1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (Volume 26) 9781684483242

Citation preview

1650–1850

EDITORIAL BOARD Theodore E. D. Braun University of Delaware Samara Anne Cahill Blinn College 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 A. 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 SAMARA ANNE CAHILL, Book Review Editor

LEWISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA

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VOLUME

 ISBN 978-1-68448-321-1 ISSN 1065-3112 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication rec­ord for this book is available from the British Library. This collection copyright © 2021 by Bucknell University Press Individual chapters copyright © 2021 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​.­bucknelluniversitypress​.­org Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press Manufactured in the United States of Amer­i­ca

CONTENTS ESSAYS Edited by Kevin L. Cope Prostitutes or Proselytes: Eighteenth-­Century Female Enthusiasts ROBIN RUNIA

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Edmund Burke on Monarchy: Keystone and ­Trials of Strength NORBERT COL

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“­These Kings of me”: The Provenance and Significance of an Allusion in Johnson’s Taxation No Tyranny MATTHEW M. DAVIS

42

Localizing ­Women? Mary Wollstonecraft, Burka Avenger, and the Adaptable Heroine SAMARA ANNE CAHILL

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The ­Woman, the Politician, and the W ­ ill: Charlotte Smith’s Literary Assaults on John Robinson, “The Lowest Rank of ­Human Degradation” ANDREW CONNELL

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In Quotes: Annotating Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda MELVYN NEW

112

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Contents

SPECIAL FEATURE Meta­phor in the Poetry and Criticism of the Long Eigh­teenth C ­ entury Edited by Mark A. Pedreira Introduction to the Special Feature: Meta­phor in the Poetry and Criticism of the Long Eigh­teenth ­Century MARK A. PEDREIRA

133

Organ­izing Poetry in the Eigh­teenth C ­ entury: Anthologies and Meta­phor ADAM ROUNCE

141

Curvilinear Thinking in the Long Eigh­teenth C ­ entury TAYLOR CORSE

163

Feeling Allegory: Affect, Meta­phor, and Milton’s Eighteenth-­Century Reception MICHAEL EDSON

178

The Worldliness of Edward Young and the Meta­phorics of Georgian Patronage JACOB SIDER JOST

204

Coleridge and Meta­phor: Crossing Thresholds LINDA L. REESMAN

220

BOOK REVIEWS Edited by Samara Anne Cahill Janet Aikins Yount, ed., Cla­ris­sa: The Twentieth-­Century Response, 1900–1950, 2 vols. Reviewed by SÖREN HAMMERSCHMIDT 239 O. M. Brack Jr. and Robert De Maria Jr., eds., The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. Volume 20. Johnson on Demand: Reviews, Prefaces, and Ghost-­Writings Reviewed by GREG CLINGHAM 243 Anthony W. Lee, ed., Community and Solitude: New Essays on Johnson’s Circle Reviewed by JOHN J. BURKE 252 Anthony W. Lee, ed., New Essays on Samuel Johnson: Revaluation Reviewed by CHRISTOPHER D. JOHNSON 259

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Contents

Anthony W. Lee, ed., Samuel Johnson among the Modernists Reviewed by JOHN SITTER 263 Leo Damrosch, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends who ­Shaped an Age Reviewed by MALCOLM JACK 266 Samara Anne Cahill, Intelligent Souls? Feminist Orientalism in Eighteenth-­Century En­glish Lit­er­a­ture Reviewed by ASHLEY BENDER 269 Teresa Barnard, ed., British ­Women and the Intellectual World in the Long Eigh­teenth ­Century Reviewed by GEFEN BAR-­ON SANTOR 275 Trevor Ross, Writing in Public: Lit­er­a­ture and the Press in Eighteenth-­Century Britain Reviewed by MALCOLM JACK 280 Rivka Swenson, Essential Scots and the Idea of Unionism in Anglo-­Scottish Lit­er­a­ture, 1603–1832 Reviewed by PAUL J. DeGATEGNO 282 Paul Corneilson, ed., Ballet ­Music from the Mannheim Court. Part V, Christian Cannabich. Les Fêtes du sérail, and Carol G. Marsh, ed., Angélique et Médor, ou Roland furieux Reviewed by GLORIA EIVE 285 Margaret Jacob, The Secular Enlightenment Reviewed by R. J. W. MILLS 288 Eve Tavor Bannet and Roxann Wheeler, eds., Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Culture Vol. 46 Reviewed by CHRISTOPHER D. JOHNSON 292 Eve Tavor Bannet and Roxann Wheeler, eds., Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Culture Vol. 47 Reviewed by CHRISTOPHER D. JOHNSON 296

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About the Contributors

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1650–1850

PROSTITUTES OR PROSELYTES EIGHTEENTH-­CENTURY FEMALE ENTHUSIASTS ROBIN RUNIA

The “exorbitant monstrous appetite” of religious enthusiasm remained the tar-

get of derision in ­England throughout the long eigh­teenth ­century, and recent scholarship has begun to situate enthusiasm and responses to it within a phil­ osophical, po­liti­cal, and physiological framework.1 As a result, the strange and strained relationship between the body and mind of the enthusiast has come ­under scrutiny. However, mid-­eighteenth-­century lit­er­a­ture suggests that female enthusiasts are particularly dangerous. Repre­sen­ta­tions of female enthusiasts exemplify Enlightenment’s deep distrust of the female body as a site of uncontainable feeling or sensation, of the female mind’s ability to appropriately understand such sensation, and, significantly, of the ability of mature w ­ omen to influence how younger w ­ omen interpret sensation. Older enthusiastic w ­ omen, fooled by their own minds and bodies, become dangerous according to the agency they wield in the potential deception of young w ­ omen desperate to interpret their own sensations. This essay traces, first, a history of enthusiasm’s relationship to the gendered body. The second portion focuses on repre­sen­ta­tions of enthusiastic w ­ omen in midcentury satiric texts that expose the real power of ­women’s relationships. Some readers may wish for an analy­sis of enthusiasm as it is represented by ­women in the eigh­teenth c­ entury. Such an exploration of the ways in which ­women, constrained at midcentury to par­tic­u­lar discourses and genres, wrote about enthusiasm is a worthy proj­ect that awaits further development. Gary ­Kelly’s succinct assessment of w ­ omen’s writing at this point in the period as l­imited to

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1650–1850 the “belletristic genres,” “purposeful piety,” or “ ‘useful’ discourses” provides clear coordinates for the mapping of ­women’s writing on spiritual and religious ­matters, and Phyllis Mack’s Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment leads the way in its in-­depth analy­sis of Methodist ­women’s correspondence.2 Further worthy work awaits f­ uture development. Nevertheless, the apparent absence of w ­ omen writing about enthusiasm in a satiric mode does not negate the implications of men’s views of w ­ omen and their relationships. On the contrary, t­ hese texts testify to the power of ­women’s sensation and the strength of the bonds between w ­ omen. Unraveling the way female enthusiasts prove the strength of female relationships requires a brief review of the eighteenth-­century conceptions of religious enthusiasm. As Michael Heyd has thoroughly demonstrated, the nuanced conceptions of enthusiasm that appear in the philosophical writings of early enlightenment writers owe significant debts to the work of Re­nais­sance thinkers.3 In the Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Burton makes clear his fears that the “madness” of enthusiasm more frequently strikes “silly, rude, ignorant ­people, old folks that are naturally prone to superstition, weak w ­ omen, or some poor illiterate persons, that are apt to be wrought upon, and gulled in this kind.” 4 For Burton, then, enthusiasm appears to be a failure of the intellect to grasp the real c­ auses of physical sensation. But by 1689, Locke had moved beyond the classical scholars upon whom Burton had relied, to write that the real failure of enthusiasm was presumption. He explains that enthusiasts are most often “men, in whom melancholy has mixed with devotion, or whose conceit of themselves has raised them into an opinion of greater familiarity with God . . . ​[who] have often flattered themselves with a persuasion of an immediate intercourse with the Deity.”5 We should then understand the ­mistake of enthusiasm as the manifestation of a warmed or “over-­weening brain.” 6 Most important, however, is Locke’s addition of moral culpability to enthusiasm’s pathology. The individual in Locke’s schema becomes responsible for accurately assessing the perception of his or her sensation. The failure of the individual’s overheated, malfunctioning mind then comes to be perceived as blameworthy.7 Shaftesbury continues to unpack the physiological nature of enthusiasm in “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm” (1711). As Isabel Rivers details, Shaftesbury’s distinction between a noble, aesthetic enthusiasm and vulgar enthusiasm recommends vigilant reflection as necessary in regulating the vulgar manifestations of the feeling.8 While he tends to deemphasize the enthusiast’s moral failure, he warms his readers about the body’s ability to overcome the mind. He cautions his reader to be wholly ­free of melancholy,

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Prostitutes or Proselytes

For other­wise, the panic may have been caught; the evidence of the senses lost, as in a dream; and the imagination so inflamed, as in a moment to have burned up ­every particle of judgment and reason. The combustible ­matters lie prepared within, and ready to take fire at a spark; but chiefly in a multitude seized with the same spirit. No won­der if the blaze rises so of a sudden; when innumerable eyes glow with the passion, and heaving breast are laboring with inspiration; when not the aspect only, but the very breath and exhalations of men are infectious, and the inspiring disease imparts itself by insensible transpiration.9 Shaftesbury articulates the idea that the disease of melancholy can be transformed into the panic of enthusiasm, which then manifests in m ­ ental illness even while it tortures the body. Significantly, as Shaftesbury concentrates on the physical nature of the disease, his language sexualizes it. The glowing eyes and heaving breasts are signs of a physical passion that uses reason and evidence as fuel for the fire ready to infect the next unsuspecting victim. David Hume, in his “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm” (1741), applies his strict views of causality to enthusiasm, reflecting the period’s skepticism and general mistrust of the enthusiast. As a result, he takes further pains to define enthusiasm as a malfunctioning of the mind that takes the form of a misreading of the body. In par­tic­u­lar, however, Hume revives Locke’s placing of moral culpability on the enthusiasts, blaming the “unaccountable elevation and presumption, arising from prosperous success, from luxuriant health, from strong spirits, or from a bold and confident disposition.”10 He goes on to insist “hope, pride, presumption, a warm imagination, together with ignorance, are, therefore, the true source of ENTHUSIASM .”11 While echoing Burton and Locke, ­here, Hume makes explicit how the physical and material situation of an individual warms or inflames the enthusiast’s imagination to unaccountable levels. The real prob­lem ­here is “that agreeable impression which arises in the mind, when the view of ­either our virtue, beauty, riches, or power, makes us satisfied with ourselves,” or, in other words, the enthusiast’s tendency to take real plea­sure in the sensation of his or her body. The enthusiast revels in “raptures” and “transports” and attributes them to “the immediate inspiration of that Divine Being.”12 The enthusiast must be held responsible for his or her false attribution of physical ecstasy to a spiritual cause. ­These definitions of enthusiasm as a moral failure of the individual to appropriately read sensation—as a contagious potential of the weak mind to misread the body—­reflects the age’s growing skepticism regarding spiritual m ­ atters. Specifically, the heat of the passions celebrated by the enthusiast ­were most often

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1650–1850 represented as overtly sexual, and the subtle sexual language of Shaftesbury’s “glowing eyes” and “heaving breasts” as well as Hume’s “raptures” is transformed into an explicit critique of enthusiasts’ sexuality. Daniel Featly’s The Dippers Dipt (1645) demonizes the body’s sexuality as an explanation of enthusiasm: “And though the Familists, Libertines and Anabaptists stand in opposition to Baptists, yet the ­great fowler of souls catcheth them all with the same foule bird-­lime of impure lusts.”13 Henry More in Enthusiasmus Triumphatus (1656) also links the heat of the enthusiast’s body to sexuality, arguing “it is plain in sundry examples of Enthusiasm above named, that the more hidden and lurking fumes of Lust had tainted the Phancies of ­those Pretenders to Prophecy and Inspiration.”14 This sexualization of enthusiasm grows increasingly gendered throughout the eigh­teenth ­century, betraying the ­triple threat of ­women’s bodies, minds, and relationships. Jonathan Swift picks up this thread in his “A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit” (1710) to place the blame for manifestations of enthusiasm upon ­women. First, tracing the history of enthusiasm, he writes, “I find ­there are certain bounds set even to the irregularities of ­human thought, and ­those a ­great deal narrower than is commonly apprehended. For, as they all frequently interfere, even in their wildest ravings; so ­there is one fundamental point wherein they are sure to meet, as lines in a centre, and that is the Community of ­Women.”15 While Swift does go on to include men in his critique of the “irregularities of h ­ uman thought” when he acknowledges that “persons of visionary devotion, e­ ither men or w ­ omen, are in their complexion, of all o ­ thers the most amorous,” he ultimately blames the susceptibility of ­women to manipulation for the source of ­women’s “frequent interference,” adding, “This may be farther strengthened by observing, with won­der, how unaccountably all females are attracted by visionary or enthusiastic preachers.”16 The prob­lem of religious enthusiasm is thus female lust. The dangers attendant upon the misreading of sensation, of lust, by ­women are perfectly exemplified in G. Bickham’s Enthusiasm Display’d; or, The Moor-­ Fields Congregation (1739).17 In this engraving, we see a field preacher supported by two w ­ omen, masked Hy­poc­risy and two-­faced Deceit (see figure  1). A third ­woman, Folly, reclines in the right foreground, recording, perhaps, the feelings prompted in her by the sermon. Meanwhile, an indecently dressed prostitute comes to hand Deceit her earnings while a variety of male figures ogle the oblivious ­women. Cumulatively, this print represents the feelings of ­these ­women’s bodies having manifested in sexual error. Jeremy Gregory follows Swift in reading female enthusiasts as passive victims of predatory preachers like t­ hose featured

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Prostitutes or Proselytes

Figure 1.  Enthusiasm Displayed (1739). Courtesy of the Horace Walpole Library.

in Bickham’s print. Comparing repre­sen­ta­tions of enthusiastic ­women to the treatment of sentimental heroines in the novels of Richardson, he concludes, “In all such seduction lit­er­a­ture the dynamic came from the seducer, ­whether lover or priest.”18 However, repre­sen­t a­tions of religious enthusiasts from the ­middle of the century suggest an additional anxiety under­ ­ lying repre­ sen­ ta­ tions of female enthusiasts. Cynthia Cupples charts the appearance of ­women as correspondents and characters in the Weekly Miscellany, a periodical supporting Anglican Church values from 1733 to 1738. Cupples details how during this period pious ­women ­were showcased as guarantors of stable f­ amily and social values, and she argues that the relative absence of ­women in the periodical a­ fter 1738 indicates that Methodism’s exposure of female susceptibility to enthusiasm somehow was perceived as a general threat to the very bound­aries of female be­hav­ior the periodi­ omen w ­ ere cal had previously guarded.19 Once the guardians of the home, such w now a threat. This work suggests that the danger of enthusiastic w ­ omen lies in its contagious nature and, when combined with Gregory’s conclusions, indicates that female enthusiasts had become a threat to other ­women. Candy Gunther Brown’s work further complicates this danger, through its examination of Methodist

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1650–1850 ­ omen’s writing. In her argument detailing Mary Bosanquet-­Fletcher’s ability to w use her diary to empower herself and her own spiritual authority, Brown reveals the dangerous and sexually charged persuasion of female enthusiasts, writing, “On many occasions, [Bosanquet-]Fletcher confided to her diary that socially prominent observers had called her an ‘impudent,’ ‘immodest,’ ‘bad ­woman or a stage player.’ ”20 As such, the danger of female enthusiasts is the spectacle they offer in the corruption of other w ­ omen. Most dangerous, then, is the potential of mature enthusiastic ­women to render other young ­women the unknowing victims of their own disordered bodies and weak understandings. Texts such as Henry Fielding’s The Female Husband (1746) detail the potential of enthusiasm to mask the deliberate manifestations of sexual deviance by ­women and to contribute to the corruption of innocents. Describing the debauching of Molly Hamilton by the Methodist Ann Johnson, Fielding argues that Johnson was able “to turn the ardour of enthusiastic devotion [felt by Hamilton] into a dif­fer­ent kind of flame,” a monstrous ability that earned her the full attention of his satirical scorn.21 Fielding continues to target the inculcation of sexually deviant enthusiastic ­women in his Shamela (1751). In an exchange of letters regarding Shamela’s involvement with Parson Arthur Williams, Shamela’s ­mother, Henrietta Maria, acknowledges the unloosed sexual passions that render Shamela “thy M ­ other’s own D ­ aughter” and goes on to encourage Shamela’s promiscuity as long as she “should take care to be well paid before-­hand.”22 In the next line of her letter, she praises her ­daughter for her study of Methodist texts: “I am glad to hear you read good Books, pray continue so to do. I have inclosed you one of Mr. Whitefield’s Sermons, and also the Dealings with him.” 23 Henrietta Maria has raised her ­daughter to be an enthusiast who celebrates the sensations of her body sexually and spiritually. Fielding makes it clear that this “Pot” has corrupted her ­daughter, rendering her the “­Kettle” and, as such, she has perpetuated her own sexual and spiritual deviance.24 Likewise, in Francis Coventry’s The History of Pompey the ­Little (1751), Lady Harridan is exposed for her own foolish conversion to Methodism, but is especially satirized for her intent to further corrupt her own grand­daughter, Sally. Coventry’s narrator describes, “besides the self-­mortification she was pleased to undergo, her ladyship had likewise an additional stratagem to procure her ­pardon above, which she thought impossible to fail her; and this was to take her eldest grand­-­daughter out of the temptations of a wicked seducting age into her own ­family, and breed her up a Methodist.”25 When informed of Lady Harridan’s

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“scheme,” Sir Vincent, Sally’s ­father, protests, “I am afraid your mamma ­will debauch the girl with religion.—­She’ll teach her perhaps to whine, and cant, and say her prayers u ­ nder the godly Mr.  Whitefield.”26 Lady Betty defends her “old doting idiot” of a ­mother in order to resist Lady Harridan’s efforts to convert her to Methodism, ultimately sacrificing her ­daughter to avoid her own contact with Whitefield and potential “debauching.”27 At this point, Lady Harridan locks her ­daughter in her closet where Sally is “made [to] repeat some long methodistical prayers, a­ fter which she heard her read several pages out of the apostle’s journal.”28 This extended and forced attention to Methodist doctrine results in Sally’s lack of attention to the titular hero, Pompey, who is then forced to “drop his superfluities” upon the books from which she had been reading.29 Our narrator goes on to insist that should Pompey’s be­hav­ior have been done to express his contempt of the Methodist doctrine, it “would exalt him in the reader’s esteem.”30 ­Here we see Coventry rehearse the satire against Methodist w ­ omen, blaming Lady Harridan’s “disappointed love and criminal amour” for her turn to the “superstitious melancholy” of religious enthusiasm.31 More pointed, however, is the fear and blame that accrues to the mature female enthusiast for her potential to corrupt the innocent, an activity that deserves to be recognized, according to Coventry’s narrator, as obscene. Similarly, Evan Lloyd’s anti-­Methodist poem “The Methodist” (1766) attributes the spiritual feelings of Methodist supporter Lady Huntingdon to a corrupting sexual deviancy. He writes: H—­—­—­, cloy’d with carnal Bliss, Longing to taste how Spirits kiss, Bids Chapels for her Saints arise, Which are but Bagnios in Disguise Where she may suck her T—­—­—’s Breath, Expiring in seraphic Death.32 Huntingdon is a bawd who opens brothels disguised as places of worship that allow her to worship the sexual sensation of orgasm even while she leads other young ­women similarly astray. In just such a way, Hogarth’s Enthusiasm Delineated (1760) pre­sents a striking image of the mature enthusiast as bawd in order to gesture t­ oward the danger older enthusiastic w ­ oman pose for younger w ­ omen (see figure  2).33 While Bernd Krysmanski’s argument that Enthusiasm Delineated “appears to be a biting satire of Methodist enthusiasm” but that “the real target of the attack is, in my opinion, not religious fanat­i­cism but enthusiasm in general and, in par­tic­u­lar, the

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Figure  2.  William Hogarth. Enthusiasm Delineated (1760–1762). © Trustees of the British Museum.

zealous predilection of misguided connoisseurs for traditional, ‘sublime’ religious art” is compelling, his discussion of Hogarth’s image as a critique of connoisseurship does not fully unpack the “bite” Hogarth’s engraving takes out of Method­ astle, in The Female Thermometer, has already linked Hogarth’s use ism.34 Terry C of the weatherglass in this print to the period’s notions of ­women’s “irrational

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moods,” and she describes how “the crowd’s spiritual elevation is shown to be indistinguishable, however from more primitive forms of excitement.”35 More specifically, however, in the left foreground, a sexually ecstatic w ­ oman, identified as the bawd M ­ other Douglas, vividly represents the threatening sexual deviancy of the mature ­woman.36 Hogarth’s print links this mature enthusiast in full swoon by juxtaposing her extremity with that of the only somewhat less distracted young female enthusiast, on the right side of the print ­under the pulpit, willing to exchange her devotion to God with a devotion to amorous attentions. In Samuel Foote’s (1760) The Minor we see the mature female enthusiast perhaps most explic­itly blamed not only for her own conflation of lust and spirituality but also for her influence on younger w ­ omen. Misty Anderson has already located the play’s blame of enthusiasm in its depiction of a gap between the spiritual and social self that threatened social order. Specifically, she reads the separation of a ­woman’s sexual self from the pro­cess of her spiritual regeneration as an unacceptable threat to notions of social culpability.37 Yet, while the play repeatedly reasserts the connection between sexual be­hav­ior and morality, it also pointedly targets the sexuality of the older w ­ oman. Within a plot dominated by Sir George Wealthy’s attempt to ­handle the responsibility of the supposed death of his ­father and his own sudden inheritance, the play’s commentary on the enthusiasm of the madam Mrs. Cole disciplines the overtly sexual older w ­ oman not only for her misperception of sexual sensation but also for her corruption of young ­women. Foote’s playwright makes clear, early in the play, that “whoever affects to be what he is not, or strives to be what he cannot, is an object worthy of the poet’s pen and [the audience’s] mirth.”38 And the specific hypocrite he chooses for his subject is the religious enthusiast about whom he concludes, “Ridicule is the only antidote against this pernicious poison . . . ​perhaps the archness and severity of [the comic muse’s] smile may redress an evil that the laws cannot reach, or reason reclaim.”39 Samuel Roybal situates the play within an anti-­Methodist context.40 He suggests that such anti-­Methodist sentiment was popu­lar, noting that the play was performed over two hundred times between 1760 and 1797. Similarly, Matthew Kinservik argues that Foote profited from the public controversy by contrasting his relative legitimacy within the theater establishment against the perceived lack of legitimacy surrounding the form of religious belief and worship his play mocks.41 Within this specifically anti-­Methodist context, Foote uses the play’s prologue to note the insufficiency of other disciplinary actions against Methodism

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1650–1850 and proclaims ridicule the last hope for reform. Thus, when Mrs.  O’Shohnessy refuses to act the part of the Methodist bawd Mrs. Cole, a part both “unladylike” and “shameful,” Foote himself, in order “to stop the infection” of “enthusiastic dissenters,” easily agrees to play it.42 Foote’s cross-­dressing makes even clearer the absurdity of Mrs. Cole’s spiritual pretensions. As Foote makes clear, she and her enthusiastic folly is beyond reform. However, it is her influence on younger ­women that must be ridiculed and reformed. The play’s frontispiece engraving captures Foote’s attempt to effect a remedy to the disease of enthusiasm. As a homely and dowdy Cole, Foote assumes a ridiculously pious and prayerful position. Foote’s characters Sir George and Dick reinforce the absurdity of the bawd by flanking her rigid figure with their own fash­ion­able and relaxed attitudes and exchanging knowing looks ­behind her back. Further, as the action of the play ­progresses, Foote details Mrs. Cole’s enthusiasm’s association with prostitution. When Sir George finds himself the target of Mrs. Cole’s proselytizing, he rejects her and dismisses Methodism, “Well, whilst they only make proselytes from that profession, they are heartily welcome to them,” effectually relegating religious enthusiasm to the ranks of the sexually deviant and socially undesirable.43 Sir George, for himself, is unconcerned about the growing number of enthusiastic dissenters. As long as they come from the ranks of ­England’s sex workers, he and his peers can continue to disregard them and their disreputable and sensational claims. As long as they fit clearly, as prostitutes, into the sexual and moral fabric of eighteenth-­century society, making no claim to authority or respectability, they can remain beneath notice. When Dick insists that he would not make a good proselyte, Sir George mocks, “Oh, the spirit, the spirit w ­ ill supply all that,” suggesting that only the enthusiast’s sexual proclivities motivate his or her proj­ects of religious conversion.44 In this echo of Swift, Foote renders the claims of the enthusiast a product of her sexual promiscuity. ­After Mrs. Cole describes her own “new birth,” Sir George concludes, echoing Locke, that her “brains” must have been “turned,” rendering her conversion the result of a ­mental illness.45 Foote reinforces the linking of this disorder to sexual impropriety by representing Mrs.  Cole’s conversion narrative in sexualized language, and, a­ fter she relates being “pi­loted into the harbour of grace” by Mr. Squintum (the “precious instrument of her spiritual sprinkling”), Foote fi­nally identifies the root of the enthusiasm prob­lem.46 While Mrs.  Cole celebrates her penetration by the “sprinkling” “grace” of Mr.  Squintum, Sir George concludes, “Ha, ha, what a hodge podge! How the jade has jumbled together the carnal and the spiritual; with what ease she reconciles her new birth to her old calling!—­No won­der ­these preachers have

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Prostitutes or Proselytes

plenty of proselytes, whilst they have the address so comfortably to blend the hitherto jarring interests of the two worlds.” 47 Foote’s play argues, through Sir  George, that Mrs.  Cole has mistakenly attributed the extraordinary sensations of her physical body to God. Worst, however, are her attempts to corrupt respectable young w ­ omen, leading them to celebrate the feelings about which they should be ashamed. The play ends with Sir George’s preservation of a young girl’s virtue and the threatening of Mrs. Cole. Mrs. Cole has arranged a dalliance between Sir George and Lucy, who turns out to be his innocent and not-­for-­spoiling cousin. Fortunately for Lucy, Mrs. Cole’s schemes, and most importantly, her methods are exposed. Lucy explains how her reason was seduced by her own melancholy and by the older ­woman’s enthusiasm to become a member of the bawd’s ­house­hold: “­There, as  enthusiasm is the child of melancholy, I caught the infection. A constant ­attendance . . . ​procur’d me the acquaintance of this w ­ oman, whose extraordinary zeal and devotion first drew my attention and confidence. I trusted her with my story, and in return, receiv’d the warmest invitation to take the protection of her ­house.” 48 Sir George’s denouncing of Mrs. Cole’s hy­poc­risy, maligning of her age and infirmity, and promising of “plentiful” and “publick” penance, is necessary not simply ­because of the sexual excesses her faith allows her to justify but also ­because of the dangerous contagion of her enthusiasm. Her worst crime is the corruption not of her herself but of young and virtuous ­women.49 As with Shaftesbury, mockery and laughter is the most appropriate tool of reform for enthusiasm. Distinct, however, is Foote’s application of this reform to a specifically older ­woman for her attempts to corrupt the innocent. While Foote’s play represents the connection between prostitution and enthusiasm, explaining enthusiasm as a manifestation of an overdeveloped sexuality, and describing the conversion pro­ cess in sexually suggestive language, the target of its reform is the bawd’s potential to be the most likely and most dangerous of proselytes. Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771) makes even clearer the dangers mature female enthusiasts pose for young w ­ omen even while it more g­ ently satirizes them. Brett McInelly argues how anti-­Methodist texts like Smollett’s targeted ­women by arguing that “Methodism infiltrated ­women’s private experience and the domestic sphere in ways that undermined a ­woman’s ­mental and emotional health as well as the stability of the ­house­hold.”50 Building on McInelly’s observations of anti-­Methodist texts’ tendencies to assume the emotional excesses and ­mental instabilities of ­women, closer examination of the treatment of spiritual experience in Smollett’s novel reveals the text’s acknowl­edgment of

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1650–1850 the serious danger that enthusiasm posed as a result of the power­ful influence mature w ­ omen have over younger ­women.51 Through the character of Jerry Melford, Smollett provides the novel’s first clues regarding the threat of religious enthusiasm’s contagion. He describes how he and his u ­ ncle happened upon a Methodist meeting: “But if we ­were astonished to see Clinker in the pulpit, we ­were altogether confounded at finding all the females of our ­family among the audience—­There was Lady Griskin, Mrs. Tabitha Bramble, Mrs.  Winifred Jenkins, my ­sister Liddy, and Mr.  Barton, an all of them joined in the psalmody, with strong marks of devotion.”52 Together, the females prove the tendency of ­women to practice sensational spirituality. Jerry goes on to relate how his ­uncle, Matthew Bramble, immediately breaks up the scene and reprimands his niece for participating in an activity so inappropriate for one of her “sex and character.”53 According to Jerry, once Lydia insists that “she had no right to the title of a devotee” and that “she hoped he would excuse [her recent be­hav­ior], as she could not bear the thoughts of living ­under his dis­plea­sure,” Bramble is relieved and celebrates Lydia’s ability to hold herself above the throng.54 Lydia’s brush with enthusiasm ends satisfactorily through reassertion of patriarchal authority and class hierarchy. She functions as a positive example of rejecting the transgressive potential of enthusiasm modeled by mature w ­ omen. Accordingly, Jerry also relates how Bramble turns his attention to Clinker, lecturing him on the dangers of enthusiasm. Rehearsing the very repre­sen­ta­tions of mentally ill enthusiasts that ­we’ve seen recur in thinkers from Burton to Hume, Bramble interprets Clinker’s spirituality as a threat to “silly ­women, and ­others of crazed understanding.”55 While, as Jerry relates, Clinker’s submission to Bramble’s judgment diffuses any threat his enthusiasm poses to the Bramble w ­ omen, enthusiasm in general still threatens in Humphry Clinker. Once a victim, now a perpetrator, Tabitha Bramble becomes the target of the novel’s satire against religious enthusiasm. Jerry alerts his ­uncle to his aunt’s misconduct, explaining, “I told him I thought it was no difficult m ­ atter to perceive the drift of Mrs. Tabitha, which was to ensnare the heart of Barton, and that in all liklihood my lady Griskin acted as her auxiliary: that this supposition would account for their endeavors to convert him to Methodism; an event which would occasion a connexion of souls that might be easily improved into a matrimonial u ­ nion.”56 According to Jerry, Tabitha’s enthusiastic pretensions are just that: a scheme to trick unsuspecting men into more intimate relationships. Jerry ­later describes how, in the face of the continued failure of her “snares,” Tabitha steps up her game:57

14

Prostitutes or Proselytes

At ­every place where we halted, did she mount the stage, and flourished her rusty arms, without being able to make one conquest. One of her last essays was against the heart of a Sir George Colquhoun, with whom she fought all the weapons more than twice over.—­She was grave and gay by turns—­she moralized and methodized—­she laughed, and romped, and danced, and sung, and sighed, and ogled, and lisped, and fluttered, and flattered—­but all was preaching to the desart.58 According to Jerry, enthusiasm is an act, a per­for­mance designed to allow Tabitha to secure a mate. Armed with inappropriate visibility and voice, Tabitha’s enthusiastic manifestations at Methodist meetings allow her to display her charms. Nevertheless, such schemes and snares, in their impropriety, repeatedly fail. Tabitha threatens domesticity even while she desperately pursues it. Eventually, Lydia too interprets her aunt’s enthusiasm as a form of disingenuous manipulation: “I am truly ashamed of my own sex—­ . . . ​I have seen enough to believe that our sex in general make it their business to ensnare the other; and for this purpose, employ arts which are by no means to be justified—­ . . . ​My poor aunt . . . ​has used even religion as a decoy, though it has not answered her expec­ ere all tation.”59 Lydia insists that despite her ­uncle’s ­earlier fears that ­women w too often the victims of male enthusiasts’ manipulation, in real­ity, ­women are the main prac­ti­tion­ers of such deception. Fortunately for her, Matthew Bramble’s harangue had had its intended effect, making her vigilant to the improprieties such immoderate sensational be­hav­ior allows. While Lydia, through the intercession of her u ­ ncle, has escaped the snare of enthusiasm and remained critical of her aunt’s example, Winifred Jenkins proves much more susceptible to the enthusiastic fervors and hypocrisies of the novel’s mature female figure. Jerry scornfully describes how Winifred “subscribes implicitly to [Tabitha Bramble’s] system of devotion.” 60 Lydia seconds this assessment of Winifred’s be­hav­ior, writing, “As for Jenkins, she affects to take all her mistress’s reveries for gospel—­She has also her heart heavings and motions of the spirit; and God forgive me if I think it uncharitably, but all this seems to me to be downright hy­poc­risy and deceit.” 61 By the end of the novel, however, Tabitha and Winifred’s enthusiastic machinations fail, and they are excused for their hypocrisies. Ultimately, the novel contrasts Clinker’s genuine Methodism with the absurdity of enthusiastic posturing by mature w ­ omen even while it represents the threat such absurd be­hav­ior poses for younger ­women as si­mul­ta­neously serious and laughable, serious for polite spheres and laughable for the irrelevant working class.

15

1650–1850 While the distinctions and implications of religious enthusiasm in general and Methodism specifically merit further analy­sis, ­these repre­sen­ta­tions of religious enthusiasm reinforce critical consensus regarding the mistrust of w ­ omen’s bodies and minds in the eigh­teenth c­ entury. However, they also reveal male fears regarding the potential power w ­ omen had over other w ­ omen. In William Combe’s poem The Love Feast (1778), we see the extreme dangers older enthusiastic ­women represented. In a footnote describing the poem’s title, Combe describes the practice of the Methodist love feast as lewd, lustful, and debauched, and he goes on to specifically challenge the motives ­behind Methodist worship as well as the nature of the feeling that motivates it, “Ev’n whilst they kneel their vicious Passions glow; / Clear Proofs that such Religion is but a Show.” 62 However, Combe pays special attention to the worship of Methodist w ­ omen. A w ­ oman named Prisca attends the love feast b ­ ecause ­there alone Salvation can be found. That lets each Passion loose without a Sin: Prisca’s impatient till its Rites begin. For her ­these myst’ries cannot come too soon, Whilst oon each Side she’s ogling a Dragoon.63 Prisca, an old lecherous w ­ oman, revels in the cele­bration of her lust. She anxiously, as her ogling and the couplet make clear, awaits the opportunity to satisfy her sexual desires. With her example to guide her, “Corinne, (from the Magdalen a Stray) / Tir’d of unsocial Pennance, broke away: / Perfection sets her f­ree to sin again.” 64 Even the most penitent and pitiful victim, one whose pathetic plight and penitence earned her a place in the Madgalen Hospital, has been led astray and abandoned all hopes of reform. Such influence does the older ­woman have that ultimately, both refuse integration into a properly domestic sphere and perpetuate the corrupting spectacle of disordered sexual deviants who recast lust as spirituality. The danger of enthusiastic ­women in eighteenth-­century ­England lies in the distinctly sexual nature of the “exorbitant monstrous appetite” masked by presumptions of spiritual sensation. This prob­lem is threefold. First, the cele­bration of the body’s feeling is incompatible with the chastity and modesty necessary to maintain domestic institutions. Second, w ­ omen’s weak understandings render them more susceptible to the misinterpretation of sensation as spirit and to manipulation or victimization by t­hose who lead them astray. Third, mature ­women demonstrate a power­ful ability to influence and guide younger ­women in the physical and m ­ ental transgressions of enthusiasm. Ultimately, the very ubiq-

16

Prostitutes or Proselytes

uity of ­these satiric repre­sen­ta­tions and the threat ­these male writers betray in them testify to the power of ­women’s sensation and of the relationships between ­women. Accordingly, midcentury repre­sen­ta­tions of female enthusiasts prove united in their exposure of both mature and younger ­women, for only by undermining t­hese bonds could t­hese authors hope to stop what they perceived as “monstrosity.”

Notes 1. “Grubstreet Journal,” Gentleman’s Magazine 5 (April 1735): 203. 2. Gary Kelly, “­Women’s Provi(de)nce: Religion and Bluestocking Feminism in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762),” in Female Communities 1600–1800, ed. Rebecca D’Monté and Nicole Pohl (New York: St.  Martin’s, 2000), 168; and see Phyllis Mack, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 3. See Michael Heyd, Be Sober and Reasonable: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Eigh­teenth Centuries (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995). 4. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-­ Smith (1621; New York: Tudor, 1927), 890, 895. 5. John Locke, An Essay Concerning ­Human Understanding, ed. Roger Wool­house (New York: Penguin, 1997), 616. 6. Locke, Essay, 616. 7. See Locke, Essay, 618. 8. See Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in ­England 1660–1780, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 149. 9. Second Earl of Shaftesbury, “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm to My Lord *****” (1711), in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. John M. Robertson (New York: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1964), 31–32. 10. David Hume, Essays Moral, Po­liti­cal, and Literary, ed. Eugene Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985), 74. 11. David Hume, A Treatise of H ­ uman Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-­Bigge and P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), 74. 12. Hume, Treatise, 74. 13. Daniel Featly, The Dippers Dipt: or, The Anabaptists Duck’d and Plung’d over Head and Ears (London, 1645), 246. 14. Henry More, Enthusiasmus Triumphatus: or, A Discourse of the Nature, C ­ auses, Kinds, and Cure of Enthusiasme (London, 1656), 37. 15. Jonathan Swift, “A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit” (1710), in The Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Robert A. Greeberg and ­William B. ­Piper (New York: Norton, 1973), 412–413.

17

1650–1850 16. Swift, “Discourse,” 414. 17. G. Bickham, Enthusiasm Display’d; or, The Moor-­Fields Congregation (engraving, 1738–1739, Lewis Walpole Library, New Haven, CT). 18. Jeremy Gregory, “Gender and the Clerical Profession in E ­ ngland, 1650–1850,” in Gender and Christian Religion, ed. R. N. Swanson (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1998), 252. 19. See Cynthia J. Cupples, “Pious Ladies and Methodist Madams: Sex and Gender in Anti-­Methodist Writings of Eighteenth-­Century ­England,” Critical Matrix 5, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 1990): 30–60. 20. Candy Gunther Brown, “Prophetic ­Daughter: Mary Fletcher’s Narrative and ­Women’s Religious and Social Experiences in Eighteenth-­Century British Methodism,” Eighteenth-­Century ­Women: Studies in Their Lives, Work, and Culture 3 (2003): 82. 21. Henry Fielding, The Female Husband (London, 1746), 31. 22. Fielding, Female Husband, 244–245. 23. Henry Fielding, Shamela: Anti-­Pamela and Shamela (1751), ed. Catherine Ingrassia (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2004), 245. 24. Fielding, Shamela, 244. 25. Francis Coventry, The History of Pompey the L­ ittle (1751), ed. Nicholas Hudson (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2008), 91. 26. Coventry, History, 93. 27. Coventry, History, 93. 28. Coventry, History, 96. 29. Coventry, History, 97. 30. Coventry, History, 98. 31. Coventry, History, 95. 32. Evan Lloyd, “The Methodist: A Poem” (London, 1766), 37. 33. William Hogarth, Enthusiasm Delineated (engraving, 1760–1762, British Museum, London). 34. Bernd Krysmanski, “We See a Ghost: Hogarth’s Satire on Methodists and Connoisseurs,” Art Bulletin 80, no. 2 (June 1998): 298. 35. Terry ­Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-­Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 42, 28. 36. Austin Dobson, William Hogarth (New York: McClure, 1907), 130. 37. See Misty G. Anderson, “ ‘Our Purpose Is the Same’: Whitefield, Foote, and the Theatricality of Methodism,” Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Culture 34 (2005): 125–149. 38. Samuel Foote, The Dramatic Works of Samuel Foote, Esq; To Which Is Prefixed a Life of the Author, in Two Volumes, vol. 1 (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1809), 7. 39. Foote, Dramatic Works, 8. 40. Samuel Roybal,  “Foote’s Minor: Anti-­ Methodist Sentiment on the London Stage,” Ball State University Forum 18, no. 3 (1977): 23–31.

18

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41. See Matthew Kinservik, “The Censorship of Samuel Foote’s The Minor (1760): Stage Controversy in the Mid-­Eighteenth ­Century,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 32, no. 2 (1999): 89–104. 42. Foote, Dramatic Works, 8. 43. Foote, Dramatic Works, 35. 44. Foote, Dramatic Works, 26. 45. Foote, Dramatic Works, 33. 46. Foote, Dramatic Works, 33. 47. Foote, Dramatic Works, 36. 48. Foote, Dramatic Works, 79. 49. Foote, Dramatic Works, 61. 50. Brett McInelly, “ ‘I Had Rather Be Obscure. But I Dare Not’: ­Women and Methodism in the Eigh­teenth ­Century,” in Everyday Revolutions: Eighteenth-­Century ­Women Transforming Public and Private, ed. Diane Boyd and Marta Kvande (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 152. 51. McInelly, “ ‘I Had Rather Be Obscure,’ ” 149. 52. Tobias Smollett, Humphry Clinker (1771), ed. James L. Thorson (New York: Norton, 1983), 129. 53. Smollett, Humphry Clinker, 129. 54. Smollett, Humphry Clinker, 129. 55. Smollett, Humphry Clinker, 130. 56. Smollett, Humphry Clinker, 132. 57. Smollett, Humphry Clinker, 152. 58. Smollett, Humphry Clinker, 243. 59. Smollett, Humphry Clinker, 240. 60. Smollett, Humphry Clinker, 194. 61. Smollett, Humphry Clinker, 240. 62. William Combe, The Love Feast (London, 1778), 1, 13. 63. Combe, Love Feast, 14. 64. Combe, Love Feast, 15.

19

EDMUND BURKE ON MONARCHY KEYSTONE AND ­TRIALS OF STRENGTH NORBERT COL

Need monarchy be mentioned in connection with Edmund Burke’s philosophy?

Its centrality might be self-­evident, given Burke’s prominent position against the French Revolution.1 ­Things are more complex, though. What monarchy Burke explic­itly supported was monarchy within parliamentary bounds.2 Conversely, much of the responsibility of the French Revolution for reducing the country to an atomistic state derived from absolute monarchy’s own studious weakening of all other institutions.3 None of this was a novelty for Burke. As early as 1773, he considered that “a court governing without an in­de­pen­dent aristocracy amounted to a popu­lar tyranny,” which “marked the point at which monarchy and democracy blended into one another.” 4 Burke’s opinions ­were altered with the beginnings of the revolution: by then “the monarchy alone rested upon the hereditary princi­ple” while “all other institutions w ­ ere elective,” which made “the monarchy . . . ​an anomaly” that could not survive long.5 Such anecdotal observations convincingly render Burke’s positions, but they bypass a more rigorous, doctrinal understanding of his ideas about kings. The apparent lack of interest in Burke as theorist of monarchy matches up with David Bromwich’s contention that “no serious historian would repeat ­today the commonplace that Burke was the f­ ather of modern conservatism.” 6 Burke’s stand with regard to conservatism, that eminently versatile concept among catchall po­liti­cal expressions—­one, also, which was coined ­after his own time7—­ demands more attention. For Burke, the fall of monarchy was no mean event of the French Revolution. Burke never dismissed it as irrelevant. Even though sup-

20

Edmund Burke on Monarchy

port for monarchy and conservatism are definitely not one and the same t­ hing, they cannot be entirely dissociated in his case. Philippe Bénéton’s sketch of the doctrinal content of counterrevolutionary conservatism emphasizes vari­ ous levels of transcendence (epistemological, po­liti­cal, and so­cio­log­ic­ al); an opposition to revolutionary universalism; and rationalism that led to the superseding of “philosophy” by “sociology and history.”8 Such doctrinal content does not sit badly with Burke, whom Bénéton places at the origin of conservatism.9 ­There is nothing, in Burke’s insistence on “a power out of themselves,” capable of subjecting “the passions of individuals” and “not, in the exercise of its functions, subject to that ­will and to ­those passions which it is its office to bridle and subdue,” that challenges Bénéton’s points.10 That “power out of themselves” does not necessarily relate to monarchy sensu stricto; nor, obviously, does it run against doctrinal conservatism. It is in the course of Burke’s justification of the Revolution Settlement of 1689 that he also posited that “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.”11 Monarchy and some form of pragmatic conservatism ­were not distant bedfellows with Burke, but at issue is ­whether monarchy as such should be regarded as a positive feature of this combination. ­Today’s misgivings about Burke’s conservatism and the relevance of his monarchism go alongside an attribution of party commitments that, ultimately, obscure ­things rather than they clarify them. Lodging belief “in the sovereignty of the crown” in the Tories, Bromwich regards Burke, qua Whig, as their obverse.12 In like manner, J. C. D. Clark argues that Burke, a supporter of a “mechanical Whig system of checks and balances,” opposed both “extremes” of monarchy and democracy.13 Burke described “a mixed and tempered government” as his ideal;14 however, its association with Whiggism may be rather hasty. Conversely, J. G. A. Pocock viewed his opposition to the “monstrous paper-­money despotism being installed on the ruins of the Church” as “the key” to all of his “analyses of the Revolution,” adding that this was in line with Tory attacks, u ­ nder Anne, on “the Whig ‘monied interest.’ ”15 Nor can one forget Burke’s endorsement of Bolingbroke where that other­wise pet hate of his comes in a much more acceptable garb: “He says, that he prefers a monarchy to other governments; b ­ ecause you can better ingraft any description of republic on a monarchy than any t­hing of monarchy upon the republican forms. I think him perfectly in the right. The fact is so historically; and it agrees well with speculation.”16 Burke did not find it necessary to call to mind that Bolingbroke had never been in f­ avor of unmitigated monarchy—as if it went without saying even from a

21

1650–1850 Tory with, if not exactly lasting Jacobite connections, at least compromising contacts with France.17 It was hardly conceivable, too, that unmitigated monarchies existed at all given the ease with which republican ele­ments could be “ingrafted” on them. Burke’s points are occasionally hurried, moving from the general (“Along with much evil, t­ here is some good in monarchy itself”) to the par­tic­u­lar: even the French monarchy, though recognizably imperfect since it was “not ­under the constant inspection of a popu­lar representative,” and accordingly “by no means a ­free, and therefore by no means a good constitution,” was “a despotism rather in appearance than in real­ity.” What Burke produced as an illustration of despotism was just “the barbarous anarchic despotism of Turkey.”18 While his pre­de­ces­sors wielded that conventional bugbear to indict absolutist France, he regarded the latter as part of the “commonwealth of Christian Eu­rope” that was now endangered ­wholesale by revolutionary France.19 As for the “mixed and tempered government,” deriving from Aristotle, Polybius, and Cicero, it could be made to serve a number of purposes. In the 1640s, it elicited such undiscriminating ac­cep­tance that Parliamentarians and Royalists alike drew from it in an ambiguous consensus where lawmaking was shared between king, lords, and Commons. 20 Charles I himself, in his Answer to the ­Nineteen Propositions of Parliament (June 18, 1642), just before the outbreak of the civil war, extolled the mixed government and its harmonization of ­those ­simple forms—­monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—­which, if individually hegemonic, would have endangered e­ ither order or liberties.21 Burke could not have termed himself, mutatis mutandis, a monarchist any more than Charles I had done before him. Both to him and to the king, what was at stake was the defense of the constitution. The latter also rested on monarchy, no ­matter what deviations could be supported by some specific king. Nor could Burke have termed himself an “aristocrat” or a “demo­crat,” for his concern was the w ­ hole of the tripartite Parliament. Monarchy as theoretical foundation is part and parcel of Burke’s full endorsement of the legacy of the Glorious Revolution. He exposed “­those exploded fanatics of slavery,” “­these old fanatics of single arbitrary power,” the “old prerogative enthusiasts” who “did speculate foolishly, and perhaps impiously too, as if monarchy had more of a divine sanction than any other mode of government; and as if a right to govern by inheritance w ­ ere in strictness indefeasible in e­ very person, who should be found in the succession to a throne, and ­under ­every circumstance, which no civil or po­liti­cal right can be.”22 This was obviously a dig at Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, or the Divine Right of Kings (published posthu-

22

Edmund Burke on Monarchy

mously in 1680), but ­there are rather serious implications in Filmer’s isolation from the mainstream of royalist thinking.23 Indicting a conventional scarecrow, Burke fell back on a consensual reading of the Glorious Revolution that, more or less painfully so, had come to obtain. ­There had emerged, he argued, “the use both of a fixed rule and an occasional deviation” as a result of “extreme emergency.”24 To put it differently, a move was effected from imprescriptible hereditary succession to a more providentialist succession: direct divine intervention justified William’s ascent to the throne.25 Burke also sensed something evocative of Leo Strauss’s “ ‘noble’ (or just) lies,’ ‘pious frauds,’ the ‘ductus obliquus’ or ‘economy of the truth,’ ” in short “what we would call ‘considering one’s social responsibilities.’ ”26 He praised the Parliament of 1689 for throwing “a politic, well-­ wrought veil over ­every circumstance tending to weaken the rights, which in the meliorated order of succession they meant to perpetuate,” specifically the rights of “an hereditary descent qualified with Protestantism.”27 Silently brushing aside the spate of Tory lit­er­a­ture that had tried to sharpen such edges instead of blunting them,28 Burke dismissed such conflicts as irrelevant since they endangered his attempt to promote a British consensus against what was taking place on the other side of the channel. He interwove national and personal immutability, and insisted, down to and including the issue of monarchy, that his ­earlier writings did not support an identification of any caesura in his po­liti­cal c­ areer.29 In this he may have been largely successful. A suspicious conversion to unmitigated monarchy does not appear to have been seriously considered by his early critics. Thomas Paine branded him as a former “friend to mankind” who, ­after playing his “part” in “the American Revolution,” had turned to castigating “the princi­ples of liberty.”30 But he did not ­really argue that, in his younger years, Burke had wished for the abolition of monarchy or even a significant reduction of its prerogative. He contented himself with dubbing Burke “a stickler for monarchy,” adding, for good mea­sure, one of his many slurs about a supposed royal pension.31 Mary Wollstonecraft chimed in about the pension.32 Respecting the possibility that Burke had turned from an antimonarchy to a promonarchy stand, she did not go much further than calling to mind his coldness and systematic enmity to George III during the Regency Crisis.33 As for Sir James Mackintosh, he made a telling case when likening Burke and the Earl of Clarendon, the “Jacobite Lord of the 17th ­century,” respecting the original contract.34 That Burke’s Whiggism should not have been taken seriously does not ­really come as a surprise, but what is much more significant is that exact gaps between Whiggism and Toryism might not have amounted to much, at least in the eyes of ­those who placed

23

1650–1850 themselves outside the current doxa. The w ­ hole yields l­ittle about the specificities of Burke’s attitude to monarchy. One may have to go back to Burke’s early opposition to George III. It bore on the supposed existence of a “double cabinet” whereby a “cabal” surrounded the king and, though it maintained the forms of a ­free Parliament, made the latter a mere onlooker.35 With the help of the “King’s Friends,” an appellation that Burke regarded as abusive to all of George III’s other subjects, the monarchy was turning into the instrument of a party instead of being the keystone of all institutions.36 It entered into ­those very ­trials of strength that it should have arbitrated and, by so d ­ oing, renewed the cleavages between the “­great parties” of the 37 past. Plainly enough, the Bolingbrokean solution of a king above parties was a mere manipulation.38 Monarchy stripped Parliament from its lawful mission to control the executive power and ruled out the possibility of a coherent government born of a majority in the Commons.39 ­Whether Burke’s critique was perfectly grounded would lead too far for the pre­sent purpose.40 It was his own Rockingham group, within the Whig Party, that he presented as the genuine repre­sen­ta­tion of the country. Ironically, this was an echo of Bolingbroke’s own sleight of hand in the promotion of his Country Party.41 One had to wait for the late nineteenth ­century before Burke’s theory of party and government, arguably the most novel aspect of his po­liti­cal thinking, came to prevail. Throughout the rest of his lifetime, he went on upholding parliamentary monarchy, though definitely no longer around the 1770 anticipatory proposals. An illustration is his support, in 1783, of the unnatural co­ali­tion of ­those former enemies over the American crisis, Charles James Fox and Lord North. It  was easier to content oneself with time-­honored slogans about king-­in-­ Parliament, but t­ here may also be some sense that Pre­sent Discontents had fallen on deaf ears. It was not ­really endorsed by the Rockinghamites who would have hoped for a more precise attack on royal undertakings and the alleged occult role of Lord Bute, the king’s former preceptor and prime minister.42 In spite of his unmistakable diffidence, Burke was envisaging t­hings from too high a vantage point fully to meet the views of his own camp. ­Going much further would be dangerous. Burke’s word can be taken for granted when he argued in Appeal that his intention had always been to uphold the balance of the constitution and to give unflagging support to t­ hose components within it that w ­ ere coming ­under momentary threat.43 In such t­rials of strength, his position was that of a paradoxical umpire whose successive standpoints may be disorienting. Even ­those, much ­later on, for whom ­there never was

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Edmund Burke on Monarchy

an about-­turn on his part,44 have shied away from defining in what manner he might have always been a monarchist within the broader scope of the tripartite Parliament, and this is perfectly intelligible. Burke’s writings, on the w ­ hole ad hoc responses to specific situations, do not seem to offer much in terms of theorization. His counterrevolutionary writings ­were aimed at a British readership that must be protected against French revolutionary lures: “Whenever our neighbour’s h ­ ouse is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a l­ittle on our  45 own.” At stake was to oppose a developing my­thol­ogy in the name of an established one. Accordingly, Burke pitted the French Revolution against the Glorious Revolution of 1688, apropos of which he conventionally argued that the Catholic and absolutist James II endangered his subjects’ liberties. Nothing could have been more moderate, or conservative, if by moderation, or conservatism, one means acquiescence to con­temporary doxa. It was with the same doxa in mind that he distinguished between James II’s personal faults and a monarchical institution that could not be challenged as such.46 The aim of the Revolution Settlement was to preserve the monarchical institution by ruling out all that, in more or less direct fashion, might have granted the ­people the right to choose their governors freely, as ­later posited by such British admirers of the French Revolution as Richard Price.47 Burke’s conviction that the French monarchy had already been de facto abolished in 1790 led him to insist on all that, in the British monarchical institution, brought together, for their greater benefit, the subjects of the ­whole empire. Tellingly enough, he quoted, along this line, a speech of his of 1774: “We are members in a ­great and ancient MONARCHY; and we must preserve religiously the true ­legal rights of the sovereign, which form the keystone that binds together the noble and well-­constructed arch of our empire and constitution. A constitution made up of balanced powers must ever be a critical ­thing. As such I mean to touch that part of it which comes within my reach.” 48 The passage articulates monarchy as such and king-­in-­Parliament, but ­there is no doubt where sovereignty was ultimately vested. Burke was closer to “cooperation theory,” where l­egal sovereignty ultimately resided in the king, than to “coordination theory,” where it was lodged, just as ultimately, in the Commons.49 This is a surprisingly “Cavalier” or, l­ater, “Tory” stance, though Burke did not sustainedly formulate it, and indeed Charles I’s Answer to the Nineteen Propositions had obscured issues rather than clarified them.50 The opening pages of Reflections also edge t­oward monarchical sovereignty. Even though “kings, in one sense, are undoubtedly the servants of the ­people, b ­ ecause their power has no

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1650–1850 other rational end than that of the general advantage,” this does not mean that they are “any t­hing like servants” since the law calls “the king of ­Great Britain,” who “obeys no other person,” “our sovereign Lord the King” and since “we are to obey the law in him.”51 Though Burke unhesitatingly admitted that “all the kingdoms of Eu­rope” had originally been elective, he added that “the King of G ­ reat Britain is at this day king by a fixed rule of succession, according to the laws of this country,” and that he must abide, which he did, by “the ­legal conditions of the compact of sovereignty.”52 ­Whether this can be regarded as fully fledged parliamentary monarchy does not ­really hold ­water: absolutist France recognized fundamental laws, and l­ittle in this balanced point of Burke’s could have run against the early Stuarts’ conception of their prerogative.53 ­There w ­ ere practical aspects, too: “the undisturbed succession of the crown” is “a pledge of the stability and perpetuity of all the other members of our constitution.”54 The ­whole serves to explain why Burke lamented France’s neglect that “the weight of a real monarchy” should bear upon the legitimate expression of a conflicting “diversity of members and interests.”55 Just as much as in 1774, that was the voice of a moderate monarchist, a similar position to that of a moderate republican in a republic of long standing that benefited from the legitimacy that accompanies duration—­that “prescription” that is one of his favorite points against revolutionary tabula rasa. Undoubtedly, the 1774 speech contained veiled warnings against what­ever might have gone beyond the king’s “true ­legal rights,” which echoed the qualms of Pre­sent Discontents, and its republication in Appeal hinted that such qualms could not have been entirely ruled out. The keystone might always be tempted to enter into t­ rials of strength while its true interest was to remain an arbiter. ­There is more, though. A few shrewd points suggest that the apparent limitations of parliamentary monarchy strengthened the monarchical institution, which was now moving beyond the partisan issues where it could have irretrievably floundered in the seventeenth ­century. As a result, the king of G ­ reat Britain was, in the eigh­teenth ­century, neither an absolutist king of France nor Louis XVI in the early stages of the revolution: He is a real king, and not an executive officer. If he w ­ ill not trou­ble himself with contemptible details, nor wish to degrade himself by becoming a party in l­ittle squabbles, I am far from sure, that a king of G ­ reat Britain, in what­ever concerns him as a king, or indeed as a rational man, who combines his public interest with his personal satisfaction, does not possess a more real, solid, extensive power, than the king of France was possessed of before this miser-

26

Edmund Burke on Monarchy

able Revolution. The direct power of the king of ­England is considerable. His indirect, and far more certain power, is g­ reat indeed.56 ­There ­were still unmistakable veiled warnings. Monarchy was worthy of the name if, and only if, it remained at its place. Of note, however, is that the two concepts of “direct” and “indirect power” do not seem to have had wide currency with Burke. What Pre­sent Discontents mostly indicted went as follows: “The power of the crown, almost dead and rotten as Prerogative, has grown up anew, with much more strength, and far less odium, u ­ nder the name of Influ57 ence.” Burke went on to aver that, ­after the Glorious Revolution, “the court was obliged . . . ​to delegate a part of its powers to men of such interest as could support, and of such fidelity as would adhere to, its establishment.”58 It is tempting to regard this as an early formulation of “indirect power,” and Burke mentions, as coming ­under “the most noble and refined part of our constitution,” that the king was trusted with “the deliberative choice and the election to office.”59 According to Burke, the monarch’s “discretionary powers . . . ​­whether for the execution of the laws, or for the nomination to magistracy and office, or for conducting the affairs of peace and war, or for ordering the revenue, should all be exercised upon public princi­ples and national grounds, and not on the likings or prejudices, the intrigues or policies, of a court.” 60 Consequently, in the same move that Burke accepted the king’s right to choose his ministers, he also insisted that “the ­people had the negative in a parliamentary refusal to support.” 61 The Letter to a Member of the National Assembly may well bear the mark of Burke’s shift from a protection of Parliament to a protection of monarchy as a result of the French Revolution, but ­little light is ultimately shed. At the best, some clarification can be gained from Reflections and its account of Louis XVI upon whom ministers ­were forced, and whose prerogative was lost in the most central aspects of the veto and diplomacy.62 Nor was such obscurity entirely dispelled, l­ater in the same year, by his words on a party’s ac­cep­tance of electoral defeat. The monarchical keystone was one among vari­ous wheels and cogs. ­There must exist “long habits of obedience . . . ​ a sort of discipline in society, and . . . ​a strong hand, vested with stationary, permanent power, to enforce this sort of constructive general ­will.” That “­will” was declared by an “organ” that differed from country to country and might even grant a minority the power to decide, the worst of all conventions being that of una­nim­i­ty as with the Polish Diet before the revolution of Stanislaw II August Poniatowski.63 The “strong hand . . . ​vested with stationary, permanent power”

27

1650–1850 was that of monarchy in Britain’s case, but Burke’s praises equally went to the monarchical keystone and the declaring “organ” and ­were balanced by his permanently reasoning as if his own party or, why not, himself in his isolation of 1791 was tantamount to the “constructive general ­will” as a result of a supposed exclusive ability to embody national history. Such reductions explain Burke’s propensity to work out rather lame solutions. The Regency Crisis is a case in point: he demanded that full power should be granted to the Prince of Wales a­ fter George III’s fit of madness in 1788. In Burke’s eyes, William Pitt, who wanted to consult the Commons, accorded too much to the popu­lar ele­ment and endangered hereditary succession.64 Burke’s stand might have been dif­fer­ent if the Prince of Wales had not been so close to his own close friend at the time, Charles James Fox, a hint that the monarchical keystone was no foregone conclusion with him. He also regarded monarchy as what, in the direst of emergencies, made up for parliamentary deficiencies: thus, William III, in the course of the wars against Louis XIV, blissfully did not seek refuge in a comfortable aloofness. Against all odds, he embodied national survival while Parliament was bent ­toward isolationism and oblivion of what made the country the fortress of endangered liberties: His Majesty did determine; and did take and pursue his resolution. In all the tottering imbecility of a new government, and with parliament totally unmanageable, he persevered. He persevered to expel the fears of his p ­ eople by his fortitude—to steady their fickleness by his constancy—to expand their narrow prudence by his enlarged wisdom—to sink their factious temper in his public spirit.—­In spite of his p ­ eople he resolved to make them g­ reat and glorious; to make ­England, inclined to shrink into her narrow self, the arbitress of Eu­rope, the tutelary angel of the ­human race. . . . ​The ­people w ­ ere first gained, and, through them, their distracted representatives.65 The passage depicts a trial of strength, but it is somewhat slanted. Burke does not mention that William had never been so much concerned by E ­ ngland’s glorious mission as by making her subservient to the interests of his own native ­ ere ­those United Provinces against France.66 The grievances of the po­liti­cal class w of the Tories who had a majority in Parliament and in government in the early stages of the Nine Years’ War, and it might not be amiss to remember what color was attributed, in the 1790s, to William Pitt’s government, which Burke blamed for not waging an out-­and-­out ideological war on revolutionary France.67 William’s spirit could hardly have galvanized the current po­liti­cal personnel who did not go beyond their early smug hopes that France was weakened by its revolution

28

Edmund Burke on Monarchy

or beyond their equally smug beliefs that the Directory was tractable. ­Little in the evocation of William directly touched upon George III. Accordingly, Britain could transfer the French internal situation to the profit and loss account, oblivious to the fact that revolutionary France aimed to conquer the ­whole of Eu­rope, thus turning to their own use Louis XIV’s alleged ambitions. Indeed, the peril was far greater since Louis XIV’s aims, Burke recognized, ­were mostly defensive while ­those of revolutionary France, being ideological, demanded unlimited submission from its neighbors.68 The ­whole shows Burke at his most “monarchical,” but it is also Burke at his most “practical” from an Oakeshottian perspective: gearing history to its usefulness for the pre­sent day ultimately betrays it.69 Hence his characteristic shortcuts in dealing with the Glorious Revolution. The ­people—­meaning by that the sanior pars or the “po­liti­cal nation”—­had defeated a supposedly liberticidal James II, who was oblivious of what demands attached to a keystone. Defeating him could not have been achieved without William. Burke endorsed visions of him as liberator, in other words as a paradoxical keystone stepping into the fray the better to secure a return to a peaceful status quo ante.70 Against Louis XIV, the keystone again entered the po­liti­cal arena to impose views that ­were part and parcel of a trial of strength. Significantly, Burke’s stress on “the ­people” being the first to rally around the king, then gaining over “their distracted representatives,” reads like a recantation of his e­ arlier pronouncements against a combination of monarchy and democracy, which, by leaving aristocracy out, paved the way for despotism. Practice, accordingly, ran against theory and raised the issue of emergencies that Burke, in keeping with his general views on the perils of casuistry, baulked at defining very precisely.71 “Extravagant speculation,” he had written the year before, dulled awareness of the very extraordinary character of emergencies and, ultimately, made “the extreme medicine of the constitution its daily bread,” thus eventually disabling such diners from attending to the “­great occasions” when re­sis­tance was truly indispensable.72 But t­ here was more. Burke’s prudential attitudes suggest, in intaglio, some uneasiness when referred to his positions about Ireland within his Anglo-­centered construction. He said nothing of the island of his birth in Appeal, although he went through all the other strug­gles that he had waged in support of liberties both in Britain and abroad. To do so would have infelicitously called to mind his Catholic background at a time when his adversaries w ­ ere only too glad to turn it to good account.73 He also referred to himself as “an En­glishman,” which, to say the least, failed to elicit widespread conviction.74 He might have agreed in petto.

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1650–1850 His early, unpublished Tracts on the Popery Laws, left unfinished in the 1760s, was laudatory of William in Ireland. The king had ratified the Treaty of Limerick (1691), but responsibility for its violation, then for the Penal Laws, attached to both Westminster and the Protestant Parliament of Dublin.75 That William did nothing against both parliaments, which Burke did not mention, confirms that the keystone remained an ideal meta­phor, that ­there ­were varying degrees of emergency, that Ireland, specifically, could not have legitimized such royal galvanization as fighting against Louis XIV and, ultimately, that the keystone was partial ­toward Dutch, not Irish Catholic, interests. William’s sun did not equally shine on every­body. Burke’s account of British oppression in Ireland resembled his account of the worst aspects of all revolutions since they signaled “ambition, avarice, and turbulence.”76 The ­whole can be referred to ­earlier preoccupations of his that have been thoroughly addressed over the past few de­cades, namely the indebtedness of his po­liti­cal rhe­toric to the aesthetics of his youthful A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.77 However, Sublime and Beautiful never focuses on monarchy—as if it did not differ from any other form of power, be it po­liti­cal or not—­and accordingly partook of “sublime” t­rials of strength and did not involve images of the keystone. The latter, however, has nothing of the weakness and affectation of the beautiful.78 Consequently, the two ideal types of Sublime and Beautiful do not entirely match Burke’s politics. Burke entered the somewhat frustrating world of politics b ­ ecause it was a potboiler. He recognized, rather disingenuously in retrospect, that he was not properly cut for it.79 Had he persevered as a phi­los­o­pher, he might have gone on insisting on all that, in po­liti­cal power at large, perhaps monarchy itself, came ­under that destructive sublime that he located in the “bull,” the ­battle “horse,” “the lion, the tiger, the panther, or rhinoceros,” the “wild ass,” the “unicorn” and “leviathan.”80 Entering politics, Burke had to allow for situations that could not easily come u ­ nder the e­ arlier ideal types. In Pre­sent Discontents, his observations on the occult influence of the “double cabinet” agreed with the connection of the sublime and darkness: power, let it be po­liti­cal or religious, nurses obscurity carefully in order to keep fear and reverence alive among subjects.81 Burke’s refusal to incriminate anybody, even Bute, involved indicting some or other “system” that resonated of the sublime.82 Politicians tried to put solutions across. Pleas for a cohesive po­liti­cal parties and governments substituted what we might, ­today, call “transparency” for the sublime obscurity of power. Such a via media also enabled Burke to condemn military manifestations of the sublime, as with the British

30

Edmund Burke on Monarchy

army’s use of Indians or runaway slaves who might rape and massacre during the War of In­de­pen­dence.83 Exaggerated in its partisanship, Burke’s account of Warren Hastings’s management of India took on the color of the quasi-­Gothic preoccupations of Burke’s aesthetics. The same applied to his treatment of the French Revolution: “Out of the tomb of the murdered monarchy in France has arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed spectre, in a far more terrible guise than any which ever yet have overpowered the imagination, and subdued the fortitude of man.”84 Just as Sublime and Beautiful acknowledged the existence of a “merely odious” sublime like that of “toads and spiders,” the revolutionary era elicited “alternate contempt and indignation; alternate laughter and tears; alternate scorn and horror.”85 All this connects with Burke’s treatment of the French monarchy in the years of the revolution, albeit indirectly since the ideal types of Sublime and Beautiful came rather too close to t­ hose “abstractions” that Burke denounced throughout his po­liti­cal ­career. Revolutionary initiatives ­were preparing an unpre­ce­dented despotism that testified to the relevance of e­ arlier characterizations of the sublime. ­Little of the sublime attached to French absolutism, as evidenced by Burke’s balanced assessment of Louis XVI: his was “an hand holding out graces, favours, and immunities,” though his love of his subjects was not allied to the ruthless energy and “determined conduct” of the “politic prince,” Henry IV.86 This was a far cry from Burke’s subsequent praises of William III, and the contrast is detrimental to the king of France who was devoid of the Dutchman’s mettle. Louis XVI was also presented as a more or less conscious agent of destabilization as a result of a faulty education,87 and of his impatience with “the pillars which upheld his throne”—­“his nobility, clergy, and his corporate magistracy”—­since he “was taught to consider as low and degrading, that mutual dependence which Providence has ordained that all men should have on one another.”88 ­Whether that dragged Louis XVI into some form of a “merely odious” sublime might be far-­ fetched, yet this cannot be entirely ruled out, for the king and his enemies ­were inextricably bound together within the vari­ous shades and hues of the sublime. If the sublime covers a broader spectrum than apparent at first, what then of the beautiful? A priori, it could have easily found its place during the revolutionary years. “Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty,” in Sublime and Beautiful, seems to open onto indications of po­liti­cal rape.89 The description of Marie Antoinette during the October Days of 1789 mainly suggests a contamination of the beautiful by the sublime that makes the insulted queen a particularly ambiguous figure. The memories of Burke’s visit to Versailles in 1773 did pre­sent

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1650–1850 her as an image of the beautiful, though without the affectation of the latter.90 By now, however, Marie Antoinette was a “Roman matron” who, Burke hoped, would have time to commit suicide in order to “save herself from the last disgrace.”91 Lucrece’s own suicide was somewhat belated—­ and the implicit association evokes ancient, not Christian values.92 All of this tilted Marie Antoinette t­oward the sublime, although this tacit sublimity was contaminated by a bathetic parallel to a passage from the same Reflections in which Burke depicts Empedocles’s ­grotesque suicide on Etna.93 Although the revolution seemed sublime, it did not follow that its victims made for perfect images e­ ither of the beautiful or of the unmitigated sublime. French noblemen, whose “swords” had not “leaped from their scabbards” in the queen’s rescue, w ­ ere neutered figures that embodied neither the sublime nor that masculine sociability that Burke had sought to create with the po­liti­cal party.94 The muddy ­middle ground of politics blurred the neat contours of Sublime and Beautiful. Burke’s two philosophies—­aesthetic and political—­may be in very close contact at times, but they do not combine in a coherent system. The abundance of aesthetic imagery explains why Burke could not have been taken very seriously, even by ­those closest to him.95 ­Those seeking some kind of realpolitik could hardly feed on the aesthetic notes that went on shooting through Burke’s counterrevolutionary writings. Bolingbroke’s paradoxical embodiments of the Patriot King w ­ ere two queens—­Elizabeth and, to a lesser extent, Anne.96 If Marie Antoinette was a contaminated beautiful, in no manner did Louis XVI match what, in William III, oxymoronically turned the sublime into a domesticated instrument of the common good. While the new po­liti­cal sublime, the one that broke all bounds, was revolutionary, the creation of a more positive po­liti­cal sublime in the 1790s was moot. ­There was a trial of strength between aesthetics and the realm of politics.97 The aesthetic Burke presented evil figures of the sublime who w ­ ere unforgettable in the literary realm but ­were po­liti­cally sketchy. In such a discourse, no arbiter could have been satisfactorily described, let it be monarchy or the w ­ hole of the po­liti­cal class. Though practical descriptions ­were eminently desirable, William’s “fortitude” against Louis, when set against his coldness to Ireland, pointed more to wishful thinking than to real kings. Hence the question raised by Burke’s writings at large: can it be that a practical keystone, one that was compatible with the common good, was undercut by the darker findings of philosophy respecting the sublime nature of power? Burke invoked the phrase “pleasing illusions” against revolutionary brutality.98 That bitterly sarcastic phrase disclosed the manner in which revolutionaries dubbed “illu-

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Edmund Burke on Monarchy

sions” all that had enabled men to soar above their natu­ral brutality and to devise relationships that, among other t­ hings, taught them to re­spect ­women. “Illusions” contrasted with Burke’s affirmation that man’s “prerogative . . . ​is, to be in a ­great degree a creature of his own making.” 99 A po­liti­cal illustration was in Burke’s point, ­after Hume, that the origin of power is in vio­lence and that it “mellows” only when it is no longer challenged: “the time of prescription . . . ​ through long usage, mellows into legality governments that w ­ ere violent in their 100 commencement.” Burke had to recognize, in the years of the French Revolution, that it was sooner said than done. As a result, every­thing boiled down to a trial of strength. The founder of counterrevolutionary conservatism faced the return of his e­ arlier philosophical explorations, of comments that testified to the fragility of sociability. In this trial of strength, the survival of socie­ties depended on inspiring confidence in their policies and procedures, the validity of which was permanently challenged by the brutal opposition of the two constitutive poles of humanity. Burke attempted to flesh out the figure of the arbiter, but the latter was entangled in the fray of party politics. Both po­liti­cal idealism and practicality ­were deflated. ­Little could be satisfactorily argued in ­favor of monarchy or, for that ­matter, any other form of government. Burke could hardly have been comfortable with Louis-­Ambroise de Bonald’s con­temporary conception of monarchy as the only constituted form of government,101 even though Bonald, in his insistence on the keystone, would definitely have agreed with him.102 Nor would Burke have been comfortable with Bonald’s gibes at the United Kingdom as monarchy in semblance rather than in sub­ hese would have been the views of the “old prerogative enthusiasts.” stance.103 T Nor would Burke have entirely agreed with Joseph de Maistre, who, though more flexible than Bonald, contended that “­there has never existed any sovereign ­family to which one can assign a plebeian origin.” Burke’s insistence on the elective origins of monarchies had ­little in common with Maistre’s refusal that “man” could ever “make a sovereign.”104 Burkean practice was thus another way of shunning the darker intimations of Sublime and Beautiful. Burke would not have recognized the echo of his views in Charles Maurras, who was far less dogmatic than Bonald. Maurras, just like Burke, accepted republics; for instance, he praised the United States, “a traditional Republic,” ­under Theodore Roo­se­velt.105 But Maurras’s rationalistic defense of monarchy, in the case of France, would not have sat comfortably with Burke’s admission that a republic, if it respected property, was preferable to a

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1650–1850 “Democracie [sic] Royale” that made its peace with a revolutionary settlement based on the violation of property.106 Maurras’s rationalism was tangentially akin to Burke’s practicality, and equally alien to Sublime and Beautiful. Had Maurras ­really heeded Burke, some significant postmortem debate might have resulted, but nothing of the kind is to be found.107 In a word, Burke merely touched, ­here and t­ here, on the issue of monarchy. The reason partly is that he did not dissociate it from the broader issue of Parliament, for he lived u ­ nder a monarchy, while Maurras did not. For all his insights into the symbolical place of monarchy, Burke never went the ­whole length of giving it the scope that it was to occupy in another country whose experience was coming to be more and more dif­fer­ent from that Britain that was at the heart of his preoccupations. That he would have wished thoroughly to trust a king must remain a m ­ atter of speculation. Respecting monarchy, Burke stuck, at a doctrinal level, with his commitment to the idea of a king-­in-­Parliament, though he never denied monarchy some overriding symbolical tenor. This can be illustrated by a fragment on the Regency Crisis that is attributed to him: “The Regal power is that part of the Constitution which being detached from, and superior to, all the local parts, parties and interests in the Nation, exerts itself to preserve a constitutional equipoise and general interest in all the parts.”108 Such a statement cannot be satisfactorily attributed to e­ ither Whiggism or Toryism. It has much more to do with the general blurring of asperities already noted by Bolingbroke.109 Burke’s inroads into monarchy as active keystone, however, suggest that he could not have been entirely satisfied ­ hese inroads had much to do with the conduct, with fully fledged Whiggism.110 T for better or for worse, of specific kings. They did not extend to an ­actual theorizing of monarchy, which Burke shunned, contenting himself with juxtaposing a handful of tentative ele­ments that no longer bore on the hint of nihilism in Sublime and Beautiful. One might be tempted to address his even e­ arlier Vindication of Natu­ral Society (1756, 1757), which was taken literally by his early readers, as well as, ­later, by Murray N. Rothbard, who attributed anarchist positions to Burke. This obviously crude reading has been thoroughly challenged,111 but the radical ideas in t­ hose early writings may not have counter­parts in Burke’s l­ater attempts to devise qualified answers for the motley world of practicality.

Notes 1. Burke modestly wrote to the Vicomte de Rivarol that the latter’s ­brother, Antoine, had authored the first counterrevolutionary “annals.” See Lettre de M. Burke,

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Edmund Burke on Monarchy

sur les affaires de France et des Pays-­Bas, adressée à M. le vicomte de Rivarol (Paris: Denné, 1791), in Edmund Burke, Réflexions sur la Révolution de France, trans. Pierre Andler, ed. Philippe Raynaud, Alfred Fierro, and Georges Liébert (Paris: Hachette, 1989), 377. The En­glish original is dated June 1, 1791. The French publication of 1791 comprised the Viscount’s answer, an “émigré” as early as 1790. 2. Richard Bourke, Empire and Revolution: The Po­liti­cal Life of Edmund Burke (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2015), 254. 3. Bourke, Empire and Revolution, 752, referring to a letter to the Chevalier de La  Bintinaye in March  1791. See The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. Thomas  W. Copeland et  al., 10 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958–1978), 6:242. See also Burke’s reservations on the Ancien Régime in a letter to Richard Burke, September 26, 1791, and in another, to the Chevalier de La Bintinnaye, October 2, 1791, in Carl B. Cone, Burke and the Nature of Politics, 2 vols. (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1957, 1964), 2:379. 4. Bourke, Empire and Revolution, 365. 5. Jeremy Jennings, “Edmund Burke, the French Revolution and His French Critics,” in The Reception of Edmund Burke in Eu­rope, ed. Martin Fitzpatrick and Peter Jones (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 91–104, 95. See Burke, Lettre . . . ​à M. le vicomte de Rivarol, 380. 6. David Bromwich, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American In­de­pen­dence (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2014), 19. See also Richard Bourke, “Burke was no Conservative, https://­aeon​.­co​/­essays​/­conservatives​ -­cant​-­claim​-­edumundburke​-­as​-­one​-­of​-­their​-­own, 22 December, 2015. 7. Philippe Bénéton, Le conservatisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988), 5. 8. Bénéton, Le conservatisme, 46–49. One finds some of t­ hese points in his recent “Pensée conservatrice,” in Le dictionnaire du conservatisme, ed. Frédéric Rouvillois, Olivier Dard, and Christophe Boutin (Paris: Cerf, 2017), 725–726. 9. However, Burke was “a liberal conservative” and Tocqueville “a conservative liberal” (Bénéton, Le conservatisme, 26–27). The legerdemain suggests a telling muddy ­middle ground. 10. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (1969; Harmonds­worth: Penguin, 1982), 151. All further citations are to O’Brien’s edition. 11. Burke, Reflections, 106. 12. Bromwich, Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke, 19. 13. J. C. D. Clark, ed., Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 34. 14. Burke, Reflections, 227. 15. J. G. A. Pocock, ed., Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1987; Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005), xxii.

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1650–1850 16. Burke, Reflections, 250. See Bolingbroke, The Idea of a Patriot King (1749), vol. 2 of The Works of Lord Bolingbroke in Four Volumes (London: Frank Cass, 1967), 381. Burke’s A Vindication of Natu­ral Society (1756, 1757) purported to be an extension of Bolingbroke’s deism to politics; his Thoughts on the Cause of the Pre­sent Discontents (1770) cryptically indicted his views of a Patriot King; even Reflections slighted his influence as a deist (Reflections, 186). 17. Bernard Cottret, Bolingbroke: Exil et écriture au Siècle des Lumières. Angleterre-­ France (vers 1715–­vers 1750), 2 vols. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1992), 1:437 (respecting Bolingbroke’s second exile in 1735). Bolingbroke’s first exile made him the failed architect of the Jacobite insurrection of 1715. 18. Burke, Reflections, 230–31 (also 236). 19. Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796–1797), vol. 5 of The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (London: George Bell and Sons, 1907–1910), 364. 20. Corinne Comstock Weston and Janelle Renfrow Greenberg, Subjects and Sovereigns: The ­Grand Controversy over ­Legal Sovereignty in Stuart ­England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 38. 21. See Charles I, Answer to the Nineteen Propositions of Parliament, in J. P. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 21–23. 22. Burke, Reflections, 111–112. 23. Weston and Greenberg, Subjects and Sovereigns, 90. 24. Burke, Reflections, 106. 25. J. C. D. Clark, En­glish Society 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology, and Politics during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 342. 26. Leo Strauss, “Persecution and the Art of Writing” (1941), in Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 35–36. “Ductus obliquus” occurs by the end of the first book of Thomas More’s Utopia. 27. Burke, Reflections, 103, 106. 28. See J.  P. Kenyon, Revolution Princi­ples: The Politics of Party, 1689–1720 (1977; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 21–34 and, obviously, 128–45 on the Sacheverell trial, which Burke addressed in An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791). 29. On Burke’s consistency, see An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), ed. and trans. Norbert Col (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1996), 60. Cone used the French Revolution as a neat articulation in Burke’s life, though not as indicative of an about-­turn: Cone, Burke and the Nature of Politics, vol. 1: The Age of the American Revolution; vol. 2: The Age of the French Revolution. Bromwich somehow follows suit, announcing “a second volume . . . ​ from Burke’s attempt to reform the government of British India to his pamphlets against the French Revolution” (Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke, viii). F.  P. Lock’s more British-­centered approach places the caesura in the 1784 general election, with

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the victory of the Younger Pitt and the rout of the Whigs: see Edmund Burke, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998 and 2006 [1: 1730–1784; 2: 1784–1797]). 30. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (1791 and 1792), ed. Eric Foner (1984), notes Henry Collins (1969) (Harmonds­worth: Penguin, 1985), 35. 31. Paine, Rights of Man, II, 174. 32. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (London: J. Johnson, 1790), 20–21. 33. Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Men, 56, 59–63. 34. James Mackintosh, Vindiciae Gallicae (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1791), 319. See the Second Earl of Clarendon’s speech of February 5, 1689 (Kenyon, Revolution Princi­ples, 12). More polemically, Mackintosh bracketed Burke and Judge Jeffries (326–327). 35. Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of the Pre­sent Discontents (1770), in Works, 1:329, 316. 36. Burke, Pre­sent Discontents, 1:329. 37. Burke, Pre­sent Discontents, 1:308. On the “­great parties,” see Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., Statesmanship and Party Government: A Study of Burke and Bolingbroke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 6–7: “religious controversy” had been at the origin of the Whigs and Tories, or the “­great parties”; the latter could be revived by “heating up the issues” that ­were “raised” by what Mansfield terms the “small parties” of the eigh­teenth c­ entury. 38. Burke, Pre­sent Discontents, 1:315, alluding to “some persons in the court of Frederic Prince of Wales.” 39. Burke, Pre­sent Discontents, 1:375–376. 40. Referring to Sir Lewis Namier (Personalities and Powers [London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955]) and to Herbert Butterfield (George III and the Historians [London: Collins, 1957]), Bourke avers: “It has long been recognised that the ambitions of George III did not involve attempts to subvert the constitution” (Empire and Revolution, 261). 41. Norbert Col, “Le torysme paradoxal de Bolingbroke,” Mentalities  / Mentalités 20–21 (2006): 45–54, 49. 42. Paul Langford, ed., Party, Parliament, and the American Crisis, 1766–1774, vol. 2 of The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Langford (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), 245, 275n. 43. Burke, Appeal, 54. 44. See Isaac Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative (New York: Basic Books, 1977). Burke’s permanent consistency allied with a profound, and permanent, ambivalence: t­here had always been in this conservative the makings of a potential revolutionary. Of note is that Kramnick is far from moving within the neoconservative tendency. 45. Burke, Reflections, 92.

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1650–1850 46. Burke, Reflections, 107–109. 47. Burke, Reflections, 99. 48. Burke, Appeal, 58–60, drawing from Speeches at Mr.  Burke’s Arrival at Bristol, and at the Conclusion of the Poll, in Works, 1:448. Burke’s italics and capitals in Appeal. 49. The two concepts of “cooperation” and “coordination” are t­ hose of Weston and Greenberg. 50. Weston and Greenberg, Subjects and Sovereigns, 46, on the blunder (“your ancestors,” meaning the ­people’s as devisers of the balanced constitution) made by Sir John Colepeper, the king’s secretary, unsuccessfully corrected (“our ancestors,” in other words the king’s) in the November reissue of the Answer. 51. Burke, Reflections, 114–115. 52. Burke, Reflections, 98. 53. Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, 8–9. 54. Burke, Reflections, 111. 55. Burke, Reflections, 122. 56. Burke, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791), in Works, 2:554. 57. Burke, Pre­sent Discontents, 1:313. 58. Burke, Pre­sent Discontents, 1:314. 59. Burke, Pre­sent Discontents, 1:333. To Butterfield, a king’s right “to choose his own ministers” may not have been that much of “established constitutional doctrine” as often argued, given the obscurity that attached to “a mixed form of government” (Butterfield, George III and the Historians, 253–254). 60. Burke, Pre­sent Discontents, 1:331. 61. Burke, Pre­sent Discontents, 1:333. 62. Burke, Reflections, 317–325. In fact, Louis XVI retained a suspensive veto. 63. Burke, Appeal, 150–152. 64. See R. R. Fennessy, OFM, Burke, Paine and the Rights of Man: A Difference of Po­liti­cal Opinion (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963), 89; Bourke, Empire and Revolution, 594. 65. Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace, 5:200. Though in a minor key, Burke, ­earlier on, eulogized George II for rather similar reasons (Pre­sent Discontents, 1:321–322). 66. J. R. Jones, The Revolution of 1688 in ­England (New York: Norton, 1972), 190. 67. O’Brien, ed., Burke, Reflections, 22. In fact, the Younger Pitt was an in­de­pen­dent Whig and his governments w ­ ere as broad-­bottom as could be achieved. 68. Burke, Heads for Consideration on the Pre­sent State of Affairs (1792), in Works, 3:397. 69. Michael Oakeshott, “The Activity of Being an Historian” (1958), in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962), new and expanded ed. by Timothy Fuller (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991), 151–183. 70. Burke quoted William’s Declarations of 1688: see Appeal, 120–122.

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71. Burke, Appeal, 38–40. 72. Burke, Reflections, 154. 73. See the spate of caricatures of Burke as a Jesuit, both before and during the revolution, and also Paine on Burke’s shortening “his journey to Rome” (Rights of Man, 43). 74. Burke, Appeal, 20. Adopting an En­glish identity is not surprising to Clark since “Celtic nationalism” had not yet come into being (see his edition of Reflections, 25). Clark is right in warning against anachronism, but “Celtic nationalism” is not at issue ­here: Burke’s regarding himself as En­glish, and his silence on Ireland in Appeal was a cover-up. A preoccupation with Ireland, however, never deserted him and left him exposed to the Gordon Riots in 1780. 75. Burke, Tracts on the Popery Laws (ca. 1765), in Works, 6:38–40. 76. Burke, Appeal, 198. 77. Some of the most sustained explorations are Kramnick, Rage of Edmund Burke; Michel Fuchs, Edmund Burke, Ireland and the Fashioning of Self (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1996); Frans De Bruyn, The Literary Genres of Edmund Burke: The Po­liti­cal Uses of Literary Form (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996); Luke Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Colonial Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). The dissentient voice of F. P. Lock (Edmund Burke, 1:121–122) is much too elliptical. 78. Burke, Sublime and Beautiful (1757, 1759), in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful and Other Pre-­revolutionary Writings, ed. David Womersley (London: Harmonds­worth, 1998), ix, 144. 79. See Correspondence of Edmund Burke, 3:389, De Bruyn, Literary Genres of Edmund Burke, 157, and Fuchs, Edmund Burke, 288–289. 80. Burke, Sublime and Beautiful, v, 108–109. 81. Burke, Sublime and Beautiful, iii, 103. Burke made a passing exception in ­favor of Chris­tian­ity in the second edition (v, 112). 82. Burke, Pre­sent Discontents, 1:330. 83. See Burke, Speech on the Use of Indians (February 6, 1778), in Party, Parliament, and the American War, ed. W. M. Elofson and John A. Woods, vol. 3 of The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 356, 359. 84. Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace, 5:155. 85. Burke, Sublime and Beautiful, xxi, 126; Reflections, 93. 86. Burke, Reflections, 126, 241–242. 87. Burke, Appeal, 202; see also Letters on a Regicide Peace, in Works, 5:258–259, where the fault was implicitly Fénelon’s, arguably his Telemachus (1699). Conversely, Paul and Pierrette Girault de Coursac highlight the Dauphin’s relative in­de­pen­dence from Fénelon (L’éducation d’un roi: Louis XVI [Paris: Gallimard, 1972], 89–93). 88. Burke, Thoughts on French Affairs (1791), in Works, 3:382.

39

1650–1850 89. Burke, Sublime and Beautiful, ix, 144; Reflections, 169 (about Marie Antoinette), and Appeal, 186 (about the rape of the British constitution). 90. Burke, Reflections, 169. 91. Burke, Reflections, 169. 92. The best-­known Christian case against suicide a­fter a rape, specifically in ­connection with Lucrece, is Saint Augustine’s City of God, xvii–­xix and xv. See Arthur M. Young, Echoes of Two Cultures (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1964), 75–76. 93. Burke, Reflections, 154. 94. Burke, Reflections, 170; Burke, Pre­sent Discontents, 1:376. On masculine sociability and party, see Norbert Col, “Burke’s Sublime and Beautiful in Po­liti­cal Sociability: From Thoughts on the Cause of the Pre­sent Discontents (1770) to the French Revolution,” in Les Lumières en France et en Grande-­Bretagne: les vecteurs d’une nouvelle sociabilité—­entre ludique et politique, ed. Annick Cossic-­Péricarpin and Allan Ingram (Paris: Le Manuscrit, 2012), 209–228. 95. Burke’s friendship with Sir Philip Francis was wrecked by the passage on Marie Antoinette. See Burke’s letter to Francis, February 20, 1790, in The Oxford Book of Letters, ed. Frank and Anita Kermode (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 166–170. Burke’s declared enemies ­were even more explicit on the irrelevance of his aesthetic imagery. See Paine, Rights of Man, 51 (“He pities the plumage, but forgets the ­dying bird”), and Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Men, 5–6, 27, 35, and, for a direct incrimination of Sublime and Beautiful, 111–114. 96. Bolingbroke, Patriot King, in Works, 2:412–413, 417, 424–425 (on Elizabeth); Of the State of Parties at the Accession of King George the First (1739), in Works, 2:430 (on Anne). 97. The best account of Burke’s aesthetics as devoid of all idealism is in Gerald  J. Butler, Love and Reading: An Essay in Applied Psychoanalysis (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), 57–62. 98. Burke, Reflections, 171. 99. Burke, Reflections, 189. 100. Burke, Reflections, 276. See David Hume, A Treatise of H ­ uman Nature (1739; New York: Prometheus Books, 1992), x, 553–567. 101. Louis-­Ambroise de Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux (1796), in Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux, suivi de Théorie de l’éducation sociale, abridged ed. by Colette Capitan (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1966), iii, 43–44. 102. Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux, vi, 55. 103. Louis-­Ambroise de Bonald, Réflexions sur la Révolution de juillet 1830 et autres inédits, ed. Jean Bastier (Paris: DUC/Albatros, 1988), 50. 104. Joseph de Maistre, Considérations sur la France (1797), in Écrits sur la Révolution, ed. Jean-­Louis Darcel (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989), iii, 196. 105. See Charles Maurras, “Discours préliminaire” to Enquête sur la monarchie (1924; Paris: Porte-­Glaive, 1986), lxvii.

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106. Burke, Remarks on the Policy of the Allies (1793), in Works, 3:417. 107. Burke was a mere practician as against Maistre and Antoine de Rivarol: Charles Maurras, “Romantisme et Révolution” (1922), in Oeuvres capitales: Essais politiques (Paris: Flammarion, 1954), 51. 108. Burke (?), quoted in J. Steven Watson, The Reign of George III: 1760–1815 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1960), 304. 109. Bolingbroke, Dissertation upon Parties (1733), in Works, 2:73–75. Burke may have regarded Bolingbroke as an indispensable “antagonist” and “helper” (Burke, Reflections, 278). 110. To Neal Wood, “the statesman is never in Burke’s perspective solely an umpire or arbiter” (“The Aesthetic Dimension of Burke’s Po­liti­cal Thought,” Journal of British Studies 4 [1964]: 41–64, 64). 111. Murray N. Rothbard, “A Note on Burke’s Vindication of Natu­ral Society,” Journal of the History of Ideas 19, no. 1 (January 1958): 114–118; John C. Weston Jr., “The Ironic Purpose of Burke’s Vindication Vindicated,” Journal of the History of Ideas 19, no. 3 (June 1958): 435–441; Frank N. Pagano, Notes to Burke, A Vindication of Natu­ral Society (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1982), 7; Norbert Col, “Burke’s Target in A Vindication of Natu­ral Society: From Bolingbroke to ‘This Sort of Writers,’ or an Early Burkean Defense of Church and State,” 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 20 (2013): 89–112.

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“­THESE KINGS OF ME” THE PROVENANCE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF AN ALLUSION IN JOHNSON’S TAXATION NO TYRANNY MATTHEW M. DAVIS

In 1977 Bruce King published a note in which he drew attention to a previously

unrecognized allusion in Johnson’s Taxation No Tyranny.1 The allusion occurs about a third of the way into Johnson’s pamphlet, in a passage where Johnson is  criticizing American radicals, who, in arguing against parliamentary taxation, invoke both the “original” rights of po­liti­cally unaffiliated men and the chartered rights of En­glish colonists: “When this is granted [that is, when it is granted the Americans have rights based on charters], their boast of original rights is at an end; they are no longer in a state of nature. T ­ hese lords of themselves, t­ hese kings of Me, t­hese demigods of in­de­pen­dence, sink down to colonists, governed by a charter.”2 In essence, Johnson is saying that the Americans c­ an’t have it both ways. They c­ an’t appeal to the “original” rights they would enjoy in “the state of nature” while also appealing to rights guaranteed by charters. In the pro­cess of making this point, Johnson alludes to a speech in John Dryden’s Conquest of Granada, Part One, in which a character rejects the authority of a king, saying, Obey’d as Sovereign by thy Subjects be; But know, that I alone am King of Me. King’s discovery was announced too late for a note to be included in volume 10 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, and, perhaps as a result, his note has attracted ­little attention over the years. I have found only two brief references to his note in forty years of Johnson scholarship. In this essay, I argue that this neglect is unfortunate ­because Johnson’s allusion to The Conquest of Granada is actually quite revealing. If we want to understand what Johnson was

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up to in Taxation No Tyranny, it is helpful to understand what he was d ­ oing with this allusion and also what other writers had done with the same allusion previously, for it turns out that Johnson was not the first Briton to use this par­tic­u­lar passage from The Conquest of Granada for po­liti­cal purposes.

Dryden’s Conquest of Granada and Almanzor In order to understand what Johnson was ­doing with his allusion to The Conquest of Granada it is impor­tant to know a ­little about Dryden’s play—or, rather, plays, since The Conquest of Granada is a heroic drama in two parts. Part One was acted for the first time on the London stage late in 1670 and Part Two early in 1671. Both parts are set in Granada in the last days before the Spanish Reconquista, when Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon w ­ ere laying siege to the Moors of Granada. The plays focus mostly on what goes on inside the city walls, where the besieged Moors are squabbling among themselves. Dryden depicts Granada as a topsy-­turvy, Hobbesian world in which rival factions strug­ gle for power and allegiances shift rapidly. His plays are filled with outsized characters who make bombastic speeches, and the most outsized and bombastic of them all is the g­ reat warrior-­hero Almanzor. As the first play opens, Boabdelin, the embattled king of Granada, announces that he is delighted that the infighting among his Moorish subjects seems to have come to an end. However, we soon learn that his rejoicing was premature. First, a messenger arrives to tell Boabdelin that the factions are once again at odds; then leaders of the two factions burst into the room. It is at this moment that we are introduced to Almanzor for the first time. He is at the head of one of the factions, and he promptly slays a leading member of the opposite faction. Boabdelin is furious and declares that Almanzor must be put to death. Almanzor, however, rejects Boabdelin’s authority and makes a defiant assertion of his personal in­de­pen­dence: No man has more contempt than I, of breath; But whence hast thou the right to give me death? 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.3

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1650–1850 What Almanzor does not explain in his speech is that he feels he can reject the king’s authority b ­ ecause of his unusual background. Unlike the other combatants in the civil war, he is not a native-­born citizen of Granada. He is a foreigner who was raised in Africa, and it is not clear who his parents are, so it is not clear whose subject he might be—or if he is a subject at all. As one of the other characters in the play explains a few lines ­later, Almanzor has been “rais’d by Valour from a birth unknown” and “acknowledges no pow’r above his own” (1.1.31). ­These two traits of his personality are in fact closely connected: it is precisely ­because nobody knows where he was born or who his ­mother and ­f ather ­were that Almanzor can get away with “acknowledge[ing] no power above his own.” In other words, it looks as if Almanzor may be that rarest sort of man—​ ah ­ uman being who is completely outside of po­liti­cal society. At any rate, he clearly thinks that is what he is. As Martin Price has written, Almanzor thinks he is “­free of the obligations imposed upon . . . ​par­tic­u­lar men by their birth into an ordered society.” 4 The Moors may owe allegiance to Boabdelin, Almanzor says, but he certainly does not. He is no man’s subject. He is as f­ ree as the “noble savages” of the olden times, “as f­ree as Nature first made man, / ’Ere the base Laws of Servitude began.”5 It’s not that Almanzor has a prob­lem with Boabdelin specifically. It’s that he has a prob­lem with anyone who tries to assert authority over him. L­ ater in the play, Boabdelin’s b ­ rother, Abdalla, seizes the crown. When he thinks that he has established himself as king, he tells Almanzor that he w ­ ill ­pardon him for fighting against him e­ arlier. He w ­ ill allow Almanzor to live. Rather than expressing gratitude, Almanzor replies with utter contempt: To live! If from thy hands alone my death can be, I am immortal and a god to thee. . . . Thou canst no title to my duty bring. I’m not thy subject. (Part One, 3.1.61) This is Almanzor’s position throughout the first several acts of Part One: he is no man’s subject. Rather, he is, to use his own meta­phor, a lion who was raised in an unpeopled desert, is “used to range” freely, and w ­ ill never be “tamely led” (Part One, 3.1.57). In the early acts of Part One, Almanzor distinguishes himself, both as an awesome warrior and as a determined individualist. He is the greatest warrior in the Moorish armies, like Achilles among the Greeks or Coriolanus among the Romans. However, when he feels he has been mistreated he goes off in a sulk, like Achilles,

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or switches sides, like Coriolanus; and whenever he sulks off or switches sides, his actions have serious consequences. When he fights with Abdalla and the rebels, they begin to win; when he switches sides and fights with Boabdelin and his men, they begin to win. It might seem that such a fiercely in­de­pen­dent man could never be tamed. But eventually Almanzor is tamed and integrated into civil society. This happens in two stages. First, the ­great warrior falls in love; then he discovers the identity of his parents. ­After seeing the lady Almahide, Almanzor feels, for the first time, the sweet but agonizing pangs of love: I’m pleas’d and pain’d, since first her eyes I saw, As I w ­ ere stung with some Tarantula: Armes, and the dusty field I less admire; And soften strangely in some new desire. (Part One, 3.1.56) Unfortunately, Almahide is not initially available: she is betrothed to Boabdelin. However, Boabdelin’s days are numbered. He and Granada are about to be ­conquered, not by Abdalla, but by the Spaniards; and the Spanish conquest of Granada ­will lead to an impor­tant revelation concerning Almanzor’s parentage. In act 4 of Part Two, Almanzor is visited by the ghost of his ­mother, who tells him he is r­ eally a Christian and a descendent of two noble Spanish families: From antient Blood, thy ­Father[’]s Line[a]ge springs, Thy m ­ other[’]s thou deriv’st from stemms of Kings. A Christian born, and born again, that day, When sacred W ­ ater wash’d thy sins away. Yet bred in errors, thou dost mis-[e]mploy That strength Heav’n gave thee, and its stock destroy. (Part Two, 4.3.169) The identity of Almanzor’s ­father is not revealed u ­ ntil l­ater, in the very last scene of the second play, when one of the Spanish nobles, the Duke of Arcos, spots an identifying tattoo on Almanzor’s arm. Arcos explains, first to Almanzor and then to o ­ thers, that he is Almanzor’s ­father. He and Almanzor’s ­mother left Spain and went into exile many years ­earlier, when she was pregnant with Almanzor. Almanzor was born while they w ­ ere at sea, and his m ­ other died in childbirth. Then the ­father and the son ­were taken prisoner by pirates and separated, but not before Almanzor was given a tattoo which would allow Arcos to identify him many years ­later (Part Two, 5.3.195–196). Thus, the mystery of Almanzor’s parentage is solved. He is (con­ve­niently) revealed to be a Spaniard and a descendent of two noble families—­and since Boabdelin and the Moors have by this point been defeated, he is given permission to marry Almahide.

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1650–1850 In the last scene of the second play, Almanzor comes to understand that he can no longer live as he has lived previously, “acknowledg[ing] no pow’r above his own” (31). He recognizes that he is a Spaniard by birth, and that he owes allegiance to Ferdinand and Isabella, but he tells Ferdinand that it may take him a while to get the hang of life in po­liti­cal society: All Court-­Customs I so ­little know That I may fail in ­those re­spects I owe. I bring a heart which homage never knew; Yet it finds something of itself in you: Something so kingly, that my haughty mind Is drawn to yours, b ­ ecause ’tis of a kind. (Part Two, 5.3.198)

The Rehearsal and Drawcansir Some Restoration playgoers loved The Conquest of Granada plays, but o ­ thers thought them two of the most ridicu­lous plays they had ever seen. George Villiers, the Second Duke of Buckingham, had been working, along with some collaborators, on a play making fun of heroic plays. When Villiers saw The Conquest of Granada plays, he must have thanked God, knowing he had found a perfect target for his attacks. He brought out his satirical play, The Rehearsal, a few months ­later, in December 1671. In The Rehearsal, two gentlemen meet in London and begin discussing plays. Then an author, Mr. Bayes, appears and invites the two men to attend a rehearsal of a play he is preparing for the stage. The two gentlemen attend the rehearsal and ask Bayes questions. Bayes tries to explain why the characters act and speak as they do, but it gradually becomes clear that t­ here is no good explanation for most of what is in the play beyond the fact that it is in “the new style.” Bayes is clearly a satire on Dryden, who, as poet laureate, was entitled to wear a laurel of bays, and one of the characters in the play Bayes is rehearsing, Drawcansir, is clearly a satire on Almanzor. Drawcansir is an over-­the-­top character, “a fierce Hero [who] frights his Mistress, snubs up Kings, baffles Armies, and does what he w ­ ill, without regard to good manners, justice or numbers.” 6 When he appears on stage, he defines his own distinctive brand of military excellence: ­Others may boast a single man to kill; But I, the bloud of thousands, daily spill. Let petty Kings the names of Parties know:

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Where e’er I come, I slay both friend and foe. (5.1.329–332, p. 62) Some of Drawcansir’s speeches in The Rehearsal echo Almanzor’s speeches in The Conquest of Granada: Almanzor: I’le Stay, Fight, Love, Despair; And I can do all this, b ­ ecause I dare. (Conquest of Granada, Part 2, 2.3. 105–106, p. 134) Drawcansir: I drink, I huff, I strut, look big and stare; And all this I can do, b ­ ecause I dare. (The Rehearsal, 4.2.248–249, p. 49) The Rehearsal turned out to be a g­ reat hit. Villiers succeeded in making Dryden, The Conquest of Granada, and Almanzor look ridicu­lous, and he seems to have convinced many theatergoers that heroic drama, with its “huffing” heroes, was a most preposterous ­thing. Partly as a result of The Rehearsal, heroic plays began to fade from the En­glish stage.

Johnson’s Comments on The Conquest of Granada A ­century ­after Villiers brought out The Rehearsal, Johnson gave his own critique of Dryden’s Conquest of Granada in his Life of Dryden: The two parts “The Conquest of Granada” . . . ​are written with a seeming determination to glut the publick with dramatick won­ders, to exhibit in its highest elevation a theatrical meteor of incredible love and impossible valour, and to leave no room for a wilder flight to the extravagance of posterity. All the rays of romantic heat, ­whether amorous or warlike, glow in Almanzor by a kind of concentration. He is above all laws; he is exempt from all restraints; he ranges the world at w ­ ill, and governs wherever he appears. He fights without inquiring the cause, and loves in spite of the obligations of justice, of rejection by his mistress, and of prohibition from the dead. Yet the scenes are, for the most part, delightful; they exhibit a kind of illustrious depravity and majestic madness, such as, if it is sometimes despised, is often reverenced, and in which the ridicu­lous is mingled with the astonishing.7 A ­little l­ater in the same work, Johnson remarked that the Conquest of Granada plays ­were written “in professed defiance of probability” (349). One of the main themes of Johnson’s comments is how unrealistic the plays and their main hero are. Johnson describes the plays as wild, wonderful, extravagant, improbable, astonishing, and ridicu­lous. He describes Almanzor as incredible and impossible; that is to say, it is impossible to believe that t­here could be

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1650–1850 such a person in the real world. Almanzor is not like the protagonist of a novel or a realistic drama. He is more like the hero of a romance. That is what Johnson means when he says that “all the rays of romantick heat . . . ​glow in Almanzor by a kind of concentration.” “Romantick” was a word Johnson associated with escapist fiction, fantasy, and flight from real­ity. If we wanted to make a similar point ­today, we might say that Almanzor is more like a superhero in a comic book than a realistic character in a novel.8

Charles Leslie and the Po­liti­cal Uses of Almanzor Beginning in the 1690s the nonjuror Charles Leslie found ways to use Dryden, Almanzor, and The Rehearsal as weapons in the po­liti­cal debates of the day. Leslie was involved in a war on several fronts with Whig journalists including Daniel Defoe and John Tutchin, Latitudinarian churchmen including Gilbert Burnet, John Tillotson, Benjamin Hoadly, and William King, and freethinking phi­los­o­phers including John Locke. In 1691 or 1692 Leslie seems to have hit upon the idea of ridiculing Whigs by comparing them to Almanzor. In a critique of William King’s po­liti­cal views, published in 1692, Leslie dismisses one of King’s arguments, saying “he might as well draw an Argument from all the vaporing Stuff of Almanzor.”9 Leslie drew a more substantial and more po­liti­cally charged parallel between Almanzor and the Whigs a de­cade ­later, in a supplement to The New Association, Part II. In the supplement, which is dated March 25, 1703, Leslie attacks the po­liti­ cal ideas of Locke and other Whigs, particularly the proposition that t­ here was a time when t­ here was no government at all in the world, when the “state of nature” prevailed, and then a ­later moment when ­human beings created government via compact.10 All of this Leslie denies. He insists that t­ here was never a time when ­human beings existed but government did not, u ­ nless it was when Adam was the only ­human being on earth (7). Rather, government was ordained by God, and God created h ­ uman beings in the expectation that they would be governed. Leslie argues that men have been governed by kings throughout history and that the history of kingly rule can be traced back all the way back to the time of the Old Testament: “we have the Names of all the Kings, all the way down from Nimrod . . . ​ to the Pre­sent Emperor of Germany, and the Sultan at Constantinople” (8). Where then s­ hall we find a Gap to let in this Imaginary Freedom and Election of the ­People! What Time ­shall we Allot for that State of Mankind?

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Before the Laws of Servitude began, When Wild in Woods the Noble Savage ran! And such a state must be suppos’d, to Found the Original of Government in the ­People. (8) Clearly, Leslie thought, ­there had never been any such time; men had never lived in the state of nature, had never lived without government, and had never ratified any sort of “social contract.” Therefore, Whigs like Locke could not appeal to natu­ral rights p ­ eople w ­ ere supposed to have enjoyed before the first institution of government; or, if they did make such an appeal, they w ­ ere merely “vaporing” like Almanzor.11 A year ­later, in 1704, Leslie began publishing a weekly newspaper, which would be called The Rehearsal. He explained l­ater that he undertook this proj­ect ­because he felt that Whig papers like Tutchin’s Observator and Defoe’s Review ­were not being adequately answered: Their books and pamphlets have been solidly and seriously answered; but their papers have been neglected, that is, their weekly penny papers . . . ​and have done more mischief than the o ­ thers. For the greatest part of the ­people do not read books, most of them cannot read at all, but they ­will gather together about one that can read, and listen to an Observator or Review (as I have seen them in the streets) where all the princi­ples of rebellion are instilled into them, and they are taught the doctrine of priest-­craft, to banter religion and the holy scriptures, and are told most villainous lies and stories of the clergy, which they suck in greedily, and are prejudiced past expression.12 In order to counteract ­these corrupting influences, Leslie began issuing a paper of his own, in which he rehearsed and criticized the arguments of the Whigs. In the f­ourteenth issue of The Rehearsal, dated October  28, 1704, Leslie turned once again to Almanzor. In the paper, he has Tutchin’s Observator (a Whig character) identify himself with Almanzor: In all my Observators, from top to bottom, I always use the stile of calling ­every t­ hing the ­people’s, as the ­people’s LAWS , the ­people’s KING , &c. that is, all made BY the ­people; and so accountable to the ­people! And if the king is so, much more are his liveries and badges, worn by whomsoever[!] [T]herefore I say that the admiralty and navy office, and all the offices and officers in the nation (which word I always use instead of kingdom, I hate that word!) do wear the NATION’S livery, not the KING’S . And consequently are the NATION’S , that is, the ­PEOPLE’S . . . ​that is, countryman, THINE and MY officers, soldiers, &c.

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1650–1850 wearing OUR livery and accountable to US boys! even the king or queen her self! SHE too wears OUR livery! . . . ​She herself is OURS! . . . ​[I]n this sense it is, that I repeat so often the noblest title I Give her of MY queen . . . ​as teaching her, how much she is a subject to ME! [F]or who made her queen of ME? Even ME my self! And you know, who makes, can unmake! The inherent and radical POWER is still in ME! for, as our oracle says, I alone am King of me. This kingdom of me is situated in what they call terra australis incognita. And it is the only place in the world where men ­were Born ­free, as nature first made man, Ere the base laws of servitude began, When wild in the woods the noble savage ran. From this Utopia we have taken all our schemes of government ever since!13 ­Here the Observator is made to appeal to the wisdom of “our oracle,” which may be a reference to Locke, or perhaps Defoe;14 then he proceeds to quote several lines from Almanzor’s “noble savage” speech, as if they ­were the words of this Whiggish oracle. Of course, this is historically inaccurate; the lines w ­ ere written by Dryden, not Locke or Defoe. But Leslie does not especially care about this: what strikes him, and what ­matters to him, is that Almanzor in Dryden’s plays proclaims essentially the same po­liti­cal doctrines as the Whigs: he maintains that he was born ­free and therefore can decline commands he does not like. Leslie feels comfortable placing the words of Almanzor into the mouths of the Whigs ­because, in his mind, Almanzor and the modern Whig are saying the same ­thing.15 They both cant about “original rights” and “the state of nature,” and neither of them is willing to obey. For Leslie, Whiggism uses the huffing, vaporing language of Almanzor to make po­liti­cal claims that are ­every bit as unreasonable as Almanzor’s own claims. Leslie drew a parallel between Almanzor and the Whigs again in Number 202 of The Rehearsal, dated April 23, 1707: [The] whigs . . . ​cry out of their being free-­born, and the original of government; which notion certainly turns any man mad, and uncapable of being governed longer than you have the rod over his head. ­These men are well describ’d, Job xi. 12. Vir vanus in superbiam erigitur, & tanquam pullum onagri se liberum natum putat. That is, “Vain man is pufft up with pride, and thinks himself free-­born like a wild ass’s colt.” Thus the

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whigs think themselves free-­born! As soon as they drop, they whinny and kick up their heels; and who has anything to say to us? This is in their cant, To be as fee as nature first made man, Ere the base laws of servitude began, When wild in woods the noble savage ran. This is their notion of the state of nature; and such savages they would have all mankind! Such savages they have made themselves. And whoever embraces their princi­ples must be such a savage. (View, 3:242–243) The series of four quotations I have presented seems to illustrate how this par­tic­ u­lar idea grew in Leslie’s mind over time. In the 1692 passage, the reference to Almanzor is essentially a throwaway. Leslie focuses mainly on what William King has to say about government and then adds, as an afterthought, “he might as well draw an Argument from all the vaporing Stuff of Almanzor.” In the 1703 passage, Leslie quotes Almanzor’s declaration of in­de­pen­dence and makes a substantive connection between the po­liti­cal ideas of Almanzor and the po­liti­cal ideas of the Whigs, especially regarding the state of nature. Fi­nally, in the 1704 and 1707 passages from the Rehearsal, Leslie actually puts the words of Almanzor into the mouths of the Whigs; in ­these passages Almanzor and the Whigs are merged. The attentive reader ­will have noticed that the title of Leslie’s periodical, The Rehearsal, also harkens back to the theatrical conflict between Dryden and Villiers. The first number of what would become The Rehearsal was actually issued as The Observator. Leslie disliked The Observator’s politics and de­cided to write a fake Observator, which he could pass off as real, in order to embarrass Tutchin. This ruse was apparently at least somewhat successful, and Leslie’s friends encouraged him to challenge Tutchin again. Leslie agreed to do so. However, in his second paper, he de­cided to adopt a dif­fer­ent strategy. He called the paper the Rehearsal, and explained his new premise in the opening dialogue. Coun[try-­man]: Good morrow, Mr. Bays. O[bservator]: What do’st mean, country-­man? Coun[try-­man]: Sir, that is your name now. Ever since your Observator of July 29, 1704, wherein you tell us of the publick post you had got. You are now the Observator-­laureat. And Bays belongs to your office, however you deserve it. And your pre­de­ces­sor Bays was famous for his rehearsal. And your works deserve a rehearsal as well as his. It’s a pity they should go at once reading over. They w ­ ill bear chewing the cud upon them. (View, 1:8–9)

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1650–1850 In a preface he wrote several years ­later for a collected edition of The Rehearsal, Leslie explained why he ­adopted this strategy: I borrowed the title [from] that most humorous and ingenious of our plays, called, The Rehearsal, which is indeed a satyr [satire] upon the other plays and lewd poems of ­those times, and exposes the blasphemous BOUNCE of their heroes, and their madrigal LOVE scenes, as very ridicu­lous, and the WIT frothy and lean. This seemed something like the task I was about to undertake, to unravel the more pernicious papers and pamphlets of this age, which aimed at wit too. (View, 1:preface, v) Of course, Leslie was not alone in rejecting appeals to natu­ral rights and “the state of nature.” Many clergymen and laymen in the Church of ­England held similar views. Indeed, one of the most widely cited expositions of ­these views was given in Bishop Overall’s Convocation Book, which was composed in 1606 as a set of additions to the church’s canons, but never ratified, and not published ­until 1690, when it was printed, for po­liti­cal reasons, by the nonjuring bishops. In the Convocation Book, Overall takes issue with the notion that authority was initially derived from the ­people, and that ­there was a time before government, when men ran wild in the woods: If any man s­ hall therefore affirm, that Men at the first without all good Education, or Civility, ran up and down in Woods and Fields, as Wild Creatures, resting themselves in Caves and Dens, and acknowledging no superiority one over another, ­until they ­were taught by Experience the necessity of government, and that thereupon they chose some among themselves to order and rule the rest, giving them power and authority so to do; and that consequently all civil power, Jurisdiction, and Authority was first derived from the ­people, and disorder’d multitude; or e­ ither is originally still in them, or ­else is deduced by their consents naturally from them, and is not God’s ordinance originally descending from him, and depending upon him, he doth greatly err.16 Leslie continued this line of criticism, but he was, as far as I can tell, the first to use Almanzor and Dryden and The Rehearsal to criticize Whig theories of the social contract and the state of nature. He would not, however, be the last. The American Episcopalian John Checkley used Leslie’s ideas to defend himself in a notorious court case adjudicated in Boston in the 1720s;17 and, as we ­shall see, Samuel Johnson used the same ideas to ridicule American Whigs in the 1770s.18

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Johnson’s Use of the Allusion in Taxation No Tyranny With this background in mind, we can begin to understand why Johnson chose to characterize the Americans as “­these kings of Me” in Taxation No Tyranny. It is clear that he was not just making a passing allusion to a phrase from an old play. Rather, he was encouraging his readers to draw a parallel between Almanzor on the one hand and the Americans on the other, and he was ­doing this in order to make the Americans and their po­liti­cal ideas look ridicu­lous. Johnson’s parallel between Almanzor and the Americans works on at least three levels. On a very basic level, it suggests that the Americans are full of hot air. They are always ranting about liberty, always vaporing on about “original rights,” and always “huffing” about perceived offenses—­and, as a result, they sound like Almanzor. The Americans make a “mighty sound” (427) and produce many “brave words” (416), but Johnson clearly thinks that much of what they have to say is just wind. On a deeper level, the comparison suggests that the Americans are like Almanzor in their po­liti­cal thinking, and particularly in their unwillingness to submit to po­liti­cal authority. The Americans are “fierce for liberty” (414) and “disdainful of dominion” (414), just like Almanzor. Although the Americans recognize that they have a responsibility to pay some taxes, Johnson points out that they make their participation in taxation “of very uncertain extent, and imperfect obligation, a duty temporary, occasional, and elective, of which they reserve to themselves the right of settling the degree, the time, and the duration; of judging when it may be required, and when it has been performed” (418). They allow to the supreme power nothing more than the liberty of notifying to them its demands or its necessities. Of this notification they profess to think for themselves, how far it ­shall influence their counsels; and of the necessities alleged, how far they s­ hall endeavour to relieve them. They assume the exclusive power of settling not only the mode, but the quantity, of this payment. They are ready to cooperate with all the other dominions of the king; but they w ­ ill cooperate by no means which they do not like, and at no greater charge than they are willing to bear. (418) In this re­spect, too, the Americans are very much like Almanzor: just as Almanzor chooses to obey the authorities in Granada to the extent that it pleases him to do so, but no further, so the Americans choose to obey the authorities in London to the extent that it pleases them to do so, but no further.

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1650–1850 But do the Americans actually have a right to behave in this way? Do they have a right to refuse to pay any tax that they have not consented to pay? Johnson thinks they do not: “That a freeman is governed by himself, or by laws to which he has consented, is a position of mighty sound; but e­ very man that utters it, with what­ever confidence, and e­ very man that hears it, with what­ever acquiescence, if consent be supposed to imply the power of refusal, feels it to be false” (427). Johnson seems to have felt that the subject’s claim to a “right of refusal” was the crux of the m ­ atter. He had argued previously that such a right cannot be granted since it is inconsistent with the sovereign’s “right to command”: “All government supposes subjects, all authority implies obedience. To suppose in one the right to command what another has the right to refuse is absurd and contradictory.”19 This is an in­ter­est­ing passage ­because it describes precisely the po­liti­ cal situation we see in The Conquest of Granada: Boabdelin and Abdalla both assume that they have “the right to command,” but Almanzor assumes he has “the right to refuse”; the would-be sovereigns in the play are infuriated by Almanzor precisely ­because his invocation of a right to refuse calls into question their authority as rulers. Johnson’s comparison also works on a third level, on the level of “plot,” if we recall what happens at the very end of Dryden’s second play. Although Almanzor initially pre­sents himself as a “demigod of in­de­pen­dence,” and although he acts like a radically in­de­pen­dent being throughout most of the first play, at the end of the second play, we find out that he actually has parents and is a Spaniard by birth, which means he is obliged to recognize the authority of the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella. And eventually Almanzor does recognize the authority of Ferdinand and Isabella. All of this is useful for Johnson ­because he wants to make a similar point about the Americans. The Americans may claim to be the “naked sons of nature,” entitled to “original rights,” but in fact they are citizens, with rights but also responsibilities, all of which are based on charters. And once ­these charters are acknowledged, Johnson says, the argument from “natu­ral rights” falls to the ground. The Americans can no longer claim to be in a “state of nature”; they sink down from “demigods of in­de­pen­dence” to subjects. Just as the discovery of Almanzor’s lineage and history proves that he is r­ eally a subject ­after all, so the discovery of the charters of the vari­ous colonies proves that the Americans are ­really subjects a­ fter all.20 Johnson could be very skillful in his use of comparisons and seems in many cases to have made a concerted effort to choose meta­phors and similes that would work not only at the main “point of contact” between the tenor and the

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vehicle but also further on down the line. What I mean by this w ­ ill be easier to understand if I introduce another example from Taxation No Tyranny. Consider the following passage, in which Johnson suggests how he thinks an En­glish “hearer” is likely to respond to American threats: Instead of terrifying the En­glish hearer to tame acquiescence, [­these threats dispose the En­glishman] to hasten the experiment of bending obstinacy, before it is become yet more obdurate, and [convince] him that it is necessary to attack a nation thus prolifick, while we may yet hope to prevail. When he is told, through what extent of territory we must travel to subdue them, he recollects how far, a few years ago, we travelled in their defence. When it is urged, that they ­will shoot up, like the hydra, he naturally considers how the hydra was destroyed. (414) Initially, it might seem that the hydra comparison f­ avors the Americans. A ­ fter all, it is hard to cut off all of t­hose heads, especially when they keep growing back. And yet, as Johnson points out, Hercules did eventually cut off all the hydra’s heads, and, ­after cauterizing the wounds, he managed to kill the beast. So, if we recall the w ­ hole story, we see that the comparison ­favors the Americans much less than it might seem to at first glance. What it ultimately suggests is that the hydra of rebellion can be defeated. The Almanzor comparison is, I think, quite similar. At first, it may seem to ­favor the Americans. ­After all, Almanzor articulates a philosophy of po­liti­cal in­de­pen­dence and radical freedom. He claims to be the only lord of himself, the only “king of Me”; and, if it is pos­si­ble for him to make such claims, then perhaps it is pos­si­ble for the Americans to make similar claims. However, if we know the ­whole story, we know that Almanzor’s parentage and ancestry are eventually revealed, and he eventually recognizes the authority of the Spanish king and queen. In the end, despite all of his can’t-­be-­tamed, I-­am-­no-­ man’s-­subject bluster, Almanzor is integrated into civil society and obliged to recognize and submit to the powers that be. He sinks down from the ideal and the aspirational to the po­liti­cal and the a­ ctual, from fantasy to real­ity, from boasting of himself as a demigod of in­de­pen­dence to recognizing his role as a subject—­and so, Johnson is telling us, must the rebellious Americans. I do not wish to suggest that ­every reader of Taxation No Tyranny would have recognized Johnson’s allusion to Dryden’s plays, accepted his invitation to compare the Americans with Almanzor, and drawn out all of the implications of the parallel I have set out ­here. On the contrary, I suspect that many of the pamphlet’s original readers failed to recognize the allusion. By the time Johnson wrote his pamphlet, The Conquest of Granada plays ­were no longer popu­lar and

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1650–1850 had not been acted on the En­glish stage for de­cades. ­There is no evidence that ­either Part One or Part Two was performed on the London stage from 1710 to 1774.21 This means that virtually none of Johnson’s readers would have seen Almanzor ranting and huffing his way across a London stage. Johnson’s allusion to Almanzor would have worked only for readers of the plays, and that must have been a rather small subset of all readers of the pamphlet. However, for readers in this l­imited subset, I believe the allusion would have been seen as very clever and striking and would have been understood in more or less the way I have described above. What I have been trying to do in this section is to imagine how an “ideal” reader of Taxation No Tyranny might have responded to Johnson’s allusion to Almanzor and the Conquest of Granada plays. By “ideal,” I mean “ideal” from Johnson’s point of view. I mean a reader who sympathized at least a l­ittle with Johnson’s arguments in f­avor of parliamentary taxation and recognized Johnson’s allusion to The Conquest of Granada. If such a reader accepted Johnson’s suggestion, he would begin to see the Americans as Almanzor-­like spokesmen for an absurd theory of politics based on an alleged right to refuse commands, laws, and taxes that are not to one’s liking; he would be more likely to dismiss colonial protests as just so much huffing, ranting, and vaporing; and he would believe that the drama in the American colonies must ultimately end as the drama in Granada did—­with ­these would-be “kings of Me” sinking down and acknowledging their duties as subjects.

Johnson and Leslie Johnson knew The Conquest of Granada, so it is pos­si­ble that he came up with the idea of using Almanzor to make fun of the Americans on his own, based on his reading of Dryden’s plays. However, it seems much more likely that he borrowed the idea from Charles Leslie. A ­ fter all, what Johnson is d ­ oing is not just alluding to  The Conquest of Granada for no par­tic­u­lar purpose but drawing a parallel between Almanzor and Whiggish po­liti­cal radicals and using that parallel to make the radicals and their po­liti­cal ideas concerning “the state of nature,” “natu­ral rights,” and “the social contract” look ridicu­lous; and this, as we have seen, is precisely what Leslie was ­doing several de­cades ­earlier.22 I believe the case for Leslie having influenced Johnson would be strong even if all we had to go on w ­ ere the “internal” parallels documented in e­ arlier sections

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of this essay. However, as it happens, t­ here is a good deal of “external” evidence that points in the same direction. For example, we know that Johnson knew and admired Leslie. In fact, this is one of ­those rare points on which Boswell’s three most authoritative con­temporary biographers all agreed. Boswell described an occasion when Johnson characterized Leslie as “a reasoner who was not to be reasoned against.”23 Sir John Hawkins wrote, “I have heard him assert, that, since the death of Queen Anne, it had been the policy of the administration to promote to ecclesiastical dignities none but the most worthless and undeserving men: nor would he then exclude from this bigotted censure ­those illustrious divines, Wake, Gibson, Sherlock, Butler, Herring, Pearce, and least of all Hoadly; in competition with whom he would set Hickes, Brett, Leslie, and ­others of the nonjurors.” Mrs. Thrale noted that Johnson was “a ­great Reader of Leslie.”24 Johnson owned the two-­volume folio edition of Leslie’s theological works and may have owned at least two additional works by Leslie.25 He added quotations from Leslie’s Case of Regale and the Pontificate to the fourth edition of his Dictionary, and he mentioned The Rehearsal in his Lives of the Poets.26 Of t­hese bits of information, perhaps the most significant for my purposes are Johnson’s mention of The Rehearsal and his use of Leslie in the revised edition of the Dictionary. The former suggests that Johnson may have read some of the passages quoted above, and the latter suggests that he was reading Leslie (as well as several other nonjurors) in the early 1770s, just before he wrote Taxation No Tyranny. ­There are several passages in Johnson’s writings and conversation in which it looks as if Johnson may be presenting ideas that he found in the works of Leslie. For example, in his Life of Milton, Johnson takes Milton to task for speaking loudly in defense of liberty in public affairs but acting the part of a tyrant in his own home: It has been observed that they who most loudly clamour for liberty do not most liberally grant it. What we know of Milton’s character in domestick relations is, that he was severe and arbitrary. His f­ amily consisted of w ­ omen; and ­there appears in his books something like a Turkish contempt of females, as subordinate and inferior beings. That his own ­daughters might not break the ranks, he suffered them to be depressed by a mean and penurious education. He thought w ­ oman made only for obedience, and man only for rebellion. (Lives, 1:157) On another occasion, as part of a conversation, Johnson recalled a po­liti­cally motivated prank he had played on the radical historian Catherine Macaulay sometime ­earlier:

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1650–1850 Sir, ­there is one Mrs. Macaulay in this town, a ­great republican. One day when I was at her ­house, I put on a very grave countenance, and said to her, “Madam, I am now become a convert to your way of thinking. I am convinced that all mankind are upon an equal footing; and to give you an unquestionable proof, Madam, that I am in earnest, ­here is a very sensible, civil, well-­ behaved fellow-­citizen, your footman; I desire that he may be allowed to sit down and dine with us.” I thus, Sir, shewed her the absurdity of the levelling doctrine. She has never liked me since. Sir, your levellers wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves. They would all have some p ­ eople ­under them; why not then have some p ­ eople above them? (Boswell, Life, 1:447–448) I have presented ­these two passages back-­to-­back ­because it looks as if they both may have been inspired by a single passage in Leslie’s works: ­These Men whose chief Topick is the Liberty of the ­People, and against Arbitrary Power, are the most Absolute of any other in their Families, and so proportionably, as they rise Higher. If they Believ’d Themselves, or their own Pretences, they wou’d go Home, and call a Council of their Wives, ­Children, and Servants, and tell them that the Master of a ­Family was ordain’d for the ­ ere put u ­ nder his Government . . . ​[and] that they Good of t­hose who w shou’d Meet and Consult together, as oft as they thought fit; and set him Rules for the Government of his ­Family: Which if he Broke, or that they thought so, for they are the Judges of that; then they shou’d Abdicate him and Choose another Master for Themselves. (Leslie, New Association, Part II, 6–7) The section prior to the ellipsis looks like it might be the source for Johnson’s remarks on Milton, and the section a­ fter the ellipsis for his critique of Macaulay. And what is even more remarkable is that the passage I have quoted h ­ ere appears immediately before the passage on Almanzor that I quoted e­ arlier in this essay. The passage quoted h ­ ere begins on page 6 of The New Association, Part Two and continues on to page  7; the passage on Almanzor quoted ­earlier in this article appears on page 8. Thus, it seems that a few pages of Leslie’s New Association, ­ ehind three remarkable passages in the Johnsonian rec­ord.27 Part Two may lie b I do not mean to suggest that Johnson agreed with Leslie on e­ very topic. It is clear that he did not. On the subject of religion, he clearly did not agree with ­Leslie’s decision to separate from the juring church of ­England. Throughout his life, Johnson worshipped in the Church of E ­ ngland by law established.28 On the subject of politics and what might be called “po­liti­cal anthropology,” Johnson

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seems not to have gone along with Leslie’s views. Leslie was a patriarchal theorist who owed something, though not every­thing, to Sir Robert Filmer, but ­there are reasons for thinking that Johnson did not accept patriarchalism.29 In addition, Leslie and Johnson seem to have disagreed about ­whether ­there was ever a time when ­people could opt out of po­liti­cal life, sail off to a faraway land, and set up a new government. As we have seen, Leslie denied that ­there was ever such a time. In his publications, he tried to show that government is and always has been inescapable. Johnson is less absolute about this. Indeed, in Taxation No Tyranny, he goes so far as to state that ­there was a period in world history when p ­ eople could set off on their own and found a new state: In countries where life was yet unadjusted, and policy unformed, it sometimes happened that by the dissensions of heads of families, by the ambition of daring adventurers, by some accidental pressure of distress, or by the mere discontent of idleness, one part of the community broke off from the rest, and numbers, greater or smaller, forsook their habitations, put themselves ­under the command of some favourite of fortune, and with or without the consent of their countrymen or governours, went out to see what better regions they could occupy, and in what place, by conquest or by treaty, they could gain a habitation. Sons of enterprise like t­ hese, who committed to their own swords their hopes and their lives, when they left their country, became another nation, with designs, and prospects, and interests, of their own. They looked back no more to their former home; they expected no help from ­those whom they had left ­behind: if they conquered, they conquered for themselves; if they ­were destroyed, they ­were not by any other power e­ ither lamented or revenged. Of this kind seem to have been all the migrations of the early world, ­whether historical or fabulous, and of this kind w ­ ere the eruptions of t­ hose nations which from the North invaded the Roman Empire, and filled Eu­rope with new sovereignties. (419–420) Although Johnson grants that t­here was such a time, he insists that this era of history ended several centuries ­earlier, circa A.D. 800 or 900, as a result of the rise of modern states. With the rise of modern states, Johnson says, “in­de­pen­dence perceptibly wasted away. No part of the nation was permitted to act for itself. . . . ​ No man could any longer erect himself into a chieftain, and lead out his fellow-­ subjects by his own authority” (420). When Columbus and other Eu­ro­pean explorers sailed to the Amer­i­cas, they sailed not as f­ree men who “became

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1650–1850 another nation” merely by leaving their old lands ­behind but as colonists, who carried their old po­liti­cal obligations with them to new locations (420–421). To be clear, Johnson is not saying that t­here was once a “state of nature,” when ­there was no government at all, but he is saying that ­there was a time when states ­were less firmly settled and disgruntled persons could “opt out” of being a subject by simply sailing away to some new land and establishing a new po­liti­cal entity. This is a concession Leslie was unwilling to make. Of course, the concession is of no use to the Whigs of Amer­i­ca since Johnson argues that the age when it was pos­si­ble to sail away and “become another nation” ended hundreds of years before the Amer­i­cas ­were settled. In summing up, it may be helpful to distinguish between the positive beliefs a man affirms and the rhetorical strategies he uses to attack and satirize his opponents. In Taxation No Tyranny, Johnson seems to me to have borrowed at least one rhetorical strategy from Charles Leslie. He seems to have noticed what Leslie did with the Almanzor parallel, and how Leslie used that parallel to satirize the En­glish Whigs of the early 1700s, and he seems to have borrowed the idea and used it to satirize the American Whigs of the 1770s. This does not necessarily mean that Johnson agreed with all of Leslie’s positive po­liti­cal beliefs. Indeed, we have seen that he clearly did not agree with some of them. Nevertheless, it is suggestive. When a writer goes looking for arguments he might use in a po­liti­cal pamphlet, he tends to turn to the works of precursors and contemporaries who share at least some aspects of his own worldview. The evidence strongly suggests that Johnson was looking at Charles Leslie in precisely that way in the early weeks of 1774 when he sat down to write Taxation No Tyranny.

Notes I am grateful to Richard Sharp for his comments on an e­ arlier draft of this essay. 1. Bruce King, “An Allusion to ‘The Conquest of Granada’ in ‘Taxation No Tyranny,’ ” Notes and Queries 122 (1977): 280. 2. All citations to Taxation No Tyranny are to Samuel Johnson, Po­liti­cal Writings, ed. Donald J. Greene (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 429. 3. All citations to The Conquest of Granada (Part One and Part Two) are to John Dryden, Plays, ed. John Loftis, David Stuart Rodes, and Vinton A. Dearing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). The speech quoted h ­ ere is from Part One, act 1, scene 1, page 30 (1.1.30). 4. Martin Price, “Dryden and Dialectic: The Heroic Plays,” in John Dryden, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 66. For additional analy­sis of the Con-

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quest of Granada plays, see J. Douglas Canfield, Heroes & States: On the Ideology of Restoration Tragedy (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 10–20 and Alan S. Fisher, “Daring to Be Absurd: The Paradoxes of The Conquest of Granada,” Studies in Philology 73 (1976): 414–439. 5. On Dryden’s Almanzor as a pioneering exemplar of the emerging concept of the “noble savage,” see Edward  J. Dudley and Maximillian  E. Novak, The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Re­nais­sance to Romanticism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), esp. 105–107; Ter Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 35. 6. George Villiers, The Rehearsal, ed. D. E. L. Crane (Durham: University of Durham Press, 1976), 4.1.101–102, page 44. 7. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets, 3 vols., ed. G.  B. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), 1:348–349. T ­ here can be no doubt that Johnson was familiar with Almanzor’s “noble savage” speech: he quotes it twice in his Dictionary—­once in his “Grammar of the En­g lish Tongue,” u ­ nder “Etymology . . . ​O f the Article,” and once u ­ nder “to begin,” sense 3—­and also in his Life of Dryden (Lives of the Poets, 1:461). 8. For more on Johnson’s views concerning romances, see Eithne Henson, The Fictions of Romantick Chivalry: Samuel Johnson and Romance (London: Associated University Presses, 2002). For a discussion of Johnson’s opinions on Almanzor as a thoroughly unrealistic character, see Matthew M. Davis, “Conflicts of Princi­ple in Samuel Johnson’s Literary Criticism” (PhD diss., University of ­Virginia, 2000), 251–294. 9. [Charles Leslie], An Answer to a Book Intituled the State of the Protestants in Ireland ­under the Late King James’s Government (London, 1692), 10. For the attribution of this pamphlet to Leslie and a list of his writings, see F. J. M. Blom, “The Publications of Charles Leslie,” Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions 6, no.  1 (1990): 10–36. For discussions of Leslie’s c­ areer and ideas, see R.  J. Leslie, Life and Writings of Charles Leslie (London, 1885); William Bruce Frank, “Charles Leslie and Theological Politics in Post-­Revolutionary ­England” (PhD diss., McMaster University, 1983); Richard Sharp, “ ‘In the Sound and Safest Way’: Charles Leslie and the Church of ­England,” Faith and Worship: The Magazine of the Lincoln Branch of the Prayer Book Society 45 (1998): 10–15 (pt. 1) and 46 (1999): 10–16 (pt. 2). 10. Charles Leslie, The New Association. Part II. With Further Improvements (London, 1703). The “Supplement” is added at the end of the pamphlet and is separately paginated. The relevant passages are 3–8, esp. 7–8. 11. Leslie’s decision to return to the Almanzor trope in 1703 may have been prompted by the posthumous publication of The Miscellaneous Works of Charles Blount (1695). In his account of his own life, the deist Blount had written in defense of suicide, using a Whiggish po­liti­cal argument. He argued that all men have a natu­ ral right to give or withhold their consent to any government, to opt out of any

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1650–1850 par­tic­u­lar body politic—­and therefore also have a right to opt out of life entirely: “Now if I can leave any one par­tic­u­lar Body Politick,” Blount wrote, “I have the same right to leave another, and so on through all t­ hose of the World, and then by consequence I offend not, if by my death I take myself away from all. For e­ very man is in this, what Almanzor tells Boabdelin, I my self am King of Me” (“To the Honourable and Divine Hermione,” n.p.). Leslie was familiar with the works of “the execrable Charles Blount” and made reference to him in his Short and Easy Method with the Deists. If he did read the passage just quoted, it would have stirred all of his Tory anx­i­eties since it shows how arguments concerning natu­ral rights can be used to release subjects from both civic and religious duties. 12. [Charles Leslie], A View of the Times, Their Princi­ples and Practices: In the First Volume of the Rehearsals, 4 vols. (London, 1750), 1:preface, iv. 13. View of the Times, 1:85–86. ­There is an irony ­here. Leslie is arguing that the idea of natu­r al rights is dangerous and may encourage En­g lishmen to deny the queen’s authority, but he himself was a nonjuror, who declined to take the oath of allegiance to Queen Anne, or any the monarchs who ruled ­England a­ fter the deposition of James II. Ironies of this sort are quite common in Leslie’s writings and ­were pointed out by some of his opponents. 14. Nicholas Phillipson thinks “the oracle” Leslie refers to must be Locke: see “Politics and Politeness in the Reigns of Anne and the Early Hanoverians,” in The Va­ri­e­ties of British Po­liti­cal Thought, 1500–1800, ed. J. G. A. Pocock, Gordon J. Schochet, and Lois G. Schwoerer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 211–245, esp. 219–220. However, Leslie’s eighteenth-­century American follower John Checkley clearly thought that the “oracle” was Defoe. See The Speech of Mr. John Checkley upon His Tryal at Boston in New-­England for Publishing the Short and Easy Method with the Deists: To Which Was Added A Discourse ­Concerning Episcopacy; In Defense of Chris­tian­ity, and the Church of E ­ ngland, Against the Deists and the Dissenters (London, 1730), 14. 15. Leslie may have known that the deist Charles Blount had in fact a­ dopted Almanzor’s words, “I my self am King of Me,” as his own motto. See note 11 above. 16. Bishop Overall’s Convocation Book is quoted—­and some helpful contextual information is provided—in J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 1660–1832: Po­liti­cal Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-­American World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 158–159. See also Gordon J. Schochet, The Authoritarian ­Family and Po­liti­cal Attitudes in 17th-­Century ­England: Patriarchalism in Po­liti­cal Thought (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1988), 92. 17. Checkley follows Leslie closely in Speech of Mr.  John Checkley, 11. Checkley’s speech was often included in l­ater editions of Leslie’s Short and Easy Method with the Deists. 18. For a ­later example of reliance on Leslie’s ideas, see John Whitaker, The Real Origin of Government (London, 1795), written as a response to the French Revo-

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lution. Whitaker argues, following Leslie, that God, who created an elaborate hierarchy for the angels, must also have expected men to observe hierarchies as well and would never have allowed masterless men to go kicking their way across the earth like “the wild asse’s colt” in Job 11:12 or run “wild in the woods” like Dryden’s “noble savage” (4). ­Here are two unambiguous allusions to Rehearsal no. 202, quoted above, in which Leslie mentions the colt and quotes Almanzor’s “noble savage” speech. See also John Adolphus, Biographical Memoirs of the French Revolution, 2 vols. (London, 1799), 2:79. 19. Samuel Johnson, The False Alarm, in Greene, Po­liti­cal Writings, 325. 20. What Johnson does when he alludes to Almanzor is similar to what he does when he alludes to “Stukely of London” (422). Thomas Stukely (1520–1578) was a mercenary and would-be colonist who talked boldly, perhaps madly, of setting up and ruling his own principality in Florida. “I ­will write to you,” Stukely told Queen Elizabeth. “In what language?,” asked the queen. “In the stile of princes,” said Stukely: “To our dear ­sister” (Thomas Fuller, The History of the Worthies of ­England [London, 1662], 258). Johnson says he has never met with “any Eu­ro­ pean, but Stukely, of London, [who] formed a design of exalting himself in the newly found countries to in­de­pen­dent dominion.” For Johnson, Stukely and Almanzor have a lot in common: they both imagine they can shake off the ties of allegiance and achieve in­de­pen­dent dominion—­and they are both laughably wrong. They are two “projectors” who have lost sight of po­liti­cal real­ity. By comparing the Americans to Stukely and Almanzor, Johnson believes he can make the Americans seem ridicu­lous. 21. For the stage history of Dryden’s Granada plays and Villiers’ Rehearsal, see The London Stage, 1660–1800, 5 vols., ed. Arthur Scouten, Emmett Langdon Avery, George Winchester Stone, and Charles Beecher Hogan (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960–1968). 22. Johnson’s use of an uppercase “M” in “Kings of Me” may be a bit of additional evidence that he was borrowing from Leslie rather than directly from Dryden. In ­every edition I have consulted, Dryden uses the lowercase ‘m’: “king of me.” Leslie usually writes “King of ME.” So it is pos­si­ble that Johnson was following Leslie’s lead in capitalizing the “M.” However, he does not follow Leslie’s example in also capitalizing the “E,” and t­ here was so much variation in the use of uppercase letters at the time that the evidence is hardly conclusive. 23. James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 6 vols., ed. George Birkbeck Hill and L. F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934–1950), 4:286n3. 24. The remarks of both Hawkins and Thrale can be found in The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. By Sir John Hawkins, Knt, ed. O. M. Brack Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009). For Hawkins, see 51; for Thrale, see 387n198. 25. Entry 581 in the sale cata­logue of Johnson’s library reads “4. Leslie’s works, 2v., &c.” This seems to indicate that Johnson owned The Theological Works of

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1650–1850 the Reverend Charles Leslie, 2 vols. (London, 1721), and also two additional volumes, for a total of four volumes. See Donald Greene, Johnson’s Library: An Annotated Guide (Victoria: En­glish Literary Studies, University of Victoria, 1975), 76. 26. For Johnson’s use of Leslie in the fourth edition of the Dictionary, see Allen Reddick, The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary, 1746–1773, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 152–156; for his reference to the Rehearsal, see Johnson, Lives of the Poets, 2:94. 27. For a discussion of a remarkable parallel between Johnson and Leslie regarding “usurpers” who laid claim to hereditary right, see Matthew  M. Davis, “ ‘Elevated Notions of the Rights of Kings’: Stuart Sympathies in Johnson’s Notes to Richard II,” in Samuel Johnson in Historical Context, ed. Jonathan Clark and Howard Erskine-­ Hill (Houndmills: Routledge, 2002), 256–257. 28. Leslie mostly worshipped separately but is said to have occasionally joined in “public” ser­vices. See Sharp, “Sound and Safest Way,” 14. 29. On Leslie as a patriarchal theorist, see Gordon  J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Po­liti­cal Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1975); Schochet, Authoritarian ­Family; James Daly, Sir Robert Filmer and En­glish Po­liti­cal Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979); Sharp, “Sound and Safest Way,” 11–12. Hawkins wrote that Johnson was a Tory but “not so besotted in his notions, as to abett what is called the patriarchal scheme, as delineated by Sir Robert and other writers on government” (Hawkins, Life, 303). On Johnson’s views concerning Filmer, see also J. C. D. Clark, Samuel Johnson: Lit­er­a­ture, Religion and En­glish Cultural Politics from the Restoration to Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 209n64, 241.

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LOCALIZING ­WOMEN? MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT, BURKA AVENGER, AND THE ADAPTABLE HEROINE SAMARA ANNE CAHILL

In sermons or novels . . . ​voluptuousness is always true to its text. Men are allowed by moralists to cultivate, as Nature directs, dif­fer­ent qualities, and assume the dif­fer­ent characters, that the same passions, modified almost to  infinity, give to each individual . . . ​but all ­women are to be leveled, by ­meekness and docility, into one character of yielding softness and gentle compliance. —­Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of W ­ oman

The cornerstone text of Western feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication

of the Rights of W ­ oman (1792) attributed w ­ omen’s conventional subordination to a perceived inability to “cultivate” the qualities of a ­human “individual.” This perceived stasis of all ­women was due, Wollstonecraft believed, to ­women being “localized” (Rights of ­Woman, 131) together at the bottom of a man-­made hierarchy in which they could never adapt, excel, or save themselves or anyone ­else. The claim about w ­ omen’s localized status would make it difficult to talk about cultural differences among ­women, and Wollstonecraft’s solution to the prob­lem of cultural difference, particularly between her own Christian society and Muslim socie­ ties, would reverberate for centuries. When Wollstonecraft argued against the naturalness of w ­ omen’s inferiority, she was constrained by two t­ hings: the limits of using “localiz[ing]” literary traditions to represent a new, adaptable heroine, and

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1650–1850 Wollstonecraft’s own cultural bias, particularly against Islam or, as she called it, “Mahometanism.” Wollstonecraft’s response to the first constraint was, ironically, to turn to the novel, a genre that she generally disparaged as popu­lar, frivolous, and favored by cruel, inhumane w ­ omen consumers.1 Yet despite her distaste for the genre, Wollstonecraft published one novel (Mary, A Fiction, 1788) and attempted to ­ oman; or, Maria was published posthucomplete another (The Wrongs of W mously in 1798) b ­ ecause she recognized the power of popu­lar culture to represent new ways of being a heroine—of portraying w ­ omen as active, as agentic, as saviors. Her fictional heroine Mrs.  Mason in the didactic work Original Stories from Real Life (1787), which I analyze below, also teaches spoiled young girls to become ethical members of the ­human community. Mrs. Mason teaches girls to use what privilege they do have to save o ­ thers. On the other hand, Wollstonecraft’s response to the second constraint, that of geographic and cultural distance from Muslim w ­ omen, was to rely on an enshrined binary that posited Muslim ­women as less adaptable than Western ­women ­until they could be distanced from the influence of Islam.2 Wollstonecraft wanted to improve the world and she saw “improveable reason” (Rights of ­Woman, 75)—­a rational response to education—as a uniquely ­human capacity. Paradoxically, however, her arguments in ­favor of ­women’s education ­were informed by an Islamophobic cultural bias that conflicted with her claim regarding the universal ­ omen from value of education.3 Wollstonecraft believed that Islam prevented w becoming educated and therefore prevented w ­ omen from adapting.4 In other words, she believed that all ­women are naturally capable of adapting, but ­women are not able to do so within a Muslim context. Since the early 1990s Wollstonecraft has been criticized by scholars such as Claudia Johnson, Suvendrini Perera, and Felicity Nussbaum for this anti-­Muslim bias that Joyce Zonana has coined “feminist orientalism.”5 Johnson observed that critics “have not yet addressed the issue of Wollstonecraft’s orientalism, the strategic purpose of which is to discredit opponents as diverse as Burke and Fordyce by showing that their piety is Moslem rather than Christian.” 6 Perera described Wollstonecraft’s references to the seraglio as representing “an early instance of . . . ​the contradictory impulses intersecting in a certain discourse of Western feminism, as the vocabulary of oriental misogyny.”7 Nussbaum put it class perhaps most trenchantly in saying that in “A Vindication the middle-­ En­glishwoman seems to climb to liberty, closely associated with civilization, on the backs of the Egyptian, the Turk, the African slave, and the servant.”8 Subse-

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quent scholarship has complicated this picture of Wollstonecraft’s feminist orientalism. More recently, Eileen Hunt Botting has argued that Wollstonecraft’s feminist liberalism had “both humanist and imperialist sides” and that each influenced f­ uture feminists in the United Kingdom and North Amer­i­ca.9 It is this double-­sidedness that makes Wollstonecraft a useful touchstone for addressing a current obstacle to global feminist dialogue known variously as the “white feminist savior complex,” “purplewashing,” or, in its specifically anti-­Muslim expression, “femonationalism”—­the assumption that the secular West is more enlightened than other socie­ties and that, for the sake of w ­ omen’s welfare, the West must intervene in ­these socie­ties.10 The prob­lem with the “white feminist savior complex” is not that it is wrong to advocate for w ­ omen’s rights in a global context, but that this mind-­set denies the agency and heroism of w ­ omen in Muslim socie­ties. ­Here Wollstonecraft’s legacy is part of the prob­lem, but it can also be part of the solution: Wollstonecraft compartmentalized w ­ omen in a Muslim context, as the above scholars acknowledge, but she also used popu­lar genres to redefine ­women’s understanding of heroism—of ­women’s ability to be their own, and ­others’, savior. This strategy is one that global feminists ­today can use both to acknowledge Wollstonecraft’s ­limited point of view and to recognize the continuing value of her insight. The turn t­ oward using popu­lar genres to contest the historical marginalization and subordination of ­women can be seen in an updated version of Wollstonecraft’s strategy by ­those who resist the “image repertoire” of femonationalism, partly received from Wollstonecraft, that portrays Muslim w ­ omen as s­ ilent, subordinate, ignorant, and in need of guidance and salvation from Western ­women.11 Instances of this strategy—of portraying Muslim w ­ omen as heroes and saviors rather than as victims—­include Marvel Comics’ 2014 adoption of the character Kamala Khan, a Muslim Pakistani teenager, to be the next-­generation Ms. Marvel. The assumption—­still apparent in post-­9/11 discourse that portrays Muslim ­women as needing to be saved by an enlightened West—is also countered in the award-­winning Urdu-­language cartoon Burka Avenger (2013–2016). Burka Avenger follows the adventures of Jiya, a young Pakistani teacher; Jiya is also the superheroine Burka Avenger, who fights the villains threatening communal welfare. In her role as the Burka Avenger Jiya wears the full-­body covering of the burqa, often associated in the West with the subordination of ­women in Muslim contexts, as a superheroine costume. Significantly, Jiya does not wear the burqa when she is teaching. Wearing the burqa is clearly her strategic choice, not a patriarchally enforced rule. For Jiya, the burqa is a symbol of a ­woman’s heroic commitment to educating the next generation. Burka Avenger’s response to the

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1650–1850 tradition of representing Western (or Christian) heroines as more adaptable than Muslim heroines stages another generic adaptation: while Wollstonecraft ­modeled adaptable heroism through realist prose fiction, Burka Avenger does so through the audiovisual medium of TV and the conventions of the superhero. The adaptability of popu­lar genres (realist prose fiction, superheroine cartoon) can bridge the distance created by cultural bias. Just as Wollstonecraft’s heroine Mrs. Mason is a teacher who models adaptable heroism for her students, so too is Jiya—­yet her repre­sen­ta­tion tacitly speaks back to the cultural bias systemic in the Wollstonecraftian tradition of heroism. This essay discusses the ­imagined geography that enabled Wollstonecraft to distance Islam from ­women’s education before turning to Wollstonecraft’s characterization of her exemplary heroine (Mrs. Mason), continuing with an analy­sis of how Wollstonecraft’s modeling of popu­lar culture (the novel, the ballad) could help ­women to adapt, and concluding with a reading of Burka Avenger as an adaptive intervention in the Wollstonecraftian tradition of the adaptable heroine.

Distancing Islam / Imagining Geography Fundamental to the pro­cess of literary adaptation is the ability to envision new ways of being and ­doing. For Wollstonecraft the central task of ­human adaptation was to cultivate “improveable” reason. Yet Wollstonecraft’s assumptions about Islam resulted in the construction of an intellectual ­imagined geography. Edward Said saw ­imagined geography as one of the core foundations of colonialism, for in mapping spatial distance onto intellectual difference, ­imagined geography can position distant p ­ eoples as more s­ imple, less rational, and in need of governance by rational Westerners. I­magined geography helps “the mind to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatizing the distance and difference between what is close to it and what is far away.”12 This ­imagined geography had par­tic­u­lar consequences for Muslim ­women who, over the course of the eigh­ teenth c­ entury, came to be portrayed as particularly victimized. Mohja Kahf sees this development as a response to new models of Western domestic femininity.13 But it also had consequences for the portrayal of Muslim men. Most succinctly Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has summed up this colonial mind-­set as one in which “white men” save “brown ­women from brown men.”14 Though Spivak was largely concerned with the Hindu context of colonial India, the pro­cess was similar (and occurred ­earlier) in stereotyping Muslim men and w ­ omen.15 Indeed, Miriam Cooke

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has coined the term “Muslimwoman” to describe the par­tic­u­lar ste­reo­t ype that this ­imagined geography produced of the Muslim ­woman: the Muslimwoman is veiled, secluded in the harem, kept in virtual sexual slavery, and deprived of ­human dignity and an education. It is a ste­reo­t ype “created for Muslim w ­ omen by outside forces, ­whether non-­Muslims or Islamist men. Muslimwoman locates a boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ ”16 The Muslimwoman is the ultimate victim and, as long as she exists, so, too, does the ­imagined geography in which white men need to  fight Muslim men to save the Muslimwoman. Numerous scholars, including Cooke, have pointed out the par­tic­u­lar popularity of the Muslimwoman in Western media a­ fter 9/11.17 But the ste­reo­t ype was entrenched in the Western imaginary much e­ arlier. Indeed, Wollstonecraft was one of the most influential, though not the earliest, propagators of the ste­reo­t ype. That is why Burka Avenger is such an exciting intervention in the Muslimwoman ste­reo­t ype. I d ­ o not argue that the producers of Burka Avenger consciously intended it as a response to Wollstonecraft. But Wollstonecraft’s contribution to the Muslimwoman ste­reo­t ype is particularly influential, and her views on how to educate w ­ omen—­how to help them to adapt—­bear a remarkable similarity to, and a telling distance from, the conventions that Burka Avenger also uses. Burka Avenger transitions the Muslimwoman from the l­imited possibilities of the eighteenth-­century realist novel (and Wollstonecraft’s pedagogical and po­liti­ cal writings) to the twenty-­first-­century global public sphere. Burka Avenger does this by envisioning the Muslimwoman not as a passive victim but as a superhero: it portrays her as an agent by imagining her in a new genre, one in which she is not constrained by the limits of Western “realism.” Admittedly, Miranda Brar has argued that Burka Avenger recasts the Muslimwoman in a way that is just as ste­ reo­t ypical as Western models of Muslim ­women, though more conducive to Pakistani nationalism as it resists Western dominance.18 Brar has a point: Western media tends to appropriate certain Muslim ­ women (Malala Yousafzai, for instance) in such a way that they become symbolically (and perhaps literally) alienated from their own cultural contexts. Nevertheless, assessing Burka Avenger specifically through the lens of Wollstonecraft’s influential account of both Muslim w ­ omen and the importance of storytelling as educational modeling shows that the distance between realism and the superhero genre was necessary to counterbalance the ­imagined geography that erases real Muslim ­women while reproducing the Muslimwoman. The structural similarity of using a heroic storytelling teacher to model agency and adaptation unites Wollstonecraft’s feminist technique with the intervention

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1650–1850 of Burka Avenger. However, ­because the realist prose fiction tradition to which Wollstonecraft contributed was informed by Wollstonecraft’s cultural bias, it is, ironically, necessary to bridge the perceived cultural distance between Islam and the West with a further distance of genre: Burka Avenger trades not in the conventions of realist repre­sen­ta­tion, but rather in ­those of the mythic superhero genre familiar to fans of Star Wars or Marvel Comics. In rejecting the bias of which Wollstonecraft’s educational theory was representative, Burka Avenger succeeds in presenting a truly transformative heroine. In other words, by adapting to a new genre the Wollstonecraftian tradition of using an exemplary teacher to model w ­ omen’s adaptability, Burka Avenger shows Wollstonecraft’s enduring power while speaking back across the distances of time and cultural bias. A discussion of Wollstonecraft’s exemplary teacher, Mrs. Mason, in Original Stories from Real Life (1787) before exploring Wollstonecraft’s a­ ctual practice as a storyteller in her novels Mary, A Fiction (1788) and The Wrongs of ­Woman; or, Maria (1798) ­will show the structural similarities as well as the importance of Burka Avenger’s intervention.

Being Mrs. Mason Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life is didactic fiction. Prob­ably influenced by Wollstonecraft’s experience as governess to the d ­ aughters of the aristocratic Kingsborough ­family, Original Stories follows the heroic mentor Mrs. Mason as she guides her two spoiled, wayward charges, Mary and Caroline, on the road to virtue. Mrs. Mason, a “near relation,” is brought in to supervise the neglected, “troublesome” ­children of “wealthy parents” ­after their m ­ other dies.19 The ­children have not been well educated, ­either intellectually or morally: they are both “shamefully ignorant,” and Mary “had a turn for ridicule” while “Caroline was vain of her person” (viii). It is ­these and other faults that Mrs. Mason intends to eradicate through a pro­cess of disciplinary sentimental modeling with a par­tic­ u­lar focus on the shared suffering of animals, vulnerable h ­ uman beings, and even wealthy l­ittle girls. But Wollstonecraft is careful to frame Mrs. Mason’s efforts in terms of social reform. She stresses in her preface that the “conversations and tales are accommodated to the pre­sent state of society,” which is sorely in need of them. Good habits are better than the “precepts of reason,” but since society is vitiated by corrupt passions, it is rational stories directed to the young (and their teachers; v)

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that w ­ ill correct the bad habits caused by t­hese wayward passions (A2). Wollstonecraft is also careful to show that lessons must be adapted to the capacities of the audience and that exemplary storytelling is the best way to encourage reform. Indeed, “knowledge should be gradually imparted, and flow more from example than teaching: example directly addresses the senses, the first inlets of the heart; and the improvements of ­those instruments of the understanding is the object education should have constantly in view” (iv–­v). Further, the ultimate aim of education is to imitate superhuman virtue: “The Supreme Being . . . ​is recognized as the Universal ­Father, the Author and Centre of Good,” and the prime aim of education must be to lead a child “to comprehend that dignity and happiness must arise from imitating Him” (vi). Like Wollstonecraft herself, Mrs. Mason wishes to teach her students virtuous habits “imperceptibly” by rendering virtuous activities “amusing” (1). Further, she l­ater affirms that to “attain any t­ hing ­great, a model must be held up to exercise our understanding, and engage our affections” (126). Thus, by positioning students to model themselves on the superhuman, Mrs. Mason (and Wollstonecraft herself) anticipates Burka Avenger’s use of superheroine conventions to model exemplary be­hav­ior. For Wollstonecraft and Mrs.  Mason a ­woman’s greatness derives from her imitation of God; for Jiya, as we w ­ ill see below, it is to model how the Muslimwoman may be a superheroine in disguise. Tellingly, Mrs. Mason distinguishes between ­humans and animals using vocabulary very similar to what Wollstonecraft uses to distinguish Christian ­women and ­women enclosed in the seraglio. As Mrs. Mason tells the girls, “The birds you saw to-­day do not improve—or their improvement only tends to self-­preservation; the first nest they make and the last are exactly the same; though in their flight they must see many o ­ thers more beautiful if not more con­ve­nient, and, had they reason, they would prob­ably shew something like individual taste in the form of their dwellings; but this is not the case” (14). Mrs.  Mason emphasizes the links between reason, education, improvement, and ­human identity, the same links that prompt Wollstonecraft l­ater to argue that w ­ omen’s addiction to unintellectual pleasures makes “mere animals of them” and cause her to declare that such “weak beings are only fit for a seraglio! (Rights of ­Woman, 77). Obviously, Wollstonecraft’s target h ­ ere is fash­ion­able Western w ­ omen; but in order to make her point she leverages the Muslimwoman ste­reo­t ype. Mrs.  Mason never mentions Islam, but the structural binary of human/ animal responsiveness to education that would inform Wollstonecraft’s canonical feminist work was central to Original Stories. Ultimately Mary and Caroline’s ­father takes them across that most impor­tant of eighteenth-­century binaries, the

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1650–1850 transition from the country to the city, and in London Mrs. Mason leaves them. But she also gives them a heroic legacy, just as Wollstonecraft did—­a book of stories. She instructs the girls to “recur frequently to it, for the stories illustrating the instruction it contains, you ­will not feel in such a ­great degree the want of my personal advice” (175–176). Mrs.  Mason is the heroic, didactic mentor of which Wollstonecraft’s novel heroines are so sorely in need. For, in her novels, Wollstonecraft shows not didactic heroines, but heroines in the trenches of social warfare: they have to adapt in order to find themselves, to carve some personal meaning out of the rigid constraints of ­women’s sexual localization. I turn now to a close reading of Wollstonecraft’s novels to show how she used dif­fer­ent genres—­the novel and the ballad—to model a new, adaptive heroine. But central to this heroine is her distance from the figure of the Muslimwoman that Wollstonecraft invokes in A Vindication of the Rights of ­Woman and to which Burka Avenger responds.

Becoming Heroines In the tragic bildungsroman Mary, A Fiction and the fragmentary narrative The Wrongs of W ­ oman; or, Maria we see Wollstonecraft challenging the narrative conventions that enabled the repre­sen­ta­tion and recognition of socially accept­ oman, particularly, demonstrates how merging able femininity. The Wrongs of W narratives from dif­fer­ent w ­ omen’s experiences shifts the focus from sentimental responsiveness to a formal consideration of the social structure that could produce striking similarities in the experiences of very dif­fer­ent w ­ omen. Thus, precisely ­because Wollstonecraft sees “the herd of Novelists” as among the group of “­women who have fostered a romantic unnatural delicacy of feeling” (Rights of ­Woman, 102); precisely ­because she groups together “novels, ­music, poetry, and gallantry” among the influences that “tend to make w ­ omen the creatures of sensation” and that gives them an “over-­stretched sensibility [that] naturally relaxes the other powers of the mind” (137); precisely for their enormously destructive influence Wollstonecraft sees novels as the battleground on which w ­ omen’s identities must be recuperated from the debilitating cultural narratives of feminine sensibility. Wollstonecraft recognized that conventional femininity was a fictional construct and that, as such, it could be reenvisioned through the very pro­cess of making fiction. This desire to adapt available models of femininity explains Wollstonecraft’s choice to write in a genre that she other­wise deeply distrusted.

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In 1786 Wollstonecraft wrote to her s­ ister Everina about her experience as a governess to the ­daughters of the Kingsborough ­family. “The topics of matrimony and dress take their turns,” she tells her, “Not in a very sentimental style—­ alas poor sentiment it has no residence ­here—­I almost wish the girls ­were novels [sic] readers and romantic, I declare false refinement is better than none, at all.”20 This lament follows a description of her own isolation—­“I am an exile—­and in a new world”—­and precedes a searing description of the girls’ m ­ other, Lady Kingsborough, as a “fine Lady without fancy or sensibility” who “lavished awkward fondness on her dogs” with an “infantine lisp” while Wollstonecraft “endeavoured to amuse” her ill c­ hildren. This episode is most prob­ably one of the seeds of Wollstonecraft’s subsequent fictional model of dysfunctional maternity: the fine lady with her lap dogs is a figure of ridicule in both Mary, A Fiction and A Vindication of the Rights of W ­ oman.21 Lady Kingsborough’s formality and lack of sensibility resulted in the absence of refinement or sentiment in her d ­ aughters, Wollstonecraft believed, a lack that might be somewhat mitigated by cultivating the Kingsborough ­children’s responsiveness through novel reading. Being a “fine” lady meant being an artificial rather than a natu­ral one, but even “natu­ral” femininity must be cultivated. Wollstonecraft believed that ­women’s identities should be molded by calling forth and properly managing young ­women’s natu­r al impulses. As a response to the Kingsborough girls’ frailties, both m ­ ental and physical, Wollstonecraft proposed amusement, just as the governess, Mrs. Mason would.22 Wollstonecraft knew that intellectual pro­gress was most effectively achieved when students can integrate new information into preexisting frameworks, a belief she put into practice throughout Original Stories. Further, as she explains to her readers the value of hymns within her curriculum in Thoughts on the Education of ­Daughters (1787), “[­Children] should be employed, and such fables and tales may be culled out for them as would / excite their curiosity.”23 It would make sense for her to encourage young ­women to think beyond the cultural scripts available to them by working creatively with conventions rather than entirely rejecting a popu­lar pastime simply ­because it was frivolous (though she clearly found it so). In Mary, A Fiction readers are given a credible account of a young ­woman’s domestic life; we see her attempts to escape its restrictions, we note her desire for the heavenly realm, and Wollstonecraft informs us in the introductory “Advertisement” that this text’s status as fiction enables her to represent the

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1650–1850 improbable: a ­woman with thinking powers. But the novel’s formal realism—­the set of conventions by which readers identify a fictional narrative as a probable and “realistic” repre­sen­ta­tion of h ­ uman life—­reveals this statement to be ironic, for Mary is a realistic and probable young individual with realistic and probable responses to the world around her.24 Wollstonecraft uses fiction to show that “real­ity” itself is a social construct and that the conventions for evaluating what is “probable” and “realistic” can be modified by readers adapting their interpretive imagination. Wollstonecraft claims in the “Advertisement” to Mary that the following fiction w ­ ill display the “soul” of an author as well as the character of a heroine with a “mind,” “thinking powers,” her “own faculties,” and a voice. She explains her aesthetic theory in a statement worth quoting at length ­because it shows the connection Wollstonecraft makes between fiction, originality, and identity: ­These chosen few, wish to speak for themselves, and not to be an echo—­even of the sweetest sounds—or the reflector of the most sublime beams. The paradise they ramble in, must be of their own creating. . . . ​In an artless tale, without episodes, the mind of a w ­ oman, who has thinking powers is displayed. The female organs have been thought too weak for this arduous employment; and experience seems to justify the assertion. Without arguing physically about possibilities—in a fiction, such a being may be allowed to exist; whose grandeur is derived from the operations of its own faculties, not subjugated to opinion; but drawn by the individual from the original source. (3) Wollstonecraft implicitly claims that she is among t­hose authors who wish to “speak for themselves, and not to be an echo—­even of the sweetest sounds.” ­Those sweetest sounds include the voices of Samuel Richardson’s and Jean-­ Jacques Rousseau’s heroines, and Wollstonecraft declares that her Mary “is neither a Cla­ris­sa, a Lady G—­, nor a Sophie” (unpaginated “Advertisement”). It is not, in this instance, Rousseau’s and Richardson’s repre­sen­ta­tions of womanhood per se that Wollstonecraft is rejecting (though she passionately rejected the example of Rousseau’s Sophie), but rather the act of choosing to imitate rather than to create. Her conviction of “how widely artists wander from nature, when they copy the original of ­great masters” prompts Wollstonecraft to veer from the “beaten track,” even a track established by “­great masters.” Yet she does situate her proj­ect in relation to that beaten track—­she signals her innovation by pointing out her departure from what is easily recognizable. Wollstonecraft’s first novel, Mary establishes a rigorous binary between “fash­ion­able” novels, which corrupt and distort natu­ral feeling, and m ­ usic (Woll-

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stonecraft habitually associated ­music with the expression of natu­ral feeling, as I ­will discuss below). Mary’s unnamed ­mother is, from the first page, characterized as a “gentle, fash­ion­able girl” with a “negative good-­nature,” a girl of “indolence” who “carefully attended to the shews [sic] of t­ hings” and grew up to become a “mere machine” with no notion of “any relative duties for her to fulfill” (5). Of course, this machine is characterized by a par­tic­u­lar kind of literary interest: she sends “to the metropolis for all the new publications” and is as enamored as a mind as vacant as hers can be of “­those most delightful substitutes for bodily ­dissipation, novels” (6). In “imitation” of t­hese or similar novels, Mary’s ­mother plants r­ ose bushes and laments that she has no lover to weep with her. At this point, the narrator steps out of f­ree indirect discourse (“What a heart-­rending accident!”) and addresses the reader directly: “If my readers would excuse the sportiveness of fancy, and give me credit for genius, I would go on and tell them such tales as would force the sweet tears of sensibility to flow in copious showers down beautiful cheeks, to the discomposure of rouge, &c. &c.” (6). With that dismissive truncation Wollstonecraft draws a parallel between artificial, labor-­ intensive femininity, novels, and false sensibility while claiming for herself the role of a master storyteller who is able to manipulate an audience of undiscerning consumers. Further, false femininity, false sensibility, and bad novels are also associated with false (or, as Wollstonecraft calls it, “negative”) virtue. Mary’s ­mother, too lazy and afraid to break the rules with passion or ingenuity, does not actively sin; but she makes “amends for this seeming self-­denial” by indulging in “all the sentimental novels” she can access, making sure to dwell particularly on  “the love-­scenes” (7). Yet even her reading is superficial. Nothing makes an impression for, as the narrator adds drily, “had she thought while she read, her mind would have been contaminated” (7). Chapter 1 of Mary implicitly condemns the consumption of conventional sentimental fiction over the analy­sis of, and creative engagement with, realist narrative. The narrator concludes chapter  1 by characterizing Mary’s parents as having “none of t­hose feelings which are not easily analyzed” (7). Mary, we w ­ ill see, is entirely dif­fer­ent from her parents, and it is her imperfect stumbling while trying to determine meaning for herself that makes her a new kind of heroine—­one who is not easily categorized, who cannot be fit “into one character of yielding softness and gentle compliance.” Mary ­will not be a novel Mary’s ­mother would read. But by the end of chapter 1 the reader ­will have already rejected the ­mother as a character with whom to identify or sympathize. Mary is introduced to us not at the outset of the novel but as an explicit contrast to her m ­ other, as a reader and as a w ­ oman, in chapter 2.

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1650–1850 Mary is an awkward, unwanted child and comforts herself by creating fictional friends from the materials of her sentimental, spiritualized imagination. Importantly, she acquires literacy not from her fash­ion­able ­mother but from a domestic servant—­and through the oral tradition of popu­lar culture: An old house-­keeper told her stories, read to her, and, at last, taught her to read. . . . ​As she had learned to read, she perused with avidity ­every book that came in her way. Neglected in ­every re­spect, and left to the operations of her own mind, she considered ­every t­ hing that came ­under inspection, and learned to think. She had heard of a separate state, and that angels sometimes visited this earth. She would sit in a thick wood in the park, and talk to them; make l­ittle songs addressed to them, and sing them to tunes of her own composing; and her native wood notes wild ­were sweet and touching. (8) This impor­tant passage tracks the development of Mary’s literary and personal consciousness—­her self-­education—­from the oral tutorials of her working-­class mentor through a period of promiscuous and indiscriminate reading (mixing popu­lar and “high” culture texts just as Wollstonecraft did in combining ­childhood stories with her reference to the “wood notes wild” of John Milton’s “L’Allegro”), and into a final ­imagined community, one that is figured as attentive to her acts of  artistic, and specifically musical, creation. Thus, in her semiautobiographical ­ fiction Wollstonecraft clearly showed the permeation of popu­lar culture into ­women’s literacy as a vivifying influence. Indeed, popu­lar culture, w ­ hether oral or  textual, forms Mary’s subjectivity and provides her with an outlet of self-­ expression, an identity to which she, as an isolated young girl, can cling. Her interior life and self-­expression are intricately tied to specific literary genres: she develops a par­tic­u­lar “fondness for reading tales of woe” (9). Indeed, an investment in “tales of woe” rather than an interest in sentimental romances usually is associated with a beleaguered heroine in Wollstonecraft’s fiction. Mary’s plea­sure in tales of woe shows her to be emotionally akin to two char­ oman: acters from Wollstonecraft’s fragmentary final novel, The Wrongs of W Jemima (another Wollstonecraftian heroine drawn to “dismal tales”) and the momentarily glimpsed, unnamed madwoman who sings deeply affecting woeful ballads that seem to comment on her unhappy situation. Wollstonecraft’s fictional depiction of a young ­woman coming to consciousness as an isolated yet in­de­pen­dent thinker is framed in terms of a contestation of discourses: the fash­ ion­able but ethically vacant discourse of Mary’s m ­ other and the popu­lar, uncultured, but engagingly vibrant discourse of the old ­house­keeper. Wollstonecraft situates ­women’s literacy at the nexus of fash­ion­able artifice and individual sensi-

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bility that the ballad also represented, according to John Mullan and Christopher Reid.25 Furthermore, as Dianne Dugaw has pointed out, “Culture at the popu­lar level shapes how communities of ­people imagine events in their lives and find or assign meanings to their experiences. . . . ​Convention reflects value and reiterates a community sense of rightness: the bounds of what p ­ eople generally find familiar, typical and expected. ­These genres value innovation less than recognisability”26 (263). Innovation can be recognized, rendered legible, only against the background of the recognizable. Jemima, the unnamed lunatic, and Mary all turn to song as an outlet for self-­expression. If ­there are wrongs peculiar to ­women, then their mode of self-­expression may be shared, too. Yet, as a former instructor of privileged young girls, Wollstonecraft knew that it was novels that would most convince her readers. Wollstonecraft used popu­lar culture as a resource in protesting debilitating models of w ­ omen’s reading practices. Wollstonecraft would teach her reader to think while she read. A thinking reader would extrapolate from fictional narratives of suffering to real-­life interventions rather than collapsing real life into a fictional construct. This is the foundation of Wollstonecraft’s proj­ect: ­women’s imaginative engagement in fiction, properly harnessed and complicated by multiple intersecting discourses, would make them better readers of real life. As Wollstonecraft told her lover Gilbert Imlay, “I consider t­ hose minds as the most strong and original, whose imagination acts as the stimulus to their senses” (Collected Letters; letter dated June 12, 1795). She often explic­itly used alternate vocabularies to make her correspondents think about her personal or even geographic position: to Imlay she pointed out her use of dialect, a remnant of her childhood—­“I must use my Yorkshire phrase; for, when my heart is warm, pop come the expressions of childhood into my head” (letter dated January 12, 1794)—­and she wrote to her ­future husband William Godwin, an atheist, that she would not use her preferred leave-­taking phrase “God Bless” even though “Sterne says it is equivalent to a—­kiss” (letter dated September 4, 1796). Wollstonecraft depicted the potential real-­life consequences of imbibing sentimental novels in her portrayal of the character Jemima in The Wrongs of ­Woman. By representing Jemima’s experience as an abused servant Wollstonecraft ­counters the specious repre­sen­ta­tion of seduction in the kind of novels that Mary’s ­mother would read. The Wrongs of W ­ oman details the systemic abuses—­ through marriage laws, lack of property rights, child custody laws, sexual abuse, and workplace harassment—to which ­women ­were subjected in eighteenth-­ century E ­ ngland. The novel begins in medias res, with the eponymous heroine

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1650–1850 Maria regaining consciousness, a­ fter being drugged, to find that her financially and emotionally abusive husband George Venables has kidnapped their d ­ aughter and imprisoned Maria in a m ­ ental asylum in order to gain access to her inheritance. In the asylum Maria’s initially impassive guard and ultimate friend is Jemima, a ­woman who has preyed in what­ever way she can on a society that has exiled her—­a bastard, a rape victim, a former prostitute—­from the ­human community. In the experiences of the working-­class Jemima, the reader is confronted with the sharp divergence between the real plight of sexually vulnerable ­women and the titillations of sentimental novels. As Jemima describes to Maria her forced defloration, she recalls, “I have since read in novels of the blandishments of seduction, but I had not even the plea­sure of being enticed into vice” (98). Jemima’s point emphasizes the gap between fictional narrative and real-­life experience. Jemima may be a “fallen ­woman,” but plea­sure had nothing to do with her fall. Sentimental novels do not speak for her—­she does not recognize herself in them. What do give her plea­sure are the popu­lar street ballads that she experienced in her childhood. Remembering her first taste of education (acquired during dinnertime conversations with her el­derly libertine keeper and his friends), Jemima explains the appeal of the experience by comparing it to one of her youthful habits: “I had often, in my childhood, followed a ballad-­singer, to hear the sequel of a dismal story, though sure of being severely punished for delaying to return with what­ever I was sent to purchase. I could [during the period of living with the libertine] just spell and put a sentence together, and I listened to the vari­ous arguments, though often mingled with obscenity, which occurred at the t­ able where I was allowed to preside” (100–101). She then proceeds to describe how her “unassuming instructor” often solicited her reactions ­because he valued her “unsophisticated feeling” (101). Jemima’s is very much a narrative of a ­woman’s educational development. It is an inset piece that shows the value of social mixing and the dissemination of learning. Her instinctive love of seeing a narrative finished (ironic in a novel left unfinished by Wollstonecraft’s untimely death) and her identification with “dismal” stories draw Jemima to literacy. Her tutor’s desire for what he considers a “natu­ral” rather than a learned response enables Jemima to merge her experience with that of the members of a very dif­fer­ent social stratum (the privileged, wealthy, educated men of her patron’s dinner ­table). Wollstonecraft did the same with her privileged readers by putting characters similar to themselves in conversation with w ­ omen from very dif­fer­ent social spheres. She challenged the legitimacy of sentimental fictional narratives while suggesting that her own fictional narratives

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are reliable b ­ ecause they, in contrast, depict ­women’s experiences realistically. Moreover, Wollstonecraft represented a real­ity in which social mixing is productive and, indeed, necessary for ­women’s education and social justice.27 Jemima’s responsiveness to the ballad singer might also account for her willingness to assist Maria and her lover Darnford by helping them to exchange notes in the margins of a shared copy of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse. Maria and Jemima succeed in forming a cross-­class friendship, and ultimately a community of ­women. B ­ ecause of this diversity—­because Maria addresses the wrongs that all ­women, regardless of educational level, could suffer in eighteenth-­century ­England—­Jemima serves as the link between the relatively privileged ­women ­represented by Wollstonecraft’s well-­educated heroines and Wollstonecraft’s ­growing awareness of the need for ­women’s solidarity, regardless of class or educational level. Jemima also serves as the connection between Maria and the beautiful lunatic—­two ­women who express themselves through dif­fer­ent forms of popu­lar fiction (Rousseau’s novel; a ballad). Just like Jemima (and Mary), the beautiful lunatic is associated with tales of woe. Jemima’s and Maria’s encounter with the lunatic is described in terms that suggest the emotional vulnerability of all three ­women. They encounter her as she was singing the pathetic ballad of old Robin Gray with the most heart-­ melting falls and pauses. Jemima had half-­opened the door, when she distinguished her voice, and Maria stood close to it, scarcely daring to respire, lest a modulation should escape her, so exquisitely sweet, so passionately wild. She began with sympathy to pourtray [sic] to herself another victim, when the lovely warbler flew, as it ­were, from the spray, and a torrent of unconnected exclamations and questions burst from her, interrupted by fits of laughter, so horrid, that Maria shut the door, and, turning her eyes up to heaven, exclaimed—­“Gracious God!” (70) Both Maria and the “lovely maniac” are new m ­ others caught in emotionally abusive marriages. “Old Robin Gray” tells the story of a young ­woman who is forced by her ­family’s precarious finances to marry against her inclinations. From the madwoman’s perspective, real­ity is just as strange, unsettling, and tragic as fiction. It is significant that this inset narrative is located between the scene in which Jemima gives Maria a copy of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloise and that in which Maria meets her ­future lover, Darnford. Maria ­will impose all her romantic fantasies centering on the heroes of fiction on Darnford and, while it is impossible to determine what Wollstonecraft intended for this relationship in her final draft, it is clear that Maria’s interpretation of Darnford is flawed. As the narrator explains,

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1650–1850 Maria “combined all the qualities of a hero’s mind, and fate presented a statue in which she might enshrine them” (78). Maria’s understanding of Darnford is itself an imposition on real­ity of the conventions she has too uncritically absorbed from fiction. The Wrongs of W ­ oman is unfinished, and we w ­ ill never know Wollstonecraft’s full vision of Maria’s narrative. But clearly Wollstonecraft was foundationally invested in the use of pop culture to achieve feminist ends—­she believed in adapting narratives to par­tic­u­lar audiences, in putting contrasting narratives in conversation with each other, in using the recognizable and legible to envision something new and heroic. Regardless of the distinctions between them, Wollstonecraft’s heroines use imaginative projection to escape from their localized role as ­women. Maria’s attention to Jemima’s narrative models a mutually productive relationship between pop culture, private experience, and social justice. Though Maria initially turns away from the “lunatic,” appalled by the ­woman’s erratic singing (a reminder of her own isolated suffering), she l­ater comes to listen to Jemima’s tale of suffering and isolation, one encapsulated in Jemima’s experience of wandering from home in search of the end of the ballad. At the end of her life, Wollstonecraft envisioned ­women from dif­f er­ent, distant realms of experience coming together in solidarity, of saving each other. But she had not bridged the distance between her heroines and the Muslimwoman.

Localizing the Muslimwoman As Susan Coleman has pointed out, many w ­ omen in a variety of cultures eschew calling themselves “feminist” b ­ ecause they (or their countrymen) see feminists as “slavish followers of an illegitimate, neo-­colonialist Western agenda.”28 Western feminism has historically (though not uniformly) bought into this binary opposition of “feminism” and cultures beyond the “West,” particularly when t­ hose cultures are majority Muslim. Just as Wollstonecraft often dismissed Muslim w ­ omen as having the voluptuousness that she identified with ­women who could not or would not adapt, so, too, a­ fter 9/11, Muslim w ­ omen are often portrayed as veiled, exotic, s­ ilent, obedient, and passive. Burka Avenger intervenes in this tradition. In Burka Avenger a young Muslim teacher, Jiya, wears a full-­body covering while fighting t­ hose who would deny ­children an education. Jiya’s mentor Kabbadi Jaan teaches her the “ancient art of takht kabbadi” so that she can fight the forces of

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social injustice (sexism, capitalism, institutional vio­lence, and animal theft) using books and pens. Her burqa, far from oppressing her, is the symbol of her power. In the lyr­ics to the Burka Avenger theme song the burqa becomes a “one piece slick invisibility cloak.”29 By portraying the burqa this way, series creator Haroon (a Pakistani pop star who also performs the theme song) merges the Muslimwoman ste­reo­t ype with the conventions of the superhero genre to contest the ­imagined geography that portrays all Muslim ­women as necessarily oppressed. With its use of Star Wars motifs, its defense of female education, and its valorization of a Muslim ­woman whose burqa enhances her per­for­mance as a superheroine, Burka Avenger intervenes in the i­magined geography described by Said. The series follows Jiya’s heroic adventures in her home city of Halwa-­Pur. Her adoptive f­ather and mentor Kabbadi Jaan teaches her the art of “fighting with books, pen, and advanced acrobatics.” Jiya fights “for justice, peace and education for all” and tackles villains who represent the “forces of tyranny and ignorance.” In the opening scene of the first episode Jiya and Kabbadi Jaan are on a Halwa-­Pur rooftop practicing a training exercise reminiscent of Luke Skywalker’s training ­under his mentors Obi-­Wan and Yoda in the films Star Wars (1977) and ­ nder Obi-­Wan’s tutelage, for instance, Luke, his The Empire Strikes Back (1980). U vision obstructed by a visor, uses his light saber to combat air-­born spheres that resemble miniature Death Stars. Similarly, Jiya closes her eyes and envisions her enemies while Kabbadi Jaan throws eggs for her to catch. And as Luke must practice feats of agility, dexterity, and balancing while ­under Yoda’s tutelage in the Dagobah swamp, Jiya also balances on wooden poles while catching the eggs. Through this East-­West pop culture mash-up Jiya is instantly recognizable as an accessible superhero, an orphan who must rise to greatness, conquering evil through a combination of destiny and personal industry. Yet Burka Avenger departs from Star Wars in impor­tant ways. Jiya is not training in a swamp on an alien planet; the rooftops of her home city are clearly in view. Nor is she battling holographic robots or swamp creatures. She protects the fragile, young, and homely, represented by the eggs, the c­ hildren she teaches, and their pet goat. Further, this training exercise is not simplistically gendered. Though she is ­handling eggs on the rooftop of her home, Jiya is associated not simply with domestic concerns but also with a disciplined physicality that enables her to combat ­those who would shut down the local school. Kabbadi Jaan tells her, “keep your hands soft and your senses sharp” and reminds her, “Takht Kabbadi ­doesn’t require the strength of your weapon but a complete command over your mind and body.” Kabbadi Jaan models the be­hav­ior he recommends: he is attentive to

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1650–1850 her responses, sensitive to her emotional state, encouraging when she is anxious or fearful, and reassuring when she is insecure. But he never patronizes her, and his mentorship is clearly intended to complement her in­de­pen­dent functioning as a self-­controlled, rational agent. He tells her that with Takht Kabbadi she can do anything and that if she keeps practicing her “inner peace exercise . . . ​­there is no limit” to what she can achieve. The resonances with Obi-­Wan’s discussion of the “force” in Star Wars are clear but unobtrusive. This is not a s­ imple adaptation of Star Wars; rather, it is a creative merging of ele­ments from a recognizable Western pop culture narrative with ele­ments of a Pakistani context that Western media does not usually associate with liberation, freedom fighting, or the education of w ­ omen. Burka Avenger demonstrates how adapting dif­fer­ent genres can open up new ways of representing not only ­women but also distant cultures. Jiya, fighting the forces of tyranny while wearing a burqa, intervenes in the ste­reo­t ype that assumes veiled w ­ omen are necessarily passive, oppressed, and intellectually stifled. Indeed, in the first episode Jiya prevents the villains Vadero Pajero and Baba Bandook from shutting down a school and denying girls an education. Burka Avenger answers Lila Abu-­Lughod’s rhetorical question Do Muslim ­Women Need Saving? with an accessible repre­sen­ta­tion of an educated, in­de­pen­ dent young heroine whose reasons for wearing the burqa are strategic and adapted to her circumstances.30 Burka Avenger uses the same methods as Wollstonecraft does—­representing a model heroine—in a genre far distant from Wollstonecraft’s formal realist novels of sensibility. This generic distance collapses the i­magined geography that created the Muslimwoman. In yet another way ­there is ­little distance between Jiya and other superheroes. Like Neo from The Matrix, or Batman, or even the Luke Skywalker of Return of the Jedi, Jiya dons dark flowing garments not ­because she is oppressed or ­because she needs saving, but ­because she is the savior.

Conclusion In the eigh­teenth ­century, Wollstonecraft could claim that w ­ omen everywhere ­were “localized” by their sex—­shoehorned into a uniform and artificial inferiority. But she particularly felt that Muslim ­women ­were prevented from adapting or improving themselves; this despite never visiting a Muslim nation, never seeing

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the interior of a harem, never—as far as the scholarship shows—­meeting a Muslim ­woman. Wollstonecraft’s ­women of the harem w ­ ere products of her culture’s ­imagined geography.31 Just as Wollstonecraft wanted to surpass the heroines of Richardson and Rousseau, so, too, Burka Avenger aims to surpass Western conventions of portraying Muslim ­women. The very distance of the superhero genre from the genre of realist fiction creates a space for adaptation within the historical Western imaginary. Wollstonecraft would prob­ably be the first to adapt to this new intellectual geography and to see in Jiya what she saw in Mrs. Mason: a heroic teacher who knows how to adapt a good story for her local audience.

Notes 1. For instance, in A Vindication of the Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft excoriates female slave o ­ wners for their moral and emotional bankruptcy in preferring to consume novels rather than to protect their fellow h ­ uman beings from suffering. She exclaims, “Where is the dignity, the infallibility of sensibility, in the fair ladies, whom, if the voice of rumour is to be credited, the captive negroes curse in all the agony of bodily pain, for the unheard of tortures they invent? It is probable that some of them, ­after the sight of a flagellation, compose their ruffled spirits and exercise their tender feelings by the perusal of the last imported novel.—­ How true t­hese tears are to nature, I leave you to determine.” See Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of ­Woman, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), ­ oman are taken 46. All subsequent citations to Rights of Men and Rights of W from this volume. 2. For an overview of how this binary developed from the 1690s to the time when Wollstonecraft was writing the Vindication in the early 1790s, see Samara Cahill, Intelligent Souls? Feminist Orientalism in Eighteenth-­Century En­glish Lit­er­a­ture (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2019), particularly the introduction. 3. For an illuminating discussion of how Wollstonecraft’s rhe­toric “publicly bolstered the idea of Western supremacy in a way that stood in conflict with her universalist ethics” and yet influenced l­ater feminist writers, see Eileen Hunt Bot­ uman Rights (New Haven, CT: Yale Uniting, Wollstonecraft, Mill, and ­Women’s H versity Press, 2016), 161–173, 170. 4. For a fuller discussion of Wollstonecraft’s alignment of Islam with the lack of education for ­women, see Samara Anne Cahill, “Powers of the Soul: Wollstonecraft, Islam, and Historical Pro­gress,” Assuming Gender 1, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 22–43. 5. Joyce Zonana, “The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of Jane Eyre,” Signs: Journal of W ­ omen in Culture and Society 18, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 592–617.

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1650–1850 6. Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, and Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 213n12. 7. Suvendrini Perera, Reaches of Empire: The En­glish Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 79. 8. Felicity A . Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-­ Century En­glish Narratives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 193. 9. Botting, Wollstonecraft, Mill, and ­Women’s H ­ uman Rights, 168. 10. On “femonationalism,” the anti-­Muslim expression of the white feminist savior complex, see Sara R. Farris, In the Name of ­Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017) and Munazza Ebtikar, “Femonationalism: White Saviour Feminism in Af­ ghan­ i­ stan,” Media Diversified, March  21, 2019, https://­mediadiversified​.­org ​/­2019​/­03 ​/­21​/­femonationalism​-­white​ -­saviour​-­feminism​-­in​-­afghanistan. For an even more recent analy­sis of femonationalism in the Eu­ro­pean context, see Edna Bonhomme, “The Disturbing Rise of ‘Femonationalism,’ ” The Nation, May 7, 2019, https://­w ww​.­thenation​.­com​/­article​ /­archive​/­feminism​-­nationalism​-­right​-­europe​/­. For the cognate term “purplewashing” in con­temporary military contexts, see Sarah Irving, “Australian L­ abor Party Spins Israel’s Occupation as Feminist,” Electronic Intifada, November  25, 2014, https://­electronicintifada​.­net ​/­b logs​/­s arah​-­irving ​/­australian​-­labor​-­p arty​-­spins​ -­israels​-­occupation​-­feminist, and Nora Miralles Crespo, “Gender and Military Culture: Lives, Bodies and Social Control ­under War” (Report 30, Centre Delàs D’Estudis Per La Pau, November  2016), http://­w ww​.­centredelas​.­org ​/­images​ /­INFORMES​_ ­i ​_ ­altres​_ ­PDF​/ ­informe30​_­eng​.­pdf, particularly 19–20. For more on the “white feminist savior complex,” an extension of Teju Cole’s “white-­savior industrial complex,” see Anne Theriault, “The White Savior Complex,” Huffington Post, January  23, 2014, https://­w ww​.­huffpost​.­com​/­entry​/­the​-­white​-­feminist​ -­savior​_ ­b​_ ­4629470. See also Teju Cole, “The White-­Savior Industrial Complex,” The Atlantic, March  21, 2012, https://­w ww​.­theatlantic​.­com​/­international​/­archive​ /­2012 ​/­03 ​/­the​-­white​-­savior​-­industrial​-­complex ​/­254843. 11. Jasmin Zine and Lisa  K. Taylor, “Introduction: The Contested Imaginaries of Reading Muslim W ­ omen and Muslim W ­ omen Reading Back,” in Muslim ­Women, Transnational Feminism and the Ethics of Pedagogy: Contested Imaginaries in Post-9/11 Cultural Practice, ed. Taylor and Zine (New York: Routledge, 2014), 7. 12. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 55. 13. Mohja Kahf, Western Repre­sen­ta­tions of the Muslim ­Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), 7–8. 14. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-­colonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 66–111, 92. 15. See Cahill, Intelligent Souls?

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16. Miriam Cooke, “Deploying the Muslimwoman,” in “Roundtable Discussion: Religion, Gender, and the Muslimwoman,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 24, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 91–119, 91. 17. See particularly the work of Lila Abu-­Lughod or Taylor and Zine, Muslim ­Women. 18. Miranda Brar, “The Nation and Its Burka Avenger, the ‘Other’ and Its Malala Yusafzai: The Creation of a Female Muslim Archetype as the Site for Pakistani Nationalism,” Prandium—­The Journal of Historical Studies 3, no.  1 (Fall 2014): 1–8, 5–6. 19. Mary Wollstonecraft, Original Stories from Real Life with Conversations, Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness (London: J. Johnson, No. 72, St. Paul’s Church-­Yard, 1791), vii. 20. Mary Wollstonecraft, The Collected Letters, ed. Janet Todd (London: Penguin, 2003), letter dated November 17, 1786. 21. In A Vindication of the Rights of ­Woman Wollstonecraft associates a preference for lapdogs with a lady’s failure to appreciate aesthetic beauty or to perform what Wollstonecraft considers a maternal duty: “Whilst some terrific feature in nature has spread a sublime stillness through my soul, I have been desired to observe the pretty tricks of a lap-­dog, that my perverse fate forced me to travel with. Is it surprising that such a tasteless being should rather caress this dog than her c­ hildren?” (261). 22. All quotations from Mary and The Wrongs of ­Woman; or, Maria are taken from the multiwork volume Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary and Maria and Mary Shelley, Matilda, ed. Janet Todd (London: Penguin, 1991). 23. Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of D ­ aughters in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, 7 vols., ed. Janet Todd, Marilyn Butler, and Emma Rees-­ Mogg (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1989), 4:10–11. 24. According to Brean Hammond and Shaun Regan, formal realism is “a set of procedures through which the novel specifies the setting, the time, and the individuality of the events and personalities that it imagines.” See Hammond and Regan, Making the Novel: Fiction and Society in Britain, 1660–1789 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 4. 25. Wollstonecraft was therefore situating herself in terms of a debate on the merits of the ballad (and other pop culture forms) that Mullan and Reid address in the introduction to the chapter on “Ballads” in their volume on eighteenth-­century pop culture. They note that one Tory response to Joseph Addison’s “famous critique of ‘Chevy Chase’ . . . ​attempts to play upon standard views about the inferiority of the popu­lar and the vulgar” (78). By the ­later eigh­teenth ­century, though, Joseph Ritson is opposing ballads to “the artificial refinements of modern taste” (qtd. in Mullan and Reid, 79). See John Mullan and Christopher Reid, eds., Eighteenth-­Century Popu­lar Culture: A Se­lection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 78–79.

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1650–1850 26. Dianne Dugaw, “­Women and Popu­lar Culture: Gender, Cultural Dynamics, and Popu­lar Prints,” in ­Women and Lit­er­at­ ure in Britain 1700–1800, ed. Vivien Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 263–284, 263. 27. Wollstonecraft shows the value of education and social mixing—­the libertine’s mentoring of Jemima—­while remaining aware of Jemima’s sexual and financial vulnerability. When the libertine dies, Jemima is immediately thrown out on the street by his relatives. 28. Isobel Coleman, Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How W ­ omen Are Transforming the ­Middle East (New York: Random House, 2010), xvii. 29. The first episode of Burka Avenger was posted on YouTube on August 4, 2013, http://­w ww​.­burkaavenger​.­com. 30. Lila Abu-­Lughod, Do Muslim ­Women Need Saving? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 31. Of course, with the rare exception of ­women like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Wollstonecraft was hardly alone in assuming she knew the truth of what life in the harem was like. As Ruth Bernard Yeazell points out, it was not ­until female travel increased in the nineteenth ­century that this image of the harem would be complicated. But even then the harem was not encountered as an “unmediated real­ity” since it is “difficult . . . ​to distinguish the truth of the harem from the West’s imagination of it.” See Yeazell, Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Lit­er­a­ture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 7.

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THE W ­ OMAN, THE POLITICIAN, AND THE W ­ ILL CHARLOTTE SMITH’S LITERARY ASSAULTS ON JOHN ROBINSON, “THE LOWEST RANK OF H ­ UMAN DEGRADATION” ANDREW CONNELL

The frustration of Arthur Conan Doyle, lionized for writing Sherlock Holmes sto-

ries that he considered vastly inferior to his historical novels, has parallels in both fiction and fact. A venerable parrot friend of Don Marquis’s lowercase vers libre cockroach archy could remember Shakespeare boring his friends in the Mermaid Tavern with maudlin lamentations on the drudgery of a “lousy playwright,” forced to debase his talents with “junk” when all he r­ eally wanted to do was write sonnets, “like a gentleman should.” The parrot was unimpressed to learn that Shakespeare’s plays “are highly esteemed to this day”: poor mutt ­little he would care what poor bill wanted was to be a poet.1 Much the same has been said, and not whimsically, of Charlotte Smith: “Although her novels . . . ​garnered the greatest profits and fame, Smith identified herself as a poet, the vocation she deemed best suited to her genteel origins.”2 She produced ten novels in ten years; yet when just three had appeared in print, she complained to her publisher, “I am extremely sick of my trade and very anxious to leave it off.”3 In the preface to the fifth, misquoting Hamlet—­“ the proud man’s contumely, th’oppressor’s wrong, the law’s delay, the insolence of office”—­ she explained that, “in consequence of the affairs of my ­family being unhappily in the power of men who seem to exercise all t­ hese with impunity, I am become an Author by profession.” 4 Of ­these “inhuman” figures, “alive to neither honesty nor humanity,” she held none more responsible for her misfortunes than John Robinson,

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1650–1850 wrapped up in “the callous insolence of his ­imagined consequence.”5 Without what she perceived as the baleful influence of the man she variously described as an “old Mule,” an “old Hog,” an “old wretch,” and an “old brute,” Charlotte Smith’s novels—­their literary stock again rising a­ fter two centuries of fluctuation—­would never have been written.

Charlotte Smith, “­Legal Prostitute” Her fraught story has been ably told.6 Born in 1749, she was the firstborn of Nicholas Turner, whose inherited estates in Surrey and Sussex enabled him to live the life of a gambling dilettante in London and Eu­rope a­ fter his wife died in childbirth in 1752. Brought up by a maiden aunt along with her younger ­sister and b ­ rother, Charlotte grew into a bookish, precocious, poetry-­writing teenager, whose arrogance did not endear her to the wealthy heiress that her ­father, having run through most of his own fortune, successfully wooed and wed in 1764. E ­ ager to get a willful d ­ aughter off his hands, Nicholas Turner persuaded her to marry in February 1765, two months before her sixteenth birthday, an arrangement Charlotte would l­ater describe as being “sold” to a “monster,” successively likening herself to a “Southdown sheep” and a “­legal prostitute.”7 Her twenty-­three-­year-­ old husband Benjamin was the younger son of Richard Smith, a successful West Indies merchant and East India Com­pany director, who had agreed to the match in the hope that domestic responsibilities would curb his son’s propensity to be a womanizing, gambling wastrel, whose moods oscillated between charming insouciance and ungovernable rage. They did not. While his fecund young wife gave birth at regular intervals, Benjamin Smith showed no inclination to curb his rake’s pro­gress through life: he was a poor ­father and worse husband.8 Richard Smith, in failing health long before his death in 1776, accordingly devised an elaborate ­will that would both prevent his only surviving child from wasting his substance and provide for the ­future of his grandchildren: the Smith estate, comprising land in ­England and Scotland, a plantation in the West Indies, and British government and East India Com­pany stock and worth about thirty-­six thousand pounds ­after debts ­were paid, was put in trust. Four codicils w ­ ere added, and t­here ­were enough ambiguities in the ­will’s wording to leave the trustees wide latitude in interpreting its intentions.9 Even with the boost to his income of a transatlantic war supplies contract, such was Benjamin’s profligacy that in December 1783, on a suit initiated by his

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brother-­in-­law Thomas Dyer, one of the trustees, he was committed to the King’s Bench Prison for debt and embezzlement. In the role of dutiful wife Charlotte joined him in jail, leaving their five sons and four ­daughters with relatives, ­until another trustee intervened. John Robinson, attorney and member of Parliament, had been raised in a small-­town culture that set g­ reat store on both obligations to and expectations from the extended ­family.10 In April 1752 he had married Mary Crowe, ­daughter of a deceased Barbados planter, whose w ­ idow was already remarried to another West Indies merchant, Richard Smith, himself a widower with three ­children. When Charlotte married Benjamin Smith in 1765, Mrs. Robinson, seventeen years her elder, became her stepsister-­in-­law; and it was by virtue of this connection that John Robinson took responsibility for her nineteen years ­later. He arranged for the suit against Benjamin Smith to be dropped in return for a deal whereby he and Sir John Dyer, elder b ­ rother of Thomas, took over as executors of the w ­ ill, and brought into the trust Richard Atkinson—­nouveau riche war contractor, financier, East India Com­pany director, disappointed suitor of Lady Anne Lindsay, and briefly a member of Parliament.11 The Smiths w ­ ere released in June 1784, the month that saw the publication of Elegiac Sonnets and Other Essays by Charlotte Smith. While she was in prison, her Sussex neighbor William Hayley, a minor poet with a penchant for playing Maecenas,12 had agreed to accept the dedication of the slim volume to himself, on the strength of which a London publisher brought it out. But t­ here was neither advance payment nor opportunity for her to bask in the glory of publication. To escape his creditors Benjamin promptly crossed the channel, and rented a dilapidated chateau in Normandy, where he planned to breed canaries. Charlotte, five months pregnant and accompanied by their nine c­ hildren, joined him in October; but a­ fter enduring six miserable months, during which she gave birth for the last time, she abandoned her husband and returned to ­England. Her biographer Loraine Fletcher speculates that over and above the discomforts of the ­castle and a distaste for the local peasantry—­which her husband, ever ready to strike up liaisons with servant girls, did not wholly share—­the crucial ­factor in this remarkable defiance of convention was a resolve never to be pregnant again.13 The three eldest boys, all in their teens, took ship across the channel, shortly followed by their ­mother and the other seven ­children. Back in Sussex, close to the home of her ­brother Nicholas, who did not want her ­there, Charlotte wrote to John Robinson, explaining that to pay grocer’s and butcher’s bills, rent, and school fees, she must have some of the Smith inheritance: “I hope you w ­ ill not think it intrusive if I request the interest that is due . . . ​I s­ hall r­ eally be so extremely distress’d without

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1650–1850 some part of this arrears that I s­ hall not know what to do for the a­ ctual exigencies of my ­family.”14

The “Indispensably Necessary” Mr. Robinson The man to whom she looked for salvation was a parliamentarian of petit bourgeois origins, raised in the market town of Appleby in Westmorland. Recollection of John Robinson as “unadorned with any accomplishments of education” was hyperbolic.15 Appleby Grammar School, whose alumni included Augustine Washington, ­father of the ­future president, and his two sons by his first marriage, Lawrence and Augustine,16 regularly sent boys to Oxford and Cambridge, although on the evidence of a surviving school rec­ord Robinson was an unremarkable student.17 He left school aged sixteen to learn the trade of a country attorney in the office of his ­uncle, Richard Words­worth:18 with a good head for figures, he kept careful accounts and wrote in a vigorous hand, without—­as is evident from his many hundreds of surviving letters—­any pretensions to literary style. Following o ­ thers in his f­amily, Robinson soon entered the ser­vice of the Lowthers, Westmorland’s foremost aristocratic dynasty, ­owners of farms, coal mines, the port of Whitehaven, and slave-­worked Barbados sugar plantations. Business sometimes took him to London, where he met and married his wife. The addition of election fixing to his duties was the chance consequence of a series of deaths that placed three Cumbrian estates in the hands of one willful, imperious teenager, Sir James Lowther, who developed a lifelong obsession with securing parliamentary seats for himself and his nominees.19 As Lowther agent, Robinson became skilled at canvassing registered voters and securing pledges of support with the help of meticulously recorded hospitality.20 If, despite his efforts, opposing candidates ­were nominated, they must be defeated ­either at the polls or in the courts of law. Neither was necessary in the general election of 1761, when he oversaw the election of eight MPs attached to Sir James Lowther. Robinson was si­mul­ta­neously rising through the ranks of Westmorland society: installed in Appleby’s White House,21 he became borough mayor, county magistrate, and col­ o­nel in the militia. His translation to Parliament in 1764 at the age of thirty-­six was fortuitous, the outcome of a Lowther f­ amily quarrel that created a vacancy in one of the two Westmorland county seats. In accordance with Sir James’s wishes Robinson man-

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aged his own unopposed election to the House of Commons, where he voted as his aristocratic patron desired, while cultivating his own contacts. In 1770, on the recommendation of the rising Charles Jenkinson, who was to be a lifelong confidant,22 he was appointed secretary to the trea­sury by the incoming prime minister Lord North and then carried out his duties with unobtrusive diligence. North placed such trust in him that, as a ministerial colleague remarked, to reach the prime minister it was “indispensably necessary” to go through “the Channel of Robinson.”23 Prior to the general elections of 1774 and 1780 he compiled lists of ­every constituency, the loyalties of e­ very MP, and pos­si­ble candidate and calculated the most effective disbursement of secret ser­vice money to help secure a continued majority for North’s administration.24 Between elections he was responsible for sustaining majorities, whipping in supporters to attend divisions and vote as required, as well as playing a key role in government appointments and patronage. With his clear grasp of bud­getary detail, Robinson, although not a member of Cabinet, was required to be available at its meetings.25 Forever “in vast haste,” 26 this industrious ­little man spent long hours on reconstructing the complex relationship between the British government and the East India Com­pany; and, as the American Revolution unfolded, toiled with Admiralty and Board of Trade and private contractors to sustain the British war effort by ensuring supplies for the growing numbers of troops sent across the ­ ere secured by connecAtlantic.27 In an age when commissions and contracts w tion, it was unexceptionable that Robinson’s b ­ rother Hugh became an admiral,28 and Charlotte’s husband Benjamin was contracted to supply oatmeal. True, lucrative deals secured by Richard “Rum” Atkinson w ­ ere severely criticized in Parliament and press, but ire was directed against Lord North:29 few knew that Atkinson came from a village a few miles from Appleby and had been christened by John Robinson’s ­uncle.30 Exertion took its toll. Robinson fell seriously ill soon ­after the 1774 election, in which he was elected not for Westmorland—­following a quarrel about patronage with an enraged Sir James Lowther, whose challenge to a duel he prudently declined—­but Harwich.31 Thereafter, though seldom long away from his desk, he routinely complained of colds, fevers, indigestion, headaches, and “Gouty ­ ere the demands of his close relationship with Humour.”32 Particularly stressful w Lord North, beneath his veneer of aristocratic insouciance as prone to anxiety as was his trea­sury secretary. North would respond to difficulties by sinking into inert self-­doubt, but Robinson was “not apt to be gloomy and despair; thank God,

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1650–1850 my mind is formed differently.”33 He and his friend Jenkinson nursed and cajoled the prime minister through his depressions, while discreetly keeping the king informed of them.34 In 1780 it took months of patient effort to dissuade North from ­either resigning or making a deal with the opposition, led in the Commons by the brilliant but dissolute Charles James Fox, who called for a compromise American peace. But by March  1782, with majorities plummeting following the news of the surrender at Yorktown, North was adamant that he could not go on.35 The ministry resigned, opening the way to the 1783 peace and the creation of the United States. Although Robinson’s ministerial ­career was over, he remained an MP. Still North’s parliamentary follower, he was at one with King George III in urging his leader not to make terms with Fox, “who ­every honest Man . . . ​must wish to keep out of Power,”36 and appalled when in April 1783 the alliance he dreaded was fi­nally forged; by virtue of its majority in the House of Commons the Fox-­North Co­ali­ tion forced its way into government.37 Further dismayed at Fox’s plans to take over the East India Com­pany, Robinson worked secretly to undermine the Co­ali­ tion ministry, deploying his electoral expertise to calculate how, and at what price, Fox and North might be defeated.38 His briefings, along with promises of financial support from the East India Com­pany directors marshalled by Richard Atkinson, emboldened the young William Pitt to agree to lead a minority government. In December 1783 the king dismissed the Co­ali­tion and appointed Pitt prime minister. Robinson, his desertion now in the open, prepared for a general election by persuading wavering MPs to switch their support to Pitt. Satirical prints depicted him as the rat-­catcher “Jack Renegado,” luring MPs into traps with bribes; by March 1784 so many of “Robinson’s Rats” had changed sides that the Fox-­North majority in the House of Commons had dis­appeared. The April election gave Pitt a handsome majority; he remained prime minister ­until 1801. With substantial East India interests, a government pension and the promise of f­ uture employment as royal surveyor general of woods and forests to add to wealth derived from inherited Westmorland property,39 Robinson lived in some affluence at Wyke House, a refurbished villa on the south bank of the Thames. In October 1781 his only child Mary had married Henry Nevill, eldest son of Viscount Abergavenny, with a dowry of twenty-­five thousand pounds to ­settle the groom’s debts. The reward he claimed in May 1784 for ser­vices to Pitt and the king was an earldom for the ailing Abergavenny, on whose death a year l­ater, Mary became countess, wife of the second earl. Robinson’s descendants ­were of the aristocracy, and remain so to this day.

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“Proud, Supercilious and Insulting”: Charlotte’s Attack Begins In October 1785 Charlotte Smith wrote a sonnet to mark the fourth wedding anniversary of the “lovely” blue-­eyed Countess of Abergavenny, concluding, And f­ uture Nevills, through long ages shine, With hearts as good, and forms as fair as thine!40 She certainly had urgent need of ingratiating herself with the Robinsons. Wives did not leave their husbands, taking all the ­children with them. Richard Smith’s ­will had made no provision for this inconceivable eventuality; and Benjamin, repeatedly on the move to escape his creditors, was resentfully disinclined to make any concessions. A few months a­ fter the death of their second son Braithwaite in a typhoid epidemic, he was briefly re­united with his ­family in Sussex, but left in April 1787. ­There was no ­legal separation, and although Charlotte had care of all the c­ hildren, Robinson and his fellow trustees did not find her legally entitled to more than thirty-­five pounds twice a year, consisting of the interest on the dowry her ­father had settled on her plus a small bequest.41 No letter received by Robinson from her now survives,42 and in her own copies of correspondence ­there is a gap between 1785 and 1791; but we can infer that, notwithstanding the launching through Robinson’s contrivance of her sons William and Nicholas into successful ­careers with the East India Com­pany in Bengal,43 any gratitude she may have felt soon gave way to ­bitter resentment. To meet her f­ amily expenses as well as to fund a Chancery suit launched to recover from the trust what she believed was due to herself and her c­ hildren, Charlotte took up her pen. Encouraged by Hayley, she turned from poetry to prose: in 1786 and 1787 Thomas Cadell published her freely rendered translations of two French works of the 1730s. Manon L’Escaut, a novel of doomed love, was condemned by a reviewer as moral poison and soon withdrawn; but the modest success of Romance of Real Life, stories based on famous lawsuits, encouraged Charlotte to exploit the vogue, initiated by Fanny Burney,44 for female-­authored romantic novels that could make money through advance subscriptions and the circulating library market. For a de­cade she averaged a novel per year, most published in four volumes, blending romance, melodrama, and social and po­liti­cal comment in a world of ancestral homes and disputed inheritances, set in landscapes whose vivid delineation testified to her romantic imagination. She wrote with passion about the Lake District, the Isle of Skye, and the rocky coasts of

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1650–1850 southwestern Wales and northern Scotland; but t­here is no evidence that she visited any of ­these places, still less North Amer­i­ca, which featured in two of the novels. For all their ironic observation of h ­ uman frailty, psychological insights particularly into men, informed po­liti­cal comment, and indignation at injustice, Charlotte Smith’s novels w ­ ere arguably too hastily assembled and loosely structured ever to be ranked with t­ hose of Austen, Dickens, or George Eliot, aspects of which they in many ways anticipated. But in the light of modern scholarship, their dismissive assessment by the regius professor of En­glish and rhe­toric at the University of Edinburgh half a c­ entury ago seems now bilious and injudicious, if not crass. She wasted ­little time on subtleties of construction, character or motive, but . . . ​began and went on as t­ hings came into her head . . . ​her strong sense of grievance dictating her theme—­the tribulations of virtue surrounded by persecutions and treacheries. ­There are few criticisms from which she could be absolved. Her narratives proceed without balance, proportion or economy . . . ​ full of elaborate but obviously contrived coincidences and sometimes impeded by interpolated histories, which at best add to the general gloom and at worst are merely intrusive. Conversation varies from literary-­stilted to colloquial and even dialectical. Character, where it exists, is black or white . . . ​This is the third-­rate novel of any age.45 To be sure, the perceived rascality of the trust was never far from Charlotte’s thoughts. Through the medium of pointed prefaces and odious minor characters clearly modelled on aspects of Robinson, she found opportunities for private revenge in a public arena. The heartless aristocrat Lord Montreville in Emmeline (1788) is assisted by an unscrupulous ­lawyer MP, Sir Richard Crofts, an estate man­ag­er of “indigent and obscure” ancestry, with “neither eminent talents nor any other education than what he had acquired at a ­free school,” who owes his parliamentary seat to aristocratic patronage.46 “Narrow-­minded and selfish,” but energetic and cunning enough to spot and exploit o ­ thers’ foibles, he enjoys “a ­great deal of po­liti­cal interest” and has “thrown off” all connection with his former life. “Proud, supercilious and insulting” to ­those beneath him, though a “cringing parasite” to his social superiors, he “affects to live only among the ­great” and seeks an entrée into the aristocracy by contriving the marriage of his son to Montreville’s d ­ aughter.

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“No Existence but in the Pages of Romance” Emmeline, says Judith Stanton, “shook up Anne Radcliffe, impressed a young Walter Scott and a younger Jane Austen and found a large readership e­ ager for more.” 47 Ethelinde (1789) gained further critical acclaim; among its admirers was Mary Wollstonecraft.48 Contrasting the corruption of London with the unsullied beauty of the Lake District, “described with a landscape paint­er’s imagination,” 49 it features another Robinsonesque parliamentarian. John Royston MP is a ­little, white-­faced election fixer and East India Com­pany shareholder, who purports to help the indigent noble hero, but proves to be a man of straw, “occupied by his politics, or his lawsuits, blinded by his i­magined greatness or restrained by his real littleness.” Turned out of government, Royston “blushes not to sell his own freedom of speaking and even thinking, to the . . . ​party by whom he thinks he can get most.” Garrulous and snobbish, “a strange mixture of ostentation and avarice,” he holds dinner parties in his “­grand ­house in the most fash­ion­able part of London,” where malicious gossip is exchanged to the accompaniment of “very ­little meat wretchedly dressed in an affectation of French cookery.” His “love of babbling” earns its deserts when the eponymous heroine’s wayward b ­ rother kicks him out of a coffee shop and challenges him to a duel, of course declined. But, despite his humiliation, Royston ­will survive: “a man who had money and parliamentary interest would always command re­spect,” however unmerited.50 Robinson’s name appeared among the eight hundred subscribers to the 1789 fifth edition of Charlotte’s Elegiac Sonnets;51 we cannot be sure when or even ­whether he became aware of his involuntary literary appearances in her novels. Of any literary or cultural tastes he may have had, his correspondence—­primarily po­liti­cal, though affording glimpses of ­family life—­reveals nothing. Still an MP, albeit “retired” from front-­line politics, he worried at “State of T ­ hings,” proffered “Aid and Assistance,” and was offended by Pitt’s “Neglect, or Contempt,”52 though deriving solace—as is apparent from his only surviving portrait—­from his responsibility for royal forests and the opportunities it afforded to serve, correspond with and meet his revered king.53 He had ­family concerns, too, having in 1790 si­mul­ta­neously to make arrangements for the care of the c­ hildren of a deceased s­ ister, while managing the consequences of long-­running ­legal action on the claims of his late cousin John Words­worth against Sir James Lowther, now Earl of Lonsdale. When the case reached Carlisle Assizes in August 1791 Robinson, a key material witness but with no desire to take the stand, in last-­minute negotiations,

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1650–1850 persuaded his ever volatile and vindictive former patron to agree to judicial arbitration. While this pro­cess wound its tortuous course Robinson continued to take responsibility for the suitable employment of his Words­worth cousins.54 He found East India Com­pany ser­vice for three of them; but what of the fastidious intellectual William, recently graduated from Cambridge? A curacy in Harwich, whose previous incumbent, related to Robinson by marriage, had recently fled his creditors and the country, seemed ideal;55 but romantic lit­er­a­ture appealed more to William Words­worth than clerical drudgery, though he deemed it politic to go to London in September 1791 to pre­sent his excuses and explain his intention of ­going to France.56 Two months ­later, in Brighton and about to cross the channel, he paid his first and last call on Charlotte Smith. Words­worth held the Elegiac Sonnets in high regard,57 but ­there is no evidence as to how his meeting with Charlotte came about. One biographer reasonably speculates that Robinson provided a letter of introduction,58 aware that she—­her financial straits notwithstanding—­had recently returned from a visit to Paris.59 This seems more plausible if he remained unaware of her unflattering portrayals of him in Emmeline and Ethelinde. ­There are no clues as to ­whether opinions on Mr. Robinson w ­ ere exchanged. Charlotte recorded the meeting without comment; Words­worth indicated that she “received me in the politest manner, and shewed me e­ very pos­si­ble civility.” 60 He departed for revolutionary France armed with a letter of introduction to the doomed politician Jacques-­Pierre Brissot, whom Charlotte particularly admired;61 and ­after a year of revolutionary turmoil returned to E ­ ngland resolved to be a poet. Jacqueline Labbe argues that she was a “continued textual presence in his poetic life.” 62 ­Whether or not Words­worth’s move to Grasmere in 1799 owed anything to its romantic evocation at the beginning and end of Ethelinde is uncertain. His birthplace Cockermouth, where his ill-­starred ­father had been town clerk, was only thirty miles distant, although separated by valleys, lakes, and mountains. Charlotte’s novels ­were not on Words­worth’s shelves,63 but some familiarity with Ethelinde can be inferred from his loftily pointing out that the stately home central to its plot is imaginary. Grasmere Abbey having no existence but in the pages of Romance, though the wreck of a sheepfold has been more than once archly pointed out as its last remains by a Peasant in answer to questions eagerly put to him by Votaries. . . . ​And as it is the duty of the conscientious Guide both to tell what is to be found and to save unnecessary trou­ble in seeking what is not to be found, I w ­ ill avail myself of this opportunity to prevent further search a­ fter the Dwelling of Miss Evelyn and her ancient ­Uncle, to assure such female

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Readers as may have given too e­ ager faith to the narratives of the Minerva Press that no such in­ter­est­ing Residence exists.64

“Impudent Robbery” Charlotte’s sense of injustice only matured with time. A few days ­after her meeting with Words­worth, she wrote, It is impossible I well know to communicate to another any notion of the suffering I have gone thro on this subject nor that sickness of soul which arises from hope long delayed. Whenever business seems to be coming to any point, when I flatter myself that my wretched Anx­i­eties are to be ended & some provision ascertain’d for my ­children, I no sooner grasp the phantom than it vanishes & I am told “Not yet—­nothing can be done Yet—­there is no necessity for anything yet.” Surely nobody can suppose that I seek this meeting as a m ­ atter of plea­sure. I, who am feted eternally by the most eminent literary Men and told that I am in the first order of beings, can have but ­little delight in exposing myself to the supercilious and purse proud insolence of Robinson Or the insulting mean contention of that detestable cream colourd Dyer.65 The modest income from her writing notwithstanding, she was constantly in debt,66 frustrated that the trust would release neither the funds bequeathed for her ­children’s education nor the income from sugar plantations in Barbados to which she believed them to be entitled: “My ­children have a thousand pounds worth of Sugars . . . ​but I cannot obtain a farthing for them.” 67 Her son Charles, not yet twenty-­one, whom she had hoped to send to university, enlisted for a soldier, lost a leg fighting the French at Dunkirk in 1793, and returned home needing further surgery, a course of Bath ­waters, and a manservant to attend him.68 “­Every year of my unhappy life seems destined to a new course of suffering,” she complained. Her husband had gone to ground and she could not “commence any pro­cess against him to compel him to allow me my own income for his ­children’s support . . . ​he has another ­family by a Cook who liv’d with him, and has hid himself in Scotland by another name.” 69 Charlotte convinced herself that the elusive Benjamin was being shielded by the obstinate “old ratcatcher”: Robinson, who seemed only to “desire to puzzle and confound,”70 persisted “in refusing me the least support for my ­family whose property he has now held for eleven years.”71 Seizing the “opportunity of telling that old Hog Robinson a g­ reat piece of my

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1650–1850 mind (which he found rather more hard of digestion than Venison)” was no more productive than other approaches, though doubtless cathartic.72 In The Old Manor House (1793), now widely regarded as her outstanding novel, with its development of “the trope of the old manor ­house to explore the myth of the En­glish nation,”73 a minor villain, the corrupt, obscurantist, ill-­favored ­lawyer Roker, was prob­ably an allusion to Robinson. Charlotte also contrived—­ surely with him, her husband, and the now deceased Richard Atkinson in mind—­ accusations of heartless corruption in re­spect of the recent American War. When the hero Orlando Somerive crosses the Atlantic in 1777 to join Burgoyne’s forces, he observes soldiers, bound for a war “the justice of which they knew l­ittle, and ­were never suffered to enquire,” sickening from the rotten victuals supplied by crooked contractors. It was all for glory. And that the ministry should, in thus purchasing glory, put a ­little more than was requisite into the pockets of contractors, and destroy as many men by sickness as by the sword made but l­ittle difference in an object so infinitely impor­tant: especially when it was known (which, however, Orlando did not know) that messieurs the contractors ­were for the most part members of parliament, who ­under other names enjoyed the profits of a war, which, disregarding the voices of the ­people in general, or even of their own constituents, they voted for pursuing.74 By the time she wrote The Banished Man (1794), Charlotte was still more ­bitter. The preface explained that she had been “sent to Chancery by the very men who ten years ago undertook the trust for the express purpose of saving” her c­ hildren. Now she found, “I am yet to look forward to no other prospect for the f­ uture but a repetition [of] injustice and evasion . . . ​the more strug­gles I have made for [her ­children’s] support, the greater the fa­cil­i­t y with which the Trustees have given up their property to be plundered by ­others.”75 Her son Lionel had left Oxford for want of money, taking up the commission of the maimed Charles.76 Even harder to bear was the decline of her favorite ­daughter Augusta, who had married a French émigré, the Chevalier de Foville, lost a child, and in 1794 developed symptoms of consumption. Treatment at Clifton Hotwell Springs incurred further expense in vain, and Charlotte could not afford to send her on a sea voyage.77 Augusta died aged twenty in April  1795—­another of the “fatal consequences of the robbery committed on me and my c­ hildren,” said Charlotte in the preface to Marchmont (1796), What had she received from “­those men who then held who still hold the property of my f­ amily? Refusal of the most necessary assistance, taunts and insults.” Her oppressor “The G ­ reat Man” had “put by way of pro-

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tection into the trust a worthy cousin of his own,” who, “instead of driving away the evil spirit whom he found preying on the wreck, began to consider how he might appropriate a share of it to himself—­He croaked, and lo! His fellows and his partner, and his agents flocked around and numberless vultures fed instead of one.”78 The “worthy cousin” was John Robinson’s cousin from Appleby, Anthony Parkin, who, as well as being found a place in the General Post Office through ­family connection,79 had been brought into the trust in 1788 and had set up an attorney’s firm, Parkin & Lambert, in Grays Inn Yard, employing Richard Words­worth, the poet’s b ­ rother, as his clerk. He appeared in Marchmont as the lumbering, greasy-­ haired amanuensis, his “broad red face, deeply scarred with smallpox,” of the nightmarish l­awyer Mr. Vampyre, who is recognizably Robinson: “a short, mean figure with a face that could not, without an affront to the species, be called h ­ uman,” 80 implacably pursuing the hero for unjust debts. Increasingly it was Parkin with whom Charlotte had to deal. “Of Mr Parkin’s scoundrelism ­there is no end . . . ​I am determined rather to perish with the rest of my ­family than submit to his impudent robbery.”81 Three weeks ­later she added, “Mr Parkyn has . . . ​taken new Ground & says he w ­ ill not consent to my having any money u ­ nless all the parties named in the ­Will of Richd Smith consent—­which he knows to be utterly impossible.”82

“The Lowest Rank of ­Human Degradation”: The End of Robinson Robinson, approaching seventy, was feeling his age. To the gout and indigestion that had long plagued him ­were added rheumatism, deafness and short sight. His appearances in the House of Commons w ­ ere increasingly occasional,83 although his deafness extended to suggestions that he might vacate his parliamentary seat for a younger man. In the general election of June 1796 he secured his customary unopposed re-­election for Harwich, but had other t­hings to worry about. Consumption claimed his unmarried ­brother Jeremiah, Recorder of Appleby in 1793;84 now his beloved ­daughter Mary was ­dying of the same disease. “I have had many severe T ­ rials thro’ Life,” he wrote to Jenkinson from Clifton Hotwell Springs in September 1796. “I am now I fear not far from experiencing another most heavy One.”85 ­After the “dreadful task” of sending away his five grandchildren, he stayed with her u ­ ntil her death a few weeks ­later. News of the Countess’s mortal sickness had reached Charlotte, who wrote from Weymouth enquiring of her publishers, “perhaps you can tell me if her Ladyship is or is not dead . . . ​Such are the terms

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1650–1850 I am upon with her ­Father Mr Robinson . . . ​that I have no communication with any of the gang. But I must write to the old wretch on the Sum of £544 which he now holds unaccounted for of my c­ hildrens property, & tho he had no mercy on me, I would not intrude even upon his sorrow, brute as he is.”86 Her hopes ­were now pinned on the transfer of the trust into other hands. To the intermittent patronage of her Sussex neighbor William Hayley had been added the goodwill of the Duchess of Devonshire and Lord Erskine,87 and the support of Hayley’s rich dilettante friend, the debonair George O’Brien Wyndham, earl of Egremont. In July 1797 Charlotte wrote an uncompromising letter to Robinson. Lord Egremont had loaned her two hundred pounds to pay off Thomas Dyer, and her l­awyer had drawn up an agreement for ac­cep­tance by the parties to Richard Smith’s ­will. It was “high time” for Robinson to relinquish the trust and order Parkin to “resign to me all power over the Estate . . . ​and ­every other part of the Assets of Richard Smith.” If not she would, with Egremont’s backing, press on with her suit, which “whenever it is brot [sic] to a hearing must overwhelm you & your Cousin Parkin to pay in your persons and properties for waste & malversation.” However, she was so “weary” of Robinson that, “even tho your Conduct has been a tissue of wickedness, fraud & folly, unexampled among men . . . ​my earnest desire to deliver my ­Childrens property from Guardians so false, so stupid, so base, ­will induce me to sign a general release . . . ​but you must agree . . . ​directly without Shuffle, Evasion or lying of any kind.”88 In the preface to her second volume of Elegiac Sonnets, published the same year, Charlotte launched into the familiar denunciation of the “perseverance in iniquity” of her “oppressors,” adding “however soon they may be disarmed of their power, any retribution in this world is impossible.”89 But not ­until 1799 could Charlotte tell her publishers, “This day . . . ​is fixed for the final dissolution of Mr Robinsons and Mr Parkins trust when Lord Egremont and My B ­ rother w ­ ill be invested with full power over the ­whole property belonging to my ­family.”90 In what proved to be her last novel, The Young Phi­los­o­pher (1798), her most explicit quasi-­fictional portrait of Robinson may have been intended as e­ ither further pressure or a parting shot. Sir Appulby Gorges is executor, assisted by his ­ ill of the nobleman solicitor Anthony Cancer of Petrify & Co, Grays Inn,91 of the w whose younger son, George Delmont, is the eponymous hero. Sir Appulby, from “some l­ittle town in the north” and lacking “any intellects beyond what might qualify him for . . . ​an exciseman,” has acquired the status of statesman by “taking advantage of every­body who by any chance fell into his power.” Having “neither feeling nor princi­ple,” he has “successfully robbed the public” and acquired “an

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overgrown fortune.” The hero Delmont, by pretending to be a man in trou­ble seeking to sell his estates, manages to confront Sir Appulby in his town h ­ ouse rather than at Wicket Hall, his “splendid villa.” Palsied and gout-­ridden, “his fat gills quivering, his swollen eye-­lids twinkling,” he talks a ­lawyer’s “unintelligible jargon” in “a north country snapping sort of croak,” evading the point and feigning deafness; but when Delmont denounces him for delaying payments from a trust of which he is executor, thereby ruining a young m ­ other, Sir Appulby is reduced to “crawling like a wounded beetle about the room, puffing and gasping.” He may go to church, put his shilling on the plate and cultivate an appearance of piety, but he is “the lowest rank of h ­ uman degradation.”92 ­After this cameo appearance Sir Appulby dis­appears as the action ranges from London to Northumbria to northeastern Scotland to Amer­i­ca, from c­ astle to cave, interspersed with abduction, seduction and po­liti­cal intrigue, ­until his return in the final pages, when he is unmasked as part of a conspiracy to prevent the hero coming into his rightful inheritance. Charlotte took the opportunity for a final deconstruction of the man she held primarily responsible for her trou­bles. Totally regardless of e­ very t­ hing, but how to gratify the appetites he had left, and to enrich his grandchildren, the unfeeling and brutal character of the old attorney (for he was originally nothing more) became harder and more insolent ­every day, as a vicious animal grows more offensive by age, and ­there was nothing Sir Appulby Gorges could do with impunity that he was not capable of ­doing, to add only a few hundreds, or even a few tens, to the sums he had collected, ­either while he was in place, or in consequence of the favour his having been in place had given him. Though he had never had any talents, and only a bustling sort of affected consequence, which he imposed on ­those who did not know him for industry and application; and though the small stock of acquired intelligence he had ever possessed, was obscured by the fumes of gluttony, and the imbecility of age, so that he could not now write a common letter without betraying his ignorance nor his indolence, yet was Sir Appulby a formidable ­enemy.93 Again, t­ here is no evidence as to w ­ hether Robinson was wounded by, or even aware of, this last assault: in none of the hundreds of surviving letters he wrote to Jenkinson—­many of which interweave domestic news with politics—is t­ here any mention of Charlotte Smith.94 Yet he did not conceal from his friend the embarrassments brought on him by another Words­worth relative whose c­ areer he had advanced. In an episode that might have come from one of Charlotte’s novels, Thomas Myers, a middle-­aged opportunist returning from East India Com­pany

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1650–1850 ser­vice that Robinson secured for him, installed himself with the Robinsons, wooed and won their ingénue, motherless grand­daughter Lady Mary Catherine Nevill, and then stood for Harwich in the 1802 general election, forcing his “old, Weak and ffeeble” benefactor into his first contest at the polls since 1764.95 Robinson held his seat,96 but the unwelcome contest may have hastened his end; two days before Christmas he suffered a fatal stroke. Mrs. Robinson, semi-­invalid since the 1780s, survived him by two years. What Charlotte thought of her stepsister we do not know; indications from the novels are inconsistent. The wife of Sir Richard Crofts (1788) had a small fortune for which he married her, but is now dead; Mrs. Royston (1789) is snobbish and vulgar, “as fearless in attacking the character of o ­ thers, as she was regardless of her own”; the “poor wife” of Sir Appulby Gorges is “less considered than his servants.”

“Reduced to a State of Beggary”: The End of Charlotte If Charlotte Smith made any comment on John Robinson’s death it has not survived; her relief at being rid of his involvement in her affairs was already proving to be transient. In July 1800 she exulted to her fellow novelist Mary Hays that a “nobleman” had “by one act of generosity set me f­ree. . . . ​My f­ amily have now a clear estate worth near seventy thousand pounds in the West Indies and this year I am about to sell.”97 But Lord Egremont’s insouciant tolerance rapidly wore thin. “I have reason to believe your Lordship ­will not read anything I write,” Charlotte complained in September 1802; instead she had to deal with his consistently disagreeable steward William Tyler. The sale of the plantation proved a mirage and even the twice-­yearly payments of thirty-­five pounds by the trust had ceased. She protested that she was now “deprived by the forensic scruples of Mr Tylers doubts of the scanty bread I till now had to eat & which even Mr Robinson who hated me with the most acrimonious abhorrence, never did attempt to give up to Mr B. Smith, but positively refused to hear of his touching it.”98 “­Little did I think that when I was taking so much pains to release ­these wretched affairs from the hands of Robinson & Prettejohn & Parkin that at the end of seven years . . . ​I should myself be reduced to a state of beggary.”99 Her b ­ rother Nicholas was as unsympathetic as ever: “The tender mercies of Robinson & Co are exceeded by ­those I owe to my own b ­ rother.”100 In despair she appealed to her husband to come to a final agreement on the settlement of the w ­ ill. Benjamin’s response to what he called her “false, contume-

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lious, malignant and incongruous letter” was that he was content to leave the ­matter to ­legal arbitration.101 Charlotte’s reply was magnificently unequivocal: The very sight of your sprawling hand is hateful to my eyes. . . . ​I sicken to think I have given birth to creatures who may partake and I fear w ­ ill of your diabolical disposition, unnatural, barbarous, selfish, hateful in the sight of Heaven and a Burthen to the Earth. . . . ​Go to Law, get into Chancery. . . . ​Take Rope enough & hang yourself. I s­ hall not cut you down . . . ​I ­really do not care one farthing what you do.102 Yet, to her dismay, Egremont seemed to take seriously her husband’s protestations that he was the injured party, not recognizing in him a “man who is the horror of all his f­amily, whose w ­ hole life has been a tissue of folly varied only by wickedness & without one virtue,” a man of “frantic & furious passions,” capable of “the most brutish & unmanly personal insults t­ owards me so that my life was often in danger,” a man guilty of “the most gross violations of decency and morality before his ­daughters.”103 The last meeting between Charlotte and Benjamin, arranged at Egremont’s Sussex mansion Petworth House in September  1803, unsurprisingly ended in unproductive acrimony.104 ­There ­were no more novels; perhaps burning hatred that had engendered them was quenched; perhaps she de­cided on less arduous ways of writing for money. A ­ fter the failure of What is She?, a romantic comedy in five acts that ran for as many nights in 1799, and Letters of a Solitary Wanderer, a series of novellas published in 1801–1802, Charlotte concentrated her literary efforts on writing books of moral instruction and natu­ral history for c­ hildren.105 Despite publishers’ advances, she felt poorer than ever, and sold her personal library to pay for her ­house­hold expenses.106 But the trustees considered her needlessly extravagant: as she wrote to the unsympathetic Tyler, “The rigour of the pre­sent Trustees infinitely exceeds that I was treated with by Sieurs Robinson & Parkin & c & c—­They the pre­sent Trustees contend inch by inch against every­thing I ask & shew no other solicitude than to distress me as much as they possibly can!”107 At the eventual death of Benjamin, yet again in prison for debt, in February 1806 Charlotte did not trou­ble to feign grief.108 Her financial position and that of the c­ hildren still dependent on her w ­ ere immediately eased with the release of some seven thousand pounds, but the Smith estate remained unsettled, and ­legal costs continued to leech on it. “While t­here is profit for L­ awyers, ­there is l­ittle hope of the affairs being sufferd to be concluded.”109 Constantly hemorrhaging and rendered increasingly immobile by dropsy, Charlotte knew that she too was ­dying. She could not complete her History of ­England from the Earliest Rec­ords

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1650–1850 to the Peace of Amiens in a Series of Letters to a Young Lady at School, published in 1806; Mary Hays had to write the third volume. Her last letters to Egremont appealed to him, having saved her ­family from the Scylla of “Parkin & Co,” not to let the “poor remains” of the Smith inheritance “be engulphed by Charybdis.”110 She urged him to follow the example of so many previous trustees and resign from it,111 but had received no response before death claimed her on October 28, 1806. Charlotte Smith did not live to see the publication of her final volume of poems, in which, a modern critic believes, she attained “a technical mastery . . . ​ that qualifies her to sit among the most select poets of the age.”112 She was spared by a few days from the news that her youn­gest child George, aged twenty-­ two, had died in Surinam from yellow fever, the same sickness that had carried off Charles in Barbados five years ­earlier. Both ­were in the Ca­rib­bean in connection with the Smith estate, which was fi­nally settled in Chancery in 1813, thirty-­seven years ­after Richard Smith’s death, when the remaining four thousand pounds went to the husband of a grand­daughter of Benjamin Smith’s elder ­brother. This protracted, disastrously self-­consuming case may have been the inspiration for Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in Bleak House.113

A Minor Tragedy Discovered in Amer­i­ca Arguably, Charlotte Smith’s enemies ­were not so much “Robinson & Co,” nor indeed l­awyers as a species, but rather the conventions of a society that could not accommodate a wife, even an abused one,114 who walked out on her husband with all the ­children and then tried to live in­de­pen­dently. Charlotte’s life might have been easier too had she been less contrary; but had her life been easier it seems probable that she would not have bequeathed so extensive and varied a literary canon to posterity. Suffering, as with so many artists, was midwife to creativity. As for Robinson, it is a truism that all po­liti­cal ­careers end in failure; ­whether his last two de­cades in public life would have been any more lustrous had he not borne the burden of the Smith trust is questionable. But ­there ­were certainly no positive outcomes for him from duties prob­ably undertaken more out of a sense of duty than of self-­importance, what­ever Charlotte thought. As far as can be deduced in the absence of a single word from him on the subject, he did what he believed to be “right, proper and l­egal”;115 the trustees before and ­after his involvement came to the same conclusions.

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The mutually hurtful relationship between Robinson and Charlotte was a minor tragedy; they found each other incomprehensible. Charlotte did not lack understanding of high politics: subsequent historians might have read with profit her explanation in the Young Phi­los­o­pher of the way in which the po­liti­cal dichotomy of Whig and Tory lapsed into disuse between 1760 and 1790,116 an acute analy­sis confirmed by Robinson’s papers and letters in which neither term is used. But his ingrained pragmatic conservatism—­getting the job done, never questioning the status quo—­was beyond the sympathy of Charlotte’s romantic, revolutionary radicalism (although Words­worth would l­ater demonstrate that, when needs must, such a leap in po­liti­cal conviction is not impossible to accomplish). Though her novels often display impressive understanding of the conflicts under­lying the frequently disreputable be­hav­ior of men of pedigree, Charlotte had no more sympathy for inadequately educated social climbers than she had for treacherous, crafty peasants. She knew Robinson no better than he knew her. For his part, Robinson might realize in theory that a w ­ oman could make money from writing poetry and prose, but it is improbable that he had any notion of how, still less why, this came to be. When he told Charlotte that “in obedience to his advise, I have exercised my admirable talents . . . ​more successfully than could have been expected,” he was prob­ably not—as she supposed—­being sarcastic; rather he was paying lip ser­vice to something beyond his understanding.117 One ­thing they did have in common was a posthumous debt to North American scholarship. U ­ ntil the twentieth c­entury both ­were, despite having their respective small niches in the British Dictionary of National Biography, only dimly remembered as minor late eighteenth-­century curiosities. Charlotte Smith’s novels and poems w ­ ere so far forgotten that when Paul Harvey compiled his magisterial Oxford Companion to En­glish Lit­er­at­ ure in 1932 he made no mention of her.118 Her correspondence was scattered and largely disregarded. Fortunately, over two hundred of her letters had found their way across the Atlantic, mostly to Yale. Pioneer work by Florence May Anna Hilbish at Lycoming College, Pennsylvania, and Rufus Paul Turner at the University of Southern California paved the way for Judith Phillips Stanton to produce a definitive edition of Charlotte’s letters. This l­abor of love—­“my life, and the intimate details of Charlotte Smith’s, have been entwined for over thirty years,”119 she wrote in 2008—­was turned down by the Oxford University Press, but accepted, to its eternal credit, by the University of Indiana. As for Robinson, although most of his voluminous correspondence had been cata­logued by the early twentieth ­century, he remained no more than a footnote

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1650–1850 to Hanoverian po­liti­cal history, unworthy of a textbook mention ­until W.  T. Laprade of Trinity College, North Carolina, working from transcripts, produced a provocative analy­sis of his role in the 1784 general election.120 Thereafter British historians, with varying degrees of willingness, acknowledged Robinson’s signifi­ ere ­either unaware of his links with romantic cance;121 but, like Laprade, they w poetry and lit­er­a­ture, or considered them irrelevant.122 Conversely, biographers and critics of Charlotte Smith, like ­those of William Words­worth, have been aware of Robinson, but purely as a malign influence; the ­things they have written about him have tended to be more arresting than accurate.123 As between John Robinson and Charlotte Smith, so between po­liti­cal history and literary appreciation, it is too easy for a gulf of incomprehension to be fixed; this we have sought to bridge.

Notes 1. Don Marquis, Archy and Mehitabel (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1927), 108–113, “pete the parrot and shakespeare.” 2. Sarah M. Zimmerman, “Charlotte Smith,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), http://­oxforddnb​.­com. 3. Judith Phillips Stanton, ed., Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 29–30: to Thomas Cadell, September  8, 1790. Henceforward abbreviated as CS Letters. 4. Charlotte Smith, preface to Desmond (1792), in Works of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005–2007), vol. 5 (2005). 5. Charlotte Smith, preface to Elegiac Sonnets, vol. 2 (1797), in Works, vol. 14. 6. Loraine Fletcher, Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), the most recent study, combines a strong narrative with acute literary analy­sis. 7. CS Letters, 521–523, 624–625, February 4, 1803, to the Earl of Egremont and January 15, 1804, to Sarah Rose. 8. Judith Phillips Stanton, “Charlotte Smith and ‘Mr Monstroso’: An Eigh­teenth ­Century Marriage in Life and Fiction,” ­Women’s Writing 7 (2000): 7–22. 9. CS Letters, xxvii–­x xix, and Fletcher, Charlotte Smith, 44–45, 54–70, discuss the terms of the ­will. 10. Andrew Connell, “Appleby in Westminster: John Robinson, M.  P. (1727–1802),” Transactions of the Cumberland & Westmorland Antiquarian & Archaeological Society [CW], 3rd series, 10 (2010): 219. 11. Fletcher, Charlotte Smith, 66. For Atkinson, see Andrew Connell, “John Robinson (1727–1802), Richard Atkinson (1739–1785), Government, Commerce and Politics in the Age of the American Revolution: ‘From the North,’ ” Northern History 50 (2013): 54–76. It is a pity that Charlotte Smith and Lady Anne seem never to have met.

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12. See Fletcher, Charlotte Smith, for the fluctuating relationship with Hayley, who also patronized the poet William Cowper and the painter George Romney. 13. Fletcher, Charlotte Smith, 76–77. 14. CS Letters, 8–9, September 19, 1785, to John Robinson. 15. Nathaniel Wraxall, Historical and Posthumous Memoirs (London, 1815), 1:428. Wraxall was an MP and con­temporary of Robinson. 16. But for the death of his ­father, George Washington would have followed his half b ­ rothers to Appleby. E. Hinchcliffe, “The Washingtons at Whitehaven and Appleby,” CW 2, 71 (1971); Andrew Connell, George Washington and Appleby Grammar School (Appleby: Appleby Tourist Information Center, 2009). 17. Notes of Richard Yates, headmaster of Appleby for “Xtmas 1736,” Cumbria County Rec­ord Office, Carlisle, Hill MSS iii, 649. 18. Richard Words­worth (1690–1760) of Sockbridge, near Penrith, twelve miles from Appleby, married Mary Robinson, John’s aunt. He was the poet’s grand­father. 19. B.  C. Bonsall, Sir James Lowther and Cumberland and Westmorland Elections 1754–1776 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1960), 1–33. 20. Robinson to Sir James Lowther, April 3, 5, 11, 24, 1757, Carlisle Rec­ord Office D/ Lons L1/1/66, details what had been spent on dinners and drinks to secure Sir James’s unopposed return for Westmorland in a by-­election. 21. B. Tyson, “Two Appleby Houses in the 18th ­Century: A Documentary Study,” CW 2, 85 (1985): 193–218. On Appleby’s main street and recently refurbished, the White House was leased to Robinson by Sir James Lowther for 999 years. 22. Andrew Connell, “ ‘Believe Me Ever Most Truly and Affectly Yours’: John Robinson (1727–1802), Charles Jenkinson (1729–1806): Friendship and Sentiment within and without the Corridors of Power,” Journal of Eighteenth-­Century Studies 38, no. 2 (2015): 195–212. 23. Letter to Charles Jenkinson from Welbore Ellis, Secretary to the Navy, October 13, 1776, British Library Additional MS 38209 f. 41. 24. P. D. G. Thomas, “John Robinson’s ‘State’ for the General Election of 1774,” Parliamentary History 30, pt. 2 (2011): 215–235; W. T. Laprade, Parliamentary Papers of John Robinson, Camden third series, 33 (London, 1922). 25. Robinson to Charles Jenkinson, October 8, 1776, BL Add. MS 38209 f. 38. 26. Robinson to Jenkinson, April 9, 1779, BL Add. MS 38211, ff. 20–22. 27. F. B. Wickwire, British Subministers and Colonial Amer­i­ca, 1763–1783 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1966), 158–172. 28. Connell, “Appleby in Westminster,” 225, 230. Hugh surrendered at Yorktown in 1782. 29. Norman Baker, Government and Contractors: The British Trea­sury and War Supplies 1775–83 (London: Athlone Press, 1971), 35; J. Horne Tooke, Facts Addressed to Landholders & c. (London: J. Johnson, 1780), 50–66. 30. Connell, “John Robinson (1727–1802), Richard Atkinson (1739–1785), Government, Commerce and Politics.”

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1650–1850 31. Connell, “Appleby in Westminster,” 222–223. 32. Connell, “ ‘Believe Me,’ ” 203. 33. Robinson to Jenkinson, August 11, 1779, BL Add. MS 38212, ff. 56–60. 34. Alan Valentine, Lord North (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967), 2:143. 35. Robinson’s advice at the time was ambiguous, but he l­ater claimed that the ministry could have gone on. See Wraxall, Memoirs, 2:283–289. 36. John Fortescue, ed., Correspondence of George III (London: Macmillan, 1927), vi, 3871, King to Robinson, August 7, 1782. 37. The fullest account is John Cannon, The Fox-­North Co­ali­tion 1782–1784 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969). 38. Laprade, Robinson Papers, xvi–­x vii, 105–106. 39. An eldest son, Robinson inherited property in 1760–1761 from both his f­ather and an unmarried ­uncle. 40. Stuart Curran, ed., The Poems of Charlotte Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), Sonnet xx. 41. Fletcher, Charlotte Smith, 79–87. 42. The collection of Robinson’s letters now held at Eridge Park, seat of the Marquess of Abergavenny, is incomplete and includes none from Charlotte Smith. 43. William sailed in 1786, Nicholas in 1788. 44. Frances Burney’s epistolary romance Evelina (1778) was published anonymously, but the revelation that it was by a ­woman increased its popularity. Her second novel, Cecilia, appeared in 1782, and the third, Camilla, in 1796. 45. William L. Renwick, En­glish Lit­er­a­ture 1789–1815 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), 67–70. 46. Charlotte Smith, Emmeline, the Orphan of the C ­ astle, ed. Judith Stanton, in Works, 2:80–81, 98–100, 163. Florence May Anna Hilbish, “Charlotte Smith, Poet and Novelist” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1941), 380, thought Robinson was Montreville and Thomas Dyer was Crofts. But Dyer was never an MP, and Montreville more closely resembles the Earl of Lonsdale, formerly Sir James Lowther. 47. Smith, Emmeline, introduction, xxiii. 48. Fletcher, Charlotte Smith, 120–121. 49. Fletcher, Charlotte Smith, 109. 50. Charlotte Smith, Ethelinde; or, The Recluse of the Lake, ed. Stuart Curran, in Works, 3:138–141, 175–176, 213–215, 295–302. 51. Hilbish, “Charlotte Smith,” 105. The 1789 edition was the first to carry the names of subscribers, among them William Pitt and Lord North. 52. Robinson to Jenkinson, October 27, 1785, and July 2, 1786, BL Loan 72/29, ff. 177–80 and 181–182. 53. Robinson’s portrait by G. F. Joseph in 1801 depicts him seated with an envelope titled “Report to the King from Surveyor General of Woods” in his right hand. On a ­table to his left is a “Report of Acorns Planted in and about Windsor ­Great Park,” with ­every year from 1790 to 1801 tabulated.

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54. Connell, “Appleby in Westminster,” 228. The Words­worths got no Lowther money ­until 1803. 55. Andrew Connell, “John Robinson 1727–1802—­Clarifications and Lines for further Enquiry,” CW 3, 11 (2011): 249–250. 56. William Words­worth to Mr. Mathews, September 23, 1791, in Letters of William and Dorothy Words­worth, Early Years 1787–1805, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. C. L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 57–58 (hereafter EY). 57. Bishop  C. Hunt  Jr., “Words­worth and Charlotte Smith,” Words­worth Circle 35 (2004); Jacqueline M. Labbe, Writing Romanticism: Charlotte Smith and William Words­worth, 1784–1807 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 58. Kenneth R. Johnston, The Hidden Words­worth (New York: Norton, 1998), 282. 59. J. Labbe, “Gentility in Distress: A New Letter by Charlotte Smith,” Words­worth Circle 35 (2004): 91–93. 60. CS Letters, 38, November 27, 1791, to Lucy Hill Holmes from Brighton; EY, 68–69, WW to Richard Words­worth, from Orléans, December 19, 1791. 61. Brissot, intellectual revolutionary, was spokesman in the National Convention for the Girondin group, who came to be seen as moderates. He fell foul of Robes­ pierre and was executed in October 1793. 62. Labbe, Writing Romanticism, 5. 63. Chester L. Shaver and Alice C. Shaver, Words­worth’s Library (New York: Garland, 1979). 64. “An Unpublished Tour,” lines 689–700, in Prose Works of William Words­worth, vol 2, ed. W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Sinigser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 308. The misnaming of the heroine was possibly deliberate. 65. CS Letters, 40, December 8, 1791, recipient unknown. 66. J. P. Stanton, “Charlotte Smith’s Literary Business, Income, Patronage and Indigence,” Age of Johnson 1 (1987): 376–392. 67. CS Letters, October 16, 1794, to Joseph Cooper Walter. 68. CS Letters, 87–89, December 16, 1793, to Thomas Cadell Sr. 69. CS Letters, 78–79, October  9, 1793, to Joseph Cooper Walter. Benjamin’s alias was Bryan Simmonds. 70. CS Letters, 123–124, May 20, 1794, to James Upton Tripp. 71. CS Letters, 136–137, July 18, 1794, to Cadell Sr. 72. CS Letters, 158, September 12, 1794, to Tripp. 73. Charlotte Smith, The Old Manor House, ed. I. Ferris, in Works, 5:x. Of the complete set in Leeds University Library, this is by far the most frequently borrowed and annotated. 74. Smith, Manor House, 5:301. 75. Charlotte Smith, The Banished Man, ed. M. O. Grenby, in Works, 7:107. 76. Lionel (1778–1842) was the most successful of the Smiths. He was in turn governor of Tobago, Barbados, Jamaica, and Mauritius and was awarded a baronetcy that remains extant.

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1650–1850 77. Fletcher, Charlotte Smith, 227–228. 78. Charlotte Smith, Marchmont (1796), ed. K. Davies and H. Guest, in Works, 9:3–5. 79. When Parkin was appointed deputy solicitor to the post office in 1771, John Robinson was trea­sury secretary and Ann Robinson had recently married Anthony Todd, the post office secretary. 80. Smith, Marchmont, 9:127–130. 81. CS Letters, 260, March 26, 1797, to Thomas Cadell Jr. and William Davies. 82. CS Letters, 263, April 16, 1797, to Davies. 83. Robinson to Jenkinson, August 17, 1796, BL Add MSS 38472, f. 232. 84. The cause of Jeremiah’s death in January 1793 can be deduced from Northallerton RO, 1167 ZQH 11/2 499—­his letter of November 4, 1791 from Buxton—­and the fact that he died in Bath; both ­were spas to which consumptives w ­ ere sent. 85. Robinson to Lord Liverpool, September 12, 1796, BL Add MSS 38472 ff. 235–237. 86. CS Letters, 239–240, July 1, 1796, to Cadell and Davies. 87. Georgina, Duchess of Devonshire, and Thomas, fist Baron Erskine, ­were friends of Charles James Fox and influential figures in fash­ion­able po­liti­cal and literary circles. 88. CS Letters, 281, July 29, 1797, to John Robinson. 89. Charlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems, vol. 2 (London: T. Cadell, 1797), vii–ix. 90. CS Letters, 332, August 27, 1799, to Cadell and Davies. 91. “Appulby,” a phonetic spelling of Appleby, represents the local pronunciation of the town’s name; “Gorges” alludes to Robinson’s eating habits. “Anthony Cancer” is obviously Parkin. 92. Charlotte Smith, The Young Phi­los­o­pher (1798), ed. A.  A. Markley, in Works, 10:216–218, 293–297. 93. Smith, Young Phi­los­o­pher, 10:418–419. The implication is that she received letters from Robinson; none have survived. 94. Connell, “ ‘Believe Me,’ ” passim. 95. Robinson to William Chaytor, September 5, 1801, Northallerton RO, 1167 ZQH 11/2. 96. Seats had two members. Robinson topped the poll with fifteen votes. Myers came second, but his election was quashed by the House of Commons. Connell, “Appleby in Westminster,” 228. 97. Correspondence of Mary Hays, British Novelist, ed. Marilyn L. Brooks (Lewiston, PA: Edward Mellen Press, 2004), 328–330, letter of July 26, 1800. 98. CS Letters, 463, September 29, 1802, to Lord Egremont. 99. CS Letters, 524, February 4, 1803, to Lord Egremont. Prettejohn was an agent of Robinson and Parkin in the West Indies, whom Charlotte held responsible for the denial of the plantation income. 100. CS Letters, 552, February 26, 1802, to Lord Egremont. 101. CS Letters, 554, February 25, 1803, Benjamin Smith to Charlotte Smith. 102. CS Letters, 556, March 1, 1803, to Benjamin Smith. 103. CS Letters, 487–490, November 5, 1802, to Egremont.

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104. Fletcher, Charlotte Smith, 322. Charlotte had not expected Benjamin to be pre­sent. 105. Fletcher, Charlotte Smith, 289–293, 319. 106. Stanton, “Charlotte Smith’s Literary Business,” concluded that over an eighteen-­ year period Charlotte’s writing earned about £4,200, nearly two-­thirds of that from the novels. Had she understood the economics of the book trade better she would have made more. 107. CS Letters, 596, December 7, 1803, to William Tyler. 108. Fletcher, Charlotte Smith, 329. Benjamin had lived in Scotland, u ­ nder a dif­fer­ent ­legal system. His death in gaol in Berwick on Tweed, E ­ ngland’s northernmost town, may indicate he was kidnapped by his creditors. 109. CS Letters, 746, July 1806, to Lord Egremont. 110. CS Letters, 752–753, August 14, 1806, to Lord Egremont. 111. CS Letters, 758, September 20, 1806, to Lord Egremont. 112. Curran, Poems of Charlotte Smith, xxviii. 113. Fletcher, Charlotte Smith, 337–338 points to Charles Dickens’s time as a court reporter at Doctors’ Commons, where ecclesiastical courts ­were held and ­wills ­were preserved. 114. Ellen Moody, review of CS Letters, https://­reveriesunderthesignofausten​.­wordpress​ .­com. 115. Smith, Young Phi­los­o­pher, 10:218. This mantra of Sir Appulby Gorges is prob­ably a phrase Charlotte repeatedly heard from Robinson. 116. Smith, Young Phi­los­o­pher, 10:305. Yet British historians of parliamentary politics in the American revolutionary era would cling to the two-­party model u ­ ntil the twentieth ­century. 117. CS Letters, 39–40, December 8, 1791, to unknown recipient. 118. This omission was rectified only in 1985, when Margaret Drabble was editor. 119. J. P. Stanton, “Recovering Charlotte Smith’s Letters: A History, with Lessons,” in Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism, ed. Jacqueline Labbe (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), 159–174. 120. W.  T. Laprade, “Public Opinion and the Election of 1784,” En­glish Historical Review 31 (1916): 224–237. 121. Andrew Connell, ‘The Potent Spirit of the Black-­Browed Jacko: New Light on the Impact of John Robinson on High Politics in the Era of the American Revolution, 1770–84,” Historical Research 232 (May 2013): 292–312, reviews Robinson’s historiography and evaluates his historical significance in the light of recently discovered letters. 122. John Cannon’s entry on John Robinson in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), http://­oxforddnb​.­com, does not mention Charlotte Smith. 123. For example, Fletcher, Charlotte Smith, 55; Johnston, Hidden Words­worth, 27, 94; and Juliet Barker, Words­worth: A Life (London: Viking, 2000), 818n8.

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IN QUOTES ANNOTATING MARIA EDGEWORTH’S BELINDA MELVYN NEW

Her practice of textual allusion was at once dense and deft, and her reading exceptionally broad. —­W. J. McCormack, ODNB

Having recently had reason to question the editorial work of both a scholarly

edition of Oliver Goldsmith’s Letters and a textbook edition of Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker,1 I perhaps unfairly brought too much editor’s baggage to what I intended to be a leisurely reading of Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, edited by Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick.2 I had not read Belinda in my fifty years in the profession and, despite its turning out to be of some interest, I would almost certainly not reread it. This is a crucial point for what I examine in this essay, namely, the extent of editorial attention one is justified in giving to a work on the margins of the canon, but one being moved closer into it by the academic community (where canons are now forged) b ­ ecause it addresses a goodly number of topics and sensibilities having their moment in the sun. This is a particularly fraught subject when the author is a w ­ oman and the book’s claim is that it enables criticism appropriate to gender studies, feminism, w ­ omen’s education, patriarchalism, disease, disability, colonial­ ere it as short as Oroonoko, ism, or race. Belinda engages all t­hese topics and, w might be as popu­lar among academics for both study and classroom use. Belinda would be a definite challenge for a scholarly edition ­because of its involved textual history, editions in 1801 and 1802, and a rewriting of the entire

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work in 1810; one would want to collate multiple copies of each edition and provide a rec­ord of changes that would be both complicated and extensive.3 Frankly, I do not expect to see this happen for Belinda or for other works in Edgeworth’s extensive corpus, if only b ­ ecause of the steadily dwindling university population of En­glish majors and hence En­glish professors, along with the distinct possibility that t­oday’s interests, driving annual sales of perhaps one hundred copies, ­will soon move on to other concerns, perhaps even a return to now marginalized authors like John Dryden and Alexander Pope. If, then, we cannot count on time to validate our l­abor, or on fame and fortune to come our way for undertaking a scholarly edition of an au courant work (Belinda or, say, any of the Chawton House series),4 can scholars be content to base their brilliant readings on classroom editions, even good ones? Since consulting original texts ­will seem onerous to ­those merely interested in “interpretation,” I would suggest, at a minimum, that ­these commercial editions might concentrate less on a work’s modern (and hence fugacious) concerns of classroom interest, and more on interests of longer duration—­even undergraduates might benefit from a less politicized approach. In par­tic­u­lar, annotators might spend more time on the texture of the work, the author’s engagement with the literary canon, and the language of her own time and place, rather than the fugacious generalizations of introductory material. This desideratum came to mind when I was reading the Oxford Belinda ­because of Edgeworth’s very careful and deliberate use of quotation marks to indicate her many borrowings throughout her text, too many of which the editor failed to annotate. I do not mean to fault Kirkpatrick for t­ hese omissions, in part b ­ ecause publishers are always more interested in the length (i.e., cost) of their textbooks than in their completeness, and in part b ­ ecause filling in omissions t­ oday is the result of not a superior memory or range of reading but simply having the internet at one’s fingertips, in par­tic­u­lar, Google, ECCO, and LION. ­There are other aspects of Belinda opened by ­these engines of knowledge, but for my pre­sent purpose I concentrate on quoted material, most especially b ­ ecause Edgeworth’s signaling of such passages indicates they had importance to her: she is alerting us, I would suggest, to her sense of belonging to a literary community, one that she honored and expected the most literate of her audience to recognize. However intense is an author’s drive for popularity, ­unless writing simply for a livelihood, ­there is uppermost in mind a fit audience but few on whom any claim to literary endurance must be staked. While some borrowed passages may loom large for a par­tic­u­lar reading of Belinda, no such claim ­will be made for any identified ­here. Instead, having traced

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1650–1850 several dozen quoted passages to their heretofore unnoticed sources, I am impelled to raise several questions concerning the value of d ­ oing so. First, can good scholarship proceed without a conscientious effort to uncover the demonstrable allusiveness of a text? Second, can such an effort help shift evaluation to concerns dif­fer­ent from the pre­sent sociopo­liti­cal interests of our own moment? ­Behind both questions is a third, made particularly relevant b ­ ecause of what we might label, in linguistic imitation, the “­Great Canon Shift” of our time, not merely the introduction of ­women authors into the canon and the subsequent displacement of male authors, but equally the shift from a male-­dominated to female-­ dominated academic culture for the study of lit­er­a­ture.5 Is the study of lit­er­a­ture a discipline in and of itself, or is lit­er­a­ture rather a sounding board for what­ever other disciplines we want to bring to it? Do literary texts establish their own finite bound­aries of interpretation, or are they boundless pastures in which each generation can graze and frolic as best suits its appetite for play and pertinence? ­These questions are a heavy burden to place on the recovery more than two hundred years ­after composition of some two dozen borrowings in a somewhat less than accomplished novel, but at the very least annotating them ­will add some small bits of knowledge to what we think we know about Maria Edgeworth. Additional knowledge is, I hope, never to be slighted or ignored, even when we cannot grasp its immediate relevance; indeed, the “seemingly irrelevant” might be a good definition for some of the very best literary scholarship of ­every generation. Belinda begins with an epigraph, which Edgeworth acknowledges to be from “Lord LYTTELTON’s Monody on his Wife.” It helps to date all such borrowings as clues to an author’s range of reading, in this instance, 1747, the year of the death of the first wife of George, Lord Lyttelton (1709–1773). It might also help to provide some indication of Lyttelton’s continued repute as a poet (­today we know him primarily as a patron and politician), for example, the fact that he was one of the poets in Johnson’s Lives of the Most Eminent En­glish Poets (1779–1781); or that “Monody” was anthologized from its first appearance to the end of the ­century; or that in the anonymous Anecdotes of Polite Lit­er­a­ture (1764) it is said to be justly deserving of “being ranked with the best elegies in our language” (3:131).6 It was so well known, in fact, that only excerpts are provided, including ­ ere any the lines of Edgeworth’s epigraph,7 which earn this praise: “Never w strokes of character more judiciously combined, nor more happily printed than in ­these four lines; they mark the exact line of virtue which borders on weakness.—­ The w ­ hole elegy is a beautiful composition, and, let me add, by far the finest

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poem his lordship has wrote” (3:135). Clearly, Edgeworth’s audience would recognize the passage, understand its context, and might even be ready to recall it as Belinda attempts to navigate her own boundary between prudence and fearfulness. Interestingly, another Lyttelton poem titled “Belinda” is found in most ­collections of his poetry as well as in most eighteenth-­century anthologies, alternatively titled “Advice to a Lady”; often, as in Poems (1800), it appears just before “Monody.” “Belinda,” written in 1731, gives many clues to the impetus for Edgeworth’s novel, both in agreement and disagreement; one example ­will suffice: “Be never cool reserve with passion join’d; / with caution chuse, but then be fondly kind; / the selfish heart that but by halves is given, / s­ hall find no place in Love’s delightful heaven” (17–18). Perhaps this anticipation of her plot helps explain why Edgeworth quotes Lyttelton’s “Belinda” in the very first paragraph of Belinda, page 7: “For this, hands, lips, and eyes ­were put to school, / And each instructed feature had it’s [sic] rule” (see Poems [1800], 16; Edgeworth alters the pre­sent tense in Lyttelton). T ­ hese lines are not identified in the Oxford edition. Late in the novel, Belinda is asked to wait a short while before sending Vincent Hervey her commitment to marry him; her response might remind one of Congreve’s Millamant,8 but only by way of contrast: “­Pardon me; I s­ hall send it as soon as I possibly can: the ‘dear delight of giving pain,’ does not suit my taste” (356). The five quoted words are not Millamant’s but ­those spoken by the dissatisfied heroine of a poem Lyttelton wrote while still at Eton, “Soliloquy of a Beauty in the Country,” again often reprinted and the first poem in the 1800 collected edition. Flavia laments her removal from town to country, “Chang’d is the scene, and all my glories die, / like flowers transplanted to a colder sky; / lost is the dear delight of giving pain,  / the tyrant joy of hearing slaves complain” (2). Again one can find in this poem ample evidence of themes echoed by Edgeworth, most particularly perhaps, the irony of Belinda’s attitude ­toward good reading: “From books to work from work to books I rove, / and am, alas! at leisure to improve.—­/ Is this the life a beauty ­ought to lead? / W ­ ere eyes so radiant only made to read?” (2). Without doubt, from Astell to Wollstonecraft to Edgeworth w ­ omen’s writings ­were ­shaped by the emergence of a feminist ideology, but it is worth noting that male writers ­were also fostering ideas that the author of Belinda could use as sources of inspiration. To be sure, Alexander Pope’s Belinda must also have been on Edgeworth’s mind, and indeed early in the work when Clarence asks for a lock of hair lady Delacour encourages Belinda to give one: “Come, a second rape of the lock, Belinda. . . . ​ Fortunately for Belinda, ‘the glittering forfex’ was not immediately produced”

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1650–1850 (76). Oxford notes this allusion to Rape of the Lock (1714),9 but not one a few pages ­later when we are told “a new star s­ hall appear in the firmament of fashion, and it s­ hall be called Belinda” (84).10 At the end of the next chapter (97), Pope is again evoked, this time when Clarence begins to separate himself from his boon companions by challenging the suggestion that no one lives as well as they: “ ‘If to live well mean nothing but to eat.’ ” What might look like a natu­ral enough conversational riposte is signaled by the quotation marks embracing the borrowing from Pope’s Imitations of Horace, epistle 1.6, a comment on gluttony: “Or if your life be one continu’d Treat, / If to live well means nothing but to eat” (lines 110–111; Pope, 633). And a few pages ­later, Imitations is again quoted, this time satire 2.1, words given to the moral center of the novel, Dr. X—­—­, when Clarence’s hurt response to a less than enthusiastic endorsement of Belinda’s perfections earns a Popean line: “ ‘ Touch him, and no minister’s so sore’ ” (111). H ­ ere again the quotation marks point to a borrowing, namely, “Peace is my dear Delight—­not Fleury’s more:  / But touch me, and no Minister so sore” (lines 75–76; Pope, 616). Neither of ­these passages is cited in the annotations, although Kirkpatrick does note several allusions to Moral Essays: “Epistle to a Lady,” lines 177–178 and 163 (annotating pages 140 and 171, respectively);11 and one rather obvious inversion of Pope’s famous “WHAT­EVER IS, IS RIGHT ” (Essay on Man, IV, line 394), perverted into Mrs. Freke’s “what­ever is, is wrong” (230).12 But a few pages ­later, when Belinda compares in her own mind Freke’s wit with Anne Percival’s, the description is in quotation marks: Anne’s wit “is like the refulgent moon, we ‘Love the mild rays, and bless the useful light’ ” (232). The source, at least for the second clause, is Pope’s translation of The Iliad, book VIII, where the warriors “Eye the blue vault, and bless the useful light” (line 698) of the “Moon, refulgent lamp of night!” (line 687).13 It is worth keeping in mind that a passage such as this would have often been reprinted in poetry and recitation anthologies throughout the ­century. It appears, for example, in Edward Bysshe’s The Art of En­glish Poetry, 2:59, which reached its ninth edition by 1762. As with many such collections, the excerpts are arranged by topic, in this instance, “Moon.” As has been pointed out, Richardson often turned to Bysshe to interlard his prose with bits of poetry.14 Quite possibly, Edgeworth used a similar anthology (­there ­were dozens throughout the ­century), accounting perhaps for her altered version, “Love the mild rays,” which I have been unable to locate. As with her borrowings from Lyttelton, lines unfamiliar to most modern scholars would have been well known to her contemporaries ­because of this anthologizing. It is also probable that certain poems and passages would have come to her through their

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use by other authors. What is impor­tant to remember is that authors, like literary critics and scholars, are most often influenced by what they are reading or have just read prior to their own writing. ­Whether Edgeworth recalled Pope’s Homer, or an anthology, or another author’s use of the description is perhaps never to be definitively known. The ­actual source, in fact, may not be quite as impor­tant as recognizing that the words are not the author’s; in the case of Edgeworth’s quoted passages, she clearly did not want us to think they w ­ ere.15 This is certainly true of several borrowings that Edgeworth set off with quotation marks early in the novel, none identified in the Oxford edition. When lady Delacour waxes poetic to lament Clarence’s seeming distance, “Why mourns my friend, why weeps his down-­cast eye? / That eye where mirth and fancy used to shine” (26), she is quoting the opening of William Shenstone’s “Elegy 26,” a poem headed by a legend obviously apropos to Belinda: “Describing the Sorrows of an ingenious Mind on the melancholy Events of a licentious Amour” (1773; 1787, 126). We can assume that Edgeworth was familiar with Shenstone’s poetry, but in the event that the relevance of ­these lines to her novel had escaped her memory, she might have found them repeated in a moral treatise, The Candid Friend: Addressed to a Young Gentleman (1797, 63), where they serve as a warning to the titular gentleman; and again in The Victim, in Five Letters to Adolphus (1800), where we are told that “the agitation of a mind awakened to see the turpitude of such perfidy [i.e., seduction of innocence], is pathetically described by the ingenious Shenstone in the following elegy” (13). Both titles are anonymous, but quite obviously the authors share Edgeworth’s concerns within a few years of the publication of Belinda. Lady Delacour’s lament, “ ‘Sad was the hour, and luckless was the day’ I pitched upon viscount Delacour” (36), is a borrowing from William Collins’s Persian Eclogue the Second (1742), where it is the first line of the refrain, “Sad was the Hour, and luckless was the Day,  / When first from Schiraz’ Walls I bent my Way.”16 Collins’s poetry was often reprinted to the very end of the ­century, and Persian Eclogues often anthologized separately, as, for example, in Poems for Young Ladies. In Three Parts. Devotional, Moral, and Entertaining (1767), which had several editions. Suffice to indicate that the speaker ­here is Hassan, the camel driver, who has left his mistress Zara in order to seek wealth: “Curst be the Gold and Silver which persuade / Weak Men to follow far-­fatiguing Trade. / The Lilly-­ Peace outshines the silver Store, / And Life is dearer than the golden Ore” (7, lines 31–34). As with lady Delacour’s reform, the pro­gress of Hassan ­will lead him to reverse his direction, and return to Zara, “Recall’d by Wisdom’s Voice” (9, line 84).

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1650–1850 While Lyttelton, Pope, Shenstone, and Collins are poets we might expect to find in modern anthologies of eighteenth-­century poetry, Edgeworth’s range of quotation encompasses several minor figures and anonymous songs. When complimenting Belinda’s looks and gown, for example, lady Delacour offers a couplet from “Fable 10: The Spider and the Bee” by Edward Moore (1712–1757): “But from the hoop’s bewitching round, / The very shoe has power to wound” (71).17 A few pages ­later, she announces the presence of Belinda with “Shine out, appear, to be found, my lovely Zara!” This is a quotation from Aaron Hill’s version of Voltaire’s Zara (act 3), a play often staged and reprinted from its first appearance on stage (1735) to the end of the ­century, and sufficiently well thought of for Garrick often to play its title character. Like Moore, Hill (1685–1750) sustained a reputation as both playwright and essayist long a­ fter his death, although largely forgotten ­today except for his quarrels with Pope and his friendship with Richardson. Even further out of sight are the popu­lar songs Edgeworth brings into her text, as with this verse offered by Clarence to defend his use of “angel” to describe Belinda: “What know we of angels, / I meant it in joke” (77). The line occurs in the first of a two-­quatrain “Song” humorously celebrating love’s transitory nature; ECCO’s first entry for it is in The Bull-­Finch: Being a Choice Collection of the Newest and Most Favourite En­glish Songs (1750), followed by more than twenty other occurrences to 1794, some with the m ­ usic included; it also was quoted in a novel before Belinda, Robert Bage’s The Fair Syrian (1787). The first quatrain: “You say at your Feet that I wept in Despair, / And vow’d that no Angel was ever so fair; / How could you believe all the Nonsense I spoke? / What know we of Angels?—­​ I meant it in Joke” (The Bull-­Finch, 1760, 102). I quote from the 1760 edition ­because it is the first collection on ECCO that also includes the song lady Delacour offers in response (78), a shortened version of the first two stanzas of an old Irish ballad, rendered thus in a 1760 version: “­There lived a Man in Ballymecrazy, / Who wanted a Wife to make him uneasy; / Long had he sigh’d for dear Ally Croaker, / And thus the gentle Youth bespoke her:  / Arrah, w ­ ill you marry me, dear Ally Croaker,  / Arrah, w ­ ill you marry me, dear Ally Croaker? . . . ​/ Thus in gentle Strains bespoke her: / Arrah, ­will ye marry me, &c.” (37). What is particularly relevant in this song is that the lover g­ ambles “ ’till he pawn’d his Coat to the Broker, / Which lost him the Heart of his dear Ally Croaker” (37), a foreshadowing, obviously, of the denouement of Belinda. In that Edgeworth’s “Original Sketch” for the novel, reprinted in the Oxford edition, did not include Vincent and his gambling, one might won­der if the idea came to her only in this chapter, first with quoting the author of The Gamester and now this ballad.

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Allusion to a third song occurs when Clarence is rescued from Hyde Park’s Serpentine and one of his boon companions (the other two have already left in hasty indifference) comments: “We shan’t have to ‘pour over your grave a full ­bottle of red’ ” (94). The line occurs in “A Description of a Wine Vault,” which seems designed as a barracks drinking song; the final stanza supplies the quoted line: “ ’Tis my ­will when I end, not a tear ­shall be shed, / No hic Jacet be cut on my stone; / But pour on my coffin a b ­ ottle of Red, / And say, that my Drinking is done” (from The Bacchanalian: Or Choice Spirits Feast Containing All the Most Celebrated New Songs, 1755, xxvi–­x xvii). This is the first of more than forty reprintings listed in ECCO,18 the last dated 1800. Clarence’s adventure in the w ­ ater, we might note, is initiated not with a song but with an oratorical flourish borrowed from Julius Caesar, 1.2.102–104: “Caesar said to me, ‘Dar’st thou, Cassius, now / Leap in with me into this angry flood, / And swim to yonder point?” (91). Edgeworth alters “angry” to “weedy” as befits the Serpentine, but one assumes she is fully aware that she has framed Clarence’s misadventure between Shakespeare and a drinking song. All ­these allusions are unidentified in the Oxford edition. More familiar borrowings from Shakespeare are noted, however, including from Richard III (13), Othello (266), Hamlet (304, 349), Macbeth (316), and The Tempest (208, 339–340). The editor is less familiar with Dryden, failing to catch Dr.  X—­—’s “one of the finest pieces of painting extant, with the advantage of ‘Ev’ry grace which time alone can grant’ ” (95), as from “To Sir Godfrey Kneller.”19 Dryden is quoted a second time, by name, but without indicating the source, on page 248: “if a straw can be made the instrument of happiness, he is a wise man who does not despise it.” The sentence is from his 1695 essay “A Parallel of Poetry and Painting” (“if a straw can tickle a man, it is an instrument of happiness”), often reprinted to the end of the c­ entury, including in The Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works of John Dryden (1800, 4:318). A third borrowing from Dryden, this time as a “translator” of Chaucer, appears on pages 319–320; the Oxford edition notes that the twenty-­one lines recited by Dr. X—­—­are from the prologue, Chaucer’s description of the parson; the Doctor, however, does not quote the original but Dryden’s version, including the tell-­tale triplet (lines 3–5). Fi­nally, not a quotation, but still worthy of annotation, at least in a textbook, is the sentence “Belinda is more capable of feeling real permanent passion, than any of the dear sentimental young ladies, whose motto is ‘All for love, or the world well lost’ ” (472). In this instance we might well feel a certain inappropriateness of the tag (or a countercurrent in Edgeworth’s thinking about romance), given that Dryden’s title embodies his account of one of the most

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1650–1850 enduring literary repre­sen­ta­tions of “real permanent passion,” the mythic romance of Antony and Cleopatra. As we continue to trace quoted passages in Belinda, the value of the internet becomes readily apparent; less apparent is the relevance of the effort. Without doubt, online sources make it pos­si­ble to recover long-­lost allusions, as well as to write essays (and books) that trace a word or phrase through hundreds of works and years. At some point, however, the value of such “research” w ­ ill have to be raised, if only b ­ ecause the supply of paper (and patience) w ­ ill be exhausted well before scholars tire of finding a source or an analogue with the click of their mouse. For example, although trying always to maintain a distinction between elucidation and interpretation, we might discover that a quoted phrase “mistress of the wood” (148), repeated on page 272 as lady Delacour’s slighting allusion to ­Virginia St. Pierre, is from Matthew Prior’s very popu­lar and often reprinted “Henry and Emma, A Poem upon the Model of the Nut Brown Maid” (1708).20 Should we then succumb to the temptation to point out that the entire V ­ irginia episode, with all its flawed artifice, may owe as much to Prior (and the ballad he draws on) as to the eccentricities of Edgeworth’s ­father and Thomas Day—­the usual sources associated with it? Or ­will interpretation, once made aware of Prior’s poem, without further prompting discover a reading previously not within its ken? At times, Edgeworth may be d ­ oing no more than echoing phrases she assumes ­will be familiar to other theatergoers. For example, she puts in quotation marks “master torment” (189), which may be from John Burgoyne’s The Heiress: “to set alarms afloat a ­little—­particularly with jealousy, that’s the master torment” (55–56). The play had thirty per­for­mances a­fter opening in 1786, and “remained popu­lar in E ­ ngland and on the continent for half a c­ entury,” according to Max M. Mintz’s ODNB entry on Burgoyne. Quotes from Ben Jonson’s Epicene (1609) on page 169 and R. B. Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775) on page 242 are both identified in the Oxford edition. The Sheridan quotation comes in a conversation between Belinda and lady Anne that raises yet another question the annotator must face, although always loath to do so, namely, that how we read any passage is highly dependent on the books we bring to the ­table. As part of this dialogue Belinda explains her view of Vincent with the phrase that he “altogether . . . ​does not suit my taste” (242). ­Needless to say, one can find echoes of this expression of emotional antipathy to a suitor in both Burney and Austen, among ­others with whom Edgeworth is usually compared, but the sentence actually strikes me as having a very strong origin in Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, the dramatic scenes in which the villain,

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Sir Hargrave Pollexfen, takes par­tic­u­lar umbrage at Harriet’s similar comment, “You do not . . . ​hit my fancy” (vol. 1, letter 17, 152–154); he repeats the phrase again and again in his ensuing kidnapping and attempted assault of the heroine. Belinda has had an e­ arlier very similar interview with Sir Philip Baddeley (152–154), where he, like Sir Hargrave, cannot believe a w ­ oman could turn down an offer of marriage from someone with fifteen thousand pounds. ­These echoes, along with Belinda’s primary prob­lem of not being able to acknowledge love ­until it is first declared by the man, led me to believe that Richardson, more than the usual ­women novelists summoned as models, is Edgeworth’s primary narrative inspiration, at least for Belinda. It is a possibility overlooked ­until now, I suspect, ­because so few ­people ­will actually have read both Grandison and Belinda in near proximity; it occurs to me precisely b ­ ecause I have, in fact, not only read them within the same time frame, but also recently edited Grandison.21 On the other hand, I was quite happy to see on the penultimate page of Belinda Margaret Delacour’s opinion that though she “could dispense with the description of miss Harriet Byron’s worked chairs and fine china, yet I own, I like to hear something of the preparation for a marriage, as well as of the mere wedding” (476); we are not informed in the annotations as to Harriet Byron’s identity nor the lengthy description of her marriage (and the wedding pro­cession, carriage by carriage) in the concluding volume of Grandison. Some of the borrowings demonstrate the wide range of Edgeworth’s own reading and memory. For example, on page 226 we are told, in quotation marks, that Mrs. Freke thinks she had that power over lady Delacour “which strong minds have over weak ones.” The sentence comes from Voltaire’s Essay on the Age of Louis XIV.22 He is again quoted in the very last chapter of Belinda: “Le secret d’ennuyer est celui de tout dire”; Oxford provides a translation (“The secret of being boring is to leave no detail out”) but fails to identify Voltaire as the author of a sentence often anthologized, as in David Evans Macdonnel, A Dictionary of Quotations (3rd ed., 1799).23 Edgeworth had used the same sentence e­ arlier in her Practical Education (1798, 2:759). Two plays by Voltaire are mentioned on page 165 and identified as such in the Oxford edition. A sentence from one of them, the sentimental comedy Le Café ou l’Écossaise (1760), is then quoted (“qui sçait donner, mais qui ne sçait pas vivre”); the Oxford annotation provides a translation, but not the source nor the mention of one of its characters, “Friport” (i.e., Freeport), a businessman with a kind heart, anticipating, among many ­others, Sheridan’s Sir Oliver Surface. Edgeworth quotes the same sentence again in Emilie de Coulanges.24

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1650–1850 A title from Jean-­François Marmontel’s Contes Moraux (“La Femme il y en a peu”) becomes a motif in the work, quoted on page 105 (and identified as such in the Oxford edition), but repeated, without comment, on pages 174–175, 189, and 277.25 A second Marmontel tale, “Soliman II,” finds its way into the text in another French quotation, “qu’un petit nez retroussé peut renverser les loix d’un empire” (339), spoken by lady Delacour in praise of Clarence.26 Both Voltaire and Marmontel w ­ ere among t­ hose authors prevalent in Edgeworth’s early reading; her moral tales have often drawn comparisons to t­hose of the latter. In fact, Marmontel seems to have opened a French theatrical thread for her at this point in Belinda. It is pos­si­ble, for example, that she was recalling Marmontel’s sentence from a theatrical version of his conte by Charles-­Simon Favart (1710–1792), Les Trois Sultanes, ou Soliman II (1761); ­there was also an En­glish version, Isaac Bickerstaff’s The Sultan, or a Peep into the Seraglio (1775), where the sentiment is offered thus: “Who would have thought, that a l­ittle cock’d-up nose would have overturn’d the customs of a mighty empire!” (1787 ed., 22). A few paragraphs ­later lady Delacour mentions “la belle et la bȇte” to which Belinda responds by noting an En­glish audience tolerating “Zemire and Azor” (340). Marmontel wrote the libretto of the comic opera Zémire et Azor, the source of most retellings of “Beauty and the Beast.” It was turned into a comédie ballet by André Gretry (1741–1813), in 1771, and into En­glish as Selima and Azor. ­ ere performed on A Comic Opera by Sir George Collier in 1776; both versions w the En­glish stage in the last quarter of the ­century. A page ­later (341), Edgeworth ends her chapter with a couplet in French from the operatic version of Le Déserteur (1769) by Pierre-­Alexandre Monsigny (1729–1817), with a libretto by Michel-­ Jean Sedaine (1719–1797); again it was often performed in London to the end of the ­century, especially in its En­glish version, by Charles Dibdin (1745–1814), first performed in 1773. The couplet is the refrain of a song in scene 4: “A l­ittle love, but urged with care / Oft leads a heart, and leads it fair” (new ed., 1774, 10). None of t­ hese sources is identified in the Oxford edition. They may be helpful, however, for scholars interested in the influence of the theater, particularly French comic opera, on Edgeworth’s fiction. Another cluster of borrowings can be found on pages 307–315, where three minor poets are quoted; one additional quotation on page 351, from Thomas Day, would have had special significance for Edgeworth. None is identified in the Oxford edition. The first is from Thomas Tickell (1685–1740), a stanza from his most popu­lar poem “Lucy and Colin” (1725), which was often reprinted throughout the c­ entury; it is quoted by lady Delacour to suggest the voices she hears

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predicting her death are real: “I hear a voice you cannot hear, / Which says I must not stay: / I see a hand you cannot see, / Which beckons me away” (307); Sir Walter Scott would ­later use the same quatrain for a chapter motto in Rob Roy (1817). On page  314, the chapter is ended with two lines from Robert Craggs Nugent (1709–1788), his often-­reprinted “Perjury,” which is still anthologized ­today: “I love thee, beautiful and kind, / And plighted an eternal vow. / So altered are thy face and mind, / ’T­were perjury to love thee now.” The borrowing is again put in the mouth of lady Delacour who is humorously explaining that if she undergoes a complete reformation she would no longer be the person lord Delacour loves. A page ­later she again has recourse to a quoted line, “ ‘Ah, l­ittle skilled of fairy lore’ ” (315), when promising Helena to fulfill her wishes; this is from “A Fairy Tale in the Ancient En­glish Style” by Thomas Parnell (1679–1718), first published in Poems on Several Occasions. Written by Dr. Thomas Parnell . . . ​Published by Mr. Pope (1722).27 When all the eighteenth-­century poets and playwrights quoted in Belinda are tallied, an Edgeworth scholar w ­ ill notice the number of Irish artists included, while a Pope scholar might be surprised to learn that both friends and enemies of Pope ­were still being anthologized at the ­century’s end, the Dunciad having considerably less influence in his c­ entury than it has had in ours. The most surprising annotative omission in the Oxford edition is the failure to identify Thomas Day (1748–1789), a major figure in the life and education of Edgeworth, as the “Day” who is the author of eight lines of prose and ten lines of verse used by lady Delacour to prove the innocence of Clarence. Her source is James Keir, An Account of the Life and Writings of Thomas Day, Esq. (1791), for both the introduction to the poem (“Mr.  Day, indeed . . .”) and the lines themselves, from a poem he titled “To the Authoress of ‘Verses to Be Inscribed on Delia’s Tomb’ ” (351). What­ever we may ultimately think of Day’s influence on Edgeworth, this passage is certainly a tribute to him. The entire passage is introduced by another Shakespeare quotation missed in the Oxford edition, although in quotation marks: “If you have any ‘sins unwhipt of justice,’ ­there are lines, which I defy you to read without faltering” (350); thus does lady Delacour challenge Clarence, as King Lear challenged Kent on the heath: “­Tremble, thou wretch / That has within thee undivulged crimes / Unwhipt of justice” (King Lear, 3.2.51–53). I have saved ­until last the most prominent figure alluded to in Belinda, John Milton.28 It was difficult throughout the entire eigh­teenth c­ entury to write a novel about virtue and vice, temptation and seduction, sin and salvation (marriage), without allusion to Milton, and Belinda is no exception. Fitzpatrick has identified several quotations from Paradise Lost, and in one of the few recent essays on the

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1650–1850 work that pays close attention to its allusiveness, Jeffrey Cass has amply demonstrated the value of ­doing so.29 Putting together passages where Paradise Lost is quoted, first on page 227, “Fallen spirit, to be weak is to be miserable” (PL, 1:157; 215: “Fall’n Cherub, to be weak is miserable”); then on page 240, “Without Ithuriel’s spear, how can they distinguish good from the evil?” (PL, 4:810–814; 297); and fi­nally, page 344, “the mind is it’s [sic] own place” (PL, 1:254; 217), he argues convincingly that for Edgeworth Paradise Lost is not a misogynistic text, and that a reading of Belinda based on that assumption is the result of a failure to understand the role of Eve in Milton’s Christian retelling of Genesis. Fitzpatrick had noted ­these three allusions, without trying to derive significance from them. It might, for example, be worth observing that in all three instances it is Belinda who demonstrates familiarity with the poem, marking her distinction from the likes of Mrs. Freke, whose argument that she would like “a strong devil better than a weak angel” is corrected when Belinda reminds her that that is Satan’s view, not Milton’s (227). Cass also points convincingly to Milton’s A Masque as significant to Edgeworth’s distinction between innocence, chastity, and opportunity as played out in Belinda; support for his view comes from an echo neither he nor Fitzpatrick noticed, again marked by quotation marks, where Mr. Percival ridicules romances by remarking that the heroine must be carried off by “some footpad, bandit fierce, or mountaineer” (251). Milton writes of “Chastity” that “No savage fierce, Bandit or mountaineer / ­Will dare to soil her Virgin purity” (Comus: A Mask, lines 426–427; 100). The passage was often anthologized in collections of poetry and drama, as well as in elocution books, so it is pos­si­ble that the variance in Edgeworth’s version first occurred elsewhere; on the other hand, it might indicate that she was quoting from memory. One additional quotation from Paradise Lost (4:310–311; 285) occurs when Dr. X—­—­says of Belinda that “She yields her charms of mind with sweet delay” (111). Fitzpatrick identifies the words as a paraphrase of Milton’s description of Eve, yielding “with coy submission, modest pride, / And sweet reluctant amorous delay.” The doctor is describing Belinda’s effect on him, in contrast to that of lady Delacour, whom he characterizes with a quotation from Thomas Gray’s “Pro­gress of Poetry”:30 “I am ‘blasted with excess of light’ ” (111), itself an echo of Milton’s “Dark with excessive bright” (PL, 3:380; 267); this too is noted by Fitzpatrick. It would be left to interpreters as opposed to elucidators to ask w ­ hether Dr. X—­—is aware that both Gray and Milton are describing the presence of God and is thus sagely suggesting lady Delacour’s false position as above humanity versus Belinda’s as within the ­human condition.

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A small additional borrowing from Milton has gone unnoticed, occurring when Belinda permits herself “to feel ‘unreproved plea­sure in his [i.e., Clarence’s] com­pany’ ” (116), an echo of “L’Allegro” where the poet asks to live with “Mirth . . . ​ in unreproved pleasures ­free” (lines 38–40; 69). We might pair this to a passage much ­later in the novel, where lady Delacour quotes “Il Penseroso” (line 130; 75), as noted by Kirkpatrick, to mock the decline of her spirits expected by lady Boucher: “Did you think . . . ​I should, like lady Q—­—­, let my sentences come out of my mouth only at the rate of a word a minute?—­‘Like—­minute—­drops—­from—­ off—­the—­eaves’  ” (353). ­There are as­suredly other passages in quotation marks in Belinda that I failed to notice and that require annotation (and even more likely borrowed passages without quotation marks that also need to be identified). And t­ here are at least two quotations that indicate the life of an annotator is never an easy one. The first is on page 276, in a letter written by Clarence: “I s­ hall pay too dear yet for some of my experiments. ‘Sois g­ rand homme, et sois malheureux.’ ” The sentence seems to have been attributed to Diderot by Julie de Lespinasse (1732–1776) in a letter she wrote to the comte de Guibert in 1774, but her correspondence was not published ­until 1809. How Edgeworth came to know the sentence remains for me unknown.31 The second is a sentence attributed in the text to Johnson: “It is misery to want what is not happiness to have” (441). Two astute annotators, Anthony Lee and Robert Walker, ­were unable to help, and my own search was complicated by finding in Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s Essay on Professional Education (1809, 111) the same sentence attributed to Patrick Brydone, although I was unable to find it in his major published work, A Tour through Sicily and Malta ­ oing, both puzzles ­will (1773). If another edition of Belinda is deemed worth the d surely be solved. It is also impor­tant to point out that I did not delve into ­those places in Belinda where allusions are made without quoted material, but which a modern reader would certainly want to have explained; for example, when we are told that Belinda is reading “Essay on the Inconsistency of H ­ uman Wishes,” it would be useful to know it was not another Johnsonian misdirection, but a 1773 moral essay by Anna Letitia Barbauld (alternatively titled “Against Inconsistency in Our Expectations”), and especially since the other works she is said to be reading at the time, by Adam Smith, John Moore, and La Bruyère, are all annotated in the Oxford edition. Still, the questions asked at the beginning of this essay remain: Given a novel of secondary status, what expense of spirit ­shall we spend in annotating it with

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1650–1850 the same time and care we would take with a major work? Is it worth our effort to uncover ­these details, even if the retentive memories and hours spent in library stacks are perhaps no longer as impor­tant as internet savvy? Can Belinda be read without this information, or, to phrase the question as it should be phrased, can a scholar write about Belinda without it? Obviously so, given the number of books and essays in which Belinda has been discussed in the past thirty-­five years, most citing the Oxford edition. However, it might be useful, if only momentarily, to imagine such scholarship as being dropped on the work of art from above, imposing on it a theory or construct that covers it like a warm blanket, a comforter for all t­ hose curled ­under it during a dark and cold night. When night inevitably turns back into day, and blankets are thrown off, might it not be worthwhile to use the sunshine to study texts from the bottom up, uncovering and discovering what they are trying to tell us with their allusions and quotations, their syntax and diction; in brief, their precise and detailed literate presence in their own literary world? This is the practice we have usually a­ dopted for poetry and for the monuments of fiction and drama. I would gingerly suggest, therefore, that before we can canonize a Behn, a Manley, a Haywood, or an Edgeworth (dare I add: or write about them as literary scholars rather than as sociologists or anthropologists, psychologists, or even historians); we need to examine their texts with scholarly care and base our interpretations—­and evaluations—on the basis of texts about which we have precisely informed ourselves. Just how this might change our view or evaluation of any par­tic­u­lar work of art I do not know, but in the case of Belinda, given the preponderance of male authors in the library of her allusiveness, it might just possibly produce a reading that opens modern critics of Edgeworth to listen a bit more carefully to what is promised in Lyttelton’s “Advice to a Lady (To Belinda),” namely, “such truths as ­women seldom learn from men” (Poems [1800], 3). Alternatively, we might apply to f­ uture annotative efforts the couplet with which Belinda is concluded: “Our tale contains a moral, and, no doubt, / You all have wit enough to find it out.” It only remains to point out that this too is a borrowing, echoing the epigraph of the anonymous Court Dunciad. Inscribed to the Honorable Mrs. Fitz—­—(1733): “This Book’s a Meaning, and, no Doubt, / Ye all have Wit enough to find it out.”

Notes 1. Melvyn New, “Review Essay: The Letters of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018),”

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Eighteenth- ­Century Studies 52, no. 2 (2019): 263–270; New, “Thoughts on Reviewing Textbook Editions and Student Companions,” Scriblerian 52, no.  1 (2019): 77–82. 2. Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, ed. Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), reissued in 1999 and again in 2008, without change from the first edition. It is the edition of choice for scholars writing on Belinda. The only other textbook edition, ed. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (London: J. M. Dent, 1993), was without annotation and is now out of print. 3. Kirkpatrick’s “Note on the Text” (xxvi–­x xxii) briefly but usefully outlines the relationship between ­these editions. 4. E.g., its edition of Eliza Haywood’s The Invisible Spy; see my review, Scriblerian 48, no. 2–49, no. 1 (2016): 155–158; at $100, it is neither a student nor a scholarly edition, despite calling itself “scholarly” on its back cover. 5. One discusses ­these undeniable trends at one’s academic peril, as I discovered several years ago when my plenary address (“A Genius of the Cast: Celebrating Sterne”) to the 2013 Sterne Bicentenary Conference and included in the conference volume submitted to the University of Delaware Press as edited by Judith Hawley, Peter de Voogd, and me was rejected as po­liti­cally dangerous. The volume went ahead without it; de Voogd had the courage to publish it in the Shandean 26 (2015): 9–26, which he edits. 6. Early attribution of this five-­volume set to Horace Walpole has since been discounted. 7. The lines, as they appeared in a collected edition of Lyttelton (1800): “a prudence undeceiving, undeceiv’d, / that nor to ­little nor too much believ’d; / that scorn’d unjust Suspicion’s coward fear, / and, without weakness knew to be sincere” (Lyttelton, Poems [Ludlow, 1800], 26). 8. See William Congreve, Way of the World, 2.1: “Millimant: ‘No, now I think on’t I’m pleas’d—­— ­For I believe I gave you some Pain.’ Mirabell: ‘Do’s that please you? Millamant: Infinitely; I love to give Pain’ ” (Complete Plays of William Congreve, ed. Herbert Davis [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967], 420). Surely Lyttelton and Edgeworth both recall Congreve. 9. Oxford notes the allusion to the title, but not the specific lines wherein the Peer “spreads the glitt’ring Forfex wide, / T’inclose the Lock; now joins it to divide” (canto II, lines 147–148; The Poems of Alexander Pope: The One-­Volume Twickenham Text, ed. John Butt [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963], 231; hereafter Pope). I have followed the Oxford edition (and the early texts) in using the lowercase for “lady” and “lord,” assuming it is a touch of Edgeworth’s progressive instinct. I have not followed the Oxford style of omitting the period a­ fter “Mrs.,” “Mr.,” and “Dr.” since Edgeworth always includes it. 10. I.e., “This Lock, the Muse ­shall consecrate to Fame, / And mid’st the Stars inscribe Belinda’s Name!” (canto V, lines 149–150; Pope, 242). An ­earlier allusion to Rape of the Lock is noted by Kirkpatrick, in a letter lady Delacour sends to Belinda:

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1650–1850 “Let me see you . . . ​‘With head uncover’d, the cosmetic powers’ ” (34; canto I, line 124; Pope, 222). 11. Kirkpatrick misses a third allusion to “To a Lady,” line 52 (Pope, 562), when lady Delacour describes Harriet Freke as someone who “could make it her sport to ‘touch the brink of all we hate’ ” (44). 12. As this conversation with Mrs. Freke continues, two suggestive comments bring Laurence Sterne and Samuel Richardson respectively to mind, although neither is quoted directly. Mrs. Freke’s observation that “drapery, w ­ hether wet or dry, is the most confoundedly indecent ­thing in the world” (231) seems to recall Tristram Shandy’s vow to draw Janatone “in all her proportions, and with as determin’d a pencil, as if I had her in the wettest drapery” (Tristram Shandy, 7.9, in The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New [Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1978], 2:589). Then when Mr. Percival responds to Mrs. Freke that modesty is a question of public taste as exemplified by the “Lacedæmonian ladies” (231), one might recall a similar discussion of the dress of Spartan ­women (as described by Plutarch) in Sir Charles Grandison, 6 vols. (1753–1754), vol. 1, letter 13 (78–79); what makes this more plausible is that Miss Barnevelt, a laughing participant in the discussion, is an early forerunner of Mrs. Freke, as noted by Emma Donoghue, Passions between ­Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1668–1801 (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 104: “Most critics have turned a blind eye to Miss Barnevelt . . . ​[who] may be the prototype for Harriet Freke and l­ater examples of the brusque, male-­identified, misogynist lesbian.” Of course, both figures have received a ­great deal of attention since 1993. 13. The Iliad of Homer, ed. Steven Shankman (London: Penguin, 1996), 399. Pope, it might be noted, calls this “the most beautiful night-­piece that can be found in poetry” (Pope, 419). 14. See Michael  E. Connaughton, “Richardson’s Familiar Quotations: Cla­ris­sa and Bysshe’s Art of En­glish Poetry,” Philological Quarterly 60 (1981): 183–195. 15. One last quotation from Pope, in the very last chapter (477), is noted in the Oxford edition as adapted from Peri Bathous: Of the Art of Sinking in Poetry: “Ye Gods! Annihilate but Space and Time, / And make two Lovers happy” (Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, 4 vols. [1727], 3:52). It would be worth adding to the note that the lines are not to be taken seriously, but rather, in keeping with the general antiromance tone of the final paragraphs of Belinda, are parodic, Pope’s ridicule of “that modest Request of two absent Lovers,” illustrating bathos by “magnification.” 16. The Works of William Collins, ed. Richard Wendorf and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 7, lines 13–14. 17. Edward Moore, Fables for the Female Sex (1744), 63. The couplet preceding the borrowed lines might well have caught Edgeworth’s attention, given her portrait of Mrs. Freke: “When Celia struts in man’s attire, / She shews too much to raise desire.” The moral of the fable also seems apropos: “To wiser heads attention lend, / And learn this lesson from a friend. / She, who with modesty retires, / Adds

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fewel to her lover’s fires, / While such incautious jilts like you, / By folly your own schemes undo” (65). Moore is not given much attention ­today, but he was a very successful playwright, most especially The Gamester (1753), which had “­great popularity” to the end of the c­ entury and may well have influenced Edgeworth’s saddling Vincent with the vice of gambling. See Edward Moore, The Founding . . . ​ and The Gamester, ed. Anthony Amberg (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), esp. the chronology of Moore’s life and works, 17–43; and on the popularity of The Gamester, 123n104. 18. It must be noted that I have accessed only ECCO, part 1; the smaller part 2 ­will, I am certain, turn up additional reprintings of all ­these songs and many of the poems mentioned in this essay. 19. John Dryden, ed. Keith Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 461, line 179. 20. The Literary Works of Matthew Prior, ed. H. Bunker Wright and Monroe  K. Spears, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 1:298, line 684. The editors point out that the poem was extremely popu­lar, and they quote William Cowper’s comment that “­there are few readers of poetry of ­either sex in this country who cannot remember how that enchanting piece has bewitched them” (1:909). 21. This may also account for my ­earlier mention of Grandison, above, note 12, and Sterne alongside him; see my “Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison and Sterne: A Study in Influence,” Modern Philology 115, no. 2 (2017): 213–243. 22. François-­Marie Arouet (Voltaire), Siècle de Louis XIV (1739), trans. [John] Lockman (London, 1740), 45. 23. From “Sixième Discours en vers sur l’homme” (“Writings of 1737”), in Oeuvres completes de Voltaire, ed. Haydn T. Mason (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1991), 17:520, line 172. 24. The play is handily available in a French text edited by Jean Goldzink (Éditions Flammarion, 2004), 297–371; the passage quoted is on 339; En­g lish versions are also readily available. The second Voltaire play mentioned, Nanine, ou l’Homme sans préjugé (1749), is included in the Goldzink edition (217–293); an alternative subtitle is “ou le préjugé vaincu” but not lady Delacour’s “or La Prude,” clearly her comment on the play’s “Pamela” theme. See also Edgeworth, Tales of Fash­ion­able Life (London, 1812), 5:138: “Ah que c’est bisarre!—­Mais mon enfant expliquez moi donc tout ça?—­Mais ça ne s’explique point—­Certes c’est une Angloise qui sçait donner, mais qui ne sçait pas vivre.—­Voltaire s’y connaissait mieux que moi apparemment—et heureusement.” 25. Jean-­François Marmontel (1723–1799), Contes moraux, in Œuvres Complettes (Paris, 1787), 3:121–175. Francis Burney had alluded to the tale in Evelina, but with a twist to describe Lord Orville: “Un jeune homme comme il y en a peu” (ed. Margaret Anne Doody [London: Penguin, 1994], 316). 26. Marmontel, Contes moraux, 1:101. See Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 303: “Where then does her didacticism

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1650–1850 come from? A purely literary answer would be ‘from the moral tale,’ and it is certainly more reasonable to put it down to Maria’s upbringing on Voltaire and Marmontel than to blame any of her relatives.” Yet, of course, Butler and the commentary in her wake all opt for the less “reasonable,” less “literary” explanations. See also her quoting of the report of an American visitor to Edgeworthstown, George Ticknor, concerning Edgeworth’s conversation, that she talked “like the novels, but in the manner of the liveliest dialogue, not the narration,” singling out “her uncommon quickness of perception, her fertility of allusion, and the ­great resources of fact” (416, emphasis added). Edgeworth footnotes “Marmontel” on 210, for the sentiment that “­whether t­ hose who cease to please, or ­those who cease to be pleased are most to blame, it may sometimes be difficult to determine”; the source is his tale “Les Quatre Flacons”: “Lequel des deux a tort, ou celui qui cesse d’aimer, on celui qui cesse de plaire?” (Marmontel, Contes moraux, 1:168). 27. Collected Poems of Thomas Parnell, ed. Claude Rawson and F. P. Lock (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989), 143, line 151: “And l­ittle skill’d of Faerie lore.” See also 505 for the place of Parnell’s poem in the folktale tradition; it is to be expected, perhaps, that Edgeworth is especially attracted to early eighteenth-­ century poets like Parnell and Prior, both of whom display an interest in ­modifying traditional forms and stories for con­temporary ears. Neither poet is mentioned by Butler. 28. All quotations from Milton are from John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957). 29. Jeffrey Cass, “Ithuriel’s Spear and Detecting the Counterfeit: Edgeworth’s Miltonic Allusions in Belinda,” in Romanticism: Comparative Discourses, ed. Larry Peer and Diane Hoeveler (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 117–129. 30. The Poems of Gray, Collins and Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1976), 174, line 101. 31. The passage can be found in Lettres de ma­de­moi­selle de Lespinase, ed. Janin Jules Gabrel (Paris, 1847), 395: “Diderot a dit que la nature en formant un homme de génie, lui secoue le flambeau sur la tȇte, en lui disant sois ­grand homme, et sois malheureux: voilà, je crois, ce qu’elle a prononcé le jour que vous ȇtes né.”

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INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL FEATURE META­PHOR IN THE POETRY AND CRITICISM OF THE LONG EIGH­TEENTH C ­ ENTURY MARK A. PEDREIRA

Few accounts of poetry and criticism in the “long eigh­teenth ­century,” extending

in its broadest view from Dryden to Coleridge, explore the rhetorical, aesthetic, and social forces influencing the art and criticism of poetic meta­phor. This special feature attempts to broaden the story of meta­phor by reexamining the works of impor­tant editors, aes­the­ti­cians, poets, and critics in the long eigh­teenth c­ entury, focusing largely from the mid-­eighteenth c­ entury to the Romantic era. Given this historical focus, my current special feature complements my e­ arlier special feature on meta­phor (in volume 18 of this journal), which focused on the theory and practice of meta­phor in the works of major poets and critics—­Dryden, Butler, Swift, and Pope—­from the Restoration to the early eigh­teenth ­century. One neglected topic in the study of eighteenth-­century poetic meta­phor concerns the question of ­whether poetry anthologies, with their archive of memorable quotations, “create taste or reflect it.” In the first essay of this special feature, “Organ­izing Poetry in the Eigh­teenth C ­ entury: Anthologies and Meta­phor,” Adam Rounce raises this question, and related editorial questions, with new insights into how eighteenth-­century editors, guided by certain editorial princi­ ples, selected and or­ga­nized poetry through “thematic headings” that function as “thematic meta­ phors.” Regarding select “popu­ lar anthologies over the de­cades,” Rounce probes the role of the anthologizer as editor, identifying what he calls “loose editorial princi­ples” in the use of thematic headings for vari­ous purposes: the “excerpting” of poetic beauties; the “purely functional,” or pedagogical, use of quotations; the archival recording of “forgotten” verse; and the

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1650–1850 editorial practices of bricolage (“yoking together”) or textual excision. In his examination of t­hese popu­ lar anthologies, Rounce persuasively shows how anthologizers borrow heavi­ly from each other, with considerable attention given to Edward Bysshe’s Art of En­glish Poetry (1702) and its influence on Samuel Derrick’s Poetical Dictionary (1761), and on other well-­known anthologies such as Thesaurus Dramaticus (1724) and The Beauties of Poetry Displayed (1757). In his essay Rounce examines in ­these poetry anthologies one of the anthologizer’s principal tasks, which is, meta­phor­ically speaking, “organ­izing poetry,” as seen ­under common “thematic headings” such as “Eloquence,” “Looks, or Mien,” and “Love.” Concerning the conceptual and orga­nizational nature of t­hese thematic headings, Rounce discusses their editorial function of highlighting meta­ phorical connections in the corresponding illustrative quotations.1 Organ­izing poetry u ­ nder such thematic meta­phors, the anthologizer’s “selected passages” are “patterned and or­g a­nized for special effects, echoes, and connections.” As Rounce observes, poetic excerpts are “gathered, presented, and re-­presented,” sometimes extending the voice of prominent poets (like Milton and Dryden) and other times creating a “collage” of voices. Given the impor­tant role of the anthologizer as editor, Rounce persuasively argues that the anthologizer, from a literary-­ critical perspective, influences “how certain poets and works can be read.” Pursuing unexplored aesthetic and literary-­critical dimensions of poetic meta­phor, Taylor Corse and Michael Edson examine in their respective essays how Hogarthian aesthetic theory and “neoclassical” literary criticism (particularly belletristic criticism) influence the discovery and reception of meta­phor in the long eigh­teenth ­century. In an essay titled “Curvilinear Thinking in the Long Eigh­teenth ­Century,” Corse explores Hogarth’s notion of the ubiquity of the “serpentine line” (S-­shaped curved line) in art and life, an aesthetic doctrine of critical significance in Hogarth’s The Analy­sis of Beauty (1753). In this work, Hogarth observes, with classical pre­ce­dent, the importance of proportion and symmetry,2 but he argues that variety, exemplified by the serpentine line—­more than any other aesthetic quality—­draws our attention and shapes our sense of beauty.3 Just as Hogarth exemplifies the presence of the serpentine line in e­ very dimension of the ­human body, art, and architecture, Corse looks at memorable examples of how Hogarth’s serpentine line may be seen in the poetry, criticism, and novels of the long eigh­teenth ­century. Corse illustrates his argument about the Hogarthian viewpoint by giving both examples and counterstatements of Hogarth’s aesthetic ideal, exemplifying Hogarth’s “curvilinear aesthetic” and its opposing “rectilinear aesthetic.” Few

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readers of the lit­er­a­ture in the long eigh­teenth c­ entury could forget, for example, Alexander Pope’s dreary poetic world and its rectilinear aesthetic depicted in Timon’s villa or Tobias Smollett’s rectilinear aesthetic in the bleak landscape scenes in Baynard’s estate (before the decease of Baynard’s wife) in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. In stark contrast, Corse gives numerous examples of the curvilinear aesthetic in the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries from thinkers as diverse as Herrick, Milton, Dryden, Burke, Sterne, Fielding, and Austen. For instance, by appealing to the authority of Milton, Corse pre­sents one of the touchstones of Hogarth’s argument for the curvilinear aesthetic in The Analy­sis of Beauty, as Adam and Eve’s enjoyment of the wildness of Eden is largely curvilinear and the serpent’s own presence is archetypically and forbiddingly curvilinear. Corse also draws connections between the curvilinear aesthetic of Dryden’s An Essay of Dramatick Poesie—­a critical work extolling “variety and copiousness” and the “labyrinth of design” on the En­glish stage—­and the curvilinear aspects of the eighteenth-­century novel, particularly in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Fielding’s Tom Jones, and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. As Corse sees it, Austen’s fictional narrative in Pride and Prejudice beautifully showcases the beauty of the Hogarthian curvilinear aesthetic in the scene at Netherfield depicting Elizabeth and Darcy dancing the quadrille, splendidly revealing (as Corse puts it) the forceful “twists and turns” of their dance and conversation. In short, Corse, in his essay on the meta­phorical implications of Hogarth’s aesthetic theory, gives a cornucopia of examples of the Hogarthian curvilinear aesthetic in the poetry, criticism, and novels of the long eigh­teenth ­century. Another contributor, Michael Edson, explores a topic of renewed interest in meta­phor theory, the issue of allegory’s relation to meta­phor and this trope’s impor­ tant affective dimension in rhetorical criticism, particularly Milton’s eighteenth-­century reception. In his essay, “Feeling Allegory: Affect, Meta­phor, and Milton’s Eighteenth-­Century Reception,” Edson reexamines vari­ous literary critical and rhetorical responses to Milton’s famous allegory on Sin and Death, ­going beyond Joseph Addison and Samuel Johnson’s well-­known dissatisfaction with the “broken” nature of Milton’s allegory: “broken” ­because of the allegory’s alleged inconsistencies and faulty correspondences (in Johnson’s criticism, the personified beings are criticized for being at once theologically real and fictionally depicted—­that is, both real and figurative).4 Reexamining certain aspects of eighteenth-­century “neoclassicism” (with an awareness of scholarly “detractors”), Edson probes the rhetorical, aesthetic, and affective dimensions of the eigh­teenth c­ entury’s “discomfort in allegory” (particularly concerning Spenser,

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1650–1850 Milton, and Dryden): essentially, in affective language, a strong “nausea”—­felt by Voltaire, Kames, Blair, to name a few—­with extended allegory, as ­these critics generally identified allegory with “personification meta­phor” and frequently registered their disgust about highly extended meta­phors of any kind. In Edson’s interpretation of eighteenth-­century allegory, the Addisonian and Johnsonian objections to Milton’s highly extended allegory (extended beyond the norms of classical theory and practice) emphasize the allegory’s alleged failed conceptual correspondences and ineffectual imagery more than affective excess. As Edson sees it, modern affect theory, g­ oing beyond the scope of classical rhe­ toric and cognitive rhe­toric, posits a theory of figurative language that takes into account how readers, past and pre­sent, have responded emotionally (and sometimes negatively) to meta­phors and familial tropes like allegory—­a useful theoretical model for evaluating historical responses to Milton’s famous allegory on  Sin and Death. Essentially, Edson’s approach outlines “the need to combine reception study with the history of emotion.” If nothing ­else, the combined disciplines of reception study and the history of emotion ­will give a broader story of how readers, especially Milton’s eighteenth-­century readers, responded historically, critically, and emotionally to the forceful figure of allegory. Complementing ­these textual-­critical, aesthetic, and affect theory ap­proach­es to meta­phor, the essays by Jacob Sider Jost and Linda Reesman delve, respectively, into the social dimensions of Edward Young’s “meta­phorics” of Georgian patronage and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s meta­phorical art of “crossing thresholds” in poetry, criticism, and life. In his essay, “The Worldliness of Edward Young and the Meta­phorics of Georgian Patronage,” Jost contends, against the historical grain (particularly George Eliot’s criticism of Young), that “Young’s worldliness”—­the “poet’s economic and social situation”—is “central” to his success as a poet. Jost pre­sents his argument in two stages: first, “a compressed socioeconomic account of Young’s life and works up to 1742,” and second, a reading of Night Thoughts (1742–1745) that shows how Young’s “theological and cosmic themes” grow out of his “social and economic situation” as a poet.5 In the first part of his argument, Jost adeptly discusses the subtle meta­phorics of Georgian patronage in two of Young’s poems, the Epistle to Lord Lansdowne and The Universal Passion. The epistle, addressed to Young’s patron the Tory Lansdowne, draws its meta­phors of the patron-­poet relationship from the “shared classical, Biblical, and courtly vocabulary of patron and poet.” In contrast, a series of seven “linked” satires, The Love of Fame (which had been originally published individually but with the “shared title” of The Universal Passion) pre­sents patronage,

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along with other major themes, from the perspective of “poetry as part of the urban London of his day”: as an ele­ment in an urban context that involves “Young’s satirist” in a “damning self-­awareness” of poetry and poetic fame. In the second part of his argument, Jost explores other dimensions of the “patronage-­seeking poet” in Young’s Night Thoughts: a cosmological and religious poem that reveals the author, on the “periphery of the Hanoverian elite,” “fashioning himself as a poet” and writing sublimely about the “the Newtonian cosmos and chain of being.” E ­ very dimension of Young’s life and reflections—­ God, heaven, time, the Newtonian cosmos, the scale of being, and literary fame—­ finds forceful and sublime expression in Night Thoughts. In his interpretation of patronage in Night Thoughts, Jost examines not only Young’s bold tropes on the patron-­poet relationship (in which the poet tropes time itself as a patron) but also how Young addresses his interlocutor, Lorenzo, constantly expanding the scale of being and presenting the cosmos and heaven with a “Newtonian twist.” 6 Concerning Young’s tropological imagination, Jost concedes, with the critics, that it might be called extravagant. He differs with the critics, however, in his viewpoint that Young’s extravagance should not be seen as debilitating but rather as enabling, an “extravagant synthesis” of the poet’s ambitious c­ areer and meta­ phoric art. In the final essay of this special feature on meta­phor, “Coleridge and Meta­ phor: Crossing Thresholds,” Linda Reesman reexamines Coleridge’s fascination with meta­phor as a way of connecting art to life, particularly concerning what social scientists call “interstructural situations”—or “rites of passage”—­that shape how Coleridge’s meta­phorical art responds to his social and domestic world. Examining Coleridge’s criticism on Shakespeare and other poets (particularly George Herbert), Reesman offers surprising insights into how Coleridge’s thoughts on “Method” and poetic logic connects with his meta­phorical imagination. In her theoretical approach, Reesman examines both Coleridge’s well-­known poems, like “The Rime of the Ancient Mari­ner,” “Dejection: An Ode,” and “The Eolian Harp: Composed at Clevedon, Somersetshire,” and lesser known poems, such as “France: An Ode” and “Sonnet to the River Otter,” to show how Coleridge’s depiction of poetic craft, nature, politics, friendship, and love reveals his ability to learn from “liminal moments,” or ritual experiences (as anthropologist Victor Turner calls them), that are “basic to social and cultural development” and therefore essential to his poetic development. In her new approach to a familiar theme, Reesman argues that “Coleridge’s use of language is grounded in his role as a literary critic based on his methods

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1650–1850 and princi­ples of language.” What emerges in Reesman’s approach to Coleridgean meta­phor is a deeper understanding of how Coleridge’s “practical criticism” guides the poet to new stages of poetic development. In his seminal critical writings, Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria and in his lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, anchors his practical criticism not only in his highly systematic theory of language (like his doctrine of method) but also in the works of g­ reat poets. As discussed in the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge’s ideal of the “­great poet,” identified with Shakespeare and Milton, argues for a poetic sensibility displaying an organic fit between style and sentiment, mind and world—­that is, a natu­ral style reflected by “a continuous undercurrent of feeling” in which words are chosen and arranged so carefully that not a single word could be changed without altering or ruining the poet’s meaning. Not surprisingly, Coleridge, like Horace or Shakespeare in their odes and sonnets, draws his meta­phors about poetic genius and fame from the source domain of architecture to describe the perfection and permanency of the Shakespearean and Miltonic style. In the first chapter of Biographia Literaria, Coleridge states, “I was wont boldly to affirm, that it would be scarcely more difficult to push a stone out from the pyramids with the bare hand, than to alter a word, or the position of a word, in Milton and Shakespeare, (in their most impor­tant works at least) without making the author say something e­ lse, or something worse, than he does say.” 7 While recognizing Coleridge’s writings on representative poets and their poetic fame, Reesman’s essay on Coleridge’s meta­phorical art focuses less on such poetic perfection and permanency than on the poet’s own constant growth and change, or meta­phorical journey, with many paths that involve “crossing thresholds.” To this end, Reesman takes Coleridge’s meta­phor of the “intellectual breeze” in “The Eolian Harp”—­a poem structured on cross-­domain mappings between nature, m ­ usic, and the dynamics of h ­ uman experience—as representative of the  “metamorphosis of imaginative ideas” in his poetry, ­whether regarding the growth of the poetic mind, the Ancient Mari­ ner’s super­ natural journey, the French Revolution, or the nature of friendship and love. In her essay’s broad exploration of Coleridgean criticism and poetry, Reesman examines how in Coleridge’s Romantic idealism, nature, as a major theme and meta­phorical source domain, motivates his meta­phorical discovery of vari­ous topics—­poetry, politics, friendship, and love—­essential to his literary critical and poetic development. For Reesman, Coleridge’s development as a poet involves “rites of passage” about his poetic craft and poetic voice, enabling him to address his most pressing concerns

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as a writer. As such, the poet’s meta­phorical genius might be said to draw largely on his success in “crossing thresholds.” In any literary era, scholarly inquiries into the art and criticism of poetic meta­phor are Protean and invariably form a small part of a much larger and virtually limitless story. Yet in the long eigh­teenth c­ entury certain literary voices, agents, and forces are nonetheless distinctive and enduring, shaping how readers read, perceive, and feel, as witnessed in early modern poetic anthologies and the emerging new rhe­toric and aesthetics, indelibly ­shaped by early Miltonic criticism, Hogarth’s curvilinear aesthetics, Young’s “meta­phorics of Georgian patronage,” Coleridge’s “liminal” (restlessly curious and constantly evolving) imagination, and the countless literary-­critical voices (including editorial voices) of the eighteenth-­ century modern rhe­toric and aesthetics. Much remains to be done, as the history of rhe­toric and the scholarship on meta­phor is virtually limitless. Yet the scholarly work of the five contributors in this special feature provides new perspectives on poetic meta­phor and literary criticism in the long eigh­teenth ­century, inviting readers to rethink the nature and scope of meta­phorical inquiry in this era.

Notes 1. For a cognitive rhetorical perspective on conceptual connections, see Mark Turner, “Conceptual Connections,” in Reading Minds: The Study of En­glish in the Age of Cognitive Science (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1991), 121–150. 2. William Hogarth, “Of Uniformity, Regularity, or Symmetry,” in The Analy­sis of Beauty, ed. Ronald Paulson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 28–30. 3. See Hogarth, “Of Compositions with the Serpentine-­Line,” in Paulson, Analy­sis of Beauty, 50–59. 4. In the Life of Milton, Johnson states, “Milton’s allegory of Sin and Death is undoubtedly faulty. Sin is indeed the ­mother of Death, and may be allowed to be the portress of hell; but when they stop the journey of Satan, a journey as real, and when Death offers him ­battle, the allegory is broken. That Sin and Death should have shewn the way to hell might have been allowed; but they cannot facilitate the passage by building a bridge, ­because the difficulty of Satan’s passage is described as real and sensible, and the bridge ­ought to be only figurative.” Samuel Johnson, “Milton,” in The Lives of the Poets, Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 21, ed. John H. Middendorf (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 198. 5. See Jacob Sider Jost, “Night Thoughts on Time, Fame, and Immortality,” in Prose Immortality 1711–1819 (Charlottesville: University of ­Virginia Press, 2015), 37–55.

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1650–1850 6. As evidence of the Newtonian dimension of Young’s beatific vision, Jost cites lines from the following passage in Night 6:175–180, in which Young pre­sents Lorenzo with a cosmic “survey” of “some superior Point” from which he ­will someday “behold” “unbounded Space” and “infinite” worlds: “From some superior Point (where, who can tell? / Suffice it, ’tis a Point where Gods reside) / How ­shall the stranger Man’s illumin’d Eye, / In the vast Ocean of unbounded Space, / Behold an Infinite of floating Worlds, Divide the Crystal Waves of Ether pure, / In endless Voyage, without Port?” Edward Young: Night Thoughts, ed. Stephen Cornford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 153. 7. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1983), 23.

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ORGAN­IZING POETRY IN THE EIGH­TEENTH ­CENTURY ANTHOLOGIES AND META­PHOR ADAM ROUNCE

Any attempt to understand the rationale b­ ehind the contents of poetry anthol-

ogies in the eigh­teenth ­century is a reminder of how odd and enlightening even the most well-­known of such anthologies are, to a modern critical audience; such enquiries are usually made by t­ hose trying to discover the sort of poetry that was ostensibly popu­lar, as well as attempting to answer an old question and prob­lem— do anthologies create taste or reflect it? As vari­ous digital proj­ects in the humanities are opening up more and more of the contents of often rarely examined volumes, as well as their offshoots and variants, so it is becoming easier to trace patterns and connections between works: the frequency with which anthologies copy passages and sections from each other; the trends that seem to both reflect popularity and perhaps establish it; and the ways in which anthologies seem to construct certain patterns of reading. What follows is a look at the ways in which some well-­known anthologies use categories of meta­phor to or­ga­nize themselves, and the results and effects of this. It is a necessarily impressionistic survey, given the vast range of materials that could be examined. It uses examples of popu­lar anthologies over the de­cades that ­were trying to produce similar results, in distinction to t­ hose that more openly challenged the idea of a canon of anthologized poetry. All the anthologies examined ­here rely upon thematic meta­phors to pre­ sent their contents, and in so ­doing introduce peculiar conditions, limits, and controls over both what they include and how certain poets and works can be read. The terminology for such works is somewhat slippery. What the pre­sent essay calls anthologies are often called commonplace books, meaning collections

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1650–1850 of quotations rather than the more literal sense of garlands of poetic flowers. Yet this is somewhat misleading. As A. Dwight Culler long ago remarked, the purpose of the poetic commonplace book changed over the eigh­teenth c­ entury, from being phrase books for the use of writers to miscellanies or collections of poetic extracts for readers that ­were also akin to dictionaries of quotation. It is a sort of subgenre, as Culler argues, where the main proponents throughout the ­century take passages and sections ­wholesale from each other as well as adding to the collective stock, so that they resemble “increments upon a common base or rings in the same tree.”1 It is not therefore always helpful to view t­ hese collections by modern standards of originality or singularity, since they of necessity built a proportion of their contents upon each other. A pertinent passage could easily be reprinted in half a dozen popu­lar anthologies, as it saved the editors the trou­ble of finding an equally relevant poetic thought from another source. It ­will also be seen that the title of “editor” in ­these works can encompass dif­fer­ent roles and intentions, sometimes within the same text. I distinguish between the anthologizer as literary critic and editor when their judgments and decisions seem to exhibit t­ hese qualities, and as compiler when such qualities are not required, but the distinction is necessarily fluid, given the utility and inherited content of ­these books. The organ­izing princi­ples of ­these sort of anthologies are gatherings of implicit meta­phors, ­under thematic headings, a necessary way of controlling the (often abridged) materials for a readership. Barbara Benedict describes this as a tradition, whereby “the best British lit­er­a­ture shares a distinct character of stylistic propriety manifested particularly by the use of meta­phor.”2 ­After all, illustrative quotations are necessarily meta­phoric, with the abstract idea represented by the images displayed. Within this tradition, poetic materials are arranged in dif­f er­ ent ways, and for dif­fer­ent purposes. Sometimes, it seems that the editor of an anthology wanted to include a par­tic­u­lar passage or set of images ­because it was apposite; sometimes, the aesthetic attraction, or con­ve­nience (such as an already printed extract being close to hand) seems more impor­tant than any specific relevance to the theme in question.

I The ways in which passages are included in the anthologies discussed h ­ ere can be divided into a provisional four-­part pattern, slightly dif­fer­ent from Culler’s sense

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of their purposes, and representing the following loose editorial princi­ples, which are not of course mutually exclusive. The most common practice is the excerpting of best parts of poems, or notable passages, as poetic beauties, sublime thoughts, celebrated parts of larger works, and the like, where the headings and the meta­phors in passages are almost irrelevant and designed only to allow the printing of such masterful lines. A more prosaic implied use is where the headings and meta­phors displayed are a means to an end, even though that end is obscure, or purely functional. Passages ­here are intended for examples of public speeches, or similar recitation material, or to be adapted for pedagogic purposes. In part, they resemble more a modern book of quotations, having a practical design, and are intended to be filleted or selected for use; that they are edifying in themselves is something of an afterthought. ­There is of course an implicit moral instruction at work in many such anthologies, though this seems to vie with pragmatism, with regard to what kind of passages are selected. More rarely, headings are used to or­ga­nize passages that are archival, or a way of recording texts not other­wise available, and saving them for posterity. A notable example of this is Thomas Hayward’s The British Muse (1738), an attempt to bring back mostly forgotten sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century verse.3 As an antiquarian interest in older British poetry developed during the eigh­teenth ­century, so did examples of such preservation, though it would not reach the mainstream of anthologies u ­ ntil ­later in the ­century. Another sort of organ­izing of poetic excerpts is more happenstance, rather than a princi­ple as such. This is when passages are transformed in meaning and effect by excision, or by being yoked together, leading to an odd serendipity that, if editorial, is akin to a form of bricolage, changing the effects of the original works by their new context, and altering the way a reader perceives them. ­These dif­fer­ent types of organ­ization can of course combine. Some thematic headings manage to be descriptive of a meta­phor, as well as aesthetically intended, confirming of canonical centrality, serving a potential practical use, and reforming their materials into a dif­fer­ent reading experience. The workings of ­these categories through meta­phors can be seen via a comparison of the same headings and their differing contents from some well-­known anthologies. It is not surprising that the same headings are used through half a c­ entury in works edited by completely dif­f er­ent figures with supposed in­de­pen­dence from other anthologies, given that in anthology culture it was common practice to take both headings and passages from pre­de­ces­sors. In this re­spect, the early appearance in the ­century of Edward Bysshe’s Art of En­glish Poetry (1702, and impor­tant revisions

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1650–1850 to 1718, with subsequent reprints throughout the following de­cades) was a signal ­factor in its eminence, and ensured that its contents and arrangement would be copied without acknowl­edgment, mostly silently, but also by t­hose like Charles Gildon, in the Complete Art of Poetry (1718), whose protestations of innocence of plagiarism border on the ridicu­lous: “If in this Collection any of the same Verses should happen to be found, it is not b ­ ecause they w ­ ere in Mr.  Bysshe’s, but ­because they ­were found in the Poets as I read them, and as f­ ree for me to quote as for him.” 4 Gildon is the exception, both in his pretense that he had somehow found precisely the same passages as Bysshe, and in his bother­ing to defend himself; most editors simply carried on borrowing and lifting, conscious of the widespread ac­cep­tance of the practice. Leah Price has referred to “the longstanding tension between the demand for new editions to edge older ones out of the market, on the one hand, and the economic incentives to recycle ­earlier editorial princi­ples or even to reuse old plates, on the other,” and the latter pragmatic imperative tended to win out, given vari­ous expenses in book production; hence ­these anthologies are paradoxically often largely made up of old wine in their supposed new ­bottles.5 What tended to happen in the poetic anthologies concerned h ­ ere is that thematic headings would stay the same, but the passages concerned would be augmented or changed over time. This is true of t­ hose discussed in the following pages, beginning with Bysshe’s Art of En­glish Poetry (the sixth edition of 1718 being the last with editorial revisions and additions), then moving to the midcentury, with The Beauties of Poetry Display’d (1757), a work sometimes thought to be edited by Samuel Derrick; parts of the latter ­were absorbed in 1761 into Derrick’s very similar but often greatly augmented A Poetical Dictionary.6 ­There is also the Thesaurus Dramaticus (1724), worth mentioning in passing as it aimed to pre­sent a version akin to Bysshe’s Art of En­glish Poetry using only dramatic poetry; accordingly it lifted a g­ reat deal of its content from the e­ arlier anthology and was lifted in turn by l­ater anthologies such as Derrick’s Poetical Dictionary, which Culler summarizes: “Although some new passages are added from the more recent poets, the bulk of his work merely combines The British Muse, The Beauties of Poetry Display’d, and the 1756 edition of the Thesaurus Dramaticus.”7 Derrick tries to make clear the difference between his volumes and Bysshe’s ­earlier, widely popu­lar work, on grounds of his using authors who postdate Bysshe’s editing, “notwithstanding the Heads u ­ nder which they are ranged, are often the same; a Circumstance which the very Nature of the Work rendered impossible to

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be avoided.”8 The extracts can be updated, but the organ­izing headings have to stay much the same, given the nature of thematic anthologizing.

II Even a glance at the parallel headings for t­ hese collections gives some idea of the oddities of their organ­ization, ranging as they do from the general and abstract to the very par­tic­u­lar. Near the beginning, while Bysshe runs from “Astonishment” to “Astrologer / Atlas / Attention / Avernus / Autumn,” the Poetical Dictionary shows its expanding canon with “Astonishment / Astrologer / Atheist / Atlas / Attention / Avarice / Aversion / Aurora (See Morning) / Aurora Borealis / Autumn / Author / Awe” (copied from the Beauties of Poetry, with the addition of the last heading). The Thesaurus Dramaticus reflects its slightly dif­fer­ent materials, moving from “Astonishment / Attention / Aversion / Augur” straight to “Bad News” (of which in drama ­there is never a shortage).9 As t­ hese lists imply, some categories are rather tokenistic, and t­ here to allow a par­tic­u­lar meta­phor to be included. This anticipates a certain way of reading, sometimes a rather literal one. The heading of “Elephant” does not allow for a ­great deal of abstracted passages, but must instead be more concrete in its examples. Bysshe’s Art uses the heading in the revision of 1718, with the somewhat cryptic cross-­reference “ELEPHANT. See Paradise,” which leads to the well-­ known description of the animals frolicking around Adam and Eve in Milton’s Eden: “Th’ unwieldy Elephant,  / To make them Mirth, us’d all his Might, and wreath’d / His lithe Proboscis” (Bysshe, 1:134). Forty years l­ater, both the Beauties of Poetry and Derrick’s Poetical Dictionary illustrate “ELEPHANT ” with James Thomson’s rumination from The Seasons on the “wisest of Brutes,” gentle and peaceable, who has seen “Revolving ages” of h ­ uman folly.10 The meta­phor shows Thomson’s popularity at midcentury, if ­little e­ lse for t­hose not needing an elephantine image for some undisclosed purpose. By contrast, the next heading in the three anthologies, “ELOQUENCE,” shows the unusual ways in which poetic excerpts ­were gathered, presented, and re-­ presented. Definitions of eloquence are of course meta­phoric, in that the quality is itself a rhetorical or aesthetic facet, related to charisma and other intangibles, rather than anything necessarily quantifiable and precise, leading to definitions of it being a talking around the subject. Accordingly, direct descriptions of eloquence

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1650–1850 are usually combined with passages where the images try to give the impression ­ ill be copied in of it. Bysshe chooses a passage from Garth’s Dispensary (that w both Beauties and the Poetical Dictionary), describing, Whiggishly and somewhat fawningly, how William III (i.e., “­great Nassau”) embodies “the power of eloquence”: “Whene’er he speaks, heav’n, how the list’ning throng / Dwell on the melting m ­ usic of his tongue” (Bysshe, 1:134). In 1757 The Beauties of Poetry also copies Bysshe’s next quotation, from Pope’s Iliad, describing Ulysses’s eloquence: Soft as the Fleeces of descending Snows The copious Accents fall with easy Art, Melting, they fall, and sink into the Heart: Wond’ring, we hear, and, fix’d in deep Surprize, Our Ears refute the Censure of our Eyes. This sense in which eloquence is potentially a form of deception is then developed through the description of Belial in Paradise Lost: “His tongue  / Dropt Manna and could make the worse appear / The better reason.” Bysshe’s choice of excerpts are linked by connecting words echoing their message: Nectar divine flow’d from his heavenly Tongue, And on his charming Lips Perswasion hung. (Blac.) Words, sweet as Honey, from his Lips distill’d (Pope, Homer) He drove them with the Torrent of his Tongue (Dryden, Juv.) Fine Speeches are the Instruments of Fools, Or Knaves, who use them when they want good Sense: But Honesty needs no Disguise or Ornament. (Otway, Orph.) (Bysshe, 1:134) ­Here, the nectar is that of Tylon, one of the orators sent to persuade Sir Richard Blackmore’s titular Whiggish hero Arthur (another stand-in for Nassau / William III) to fight the Saxon yoke (Prince Arthur, bk. 4); this links to the honeyed words of Pope’s Nestor (Iliad, bk. 1), which leads to De­mos­the­nes in Dryden’s Juvenal; the connections are then undercut by the outburst from Otway’s Orphan, where the link between eloquence and deceit is restated. ­After this, the final quotation from John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham’s praise of Thomas Hobbes, “But h ­ ere bright Eloquence does always smile / In such a choice, yet unaffected Style,” is a further ­ hole entry is a fine reproof to the manipulative uses of speech above it.11 The w demonstration of the more designed use of the commonplace book, showing Bysshe’s ability to gather together memorable and exact descriptions, providing the readers (should they require it) with the sort of example they could deploy

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again themselves, using the congruence between meta­phors and vocabulary—­ words melt, are like honey, or manna, and often deceive, as (it is implied) speech always does, when compared with writing. T ­ here is enough linking in the passages to engage both the knowledgeable reader and the incidental one. Furthermore, the demo­cratic mingling of dif­fer­ent materials allows for the proximity of what would be, by normal literary-­historical standards, the strangest bedfellows. Outside of collections, the only time that Blackmore would be followed by lines from Pope and Dryden would be when the latter two ­were ridiculing him. Whereas Beauties is content to copy three of Bysshe’s quotations and excise the o ­ thers, in 1761 Derrick’s Poetical Dictionary extended this, using the Garth and the Otway examples, replacing the other quotations with similar sentiments: Fine Speeches are the Instruments of Fools, Or Knaves, who use them when they want good Sense: But Honesty needs no Disguise or Ornament. Otway’s Orphan When he spoke, what tender words he us’d So softly, that, like flakes of feather’d snow, They melted as they fell Dryden’s Spanish Friar I’ll try To change soldier’s to the lovers stile, Use all the strongest eloquence that art Or the sharp anguish of my soul can frame, To plead my passion, and promote my love Beckingham’s Scipio Now with fine phrase, and foppery of tongue, More graceful action, and a smoother tone, That orator of fable, and fair face, ­Will steal on your brib’d hearts. Young’s ­Brothers (Poetical Dictionary, 1:262–263) ­These all come from plays: Dryden’s Spanish Fryar, Charles Beckingham’s Scipio Africanus (1719), Edward Young’s tragedy The ­Brothers (1753), and William Havard’s Regulus (1744), a vehicle for Garrick’s gifts at tragedy. Derrick would cite Havard more than once in relatively exalted com­pany, which seems somewhat incongruous, given his subsequent obscurity, but it was only seventeen years ­after his play’s appearance, and Havard was a respected con­temporary author

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1650–1850 and regular actor at Garrick’s Drury Lane theater. He also appeared in Churchill’s Rosciad (1761), an ironic mark of significance.12 Derrick was inclined to include recent works (in contradistinction to Bysshe, who rarely quotes from before 1640 or, in the latest revision of 1718, from con­temporary poetry other than the initial volumes of Pope’s Iliad (1715)). His choices ­here are reminders of the wealth of obscure dramatic and poetic work once thought likely to be at least equal with Dryden and Milton (Beckingham and Havard had less of an audience, though Otway and Young ­were well known enough to be anthologized, albeit not necessarily for their dramatic works; Young’s Night Thoughts was one of the best-­selling poetic works of its ­century), and do at least indicate Derrick’s own taste, rather than being entirely copied from previous anthologies; his title page lists poets from Shakespeare to Christopher Smart (still writing at the time of publication) and the contemporaneity of Derrick’s inclusions is a useful indication of what was felt likely to be memorable around and ­after this point in the ­century.

III Another recurrent aspect of ­these anthologies (and one very distant from modern critical ways of reading lit­er­a­ture of the eigh­teenth c­ entury) is the way in which dramatic verse is represented primarily as poetry, changing the sensibility with which it is encountered alongside other lyrical, didactic, or heroic extracts. Moreover, when such extracts are represented as attendant parts of a larger ­whole, the pro­cess of reading is meant to remove dramatic contexts, emphasizing the shared qualities (euphony, precision of language, memorability of image or of thought) that unite them. Derrick’s passages h ­ ere are also about the use of eloquent language to influence, manipulate, and dissemble, and this gives them something of a unity, while also blending together their qualities, u ­ ntil it becomes hard to tell them apart—­a reminder of the provocation offered by Robert Graves and Laura Riding (with reference to Palgrave’s Golden Trea­sury) that the materials of anthologies are downgraded by their proximity, losing their character ­until they blend into the same soup: “The intelligent but unread reader who wishes to find out which poets he would like to know better gets no help from the popu­lar anthology: in an anthology every­thing reads, demo­cratically, much the same . . . ​ even positive poems lose character by being anthologised. Poems by Shakespeare, Donne, Shelley, Keats become affected by the same negative poison, to the point ­ ere deliberately where they are almost unrecognisable.”13 Graves and Riding w

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challenging the unquestioned ac­cep­tance of anthologizing as a way of reading, despite its tendency to offer only highly selective and homogenized extracts. Hannah More had made a similar complaint about the ways in which anthologies fostered a superficial pretense of taste and knowledge: “A few fine passages from the poets (passages perhaps which derived their chief beauty from their position and connection) are huddled together by some extract-­maker, whose brief and disconnected patches of broken and discordant materials, while they inflame young readers with the vanity of reciting, neither fill the mind nor form the taste.”14 A counterargument is offered by the example of Bysshe, where a theme embellishes and enhances the qualities of sections of poetry not other­wise seen together, so that the parts become more effective as a w ­ hole. To a degree, the new context refashions the extracts, and the meta­phoric headings enable this pro­ cess of remaking; this would not challenge the wider cultural malaise implied by More’s complaints per se (though nothing would, given the necessity of anthologies to extract and abridge materials). But it does at least offer a way of repositioning and connecting texts away from their original context without isolating and neutering them. In this sense, what is significant is often not the origins of passages, so much as the way that they work together as an exemplification of a theme. In this re­spect, someone like Bysshe was an effective editor as well as a compiler, even if it ­will always be ambiguous ­whether his ability to pick sections of poems that he liked and join them together was an act of more or less chance (in that congruent ideas and extracts ­were combined) or something more deliberate. What is plain in some of Bysshe’s combinations of texts to support a meta­phoric heading is a greater apparent purpose than just embellishment of a quality: in the very heading of “LOOKS , or Mien. see beauty, eyes,” t­ here is an indication of how the meta­ phor gathers a wider poetic resonance. The examples that follow link the staples of Bysshe’s collection, Dryden and Milton, in a way that collects the extracts as a continuous collage, rather than a series of related but disparate points: The King arose with awful Grace;   (Pal. & Arc.) Deep Thought was in his Breast, and Counsel in his Face.   Dryd. Deep on his Front engraven, Deliberation sate, and publick Care, And Princely Counsel in his Face yet shone.   Milt. Big was he made, and tall; his Port was fierce; Erect his Countenance: Manly Majesty Sate in his Front, and darted from his Eyes,

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1650–1850 Commanding all he view’d.   Dryd. Oedip. His awful Presence did the Croud surprize, Nor durst the rash Spectators meet his Eyes; Eyes that confess’d him born to Kingly Sway So fierce they flash’d intolerable Day.   Dryd. Pal. & Arc. (Bysshe, 2:17) The link h ­ ere is from the “Deep Thought” of Theseus in Dryden’s Palamon and ­ uman life and inevitaArcite, about to deliver his summary of the mutability of h bility of death (3:1020–1021), to Milton’s Beelzebub in Pandemonium, “Majestic though in ruin, sage he stood” (Paradise Lost, 2:305), with deliberation and care “Deep on his Front,” even though his rebellion and fall makes such qualities of kingship seem travestied, and more of a per­for­mance than a substance; Bysshe inverts the context and ostensible meaning of Milton’s passage to pre­sent the lines as an extension of Theseus’s grave, just sense of responsibility. This is followed by Jocasta’s description of Laius’s “Manly majesty,” in Dryden’s Oedipus (act 3, scene 1), which is unfortunate news, to say the least, for her interlocutor, his erstwhile son. Next is Palamon and Arcite again, with Emelrius of Ind as the most noteworthy monarch supporting Arcite in the tournament (3:78–81), the fierceness of his looks scaring the spectators. The result is a composite text, with the cumulative link of the idea of the awful power of majesty in ­these looks, and they share enough to give an enhanced impression of the meta­phor (followed by Bysshe’s adding other slightly dif­fer­ent passages from Dryden’s Aeneid, Cowley, and Congreve). The contrast with the extracts in Derrick’s Poetical Dictionary ­under “Looks” (3:21–22) is telling. The sections of poems printed t­ here are more indicative of literary taste not lasting (in that still extremely famous lines mingle with passages from works all but forgotten) and also of the dramatic inheritance of such anthologies, where chunks of popu­lar drama w ­ ere brought in to help with illustrating specific points. The resulting extracts fulfil their ostensible task (defining the heading) but do not join together, as in Bysshe’s ­earlier se­lection. Moreover, Derrick’s extracts also reveal that the often apposite poetic definition is meta­phoric, rather than literal. The Poetical Dictionary begins with Brutus’s first appearance in Julius Caesar, and his comment to Cassius that “If I have veil’d my look, / I turn the trou­ble of my countenance / Merely upon myself,” as he is vexed “with passions of some difference,” a speech that anticipates most of the conflicts of both Brutus and the play. Then ­there is Hamlet’s hyperbolic praise of his late ­father’s appearance, which is a descriptive rather than a literal use of looks (“what a grace

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was seated on his brow”); the most famous of plays is succeeded by an extract from the other end of critical familiarity, John Denham’s only play, the tragedy The Sophy (1641): “In his looks appears  / A wild distracted fierceness,” sign of “some dreadful purpose.” T ­ here are then three passages from Dryden’s most cited play of the era, Don Sebastian: “He looks secure of death,” then “He may be honest, but he looks damnation,” and how the “wild distracted” vassals look “full of business.” The heroine of Nicholas Rowe’s well-­known domestic tragedy, Jane Shore, bemoans that “My form alas has long forgot to please”; her “pining discontent” is then contrasted with the “venerable aspect” of Belmour, her loyal friend, and followed in its turn by more discontent, from the very familiar source of Addison’s Cato, as Juba comments that Sy­phax’s looks are a win­dow on his soul, and the latter agrees (“Tis not my talent to conceal my thoughts”). The subsequent source texts are harder to recognize. In Edward Young’s Busiris (1719), Myron is described as gazing “with such malignity of love, / Sending his soul out to me in a look.” Conversely, we are told, from the same work, “What glory blazes from his eyes.” Then follows George Sewell’s Tragedy of Sir Walter Raleigh (1719), whose leading character’s “Visage seem’d to bear  / A mixture of uncertain cheerfulness” and James Thomson’s Agamemnon (1738), where the adulterous and soon to be murderous Egisthus regrets that “­Those looks of smiling heaven” of less troubled days have now dis­appeared from Clytamenestra (somewhat unsurprisingly, given her self-­inflicted prob­lems). A final passage, with the now familiar image of “How distant are your looks,” is from William Havard’s Scanderbeg (1733), a tragedy based on the once popu­lar subject of the fifteenth-­ century Albanian nobleman’s rebellion against the Ottoman Empire. This description gives some indication of both the heterogeneity of the midcentury poetic anthology and how its materials could range from the famous to the obscure, the lyric to the dramatic. It can be suggested that the preponderance of drama in many anthologies is partly attributable to the wider currency of both old and relatively recent plays (from the exceedingly popu­lar Don Sebastian to the recent efforts oy Thomson or, one generation back, Edward Young), and also for their more prosaic details. Lengthy dramatic (indeed melodramatic) speeches are easier to mine for usable meta­phors and images than more abstract lyric or narrative poems that may well not contain such cogent descriptions. It also means, though, that many pages of anthologies do not have the relative cohesion of Bysshe’s design, where often passages ­will segue into one another with less sense of conflict or change, as the sustaining meta­phor or image w ­ ill combine with a wider unity of purpose. Derrick’s Poetical Dictionary, in contrast,

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1650–1850 often heaps up examples of the same or similar figures, or meta­phors that are akin in outline, but less intertwined in their poetic origins and aesthetic. In terms of canonicity and reception, it should also be noted that many of the now forgotten works to be found in such compilations had the currency of being relatively contemporaneous—­the plays of Havard would have been seen by or known to many a reader, making them less of the novelty they now seem. Partly this is a result of chronology. ­Because Bysshe ­stopped revising and accumulating quotations a­ fter 1718 (whereupon the reissues of his anthology reprinted the same materials with a ­later date), his basis of poetry and drama was grounded in lit­er­a­ture from 1650 to 1700, and in a few key sources (chiefly Dryden and Milton, with repeated nods to Cowley, Blackmore, and l­ater Pope). T ­ here is a sense of his collection always being of a piece (not least in its not reflecting anything con­temporary, ­after 1720), whereas other anthologies offer a less restrictive, but necessarily a less coherent sense of their era. It is also the case that Bysshe organizes poetry far more directly, using the obvious links between his quotations to create a par­tic­u­lar effect, in contrast to editors who try to span a much wider chronological range, and therefore insert material in rather dif­fer­ent registers.

IV The difference between Bysshe and ­later anthologies can be seen in full in one of the most general, abstract, and popu­lar of meta­phoric headings in ­these books, “Love.” Bysshe’s se­lections are notably for their more compact frame of reference, of course, g­ oing back no e­ arlier than Cowley or l­ater than Pope, but it is also the case that his selected passages are patterned and or­g a­nized for specific effects, echoes, and connections. The congruence of his chosen definitions of love over two pages (using only his leading poetic source, Dryden) illustrates this: The Pow’r of Love, In Earth, and Seas, and Air, and Heav’n above, Rules, unresisted, with an awful Nod; By daily Miracles declar’d a God: He blinds the Wise, give Eye-­sight to the Blind, And moulds and stamps a-­new the Lover’s Mind. [Palamon] No Law is made for Love: Law is to ­Things which to ­free Choice relate; Love is not in our Choice, but in our Fate.

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Laws are but positive; Love’s Pow’r we see In Nature’s Sanction, and her first Decree. Each Day we break the Bond of ­human Laws, For Love, and vindicate the common Cause. Laws for Defence of civil Rights are plac’d; Love throws the Fences down, and makes a gen’ral Waste. Maids, ­Widows, Wives, without Distinction, fall; The sweeping Deluge, Love, comes on, and covers all. [Palamon] In Hell, and Earth, and Seas, and Heav’n above, Love conquers all; and we must yield to Love. [Aeneid] For Love the Sense of Right and Wrong confounds: Strong Love and proud Ambition have no bounds. [Palamon] The Faults of Love, by Love are justify’d: With unresisted Might the Monarch reigns, He raises Mountains, and he levels Plains. [Sigismunda] Kings fight for Kingdoms, Madmen for Applause; But Love for Love alone, that crowns the Lover’s Cause.    [Palamon] Love gives Esteem, and then he gives Desert; He ­either finds Equality, or makes it; Like Death, he knows no Diff’rence in Degree, But plains and levels all. [Marriage a la Mode] (Bysshe, 2:19–20) The passages all come from Dryden, and largely from “Palamon and Arcite” (his version of Chaucer’s courtly tale of rival lovers and its frustrations), with nods to “Sigismunda and Guiscardo,” the Aeneid and the early play Marriage a la Mode, which offers much the same sentiment. By creating extended passages from the same author, Bysshe strengthens the effect of the meta­phor through yoking together the same images and tone, ­until the passages run into each other in an extended Drydenic musing. The thoughts are commonplace (love is all power­ful, defies earthly laws, is no respecter of persons, rank, circumstance, ­etc.), but the ubiquity of love allows for late Dryden and early to be matched, in the flow of meta­phors concluding in the near pun of “plains and levels all,” recalling the leveling plains invoked by Sigismunda half a dozen lines before, in her speech justifying her remarrying beneath herself for love (too late, given her ­father’s murderous jealousy). Where Bysshe uses the similarity between language and tone to create a par­tic­u­lar focus, The Beauties of Poetry offers a range of texts that both reflect

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1650–1850 and belie its publication in 1757. It starts (2:25–26) by defining love through five extracts from Pope (the Pastorals, Eloisa to Abelard, Imitations of Horace, Rape of the Lock, and Odes) but then moves into three examples from the pastorals of the blind Scottish poet Thomas Blacklock (published the year before, in 1756, with an introduction by Joseph Spence). Of t­ hese pastorals, the titles (“The Plaintive Shepherd,” “Inscribed to Euanthe”) indicate that they ­were unlikely to win the admiration of Samuel Johnson (­later to encounter Blacklock through Boswell), and the extracts support the old adage that, if you like that sort of t­ hing, they are the sort of t­ hing you like. Whereupon (2:26–30) follow four pages and six extracts from the far from con­temporary Solomon on the Vanity of the World (1718), Matthew Prior’s monumental discussion of the futility of earthly desires. T ­ hese lengthy ruminations on the “Fantastic Tyrant of the am’rous Heart” are unexpected, for all Solomon’s legendary amorous history, and do not seem to locate the meta­phor in any pithy way, instead repeating all the dif­fer­ent aspects in which the proverbially wise but world-­weary king suggests that love controls our hearts, our fates, and so on: Thou sov’rein Pow’r, whose secret ­Will controls The inward Bent and Motion of our Souls! Why hast thou plac’d such infinite Degrees Between the Cause and Cure of my Disease? (Beauties, 2:29) ­These passages are weighty, in philosophical resignation in the face of love’s caprices and in duration. More than a hundred lines of the solemn musing of the ancient monarch is perhaps a sign of the effective profundity of the poem, suggestive of its influence at midcentury, and proleptic relation with similarly portentous con­temporary pieces (such as The Vanity of H ­ uman Wishes and Rasselas). Conversely, its relative didacticism, prolixity, and incongruity as a trove of aphoristic passages to illustrate the workings of love might indicate that its presence in the Beauties is an anomaly and that it was relatively less read by 1757 than the reprinting of t­ hese extracts would suggest. The reiteration of Solomon’s descriptions of love at length over a few pages makes for an odd experience, in that one implied anthologizer’s princi­ple—of culling and editing in order to sharpen the effect of a text or idea—is dissipated and contradicted. The following texts, though, build upon Prior’s repre­sen­ta­tion of love in a sort of sideways motion (2:30–32), as another piece of Blacklock’s pastoral is followed by two works by Elizabeth Singer Rowe. Rowe had known Prior, conversed and corresponded with him and read his works;15 she had written

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a poem “To Mr Prior on His Solomon” (“The m ­ usic of the spheres and heav’nly throngs  / She minds no more, to listen to thy songs”), and both her poems included in the Beauties are about divine rather than earthly love, linking with the preceding themes of worldly vanity, and moving the discussion of love onward and upward to more celestial realms. Her “On Love” works on the premise that “Ye Stars that sparkle in the midnight Skies, / Propitious Love shines out in all your Eyes,” and concludes with an echo of 1 Corinthians and Paradise Lost on the comprehensiveness of the deity: O thou art all in all! the highest End, That boundless Grace and Wisdom could intend! And Lengths, and Breadths, and Depths, and Heights above, ­Shall fi­nally be swallow’d up of Love: No further Changes then; but fully blest, The Maker, and his finish’d Work, ­shall rest. (Beauties, 2:31) In similar vein is the other poem entitled “On Love,” as its opening couplet suggests: “Victorious Love, thou sacred Mystery! / What Muse, in mortal Strains, can speak of thee?” The turn taken ­toward a religious dimension ­under the heading of “Love” in the Beauties makes an impression that transcends its more earthbound examples; the se­lection turns to and finishes with extracts from Waller, Cowley, Dryden’s Conquest of Granada, Nicholas Rowe, Nathanael Lee, and Rochester (2:32–33), but t­hese seem more inherited, and less striking and distinctive than the Matthew Prior and Elizabeth Singer Rowe extracts, as the presence of the latter two adds a dif­fer­ent, larger theological dimension to the erstwhile se­lections of the lovesick, the victims of Cupid’s bow, and the profuse expressions of love’s blindness and injustice. Moreover, they complicate in in­ter­est­ing ways canonical understandings: Prior’s reputation by the 1750s is supposedly based on his shorter, narrative and fabular works, rather than his lengthy philosophical verses; Rowe’s devotional writings always had an audience, but it is useful in terms of her reception to see her works appearing alongside con­temporary midcentury poets in a secular context. Four years l­ater, Derrick reprinted a deal of t­hese existing definitions and descriptions of love, but augmented them to an excessive degree. The Poetical Dictionary (1761) offers up nearly fifty pages of mainly dramatic extracts, in illustration of love’s many ambiguities and won­ders (3:23–69). Around half of ­these are taken from existing poetry anthologies, some recent and con­temporary additions (Lord Lyttelton, David Mallet), and wave a­ fter wave of mainly seventeenth-­century

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1650–1850 drama, much of it lifted from the Thesaurus Dramaticus; the effect is to almost drown the reader in repetitive instances of love. Taking a deep breath, the contents are as follows.16 The opening salvo is of poetry, then drama, but not especially tied to chronology or design, save the borrowing from the l­ abors of previous compilers: David Mallet, Alfred George, Lord Lyttelton* Love’s ­Labour’s Lost Pope’s Pastorals * Eloisa to Abelard * Blacklock’s poems (×2) * Prior, Solomon (×5)* Rochester, from A Letter from Artemisia in the Town to Chloe in the Country (“Love’s the most gen’rous Passion of the Mind”)* Edmund Waller, “To a Friend”* Two Gentlemen of Verona (×3)* Twelfth Night* Beaumont’s Coxcomb* Dryden, Conquest of Granada * All for Love* Tyrannick Love* Bevil Higgons, The Generous Conqueror (1702) (×2) Nathaniel Lee, Theodosius (×3) Thomas Otway, The Orphan Dryden, The Spanish Fryar Derrick then goes back to the relatively ancient 1580s, and the wit of John Lyly, before moving forward in a chronological sweep through the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline drama and then poetry, to the Restoration and beyond. The mix of the canonical and the utterly forgotten, the sublime and the mundane, the brilliant and failed, is striking: John Lyly, Gallathea (1588) Othello Two Gentlemen of Verona George Chapman, The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois John Day, Law Tricks (1608) Samuel Daniel, Hymen’s Triumph (1614) Earl of Sterling, Croesus (1604)

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Beaumont and Fletcher, Monsieur Thomas Beaumont and Fletcher, Valentinian Thomas Middleton, Anything for a Quiet Life John Mason, Muleasses the Turk (1610) Edward Sharpham, Cupid’s Whirligig (1607) James Shirley, “For love, good mistress, is much like wax . . .” [actually from Ram-­Alley, or Merry Tricks (1611), by Lordling Barry] John Beaumont, “A Description of Love” Swetnam the Woman-­hater (1620) James Shirley, The ­Sisters (×2) Thomas Carew, from “Conquest by Flight” John Cleveland, from The Antiplatonick [containing the memorable desire for a lover “bold and ­free / Not eunuch’d with formality.”] John Suckling, from “Dialogue: Upon Lord Broghill’s Wedding” Robert Mead, The Combat of Love and Friendship (1654) (×2) Robert Herrick, “Hear, ye virgins” Francis Fane, Love in the Dark (1675) Earl of Orrery [Lord Broghill, referred to by Suckling, above], Tryphon: A Tragedy (1668) Earl of Orrery, Mustapha (1668) (×2) Dryden, Spanish Fryar (×2) ­ rothers (1690) George Powell, The Treacherous B Dryden, Don Sebastian Amphitryon King Arthur (×2) Love Triumphant Thomas Southerne, Oroonoko George Granville, Lord Lansdown, The British Enchanters (1705) The Jew of Venice (1701)* William Congreve, The Morning Bride Nicholas Rowe, The Ambitious Stepmother (1701) Tamerlane Joseph Trapp, Abramule (1704) (×2) Edmund Smith, Phaedra and Hippolytus: a Tragedy (1707) Addison, Cato (×5) Charles Beckingham, Scipio Africanus (1718) George Sewell, Sir Walter Raleigh (1719) (×2)

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1650–1850 Milton, Comus James Thomson, Sophonisba David Mallet, Mustapha (1739) Henry Brooke, Gustavas Vasa (1739) William Paterson, Arminius: a Tragedy (1740) James Thomson, Tancred and Sigismunda (1745) Tobias Smollett, The Regicide (1749) (×3) John “Estimate” Brown, Barbarossa: the Usurper of Algiers (1755) William Havard, Scanderbeg (1733) Thomson, Agamemnon (1738) Havard, Regulus: A Tragedy (1744) Smollett, The Regicide Extracts from texts now very marginal mingle with the still famous, as with Muleasses the Turk and Othello, or the con­temporary plays by Havard and “Estimate” Brown alongside Cato and Don Sebastian. Some of t­ hese works and authors are all but forgotten, even to the most exhaustive literary or dramatic history. The chronology is not absolute, and sometimes skips a de­cade or two, or places an author or text slightly out of kilter, but generally the Poetical Dictionary seems to base its contents upon following ­these dates, then repeating them or starting again at a l­ater point, as it continues: Dryden, Conquest of Granada Otway, The Orphan Caius Marius Dryden, Spanish Fryar (×2) Rowe, The Ambitious Stepmother Trapp, Abramule Smith, Phaedra and Hippolytus James Thomson, Sophonisba Smith, Phaedra and Hippolytus Brooke, Gustavas Vasa Dryden, Oedipus Samuel Crisp, ­Virginia (1755) [Beaumont], John Fletcher et al., The Bloody ­Brother, or Rollo, Duke of Normandy (c. 1616) Rochester, Valentinian Dryden, Aureng-­zebe Troilus and Cressida

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Lee, Alexander [i.e., The Rival Queens] (1677) (×3) Mithridates (1678) (×3) Dryden, Troilus and Cressida Lee, Theodosius (1680) (×2) Caesar Borgia (1680) Otway, The Orphan (×3) Dryden, Spanish Fryar Otway, Caius Marius (×4) Lee [& Dryden], The Duke of Guise (1683) ­ reat (1683) Lee, Constantine the G Otway, Venice Preserved (×5) Lee, The Massacre of Paris (1689) Dryden, Don Sebastian Thomas Southerne, Oroonoko Rowe, Tamerlane (1701) Aaron Hill, Elfrid, or the Fair Inconstant (1710) ­These dense jungles of Restoration and eighteenth-­century drama (to say nothing of the rococo offerings from before 1660) eventually wind down, ­after forty-­ six pages: the finale, for the hapless reader who might have forgotten that love was the subject heading, is the entire “balcony” scene (Romeo and Juliet, act 2, scene 2; Poetical Dictionary, 2:64–69), followed by an extract from Benjamin Stillingfleet’s once widely read Essay on Conversation (1748). Love’s grotto is then mercifully illustrated only by a se­lection from Gay’s “Fan”; then almost the entirety of Mary Leapor’s “The ­Temple of Love” achieves the same purpose, if the reader is not too exhausted to notice.17

V Derrick’s massive, ill-­disciplined, and almost inchoate se­lection, where extract ­after extract makes the same or a very similar point, shows the prob­lem of anthologizing through meta­phor. ­Unless t­ here is an editorial princi­ple or working out of par­tic­u­lar qualities, t­ here is no reason for such an entry to ever stop, and it also shows a wider question of discrimination: almost all poetry suggests, echoes, or alludes to something ­else, and is resonantly meta­phoric, therefore an effective means of illustrating a series of abstract or concrete ideas through poetic examples is always potentially spilling over or muddying its own w ­ aters; concomitantly,

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1650–1850 the anthologist’s attempt to represent a huge literary past through ­limited se­lection is equally doomed to fail, as the results cannot but be arbitrary, w ­ hether as sprawling and wild as Derrick’s entry on love, or as crafted and deliberate as some of Bysshe’s. This brief survey suggests how much the available poetic canon widened between 1700 and 1761, but also how diversely, if not always coherently it was anthologized, with significant writers (Dryden, Milton, Shakespeare) dominating, while o ­ thers appeared briefly, or sustained a presence in contradiction to their relative fame. Some of this is obvious, and to do with the passing of time—­Whig panegyric or epic in the Blackmore strain, Epicurean passages à la Cowley, and other modes or styles ­were enormously successful, but then waned somewhat, or vestiges of them survived, cut back but still available, in anthologies as successive generations revised the past. Equally noteworthy is that the related tradition of reprinting and copying previously printed extracts creates weird pockets in time, almost, whereby the dusty Restoration tragedies of a Lee or an Otway are reprinted voluminously, reflecting e­ ither an Indian summer in their reception, par­tic­u­lar qualities in their work that make it ripe for anthologizing, or an anomaly, an artificial enhancement of their popularity based around the reprinting of the already published. Appearances of the contemporaneous are similarly ambiguous, in what evidence they offer about reputation. Recently published works in the 1750s by Blacklock, Havard and ­others would not sustain themselves to the end of the ­century, suggesting that much writing is modish, and its status ephemeral, given the dif­fer­ent tastes of succeeding generations. And, of course, it is misleading to rely upon works full of reprinted passages from anthologies of ­earlier de­cades, and perhaps equally random recent se­lections, as representative of a reading pattern or culture. But we can still see how the types of passages included changed according to their utility—­how some show an aesthetic choice, ­others a method of preservation, an alternative and more con­ve­nient way of reading, and o ­ thers defeat their own supposed purpose, e­ ither in their prolixity or their lack of focus. Perhaps most importantly, this suggests something about how reading poetry could operate on dif­f er­ent levels—­author-­centered, the relation of an image or idea, the plea­sure of the expression rather than the sense of the cohesive ­whole, or a strange bricolage in which the separate parts are subsumed by some larger princi­ple or idea. The organ­izing of meta­phors turns out, perhaps, to be a way of transfiguring them instead, and is one of the many reminders of the distance between the first readers of eighteenth-­century poetry and our own expe-

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rience. We bridge that distance only by attending closely to what t­ hese collections include, and why.

Notes 1. A. Dwight Culler, “Edward Bysshe and the Poet’s Handbook,” PMLA 63, no.  3 (1948): 858–885, 869. 2. Barbara Benedict, Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1996), 168. 3. See Norman Hidden, “Thomas Hayward and The British Muse,” En­glish 37 (1988): 217–222; Richard Terry, Poetry and the Making of the En­glish Literary Past, 1660–1781 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 220–223. 4. Charles Gildon, The Complete Art of Poetry, 2 vols. (London, 1718), 1:A6v. 5. Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 69. 6. Given the collective nature of anthology contents, it is not proof of Derrick’s involvement that much of the Poetical Dictionary replicates the Beauties, but some relation is pos­si­ble, not least ­because of attributions to Derrick in biblio­ graphies and cata­logue rec­ords of the Beauties; this is, of course, not definite proof ­either, and it remains pos­si­ble that the Beauties was compiled by someone ­else, and Derrick merely copied much of it for his own anthology four years ­later. The pre­sent argument tries to accommodate both scenarios. 7. Culler, “Edward Bysshe and the Poet’s Handbook,” 869. 8. The Beauties of Poetry Display’d . . . ​from the Writings of Addison, Akinside, Blacklock, Dryden, Gay, Garth, Grey, Milton, Pope, Prior, Rowe, Shakespeare, Smart, Swift, Thomson, Waller, West, Young, and other Celebrated Poets, 2 vols. (London: J. Hinton, 1757), 1:xxiv. 9. Edward Bysshe, The Art of En­glish Poetry, 6th ed., 2 vols. (London: Sam. Buckley, 1718), 1:22–27; Samuel Derrick, A Poetical Dictionary; or, The Beauties of the En­glish Poets, 4 vols. (London: John Newbery, George Kearsley, et al., 1761), 1:43–54; Beauties, 1:49–56; Thesaurus Dramaticus: Containing All the Celebrated Passages, Soliloquies, Similes, Descriptions, and Other Poetical Beauties in the Body of En­glish Plays, 2 vols. (London: T. Butler, 1724), 1:12–16. 10. Beauties, 1:149; Poetical Dictionary, 1:261–262, quoting from Thomson’s “Summer.” 11. The lines, from Sheffield’s “To Mr Hobbes,” are misattributed by Bysshe to a hard-­to-­decipher abbreviation of “Norm.” or “North” (1:134). 12. See Robert Shaughnessy’s Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry on Havard (1710–1778) for more on his relationship with Garrick, who borrowed parts of Havard’s “Ode to the Memory of Shakespeare” without acknowl­ edgment for his ode at the Stratford Jubilee of 1769. 13. Robert Graves and Laura Riding, “Anthologies,” repr. in The Common Asphodel (London: Arden, 1949), 183–184.

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1650–1850 14. Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (London, 1799), quoted in Price, Anthology, 75. 15. Paula Backscheider, Elizabeth Singer Rowe and the Development of the En­glish Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 9. 16. Dates are added to the more obscure (a relative term); x and a number indicate how many extracts are taken from a par­tic­u­lar author or work; an asterisk marks a copying from a previous anthology, where identifiable. 17. The “­Temple of Love” reprints lines 9–88 of Leapor’s poem; Poetical Dictionary, 2:71–73.

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CURVILINEAR THINKING IN THE LONG EIGH­TEENTH ­CENTURY TAYLOR CORSE

In the preface to his treatise The Analy­sis of Beauty (1753), William Hogarth tells

the following anecdote: “In the year 1745, [I] published a frontispiece to my engraved works, in which I drew a serpentine line lying on a paint­er’s pallet, with ­these words ­under it, THE LINE OF BEAUTY.”1 It appears that Hogarth deliberately set out to mystify his audience, as he fondly recollects: “The bait soon took; and no Egyptian hieroglyphic ever amused more than it did for a time, paint­ers and sculptors came to me to know the meaning of it, being as much puzzled with it as other ­people, till it came to have some explanation.”2 The explanation turns out to be fairly straightforward. In his treatise on aesthetics, Hogarth identifies two guiding princi­ples, one of which is the S-­shaped curved line that appears on the frontispiece, the other of which is summed up in the word “VARIETY ” that appears at the bottom of the pallet.3 Hogarth regards himself as the first person to expound fully on the meaning of ­these terms, although the ideas ­behind them w ­ ere well understood by artists like Michelangelo and writers like Shakespeare and Milton. Hogarth’s treatise is valuable ­because it gives insight into a mind-­set, or a way of thinking and imagining, that was widespread in the long eigh­teenth ­century, not only in the plastic and visual arts, but also in the related discourses of fiction, poetry, criticism, and politics. For Hogarth, it is a fundamental truth of ­human psy­chol­ogy that “the eye hath this sort of enjoyment in winding walks, and serpentine rivers, and all sorts of objects, whose forms . . . ​are composed principally of what, I call, the waving and serpentine lines.” 4 Hogarth comments extensively on the curvilinear patterns

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1650–1850 that he observes everywhere in the natu­ral world—­from feathers, flowers, shells, butterfly wings, and ­whale bones to the twisting muscles and sinews of the ­human anatomy. The opposite of “waving” and “serpentine” is regularity and uniformity. According to Hogarth, it is a “constant rule in composition in painting to avoid regularity.”5 He also maintains that “if uniform objects ­were agreeable, why is ­there such care taken to contrast, and vary all the limbs of a statue?” 6 ­These precepts find expression in numerous works of the period, from Pope’s abhorrence of uniformity and symmetry in landscape gardens, to Burke’s dislike of mathematically regular social systems, to Austen’s praise of undulating walks and vistas in Darcy’s estate at Pemberley. In this essay I explore some of the tension and contradiction that lies ­behind much of this curvilinear thinking and imagining. Oddly enough, a useful starting point for this discussion is a con­temporary play by Tom Stoppard, Arcadia (1993). In this brilliant comedy, Stoppard introduces us to Hannah, a cultural historian, who explains to her friend Barnard the essential princi­ples of En­glish landscape gardening. “This is how it all looked u ­ ntil, say, 1810—­smooth, undulating, serpentine.”7 With uncanny precision, Stoppard seizes on a key aspect of the curvilinear aesthetic—­the serpentine—­which he associates with the “picturesque” movement of William Gilpin and ­others. This notion, however, goes much further back than the last de­cade of the eigh­teenth ­century when Gilpin published his influential work, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape (1794).8 In the mid-­seventeenth ­century, Robert Herrick coined a phrase, “wild civility,” which aptly suggests the oxymoronic fusion of qualities—­energy and unruliness on the one hand, order and stability on the other—­that embody the curvilinear ideal. His signature poem “Delight in Disorder” makes many of the same points that Hogarth does in the mid-­eighteenth ­century. Like Hogarth, Herrick finds much to admire in images of “wantonness,” “distraction,” “erring Lace,” ribbons that “flow confusedly,” the “winning wave,” and the “tempestuous petticote.”9 As commentators have noted, ­there is a po­liti­cal dimension to Herrick’s praise of sprezzatura, which clearly takes the side of the Cavaliers in the culture wars of the 1640s.10 In a similar vein, Hogarth celebrates how “the flowing curl; and the many waving and contrasted turns of naturally intermingling locks ravish the eye with the plea­sure of pursuit, especially when they are put in motion by a gentle breeze. The poet knows it, as well as the painter, and has described the wanton ringlets waving in the wind.”11 Such imagery is figured, more often than not, as feminine—­a point that Mary Wollstonecraft argues fiercely in her dispute with Burke at the end of the c­ entury.12 The common denominator to this aes-

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thetic ideal is what Hogarth calls “the serpentine line,” which “by its waving and winding at the same time dif­fer­ent ways leads the eye in a pleasing way along the continuity of its variety.”13 The notion of “continuity” and proportion is impor­ tant in order to keep all of this wantonness and variety within certain bounds. Other­wise, chaos and confusion ensue. Waving and serpentine lines are abundant in Paradise Lost, especially in John Milton’s lush account of Eden where we find “a happy rural seat of vari­ous view,” including “crisped Brooks” that roll “with mazy error,” woods and groves of ­every kind, “Flow’rs of all hue,” grottoes, lakes, and much more.14 Milton, in fact, is one of Hogarth’s poetic touchstones for the curvilinear imagination. The imagery and ideology of Paradise Lost also inform the background of many a literary landscape in the eigh­teenth c­ entury. Take, for example, the famous advice that Alexander Pope gives to Richard Boyle in The Epistle to Burlington.15 According to Pope, the secret to successful landscape design is to “consult the genius of the place in all” (57). This quasi-­mystical spirit has ­great power: it “calls in the country, catches opening glades,  / Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades” (61–62). Pope clearly admires variety as much as Milton does: “He gains all points who pleasingly confounds, / Surprises, varies, and conceals the bounds” (55–56). This shared aesthetic also includes a strong appreciation for spontaneity and chance: “Spontaneous beauties all around advance,  / Start ev’n from difficulty, strike from chance” (67–68). Pope illustrates his point, in the second line of this couplet, by making the sound seem an echo to the sense. Like Hogarth, Pope also detests lifeless symmetry and uniformity, the apotheosis of which is Timon’s Villa. In almost ­every re­spect, this Villa (and every­thing it represents) is the anti-­Eden. It is a place where “No pleasing intricacies intervene, / No artful wildness to perplex the scene; / Grove nods at grove, each alley has a b ­ rother, / And half the platform just reflects the other” (115–118). In addition to being a stupendous monument to poor taste and false magnificence, Timon’s Villa reflects the intellectual vacuity, emotional rigidity, and spiritual aridity of its owner, who does not read books (only their richly ornamented covers), who entertains his guests according to a set timetable, and who neglects to have his fountains flow with w ­ ater: “Unwater’d see the drooping sea h ­ orse mourn, And swallows roost in Nilus’ dusty urn” (125–126). All of t­ hese passages suggest that the aesthetic princi­ples of Hogarth, Milton, and Pope have po­liti­cal implications as well. To put it bluntly, if the po­liti­cal corollary of variety is ­human liberty, then the corollary for all this stifling ceremony is servility. In Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve are ­free to roam, within certain limits, the intricate wildness of Eden. By the

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1650–1850 same token, spectators won­der endlessly at “the pleasing turns, and intertwining of the lines” that Hogarth singles out for praise in his description of ancient Greek statuary.16 Hogarth is not the only prominent En­glish artist who holds t­hese views. Joshua Reynolds, like Hogarth, not only regards “variety” as an impor­tant aesthetic princi­ple, but also as a deeply embedded feature of ­human psy­chol­ogy. Reynolds, in fact, sounds very much like Hogarth when he states that “variety and intricacy is a beauty and an excellence in e­ very other of the arts which address the imagination.”17 Reynolds warms to this theme in his eighth discourse on art, where he maintains that t­ here are intellectual qualities and dispositions which the Painter can satisfy and affect as powerfully as the Poet; among ­those we may reckon our love of novelty, variety, and contrast; t­ hese qualities, on examination, ­will be found to refer to a certain activity and restlessness, which has a plea­sure and a delight in being exercised and put in motion: Art therefore only administers to ­those wants and desires of the mind.18 Writing in the empirical tradition of such thinkers as Locke and Hume, Reynolds sees a love of variety as part of our very nature. “It requires no long disquisition to shew, that the dispositions which I have stated actually subsist in the h­ uman mind. Variety reanimates the attention, which is apt to languish ­under a continual sameness.”19 Like Hogarth, Reynolds also believes that certain restrictions should apply, for other­wise “the pursuit therefore of novelty and variety may be carried to excess.”20 Reynolds cautions that “where all is novelty, the attention, the exercise of the mind is too violent. Contrast, in the same manner, when it exceeds certain limits, is as disagreeable as a violent and perpetual opposition; it gives to the senses, in their pro­gress, a more sudden change than they can bear.”21 Reynolds wants to make sure that t­ hese qualities be “kept within certain bounds,” for “if they are carried to excess, [they] become defects and require correction.”22 Although Reynolds addresses ­these observations to students of art and members of the Royal Acad­emy, the social and po­liti­cal implications of his pronouncements are nonetheless fairly clear: be daring, in other words, but d ­ on’t stray too far beyond the limits of propriety and decorum. The same curvilinear aesthetic appears in works of prose fiction such as Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749). Much of the appeal of Paradise Hall, Squire Allworthy’s country estate, arises from the waving and serpentine lines that make up the grounds on which the manor ­house is situated. This estate has many Edenic features, including a “hill high enough to enjoy a most charming Prospect

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of the Valley beneath,” a “plentiful Spring,” a cascade and stream that “with many lesser Falls winded along,” as well as groves of oak, beeches, and elm.23 One notable feature is the S-­shaped “River, that, for several Miles, was seen to meander through an amazing Variety of Meadows and Woods, till it emptied itself into the sea.”24 The key component of this landscape is variety. Thus Fielding describes Allworthy’s Park as being “composed of very unequal Ground, and agreeably varied with all the Diversity that Hills, Lawns, Wood, and ­Water, laid out with admirable Taste, but owing less to Art than to Nature, could give.”25 As much as he owes to Milton, Fielding could also be taking a lesson from the pages of Hogarth, who states that “this way of composing pleasing forms, is to be accomplished by making choice of a variety of lines, as to their shapes and dimensions, and then again by varying their situations with each other, by all the dif­fer­ent ways that can be conceived.”26 As Hogarth sums it up, “the art of composing well is the art of varying well.”27 Like other literary landscapes, Allworthy’s estate is a moral as well as an aesthetic construct whose diverse lines, shapes, and views encourage “freedom of choice.” As a young man, Tom makes a number of decisions, for good and ill, but ­these choices are prompted by curvilinear world in which he grows up, a world that is curbed by the rectilinear thinking of Thwackum, Square, and (to some extent) Allworthy himself. Another fictional embodiment of this dialectic (curvilinear versus rectilinear) appears in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) when Matthew Bramble pays a visit to his old friend Mr. Baynard (letter 275). Right from the start, Bramble is troubled to find that the “tall oaks” which once “shaded the ave­nue” have all been cut down.28 Varying light with shade is an impor­t ant component of the curvilinear ideal, which Pope commends in certain walkways where “strength of shade contends with strength of light” (Epistle to Burlington, 82). Pope also laments the loss of trees, turned into broomsticks, that “now sweep ­those alleys they w ­ ere born to shade” (98). Similarly, Baynard’s estate has been subjected to a ruthless regimen of “improvement” that involves, among other ­things, the destruction of a well-­stocked garden and the removal of trees, walls, and hedges. All that remains of this once happy place is a “naked circus of loose sand, with a dry bason and a leaden triton in the m ­ iddle.”29 T ­ hese graphic images of aridity and sterility recall the “un-­watered sea ­horse” and “dusty urn” that ornament that barren grounds of Timon’s Villa, “With h ­ ere a fountain, never to be played; / And ­there a summer ­house, that knows no shade” (121–122). We soon learn that the cause of all this disagreeable ostentation is a ruinously expensive wife. Smollett uses the word “thraldom” to describe “the unmanly acquiescence of Baynard”

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1650–1850 and the “absurd tyranny,” which she exerts over him.30 Once again, loss of liberty is associated with uniformity and symmetry. Ironically, Baynard is able to regain his freedom when his wife dies; and the aesthetic symbol of this transformation occurs when workmen rebuild “the walls of the garden at the back of the h ­ ouse” and plant “clumps of firs, intermingled with beech and chesnut.”31 In short, variety resumes, not to mention the life-­giving force of a serpentine rivulet, which refreshes “the fainting Naiads, who had so long languished among mouldring roots, withered leaves, and dry pebbles.”32 One of the fullest expressions of the curvilinear ideal (and its rectilinear opposite) occurs in Jane Austen’s detailed description of Pemberley. Right from the outset, Elizabeth Bennet notes that “the park was very large, and contained ­great variety of ground.”33 Variety is on con­spic­uo ­ us display ­here from the “beautiful wood” through which she and the Gardiners drive to the “top of a considerable eminence”; from ­here they have a view Pemberley House itself, “situated on the opposite side of a valley.”34 Once inside the ­house, Elizabeth sees the surrounding terrain from a dif­fer­ent perspective: “­Every disposition of the ground was good, and she looked on the w ­ hole scene, the river, the trees scattered on its banks, and the winding of the valley, as far as she could trace it, with delight.”35 Every­thing, inside and out, is seemingly natu­ral. Just as the riverbanks are “neither formal, nor false adorned,” so the interior rooms are “neither gaudy nor uselessly fine.” (The parallel syntax reflects this point.) As the scene unfolds, surprise of e­ very sort becomes an impor­tant ele­ment—­from the unexpected conversation with the ­house­keeper, the unexpected praise of Darcy (as ­brother, friend, and proprietor), the unexpected appearance of Darcy himself, to his unexpected kindness and graciousness ­toward Elizabeth and her party. All this inner and outer commotion takes place in a setting that is constantly changing. As they stroll through the woods, Austen mentions “spots where the opening of the trees gave the eye power to wander.”36 They cross bridges, descend into valleys, go through glens, and walk beside a stream where Elizabeth longs “to explore its windings.”37 The meandering nature of the Pemberley estate mirrors the “pleasing intricacies” of Darcy’s and Elizabeth’s characters, which often reveal the unexpected and the unsuspected. Taken as a w ­ hole, Pemberley embodies the curvilinear ideal expressed by Pope and promulgated by Hogarth: “The serpentine line, by its waving and winding at the same time dif­fer­ent ways, leads the eye in a pleasing manner along the continuity of its variety . . . ​and which by its twisting so many dif­fer­ent ways, may be said to enclose (tho’ but a single line) varied contents.”38 ­Because of ­these shifting perspectives, Pemberley appears to be a

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dynamic, not a static, estate; and although variability is a key component of this place, it retains an under­lying sense of stability and continuity. As Alistair Duckworth remarks, “Pemberley is a beautiful scene from wherever it is viewed by Elizabeth.”39 The antithesis of Pemberley is Rosings, whose park is nowhere as large or varied as that of Pemberley (some ten miles in circumference) and whose walks are straightforward and predictable, so much so that Darcy and his Fitzwilliam keep bumping into Elizabeth on a regular basis. The mansion presided over by Lady Catherine de Burgh is more formal and stately than Pemberley House, and its routines are dull and lifeless. If variety is the hallmark of Pemberley, then uniformity is that of Rosings. The corollary of sameness is servility, and as ­every reader of Austen is aware, Lady Catherine keeps all of her dependents in dreary subjection to her autocratic ­will—­every­one, that is, with the exception of Elizabeth. As her Ladyship declares early on, “Upon my word, you give your opinion very decidedly for so young a person.” 40 A largely rectilinear construct, Rosings is a place whose proprietor demands social deference of nearly every­one. As a consequence, ­there can be no real freedom of thought, word, and action—­only an insipid routine of cards, conversation, meals, and ­music, the same ­thing day in and day out. Playfulness and liveliness, the essence of Elizabeth Bennet, cannot flourish in such a setting. The ­people who succumb to it (Miss de Bourgh, Mr. Collins, Charlotte Lucas) experience a kind of torpor that renders them emotionally and intellectually numb, this being a h ­ ouse where “­every such entertainment was the counterpart of the first.” 41 In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke regards the S-­shaped curve of British landscape gardening as the organic byproduct of a social system that has developed naturally over the centuries. In contrast, he likens the radical po­liti­cal theories of France to their uniformly symmetrical gardens: “The French builders, clearing away as mere rubbish what­ever they found, and, like their ornamental gardeners, forming every­thing into an exact level, propose to rest the w ­ hole local and general legislature on three bases of three dif­fer­ ent kinds; one geometrical, one arithmetical, and the third financial.” 42 Equality, in this new scheme of governance, is an abstract, mathematical notion. “Men, with them, are strictly equal, and are entitled to equal rights in their own government. Each head, on this system, would have its vote, and everyman would vote directly for the person who was to represent him in the legislature.” 43 Burke devotes much of his essay to debunking this egalitarian ideal, but his main objection is a practical one. Such a system simply ­will not work, and the main reason it ­will not

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1650–1850 work is that it flies in the face of ­human experience and ­human nature. For one ­thing, individuals are not equal—­far from it. Observe, says Burke, the “many diversities amongst men, according to their birth, their education, their professions, their residence in towns or in the country, their several ways of acquiring and of fixing property, and according to the quality of the property itself, all of which rendered them as it ­were so many dif­fer­ent species of animals.” 4 4 Burke stresses the in­equality of the ­human condition in order to make his case for a system of governance that re­spects “the many diversities amongst men.” The country that does this best is, of course, ­Great Britain: “By this means, our constitution preserves an unity in so g­ reat a diversity of its parts.” 45 It is a complex system, to be sure. “We have an inheritable crown; an inheritable peerage; and an h ­ ouse of commons and a p ­ eople inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties, from a long line of ancestors.” 46 The work of centuries, this complicated social arrangement is in accord with the diversity of ­human experience. ­Later on in his treatise, Burke creates a vivid meta­phor drawn from the physics of refraction to illustrate why nature and society abhor a precise, mathematically straight line: ­These metaphysic rights entering into common life, like rays of light which pierce into a dense medium, are, by the laws of nature, refracted from their straight line. Indeed, in the gross and complicated mass of h ­ uman passions and concerns, the primitive rights of men undergo such a variety of refractions and reflections, that it becomes absurd to talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction. The nature of man is intricate, the objects of society are of the greatest pos­si­ble complexity; and therefore no s­ imple disposition or direction of power can be suitable e­ ither to man’s nature or the quality of his affairs.47 I quote at length from Burke ­because he so fully elaborates the po­liti­cal dimension of the Hogarthian aesthetic, which also emphasizes complexity, intricacy, and variety as intrinsic categories of art and nature. In this densely imagistic and meta­phorical passage, the “straight line” of abstract reasoning becomes diverted into a multiplicity of dif­f er­ent directions, or “refractions and reflections.” Humanity is so complex, Burke argues, that only experience and tradition, not some “abstract rule,” can determine how best to preserve and reform civil institutions. Some thirty years e­ arlier, Burke had formulated ­these basic ideas, partly u ­ nder the influence of Hogarth’s treatise. In his work on the sublime and beautiful (1757), Burke writes that “as perfectly beautiful bodies are not composed of angular parts, so their parts never continue long in the same right line.” 48 He goes on to

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say that ­these bodies “vary their direction at ­every moment, and they change ­under the eye by a deviation continually carry­ing on”; ­later on in the same section (15), he praises Hogarth, “whose idea of the line of beauty I take in general to be extremely just.” 49 In section 23, Burke continues develop the Hogarthian idea of variation: “Another princi­ple property of beautiful objects is, that the line of their parts is continually varying its direction, but it varies by a very insensible deviation.”50 He even goes one step further than Hogarth by claiming that “the variation itself must be continually varied.”51 Politics was perhaps the farthest ­thing from Burke’s mind when he composed, at the age of twenty-­seven, his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, but ­these ideas inform his l­ater notion of the British constitution as a work of natu­ral beauty, which reflects “the many diversities amongst men.” The waving and serpentine lines that Hogarth and ­others perceive in the natu­ral world have many corollaries in the constructs devised by ­human beings. Take, for example, that singularly British creation, the sprawling theatrical world of Shakespeare and other seventeenth-­century playwrights. As John Dryden describes it, the quin­tes­sen­tial En­glish play is a glorious natu­ral byproduct of curvilinear thinking and imagining. In his Essay of Dramatic Poesie (1667), Dryden’s spokesman Neander claims that “we have in­ven­ted, increas’d and perfected a more pleasing way of writing for the stage than was ever known to the Ancients or the Moderns of any Nation, which is Tragicomedie.”52 This cultural hybrid has become so successful that Neander won­ders “why Lisideius and many ­others should cry up the barrenness of French Plots above the variety and copiousness of the En­glish.”53 Dryden, like Hogarth, regards variety as an essential attribute of art and nature, and En­glish playwrights have learned to achieve this by alternating scenes of mirth and sadness. Neander offers an effective analogy from the natu­ ral world: “Grief and Passion are like floods rais’d in l­ittle Brooks by a sudden Rain; they are quickly up, and if the concernment be pour’d unexpectedly in upon us,  it overflows us.”54 En­glish audiences enjoy quick, sudden, and unexpected exchanges; by the same token, they cannot endure regularity and uniformity, the hallmarks of the modern French stage. As Neander wittily puts it, French “actors speak by the Hour-­glass, like our Parsons.”55 Dryden also praises the variety to be found in En­glish comedy, especially repartee, which is “one of the chiefest graces; the greatest plea­sure of the audience is a chase of wit kept up on both sides, and swiftly manag’d.”56 Hogarth describes the same mind-­set in similar terms when he states that “this love of pursuit, merely as pursuit, is implanted in our natures, and design’d, no doubt, for necessary, and useful purposes.”57 How, exclaims

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1650–1850 Hogarth, could we enjoy our “favorite diversions, without the frequent turns and difficulties, and disappointments, which are daily met with in the pursuit”?58 According to Hogarth, we see this innate bias everywhere, even in “the well-­ connected thread of a play, or a novel, which ever increases as the plot thickens”; it is this kind of intricate variety that “leads the eye a wanton kind of chase.”59 For the same reasons (variety and copiousness), Dryden also praises the large and diverse cast of characters that populate the En­glish stage: “ ’ Tis evident that the more the persons are, the greater ­will be the variety of the plot.” Furthermore, “you w ­ ill find it infinitely pleasing to be led in a labyrinth of design where you see some of your way before you yet discern not the end till you arrive at it.” 60 Fielding echoes this sentiment when he praises, in the opening chapter of Tom Jones, the “prodigious variety” to be found in ­human nature.61 ­Later on in the novel, he singles out “the ­great Variety of humorous Characters” that appear in the “lower Spheres” of life.62 ­These writers agree with Hogarth that “simplicity, without variety, is wholly insipid,” 63 and so they embrace dif­fer­ent techniques for avoiding monotony and sameness. Hogarth, in fact, singles out Dryden for his astute appreciation of the variety produced by subtle gradations of light and shade. “Dryden,” says Hogarth, “seems, by the penetration of his incomparable genius, to have understood that language in the works of nature, which the latter [Sir Godfrey Kneller], by means of an exact eye and a strict obeying hand, could only faithfully transcribe.” 64 By way of illustration, Hogarth quotes the following couplet: “Where light to shades descending, plays, not strives, / Dies by degrees, and by degrees revives.” 65 Copiousness and variety are the same virtues for which Dryden praises Chaucer in his preface to Fables Ancient and Modern (1700). “­There is such a Variety of Game springing up ­here before me, that I am distracted in my Choice, and know not which to follow. ’Tis sufficient to say, according to the Proverb, that ­here is God’s Plenty.” 66 The curvilinear aesthetic takes plea­sure in the delights of the chase, the unexpected twists and turns of a labyrinthine plot, and the multitudinous characters in a complex narrative. Digression, swerving from a steady and predictable line, is a natu­ral corollary of curvilinear thinking. Dryden acknowledges this idea in his preface to Fables when he defines the nature of the essay, the literary genre he is practicing at that very moment: “Besides, the nature of a preface is rambling, never wholly out of the way nor in it”; Dryden adds that he learned this “from the practice of honest Montaigne.” 67 Rambling, or digression, implies an apparent lack of method and purpose, but Dryden regards it as a vital strategy for enhancing variety and engaging the reader’s interest (or “concernment,” as he likes to call it).68 ­There is

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considerable freedom of movement allowed by the notion that one may talk with propriety about anything as long as it is not wholly out of the way nor wholly in ­ ere, which precludes wild departures the way. A kind of via media is also at work h from the subject on the one hand and slavish adherence to it on the other. Certain fictional narratives, such as Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy, also incorporate the pleasing “labyrinth of design” that Dryden celebrates as being integral to En­glish stagecraft. The same sort of curvilinear plot, thick with digression and crowded with character, informs the novelistic worlds of Fielding and Sterne, authors who embrace variety as the very life force of prose fiction. Such a mind-­ set makes it pos­si­ble to include random stories within stories (like the autobiography of the Man of the Hill or the death of Lieutenant Le Fevre) that seldom seem wholly out of the way. ­Towards the end of his Analy­sis of Beauty, Hogarth pays special attention to the art of country dancing, which embodies many of his impor­tant points. “The beauty of this kind of mystic dancing, as the poets term it, depends upon moving in a composed variety of lines, chiefly serpentine, govern’d by the princi­ples of intricacy, &.” 69 He goes on to say that “one of the most pleasing movements in country dancing, and which answer to all the princi­ples of varying at once, is what they call the hay.” Hogarth is fascinated by this par­tic­u­lar movement ­because “the figure of it altogether, is a cypher of S’s, or a number of serpentine lines interlacing, or intervolving each other.”70 Neither as rigid as the formal minuet nor as undisciplined as “the dances of barbarians” (with lots of skipping, jumping, and turning around), En­glish country dancing brings to mind the way angels are said to dance in Paradise Lost, in “mazes intricate, / Eccentric, intervolv’d, yet regular / Then most, when most irregular they seem” (5.622–624). According to Hogarth, among the beauties of this dance are “the turns of the head, and twist of the body in passing each other,” all of which “displays the greatest variety of movements in serpentine lines imaginable, keeping equal pace with musical time.” 71 When James Thompson praises w ­ omen, in par­tic­u­lar En­glish w ­ omen, it is for their sinuous movement, their capacity to “float in large Simplicity of Dress.” He also admires their ability to move with “smooth Step, / Disclosing Motion in its ­every Charm, / To swim along, and swell the mazy Dance.”72 ­These are the same winding and waving motions that catch the eye of Hogarth and other writers. En­glish country dancing remained popu­lar well into the age of Austen, who pre­sents this social phenomenon not simply as a pleasant diversion but as a way for p ­ eople to commingle, decorously, in a deeply emotional and physical manner that engages all the senses. “Country dances,” writes Vivien Jones, “typically

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1650–1850 involved very complicated figures in which each ­couple worked their way from the top to the bottom of the set by completing the dance figure with e­ very other ­couple in turn.”73 Take, for example, the quadrille that Elizabeth and Darcy dance together at Netherfield; it takes several twists and turns, which reflect the unexpected shifts in their conversation—­from conventional topics like the neighborhood ball to surprising topics like Wickham. The real mystery, of course, is the nature of each other’s character. As Elizabeth remarks, “I hear such dif­fer­ent accounts of you as puzzle me exceedingly.” Darcy ­will not gratify her curiosity with a ­simple answer; instead, he concurs that “report may vary greatly with re­spect to me.”74 In Austen the S-­shaped curve of country dancing is of a piece with the intricate, and ever-­varying, complexity of the h ­ uman personality. From the outside, such activity may see a ­matter of mere technical accomplishment. That, at any rate, is how a foolish and superficial observer like Sir William Lucas sees it. “I have been most highly gratified indeed, my dear Sir. Such very superior dancing is not often seen. It is evident that you belong to the first circles.”75 Unbeknownst to Sir William, a more profound dance is g­ oing on internally—an intellectual and emotional kind of play that is evident only to Elizabeth and Darcy, and the alert reader of Austen. The curvilinear aesthetic, as this brief survey suggests, infuses a ­great deal of eighteenth-­century poetry, prose fiction, criticism, and po­liti­cal philosophy. Hogarth’s treatise, The Analy­sis of Beauty, is useful precisely ­because it lays out, in such full and explicit detail, the ubiquity of the serpentine line in art and nature, along with the closely related concepts of variety and intricacy. For writers as dif­ fer­ent as Dryden and Burke, ­these aesthetic ideas are inevitably bound up with the notion of freedom—­personal, social, artistic, and po­liti­cal. In their vari­ous ways, all of ­these writers explore the bound­aries of individual freedom within an ever-­shifting set of social obligations and responsibilities. Hogarth’s S-­shaped curve is a graphic visual image of this dynamic equilibrium, where chaos and anarchy loom at one end of the spectrum, tyranny and oppression at the other. It is fascinating, I think, to see this paradigm played out in so many dif­fer­ent settings, ­whether it be a country dance, a waving ribbon, a meandering stream, a digressive plot, or a revolution that astonished ­people on both sides of the En­glish Channel.

Notes 1. William Hogarth, The Analy­sis of Beauty (1753; New York: Garland, 1973), x. 2. Hogarth, Analy­sis of Beauty, x–xi.

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3. Hogarth, Analy­sis of Beauty, i. 4. Hogarth, Analy­sis of Beauty, 25. 5. Hogarth, Analy­sis of Beauty, 19. 6. Hogarth, Analy­sis of Beauty, 20. 7. Tom Stoppard, Arcadia (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), 29. 8. William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape: to Which Is Added a Poem, On Landscape Painting, 2nd ed. (London, 1794). 9. Robert Herrick, The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, ed. J. Max Patrick (New York: New York University Press, 1963), 41. 10. See Katharine Eisaman Maus and Barbara Lewalski, eds., The Norton Anthology of En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, 9th ed. (New York: Norton, 2012), 1758n3. 11. Hogarth, Analy­sis of Beauty, 28. 12. See Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in A Wollstonecraft Anthology, ed. Janet  M. Todd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 76–77. Wollstonecraft accuses Burke of persuading ­women “that littleness and weakness are the very essence of beauty; and that the Supreme Being, in giving ­women beauty in the most supereminent degree, seemed to command them, by the power­ful voice of Nature, not to cultivate the moral virtues that might chance to excite re­spect, and interfere with the pleasing sensations they ­were created to inspire” (76). 13. Hogarth, Analy­sis of Beauty, 38–38. 14. John Milton, Paradise Lost (4:247–267), in John Milton: The Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1957), 283–284. 15. All references to Pope are to The Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope, ed. Aubrey Williams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969). 16. Hogarth, Analy­sis of Beauty, 58. 17. Joshua Reynolds, “Discourse 13,” in Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1959), 243. 18. Reynolds, “Discourse 13,” 146. 19. Reynolds, “Discourse 13,” 146. 20. Reynolds, “Discourse 13,” 146. 21. Reynolds, “Discourse 13,” 146–147. 22. Reynolds, “Discourse 13,” 147. 23. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, ed. Sheridan Baker, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1995), 30–31. 24. Fielding, Tom Jones, 31. 25. Fielding, Tom Jones, 31. 26. Hogarth, Analy­sis of Beauty, 40. 27. Hogarth, Analy­sis of Beauty, 40. 28. Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, ed. Louis  M. Knapp and Paul- ­Gabriel Boucé (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 285.

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1650–1850 29. Smollett, Expedition of Humphry Clinker, 286. 30. Smollett, Expedition of Humphry Clinker, 293. 31. Smollett, Expedition of Humphry Clinker, 343. 32. Smollett, Expedition of Humphry Clinker, 343. 33. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 2nd ed., ed. Donald Gray (New York: Norton, 1993), 156. 34. Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 156. 35. Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 156. 36. Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 161. 37. Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 162. 38. Hogarth, Analy­sis of Beauty, 38–39. As Pope puts it, “He gains all points who pleasingly confounds, / Surprises, varies, and conceals the bounds” (55–56). 39. Alistair Duckworth, “Pride and Prejudice: The Reconstitution of Society,” in The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 116–143, reprinted in Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 320. 40. Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 109. 41. Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 111. 42. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Leslie Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 173. 43. Burke, Reflections, 175. 44. Burke, Reflections, 185. 45. Burke, Reflections, 33. 46. Burke, Reflections, 33. 47. Burke, Reflections, 61–62. 48. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. J. T. Boulton (London: Routledge, 1958), 114. 49. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 114–115. 50. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 155. 51. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 156. 52. All references to John Dryden are to Selected Poetry and Prose of John Dryden, ed. Earl Miner (New York: Random House, 1985), 72. 53. Dryden, Selected Poetry, 72. 54. Dryden, Selected Poetry, 74. 55. Dryden, Selected Poetry, 73. 56. Dryden, Selected Poetry, 74. 57. Hogarth, Analy­sis of Beauty, 24. 58. Hogarth, Analy­sis of Beauty, 24. 59. Hogarth, Analy­sis of Beauty, 24–25. 60. Dryden, Selected Poetry, 74. 61. Fielding, Tom Jones, 56. 62. Fielding, Tom Jones, 480. 63. Hogarth, Analy­sis of Beauty, 21.

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64. Hogarth, Analy­sis of Beauty, 105. 65. Dryden, “Epistle to Sir Godfrey Kneller,” 476 (lines 69–70). 66. Dryden, “Epistle,” 531. 67. Dryden, “Epistle,” 524–525. 68. See H. James Jensen, John Dryden’s Critical Terms (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), 33. 69. Hogarth, Analy­sis of Beauty, 150. 70. Hogarth, Analy­sis of Beauty, 150. 71. Hogarth, Analy­sis of Beauty, 148. 72. James Thompson, “Autumn” (lines 590–596), in The Seasons, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 167. 73. Vivien Jones, “Dancing,” in Mansfield Park, ed. James Kinsley and Jane Stabler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 383. 74. Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 63. 75. Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 62.

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FEELING ALLEGORY AFFECT, META­PHOR, AND MILTON’S EIGHTEENTH-­CENTURY RECEPTION MICHAEL EDSON

The eighteenth-­century dislike for Sin and Death in Milton’s Paradise Lost con-

tinues to embarrass scholars. Faced with Addison’s and Johnson’s objections to allegorical entities (Sin, Death) interacting with real characters (Satan), modern scholars dismiss such complaints as reflecting the same misplaced zeal for unity and consistency ­behind Richard Bentley’s 1732 revision of Paradise Lost. Neoclassical critics are said to forget Milton’s materialism (Stephen Fallon, Catherine Gimelli Martin) or the norms of baroque allegory (John Shawcross). Their categories are faulty: “confusing” allegory and personification, neoclassicists object to Sin and Death for defying their own figural misconceptions (Thomas Maresca). Critics such as Addison are even shown to have come around to the modern view that the abstract tenets of neoclassicism “do no justice” to Milton (Esther Yu).1 Though I use “neoclassicism” h ­ ere to specify the classical-­minded belletrism of Addison, Johnson, and Hugh Blair, the term is now rare in literary studies for many reasons, one perhaps being neoclassicism’s low reputation owing in part to its reaction to Sin and Death.2 With most past analyses stressing the limitations of neoclassical criticism, few have attempted to grasp this reaction in its own terms. Using neoclassical theory, I offer an explanation beyond repre­sen­ta­tional inconsistency for objections to Sin and Death, one based on the feelings attending allegory. Eighteenth-­century critics and rhetoricians possessed a rich affective vocabulary for personification allegory, Milton’s included. T ­ here was wide agreement that personified virtues, vices, and appetites generated responses in readers beyond the logical or ontological “absurdity” Johnson found in Sin and Death and

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the no less heady “sublime” Edmund Burke associated with the episode.3 Drawing on a rhetorical tradition in which figuration relates to emotion and affect, critics frequently attributed disgust, exhaustion, and nausea with allegory and its close relations, meta­phor and personification.4 ­These negative sensations are not local and mimetic; they do not reflect a named or described sickness or a run-in with a personified Fatigue. They attend allegory regardless of content. Intensified by increased length or detail, ­these sensations also connect to what Joel Fineman has punningly termed “longing,” the allegorist’s need to elaborate a single correspondence into a system of parallels and produce the long allegories that eighteenth-­century critics found unsettling.5 Allegory’s ties to troubled feelings signals more than its degraded status or supposed decline a­ fter 1700. Complaints about allegory, and about Milton’s in par­tic­u­lar, reveal the role of sensation in neoclassical assessments of literary success. Instead of dismissing neoclassicists for applying irrelevant rules, we should see such rules as grounded to some extent in the physical experience of figuration. In focusing on eighteenth-­century responses to Milton’s allegory, I seek not only to extend recent inquiries into the felt aspects of reading, but also to retrain us to read Sin and Death so as to take seriously the physical aspects of figural language. Since part of my argument is that figural categories w ­ ere more fluid in the 1700s than t­ oday ­because figures w ­ ere defined by feeling as much as by function, and therefore that the response to Milton’s allegory had l­ittle to do with the  alleged “confusion” of figural types, I avoid making strict distinctions between figures. However, some basic definitions are needed. With qualification, I approach meta­phor through the lens of conceptual meta­phor theory, as a mapping of attributes between concepts and images. Meta­phor maintains one-­to-­ one parallels between what I. A. Richards called “vehicles” and “tenors,” or what George Lakoff and Mark Turner have more recently termed “source” and “target domains.” 6 Personification is a meta­phor finding its source domain in the ­human body. Both definitions would have been intelligible around 1700; indeed, both embody something of the purported eighteenth-­century conflation of figures. As I show, t­here is value in taking a friendlier approach than past studies, which assumed such figures to differ and quickly dismissed the eighteenth-­century treatment of allegory as personification meta­phor as an error. Like the neoclassicists, I also approach allegory as a “meta­phor developed so continuously as to make it . . . ​unobviously meta­phorical.”7 A self-­ destructing meta­ phor, allegory elaborates the source domain beyond target needs, and though source imagery in excess of meaning is not unique to personification, critics often focused on

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1650–1850 personification allegory when criticizing inconsistent allegory more generally. When in 1727 Voltaire notes how Death’s rape of Sin “bear[s] no Allegory . . .’tis distasteful without any Purpose, or if any Allegory lies ­under it” the surface image is “more obvious,” he laments the untethering of source from target that by modern standards makes allegory allegory.8 Not only did critics expect allegory to work like meta­phor, but as Voltaire’s distaste also implies, figures (meta­phor, allegory, personification) ­were often classed by the bodily responses they induced.

Repre­sen­ta­tional Inconsistency and Neoclassical Style This section summarizes the standard scholarly view of the eighteenth-­century reception of Milton’s allegory. In brief, that view is this: invested in a neoclassical poetics deriving from Horace, Aristotle, and Quintilian that prized consistency and simplicity, critics ­after 1700 recoiled from the repre­sen­ta­tional inconsistency Sin and Death introduced into Paradise Lost. The allegory (2:648–889; 10:345–410) is so familiar as to need no quoting, but I nevertheless include excerpts from it in the following pages. My goal is to invite modern readers to set aside summaries and paraphrases, reencounter Sin and Death, and try to feel the allegory as Addison and Johnson felt it, even if we can never experience Sin and Death in precisely the same way. The allegory begins at the Gates of Hell, where Death threatens ­battle to Satan: “Art thou that traitor angel, art thou he, Who first broke peace in Heav’n and faith [?] . . . Back to thy punishment, False fugitive, and to thy speed add wings, Lest with a whip of scorpions I pursue Thy ling’ring, or with one stroke of this dart Strange horror seize thee, and pangs unfelt before.” So spake the grisly terror [Death], and in shape, So speaking and so threat’ning, grew tenfold More dreadful and deform: on th’ other side Incensed with indignation Satan stood. . . . Each at the [other’s] head Leveled his deadly aim.9 As Addison stresses in several Spectator papers, Sin and Death, who “act a large part” in Paradise Lost, are “not agreeable” to a “Heroic Poem.10 Homer and Virgil

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use personified entities in their epics, but t­ hese do not undertake “any Series of Action” (3:337). Having personifications such as Death interact with real, mimetic characters such as Satan ill suits a heroic poem, “which o ­ ught to appear credible” (3:338). For Addison, t­ here is nothing intrinsically inconsistent in allegory and he himself wrote allegoric visions.11 Nevertheless, as Esther Yu notes, Addison shows a “concern . . . ​with generic integrity” and an “investment in defending the dignified form of the classical epic from the corruptions of the epic romance.”12 The fictionality of Sin and Death introduces inconsistency into the naturalistic epic frame. Johnson sees allegory as often inconsistent regardless of genre. A writer of allegories, Johnson as critic commonly condemns allegory, including Milton’s.13 “When Death offers [Satan] ­battle,” Johnson writes, “the allegory is broken.” Also problematic for Johnson is book 10, where Sin and Death “facilitate [Satan’s] passage [over Chaos] by building a bridge” (1:291): And at the brink of Chaos, near the foot Of this new wondrous pontifice, unhoped [Satan] Met who to meet him came, his offspring dear. ­Great joy was at their meeting, and at sight Of that stupendous bridge his joy increased. (10:347–351) Sin identifies herself and Death as responsible for the new construction: “thou us empow’red  / To . . . ​overlay  / With this portentous bridge the dark abyss” (10:369–371). As scholars have observed, Johnson distrusts interaction across repre­sen­ta­tional planes: Satan is a real character, Sin and Death rhetorical inventions. The two levels must not converge; to mix truth and fiction is “absurd.” The negative examples of allegorical agency elsewhere in his writings (“Discord may raise a mutiny,” but “cannot conduct a march, nor besiege a town,” an allusion to Voltaire’s 1723 epic the Henriade [4:71]) suggest that Johnson shares Addison’s concern with genre but is more focused on inconsistency. Preferring personified action specific to the abstraction depicted or the imagery of the emblem tradition, Johnson balks at Sin and Death’s bridge building. When such entities do more than they represent, rhe­toric looks real. ­Whether readers confused mimetic and allegoric is irrelevant; Johnson assumes it, and such confusion seems pos­si­ble on a first reading: with the allegory starting at 2:648 but neither character named u ­ ntil 2:760 and 2:787 respectively, Sin and Death could be read for over a hundred lines as real characters. Surely Johnson is miffed, too, as personification should reduce precisely the ambiguity Milton’s personification increases. What a figure named Death stands for should be no mystery—as long as he acts like Death.

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1650–1850 Taking Johnson’s view of allegories as “broken” meta­phors, we can frame his objections using terms from conceptual meta­phor theory. When Sin and Death pursue actions unrelated to the ideas they represent, the source images (Sin and Death as entities) lack corresponding ele­ments in the target idea (sin and death as ­ thers stand concepts). In some aspects vehicles for theology, Sin and Death in o for nothing beyond themselves. One-­to-­one parallels between image and concept break down; we read figuratively at one moment and literally at another, an oscillation, Johnson claims, that “shocks” readers (1:291). Perhaps Milton attracted censure ­because he courts inconsistency in so many ways, as clear from Sin’s story of her rape: I fled, but he [Death] pursued (though more, it seems, Inflamed with lust then rage) and swifter far, Me overtook his m ­ other all dismayed, And in embraces forcible and foul Engend’ring with me, of that rape begot ­These yelling monsters that with ceaseless cry Surround me, as thou saw’st, hourly conceived. (2:790–796) When Voltaire reflects that Sin and Death’s coupling has no meaning or is “more obvious” than this message, he laments the source of the inconsistency Johnson disdains. The greater the autonomy of the source, the more about Sin and Death look real, though in the above passage description (Sin’s monstrous body) as much as action (Death’s rape) clouds the target. Excess description in allegory also frustrates other eighteenth-­century critics. When Joseph Spence criticizes Spenser’s Pride in the Faerie Queene for “set[ting] one a guessing” about its target meaning, the ambiguity reflects not Pride’s actions but her having too many “attributes.”14 Personified speech contributes to inconsistency as well. Johnson does not criticize Sin’s and Death’s speeches, but he could not have overlooked them: of the 242 lines in the allegory, nearly half feature Sin or Death speaking. Elsewhere, Johnson rejects the garrulous Envy of Abraham Cowley’s 1656 Davideis (“­Every reader feels himself weary with th[e] useless talk of an allegorical Being” [1:224]), implying Johnson also disapproved of Sin and Death’s “talk” for failing to illustrate the target. Such is to be expected from Johnson, whose own allegories clarify ideas by avoiding details. Similar complaints come from Addison about the excess “Particulars” in some other “Passages” in book 2 (3:60), including presumably Milton’s description of Chaos:

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behold the throne Of Chaos, and his dark pavilion spread Wide on the wasteful deep; with him enthroned Sat sable-­vested Night, eldest of ­things, The consort of his reign; and by them stood Orcus and Ades, and the dreaded name Of Demogorgon; Rumor next and Chance. (2:959–965) Chaos is more inert than Sin and Death, but like Aeschylus’s Strength and Euripides’s Death, which earn Johnson’s disdain (1:291), Chaos l­ater speaks (2:990–1009). ­Needless to illustrate the idea of chaos, his exchange with Satan makes Chaos look real.15 None of the other figures ­here, such as Night, earn Addison’s ire, presumably ­because they neither interact with real characters nor feature descriptions and speeches without target significances. The more detailed the action, speech, or appearance of a personification, the likelier readers see inconsistency or ambiguity. Johnson and Addison represent common views. For Blair, mixing real and allegorical persons destroys “consistency.” Such inconsistency, Henry Home, Lord Kames observes, makes the allegory of Sin and Death “not generally relished” by readers. Objections to source excess as causing inconsistency spread throughout criticism. Thomas Warton rejects portions of the Faerie Queene as “mere description” “­under which no meaning is couched.”16 As Blair insists, “the meaning should be easily seen through the figure” (1:317). Ambiguous due to its unstated tenor, allegory ­here is expected, like meta­phor, to have a translucent source and unequivocal target. The sample “allegory” from Johnson’s Dictionary ­ aughter of diligence, and the parent of authority”) confirms this (“wealth is the d expectation of “excessively clear and rationalistic tropes.”17 The eighteenth-­ century habit of treating all allegory as personification allegory reinforces the expectation; as Johnson’s sample implies, clarity and consistency ­were served by assuming allegory to always feature persons named for its concepts. Hence the modern view of Sin and Death’s rejection as a prob­lem of neoclassical taste: fed up with the deferrals of allegory, critics wanted, in Thomas Maresca’s words, “univocal and consistent meanings.” This preference for “classical simplicity,” as Bernard L. Einbond calls it, reflected a “taste for decorum and absolute law,” Jason Crawford notes.18 To satisfy such taste, neoclassical critics “confused” (so it appears t­ oday) personification with allegory and allegory with meta­phor, both to Milton’s disadvantage.

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Form, Content, and Allegorical Feeling So far, so good: objections to Sin and Death reflect a collapse of preexisting figural categories, a consolidation reflecting preferences in neoclassical poetics. But to say that a love of consistency or simplicity drives this just raises another question. Why prefer consistency and simplicity? Since many classical writings defy neoclassical taste—­Johnson notes the excessive activity of the personifications in Aeschylus and Euripides—­such preferences cannot owe entirely to classical pre­ce­dent. If neoclassicists “obscured the aesthetics of Milton’s allegory,” then modern scholars have no less distorted the aesthetics of neoclassicism.19 As I  argue, neoclassical rules, abstract and arbitrary though they may appear and sometimes are, reflected a­ ctual reader response and aimed to produce figures that, put bluntly, felt good. As Johnson’s weariness with Cowley indicates, figures ­were judged to some extent by the feelings they elicited. Even in the eigh­teenth ­century, when moral and cognitivist accounts of aesthetic experience ruled, critics noted the embodied aspects of reading. As Brian Vickers observed in his excellent inquiry into eighteenth-­century rhe­toric, inheritors of the classics found in figures a “series of emotional and psychological effects, almost prior to . . . ​ meaning or argument.”20 Much of what follows reiterates Vickers’s claim for neoclassicism’s attention to the felt, noncognitive aspects of figuration while updating his argument in light of new scholarship on the subtle sensations—­recently termed “affects”—­beneath or beyond the strong emotions of pity, fear, and sublimity that dominate scholarship on aesthetic response.21 Drawing on a rhetorical tradition in which figuration aimed to move readers, the neoclassicism of Johnson (even if ­limited to certain princi­ples) was hardly a rigid formalism without regard for the affects of language and imagery. Such figural “feelings” have long been recognized in positive forms: ancient and modern commentators attributed vari­ous sensations to figures, including force, vivacity, intensity, and surprise.22 However, aesthetic dis­plea­sure has rarely received the same attention, so the feel of allegory and related figures has been largely ignored. Disgust, distaste, nausea: t­ hese w ­ ere the affects associated with allegory. Neoclassical stomachs w ­ ere turned by other t­ hings, too, pastoral poetry (Johnson, Lives, 1:278–279) and French critics included.23 Yet such negative terminology converges on allegory and meta­phor more than even the language of sublimity; in the 1700s, only Burke and James Paterson hailed Milton’s allegory as “sublime,” and Burke referred to only eight lines on Death.24 The language of dis-

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taste is more widespread. Voltaire finds the allegory “distasteful”; Blair calls it “disgusting,” declaring that Milton should have “omitted” Sin and Death apparently for making readers “nauseous” (2:427; 1:302). Dryden likewise claims that allegory and its relations “nauseate.” For Joseph Trapp “the Stain of Poetry” is allegory, a figure having “grown nauseous.”25 All of ­these quotations have more nuanced meanings in their respective texts, but even out of context their significance is clear enough. To dismiss such language as merely meta­phorical perpetuates the common view of Sin and Death’s eighteenth-­century rejection as a response to cognitive or logical concerns. But when t­hese critics speak of nausea and distaste, they appear to speak literally. The rise of a gustatory language of aesthetics a­ fter 1600 did not supplant literal usages of “taste” or exclude real sensation. With aesthetic taste recognized as a meta­phor, aesthetic disgust would have still carried bodily meanings.26 If allegory did not make critics literally ill, then their terminology at least indicates that they felt some discomfort and enlisted disgust and nausea to gesture at that sensation. More visceral than such traditional aesthetic passions as pity and fear, the gut reactions invoked by Blair, Trapp, and Dryden stress the physicality of reading allegory. Such unpleasant feelings ­either ­were part of perceptions of inconsistency or first manifested such perceptions. The latter possibility matches David Hume’s position from the 1740s, in which aesthetic judgments are physical sensations retrospectively given intellectual justification.27 In short, critics felt faulty figures before they could name the formal or logical prob­lem—­ hence objections often carried a language of bodily discomfort. Per Hume’s model, neoclassical rules emerge retrospectively to manage feeling, to help avoid figures rubbing readers the wrong way. Disgust for Milton’s allegory at first looks like a response to figural content, a disgust for Death’s raping Sin. Blair identifies low and “dirty” meta­phors, including sexual ones, as making readers “nauseous” (1:302). Spence likewise reproaches Spenser for “affixing such filthy ideas” to the figure of Error in the Faerie Queene that it “turns one’s stomach.”28 But other statements complicate this view. Blair elsewhere ignores content when reproving Anthony Ashley-­Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury for extending his meta­phors for “pages” ­until “the idea becomes nauseous” (1:313). Nor is dislike for Milton’s allegory a total response to represented content.29 Voltaire’s finding of Sin’s rape “distasteful without any Purpose” appears to separate structure from content, implying that the allegory’s sexual imagery would be “distasteful” even if it had a deeper meaning. But Voltaire’s ambiguous syntax also makes it pos­si­ble to read “distasteful” as referring to

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1650–1850 structure: the lack of a target for Sin’s rape carries its own dis­plea­sure, a dis­plea­ sure presumably compounded by the moral “distaste” aroused by the subject. Figurative content is a partial but not total cause for the negative feelings surrounding allegory and meta­phor. The idea that source-­target structures have a feel in­de­pen­dent of content carries impor­tant implications for Milton’s reception. First, neoclassical “disgust” should not be understood as the attenuation of some prior, possibly positive, sensation. For critics the delights of allegory w ­ ere fleeting: “they never afford any lasting plea­sure,” declares Kames (Ele­ments, 2:578). But given that Voltaire could celebrate Milton’s allegory and then, a paragraph l­ater, voice revulsion for a portion of it, reveals disgust as a feeling always in the background of the source-­ target structure, a feeling often drowned out by responses to content. Second, although Voltaire’s distaste for content (Sin’s rape) may reinforce this structural discomfort, structural affects at times also overshadowed content feelings, as seems to have been true of Shaftesbury’s meta­phors given Blair’s failure to mention content. Unlike the aesthetic “disgust” l­ater identified by Immanuel Kant, a disgust arising when the object represented proves so repellent that the beauty of the repre­sen­ta­tion is lost, neoclassical disgust arises when the “feel” of figural repre­sen­ta­tion becomes too noticeable.30 Such disgust challenges t­oday’s commonsense view of content as the only or primary source of feeling, of images of sex or vio­lence or pain as discomfiting readers. Neoclassical disgust also defies neoclassicism’s own sympathetic-­expressivist model, in which bold figures reflect writerly passions and, handled skillfully, similarly inflame their readers, a paradigm ­later exploited by the Romantics to rebrand personification as passionate apostrophe.31 ­These models overlook how figures can have a feel distinct from both that producing them and that which their content inspires, even when emotion or its tokens (sighs, tears) are represented. That the disgust felt by critics involves both content and structure emerges more clearly in the case of fatigue, the other negative feeling often associated with figuration in this era. For Johnson and ­others, allegory and meta­phor are “wearying.”32 Weariness and nausea frequently appear together. As Isaac Watts warned in 1743, “­Don’t over-­fatigue the Spirits [with reading] . . . ​lest the Mind . . . ​ be tempted to nauseate and grow tir’d of a par­tic­u­lar Subject.”33 By failing to mention any specific “subject,” Watts pre­sents nausea as related less to content than structure, less to the subject treated than to its treatment. A similar pairing, this time in direct reference to allegory, informs Hume’s 1763 dismissal of the “tiresome” Faerie Queene, a poem “with which the palate is soon satiated.”34 This

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recurrent link between fatigue and disgust, satiation, or overindulgence implies that allegory’s feel reflects an excess beyond represented content. To grasp the response to Sin and Death, then, we must consider the structure of allegory and meta­phor.

The Discomfort of Meta­phor The disadvantage of approaching meta­phor as a cognitive-­didactic tool, as a way of teaching the unknown through the known, an approach pop­u­lar­ized by Lakoff and other conceptual meta­phor theorists, is that such a model glosses over meta­phor’s “feel.”35 Fortunately, more recent scholars such as Chanita Goodblatt and Joseph Glicksohn recognize how meta­phor, in merging concept fields, manifests foremost as a feeling, as tension. The more unusual the pairing, or the more distant the fields, the greater the tension becomes.36 Affects resist repre­sen­ta­ tion, so it is not surprising that no one in the 1700s identified the tension, though Kames comes close when identifying the “fatigue” of meta­phor as increased when the source and target have a “distant resemblance or contrast” (2:517). In mingling contraries, Milton’s Sin-­as-­daughter meta­phor thus as much pains readers as it “teach[es] about the motives, nature, and mechanics of separation from God.”37 Indeed, making readers uncomfortable may have been part of the lesson. Even if Milton had paired less antithetical ideas, tension or inconsistency would remain: sources and targets never match, and differences often outstrip likenesses, making structural or ontological discomfort ever pre­sent. Such discomfort seems to be the affect that critics gestured at as disgust or weariness. As Kames suggests, and as Johnson’s disdain for the “heterogeneous” ideas in Cowley further implies, such tension was detected only when the target contrasts greatly with the source or is so obscure that readers stop to study a figure (1:200). Hence critics approve meta­phors with obvious likenesses: the sooner the target is disclosed, the less apparent is the tension. Per Joseph Priestley, “inconsistency” is “unnoticed” when figures appear “but for a moment.”38 Modern readers may object that meta­phor ­causes no discomfort. Less apt to complain about Sin and Death than w ­ ere neoclassical critics, we are also apparently less sensitive to the structural discomfort ­behind such complaints. Yet we still experience this discomfort with mixed meta­phors, despite such meta­phors often being easier to understand and more exact in explaining concepts than unmixed ones. This suggests that such dislike reflects not so much cognitive or

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1650–1850 logical f­ actors as their compounding a tension already intrinsic to source-­target structures.39 Modern readers may also object that they feel no discomfort in allegory: what distinguishes allegory from meta­phor is an unstated target and therefore an absence of a cross-­domain mapping that would create target-­source tension. Yet conceptual meta­phor theory—­despite its sidelining of affect—­helps us see allegory as meta­phor and therefore appreciate the eighteenth-­century view. For mid-­eighteenth-­century critics, allegory would have involved discomfort: they expected allegory to be lucid like meta­phor and therefore felt the absence of an unequivocal target. For them allegory had an unresolved or amputated feel, an imbalance between source and target attributes causing a discomfort similar to that felt with mismatched sources and targets in meta­phors. Hence Johnson links the “weariness” spawned by Cowley’s personified Envy with Cowley’s forced meta­phors more generally. Recalling Kames on allegory’s failure to give “lasting plea­sure,” Johnson claims that Cowley’s confused images “entertain for a moment, but . . . ​soon grow wearisome” (1:217). Similar language, similar trigger: allegory’s multiplying of source ele­ments without target equivalents intensifies the same tension felt with far-­fetched conceits. As a meta­phor embodying its target concept, personification in theory dampened this tension, hence why critics frequently wrote as if all allegory was personification allegory. But in practice, by introducing descriptions (Spenser’s Pride), actions (Death), or speeches (Cowley’s Envy) beyond what illustrated the target, personification heightened the discomfort of meta­phor. The best proof of the discomfort in allegory appears in how often its detractors wrote allegories or allowed their own personifications agencies they refused ­others. Writers ­after 1650 ­were also seen as unable to stop from “run[ning] Meta­ phor stark mad into an Allegory.” 40 The mania of extension at first appears to argue against the pain of allegory, but as Goodblatt and Glicksohn states, extension minimizes the author’s discomfort, aiming to resolve inconsistency by tracing added source-­ target correspondences, additions that only increase the inconsistency and distress for readers.41 Goodblatt and Glicksohn’s explanation squares with Joel Fineman’s notion of “allegorical desire”: unsatisfied with mapping only certain aspects across concepts, allegorists “long” to add parallels and extend a figure, as in Spenser’s House of Holiness, which “from turret to dungeon” omits no “term of the correspondence between ­castle and conceptual system.” 42 Sometimes this extension betrays writers into low or “filthy” details, a charge leveled at Spenser’s Error. According to the affective model of figuration

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that Goodblatt and Fineman imply, the self-­perpetuating quality of figures reflects a structural uneasiness. Blair’s two “nauseas” therefore have similar origins: Shaftesbury’s multipage meta­phors, like Milton’s three-­hundred-­plus-­line allegory, extend a source-­target structure ­until multiple source attributes lack or appear to lack target parallels, magnifying the tension or imbalance inherent to such structures. Blair and Voltaire object in part to Milton’s subject m ­ atter, but insofar as tension within figures drives the extension that leads to unseemly content—­content that in lacking deeper meanings would have unsettled readers regardless of its impropriety—­even disgust at repre­sen­ta­tion is at some deeper level a response to figuration.

The Prob­lem of Length As the two contexts for Blair’s “nausea” imply, the stress on agency and consistency in responses to Milton’s allegory indicates a largely unspoken concern about the felt aspects of extended figures. Scholars would be wise to consider the prob­lem of length in relation to allegory, a figure typically analyzed as a ­whole and not as it unfolds across lines or pages. Addison implies the need to analyze allegory in terms of space and time. Throughout his writings on Paradise Lost, Addison applauds concision of style in all aspects. He applauds book 2’s limiting the “Animals” of Hell to “a Single Line” (3:119). He admires book 3’s speeches for their “Shortness” (3:142). Even when lauding Milton’s digressive similes, Addison hints that such figures outrun their parallels: “the Resemblance does not, perhaps, last above a Line or two, but the Poet runs on” (3:90). Beyond Milton, he praises the one-­line cameo in Habakkuk of a personified Pestilence, whom Spenser would have attended, Addison quips, with figures of Fever and Pain (3:339). He approves the brevity of classical personification: Sleep has “a short Part” in the Iliad (3:337) and Fame a “very short” part in the Aeneid (2:564). Addison’s above-­quoted remark that Sin and Death “act a large part” in the poem now starts to sound like a complaint. In his concern with length Addison finds com­pany. Praise for short allegories comes from critics as diverse as Thomas Tickell, Spence, and Blair.43 In his preface to his 1715 ­Temple of Fame, Pope warns that allegories should not be “too long, or too much clog’d with trivial Circumstances.” 4 4 Kames also opposes meta­phors with “minute Circumstances” (2:578). T ­ here are many ways to extend a meta­phor, and as Addison’s linking long allegory with Fever and Pain implies, neoclassicists

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1650–1850 saw personification in practice as clogging and bloating allegory even as personification in theory promised to condense and clarify. Johnson’s desire to limit personified action by definition or emblematic iconography therefore also enforces brevity. When he insists, “Fame tells a tale, and Victory hovers over a general” but “can do no more” (1:291), the definitions of fame and victory as much limit the extension making allegory uncomfortable as curb the agency enabling such extension. When Enlightenment critics refer to personifications as “Emblematical Persons,” their choice of terminology embeds a judgment both about the action appropriate to personification and about the length most suitable for allegory (Addison, 3:573). This preference for small-­scale figures challenges the view that inconsistency born of personified activity drove neoclassical antiallegorism. Addison’s remark on Sin and Death as “act[ing] a large part” indicates as much: does the stress fall on excess activity or the “large part” this activity occupies? Addison’s comment that Homer’s “Allegorical Persons” appear only in “short Expressions” follows so closely on his remarks about their inaction as to pre­sent extension and agency as one and the same issue (3:337). Having personifications act was a common way to extend an allegory, but it was extension, with or without personification, that prompted perceptions of inconsistency. Echoing his charge that Milton’s allegory “breaks” when Death challenges Satan, Johnson notes of Dryden’s personification-­less Absalom and Achitophel (1681) how “allegories” of “­great length w ­ ill always break” (2:136). Allegory “breaks” when no target attribute parallels a source attribute or when the target is so obscure as to appear absent, both of which become likelier the longer a source-­target structure extends. As eighteenth-­century critics knew from Aristotle’s Poetics, extent ­shaped perceived unity and clarity: In animals, and other objects, a certain magnitude is requisite, but that magnitude must be such as to pre­sent a w ­ hole easily comprehended by the eye; so, in the fable, a certain length is requisite, but that length must be such as to pre­sent a ­whole easily comprehended by the memory . . . ​the more extensive the fable, consistently with the clear and easy comprehension of the ­whole, the more beautiful it ­will be.45 Much as Aristotle, Johnson and ­others view art as unfolding in time, preferring allegories that are short enough to remember all the details. Even clear and consistent allegory can seem other­wise if it extends so far that readers lose sight of source-­target parallels. No reader “­mistake[s]” Fame in the Aeneid as a “real” character, Kames opines (2:585); at twenty-­five lines in length, Fame, even grant-

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ing her excessive agency, is not long enough for readers to see inconsistencies or to forget that t­ here is a target and that Fame is a fiction. Milton’s allegory apparently differs, its greater length and reading time frustrating comprehension and allowing readers to overlook parallels. Even had Sin and Death remained inert, inconsistencies would have been found, as they ­were in Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, as extension leads to perceived inconsistency. My argument is not that scholars identifying repre­sen­ta­tional inconsistency as driving eighteenth-­century dismissals of Sin and Death are wrong. Johnson and Addison objected to real or perceived imbalances or inconsistencies in allegory’s source-­target structures. But scholars do not take their analy­sis far enough, ignoring the affective language used. Inconsistency was a product of extension, sometimes through personification and sometimes not, so the root of the response to Sin and Death was largely the discomfort the allegory’s length inspired. Disgust, nausea, and fatigue do not naturally attend inconsistency; as their choice of terms imply, critics responded to some excess. All source-­target structures contain superfluities, unmatched attributes or broken parallels that generate a pressure initially or frequently overlooked. Brief figures mask this discomfort, but extended figures multiply real or perceived incompatibilities to the point that the tension becomes perceptible. Figures pleasing in small portions disappoint in larger servings; a meta­phor that once “enlivened,” “if drawn out,” ­will “tire” or “become disagreeable” (Blair, Rhe­toric, 1:313; Kames, Ele­ments, 2:578). As for the fatigue associated with allegory, critics surely meant the strain involved in reading any long work. But such weariness is also specific to allegory: Paradise Lost is far longer than its embedded allegory, and the poem did not receive the same complaints. So, to return to an e­ arlier question, why did neoclassicists value consistency and simplicity in figures? Consistency and simplicity helped avoid the discomfort of figuration.

Uncommon Mea­sures of Allegory How long was too long? At what point did source-­target discomfort become too much? To ask ­after thresholds may appear to ignore how such discomfort, like any other sensation, varied from critic to critic according to individual biology; as Trapp indicates, “­There is no Rule . . . ​for any determined Length in Descriptions . . . ​ but only from their being, or not being, tedious to the Readers.”  4 6 However, as we have already seen with the neoclassical rule against inconsistency, and w ­ ill

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1650–1850 see again in the case of figural types, rules and categories evolved from physical feelings and therefore imply some repeated and socially recognized experience, a recoverable threshold at which figural plea­sure turned to pain or fatigue for readers generally. That Spenser and Milton wrote allegories at all reveals long allegories as having not always unsettled readers, implying the presence of cultural ­factors beyond subjective response. Standards of acceptable length may have varied according to form (prose or verse), and since Milton’s allegory is the subject, I confine the discussion to poetry. Neoclassicists often mea­sure acceptable lengths in terms of lines; as Pope reflects, “The good ancients [Virgil] have no long descriptions, commonly not above ten lines, and scarce ever thirty.” 47 If Pope’s thirty-­line maximum captures the threshold of discomfort for allegory as well, then Milton’s three hundred plus lines obviously unsettled readers, though as Spence’s desire to limit personification to emblematic imagery implies, the ideal was perhaps closer to a single-­line allegory. Addison’s acceptable allegories are longer: Homer’s Sleep (Iliad, 14:231–291) is sixty-­two and Virgil’s Fame (Aeneid, 4:173–197) twenty-­five lines. Two other “Emblematical Persons” who win Addison’s approval, Envy and Hunger in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (2:760–782, 8:808–822), run fifteen and twenty-­two lines, respectively (3:573). Despite his declared example of a “long allegory” being Absalom and Achitophel at 1,031 lines, Johnson’s criticism of Strength in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound (speaks for 48 lines) and Death in Euripides’s Alcestis (speaks for 55 lines) places his threshold lower than Addison’s. Johnson’s rule, “Fame [can] tell a tale, and Victory [can] hover over a general . . . ​[,] but Fame and Victory can do no more,” would seem generally to encourage short personification meta­ phors. Meta­phors of less than three lines are ideal, and ­those upward of sixty lines are tolerable, but beyond that discomfort looms. Not every­one agreed on what “short” and “long” meant in allegory. As Addison would have known, Virgil’s book 4 personification of Fame (“Millions of opening Mouths to Fame belong; / . . . ​She fills the peaceful Universe with Cries”) had attracted debate over its length.48 In 1696, John Dennis applauds Virgil’s “short” personification, which, he declares, “is drawn in fifteen Lines . . . ​three of which Number describe her Person.” 49 Identifying Fame by contrast as too long at “fourteen lines,” Dryden opines that Virgil “would have contracted” the passage had he lived longer, adding, “Similitudes and [allegorical] Descriptions when drawn into an unreasonable length . . . ​ nauseate the Reader.”50 Allowing that Fame’s extent proves “displeasing to some,” Trapp in 1731 refutes Dryden and offers a third perspective:

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I do not understand why Similitudes and Descriptions are coupled [by Dryden] . . . ​a greater Length may be allowed to the last, than to the first. . . . ​ This Description, strictly speaking, consists but of Twelve [lines]: For the first Verse . . . ​is not part of the Description; which begins at Fama malum, and ­ hose Fifteen Lines are no part of the ends at Nuncia veri. And Three of T Description, but a fabulous Account of [Fame’s] Birth.51 Critics seem no more settled on what counts as a short figure than on how to count: is Virgil’s Fame twelve, fourteen, or fifteen lines long? On the one hand, the passage prob­ably received so much attention b ­ ecause Fame, by expanding in size (“Soon grows the Pygmee to Gygantic size”), dramatized the prob­lem of figural expansion.52 Similar to Milton’s Death, who also expands (he “grew tenfold / More dreadful” [2:705–06]), Fame reinforced notions about the self-­extending nature of allegory by performing that extension. On the other, Fame likely became a focus of debate b ­ ecause at stake in its length and “feel” was its very status as a figure: if long, it was an allegory; if shorter, a simile, with simile consistently defined in ­these years as a “diffused meta­phor,” a trope of intermediate length. Taken to its extreme, the logic informing the above debate reveals figural types to be determined by length and thus to some extent by the affects they occasioned. To see this extreme realized, we need only return to consider the supposed eighteenth-­century conflation of the distinct figures of meta­phor, allegory, and personification.

Functional and Affective Aspects of Figuration ­After 1660 the Re­nais­sance system of figuration authorizing Spenser’s and Milton’s allegories waned. Replacing it was the new system formalized by Addison, Kames, Johnson, and Blair assuming allegory, like personification, to immediately disclose its meanings, and like meta­phor, to offer explicit correspondences between successive source-­target ele­ments. Supposedly separate tropes of personification and allegory—­and for that ­matter simile, too—­were dissolved more or less into the category of meta­phor. For scholars this condensation of classes of figures embodies, at best, a logical ­mistake and, at worst, a conscious plot to reduce allegory to a rhetorical flourish and thereby banish extended allegories of Milton’s sort, to say nothing of allegories so extended that they become a genre, as in the case of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Pro­gress (1678). No doubt many neoclassicists did wish to subject long, ambiguous allegory to neoclassical norms of con-

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1650–1850 sistency and simplicity, but to blame this leveling of figural types on stylistic rules grants such rules too much power. As already shown, feeling helps make rules. To dismiss neoclassicists as bad historicists who apply anachronistic rules and categories to Milton’s poetry out of ignorance and self-­interest ignores that perhaps such categories felt very right to them, and that they had reasons, or rather feelings, for organ­izing figural categories as they did. Neoclassicists situated figures on a spectrum of feeling. For them many figures work like meta­phor, granted, but not all figures are meta­phor. The difference becomes largely a m ­ atter of feeling, though since this affect was hard to articulate, critics frequently used a proxy language of length. Critic John Hughes plots the spectrum: “as a Simile is but a more extended Meta­phor, so an Allegory is a kind of continu’d Simile.”53 Critics constantly define allegory as elongated meta­ phor.54 In functional terms, allegory is not extended meta­phor, any more than meta­phor is contracted simile. Where in meta­phor both target and source are apparent, in allegory the target is unstated; where in meta­phor sources and targets exist in one-­to-­one correspondence, in allegory source attributes lack exact parallels; and so on. As their guidebooks suggest, Kames and Blair knew allegory and meta­phor to differ, but this made no difference: they continued to situate meta­phor and allegory on a continuum defined by length.55 Since elongation intensifies the inherent tension in source-­target structures, and also since simile, meta­phor, and allegory all share this structure, all three had a similar tension, with each specific figure distinguished by degree of discomfort. ­Whether a figure was technically a meta­phor or allegory, the disgust or fatigue felt very much the same. The difficulty that the eigh­teenth c­ entury had of thinking allegory apart from personification was not a blunder, but rather a reflection of the basic similarity of feeling across many figures. The affective understanding of figural difference is nothing new. Although figures in e­arlier times w ­ ere arranged differently, they had fluid bound­aries. Re­nais­sance rhetoricians anticipated both neoclassical critics and modern linguists in putting figures on a continuum; for them, “no basic distinction” existed between allegory and meta­phor except length and level of detail.56 ­There was pre­ce­dent for such a view: classical rhetoricians often conflated allegory, meta­ phor, and simile ­under the head of “saying something other than what one means.” When distinctions ­were made, allegory was associated with “meta­phorical extension.” Even when admitting functional differences, Cicero and Quintilian identify meta­phor as “a shortened form of Simile” and prosopopoeia as a kind of meta­ phor.57 Figures in the eigh­teenth ­century had more to do with feeling than we

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t­ oday realize: since length dictates the time spent pro­cessing a figure, and since this duration shapes feeling, figural types ­were distinguished by affect. Scholars who impugn neoclassicists for “confusing” figures thus not only ignore the flux in figural systems over time, but in keying figural difference to functional difference also miss how functionally dissimilar figures can be associated according to their similar sensations. The tension between function and affect as the basis for figural difference persists ­after 1700. In his Lectures on Hebrew poetry (1753), Robert Lowth defines allegory as “a figure which . . . ​conceals a foreign or distant meaning.” When he elsewhere describes allegory as “a continuation of meta­phor,” with meta­phor involving “resemblance,” functional and affective definitions collide: no ­matter how far one stretches a resemblance it never becomes a hidden meaning.58 Through such definitions, Lowth finesses the prob­lem that allegory, while not meta­phor, feels like meta­phor. The same happens in Adam Smith’s Lectures on Rhe­toric (1762–1763). Having defined meta­ phor and allegory in affective terms—as “contracted allegory” and “diffused Meta­phor,” respectively—­Smith illustrates allegory using an ­imagined Spenserian rewriting of the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” meta­phor from Hamlet: Spenser “would have described fortune in a certain garb, throwing her darts.”59 Extending allegory through personification was common enough, but Smith’s notion of allegory as personification conflicts with his notion of allegory as diffused meta­phor. No amount of extension w ­ ill turn meta­phor into personification allegory without also concealing the target. Rhe­toric manuals show a similar both-­and approach to affective and functional notions of figuration. Similar to Johnson’s Dictionary sample, the example allegories in manuals look to us often like meta­phors. In 1767, Thomas Gibbons (1720–1785) cites four “allegories”—­from Prior’s “Henry and Emma” (1709), Matthew Green’s The Spleen (1737), Horace’s “ship of state” ode, and Psalm 80. Functionally, all feature source-­target pairings rooted in resemblance and extended through successive attributes, with the target sometimes identified, as Green’s lines illustrate: “At helm I make my reason sit, / My crew of passions all submit.” 60 Similarly, in his manual Priestley illustrates a “long allegory” from Richard II (“Edward’s seven sons . . . ​/ ­Were seven fair branches”), which is for us a short meta­phor of seven lines with both target (sons) and source (branches) explicit.61 Although such examples suited a notion of allegory as “continued meta­phor,” the failure to excerpt from functional allegories by Spenser, Milton, Bunyan, and Dryden would have been apparent. Priestley mentions Pilgrim’s Pro­gress but illustrates

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1650–1850 using Shakespeare; Kames mentions the Faerie Queene while offering meta­phors from Henry IV, Isaiah, and Horace (2:578, 663, 574–575). Critics wanted to pre­sent lengthy allegories as beyond categories and unthinkable, and their omission of the period’s familiar allegories supports this idea. But their se­lection also squares competing views of figuration. Kames and Priestley gave examples suitable to the affective definition while hinting at a broader range of functionally distinct allegories, allegories they trusted would be familiar to readers. As this h ­ andling in manuals implies, figures could not be fully distinguished by degrees of feeling, one degree for simile, another for meta­phor, and so on. But this affective language could register a basic threshold between figures. When observing in relation to Sin and Death that “an Allegory is a long Meta­phor, and to speak too long in Meta­phor’s [sic] must be tiresome” (382), Voltaire at first looks like another eighteenth-­century critic presenting allegory as pathological, as always overextended. But he also draws a matter-­of-­fact distinction: one knows the difference between meta­phor and allegory when it starts to feel tedious. Blair also identifies allegory as never anything but exhausting: “if the resemblance, on which the figure is founded, be long dwelt upon . . . ​we make an allegory” and “tire the reader” (1:313). However, Blair can also be taken more neutrally as distinguishing meta­phor from allegory in an era where feeling, positive or negative, marked figural difference. Voltaire and Blair can hardly be said to endorse allegory, but the negative feelings they mention may reflect less an antiallegorical agenda than a low tolerance for the source-­target tension most prominent in extended allegories.

Rethinking Critics on Allegory Recognizing the role of feeling in neoclassical categories changes how we read critical statements about allegories beyond Sin and Death. When applauding the brief appearance of Discord at Iliad 5:738–742, Addison indicates, “Such short Allegories . . . ​are not designed to be taken in the literal Sense,” but only to describe in an “entertaining Manner” (3:338). The idea of literalness as to some degree a function of length matches Johnson’s view that the longer the allegory the likelier readers m ­ istake the manifest action as literally true. Addison declares Homer’s allegories as better regarded as meta­phors, as “Poetical Phrases [rather] than allegorical Descriptions” (3:337). From a modern, functional perspective, Addison ignores how short allegory is still allegory; he acts as if the only true allegories are extended ones such as Milton’s. But according to the affective model,

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Addison uses the proxy language of length to articulate the threshold of feeling at which meta­phor becomes allegory. Meta­phors w ­ ere often defined as “contracted allegory,” so Addison’s thinking of Homer’s “short Allegories” as meta­phors, far from a contradiction or distortion, reflects a view of such figures as more or less identical except in length. Moreover, since discomfort in meta­phor apparently only increases to the point to qualify as an allegory ­after it has been drawn sixty lines or so (as Addison implies elsewhere), ­these one-­line appearances are, affectively speaking, best considered as meta­phors. Other oddities in the eighteenth-­century treatment of figures become likewise intelligible in affective terms. As scholar Steven Knapp observes, when classifying Discord in the Iliad as a meta­phor (3:338), Addison con­ve­niently ignores the more active Discord at 4:439–45 (“Discord raging bathes the purple Plain”). Knapp accuses Addison of misrepresenting Homer’s Discord in order to stabilize a distinction between (passive) meta­phor and (active) personification.62 From a functional perspective in which agency defines personification, Knapp is right; but in affective terms, the difference between meta­phor and personification has as ­little to do with agency as the difference between meta­phor and allegory has to do with an explicit target. While personified agency can extend a meta­phor and intensify its discomfort to the point of making meta­phor into allegory, discomfort can also be amplified by speech and description. By this logic, w ­ hether the Discords at Iliad 4:439–45 and 9:72–75 are meta­phors or personification meta­ phors ultimately depends on their length and therefore feel, which may or may not relate to agency. Since both passages are brief, Addison may be justified in offering one to represent the ­whole of Homer’s h ­ andling of Discord: despite differences in kind or quality, both passages feel meta­phoric. Not to say that quantitative differences always overruled qualitative ones. ­Whether a personification consisted chiefly of action, speech, or description mattered. When Addison praises Hunger and Envy, he omits Ovid’s other two figures, Sleep and Fame. If purposeful, the omission cannot be an objection over length: while they receive a comparable number of lines as Hunger and Envy, Sleep and Fame are undescribed and inert, the bulk of the description devoted to their respective lairs (11:592–615, 12:39–63). With their bodies and actions described, Hunger and Envy qualify as personifications and therefore receive mention, whereas Sleep and Fame feel like plain meta­phor, which is not Addison’s topic. Recall also the critical debate over Virgil’s Fame: Fame’s status as simile or allegory was de­cided by length, but not entirely so. Since Dennis stresses how Virgil manages personifications by “say[ing] what they do, [rather] than what they are,”

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1650–1850 his observation that just three lines describe Fame’s “Person” seems to have bearing on how Fame feels and is thus classified.63 Dennis’s emphasis on how ­little bodily description Fame receives suggests how the specific manner of an extension (person, action, or speech) inflects its categorization (meta­phor, simile, allegory). Ultimately, the way Milton’s allegory felt and was evaluated was largely but not fully dependent on length, with the precise kind of extension dampening or amplifying structural discomfort.

Coda: Reception Histories as Histories of Feeling The eighteenth-­century reception of Milton’s Sin and Death involves more than a failure to satisfy neoclassical taste. Beyond a response to immoral content, complaints about Milton’s allegory, and allegory generally, respond in some degree to structure, namely to a structural tension inherent to allegory and related figures. To claim that eighteenth-­century critics reject allegory for repre­sen­t a­ tional inconsistency and identify allegory with personification meta­phor to secure consistency is correct, but this argument neglects to answer why inconsistency bothers in the first place. As I have argued, inconsistency made allegory uncomfortable. The longer or more detailed an allegory, the likelier real or perceived inconsistencies magnify the inherent tension in source-­target structures, and the greater that tension, the likelier readers are disturbed, a discomfort that critics gestured at u ­ nder the heads of nausea, disgust, and weariness. Scholars have overlooked this affective aspect of Milton’s reception b ­ ecause they have dismissed the objections to Sin and Death, together with the rules and categories ­behind ­those objections, as misguided. But approaching neoclassical rules as guides to avoiding ill feelings reveals neoclassical poetics as more attuned to affect than previously recognized. The quality or value of a figure—­indeed, the identity of a figure—­largely depended on how it made readers feel. Recovering the feel of figuration carries implications for how scholars understand eighteenth-­century criticism. Scholars approach allegory as a structure of simultaneity, as manifesting all at once, as it no doubt is for scholars who have studied Milton’s Sin and Death, Absalom and Achitophel, or other allegories extensively and can therefore recall most of the details concurrently. From this perspective, length is irrelevant. Many readers in the 1700s did not encounter Paradise Lost in full, but rather read extracts in anthologies and miscellanies. But as the focus on length, duration, and feeling in eighteenth-­century criticism sug-

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gest, critics read the entire poem and approached Milton’s allegory as a temporal experience, as an unfolding of meaning over time. Critics treated allegory as personification meta­phor since at the level of reading and therefore feeling the two are not all that dif­fer­ent; for them, figures existed on a spectrum defined largely by feeling and often blurred together. The conclusions offered h ­ ere are not ­limited to allegory: many figures and genres that seem to be functionally dif­fer­ent may have enjoyed a closer past association for having had a similar “feel.” How would views of critical system-­making ­after 1700 change if feeling ­were given priority? What new figural groupings would emerge? Since ambiguous allegory continued to appear despite its omission from many critical taxonomies, such an inquiry would at least offer an opportunity to understand the gaps between critical categories and a­ ctual literary production. In arguing for the eighteenth-­century reception of Sin and Death as having as much to do with feeling as with rules, the approach outlined h ­ ere points to the need to combine reception study with the history of emotion. That Milton’s allegory of Sin and Death was written at all, and only ­later became the object of critical annoyance, reflects a broader shift in physiologies that awaits study. Not all allegories w ­ ere nauseating a­ fter 1700, nor had allegory always been disgusting—­ and allegory and typology as ways of reading flourished always.64 An older climate of feeling, one in which readers and critics w ­ ere less sensitive to the tension intrinsic to meta­phor and its figural relations, gave way through some confluence of historical ­factors to an affective regime in which meta­phor and allegory ­were more distressing than previously was the case. What t­ hese ­factors ­were, and how precisely the climate of feeling changed, remains to be discovered. What we do know is that scholars ­today no longer inhabit the same community of feeling and do not feel the same tension, or at least we do not allow t­ hose feelings to influence how we define and evaluate figures, as is perhaps clear from the embarrassment we feel in confronting the neoclassical response to Sin and Death. In building a cosmic causeway to Hell, Sin and Death therefore promise to help link reception study with the theory and history of affect, another kind of bridge of which we can imagine even Johnson may have approved.

Notes 1. Stephen Fallon, “Milton’s Sin and Death: The Ontology of Allegory in Paradise Lost,” En­glish Literary Re­nais­sance 17, no. 3 (1987): 329–350; John T. Shawcross, ­ entury,” in “Allegory, Typology, and Didacticism: Paradise Lost in the Eigh­teenth C

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1650–1850 Enlightening Allegory: Theory, Practice, and Contexts of Allegory in the Late Seventeenth and Eigh­teenth Centuries, ed. Kevin  L. Cope (New York: AMS Press, 1993), 41–74; Thomas E. Maresca, “Personification vs. Allegory,” in Cope, Enlightening Allegory, 21–39; Catherine Gimelli Martin, The Ruins of Allegory: Paradise Lost and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 163, 11; and Esther Yu, “From Judgment to Interpretation: Eigh­teenth C ­ entury Critics of Milton’s Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 53 (2012): 181–208, 187. 2. The notion of eighteenth-­century criticism as uniformly “neoclassical” has been long refuted; see Howard D. Weinbrot, Augustus Caesar in “Augustan” E ­ ngland (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1978). However, I purposefully use “neoclassical” in this article to recuperate neoclassicism as a school invested in figural affects. 3. Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent En­glish Poets (1779–1781), 4 vols., ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006), 1:291. Hereafter all citations appear in text. For Edmund Burke on Death, see A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), ed. James T. Boulton (London: Routledge, 1959), 59. 4. The trope-­ figure distinction was inconsistently observed in the eigh­ teenth ­century, and I also use “figure” and “figuration” to encompass both tropes and figures. 5. Joel Fineman, “The Structure of Allegorical Desire,” in Allegory and Repre­sen­ta­ tion, ed. Stephen  J. Greenblatt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 40. 6. George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Meta­phor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 4. 7. Peter Crisp, “Allegory: Conceptual Meta­phor in History,” Language and Lit­er­a­ ture 10, no. 1 (2001): 5–19, 7. 8. Voltaire, Essay on Epick Poetry (1727), in The Complete Works of Voltaire, vol. 3b, ed. David Williams (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1996), 384. Hereafter all citations appear in text. 9. Paradise Lost, in The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen  M. Fallon (New York: Modern Library, 2007), 2:689–690, 699–707, 711–712. Hereafter all citations appear in text. 10. Donald F. Bond, ed., The Spectator, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 3:336. Hereafter all citations appear in text. 11. Addison praises allegory in Spectator, 391 and 421. For Addison’s allegories, see Spectator, 61, 63, and 183. 12. Yu, “From Judgment to Interpretation,” 187. 13. Johnson does praise allegory. In Rambler, 121, he hails allegory as one of the most “pleasing vehicles of instruction” (The Rambler, in The Yale Edition of the Works

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of Samuel Johnson, vol. 4, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969], 285). See also Bernard L. Einbond, Samuel Johnson’s Allegory (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 34–44; and Jason John Gulya, “Johnson on Milton’s Allegorical Persons: Understanding Eighteenth-­ Century Attitudes ­toward Allegory,” Literary Imagination 18, no. 1 (2016): 1–16. 14. Joseph Spence, Polymetis (London: R. Dodsley, 1747), 304. 15. For more discussion of Milton’s Chaos, see John Rumrich, “Milton’s God and the ­Matter of Chaos,” PMLA 110, no. 5 (1995): 1035–1046; and Martin, Ruins of Allegory, 163–164, 194–200. 16. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhe­toric and Belles Lettres, 2 vols., ed. Harold F. Harding (1783; Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), 2:425; and Henry Home, Lord Kames, Ele­ments of Criticism (1762), 2 vols., ed. Peter Jones (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), 2:663. Hereafter all Blair and Kames citations appear in text. Thomas Warton, Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (1762; New York: Haskell House, 1969), 2:96, 95. 17. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the En­glish Language, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (London: W. Strahan, 1755–1756), entry for allegory; Martin, Ruins of Allegory, 11. 18. Maresca, “Personification vs. Allegory,” 25; Einbond, Samuel Johnson’s Allegory, 42; and Jason Crawford, Allegory and Enchantment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 35. 19. Martin, Ruins of Allegory, 162. 20. Brian Vickers, Classical Rhe­toric in En­glish Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1970), 57, 74. 21. For one analy­sis, see Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 22. See Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhe­toric (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 320–322. For Blair, meta­phors tend to have “more spirit and force” than similes (Rhe­toric, 1:299). 23. [Joseph Warton], An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope (London: M. Cooper, 1756), 42, 148, 202. 24. See Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 59, and James Paterson, A Complete ­Commentary . . . ​on Milton’s Paradise Lost (London: R. Walker, 1744), 225. Addison refers to Milton’s description as “full of Sublime Ideas” (Bond, Spectator, 3:120), but he does not declare the allegory “sublime.” 25. John Dryden, “Dedication to the Æneis” (1697), in The Works of John Dryden, vol. 5: Poems, ed. William Frost (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 308; Joseph Trapp, Lectures on Poetry (1742; New York: Garland, 1970), 33. 26. Denise Gigante, Taste: A Literary History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 17. 27. See David Hume, A Treatise of ­Human Nature (1738), ed. L.  A. Selby-­Bigge, 2nd ed., rev. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 471. 28. Spence, Polymetis, 304.

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1650–1850 29. Steven Knapp, Personification and the Sublime (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 57. 30. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790), trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 180. 31. For figurative language as arousing feeling, see P. W. K. Stone, The Art of Poetry 1750–1820: Theories of Poetic Composition and Style in the Late Neo-­classic and Early Romantic Periods (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967), 58–76; and Vickers, In Defence of Rhe­toric, 296–297, 304–305. 32. For Kames, “a meta­phor drawn out at any length . . . ​overstrain[s] the mind” (Ele­ ments, 2:578); and for Blair, if a figure “be long dwelt upon” we “tire the reader” (Rhe­toric, 1:313). 33. Isaac Watts, The Improvement of the Mind; or, A Supplement to the Art of Logick, 2nd ed. (London: J. Brackstone, 1743), 206. 34. David Hume, The History of ­England, from the Invasion of Julius Cæsar to the Revolution in 1688, New ed., 8 vols. (London: A. Millar, 1763), 5:509. 35. Meta­phor for Lakoff and Turner is a “tool for understanding our world” (More Than Cool Reason, xii). 36. Chanita Goodblatt and Joseph Glicksohn briefly discuss this tension in “Discordia Concors and Bidirectionality: Embodied Cognition in John Donne’s Songs and Sonnets,” Poetics ­Today 38, no. 1 (2017): 163–188, 166, 168. 37. Mark Turner, Death Is the M ­ other of Beauty: Mind, Meta­phor, Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 81. 38. Joseph Priestley, A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism, ed. Vincent M. Bevilacqua and Richard Murphy (1773; Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), 191. 39. See Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., ed., Mixing Meta­phor (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2016), esp. Gibbs’s introduction and Cornelia Müller’s chapter, “Why Mixed Meta­ phors Make Sense.” 40. Thomas Flatman, “The Preface to the Reader,” Poems and Songs, 3rd ed. (London: Benjamin Tooke, 1682), A5r. 41. Chanita Goodblatt and Joseph Glicksohn, “Bidirectionality and Meta­phor: An Introduction,” Poetics T ­ oday 38, no. 1 (2017): 1–14, 11. 42. Fineman, “Structure of Allegorical Desire,” 40; Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (1964; Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2012), 191. 43. See Blair, Rhe­toric, 1:313; Spence, Polymetis, 304; and Thomas Tickell, Spectator, 595, in Bond, Spectator, 5:36. 44. Alexander Pope, “The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems,” in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, vol. 2, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954), 243. 45. Thomas Twining, trans., Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry (London: Payne and Son, 1789), 80.

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46. Joseph Trapp, The Works of Virgil . . . ​with Large Explanatory Notes, 3 vols. (London: J. Brotherton, 1731), 2:238n. 47. Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men (1820), 2 vols., ed. James  M. Osborn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 1:168. 48. John Dryden, trans., Virgil’s Aeneid (1697), ed. Frederick M. Keener (New York: Penguin, 1997), 95, lines 263, 266. 49. John Dennis, Remarks on a Book Entituled Prince Arthur (London: S. Heyrick and R. Sare, 1696), 127, 128. 50. Dryden, “Dedication to the Æneis,” 307–308. 51. Trapp, Works of Virgil, 2:237–38n. 52. Dryden, Virgil’s Aeneid, 95, line 255. 53. John Hughes, “An Essay on Allegorical Poetry,” in The Works of Mr.  Edmund Spenser, 2 vols. (London: Jacob Tonson, 1715), 1:xxix. 54. For examples, see Hughes, “Essay,” xxix (“Allegory is a kind of continu’d Simile”); John Newbery, The Art of Poetry on a New Plan, 2 vols. (London: J. Newbery, 1762), 2:4 (allegory is “extended . . . ​simile”); Priestley, Course of Lectures, 194 (“allegories are continued meta­phors”); and Blair, Rhe­toric, 1:295 (allegory is “a continued Meta­phor”). 55. For Kames, in meta­phor “one t­ hing [is] figured to be another,” whereas in allegory “the subject represented is kept out of view” (Ele­ments, 2:572); for Blair meta­phor “explains itself by the words that are connected with it,” while allegory “stand[s] more disconnected” (Rhe­toric, 1:316). 56. Mindele Anne Treip, Allegorical Poetics and the Epic: The Re­nais­sance Tradition to Paradise Lost (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1994), 25. 57. Crisp, “Allegory,” 7; Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, 5 vols., trans. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 3:429, 431, 433. 58. Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1753), 2 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1787), 1:214, 215, 106. 59. Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhe­toric and Belles Lettres, ed. J. C. Bryce (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), 30. 60. Thomas Gibbons, Rhe­toric; or, A View of Its Principal Tropes and Figures (London: J. and W. Oliver, 1767), 55–58. 61. Priestley, Course of Lectures, 194. 62. Knapp, Personification and the Sublime, 58–59. 63. Dennis, Remarks, 128. 64. For the habitual nature of allegorical and typological reading in the time period, see Paul J. Korshin, Typologies in ­England, 1650–1820 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1982).

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THE WORLDLINESS OF EDWARD YOUNG AND THE META­PHORICS OF GEORGIAN PATRONAGE JACOB SIDER JOST

Rather a paradoxical specimen, if you observe him narrowly: a sort of cross between a sycophant and a psalmist; a poet whose imagination is alternately fired by the “Last Day” and by a creation of peers, who fluctuates between rhapsodic applause of King George and rhapsodic applause of Jehovah. —­George Eliot, “Worldliness and Otherworldliness: The Poet Young” He said . . . ​that ­there ­were very fine t­ hings in his Night Thoughts, though you could not find twenty lines together without some extravagance. —­James Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LLD

A nd so yet another essay on the poetry of Edward Young begins with an invoca-

tion of George Eliot. Her essay, “Worldliness and Otherworldliness,” which appeared in the Westminster Review in 1857, executes a critical auto-­de-­fé with few parallels in the history of En­glish lit­er­a­ture. Eliot resurrects Young, outlining his biography and summarizing his works for Victorian readers a ­century removed from his lifetime. She does so in order to immolate Young’s achievement as a poet and his character as a ­human being: “The religious and moral spirit of Young’s poetry is low and false; and we think it of some importance to show that the ‘Night Thoughts’ are the reflex of a mind in which the higher ­human sympathies ­were inactive.”1 Eliot’s Young is a venal hypocrite, a “pious and moralizing rake” who

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fawned on patrons and begged for clerical preferment from the king’s mistress (340). His moral faults are matched by his “radical insincerity as a poetic artist” and the “thin and artificial texture of his wit,” which in turn make him at once “inopportunely witty” and “prone to bombastic absurdity” (366). No negative review that aspires to an enduring audience can afford to be too convincing; if Keats ­were r­ eally as bad a poet as John Gibson Lockhart claimed, the latter’s foolish sarcasms about the “driveling idiocy of Endymion” would have been written on w ­ ater.2 “Worldliness and Otherworldliness” suffers from a misfortune of this kind. B ­ ecause of the nineteenth-­century shift in literary taste that Eliot both enacts and indexes, her all-­too-­successful denunciation must now find its audience, both unfit and few, in scholars of Young and mid-­eighteenth-­century poetry whom temperament and self-­interest incline t­oward critical leniency or even appreciation.3 Yet so lancing is Eliot’s critique that it is seldom passed over in silence. Young’s champions have mounted vari­ous defenses: his definitive modern biographer, Harold Forster, has sought to refute the charges of venality and hy­poc­ risy, while literary critics have found in Night Thoughts an epic of Anglican apol­o­ getics, a “rhe­toric of otherworldliness” in the ser­vice of Christian exhortation, an ingenious “false sublime” of rhetorical arabesque unmoored from character and ­human selfhood, a fideistic rejection of both the natu­ral and h ­ uman worlds, and a harbinger of the Blakean and German Romantic counter-­Enlightenment and of “the emerging cult of sensibility and sincerity” that was ­later to damn him.4 In this essay, I abandon such defenses. I propose a new critical assessment of Young that embraces Eliot’s premise: Young was indeed worldly. He belonged to and addressed his poetry to the stratum of En­glish society that was known metonymically as “the world”: the elite at the summit of the hierarchies of rank, wealth, and education. But I reject Eliot’s conclusion. Far from compromising his achievement as a poet, Young’s worldliness is central to it.5 As a poet and as a clergyman, Young was obsessed with and motivated by the social, economic, and intellectual exchanges that connected client to patron and author to public in Georgian E ­ ngland. Innumerable place seekers and courtiers in Young’s time ­were worldly in their lives. Young was also worldly in his art. Young’s poetry is worldly in that it takes the poet’s economic and social situation—­intimate with rank and power yet dependent on patronal largesse—as one of its central themes. His series of satires, The Universal Passion (1725–1728), reduces all h ­ uman frailty to “love of fame,” that is, dependence on the approval of ­others. Young universalizes the poet’s plight as the ­human condition tout court.

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1650–1850 His dramas are allegories of patronage that explore fraught relationships of unequal power and mutual obligation: Busiris (1719) depicts a loyal general who at length rebels against a tyrannical king, while The Revenge (1721) tells the story of a trusted servant who resents, and fi­nally avenges, a long-­ago insult at the hands of his master. Young’s poetry was worldly; this does not mean that it was secular. Just the opposite: in his greatest poem, Night Thoughts, Young draws meta­phor­ ically on the milieu of Hanoverian worldliness to make the otherworldly comprehensible.6 He lived in an era when the geo­graph­i­cal and cosmic reach of the En­glish imagination was expanding vertiginously while the social imaginary remained on an intimate h ­ uman scale. Young uses meta­phors derived from the precariousness and risk of the poet’s social position to depict the uncanniness of a universe whose temporal and spatial scale is inhumanly large. This argument proceeds below in two stages. I open with a compressed socioeconomic account of Young’s life and works up to 1742, placed within their late Stuart and Hanoverian context. I turn then to a reading of Night Thoughts (1742–1745), the work in which Young most forcefully deploys meta­phors derived from the social and economic situation of the poet to articulate his theological and cosmic themes.

“The Muses Friend Is Pleased the Muse Should Press” Young’s lifetime, which ran from the reign of Charles II to that of George III, witnessed a steady expansion in the spatial and geo­graph­i­cal imagination of En­glish culture. U ­ nder the Act of Union, a unitary state centered on London expanded to comprise the ­whole of ­Great Britain as well as a growing archipelago of colonies and commercial holdings beyond. The growing global reach of that state—­ colonial, imperial, and commercial—­found expression in imaginative texts such as Dryden’s Amboyna, Behn’s Oroonoko, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and its sequels, and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Even more saliently for Night Thoughts, Newton and his successors continued the revolution, begun a ­century before by Copernicus and Galileo, that transformed the Eu­ro­pean sense of the scale of the universe, making pos­si­ble a new cosmic sublime in the works of Milton and ­later Young himself.7 Yet this pro­cess of spatial expansion occurred in a social and cultural world that remained stubbornly small. Though the population of London at the turn of the eigh­teenth c­ entury was enormous, on the order of half a million, the republic

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of letters was tiny by comparison. To a striking extent, the major poets and playwrights of the era—­John Dryden, William Congreve, Mathew Prior, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, James Thomson, Edward Young, to list no more—­form an overlapping network of first-­and second-­degree connections both with each other and with an equally short list of noblemen, politicians, clergy, and other patrons (a sampling: Harley, Bolingbroke, Dodington, Bathurst, Walpole, Lansdowne, and Queen Caroline).8 In many cases, men of letters originated, as Young did, from the socially connected gentry and clerical elite that populated the En­glish public schools and universities and also provided the nation with its politicians, courtiers, beneficed clergy, civil servants, pamphlet writers, and military officers. It was not merely the case that the world of poetry was a small one, something that arguably remains true t­oday. The network of poets was densely interwoven with the networks of dramatists, clerics, courtiers, members of parliament, and other cultural and po­liti­cal elites. Addison was a secretary of state and Steele a member of Parliament; Prior was a diplomat and Defoe (certainly) and Aphra Behn (prob­ably) ­were government spies. By the time of Young’s death, in 1765, the print sphere of En­glish letters rested on a larger base, including more provincial, Scottish, American, female, and nonelite authors. Samuel Johnson, the son of a provincial bookseller who rebuffed Lord Chesterfield and found his most enduring patronage relationship in the haute bourgeois domestic ­house­hold of Mr. and Mrs. Thrale, is representative. But at the outset of Young’s ­career it was still comparatively small. Poetry was impor­tant in this world—it could win a pension or make a name—­but in order to flourish it depended not primarily on the print market but rather on personal relationships.9 Though a few poets w ­ ere rich (Pope made a fortune from poetry, one of a very small number of poets in any era to do so), for most proximity to the ­great was no guarantee of security. And even when poets w ­ ere in comfortable material circumstances, as Young was his w ­ hole life, their usual stance was one of dependence on ­those more prosperous and power­ful. Edward Young’s ­father (also educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford; also ordained into holy ­orders in ­middle age; also enabled by his skill as a writer and by noble patronage to rise to the comfortable upper reaches, though not the summit, of the pyramid of Anglican preferment; also named Edward Young) belonged in the heart of this world, and the poet was to the manor born.10 ­There is no evidence that Young lisped in numbers; his first published verses date to 1711, the year he turned twenty-­eight, and his first separately published poem, a panegyric on the Peace of Utrecht written as a verse epistle to the

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1650–1850 playwright and Tory nobleman Lord Lansdowne, dates to his thirtieth year. But the Epistle to Lord Lansdowne demonstrates a confident fluency in addressing the po­liti­cal establishment (Lansdowne had been created a Tory peer the year before). Young begins the poem, and his c­ areer as a poet, not just by addressing Lansdowne as a patron, but also by offering two extended meta­phors that theorize the patron-­poet relationship: When Rome, my Lord, in her full Glory shone, And ­great Augustus rul’d the Globe alone, While suppliant Kings in all their Pomp and State, Swarm’d in his Courts, and throng’d his Palace Gate; Horace did oft the Mighty Man detain, And sooth’d his Breast with no ignoble Strain . . . ­Pardon, if I his Freedom dare pursue, Who know no Want of Caesar, finding You; The Muses Friend is pleas’d the Muse should press Through circling Crowds, and L­ abour for Access, That partial to his Darling he may prove, And shining Throngs for her Approach remove, To all the World industrious to proclaim His Love of Arts, and boast the glorious Flame.11 Writing a generation before Oliver Goldsmith was to pop­u­lar­ize the idea that “the Augustan Age of ­England” might be dated to “the reign of Queen Anne, or some years before that period,” Young claims the mantle of Horace and addresses the queen’s newly created peer as a con­temporary Augustus.12 Young layers his classical conceit between con­temporary geography and biblical typology, anachronistically making Augustus the ruler of the “globe” and modeling the relationship between the poet and the emperor whose “Breast” he “sooth’d” on that of David and Saul.13 But Young then turns from history to an eroticized meta­phor, imagining the poet-­patron encounter as that of a female “Muse” pressing her way through “Throngs” of callers to access her “Friend,” who f­avors her as his “Darling” and demonstrates publicly his flaming “Love” by ostentatiously moving ­others out of the way to open her approach. The image is of a levee, in which clients compete for their host’s attention in front of him and each other. In Young’s doubled allegory, patron and poet first perform elevated historical roles that both would know well from their shared classical education, and then enter into an extravagant dyadic pageant: a­ fter playing Augustus and Horace, patron and poet take a turn as Antony and Cleopatra. The Muse pushes her way through a

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crowd that is both her audience and her competition, and finds her erotic assertiveness rewarded by her lover’s exhibitionistic display of ­favor. In what are literally the opening lines of Young’s c­ areer as a published poet, he imagines the print sphere as the site where this historical roleplay and affective display take place. “The Muses Friend,” a­ fter all, is pleased the muse should “press” her claims—in the printing ­house as well as the reception room. From the outset, the poet’s calling for Young is relational: it entails finding a place in a social world in which readers, patrons, and competing poets are all as known and vis­i­ble to each other as the callers at an aristocratic levee. This is the world to which Young belongs, by birth, by education, and by rights as an Oxford fellow (and, l­ater, as beneficed and pensioned clergyman). But b ­ ecause it is not only relational but also public, poetry is risky, even transgressive: the hermaphroditic poet must be at once feminine, an alluring muse, and assertive, pressing her claims ­under the eyes and through the bodies of the crowd in hopes that the patron w ­ ill welcome her. The poet’s extravagant appeals risk embarrassment and rejection. He or she is a social amphibian, the insider who again and again must take the risk of being an outsider.14 To a striking extent, Young’s entire subsequent ­career and oeuvre can be understood in the terms created by ­these opening lines. As Dustin Griffin has well demonstrated, Young was “rewarded by private, state, and ecclesiastical patronage virtually all his writing life,” finding patrons in both the Stuart Anne and the Hanoverian George II, both the Tory Lansdowne and the Whig Walpole (and among ­others).15 Young’s works are not lacking in straightforward cele­brations of the patron-­poet compact: At this the Muse s­ hall Kindle, and Aspire: My breast, O Walpole, glows with grateful fire: The streams of Royal bounty, turn’d by Thee, Refresh the dry domains of Poesy.16 As Adam Rounce points out, even Young’s late Conjectures Concerning Original Composition, usually read as a proto-­Romantic valorization of the autonomy and originality of the author, celebrates patronage as the economy in which talented authors flourish: “Virgil and Horace owed their divine talents to Heaven; their immortal works to men; thank Maecenas, and Augustus for them.”17 Yet Young’s insecurity about the publicity and pos­si­ble transgressiveness of the poet’s role is never far away. In his preface to The Love of Fame, the sequence of seven linked satires (originally issued separately, but with the shared title The Universal Passion) that are dedicated to a gallery of noblemen and that secured Young his

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1650–1850 two-­hundred-­pound royal pension, the poet applies Plato’s “fable of the birth of love” (narrated by Diotima in the Symposium) to “modern Poetry”: Poetry . . . ​is the son of the Goddess Poverty, and the god Riches: he has from his ­father his daring Genius; his Elevation of thought; his building ­castles in the Air; his prodigality; his neglect of t­ hings serious and useful; his vain opinion of his own merit; and his affectation of preference, and distinction. From his ­mother he inherits his indigence, which makes him a constant beggar of favours; that importunity with which he begs; his flattery; his servility; his fear of being despis’d, which is inseparable from him.18 In adapting the fable from love to poetry, Young darkens Plato’s original considerably; Diotima had described love, the son of “Resource” and “Poverty,” as needy, yet also clever, brave, and “a lifelong lover of wisdom.”19 Moreover, Young reprises from the Epistle to Lord Lansdown fifteen years e­ arlier his conception of the poet as a hybrid, amphibious being, poised between wealth and poverty, security and indigence. Poets come in for many further lashes over the course of The Universal Passion. Young’s satirist shows an alert, damning self-­awareness throughout, as at the end of satire II: O thou myself! abroad our counsels roam, And, like ill husbands, take no care at home. Thou, too, art wounded with the common dart, And love of Fame lyes throbbing at thy heart.20 “O thou myself!” The poet’s autoapostrophe opens a rueful admission that in a world full of satiric targets—­prodigals, gluttons, coffee­house politicians, flatterers, freethinkers, misers, braggart soldiers, coquettes, shrews, bluestockings, tipplers, and gamblers—­there is no figure more fallibly ­human than the poet himself. The third satire of the Love of Fame points to another feature of the patron-­ poet relationship that runs through Young’s thought: its subtext of hostility and aggression: Most manfully besiege the patron’s gate, And oft repuls’d, as oft attack the ­great, With painful art, and application warm, And take at last some l­ ittle place by storm.21 The punning phrase “­little place” denigrates at once the patron’s gift (some minor office or living) and the patron’s estate itself (the gate, so manfully besieged, turns out to have nothing much ­behind it). The conceit of the patronage-­

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seeking poet as an Achaean warrior on the fields of Ilium reappears in Night Thoughts: “Twice told the period spent on stubborn Troy  / Court-­favor, yet untaken, I besiege.”22 In a striking sequence of similes from satire IV, Young first imagines the “Muse” as a homeless and indebted prostitute trying to score gin, and then describes poetic composition as a maimed body’s ineffectual attempt to recover ­wholeness: What foe to verse without compassion hears, What cruel prose man can refrain from tears, When the poor Muse, for less than half-­a-­crown, A prostitute on ­every bulk in town, With other whores undone, though not in print, Clubs credit for Geneva at the Mint? . . . All other trades demand, verse-­makers beg: A dedication is a wooden leg.23 Once more precariously dependent in a London underworld redolent of Pope’s Dunciad and Johnson’s Life of Savage, poetry is a vulnerable and feminized body for sale, as well as an attempt to compensate for a crippling disability. Where the Epistle to Lord Lansdown drew on the shared classical, biblical, and courtly vocabulary of patron and poet, Young’s meta­phors ­here in The Universal Passion instead imagine poetry as part of the urban London of his day. This is not to say that Young’s satires are merely of their time, a poet’s-­eye view of 1720s E ­ ngland. The Universal Passion has roots in Horace and Juvenal, in Ecclesiastes and Job, in Platonic and Christian contemptus mundi. But it proj­ects ­these antecedents through the lens of Young’s own world and experience. Young turns the Georgian poet into Everyman. A ­century before, Milton had seen the love of fame as elite, exclusive, “That last infirmity of Noble mind”; for Young it is The Universal Passion.24

Poor Pensioner on the Bounties of an Hour: Meta­phors of Patronage in Night Thoughts I began my so­cio­log­i­cal sketch above by contrasting the vertiginously expanding world of Restoration and eighteenth-­century geography and cosmology with the enduringly ­human scale of the period’s elite economic, po­liti­cal, and literary milieux. I then argued that Young, with some justice, insists in his poetry on the

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1650–1850 poet’s marginal place within the elite world, and in so d ­ oing makes the poet represent the uncertain position of humanity as a w ­ hole. T ­ hese three features of Young’s mentality—­the infinite cosmos, the small social world, the poet’s plight—­ come together forcefully in Night Thoughts, which appeared in a sequence of nine Nights over the course of 1742–1745. Young’s brief in Night Thoughts is to re­orient his readers from the everyday world to the vast space of the universe and the infinite timescale of the immortal h ­ uman soul, and he accomplishes this goal through meta­phors derived from the economy of poetry. For pilgrim and poet alike, this world is not home. Night Thoughts contains many quite literal discussions of patronage, poetry as a ­career and economic activity, and as in The Universal Passion the poet’s ambition for fame is ruefully acknowledged as a paradigmatic case of fallen ­human concupiscence: lorenzo! to recriminate is Just. Fondness for Fame is Avarice of Air. I grant the Man is vain, who writes for Praise. Praise no Man e’er deserv’d, who sought no more.25 Complaints about patronal neglect in Night Thoughts are not, as hostile critics have supposed, signs of hy­poc­risy or bad faith but rather invitations to self-­ awareness: “Court-­Favour, yet untaken, I besiege; / Ambition’s ill-­judg’d Effort to be rich. / Alas! Ambition makes my L­ ittle, less” (4:67–69). But Young has woven themes of patronage and the imagery of the Hanoverian social world more deeply into the fabric of Night Thoughts. This is true from the very beginning; the first night of the poem, titled “The Complaint,” opens with a five-­line prosopopoeia of Sleep: Tir’d nature’s sweet Restorer, balmy Sleep! He, like the World, his ready visit pays, Where Fortune smiles, the wretched he forsakes; Swift on his downy pinions flies from Woe, And lights on Lids unsully’d with a Tear. In this description (which seems at first to be an apostrophe, addressing sleep like a muse, before tacking to the third-­person pronoun at the beginning of the second line), Young first personifies “Sleep” as a “sweet Restorer” of “tir’d nature.” But in the simile of the second line, we are once more, as in the Epistle to Lord Lansdown, in the bedroom or salon of a nobleman. Young imagines sleep as “the World,” that is, the round of social calls and visits. Like a client appearing at a nobleman’s or ­woman’s levee, sleep visits ­those on whom “Fortune smiles,” while

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leaving unvisited the unfortunate “wretched.” Young emphasizes this simile with a densely alliterative line whose contrasting hemistichs repeat the same sequence of three consonants (W­here Fortune smiles, the wretched he forsakes). Taken as aw ­ hole, the opening period is almost Shakespearian in its meta­phorical extravagance: in a mere five lines Young combines personification, simile, and meta­phor to imagine sleep as a balmy restorer, then a tactically prudent social caller, then a swift yet pillowy bird. But at its center is a simile that understands “Sleep,” a universal fact of animal life, in terms of elite social etiquette.26 A l­ittle over sixty lines l­ater, Young offers a meta­phor that understands time itself as a patron, modeled on the king who had granted Young a literal two hundred pounds annually in 1726: “And can Eternity belong to me, / Poor Pensioner on the bounties of an Hour?” (1:65–66). The lines that immediately follow turn to an extended and extravagant reflection on the unique place of humanity in God’s creation: How poor? how rich? how abject? how august? How complicat? how wonderful is Man? How passing won­der He, who made him such? Who center’d in our make such strange Extremes? From dif­fer­ent Natures, marvelously mixt, Connection exquisite of distant Worlds! Distinguisht Link in Being’s endless Chain! Midway from Nothing to the Deity! Tho’ sully’d, and dishonour’d, still Divine! Dim Miniature of Greatness absolute! An Heir of Glory! a frail Child of Dust! Helpless Immortal! Insect infinite! A Worm! a God! I ­tremble at myself, And in myself am lost! At home a Stranger, Thought wanders up and down, surpriz’d, aghast, And wond’ring at her own: How Reason reels? (1:67–83) “How poor? how rich?”: in the preface to The Universal Passion, discussed above, the fruit of the marriage of poverty and riches is poetry. ­Here it is “Man” itself. Nine years ­earlier, Pope’s Essay on Man had given classic Augustan expression to the ancient topos of the g­ reat chain of being: “Then, in the scale of reas’ning life, ’tis plain  / ­There must be, somewhere, such a rank as Man.”27 Young’s version replaces Pope’s equanimity with a long train of fretful oxymora, whipsawing “Man” between nothingness and deity, glory and dust, worminess and godhood.

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1650–1850 Humanity stands in the same marginal and amphibious relation to his fellow reasoning beings (God and the angels) that the poet does to his own social world of patrons and readers. In Night 6, Young seeks to stir his interlocutor, Lorenzo, with a foretaste of the astronomical pleasures of the blessed afterlife. Giving the traditional conception of mankind’s posthumous state as “heaven” a decidedly Newtonian twist, the poet allures Lorenzo by promising him that he ­will “Behold an Infinite of floating Worlds” and “Divide the Crystal Waves of Ether pure, / In endless Voyage, without Port” (6:178–180). Beatific vision turns into astronomic observation and space travel. Young follows this prospect with a series of comparisons that convey the vastness of the universe: The least Of t­ hese disseminated Orbs, how ­Great? ­Great as they are, what Numbers T ­ hese surpass Huge, as Leviathan, to that small Race, ­Those twinkling Multitudes of ­little Life, He swallow’s unperceiv’d? Stupendous ­These! Yet what are ­these Stupendous to the Whole? As Particles, as Atoms ill-­perceiv’d; As circulating Globules in our Veins; So vast the Plan: Fecundity Divine! (6:180–189) That is to say: the smallest star is huge, but small stars are to big stars (the sun?) as plankton is to a whale—­yet big stars are, in the scale of the universe as a ­whole, as small as atoms or blood cells. The larger term of each pairing becomes the smaller term in the comparison that follows, inflating exponentially the scale that the reader’s imagination must comprehend. And yet, with that imagination stretched across the span of the universe, Young has one more analogical multiplier in store: Yet this the Least in Heaven. What This to that illustrious Robe He wears, Who tost this Mass of Won­ders from his Hand, A Specimen, an Earnest of his Power? ’Tis, to that Glory, whence all Glory flows, As the Mead’s meanest Flowret to the Sun, Which gave it Birth. (6:191–197) If the sun is an atom compared to the universe, the universe is, compared to God’s robe, as a wildflower compared to the sun. On the one hand, we are h ­ ere closer to the inconceivable, inhuman scale of Carl Sagan or Neil deGrasse Tyson’s

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Cosmos than to the g­ rand but comprehensible dimensions of Dante’s mountain of Purgatory or Satan’s spear in Paradise Lost. Yet, at the moment that Young has racked his reader’s sense of scale past the point of endurance he returns from the dimensions of the starry cosmos to the image of a ruler sitting in state, clad in a “Robe,” disbursing munificence (the entire created universe, of which our world is just an infinitesimal part) with an open hand. Just as sleep is a social caller and time disburses pensions, Young conceives of the universe itself in terms that recall the “royal bounty” of The Instalment. Of course, the image of a kingly ­creator God sitting in berobed state is biblical and Miltonic, not an eighteenth-­ century invention. But references to “Ermin,” the “Exchequer,” and “Ribbon” in the succeeding pages of Night 6 make it clear that Young imagines kings and courts in locally eighteenth-­century terms (6:307, 337–338). Young shows intimate knowledge of the ­great world, its status symbols and power dynamics. He incorporates its imagery into his poetic practice, as a term of analogy and a vehicle of meta­phor. Sleep, death, and God are all understood as parts of the patronage economy—­and Young claims the position of the poet as the place of all mankind.

Conclusion: The Extravagance of Edward Young At the beginning of this essay I cited the critical assessment of Young’s sometime friend Samuel Johnson, whose opinion that the reader of Night Thoughts “could not find twenty lines together without some extravagance” was solicited by the more fervent Young admirer James Boswell during Johnson and Boswell’s 1773 tour of Scotland.28 I have followed in Johnson’s footsteps, repeatedly calling Young “extravagant” in the argument above. Etymologically, extravagance means “wandering beyond, straying,” and as such aptly describes both the cosmic range of Young’s imagination and the audacity of his poetic tropes. Moreover, beginning around the turn of the eigh­teenth ­century, extravagance takes on its still-­current meaning of prodigality, wastefulness, and unnecessary expenditure. (The OED first rec­ords this pecuniary meaning for “extravagant” from The Spectator [1711] and for “extravagance” from John Arbuthnot’s ­Tables of Ancient Coins [1727].) Shaun Irlam has recently claimed Young as a poet of “enthusiasm,” a term whose eighteenth-­century meaning spans the realms of religion and poetry; in describing Young as extravagant, I postulate a parallel exchange in his works between the poetic and the economic spheres.29

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1650–1850 Young was not literally extravagant—in fact, his prudent management of the fruits of a successful ­career in poetry and the church allowed him to leave his son Frederick a handsome estate—­but even sympathetic readers may concur with Johnson that he sometimes lets his pen run away with him. “Death urg’d his deadly siege,” to choose but a single instance, is a line whose redundant adjective Pope or Johnson might have reconsidered on revision (6:24). And even his biographer and stout defender Harold Forster has attributed to Young a “notorious lack of discretion” in at least some of his dealings with patrons.30 Young’s control of En­glish verse and his strategic acumen in fashioning himself as a poet may well have been inferior to Pope’s. Whose ­were not? Young’s achievement does not lie in the economy of his meta­phors or his c­ areer. Instead, it lies in his extravagant synthesis of the two, by which he imagines the poet on the periphery of the Hanoverian elite as the emblem of humanity’s place in the Newtonian cosmos and the chain of being.

Notes For helpful conversations on eighteenth-­century science and the poetic imagination, I wish to thank Laura Yoder, Courtney Weiss Smith, and Carol Ann Johnston. 1. George Eliot, “Worldliness and Otherworldliness: The Poet Young,” in The Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (New York: Columbia, 1963), 358. 2. John Gibson Lockhart, “Cockney School of Poetry IV,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 3, no. 17 (August 1818): 519–524, 519. 3. For the authoritative history of Young’s eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century reputation, which began to decline ­after 1800 and was already at an ebb when Eliot administered the coup de grace, see Henry C. Pettit, “The En­glish Rejection of Young’s Night Thoughts,” University of Colorado Studies in Language and Lit­ er­a­ture 6 (1957): 23–38. 4. The standard biography of Young is Harold Forster, Edward Young: The Poet of Night Thoughts, 1683–1765 (Alburgh, Norfolk: Erskine, 1986). For the biography’s function as a defense of Young against Eliot (and, before her, Herbert Croft), see James  E. May’s review in Eighteenth- ­Century Studies 21, no.  4 (1988): 518–521. May’s own biographical article in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (“Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)” [Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed., May 2015], http://­w ww​.­oxforddnb​.­com​/ ­view​/­article​/­30260) is less self-­consciously defensive. For Young’s Anglican theology, see D. W. Odell, “Genius and Analogy in Young’s Conjectures and the Theology of Night Thoughts,” Renascence 64, no. 2 (2012): 143–160; for the otherworldliness of Night Thoughts, see Merrill D. Whitburn, “The Rhe­toric of Otherworldliness in Night Thoughts,” Essays in Lit­er­ a­ture 5, no. 2 (1978): 163–174, and Shaun Irlam, Elations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); for Young’s baroque rhetorical artistry, see Steve Clark,

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“Radical Insincerity in Young’s Night Thoughts,” British Journal for Eighteenth-­ Century Studies 20 (1997): 173–186; for Young’s putative fideism, see Blandford Parker, The Triumph of Augustan Poetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); for Young as prophet of counter-­Enlightenment, see Wayne C. Ripley, “ ‘An Age More Curious, Than Devout’: The Counter-­Enlightenment of Edward Young,” Eighteenth- ­Century Studies 49, no. 4 (2016): 507–529; for Young and sensibility, see Cheryl Wanko, “The Making of a Minor Poet: Edward Young and Literary Taxonomy,” En­glish Studies 72, no. 4 (1991): 355–367. 5. This procedure of making a strength of poetic qualities that Eliot reads as weaknesses has a pre­ce­dent in Clark, “Radical Insincerity,” whose title is a quotation from the Westminster Review essay. 6. I share an economic approach to Young’s poetry with Paige Morgan; see her “Haggling with the Muses: Negotiating Value in 18th  ­Century En­glish Poetry” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2014). 7. See Marjorie Hope Nicolson, “Milton and the Telescope,” En­glish Literary History 2 (1935): 1–32; Mary Baine Campbell, Won­der and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Eu­rope (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 111–220. See below for Young’s cosmos. Wayne  C. Ripley’s “Love and Omnipotence: Night ­ reat Awakening, and Physico-­Theology,” Eighteenth- ­Century Thoughts, the G Poetry 1 (2011): 21–35, argues that Night Thoughts rejects the Newtonian idea that the existence and qualities of God may be read from the evidence of the natu­ral world. (Though he ­doesn’t cite them in this article, Ripley reprises an argument between Blanford Parker and D. W. Odell; see Odell, “Young’s Night Thoughts: Christian Rationalism or Fideism?,” En­glish Language Notes 43, no. 1 [2005]: 48–59.) Though I tend t­oward the view, with Odell and against Parker and Ripley, that Young envisaged a positive role for natu­ral theology in the mode of Joseph Butler, my point h ­ ere is merely that Night Thoughts is written within the imaginative world of seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century cosmology: an infinitely large universe in which the earth shrinks to spatial insignificance. 8. As this miscellaneous sampling suggests, the small world of the Stuart and Hanoverian elite was riven by personal feuds and partisan animosities—­but it was all the more intimate for that. Michael Gavin’s “Historical Text Networks: The Sociology of Early En­glish Criticism,” Eighteenth- ­Century Studies 50, no. 1 (2016): 53–80 (a study of the period 1660–1699) finds dramatists and poets “cluster[ed] together as a community” within the larger world of Restoration print; further digital humanities work in this vein remains to be done on the nexus of authors and spheres such as politics, the church, and the court (61). 9. I make this point in greater detail in Jacob Sider Jost, “The Gentleman’s ­Magazine, Samuel Johnson, and the Symbolic Economy of Eighteenth-­Century Poetry,” Review of En­glish Studies 66 (November 2015): 915–935. See also Dustin Griffin, Literary Patronage in ­England, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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1650–1850 10. For biographical details on Young père, see V.  E. Chancellor, “Young, Edward (1641/2–1705),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed., October 2007), http://­w ww​.­oxforddnb​.­com​/ ­view​/­article​/­55439. 11. Edward Young, An Epistle to the Right Honourable the Lord Lansdown. By Mr. Young (London, 1713), Eighteenth-­Century Collections Online, ESTC T001017. 12. Oliver Goldsmith, The Bee (London, 1759), 235–236. 13. “And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him” (1 Samuel 16:23, KJV). 14. Though it must be considerably adapted to apply to the rank-­based society of  early eighteenth-­century Britain as opposed to the class-­based society of nineteenth-­century France, I am ­here influenced by Bourdieu’s description of the “literary and artistic field” as a “dominated position” within the “dominant pole of the field of class relations.” Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 37–38. 15. Griffin, Literary Patronage in ­England, 155–169. 16. The Instalment. To the Right Honorable Sir Robert Walpole, Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter. By E. Young, LL D. (London, 1726), Eighteenth-­Century Collections Online, ESTC T067280, 5. 17. Conjectures on Original Composition. In a Letter to the Author of Sir Charles Grandison, Eighteenth-­Century Collections Online, ESTC T140626, 47; see Adam Rounce, “Young, Goldsmith, Johnson, and the Idea of the Author in 1759,” in Reading 1759: Literary Culture in Mid-­Eighteenth-­Century Britain and France, ed. Shaun Regan (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013), 95–112, 100. 18. Young’s seven satires ­were published separately ­under the title The Universal Passion from 1725–1728; he added this preface when reissuing them together ­under the title Love of Fame in 1728. Love of Fame, the Universal Passion. In Seven Characteristical Satires (London, 1728), Eighteenth-­Century Collections Online, ESTC T113649, unpaginated preface. 19. Symposium, 203c–­d, from Plato, Symposium, trans. Christopher Gill (New York: Penguin, 1999), 39. 20. Love of Fame, 39. 21. Love of Fame, 53. This passage was brought to my attention by, of all t­ hings, William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3rd ed. (Cleveland: Meridian, 1955), 124. 22. Edward Young, Night Thoughts, ed. Stephen Cornford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 4:66. H ­ ere and below I cite by Night and line to this edition. 23. Love of Fame, 74. 24. John Milton, Lycidas, in Complete Shorter Poems, ed. Stella P. Revard (Chichester: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2009), 71. 25. Night Thoughts, 5:1–4.

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26. Given the size of Night Thoughts, Young is rarely content to use a trope once. A dif­fer­ent personification, “the day of Death,” appears as a morning social caller in Night 6.370–72: “Lorenzo! never shut thy Thought against it; / Be Levees ne’er so full, afford it room, / And give it Audience in the Cabinet.” 27. Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, ed. Maynard Mack, vol. 3.1 in the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, n.d.), 1:47–48. 28. James Boswell, The Life of Johnson: Together with Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson’s Diary of a Journey into North Wales, 2nd ed. rev., 6 vols., ed. George Birbeck Hill and L. F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), 5:269–270. 29. Irlam, Elations. 30. Forster, Edward Young, 49. This par­tic­u­lar quotation refers to Young’s relations to Addison during the latter’s short-­lived tenure as secretary of state.

219

COLERIDGE AND META­PHOR CROSSING THRESHOLDS LINDA L. REESMAN

“Imagination creates meta­phor and symbol by a unifying metamorphosis. It is a

characteristic of genius.”1 If t­ hese statements accurately describe the poetic mind of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as James Engell and W. Jackson Bate suggest in their edition of Biographia Literaria, then Coleridge’s genius demands further examination. How do his par­tic­u­lar characteristics contribute to an historical view and development of the literary mind? At an early point in his growth as a writer, Coleridge, the preacher, chose to become Coleridge, the poet. His transition into a life of poetics was based on his religious beliefs, beliefs that proved essential to his undertaking of philosophical and theoretical princi­ples and to elucidating and reinforcing his methods of reasoning and logic. In 1809 he wrote, “If ever ­there was a time, when ­those fundamental truths, ­those ground works of thought, feeling, and action, which sermons ­ought to teach us, should mingle with our opinions, and influence our conduct relatively to po­liti­cal questions and public events, that time is now pre­sent!”2 Driven by the need for social reform on the edge of war with France and legislative abuse abounding in E ­ ngland, Coleridge married his faith and princi­ples in a more practical endeavor than the pulpit. This critical decision to transition from preacher to poet opened the way for Coleridge’s writing to effect cultural change in a manner unique to his poetic use of language. Furthermore, while many literary critics have carefully investigated Coleridge’s dedication to the shaping of poetic form through the use of rhetorical analy­sis, consideration of his under­lying princi­ples and nonconforming methods ­will offer readers new perspectives on his poetics. As it is described in his poem “The

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Eolian Harp: Composed at Clevedon, Somersetshire,” Coleridge attracts the reader’s attention with a meta­phorical phrase, “intellectual breeze,” as he ascribes an abstract concept to nature. With ­great originality of expression, he compares nature to the sounds of the harp framing all within the vastness of an intellectual wind, or the unlimited mind. And what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversely framed, That t­ remble into thought, as o ­ ’er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze. (44–47)3 This metamorphosis of imaginative ideas—­here blending an abstract idea (the intellectual) with the concreteness of the natu­ral (the breeze)—­permeates his poetry, transforming and transcending Enlightenment concepts of reason and logic into a Romantic idealism. He further defines the art of poetry and its abstractions, scientifically and linguistically, to illustrate a mimetic theory of poetry. More explic­itly, Coleridge turns to astronomy to describe how the art of poetry copies nature through “imitation,” and, as he says, “[through] the mesothesis of likeness and difference.” As he explains, “But to borrow a term from astronomy, it is a liberating mesothesis: for it may verge more to likeness as in painting, or more to difference, as in sculpture.” 4 As Emerson R. Marks and other critics have noted, “Coleridge’s thought is highly eclectic, blending ideas of divergent intellectual ancestry.”5 Coleridge, then, joins ideas from disparate aspects of philosophical and scientific origins to blend both into an organic unity, yet t­ hese ideas remain distinctly dif­fer­ent while the poet finds a point of reconciliation between likeness and difference. Coleridge looks at the juncture, or liminal moment where t­ hese ideas meet. Creating a border of ideas in this manner aids the reader’s understanding of Coleridge’s use of meta­phor as a means to create poetic form. It lends itself to further explore his imaginative genius through an analy­sis ­here that borrows from an anthropological view of liminality. Liminality as an anthropological concept often used in the study of tribal African society offers a broader perspective with which to analyze the relationship between instinctive social reactions and the innate poetical expression in Coleridge’s literary theory and poetic style. Anthropologist Victor Turner applied a theory of liminality as the basis of the transformative nature of rituals in agrarian socie­ties, and this nature of cultural transformation serves to inform Coleridge’s theory on the method of poetry. Coleridge understood that poetry based on mimesis or imitation impacted social consciousness. He sought methods to reconcile the likeness and difference between life and art. Through an

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1650–1850 application of this liminal theory of margins and bound­aries that define social transitions and transformations, I propose to expand established critical interpretations of Coleridge’s poetic thinking to show how his domestic relationships (and conflicts of intimacy) w ­ ere par­tic­u­lar and fundamental to his philosophical idealism, shaping the social imagination of his readers through his poetics. To understand the connection that I am making between social science and literary theories, it is impor­tant to first establish a working definition of Turner’s liminality. As an anthropologist, Turner defines liminality in light of a class of rituals that comprise the rites of passage basic to the social and cultural development of a society. He states, “If our basic model of society is that of a ‘structure of positions,’ we must regard the period of margin or ‘liminality’ as an interstructural situation.” 6 Furthermore, Turner continues, “Rites de passage are found in all socie­ties but tend to reach their maximal expression in small-­scale, relatively stable and cyclical socie­ties, where change is bound up with biological and meteorological rhythms and recurrences rather than with technological innovations.”7 Applying this basic concept of “interstructural situations” to poetic theory, several of Coleridge’s poems can be analyzed in relationship to the margins of h ­ uman states of mind and the passages that occur between life’s stages as illustrated through poetic meta­phor. His methods and princi­ples provide proof of how the meta­p hor and symbol rest on “rites of passage,” signifying a movement of thoughts and ideas that also transform social structures or positions. In other words, how one moves through social and emotional stages of growth can be understood from an analy­sis of Coleridge’s poetic meta­phor. Coleridge relies on the dramatic plays of William Shakespeare to examine the nature of language transitioning from prose to poetry and also establishes a significant idea of the marginality between prose and poetry as a border in poetic discourse. As his writings on Shakespeare and Milton illustrate in Biographia Literaria, Coleridge’s theories concerning the use of meta­phor rely strongly on ­these highly significant sources. This essay touches on literary examples from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, George Herbert’s “­Temple” and “Virtue,” Coleridge’s “France: An Ode,” “Sonnet to the Autumnal Moon,” “Sonnet to the River Otter,” “The Eolian Harp: Composed at Clevedon, Somersetshire,” “Dejection: An Ode,” and “The Blossoming of the Solitary Date-­Tree,” among other brief poetic references. One example of an interstructural situation occurs in Shakespeare’s Henry IV. In Coleridge’s analy­sis of the encounter between dramatic characters Falstaff and Mistress Quickley, he uncovers hidden meaning in their dialogue, meaning that reflects social and moral obligations of their culture. Falstaff soon learns of his

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indebtedness to Mistress Quickley during an exchange that structures the interpersonal conversation around perceptions of indebtedness and marital desire. The dramatic dialogue carries Mistress Quickley’s thoughts and sentences in a “closely interlinked” sequence of ideas that demonstrates a disciplined mind that reasons through cultural education. Falstaff simply asks the Mistress, “What is the gross sum that I owe thee?” Mistress Quickley answers, “Marry, if thou wert an honest man, thyself and the money too.” She continues in a series of ideas for the next sixteen lines to lay out a detailed explanation of Falstaff’s promise “to marry me and make me my lady thy wife.”8 As Coleridge shows, Mistress Quickley is about to make Falstaff an “honest” man, if he w ­ ill “make me my lady thy wife” and also “honest” in the sense of payment for her ser­vices. Coleridge recognizes how Shakespeare’s use of implied meaning in this social interaction designates a continuum of ideas that emerge from social expectations of the characters in terms of financial honesty and marital commitment. In Essays on the Princi­ples of Method, Coleridge then emphasizes, in his words, “the importance of Method in the duties of social life.”9 For Coleridge, “METHOD, therefore, becomes natu­ral to the mind which has been accustomed to contemplate not t­ hings only, or for their own sake alone, but likewise and chiefly the relations of ­things, ­either their relations to each other, or to the observer, or to the state and apprehension of the hearers.”10 Accordingly, Coleridge interprets Method in Shakespeare as a meta­ phoric connection between honesty and fidelity and the social structure of daily conversation. Coleridge affirms that the power­ful influence of poetic form is based on “the Science of Method.” For Coleridge, the absence of Method leads the uneducated mind to rely merely on events and images, without the understanding of how to classify them. Recognizing the relations of ­things to each other, Coleridge identifies what Turner refers to as “an interstructural situation” that is able to occasion cultural change through the language of poetry. I am proposing that Coleridge’s use of meta­phor is grounded in his role as a literary critic based on his methods and princi­ples of language. Together with his critical theories and poetic form, Coleridge found a way to urge cultural change through his poetry while reconciling antagonistic forces of domestic and social engagement that plagued his own experience. While his poems w ­ ere often po­liti­cal in nature, his own po­liti­cal and historical views ­were transformed by a greater desire to empower individual feelings to effect cultural change. Romantic poets had already illuminated the importance of ­human affections, thereby subordinating reason to emotion and social convention to intimacy. This period of heightened emotions further deepened the mirroring

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1650–1850 and interaction between individual h ­ uman affection and their reflection in society at large. This new attitude with re­spect to personal, emotional empowerment led Coleridge to enrich the aesthetics of poetic language: to encourage the literary mind to engage with the imagination through meta­phor. As Coleridge ­reinvented language to more closely resemble his philosophical idealism, t­hese linguistic changes allowed him to address inequalities in con­temporary notions of gender, class, and social per­for­mance. Coleridge understood that the subjective mind s­ haped the world and ­human experience. Since he strug­gled with his own ­human condition, emotionally and physically, he sought to change the world around him while lacking the ability to enact significant reform in his own life. Meta­phor creates a literary atmosphere in which the symbolic repre­sen­ta­tion establishes the poet’s authority. Coleridge thus became engaged linguistically in reconciling conflicting forces—­social, po­liti­cal, and personal—as he consistently approached thresholds that led to his own emotional disappointment and failure, only to reengage, through his domestic relationships, with a world of poetic language, a world that served to bridge his unresolved contradictions. One instance where Coleridge’s use of poetic language imposes itself on po­liti­cal conflict to effect cultural change occurs in his publication of “France: An Ode” in the Morning Post on April 16, 1798.11 An editorial note reads, “The following excellent Ode ­will be in unison with the feelings of ­every friend to Liberty and foe to Oppression; of all who, admiring the French Revolution, detest and deplore the conduct of France ­towards Switzerland.”12 However, as noted in J. C. C. Mays’s edition of Poetical Works, “The poem was written at a time when news of the final Swiss defeat at Berne forced the Opposition in E ­ ngland to recognise France’s imperial pretensions and admit the justice of the Government’s long-­standing argument.”13 The poem was originally titled “Recantation,” and the fourth stanza bemoans the vio­lence inflicted on the French nation with chants of “blood-­stain’d streams” (67) and “mountain snows / With bleeding wounds” (69–70) that evoke the poet’s lament for freedom as Coleridge states, “Forgive me, Freedom! O forgive ­those dreams!” (64).14 The poem first establishes the poet’s homage to the eternal laws of nature, the power of the clouds, waves, and woods where freedom resides undisturbed, while in Switzerland the oppressed continue their fight for liberty. Then, the speaker disrupts the stability of nature’s ele­ments with harsh criticism for France’s po­liti­cal ambitions. Nature’s liberty is mocked by a nation seeking freedom as Coleridge passionately remarks in his apostrophe to France: “O France! that mockest Heav’n, adult’rous, blind, / And patient only in pernicious toils, / Was this thy boast, cham-

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pion of h ­ uman kind! . . . ​T’insult the shrine of Liberty with spoils / From freemen torn! To tempt and to betray!” (78–80, 83–84).15 His last stanza of the ode reminds the reader of the poet’s hope dwelling within the eternal freedom of “earth, sea, and air”: “Yes! as I stood and gaz’d, my forehead bare, / And shot my being thro’ earth, sea, and air, / Possessing all t­hings by intensest love—­/ O Liberty! my spirit felt thee ­there!” (102–105).16 The power of the poet’s sentiments arises from his passion for freedom. He pours his heart into the language of meta­phor and symbolism, into words that make vis­i­ble and magnify nature’s most fundamental ele­ments—­the solidity of the earth, the depth of the sea, and the expansiveness of the air—­all of which remain trustworthy and unadulterated possessions bestowed on humankind. Seeking to resolve the conceptual and po­liti­cal tension between revolutionary France and its betrayal of individual freedom, Coleridge seeks a higher, more meta­phorical form of communication by rising to an apostrophe to Liberty. By turning his attention to the divine source of liberty, the poet rises above the world’s weakness. He effects a solution as he transitions the reader’s thought from the h ­ uman to the divine. This transitional stage mirrors Coleridge’s understanding of the imagination as the means for completing a rite of passage from disappointing, failing social and material worlds to an elevated state of mind that acknowledges the eternal laws of nature and pre­sents them as the only power that can effectively govern the ­human race. In the literary atmosphere that Coleridge creates in “France: An Ode,” the reader experiences a metamorphosis of thought: a passage from conflict to resolution inherent in Coleridge’s use of meta­phor. The poet further establishes this understanding in his critical theory on the reconciliation of opposites that has been at the center of scholarly debate throughout its literary reception during the eigh­teenth ­century. From  M.  H. Abrams to T.  S. Eliot and I.  A. Richards, twentieth-­century critics have plunged into the depths of Coleridge’s philosophical and metaphysical understanding of how poetry fuses the two worlds of phenomenon and noumenon. Marks recognizes how Coleridge establishes the transition between t­ hese two forms of expression when he observes, “In all written discourse Coleridge discerns three species of style: one peculiar to verse, one proper only to prose, and a neutral third common to both.”17 Marks then compares Coleridge’s analy­sis of poetic style to T. S. Eliot’s remarks on the nature of poetry and prose in relationship to each other. Marks explains the need for transitions between t­ hese rhetorical styles based on Eliot’s interpretation “to give a rhythm of fluctuating emotion essential to the musical structure of the ­whole.”18 Furthermore, Edward Kessler provides additional clarity to the issue of contradiction

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1650–1850 between the observable world and the inaccessible ­things of the intellect as he points out that Coleridge embraced an abstract self, one that he describes as “beyond meta­phor.” He explains, “Coleridge was singularly equipped (perhaps fated) to ­handle abstraction.”19 Coleridge affirms, “For from my very childhood, ­ ere unrealize what­ever of more I have been accustomed to abstract and as it w than common interest my eyes dwelt on; and then by a sort of transfusion and transmission of my consciousness to identify myself with the Object.”20 From Coleridge’s desire to know himself and affirm his own existence, his methods of poetic style emerged following his admiration of Shakespeare through a logic of passion, not reason. As Marks suggests in his analy­sis of Coleridge’s language of verse, “An order of words and sentences felt to be unnatural by both Samuel Johnson and T. S. Eliot, Coleridge praises as ‘exquisitely artificial: but the position [of the words] is rather according to the logic of passion or universal logic, than to the logic of grammar.’ ”21 Ultimately, Coleridge’s poetic methods and broad use of meta­phor rely substantially on a passion of language he discerned from the natu­ral and its imitation in the art of poetry. His poetic contribution further elaborated on the transitional moments between forms of language. The issue for Coleridge is not in the substantiality of the world but in the insubstantial, the abstract, from which he derives self-­knowledge. Kessler suggests that Coleridge’s attempts to reconcile self and nature led him to pursue a more sustained view of himself as an abstraction within an abstract sphere of knowledge. However, while Coleridge continued to strug­gle in defining the mysteries of the universe, acknowledging the existence and natu­ral paradox of contradiction, he refused to see this same contradiction within himself. While  I.  A. Richards criticizes Coleridge’s scornful endeavor of self-­knowledge in the “Rime of the Ancient Mari­ner,” Kessler adds to this critical interpretation, saying, “But, as we have seen before, Coleridge is presenting to us a productive paradox, not a sterile contradiction, and even though he is unable to resolve his own oppositions (‘life, death, soul, clod’) his poem does not end in ‘dark fluxion’ but forcefully points ­toward the ‘knowledge that passeth all understanding.’ ”22 Through Kessler’s analy­sis of meta­phors central to Coleridge’s poetry, he extracts implications that can be ascribed to Coleridge’s desire for a unity of Being. Focusing on the eddy, the phantom, and then limbo, Kessler begins with the imagery of nature through a phenomenon, a whirling pool of w ­ ater, driven by the unseen forces of nature and progresses ­towards the invisibility of the phantom, a figure separate from the body, from any form of self. Kessler explains, “Rejecting both the subjective idealist who would divorce the world from its

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physical moorings and transform it into a shadow or phantom, and the materialist who would banish man’s spirit entirely, Coleridge attempted with his Phantom meta­phor to explore his ambiguous personal relationships with both external nature and language.” 23 As Kessler’s argument pursues Coleridge’s need to extricate himself from any bodily form, poetically and intellectually, the “Limbo” Coleridge describes is his attempt to identify the liminality of ­human experience (turmoil in his marriage and friendships, for instance) and the coincidence between the ­human and the divine in his search to understand unity of Being. However, I would further argue that Coleridge’s intentions ­were not merely to achieve a spiritual unity with divinity, transforming himself beyond self, but to persist with meta­phoric language so as to reshape ­human experience from a higher consciousness. Coleridge wished to separate himself from the sufferings and strug­gles of existence and saw society progressing to a purer state, all by elevating thought while still relying on nature. He was able to correct a false reliance on nature, a pantheistic worship of phenomena, while recognizing the passageway between ­matter and spirit. Unlike the spiritualist poet William Blake, Coleridge did not enshrine the symbolic world, yet he admired its authority to empower the world of noumena (objects of intellect) and phenomena (some ­thing or person of experience). As changes in critical theory continued to redefine the poetic genre through the eigh­teenth c­ entury, Coleridge and his contemporaries, especially his literary companion William Words­worth, persisted in their reactions to a stagnant poetic style that relied on formalized diction. The impact of Words­worth’s preface to the Lyrical Ballads of 1800 serves as a springboard for examining the nature of poetry as it pertains to the poet, the critic, and the reader. Words­worth’s definition of poetry as “the expression or overflow of feeling” has been widely accepted, as has his precise definition of poetic expression as “spontaneous and genuine, not the contrived and simulated, expression of the emotional state of the poet.”24 Yet Coleridge surpasses Words­worth’s explanation that poetic language should be available to a common understanding. As he teases out differences in poetic theory between Words­worth and himself, Coleridge emphasizes a principal quality of poetic power in one’s ability to “enter into the feelings and experience of another, and submerge one’s own identity in the pro­cess,” as Engell and Bate explain.25 Searching for the cultural influence of poetry, Coleridge constructs ideas on the method of poetic power by showing how the individual self blends with a social self through meta­phorical concepts. From Coleridge’s critical princi­ples in Biographia Literaria, two concepts emerge, “poetic illusion” and “suggestiveness”

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1650–1850 that illustrate how the imagination, according to Engell and Bate, “is induced to fill out the picture (rather than to receive it passively) in elaborated detail, an act that also involves the interplay of the senses.”26 The meta­phor serves as a passage of ideas and not merely a repre­sen­ta­tion of an idea. The meta­phor should bring forward the movement of the imagination as it shifts from one concept to another, uplifting thought to a higher understanding, from the concrete to the abstract to a higher form of another concrete idea; however, it is the passage of thought that occurs that demarcates a cultural identification and, as a result, a broader connection to one’s world. In his practical criticism, Coleridge extends the use of meta­phor as a so­cio­log­i­cal dynamic of poetry, where poetic ideas unite the readers in a shared experience of the imagination that cannot occur in forms of language other than poetry. In Coleridge’s analy­sis of “Style Common to Prose and Poetry,” an essay from Biographia Literaria, he accurately fathoms Words­worth’s theory of poetic style as “courtesies of modesty, [rather] than a­ ctual limitations of his system,” a system that denotes a necessity for drawing on “­those par­tic­u­lar subjects from low and rustic life.”27 In contrast, as Coleridge queries the nature of poetic language from the viewpoint of high culture, turning to the metaphysical poet George Herbert. In Herbert’s poem “­Temple” Coleridge admires how the poet illustrates his subjects “for the weight, number, and expression of the thoughts, and for the s­imple dignity of the language.”28 In an essay from The Friend, Coleridge describes Herbert’s poetic diction as “pure” and “manly” but overshadowed by a “quaintness” of language, where he explains, “The quaintness of some of his thoughts (not of his diction, than which nothing can be more pure, manly, and unaffected,) has blinded modern readers to the g­ reat general merit of his Poems, which are for the most part exquisite in their kind.”29 In Herbert’s sonnet “Virtue” his meta­phorical language elicits a “sweet day” as “bridal of the earth and sky” and the power of the “sweet ­rose” that “bids the rash gazer wipe his eye.” More emphatically, the “sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses” is compared to a “nest,” a word Coleridge substituted for Herbert’s word “box.”30 Nature emanates sweetness in the same manner that a bride radiates virtue, unifying the anticipation of a new season with a new beginning in h ­ uman affections, a marriage of hope. Coleridge magnifies Herbert’s use of “sweet” from one image to the next, reconciling a social reference of “bridal” to a natu­ral image of “­rose” as a bridge for moral and linguistic purity. Coleridge maintains a distinction h ­ ere between the poetic diction of Herbert, formalizing ideas through nature’s arti-

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facts such as the nest, in comparison to Words­worth’s more modest use of diction to reflect a common and familiar use of objects. The poet’s reconciliation of nature with hope can also be discovered in Coleridge’s early sonnets, one of which, “Sonnet to the Autumnal Moon,” was written sometime between 1789 and 1795 and published in 1796. In sonnet form, Coleridge demonstrates the power of the meta­phor to transform the reader’s thinking, identifying the passage of time through childhood memories. A relationship between nature and the ­human condition is established through Coleridge’s philosophical questioning of the opposite emotions of hope and despair. Hope and despair are intermingled in a comparison of childhood visions with visions of nature as “meteorological rhythms,” the “watry light” of the moon seen as a “weak eye” that “glimmers thro’ a fleecy veil” (3–4).31 Just as the light of the moon emerges from b ­ ehind the clouds, as “the sorrow-­clouded breast of Care” (13), so too does hope appear from “­behind the dragon-­wing’d Despair” (11). Hope, once hidden b ­ ehind a veil, ­will reappear with the brightness and speed of “a meteor kindling in it’s flight” (14), exemplifying t­hose “meteorological rhythms” that produce transitional outcomes.32 In their comparison of nature to the h ­ uman stages of life, ­these meta­phors of the “veil” and the “meteor” infer that the passage of time can be recaptured with remembrances of childhood visions, scenes that evoke power­ful feelings and a reminder that despair ­will give way to hope as the reader unites with pleasant memories of the past. The kindling flight of the meteor burns away the obscurity or darkness of the veil. In another sonnet written during the early 1790s and published in the 1796 edition of Sonnets from Vari­ous Authors, the title echoes subjects of rivers and streams, common in sonnets of the late eigh­teenth c­ entury.33 Coleridge’s “Sonnet to the River Otter” reveals the poet’s reminiscences of his childhood spent in Devonshire at Ottery St. Mary where his f­ ather, the Reverend John Coleridge, was vicar of the parish.34 Pleasant visions of his childhood are expressed through their comparative connection to the “wild Streamlet of the West!” (1) in a detailed description of the river’s par­tic­u­lar traits.35 The rising ­waters, the plank that bridges one bank to the other, the gray willows that border the riverbank, and the textured layers of sand evoke rich images of his carefree moments as a child. The poet notes, “What happy, and what mournful hours, since last / I skimm’d the smooth thin stone along thy breast” (3–4).36 He bemoans the passing of ­these carefree days when he was “a careless Child” but t­ hese images of the Otter bring him back in time. Yet the poet longs for a happier past when he tells t­ hese visions,

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1650–1850 “On my way, / Visions of childhood! oft have ye beguiled / Lone manhood’s cares, yet waking fondest sighs” (11–13).37 The lines that delineate the riverbank from the rising w ­ aters and the gray willows bordering the riverbank’s edge suggest a unity of two stages of life, childhood and manhood, where the river itself becomes a fluid passageway joining disparate ele­ments of earth and w ­ ater. The border of willow trees reaches upward t­oward the air, suggesting a reconciliation of emotions: the joys of childhood and the nostalgia of manhood. Each experience occurs within the space of a threshold (a liminal experience) defining the poet’s life journey. Coleridge empowers familiar memories of the River Otter with meta­ phors that permit him to resolve his longing for a happier past. Faced with uncertainty of the pre­sent, Coleridge’s equivocation on all ­matters, both intimate and po­liti­cal, serves to define his often erratic be­hav­ior not as contradictory but as transitory, crossing from one idea to the next, as he reenvisioned the same idea but from a newly or­ga­nized temporal and spatial perception. For Coleridge, the language of meta­phor provided a necessary transition among life’s events in order to gain self-­knowledge without self-­condemnation. As Engell and Bate note, “in poetry the reader is carried forward,” as Coleridge explains, “not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleas­ur­able activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself.”38 Coleridge clearly articulates the abstract meaning of poetic style in his explication of how the poet’s imagination results in a kind of poetics that transcends the limitations of the ­human condition. Further evidence of Coleridge’s practical criticism underpinning his poetic style appears in the following passages from “Definitions of a Poem and Poetry” in Biographia Literaria, the most thorough explications of his literary opinions. Coleridge defines a poem as that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object plea­sure, not truth; and from all other species (having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the ­whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.39 And he continues, ­ hole soul of man into The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the w activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone, and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it w ­ ere) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical

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power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination. This power . . . ​reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities.40 From ­these two passages Coleridge distinguishes himself as a poet and a literary critic defending the purpose of a poem as a pleas­ur­able experience wherein each part fulfills the gratification of the reader with as much delight as the ­whole poem achieves. With the recognition of literary critics such as M. H. Abrams, Coleridge’s role as a poet whose passion for meta­phorical language actively expresses his literary theory convinces the reader that his creative pro­cess is, in fact, inseparable from his criticism. Abrams asserts, “The truth of the m ­ atter is, that beyond any critic of comparable scope, Coleridge can hardly consider a literary fact without explicit reference to first princi­ples.” 41 He assures us, “As in his philosophy, so in his criticism, Coleridge roots his theory in the constitution and activity of the creative mind.” 42 For Abrams, t­ hese definitions of poem and poet demonstrate “inclusiveness as the criterion of poetic excellence” that joins the “opposite or discordant qualities” of a poem into a unity accomplished through the expression of the poet’s imagination.43 Coleridge’s poetic shaping of language as the “intellectual breeze” meta­phor­ically, and most precisely stated, describes the application of his literary princi­ples to the w ­ holeness of his poetic ideas in understanding the ­human condition. As Coleridge uses meta­phor to connect disparate ideas of the intellect and a breeze, the transitional pro­cess relies on natu­ral states of growth and change. As anthropologist Turner explains in his study of the rites of passage from a more primitive society, “I prefer to regard transition as a pro­cess, a becoming, and in the case of rites de passage even a transformation—­here an apt analogy would be ­water in pro­cess of being heated to boiling point, or a pupa changing from grub to moth.” 44 This helpful perspective, although a nonliterary one, does clarify the relationship of the imagination to the meta­phor as a form of metamorphosis, just as naturally as it occurs in the cultural life of humankind. From childhood to manhood, Coleridge continues to define liminal moments in his life through poetic form shaping both his language and thinking around the reconciliation of opposites. In his poem “The Eolian Harp: Composed at Clevedon, Somersetshire” (versions range from 1795 to 1817), several natu­ral meta­phors emerge to bridge the poet’s rite of passage into manhood. As he contemplates his wife, “My pensive Sara!” and their home “our cot o’ergrown,” Coleridge creates a perceptual transition from the “white’flowered Jasmin” and “broad-­leaved Myrtle” to symbols of “Innocence and Love” (1, 3–5).45 The flowers and leaves that ornamentally adorn the cottage embrace the newly married c­ ouple with their

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1650–1850 beauty and grace. Innocence and love pervade the poem’s theme of marital happiness as the poet muses on his home and wife. Nature becomes the instrument of domestic comfort, extending the meta­phor into the silence of natu­ral surroundings and the murmurings of the sea silencing ­human thoughts. The lute’s strings crafting mysterious sounds silence the “still air” (32) where ­music is the instrument producing the sounds and rhythms of life that Coleridge seeks to unify.46 The “desultory breeze” (14) overshadows the sound of the lute; “the breeze warbles” (32), creating the sound of ­music through natu­ral rhythms, subduing any artificial inventions of manmade instrumental sound. Giving poetic power to nature supersedes the ­human experience as “one intellectual breeze” (47) that sweeps over all that exists and elevates individual love to a more holy, spiritual u ­ nion: “For never guiltless may I speak of him, / The Incomprehensible!” states the poet, praising God with the power to bestow upon him, “A sinful and most miserable Man,” the peace he feels in this home with his honored wife (58–59, 62; 232–235).47 The poem achieves a significant unity of poetic style, one that unites concrete imagery with abstract affection, an objective Coleridge elucidates in his philosophical theory of poetry. As he systematizes his ideas, “Essence, in its primary signification, means the princi­ple of individuation, the inmost princi­ple of the possibility, of any t­ hing, as that par­tic­u­lar t­ hing. It is equivalent to the idea of a ­thing, whenever we use the word idea, with philosophic precision.” 48 Coleridge focuses on the philosophical princi­ple of essence in his determination that when a t­ hing is compared to an equivalent “idea of a t­ hing,” this equivalency occurs ­because of the precision of the comparison. Even without commenting directly on meta­phoric language ­here, his discussion explores the distinction of sameness and difference, showing the importance of ideas in the elevation of poetic language. Domestic happiness is short-­lived. During another phase of his life, Coleridge expresses the sorrow of lost love in “Dejection: An Ode” (1802) and the loneliness of solitude in “The Blossoming of the Solitary Date-­Tree” (1805). In January 1802, Coleridge attempts to reengage himself with a fresh source of imagery. He attends Humphrey Davy’s lectures on chemistry at the Royal Institution with his friend Thomas Poole, intending “to increase my stock of images [meta­phors].” 49 Noting how Coleridge is focusing on his poetic development despite his ailing health, biographer James Dykes Campbell explains, “On February 6, 1802, Southey informs W. Taylor that T. Wedgwood and Mackintosh are hatching a ­great metaphysical work, to which Coleridge has promised as preface, ‘a history of metaphysical opinion,’ for which he is reading Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas. But during

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all this time Coleridge was writing ‘heart-­rending’ accounts of his health to the Words­worths.”50 Waning health and his domestic relationships ­were weakening alongside his poetic productivity. Struggling with his addiction to opium, Coleridge suffered physically and emotionally during the year of 1802 to such depths that his severest pain is captured in meta­phors of sound and light imaged forth in his poem “Dejection: An Ode.” The ode was written on April 4 and published in the Morning Post on October  4, Words­worth’s wedding day. In its original version the poem directly addresses Words­worth: “O William, friend of my devoutest choice, / O rais’d from anxious dread and busy care . . . ​/ To thee do all ­things live from pole to pole,  / Their life the eddying of thy living soul!”51 Meta­phors of nature’s activities abound from the eddying of the “living soul” to moonlit scenes, at times tranquil, as Coleridge writes, “This night, so tranquil now, w ­ ill not go hence  / Unroused by winds” (3–4) and alternatively warning of “The coming-on of rain and squally blast” (14).52 But along with his health ebbing and flowing, Coleridge could not survive his loss of poetic inspiration, as he writes, “But oh! Each visitation  / Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, / My shaping spirit of Imagination” (84–86).53 Loss of health and inspiration took its toll as well on Coleridge’s marriage relations with Sarah Fricker, a marriage already weakened by Coleridge’s frailties and the c­ ouple’s incompatibility. By the end of the year Coleridge was to leave his home and f­ amily at Greta Hall in Keswick to pursue emotional and physical comfort ­under the care of a surgeon, Mr. James Gillman and his wife, in Highgate where he remained ­until his death. However, Coleridge continued to seek emotional reconciliation through meta­phors that embrace domestic themes, honoring the child within the man, and the ­mother listening for the voice of her child in his poem “The Blossoming of the Solitary Date-­Tree.” The poet exalts imagination in his comparison to “The buoyant child surviving in the man”; giving rise to hope among the voices of “Fields, forests, ancient mountains, ocean, [and] sky.”54 All their (nature’s) voices unify the paradox of the senses enjoying the beautiful and the lovely while feeling “the ache of solitariness,” as Coleridge describes a sumptuous scene of feasting and of ministering graces that appear as shadowy to t­ hose who have not the arms to grasp them.55 The joy a ­mother feels when hearing her child first speak the early sounds of language is compromised by the threat of death: “Mischance or Death her Darling take, / What then avail t­ hose songs, which sweet, of yore, / W ­ ere only sweet for their sweet Echo’s sake?—” laments the poet (30–32).56 Repetition of “sweet” in this domestic scene is reminiscent of Herbert’s poem “The T ­ emple”

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1650–1850 discussed e­ arlier in this essay as one Coleridge admired for its excellent and pure diction. Coleridge redeems the potential loss of love through the liminal experiences of ­mother, child, and man, as the m ­ other hears her own voice in her child’s and the man carries his child self within him. Both are instances of transformation through time, the rites of passage of child into adult; all demonstrate “the individual’s capacity of joy” as Coleridge demarcates the power of the imagination to reconcile opposing forces.57 Like the date tree that bears fruit only when another of its kind is planted nearby, the ­human condition demands unification through the object and its meta­phorical abstraction. Abrams sums up Coleridge’s reliance on poetic theory to elucidate his poetic form: Indeed, it is astonishing how much of Coleridge’s critical writing is couched in terms that are meta­phorical for art and literal for a plant; if Plato’s dialectic is a wilderness of mirrors, Coleridge’s is a very jungle of vegetation. Only let the vehicles of his meta­phors come alive, and you see all the objects of criticism writhe surrealistically into plants or parts of plants, growing in tropical profusion. Authors, characters, poetic genres, poetic passages, words, meter, logic become seeds, trees, flowers, blossoms, fruit, bark, and sap.58 Through meta­phors drawn from nature that encapsulate the domestic qualities of life, Coleridge’s philosophical idealism merges, in his poetry, with a view of his personal world. As a mode of poetic mimesis, Coleridge’s use of meta­phor establishes literary relationships that imitate domestic friendships. Coleridge reinvents language to introduce layers of meaning that bridge domestic thresholds and that reconcile cultural forces with personal conflicts. Throughout the stages of life, from his own childhood to adulthood, Coleridge identifies moments in his poetry when selfhood conflicts with social per­for­mance. His social failures feed his poetic achievements and lead to the discovery of new perspectives on the self. In the array of his domestic relationships as friend, husband, ­father, son, and ­brother, Coleridge reaches beyond cultural expectations regarding gender, class, and role. Poetic language defines rites of passage in poetic, meta­phoric forms, forms in which the poet also elucidates his literary methods and critical theories, reshaping society through the poetic imagination.

Notes 1. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, eds., introduction to Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, vol. 7 of The Collected

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Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1983), ciii, emphasis added. 2. J. R. de J. Jackson, Method and Imagination in Coleridge’s Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 24. 3. J. C. C. Mays, ed., Poetical Works: Poems (Reading Text), vol. 16:1 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2001), 115. 4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ­Table Talk (New York: R. Worthington, 1884), 265. 5. Emerson R. Marks, Coleridge on the Language of Verse (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1981), 64. 6. Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 93. 7. Turner, Forest of Symbols, 93. 8. William Shakespeare, King Henry the Fourth, Part Two (Harmonds­worth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1970), 53. 9. Barbara  E. Rooke, ed., The Friend, vol. 4:1 of The Collected Works of Samuel ­Taylor Coleridge (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1969), 451. 10. Rooke, Friend, 451. 11. Coleridge’s poem “France: An Ode” also appeared in subsequent versions in ­Sibylline Leaves in 1817, 1828, 1829, and 1834. 12. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, ed., Coleridge: Poetical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 243. 13. Mays, Poetical Works, 174: 462–463. 14. Mays, Poetical Works, 174: 462. 15. Mays, Poetical Works, 174: 466. 16. Mays, Poetical Works, 174: 468. 17. Marks, Coleridge on the Language of Verse, 82. 18. Marks, Coleridge on the Language of Verse, 72; T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1957), 24–25. 19. Edward Kessler, Coleridge’s Meta­phors of Being (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1979), 123. 20. Rooke, Friend (CC), I, 521n; see also CL, IV, 974–975. 21. Marks, Coleridge on the Language of Verse, 82. 22. Kessler, Coleridge’s Meta­phors of Being, 168–169. 23. Kessler, Coleridge’s Meta­phors of Being, 40. 24. Engell and Bate, Biographia Literaria, II, 102. 25. Engell and Bate, “Editors’ Introduction,” in Biographia Literaria, cix. 26. Engell and Bate, “Editors’ Introduction,” in Biographia Literaria, cxi. 27. Engell and Bate, Biographia Literaria, II, 89. 28. Engell and Bate, Biographia Literaria, II, 93–94. 29. Engell and Bate, Biographia Literaria, II, 94n; The Friend (CC), II 44 (I 45). 30. Engell and Bate, Biographia Literaria, II, 95n.

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1650–1850 31. Mays, Poetical Works, 61: 103. 32. Mays, Poetical Works, 61: 103. 33. Mays, Poetical Works, 140: 299. 34. James Dykes Campbell, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Narrative of the Events of His Life (London: Macmillan, 1894), 1. 35. Mays, Poetical Works, 140: 300. 36. Mays, Poetical Works, 140: 300. 37. Mays, Poetical Works, 140: 300. 38. Engell and Bate, “Editors’ Introduction,” in Biographia Literaria, cviii. 39. Engell and Bate, Biographia Literaria, II, 13. 40. Engell and Bate, Biographia Literaria, II, 15–16. 41. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 115. 42. Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp, 115. 43. Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp, 118. 44. Turner, Forest of Symbols, 94. 45. Mays, Poetical Works, 115. 46. Mays, Poetical Works, 115. 47. Mays, Poetical Works, 115. 48. Engell and Bate, Biographia Literaria, II, 62. 49. Elizabeth Sandford, Thomas Poole and His Friends (Somerset: Friarn Press, 1996), 2:214. 50. Campbell, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 128. 51. E. H. Coleridge, ed., Coleridge, 366. 52. Mays, Poetical Works, 293: 697. 53. Mays, Poetical Works, 293: 700. 54. Mays, Poetical Works, 396: Preface: A Lament, 811. 55. Mays, Poetical Works, 396: Preface: A Lament, 811. 56. Mays, Poetical Works, 396: 813. 57. Mays, Poetical Works, 396: Preface: A Lament, 811. 58. Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp, 169.

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Janet Aikins Yount, ed. Cla­ris­sa: The Twentieth-­ Century Response, 1900–1950, 2 vols. Brighton: Edward Everett Root, 2019. Vol. 1: pp. xx + 184. Vol. 2: pp. xv + 526. REVIEWED BY SÖREN HAMMERSCHMIDT, GATEWAY COMMUNITY COLLEGE

In Cla­ris­sa: The Twentieth-­Century Response, 1900–1950, Janet Aikins Yount sets

out to chronicle the fortunes of Samuel Richardson’s second novel in the first half of the twentieth ­century, and she does so with considerable success. Operating from the premise “that readers who investigate the origins of each response to Cla­ris­sa, attending to details of its occasion, ­will gain a more nuanced understanding of the novel’s reception” as well as of the development of criticism as a discipline, Yount sets out “to reanimate the reprinted responses to Richardson’s novel and to illuminate how they struck readers when they first appeared” so that they may spark “further investigations into Cla­ris­sa’s place in the literary and cultural life of the past c­ entury” (1:xi). To do so, Yount divides her work into two volumes: one, subtitled Cla­ris­sa’s Reception, 1900–1950, offers a collection of reviews, essays, textbook chapters, and other sources of commentary on Richardson and his novel during the period of coverage. The other volume, The Conversation about Cla­ris­sa, 1900–1950, serves as a critical companion and study guide to the anthology provided in the first and offers up Yount’s takes on the source materials she has gathered as well as pointing out strands of debate and critique that accumulated around Cla­ris­sa in t­ hose years. Both volumes are broken up into four sections—1900–1914 (“Responses Before the ­Great War”), 1915–1930 (“The Post-­War Response”), 1931–1944 (“Contending Voices Before and During World War II”), and 1945–1950 (“World War II and Beyond”)—­that correspond to significant world events, especially the two world wars; within the Conversation volume, ­those sections are further subdivided

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1650–1850 according to major themes and writers in the commentary surrounding Cla­ris­sa. This arrangement allows Yount to give the wealth of documents she has accumulated a more definitive chronological shape and at the same time to track connections between the more immediate literary concerns of her materials and larger social efforts like the suffrage movement or geopo­liti­cal developments such as the rise of nationalism, totalitarian regimes, and anticolonial re­sis­tance across the half c­ entury that her volumes cover. Her focus throughout, however, remains on the place that discussions of Cla­ris­sa in par­tic­u­lar, and of Richardson more generally, take in the academic and popu­lar institutional fortunes of En­glish studies, eighteenth-­century lit­er­a­ture and literary history, and the novel. Yount’s collection is extremely valuable if for no other reason than that she makes available and accessible a wide range of documents—­many of them obscure, difficult to find, or critically understudied, and several translated into En­glish for the first time—­that together constitute a dense reception history of Cla­ris­sa in the first half of the twentieth ­century. In the Reception volume, Yount manages to cover a remarkably full range of responses to Cla­ris­sa and its author, from Leslie Stephen’s revolted remark in 1904 that “the last time I read Cla­ris­sa Harlowe it affected me with a kind of disgust” at “the elaborate detail in which” Richardson “rub[s] our noses . . . ​in all her agony, and squeez[es] the last drop of bitterness out of e­ very incident” (2:61), to Ian Watt’s superlative praise in 1949 that “Richardson’s success in transcending the traditional treatment of the novel-­ heroine is shown by the way his masterpiece is very often spoken of, not as Cla­ ris­sa, but as ‘Cla­ris­sa Harlowe’ ” (2:506)—­and a wealth of appreciations and critiques in between t­ hese poles. The collection assem­bles a wide range of Eu­ro­ pean and North American responses and discussions of the novel penned by ­critics and reviewers, editors, and authors of textbooks, essay collections, and editions in both academic and popu­lar literary spheres. This allows Yount not only to track the fates of Richardson’s novel among the general reading public but also to illustrate its role in the establishment of En­glish studies in general and eighteenth-­century literary history in par­tic­u­lar as academic fields and scholarly pursuits and to evaluate Cla­ris­sa’s place in the debate over the value and functions of the novel as a literary genre, of lit­er­a­ture and its relation to realism or real­ity, and of the repre­sen­ta­tion of female characters as modes for advocating for the enfranchisement of ­women, among many other interests. At an early point in the Conversations volume, Yount does address the absence of materials by writers from Spain, Central and South Amer­i­ca, or Asia in the Reception volume and the relative paucity of such writers in her discussions in the Conversa-

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tions volume (though Africa remains unmentioned in regards to both) by briefly discussing the lack of enthusiasm for or awareness of Cla­ris­sa in many parts of the world (1:22). To supply this gap and si­mul­ta­neously demonstrate the novel’s nevertheless often global reach and significance, however, Yount makes considerable efforts to connect the conversations about Cla­ris­sa, its author, the novel as a literary form, and the role of literary history as well as of En­glish studies to con­ temporary social and po­liti­cal changes, many of them—­like w ­ omen’s suffrage, colonial strug­gles for in­de­pen­dence, and the world wars—­global in extent as well as in effect. Occasionally, Yount leans a bit too heavi­ly on thematic or structural similarities between critical discussions of Cla­ris­sa across documents in her collection so that she might argue for the novel’s supposed influence on l­ater writers or texts. The argument that “the power dynamics in Richardson’s plot,” between Lovelace and Cla­ris­sa in par­tic­u­lar, might have “contributed to [Wilhelm] Dibelius’s social and ideological conception of the En­glish ­people and of the British nation’s potential for ‘all power­ful’ world domination” (1:19) in pre–­Great War Germany would require—­for this reviewer at least—­more substantial evidence than the mere positing of a Bakhtinian “re-­accentuation” of Lovelace’s pursuit of domination over Cla­ris­sa in Dibelius’s work to be convincing. Despite such infrequent misgivings, however, the guide that Yount provides in the Conversations volume to the variety of thematic and critical strands assembled in the Reception volume is an extremely valuable, evocative, and incisive achievement that should serve as a jumping-­off point for f­ uture studies of the twentieth-­century reception of Cla­ris­sa and of Richardson as well as of the fortunes of the novel and the institutionalization of En­glish studies and of eighteenth-­century literary history in that period. The documents that Yount has assembled and the critical guide that she provides, for example, should offer us new materials and new insights to trace the early twentieth-­century elaboration of what Clifford Siskin, in The Work of Writing, called “novelism” into the backbone of literary studies and of literary nationalism si­mul­ta­neously. In this vein, then, Yount’s collection thus joins a number of impor­tant recent studies—­Janine Barchas’s The Lost Books of Jane Austen, Devoney Looser’s The Making of Jane Austen, and Nicole Wright’s “Alt-­Right Jane Austen” among them—on the uses to which literary texts and their authors have been put to generate new meanings and especially of the ways in which eighteenth-­century writers became banner figures (or, occasionally, bugbears) for one cause or another in ­later centuries. While the writers we study—­and sometimes even the

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1650–1850 writers who study the writers we study—­may have passed on, they are in fact not entirely or safely dead in the way that turn-­of-­the-­century poet, critic, and editor Richard Burton ­imagined or wished it: “Criticism is only safe when it deals with authors who are dead,” he reasoned, ­because “the dead . . . ​cannot strike back” (qtd. in 1:viii). Instead, as Yount’s collection amply demonstrates, eighteenth-­ century authors and their texts continue to resonate with new audiences, generating new meanings and becoming the nodes or catalysts by which such meanings may be generated for new occasions and contexts. Yount’s collection and critical guide not only help us see, in more detail than before, one such generative period at the birth of eighteenth-­century studies as a distinct literary-­historical field, but also represent another such generative moment as they become the foundation for new insights and meanings. We are thus fortunate that, ­after the collapse of AMS Press, The Twentieth-­ Century Response was rescued by Edward Everett Root Publishers. It is to be hoped that some publisher—­maybe EER once again?—­will come to the rescue and supply another gap by seeing into publication the reception history of Cla­ ris­sa in the nineteenth ­century, which had been contemplated as part of the original plan for AMS and gets teased by Yount in the preface to her volumes. Yount and before her Lois Bueler, in Cla­ris­sa: The Eighteenth- ­Century Reception, have proven how crucial collections such as theirs must invariably be for accurate assessments of the reception of Richardson’s most ambitious work. More broadly, they have also demonstrated how impor­tant such collections are for a deeper understanding of the ways in which literary history and eighteenth-­century studies developed as academic fields of inquiry and as forms of commentary that closely engaged with the world around them as much as they grew out of it. Yount certainly makes a compelling case for how much richer our understanding of our own disciplines, our disciplines’ histories and social, po­liti­cal, and economic impacts, must be as we recover the documents and conversations of specific moments in our literary-­historical discourses.

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O. M. Brack Jr. and Robert De Maria Jr., eds. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. Volume 20. Johnson on Demand: Reviews, Prefaces, and Ghost-­Writings. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018. Pp. xl + 632. REVIEWED BY GREG CLINGHAM, BUCKNELL UNIVERSITY

In September 2019 the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington, Connecticut, spon-

sored a symposium on scholarly editions of the collected works and correspondence of British writers from the long eigh­teenth c­ entury. The writers represented at this event ­were Horace Walpole, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Frances Burney, Aphra Behn, and Alexander Pope. On a lambent autumn day at the Yale Gradu­ ate Club, eminent scholars—­Stephen Clarke, Robert De Maria, Gordon Turnbull, Peter Sabor, Elaine Hobby, and Michael Suarez—­engaged, informed, and entertained a large, appreciative audience about the history, personalities, goals, challenges, and real outcomes and afterlives of such large-­scale scholarly proj­ects as the Yale Edition of the Correspondence of Horace Walpole and the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. Comprehensive, multivolume, multieditor, scholarly editions of writers in prose and verse ­were features of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, predigital ages in which individuals and institutions seemed to have a dif­fer­ent relationship to time, reading, and expectation than is now common. The scholarly editions of this long period in American and British literary culture ­were a continuation of a ­great humanistic enterprise—­exemplified by the work of Re­nais­sance scholars such as Scaliger, Estienne, and Heinsius—to restore and to establish the texts of classical writers, and thus to make pos­si­ble civilization itself. We have long benefited from scholarly editions without quite realizing how essential they are to ­con­temporary scholarship and criticism. Such editions—­think of Spenser,

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1650–1850 Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Cowley, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Smollett, Words­worth, Austen, Tennyson, and Eliot, to go no further—­provide authoritative, annotated texts that we read and to which we refer, and the research they necessitate and embody often results in the discovery of additional manuscripts, associated texts, or artwork or bibliographical evidence that illuminate issues of attribution and of historical and critical interpretation. Usually, scholarly editions take many years to complete, sometimes many more years than planned or anticipated, as materials multiply, leads proliferate (or dry up), bibliographical prob­lems are encountered, financial difficulties arise, personal and professional relationships evolve, and life (and death) takes its toll. A large, extensive scholarly undertaking ­will encounter such obstacles. As Johnson writes of one of his own g­ reat undertakings in the preface to the Dictionary, “A large work is difficult ­because it is large, even though all the parts might singly be performed with fa­cil­i­t y; where t­ here are many t­ hings to be done, each must be allowed its share of time and l­abour, in the proportion only which it bears to the w ­ hole; nor can it be expected, that the stones which form the dome of a t­ emple, should be squared and polished like the diamond of a ring.”1 Large editorial proj­ects are now thought of belonging to a bygone age. The worlds of the scholar and the university press have radically changed since the time of Wilmarth Lewis, Col­o­nel Isham, and Donald and Mary Hyde. The working conditions, social and po­liti­cal realities, and publishing expectations of modern universities no longer facilitate and support, or even tolerate, the pursuit of bibliography or textual and editorial work, which take time and have, besides, been demoted in the Critical Pantheon of Acceptable Pursuits. University presses, for their part, are nowadays subject to the same financial constraints as commercial companies—­indeed, most university presses now are commercial entities, though they are not always profitable—­and, with a few exceptions, are reluctant or unable to invest in large editorial proj­ects or to commit themselves to the steadiness of purpose required to bring them to completion over de­cades. In the case of the Walpole and the Johnson editions, private wealth and personal dedication on the part of Wilmarth S. Lewis and Donald and Mary Hyde, respectively, w ­ ere essential in collecting books and manuscripts, conceptualizing the proj­ect, and driving the proj­ect forward. Nurtured in the mid-1950s, the relatively modest goals of the Yale Johnson—­six volumes to be completed in ten years—­expanded exponentially to fi­nally include twenty-­three volumes that took sixty-­three years to complete (the editorial committee formed in 1955; vol. 1, Prayers and Diaries, appeared in 1958; and vol. 20, Johnson on Demand, the last to be published, appeared in 2018). Over t­hose years, critical and bibliographical

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orthodoxies changed, and editors came and went, most into retirement and then death. Formally, the proj­ect had three general editors—­Allen T. Hazen (1955–1965), John  D. Middendorf (1965–2007), and Robert De Maria  Jr. (2007–2018)—­and involved many scholars, librarians, and book collectors of note. In a preface to ­ nder review h ­ ere—­Professor De Maria lists Johnson on Demand—­the volume u and acknowledges the work and contribution of the founding members of the editorial committee and of subsequent committee members, and the long list of names forms a veritable who’s who of Johnson scholarship and eighteenth-­ century bibliography and scholarship in the second half of the twentieth c­ entury. To me, as a young aspirant in the 1970s, ­these scholars w ­ ere like ­giants who walked the earth before the flood. The triumph of their collective achievement is real, and it is also tinged with the sober recollection that few have lived to see the fruits of their l­abor. ­There is melancholy, too, associated with the consciousness that we have come to the end of the proj­ect itself, for, as Johnson says so movingly in Idler 103, “we always make a secret comparison between a part and the ­whole: the termination of any period of life reminds us that life itself has likewise its termination; when we have done any t­ hing for the last time, we involuntarily reflect that a part of the days allotted to us is past, and that as more is past ­there is less remaining.”2 Though dif­fer­ent from the romance of the Boswell papers, and the Bildungsroman that is Wilmarth Lewis’s love affair with Horace Walpole, the history of the Yale Johnson is fascinating in its own way, and illuminating of scholarly culture in mid-­twentieth-­century Amer­i­ca and Britain, and its story is worth telling.3 As the current general editor, Robert De Maria has guided the print edition to its conclusion and has overseen the creation of the open access digital edition hosted on the Yale University Press website,4 where, if necessary, corrections and small additions ­will easily be made to the existing volumes, and which, presumably, w ­ ill receive increasingly more attention as reading practices change and the print edition becomes scarce and expensive. De Maria has coedited three of the volumes of the Yale edition, one with Gwin Kolb (Johnson on the En­glish Language, 2005) and two with the late O. M. Brack Jr., Biographical Writings (2016) and Johnson on Demand (2018). Johnson on Demand includes 142 discreet works—­reviews, prefaces, and ghost writings written between 1725 and 1783 (plus a few published posthumously). The princi­ple governing se­lection is clearly stated and rational. Included are works that Johnson wrote for o ­ thers or “as parts of the planning or aspects of the reception of o ­ thers’ work” (x). As De Maria notes, “When Johnson wrote

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1650–1850 for ­others, he sometimes mingled his own work with theirs in ways that are often not easy to discern” (x). But to the best of their ability, and ­after long consideration of the views of other experts in the field, the editors have included in this volume all of the works that are wholly or “almost wholly” by Johnson, except a few reviews that thematically belonged and ­were included in other volumes of the Yale edition (for example, the reviews of pamphlets on the case of Admiral Byng [1756], from the Literary Magazine, which went into the volume of Po­liti­cal Writings, and the review of Soame Jenyns’s ­Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil [1757], also from the Literary Magazine, which went into the volume containing Crousaz’s commentary on Pope’s Essay on Man). Johnson wrote many reviews—­Johnson on Demand includes thirty-­one pieces from the Literary Magazine, seven from the Universal Chronicle & Public Ledger, two from the Gentleman’s Magazine, and one from the Critical Review—­and, as per the custom of the day, many contain large quantities of quotation and paraphrase. In t­ hese reviews the editors have de­cided to exclude many passages of straight quotation but have included most of Johnson’s paraphrases, for “the latter seemed to us almost a form of translation, and Johnson’s economy and skill in paraphrase is worth preserving” (x). Most readers would agree, as they would with the proposition that what r­eally justifies the inclusion of such large quantities of relatively ordinary Johnsonian prose are “the judgments Johnson makes” (x). One of the most in­ter­est­ing of Johnson’s judgments in a review in this volume comes in his concluding remarks on Goldsmith’s The Traveller for the Critical Review (1764): “Such is the poem, on which we now congratulate the public, as on a production to which, since the death of Pope, it w ­ ill not be easy to find any t­ hing equal” (501). From the blitheness of this statement, one would not know that The Traveller was a poem to which Johnson himself had contributed! This was not the only instance of Johnson praising himself in print: as Brack and De Maria point out in their headnote to Johnson’s preface to the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1742 (1743), “It is notable that Johnson particularly praises his own main contributions to the Magazine: the Debates in Parliament and the ‘lives of celebrated men’ ” (107). ­There is apparently no place for modesty when critical truth is ­under discussion. Perhaps Johnson’s critical confidence is a bit like Pope’s, as described by Johnson: “he did not court the candour, but dared the judgement of his reader.”5 Perhaps equally impor­tant is the sociability and the public spiritedness that animate Johnson’s reviews, for his view of the journalist’s ethical commitment to truth-­telling—as expressed in this volume in “Of the Duty of a Journalist” (406–408)—­does not preclude the reviewer’s commitment to the exchange of

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current ideas about books, science, and culture, almost another form of conversation in Johnson’s hands. Johnson on Demand then contains all the short, miscellaneous prose that is Johnson’s that has not found a home in another volume of the Yale edition. Other, more dubious attributions or slight or fragmentary contributions to the writings of o ­ thers w ­ ill appear with another press in a volume titled Contributions to the Works of O ­ thers. ­There are several references in this volume to related texts of interest, that may be by Johnson, that are designated to appear in the ­future Contributions. For example, two works written for Giuseppe Baretti are reserved for Contributions, while four ­others for Baretti have been included in Johnson on Demand (424–430). Likewise, in the headnote to Johnson’s preface to Robert Dodsley’s The Preceptor (1748), Brack and De Maria note, “Irma Z. Sherwood has made a good case, on internal evidence, for Johnson’s authorship of the introduction to section 12, which immediately precedes his ‘Hermit of Teneriffe.’ It may be, however, that he merely edited or rewrote it, and we have consigned it to the planned volume Contributions to the Works of ­Others” (169). We thus look forward to this additional volume of liminal or dubious Johnson writings, not only for its further rationalization of the canon, but also ­because the writings to be included in that volume seem by no means to be marginal. In the case of the preface to Dodsley’s The Preceptor, Johnson discusses pedagogy and humanistic learning, central themes in other, canonical works (e.g., the Life of Milton). Also, as Bishop Thomas Percy told Boswell, it was Johnson’s favorite of his own writings (169). Johnson’s willingness to praise a work in which he himself is featured speaks, among other t­ hings, to a precommercial notion of authorial identity that is open, fluid, adaptive, and nonpossessive. Johnson was a professional writer, earning money—­and needing the money he earned—­from his writings. That he had a name, however, did not prevent him from investing both time and expertise in making the names of ­others, sometimes for payment (as with his authorship of the sermons published u ­ nder the name of Rev. John Taylor in 1788–1789), but usually for the sake of friendship and the ­simple need to get the job done (as with his anonymous contribution to Anna Williams’s Miscellanies in Prose and Verse [1766] or his collaboration with Sir Robert Chambers in the writing of the Lectures on the En­glish Law [1767–1773]). Given the monumentality of Johnson’s literary persona, the extensiveness of the collaboration is counterintuitive and staggering. So is the list of eighteenth-­century figures to whom he lent a writing hand. This includes Rev. William Dodd, Rev. John Taylor, Oliver Goldsmith, Sir Robert Chambers, Sir Charles Burney, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Maurice, Giuseppe Baretti,

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1650–1850 Charlotte Lennox, and William Lauder. Indeed, like Jorge Luis Borges—­who identified strongly with Johnson and who edited some of Johnson’s works and translated o ­ thers into Spanish—­Johnson’s most characteristic literary manner may have been inspired and s­ haped by the experience of collaboration, in the broadest sense.6 Such a literary manner does not exclude his stance as a single author, for in his imaginative and learned grasp of most issues on which he writes, Johnson embodies an implicit sense of and obligation to multiple perspectives and to multiple, transhistorical, and transcultural connections. What he says of Shakespeare’s mingled drama perhaps describes the peculiar collaborative awareness of his own “collaborative” style; for, like Shakespeare, his works are “compositions of a distinct kind; exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion ad innumerable modes of combination; and expressing the course of the world.”7 ­These qualities make for one of the delights of Johnson on Demand. De Maria notes that the volume “includes Johnson’s work in such a wide variety of genres and on such a large number of themes” (xxiii). It therefore lacks a clear thematic or generic thread or unity that is common in other volumes of the Yale edition, but its miscellaneousness tells us much about the kind of writer Johnson is, as we see in the list of topics on which he writes. T ­ hese include (in no par­tic­u­lar order) encomiums, philosophy, religious allegory, poetry, satire, literary history, literary criticism, history (local and national), biblical chronology, ­music, biography, the Italian language, the Celtic language, Latin, language, dictionaries, essays, fiction, theater (classical and modern), exploration, colonialism, bridges, civil engineering, weights and mea­sures, art, architecture, sculpture, museums, astronomy, astronomical instruments, electricity, hospitals, prison, convicts, capital punishment, grammar, journalism (literary, po­liti­cal, and social), sermons, evangelical history, memoirs (personal and po­liti­cal), bibliography, book collecting, printing, editing, education, longitude, games, trade, commerce, tea, modern culture, geography, travel, natu­ral science, natu­ral history, and war. This extraordinary range of topics is addressed in a number of generic forms that are equally impressive. They include the advertisement, the observation, the preface, “To the Reader,” the “consideration,” the proposal, the notice, the review, the letter, the introduction, the dedication, the address, the postscript, the account, the reflection, the reply, the “preliminary discourse,” the meditation, the petition, translation, and straightforward (though anonymous) contributions to both prose and poetry. Is t­ here anything comparable in literary history?

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Johnson is often still thought of as monolithic; but this volume invites us not only to appreciate the catholicity and comprehensiveness of his interests, and the tremendous extent of his knowledge, but also to recognize two features of his identity as a writer, already adverted to, that speak to his imaginative fluidity and generosity of spirit—­that is, his willingness to collaborate with and to assist ­others and (especially in the ghost writings) the flexibility of mind and the suspension of self that inform his ability to adopt the interests, perspectives, and language of another’s proj­ect, including the adoption of the voices of ­women (e.g., Charlotte Lennox) and criminals (e.g., Rev. William Dodd). In this sense—­and, again, in something of a Borgesian vein—­all of Johnson’s prose is a kind of translation, in which, as he says of Dryden’s prose (equally true of Dryden’s poetry), he 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.”8 O. M. Brack and Robert De Maria’s editorial control of Johnson on Demand is exemplary. They follow the bibliographical and stylistic protocols of the Yale edition in general (though ­there is no separate section on textual practice in this volume, which one would have liked for the sake of clarity). Copy texts are the first printing, corrected from any existing manuscripts or subsequent or alternate printings, if any exist (for an example of the latter, see “Considerations on the Plans Offered for the Construction of Black-­Friars Bridge,” 458). In headnotes, each work is given a short but adequate textual and historical introduction, and both textual and contextual notes are short, useful, and adequate. Commentary, as in other Yale volumes, is minimal, unlike other major editions, such as the California edition of Dryden’s works or Roger Lonsdale’s Oxford edition of the Lives of the Poets, where introductions and critical and historical notes run to hundreds of pages and have a life of their own, separate from the text. While interpretive, critical, and historical accounts of Johnson’s writings w ­ ill surely continue to be produced, his texts seem now to have been settled by the Yale edition, which is where scholars, students, and even general readers are likely to start their reading and their study of Johnson. ­There is both plea­sure and melancholy, then, associated with this final volume of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. ­There is plea­sure in the contemplation of the collective achievement of all ­those who have contributed to the proj­ect, and ­there is melancholy in the recognition that we are unlikely to see the like again. But wait! The Walpole Library symposium on scholarly editions not

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1650–1850 only highlighted some of the ­great editions of the past, but also introduced two editions just commencing, collected works of Aphra Behn (Cambridge) and of Alexander Pope (Oxford). T ­ hese new editions w ­ ill incorporate ideas about the history of the book and material culture, as well as approaches to online platforms, searchable texts, and open access. They w ­ ill benefit from current views about the use of copy text, attribution, normalization, and levels of annotation and comprehensiveness of indexing that ­were unavailable to the Yale editions of the works of Walpole, Boswell, or Johnson when they began in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. ­Under the inspirational direction of its coeditors (Michael D. Suarez, James Mc Laverty, Valerie Rumbold, Marcus Walsh, and H. R. Woudhuysen), the Oxford Pope, in twenty-­three volumes (including the Homer translations), w ­ ill structure its editorial operations so as to reflect the expanding notions of what a book is and what it means to edit a book for readers worldwide; and the edition’s operation ­will be structured so as to bring young scholars onto the team and into the editorial pro­cess at vari­ous early stages of their ­careers, so as to mentor the participants while teaching them the craft. Perhaps the age of scholarly editions is not over ­after all.

Notes to The Yale Edition of The Works of Samuel Johnson Review 1. Samuel Johnson, Johnson on the En­glish Language, ed. Gwin J. Kolb and Robert De Maria Jr., Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson vol. 18 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 104. 2. Samuel Johnson, Idler and Adventurer, ed. W. J. Bate, John M. Bullitt, and L. F. Powell, Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson vol. 2 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 315. 3. Robert De Maria is the one to tell this story. He has made a beginning in “A History of the Collected Works of Samuel Johnson: The First Two Hundred Years,” ­ entury, ed. Howard D. Weinbrot in Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New C (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 2014), 343–676, and in vari­ous short notices in the Johnsonian News Letter. For the Boswell papers, see David Buchanan, The Trea­sure of Auchinleck: The Story of the Boswell Papers (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1974), and for the Walpole papers, see Wilmarth Lewis, Collector’s Pro­gress (New York: Knopf, 1951) and Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis, One Man’s Education (New York: Knopf, 1967). 4. See http://­w ww​.­yalejohnson​.­com​/­frontend. 5. Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Poets, 3 vols., ed. John B. Middendorf, Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson vols. 21–23 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 23:1188.

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6. See Greg Clingham, “Johnson and Borges: Some Reflections,” in Samuel Johnson among the Modernists, ed. Anthony  W. Lee (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2019), 189–212. 7. Samuel Johnson, Johnson on Shakespeare, 2 vols., ed. Arthur Sherbo, with an introduction by Bertrand H. Bronson, Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson vols. 7–8 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), 7:66. 8. Johnson, Lives of the Poets, 21:443.

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Anthony W. Lee, ed., Community and Solitude: New Essays on Johnson’s Circle. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2019. REVIEWED BY JOHN J. BURKE, UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA

It seems fair to say that Anthony Lee’s collection of essays takes much of its inspi-

ration from John Radner’s prize-­wining book Johnson and Boswell: A Biography of Friendship (2012). Lee’s collection even begins with a sample of what would prove to be Radner’s final work, a careful examination of Johnson taking a paternal role in his correspondence with three much younger male friends: Bennet Langton, Robert Chambers, and James Boswell. Anthony Lee contributes an essay to his own collection that examines a reverse dynamic with the much younger Arthur Murphy looking for Johnson to play a paternal role for him. Unfortunately, we ­don’t learn much about the results of such role-­playing that we d ­ on’t already know. It also seems worth remarking that this collection’s interest in “solitude” and/or “community” closely follows upon the appearance of Leo Damrosch’s well-­received 2019 book The Club, which focuses on a very dif­fer­ent idea of community, this one, however, exclusively male. Since literary scholarship proves inescapably to be as much about “us” as it is about “them,” we c­ an’t help but notice that the topics h ­ ere are s­ haped by familiar con­temporary concerns, the exclusion of ­women being but one of them. ­There are, for that reason alone, painful bites in the essays about the roles played by female writers. This is particularly true in two of the essays, the one by Marilyn Francus on the youthful Frances Burney and the other by Claudia Thomas Kairoff on Anna Seward. It may seem to some of us at times that more than enough has been said on this topic. Yet everyday events keep reminding us just how wrong it

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would be to turn our eyes away. ­Women’s issues continue to ­matter. Our collective attention to them seems more urgent than ever. James May contributes an essay that touches, obliquely, on other burning con­temporary issues, namely, nationalism, and migration/immigration as they are treated in Oliver Goldsmith’s long poem The Traveller; or A Prospect of Society (1764). May’s main interest, though, is highly technical; namely, the significance of the changes or revisions that Goldsmith made over eight editions in the text of his first major success of this poem. Goldsmith was born and lived the first part of his life in Ireland, but moved to Edinburgh, to study medicine. Then he found his way through the countries of western Eu­rope. In his poem he becomes the Traveller finding his way through Italy, Switzerland, France, Holland, and fi­nally reaching ­England. All the while he finds himself looking for the place/nation where he would most likely be happy. He ultimately concludes that each nation/place has something about it that can bring about happiness. But what about Ireland, one may ask. Apparently, we are left to conclude that Ireland in its pre­sent circumstances could not offer any possibility for ­human happiness. Christine Jackson-­Holtzberg’s essay throws considerable light on what is certainly one of Johnson’s lesser known early friendships, that with the Scottish scholar James Elphinston. She starts her essay by recounting an odd episode that happened in 1787 with a ­bottle that had preserved four of Johnson’s letters. This ­bottle was picked up by French fishermen just off the coast of Normandy. This is the “Argonautic Epistel” in her essay’s title. If the spelling of the word “epistle” seems odd, it is purposely so. It reminds us that spelling reform was one of James Elphinston’s major interests (or quirks). Consequently, the adjective “­great” is spelled “grait” ­because that’s the way Elphinston thought it was pronounced. The relative pronoun “who” loses its “h” and adds an “o” to become “hoo.” Johnson, as far as I can tell, was never much taken with this attempt to apply logic (lojik) to the illogic of language. However, he did appreciate his help with a Scottish edition ­ ehind of his Rambler papers. Elphinston is described by Boswell as “the force” b the edition’s success in Scotland. Elphinston also provided help with suggestions regarding translations, most likely with the numerous quotations in Latin or Greek. This is a tough read but also a rewarding one about one of Johnson’s male friendships that we know very l­ittle about. James Caudle’s essay and that of Marilyn Francus draw attention to what we might describe as the darker or more unpleasant aspects of Johnson’s social personality, mainly his lack of what we would call good manners. Caudle offers us a

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1650–1850 well-­informed examination of the fiery argument that broke out between the Anglican Johnson and the Presbyterian John Dun, the longtime resident minister at the Boswell f­amily residence in Auchinleck. Rev. Dun apparently made some offhanded derogatory comments about the be­hav­ior of the Anglican clergy. (In the written accounts ­there are no mentions of Anglican theology, ­unless being “fat” and “lazy” are m ­ atters of grave theological concern.) What we do know from Boswell is that Johnson at first grew agitated and then angry. He ended up insulting the unfortunate Rev. Dun by describing him as no better than a “Hottentot” (presumably, then, as an “ignorant savage”) when it came to understanding and appreciating the ­great Anglican theologians. Caudle had come into possession of a letter in which Rev. Dun denied that the g­ reat Dr. Johnson had ever so insulted him, never mind that he called him a “Hottentot,” thereby flatly denying what Boswell described in The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and calling into question Boswell’s accuracy and truthfulness as the biographer of Samuel Johnson. Caudle is well informed, but not fully persuasive in his case against Boswell. His essay could have been considerably strengthened if ­there had been a careful examination of the currency of the word “Hottentot” in the late eigh­ teenth c­ entury, especially as an insult. In par­tic­u­lar, what would have been the currency of the word “Hottentot” in the relatively isolated world of rural Auchinleck in the last de­cades of the eigh­teenth ­century? Is it pos­si­ble, for instance, that Rev. Dun d ­ idn’t even recognize the put-­down implied by the harsh use of that not yet po­liti­cally incorrect word? Something much the same is at work in Marilyn Francus’s essay on the youthful Frances Burney’s relationship with the el­derly Johnson where he seems to take on a paternal role, and she the role of a ­daughter he never had. ­There is ample evidence that Johnson was extremely fond of the twenty-­six-­year-­old Fanny. When Johnson is told that Elizabeth Montagu might also be attending the same reception at Streatham in honor of the youthful author’s major literary success, he has a strange reaction. In a very odd but memorable moment Johnson, seemingly wanting to compliment Burney on her spectacular success, urges her to attack the most celebrated female author of their time, which is understood to  be Elizabeth Montagu, Queen of the Blues: “fly at the Eagle!—­down with Mrs. Montagu herself.” Yes, this is another one of ­those moments that cast Johnson in a negative light, much like his attack on Rev. Dun. Francus rightly goes on to argue, not too surprisingly, that this moment actually drove a wedge into what had been a warm and friendly relationship between them. The shy young Frances Burney wanted nothing to do with Johnson’s call for hypermasculine chest beat-

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ing in the public arena. She went on instead to carve out a role far more suited to her gentle nature. So far, so good. The prob­lem with this other­wise solid essay is that the author ­doesn’t give nearly enough attention to the role Elizabeth Montagu’s name played in all this. How and why did Elizabeth Montagu occupy such an exalted role in every­body’s minds at the time? Put more simply, what made her “an ea­gle”? Why would she be characterized as a ravenous bird of prey? Next come two essays that, to my mind at least, represent a special kind of excellence in scholarly writing. The first would be Lance Wilcox’s essay on the dif­ fer­ent narrative voices Johnson uses while recounting (in 1743–1744) the life of his recently deceased (August  1, 1743) friend and companion the poet Richard Savage. This is a far dif­f er­ent Johnson from the one we remember from the pages of Boswell’s superb work, and it is more than worth experiencing this up close in Johnson’s early master work. Wilcox argues for four narrators: the Sage, the Historian, the Memoirist, and the Friend. ­Those who are acquainted with the details of Savage’s mostly unhappy life ­will readily understand why one voice would never do for recounting the few successes and the multitude of miseries and failures of his stormy life. Wilcox’s argument uncovers for us a Johnson developing a complex prose style that can deal with the complexities of his relationship with the man we know as Richard Savage, but who may r­ eally have been an abandoned baby christened Robert Smith. I found myself marveling at Lance Wilcox’s skill at showing us a Johnson we can truly admire, a Johnson struggling to come to terms with his complicated friendship with this very difficult man. Time and again Savage displays off-­putting be­hav­iors, but he was also a man with a strangely seductive, even winning personality. Johnson does all this as he is creating a prose style with multiple voices as his way of dealing with ­these frustrating realities. Johnson was then—­early on—in the business of creating a power­ful prose style that requires honesty above all, which would serve him well in l­ater years. Complex realities need to be met with complicated responses. This is an essay that could and should be read by anyone taking up the serious study of the figure we have come to know as “Dr. Johnson.” Elizabeth Lambert’s essay had a similar effect on me, but for a dif­fer­ent set of reasons. Racism, especially of the American variety with its deep roots in the institution of black slavery, is a subject that commands our attention. We as literary scholars find ourselves in a bind b ­ ecause some of the figures we admire appear to be too much creatures of their own times. Boswell’s defense of the practice of slavery, for instance, has long been a source of pain and embarrassment in literary studies. So, what do we do? Elizabeth Lambert provides us with

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1650–1850 an admirable example of what can and should be done. She does this by taking advantage of her expertise in Edmund Burke studies. Burke, as she reminds us, was a friend to both Johnson and Boswell. She uses this to give us fresh perspective on the dif­fer­ent public positions they took on the practice of slavery, in par­ tic­u­lar black slavery, that is, slavery based on the color of one’s skin. It is somewhat reassuring that Johnson had relatively enlightened views on the issue. We know he hated the practice, and did what he could to make that clear to one and all. He virtually ­adopted Frank Barber, a onetime Jamaican slave, and late in life dictated that Barber was to be one of his heirs in his last ­will and testament. More specifically, he wanted to set aside a sizable sum of money so that Barber could have an annual income of at least seventy pounds ­after his death. Boswell, I’m afraid, has no such claim on our good ­will. He supported the practice as good economics ­because it enabled the upper classes to maintain their status. All this can be found in a pamphlet he published in defense of the practice of slavery. It may be worth noting that Boswell was happy enough to have Barber as an impor­tant source of information about Johnson’s domestic habits when nobody ­else was around, thereby grounding and strengthening his achievement in his indisputably magnificent biography of Johnson, which is much better ­because of Barber’s help. What better way to shine a light on Boswell’s blind spot when it came to slavery than to turn to the other eighteenth-­century figure much admired by Boswell, namely, Edmund Burke? This deft move enables Lambert to show just how wrong Boswell was, and to do it with g­ reat skill and admirable tact. Despite the prominence of the word “solitude” in the collection’s title, very ­little is said about it apart from noting that Samuel Johnson hated solitude ­because he dreaded being alone. This is more than a ­little odd. ­After all, Johnson as a professional writer responsible for a large volume of published work had to have spent an extraordinary amount of time alone composing ­those works. And that d ­ oesn’t even begin to account for the amount of time he devoted to the reading he must have done to prepare himself for that writing. ­Unless I live in a dif­fer­ent universe, most of the reading he did had to have been ­silent reading, which at least in most instances would have required m ­ ental as well as some kind of physical solitude, that is, time away from the com­pany of his fellow h ­ uman beings. In other words, the man who hated being alone had to have spent much time alone to do what he did best. Two essays at the end of the book do address the issue of solitude. In both instances it is the kind of solitude that w ­ ill be celebrated in the Romantic Age to come. Claudia Thomas Kairoff contributes an essay that draws a comparison and

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contrast between Johnson and the much younger Anna Seward to illustrate the difference between the old and the new. Sentimentality is not new. It is in fact very much part of the Age of Reason. So, Anna Seward searching out experiences that would bring “delicious tears” is not quite so shocking as it might seem at first. Seward’s true novelty comes when even at the risk of significant physical danger she seeks out experiences of “the sublime.” This is a long way from sentimentality. Anna Seward is in search of an emotional feeling of what she calls “transport,” or what we might call a “high,” not one that is chemically induced, but rather one induced by nature. This is the elevated state of feelings that can lead to ecstasy that are the driving motivations in Words­worth’s “Tintern Abbey” or in Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” My major objection to Kairoff’s pre­sen­ta­tion comes when she sides with Anna Seward’s complaints concerning Johnson’s coolness ­toward Thomas Gray’s poetic achievements. She admits that Johnson “­wholeheartedly approves” of his “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” ­because it fulfills Pope’s requirement that a poem recall “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” Johnson, she says, does not add that the ‘Elegy’ exudes Christian humility and piety; “of all his poems Gray’s “Elegy” fulfilled Johnson’s moral expectations” (209). A caveat ­here. I ­don’t think Gray’s “Elegy” “exudes” any such ­thing. If anything, it exudes the smoldering class resentments of the nobodies of this world. If Johnson objected to anything in this poem, it would almost certainly be that “delicious tear” that comes at the end. No won­der Anna Seward so much admired Gray’s poetry. Christopher Catanese has the final say in the volume. He, too, is interested in the efforts to break ­free from the chains of the Age of Reason and its connection to the changing attitudes ­toward solitude. He turns ­toward the work of young Thomas Warton (1728–1790) to achieve that aim. Thomas Warton began working on the poetry of Edmund Spenser (1522–1599), especially The Fairie Queene (1590, 1609), which had fallen out of ­favor ­because of its romantic character. But Warton had a sense that ­there was a change in the air, that the readers or consumers of lit­er­a­ture ­were looking for what was new and dif­fer­ent. Samuel Johnson, Catanese argues, was already alert to the changes, still largely invisible, but felt, if not seen, like the wind. Johnson sensed what was happening owing to his work on the periodical essays that we know as the Rambler papers; he more than likely shared his thoughts with his younger friend the Reverend Thomas Warton, when he visited with him in Oxford. The key to all this, according to Catanese, was a Latin phrase, aura popularis, which was customarily translated as “the gentle breeze of popu­lar ­favor.” Johnson, however, translated the phrase as “a gale of popu­lar

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1650–1850 f­avor.” The older meaning of “gale” illustrated in his Dictionary by a quotation from Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona: “What happy gale / Blows you to Padua from old Verona?” The word “gale” meaning a light wind w ­ ill have to yield to the new modern meaning (“a very strong wind”). This power­ful wind that is blowing justifies Thomas Warton’s hunch that eighteenth-­century readers w ­ ere ready for something “new,” and that something “new” for him would be a rediscovery of the greatness of Edmund Spencer’s poetry. According to Catanese, Warton is quite clear about what he expects this revolution to look like: the reader ­will “no longer [be] a critic . . . ​but rather [someone] motivated by the promises of transport, enchantment, and delight” (221). Or, to put it another way: Warton’s judgment that “in the Fairie Queene we are not satisfied as critics, yet we are transported as readers” (220). At this moment it becomes clear that the word “transport” lies at the heart of the collection’s final two essays, and that is a long way from the friendships that w ­ ere being examined at the beginning. We can gather some additional information about what the word “transport” must have meant for ­those alive and alert in the eigh­teenth ­century from Johnson’s ­great Dictionary. Johnson offers three pos­si­ble definitions for “transport” as a noun, but the third is the one that should be of interest to us: ­there it is defined as “Rapture” or “ecstasy.” Johnson offers an illustrative quotation from the Sermons of the Reverend Robert South: “A pious mind receives a temporal blessing with gratitude, a spiritual one with ecstasy and transport.” In other words, eighteenth-­ century readers ­were now seeking some kind of “high” or even out-­of-­the body experience from reading poetry w ­ hether the trigger be called the “sublime” or “romance.” This seems to suggest that “the eighteenth-­century word transport” is kin to our use of the word “high” but without any requirement that it be drug-­ induced. At the end of this one cannot help but won­der if Thomas Warton would ever have experienced ecstasy or even high emotional satisfaction from Thomas Gray’s Bardic odes; or if Anna Seward ever experienced any sublime high, much less rapture, when reading Spenser.

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Anthony W. Lee, ed., New Essays on Samuel Johnson: Revaluation. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2018. Pp. xx + 261. REVIEWED BY CHRISTOPHER D. JOHNSON, FRANCIS MARION UNIVERSITY

The collection begins with five essays loosely grouped ­under the heading “Re-­

reading Specific Texts.” Lynda Mugglestone examines Johnson’s annotations to the Warburton edition of Shakespeare. Written as shorthand instructions for Johnson’s amanuenses, the annotations reveal the “levels of symbiosis that exist between . . . ​Johnson as dictionary maker and his ­later role as Shakespearian editor” (4). The illustrative examples in the Dictionary, for example, anticipate the Preface to Shakespeare by revealing Johnson’s interest in colloquial language. In an especially strong section, Mugglestone shows how Johnson challenged previous interpretations of The Tempest: “the Dictionary widely affirms” Caliban’s language to be “fluent and intelligent” and his character to be “an entirely rational being” (19). Anthony W. Lee considers the utopian “secret island” passage in London, A Poem. Finding the text to be richly referential, Lee argues that Johnson becomes “a master mimic, a literary ventriloquist who performs using the voices of ­earlier writers to generate . . . ​polysemic constructions” (33). Using ideas from Frederick Jameson, Lee defines intertextuality as more than learned distraction. Johnson, he posits, contrasts experiences of “scarcity, fear, conflict and competition” with allusive visons of “plentitude, fullness, community, and collaboration,” creating “a brief, bright beam of light” that is “not merely diversionary but manifestly productive of optimistic redress” (38). Adam Rounce addresses the fraught topic of Johnson’s additions to the Lives of the Poets. Acknowledging that the “booksellers who conceived the proj­ect” bear the greatest responsibility for the odd mixture of “luminaries and poetasters,”

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1650–1850 Rounce still holds Johnson “somewhat culpable” for his few additions, which do not reflect literary taste—at least not as understood by twenty-­first-­century readers—­but rather “Johnson’s concerns with morality and devotion” and his re­spect for “the common, unsophisticated reader” (48, 52). Johnson, for example, included Isaac Watts “as a model of piety first and a poet very much second” (52). While John Pomfret’s poetry may appear artless to some, it no doubt resonated with readers’ desire “to seek refuge from a tiring and overcomplicated world” (52). In the end, Rounce cautions against reading too much into the se­lections, which ­were often determined by material concerns, such as copyright and salability. The Lives, he concludes, was “intended to be a marketable product,” not “an authoritative act of canon formation” (64). In an especially compelling essay, Katherine Kickel connects the posthumously published Prayers and Meditations to the traditions of consolation lit­er­a­ture. Johnson’s writings might have alarmed t­hose who adhered to Anglican prohibitions against directly addressing the dead and t­ hose who found in the expression of grief an “apparent lack of conviction about the afterlife” (72). More tolerant readers of the texts, however, would discover earnest strug­gle and the emergence of an au­then­tic, personal voice. Kickel connects Johnson’s prayers to Melvyn New’s idea of “pragmatic piety,” an expression of devotion s­ haped, but not constrained, by “the language of the Anglican establishment” and “grounded in self-­discovery and reflection,” qualities that expand the genre of consolatio, making it “more meditative, more extemporaneous, more intimate, and more personal” (74, 82). Thomas M. Curley provides a nuanced contextualization of Taxation No Tyranny. Tracing the development of Johnson’s ideas from his work for the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1730s, through his subversively anti-­imperialist editorship of the Literary Magazine in the 1750s, Curley reveals in Johnson’s defense of the British Empire a cosmopolitan “re­spect for universal ­human rights” and a profound disdain for Amer­i­ca’s “terrible legacy of racial exploitation” (89). In part, Taxation No Tyranny reflects the ideas about “ancient and modern empire, parliamentary sovereignty and virtual repre­sen­ta­tion, and colonial liability to taxation” recorded in A Course of Lectures on the En­glish Law, which Johnson co­wrote with Robert Chambers (96). At the same time, it “scornfully” imagines “the end of empire with l­ittle regret” (99). Part 2, “Remapping Larger Themes and Issues,” begins with John Sitter’s discussion of Johnson and sustainability. Building on Daniel Philippon’s definition of sustainability (“ ‘ the pro­cess of achieving ecological health, social equity, and economic viability for current and ­future generations’ ” ), Sitter examines the brief

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essay “On the Character and Duty of an Academick,” where Johnson charges academicians with the responsibility to promote the common good (111). Equally impor­tant, Johnson’s writing, Sitter finds, expresses dispositions that align with sustainability studies, including a georgic view of land use and a “skeptical . . . ​ empirical” conservatism (126). Using Johnson’s ideas, Sitter urges scholars to “speak beyond” disciplinary borders (127). To ignore the hard truths of the Anthropocene era, Sitter asserts, is to commit “an act of intergenerational injustice” (125). Examining the harsh assessments of Gray’s odes and Milton’s “Lycidas,” John Richetti argues that Johnson’s critical positions, however conventional they now appear, ­were heterodoxical in his own age. Gray’s artificial, exaggerated language, in fact, more closely reflected “orthodox poetic practice and theory in the mid-­eighteenth ­century” than did Johnson’s calls for clarity, logic, and morality (131). Richetti demonstrates that Johnson’s insistence that poetry should “promote the contemplation of moral and po­liti­cal truth” controls the “disturbingly truthful and only minimally fanciful” Vanity of ­Human Wishes (134, 139). Greg Clingham suggests that “Johnson’s most characteristic thought is rooted in the experience of ­children” (146). Examining the correspondence with Queeney Thrale, Clingham reveals “Johnson’s playfulness and tenderness” as well as “the sureness with which he enters the child’s world,” a pattern repeated in Johnson’s relationship with the young Frank Barber (149). In the Rambler, Clingham discovers Johnson’s concerns about the exploitation of young girls and their need for liberal education. Johnson also understands that intellectual growth emerges through the “to-­and-­fro movements between articulate and inarticulate selves,” a pro­cess captured in the “open-­ended narrative structure” of Rasselas, which captures “a mythic form of child (that is, of ­human) development” (176). Steven Scherwatzky wrestles with the question of why Johnson never completed an autobiography in spite of his re­spect for the genre. Building on works by George Gusdorf and Louis Renza, Scherwatzky concludes that Johnson recognizes “the existential distance between the self and its creations” (183). More specifically, Johnson fears the difficulty of accurately retracing a life without producing an apology for that life. As a result, Johnson remains suspicious of his own memory and rarely offers his reader moments of personal reflection. For Johnson, attempting autobiography becomes futile as “the quest for clarity results in confusion; the search for truth produces fiction; the attempt to stabilize identity results in instability” (198). Shifting from the epistemological to the sensory, Emily C. Friedman examines Johnson’s use of olfaction, arguing that his writings suggest “the variety of ways that smell language was deployed in . . . ​

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1650–1850 eighteenth-­century culture” (205). Particularly valuable are Friedman’s discussion of Johnson and Boswell’s contrasting use of smell in their Scottish travel narratives and her analy­sis of Rasselas, where “luxurious fragrance” becomes an “early warning sign of corruption or slothfulness” (210). In the collection’s final essay, Paul Tankard examines Johnson’s journals, paying par­tic­u­lar attention to the abundant lists of resolutions. In Tankard’s analy­sis, ­these writings w ­ ere never intended to edify a reader nor define a biographical subject. They w ­ ere, instead, intended to help Johnson himself. A journal becomes “an instrument, rather like a surgical tool, by which [Johnson] probes the tender and troublesome places of his own soul” (220). Even when the resolutions remained unfulfilled, they allowed Johnson “to maintain control of the everyday, rather than giving life over to habit, or necessity, or immediate and sensual plea­sure” (230). Like ­others within the collection, Tankard’s essay humanizes Samuel Johnson, making the ­Great Cham both recognizable and unique. New Essays on Samuel Johnson is a valuable collection. It ­will reward specialists with a few unexpected insights, while remaining accessible for all readers. Many of the essays would be directly applicable for ­those preparing to teach Johnson to undergraduates.

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Anthony W. Lee, ed., Samuel Johnson among the Modernists. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2019. Pp. xi + 290. REVIEWED BY JOHN SITTER, UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME

In addition to Anthony Lee’s thoughtful introduction, this collection includes nine

chapters that put Johnson into conversation with vari­ous authors and aspects of the first sixty years of the twentieth ­century. The contributions are “Johnson, T.S. Eliot, and the City” by Melvyn New; “ ‘Saint Samuel of Fleet Street’: Johnson and Woolf” by Lee; “Intellectually ‘Fuori del Mondo’: Pound’s Johnson” by Joe Moffett; “The Antinomies of Pro­gress: Johnson, Conrad, Joyce” by Clement Hawes; “Johnson Goes to War” by Jack Lynch; “Samuel Beckett and Samuel Johnson: Like-­ Minded Masters of Life’s Limitations” by Thomas M. Curley; “The ‘Plexed Artistry’ of Nabakov and Johnson” by Carrie D. Shanafelt; “Johnson and Borges” by Greg Clingham; and “Ernest Borneman’s Tomorrow is Now (1959): Thoughts about a Lost Novel, with Glances t­ oward Samuel Johnson and Other Modernists” by Robert G. Walker. Some of the contributors draw archival and documented connections, as does Lynch in unearthing many Johnsonian presences among the authors, scholars, and common readers of the World War I generation. He attends with moving erudition both to ­those who understood Johnson well and to ­those “more ­eager to speak through him than to listen to him” (131). Some other contributors lean more heavi­ly on the idealist, rather Bloomian notion that, in Melvyn New’s formulation, “literary genius is always in dialogue with literary genius” (40). This approach leads New to ruminate not only on the Christian ambivalence t­ oward modernity and urbanity that Johnson and Eliot both exhibit, especially as manifested in London and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, but also on their ambivalent indebtedness

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1650–1850 to Milton. New’s wide-­ranging essay sometimes ranges more widely than is helpful, into discontents with the postmodern state of literary scholarship, but he argues with ­great learning and utility that Johnson and Eliot both illustrate modernism as a “per­sis­tent state of psychic depression” fostered by the city that “corrupts, confines, and fi­nally exhausts every­one” (26). Clement Hawes’s “The Antinomies of Pro­gress: Johnson, Conrad, Joyce” complements New’s account of Johnson’s skepticism regarding “the promise of modernism,” a continually “hollow” promise of “ameliorative change” (25). For Hawes, Johnson is, like Swift, an early skeptic of empire, who anticipates Joyce’s and Conrad’s refusal of “the worst of ‘pro­gress’ as an ideological theme: its abuse as a racist and imperial mode of self-­legitimation” (113). Hawes’s insistence that it is time to “stop evoking Johnson as an obstinate conservative and to start recognizing him as a power­ful e­ nemy of received ideas and unexamined custom” (113) ­will not surprise many Johnsonians, but it is a message many other literary scholars and historians still need to hear. I find especially evocative Hawes’s contention that Johnson’s vision offers “for En­glish politics and letters a path not taken: the possibility, routinely dismissed in the nineteenth ­century as ‘­Little En­glandism,’ of refusing colonial expansion, exploitation, vio­lence, and racist misrepre­sen­ta­ tion” (111). The importance of Johnson for Woolf is itself not news: “Saint Samuel of Fleet Street” is Woolf’s phrase, and she mentions or alludes to him in at least nineteen works. But Anthony Lee’s chapter tells the story more fully than ever, surveying thematic parallels (such as their shared antipathy to war) and their deep interests in literary criticism and biography. His carefully documented tale earns its conclusion that “Woolf’s intertextual assimilation and redeployment of Johnson exemplifies how the materials of the past may be appropriated to make new art of the highest order” (68). In any proj­ect of the X-­and-­Y sort, the “and” may sometimes seem more sequential than consequential. So, at least to this reader, admittedly ­little versed in Pound or Nabakov, seem the connections drawn between ­those two authors and Johnson. Joe Moffett’s observation concerning The Vanity of ­Human Wishes that its “melancholy and nostalgia . . . ​foreshadows what appears ­later in Pound” is vague, as is his contention that its “elegiac tone . . . ​has been shown to undergird much of Modernism” (77–78). Carrie Shanafelt’s conclusion that Johnson and Nabakov “negotiated the terms of their artistry as reconciliations between their own subjective systems of meaning and value and the worlds where they invited their worldly readers to play” (187) seems something one might say of most

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strong writers. Robert Walker’s choice to connect Johnson with the little-­known modern writer Ernest Borneman ­will prob­ably resonate with few readers of this volume, perhaps regrettably. For his approach to Borneman, Walker says, the “choice of Johnson is not arbitrary” (214), but for illuminating Johnson, the choice of Borneman is. Beckett and Borges are dif­f er­ent stories. Beckett was interested from early on in Johnson’s ­later years, particularly his relationship with Mrs. Thrale, and he attempted to write a play, “­Human Wishes,” about that period. Thomas Curley scrupulously traces Beckett’s reading of Johnson’s work, the biographical accounts, and the correspondence. His summary verdict seems exactly right: “No famous modern author was more fascinated by Johnson and his anx­i­eties than was Samuel Beckett. He turned a blind eye to the traditional magisterial figure of the ­Great Cham. Instead, he focused on a doubt-­ridden and phobia-­filled figure, a subversive Johnson, wrought in his own nihilistic image and serving as a formative influence on his own canon” (133–134). Greg Clingham brings much new information to the t­ able in connecting Juan Luis Borges and Johnson. Borges’s interest ran much deeper than his two survey-­ course lectures would indicate (if his students’ notes are a reliable index), including plans for an edition of selected works and, surprisingly, a translation of the Lives of the Poets. While not fi­nally persuaded by Clingham’s contention that Johnson saw “translation . . . ​a s the quintessence of literary creativity” (208), I think any reader of his fine translatio studii ­will have a deeper appreciation for what Clingham calls the paradoxical “invisibility” of ­these master prose stylists. Anthony Lee has done Johnsonian and modernists alike a ser­vice in bringing ­these essays together and to light.

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Leo Damrosch, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends who S ­ haped an Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. vi + 473. REVIEWED BY MALCOLM JACK, SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES, LONDON

Unexpectedly the hero of Leo Damrosch’s book The Club turns out to be James

Boswell. It is not that Damrosch is unaware of Boswell’s limitations and shortcomings, which included a highly inflated opinion of himself, but nevertheless, in the long drawn-­out choreography, he emerges as the most vivid and the most h ­ uman of the cast. The strength of Damrosch’s study is the h ­ andling of the delicate and sometimes difficult-­to-­fathom relationship between Boswell and Johnson whom the young Scotsman elevated to the status of a sage. Throughout the account of their friendship we are variously entertained and repulsed by Boswell’s be­hav­ior. He was a man of uncontrollable sexual desire, which led to countless dalliances with prostitutes; he was im­mensely vain, constantly seeking approbation from his fellows and, according to Damrosch, was no intellectual. Nevertheless he had a breezy charm and a way of inducing p ­ eople to speak out; his affection for Johnson comes over as entirely genuine, and we must admire both his recording skills and his per­sis­tence in fi­nally producing what has become a major biography in En­glish lit­er­a­ture, The Life of Samuel Johnson. Although Damrosch’s book is ostensibly about the Club, it is rather a series of biographical sketches of the group of friends whom we are told “­shaped an age.” It begins with a long sketch of the early years first of Johnson and then of Boswell who remain throughout the chief protagonists. Their “fateful” meeting took place in 1763, when the fifty-­three-­year-­old Johnson was already an established literary figure (following the Dictionary of 1755) while twenty-­two-­year-­old Boswell, the son of a Scottish Laird, was idling time in London before proceeding

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to Holland to pursue ­legal studies at Utrecht. It was not an auspicious start. Boswell, hearing that Johnson had been disparaging about the Scots, made a remark to the effect that he could not help being a Scotsman, to which the Doctor replied in characteristically acerbic mode “that is what a g­ reat many of your countrymen cannot help.” Despite that cool beginning, Boswell persisted, returning to visit Johnson when other friends w ­ ere pre­sent a week l­ater. He was to be pleasantly surprised when getting up to leave with the o ­ thers, Johnson told him not to go. They had something of an instant crush on each other. The two friends made curious bedfellows; neither of them enjoying a clean bill of health. A ­ fter considering vari­ous theories about the cause of Johnson’s depression and peculiar gestures and occasional noises, Damrosch concludes that he suffered from obsessive-­compulsive disorder, a neurological illness dif­fer­ ent from the madness that he always feared. Boswell too suffered from depression and self-­disgust at his own licentious be­hav­ior, which inevitably led to venereal illness. It seemed that when in com­pany together, the depressive symptoms of both men ­were banished. Their friendship lasted for over twenty years, ­until Johnson’s death in 1784. The year ­after Boswell and Johnson’s first meeting, Joshua Reynolds, already a friend of Johnson’s, had proposed the formation of a club. From the start it was to be a forum for a group of lively friends with wide interests who would meet for convivial conversation and some indulgence in food, and especially in alcoholic drink. T ­ here was no physical premises; meetings took place at the Turk’s Head Tavern in Gerrard Street (in an unfortunate slip at the beginning of the book the tavern is marked on the map near Somerset ­house on the embankment instead of in its a­ ctual place in Soho’s present-­day China Town). In due course a glittering array of names are to be found among the members: David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, and Sir William Jones among them. L­ ater Adam Smith and David Hume joined the Club. Boswell himself had to wait for admission ­until 1773 ­because, according to Damrosch, he was regarded as a lightweight by the other members, his only merit being his devotion to Johnson. Nevertheless it was with Boswell’s entry that a  detailed rec­ord of conversations was kept, naturally centering on Johnson’s rounded, and sometimes pontifical, contributions. Johnson knew well that he “dogmatised” and would be contradicted by the o ­ thers, but he sought that, deriving g­ reat plea­sure from the cut and thrust of the Club’s debate. He was particularly enthralled with Edmund Burke’s witty torrent of words, regarding him as the most power­ful mind of the assembled members. Po­liti­cal subjects, such as the

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1650–1850 vexed question of emigration to the colonies, came up frequently and no doubt helped to formulate opinions that Burke, in due course, expressed so eloquently in Parliament. The conversation always veered back to the nature of humankind and the effects of education and religion, subjects central to all Enlightenment thought. At the center of the book is a series of biographies of Reynolds, Goldsmith, Burke, Garrick, Smith, Gibbon, and Hume. In each case special attention is directed to their relations with Johnson. Reynolds was not only a founding member of the Club, but to an extent, he exemplified its sociability. He was of a relaxed, genial temperament, which Johnson remarked never changed the year round. Johnson’s affection for “Goldie” and his eccentricities was matched by a re­spect for his work, which, in an epitaph, he said “adorned” the age. Despite his Roman Catholic background, Burke remained an object of admiration by Johnson, while Garrick, his lifelong friend with whom he had walked to London from Lichfield, occasionally irritated him. Damrosch speculates that their relationship cooled off ­after the failure of Irene at Drury Lane even though Garrick had done his best to keep the play ­going. Adam Smith seems to have played the role of the Club Bore, while Hume, the ­great infidel, offended the religious sensibilities of both Johnson and Boswell. Although outside the Club a circle of ladies (the “shadow club”) was very impor­tant to Johnson. Hester Thrale—­with whom he eventually fell out over her unexpected marriage to Gabriele Piozzi ­after the death of Henry Thrale—­was a caring companion at whose home in Streatham, Johnson enjoyed peace as well as comfortable living. Fanny Burney, who also disapproved of Hester Thrale’s marriage to Piozzi, was another lifelong companion. At his own home he supported a ménage of dependents including Anna Williams, a favorite confidante and the ever-­loyal Francis Barber. This rich tapestry is described with a plethora of reference from Damrosch’s very wide reading of lit­er­a­ture and detailed, scholarly knowledge and numerous illustrations, many from the collection of the Houghton Library at Harvard. For this reviewer the didactic impulse to explain obvious ­matters to the reader was a slight irritant in what is nevertheless a considerable contribution to understanding Johnson, his friendships, his sociability, his depressive nature, and how he comes to life in Boswell’s monumental biography.

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Samara Anne Cahill, Intelligent Souls? Feminist Orientalism in Eighteenth-­Century En­glish Lit­er­a­ture. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2019. Pp. 232. (Review commissioned by Editor Kevin L. Cope) REVIEWED BY ASHLEY BENDER, TEXAS W ­ OMAN’S UNIVERSITY

Samara Anne Cahill’s Intelligent Souls? Feminist Orientalism in Eighteenth-­

Century En­glish Lit­er­a­ture offers an extended critical account of the development of feminist orientalism in relation to “misogynistic mortalism,” a term she coins to describe the belief that ­women do not have (immortal) souls (3). More specifically, she locates the 1690s as the origins of an Islamophobic strain of misogynistic mortalism that “projected patriarchal oppression onto a variety of religiopo­liti­cal ­others, but predominantly followers of Islam, in order to align Trinitarian orthodoxy with w ­ omen’s education, spiritual equality, and intelligence” (2). This rigorously researched study positions itself at the intersection of religious, po­liti­cal, educational, and gender discourses of the long eigh­teenth c­ entury. Drawing from a range of primary materials—­including religious polemics, drama, fiction, periodicals, and poetry, among ­others—­she unravels the rhetorical threads and the “series of propagandistic rhetorical moves” (3) that led to a ste­reo­typed image of the victimized, soulless, and unintelligent Muslim ­woman as the antithesis of the intelligent, rational, Christian En­glish ­woman. Requiring a “mechanism of displacement” (3), Islamophobic misogynistic mortalism—­the incorrect belief that Muslim doctrine denies w ­ omen immortal souls—­became a means through which En­glish ­women could interrogate and critique their own subjugation. The implications of this line of argumentation, Cahill suggests, extend beyond ­women’s education to the very notion of “Britishness.” Intelligent Souls? is complementary to recent scholarship on Islam and the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth-­century En­glish imagination (Bernadette Andrea, Delarivier Manley and Mary Pix: En­glish ­Women

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1650–1850 Staging Islam, 1696–1707 [2011]; Humberto Garcia, Islam and the En­glish Enlightenment, 1670–1840 [2012]; and Emily M. N. Kugler, Sway of the Ottoman Empire on En­glish Identity in the Long Eigh­teenth C ­ entury [2012]) and serves as an impor­tant scholarly intervention, not only for the field of eighteenth-­century studies, but also for the history of ­women’s writing and feminist rhe­torics. Whereas Joyce Zonana posits the rise of feminist orientalism with Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of ­Woman in 1792, Bernadette Andrea focuses instead on 1696—­the end of a season of numerous plays by ­women focusing on Islam and Muslim settings (9). Like Andrea, Cahill sees the 1690s as an impor­tant historical moment in the history of feminist orientalism. Unlike Andrea, however, she argues that feminist orientalism grew out of “a very specific politicized trope that . . . ​only became Islamophobic in the 1690s” (9). In chapter 1, “The Negative Ideal,” Cahill points to the Trinitarian Controversy of the 1690s as the source of the Islamophobic turn of misogynistic mortalism. She begins with the history of the controversy itself, a debate, she argues, that is as much about Christ’s divinity as it is about a unified En­glish identity. From this controversy arose a tendency to associate Islam with Socinianism (yoked ­because they both deny the Trinity), Roman Catholicism, and freethinking. Cahill then walks readers through debates regarding the status of w ­ omen’s souls and the use of misogynistic mortalism to demonize religious O ­ thers through claims that the opposition denied ­women’s immortal souls. The final sections of this chapter track the pro­ cess by which misogynistic mortalism became associated specifically with Islam. She suggests that intra-­Christian exegetical debates eventually began to incorporate “nascent cultural hierarchies” (26) that drew on texts about Islam published in the years leading up to and during the Trinitarian Controversy, for example, Lancelot Addison’s The First State of Mahumedism (1679) and Humphrey Prideaux’s The True Nature of Imposture (1697). Prideaux’s text, she argues, is exemplary of the tendency to create a hierarchy of pleasures that associates Islam with sensual, physical pleasures (and the harem) and “Chris­tian­ity with the spiritual plea­sure of eternal reward” (40). By the end of the seventeenth ­century, the unfounded belief that Islam denied ­women souls, in combination with xenophobic ste­reo­t ypes of Islam as a religion of sensual, not spiritual, delights, had become an accepted belief and common rhetorical trope, especially in debates regarding ­women’s rights and education. Cahill continues to or­ga­nize the subsequent chapters thematically, while moving in loose chronological order, beginning in the 1660s and ending with Wollstonecraft in 1792. Starting before 1696 is necessary, as Cahill attempts—­and

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succeeds—at isolating specific turning points in the history of misogynistic mortalism and feminist orientalism. In the second chapter, “Minding the Gap,” Cahill once again synthesizes a range of social, intellectual, and philosophical debates, this time to contextualize the works of Katherine Philips, Margaret Cavendish, and Mary Astell as well as prose fiction from the 1720s by Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Penelope Aubin, and Jane Barker. Cahill devotes the first half of the chapter to ­these contexts (among them, the querelle des femmes and ­women’s education debates; the philosophies of Descartes and Locke; and platonic imagery) in order to establish the centrality of the soul to ­women’s arguments for their intellectual and rational abilities. For t­ hese writers, the immaterial, immortal soul was foundational to their identities. The second half of the chapter maps out the shift in the use of Islamophobic tropes between the e­ arlier and ­later groups of w ­ omen. Philips, she argues, neither uses misogynistic mortalism nor “demonize[s]” Islam (70). Cavendish, also invested in female platonic friendships, does “contrast Muslim bodily pleasures and Western intellectual pleasures” in her analogy of the seraglio (76), but she does not include “overt hostility to Islam” e­ ither. Similarly, Astell draws on a “conventional alignment of Islam and sensuality” that links Socinianism and Islam à la the Trinitarian Controversy, but Socinianism, not Islam, is her quarry, and her use of misogynistic mortalism is not “the Islamophobic version” (78). By the 1720s, Cahill suggests, ­things had changed: Rowe, Aubin, and Barker may have held conflicting ideas of national identity and national security, but for them, Islam was a shared Other against which they could imagine a unified Britain (82) and w ­ omen’s centrality to that definition. All three w ­ omen depict an increased anti-­Islam animosity not seen in the e­ arlier writers’ work (53). The immortal female soul was once again central to their arguments, linking t­hese authors in vari­ous ways to the Trinitarian Controversy and reinforcing Cahill’s claim that a shift in Islamophobic misogynistic mortalism occurred in the 1690s. With her examination of Haywood’s Female Spectator (1744–1746) in chapter 3, “The Canal of Plea­sure,” one of the strongest chapters in the book, Cahill reveals Islamophobic misogynistic mortalism in full force. This chapter serves three main purposes. First, it analyzes in greater detail the hierarchy of pleasures that associates intellectual pleasures with Chris­tian­ity and sensual pleasures with Islam, reinforcing Islam as a negative ideal used to “police the bound­aries of En­glishness” (105). Cahill argues that w ­ omen writers “leveraged” this “perceived distance between Chris­tian­ity and Islam . . . ​to represent themselves as subjects of intellectual rather than merely physical pleasures” (100). Using this hierarchy, ­women could both claim their own intelligence and critique patriarchal oppression.

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1650–1850 For example, in Cahill’s reading of Haywood’s Female Spectator, Cleora (Haywood’s speaker) “aligns the intellectual pleasures of the soul with Chris­tian­ity while associating tyranny and pleasures of the body with Islam” (105–106), in order to argue for improved education and intellectual cultivation for ­women. Put another way, Christian princi­ples require the cultivation of w ­ omen’s minds, whereas “Mahometans” “treat ­women like ‘Clay’ ” (106). Second, this chapter demonstrates a shift away from the liberating feminocentric platonic tradition of ­earlier writers that gave way, eventually, to a satirization of female coterie and the caricature of the Platonic Lady: “The withdrawal of w ­ omen from normative patriarchal heterosexuality into a feminocentric site (or discourse) [was seen] as a foreign contagion that needed to be disciplined and regulated” (116). This satire required that intellectual w ­ omen, such as the Bluestockings, distance themselves from this “ ‘negative ideal’ of feminine identity” (116). Furthermore, Cahill argues, this satire “contributed to feminist orientalism b ­ ecause the Platonic Lady was a ste­reo­type that encompassed critiques of ste­reo­typical Roman Catholic and Muslim masculinities” (116–117). Thus this chapter is equally an interrogation of British masculinities and how British masculinities ­were, on the one hand, constructed in contradistinction to negative ideals of Islam, Roman Catholicism, and other religious alterities, such as freethinking and Socinianism and, on the other, critical in developing British national identity. Chapter  4, “A ‘Foreign and Uninteresting’ Subject,” analyzes works by the Bluestockings, Charlotte Lennox, and Samuel Johnson. ­These writers, Cahill argues, “exemplify the use of Islamophobic misogynistic mortalism in the second half of the eigh­teenth c­ entury and show how it was implicated in questions of ­women’s education and national identity” (142). For Johnson, Islamophobic misogynistic mortalism becomes a way to explore curiosity and generalized knowledge, drawing on the trope to conflate sensuality with a lack of curiosity and learning. For example, in both Irene (1749) and Rasselas (1759), Johnson argues in ­favor of ­women’s education, suggesting that it is not only a moral imperative but necessary for the salvation of ­women’s souls: “For him, inadequate female education is identified with the Muslim harem, while the proper education for ­women is identified with Chris­tian­ity” (151). A highlight of this chapter is Cahill’s reading of Lennox’s Female Quixote (1752), through which she reveals a domestication of ­women’s reading and a narrowing in scope of legitimate subjects ­women should read about. For example, she reads Arabella’s conversion at the end of the novel as a staging of “this domestication in microcosm on the person of Arabella” (160) and as a dismissal of the “foreign and uninteresting

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subjects” of the chapter’s title. By her own admission, Cahill’s is a “darker” reading of this seemingly Horatian satire. She says, Yet it is Arabella who must be regulated, disciplined, and humiliated so that her singularity, her queerness, her foreignness become safely domesticated. Her body can reproduce, but her reading practices should not. They cannot be allowed to influence other ­women’s minds the way her ­mother’s romances had influenced hers. The Platonic Lady tradition and her attraction to the foreign are shut down in The Female Quixote. (164) My one criticism of this chapter is Cahill’s claim that “Richardson clearly did not support the Trinitarian Controversy rhe­toric of castigating opponents as heretics, atheists, or Mahometans” (156). Perhaps not in his fiction, but at least in his early works, specifically, The Infidel Convicted (1731) and The Apprentices Vade Mecum (1733) (which draws heavi­ly, in its third section, from the ­earlier text), Richardson’s invectives against deists and freethinkers, and his perpetuation of xenophobic ste­reo­t ypes that conflate Islam with sensual pleasures, engages the rhetorical gymnastics of the Trinitarian controversy that Cahill lays out in the first chapter. An analy­sis of this shift in Richardson’s rhe­toric as he moved from pamphlets, polemics, and conduct manuals to the fiction of his more mature years would enrich the chapter, providing a contextualization of his fiction within his larger oeuvre that too infrequently occurs in the scholarship of his novels. Cahill concludes with a look at education debates from the 1730s to the 1790s, with special focus on Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of ­Woman (1792) and ­earlier instances of Islamophobic misogynistic mortalism that inform her own. Among other texts, ­under consideration are the “Sophia” pamphlets of the late 1730s; correspondence between Elizabeth Car­ter and Catherine Talbot (in response to Rambler no. 97, written by Richardson); and responses to Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753), in which the titular character is willing to have his d ­ aughters, but not his sons, educated in a Roman Catholic tradition. A number of Richardson’s female contemporaries criticized him for both of t­ hese contributions to the debate on ­women’s education. ­Women’s education, in their view, was impor­tant not only to Christian w ­ omen’s moral development and the cultivation of their souls (see, e.g., 177, on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Granville Pendarves Delaney, and Elizabeth Car­ter), but also, for some writers, for the cultivation of a moral nation (see, e.g., Cahill’s reading of Hanna More, 179–181). Like ­women writers before her, Wollstonecraft’s arguments for ­women’s rights hinge on ­women’s immortal souls. Attacking arbitrary and tyrannical power

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1650–1850 in both A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of ­Woman, in the latter, Wollstonecraft integrates the Islamophobic strain of misogynistic mortalism into her arguments that w ­ omen’s inferiority is not natu­ral but seems that way b ­ ecause of custom (188). But where Muslim w ­ omen are denied souls as a tenet of religion (she incorrectly asserts), Christian ­women are allowed souls but not allowed to cultivate them. Cahill’s reading highlights the link in Wollstonecraft’s argument among education, social moral development, and social pro­gress. Like other w ­ omen writers, for Wollstonecraft, “the Mahometan strain” becomes a rhetorical tool to point out the hy­poc­risy of patriarchal oppression in ­England and, significantly, the social value of ­women and ­women’s education. Intelligent Souls? is a meticulous, thorough study that traces the evolution of misogynistic mortalism from its use as an insult in inter-­Christian debates, to its projection onto Islam as a means to create a shared Other against which En­glish Chris­tian­ity could define itself, and fi­nally to one of the most power­ful yet racist tropes Western (and in this case, En­glish) ­women have used to argue in ­f avor of their spiritual and intellectual equality with men. The ranginess of this text is, at times, dizzying as Cahill moves quickly from one discussion to the next, but the contextualization is always purposeful, and Cahill is always careful to demonstrate the links among the dif­fer­ent discussions. Neither this quibbling criticism nor Cahill’s missed opportunity with Richardson’s early works detracts from the importance of this study, which comes at a critical juncture in our own history, a fact that Cahill acknowledges with her introduction and conclusion. The result of the trope’s uncritical reception and application (5) is the still per­sis­tent ste­reo­ type of a Muslim ­woman who is oppressed by her own society and religion, but who can nevertheless be saved by Western intervention. The book is consequently a reminder of the limitations of con­temporary Western feminist discourse. Furthermore, at a time when we see an alarming increase in the demonization of Islam and Arab ­peoples in Western nations, this history provides a much-­needed context for confronting the construction of white Western identities at the cost other ­people’s denigration and subjugation.

274

Teresa Barnard, ed., British W ­ omen and the Intellectual World in the Long Eigh­teenth ­Century. London: Routledge, 2015. Pp. 214. REVIEWED BY GEFEN BAR-­ON SANTOR, UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA

This vibrant interdisciplinary collection demonstrates in vivid scholarly detail an

empowering fact about the long eigh­teenth c­ entury: that even though ­women in the period generally did not receive formal education and ­were in many other ways barred from fully participating in the world of learning, they nevertheless found vital and creative ways to pursue their passion for learning and to make a contribution to knowledge. This happened ­because “­women could, if allowed, join in the rapidly expanding print culture and visit the new museums, theatre exhibitions, concerts and ­music rooms, and stately homes” (2). The book divides the areas of female intellectual endeavors into three parts—­science, religion, and politics and philosophy—­with three essays in each category. The collection thus takes a panoramic survey of the intellectual world, with detailed and engaging examples. The first part of the collection focuses on ­women’s contributions to science. In chapter 1, Daniel J. R. Grey notes that while ­there has been much scholarship that investigates Mary Wortley Montagu’s writings about Turkey, relatively ­little attention has been paid to her crucial role in bringing the smallpox inoculation to ­England. A survivor of the smallpox herself and ­eager to protect her ­children from the potentially deadly infection that often left survivors severely scarred, Montagu had two of her c­ hildren inoculated, following a practice she observed in Turkey. In advocating for her fellow country ­people to follow her example, Montagu embodied the socially controversial position of a female amateur medical “expert.” In the controversy that ensued, “Montagu was ­either hailed as a

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1650–1850 modern-­day Minerva unlocking the secrets of science for the benefit of all, or a wicked ­mother gambling with her ­children’s lives and in thrall to superstitious and ignorant foreign medical procedures” (17). As a result, Montagu came to rely more on personal conversations and interpersonal influences, rather than writing and public advocacy, to make her crucial contribution to medicine. In chapter 2, Teresa Barnard explores how the “forceful literary presence” of the volcano in the eigh­teenth c­ entury was reflected in the poetry of Anna Stewart and Eleanor Anne Porden Franklin (who married the Arctic explorer Franklin and had a connection to Erasmus Darwin) (33). Following “early excavations through the volcanic ash and pumice of Vesuvius [that] revealed Pompeii’s poignant artefacts beneath the debris” explorers ­were attracted to the Bay of Naples, hoping to witness volcanic eruptions (33). While ­women ­were generally excluded from gentlemanly pursuits such as physical explorations through travel, they could acquire significant scientific knowledge by reading and attending public lectures. Barnard shows how, for Stewart and Porden, “self-­education and literary imagination led the way t­ owards their own repre­sen­ta­tion of the volcano” (33–34). Both ­women used poetic imagery as an effective instrument of scientific understanding—­and of communicating scientific knowledge to the reading public. As a result, the meaning of scientific travel expanded as well: “It was their imagination that led them on their journey and their readers are their companions, travelling with them into the realms of adventure” (51). In chapter 3, Malini Roy discusses Mary Wollstonecraft’s draft materials for “Letters on the Management of Infants,” which w ­ ere unfinished at the time of her death from complications of childbirth. Wollstonecraft’s contribution to pediatrics can be contextualized in relation to the concept of the “child of nature,” developed in the work of phi­los­op ­ hers such as Jean-­Jacques Rousseau who believed that ­children should be raised with more freedom and a greater connection to nature. Roy traces the influence that Wollstonecraft had on the writing of Lady Mountcashell, to whom Wollstonecraft was a governess and who went ­ others. Roy also draws thought-­provoking conon to write Advice to Young M nections between Wollstonecraft’s ideas and twenty-­and twenty-­first-­century debates. Specifically, despite the common emphasis on nature, Roy notes “the profound differences between the philosophies of Wollstonecraft and [Benjamin] Spock,” the author of Baby and Child Care, who in 1945 advocated for “feeding the baby breast milk . . . ​and nurturing the baby’s primal bond with the ­mother.” Roy notes that while for Spock, “the baby appears to need no special care beyond what the ­mother’s natu­ral instincts dictate,” Wollstonecraft believed in the need

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for “acquired skills on behalf of a parent who is not necessarily equipped with innate knowledge” (55). Another thought-­provoking view is that while Wollstonecraft endorsed breastfeeding, the position that she likely inspired Mountcashell to articulate was that, in Mountcashell’s words, “It is by no means necessary that a ­woman who is nursing should lead the life of a recluse.” Roy brings this liberating sentiment into correspondence with Elisabeth Badinter’s The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of W ­ oman (2010) in which the French phi­los­o­pher critiques “the policing of w ­ omen’s life and lifestyle choices through the widespread public advocacy of time-­consuming breastfeeding” (67). The second part of the collection focuses on religious discourses. In chapter  4, Susan Chaplin examines Hannah More’s Sacred Dramas. She shows that despite More’s well-­known gender conservatism, the biblical-­inspired dramas gave a power­ful presence to w ­ omen, and that they “open up a space for the emergence of a maternal feminine agency that exists as a radical counterpoint to the word of God, his prophets, and poets” (81). Examples of the emphasis on the feminine include a feminized King David, as well as the prominence of female characters in the story of Moses’s infancy. The story of Moses celebrates female morality and resourcefulness, as Moses’s ­mother and ­sister, as well as the midwives and Pha­raoh’s ­daughter, take courageous initiative to respond to the injustice of the Pha­raoh. Chapin shows how More gives Moses’s ­mother and the other ­women in the drama “an active authoritative agency and a distinctly prophetic, poetic voice,” thus suggesting “a subtle affiliation between the ­woman author and the m ­ other whose creative intervention at this point in Israel’s history ultimately saves her son and her nation” (83). In chapter  5, Kaley Kramer examines Elizabeth Inchbald’s A S­ imple Story (1791) as an En­glish Catholic novel that interrogates po­liti­cal and religious tensions, in par­tic­u­lar tensions between Catholics and Protestants, in the country. Exploring “Inchbald’s truly innovative and radical introduction of Catholicism in a Protestant literary form [the novel]” (88), Kramer delineates an accommodating approach ­toward Catholicism that reflects “the familiarity of Catholicism in En­glish society at the end of the eigh­teenth ­century” (88), for example through the gesture of kneeling in the novel. Overall, A ­Simple Story promotes moderation and reconciliation between protestants and Catholics. In chapter 6, Natasha Duquette examines, in an interconnected manner, the works of Anna Barbauld, Helen Maria Williams, Joanna Baillie, and Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck—­with a focus on how ­these writers used aesthetic means to call for po­liti­cal and social action such as the abolition of slavery and the need for

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1650–1850 prison reform. By choosing artistic forms, t­ hese ­women ­were able to participate in other­wise male areas of intellectual activity. Duquette contends that “dissenting ­women writers ­were certainly a subordinate group in eighteenth-­century Britain, but they intervened in social discourse by fitting trenchant theological hermeneutics into poetic and aesthetic texts with titles that modestly and cleverly veil their exegetical content” (109). The book’s final section is titled “Radical W ­ omen, Politics, and Philosophy.” In chapter 7, Laura Mayer tells the story of how Elizabeth Percy, the Duchess of North­umberland, who married her husband, Sir Hugh Smithson, for love, was the creative force ­behind the building of the ­couple’s estate at Alnwick ­Castle in a Gothic style—in contrast to her husband who oversaw the building of the ­couple’s London ­house, Syon House, in a classical style. The duchess accomplished her design proj­ect through intellectual engagement with writing, antiquarianism, and travel inspired by her “delight in a glorious medieval past” (136). She pursued “travel in pursuit of the picturesque” and in 1772 climbed Lausanne’s Mount Sorat despite suffering with gout (138). While the duchess was often ridiculed for her obsession with the Gothic, Horace Walpole calling her a “junketaceous Lady” (129), Mayer documents the intellectual depth of her building proj­ect. In chapter  8, Louise Duckling explores the contribution of Joanna Baillie’s Plays on the Passions, calling them “a major intellectual proj­ect” (143). Unable to formally participate in the emerging scientific study of ­human nature, Baillie used drama to explore “extreme passions and the psy­chol­ogy of h ­ uman nature” (144). The plays ­were published anonymously in 1798 to widespread acclaim. When Baillie, however, de­cided to “boldly face the day” and revealed her authorial identity two years ­later, she faced the consequence of female authorship and was treated with bias, her plays depicted no longer as equal in their genius “or even superior to . . . ​[­those] of Shakespeare” but as “the product of an accomplished but misguided author” (144). Duckling’s article restores fairness by highlighting Baillie’s contribution to the study of ­human nature, in par­tic­u­lar to the understanding of sympathy. In chapter 9, Imke Heuer examines the po­liti­cal subtext of Harriet and Sophia Lee’s The Canterbury Tales. Named a­ fter Chaucer’s work, the collection of stories, like its namesake, “explore dif­fer­ent social classes and types as well as the range of h ­ uman emotions and behaviour” (159). And like in Chaucer’s work, the tales are “set in dif­f er­ent Eu­ro­pean countries and epochs . . . ​from the Crusades to the Lees’ own time” (161). Examples of stories include “Constance,” which takes place against the backdrop of the French Revolution, and “Kruitzner,” which takes

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place during the Thirty Years’ War. The tales “express a general sympathy for victims of war, persecution and oppression, in­de­pen­dent from their individual po­liti­cal loyalties” (162). Despite their intellectual, moral, and artistic contribution, however, the Lees “shared the fate of many eighteenth-­century w ­ omen writers who w ­ ere marginalised by subsequent ‘canonization’ ” (158). Overall, British W ­ omen and the Intellectual World in the Long Eigh­teenth ­Century makes a significant contribution to the proj­ect of making the work of ­women known and accessible. The collection provides vivid evidence for the power of the imagination to overcome cultural barriers and enable ­women to make contributions to the world of knowledge, albeit sometimes in veiled ways. Intellectual contributions are broadly defined in the collection. For example, in a review of the book in Early Modern ­Women (11, no. 1, Fall 2016), Hilda H. Smith points out that “labeling [the Duchess of North­umberland’s] role as patroness, builder, and traveler as ‘intellectual’ seems a stretch” (269). However, this potential limitation is also a strength, as it highlights the potential of the collection to expand our understanding of what constitutes an intellectual contribution. When studying a culture governed by gender limitations, a flexible and accommodating approach that is not overly concerned with definitions enables the authors of the collection to communicate to their readers accomplishments that would other­ wise remain largely unexplored—­and thus to illuminate the resilience of the female intellect.

279

Trevor Ross, Writing in Public: Lit­er­a­ture and the Press in Eighteenth-­Century Britain. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Pp. vii + 301. REVIEWED BY MALCOLM JACK, SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES, LONDON

Trevor Ross’s Writing in Public is not an easy read. At the center of his argument, which is complex and at times difficult to follow, is the proposition that with the failure of the attempt to renew censorship by reviving the Licensing Act in 1695, En­glish public lit­er­a­ture entered a new phase of ­free expression, at last unshackled by official control. The emancipation was far from total—in certain areas, for example in cases of seditious libel, proceedings could still be taken against authors for what they wrote. The theater remained largely ­under a censored regime for a long period afterward. Nevertheless, a new era had dawned: “Despite setbacks and crackdowns, the scope of licit speech widened measurably over the next ­century, with a f­ ree press ever more loudly heralded as the bulwark of the En­glish constitution” (1). This was the beginning of a world order in which lit­er­a­ture became a vehicle of saying anything without the need to conform to con­temporary beliefs and values. The bulk of Ross’s book is a detailed examination of the changes that came about in the law of copyright, defamation, privacy, and seditious libel by ­going through trial rec­ords through the period 1760–1810. Each category forms a section of the book, tracing the most significant landmarks of change. T ­ here are considerable subtleties to be exposed: in the case of copyright the debate raged around the argument as to ­whether copyright protected a work’s ideas and sentiments or merely its arrangement of words. This l­imited applicability of copyright to the arrangement of words was linked, in 1769, by Justice Yates, ruling in the case of Millar v. Taylor, to the notion that once an author had published a book, it

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was “irretrievably given to the public. . . . ​Upon publication, ideas are f­ree” (39). Copyright was not perpetual, unlike property rights. In another liberalizing episode, supported in the courts by a ruling in 1808, criticism of lit­er­a­ture was not deemed libelous; indeed, it was regarded as something in the public interest. As a counterblast to ­these liberalizing developments, seditious libel was not swept away with. It remained a power­ful tool in the hands of successive British governments by which they continued to impose po­liti­cal censorship ­after 1695, particularly by controlling the press. Nevertheless, as broadly liberalizing tendencies increased, public opinion became valued in its own right: the courts began to mea­sure the degree of harm by caused by libels in that context. To avoid prosecution, writers took to time-­honored rhetorical flourishes and disguises. In the world of poetry Ross reminds us that Imlac, in Johnson’s Rasselas, was a poet of influenced public affairs and Shelley proclaimed that poets ­were unacknowledged legislators. Both writers ­were suggesting that poetry too had become a vehicle of social transformation. Some of the links in Ross’s exposition are too extenuated. Bringing Immanuel Kant’s views on poetry and rhe­toric may have been in­ter­est­ing to certain intellectually minded members of the l­egal profession, but their influence on the pragmatic course of decisions ­under En­glish common law seems doubtful. Ross is on firmer ground when, as well as describing l­egal shifts in the status of writing, he also traces the cultural changes that enabled lit­er­a­ture to take a place as a form of freedom, an impor­tant way in which the reading public could escape from the norms imposed upon it by the ­legal and moral precepts of con­ temporary society. In this liberated lit­er­a­ture anything could be said and it could be said even in ways, such as the pornographic, that deviate from the traditional aesthetic and moral restrictions of society. The public role for lit­er­a­ture had become indeterminate in a way that could not be i­magined in e­ arlier ages; it came to coexist with an increasing value on subjectivity as a means of expression in demo­cratic society. Ross’s book certainly puts the history of public lit­er­a­ture and press freedom in detailed historical context. Although dense and at time opaque, it contains a mine of scholarly reference, very well indexed. It is a significant and unique contribution to the study of public discourse in eighteenth-­century Britain.

281

Rivka Swenson, Essential Scots and the Idea of Unionism in Anglo-­Scottish Lit­er­a­ture, 1603–1832. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2016. Pp. xviii + 329. REVIEWED BY PAUL J. DeGATEGNO, PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY, BRANDYWINE

Rivka Swenson’s learned and engaging study offers new perspectives on the

literary and cultural history of British ­unionism, particularly its molding of Scottish and Anglo-­Scottish identities. Beginning with both the 1603 Union of Crowns and the 1707 Act of Union that unified the En­glish and Scottish parliaments, Swenson concentrates on the symbols, imagery, tropes, and ste­reo­types of the “essential Scot” and how ­these ­shaped the prose narratives of Daniel Defoe, Tobias Smollett, Samuel Johnson, and Susan Ferrier as well as the impor­tant influence of James Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian. Essential Scots offers an extended introduction outlining the two parts of the book: “essential Scottishness and the form of original Anglo-­Scottish discontent” and “­unionism and the challenge of the individual in early nineteenth-­ century Scottish writing.” The early chapters in part 1 focusing on Defoe, Smollett, Johnson, and Macpherson prove the most successful in establishing a correlation between po­liti­cal structures and narrative structures. The analy­sis of Defoe enabling an Anglo-­British nation, unifying the “essential Scot” with his En­glish neighbor, advising the Scots they had “nothing to fear from the En­glish,” seems most persuasive (26–28). Discussing his History of the Union of G ­ reat Britain (1709) and such poems as “Caledonia ­etc. A Poem in Honour of Scotland, and the Scots Nation” (1706) and “Scots Poem: Or A New-­Years Gift” (1707), Swenson pre­sents Defoe as an essential spokesman for the Harley government and his work “an antidote” against antiunionism and all that threatens “a unified w ­ hole” (45, 47). Yet, the Union and Scotland in general became a faded hope for Defoe,

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as seen in The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of ­Great Britain (1724–1726), but Swenson deals adeptly with the complexities of his fantasy. The result offers an enhanced reading of the two Crusoe novels and another useful explanation of the Tour’s architecture. Shifting to the 1740s and 1750s, Essential Scots finds Tobias Smollett sharing Defoe’s concerns about an active Scottish decay, one lacking improvement or pro­gress; however, Smollett engages in a recovery of the Scottish spirit and character. The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) and The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) reflect two dif­fer­ent approaches in rebuilding the Scot who now wanders the globe caught in the diaspora: Roderick returns home reviving the estate, and Lismahago emigrates to a new land seeking personal recovery. ­These discussions highlight the strength of this study, defining the traveling Scots who are durable and capable of surviving emigration versus ­those left b ­ ehind in the ruins of the Scottish past. Swenson regards this tension as an opportunity for reunion. Focusing on a “pattern of alienation-­and-­restoration” lets diaspora becomes advantage (90). Smollett believes in preserving the essential Scottish identity, and the past remains ­viable as Scots show themselves both as intrepid travelers across the globe and as capable of reentering a real Scotland. Johnson’s view in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) has a dif­fer­ent intention as Swenson’s study titles its central chapter—­“Samuel Johnson’s Return to Scotland ­after Ossian.” If this seems an overreading of Johnson’s reasons for traveling to the Hebrides, it certainly proves a persuasive discussion, though one not without occasional prob­lems. Swenson does not fully accept the traditional view of Johnson’s immunity to the epidemic of pre-­Romantic sensibility; instead, the Journey argues for “the inessential Scot and the necessity for Scottish replantation” (112). Johnson dislikes Macpherson’s The Poems of Ossian (1773) since they promote faux ruins obscuring the real depopulation and decay, while enabling an unhealthy cult for an ancient land. The Scots, in Johnson’s pragmatic view, must reinvigorate the land and themselves while coming to terms with the dangers of quasi-­romantic longing. Swenson effectively notes Johnson’s nuanced reaction to Ossian—he is not contemptuous of ­actual ruins but would rather a Union narrative calling for return and renewal, not an appeal to a Scotland “as the site of hermeneutic dissolution” (115). The generosity of Swenson’s response to Macpherson is shown throughout this section and supports the work of a few late twentieth-­century critics in charting his achievement, yet her complex arguments deserve more extensive commentary. Howard Gaskill, Dafydd Moore, Ian Haywood, Juliet Shields, and o ­ thers have shown the po­liti­cal

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1650–1850 dimensions of his Jacobite heritage and Macpherson’s non-­Ossianic work, especially the Histories. Opportunities also exist for reference to Macpherson’s Introduction to the History of G ­ reat Britain and Ireland (1771) and The History of G ­ reat Britain from the Restoration to the Accession of the House of Hanover (1775) on the question/origins of the Union. ­These debates on national identities and calls for a more polyphonic understanding of lit­er­a­ture and culture surely find Macpherson and Ossian at the discussion center. Part II of this text investigates the techniques and methods of two well-­ known nineteenth-­century Scottish writers who faced the challenge of ­unionism in their narratives, and a minor journalist, Robert Mudie, whose curious A Historical Account of His Majesty’s Visit to Scotland (1822) seems, according to Swenson, “the consummate heir to . . . ​Defoe” (180). Chapter 4, a high point of this section, deals with Susan Ferrier, a con­temporary of Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, and addresses issues of national identity and culture in Marriage (1819). The concluding chapter is a brief restatement (or coda) of the text’s preceding themes showing Walter Scott’s novels and short stories refreshing the “repatriation, reclamation, recovery” of the Scotland trope (240). Historians of the novel, especially ­those studying it as a female literary tradition, ­will welcome Swenson’s analy­sis of Marriage, a work deserving far more interest than shown to date. The typical view of this novel seems satisfied in believing Scotland r­eally was of l­ittle interest to Ferrier, and she disliked the essential Scottish ballads and literary antiques. But Swenson directly ­counters this point, arguing Ferrier may have been ambivalent about “auld Scotland” but not a return plot that “accommodates a sense of progressive revolution” (145). This analy­sis applies the ­unionist filter to Ferrier’s work and celebrates themes and tropes often ignored, supporting not only the notion of an egalitarian marriage, but also a diverse, rehabilitated Scotland. From the beginning Swenson does exemplary work in examining ­these writers through the lens of a ­unionist philosophy and particularly Scotland’s transcendent and transformative rebirth. Though the strengths of this study can at points become muffled by jargon and the author’s love of epigraphs, the technique of discussing history, lit­er­a­ture, and culture in one text requires a nimbleness of imagination and a rich vision of the subject’s potential. Happily, both characteristics are displayed to a very high standard h ­ ere.

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Paul Corneilson, ed., Ballet M ­ usic from the Mannheim Court. Part V, Christian Cannabich. Les Fêtes du sérail, and Carol G. Marsh, ed., Angélique et Médor, ou Roland furieux. Recent Researches in the M ­ usic of the Classical Era, vol. 3, gen. ed. Neil Zaslaw. Middleton, WI: A-­R Editions, 2019. Pp. xxxvii + 207. THIS CRITICAL EDITION OF TWO BALLETS BY CHRISTIAN CANNABICH (1731–1798), LES FÊTES DU SÉRAIL AND ANGÉLIQUE ET MÉDOR, OU ROLAND FURIEUX, COMPLETES A-­R’S FIVE-­VOLUME SERIES OF BALLET M ­ USIC FROM THE MANNHEIM COURT. THE OTHER VOLUMES INCLUDE CRITICAL EDITIONS OF BALLETS BY CARL JOSEPH TOESCHI (PT. II, VOL. 47; AND PT. III, VOL. 52), GEORG JOSEPH VOGLER (PT. I, VOL. 45), AND FOUR ADDITIONAL BALLETS BY CANNABICH (PT. I, VOL. 45; PT. II, VOL. 47; AND PT. IV, VOL. 57). REVIEWED BY GLORIA EIVE, CONTRIBUTING BOOK REVIEW EDITOR FOR THE ARTS

In many ways, Cannabich’s name is synonymous with the musical establishment

at the Mannheim court that he directed and represented for most of his life. He was a pupil of Johann Stamitz, director of the Mannheim orchestra, and except for a brief period of study with Niccolõ Jommelli in Rome and Stuttgart, Cannabich’s musical activity was centered on Mannheim, first as a twelve-­year-­old scholar, l­ater as a violinist in the Hofkapelle, as a maître de concerts with Toeschi (1758–1773), and director of instrumental m ­ usic (1773–1797). Cannabich was a prolific composer of symphonies, concertos, chamber works, and ballets, and his works ­were widely published in Eu­rope and in Paris. He is known especially however for his exceptional direction of the Mannheim orchestra, which was considered the foremost orches-

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1650–1850 tra in Eu­rope. He was a close friend and musical colleague of Mozart and is mentioned with g­ reat admiration and praise in Mozart’s letters. An impor­tant part of Cannabich’s activities as director of instrumental ­music at the Mannheim court was composing ballets to be performed between the acts of the operas performed at the Electoral court and, especially, for the cele­ brations on the Elector’s and Electress’s Name Days. Regrettably, most of Cannabich’s almost thirty ballets have been lost or destroyed. Accordingly A-­R’s publication in this five-­volume series, of six of his surviving ballets performed at Mannheim during the 1760s and 1770s, is an especially appreciated gift to ­music and dance scholarship. Cannabich’s ballets in this fifth volume are settings of extremely popu­lar eighteenth-­century themes, with choreography by two of the most eminent French dance masters of the time: Les Fêtes du sérail, a Turkish harem extravaganza by Jean-­Georges Noverre (1727–1810) edited by Paul ­Corneilson, and Médor &Angéllique, ou Roland furieux, an episode from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, very freely choreographed by Étiene Lauchery (1732–1820) and edited by Carl G. Marsh. The ballets are presented in full score, engraved in a clear, legible format and meticulously edited and documented. Each ballet is preceded by a detailed introduction and analy­sis of the score and choreography, presenting all the available historical, musical, and dramatic information. Detailed critical reports on the sources used and protocols followed in preparing each ballet follow at the end of the volume. Cannabich’s Les Fêtes du sérail exists only in manuscript parts in Regensburg (D-­Rtt, Cannabich 34). The “Turkish” instrumentation includes prominent woodwinds, including piccolos and oboes, and an extended percussion section with timpani, cymbals, triangle, side drum, and large bass drum (struck on both sides with drumstick and switch). Noverre also expands the customary cast of dancers in his seraglio to include janissaries, bostangies, and dwarfs. (We are reminded of Mozart’s Turkish opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail, 1782.) ­There is no extant printed libretto or scenario for Cannabich’s ballet but Noverre’s detailed description of the ballet Les Jalousies, o, Les Fêtes du Sérail, in his Lettres sur la danse serves to identify the passages of pantomimed action and dance (Lettres sur la danse, et sur les ballets . . . ​, Paris: Aimé Delaroche, 1760). A translation of Noverre’s letter is included (Appendix A), annotated to correspond to the musical sections in the score. Most of the pantomime and dance sections in the ballet are very short, in classic musical style, with transparent

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textures, and only the final Contredanse (No.  21) is extended, in full tutti with alternating passages of D major and d minor. The score to Angélique et Médor, ou Roland furieux is somewhat easier to follow and Lauchery’s extant French text for a 1770 per­for­mance in Kassel (as Médor & Angélique, ou Roland furieux) clarifies the musical divisions between pantomime and dance. A translated, annotated copy of Lauchery’s text is included (Appendix B) and the pantomime passages in the score have been carefully annotated. Lauchery’s ballet is a greatly reduced and simplified version of the episode in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso following the Saracens’ defeat. Angélique, Queen of Cathy, and Médor have fallen in love as she nursed the wounded warrior back to health. Roland, nephew of Charlemagne, is also in love with Angélique, comes to claim her, and when he learns she has forsaken him for Médor flies into a violently destructive rage and (briefly) loses his sanity. Lauchery evades the prob­lems created by the love triangle and resolves the impasse by introducing the fairy Logistille as a deus ex machina, with the spirits Glory, Fame, and Terror, and the shades of ancient heroes. Logistille restores Roland’s sanity, delivers him and his companion Astolphe to Glory, Fame, and Terror who carry them away on a cloud, and peace is restored. The drama is advanced in the passages of pantomime, which alternate with extended, more elaborate, “reflective” dances. The orchestra (flutes, oboes, bassoons, horns, trumpets, timpani, and strings) takes an active role in supporting and advancing the pantomimed dramatic action, frequently with in­de­pen­dent parts for woodwinds and strings (rather than merely doubled voices), expressive instrumentation, harmonic, and melodic inflections. The ballet concludes with a series of dances for pas de deux, and an extended Chaconne and Contredanse for the entire com­pany. Carol Marsh’s and Paul Corneilson’s editions of Cannabich’s two ballets are exemplary and their careful references and documentation very effectively clarify and supplant the missing details in t­ hese Mannheim ballets. One would hope Cannabich’s lost scores, scenarios, and libretti might be found or replicated but absent t­hese, Marsh’s and Corneilson’s reconstructed Mannheim ballets and libretti provide invaluable win­dows into Mannheim’s eighteenth-­century musical world and should be included in public and private musicological collections.

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Margaret Jacob, The Secular Enlightenment. Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2019. 360 pp. REVIEWED BY R. J. W. MILLS, QUEEN MARY UNIVERSITY OF LONDON

The major shift in recent Enlightenment studies has been a newfound awareness

of the positive relationship between Enlightenment and religion. Esteemed historian Margaret Jacob’s latest book aims to restore the balance by reminding her readers that the Enlightenment played a singularly significant role in the creation of secular modernity. Indeed, Jacob defines the Enlightenment as a “movement of ideas and practices . . . ​that shifted attention away from religious questions t­ owards secular ones” (1). The uncomplicated definition of secular ­here refers to enlightened subjects living life “without constant reference to God” and focusing on temporal well-­being (1). She charts the decline of older Christian explanations of life and the universe, and their replacement with secular ones. But Jacob’s enlighteners are not the stringent anti-­Christian campaigners of ­Hazard, Gay, or even Israel. They are practical p ­ eople seeking worldly improvement—­uninterested, rather than angered, by religious doctrine and authority. Ours is an era when the Enlightenment’s achievements—­not only secularism, but also the correlates liberalism, democracy, and concern for ­human happiness—­are ­under global attack. Jacob wants to retell the story of the immensity of what was gained to ensure that we do not give it up unwittingly. The opening chapter describes the setting for the Enlightenment’s emergence in a fast-­paced, wide-­ranging, but ultimately formless survey of cultural and social change by 1700. Jacob emphasizes how early modern Eu­ro­pean international trade and imperial expansion meant that the world known to Eu­ro­pe­ans in 1700 was larger and infinitely more complicated than that known to t­hose in

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1500. Closer to home, urbanization and growing commerce overturned the old po­liti­cal and social order—­and offered greater opportunities for freethinking, too. Similarly, Jacob underscores the significance of changes in book production and circulation, not least of proscribed material, and the growth of new, nontheological genres. The material covered is impressively wide-­ranging if familiar. The prob­lem is that the relationship between ­these developments and their purportedly secular consequences is implied rather than demonstrated. The second chapter continues the scene setting by examining how educated Eu­ro­pe­ans shifted from Christian understandings of time to modern conceptions. Set aside ­were chronological limits derived from literal readings of the Bible or the fantasies of predestination and millenarianism. Time ceased to be conceived in terms of anxiety about salvation and divine judgements on our time spent on earth, and increasingly as a context for self-­discipline, self-­control, and self-­improvement. New timelines ­were ­adopted, understanding time as unfolding, unending, and linear. This is abstract stuff, and Jacob strug­gles valiantly to convey how, for example, commercial activity led to new secular ways of breaking up time and new time-­related virtues too, such as punctuality. New technology, epitomized by the pocket watch, brought an “embrace of worldly time,” while new geological theories vastly extended the age of the earth (50). The third chapter professes to look at the lives of the “ordinary, literate, reasonably educated eighteenth-­ century p ­eople we may legitimately describe as enlightened”—­ individuals “at ease in this world with l­ittle thought about any other” (66–67). ­Here Jacob surveys the lives of several enlightened individuals to show how they embraced gentility, politeness, and rationality over credulity and rudeness; w ­ ere thoroughly cosmopolitan and interested in the non-­European world; and ­were concerned with worldly topics for their own sake, be it natu­ral history or ameliorating poverty. The remaining chapters use the leitmotif of examining specific enlightened cities as a means for summarizing national Enlightenments. Jacob ranges freely across relevant themes, again giving the reader the sense of formlessness. Aided by Dutch book sellers, France is the center of freethinking. Jacob’s emblematic text is Bernard and Picart’s Religious Ceremonies of the World (1723), rather than Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721). Voltaire is the Newtonian deist whose worldview comes ­under decisive challenge by materialism of the 1750s onward. Jacob uses the example of the bookseller W ­ idow Stockdorff to illustrate the secularizing importance of the radical book trade in censorious eighteenth-­century socie­ties. Rousseau is the pioneering radical demo­crat (and not the civil religionist

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1650–1850 or inspirational deist). Jacob next surveys the distinctly urban, moderate, socially cohesive, and secular but not anti-­Christian Scottish Enlightenment. The enlightened Scots, through their professional and associational activities, ­were fundamentally concerned with “the search for social and po­liti­cal improvement” (138). Jacob stresses the centrality of the achievements of eighteenth-­century Scottish natu­ral science epitomized by the work of Joseph Black, James Hutton, William Cullen, and John Robison as much as t­ hose of David Hume and Adam Smith. Jacob then turns her attention to Berlin and Vienna, and the Enlightenment in the German-­speaking lands. The German Enlightenment was built on a “university culture” that aimed to provide secular solutions to the issue of “religious authority and po­liti­cal instability” in the post-1648 era (159). While some of the most radical irreligious thought emerged out of early eighteenth-­century Germany, it was the moderates who ­were the real d ­ rivers of change. Yet Jacob notes intriguingly that much of German Enlightenment thought had an abstract quality distanced from practical improvement—­this resulted, she maintains, from the peculiar limitations imposed by German absolutism. T ­ hese constraints stunted the Enlightenment’s development in Germany. Naples, Milan, and the Italian Enlightenment are next. In 1700 “the heavy hand of the Counter-­Reformation” (204) still maintained a firm grip, embodied in the partnership of scholasticism and religious persecution. Heroically driving forward Enlightenment was Celestino Galiani’s Newtonian science, Ferdinando Galiani’s po­liti­cal economy, and Gaetano Filangieri’s po­liti­cal theory. All three emerged out of the intellectually fecund urban setting of Naples, Continental Eu­rope’s second largest city. Milan, while traditional in comparison, became the center of vibrant economic debate and attempts at temporal reform—­epitomized by Cesare Beccaria’s innovative debating group the Acad­emy of Fists. Beccaria’s Of Crime and Punishments (1764), moreover, “landed like a bolt of thunder,” with the abolition of state torture in several Eu­ro­pean countries being attributable to its influence (225). Jacob’s final chapter looks at the revolutionary 1790s, summarizing what happened next across the enlightened world. The revolutions of Philadelphia, Brussels, Amsterdam, and Paris all owed a debt to the movement—as did the swellings of revolutionary and reformist sentiment elsewhere in the West, and increasingly throughout larger swathes of society. The movement had “offered the intellectual tools for the creation of a new persona—­a thinking and critical person guided by secular princi­ples—­that informed the emotional identity of revolutionaries and reformers” (234). T ­ hese tools endured. Yet Enlightened goals

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­ ere disappointed or thwarted, not least in the Habsburg Lands where the “anti-­ w Enlightenment had won” (256). The Secular Enlightenment is a fast-­paced and wide-­ranging volume, written in accessible, often familiar style. The gender balance of figures covered is exemplary. Masochistic scholars wanting to get their teeth into yet another major interpretation of “the Enlightenment” may find that the book is suggestive rather than conclusive in argument, as Jacob often leaves the import of her analy­sis to be inferred by the reader; that Jacob wears her historiographical engagement very lightly indeed, with the work clearly being intended for a popu­lar audience; that the absence of a chapter on the traditionally ascribed religious En­glish Enlightenment, given En­gland/Britain’s role in bringing about the modern world, is a telling omission; that Jacob is clearly on the philosophes’ side and arguably glosses the Enlightenment’s shadow legacy of colonialism, imperialism, and racial science; that every­thing that is good about the Enlightenment is attributed to secular rather than religious motives; and that the complexity of what “secularism” and its relationship to religion is greatly undertheorized and underexamined. On this latter point, many of the developments described—­declining belief in biblical time, hell, and magic, say, or the gradual takeover of scientific reasoning, or the concern for temporal happiness—­could be beliefs not only held but pioneered by many observant and enlightened Christians. A s­ imple dichotomy of secular and religious is at play. Individuals might remain privately religious but live publicly secular lives, say, or the motivations for improving temporal well-­being might ultimately have religious under­pinnings. One good example h ­ ere is the emergence of theological utilitarianism in Enlightened E ­ ngland. Jacob’s nonengagement with the wider conceptual issues of her subject may have resulted from wanting to write something a popu­lar audience might actually want to read or ­because she is advancing the ­simple thesis that ­because of the Enlightenment more ­people lived secular lives. This is understandable but ­will leave many wanting much more. The Secular Enlightenment ranges across so many topics—­nearly every­thing that could be covered is covered—­and the reader is often left with a sense of the absence of coherence and argument. Yet Jacob writes with infectious enthusiasm and with authority on myriad subjects. Perhaps the best way to conceive of The Secular Enlightenment is as a very worthwhile introduction to the Enlightenment for undergraduates and the general reader.

291

Eve Tavor Bannet and Roxann Wheeler, eds., Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Culture, Vol. 46. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Pp. xii + 272. REVIEWED BY CHRISTOPHER D. JOHNSON, FRANCIS MARION UNIVERSITY

SECC 46 begins with four essays on the transnational impact of Don Quixote.

Catherine  M. Jaffe provides a cogent introduction, which is followed by Amelia Dale’s examination of “En­glishness, masculinity and quixotism” in Joseph Andrews and Tristram Shandy (5). Dale ties the quixotic to both Anglo-­British masculinity and to traditional figurations of the feminine. Joseph Andrews begins as “an impressionable, feminized quixote” (10). His masculinity emerges ­later when he separates the quixotic from the feminine, becoming not only “quixotically En­glish” but also “unequivocally male” (11). Tristram Shandy examines similar dynamics as the “penetrable, sentimental” (and therefore feminized) Shandy men attempt to appropriate “quixotism as a failing phallic compensation for their masculine lack” (15). Elena Deanda-­Camacho considers the unexpected relationships between Cervantes and Sade. Both Don Quixote and 120 Days of Sodom explore the performative qualities of language, pre­sent texts that resist their authors’ plans, and anticipate the metafiction associated with postmodernism. Deanda-­Camacho also shows that Cervantes’s works w ­ ere “Sade’s comfort books,” the texts “to which he returned” not only for inspiration, but also “as a way to cope with imprisonment” (29). Elizabeth Franklin Lewis compares Spanish maps depicting Don Quixote’s adventures with the travel journals of Henry Swinburne and John Talbot Dillon, both of whom “found evidence of Don Quixote in the Spanish landscape” (36). Whereas the cartographers sought to establish Cervantes’s novel “as a pinnacle of a ­great Spanish culture,” the British writers used Don Quixote to confirm chauvinistic “notions of a quaint but decidedly backwards Spain” (45). For Aaron  R.

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Hanlon, the quixotic reveals “the heuristic prob­lem of lit­er­a­ture’s ‘belonging’ once it leaves home and is changed by the journey” (50). To support his claim, Hanlon offers a nuanced discussion of Pacific quixotism, showing how Filipino author Jose Rizal reimagines Cervantes’s characters in ways that both interrogate and affirm Eurocentrism. The next four essays, along with a valuable introduction by Rebecca Messbarger, address the Habsburgs and the Enlightenment. Rita Krueger examines Maria Theresa’s “imperial mothering,” which combines efforts to expand the influence of the Austrian state with traditional marriage advice to her ­daughters (70). Rejecting the secular Enlightenment, Maria Theresa remains a “throwback to baroque culture” and a defender of “Catholic hegemony” (70). Her conservative impulses found expression in her letters to her married ­daughters, where she “explic­itly rejected any notion of a new place for ­women in marriage” (76). In both po­liti­cal and domestic spheres, Maria Theresa saw “intellectual, social, and cultural departures as perilous rather than liberating” (78). Julia Doe examines the impact of Maria Theresa’s youn­gest ­daughter, Marie Antoinette, on French operatic culture. Unlike her old-­fashioned ­mother, Marie Antoinette steered courtly fashion ­toward con­temporary tastes. ­Under her direction, “time-­honored examples of la musique ancienne” ­were exchanged for lighter opéras-­comique and more “cosmopolitan” works by composers such as Gluck, Piccinni, and Sacchini (84). R. S. Agin challenges historians who associate the end of judicial torture with changes in l­egal procedure. Looking closely at the Duchy of Milan, where local leaders resisted Austrian attempts to curtail torture, Agin uses the writings Pietro Verri and Cesare Beccaria to trace the slow reform of Milan’s entrenched, barbaric practices. The issue of judicial torture, Agin demonstrates convincingly, “was intricately interwoven with the problematic politics of empire, with competing visions of the past and pre­sent, and even, in the case of the Verri ­house­hold, with the difficult relationship between f­ather and son” (104). Heather Morrison provides a persuasive analy­sis of the Habsburg Expedition of 1783, a “plant-­collection mission” at the vanguard of economic botany (107). Whereas previous expeditions pursued exotic ornaments for the court, the trek of 1783 sought “useful and profitable plants,” thus ushering in an age that viewed the “work of natu­ral scientists as a source of potential economic and colonial development” (107, 117). The final section of SECC 46 contains individual essays. Michael B. Guenther identifies a “constellation of values” related to science, imperialism, and subarctic explorations “that came to define our relationship to the natu­ral world at the dawn of the Anthropocene” (125). Northern expeditions rejected colonial strug­gles to

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1650–1850 create “mature, populous” socie­ties and embraced the concept of extractive zones that could yield “valuable commodities with few responsibilities or costs” (135). By exploiting areas “where minerals, energy, and supplies ­were mined to feed the growing appetites of distant economies,” late eighteenth-­century adventurers forged “institutional relationships and ­careers that would influence the patterns of imperial and economic expansion in the de­cades to come” (137–138). For Richard Frohock, John Gay’s Polly examines the essentials of “­human nature and civil society” by contrasting British pirates with indigenous West Indians (148). Through the pirates, Gay “extends Mandev­ille’s domestic social analy­sis to realm of Atlantic empire, positing that self-­love and self-­interest” govern society (148). Although the utopic West Indian society cannot overcome the horrific force of Macheath’s henchmen, Gay never celebrates British aggression. Instead, Polly remains “bitingly critical of En­glish empire as a manifestation of h ­ uman vice and folly” (158). In one of the collection’s most gratifying essays, Adam Potkay explores pity, gratitude, and the treatment of the poor in works by Rousseau and Adam Smith. Suspicious of the ideology found in sentimental fiction, the phi­los­op ­ hers refuse to treat “pity—or gratitude—as an unqualified ethical or po­liti­cal good” (164). Rousseau, recognizing that ­those who pity are “as apt to avoid suffering as to alleviate it,” imagines an ideal world in which “pitiable poverty would be eliminated” (164). Approaching the issue from a dif­fer­ent a­ ngle, Smith sees pity as potentially unjust and questions the benefits of gratitude, which is moral only to the degree that it originates from moral motives. Jeffrey Merrick analyzes a variety of French texts that address sodomy and suicide. Philosophes, such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau, rejected biblical admonitions, but did not embrace “modern notions of privacy and liberty” (186). Instead, they constructed arguments based on observation and deduction. They considered sodomy “unnatural ­because it diverted the natu­ral instinct for sexual plea­sure from its proper object and antisocial b ­ ecause it thwarted procreation” (198). Similarly, suicide “stifled the ­human instinct for self-­preservation and . . . ​ruptured the network of bonds that integrated ­humans into communities” (198). Jeff Loveland evaluates Denis Diderot’s role as editor of the Encyclopédie. Following the practice of mid-­eighteenth-­century editors, who w ­ ere largely uninterested in “the tasks of recruiting collaborators and revising their contributions,” Diderot gave “­free rein to his contributors,” which helped make the Encyclopédie “a lively and diverse repertory of con­temporary ideas” (207, 221). In the closing essay, Tamar Mayer examines the sketchbooks Jacques-­Louis David completed in prepa-

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ration for the Oath of the Horatii. The sketches, handsomely reproduced in the volume, provide multiple examples of mirror reversal and suggest “a deep engagement . . . ​with questions of balance and stability” (229). Mayer ties ­these observations to a convincing thematic reading of the painting, concluding that the Horatii serves as “an emblem of exemplary ancient dedication to civic ideals” (242). SECC 46 is richly interdisciplinary and entirely accessible. The contributors and editors have produced an engaging, rewarding, and useful volume.

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Eve Tavor Bannet and Roxann Wheeler, eds., Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Culture, Vol. 47. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Pp. xii + 293. REVIEWED BY CHRISTOPHER D. JOHNSON, FRANCIS MARION UNIVERSITY

Although the appearance, format, and (very reasonable) price remain the same,

volume 47 marks several impor­tant changes for Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Culture. The latest volume includes twenty-­seven items, more than twice the number of most ­earlier volumes. Many of ­these items are only three to five pages in length, rather than the twenty to twenty-­five pages found previously. Continuing a trend that began with volume 45, all of the essays are thematically or­ga­nized. Gone are the wide-­ranging individual essays that made SECC a delightful, interdisciplinary miscellany. Equally significant, many, though not all, of the essays are deeply theoretical and sometimes comment as much on the twenty-­first c­ entury as they do on the eigh­teenth. ­These tendencies are immediately apparent in the late Srinivas Aravamudan’s 2016 ASECS presidential address, which follows Felicity Nussbaum’s beautiful tribute to Professor Aravamudan’s life and ­career. Asking what Giambattista Vico might have thought about the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and our current climate crisis, Aravamudan employs concepts related to the Anthropocene and posthuman theory to posit a speculative assertion that humanity may be moving ­toward “a fourth Vichian age, when poetic knowledge and objective science meet” (21). The address, at once captivating and unsettling, speaks to the concerns of much recent scholarship, yet it does not demonstrate so much as it suggests. In this way, it stands in opposition to the more traditional essays typical of SECC. The remainder of the volume oscillates somewhat awkwardly between what SECC has been and what it seems to be becoming.

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The next four essays—­helpfully introduced by Hazel Gold and grouped ­under the heading “­Labor, Industry, and Technology”—­recall ­earlier volumes of SECC. Valentina Tifoff offers a meticulously researched account of Spain’s efforts before and during the siege of Gibraltar to train orphans to become sailors and to coerce British prisoners of war into sharing textile-­making skills, which in turn allowed other orphans to gain useful employment. Spain’s underappreciated involvement in the American Revolution, Tifoff concludes, supports “James Marten’s claim that ‘­Children have been and are deeply engaged in e­ very facet of war—­not simply as victims’ ” (46). Susan Egenolf examines how visual arts and popu­lar culture from the Western Midlands used classical my­thol­ogy to represent the emerging “industrial scene as aesthetically attractive” (56). Mining, Egenolf demonstrates, became the exploration of the underworld, Cyclops a repre­sen­ta­tion of skilled workers, and Vulcan at once an everyman figure and the “patron god for industry” (62). In one of the collection’s best essays, Susan  H. Libby reveals how engravings from Diderot’s Encyclopédie transformed “the very real dangers and terrors of plantation life into a predictable, rational system of mechanized wealth creation and national security” (81–82). “Pristine scenes” of orderly landscapes, impressive machines, and diminutive slaves dispelled “the philosophes’ discomfort about buying and selling h ­ uman beings in pursuit of economic gain” (82). Jon Klancher traces the modern usage of the word “scale” within eighteenth-­century trade-­skill books, suggesting that the developing “conceptuality of scale” initiated the understandings of skilled l­abor that gained prominence during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (103). The next section, “Publicity, Memory and Fame,” begins with Shearer West’s 2016 plenary address. West correlates the “twenty-­first-­century narcissistic obsession with . . . ​images of the self” with eighteenth-­century portraiture (110). Juxtaposing printed texts as diverse as Lavater’s Physiognomische Fragmente and Rousseau’s Confessions with self-­portraits by Reynolds, Rembrandt, and Angelica Kauffman, West finds a “growing fascination with singularity and eccentricity,” which she convincingly connects to “a deep-­rooted En­glish po­liti­cal commitments to liberty” (110). Heather McPherson introduces the subsequent essays, which begin with Wendy Wassyng Roworth’s examination of Angelica Kauffman’s studio in Rome. Through careful analy­sis of con­temporary descriptions and expenditure rec­ords, Roworth shows that the studio became not only a productive workspace, but also an integral part of Kauffman’s self-­fashioned celebrity status. Francesca Bove considers the sparse, garret-­like studio depicted in George Morland’s The Artist in His Studio with His Man Gibbs, which serves as a “crucial

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1650–1850 site for the construction” of the paint­er’s “artistic personality” (151). The portrait reveals Morland’s understanding of “art as the spontaneous and original product of his interiority rather than the derivative output of academic knowledge” (153). Equally impor­tant, it shows Morland seeking publicity through allusions to a “debauched lifestyle,” thus creating “a new type of artistic identity in Britain at the turn of the nineteenth ­century” (154, 159). In a brilliant essay, Heather McPherson connects portraits of Madame Récamier to celebrity culture. By cultivating an image of ­simple elegance, Récamier made herself a “locus of public desire” and used her fame “as cultural capital” (164). Leith Davis provides a similarly excellent discussion of the Williamite War in Ireland. The conflict, especially the siege of Derry, initially became a lieu de mémoire, an event “ ‘immediately invested with symbolic significance’ ” (192). As Britain worked to define the 1688 Revolution as a “ ‘bloodless’ regime change,” however, the Irish war became an unfortunate reminder of an actively forgotten past, and Irish history “was pushed to the sidelines” (199). The final two sections, collected ­under the heading “Emerging Issues,” offer fourteen brief discussions addressing two topics: “Intention and the Eighteenth-­ Century Text” and “Tolerance, ­Free Speech, and Civility from Voltaire to Charlie ­ ere the emphasis on connecting the past to the pre­sent becomes parHebdo.” H ticularly prevalent. Mark Vareschi and Jess Keiser provide a valuable introduction to the first group of essays, which begins with Stephanie Insley Hershinow’s discussion of intention as defined in Johnson’s Dictionary. Hershinow makes the intriguing point that both con­temporary analytical philosophy and the New Criticism elide the useful “messiness” of eighteenth-­century understandings of intention (215). Revealing both the strengths and weaknesses of the volume’s short essays, Hershinow pre­sents a compelling idea, but not a defensible, finished critical statement. The shortcoming is not in Hershinow’s idea but rather in the format, which does not provide sufficient space to establish and defend the idea. Similarly, Sarah Ellenzweig’s contention that the new materialism overly simplifies Cartesian dualism seems both reasonable and impor­tant, but it only suggests, rather than completes, the argument. Edmund J. Goehring looks at musical compositions, notably Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, arguing that neostructuralism’s rejection of intentionality is ultimately limiting. Once again, the reader is teased rather than convinced. Moreover, as with the previous essays in this section, Goehring uses eighteenth-­century texts to comment on twenty-­first-­century theoretical constructions. In this way, he and the o ­ thers reverse the long-­

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established practice of SECC, which has consistently placed eighteenth-­century culture at the center of arguments. Sarah Eron’s discussion of memory in Robinson Crusoe is better grounded in the eigh­teenth ­century. More than a s­ imple repository of experience, memory for Eron comprises a “special kind of mind-­brain relationship” that helps individuals “navigate and manage a multitude of material challenges—to intentionally survive conditions of distress in conscious ways” (230, 232). Eron’s superb idea deserves more extended discussion. The same could be said for Thomas Salem Manganaro’s examination of akrasia in Locke’s Essay Concerning ­Human Understanding. Noting that actions ­counter to one’s own best interests threaten “the systematic aims of Enlightenment” causality, Manganaro argues that Locke, like Rousseau, uses narrative to interrogate “the disconnect between intentions and actions” (237). Kathleen Lubey, in another rushed essay, examines intention and sex, concluding that eighteenth-­century pornographic texts do “not conceive of persons as sophisticated sexual subjects who can translate intention into action” (243). The volume’s final section, introduced by Dena Goodman, focuses on the intersections of Voltaire and Charlie Hebdo. The essays seek to complicate the popu­lar depiction of Voltaire as a pioneer of tolerance following the 2015 Paris attacks. Jeffrey M. Leichman argues that students should read Voltaire’s horrifically bigoted play Mahomet in order to understand that “modern Eu­ro­pean secularism might be synonymous with the denigration of Islam” (53). Reginald McGinnis notes that Voltaire “was always wary” of using “mockery as a means of eradicating evil,” reminding us that abuse rarely persuades (259). John R. Iverson claims that Voltaire may not have been as pure an advocate for ­free speech as his modern admirers assume. He remained, instead, “an activist interested primarily in the efficacy of his works,” a writer who focused on communicating ideas “in ways that could be digested even by his adversaries” (261, 262). Fayçal Falaky investigates the reasons eighteenth-­century Eu­ro­pe­ans associated the Wahhabis with the positive achievements of deism and Protestantism, concluding that a par­tic­u­lar strain of “Eurocentric universalism” blinded early-­modern observers to the vio­lence and intolerance of ­those who originated the ideologies of ISIS and al-­Qaeda (268). In one of the section’s best (but still underdeveloped) discussions, Ourida Mostefai encourages readers to revisit Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration, which “promotes a robust concept of freedom and civil rights,” not with abstract aphorisms, but rather through “a concrete and pragmatic proposal” that has much to teach us “in this new era of religious fanat­i­cism” (272). In

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1650–1850 the collection’s final essay, Elena Russo, with passing references to Voltaire and Bayle, connects speech and vio­lence, especially in the twenty-­first ­century when “feelings are elevated to the level of ideas, and ideas are felt viscerally” (278). Readers looking for the familiar in volume 47 ­will be rewarded with a handful of well-­developed, fully supported essays that would be at home in any volume of SECC and that continue an impor­tant scholarly tradition spanning almost fifty years. T ­ hose same readers might be disappointed to discover other essays that introduce ideas rather than articulate arguments and that sometimes subordinate eighteenth-­century culture in order to explore modernity. ­There is, to be sure, a place for brief, exploratory essays, and t­ hose presented h ­ ere are consistently engaging. ­There is also, of course, a place for the speculative consideration of the current age as it relates to the past. One won­ders, however, if Studies in Eighteenth- ­Century Culture is the right place for such work, especially when one considers the value of what has been and what could be lost.

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS Essay Authors SAMARA ANNE CAHILL specializes in eighteenth-­century Anglophone lit­er­a­ture, particularly En­glish repre­sen­ta­tions of the Ottoman Empire. She is the author of Intelligent Souls? Feminist Orientalism in Eighteenth-­Century En­glish Lit­er­a­ture (2019) and, with Kevin L. Cope, the coeditor of the essay collection Citizens of the World: Adapting in the Eigh­teenth ­Century (2015). She teaches at Blinn College and is the editor of Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment. NORBERT COL, a former student at École Normale Supérieure de Saint-­Cloud and an “agrégé” in En­glish, teaches British and Irish history at Université de Bretagne-­Sud, Lorient (France). He specializes in the history of ideas, more specifically on Edmund Burke and Jonathan Swift, though he has also written on Thomas More, Daniel Defoe, Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, and Michael Oakeshott. He is the author of a bilingual edition of Edmund Burke’s An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1996); Burke, le contrat social et les révolutions (2001); and À la recherche du conservatisme britannique: Historiographie, britannicité, modernité (XVIIe–­XXe siècles) (2007). He has also edited Écritures de soi (2007) and coedited, with Allan Ingram, Utopie, individu et société: la sociabilité en question (2015). ANDREW CONNELL read history at Queen’s College, Oxford, and taught it at John Robinson’s alma mater, Appleby Grammar School. He followed in Robinson’s

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About The Contributors

footsteps as mayor of the town, which he has also been elected to represent on district and county councils. The essay in this collection is his fifth published article on Robinson, on whom he delivered a paper in Baltimore at the 2011 SHA conference. Other research articles in a range of journals have been on Westmorland parliamentary politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as an analy­sis of why and with what social consequences a projected railroad crossing the En­glish Lake District was never built. His solitary book dissects a unique social occasion: “­There’ll Always Be Appleby”: Appleby Gypsy Horse Fair: History, My ­thol­ogy and Evaluation (2019). He is also a professional singer in the niche market of retirement homes. TAYLOR CORSE is an associate professor of En­glish at Arizona State University. He is the author of Dryden’s Aeneid: The En­glish Virgil and the coauthor of Anne Conway: The Princi­ples of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy and The Alphabet of Nature by F. M. van Helmont. His articles have appeared in such journals as Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, Eighteenth-­Century Life, and Restoration. He has also translated and edited con­temporary Italian fiction by Grazia Verasani and poetry by Ferruccio Benzoni. His other interests include guitar, tennis, and hiking. He lives with his wife and ­children in Tempe, Arizona. MATTHEW  M. DAVIS is an assistant professor (general faculty) in the En­glish Department at the University of V ­ irginia. He wrote his dissertation on Samuel Johnson’s literary criticism and has published articles on Johnson, Shakespeare, Milton, Hardy, and Frost. MICHAEL EDSON is associate professor of En­glish at the University of Wyoming and associate editor for Eighteenth-­Century Life. His research interests include poetics, affect, histories of reading, histories of editing, printed annotation, and reader marginalia. His articles have appeared in or are forthcoming from the Journal for Eighteenth-­Century Studies, The Eigh­teenth C ­ entury, Textual Cultures, and Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Culture. His edited volume, Annotation in Eighteenth- ­Century Poetry, was published in 2017. JACOB SIDER JOST teaches at Dickinson College. He is a scholar of eighteenth-­ century lit­er­a­ture and culture and the author of two books: Prose Immortality, 1711–1819 (2015) and Interest and Connection in the Eigh­teenth ­Century: Hervey, Johnson, Smith, Equiano (2021).

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About The Contributors

MELVYN NEW, professor emeritus at the University of Florida, has been publishing on eighteenth-­century lit­er­a­ture for fifty years. He served as general editor of the University of Florida Edition of the Works of Sterne, the ninth and final volume of which was published in 2014. His recent essays include “Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison and Sterne: A Study in Influence” (Modern Philology, 2017); with Robert G. Walker, “Who Killed Tom Cumming the Quaker? Recovering the Life Story of an Eighteenth-­Century Adventurer” (Modern Philology, 2019); and “Johnson, T. S. Eliot, and the City,” in Samuel Johnson among the Modernists (2019). He has been the book review editor for The Scriblerian for the past fifteen years. MARK A. PEDREIRA is professor of En­glish at the University of Puerto Rico. His research interests include rhe­toric, meta­phor theory, philosophy, textual criticism, classical lit­er­a­ture, Shakespeare, and Restoration and eighteenth-­century British lit­er­a­ture. He has published articles and book chapters on meta­phor theory, Samuel Butler, Abraham Cowley, and Samuel Johnson, including a book chapter on Samuel Johnson, titled “Scholarship,” in The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson (2021). His vari­ous publications on Samuel Johnson are being expanded into a book, now in pro­gress, on the connection between meta­phor and thought in Johnson’s scholarship and criticism, including the first and fourth editions of Johnson’s Dictionary of the En­glish Language (1755 and 1773), his edition of Shakespeare (1765), and the Lives of the Poets (1779–1781). LINDA L. REESMAN is professor of En­glish at Queensborough Community College, one of two community colleges located in Queens, New York, and part of City University of New York. Having studied British Romanticism at St. John’s University in Queens, she received her doctoral degree while concentrating her research primarily on the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Her research interests over the past twenty years have been concerned with the role of marriage and its social transformation for ­women writers, especially for the wives of Romantic writers. She has frequently presented at the Coleridge Summer Conference, a biannual meeting convening in Somerset, E ­ ngland, near the first home of the Coleridge f­amily. She has published several articles in the Coleridge Bulletin and has provided numerous reviews for the Eighteenth-­Century Current Bibliography (ECCB) and other publications. ADAM ROUNCE is associate professor in En­glish lit­er­a­ture at the University of Nottingham. He has written extensively on vari­ous seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­

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About The Contributors

century writers, including Dryden, Pope, Churchill, and Johnson. He is coediting two volumes for the ongoing Cambridge University Press edition of the writings of Jonathan Swift as well as writing a separately published chronology. He is the author of Fame and Failure, 1720–1800: The Unfulfilled Literary Life (2013). ROBIN RUNIA is associate professor of En­glish at Xavier University of Louisiana. She has published essays and articles on w ­ omen’s writing, gender, and race in the long eigh­teenth ­century. She is currently working on a monograph analyzing race in the works of Maria Edgeworth. She is also an editor of the Maria Edgeworth Letters Digital Humanities proj­ect.

Reviewers GEFEN BAR-­ON SANTOR is a part-­time professor at the Department of En­glish, University of Ottawa. She has taught courses from the medieval period to the eigh­teenth ­century, as well as technical writing and lit­er­a­ture and science. She also teaches academic writing for publication to professors whose primary language is not En­glish at the University of Ottawa’s Official Languages and Bilingualism Institute. Her research and publication focus is the reception of Shakespeare in eighteenth-­century Britain, as well as lit­er­a­ture and science. ASHLEY BENDER is assistant professor of En­glish at Texas W ­ oman’s University. Her research interests include lit­er­a­ture of the long eigh­teenth c­ entury, especially drama; Shakespeare in the eigh­teenth c­ entury; sex and gender in the eigh­ teenth ­century; textual studies; ser­vice learning in the composition classroom; experiential education and multimodal pedagogy. JOHN  J. BURKE became professor emeritus of En­glish in 2017. Before that he served as an active faculty member in the Department of En­glish at the University of Alabama for forty-­three years. During that time span he published numerous essays and articles that addressed compelling issues in Johnson and Boswell studies. Given his review in this volume of Community and Solitude: New Essays on Johnson’s Circle, a collection of essays that includes a contribution by John Radner, it seems worth noting that Radner published an essay that showed his promise early on in one of Burke’s own early and noteworthy publications, The Unknown Samuel Johnson (1983). John Radner’s was a life well lived. May he rest in peace.

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About The Contributors

GREG CLINGHAM is emeritus professor of En­glish at Bucknell University, where, at dif­fer­ent times, he held the NEH Chair in the Humanities and the John P. Crozer Chair in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture. He is the author or editor of ten books and dozens of scholarly articles on Johnson, Boswell, Dryden, translation, memory, historiography, Orientalism, archives, the history of the book, and scholarly publishing, including Johnson, Writing, and Memory (2002). He is presently writing a cultural history of Lady Anne Barnard at the Cape of Good Hope (1797–1802), while also working on Sir George Macartney’s diplomatic papers from China, India, Rus­sia, and the Cape of Good Hope. From 1996 to 2018, he was the director of Bucknell University Press, which published approximately 700 titles during his tenure, including 225 in eighteenth-­century studies. 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 recent essays on Macpherson include “The Correspondence of James Macpherson” in The International Companion to James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian and “Replying to a Crisis: James Macpherson’s The Rights of ­Great Britain Asserted against the Claims of Amer­i­ca” in Britain and the World. GLORIA EIVE is a musicologist, editor, and educator. Her par­tic­u­lar interests are the m ­ usic and culture of the Italian Enlightenment, particularly the violin “school” of Giuseppe Tartini (1692–1770) in Padova, its smaller “satellite” in Faenza, directed by Tartini’s early pupil, the violinist and composer Paolo Alberghi (1716–1785), and musical activities in northern Italy. Her publications and conference papers reflect ­these and related musical interests. She is a gradu­ate of the University of California, Berkeley, and her fellowships and professional activities include being a Woodrow Wilson Travelling Fellow in Italy and fine arts editor for ECCB: The Eigh­ teenth ­Century Current Bibliography (1993–2012). She is vice-­president of San Francisco Early M ­ usic Society (SFEMS) and arts review editor for 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era and SRE: Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment. SÖREN HAMMERSCHMIDT is residential faculty in En­glish at GateWay Community College, where he teaches En­glish composition and lit­er­a­ture courses. His other hat is a powdered wig: his work on eighteenth-­century media ecologies, portraiture, and epistolary culture in Britain and the Atlantic world has most

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About The Contributors

recently appeared in Eighteenth- ­Century Fiction, Word & Image, Eu­ro­pean Romantic Review, and the collection Samuel Richardson in Context. He is currently coediting (with Louise Curran and George Justice) the Correspondence Primarily on “Pamela” and “Cla­ris­sa” (1732–1749) for The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson and is starting new work on author portraits and the professionalization of early-­century authorship MALCOLM JACK has written widely on Enlightenment topics, publishing Corruption and Pro­gress: The Eigh­teenth C ­ entury Debate in 1989. He has written on, and edited the works of, William Beckford and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. His interest in Portuguese history resulted in two books: Sintra: A Glorious Eden (2002) and Lisbon: City of the Sea (2007). His latest book, To the Fairest Cape: Eu­ro­pean Encounters in the Cape of Good Hope (2019), explores the rich travel lit­er­a­ture of the Cape. He was visiting professor at Nanyang Technical University, Singapore in 2015 and has lectured widely in vari­ous universities around the world. He is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, London and president of the Beckford Society and of the Johnson Club. He was appointed KCB in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2011 for ser­vices to the UK Parliament. CHRISTOPHER  D. JOHNSON is professor of En­glish and Trustees’ Research Scholar at Francis Marion University. His most recent book is A Po­liti­cal Biography of Sarah Fielding (2017). He is currently working on a study connecting the rise of the novel to the dynamics of domestic vio­lence. He is also organ­izing a new journal, Carolina Currents: An Interdisciplinary Journal of South Carolina Studies. R. J. W. MILLS is currently a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Research Fellow in History at Queen Mary University of London. His research has covered numerous topics relating to early modern British religious and intellectual history, and he is currently exploring how the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment approached the study of religion. He has published in several journals and is completing his first monograph, The Scottish Enlightenment Explains the Gods. JOHN SITTER is the author of The Cambridge Introduction to Eighteenth-­Century Poetry and other studies of the period’s lit­er­a­ture, including an essay, “Sustainability Johnson.” Recently retired from the University of Notre Dame, he is now teaching courses in environmental lit­er­a­ture and sustainability studies at Emory University.

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