts involve sometimes dizzying leaps across time and space, the reader who follows him across ­these spans w ­ ill be richly rewarded, for The ­Things T ­ hings Say is a truly magnificent book, passionately argued, theoretically groundbreaking, and eloquent even in its transcription of the truncated syllables stammered out by t­ hings.

373

Tim Fulford, The Late Poetry of the Lake Poets: Romanticism Revised. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xiv + 311. 15 b/w illustrations. REVIEWED BY BRIAN GOLDBERG

The Lake Poets—­William Words­worth, Robert Southey, and Samuel Taylor

Coleridge—­composed most of their best-­known poetry before 1814, but all three continued to write into the 1820s and beyond. In The Late Poetry of the Lake Poets Tim Fulford makes the case that this writing has its own character and value. Weaving through his discussion are a number of ­factors that, Fulford argues, especially ­shaped the l­ater poetry as the Lake Poets attempted to solidify their reputations and remain relevant to con­temporary readers: innovations in typography, the growing marketplace presence of illustrated books, the poets’ renewed recognition of female audiences, and a set of ongoing rivalries with writers including Lord Byron, Walter Scott, Francis Jeffrey, and Words­worth himself, who is, in Fulford’s agonistic account, the figure the other two Lake Poets have to differentiate themselves from but can never outdo. The early poetry is so strongly associated with the French Revolution and the de­cades of war that followed it that ­these ­factors may seem contingent, personal, or even trivial in comparison, but Fulford makes a strong and convincing claim about the poetry that results. As a body of work it contains “a number of profound poems that ponder, from their par­tic­u­lar historical situations, universal ­human concerns,” particularly ­because that late poetry, as it grows out of and revises the poetry of the earlier period, reflects the experience of age rather than the experience of youth (2). The book is or­g a­nized into three main sections, one each on Southey, Coleridge, and Words­worth. The first begins with Southey’s late picturesque writing, a mode that starts out as an “extreme and . . . ​controversialist” reaction

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to the radical literary politics of Byron and William Hazlitt and subsides into a less violent, domestic “engagement with the landscape” (52). Like Words­worth, Southey exploited a new outlet for publication in the growing market for illustrated books about the Lake District, and like Words­worth he was interested in establishing that an intellectual and aesthetic investment in this locale was not merely narrow-­ minded and provincial, as Jeffrey had consistently argued, but was a commitment to a local, “moral way of life that a commercializing and commodifying nation was abandoning at its peril” (33). However, Southey also recognized that he could not be the poet Words­worth was, and in order to maintain his own writerly identity he continued to perform the kinds of metrical experiments that had characterized his earliest epics and are now most widely known through ­later poems such as “The Cataract of Lodore.” Words­worth acted for Southey as a reference point, an inspiration, and a spur to innovation, but other Southeyan rivalries w ­ ere less friendly. Southey was named poet laureate in 1813; but the radical Byron was immeasurably more popu­lar, and the younger author used that popularity, in Southey’s view, to further a diabolically amoral agenda. In response, Southey returned to the epic writing of his early ­career in his 1825 A Tale of Paraguay, a poem that, as Fulford describes, substitutes fatherly love for the sexual passions of Byron’s similarly themed “The Island.” A Tale of Paraguay thus not only corrects the younger Byron by demonstrating how Eu­ro­pean expansion should be treated in verse but also provides a meta­phorical brief for the “missionary paternalism” that Southey supported and Byron opposed (100). The section on Coleridge takes as its theme the acute anxiety that Coleridge felt about his own authorship. One chapter details his attempts, particularly in his 1816 volume Christabel; Kubla Khan, a Vision; The Pains of Sleep, to develop a persona that might stand between the vulnerable, confessional author and his audience. Fulford reinterprets the poetry in this volume in light of its publication date rather than the much-­earlier dates of composition. By 1816, “Christabel” and “Kubla Khan” had been widely recited for nearly twenty years, with “Christabel” especially acting as an inspiration for the medievalist poetry of Scott and Byron. By replacing the oral history of this poetry with a print history, that is, by fi­nally publishing it, with introductory material attached, Coleridge makes a “priority claim” regarding Byron and Scott but also launches a “self-­cancelling” argument about poetic creation insofar as the poems still dramatize “a model of poetry as an enchantment preceding and exceeding print culture” (138). A de­cade l­ater, Coleridge is less anxious, and his print-­based self-­presentation is less concerned with the priority of the spoken word. In the illustrated annual ­albums that dominated the market in

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1650–1850 the 1820s and then in his final collected edition, Coleridge publishes poetry that reflects back on his earlier work and participates in a “gendered u ­ nion of masculine writing and feminine reading made at a distance, through the printed book” (155). Coleridge’s persona is no longer the “bard enchanting listeners” but the “domesticated old gent who seeks world-­wearily to instruct and entertain young ­women rather than to engage their sympathy and pity” (166), a not-­entirely-­ comforting effect determined by the nonenchanting chasm between the poet and his audience. The book’s final section is on Words­worth. Rather than abandoning his earlier recognition that Nature can never be fully apprehended through language, Fulford argues, the ­later Words­worth addresses this dilemma by invoking a new kind of geo­graph­i­cal specificity. Words­worth’s late poems of naming attach an awareness of national history to the unyieldingness of nature, and through the publication of guidebooks and books of prints, the poems also make local names available to a wider national audience. Ultimately, in his collaboration with artists such as William Green and William Westall, Words­worth developed an impersonal “topographic verse” that disconnected the importance of Lakeland places from their idiosyncratic role in the biography of the poet (257). The poet-­a s-­tourist becomes a guide for a nation of tourists who must be shown by example how to perceive the moral exemplarity of the Lake District, its landscape, and its natives. While ­these publications ­ were critically and commercially successful, Fulford emphasizes that the poet was no mere showman or ideologist. Words­worth maintains his belief that poetry must challenge readers and that poetic engagement with the phenomenal world can lead to virtue and insight only if readers, and tourists, make a corresponding and continuing effort. In one of Fulford’s more extended examples, the often-­revised “Long Meg” sonnet is shown to demonstrate that “meaning-­making is a feminine kind of play” that the masculine poet may try but ­will always fail to control; and the forms of national identity figured by an attachment to the landscape similarly amount to “a weight that is actively taken up, not an identity that is given” (274). ­There is a synthetic ele­ment to this book. As its thorough notes demonstrate, the subject of Lake writing ­after 1814 has not been entirely neglected by critics, and few scholars ­will take exception to, or be surprised by, the contention that the Lake Poets engaged in vari­ous contests with Jeffrey, Byron, and Scott, that they had ambivalent but potentially positive attitudes ­toward illustrated books, or that they developed an increasingly complex awareness of ­women writers and readers during the 1820s and ­after. (Another work of scholarship that might be

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mentioned in this connection is Dennis Low’s The Literary Protégées of the Lake Poets [Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006], which specifically contextualizes the relationship of the Lake Poets to ­women writers at the time.) That said, The Late Poetry of the Lake Poets provides a thorough, persuasive, and original overview of late Lake writing. Much of the book’s interest comes from its numerous close and fascinating readings of individual poems. For example, we are unlikely to get a more careful or compelling account of Coleridge’s “The Blossoming of the Solitary Date Tree” than Fulford’s description of how the poem and, eventually, its introduction ­were transformed from an 1801–1802 manuscript fragment about Sara Hutchinson into 1828’s published meditation on intertextuality, absence, and loss (195). In this case Fulford’s mode of reading, which traces themes and allusions across successive versions of the work and its paratexts, is an impor­tant expression of the book’s guiding conviction that late Lake writing is best understood as a finely honed, tactical rewriting of its better-­known pre­ce­dents. Scholars have often explored the implications of Romantic revisionary practices, but the main difference h ­ ere, and elsewhere in The Late Poetry of the Lake Poets, is in the par­tic­u­lar convergence of method and subject ­matter. The Late Poetry of the Lake Poets fi­nally demonstrates that, in order to interpret and properly esteem the late Romanticism of revision and recollection, it is necessary to work patiently through multiple texts, variations, and methods of publication just as the poets worked through multiple, sometimes divergent or contradictory, modes, memories, and circumstances over a long period of time. In a sense, then, the book describes not the experience of any given reader but something like the reanimated or re­imagined experiences of the authors themselves, which makes it a remarkable act of critical sympathy and engagement.

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Fayçal Falaky, Social Contract, Masochist Contract: Aesthetics of Freedom and Submission in Rousseau. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. Pp. xii + 224. REVIEWED BY JASON A. NEIDLEMAN

After being forced to flee Geneva, Isaac Rousseau abandoned his ­children,

leaving them in the care of an ­uncle, who in turn sent them to live with the minister, Lambercier. Mlle. Lambercier was given the task of disciplining the young Jean-­ Jacques Rousseau, a responsibility she executed, in part, by administering spankings. Rousseau, to his surprise, found this punishment “much less terrible than the idea” and, as he would relate in the Confessions, eventually came to derive plea­ sure from ­these beatings, “for a degree of sensuality had mingled with the smart and shame.” Rousseau believed that ­these spanking episodes determined his tastes, desires, and passions, “for the rest of [his] life” (Oeuvres complètes [Paris: Pleiade, 1959], 1:15). Though Rousseau attributed his preference to a desire for flagellation, the nineteenth-­century psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-­Ebing described Rousseau as a masochist—­a term that Krafft-­Ebing himself coined, drawing on the writings of Leopold von Sacher-­Masoch. In Social Contract, Masochist Contract, Fayçal Falaky begins from Krafft-­ Ebing’s diagnosis of Rousseau and understanding of masochism as the willful sexual subjection of oneself, completely and unconditionally, to the humiliation and abuse of a person of the opposite sex for purposes of domination and subordination (2). However, whereas Krafft-­Ebing saw Rousseau’s masochism as a perversion, Falaky sees something more profound and more illuminating. Masochism, Falaky argues, cannot be fully understood in such narrow terms. It rather “emerges as a ubiquitous phenomenon whose literary imbrications prove to elude

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Krafft-­Ebing’s proj­ect to codify and regulate sexual behaviour” (2). What Krafft-­ Ebing saw as a perversion, Falaky regards as a useful frame for morality itself. Masochism is a psychoanalytic category that emerges only in the nineteenth ­century for the purpose of describing a very par­tic­u­lar dynamic. As Gilles Deleuze puts it, “we are dealing with a victim in search of a torturer who needs to collude with the torturer to realize the strangest of schemes” (Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty [London: Zone Books, 1991], 20). Nevertheless, Falaky makes a convincing case that this phenomenon can be understood more broadly. Indeed, Falaky deploys the logic of masochism to examine and illuminate much of Rousseau’s philosophical system, including his moral and po­liti­cal philosophy. Each chapter of Social Contract, Masochist Contract focuses on a par­tic­u­lar masochistic trope and the implications of that trope for Rousseau’s understanding of freedom, submission, and the relationship between the two. The book can also be usefully approached as a series of readings of some of Rousseau’s most significant texts: the Confessions, Emile, Julie, and The Social Contract. Two themes recur: Rousseau’s emphasis on controlling desire/appetite and his insistence that constraints on liberty be self-­imposed. Together, t­ hese compose what Falaky calls Rousseau’s “masochistic logic” (11). It should be noted before g­ oing any further that we are in good hands with Falaky; he is an excellent reader of Rousseau, with a command of the entirety of Rousseau’s corpus. Falaky begins the book with an account the figure of the masochist, whom he treats as a counterpart to the “sensationist phi­los­op ­ hers” of the eigh­teenth ­century and the “positivistic materialists” of the nineteenth (4). The masochist neither embraces plea­sure nor simply represses it. (Though the masochist is implicitly male in its early theorizations, Falaky’s appropriation is generalized.) Rather, the masochist derives plea­sure from delaying plea­sure for as long as pos­ si­ble; the masochist denies him-­or herself plea­sure at the very point of experiencing it. Masochism is not the redirecting or rechanneling of passion; it is deriving plea­sure from pain. Masochism, as Falaky puts it, is not “hijacked sexual desire” but rather the satisfaction of it through pain (24). As such, it provides a useful lens through which to think about the nexus between virtue, constraint, and plea­sure in Rousseau. Rousseau inaugurated a new framework for theorizing obedience and virtue. For Rousseau, it was not enough to obey the law—no m ­ atter how substantively valid—­whether that law derived from God, nature, or the state. Laws must be both substantively and procedurally valid, which is to say that laws—­whether po­liti­cal

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1650–1850 or moral—­must be self-­legislated. Constraint and liberty w ­ ere intertwined for Rousseau, such that liberty requires that each of us has a say over the manner and extent to which our liberty is constrained. That the law forbids an action was not enough for Rousseau; in order for the constraint of the law to be consistent with liberty, we need to have legislated for ourselves, and it is h ­ ere that Falaky sees masochism at work. The condition that we consent to our own submission implicates us in a masochistic logic. Although Rousseau insisted that “plea­sure is not to be commanded” (Emile [New York: Basic Books, 1979], 476), Falaky shows that Rousseau did in fact derive plea­sure from being commanded. Obedience to a law given to oneself allows for the nexus of liberty, constraint, and plea­sure that Rousseau craved. We must be, as Rousseau wrote in The Social Contract, si­mul­ta­neously sovereign and subject. Scholars have understood for some time that ­there is a complex interplay of domination and submission at the core of Rousseau’s theory of freedom. Falaky takes the next step and gives that impulse t­ oward submission a clinical diagnosis: masochism. The thinkers who influenced Rousseau’s thinking on freedom—­ Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu—­all thought about freedom within the context of constraint. For Hobbes, constraint emanated from a sovereign previously authorized by the ­people; for Locke, it came from the law of nature, pronounced by God and inscribed in reason; and, for Montesquieu, it was civic virtue that constrained liberty in republican socie­ties. But, as noted above, Rousseau took liberty one step further, insisting that constraint itself be internal to the logic of liberty. He defended freedom more unreservedly than ­those who preceded him: “To renounce one’s freedom is to renounce one’s quality as a man, the rights of humanity, and even its duties” (Rousseau, The Social Contract, in Oeuvres complètes, 3:356). He distanced himself explic­itly from Samuel von Pufendorf and implicitly from Locke, who counseled relinquishing portions of one’s natu­r al liberty so as to preserve and enlarge the rest. He wanted to find a way to reconcile freedom and constraint or, as more recent interpreters have argued, freedom and domination. It is in the embrace of constraint and limitation that Falaky is able to reveal a masochistic logic in Rousseau’s account of moral and po­liti­cal agency. In a variety of contexts, Falaky argues, Rousseau not only theorized constraint but fetishized it; rather than mitigate the law, he emphasized its severity. ­Here, Falaky leans heavi­ly on the role played by imagination, and this might very well be the greatest contribution of the book. In order for the masochistic logic to function, the imagination must work to turn constraints on desire into objects of desire themselves. This allows Falaky to move beyond freedom and

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submission to generate insights into what Rousseau regarded as our urgent—­but almost certainly doomed—­quest to recuperate natu­ral goodness. It has been long recognized that the imagination plays an impor­tant role for Rousseau, but Falaky does perhaps the best job to date of making clear what it was about that imagination that made it so problematic for Rousseau. In the Confessions, Rousseau credits his imagination with having calmed his nascent sensuality and, thereby, saved him from himself (56). This is a theme that recurs across the spectrum of Rousseau’s work, as agents interpose illusions between themselves and their desires and, in so ­doing, substitute a plea­sure derived from the illusion for the plea­sure deferred by it. Illusions of the kind that Falaky describes dot the landscape of Rousseau’s work. Julie tells St. Preux that, without the idea of perfection, love is nothing; the Vicar, Falaky explains, gives the as yet sexually oblivious Emile an illusion intended to “protect him from the dangers of ­women in flesh and blood” (36). In both cases, sexual desire is deferred in ­favor of virtue. In La nouvelle Héloise, Julie—­the object of St. Preux’s desire—­becomes a repository for his virtue, as his desire for her is transformed into a desire to be worthy of her. Likewise, Emile makes a fetish of the purity of his devotion to Sophie: “Dear wife, be the arbiter of my pleasures as you are of my life and my destiny. ­Were your cruelty to cost me my life, I would nonetheless give to you my dearest rights” (Emile, 477). ­These are useful illusions, as mea­sured from within the logic of Rousseau’s moral economy. Not surprisingly, Falaky is attracted to moments in which Rousseau turns to t­hese illusions to justify and sustain limitations on liberty. But Rousseau was equally interested in the way the imagination could be deployed to make ill use of liberty, such as when an inflamed amour propre fuels social division and moral corruption. The masochistic conceit necessitates an emphasis on ­those illusions that Rousseau embraced, but Falaky’s reading w ­ ill be of interest to scholars working more broadly on imagination, amour propre, patriotism, and all of the other supplements, as Jacques Derrida calls them, that Rousseau invoked to compensate for the alienation he associated with civilized Eu­rope. Not all of ­these responses w ­ ill be conducive to the logic of masochism, and many readers w ­ ill want to question w ­ hether a masochistic logic best explains the relationship between freedom and submission in Rousseau. Falaky makes the case that Rousseau was interested in the passions—­their danger, their management, their rechanneling, and so forth—­but it is reasonable to ask w ­ hether this interest was always framed through a masochistic lens. That one has a master does not necessarily make one a masochist. But this is quibbling. Falaky has given us both

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1650–1850 an illuminating reading of Rousseau and a framework for thinking through our own understanding of the relationship between freedom and submission. This does not mean, Falaky cautions, that we “enjoy to be spanked or that we revel in the pain we receive” (167). But, he adds, “as law-­abiding citizens, we all desire to subject our ­will to the tacit permission of a higher power. We . . . ​want a Law that confirms that our repressed desires are instinctive and that our subjugation to it is natu­ral” (167). Falaky’s study of Rousseau is as much about our masochism as it is about Rousseau’s. We are, in this sense, all of us Rousseau’s ­children, all of us seeking a justification for submission.

382

Daniel P. Watkins, Anna Letitia Barbauld and Eighteenth-­Century Visionary Poetics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Pp. ix + 245. 3 b/w illustrations. REVIEWED BY ELIZABETH A. HAIT

Daniel  P. Watkins, having acknowledged his debt to scholars of visionary poet-

ics, convincingly takes issue with the claim that from the time of John Milton ­until the time of William Blake, no En­glish writers ­were working in the visionary mode. Watkins shows that Blake was not the only visionary poet of his time. Examining the poets of the late eigh­teenth c­ entury, Watkins has found t­hose who “share a common Protestant Dissenting vision dedicated to f­ree thought and the conviction that the princi­ples of love, benevolence, and sympathy, if properly cultivated, and if informed by intellectual seriousness and historical understanding, are power­ful enough to change the world” (ix). Unlike Milton, whose visionary poetry attempted to “justify the ways of God to man” and had sources in the scriptures and an eye on eternity, the eighteenth-­century visionary poets often grounded their vision of a renewed world in time, in history, in the material world. Their “vocabulary of visionary poetics” (ix) involved attempting to alter habitual ways of envisioning the world (for example, changing attitudes t­ oward power and wealth) by using their poetry to jolt their readers out of their rigidly customary ways of thinking in order to rebuild the world based on re-­visioned values, such as love and sympathy. At first, Watkins had planned to write about the works of three ­women writers of the long eigh­teenth ­century—­Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Poems (1773, 1792), Ann Yearsley’s Rural Lyre, and Joanna Baillie’s Metrical Legends; however, he narrowed his focus to the 1792 volume of Barbauld’s Poems ­because he found them to be “a carefully constructed visionary statement and an especially good example of

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1650–1850 the visionary method used by poets in the eigh­teenth ­century” (xi). To support this claim, Watkins, at the end of his introduction, indicates that his purpose is “to examine Poems in a sustained and comprehensive fashion, tracking in detail Barbauld’s poetic strategies, literary sources and contexts, and thematic interests in an effort to define the character and map the trajectory of her poetic vision” (31). In so ­doing, he distinguishes Barbauld’s poetic vision—­which is based in the material world and in history, searching for a means of ameliorating the lives of the living—­from a more traditional, biblical, Miltonic poetic vision. To show that Barbauld is not the only person (or the only ­woman) writing in the visionary mode at the time, Watkins, in his introduction, discusses the visionary works of Elizabeth Hands and Anne Bannerman, Barbauld’s contemporaries. He indicates that, like Barbauld, though Hands and Bannerman both knew of Milton’s visionary work, “they situate themselves, poetically, outside [Milton’s] tradition and begin to construct a new sort of poetic sensibility, one that works from multiple sources and across several genres so as to produce a nuanced, textured, and multilayered vision that is both historically circumscribed and at the same time engaged in the task of transforming ­human consciousness, not for the purpose of creating a heavenly Jerusalem but for the purpose of reshaping the nature and direction of history” (9). And referring to recent scholarship that has brought to light the works of many ­women writers thus far ignored, Watkins asserts that ­these female visionary writers are not marginalized but should be considered and valued alongside their male counter­parts. In fact, he states that, with re­spect to visionary poetry, “Barbauld’s Poems is perhaps the most impor­ tant poetic document of the l­ater eigh­teenth ­century” (195). Watkins’s book is divided into seven chapters in which he analyzes and interprets groups of Barbauld’s poems as they appear chronologically in her book. In this way, Watkins traces the development of Barbauld’s visionary poetics, for her “visionary purpose cannot be found in a single poem but must be discovered . . . ​ across the span of the entire volume” (33). In this journey of self-­discovery and poetic discovery, the ordering and placement of her poems are significant as they mirror her attempts to find a means of using poetry to transform the world. Watkins recognizes “clusters” of poems and examines their “cross references” (32), as well as allusions to poems in the volume that are outside each cluster. Most of the poems are preceded by epigraphs, which make clear the extent of Barbauld’s reading in classical lit­er­a­ture—­Ovid, Horace, and o ­ thers—­and in con­temporary lit­er­a­ture, as well as in the Bible. One of the most fascinating features of this book is the way that Watkins researches each epigraph, first indicating how it relates

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directly to Barbauld’s poem, then taking the epigraph and placing it into its source and comparing or contrasting the meaning of the epigraph’s poem with that of Barbauld’s poem. H ­ ere, also, dialogues develop as the epigraph’s poem casts light or shadow on Barbauld’s poem. In addition, Watkins proposes to examine the vari­ ous poetic modes—­satire, lyric, pastoral, and so on—­that Barbauld employs, noting any subversion of the modes that might disrupt readers’ expectations and clear space for reseeing the mode and its subject. Chapter 1 places Barbauld’s two editions of Poems in their historical, po­liti­cal, social, and religious contexts, indicating how both the 1773 and the 1792 editions ­were influenced by Joseph Priestley and how the two volumes “seem to stand in talismanic relation to ­these very dif­fer­ent historical moments” (35), specifically before and ­after the American and French Revolutions. In chapter 2, “Politics, Vision, and Pastoral,” Watkins analyzes the first two poems: “Corsica” and “The Invitation.” At this stage, Barbauld is attempting “to develop a prophetic voice and method that might address the world and the mind in such a way that ­will change both” (50). Her first attempt, a prophetic poem about the revolution in Corsica, she considers a failure, just as the revolution itself had failed, and she realizes her opposition to vio­lence as a means of transforming the world. In her next poem, “The Invitation,” she turns to the pastoral, beginning not with revolution but with nature, the idyllic. The poem celebrates among other topics the pastoral atmosphere of an En­glish school (Warrington Acad­emy), and she imagines the gradu­ ates becoming ­great leaders in ­England. This train of thought leads her to imagine an idealistic young man becoming a soldier and entering into conflict, and vio­lence has crept into her pastoral. She ends this poem with an admission of another failure to find a visionary poetics. She vacillates between prophetic and pastoral modes, finding neither completely compatible with her evolving vision of a transformed world. Her poems throughout the book are in dialogue with each other, correcting each other, on her journey. In chapter 3, “Satire, Antipastoral, and Visionary Poetics,” Watkins examines the shorter poems that follow the first two longer poems of Barbauld’s collection. Still searching for her visionary voice and vehicle, Barbauld experiments with dif­ fer­ent types of poems and vari­ous subjects, honing her craft. Watkins notes that the shorter poems are “poetically more manageable, enabling her to maneuver her visionary interests and themes more nimbly and efficiently” (79). In ­these poems, she continues to move t­ oward the belief that conflict, vio­lence, and war are not the means of changing the world. Peaceful methods seem more conducive to transformation.

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1650–1850 In chapter 4, “Personal Life and Visionary Poetics,” Watkins analyzes the next group of poems, which “turn ostensibly to even smaller subjects, presumably in an effort to ground more securely the ­human focus of her visionary poetics” (94). Watkins describes them, using John Stuart Mill’s words, as “ ‘ the internal culture of the individual’ ” (94). In this section, the importance of friendship, love, contentment, wisdom, and social interaction is emphasized. Watkins sees ­these poems as “explor[ing] who Barbauld is as a poet and what her proper interests and subject ­matter should be” (95). The poems discussed in chapter 5, “Reflections on Writing,” show Barbauld composing poems about her writing pro­cess. In t­ hese poems, she “­faces directly the prob­lem of writing in an effort to determine the extent to which she is capable of creating a visionary poetry built on the princi­ples set out in the previous poems” (117). One of the developments of her visionary poetics in this group of poems is her altered perception of the pastoral, “not as a place of retreat but rather as a way of thinking that keeps alive the princi­ple of love” (134), and she rejects the idle love (Cupid’s love) that is often found in traditional pastoral poetry. In her vision of the world, love must be power­ful and selfless, a ­going out of oneself. Watkins calls the poems in this chapter “among the most difficult and complex in Poems, insofar as they strive to work through many of the thorny issues—­pastoral idealism, subjectivity, social engagement, the nature and function of the visionary imagination—­that occupy Barbauld’s imagination in the larger volume” (144). In chapter 6, “The Personal and Biblical Princi­ples of Poetic Vision,” Watkins analyzes six songs and eight hymns. Through ­these poems, Barbauld considers what effect her being a visionary poet w ­ ill have on her life personally, and she examines the role of the Bible in her mission to remake the world. In the songs, Watkins notes Barbauld’s pacifist response to conflict. In the hymns, she clarifies her perception of the Bible and of God—­not human-­like or intervening in the affairs of ­people but “entirely beyond the reach of ­human comprehension” (161). She sees Christ as fully ­human, “the perfect model of ­human character, one who lives the princi­ple of love even in the face of suffering and death” (164). Watkins affirms that for Barbauld, “unconditional and unwavering love” is “transformative” and is “one key source of [her] visionary poetics” (164). In chapter 7, “God, Vision, and the Po­liti­cal Moment,” Watkins analyzes Barbauld’s final three poems—­“An Address to the Deity,” “A Summer Eve­ning’s Meditation,” and Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade—in which she states and illustrates her conclusion about visionary transformation of the world, to which all of the previous poems have

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led. Rather than resorting to vio­lence or retreating from the prob­lems of the world, she proposes love, peace, virtue, sympathy, and patience. Watkins explains that the first two poems “push the idea of God as far as Barbauld’s imagination is capable, using the intellectual and imaginative freedom discovered in this effort to guide her ­toward the po­liti­cal and visionary conclusions set out in Epistle to William Wilberforce” (173), which was added to Poems in the 1792 edition. This last poem is a power­ful expression of Barbauld’s mature visionary poetics. The “poetic epistle” combines the personal with the visionary, letting her visionary voice “speak not only to the person but to the world with the aim of transforming collective consciousness” (186). Though Barbauld praises William Wilberforce for his attempt to convince Parliament to abolish slavery in the empire, she indicates that the greed, cruelty, and evils associated with imperial expansion cannot be erased by the abolition of slavery. ­These evils have infected e­ very facet of En­glish life, and the best way to transform the nation is to allow the empire—­rife with ­these evils—to collapse on its own. Only then can p ­ eople of vision—­bolstered by the unconditional love, faith, sympathy, and peace—­awaken and begin to remake the world. Watkins, in his conclusion, reiterates that En­glish visionary poetry did not cease to exist between the times of Milton and Blake and that though Barbauld writes visionary poetry, her poems differ from ­those of Milton and Blake. ­After mentioning Barbauld’s wide reading and the large number of writers—­con­ temporary and past—­that influenced her vision, Watkins summarizes the main ideas from the preceding seven chapters that led to her “pacifist vision” (196), noting Barbauld’s emphasis on love, liberty, and friendship, as well as faith and ser­vice as being necessary to a peaceful life that can transform the nation and the world without vio­lence or war. Referring back to the introduction, Watkins acknowledges that Barbauld was not the only En­glish w ­ oman writing visionary works in the long eigh­teenth ­century, and he briefly discusses the works of Ann Yearsley and Joanna Baillie, whose visionary conclusions closely resemble Barbauld’s. Lastly, Watkins acknowledges his debt to the scholars of the past several de­cades who have delved into the books and manuscripts of w ­ omen writers of the long eigh­teenth c­ entury and found a vibrant visionary tradition among them. Daniel Watkins’s explanations and analyses of Barbauld’s poems are clear, cogent, persuasive, informative, and engaging. His book is a valuable companion for a study of Barbauld’s Poems and a valuable resource for anyone interested in visionary poetry of the long eigh­teenth c­ entury. The book contains extensive endnotes and an extensive bibliography, as well as a helpful index. A second edition

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1650–1850 would benefit from careful proofreading to correct several errors and misspellings, two of which are words in quotations from other works. Watkins’s detailed examination and interpretation of Barbauld’s poems and their sources make his book a joy to read. Watkins pres­ents Barbauld as a deep thinker, a critical thinker, and a true w ­ oman of letters. Through this book, readers ­will learn not only about visionary poetics in the long eigh­teenth ­century but also about the po­liti­cal and cultural climate that produced Anna Letitia Barbauld as well as Blake. Watkins concludes by informing the reader that t­ here is more work to be done with re­spect to w ­ omen writers of the long eigh­teenth ­century and visionary poetics.

388

Michael Griffin, Enlightenment in Ruins: The Geographies of Oliver Goldsmith. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013. Pp. xv + 226. REVIEWED BY R.J.W. MILLS

This work is a welcome addition to the scholarship on Oliver Goldsmith and

contains much that ­will interest literary and intellectual historians of eighteenth-­ century Ireland and Britain. Much of the previous commentary has treated Goldsmith dismissively, as a naïve pastoral sentimentalist. In contrast, Michael Griffin chooses to take him seriously as a subtle thinker whose keen sociopo­liti­cal commentary requires closer attention. Across four thematic chapters, Griffin examines many of Goldsmith’s verse and prose compositions against the backdrop of two themes: his professional status as a Grub Street author and, more interestingly and significantly, Goldsmith’s position as an Irish exile in London whose Tory Jacobitism informed his productions. Griffin maintains that Goldsmith was always balancing his need as a professional author to write marketable works that fulfilled his readers’ expectations with what Griffin calls a practice of “subtle incision” (73), in which Goldsmith perennially undercut his hack arguments or generic stylings with unique caveats and insights. Goldsmith’s real ideas are to be found in ­these moments of incision. The second interpretative princi­ple is Griffin’s reading of Goldsmith as an Irish exile in London, a detached figure writing works for a confident British reading public with whom he did not share the same optimism about commerce and empire. Griffin persuasively argues against interpreting Goldsmith as an En­glish author writing about En­glish issues. The first chapter surveys Goldsmith’s engagement with Enlightenment debates over physical c­ auses, racial difference, and po­liti­cal sociology in works such as the essay “A Comparative View of Races and Nations” (1760) and An History

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1650–1850 of the Earth and Animated Nature (1774). Griffin dutifully contextualizes Goldsmith’s rather pedestrian and derivative analyses. The “Comparative View” presented En­glish governance of Ireland as “benignly paternalistic” and the Irish as “characteristically yielding” (32), but Goldsmith’s per­for­mance ­here has to be understood as an “anonymous and paid piece of journalism” (32) written hurriedly during Britain’s annus mirabilis 1759. Goldsmith was heavi­ly reliant on undigested readings of Enlightenment theorists, including the 1753 En­glish translation of Francois-­Ignace Espiard de la Borde’s understudied Essai sur la genie et le caratére des nations (1743). Animated Nature is shown to be heavi­ly reliant on the early volumes of Georges-­Louis Leclerc de Buffon’s Histoire naturelle (1749– 1788), for reasons as much to do with the Frenchman’s style as his content. Goldsmith follows Buffon on most topics and pres­ents a typology of racial differences depicting white Eu­ro­pe­ans as superior and all other races as degenerate due to climatic influences. The analy­sis picks up tremendously in the second chapter. This examines Goldsmith’s prospect poem The Traveller (1764) and his sentimental novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). ­These are engagingly evaluated as offering problematizing takes on the legacy of the Glorious Revolution and British imperial expansion at the time of the Seven Years’ War. Griffin is keen to ward off charges against Goldsmith of “soft sentimentalism” and “naïve” pastoralism (54), by showing the sharp po­liti­cal commentary on detrimental effects of growing trade and imperial expansion. The Traveller is not ­really about the Eu­ro­p ean nations explored but ultimately the c­ auses of Irish national unhappiness. In the pro­cess, Griffin discusses Goldsmith’s fascinating take on the necessity of penury and foreign employment to enable the proper study of other nations; rich travelers never immerse themselves in other cultures abroad b ­ ecause their financial situation does not require it. The Vicar of Wakefield is read as criticizing the “putridity of the emerging social system” (73) of eighteenth-­century Britain and as much more than a mere cele­bration of rural life. Goldsmith’s Jacobitism resulted from his belief that monarchy protected the poor from the socially divisive forces of the commercial nouveau riche. The novel is thus a Jacobite parable: a story of the “exile, redemption, and restoration of a flawed, mildly foolish but endearing paternal authority” (82). Chapter 3 focuses first on Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village (1770), an aisling in which Goldsmith personifies the Irish landscape as a betrayed w ­ oman. Continuing the themes of the previous chapter, Goldsmith’s social commentary h ­ ere is not “weakly nostalgic” but “subtly and intriguingly allegorical” (89). Griffin moves

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to discuss Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World (1760–1761). Sometimes read straightforwardly as a contribution to the Enlightenment’s debate over Chinese civilization, Griffin reads Goldsmith’s Orientalism as a cover allowing him to make critical comments about ­England and the En­glish that Goldsmith as an Irishman could not. Moreover, Goldsmith incisively mocks the cultural myopia of con­ temporary chinoiserie, positioning it as an En­glish cultural creation with ­little to do with China itself. The fourth chapter returns to Auburn, the title location of The Deserted Village. Goldsmith’s critique, ­here using the biological motif of money as the blood of a nation, maintained that Ireland’s circulation was being hampered by absentee landlords moving domestic wealth abroad. Griffin maintains that Auburn should be understood as a fictive location used to explore the pro­cess of depopulation and societal breakdown that Goldsmith maintained was happening in Ireland. Goldsmith, however, also held that ­these ruptures in traditional rural society would happen in En­glish villages too if trade was left unchecked. In fleshing out this interpretation historically, Griffin examines Goldsmith’s involvement in debates over absentee landlord taxes, both in midcentury Dublin and in ­England in 1773, including Goldsmith’s relations with Edmund Burke and the pro-­tax minister of Parliament George Savile. Goldsmith’s interactions with James Edward Oglethorpe, who or­g a­nized Irish settlements in Georgia, are also discussed profitably. This richly detailed contextual analy­sis brings out the sharp and distinctly Irish Jacobite stance of Goldsmith’s final productions. Writing a­ fter the 2008 financial crash, Griffin concludes by suggesting that Goldsmith has something to teach us about social divisiveness and perversion of politics caused by the commercial rich. Goldsmith certainly emerges out of this work as someone with a complicated relationship with commercial, imperial modernity. This review’s few criticisms result primarily from the book’s opening chapter. This is plodding in its delineation of Goldsmith’s views: Griffin cannot quite make Goldsmith sparkle ­here with the same insight as he does in subsequent chapters. Sympathetically treated or other­wise, Goldsmith h ­ ere remains derivative of French works and without much to say about Anglo-­Irish relations. Literary historians might also have wished for more discussion of Goldsmith’s works in the final chapter, alongside the excellent historical contextualization. That said, Enlightenment in Ruins is readable and provoking, and has impor­tant and persuasive ­things to say about how we interpret Goldsmith.

391

Michael Austin, New Testaments: Cognition, Closure, and the Figural Logic of the Sequel, 1660–1740. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012. Pp. xvi + 163. REVIEWED BY KEVIN L. COPE

The downside of our keyword-­driven, easily indexable, search-­engine-­obsessed

age is an overwhelming derivativeness. Sprinkle a few well-­chosen terms in a dialog box, hit Enter, and, presto, the ­great informational cloud ­will rain down pre­ce­dents, antecedents, precursors, and occasionally explanations for anything and every­ thing. In so epigonous an age, it should come as no surprise that no one prior to Michael Austin had been so original as to convert the art of following into a new field of inquiry. In New Testaments—­with its plural title pluckily borrowed but also slightly altered from an original by no less than God—­Michael Austin probes the origin and the management of sequels: of works that connect to and extend from earlier compositions. Focusing on the four best-­selling compositions of the newly identified copycat seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries, Austin advances combined readings and publishing histories of John Milton’s Paradise Regained, John Bunyan’s two-­part Pilgrim’s Pro­gress series, Daniel Defoe’s multiplexed Robinson Crusoe set, and Samuel Richardson’s and other authors’ continuations of Pamela, using this manageable array of familiar works as test cases for his theories about the emergence of the sequel as a respectable, lucrative genre. Austin introduces his slender (123 text pages) study by displaying a well-­stocked arsenal of theoretical matériel. First in the parade of intellectual weaponry is cognitive psy­chol­ogy, which, he asserts, tells us that h ­ uman beings continually strug­gle to balance a desire for definitive, final judgments against a playful, creative re­sis­tance to closure. Drawing on a miscellaneous set of studies by psychologists working for every­one from old-­line Eu­ro­pean universities to the Israeli intelligence

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forces, Austin suggests that h ­ uman “NFC” (need for closure) encourages the concluding of literary works while re­sis­tance to finality promotes post hoc revision—­ sequels. Austin next deploys the heavy armament of evolutionary biology, anchoring eighteenth-­century practice deep in the Olduvai Gorge by suggesting an adaptive value in the aforementioned cognitive habits. As Austin’s theoretical parade continues to roll, generic “metaphysical” speculation draws attention as a method for reconciling contradictions (thus explaining how a dependent sequel can also count as an original work). This all-­purpose “metaphysics” originates not from the usual rationalist phi­los­o­phers but rather from remotely situated tribes, such as the Ifaluk of Micronesia, or from folks situated deep in the archives of social science, such as good old Claude Lévi-­Strauss. Inclusivity is not a prob­lem for Austin, for we also encounter Chinese Daoists, Indian Hindus, the Christian Saint Athanasius, the German phi­los­o­pher Hegel, and the tele­vi­sion pop physicist Brian Greene. Indeed, we even meet up with Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolfman while hearing a few words from Boris Karloff. This free-­ranging speculation is commendably ambitious, yet it operates at so high a level of generality and abstraction that it can do l­ittle more than raise sequel-­inductive questions. As often happens in sweepingly theorized books, much of this soft theoretical fog dissipates once the author gets down to the business of close reading and textual analy­sis. When Austin comes to the more tangible work of considering his four target works (plus a brief divagation on John Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel), he happily falls back into a more practicable approach. Understanding John Milton’s Paradise Regained, Austin explains, requires understanding that biblical typology undergirds most sequels. The typological mind, the characteristics of which Austin has extracted from the earlier studies of Paul Korshin and Everett Zimmerman and even Northrop Frye, supposes that past and pres­ent events stand in both a replicating and signifying relation to one another. This two-­way as well as double relationship fits nicely with the mix of copying and innovating that defines the sequel genre. Typologists of the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries discovered the greatest of all synergies between the Old and the New Testament. This Old-­New Testament exchange provided both subject m ­ atter and rhetorical technique to an astounding range of lit­er­a­ture, a range that, for Austin, begins with Milton’s redemptive epic and surprisingly culminates in Richardson’s chattering epistolary novel Pamela. Austin starts the ball rolling with an ingenious if somewhat labored reading of Paradise Regained in which this famous follow-on work centers on two contrasting messianic types: King David, whose work must be repeated in the Restoration; and Adam, whose work must be completed in some l­ater age. Formally, the cycle of

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1650–1850 repeating and completing (­later, in a dif­fer­ent or unexpected or soteriological way) provides the fundamental narrative story line for all sequel authors. Leaving the surly old versifying but rhyme-­resenting Puritan b ­ ehind, Austin enters the three-­part, sequel-­like core of his book, where complementary studies of Bunyan, Defoe, and Richardson play out variations on and extensions of a common theme. Austin postulates that the g­ reat background text-­sequel of the Old and the New Testaments provides a framework by which seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century text-­sequels can form, if not a single picture, at least a narratively conjoined diptych. In the case of two-­part Pilgrim’s Pro­gress, the first part, recounting male “Christian’s” journey, focuses on the experience of the fallen world, while the second part, chronicling female “Christiana’s” travels, highlights recovery, repentance, mercy, and forgiveness. In the sprawling double novel of that l­ater, secularized Puritan Richardson, the first segment of Pamela’s adventures focuses on readily identifiable counter­parts to Old Testament story ele­ ments (for example, the period of captivity)—on an assortment of miseries and persecutions—­ while the somewhat tedious second segment extols Pamela’s works of mercy and her religion-­informed community spirit. In the vari­ous parts and manifestations of Defoe’s long-­running Robinson Crusoe saga, likewise, the shaggy adventurer progresses through a series of increasingly cheerful genres, from agonizing spiritual biography to somewhat livelier travel yarn and on to confident aphorism writing, with Robinson’s concluding nostrums meta­phor­ically fulfilling, updating, extending, and improving the old covenant. In all of t­ hese readings, Austin displays considerable subtlety and underlines informative details. In the case of the second part of Pilgrim’s Pro­gress, for example, he conducts a careful survey of events, thereby discovering that Christiana, a beneficiary of the patience and grace offered by the new covenant, sees eight more emblems and learns thirteen more proverbs while visiting the “House of Interpreter” than does Christian during his rougher initial pilgrimage. Austin’s reading of the Robinson Crusoe series includes a fascinating analy­sis of Robinson’s notion that, in complex, heavi­ly populated modern socie­ties, truth and falsity—­veracity and lying—­run together, overlap, and necessitate each other, if only b ­ ecause lit­er­ a­ture itself enforces irreconcilable distinctions between moral and literal truth. Sometimes the subtlety of Austin’s readings leads him into boggling stylistic complexities. In one walloping sentence, Austin tells us that goofy Pamela Andrews in Fielding’s farcical, satiric continuation of Pamela is “a culturally authoritative narrative type whose ideological meaning had to be fixed through strategic re-­ narration of the essential story.” True, Richardson is famous for riding a hobby­

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horse for exercise, but maybe getting off the theoretical high ­horse when dealing with a funny work might be just a ­little bit helpful. Austin’s New Testaments is one of t­ hose books benefiting from the redemptive power of truth. Although short in length, the book is long on information and on careful readings as well as experientially long owing to an extremely methodical style. No one ­will doubt that Austin has done his homework, for nearly ­every paragraph abounds with acknowl­edgments of and citations from a bevy of critics, historians, and theorists, a blessing that comes at cost to tempo and reading plea­ sure. This extreme thoroughness, fortunately, demonstrates Austin’s commitment to ensuring the validity of his interpretations and his readiness to defend a very traditional approach: to devote himself to the courageously unpop­u­lar study of what was once called, in university curricula across the English-­speaking world, “the Bible as lit­er­a­ture.” However provisional and inserted Austin’s numerous riffs on con­temporary science, ­whether neurology or cognitive theory or anthropology or physics, might seem, they serve to break down the mind-­forged manacles of modern, silo-­bound disciplines and to suggest to ­future scholars the possibility of linking lit­er­a­ture to the full range of con­temporary research. Although a bit stratospheric, if not stratified—­Austin takes the standard “three big authors plus a l­ittle bit of Dryden and Milton” approach, bypassing the many layers of lesser lit­er­a­ture lurking in the lower registers of library catalogues—­New Testaments proves that the canonical authors can still support new research. Although somewhat Protestant or even Puritan—­Bunyan, Defoe, and Richardson are not exactly the most high-­church members of ­either the literary canon or the sequel-­writing tribe—­ Austin’s book shows us that lit­er­a­ture responds to every­thing, ­whether the Catholic influence enunciated in Austin’s brief, inset reading of Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel or ­whether the secret ­doings of the Mossad. Austin ­frees us from the same dull round of Foucault, Derrida, and Freud; he takes us, if not quite into the New Jerusalem of unbounded interdisciplinarity, at least up to the banks of the Jordan, within view of new possibilities.

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Audrey T. Carpenter, John Theo­philus Desaguliers: A Natu­ral Phi­los­o­pher, Engineer and Freemason in Newtonian ­England. London: Continuum, 2011. Pp. xvi + 339. 19 b/w illustrations + 1 map. REVIEWED BY BÄRBEL CZENNIA

Few eighteenth-­century lives may have been affected by developments that we

associate with the beginning of the modern era in the Western world as dramatically as the life of John Theo­philus Desaguliers: globalization; the emergence of the sciences and the resulting technological pro­gress; the separation of church and state; economic stability and upward social mobility for growing sections of the population, accelerated by broader access to education; and, last but not least, a degree of personal freedom that increasingly enabled individuals to make the most of their talents, what­ever their national, ethnic, social, or cultural origins. As Audrey T. Carpenter puts it, Desaguliers “lived at the very time when men began not only to think systematically about life in the pres­ent but to realize that it could be managed and changed for the f­ uture. Desaguliers seized his chance, and, through hard work and natu­r al ability . . . ​overcame many hurdles and was able to contribute to the dissemination of knowledge and to gain a position of re­spect and trust in society” (247). Born in France as a member of a persecuted religious minority, smuggled to E ­ ngland as a baby by Huguenot parents who barely escaped death ­after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, exposed to financial hardship as the child of penniless refugees who spend the second half of their lives trying to rebuild their previous economic existence, Desaguliers acquired a new linguistic, religious, and cultural identity and then died nearly sixty years l­ater, as a fully integrated member of the urban upper m ­ iddle class of his elective homeland.

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What Carpenter unfolds, in ten vivid and well-­researched chapters as well as in several useful appendixes, is an eighteenth-­century British anticipation of the “American dream”: the life story of an underprivileged immigrant who, through hard work and a healthy portion of good luck, managed to reinvent himself and to rise, if not exactly from rags to riches, certainly to a comfortable degree of prosperity and even fame. Not only was Desaguliers a typical eighteenth-­century “polymath whose range of interests included poetry, astronomy, steam and ­water power, theories of ­matter, optics, electricity, and even fortifications and fireworks” (247); what makes his life story even more fascinating to read both for eighteenth-­ century specialists in vari­ous academic disciplines (for instance, for cultural historians, theologians, phi­los­o­phers, science historians, and literary historians) and for college students in need of an introduction to the unique spirit of that age is the remarkable array of ­people from all walks of life and from all social classes that Desaguliers encountered, a range of experiences and acquaintances that provides, as Carpenter points out, “glimpses of many aspects of early eighteenth-­century life” (247). Among the most prominent features of that period ­were the multifariousness and the interconnectedness of dif­fer­ent kinds of knowledge (before the dawn of nineteenth-­century specialization) as well as the astounding number of national and international networks maintained by an educated elite that comprised trained academics, in­de­pen­dent projectors, influential aristocratic patrons, and newly prosperous industrial entrepreneurs. Meticulously tracing e­ very step of Desaguliers’s impressive c­ areer, Carpenter pres­ents him as an astute interloper between dif­fer­ent nations (France and ­England; ­later also other Continental Eu­ro­pean countries); languages (French, En­glish, Latin, and Greek); religious denominations (French Huguenot, British Anglican); social classes (impoverished immigrant communities, middle-­class entrepreneurs, aristocrats); academic disciplines (theology, philosophy, the emerging sciences in all their theoretical, experimental, and practical facets); and worldviews (Protestant Chris­tian­ity, Newtonianism, Freemasonry). In addition to intelligence and hard work, Carpenter argues, personal charisma early on endeared Desaguliers to a number of influential British patrons comprising the industrialist and mine owner John Wilkins, the scientific celebrity Isaac Newton, the Oxford mathematician John Keill, the aristocrat James Brydges, the First Duke of Chandos, and even King George II and his wife, Caroline. The material and immaterial support of ­these patrons enabled the talented young immigrant to obtain an Oxford education and to build impor­tant private and professional connection, which in turn gained him

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1650–1850 access to prestigious institutions such as the Royal Society and the ­Grand Lodge of En­glish Freemasonry. In order to condense the diverse interests and activities of Desaguliers into a coherent life story, Carpenter opts for a mixed, partly chronological, partly theme-­ oriented narrative structure, moving from the time before Desguliers’s birth in chapter 1, “Early Life: From Forebears in La Rochelle to Education in Oxford,” to his ­later years as a member of Britain’s intellectual establishment in chapter 10, “The House in Channel Row: F­ amily, Health and Descendants.” Chapters 2 (“Lecturing in London and Beyond, Royal Recognition and Ecclesiastical Preferment”) and 3 (“Demonstrator and Fellow of the Royal Society”) closely follow the chronological approach by describing the early years of Desaguliers’s rise to fame as an in­de­ pen­dent lecturer and talented pop­u­lar­izer of Newtonianism. In chapters 4 to 8, Carpenter examines activities that contributed e­ither to Desaguliers’s social advancement (for instance, his leadership role in En­glish Freemasonry in chapter 4 and his role as beneficiary of the patronage of the Duke of Chandos in chapter 7) or to his professional standing (for instance, his work as scientific author and translator in chapter 5 and his achievements as engineer in chapter 6). Chapter 9 (“Poems, Plays, and Pictures: A More Personal Perspective”), while also emphasizing Desaguliers’s accomplishments as an unusual multitalent, may be the least successful of the ten chapters in that it becomes too much of a mixed bag. Although the title of chapter raises hopes for a detailed examination of Desaguliers’s output as an occasional literary author (including several published and unpublished poems as well as some prologues and epilogues to ­children’s plays), only ten out of seventeen total pages focus on his ­actual literary productions, and none of his poems is analyzed, interpreted, or contextualized in full. Instead, Carpenter limits herself to a rather abbreviated discussion of Desaguliers’s longest published poem, “The Newtonian System of the World, The Best Model of Government” (1727), a thirty-­four-­page allegorical oeuvre with a strong panegyric, pro-­Hanoverian spin. Focusing mainly on its preface, Carpenter calls the poem “derivative” and only refers in passing to a number of literary “influences,” including mostly unspecified references to Milton’s Paradise Lost, to poetry by John Dryden, to Jonathan Swift’s Tale of a Tub, and to “Latin lines of Edmund Haller . . . ​ written to accompany the first edition of the Principia” (206). Considering that this biography was originally submitted as a PhD dissertation in an En­glish department, the reader would have wished for a ­little more than just a c­ ouple of short references to satirical imitations of Desaguliers’s longest poem (206–207) and vague statements such as “the ideas ­were novel and the verse flows” (205), without

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any further elaboration. Readers with an interest in literary history cannot help but consider the superficial treatment of another poem, titled “Amanda, or good Nature the only true Greatness of Soul,” an even greater wasted opportunity. As Carpenter explains in her very helpful “Appendix 2: Desaguliers’s Unpublished Poetry” (255–260), this poem was written “on the occasion of the rescue of a fish from one of Desaguliers’s [scientific] demonstrations in Bath in about 1730,” which involved the demonstration of an air pump (259). This poem is a remarkable find that would deserve to be examined in the context of a long En­glish tradition of literary texts and visual art that explored the murky ethics involved in scientific pro­gress, often including the questionable treatment endured by living creatures (both ­human and animal) from the hands of natu­ral phi­los­o­phers. Pointing backward to Thomas Shadwell’s play The Virtuoso (1676) and forward to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Desaguliers’s poem antedates Anna Letitia Barbauld’s defense of an animal against scientific commodification in “The Mouse’s Petition” (1773) (as well as Joseph Wright of Derby’s 1768 painting An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump) by several de­cades. In contrast to Shadwell’s play and Barbauld’s poem, however, Desaguliers’s poem was written by an author who was a scientist himself, therefore raising some in­ter­est­ing questions about his self-­ perception, his personal and professional identity, and the importance of (self-) irony in the poem. His double role as narrator/observer and as character/researcher also suggests that ­there might be a l­ittle more to discover than just evidence for the occasional “lighter side to his life,” “congeniality,” and a “sense of humor” (203) of “someone who might have appreciated having a practical joke played on him” (211). The remaining pages of chapter 9 offer a mélange of anecdotes related to Desaguliers’s amateur contributions to private theatrical per­for­mances of ­children’s plays that involved members of his own f­ amily, a discussion of vari­ous portraits and engravings of him produced during his lifetime, and a number of personal reminiscences extracted from private diaries of contemporaries, all juxtaposed with the intention to provide a more detailed picture of Desaguliers as a private person. At this point, however, one of Carpenter’s unquestionable virtues, her extraordinary thoroughness and attention to detail, nearly becomes counterproductive as it contributes to a loss of focus. Desaguliers’s prologue and epilogue for Nathaniel Lee’s c­ hildren’s play Sophonisba, for example, are not subjected to any kind of literary analy­sis but merely employed to transition into a detailed account of all the aristocratic child actors and parents involved in the production (212–213). Likewise, Desaguliers’s 1732 nonliterary involvement in a c­ hildren’s per­for­mance of Dryden’s The Indian Emperor opens the door to a page-­long

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1650–1850 digression on all the visual details in “a conversation piece by William Hogarth” that captured the event but that other­wise adds ­little to our understanding of Desaguliers himself (213–214). Once Hogarth has become the focus of Carpenter’s attention, her next associative step is a lengthy discussion of the question of ­whether vari­ous clerical figures in other Hogarth paintings may have been modeled on Desaguliers, which in turn leads on to a description of Desaguliers portraits by vari­ous con­temporary artists (214–219). Another example of Carpenter’s associative style as well as an occasional tendency to overdocumentation is her account of Desaguliers’s attendance of a social gathering at John, Duke of Montagu’s ­house in 1735 (220). Not only does it add ­little to the characterization of Desaguliers himself; it also gradually unravels into a minute listing of all the other known guests as well as their social standing and mutual connections, increasingly reading like a who’s who of eighteenth-­century British aristocracy in a con­temporary society magazine. The same criticism might be applied to an account of Desaguliers’s (minor) involvement in a ­house raffle, apparently included by Carpenter to demonstrate his growing social prestige as a trustworthy public authority figure—an anecdote that, once again, is overdocumented and includes many factual details simply ­because they w ­ ere available and not necessarily ­because they contribute to our perception of Desaguliers as a rounded and “congenial” personality (222–223). Carpenter claims that the “poems, plays and paintings” discussed in chapter 9 “help to give an occasional insight into Desaguliers’s world and character” and show that Desaguliers “was a well-­known and congenial man who could mix business with plea­sure” (219), but she si­mul­ta­neously undersells and oversells some of her textual evidence b ­ ecause she does not always allow ­those texts to do the talking. Her reiterated conclusion at the end of the same chapter, stating that the personal recollections “all help to build an impression of a congenial and trustworthy man with a wide range of acquaintances who was as much at ease amongst the aristocracy, and even royalty, as he was with more modest com­pany” (223) sounds a l­ittle vague and nearly as if she did not trust her own evidence. While ­there can be no doubt about the author’s best intentions, a separate chapter discussing Desaguliers’s literary output in its broader literary and cultural contexts and a separate chapter with a clearer focus on Desaguliers the private man, examining his social roles as husband, ­f ather, and personal friend and providing a more systematic analy­sis of her many in­ter­est­ing text samples, possibly contrasting Desaguliers’s self-­perception at vari­ous stages of his life with (verbal and visual) outside perspectives, might have been a better solution.

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The difficulty in establishing clear thematic hierarchies and narrowing down available information in the interest of clarity is not limited to chapter 9. Similar tendencies result in informational overcrowding of the other­wise very in­ter­est­ing chapter 7 (on Desaguliers’s relationship with his patron the Duke of Chandos), temporarily blurring the line between a biographical account of the life of Desaguliers and the life of the Duke of Chandos (esp. 155–163). The tenth and last chapter likewise offers a bit of a hodgepodge of information, mixing details of ­later Desaguliers ­family life in Channel Row with digressions on the lives of vari­ous private lodgers in his ­house and minute accounts of the—­ independent—­lives of vari­ous Desaguliers ­children and even grandchildren. While the under­lying motivation is clearly Carpenter’s enthusiasm for all ­matters related to John Theo­philus Desaguliers, the author’s zeal for completeness and comprehensiveness occasionally overshadows, rather than illuminates, the central hero of this biography. Not only does the abundance of information sometimes obscure interpretation and evaluation, but it also results in the creation of redundancies in vari­ous chapters, as indicated by the repeated use of phrases such as “as I said before” and “as stated earlier.” Carpenter is at her best when she describes Desaguliers’s success as a gifted lecturer whose natu­ral talent as an educator not only propelled his rise through the ranks of En­glish society but also transformed him into a scientific authority of international renown and into Britain’s most impor­tant pop­u­lar­izer and facilitator of the new sciences in the wake of Newton (chapter 2 and 3). Other strong chapters are ­those that have a more clearly defined topic such as Desaguliers’s scientific translations (chapter 5) and his influential publications on con­temporary science, A Course of Experimental Philosophy and A Dissertation Concerning Electricity (chapter 8). Another highlight is chapter 6 (“Fire, ­Water and Air”), which describes Desaguliers’s activities as an engineer. Quick to recognize the practical and commercial potential of recent scientific discoveries, Desaguliers was one of the first p ­ eople to explore the uses of steam engines for the drainage of mining shafts. He also saw the potential benefits of evolving new disciplines such as “hydrostaticks” (the movement of fluids, nowadays called “hydraulics”) for improved navigation on the Thames, for the overland transportation of drinking ­water to quickly growing modern cities such as London and Edinburgh, and even for improved irrigation and more spectacular w ­ ater features in landscape gardens designed by Stephen Switzer or owned by his patron, Lord Chandos. The breadth of Desaguliers’s knowledge and versatility of his intellect is furthermore evidenced by his improvements of con­temporary fireplaces and chimneys as well

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1650–1850 as his innovative heating and ventilation systems for private and public buildings and for industrial-­scale drying facilities in the brewing and distilling businesses, to mention only a few. Audrey Carpenter’s fine book on Desaguliers and his age deserves additional praise for its high quality as a physical product that is of solid make, pleasant to hold in one’s hands, and pleasing to the eye. Neither a visually appealing layout, nor good paper quality, nor the high quality of (twenty) black-­and-­white illustrations, nor the complete absence of mechanical and factual errors can be taken for granted anymore at a time of economic depressions and declining standards for academic publishing. Added value also comes from three appendixes (offering a list of all experiments performed during Desaguliers’s lectures, copies of his unpublished poems, and genealogical information), detailed endnotes, an exhaustive bibliography, and an alphabetical index of personal names and related concepts and objects, all of which turn Carpenter’s biography into a valuable resource for all scholars who appreciate a truly interdisciplinary approach to eighteenth-­century studies.

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Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Enlightenment’s Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. Pp. viii + 344. 7 b/w illustrations + 2 maps. REVIEWED BY DAVID A. REID

During the Enlightenment, the Scottish Highlands became the subject of intense

debate over the relationship between society, empire, and the natu­ral environment. In Enlightenment’s Frontier, Fredrick Albritton Jonsson explores ­these debates and their role in broader Enlightenment discussions about population growth, the limits of natu­ral resources, environmental conservation, and po­liti­cal economy. But more than this, Jonsson demonstrates how ­these debates had very real and sometimes tragic consequences for the ­people of the Highlands, especially as the result of paternalistic policies of land reform and population control. He argues that Enlightenment ideology played a much more impor­tant role in determining public policy than has generally been acknowledged and that debates over ideology led to a growing number of alternative ideas about land use and environmental stability. In effect, Scotland became a laboratory to test Enlightenment ideas about environmental improvement and its limits. This is scholarship on an impressive interdisciplinary scale, bridging intellectual, po­liti­cal, environmental, and social history with the history of science and technology. Underscoring Jonsson’s argument regarding the importance of Enlightenment ideology is an innovative narrative about the development of po­liti­cal economy and natu­r al history, one that sees this development as originating in efforts to enclose and cultivate land in the Scottish Highlands between 1750 and the 1820s. Two initial events helped make questions about land reform particularly pressing: the annexation of the landed estates formerly owned by Scottish leaders of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 and the outbreak of the Seven

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1650–1850 Years’ War. The Seven Years’ War in par­tic­u­lar led Scottish landowners and intellectuals to debate how the annexed estates could be modernized to support the war effort. Primary among their concerns w ­ ere ways to encourage the “traditional” militarism of Highland ­peoples through subsistence-­level farming. ­Under the auspices of the Select Society of Edinburgh and the Board for the Annexed Estates, participants in the debates sought to define technical questions that could be quantitatively answered: What was the minimal subsistence level required to sustain the Highland population? What was the maximum population that Highland agriculture could support? T ­ hese questions w ­ ere then linked to associated questions regarding farming technologies that would both sustain the Highland population and foster the hardened martial qualities required by the imperial military. Strong differences of opinion arose in response to ­these questions. Promoters of the new commercial and industrial economy, such as the publisher James Anderson, favored creating new communities that would encourage ­free trade. Anderson’s focus, in par­tic­u­lar, was the trade of fish from the Hebrides and cash crops adapted to the Scottish climate from the colonies. For Anderson, natu­ral history would determine which foreign species would have the greatest success and what government policies would best protect t­ hese nascent industries. In reaction, conservative opponents such as the naturalist John Walker worried that without a strong tradition of resource management by social elites (i.e., aristocratic landowners), the ­free market would ­either lead to social collapse or weaken Highland society’s martial spirit through the corruption of modern commercial luxuries. Walker believed that Scotland was already providentially supplied with all the resources it needed. It was now up to expert naturalists to determine what t­ hese ­were and how best to exploit them. Despite the ideological differences between liberals and conservatives, however, both agreed that domestic industries needed to be promoted over foreign colonies and that the natu­ral environment of Scotland was already suited for the needs of the Highland population. In essence, they maintained that Scotland itself needed to be colonized according to policies inspired by Enlightenment science and social theory. By the end of the eigh­teenth ­century, optimism about Scotland’s capacity to support a growing population and its agricultural and energy needs ceded ground to worries that the environment would ultimately limit food production and carry­ ing capacity. Once ­those limits ­were reached, it was argued, the consequences would be famine, disease, and large-­scale emigration to the empire’s colonies, thus depriving Britain of the domestic population it so desperately needed. Thomas Mal-

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thus’s An Essay on the Princi­ple of Population (1798) is the most well-­known source of ­these concerns, but Jonsson demonstrates that Malthus built on the work of many other Scottish naturalists and po­liti­cal economists. Jonsson focuses on three primary areas of concern: the limited supplies of coal available in Scotland, the introduction of new breeds of sheep for their wool, and food production through wasteland reclamation. In exploring the relationship between ­human populations and the environment, Scottish savants developed a variety of quantitative methods. The mining entrepreneur Henry Grey Macnab, for example, concluded from his calculations that British coal reserves would last 1,200 years, even with rising demand. In response, Macnab’s rivals used competing methods to argue that coal would be exhausted within one hundred years, thus starting a debate that still resonates in the twenty-­first ­century. While t­ hese latter naturalists proposed dif­fer­ ent remedies to deal with environmental limits to growth and development, in general they agreed that landowners needed to protect Scotland’s natu­ral resources and not give in to short-­sighted greed. They thus became the voice of conservation efforts. “For all of ­these observers,” Jonsson concludes, “the threat of exhaustion served as a clarion call to unite landowners and politicians in unified action” (187). He thus convincingly demonstrates that voices for commercial exploitation and voices for conservation competed with one another for far longer than heretofore recognized and that the opposing arguments developed in parallel rather than sequentially with a newer liberalism pushing out traditional conservatism. The turn of the ­century brought yet another phase in the debate as Malthusian worries that population growth would inevitably lead to a crisis of resources led a growing number of liberals to argue that emigration to the colonies was actually a good ­thing. In time, they argued, any population deficiencies would be made up for by natu­ral population growth. Furthermore, the hardships of life in the colonies would continue to foster Scotland’s traditional martial spirit rather than undermine it. Meanwhile, the spread of sheep farming in the Highlands would encourage the excess population e­ ither to move abroad or to move to the cities to work in manufacturing—­both being desirable outcomes. Liberals thus began to see Scotland as part of a global dynamic of imperial and island development. Jonsson’s arguments about the development of natu­ral history, po­liti­cal economy, and their connections to public policy are further supported by a narrative about the importance of social and po­liti­cal institutions in both Enlightenment Scotland and the British Empire. Jonsson demonstrates how Scottish savants and aristocratic landowners eventually rejected the cameralist policies of the Board of Annexed Estates in ­favor of voluntary social organ­izations such as the Select

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1650–1850 Society of Edinburgh, the Highland Society of Scotland, and the British Fisheries Society, a joint stock com­pany formed in 1785—­a hybrid form of oversight that Jonsson dubs “civil cameralism.” Although the rejection of direct government intervention in land policy was based on the perceived failures of the Board of Annexed Estates, the voluntary socie­ties included many of the same members as the Board and followed similar models of fact collecting and debate. They also sponsored scientific publications and helped establish the authority of Enlightenment science in Scottish society. In effect, ­these institutions brought aristocrats and naturalists together to share ideas and debate public policy. And they created an environment that encouraged the formation of patronage relationships. As impor­tant as t­ hese institutions w ­ ere for the spread of ideas across Scotland, the long-­term success of land and economic policy also depended on how successfully Scottish planners could take advantage of their connections with po­liti­cal and military leaders in London. At this level, they w ­ ere also competing with the interests of British officials overseas. In a particularly fascinating example, John Murray, the Fourth Duke of Atholl, attempted to promote Scottish-­grown larch timber as a superior material for the building of naval ships during the Napoleonic Wars. His lobbying efforts, however, failed to adapt to changing po­liti­cal conditions as the wars came to an end and as arguments that the navy would benefit more from easily obtainable timber from India and, eventually, Canada became dominant, even as tests proved the superior strength of larch. In short, scientific and environmental arguments had to stand alongside global po­liti­cal, social, and economic concerns when it came to establishing policies with long-­ range implications. Reflecting for a moment on con­temporary concerns, it is clear that scientists ­today have a much more detailed and comprehensive understanding of the environment than they had in the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries. But it is just as evident that when it comes to setting social policy based on scientific knowledge, scientific expertise continues to exist in an uneasy relationship with commercial self-­interest and networks of po­liti­cal patronage. As we continue to expand our own understanding of human-­induced global warming and environmental change and negotiate ways to respond to it, it is sobering to realize that the history of t­ hese relationships is much longer than we have traditionally recognized.

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Lisa Forman Cody, ed., Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Culture, vol. 42. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Pp. xii + 337. 35 b/w illustrations. REVIEWED BY CHRISTOPHER D. JOHNSON

Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Culture, volume 42, is a carefully edited, hand-

somely produced collection of thirteen essays representing a wide range of disciplines. The volume begins with Christopher  M.  S. Johns’s discussion of Antonio Canova’s largely forgotten work Penitent Magdalen. Seeking to explain the statue’s popularity in Napoleonic Paris, Johns paints a detailed picture of the social, spiritual, and aesthetic cultures of late eighteenth-­century France, ultimately connecting the work to renewed French interest in Correggio, the re­introduction of Catholicism in France, and Bonaparte’s coronation ceremony. Jeffrey M. Leichman also addresses French culture in an engaging examination of La mére coupable, Beaumarchais’s final work on the history of the Almaviva ­family. Less well-­known than Le barbier de Séville and Le mariage de Figaro, La mére coupable marks Beaumarchais’s transition from vibrant comedy to the more serious style of drame, which he uses to allegorize “the situation of the newly created citizens of the republic” (22). Rejecting the “implicit caste divisions” of classical tragedy and comedy, Beaumarchais establishes drame as “the first truly modern theatrical mode” and uses La mére coupable to explore the “importance of female morality to the integrity of the bourgeois ­f amily” (24, 29). In so ­doing, he allows the play to reflect “the overthrow of the basis of po­liti­cal authority, from divine-­right monarchy to republican ideals of honesty, transparency, and repre­ sen­ta­tion” (32). Discussing the early reception of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Edmund J. Goehring offers another rich contextualization. Through a detailed analy­sis of a pamphlet

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1650–1850 by Benedict Dominic Anton Cremeri, Goehring connects Mozart’s opera to Enlightenment fears of Jesuits, whose “use of art . . . ​was seen as indulging the public’s baser appetites, most of all in how it unleashed spectacle to overwhelm reason’s bulwarks” (51). In this way, Goehring ties the reception of Don Giovanni to Enlightenment efforts to purge the stage of clerical trappings. As Goehring concludes, “it is precisely via the dark m ­ atter of spectacle that Mozart’s opera gets pulled into the hermeneutical orbit of Jesuitical, phantasmagorical world governed by terror and tyranny” (60). Concern for theatricality and spectacle figure prominently in two subsequent essays. Kristina Kleutghen discusses architectural and visual repre­sen­ta­tions of the West in China during the Qing dynasty. Focusing specifically on the Eu­ro­pean Palaces, which occupied seventy-­five acres of the Eternal Spring Garden, Kleutghen argues that both the ­actual structures and pictures of them intensified “the theatrical nature of” Qianlong’s role “by literally placing him on a stage” (99). In an analy­sis of the costuming of Restoration “Indian plays,” Ana Elena González-­Treviño considers cultural appropriation and connections between theater and throne. The Indian Emperor, González-­Treviño notes, allowed John Dryden to address con­ temporary interest in “imperial domination, the torture and martyrdom of a supreme ruler, and the fantasy of a prelapsarian state of innocence ruled by nature rather than art” (103). The emperor’s headdress, at once mysterious and analogous to a monarch’s crown, “constituted a universal code” of authoritarian power, which generated a “degree of nostalgia for an absolutist past” (109, 111). At the same time, it reminded audiences of the theatricality of Charles II’s reign. As González-­ Treviño concludes, The Indian Emperor ultimately “underscored the performativity and exotic quality of the restored monarchy with its amorous preoccupations and spectacular attire” (117). Annie K. Smart pres­ents a “recuperative reading” of Chateaubriand’s Voyage en Amérique, a work that has been widely criticized for its questionable veracity (124). Applying Edward O. Wilson’s idea of “biophilia,” Smart finds much to admire in the fictionalized travel narrative. Like Wilson, she argues, Chateaubriand “emphasizes the importance of understanding the living world, . . . ​places a spiritual, not an economic, value on natu­ral diversity, . . . ​and suggests that this attraction to the variety and otherness of nature makes us fully h ­ uman” (125). In an essay that includes an abundance of useful images, Kimberly Chrisman-­ Campbell interprets depictions of animals in repre­sen­ta­tions of the toilette. Noting that the once-­royal ritual transformed “from an exercise in po­liti­cal power and proximity into a domestic cele­bration of taste and sociability,” Chrisman-­

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Campbell finds parallels between the toilette and pet owner­ship, which similarly “transitioned from a royal to a bourgeois pastime” (147–148). Within visual repre­ sen­ta­tions of the toilette, pets frequently “functioned as con­ve­nient symbols” to communicate status or reveal ­human foibles (148). In the last quarter of the ­century, Chrisman-­Campbell finds, c­ hildren “began to fill the space previously occupied by animals in toilette scenes” (164). Studying the introductory prefaces within the seven-­ volume Recueil d’antiquitiés egyptiennes, étrusques, greques, romaines, et gauloises, Hector Reyes discovers an unexpected dimension of the Comte de Caylus’s understandings of art and history. For Caylus, who served as a lecturer at the Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculture in the 1740s, drawing renders “­imagined historical experience more pres­ent and tangible” (172). More specifically, Caylus posits that artistic expression becomes “the instrument by which one learns about the experience of p ­ eoples and civilizations of the past” (174). Caylus’s theory took on a practical dimension when he encouraged “antiquarians to acquire a basic knowledge of drawing,” which he believed “would aid their historical research ­because it would teach them to develop sensitivity to objects’ formal particularities” (183). In one of the collection’s best essays, Laura Miller discusses En­glish translations of Francesco Algarotti’s Il Newtonianismo per le dame. Through detailed textual analy­sis, Miller convincingly refutes earlier claims that subsequent En­glish translations ­were based on Elizabeth Car­ter’s 1739 work. By tracing the differences among vari­ous translations, Miller exposes variations in “publishers’ responses to dif­fer­ent generations of female and male readers” as well as “distinct shifts in the landscape of eighteenth-­century British popu­lar science” (192). Her analy­sis usefully complicates understandings not only of science writing but also of novelistic fiction and didactic lit­er­a­ture. Returning to France, Heidi Bostic examines two years of correspondence between Françoise de Graffigny and François-­Antoine Devaux. The letters, Bostic shows, “both illustrate and exceed eighteenth-­century theories and practices of friendship” (216). Covering a wide range of topics and expressing genuine affection, the letters reinforce assumptions about eighteenth-­century epistolary culture. At the same time, they reveal an unusual level of intimacy between a man and ­woman with no romantic attachment. The letters also allow Graffigny to claim an intellectual “status that an eighteenth-­century w ­ oman never would have dared to presume publicly” (225). The next two essays discuss Jane Austen’s fiction. Julie Park reads Sense and Sensibility in terms of a “poetics of enclosure,” which is to say that she finds that

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1650–1850 late eighteenth-­century “socio-­economic patterns of enclosure” form the basis of the novel’s “narrative structure and the intertwined economies of domestic and emotional life it engenders” (237). Austen, in Park’s analy­sis, “reframes enclosure as an intensely interiorized mode of being” (237–238). Just as enclosed and managed land became more productive, characterological enclosure within the novel allows for rich repre­sen­ta­tion of “interior experience” (240). Park’s construction of space, both literal and literary, allows for perceptive readings of the characters Marianne and Elinor. Caroline Austin-­Bolt provides an equally compelling discussion of Austen’s use of ­free indirect discourse, by examining the degree to which “Austen temporarily transfers authority to the reader in key passages that elicit judgment” (271). Austin-­Bolt then contextualizes Austen’s fiction within eighteenth-­ century understandings of moral judgment and happiness, concluding that Austen’s self-­effacing narrators provide “ ‘zones of dialogic contact’ that prompt readers to act—­that is to interact with the eigh­teenth c­ entury’s debate about happiness” (286). The collection concludes with Kate C. Hamilton’s persuasive investigation of Elizabeth Barry’s celebrity status in Restoration E ­ ngland. Hamilton pays par­tic­u­ lar attention to Barry’s association with the Earl of Rochester, especially his legendary wager, recorded by Edmund Curll, that he could transform the failing actress into a star. The Barry who emerges from Hamilton’s essay plays a far more significant role in the construction of her own public image than previous commentators have acknowledged. The reader learns, for example, that she helped shape the characters that Thomas Otway created for her to play. Lisa Cody has done a superb job of editing this collection of meticulously  researched, highly readable essays. Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Culture, volume 42, is an impor­tant scholarly contribution.

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Timothy Erwin and Michelle Burnham, eds., Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Culture, vol. 43. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pp. x + 250. 8 b/w illustrations. REVIEWED BY CHRISTOPHER D. JOHNSON

Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Culture, volume 43, begins with Paula  R. Back­

scheider’s discussion of “mixed form plays” (2). Examining Aphra Behn’s Emperor of the Moon (1687) and Elizabeth Inchbald’s Wives as They ­Were, and Maids as They Are (1797), Backscheider demonstrates how the two playwrights used a combination of “spectacle and farce” to participate in “public debate” and carry “out individual po­liti­cal agendas” (2). Placing the plays within a rich historical context that w ­ ill prove valuable to lit­er­a­ture and theater scholars alike, Backscheider establishes that Behn and Inchbald use “spectacle to tap into allegorical potential” and “farce to exploit that form’s potential for topical allusions and messages” (22). Sarah B. Stein provides an insightful reading of John Dennis’s translation of Psalm 18 (1704), arguing that translation allows Dennis to reconcile “two (opposing) forces”: neoclassical order and poetic sublimity. Although scholars might quibble about the degree to which the neoclassical and the sublime are in opposition, Stein provides a valuable discussion of Dennis’s understanding of poetry and religion. Moving beyond the theories offered by John Dryden and John Denham, Dennis sees “translation as a path to personal and societal redemption and as a way to connect earthly and spiritual realms” (28). An ideal poetry, one that combines “neoclassical rule and religious passion,” can “redeem man’s fallen state by serving as orderly instruction to man in his disorder” (36, 37). Turning from the transcendent to the material, Ann Campbell examines surrogate families in Moll Flanders (1722), noting that Moll’s preference for relationships

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1650–1850 that “promote her economic advancement” evinces Daniel Defoe’s “moral flexibility” (53). In the end, Campbell provides a compelling reading of the novel that leaves its author ever more enigmatic as the ethos of Moll Flanders becomes irreconcilable with that of Defoe’s didactic writings on marriage and ­family. Patricia Comitini discusses another ideologically complex writer: Eliza Haywood. In Fantomina (1725), Comitini finds a nuanced investigation of the pleasures of the imagination and the power of fiction. Haywood’s novella, Comitini posits, “illustrates how sexual desire is less about looking at a par­tic­u­lar ­woman’s body . . . ​ and more about the fictions that make the feminine body attractive” (73). Haywood’s protagonist, through her vari­ous guises, defines herself by the fictions she creates and by so d ­ oing perpetuates her lover’s desire. “Storytelling,” Comitini concludes, “sets the seduction in motion” (74). Exploring the connections between ­music and politics in Rousseau’s work, Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-­Schwinden finds unrecognized importance in the Affair of the Fourteen, a 1749 event that “consisted of the capture, interrogation, and in some cases, imprisonment” of fourteen Pa­ri­sians responsible for “slanderous songs about the king’s mistress” (93). This experience, Geoffroy-­Schwinden argues, informed Jean-­Jacques Rousseau’s influential discussion of ­music’s ability to “persuade without convincing” in Essai sur l’origine des langues, published posthumously in 1781 (95). As Geoffroy-­Schwinden notes, “the range of musical and po­liti­cal possibilities extant in 1749 Paris, first, made pos­si­ble Rousseau’s imagination of a more utopian use of ­music, and second, laid the foundation for the po­liti­ cally focused musical culture that developed so quickly in the 1790s” (106). Joanne E. Myers provides a valuable reading of George Berkeley’s neglected treatise Siris: A Chain of Philosophical Reflexions and Inquiries Concerning the Virtues of Tar ­Water (1744). Building on J.G.A. Pocock’s claim that Enlightenment thinking included “a vein of enthusiasm,” Myers finds a rejection of “mechanistic physiology” and an assertion that “faith is a requisite to understanding” in Berkeley’s discussion of tar ­water as a panacea (112, 115). April London considers Sarah Fielding’s use of anecdote in The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia (1757). Discarding earlier eighteenth-­century practices, Fielding employs anecdote not to explore the connections between “sexual intrigue” and “present-­day po­liti­cal chicanery” but to advance didactic themes (143). In ­doing so, Fielding si­mul­ta­neously normalizes traditional gender roles as Cleopatra and Antony, “the mannish w ­ oman and the womanish man,” are mercilessly vilified (144). Fielding’s work, London concludes, anticipated that of other writers who re­oriented

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anecdote “away from its then-­dominant association with prurient scandal” and ­toward instructive purposes (147). Returning to the issues of f­ amily introduced in Ann Campbell’s essay, Rori Bloom discusses the connections between families and prostitution in Restif de la Bretonne’s Le palais royal (1789). In Restif’s fiction, the f­ amily functions “as both the site of moral salvation and the nexus of sexual corruption” (154). In spite of its contradictory potentials, the ­family for Restif becomes the only means for social reformation. Rejecting the “power of the Revolution to offer new solutions for society,” Restif asserts that the evils of prostitution are best solved by reuniting wayward girls with their estranged families and “domesticating sexual desire, incorporating it into ­family life by means of marriage” (154, 162). Sabrina Ferri explores Lazzaro Spallanzani’s analy­sis of ancient ruins. At once biological and organic, ruins for eighteenth-­century observers “stir the imaginations by evoking a sense of an ending” (171). As the historical artifacts give way to biological imperatives, “the dissolution of civilization—­embodied by decaying buildings—­comes to prefigure the end of ­human life” (171). Spallanzani, like his contemporaries, recognized the sublime aesthetic power of ruins but brought to his study an eminently scientific approach that anticipated “the methods of modern archaeology” (174). The result is an understanding of ancient ruins that combines an “antiquarian taste . . . ​and naturalistic curiosity” (185). Providing something of a revisionist reading of Arthur Murphy, Barbara Mackey King argues that the playwright and journalist celebrates ­women’s intelligence. King’s argument on its face seems problematic since, as she reveals, a third of Murphy’s articles in Gray’s Inn Journal (1753–1754) are devoted “wholly or in part to criticisms of ­women’s fashions, to their lack of intelligent conversation, and to similar trifles” (198). In King’s analy­sis, t­ hese statements are not harsh vituperations about ­women but rather instructive critiques, which Murphy uses to cultivate “the characteristic he most admires in ­women: their intelligence” (202). The volume concludes with Karen Gevirtz’s engaging discussion of video adaptations, which use “old, perhaps hallowed or sanctified cultural objects to rewrite history and thereby rewrite the current cultural moment” (220). In Becoming Jane (2007), Gevirtz finds not only “a familiar effort to reduce or negate ­women’s contributions to the public sphere” but also “a larger proj­ect to cleanse the past of conflict and challenge” (224). Similarly, the tele­vi­sion production Crusoe (2008– 2009) “rewrites the history of race in the Amer­i­cas” even as it “idealizes heterosexual norms and justifies capitalism” (228, 230). In viewing t­ hese works, Gevirtz

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1650–1850 cautions her reader “to examine what long eigh­teenth c­ entury we are dreaming of with such adaptations and with it, what pres­ent we are dreaming of as well” (232). As has been the case for many successive volumes of Studies in Eighteenth-­ Century Culture, the editors have done an admirable job of selecting a fine group of keenly argued, deeply researched essays representing a variety of disciplines. They have also produced a handsome, carefully edited volume that ­will be of ­great use to a wide range of scholars.

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Robert Zaretsky, Boswell’s Enlightenment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Pp. ix + 278. REVIEWED BY PAUL J. DEGATEGNO

In this lively narrative, Robert Zaretsky captures the contradictions that defined

James Boswell and his “uninhibited” journals, specifically London, Holland, and the ­Grand Tour, including Corsica. With the flair of an accomplished novelist, Zaretsky creates a vivid portrait of late-1750s Edinburgh and the young James Boswell yearning to visit London and the Continent and especially to interview his heroes, Voltaire and Rousseau. Launched on his odyssey, Boswell moves with Zaretsky at his shoulder; Zaretsky describes the young Scot “fashion[ing] nuggets of conversation that often move the reader to laughter or tears” from ­England to the Continent, while “groping [­toward] the goal of improvement: the writing of a journal” (52–53). Since this study seems a minibiography on a life well known by students and scholars t­oday, the author is instead using his subject as an instrument for explaining and experiencing the Enlightenment. He asks directly or implies the question throughout: How do Boswell’s journals represent the Scottish Enlightenment and the role of the Scots in the eighteenth-­century world? In this analy­sis, Boswell’s character, as it evolved during the critical years 1762–1766, w ­ ill help portray how genius flourished in such circumstances. But Zaretsky has wider goals as well since Boswell reports from “the front lines of the Enlightenment,” showing often how genius flourished in the complex world of the Continental Enlightenment. In the first four chapters of this slim volume, we are led on a journey into Boswell’s interior landscape. Boswell is charming, learned, skillful, yet pedantic

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1650–1850 and “tormented by his f­uture.” Zaretsky explains Boswell’s strug­gle between his religious upbringing and his belief in the genius and liberating influences of “the ­great . . . ​and ingenious.” His predicament can only be addressed as a kind of search for truth, yet as Samuel Johnson realized, “that creature was its own tormentor, and I believe his name was Boswell” (30). Each of t­ hese early chapters locates Boswell with an influential figure: first with Alexander Boswell, Lord Auchinleck, his ­father; Henry Home, Lord Kames, a phi­los­o­pher and ­legal scholar; David Hume, the historian; and fi­nally with Samuel Johnson, whose common sense served as a spur to the young man. Each person becomes a source of improvement for Boswell as he hesitates about his ­career, leaving fi­nally for Utrecht and the ­Grand Tour. The main section of Boswell’s Enlightenment (the final six chapters) pres­ents Boswell expanding his ­father’s original plan for the Tour and in so ­doing learning how he could re-­engage from bouts of depression, emerging as a more active, disciplined student of lit­er­a­ture. Zaretsky keeps to his first plan, introducing readers to such distinctive personalities as the bluestocking Belle de Zuylen, Frederick the ­Great, the po­liti­cal phi­los­o­pher Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, the writer—­“ the high priest of the French Enlightenment” (12)—­Voltaire, and fi­nally the Corsican revolutionary leader Pasquale Paoli. Boswell’s fascination with each is seen through the lens of Enlightenment princi­ples, especially the ongoing war of words between Rousseau and Voltaire concerning religious toleration and philosophical optimism. Zaretsky is particularly well prepared for this discussion; since ­after his (and John Scott’s) The Phi­los­o­phers’ Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Understanding (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), his understanding and sympathy for both phi­los­o­phers comes through, while Boswell seems irritating, if not rather desperate, in seeking some certainty for personal salvation. The pleasures and excitement of the ­Grand Tour ­were heightened with Boswell’s visit to Corsica, where Paoli, the insurgent leader, and his followers had worn down the Genoese, only to find the French in late 1764 garrisoning five towns on the island. The focus on the meaning of liberty and the radical, antimonarchist views of the scandalous John Wilkes, whom Boswell sought out in Naples, prepared him for meeting Paoli and l­ater becoming a vocal advocate for Corsican liberty. Zaretsky happily escapes the constant Boswellian focus on religion and salvation, explaining how fame and literary heroism would become worthy objects as Paoli transformed and bred confidence in the young man. ­There are some l­ittle niggles h ­ ere. Zaretsky missed a chance of portraying Boswell’s meeting James Macpherson, the poet of Ossian, in London, a figure

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whose reputation in the past three de­cades has under­gone a thoughtful reconsideration, especially as precursor of Romantic sensibilities. Also, he ignores the issue of Boswell’s perceived misogyny, a preconception that some pres­ent readers would use in condemning him. Certainly, Zaretsky intends on praising him, while not ignoring his failings, yet a scholar cannot avoid the world as it is. Drawing on an impressive array of firsthand sources and writing with a keen eye for the dramatic, Zaretsky has done students and scholars alike a timely ­favor. The Yale Edition of the Private Papers of James Boswell—­particularly the trade edition designed for the general reading public—­has become an impor­tant, if not daunting, reservoir of eighteenth-­century culture that only a small number ­will actually read. ­Today, students may have Boswell’s London Journal 1762– 63 (New York: Penguin, 2015) assigned as supplementary reading in an eighteenth-­ century lit­er­a­ture course or one on the history of ideas, but more likely even this has become unusual. For ­those who are unable or unwilling to read the early journals, we have Zaretsky’s summary and analy­sis, and his book has done a ­great service—­sent us back to Boswell and his “variations of mind” more informed and in higher spirits.

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Howard D. Weinbrot, ed., Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New C ­ entury. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 2014. Pp. xiii + 386. REVIEWED BY PAUL J. DEGATEGNO

In the eight years following the tercentenary anniversary of Samuel Johnson’s

birth, the scholarly analy­sis of his works and their importance to British eighteenth-­ century lit­er­a­ture continue unabated, and that fact should not be surprising but surely celebrated, especially when a collection of essays such as Howard D. Weinbrot’s Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New ­Century becomes available. New Contexts joins two earlier collections, Johnson ­after Three Centuries (2011) and Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum (2012); each proj­ect began as a conference where scholars delved even more deeply into areas of Johnsonian interest. Weinbrot, who has a well-­deserved reputation for seeking out the intellectual lights and the latest stimulating work on eighteenth-­century literary figures, does not disappoint ­here. With characteristic briskness and thoroughness, he tells us that ­there is a g­ reat deal more to know about Johnson and his age, especially “his canon, his varied achievements, and modes of proceeding” (8). The book is a densely detailed, scholarly set of essays based on sustained literary analy­sis and generous research, arranged into six intersecting parts. Part I, “Johnson and the Arts of Thought,” examines Johnson’s intellectual pro­cesses, as Stuart Sherman focuses on his theatrical writings and their “fascination with the psychological pliabilities of time” (16), promising to make sense of Johnson’s lifelong fascination with the theater. David Fairer’s “The Agile Johnson” is a fast-­paced, humanistic, and witty study of Johnson’s playfulness or physicality giving further proof of his agile mind. Though Johnson might appear clumsy in his movements, his mind was focused on providing a precise picture of a scene, and Fairer uses

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this meta­phor for understanding Johnson’s definitions for the Dictionary. Weinbrot’s “ ‘ ’Tis Well and Old Age Is Out’: Johnson, Swift, and His Generation” usefully points out that the unlovely picture we have of Jonathan Swift in Lives of the Poets has more to do with Johnson’s dislike for the politics and cultural vulgarity of the late seventeenth and early eigh­teenth centuries than with Dean Swift. Part II, “Johnson the Writer,” offers Thomas Keymer’s “Johnson’s Poetry of Repetition,” in which Keymer agrees that Johnson’s skill as a prose stylist originates within his poetic sensibilities. Offering a considered and convincing study of the “forceful, unrelenting reiteration” of parallel, antithesis, and chiasmus, Keymer suggests that Johnson’s poetry is best appreciated as a “calibrated cele­bration of a well-­lived life” (81). Jack Lynch searches for Johnson’s attitudes ­toward letter writing, especially in the less familiar examples, and explores the “shocking amount” of energy he expended in getting a variety of friends to write to him (96). Certainly, too much emphasis on two Johnson letters—to Lord Chesterfield and James Macpherson—­ignores the many that offer him (and us) joy of news and warmth from his friends and also an obligation to respond. Lynch regrets a lack of a full Correspondence—­the “reciprocal intelligence”—­but paid-up Johnsonians, as he is, can often find the letters to him. Part III, “Johnson and the Dull Duties,” and Part IV, “Johnson and Politics,” provide vigorous discussions on the Dictionary and his edition of Shakespeare, but in con­temporary periods of heated po­liti­cal debate, such as our own, substantive analy­sis of how Johnson played through a series of parries and thrusts battling over vari­ous controversies remains fascinating. F. P. Lock’s “ ‘To Preserve Order and Support Monarchy’: Johnson’s Po­liti­c al Writings” makes a realistic request—­ “should we attempt to impose order on such disparate material” (175)—­and decides value exists in discussing what Johnson actually says, as well as what he thought he had accomplished. Adding flavor to his essay, Lock disputes Donald Greene’s view of Johnson as a populist firebrand, concentrating on the mature 1770–1775 pamphlets. In Taxation No Tyranny (1775), Johnson reveals his po­liti­cal creed, in which wise po­liti­cal authority must reign above uninformed and uneducated popu­lar opposition. Lock’s valuable comments on the ­later pamphlets, sermons, and law lectures offer a fresh context, one very much in keeping with the book’s goal. Nicholas Hudson’s “The Active Soul and Vis Inertiae: Change and Tension in Johnson’s Philosophy from The Rambler to The Idler” provides Part V, “Johnson, Religion and Philosophy,” with a stimulating examination of Johnson’s “consistent and uncomplicated” philosophy of life within ­these essays. Though Hudson makes

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1650–1850 clear that Boswell’s biography implies that Johnson was an “inherently unified self,” he differs with that notion, insisting that Johnson could often express an undecided view on h ­ uman nature and “could change his mind,” especially in The Idler, where he reassesses his views from the earlier essays (including The Adventurer). Undergraduates reading se­lections from ­these periodical papers, typically found in anthologies, should read Hudson’s analy­sis, in which he grasps their poignant, often b ­ itter critique of ­human concerns with par­tic­u­lar deftness and clarity. Part VI, “Johnson a­ fter Johnson,” concludes the collection with a group of essays whose range of reference is strikingly vari­ous in their intentions. Robert Folkenflik’s examination of Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Johnson, Blinking Sam (1775), and particularly the history of Johnson portraiture pres­ents a fascinating review of a little-­known subject. Freya Johnston’s surprising commentary on Byron’s “constitutional similarities” to Johnson, from a “love of truth” to a “fondness for crash diets” (288–289), joins James Engell’s lucid, lively criticism on an “unexplored” analogy of national representatives—­Johnson and En­glish culture with Walter Scott and Scottish culture. Fi­nally, in a proper ending, Robert DeMaria, as the general editor and chair of the editorial board of the Yale Johnson, discusses the “History of the Collected Works of Samuel Johnson: The First Two Hundred Years” and particularly examines the nearly sixty-­year editorial balancing act of the Yale Edition. The New Contexts essays display as a ­whole their scholars’ fertile intellects as well as the nimbleness of imagination and knowledge of Johnson. ­These writers offer ingenious models of how students and scholars alike might prepare and ready themselves for searching out what might have been missed or misunderstood in the earlier de­cades of Johnsonian criticism. If Johnson’s readiness of mind remains one of his greatest attributes, so then we must welcome critics who engage with the same (or at least the desire) for this “promptitude of thought” (37).

420

Samuel Richardson, Pamela in Her Exalted Condition, ed. Albert J. Rivero. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. lxxxviii + 732. 17 b/w illustrations. REVIEWED BY KIT KINCADE

According to the general editor’s preface, this series is the “first fully annotated

scholarly edition of Samuel Richardson’s works . . . ​ever to have been undertaken” (xiii), recording and evaluating the five previous “substantial” collected editions of Richardson’s works from the first (1811) to the most recent (1929–1930). The Cambridge Edition distinguishes itself by including scholarly apparatus as well as being the first to comprise other works besides Pamela, Cla­ris­sa, and Sir Charles Grandison, providing breadth as well as depth of coverage. The preface also argues that undertaking such a proj­ect is justified ­because of the scarcity of editions, lack of editorial provenance in extant editions (naming neither editors nor editorial princi­ ples), and unreliable choice of copy text in previous editions (xiii). The general preface contends that the editorial board chose the first edition of Richardson’s work as copy text, rather than the last, per his “editorial wishes” (I use that term rather than “within his lifetime” ­because his revisions ­were continued for de­cades by his ­family, who ­were following his instructions). The editorial guidelines and Albert J. Rivero’s production follow W. W. Greg’s belief that the editor’s authority w ­ ill be the determining ­factor in judging which edition of the text best represents the author’s original intentions. Rivero’s general introduction details Richardson’s motivation, rationale, and methods for composition of the third and fourth volumes of Pamela’s story. Approximately thirteen months ­after the publication of the first two volumes, Richardson found himself facing an unexpected dilemma. “The stunning and spectacular success of the original” (xxxi) meant that ­there w ­ ere readers clamoring for

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1650–1850 more and that ­there w ­ ere many authors willing to step in ­either to provide more of Pamela’s story or to satirize and ridicule Richardson’s creation. His original anonymity provided an easy context in which many could claim the right to pen sequels, continuations, and retellings. Rivero spends a substantial portion of his introduction detailing the “circumstances of composition,” indicating that Richardson was “outraged” ­because of the “theft of his literary property . . . ​[and] ­because of what he feared would be their debasement and depreciation of his characters” (xlv). Essentially, Richardson found himself revising the first two volumes while si­mul­ta­neously writing the second two. With regard to con­temporary critical and early reception, Rivero notes that “critics have been less than kind to Pamela in Her Exalted Condition,” believing it to be “less compelling” and lacking “incidents” (xxxiii). This critique has stuck through the years, with the result that the book garners far less critical attention than his other novels do. The last section of Rivero’s introduction covers the specific type of revisions that Richardson made to the character of Pamela and to vari­ous story ele­ments. Also included in this edition, in addition to the complete first edition of the text of the novel and the aforementioned general preface and general introduction, are several features designed to aid the advanced student or scholar with textual or publication questions. This volume contains a chronology of the life of the author; a textual introduction focusing on the copy text; extensive appendices that include the license, contents, and illustrations from the Octavo Edition (1742); emendations; a word-­division list; bibliographic descriptions of early editions; explanatory notes; and an index. A final note on this edition, pertaining to textual bibliography: scholarly editorial practice requires editors to examine multiple copies of the edition chosen for their copy text. Williams and Abbott believe that twelve to twenty copies should be compared; ­others proposed a smaller number (four or so); still ­others leave it up to the individual editors (dependent on availability of copies). Horizontal collation reveals changes (intentionally and mistakenly) made during the pro­cess of shaping that par­tic­u­lar edition. The Cambridge University Press guidelines for editing Richardson’s works actually discourage comparative work between the selected copy text and other copies of that same edition: In an ideal world, this t­ able might be extended to rec­ord the outcome of systematic “horizontal” collation of the copy text against one or more other copies of the same edition. During preparation of the OWC Pamela (2001), Alice Wakely’s comparison between the Bodleian and Duke copies of the first

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edition (the latter as rendered by Eaves and Kimpel) yielded two or three apparent cases of mid-­production correction to standing type. All w ­ ere single-­ character errors, however, that would in any case have been picked up in the normal pro­cess of editorial emendation. The small rewards to be expected from horizontal collation w ­ ill not justify the effort involved, and editors are therefore urged to reserve their time and energy for other tasks. (Editorial Board, Cambridge Edition of the Works of Samuel Richardson [CEWSR], “Notes for Editors” [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, n.d.], 7) Rivero’s work included examining three dif­fer­ent first editions (two Newberry copies and one from the British Library), which is better than the example cited earlier (only comparing the Bodleian and Duke copies). In d ­ oing so, he found two major press variants as well as some minor corrections. It is fair to say that the advice of not employing horizontal collation, as in the guideline’s example, is based on one incident using only two copies—­a number lower than any recommended by textual scholars. The advice may not be as exhaustive about the entire pro­cess of composition of the first edition as the editorial boards seems to imply that it is. Rivero’s findings using three copies bear this out and imply that the recommendations of textual scholars help to reveal Richardson’s original pro­cess and that editors should err on the side of examining more, not fewer, copies.

423

Lyndon J. Dominique, Imoinda’s Shade: Marriage and the African ­Woman in Eighteenth-­ Century British Lit­er­a­ture, 1759–1808. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012. Pp. xii + 289. 19 b/w illustrations. REVIEWED BY ELLEN MOODY

L yndon J. Dominique’s book is a study of a group of eighteenth-­century texts

with some reaching out to twentieth-­and twenty-­first-­century English-­language texts concerning slavery. In many, ­there is a central white or secondary mulatto heroine who represents a refashioned version of Aphra Behn’s black African Imoinda from Behn’s boldly graphic depiction of the horrific cruelties inflicted on slaves in her autobiographical prose fiction Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (1688). In the part of Behn’s novella where Imoinda appears, Behn writes a pathos-­filled familial romance, ending in an erotically focused (on Imoinda’s sexual parts) tragic death. In Dominque’s “Afterword,” he reveals a deep emotional engagement with this figure of “the African Imoinda.” He wants to “reclaim” her as influencing a c­ ouple of early antislavery texts but, equally importantly, as a source for progressive, reasonable, and “benevolent”-­meaning texts, close reading of which exposes the inadequacy of the ameliorist or idealistic stance by which they justify slavery (262–263). Dominique has a second source text, though, which he fully acknowledges: Thomas Southerne’s stage adaptation of Behn’s romance, which crucially includes a racialist transformation of Imoinda into an enslaved, white, Eu­ro­pean wife to the same prince (Oroonoko, 1696). The imitations and alterations that followed (by John Hawkesworth and Francis Gentleman) use Southerne as their source and take his de-­Africanization much further; their anonymous Oroonoko features African and creole protagonists and carries a genuine antislavery agenda (65– 67). One prob­lem at the core of Imoinda’s Shade is that Dominique omits the part of Southerne’s equally successful, innocent, pathetic, white Eu­ro­pean heroine,

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Isabella (in the aptly named The Fatal Marriage; or, The Innocent Adultery, 1693) and the use of the same type actresses or literally the same ­people played in the vari­ous permutations. ­There is a larger prob­lem: Dominique briefly rules out counting as impor­tant the central erasure in t­ hese works that most of t­ hese heroines are white; and some are ­free and ­middle class (viz., Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray in the novel of that name [1805]), and ­others are light-­skinned mulattos (e.g., The ­Woman of Color, anonymous, 1808, edited by Dominique). He does not bring up the strong case that Jenny Sharpe (Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archeaology of Black W ­ omen’s Lives [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003]), among ­others, has made that a white skinned and featured w ­ oman who is legally f­ ree cannot stand in for a black, Eu­ro­pean for African, slave. In all conditions, the slave is answerable with his or her body and thus, by extension, life. Admittedly, some of Dominique’s texts have black African, mulatto, and British profoundly victimized heroines, most notably August von Kotzebue’s The Negro Slaves (En­glish adapted 1796), almost uncompromisingly antislavery in the original German (111–126). Dominique believes that Maria Edgeworth read Elizabeth Griffth’s bowdlerized “hopeful” version of Behn’s text (1800). The heroine of Edgeworth’s The Grateful Negro (1804) is black African, and one of the stories resembles Behn’s (85) and Southerne’s; but by Dominique’s own account, Edgeworth’s is a pro-­benign (so she imagines) plantation-­owner fiction, consciously influenced by and a product of her reading an impor­tant, not quite Thomas Clarkson–­like treatise, Bryan Edwards’s The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1793). Edgeworth’s letters, along with her association with her ­father’s circle of radical reformers, cumulatively suggest that Edgeworth desired to write a didactic text; unfortunately, when it came to representing black p ­ eople, her best intentions w ­ ere thwarted. Her ­father, Thomas (often made the villain in her self-­censorship), forced her to change her story of Juba in Belinda (1801): a black man who intends to marry and live happily in E ­ ngland with a white En­glish bride becomes the bride’s friend who dances at her wedding (72–73). Somewhat ironically, Dominique shows his texts retroject genuine antislavery descriptions of radically inhumane conditions for black slaves in ways that I suggest anticipate Caryl Phillip’s Cambridge (1991), a controversial, ironic imitation of a diary by a colonialist, single, white Eu­ro­pean w ­ oman living in the West Indies. Cambridge is a Booker Prize–­type book: it contains an embedded slave narrative by a black man about to be hanged unjustly. Cambridge has been castigated for its caricatures and marginalization of black ­women slaves (e.g., by Timothy Bewes, “Shame, Ventriloquy and the

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1650–1850 Prob­lem of Cliché in Phillips,” Cultural Critique 63 [2006]: 33–60). A case in point is the painful (for this reader to read), serious ­Dying Negro and Sandford and Merton (7) by Thomas Day (a member of Edgeworth’s circle), who, like Phillips, uses slavery-­approving white ­people to unconsciously expose how unlivable as a life and quickly fatal black slave existence can be. However, by and large, even the more enlightened of Dominique’s texts make slavery acceptable. ­There is no room in any of them for the kind of candid explanation of why it is so difficult to eradicate and so easy to install forms of slavery found, for example, in the writing of Diderot and D’Alembert’s article in the Encyclopedie and Diderot’s L’histoire des Deux-­Indies, in which Diderot also explains how a differently colored skin and dif­f er­ent general characteristics make it harder to f­ ree black p ­ eople who are dominated by whites (given per­sis­tent racist hegemonic beliefs). Dominique brings up Thomas Paine and Clarkson, but Paine does not discuss slavery; and Dominique says about Clarkson only what is generally known (136–137, 236–237). Most commonly, Dominique’s texts trivialize (he urges us to acknowledge amusement in some); they defame ­people who are not white (I ­will come back to this verb, used by Dominique) and who are not born in ­England. They distance the viewer or reader from what is happening elsewhere and hardly bring out the bodily pain at the heart of a system of terror, which he concedes (158–160). Two texts contain nonwhite w ­ omen slave-­servants (the two terms are elided in Dominique’s discussion): Cubba, a creole equated with Irish p ­ eople, in James Macready’s farcical The Irishman in London; or, The Happy African (1793); and Savannah, the mulatto companion-­servant to the heroine in Opie’s Jacobin, somewhat antimarriage Adeline Mowbray (178–189, 205–206, 210–222). The stories dramatize t­ hese w ­ omen as e­ ither e­ ager to find a home (indifferent to w ­ hether they are enslaved or not) with their British own­er/masters in ­England (­because, as some of eighteenth-­century texts falsely imply, the Mansfield decision outlawed slavery t­ here) or delighted to function to bring about happy or socially acceptable endings for the white protagonists. Dominique wants us to see in t­ hese texts acceptable early recognition that black p ­ eople can equally be and w ­ ere recognized implicitly as at home (and even citizens) as whites ­were in the British Isles. The indisputable value of this volume is the informative detail Dominique supplies for the student of abolitionist British lit­er­a­ture in popu­lar ameliorist and colonialist texts, including slapstick burlesque (James Townley’s High Life below Stairs, 1759) and musical or benevolist sentimental drama (Isaac Bickerstaff’s comic opera Love in the City, 1767; Richard Cumberland’s The West Indian, 1771). Dominique close reads an intriguing novella taken from John Fawcett’s pantomime,

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William Earle’s Obi; or, The History of Three-­Fingered Jack (1800). I am citing only a few texts of the many texts alluded to and analyzed. The reader can come away with a nuanced and encompassing understanding of the stigmatizing and linguistic term “creole” from much of chapter 4. Dominique exposes the racist, commercial, and nativist motives for the Sierra Leone colonial experiment (80–81, 196– 197). The reader w ­ ill learn how the Hardwicke Marriage Act (1753) was used in the colonies to “keep the stratification of the poor and rich intact” and of course how ­legal marriage was made impossible for black slaves regardless (34–37). But t­here is also much to trou­ble a reader who is not intent (as Dominique seems to be) to suppose redeeming positive results in a presumed audience’s mind-­ set in the way Dominique discusses some intimate, uncomfortable material. He includes nineteen illustrations, which offer indelible visualization of the humiliating, horrifically punitive public punishments inflicted on black ­women slaves. Some of ­these prints go undiscussed. One trope he rightly goes into at length about is pictured white men (rarely white ­women) attempting to wash “the color” out of or rub very hard a black male’s skin. Dominique sets about to find “constructive work done” ­here and ends praising Godwin for changing the gender of a washer to female (230– 233). In one written passage in The ­Woman of Color in which the heroine is a fabulously rich mulatto heiress sent to E ­ ngland to marry a wealthy white man (so as to make her c­ hildren more white), she places on her lap a young white En­glish boy so that he may rub her skin and see that its color is “not filth.” Dominique discusses this as a trope of “failed whitening” (his in­ven­ted term, placed in italics), “a didactic tool” that should be seen as “improving attitudes” (226). One of the most grating features of this book is Dominique’s repeated invention of terms, a vocabulary that functions to define what is in a text to make it more enlightened or about slavery (when it may be about gender oppression or some aspect of colonialist imperialism apart from slavery): a character is “creatively defamed” (91); the author is using a “soft, strategic voice” (102, 106) or “creatively reforming” a character (this for last-­minute reformations of hitherto-­ vicious characters [125, 135]). “Narrative maternalism” (132) is used for a story from a ­mother’s point of view in which she instills what Dominique sees as perverse (­because counterproductive) hatred and vio­lence in her son. Dominique dwells on “epidermal conversion”: this he uses when some p ­ eople who manifest a black phenotype by successive generations of intermarriage with p ­ eople who manifest white phenotypes produce over time black ­children who appear more white ­until they can “pass” for white (241). Although Dominique registers the bestial abuse that a white master has inflicted when he has “reveled” in self-­congratulatory

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1650–1850 sexual intercourse with a ­woman whose ­daughter he then has sex with, Dominique seems to me to have lost perspective when he equates this “epidermal conversion” with enforced acts of “religious conversion” on Jewish ­people (241) and remarks without any sense of absurdity that b ­ ecause Austen’s Fanny Price in Mansfield Park is “epidermally dull” (she does not “glow”), we may miss that Fanny, like Burney’s Juliet in The Wanderer, is meant to stand in for “­women forced into violent non-­consensual acts” and therefore black w ­ omen slaves (244–247). This is an intensely well-­meaning book. Dominique argues that like the recent texts he discusses, ­these eighteenth-­century texts “provide ‘creative spaces’ ” that ­will enable all readers (but he has black or readers of color in mind especially) to make “positive statements” about themselves and their history. He says he has put together an argument, offered “a methodology,” and “marshalled a group of recalcitrant texts” to tell a story that can “correspond to edification and reflection about the issues of slavery and freedom” (262). Throughout the book, he asserts his British witnesses who are troubled about slavery (and ­others) care intensely about the princi­ple of freedom, but ­there is ­little evidence that any of his characters or authors are seriously concerned with the issue of liberty, civil, po­liti­cal, or economic. He does concede in his final paragraphs that with the lack of texts by black w ­ omen in his chosen period, “­women of ‘Imoinda’s shade’ offer an opportunity to reflect on the concerns of the slave w ­ oman—­but only as effectively or in­effec­tively as a white writer’s imagination created them” (266). T ­ here is a weakness of style in the book, a lack of forcefulness in its abstract, meandering sentences, which may stem from this problematic purpose: his texts do not do what he wants them to; they are often cruel and sometimes unconsciously barbaric. I sympathize greatly with what he has meant to do but think in this pres­ ent juncture of our history, looking to find, in order to build on, good that is not ­there is counterproductive.

428

Marilyn Francus, Monstrous Motherhood: Eighteenth-­Century Culture and the Ideology of Domesticity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Pp. xi + 297. REVIEWED BY MEREDITH A. LOVE

In Monstrous Motherhood: Eighteenth-­Century Culture and the Ideology of

Domesticity, Marilyn Francus argues that “ ‘good’ or even normative mothering is rarely represented in eighteenth-­century British lit­er­a­ture” (15). Francus notes that “envisioning a domestic m ­ other was not difficult in eighteenth-­century Britain, but imagining her as a protagonist with a narrative was” (8). To make this case, Francus takes the reader through several dif­fer­ent tropes of the monstrous ­mother. The “monstrous fertile m ­ other” (26) is the subject of the first chapter. Francus suggests that anxiety in lit­er­a­ture surrounding the sexual ­woman who can make a man physically dependent on her for satisfaction is reflective of the anxiety that men had about ­women writers, the imagination, and the possibility that men would lose their literary authority (35). Francus traces the trope of the fertile m ­ other through the work of vari­ous authors including Spenser, Swift, Pope, Sterne, and Mary Shelley, adeptly proving that “the psychologically monstrous m ­ other was a fecund site for lit­er­a­ture, providing multiple, devious narratives” (45). Hester Thrale is the primary concern of chapter 2, as Francus provides a lively, focused review of Thrale’s ­family life, thereby illuminating the conundrum faced by m ­ others in the eigh­teenth c­ entury. For, while motherhood required much effort and investment of self in the ­children, this real­ity “defied the eighteenth-­century ideology of motherhood and self-­effacing female conduct” (46). In short, Thrale’s story “demonstrates the social expectations of m ­ others, the desire to be a good ­mother, and the difficulties in trying to do so” (47). This chapter is particularly strong, as it serves as an excellent overview of Thrale’s life, the ways in which o ­ thers

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1650–1850 perceived and wrote about her, and the consequences of her f­ amily choices. It is ideal for students and scholars who are unfamiliar with her life and work, in addition to being a sound study of motherhood in the period. Chapters 3 and 4 take on the difficult topic of infanticide, with Francus reminding us of the multiple repre­sen­ta­tions of child murder pres­ent at the time in biblical, mythological, and literary repre­sen­ta­tions of motherhood. Thus, in a sense, infanticide, while abhorrent, was not entirely unexpected. Francus provides a sufficient overview of the ­legal statutes and public perception of infanticide during the period, highlighting the ­legal, economic, and social consequences of unwed motherhood. In the courts, m ­ others who ­were suspected of killing their babies ­were presumed guilty and had to prove their innocence (87); in fact, “mere concealment of a dead child proved infanticide” (99). Yet the court made a demarcation between “good” and “bad” infanticide. ­Women who w ­ ere “docile” and could summon character witnesses, claim ignorance of their pregnancy, and allow ­others to speak for them could be “recuperated” (and returned to the workforce; 100–101). “Bad” infanticidal ­mothers, however, ­were not ignorant, quiet, or passive; they ­were often “demonized and hanged” (101). Chapter 3 focuses on the Heart of Midlothian (1818) by Sir Walter Scott, which features four w ­ omen “implicated in infanticidal narratives” (82). In the fourth chapter, Francus examines court narratives of infanticide that feature “the rebellious infanticidal m ­ other,” “a spectacle who draws attention to herself and her deviance” (101). The trope of the “wicked stepmother” is investigated in the next two chapters, as Francus looks beyond the idea of stepmother as mere monstrosity and brings attention to narratives that highlight “patriarchal critique, the effects of marriage and sexuality on parenthood, the absence of nostalgia for the dead ­mother” (125). Ultimately, the stepmother, who comes into a f­ amily that “has been altered or damaged” (125), “exposes the domestic ideology as a fantasy, unachieved and possibly unachievable” (126). The widowers of Penelope Aubin’s Life of Charlotta Du Pont (1723) and Sarah Fielding’s Adventures of David S­ imple (1744) are, as Francus argues, examples of ­fathers who choose their sexual desires and self-­ interests over their duty to f­ amily by remarrying and introducing the stepmother into the home. Good stepmothers such as Jane Austen’s Mrs. Dashwood and Helena Wells Whitford’s Caroline Williams of The Stepmother: A Domestic Tale (1799) are also discussed, yet readers are reminded that, for the most part, stepmothers come out looking wicked, as they abuse patriarchal power or bring attention to the incompatibility of marital happiness and sexuality with good parenting (148). Elizabeth Burney and her relationship with her stepchildren are the

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focus of chapter 6. Again, Francus’s textual analy­sis is illuminating and persuasive and is suitable reading for a nonexpert in the field. The final chapter, titled “But She’s Not ­There,” investigates “spectral mother­ hood.” Francus provides three categories of the missing m ­ other: t­ hose who are absent or separated from their c­ hildren; ­those who are “surveilling,” caring for a child who does not recognize her as m ­ other; and the dead m ­ other (172). Examples from the work of Ann Radcliffe, Sarah Fielding, Amelia Opie, and o ­ thers illustrate the multiple ways in which m ­ others are pres­ent through their absence. The strength of this chapter lies in Francus’s assertion that it is through spectral motherhood, through “maternal haunting,” that m ­ others and c­ hildren can each have a narrative role (174). The absent ­mother is pres­ent through memory or through the written word (i.e., letters and w ­ ills); she is able to exert influence and power, yet “spectral motherhood is a fantasy, a compensatory vision to allay social anx­i­eties about maternal power, a vision that puts valorized motherhood largely beyond ­women’s reach” (195). Overall, Francus’s text is compelling, and the author’s argument is persuasive—­ motherhood in the eigh­teenth ­century was not a stable construct, and the lit­er­a­ ture of the period attests to that. Appropriate for both experts in eighteenth-­ century British lit­er­a­ture and ­women’s studies and students or newcomers to the period, Monstrous Motherhood reminds us to take note of the variety of m ­ others represented in lit­er­a­ture and the social forces that so often made them monsters.

431

Teresa Barnard, ed., British ­Women and the Intellectual World in the Long Eigh­teenth ­Century. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015. Pp. xviii + 194. REVIEWED BY ELLEN MOODY

T­here is much of value in this collection of essays, whose aim is to demonstrate

how eighteenth-­century w ­ omen participated in and influenced major intellectual currents of thought across the eigh­teenth c­ entury, from the more theoretical areas of science, religion, and lit­er­a­ture to practical arts such as building and landscape renovation and theatrical practice. In the volume’s introduction, Teresa Barnard and Ruth Watts suggest that while nineteenth-­century ­women writers are increasingly done justice to, far fewer eighteenth-­century w ­ omen have been. They acknowledge the work of books such as Karen O’Brien’s ­Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-­Century Britain (and Ann B. Shteir on w ­ omen in botany, Ludmilla Jordanova on w ­ omen artists, Ruth Watts on w ­ omen in science [5–6]), but they argue that ­those who deci­ded on another strategy and ­those who deci­ded not to threaten the hegemonic belief system of their culture have been overlooked. In order not to provoke objection, the ­women in this book masked and used irony in their content and kept implicit their innovative and (still unacknowledged) influential thought. Beyond the often-­described tradition of dismissal, erasure, and hostile and domesticating interpretation, how difficult it is to educate oneself without outside professional help, and with their lack of institutional affiliation or degree and training, ­these w ­ omen wrote in kinds of genres and discourse in which such intellectual work is not usually found. All ­women in this era had to overcome the entrenched idea that ­women ­were “innately vulnerable” (in more areas than sexual experience) and inferior intellectually and should be devoting their lives to their families, but h ­ ere we have also w ­ omen whose work was unpub-

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lished during their lifetime, w ­ omen who could not travel or w ­ ere outside recognized networks. ­There are (as other reviewers have noted, e.g., Hilda L. Smith, Early Modern ­Women 11, no. 1 [2016]: 67–70) prob­lems in Barnard’s pre­sen­ta­tion and the organ­ ization of the book. Key terms remain unclarified (for example, what is meant by “intellectual” or “feminism”); Barnard and some of her contributors want to claim more radicalism for individuals and texts covered than the texts support. They work hard to qualify what is already known: Daniel R. Grey basically retells the familiar story of Mary Wortley Montagu’s experience of smallpox and the controversies surrounding her introduction of small pox inoculation; Kaley Kramer reads Elizabeth Inchbald’s novel A ­Simple Story as serious Catholic polemics and strains somewhat to find in it a reflection of con­temporary Catholic life as it was lived by Catholics in this era that was so hostile to them. Albeit a fascinating and innovative gothic, Harriet Lee’s Canterbury Tales is not the revolutionary book that Imke Heuer claims it is. Susan Chaplin is not the first writer to try to reclaim Hannah More for feminism in the face of More’s overwhelming, incessant, vehement, and indefensible attacks on ­women’s liberty: Chaplin argues that ­those who have found in More a “deep distrust of the m ­ other” and “her body” ignore how her work feminizes some males (76) and includes biblical stories that focus on maternal agency and power. She wants us to acknowledge “the destructive, painful implications of female self-­abnegation in More’s professional life” as crucial to the nature of her work. What lesson Chaplain imagines is taught or was taught most readers is omitted (86). As fully contextualized as Malini Roy’s suggestive essay can make Wollstonecraft’s remarkably modern methods for taking care of her first baby, Fanny Imlay, the document in question, published a­ fter her death by Godwin as “Letters,” is “a cursory two pages with a t­able of contents, indicating seven projected letters, but one short introductory letter” (56). Roy teases what she can out of what is known about Wollstonecraft’s methods as a governess and ­mother from her life and other writing; the value of her essays resides more strongly in her summary and analy­sis of the era’s popu­lar pediatric writing and how it links to modern mainstream and controversial books on motherhood. I single out four essays as rich, original, and bringing before us ­women writers we might not have heard of. Barnard’s “The Lure of the Volcano in the Female Imagination” includes how Joseph Wright’s gothic paintings amplify the disquiet about the origins and history of the earth, a disquiet intensified by reports of three volcanic eruptions. Erasmus Darwin eulogized and normalized them in his poem The Botanic Garden. Darwin also draws up scientific instruction for w ­ omen in his

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1650–1850 Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools. The Royal Institute at Albemarle’s lectures on volcanoes w ­ ere open to all middle-­class ­people; a ­woman with the money, social position and sufficient health to travel could also examine t­ hese sites. Eleanor Anne Porden (she became the explorer Franklin’s wife) attended, studied and analyzed what she read and heard and saw, formed a group around her interest in “the earth’s strata, rocks, structure,” and then turned not just to geology but to Rosicrucian my­thol­ogy to write an epic poem, The Veils. An analy­sis of this seemingly impossible blending of utterly distinct areas helps to explain similar amalgams in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and l­ater novels (e.g., Valperga). By sheer hard study and through her f­ amily, local and epistolary connections, Anna Seward’s influential poetry, rich in understanding of science, reached many readers. Joanna Baillie and Maria Edgeworth rightly complained how ­women ­were given insufficient training to write scientifically about volcanoes (36), but Anna Seward made magnificent imaginative use of Patrick Brydone’s remarkably detailed letters and notes on his excursion to Etna in her poem “Mount Etna” (45–47). Barnard finds comparable to Sir William Hamilton’s writings and influence Barbauld’s antivivisection poetry, which exposed the cruelty of con­temporary experimentation with animals. Barbauld’s “Mouse’s Petition” identified with the titular small creature, affirmed the value of its life, and “prevented the par­tic­u­lar animal’s pain and death” (35–36). Natasha Duquette’s “Veiled Exegesis: Dissenting ­Women’s Aesthetic Approach to Theological Hermeneutics and Social Action” is a long essay that makes large claims for the “theological hermeneutics” incorporated into dissenting ­women’s poetry through a group of masking tactics. The (to some) familiar religious sensibility and melancholy of Williams’s Peru and Poems elaborates on details of the ­human suffering of the Atlantic passage against legislation supposedly ameliorating the slaves’ condition. Williams writes a “contemplative sublime,” calling for “mercy and grace,” a “courageous movement into unmapped territory, healing generosity of feeling,” an “infusion of darkness with light [that has a] degree of permanence that points ­towards eternity” (122). Jane de Montfort in Baillie’s play The Trial pres­ents a socially conscious sublime. Baillie’s pre­sen­ta­tion of a “dauntless social consciousness” (123) prompts Schimmelpenninck’s pre­sen­ta­tion of sublimity in which she treats “beauty as an overarching theological and aesthetic category” and refutes Burke (125). All of ­these w ­ omen poets and ­others (Hannah More and her Quaker cousin Elizabeth Fry) supported one another’s public identities through subscriber lists, introductions, and footnotes. They are female prophets before Emily Dickinson: Williams and Barbauld ­were likened to Jael and

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Deborah. They represent “collaborative dissents in culturally sanctioned feminine forms.” Their legacy is found in Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Louisa May Alcott. Louise Duckling’s “Coming Out of the Closet and Competing with John Any-­ body” explains why Baillie is still rarely credited for the originality of her thought in the preface to her plays, in which she anticipates arguments found in Words­ worth’s Lyrical Ballads. Baillie argued for writing in natu­ral, ­simple language (not embellished, not artificially adorned) to expose and explore passions that ­were not presented frankly (even in radical novels); she suggested that readers, viewers, and poets alike wanted to explore troubled p ­ eople, that we feel a sympathetic attraction to displays of “unsocialized passion.” This is Adam Smith’s theory of moral sympathy tied to the intimate private world (148–150). Duckling also connects this discourse to ­those that Mary Povey (Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-­Victorian E ­ ngland ) demonstrated are attempts to intervene in discourses hitherto reserved for men by using dif­f er­ent or newly reinvented genres. Duckling suggests that Basil is a reconstruction in dramatic terms of Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of W ­ omen ­because it is about the prob­lem of how to act out a role that is proscribed. The full context h ­ ere is Ellen Donkin’s study of Baillie’s c­ areer in the theater (the details of her c­ areer tactics and difficulties with p ­ eople like Garrick) in Getting into the Act (cited by Duckling). Donkin shows how Burney turned to men as man­ag­ers and as surrogates, and Baillie made the ­mistake not to go to rehearsals and involve herself in the productions of her plays. That is why neither succeeded on the stage—­damned if you do and damned if you ­don’t. Baillie is attacked a­ fter she comes “of the closet,” but ­because she did not literally come out enough regularly where it might have counted practically, her work was not presented with the depth of seriousness, energy, and creativity that productions require. Duckling finds that Baillie ended (like Elizabeth Car­ter) hiding b ­ ehind an image of domesticity and the proper lady (153–155). I have saved for last Laura Mayer’s essay on the patronage, writings, and picturesque touring of Elizabeth Percy, First Duchess of North­umberland (1716–1776). Elizabeth Percy married for love Sir Hugh Smithson; the pair inherited vast wealth, and the Duchess set about renovating Alnwick c­ astle into a gothic-­style c­ astle that was livable (for example, it had a well-­lighted library). Her building activities w ­ ere analogous with t­ hose of Lady Anne Clifford (the much-­respected l­ater seventeenth-­ century power­ful aristocrat). She seems to have been much respected by Thomas Percy and praised by students of ancient buildings (133). Yet Elizabeth Percy is dismissed as a marginalized patron; the Duke is praised for Alnwick (though the

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1650–1850 money to do the renovation was also originally hers), and the Duchess’s sentimental enthusiastic tone is the basis of ridicule and dismissal. Both Elizabeth Bohls (­Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818) and Povey show how ­women used discourses other than the usual to intervene, contribute to, and create the emerging picturesque aesthetic. Elizabeth Percy’s diaries demonstrate that her choices ­were conscious. She amplified the mood of the gothic through uses of picturesque views, objects, and landscaping. She romanticized and gendered styles; she built up sensual ways of viewing. We should see her as a responsive antiquarian in the spirit of the era. Barnard’s volume brings before us worlds of ­women intervening in the arts and sciences seriously. ­There is much quotation from lesser-­known works so as to give the reader something of the experience of the texts (e.g., from Lee’s Canterbury Tales; from many of the materials, unpublished letters, and controversies pertaining to scientific innovations such as inoculation). The volume is most of the time readable, happily ­free of the boilerplate rhe­toric of theory. I was made uncomfortable by the cited grounds of one reviewer’s objection to this lack: Caroline Franklyn says ­there is too ­little discussion of the “gendering of genres, and the status of antiquarians and amateurs, particularly as several contributors are themselves in­de­pen­dent scholars” (Modern Language Review 112 [April  2017]: 489). As an in­de­pen­dent scholar myself, this made me realize how many of the ­women in this volume would in the era have been regarded as in­de­pen­dent scholars too (if the term had existed).

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Stephen Bending, Green Retreats: W ­ omen, Gardens and Eighteenth-­Century Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. x + 312. 25 b/w illustrations. REVIEWED BY R.J.W. MILLS

Stephen Bending’s volume takes as its subject a number of figures from the

eighteenth-­century “educated, leisured, wealthy, and relatively tight-­knight female elite” (2) and the gardens they inhabited and created. Current scholarship has focused on the “male genius [transforming] female nature” (8); Bending wants to “put ­women back into garden history” (4). He does so by excavating how gardens ­were places where ­women could fashion their identities in knowledge of, but also in opposition to, well-­known and usually gendered tropes of gardens as locations of seduction, retirement, piety, and punishment. Investigating ­these ­women moves us beyond t­hose histories of eighteenth-­century gardens that associate ­women with e­ ither “pious domesticated femininity” or “passive sexual availability” (32). Bending’s subjects designed, worked on, and thought about their gardens in acts of deliberate self-­fashioning against this lit­er­a­ture of retirement. The two chapters in the opening Part I delineate, through a nuanced examination of published and private material, eighteenth-­century Britain’s lit­er­a­ture of gardening and the figure of w ­ omen within “mainstream cultural imagination of retirement” (92). Accounts of the retirement of the “learned ­woman, the pious ­woman, or the proper lady secure in her country retreat” (68) ­were developed in relation to, and often in opposition to, fash­ion­able commercial society. Bending emphasizes the “cultural uncertainty” about the benefits of solitude and retirement for w ­ omen. He also emphasizes how the lived experience of w ­ omen gardeners, while greatly framed by the lit­er­a­ture of refinement, did not in real­ity neatly align with expectations. Such models informed his subjects’ action but equally

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1650–1850 informed their attempts to assert themselves against expectations. One particularly in­ter­est­ing observation is Bending’s view that eighteenth-­century w ­ omen gardeners often wrote to each other with a “palpable sense of community” (84), as members of a virtual convent of ­women retired from social life. Part II contains four case studies. Based on extensive delving into the Montagu Papers at the Huntington Library, the first chapter explores the garden of the “Queen of the Bluestockings,” Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800), at Sandleford. Initially, Montagu used her country retirement and modest garden life to develop a “carefully cultivated image of retired religious interiority” (160), in an effort to counteract negative associations with “immodest metropolitan sociability” (141). ­L ater in life, employing “Capability” Brown, Montagu refashioned Sandleford’s grounds to precisely the sort that befitted her status as a “fine lady” (162), but she compensated for the impressions given by such expensive proj­ects by constantly spending on benevolent c­ auses. The gardens at Sandleford allowed Montagu to switch between presenting herself as a wealthy metropolitan ­woman of letters and then as a religious recluse living a life of pastoral retirement. The next chapter moves on to the gardens of Lady Mary Coke (1727–1811) and Lady Caroline Holland (1723–1774). The latter, the least arresting of Bending’s case studies, used her gardens at Holland Park as a location of semiretirement from the po­liti­cal activities of her husband, Henry Fox. Holland did not experience her garden in the form of “learned and literary self-­representation” (190) but as a proj­ect with which she busied herself and over which she exerted control. Bending emphasizes that Caroline Holland should be seen as a key figure in the construction of the Holland Park estate and as of comparable importance to the again-­involved Capability Brown. Mary Coke’s neighboring Notting Hill was a “working garden rather than a plea­sure garden maintained by ­others” (191). Coke suffered two personal disasters: a deeply unhappy and abusive marriage to the libertine Lord Coke, followed a de­cade ­later by the death of her intimate the Duke of York. The failure of divorce proceedings led Coke to believe she wore a “badge of shame” (196) for the rest of her life. In both cases, Coke felt abandoned by her f­ amily and, following the death of York in 1767, she immersed herself in retirement. Coke’s was a lonely solitude: the standard accounts of female retirement, with its focus on meditation on one’s life, could only lead her down the path of depression. Gardening was a means of blocking out, for as long as pos­si­ble, the melancholy of her situation. Bending analyzes Coke’s publicly prominent garden as a deliberate means, despite her personal solitude, of publicly fighting back against the world that had abandoned her.

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Book Reviews

Chapter 5 focuses on Henrietta Knight (1699–1756), who had been banned from London in 1736, due to accusations of an alleged love affair by her husband, Robert Knight. She settled at Barrells Hall in Warwickshire. Bending views her as an example of how a ­woman could meditate on the “public models of private life” (206). She received unhelpful advice, b ­ ecause of its focus on the masculine withdrawal from politics, of her sympathetic half ­brother, Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke (1678–1751), while her f­ amily framed her retirement in terms of the tradition of scandal narratives discussed in Part I. Supported by the poet and gardener William Shenstone (1714–1763), Knight fought back against the framing of her country retirement as a “form of endless disgrace” (219) and used landscape gardening to regain some semblance of power. At Barrells she created a garden in which she could perform the role of being hostess of a literary circle; in ­doing so she aimed to secure a pleas­ur­able retirement that pushed back against the moralizing wider public’s expectations of how she should behave. Bending’s often delightful and often moving book is steeped in literary and nonliterary texts and much archival material. This is a well-­produced and, especially in the second half, well-­written book. Bending’s prose is lively and often witty. His account is supported by numerous well-­taken photo­graphs and helpfully illustrative eighteenth-­century drawings of the gardens discussed. That said, the book ­really comes to life in the case studies that make up Part II. The opening chapters in Part I are quite diffuse. Bending’s arguments are often densely interwoven with, often hidden beneath, his recounting of the diverse languages of retirement in eighteenth-­century literary and religious culture. On the odd occasion, the analy­sis verges on the jointly grandiose and banal. We are told that one “feature that we should recognise in the experience of the garden is its temporality” (187), which is another way of expressing the fact that Caroline Holland had access to more than one property and so did not spend all her time in gardens at Holland Park. Overall, however, this is a fascinating volume that adds to our current scholarly understanding about how wealthy ­woman constructed their identities, how they used their gardens in this pro­cess, and how they ­were influenced by and interacted with the language of retirement.

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS Chapter Authors KEVIN JOEL BERLAND is emeritus professor of En­glish and comparative lit­er­a­ ture at Pennsylvania State University. He has published widely in the areas of early modern British and colonial lit­er­a­ture, classics in the eigh­teenth ­century, physiognomy, colonial ­Virginia, disability, and poetry. He is working on a history of the reputation of Socrates from the earliest days of print to 1800. N. S. BOONE teaches courses in writing and American lit­er­a­ture at Harding University. His publications range from essays on ancient texts, such as The Iliad and the book of Revelation, to British authors such as D. H. Lawrence and Philip Larkin, classic American writers such as Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mark Twain, and modern and con­temporary poets such as William Carlos Williams, Rita Dove, and Jorie Graham. The essay published in this volume, on Thomas Tryon, is his only foray into the long eigh­teenth ­century. PETER BYRNE is associate professor of En­glish at Kent State University at Trumbull. He received his PhD at the University of California, Irvine, in 2004. His research focuses primarily on the role of genre in theatrical composition and per­for­mance. Among his recent published articles are “ ‘Titles Are Jests’: The Challenge to Generic Dialectic in A King and No King,” in Medieval and Re­nais­sance Lit­er­a­ture in ­England

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About the Contributors

28 (2015), and “ ‘ The Bowe of Ulysses’: Reworking the Tragedies of Shakespeare,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy (2016). GREG CLINGHAM is director of Bucknell University Press and professor of En­glish at Bucknell University. He is the author of Johnson, Writing, and Memory (2002), the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson (1997), and coeditor of Samuel Johnson ­after 300 Years (2009), among many other publications on Dryden, Johnson, Boswell, translation, and historiography. He is presently writing on Sir George Macartney’s unpublished diplomatic papers from Rus­sia, China, and the Cape of Good Hope, and on Lady Anne Barnard’s archive and her depiction of life at the Cape circa 1800. IGOR DJORDJEVIC is chair of the Department of En­glish and an associate professor of early modern lit­er­a­ture at Glendon College, York University. He is the author of Holinshed’s Nation: Ideals, Memory, and Practical Policy in the “Chronicles” (2010) and King John (Mis)Remembered: The Dunmow Chronicle, the Lord Admiral’s Men, and the Formation of Cultural Memory (2015). His research interests are in the history of reading and especially the relationship between En­glish cultural memory and the vari­ous forms of and approaches to historical writing in the early modern period. PATRICIA GAEL received her PhD from Pennsylvania State University. Publishing essays in journals such as Seventeenth ­Century, Words­worth Circle, and Library, she has addressed topics ranging from the repre­sen­ta­tions of kingship to lyrical poetry to the emergence of book reviewing during the Enlightenment. An in­de­ pen­dent scholar, she collaborates with a prominent information and finance firm. WILLIAM HALL is assistant professor of En­glish at Brigham Young University. His research interests include eighteenth-­century poetry, literary history, and aesthetics. Digital humanities methods, especially macroanalysis and data visualization, inform his work on eighteenth-­century poetry and poetics. ASHLEY MARSHALL is professor of En­glish at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is the author of The Practice of Satire in ­England, 1658–1770 (2013) and Swift and History: Politics and the En­glish Past (2015), and has published articles in the Review of En­glish Studies, Modern Philology, the Huntington Library Quarterly, Eighteenth-­

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About the Contributors

Century Life, Swift Studies, and elsewhere. She is currently completing a book on po­liti­cal journalism in London, 1695–1720. MARIA CLARA PAULINO is associate professor of art history at Winthrop University. Before moving to the United States, she taught at the University of Porto, Portugal, and was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. She holds gradu­ate degrees in art history and Germanic philology. Her research has been supported by grants from the Fulbright Foundation and the British Council. Her interests lie in the intersections between art and lit­er­a­ture and in the cultural dimensions of “seeing.” Her book Uma torre delicada: Lisboa e arredores em notas de viajantes ca. 1750–1850 (2013) discusses the art and architecture of Lisbon as seen through the eyes of foreign visitors in the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries. ALEX SELTZER is an in­de­pen­dent scholar with a special interest in Mark Catesby. He has published an essay in the British Art Journal on Catesby and the role of the physico-­theological view of nature in some of the artist’s odd couplings of plants and animals. He has also published studies on Gustave Courbet, on Alphonse Legros, and on the film director Akira Kurosawa. WILLIAM STARGARD is professor of art history and assistant dean of faculty development and teaching excellence at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Mas­sa­ chu­setts. His scholarly work focuses on Bernardo Vittone and architecture in the eighteenth-­century Savoyard state. He is presently completing a book manuscript, “Enclosure and Its Display in the Architecture of Bernardo Vittone and Early Modern Eu­rope.” MORGAN STRAWN earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin–­Madison. He has published numerous articles on lit­er­a­ture and its relationships to the classical tradition and religious history, including “Homer, Sentimentalism, and Pope’s Translation of the Iliad,” which appeared in Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture (2012). An in­de­ pen­dent scholar, he resides in New York, where he conducts research into topics such as Boswell, eighteenth-­century Catholicism, and authoritarianism. DONOVAN TANN is professor of En­glish and chair of the Language Arts Department at Hesston College. He completed his PhD in En­glish at T ­ emple University in

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About the Contributors

2014 and received a 2008–2011 fellowship through the Lilly Gradu­ate Fellows Program. His dissertation examined discourses of religious space in seventeenth-­ century En­glish lit­er­a­ture, and he has since presented widely on the intersections of lit­er­a­ture and religious thought in the early modern En­glish world. ROBIN L. THOMAS is associate professor of art history at Pennsylvania State University. His publications focus on the architecture of Naples and include Architecture and Statecraft: Charles of Bourbon’s Naples 1734–59 (2013). At pres­ent, he is working on a book about the Bourbon palaces at Capodimonte, Caserta, and Portici.

Reviewers MARTINE W. BROWNLEY is Goodrich C. White Professor of En­glish at Emory University and director of Emory’s Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. She has published articles and reviews on eighteenth-­century authors and on con­temporary w ­ omen writers. Her books and essay collections include Mothering the Mind: Twelve Studies of Writers and Their ­Silent Partners (coedited with Ruth Perry, 1984), Clarendon and the Rhe­toric of Historical Form (1985), Deferrals of Domain: Con­temporary ­Women Novelists and the State (2000), ­Women and Autobiography (coedited with Allison Kimmich, 1999), and Reconsidering Biography: Clarendon and the Rhe­toric of Historical Form (2012). KEVIN L. COPE is Adams Professor of En­glish Lit­er­a­ture and a member of the comparative lit­er­a­ture faculty at Louisiana State University. The author of Criteria of Certainty, of John Locke Revisited, and of In and ­After the Beginning, Cope has written scholarly essays on topics ranging from the early modern fascination with miracles to colossalism in modern culture. He edits the annual journal 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era and has served for over a de­cade as the general editor of ECCB: The Eighteenth-­Century Current Bibliography. A member of the National Governing Council of the American Society for University Professors, Cope is regularly referenced in publications such as the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed and is a frequent guest on radio and tele­vi­sion news and talk shows. BÄRBEL CZENNIA is associate professor of En­glish at McNeese State University and the book review editor of 1650–1850: Aesthetics, Ideas, and Inquiries in the

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About the Contributors

Early Modern Era. She has published a book (in German) on novel translation (1990) and essays on Congreve and Sheridan translation as well as on nation-­ building, the exploration of the South Pacific, meteorology, sociability, libertines, female eccentrics, fireworks, animals, world citizenship, and gardening in the long eigh­teenth ­century. Her essay collection Celebrity: Idiom of a Modern Era was published in 2013. PAUL J. DEGATEGNO is professor of En­glish at Pennsylvania State University, Brandywine. He is the author of James Macpherson (1989), Ivanhoe: The Mask of Chivalry (1994, 1998), and The Critical Companion to Jonathan Swift (2006, 2012). His most recent essay, “The Correspondence of James Macpherson,” was published in The International Companion to James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian (2017). He is currently working on Macpherson’s government pamphlets. LYNN FESTA is associate professor of En­glish at Rutgers University, the author of Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-­Century Britain and France (2006), and coeditor (with Daniel Carey) of The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-­ Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory (2013). Her book Fiction without Humanity: Person, Animal, ­Thing in the Early Enlightenment is forthcoming. ANNE BARBEAU GARDINER is emerita professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, and a contributing editor of New Oxford Book Reviews. She has published widely on Dryden—­including Ancient Faith and Modern Freedom in John Dryden’s “The Hind and the Panther” (1998)—­and on Milton, Swift, and Catholics of the seventeenth ­century. BRIAN GOLDBERG is associate professor of En­glish at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of The Lake Poets and Professional Identity (2007) and essays about Words­worth, Shelley, Keats, Scott, and other Romantic writers. ELIZABETH A. HAIT is associate professor of En­glish at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. She has taught courses on the lit­er­a­ture of the Romantic period, the Victorian period, critical theory, and ­children’s lit­er­a­ture. She has published articles in Neophilologus, Studies in Short Fiction, and Names. CHRISTOPHER D. JOHNSON is professor of En­glish and director of the Robert E. McNair Center for Research and Ser­vice at Francis Marion University. He has served

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About the Contributors

as president of the Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-­Century Studies. He has published over forty book reviews and more than twenty articles and essays. His most recent book, A Po­liti­cal Biography of Sarah Fielding, was published in 2017. KIT KINCADE is professor of En­glish at Indiana State University. She is the editor of Daniel Defoe’s An Essay on the History and Real­ity of Apparitions (Stoke Newington Daniel Defoe edition, 2007) and coeditor (with Katherine Ellison and Holly Faith Nelson) of Topographies of the Imagination: New Approaches to Daniel Defoe (2015). She has also published an edition of Clara Reeve’s The Old En­glish Baron (2010), essays on Daniel Defoe, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen, and many book reviews for ECCB: The Eighteenth-­Century Current Bibliography. MEREDITH A. LOVE is professor of En­glish at Francis Marion University, specializing in composition and writing studies, rhe­toric and feminism, professional writing, and college and c­ areer readiness. Her research has been published in Rhe­toric Review, Composition Studies, College Composition and Communication, Feminist Teacher, and Harlot. She teaches first-­year composition, business writing, theories of writing, and gender and public rhe­toric. R.J.W. MILLS is a teaching fellow in the history of po­liti­cal thought at University College London, has published numerous articles on eighteenth-­century British intellectual history, and is slowly finishing a book on the Scottish Enlightenment’s study of religion and glacially beginning a biography of the Scottish poet-­philosopher James Beattie (1735–1803). ELLEN MOODY holds a PhD from the City University of New York. She was a lecturer in En­glish in se­nior colleges for over thirty years and recently retired from George Mason University. She continues to teach at the Osher Institute of Lifelong Learning at Mason as well as at American University. Her most recent book is an edition of Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde; or, The Recluse of the Lake (2017). Her other published book is on Anthony Trollope and cyberspace (Trollope on the ’Net). She has published essays on Trollope as well as on seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­­century lit­er­a­ture, with a focus on ­women’s poetry and Jane Austen. She reviews frequently for eighteenth-­century periodicals and maintains a large scholarly website and two scholarly blogs.

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About the Contributors

JASON A . NEIDLEMAN is professor of po­liti­cal science at the University of La Verne, where he teaches po­liti­cal theory. He is the author of The General W ­ ill Is Citizenship: Inquiries into French Po­liti­cal Thought (2001) and Rousseau’s Ethics of Truth: A Sublime Science of S­ imple Souls (2017). His current research focuses on the relationship between power and ideas. An example of this work, “Left to Their Own Devices: Smith and Rousseau on Public Opinion and the Role of the State,” can be found in Maria Pia Paganelli, Dennis C. Rasmussen, and Craig Smith, eds., Adam Smith and Rousseau: Ethics, Politics, Economics (2018). DAVID A. REID is currently an adjunct instructor of history at Joliet Ju­nior College in Joliet, Illinois. His research focuses on the history of science, particularly as it relates to science education among En­glish religious Dissenters and their collegiate academies during the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries. His published work has appeared in the journals History of Universities, History of Education, and Northern History. JAQUELYN W. WALSH is professor of En­glish at McNeese State University, where she has taught since 1990. A gradu­ate of the University of Mississippi, she is the author of the book The Impact of Restoration Critical Theory on Four of Shakespeare’s Comedies, published in 2000 by Edwin Mellen Press. Her publications include articles on Colley Cibber, Francis Beaumont, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Nadine Gordimer, Barry Hannah, Robert Olen Butler, Oriana Fallaci, Dana Gioia, Paul Zimmer, Sherman Alexie, Ford Madox Ford, Frank McGinley, and Jorie Graham, in such works as Cyclopedia of World Authors, Irish Novelists, and Critical Survey of Long Fiction.

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