Historical Style: Fashion and the New Mode of History, 174-183 9780812293043

Table of contents :
Contents
Abbreviations
Introduction. Fashions Past
Part I. The Dress of the Year
Chapter 1. Modern Fashion and Comparative Contemporaneity
Chapter 2. Portrait Historicism and the Dress of the Times
Part II. The Fictions of Serial History
Chapter 3. Hume, Historical Succession, and the Dress of Rousseau
Chapter 4. Historical Novelty and Serial Form
Chapter 5. Walter Scott’s Fashion Systems
Chapter 6. William Godwin and the Objects of Historical Fiction
Coda. Beautiful Historical Experience
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

Historical Style

Material textS Series Editors roger Chartier leah Price Joseph Farrell Peter Stallybrass anthony Grafton Michael F. Suarez, S.J. a complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Historical Style 2

Fashion and the New Mode of History, 1740–1830

Timothy Campbell

U n i v e r s i t y of Pe n ns y lva n i a Pr e s s Phil adelphia

Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press all rights reserved. except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of america on acid-free paper 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

a catalogue record for this book is available from the library of Congress. iSBN 978-0-8122-4832-6

For Melissa and Charlie

again, wert not thou, at one period of life, a Buck, or Blood, or Macaroni, or incroyable, or Dandy, or by whatever name, according to year and place, such phenomenon is distinguished? —Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

CoNteNtS

2

list of abbreviations xi introdUction Fashions Past 1 Part i tHe DreSS oF tHe Year chaPter 1 Modern Fashion and Comparative Contemporaneity 35 chaPter 2 Portrait Historicism and the Dress of the times 77 Part ii tHe FiCtioNS oF Serial HiStorY chaPter 3 Hume, Historical Succession, and the Dress of rousseau 129 chaPter 4 Historical Novelty and Serial Form 161 chaPter 5 Walter Scott’s Fashion Systems 203 chaPter 6 William Godwin and the objects of Historical Fiction 238 coda Beautiful Historical experience 278

x

Contents

notes 285 bibliograPhy 337 index 353 acknowledgments 361

a B B r e v i at i o N S

2

A “C” C D E H HM K L M N O P Q R S SL T U W

John aikin, ed., The Athenaeum (Jan.–June 1807) Pamela Clemit, “Commerce of luminaries” Thomas Jefferys, Collection of Dresses Joshua reynolds, Discourses on Art David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary Maria edgeworth, Harrington Walter Scott, Heart of Midlothian Walter Scott, Kenilworth Letters of David Hume William Godwin, Mandeville Jane austen, Northanger Abbey Walter Scott, Old Mortality William Godwin, Political and Philosophical Writings William Godwin, The Enquirer Sophia lee, The Recess richard Brinsley Sheridan, The School for Scandal and Other Plays William Godwin, St. Leon William Cowper, The Task Maria edgeworth, Castle rackrent and ennui Walter Scott, Waverley

IntroductIon

2

Fashions Past

When the landmark volume The Birth of a Consumer Society (1982) first went looking for signs of a familiarly modern consumerism in eighteenth-century Britain, it found them at a glance in the period’s fashionable styles. neil McKendrick observes how, in contrast to the “composite image of the tudors” that will suffice for historians of the sixteenth century, “the accelerating pace of fashion change [in the eighteenth century] can only be accommodated by referring to the styles of George I, George II, the 1760s, the 1770s, the 1780s and 1790s, and with many fashion goods even that is insufficient and anyone with scholarship worthy of the name would have to refer to individual years.”1 But remarkably, thirty years after the multidisciplinary turn toward material culture that The Birth of a Consumer Society helped inspire (shaping “thing theory,” the new history of the book, object-oriented ontology, and so on), we have yet to grapple fully with the way these changing styles were almost equally visible to eighteenth-century Britons themselves, and within the revolutionary practices of historical representation they were simultaneously elaborating. In Historical Style, I focus on this convergence of fashion, commerce, and historical specificity to trace the extraordinary implications of fashionable dress for a new mode of history. this history probed the distinctive contours of individual decades and years; comprehended the social and material lives of ordinary persons, past and present; and finally found definitive expression in the romantic historical fiction of Walter Scott, whose novels outsold those of all his contemporaries combined. this history’s practices and presumptions, I argue, consolidated the inchoate lessons of a novel, print-cultural record of fashionable life that proliferated from the mid-eighteenth century, especially in the form of precisely dated illustrations that fostered new alertness to the location of all dress in time. At the instigation of fashion plates, graphic sat-

2

Introduction

ires, periodical prose and illustrations, and portrait reproductions—and often in self-consciously paradoxical ways—Britons reinvented the material life of the past as a source of novelty for the present. Writing in the 1950s (at the last high moment of the “hundred years’ fashion”),2 roland Barthes described the “implacably annual” procession of a printcultural fashion system that was fundamentally “new each year,” in a way that made fashionable dress peculiarly autonomous from history and its causes.3 In this book I foreground instead an earlier moment of systematic fashion, starting in the mid-eighteenth century, when the visual and textual genre of the “dress of the year” first became iconic. For Barthes (writing at the height of structuralism), “A state of fashion can never be explained analytically, there is no analogical relation between the napoleonic period and high waistlines.” In short, he claims, “History does not produce forms.”4 But the story I tell of this earlier fashion moment is one in which the changing forms of dress in eighteenthcentury Britain nevertheless produced a distinctive history. By retracing Britons’ increased sensitivity to cycles of fashion—and to now-familiar dynamics of currency and obsolescence in everyday commercial life—I account for the complex ways in which this sensitivity both shaped and vexed the period’s projects of historical representation. While I stage my inquiry alongside existing accounts of a rise of historical consciousness in the period, I set out less to offer a developmental narrative than to describe the proliferating effects of a structure of change.5 In the process, I emphasize the contingency of Britons’ impulse to envision cultural life as ongoing history and to shape that history in fashion’s image. As the idea of historicism dawned, eighteenth-century Britons built an enduring practice of historicism from the materials they found all around them amidst the birth of a consumer society—not the “dry, sapless, mouldering, and disjointed bones” that had long fixated antiquaries, but the vivid images of passing styles that were remaking the substance and methods of memory.6 In the form of printcultural fashion, which left behind a record that could be consulted years hence, the regular rhythms sustained by commercial life became a generative matrix for historical reflection. ultimately, attending to the remarkable convergences between the historical vision of the long eighteenth century and its fashions reveals an early moment of historicism that was more complex, and more riven with productive tension, than we have so far recognized. In the way fashion texts endured and accumulated, Britons confronted the novel persistence of old fashions, which produced new curiosity about the very recent past as well as new self-

Introduction

3

consciousness about the means by which the past could be known. And in the course of appreciating not only the historical exceptionality of the material abundance of their age, but also the partialness and anachronism of their own consumerist vision of history, eighteenth-century Britons turned the significations of dress into an organizing contradiction of the first historicist age.

old English dresses to evoke the surprising provocations of the protean historical vision that resided in the somewhat unlikely domain of dress, I begin with an eighteenthcentury visual text that I take as an icon for my own project: a remarkable illustration from thomas Jefferys’s early costume history A Collection of the Dresses of Different Nations, Antient and Modern, Particularly Old English Dresses (1757) (Figure 1).7 the subtitle of this collection, “Particularly old English dresses,” aptly announces the subsidiary program that is the project’s real innovation: not its geographical or ethnographic assemblage of global costume, as would have been more familiar, but instead its assemblage in place of the changing styles of Britons.8 Most remarkably, in a way that offers a glimpse of the horizon of historical self-consciousness I am describing, the Collection’s unique plate depicting the “Habits of English Gentlemen in 1735, 1745, 1755” stages a dynamic scene of cultural interaction across time that is in important ways new. In the image what immediately becomes an open question is the precise relation of each of the three “times” identified by these men’s dress (1735, 1745, and 1755) to the other times with which they coincide on the page. the force of this question grows evident in these gentlemen’s strikingly active gazes— which insist, I think, upon the various permutations of comparison that might emerge here. What the most current figure of 1755 might ask of his counterpart of 1735 (or vice versa) would presumably differ in kind from what their fellow of 1745 might ask of the other two. And crucially, the question of whether we are looking backward to the past or forward to the future (or both) is up in the air depending upon the permutation of comparison that we choose. Some possibilities of contemplation seem intriguingly foreclosed in ways we might interpret—as in the case of the gentleman of 1735, in his inability to see his future counterpart from 1755, at least in this frozen moment. the art of this image, nevertheless, is to force a viewer to confront the full range of comparative possibilities, visually realized and otherwise.

4

Introduction

Figure 1. From thomas Jefferys, A Collection of the Dresses of Different Nations, Antient and Modern, vol. 2 (1757). courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale university.

At the same time, we might wonder about the claim this dress is making to dated representativeness in the first place. notably, the dates of 1735, 1745, and 1755 form a standardized sequence, set apart at regularized intervals of ten years each. the dress might seem specifically to commemorate the styles of the individual years designated and so to leave gaps between those years. But the

Introduction

5

regular sequence might also suggest that this dress distills the general contours of the complete decades of style for which it also seems to stand—at intervals just long enough for distillation to resolve into clear distinctions. Viewers are asked to scrutinize the differences between these respective dress “habits”; but they are also invited to contemplate the conspicuous, formal means by which this image underscores difference, or makes that difference visually apparent, and even pushes such difference to the point of motivating narrative. In the context of the larger Collection, the remarkable qualities of this particular plate grow clearer still. together with a complementary rendering of the “Habits of English Ladies in 1735, 1745, 1755,” this image is highly unusual among the many illustrations contained within these volumes (Figure 2).9 First, these plates approach uniquely near (chronologically) to the Collection’s own day of 1757. Second, among the hundreds of historical and ethnographic costume plates contained in the Collection, these two singularly modern images are the only two examples that assemble dressed figures from multiple “times” on the same page, to cohabit the same visual plane—gathered at intervals that make comparison almost inevitable. In this way, the “Habits of English Gentlemen in 1735, 1745, 1755” posits the historical exceptionality of its mid-eighteenth century present through an implicit claim about the habits of vision arising at the same moment, in life and in print. For the Collection, modern Britons have fashion—here a kind of “liberty” with form—that stands in contrast to the customary dress of traditional cultures around the globe. As Jefferys’s prefatory text observes, “At present indeed the Europeans are so much at Liberty to follow their own Fancy in the Figure and Materials of their dress, that the Habit is become a kind of Index to the Mind, and the character is in some Particulars as easily discovered by a Man’s dress as by his conversation.”10 this profusion of possibilities for the “figure and materials” of dress points to a broadly transformed consumer marketplace in which material life promised to express individual and collective human aspiration with unprecedented nuance. Britons could “follow their own Fancy” in dress, in the straightforward sense of selecting a style that suited them, but also via dress, in the stronger sense of pursuing desire as such through clothing (and through the collective “fancy” of fashion) rather than some other avenue. As Jefferys’s figures of 1735, 1745, and 1755 contemplate fellow Britons of times quite proximate to their own, they regard each other with a mix of surprise, curiosity, and pleasure. this is a response provoked not by alienation from a distant time or place but by an uncanny—and, it seems, heretofore unrecognized—difference from one another over these relatively short intervals of social

6

Introduction

Figure 2. From thomas Jefferys, A Collection of the Dresses of Different Nations, Antient and Modern, vol. 2 (1757). courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale university.

life. notably, the most recent fashions of 1755 are not privileged over or separated from the earlier dress of 1735 and 1745. In the way that all three figures are represented as equivalent objects of inquiry for the others, they bespeak the irreducible particularity of each of the three times that stand as provenance for their costumes. As an assertion about the distinctness of commercial modernity, the

Introduction

7

unique proximity of these “habits” in time suggests how the increasingly regular changes of dress fashions at midcentury, made apparent by their print-cultural reproduction, allowed for the incremental alterations of fashion to signify in new ways—and thus for different times to enter into new kinds of relations. In all these ways, the “Habits of English Gentlemen in 1735, 1745, 1755” intimates the consciousness of the nascent print-cultural fashion system that I describe in this book. this system functioned through a complex set of procedures that labored to discern and reproduce compelling alterations in cultural forms, and to do so with the kind of regularity that made the expectation of change integral to the experience of those forms. Yet as the Collection also suggests, the distinctness of each moment had always to be produced or recognized in relationship to what just had been and was no longer, in a way that heightened the importance of the past to the present. By presenting the discreteness but also the equivalence of these three “times,” Jefferys’s rendering of dress reflects how fashion approximated and induced a new attunement to the temporal specificity of cultural interactions that was requisite to modern historicism. And as an aid or prompt to memory, fashion henceforth anchored a wider range of meaningful associations about the peculiarity of each moment of social life. the Collection’s confidence in recalling these recent dates as distinctive times of their own stemmed from the revolutionary promise of its constituent visual sources to attend to the immanent history of social life via precise attention to passing styles of dress. the figures for 1735 and 1745 are directly copied from a pair of designs that were themselves quite unusual in their original moment, L. P. Boitard’s Taste A-La-Mode, 1745 (1745) and Taste A-La-Mode as in the Year 1735 (1749) (Figures 3 and 4). As I show in chapter 1, Boitard’s designs—precisely because of their almost unique vantage upon the “year” during the 1740s moment of their production—led an extraordinary afterlife within the visual print culture of fashion that succeeded them over the course of the eighteenth century. Taste A-La-Mode, 1745 in particular became a kind of urtext for a specifically citational tradition, one that brought this dress from 1745 into continual comparison and contrast with the dress of the future. After reappearing in Jefferys’s Collection in 1757, the same design and costume were directly copied and updated for most of the next century in examples I have located in 1772, 1776, 1784, 1790 (twice), 1809, 1823, 1834, and elsewhere. the conspicuous repetition of Boitard’s design in the future brings home the indispensability of this illustration at an early moment in the history of fashion in print. But while costume historians (along with romantic-era Britons themselves) have long registered and lamented the dearth of fashion im-

Figure 3. L. P. Boitard, Taste A-La-Mode, 1745 (top) and details alongside figures from the Collection of Dresses for 1745 (bottom). © trustees of the British Museum.

Figure 4. L. P. Boitard, Taste A-La-Mode as in the Year 1735 (top) and details alongside figures from the Collection of Dresses for 1735 (bottom). courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale university.

10

Introduction

ages in the early to mid-eighteenth century, this problem of historical visuality has not much permeated the awareness of literary and cultural historians. As the fashion historian John L. nevison notes, there were at this time “dated portraits of English ladies which can be used [today] as fashion illustrations”; Boitard’s isolated “caricature scenes . . . also may serve as records of fashion. there was, however, no journal of fashion in England before the reign of George III. Indeed, there seems to have been no publication or series of prints to give guidance to the fashion trade in Europe in the mid-eighteenth century”—at which point it was British publications, at a generative distance from France, that took the lead in serializing fashion in print.11 For those Britons (in 1757 and after) seeking to recover the earlier moments of “1735” or “1745” in all their temporal specificity, fashionable and otherwise—and who therefore sought contemporaneous representations sharing their own commitment to trace the precise lines of a cultural moment—Boitard’s designs remained an almost necessary point of origin.12 It was only from the late 1750s onward, in the wake of the Collection of Dresses, that a regular provision of fashion images became available to Britons in

Introduction

11

Figure 5. Women’s pocketbook fashion plate from The Ladies Mirror, or Mental Companion for the Year 1785 (containing a title-page genre scene with “Ladies in the dress of the Year” as well as a fold-out depiction of “the most Fashionable and Elegant Head dresses for the Year”).

accessible print forms—most emblematically in the numerous pocketbook annuals for women where the visual and textual genre of “the dress of the year” first became iconic. these pocketbook fashion plates supplied direct archival resources to future historical projects, but they also disseminated a concise, formal apprehension of the wider fashion system that was reordering modern commercial society in elusive yet fundamental ways (Figure 5). For us they also point to a deep archive of the pleasures and dangers of commercial repetition, or to an early scene of modern periodicity and seriality (long preceding the Victorian novel) that has profoundly influenced our patterns of historical self-reflexivity ever since.13

Immanent distance and Modern Life In the period from roughly 1740 to 1830, an emergent historicism was at the root of a remarkable series of intellectual remakings, as ordinary Britons for the first time began to recognize and to care about the precise ways in which their culture had changed over time. they began to see how they themselves, in

12

Introduction

their subjective and social being, were present-day products of contingent historical circumstances. A nascent practice of social history renewed traditional historiography (heretofore dominated by lessons on politics and warfare for elites) with scenes of private life.14 the progressive historical philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment theorized how stages of economic development shaped the social character of disparate cultures in homologous ways. In a “Gothic revival” that signaled the dawn of a modern poetic canon in English, literary critics reappraised the aesthetic value of the rude texts of Britain’s past and insisted that these texts be understood on their own terms rather than those of classical antiquity.15 And at century’s end, in a development that extended the same insights before a broad audience, the historical novel emerged as a formal (and marketplace) culmination of these trends. In the hands of Walter Scott, the genre achieved world-historical importance not just for its momentous popularity or for its global influence on the history of literature (especially via the European novel of realism), but also for the profound shadow historical fiction cast upon the historiography of the century to come.16 After the epochal novels of Scott, the historian always had to reckon with the power Scott’s fiction displayed (as the historian thomas Macaulay observed) to “make the past present, to bring the distant near” in unprecedentedly compelling ways.17 And through a fashion system, Britons coordinated this new awareness of the historical past with an unprecedentedly abundant material world—from the London retail scene that was the envy of Europe to the proliferating representations of fashionable life that fostered conviction about this new state of abundance and scrutinized its character. the fuller context of Macaulay’s praise of the historical novel overtly suggests how the newfound immediacy of the past connected directly with renewed attention to the history of material life. Scott’s fiction, Macaulay wrote, was most distinctly admirable in its capacity to “call up our ancestors before us with all their peculiarities of language, manners, and garb, to show us over their houses, to seat us at their tables, to rummage their old-fashioned wardrobes, to explain the uses of their ponderous furniture.”18 Macaulay identifies a vision of history—cluttered with home goods and tableware, dress and furniture—that, for better or worse, became indispensable after Scott, as much in the lavish material worlds of realist novels as in historiography. But as I will show, an exaggerated sense of Scott’s originality has obscured how much Scott’s reenvisioning of history was also a knowing retrospect on the long eighteenth century that preceded him. Scott remade history by means of the unfolding materialization of time that he found ready-made in the earlier period, most of all in the print-cultural world of fashionable dress.

Introduction

13

While scholars of eighteenth-century Britain have exhaustively documented and debated the evidence for and implications of a “birth of a consumer society” in the period,19 relatively little work has connected this development in a sustained way to the simultaneous revolution in historical mentality—especially because fashion has not been sufficiently in view. Presumptions about fashion’s frivolity and eliteness have always limited serious attention to the phenomenon of dress. the neglect of the particular archive of fashionable dress that I foreground in this book, however, was also a feature of the contingent path of intellectual history as compounded by fashion’s elusive situation between image, text, and object. Much of the most remarkable historical work embedded in my own archive inheres in pictures, in ostensibly ephemeral images that have remained off the map not only of most art historians (whose accounts of the period’s historical representation have been preoccupied with more academic ideas of “historical painting”) and literary critics (whose accounts of largely unillustrated novels have fairly general ideas about the meaningfulness of characters’ dress), but also of the history of history itself. In the last case, this is especially in consequence of the irreconcilability of images with the influential textualist methods of the political school of historiography (including J. G. A. Pocock and others) that has provided the foundational account of the age’s historical thought in recent decades.20 At the same time, fashion’s forceful and creative mediations of the past have remained mostly opaque to a scholarly historiography of consumer “revolution,” for which consumption has often been a problem known in advance. Presuming a radical break in British culture after the birth of consumption, this historiography has been more at pains to pursue the sudden familiarity (to us) of eighteenthcentury habits of consumption than to observe the complex reappraisal of prior moments that a temporally portable enthusiasm for a world of goods simultaneously helped to inspire (for them).21 Although I keep the actual dress and material culture of the long eighteenth century in mind, I do not offer an account of the origins of eighteenth-century fashion per se, neither in the sense of the relationship of this period’s looks to the styles of prior epochs nor in the sense of the recent economic developments in textile production and retail that sustained this fashion culture at its base. Just prior to this moment, the rise of cotton and the resulting flood of cheap prints and colorful fabrics had suddenly and vastly multiplied the aesthetic possibilities and social reach of regular variation in dress so that the very “substance of dress was permanently altered.”22 thus rather than trace fashion’s emergence over time, I describe the internal complexities of a particular order of fashion that had

14

Introduction

already begun to assume systematic form. Within this order, I stress, the “materiality” of consumption especially inhered in the print-cultural mediation of dress. the visual and textual forms of fashionable life in print gave (sometimes wishful) life to a material culture in process, altering with the regularity suggested by the “dress of the year”; and the same visual and textual forms also gave that material culture wide imaginative circulation, together with a uniform reproducibility that the dress objects themselves often lacked.23 In this book, then, I assign to fashion and its cycles a privileged place in the experience of “acceleration” that reinhart Koselleck has influentially attributed to the eighteenth-century “beginning” of modernity. Koselleck particularly notes how the historical epochs used to conceptualize human culture grew shorter and shorter in this moment: “there is every reason to believe that more and more new experiences had actually accumulated in shorter and shorter amounts of time, so that with such shortened as well as more quickly established determinations of periods, a new experience of time seems also to have announced itself.”24 the sense of historical time’s elasticity here is persuasive, but Koselleck’s suggestion that this “new experience” would simply have “announced itself” falls short, especially in failing to account for the dress that so often did this announcing. there was an objective acceleration of material life during the eighteenth century, but widespread conviction about and intensified perception of cultural acceleration was a special consequence of the rhythmic representations of fashion within print culture25—by century’s end, more metronomic than steadily accelerating—which made the status of fashion’s “periods” in relation to periods of other kinds a consistently provocative problem.26 Especially through fashionable dress, eighteenth-century texts like periodicals, annuals, portraits, and topical prints arranged the eternal mutability of culture in a way that made acceleration legible—but also visible. And more broadly, as Peter de Bolla argues, “Something recognizable as precisely a culture based on the visual, on modalities of visualization, the production and consumption of visual matter” emerged in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. de Bolla limits his own inquiry to the “artworks” subject to formal aesthetic procedures, and for that reason explicitly excludes fashion from his account of visual culture. Yet as I will show, it was precisely through fashion that Britons of this moment gained for themselves an early appreciation of the very problem that de Bolla articulates for his present-day readers— of “how one might begin to look in history, as it were, how we might look from our own contemporaneity with eyes belonging to a past era.”27 In print-

Introduction

15

cultural fashion, especially through the perceptual shock produced by outdated dress, Britons saw firsthand the contingency of visual custom. the midcentury visualization of contemporaneity I am describing here may be thought of as the second act of the earlier production of contemporaneity that J. Paul Hunter locates in early eighteenth-century news culture, where he notes the “sense that the moment . . . was in itself a kind of art object—to be adored, meditated upon, fondled, and contemplated again and again.”28 But whereas the news (as a straightforward serial form) ultimately conformed events to the homogeneous empty time that was the stuff of one kind of historical modernity, the visualization of contemporaneity at midcentury proved more fundamentally interruptive of straightforward, temporal procession. new fashions, in other words, summoned a “present”; but old fashions hanging on, or purposefully resurrected, shaped a synchronic order more precisely alert to the many times it encompassed. What Koselleck calls “the simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous” was peculiarly characteristic of dress, especially as print-cultural images assertively fixed dress in time, in a way that made the temporal provenance of clothing readily perceptible. Whether in the residual objects of old dress that filled up closets and attics, or in the proliferating reproductions of fashions that, while soon enough outmoded, nevertheless lived on in print, obsolete styles could be brought forth to jar the eye habituated to the present, or to be reassembled on the same printed page with the looks of other moments.29 As against the late nineteenth-century moment when mass production was “achieved before its explicit conceptualization,” in this eighteenth-century moment the fantastical extension of a system of fashion long preceded its surefooted establishment as material condition.30 Print disseminated and enacted a distinctly modern mode of desire just as likely to be perfected in the absence of possession—as in the exemplary case of the unconsummated longing of window shopping, but also in the much wider virtual sphere of material longing that print culture made possible. Barthes observed in the twentieth century how the photograph in a fashion magazine “makes the purchase unnecessary, it replaces it; we can intoxicate ourselves on images, identify ourselves oneirically with the model.” And in a way that makes fashion more accessible than at first appears, we can “in reality, follow Fashion merely by purchasing a few boutique accessories.”31 As eighteenth-century Britons contemplated similar periodical images of objects unpossessed, their fantasies of possession grew all the more intense in consequence. colin campbell, for instance, describes an

16

Introduction

emergent ethos of modern consumerism that built its serial daydreams upon a steady succession of fashionable enticements. Britons drew a new kind of pleasure “from imaginative use of the objects seen” (e.g., from “mentally ‘trying on’ the clothes examined, or ‘seeing’ the furniture arranged within one’s room”).32 In this way fashion, for which dress was always the leading edge, was at the center of an extension of the pleasure of objects via increasingly elaborate fictions of their uses—staged in innovative showrooms, prints, and periodicals, but also, I argue, in the imaginative histories that eighteenth-century Britons likewise built in fashion’s image. In a related way, fashionable dress also mattered distinctly because of the way its cycles extended, in mediated ways, even to the working poor.33 In material life as well as in print, increasingly affordable and efficient dissemination allowed fashion to reach not only beyond the elite but also beyond the urbane middle classes as it “penetrated even into the villages and farmhouses of Georgian Britain.”34 despite our present-day presumptions about the period, John Styles finds among the working poor in late eighteenth-century Britain “a set of expectations profoundly influenced by the operation of the fashion system in the commercial marketplace.”35 unlike every other area of consumer culture, in clothing “relative abundance prevailed[,] and the exercise of discrimination was a possibility.” As a consequence, “even plebeian dress . . . broadly follow[ed] the trends of high fashion”—at least in their “best clothes,” or in the accessories (hats, neckcloths, handkerchiefs) they might have purchased once per year in the latest colors and patterns.36 (these laborers are perhaps the surprising ancestors of Barthes’s fashion-magazine readers, who follow fashion through accessories.) thus as against E. P. thompson’s classic account of a reassertion of traditional popular culture in the period that resisted the incursions of capitalist commerce,37 Styles makes clear how customary practices often “flourished precisely because they provided opportunities and legitimising excuses to participate in attractive forms of commercialized consumption.”38 In all these ways, the specific dynamics of fashion in time and fashion as time are more at the root of modern historicism than we have yet realized.

Fashioning Historicism, old and new In the spirit of the fashion it surveys, Historical Style begins in a moment just before historicism’s hegemony, amid a range of eighteenth-century texts that convincingly exposed the precarious status of history amid the circulations of

Introduction

17

commerce. By recovering the neglected affinities between historical sophistication and material abundance, I underscore a discomfiting paradox that became apparent to eighteenth-century Britons themselves: that the ascendant “knowledge” of history was in some ways only the most profound symptom of the rise of a fashion system and of the broader consequences of that system for culture. throughout this book, I am alert to what claude rawson calls “contexts of defeated aspiration,” to figures like the painter Sir Joshua reynolds, the novelist Sophia Lee, and the radical philosopher William Godwin—figures whose varying disappointments with the commercial conditions for historiography during the long eighteenth century can serve to clarify those conditions for us.39 Yet rather than endorse their respective disappointments, I mean for their resistance to commercialized history to stand alongside contemporaneous enthusiasm for the genuinely productive historical effects of the fashion system in the period. the peculiar historicism that is my object was finally as much a commercial ethos as a genuine knowledge; and in a strong sense, the new mode of history I describe could only have been articulated alongside commerce and its fictions. during the eighteenth century, their convergence made a historiography that would extricate its methods and procedures from market ways of knowing something of a contradiction in terms. Pocock, for instance, has drawn attention to the capacity for sympathy that early eighteenth-century theorists discovered to be enhanced by the widespread practice of commerce, which “refines and moderates the passions by making us aware of what we share with others.”40 As James chandler recapitulates, “the fundamental virtue to be refined or ‘polished’ in a commercial society . . . is a capacity for putting ourselves in the place or ‘case’ of another.” this modern vision of virtue addresses “the fundamental psychological necessity of commercial translations: two agents keen to strike a bargain must each, in order to serve his or her own interests, be able to imagine what it might be in the interest of the other to do or have done.”41 While practiced and polished for the commercial present, such enhanced sympathy proved, somewhat paradoxically, invaluably applicable to the construction and examination of a past that was understood to be different. In a sign of the presentist impetus for the eighteenth-century historical impulse, over and again the age’s most revolutionary ground of historical sympathy was a commercialized attention to material life that had to be invented on behalf of the past—by attaching to the past’s subjects a desire for, and to its objects the allure of, contemporary fashions. In this sense, we should consider

18

Introduction

how a new historiography, factual and fictional, supplied compensatory public forms to private consumption. Pocock’s noteworthy account paints a commercial world perilously lacking in publicity in which “the real world of economy and polity rested on a myriad fantasy worlds maintained by private egos.”42 taken en masse, a new historiography promised to remedy this situation by staging individuals’ relationships to consumer-commerce within a larger social field and across numerous temporal locations, thereby bridging the gaps between the hyperindividuated “fantasy worlds” of commercial subjects. A widely resonant historicism also required the serialization that commercial cycles offered (that is, a regular sequence of material change that could coincide with datedness), because the cultural objects that underwrote the practices of modern social history had to be made to bear the imprint of a precise time in order to do this underwriting. For much of the eighteenth century, literary texts willingly gave objects of commerce expansively diachronic existences (like Joseph Addison’s picaresque shilling in the Tatler that traversed hundreds of years of English history). But by the end of this period, commodity artifacts were more normatively bound to a time of origin that they proclaimed with great exactness. this phenomenon owed a substantial debt to the parallel temporal precision demanded by a growing commercial sensitivity to the limited shelf life of products.43 As Erin Mackie observes, “the very materiality of culture is what opens it to historical change: consumption is a process that continually produces and redefines social categories.”44 the new investment in a very prominent moment of initial consumption allowed eighteenth-century commodity artifacts to stage and to preserve the processual redefinition of the social over time. to the extent that dress became fashion, clothes were tellingly cut apart from their longstanding reflection of a longue durée, or from those customary practices and long processes of habituation to which etymology continued to tie dress (as “costume” and “habit”). this sense was obliquely reflected in Edmund Burke’s histrionic lament that the “decent drapery of life [was] to be rudely torn off ” at Versailles, and the “moral wardrobe of the imagination . . . exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.”45 Indeed, by the latter half of the eighteenth century, as t. H. Breen demonstrates, even in the frontier outposts of the British empire in north America, dress and any number of other commodities had for many people already escaped local culture. these commodities signaled the way the present moment moved in accord with commercial ties that transcended traditional constraints of time and place.

Introduction

19

As the market, in Breen’s terms, “standardized everyday experience,” shoppers throughout British territories “had to learn an unfamiliar vocabulary— queen’s ware, not china; Wilton carpets, not rugs; maid’s lamb gloves, not gloves—that defined an expanding consumer culture.” Breen’s peculiar case of America (in which colonists uniquely struggled to abandon their ties to an imperial market at the behest of political considerations) finally only underscores how every locality of the British Empire was being transformed by goods from elsewhere.46 Likewise, Leora Auslander (thinking comparatively of England, France, and America) shows how the idea “that ordinary people’s possessions could carry symbolic and affective meaning and could be connected through shared style and taste” led to new recognition of the potential “place of material culture in political transformation” in a revolutionary age.47 I emphasize how the encounter with everyday material life as a common ground also had consequences different from these more immediate political events. In a way that transformed historical attitudes as much as political sensibility, Britons extended the sympathetic project of “connecting” through the categories of “style and taste” to times other than their own, and thereby transferred the same mode of connection to the ordinary possessions of the past. during a period when Josiah Wedgwood made a fortune remanufacturing and alluding to classical vases, and when Britons excavated roman ruins amid the fashionable scene at Bath, the “modern antique” became a persistent pun. the pun emphasized the peculiarly promiscuous ways in which fashionable material life crossed the boundaries between past and present, in much more irreverent ways than austere ideas of neoclassical style might suggest.48 In numerous invocations of the modern antique, the rapid contemporary evolutions of dress, hair, and cosmetics elicited the paradoxically novel modernity of the past, whether in the artist thomas rowlandson’s prurient caricature of British Egyptomania (which referenced the celebrity mistress Emma Hamilton’s scandalously revealing, pseudoclassical poses in diaphanous gowns that brought ancient life into erotic proximity with modern undress),49 or in a prominent jest about the cosmetics of an older woman in richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play The School for Scandal (whose copious facial makeup cannot conceal her aged neck, and so makes clear “at once that the head’s modern, though the trunk’s antique”). William Hazlitt criticized the poetry of Walter Scott himself (in contrast to Scott’s novels) on the grounds that Scott’s “Muse is a Modern Antique” who “takes away any appearance of heaviness or harshness from the body of local traditions and obsolete costume.”50 Hazlitt tied Scott not only to the refinement of modern dress, but also to the ephemeral periodicals that

20

Introduction

conveyed dress styles alongside poetic verse: “We see grim knights and iron armour,” he complains, “but then they are woven in silk with a careless, delicate hand,” all executed “much upon a par with the more ephemeral effusions of the press.”51 Here Hazlitt hesitates before a particular mode of history that Scott emblematized, one that brought the past too close to the material and print-cultural fashions of the present. Hazlitt’s is a fundamentally rough past incommensurable with the soft ethos of “style and taste,” in need of “gusto.” Scott himself, though, celebrated precisely this contiguity of past and present fashion when he observed the “modern antiques” and “antiquated moderns” of his own novels in a self-deprecating, fashion-inflected account of a fictional meeting to form a “Joint-Stock company, united for the purpose of writing and publishing the class of works called the Waverley novels”—the age’s great commercial venture in historical representation.52 At the core of the Scottish Enlightenment, Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments offers a final, extended example of the historical extension of modern style and taste. Here Smith grounds his assertion about the arbitrary nature of all taste upon more direct encounters with present-day cycles of fashionable dress. Architecture, music, and poetry reflect “the fashion of their make” and “give the vogue to their particular stile” in just the way clothes do. If many fail to recognize how the “dominion of custom and fashion” fully extends to the more enduring arts, that is because “few men have an opportunity of seeing in their own times the fashion in any of these arts change very considerably.” Yet because dress is not so durable (“a well fancied coat is done in a twelve month”), “every man in his own time sees the fashion in this respect change many different ways.”53 the logic justifies greater sympathy for the cultural production of the past, albeit at the price of the diminution of ideals of artistic transcendence. Strikingly, Smith paints the implications of the problem in explicitly historicizing terms: “Few men have so much experience and acquaintance with the different modes which have obtained in remote ages and nations, as to be thoroughly reconciled to them, or to judge with impartiality between them, and what takes place in their own age and country.”54 In part this seems an implicit recommendation of a project (like Scott’s own) to promote greater acquaintance with the “different modes” of “remote ages.” But more explicitly, Smith calls for his contemporaries to allow their close encounters with fashionable dress to bring home larger lessons about the particularity of all culture. dress seemed to Smith to disclose more general truths, but the “truths” he propounded also reflected the peculiar lessons of modern dress. However much

Introduction

21

dress may have been allied, in Smith’s understanding, to a wider range of material practices and cultural productions, it was only the exceptionally rapid succession of dress styles in commercial society that made fashion arrestingly available to perceptual experience. For Smith, the commercial state of fashion furnished regular, empirical verifications of the mutability and contingency of taste. In his words, “that fashion appearing ridiculous to-day which was admired five years ago, we are experimentally convinced that it owed its vogue chiefly or entirely to custom and fashion.”55 Yet in a way that must always humble an observer, this recognition only occurs in retrospect: what is in fashion always will appear ridiculous but never does to those under its sway. In epitomizing what Smith calls “disturb[ance]” to the “habitual arrangement of our ideas,” dress uniquely mediated between everyday experience and the distant fate of culture as it became the matter of history.56 In a prefiguration of Scott, such attention to minute cycles of dress unfolded in dialectical relation to Smith’s more sweeping articulations of stadial history and the wealth of nations.57

A Sense of the Present When Georg Lukács influentially addressed the special relationship between modern historical self-consciousness and romantic historical fiction in the twentieth century, he convincingly resurrected Scott’s historical novels as proto-Marxian progenitors of social realism. In doing so, Lukács identified an unprecedented “mass experience” of contemporaneity during Scott’s revolutionary age, to which the Waverley novels gave form. In an epoch caught up in the eventful sweep of napoleonic total war (with its wholesale mobilization of civilian life and its direct address of the population at large via propaganda), the sense of momentous things suddenly happening all at once, and happening across many nations, “strengthen[ed] the feeling first that there is such a thing as history, that it is an uninterrupted process of changes and finally that it has a direct effect upon the life of every individual.”58 For Lukács, this perception or “feeling” of contemporaneity allowed access to objective historicalmaterial truth. remarkably, Lukács censured the “mere costumery” of the historical fiction that preceded Scott as the peculiar antithesis of this modern historical awareness. the bare material life of the past, arranged only as the “curiosities and oddities” of the past’s respective milieus, was for Lukács a superficial sign or distraction to be distinguished from the “process of changes” that he identified as history.59

22

Introduction

Lukács’s strong distinction between variations of costume and more substantive change allowed him to extricate Scott’s historical realism from the pervasive play of dress that actually happens on the pages of Scott’s novels. But I have already begun to suggest how the eighteenth-century phenomenon of contemporaneity in Britain unfolded altogether differently than Lukács here imagines. rather than a historical-material truth to be discovered, eighteenthcentury contemporaneity was instead a social project to be realized actively by means of material life. the visual print culture of fashionable dress, as an expression of the fundamental structure of commercial society, played a decisive role in reorienting the mere “curiosities and oddities of the milieu” (in Lukács’s dismissive phrasing) so that they could bear for the age the “uninterrupted process of changes” that Lukács sought to capture. ultimately, Lukács’s refusal to confront the systematic place of dress in the novels of his would-be hero Scott reflects a longer story. Ever since the eighteenth century, that is, fashion has been a system and a material practice where contemporaneity is emblematically realized but at the same time embarrassed. Fashion shows too clearly the artifice and intentionality that produce the coherence of “the times,” and the partialness of the “present’s” hold on actuality (as is clear from the conspicuous labor required to follow fashion closely and from the exclusivity of those who perform that labor). At the same time, fashion lays bare the foundational anachronism of historicism itself, which extrapolates a general idea of the historical specificity of culture from the intently felt present of commercial modernity.60 In its broader sense, eighteenth-century fashion was a force of cultural homogeneity, a means for “inculcat[ing]” Britons “into those norms of speech, dress, and manner ‘common’ to the nation as a whole.” Fashion thereby produced the kind of society historicism itself can most adequately describe: one that moved together in time.61 Ironically, Lukács was pointing to an “uninterrupted process of changes” that fashion had modeled for history itself, or to a fantasy of making history (both as a vision of the past and as what will happen in the future) look more like fashion: a productive social coherence achieved through regular successions of change. But in the eighteenth century this remained a project of highly uncertain prospects and politics. Jerome christensen’s account of the period, for instance, describes a “commercialist hegemony” imagined by the eighteenth-century “man of letters” that only arrived in the nineteenth century. Such hegemony depended upon a level of cultural synchronicity not yet possible in the eighteenth century—a yet impracticable if already desirable “substitut[ion]” of “the more reliable cycles of the market, the comings and

Introduction

23

goings of the post” for more dramatic incursions of sociopolitical change. As the proleptic figure of such a social vision, fashion inhered in the serial form of culture that dress announced but imperfectly realized. to be fundamentally ordering, christensen emphasizes, such seriality had to be systematic: “not just an expression of vanity or the indulgence of an irrational appetite for ornament, but a regular succession of alterations and refinements. novelty is crucial, but the new is recognizable only when its appearance . . . is predictable,” that is, when it appears with familiar regularity. this was the case with “a new line from Wedgwood once every six months” (in christensen’s example), but also, I think, with the more capacious and less ideologically overdetermined form of the dress of the year.62 In such a vision, the state of commerce in one sense supersedes history by extending the market cycle in history’s place. Yet on Lukács’s timeline, a selfconscious eighteenth-century drive to substitute a system of fashion (or a structure of seriality) for historical eventfulness would seem to require an impossible prescience—a point I wish to emphasize. We can begin to make sense of the contradiction by understanding how a “feeling of history” (in something like Lukács’s sense) first emerged alongside the system of fashion.63 Fashion provided eighteenth-century Britons with anachronistic access to a series of pasts, via the exported provocations of a modern system that did not yet obtain in those former moments. As a result, a tension between the commercial cycles that bound modern time, and the anarchic history that seemingly lay beyond them, emerged with new force. the period’s dawning vision of commercialism (of an order that might keep the ravages and discord of political strife at bay by means of fashion cycles) turned fashion into an ironic point of origin for a more powerful sense of history, often feared to lurk just behind the highly visible processions of fashion that were suspected of occluding more fundamental changes. While history seemed to some to lie hidden behind the shadow play of fashion, for others history continued to inhere there in open view. Set against the stiff “costume” that Lukács disparaged (and against the ominous “recognizable new” that christensen marks), the social-material contemporaneity that fashion has brought into sight ever since the eighteenth century also calls to mind the very different significance of dress for Lukács’s twentieth-century mentor Georg Simmel. For Simmel, fashion lay at the very heart of a “sense of the present” in the strong sense, as a means to produce the present as an intensified locus of desire and attention: “Fashion possesses the peculiar attraction of limitation, the attraction of a simultaneous beginning and end, the charm

24

Introduction

of newness and simultaneously of transitoriness. Fashion’s question is not that of being, but rather it is simultaneously being and non-being; it always stands on the watershed of the past and the future, and, as a result, conveys to us, at least while it is at its height, a stronger sense of the present than do most other phenomena.”64 As mobilized by a fashion system, dress produces genuine contemporaneity (reflecting a spontaneity that stands in contradiction to market rationality)65 that cannot be dismissed out of hand. At the same time, for Simmel, fashion envisions contemporaneity as the enjoyable prospect of “simultaneous beginning and end,” in a sense that sits at odds with that sense of “process,” or development, to which Lukács points—where things move forward in a way that commercial (re)production does not. As a present whose only possible future is “non-being,” the commercial present of fashion discloses not historical-material processes extending through time (as for Lukács) but something more like the skeptical Humean vision of human identity, where the precise relation of any one moment of consciousness to another (as with the irreducibly discrete “years” of dress) must finally remain in doubt. ultimately, Lukács’s account of romantic-era contemporaneity bears a surprising and unacknowledged trace of Simmel’s appreciation of fashion. For at least in some sense, Lukács seems to have quietly adapted Simmel’s conceptualization of the “strong sense of the present” in fashion as the template for his own account of the new “feeling of history” shaped by the epic historical simultaneity of romantic wartime. I emphasize how this implicit dialogue between Lukács and Simmel (on the origins of a sense of contemporaneity) itself repeats history. Lukács, I am suggesting, found in Scott, and in Scott’s “derivation of the individuality of characters from the historical peculiarity of their age,” precisely what Simmel’s account of fashion at the turn of the twentieth century had primed Lukács to see.66 If Scott enabled historicism, that was because fashion had enabled Scott—and Lukács somehow registered how Scott himself was always redeploying fashion as literary-historical form in the first place. In the end, the persistence of a fashion system long after Scott explains why this eighteenth-century story (of fashionable dress becoming a model for history) could repeat itself—and so in the twentieth century, through Lukács’s intervention, make Scott himself relevant to historical thought once more.

2 At the close of the eighteenth century, in a monthly issue for october 1799, the Lady’s Magazine paused, in much the same way the preface to the Collection of Dresses had done, to observe the privileged access to the inner lives of

Introduction

25

persons and to the historical distinctness of epochs that fashionable dress could provide. With a striking anticipation of Lukács’s own language of historical peculiarity, the Lady’s Magazine notes, “It was the observation of a very great person, that every man may be known by his dress. Every age has had its peculiarities and eccentricities, in the progress to these glaring distinctions which divide the manners, habits, and customs of distant epochs.” But the Lady’s Magazine further observes how “fashions perform their evolutions, and return home like comets at stated times, though none of our able beaux may be able to calculate their return.” In one sense, fashion lies uniquely close to the spirit of the age; and an epoch, like a man, may be known at once by a glimpse of its dress. By suggesting a “progress” toward “glaring distinctions”— that is, a direction—fashion comes close to exhibiting the uniquely syncretic powers Herbert Blumer ascribes to the twentieth-century fashion system: “to sift out of . . . diverse sources of happenings a set of obscure guides which bring it into line with the general or over-all direction of modernity itself. this responsiveness in its more extended form seems to be the chief factor in formation of what we speak of as a ‘spirit of the times’ or a zeitgeist.”67 Yet at the same time, in the discourse of the eighteenth century as now, fashion lies within and without those epochs that “may be known by” it. “Peculiarities” of ages are not reducible to progress, and as a “comet” performing its incalculable evolutions, fashion also follows a temporal course of its own making. this course, made possible by formal cycles, puts fashion productively at odds with the ordinary processes of cause and effect or development that mark the progress of peoples through time. the progress toward distinctions, to the extent that it preoccupies historical representation, necessarily elides or evacuates the most contingent or singular qualities of any given moment by privileging instead what extends across time. Fashion’s comet, by contrast, produces arresting conjunctions, or relatively unmotivated convergences on the neutral ground of style, and thereby opens up or provokes a mode of historical inquiry not so narrowly bound to teleology. As the same essay from the Lady’s Magazine observes with measured fascination, “the long toed shoe which now figures in [the fashionable retail destination of ] Bond-street was regulated by an Act of Parliament so long ago as the reign of Edward IIId.” Here the processions of fashion motivate interest in an archaic past (when such shoes were the target of sumptuary laws) but also transport to the past an uncanny charge of presentness (evident in the rhetorical construction of a past that had the same shoe). Initially this seems a comparatively innocent convergence between archaic politics and modern fashion. But

26

Introduction

the invocation of Parliament leads to larger questions about the politicalhistorical conditions that fashion might always be indicating. With the tricolor cockades of the French revolution clearly in mind, the essay recalls how the “Greek empire [itself ] suffered much from blue and green”: “It is impossible, therefore, for a profound politician to regard the variations of dress as anything but the outward and visible signs of those great changes which are hidden from all eyes but his own.”68 the tone here—of wry self-deprecation that will not quite discount the possibility of its own seriousness—holds out for variations of dress, ancient and modern, the promise that modernity has always longed to find there: the promise of an expressive domain in sympathy with desire for change of other kinds, at a remove from articulate language that is the source of fashion’s unique capacities (if also its limitations) as a sign of history. Already imminent in this description is the future of dress as a vanguard expression of the mental life of the moment: the prophetic capacity through which fashion’s changes do not “follow the changes in society with any temporal exactitude,” but instead “are much more likely to precede them, as the unconscious desire for change appears in the illustrative bodily realm before anyone articulates and reasons the need.”69 In the strongest sense, history itself might even be said to require a priori difference (produced at the level of aesthetic form by that deeper impulse expressing itself within fashion) in order to happen; and in eighteenth-century Britain, commerce supplied such difference in unprecedented plenitude.70 ultimately, the account that I unfold throughout this book pursues an analogous dynamic on a large scale. A protean “sense of history,” finally inextricable from the cycles of material life, found expression through the images and objects of fashionable dress long before the same sense of history took fully articulate literary form through the mediation of the romantic historical novel at the close of the long eighteenth century. the May 1799 dispatch of the Lady’s Magazine also celebrated the resilience of fashion’s cycles after their brief disruption by the more conventional eventfulness of war: “At no time, for these five years past, have we had so gay, or so full a season in the metropolis, as the present. Fashion has not only resumed all its splendor, but it has, from the interval of rest and economy, acquired new taste for the capricious and expensive. Fancy is now racked for novelties of decoration, and dress is daily flying from Greek simplicity into Eastern magnificence.”71 As the nineteenth century dawned, a resilient discourse of dress gave voice to an impulse to live in time in ways other than history-as-such seemed to offer—in the fullness of a present that exceeded what the teleologies of the future would recognize there in retrospect. this

Introduction

27

present embraced its own fullness, in no small way, by a distinctive way of relating to the past. From the eighteenth century onward, Fernand Braudel has argued, “the future belonged to societies which were trifling enough, but also rich and inventive enough, to bother about changing colours, material and style of costume.”72 It needs only to be added that this future’s pasts bore the same marks of trifling invention—that the “periods” of the future’s histories took their shape from fashion’s serial alterations, which were the building blocks and the instigation of the profounder historiographical insights they later elicited. After the eighteenth century, an unprecedentedly influential and conceptually sophisticated historiography was an effect of commercial culture and of the audiences and outlooks that commerce shaped. this new historical sophistication was an effect with its own provisional autonomy that was generative of historical possibility (both for those who embraced and for those who resisted its prospects). Yet finally this is an effect that requires, not that we extricate history from fashionable consumption at every turn, but that we sometimes come to terms with the alternately enabling and limiting implications of these domains’ equivalence. Historical Style is the long story of how and why we have needed fashion to make and sustain our historical modernity, as well as an argument for what we can learn by embracing the commercial form of fashion, in its provisional distance from history, once again.

outline Historical Style consists of two parts. Part I, “the dress of the Year,” dramatizes the new visual order instantiated by print-cultural fashion alongside the new problems of historical representation that it generated. chapter 1, “Modern Fashion and comparative contemporaneity,” surveys the print-cultural archive of dress that I have described to show how Britons grew enamored of fashion’s capacity to date and to memorialize new qualities and scenes of socialhistorical life. I begin from a position of romantic-era retrospect upon the dauntingly imageless history of early eighteenth-century fashion, especially as articulated by Anna Letitia Barbauld’s remarkable but almost unstudied essay on the “comparison of Manners.” As a facet of Barbauld’s influential career, this essay maps a broader convergence between the print-cultural history of dress fashion and the rise of the novel in the age. I then organize my address of the visual print culture of dress at midcentury around two different stories

28

Introduction

of the “year” 1745. In part this date summons the familiarly historical events of the Scottish Jacobite rebellion against English Hanoverian rule that Scott’s Waverley took as its subject. But the year 1745 simultaneously summons the long and remarkable afterlife of Boitard’s Taste A-La-Mode 1745. ultimately, I show how Waverley points to the heretofore unappreciated intersection of these stories and, thus, to a different genealogy of historicism and of Scott’s emblematic historical methods. chapter 2, “Portrait Historicism and the dress of the times” argues for the increasing impact of fashion’s visual-perceptual compulsions upon the fine arts. I first establish how, in increasingly habitual ways, Britons entered into the social life of the past through the dress of old portraits and portrait reproductions. I then retrace the complex, symptomatic response of Sir Joshua reynolds to a newly particularized vision of history, concentered on dress, that competed in essential ways with his own celebrated and idealizing portraiture. As I track the evolving proclamations of reynolds’s serial Discourses on Art (1769–90) as well as the intensifying contradictions of reynolds’s painterly practice, I show how a suddenly powerful alliance between fashion and history made reynolds’s timeless neoclassical aesthetic—and especially his desire to minimize dress—almost impracticable. Both as a theorist and as an artist, reynolds provides a dramatic limit case that exposes the kinds of history which fashion ruled out. Part II, “the Fictions of Serial History,” retraces how modern historical writing learned to summon and to confront the compulsive allure of fashions during the epoch extending from david Hume to Walter Scott. In chapter 3, “Hume, Historical Succession, and the dress of rousseau,” I address Hume’s proleptic enactment of a fully commercialized social order within his writings.73 Hume’s vision of orderly novelty, I argue, proposed a mechanism of social organization but also a consonant method of historiography. I attend especially to Hume’s early, ultimately suppressed essay “of the Study of History” to emphasize how Hume carved out a place within historiography for the illicit, transhistorical enticements of fashionable scandal (more typically on view in the fictional modes of romance and secret history). this context guides my account of the revelatory social episode of Hume’s public fallingout with Jean-Jacques rousseau in Britain, during which Hume exhibited a strange but representative fixation with rousseau’s Armenian dress. through a calculated dissemination of engraved portrait reproductions of rousseau’s notorious costume, I argue, Hume helped remake the French icon of funda-

Introduction

29

mental anticommerciality into something more like a figure of ordinary fashion who could keep commercial history moving. In chapter 4, “Historical novelty and Serial Form,” I address the early history of the modern historical novel, especially the genre’s characteristic confrontations with past circumstances via the condition of modern fashion, during the neglected epoch between Hume and Scott. I foreground a fundamental shift in the relationship between the genre of “the novel” and a wider system of commercial novelty. In essence, the more fundamental experimentation of the 1750s—when novels embodied novelty in an essential way through formal innovation—ultimately gave way to the conventionalized fictional practices of the 1780s when novels learned to embed novelty drawn from elsewhere (in the borrowed attractions of fashionable dress or in the formulaic variation of incident that the advent of subgenre supplied in advance). this literaryhistorical context guides my account of Sophia Lee’s early historical novel The Recess (1783–85), where Lee addresses the wider commercialization of her own moment upon the terrain of an imagined historical Elizabethan past. Lee’s resistance to a commercialized mode of reading comes into focus through her extraordinary anticipation of her novel’s inevitable fate amid serial commerce (including its misappropriation in pocketbook illustrations). Yet especially in a key scene that transforms Kenilworth castle into an anachronistic Elizabethan textile factory, the novel also confronts the impossibility of returning from its own moment to a past different from commercial modernity. I conclude by considering how Lee sets a course for the genre of historical fiction that extends through Maria Edgeworth’s tales of Fashionable Life (1809–12)— the first single-authored series of British novels—to Scott’s own Waverley novels. In chapter 5, “Walter Scott’s Fashion Systems,” I examine the unprecedentedly systematic place of fashion in the serial enterprise of the Waverley novels themselves. From Waverley’s beginnings in the dull rather than exotic “court dress of George the Second’s reign, with its no collar, large sleeves, and low pocket-holes,” to Kenilworth’s commodity-laden showrooms of Elizabethan luxury (that fill cumnor Hall and that appeal to the “ladies of fashion of the present, or of any other period”), to The Heart of Midlothian’s defining attention to the modest daily toilet of Jeanie deans (culminated yet transformed by her receipt of a trunk, at novel’s end, filled by her benefactor with “apparel of the best quality,” from which “article after article was displayed, commented upon, and admired”), fashion pervades Scott’s fiction as content

30

Introduction

and as method. As a structure for the Waverley novels, fashion offers a “neutral ground” upon which Scott’s commercial present can meet the difference of the past—a domain of processes and desires that transcend historical particularity even as individual styles of dress are ever changing. Both an arch procession of mere forms and an anachronistic imposition upon the past, Scott’s fashion-filled history is conspicuous artifice. But finally the very transparency of the artifice by which Scott opens up the past to present consumption helps make “real” that other history within the novels, to which this fashion never entirely belongs. In chapter 6, “William Godwin and the objects of Historical Fiction,” I conclude the book with a revisionary reading of the long career of Godwin, the noted political theorist and not-so-noted historical novelist. I examine his hostile response to Scott’s fiction in the context of Godwin’s own longstanding preoccupation with the nature of the historical reflections occasioned by consumer commerce. Early in his career, Godwin balanced the imaginative force the marketplace lent to thought against the frivolity and distortion it simultaneously threatened. But Scott’s triumph occasioned a more strident opposition to the provocations of fashionable commodities. In Mandeville (1817), Godwin articulated a newly fundamental fatalism about the prospects of extricating historical representation from commercial imperatives—just at the moment when Godwin’s foregoing practice of historical fiction was largely swept aside by Scott’s success. remarkably anticipating twentieth-century cultural critique that lamented the bleak prospects for serious historical thought under the conditions of consumer capitalism, Mandeville proceeds as an angry dramatization of the deeper trauma that Scott’s more marketable fictions will not accommodate. Yet the novel also stages its protagonist’s futile antipathy toward a rival historian, and so acknowledges how Godwin’s repudiation of Scott is his only present recourse. ultimately, I show how Godwin diagnoses, and conspicuously refuses, the serial form of Scott’s historical imagination, even at the cost of his own legibility—but I also suggest how the rigid terms of Godwin’s vision (as a reflection of our own) might redirect us to more capacious possibilities at the intersection of commerce and history that are a different legacy of the long eighteenth century. the coda addresses the contemporary aftermath of the long story I relate in Part II of this book—wherein historical writing (especially in novels) interpolated the attractions of fashionable commodities and, in the process, remade the relationship between fashion and history for readers and consumers. Here I turn to contemporary fashion art that has reclaimed the historicalconceptual provocations of more intrinsically material qualities of clothes, for

Introduction

31

so long subsumed within the writing and images that have predominated as the self-conscious mediums of historical representation. I do so by juxtaposing Scott’s deployment of dress in the Waverley novels to the work of the twentyfirst-century designer Alexander McQueen, whose landmark fashion shows Highland Rape (1995) and Widows of Culloden (2006) precisely revisited, via couture, the 1746 atrocities in the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellion that were the conspicuously absent center of Scott’s Waverley. In part, McQueen’s work reopens questions about the forms and media through which we access history. But more fundamentally, McQueen’s art illuminates how fashion challenges our hegemonic critical-theoretical conviction about the “necessary link between historical consciousness and historical writing on the one hand and the worst disasters that may befall humanity on the other.”74 At a moment when social critique frequently reduces the encounter with history to a procession of traumas, fashion produces “discrepancy” between past and present on a different terrain of experience. now as in the eighteenth century, fashion’s fleeting pasts can direct us to historical possibilities and resources to be found in the more ordinary course of commercial life, in ways that can renew our own modes of history.

Part I 2

The Dress of the Year

ChaPter 1

2

Modern Fashion and Comparative Contemporaneity

For the first time, here, the recent past becomes distant past. —Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

the comprehensive vision of costume in thomas Jefferys’s Collection of the Dresses of Different Nations, Antient and Modern, Particularly Old English Dresses (1757–72) was produced alongside an especially compelling pair of images that reveled in the uniquely self-conscious evolution of contemporary fashion. together, these illustrations of the “habits of english Gentlemen in the Years 1735, 1745, 1755” and the “habits of english Ladies in the Years 1735, 1745, 1755” posit an intensified scrutiny of dress as a primary source of eighteenthcentury Britons’ newly demanding expectations of historical specificity in representations of culture (see Figures 1 and 2). the proximity of these figures in time and space further suggests how these expectations came particularly at the behest of the seemingly more modest or incremental variations of recent styles. Such variations finally made for more fundamentally jarring insights into the nature of historical difference in modern life. as I have noted, the Collection of Dresses was itself returning to L. P. Boitard’s influential designs Taste A-La-Mode, 1745 (1745) and Taste A-La-Mode as in the Year 1735 (1749) (see Figures 3 and 4). at a very early moment, Boitard’s prints had shown eighteenth-century Britons how they differed from themselves over time, and how at any given moment they were profoundly of that moment in time, even as it took a special kind of representation to make this existential point clear. especially in reconceiving the innovative depiction of the year 1745 as a two-part sequence, Boitard conceptualized a dated present

36

The Dress of the Year

that made sense of itself as a visually measurable departure from a recent past. the image of 1735, “being the contrast to the year 1745,” thereby announced the new insufficiency of the present unto itself. henceforth, the increasingly fine lines of the present’s temporal-historical distinctiveness had to be made clear via visual-archival comparison to the past. Despite the disavowal of seriousness that Boitard’s satirical mode might suggest, his depictions of 1735 and 1745 closely anticipated the fine eye of the midcentury periodical fashion plate that would soon reshape the visual epoch. the somewhat unnatural arrangement of the figures in each case (with several subjects facing directly away from the viewer) is designed to reveal the details of the backs of their clothing. this mode of arrangement reflects the dialectical way in which the satirical impulse, even despite itself, inevitably led to heightened knowledge of the purported object of disdain. and of course the satirical impulse was often an alibi or cover for more genuine interest, on the part of the artist as well as viewers of the images.1 Notably, Boitard’s Taste A-LaMode as in the Year 1735 was reimagining in explicitly serial form a source text that was more unambiguously satirical—and undated. Boitard’s The Beau Monde in St. James Park (1735), which depicted several figures who later reappeared in Taste 1735, quoted alexander Pope to rebuke “the ruling passion [that] conquers reason still.” But the revised version conspicuously struck Pope’s moralism and gave itself over to more open possibilities.2 In this chapter I survey eighteenth-century Britons’ proliferating attention to the remainders of fashion cycles in the wake of Boitard, and I outline the ultimate implications of this attention for simultaneously emerging practices of historical representation as most fully realized in novelistic fiction. I begin with a reconsideration of anna Letitia Barbauld’s poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812), a precisely dated, overtly political intervention in her own moment and (for recent scholarship) an emblematic document of romantic-era historical self-consciousness. as I will show, Barbauld’s extensive engagements with the history of fashionable life elsewhere in her writings compellingly complicate and supplement the more noted historical trajectories in the poem’s cyclical vision of progress. Most remarkably, her essay on the “Comparison of Manners in two Centuries” specifically foregrounds the new provocations of a visual record of fashion that she herself dates to the mid-eighteenth century in Britain. I then turn from Barbauld to the visual record of dress that she invokes in the essay; and I emphasize two essential features of this archive: first, a visualcultural ethos of citationality that insistently preserved the precise contours of old fashion illustrations; and second, the rise of the regularly issued fashion

Modern Fashion and Comparative Contemporaneity

37

plate and the iconic genre of the “dress of the year” in women’s pocketbooks. I organize my account of this archive’s privileged relation to the age’s most innovative projects of historical representation around two different stories of the year 1745. My first story of 1745 concerns the unique legacy of Boitard’s Taste A-La-Mode, 1745. the many imitations this image precipitated over the course of the next century partly offered archival homage to a landmark design. But more essentially these images appropriated, directly and indirectly, Boitard’s powerful formal apprehension of a newly fundamental dynamic of culture. My second story of 1745 retraces the more conventionally historical event of the second Jacobite rebellion and its entry into the annals of literary history in Walter Scott’s first historical novel. During the rising now remembered as “the Forty-Five,” Bonnie Prince Charlie (the grandson of the deposed Stuart King James II) returned from exile in France to conquer edinburgh and lead his soldiers on a dramatic march through english territory. By unifying these two stories of 1745, Waverley finally discloses how the pastiche “history” of fashion and the tragic history of war became, in surprising ways, one and the same story, despite Scott’s provisional interest in separating them. Ultimately, the discourse of dress in eighteenth-century Britain unsettles much of our familiar, long twentieth-century thinking about the radical political potentialities of fashion as historical method (in the tradition extending from Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire to Walter Benjamin’s “tiger’s leap”),3 especially by exposing how a Continental intellectual tradition has always sold short the significance of this earlier formation. What Benjamin argued about a later consumer culture in France—that “the inexorable confrontation of the most recent past with the present [in the moment] is something historically new”—was already powerfully true of the print-cultural, commercial vision of dress in eighteenth-century Britain, at an earlier moment of self-conscious historical modernity that can be heuristically encapsulated by the common attention to dress and the year of 1745 in Boitard, Jefferys, and Scott.4 In the largest sense, I recover here what historical materialism has always owed to the materialistic history of the long eighteenth century in Britain.

altered Looks Barbauld’s poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812) begins with an end of history of sorts, a prophetic vision of economic collapse that marks the demise of Britain and the passing of the vanguard of world history to the americas.

38

The Dress of the Year

By addressing some of the contradictory qualities of historical ruin in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven itself, I attend to the way that the poem posits commerciality as contingency—that is, as a state that might come to an end, at least for Britain itself. I do so especially by interjecting into the poem (and by extension, into the maneuvers of romantic historicism that Barbauld here representatively enacts and clarifies) some of the strangeness and contradiction that the domain of fashionable manners embodies elsewhere in Barbauld’s thinking about historiography. as a poem about a year, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven asserts itself as a serious public intervention in the genre of the “state” of Britain. as I suggest, however, the genre of the year also draws the poem close to the distinctive temporality of fashion and to the different vision of history that fashion sustained for Barbauld’s moment. In its gloomy prophecy for the nation, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven elicited a telling controversy that essentially marked the public end of Barbauld’s long and esteemed literary career, one that was especially striking for robustly spanning two literary eras (from the early 1770s until this poem’s publication in 1812) and for originating the first multivolume anthology of the British novel, The British Novelists (1810), a decisive project that continues indirectly to shape our sense of the novel form and its history. Fashion’s relevance to Eighteen Hundred and Eleven comes most compellingly into view in Barbauld’s remarkable essay on the “Comparison of Manners,” which she published anonymously in the first issue of her brother (and frequent collaborator) John aikin’s periodical the Athenaeum in 1807.5 In essence the essay understands the alterations of fashionable manners to proceed apart from the modes of causation proper to history, so-called, and the presence of fashion within the subsequent poem thereby complicates an assessment like emily rohrbach’s, that Barbauld can ironize but not escape the powerful schema of Scottish enlightenment stadialism.6 Likewise, fashion complicates Barbauld’s seeming endorsement of universal chronology as a necessary metric for a relational or comparative world-historicism. this is the version of Barbauld whom James Chandler recognizes, especially in elevating to epitaph an elegant phrase from her essay on “the Uses of history”: “You do not see truly what the Greeks were, except you know that the British Isles were then barbarous.”7 the most influential accounts of Barbauld’s poem rightly underscore the centrality of commerce in her conceptualization of history, but they are less attuned to the special capacity of commercial life, for Barbauld’s age (as often for our own), to lie both within and without history. In the broadest terms,

Modern Fashion and Comparative Contemporaneity

39

commerce often figures as a leading edge of historicity, enacting peculiarly alert and breathless anticipation of events half a world away; but at other times the productions and processes of commerce figure as mere distraction, simulation, or theater that is fundamentally deaf to the deepest historical realities. Eighteen Hundred and Eleven directly inhabits the ambiguous historicity of commerce, especially by highlighting a discrepancy between the poem’s allegorical Genius of commerce (a motor of history who leaves Britain behind in favor of the americas) and a different, equally commercial outlook that is more embodied and more uncertain.8 It is the embodied commercial scene that first discloses the nation’s imminent, general ruin. after noting the abandonment of the once “crowded mart,” or marketplace, and the sudden vanishing of its “cheerful hurry” (in other words, this is a site of commerce that has until now sustained sociability itself ), the poem offers what might seem a predictable rebuke to the merchants seemingly still present here, whose suddenly bleak prospects, in every sense of the word, come home: Sad, on the ground thy princely merchants bend9 their altered looks, and evil days portend, and fold their arms, and watch with anxious breast the tempest blackening in the distant West. In the sequential logic of Barbauld’s poem, these merchant figures bear a special importance in standing in, however adequately, for a more general history; they offer the first and therefore privileged response to the new state of things in the immediate aftermath of a sudden evaporation of “baseless wealth,” which is “dissolved in air away,/ Like mists.”10 there is an explicit ambiguity in these merchants’ “altered looks”: the description points simultaneously to transformed visages, or faces darkened with worry, and to changed perception, that is, a capacity to look or to see differently in the immediate aftermath of this change of circumstances. Moreover, the image in the poem incorporates paradox, or at least frenetic oscillation, as the merchants “bend” their eyes to the ground (with a suggestion of chaining or binding that gaze) yet somehow also watch the skies above and the forming tempest. Perhaps it is best to think of this as a dialectical (as well as physical) movement through which the poem incorporates the distant into the internal and vice versa. Yet these merchants’ altered gazes might also have a mind of their own, as the merchants can only direct their will to “bend”—that is, to

40

The Dress of the Year

deflect—a line of sight somehow imposed on them from without, yet which they resist. Such a thought is especially striking in light of Mary Favret’s sense, in her extensive meditations on weather and war in the poem, that Barbauld’s speculative abstraction of the Genius of commerce finally bespeaks war more than an autonomous commercial order. this Genius looks much more like a compromised, corrective negation of Napoleon—imperiously setting things right—than a fundamental alternative to Napoleon’s tyranny. as a category, such “genius” is therefore peculiarly contaminated by a modern kind of war that has become “an intellectual rather than a physical contest.”11 and in the figure of the Genius, perhaps, cheerful commerce is not itself.12 In their specificity, these visages of Barbauld’s merchants offer a reminder of a long, early modern legacy according to the mercantile classes a privileged global awareness, a news-consciousness at least bordering on the historical self-consciousness of “the times” that romanticist literary critics have understood Barbauld’s poem to enact. I also understand Barbauld’s poem to be parsing or probing the potential distinctions between the domains of commerce and history. If the merchants’ “altered looks” are the first and starkest register of ominous, world-historical change, it is striking how the presumably allencompassing demise of Britain takes the contingent form of economic calamity or financial panic: “ruin, as with an earthquake shock, is here” as “whispered fears” have now “creat[ed] what they dread.”13 It is not immediately clear whether this economic representation of national ruin comes of inhabiting the perspective of the merchant (which might be strange, as the ruin arrives on the scene before the poem registers these merchants’ presence) or whether this episode of ruin just happens to be peculiarly available to commercial perception. In terms of the broader question of historical representation, ruination’s coming home to the consciousness of merchants seems especially noteworthy because the distinct rapidity of ruin’s economic form diverges from the prevailing form of ruin in the poem. the latter form is the one recent accounts of the poem have tended to emphasize: in essence, the temporally extended process of a disused London slowly crumbling, which we might more readily associate with the historical sensibility of antiquarianism (and which issues in the abandoned, future city of London’s “crumbling turret, mined by time” and the reed-choked thames that future North american tourists sympathetically survey).14 all this is a long way of introducing the tensions between a commercially driven perspective and more conventional categories of historical sentiment in the poem—neither of which seems reducible to the objective and

Modern Fashion and Comparative Contemporaneity

41

despotic historical process suggested by the Genius of commerce. What is in question, fundamentally, is the relationship of commercial ways of knowing to the nation and to the course of history as such. What emerges, finally, is a newly sensitized commercial vision provisionally set apart from the universal history of progress.

Comparison of Manners Dwelling upon these altered merchants’ multiplied vantage points offers one alternative to our pursuing the predictable course of Genius and historical progress in the poem with satisfaction. In what follows I pursue this alternative location of commercial vision—and the possibility it suggests of seeing differently via an oppositional mode of commercial alertness—by way of Barbauld’s “Comparison of Manners” essay and the distinctive mode of “comparison” that she articulates there.15 the “Comparison of Manners in two Centuries” examines the state of fashionable manners in London, first during what she calls the “compass of time” from 1709 to 1714 and then in her own day (ca. 1807).16 Notably, Barbauld’s stated project in the essay explicitly sets some of our thinking about her historicism on its head. She begins to observe how “to compare the manners and customs of men in different countries and periods, has always been accounted one of the most useful, as well as one of the most entertaining speculations relative to human life.” Yet in this moment, at least, Barbauld also makes comparative history as such—and especially something like wondrousness about civilized Greeks sharing a day with savage Britons—sound old hat. While her contemporaries typically embrace, she claims, the most “remarkable contrasts, such as are afforded by parallels drawn between the most savage, and the most civilized, states of mankind; and between ages the most remote, and the most recent,” Barbauld credits such approaches with more powers of surprise and diversion—in short, more entertainment value—than of use or wisdom (A, 1, my emphases). Of course, one of the contemporaries we should have in mind is Walter Scott himself, soon to compose Waverley, or so it would seem, on precisely this plan, by following a polite young englishman as he confronts the savage state of the Scottish highlands. In departing from these overblown schemas in her own essay, Barbauld turns instead to the different ground of “the gradual operation of causes in constant action” and the “minuter changes which take place in the same country.” these proceed apart from “public circumstances” and can only be “dis-

42

The Dress of the Year

turbed by some extraordinary alteration” therein—yet nevertheless evolve ceaselessly on their own terms. although even in the context of this essay Barbauld initially dismisses the social importance of fashion, she ultimately changes course by intimating a different kind of significance for the phenomenon, particularly in the way fashion produces a sequence of change proceeding apart from history’s ordinary course of events. Fashionable dress is on the one hand “peculiarly striking on a general and cursory survey of any assemblage of mankind” and on the other hand “of no great moment in an estimate of the times”—for its “rapid changes, and the total absence of every principle in directing its modes except that of novelty, render” it so. as against other domains of manners, dress alters profoundly in a “much shorter space than the revolution of a century.” In their chaotic rapidity, fashion’s changes stand out as signs of the times and yet confound efforts to “estimate the times” in a way that renders fashion’s permutations a special kind of supplement to history— particular and yet absent of every “principle” but the pleasure of change itself (A, 1–2, my emphasis). In a way that ultimately brings Barbauld close to Scott’s later fiction, dress is also the domain through which she stages the equivalence of all moments in the history of manners, and thereby expresses a fundamental commitment to the peculiarity of each moment. She opines, for instance, that “I know not whether a beau or belle of queen anne’s reign, would appear more whimsical in our eyes than one of George the second’s”—and on the basis of that insight suggests how dress may “incidentally lead to some important inferences” (a tantalizing possibility that remains something of a blank in the essay) (A, 2). here the potential whimsicality of the reign of George II diverges from the peculiar sartorial dullness that Scott’s Waverley wryly assigned to the same epoch (“with its no collar, large sleeves, and low pocket-holes”).17 But the proximity of her gesture to Scott’s is nevertheless striking. For Barbauld, the “revolution of a century” from 1709 to her own time made clear how the arts, sciences, and material life had advanced, but also how the effects of that same epoch upon dress and manners were, in her estimation, “more equivocal.” Ultimately, this move to decouple manners and even national character from progress intriguingly extricates everyday life in Britain from history’s determinations; and in this way Barbauld suggests how such separation had become more profoundly possible amidst the reign of novelty in commercial modernity. In unexpected ways, attention to fashion seems closely to resemble the sort of contingent historiography that does not, as Barbauld says elsewhere, “originate in abstruse speculation, but grows naturally out of our situation and

Modern Fashion and Comparative Contemporaneity

43

relative connexions.”18 as Barbauld’s brother aikin complained (in the course of advocating for biography over history “as it has been . . . the custom to compose it”), conventional history offers “a distinct view only of those great events, as they are called, which, from their uniformity and simplicity, instruct us less in the real nature of mankind, than the story of domestic and civil life.” In a fundamental way, “the individuals who are brought forward on [history’s] canvas, and supply it with figures of portraiture, are often less distinguished from each other by characteristic marks, than many who remain unnoticed in the crowd.” Inverting presumptions about the narrow uniformity of private life and ordinary commerce, aikin presents history’s great actors, like its conventionally historical events, as strangely more alike than different, as against a “common life . . . more copious, varied, and distinct.”19 In this sense, the very particularity of time by which we are wont to understand romantic historicism requires something other than war and politics—which in aikin’s sense comprise only an unvaried succession of the same old types and plots. a singularly open-ended facet of social life, fashionable manners thus provided fit answers to a history that, like the Genius of commerce itself, threatened to be mere repetition. Lest we underrate the social force of fashion for Barbauld, it is worth remembering her earlier (and more ominous), short allegorical fiction “Fashion: a Vision,” in which the whole world, not excluding commerce itself, moves in accord with the whims of a tyrannical Queen Fashion. the narrator of the dream is explicitly taken behind the throne of Queen Fashion to observe “the Genius of Commerce doing her homage.”20 thus it might be said that the war-driven Genius of commerce in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, set out upon its conquests of new worlds, has precisely deviated or rebelled from its proper allegiance to the more fanciful and less purposive course of change that fashion directs, which would allow commerce itself to flourish. the robust preservation of novel “states of society,” as the “Comparison of Manners” makes clear, also depended upon literary-commercial forms of representation that were new in their own right. In composing her “view of the manners of this country, and especially its metropolis, as they appeared about a century ago,” Barbauld’s primary sources are “the tatler, Spectator, and Guardian,” which of all texts afford the “most exact representation of the existing state of society” at the turn of the eighteenth century (A, 1).21 her language of exactness and of a “state of society” (at the moment when the word “society” took on the modern sense of “abstract and . . . impersonal laws which determine social institutions”)22 suggests a residual seriousness of purpose in the essay’s ostensibly light engagement with early eighteenth-century

44

The Dress of the Year

cultural life. and Barbauld’s first object of consideration in this comparison of manners is precisely dress itself. She recounts the Tatler’s trial of the hooppetticoat, reports on the dissemination of French fashions via dolls, notes the former cosmetic practice of patching, provides an inventory of a beau’s dress, and so on, at some length, while she draws comparisons to the present along the way. as reflections of the early eighteenth century, the Tatler and Spectator conveyed multitudinous social detail that would not otherwise be available for recovery, and these periodicals’ emergence opened a gap between the social modernity they helped inaugurate and the less-documented social epochs that preceded them. In a gesture of essential significance to my own argument in this book— one that finally relegates the Tatler and the Spectator to a prehistory—Barbauld further emphasizes her post-1750 epoch’s possession of an even newer inheritance of special importance: a specifically visual prod toward cultural comparison. Barbauld, lamenting the imperfect because merely verbal descriptions of the headdresses in the age of those early eighteenth-century periodicals, explicitly observes, by contrast, how “the remarkable variations with respect to height, breadth, form, and ornament, which may be recollected during the last half-century, and have been faithfully transmitted in the lady’s pocketbooks and almanacks, will render any earlier extravagancies in that part of dress readily conceivable. It is a pity that the low state of the arts in the first period, did not permit a similar visible representation of the several freaks of fashion, which then took their turn” (A, 3). From the mid-eighteenth century, the commercial art of print made visual difference more fully representable and recordable, and so shaped a new kind of archive as well as a new form of visual provocation upon which to build new modes of cultural comparison and recollection. Barbauld, I emphasize, specifically points to what may be “conceiv[ed]” of earlier moments via the remarkable visual variations that accumulated in the form of pocketbook fashion plates after the 1750s. In this way she suggests how a print-cultural sphere of comparative visuality (accessible within the fifty-year span between 1757 and 1807) underwrote the much larger thrust of her own essay and also broadly sustained the growing revaluation of the writings of addison and Steele as signs of their moment (by herself, William hazlitt, and other contemporaries).23 Present-day visual conviction about social difference across time, that is, motivated textual recovery of the specificities of material life even for those earlier moments (like the first decades of the eighteenth century) that were impoverished of modern visuality. the refined attention to

Modern Fashion and Comparative Contemporaneity

45

the distinctive form of the present in modern print commerce made recoverable from the past, too, something more than the repetitious unfolding of history proper. Strikingly, in her self-consciousness about the distinctness of the visual print culture of dress in her own day, Barbauld already broached the more recent insights of the fashion historian Christopher Breward. the heightened seriality of dress from the midcentury, as Breward argues, “represented a more structured ordering of the provision and dissemination of fashion information that must have had a significant effect, alongside shifts in the environment of shopping, on the increasing pace with which visual identities were formed and reformed, discussed and negotiated amongst the comfortable sections of society across the country.”24 Going one step further than Breward, Barbauld’s own attention suggests how these “visual identities,” in the process of being “formed and reformed,” would also have precipitated an archive of recently discarded ones. In this sense, eighteenth-century fashion illustration perpetuated the enduring sensory shock of old looks as much as (in Breward’s emphasis) it attuned fashion’s devotees to the satisfactions of new ones. Near its conclusion, Barbauld’s essay on the “Comparison of Manners” examines a facet of manners of overt importance to Eighteen Hundred and Eleven itself: namely, the superstitions that “form a part of the character of the age” that it is “curious and useful to contemplate.” rather than confine superstition to the past through a confidence in human progress, Barbauld instead observes a present-day convergence with the epoch of addison and Steele. Not only have “Ghost-stories . . . obtained currency within a few years past” (notably in early Gothic literature), but at the same time, “extraordinary dreams still occupy the public conversation; and the late wondrous changes in europe excited a copious flow of the spirit of prophecy among us” (A, 116). the specific resurgence of a “spirit of prophecy” within Barbauld’s present state of society in 1807 of course carries forward into the prophetic form of Eighteen Hundred and Eleven. When we renew our sense of that poem’s prophecy by way of her “Comparison of Manners” essay, such prophetic form remains a sign of its times—but in a way that aligns it more with the sociable commerce of manners than with the transhistorical gravity of historical vision or poetic office. It is a mode that comes into the poem trailing a distinctive origin in Barbauld’s sifting of outmoded styles and manners in the earlier essay.25 One thinks, for instance, of the late nineteenth-century review that defends Barbauld’s “considerable” poetic merit against the poet robert Southey’s unfair criticism in her own day, but that nevertheless pokes fun at several “short-

46

The Dress of the Year

sighted auguries” of Barbauld’s poem: her predictions that the plays of Joanna Baillie would alternately shake the american stage with those of Shakespeare, that the poets James thomson and John Milton would be remembered at Niagara, and that the Genius of commerce would imminently arrive in South as well as North america.26 this afterlife perhaps exposes what Barbauld herself already recognized: the contingent fashionability of the prophetic form she embraced, but also of the cultural evaluations she made at one moment in the unpredictable life of manners. In this sense we have some license to embrace the unruly allure of the poem’s emblematically modern pleasures, London’s summer ices and winter roses—and to embrace their temporal disjointedness against the fated historical telos of the poem (where Britain merely slides into ruin). Likewise, we have license to unleash fashion’s defiant relationship to the logic of universal history upon those of Barbauld’s constructions that would seem merely to pose the violent “contrast” of primitive and modern rather than foster the mode of comparison modeled in her essay on manners. Most emblematically, the poem as I am accounting for it invites us to draw unexpected lessons from the collision of warlike Bonduca (the roman-defying Celtic queen of first-century Britain) and the modern women of 1811, those “light forms” who “beneath transparent muslins float.”27 Where the impulse to dramatize contrastive conflicts between civilization and savagery might divert and distract us from the copious resources, material and imaginative, that peaceful commerce could otherwise supply, the presence of fashionable manners in Barbauld’s constructions of contrast invites us to strive instead to compare, and to see—in the very transparency of such modern muslin—fashion’s capacity to open different kinds of history to view.

Objects of Mutability While “fashion” in its vaguest sense (of a prevailing dress of distinction for elites) extends back time out of mind, the onset of “fashion in the sense of rapid change”—and, I would add, rhythmic or routinized change—“in shape, material and style is something quite different,” and in large measure particular to the eighteenth century in Britain.28 at the dawn of the epoch, in the early project of The Tatler (1709–11) and The Spectator (1711–14) to shape a polite literature, a complex disposition towards fashion, what erin Mackie calls a regulatory “logic of antifashion fashion,” first came into prominence.29

Modern Fashion and Comparative Contemporaneity

47

When addison and Steele sought to rein in fashion through a paradoxically fashionable periodical, “they generate[d] a destabilizing resemblance between the object of criticism—the vain, illusive fetishes of fashion and commodity— and the very forms this criticism takes—speculation, imaginary conceits, dream visions, allegories.”30 In this sense, fashion quickly threatened to co-opt even the most high-minded literary and philosophical discourse. Fully attuned to this implication, Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees scandalously located virtue on a continuum with the arbitrary dictates “of the different tastes of Nations and ages”: “In Morals there is no greater Certainty,” he insisted, than of the superior beauty of square over round buttons.31 Or, as he memorably put it in his allegorical conceit of British commercial society as a “Grumbling hive,” “their Laws and Cloaths were equally / Objects of Mutability.”32 Yet partly because in earlier manifestations of fashion the temporal quality that predominated in later conceptions was less decisive, Britons of the early eighteenth century did not yet embrace the full implications of fashion as history. they were unused to the emergent, disposable commodity whose value was tied primarily to fleeting, speculative affect. Instead they remained accustomed, if not to the elite ethos of patina, then at least to the less exclusive ethos of durability. By the end of the period, in contrast, William Cobbett lamented a recent transformation of middle-class households (formerly filled with “Oak clothes-chests, oak bed-steads, oak chests of drawers, and oak tables,” that is, “things [that] were many hundreds of years old”) into showcases of frail and fashionable commodities.33 a complementary transformation grows evident within probate inventories over the course of the eighteenth century. Where clothes were once “listed and valued” in wills, as the century progressed these clothes were increasingly “given away,” as their worth grew relatively inconsiderable.34 Clothes and furnishings possessed of substantial material value independent of the sway of fashion made for poor registers of “the times.” But as clothes and other material possessions became more disposable, they could also be (and speak) more assuredly of the past. Durable material goods were not replaced often enough to evoke fleeting historical moments (rather, these objects accrued history or wore away), but early fashion also failed fully to signify as historical because it did not unfold all in a moment. In the early part of the century, new looks sometimes took decades to permeate Britain, and thus to addison, for instance, a single date might paradoxically evoke many moments in the sequence of fashionable styles. Yet “whereas addison could write in 1711 that ‘the rural beaus are not yet out of the fashion that took place at the time of the revolution,’ and that in

48

The Dress of the Year

the West Country ‘the fashions of Charles II’s reign were still worn,’ by the end of the eighteenth century the [fashion] time-lag between London and the provinces was being measured in weeks and months rather than in decades.”35 On the historical scale of the year, then, the delay in dissemination became negligible. and especially through the visual mediations of fashion plates that routinely appeared from the mid-eighteenth century, fashionable dress increasingly offered to Britons the dependable synchronicity or “simultaneity” that was necessary for imagining a nation moving together in history.36 remarkably, at least in some ways the synchrony of fashion was more complete at the close of the eighteenth century than it was for most of the twentieth. In a later industrial moment of trend forecasters and mass production, garments were typically “designed months before . . . reaching the shop window”; but dresses of the late eighteenth century were likely to be made on demand from styles (perhaps those depicted in fashion plates) that could potentially be “engraved . . . , copied . . . and worn by the customer before the end of the month.”37 In a different way, fashionable commodities also came to bear time because of an eighteenth-century transformation in the way they were sold. With the emergence of modern retail patterns in the period, shops took the place of traditional markets and fairs that had formerly driven the temporality of commerce. Until the end of the seventeenth century, in terms of the availability of goods, “Periodicity still dominated the retail trade.” that is, even those tradesmen who “kept ‘open shop,’ a continuous market, . . . appear little different than the stallholders in the weekly market or fair. the fair determined the timing of their [often annual] journey to London and elsewhere for stock.” But by the close of the eighteenth century, retail shops by and large obtained goods “when and as . . . needed”—and so violated market time by making those goods constantly rather than only periodically available.38 Over the course of the eighteenth century, the concept of the “market” itself came to signify not a specific place or a time but “a boundless and timeless phenomenon.” and as the market was envisioned as a “process” rather than a place, the cyclicality of market time formerly associated with particular sites became a property instead of consumer objects.39 When the shop or the market was always available, it was only the goods themselves that changed, in accordance with the increasingly regular cycles of fashion. as the material remains of the first real fashion cycles accumulated and a new commercial synchrony took hold, an older emphasis upon fashion as a collection of all possible forms had to accommodate growing sensitivity to the

Modern Fashion and Comparative Contemporaneity

49

temporal character of fashion’s rhythms.40 When the sardonic commercial apologist Mandeville surveyed the early decades of eighteenth-century fashion in 1724, he in part retained a taxonomic perspective by observing “the vast Variety of Forms” in men’s beards over the course of three centuries. But he also illustrated a proliferating impulse to measure fashions’ durations: “Modes seldom last above ten or twelve Years, and a Man of threescore must have observed five or six revolutions of ‘em at least.”41 even the larger cycle of modes seemed to revolve on a grand scale. Men of Mandeville’s own day shaved closely; and although over the prior three centuries all manner of fashionable beards had intervened, “three hundred Years ago Men were shaved as closely as they are now.”42 Mandeville’s attention to fashion is somewhat precocious.43 Yet even for him, fashion’s cyclical “revolutions” remained congruent with a sense that history also “revolved.” this congruency between fashion and history diminished over the course of the eighteenth century as this older trope of history’s movement gave way to competing conceptualizations of linear time and historical progress, accompanied by the strong sense of simultaneity that universal timelines like Joseph Priestley’s Chart of Biography (1765) began to instantiate. as a result, fashion’s stubbornly cyclical evolutions looked increasingly alien to the altered fabric of a history filled with decisive revolutionary turning points.44 the problem of fashion-in-time reached an early culmination in Britain with the aforementioned Collection of Dresses, where the exceptionalism of modern fashion in part took shape alongside a global assembly of costume— from China, North america, ethiopia, arabia, and so forth—numbering nearly five hundred plates. Scholars have tended to align the text with colonialist protoethnography. For Chi-Ming Yang, for instance, the Collection “points to the developing, fetishizing concern with providing culturally specific representations of foreign fashion.”45 But the subtitle of the work, Particularly Old English Dresses, accurately announced the simultaneous materialization of history within the collection. alongside the historical dress of monarchs, the first two volumes also presented such representative english dress as that of “an english Gentleman about 1700,” an “english Gentleman 1640,” and a “Cromwelliste” republican of 1650. the fourth volume, published subsequently in 1772, expanded the focus upon “old english dresses” with representative images of Picts, Caledonians, ancient Bretons, romans, Saxons, Danes, and Normans, as well as prints of the “habit of an english Woman, in 1626” and a fourfold set of an “english Lady” in spring, summer, autumn, and winter, “showing the english taste of dress at the time they were done, in 1641” (C, 4:21).

50

The Dress of the Year

and while the Collection of Dresses emphasized english national history, it was also generally desirous of dating “foreign fashion,” presenting, for instance, an “arabian Woman of 1581,” an “ethiopian 1581,” a “Morisco Slave 1568,” and “Indian Chief [i.e., Native american] 1749,” and a “Chinese Mandarin in 1700.” Substantiating the centrality of “costumery” to the early impulse to historicize, the preface to the first volume (1757) acknowledged a debt to the new precision of the english stage, where the costume “no longer [entailed] the heterogeneous and absurd Mixtures of foreign and antient Modes, which formerly debased our tragedies, by representing a roman General in a full bottomed Peruke, and the Sovereign of an eastern empire in trunk hose” (C, 1:xiii).46 Moreover, the preface also gestured toward an autonomous history of dress itself by highlighting the “many Changes of female Dress, that may be traced [visually] in this Collection” (C, 1:xi). to “excite [the Curious] to a more critical examination” of these changes, the text begins with a list of chronological milestones: Party-coloured Coats were first worn in england in the time of henry I. Chaplets or Wreaths of artificial Flowers in the time of edward III. hoods and short Coats without Sleeves . . . in the time of henry IV. hats in the time of henry VII. ruffs in the reign of edward VI . . . Wrought Caps or Bonnets were first used here in the time of Queen elizabeth. . . . the Commode or tower [a hairstyle] was introduced in 1687. Shoes of the present fashion were first worn in 1633. Breeches were introduced instead of trunk hose in 1654. and Perukes were first worn after the restoration. (C, 1:xi–xiii) If the Collection of Dresses was in part “intended as a pattern-book for fancy dress in art and in the flesh, being advertised alongside accounts of masquerades and advertisements for the theatrical costumiers who usually supplied masquerade costume as well as stage dress,” it is clear that this was not the sole audience.47 the information Jefferys seeks to supply rarely has to do with the details of construction. the supplemental information he does provide has to do with fabric, color, and pattern, that is, with details of appearance the print does not convey, but also with the cultural situation of these dress objects, that is, with the uses or occasions for which the depicted objects are intended. the dresses are an entry into culture.48 and in those cases where the knowledge of the Collection of Dresses fell short, I note, the fuller “explanation” for which Jefferys hoped might equally be offered by the antiquarian research or the fictional speculation of the future.

Modern Fashion and Comparative Contemporaneity

51

From Jefferys’s mid-century moment, as clothing lost its longstanding status as the signature emanation of rooted custom, dress came to embody instead the contradictions of the commercial nation. On the one hand, that is, the state of fashion manifested the historical exceptionalism of modern european culture. In emphasizing the possibilities of personal expression dress newly fostered (by allowing people to “follow their own Fancy in the Figure and Materials of their Dress” [C, 1:ix]), the Collection of Dresses signaled a broadly transformed consumer marketplace. the supply of fabrics, colors, and adornments, of course, still depended upon the material conditions of the mode of production; but for eighteenth-century consumers the rise of commerce greatly diminished the rough determinations of material considerations. Consumer culture now could value qualities like fabric and color as means of producing arbitrary, marketable difference that was rooted primarily in its own formal-aesthetic system of meaning. Yet as dress came more fully to resemble a grammar, “a form that does not signify anything in itself,”49 the preeminence of fashionable culture posed a problem for a simultaneously emerging nationalism that sought to understand “the times” in which Britain currently found itself in relationship to long historical narratives. For the many Britons who eagerly awaited news of the latest styles, dress embodied the possibility of escape from customary culture into glamorous cosmopolitan promise. and in its tendency to draw upon the past for inspiration, momentary fashion even made possible an ironic, provisional escape from the present (perhaps with something of the structure of “romance”). as fashion, however, the very freedom of costume that seemed poised to deliver Jefferys’s Britons from the traditional historical constraints of custom and geography left them no less subject to more arbitrary forces of the moment. Fashion was choice but also tyranny, more variable but perhaps not less powerful than the determined dress and social life of the past. and when set against rooted history, fashion often threatened to reshape “the times” for its own purposes. responding to this new, modern condition of costume, the Collection of Dresses, however consciously, also posed dateable dress as a problem—most dramatically in the historically fraught print of the “habit of a Gentleman in the highlands of Scotland in 1745,” which memorialized dress made illegal in Scotland in the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden in 1746. It is difficult not to associate this image with an identifiable event—the second Jacobite rebellion ultimately known as a date. In a way that the wholly representative dress of fashionable english ladies and gentlemen in the Collection of Dresses was not, this plate was inevitably the commemoration of a moment when history

52

The Dress of the Year

Figure 6. Taste a-la-Mode, 1745; Taste a-la-Mode, 1790 (1790). Courtesy of the Library of Congress, PC 1-7763.

was made. Where english men and women of 1735, 1745, and 1755 wear the clothes of their commercial “periods” of style (each with the length of one decade), the Scottish gentleman’s highland dress seems irresolvably torn between longstanding cultural-historical representativeness and a localized event. against the backdrop of such a plate, the Collection of Dresses implicitly brings into view a modern english fashion which carries a date and thus summons history, but which also eludes history of a certain kind. the insights of this mid-century episode looked forward to the power of annualized fashion cycles and to the refinement of romantic historical fiction, where this protean awareness reached a kind of formal and methodological fruition. But it is telling that in 1790, at the dawn of the French revolution, the radical publisher William holland disseminated a print directly copying Boitard’s rendering of 1745 fashion alongside a new depiction of “Taste a-laMode, 1790” (Figure 6).50 In part, this late return to Boitard’s influential design accentuated how the flourishing comparative fashions of the late eighteenth and

Modern Fashion and Comparative Contemporaneity

53

early nineteenth centuries continued to look back to a generative mid-century moment and to a founding document of their own procedure. Yet as the product of 1790s radicalism, we might also read Taste a-la-Mode, 1745; Taste a-laMode, 1790 as a retrospective problematization of a “history” accessed through dress—at once a critique of fashion’s reductive accounting of “things as they are” and an assertion of the complicity of style in larger changes.51

an englishman of the Period In his own practice of historical fiction, Scott relied upon—while he also discounted—the distinctness of modern fashion from what preceded it. In Waverley it is anything but incidental that the Baron of Bradwardine, who is essentially edward Waverley’s introduction to the condition of the highlands, is “dressed . . . more like a Frenchman than an englishman of the period”

54

The Dress of the Year

(W, 41). Scott’s stroke of cultural-historically specific characterization, given without further sartorial elaboration, presumes (and perhaps interpellates) a contemporary audience already familiar with the typical costume on both sides of the Channel six decades earlier. the transformation of fashion over the latter half of the eighteenth century made such a stroke possible, especially through a proliferation of temporally precise visual records that Scott could take for granted as scaffolding for his literary past. at the same time, Scott’s simultaneous attention to French and english styles is perhaps an arch prolepsis of the frequently twinned fashion-press dispatches on both London and Paris fashions in Scott’s own day. It is true that here the author of Waverley also insists upon the limits of his character’s dress: the Baron of Bradwardine is like a man “who had resided some time at Paris, and caught the costume, but not the ease or the manner of its inhabitants” (W, 41). But as I elaborate Scott’s relationship to fashion, I will take this as a confessional statement. Scott suggests through the Baron how much more readily his literary characters take on the costume rather than the “manner” of historically specific culture, and he ultimately finds in that gap an enabling space for reflection. In differentiating costume from manner, Scott underscored the self-consciousness of the multifaceted engagement with social dress in eighteenth-century Britain. to some extent he inhabited the ambiguity of an eighteenth-century language of dress that bore the traces of an older way of thinking. “habit,” in a usage that fell out of favor at the conclusion of the long eighteenth century, designated dress, but in a sense that linked dress to an accustomed, “habitual” way of doing things. Conversely, the sense of “costume” that prevails today, which emphasizes only clothing, has narrowed a much broader conception of “custom, use, wont, fashion, guise, habit, manner” that the term once signaled, when dress less problematically stood in for culture.52 the holistic conceptions of “costume” that preceded Scott make especially pointed his ostensible diminution of dress into a perilously trafficable, and perhaps inherently trivializing, signifier of culture. reflecting how the language of dress had shaped a scrutinized, problematized, and reflexive engagement with custom over the course of the eighteenth century, Waverley partly acknowledged what was lost in the translation of history into fashion. Indeed the Baron is a “character” worthy of note precisely because “his language and habits were as heterogeneous as his external appearance”—because he is uniquely irreducible to dress (W, 41). this reconception of costume, I think, distinguishes Scott from his immediate Scottish enlightenment forbears. Dugald Stewart, recounting the historian William robert-

Modern Fashion and Comparative Contemporaneity

55

son’s difficult task in the History of Scotland (1759) of generating interest in a remote and brutal past, anticipated Scott’s celebrated awareness in Ivanhoe of the necessity of translating the past “into the manners as well as the language of the age we live in.”53 In recognizing the unique urgency of making Scottish history conform “to the present standard of British taste,” Stewart stressed the importance, in his own words, of “translating (if I may use the expression) . . . antiquated fashions into the corresponding fashions of our own times.” the inevitable “sacrifices” are not “inconsistent with . . . fidelity,” because they serve to “counterac[t] that strong bias of the mind which confounds human nature and human life with the adventitious and ever-changing attire which they borrow from fashion.” While illustrating the slipperiness of the distinction between modern “fashions” and ancient “manners”—a distinction that Scott’s more measured formulations maintain—Stewart’s call for translation simultaneously adopted a highly vexed trope that opposed dress to superfluity. to enliven the past, he argued, the historian must “reject whatever was unmeaning or offensive in the drapery, without effacing the characteristic garb of the times.”54 While Stewart would not “confound” dress with human nature, his tropology cannot avoid confounding “ever-changing attire” with the essence of “the times.” In the Waverley Novels, this rather intractable conflation of dress with the “spirit of the age,” of surface with essence, becomes a central problematic. But if Scott signals the problem by taking some pains to differentiate the Baron’s “language and habits” from his costume (and thus in a narrow sense confirms Georg Lukács’s prominent suspicion of costume), Waverley nevertheless concludes with edward Waverley’s apotheosis in a fashionable portrait, arrayed in his “highland dress.” always inevitably bound to recognize the futility of “the unfortunate civil war,” he is, in the end, merely dressed up—and transformed by the imperatives of “an eminent London artist.” Waverley’s portrait, which is “generally admired” together with the weapons hanging alongside it, makes clear how the commodified ways of knowing within commercial culture not only delimit Waverley’s adventurous interlude as it occurs, but also necessarily confine the form of historical representation for which he is the eponym (W, 338). In the kind of historical experience that Scott enacts, costume leaves the lasting impression. Waverley’s portrait also redirects our attention to the author of Waverley’s claim, in the final “Postscript, which should have been a Preface,” that he has “drawn” his subordinate characters not (like his principal characters) from the “narrative of intelligent eye-witnesses,” but “from the general habits of the pe-

56

The Dress of the Year

riod, of which I have witnessed some remnants in my younger days ” (W, 341, my emphasis). In light of Scott’s insistent attention to dress, we should pause over the potentially sartorial quality of these “habits.” Moreover, “remnants” hold a particular meaning in the period amongst “drapers and clothiers” as the scraps that remained from their work—to be resold, as Samuel Johnson observes in the Idler, in eighteenth-century shops.55 Waverley thus drives us again to recognize the opacity of the kind of history that “habit” constructs within modern commercial culture. While Scott proves more than capable of registering this as a dilemma, in the end he produces a mode of historical representation that seems ever more inescapably bound to “mere costumery.”

Fashions of the Day In the same postscript, the author of Waverley memorably remarks that “the gradual influx of wealth, and extension of commerce, have since united to render the present people of Scotland a class of beings as different from their grandfathers, as the existing english are from those of Queen elizabeth’s time” (W, 340). the passage draws upon an unprecedented cultural fascination with uneven development, or what Chandler calls “comparative contemporaneities.”56 In Scott’s representative calculus of historical progress or change, dated specificity turns “anachronism” into “a measurable form of dislocation.” the cultural movement we now know as British romanticism, Chandler argues, was in large measure “constituted as a practice of specifying the dated state of historical cultures in and as literary texts,” as reflected in representative poems like Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven and Percy Shelley’s “england in 1819” but also in Waverley itself.57 Such early nineteenth-century instances of “a national operation of selfdating . . . that is meant to count as a national self-making” take place within a public sphere that is “deeply and habitually structured by the annualized representation of society, politics, and culture.” Chandler traces a genealogy of this romantic habit of representation within a “new annualized journalism” that began to take shape in early eighteenth-century publications like The Political State of Great Britain (from 1711) and the Historical Register (from 1716). at the heart of this account lies a midcentury evolution of this older annual genre of the “state,” when dates themselves became titles that autonomized years. Over the course of the eighteenth century, “the notion of a spirit

Modern Fashion and Comparative Contemporaneity

57

of an age and that of a ‘state of a nation’ converged on the annual scale in the regularized time of the periodical press,” as in one especially noteworthy serial institution, the Spirit of the Public Journals for 1798 (followed by issues for 1799, and so on), within which years took on the character of an “age” through the subtext of the watchword expression the “spirit of the age.” In short “the history of periodical forms” shaped “the periodization of history,” and the “politics of literary culture” in the early nineteenth century oriented itself around a new mode of “writing the year as an epoch.”58 But intriguingly, Chandler also hints at the unacknowledged privilege of fashion within the historical discourse he describes. a reader of the London Morning Chronicle on 1 January 1819, he recognizes, would have encountered “reports directly on the ‘state of england’ only in its social column, ‘the Mirror of Fashion’” (which, as I will explain, was a title of some importance for Scott himself).59 Chandler also briefly acknowledges George Cruikshank’s Monstrosities, a fascinating annualized parody of fashion, roughly contemporaneous with the Waverley Novels, which offered a telling send-up of a “material” history of dates that was partly spurred by Scott’s enormous popularity. Cruikshank’s intently dated Monstrosities (produced between 1816 and 1826) featured exaggerated renditions of the fashions of the moment promenading about town. the Monstrosities of 1822, for instance, contrasted the distorted proportions of balloon-pantsed dandies and commensurately grotesque fashionable women to the classical physique of achilles (in richard Westmacott’s newly unveiled sculpture in honor of the Duke of Wellington). Chandler is particularly interested in the way Cruikshank’s images, as a series, operate through comparative dating; the point of producing a drawing each year is to compare one to another. through fashion, however, Cruikshank also conceptualizes the oddity of annualization itself—and not only because he seems to have had some difficulty living up to the demands of an annual scheme (an instance of the perennial burden fashion imposed to be recurrently new).60 In the caption of the second illustration of the series, Dandies of 1817 & MONSTROSITIES of 1818, the styles that are in fashion one year (1817), temporarily misrecognized as not monstrous, are inevitably also unfashionable monstrosities in the making for the next year (1818).61 Dandies presently wear what they themselves will soon pronounce the monstrosities of the following year; timing is everything. here, as in Benjamin’s account of the consumer culture of later nineteenth-century France, “the other side of mass culture’s hellish repetition of ‘the new’ is the mortification”—the making monstrous, perhaps—“of matter which is fashionable no longer.”62 But

Figure 7. George Cruikshank, Monstrosities of 1783 and 1823 (1823). heW 4.12.6, harry elkins Widener Collection, harvard Library.

Modern Fashion and Comparative Contemporaneity

59

Cruikshank’s suggestion that the 1817 fashion he caricatured was always already monstrous only slightly exaggerated (or accelerated) the 1773 observation of the Lady’s Magazine (an early promulgator of straightforward fashion information) that “the fashion which reaches amsterdam in 1773 was both born and expired in Paris in 1771.”63 at the same time, read slightly differently, Dandies of 1817 & MONSTROSITIES of 1818 offers a reminder of the artificial process of selecting the fashion “of the year” in the first place. Viewers must wonder, that is, whether the fashions of two years (1817 and 1818) commingle here; and thus they appreciate how the visual reproduction of fashionable synchrony was inherently selective, and excluded a range of clothing that was not so readily dateable, but presumably still on parade in the park. In Monstrosities of 1783 and 1823, a subsequent print of the series, Cruikshank invited still more self-conscious consideration of the comparative gaze shaped by dateable fashions (Figure 7). here, in essence, “the two periods [of 1783 and 1823] stare at each other in amazement.” Notably, Cruikshank works directly from several prints from the earlier “period” of 1783 (or thereabouts), so that his composition does not merely nostalgically reimagine older styles but rather channels more direct archival provocation. the three busty women in the center-left background recapitulate The Bosom Friends (1786), which satirized a 1780s “vogue for projecting busts, inflated derrières, and gigantic hats and muffs.”64 the woman to the far left, with her impossibly large umbrella hat and muff, cites Les Incommodités de Janvier 1786; and the woman to the far right, whose dress we see from behind, closely recopies Crossing a Dirty Street (1782) (Figure 8). and most compellingly, Cruikshank conspicuously borrowed the prominent woman in an enormous hooped petticoat in the right foreground from an earlier engraving, with the suitably annualized title of 1784, or The Fashions of the Day, by thomas rowlandson (after humphry repton, subsequently the noted landscape designer) (Figure 9). On closer inspection it becomes clear how the Monstrosities of 1783 and 1823 appropriated (and creatively rearranged) several additional figures from the same source (Figure 10). Of course, Cruikshank’s past “period” of 1783 is not perfectly annualized, but nevertheless the degree of precision made possible by the dated prints of forty years past is remarkable. In Monstrosities of 1783 and 1823, Cruikshank reprised (with the greater complexity that modern fashion made possible) the essential maneuver of the more overtly historical illustration Ancient Military Dandies of 1450, Modern Military Dandies of 1819, where a suit of armor on display in the “Grand armory at the GOthIC haLL Pall-Mall”

Figure 8. Details from Monstrosities of 1783 and 1823 (left) and visual sources (right). top right and bottom right courtesy of the Library of Congress, PC 1-7107 and PC 1-6133; center right courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Figure 9. thomas rowlandson, 1784, or The Fashions of the Day (1784). Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Figure 10. Details from Monstrosities of 1783 and 1823.

62

The Dress of the Year

comes to life in the fashionable present.65 Like the giant helmet that crashes onto the scene in horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, the ancient armored men dwarf the modern in scale, but their unnaturally slender waists nevertheless closely mirror those of their fashionable heirs. as the title has it, all are “dandies,” a designation that makes explicit how this fashionable culture characteristically reprised the past in familiarized terms. to read Cruikshank’s series of Monstrosities only in light of the “rage for Scott’s historical novels” is to miss the extent to which Cruikshank was implicitly locating Scott’s literary project within an already thoroughly institutionalized annualization of fashion in visual culture.66 there is an obvious pre-Scott antecedent in James Gillray’s ‘Monstrosities’ of 1799. Cruishank’s series essentially recapitulates Gillray’s own print, which contains all the essential elements of the subsequent Monstrosities, down to the fashionable park setting. and Gillray’s etching is only one of a number of dated send-ups of fashion

Figure 11. G. M. Woodward, Fashions of the Day, or Time Past and Time Present (1807). Courtesy of the Library of Congress, PC 3-1807.

Modern Fashion and Comparative Contemporaneity

63

that predated Waverley. Cruikshank’s overtly comparative illustrations acknowledge his allegiance to a longstanding mode of visual parody, such as that of TOO MUCH and TOO LITTLE, or Summer Clothing for 1556 and 1796, engraved by Cruikshank’s own father Isaac.67 here the precisely dated sartorial excess of tudor england contextualizes the overly revealing outfits of the present. While the implicit demand for an intermediate style of dress that is “just right” is something of an ahistorically formal gesture, it is one that clearly seems insufficient without dates, without a juxtaposition of this formal evaluation of fashion to linear history. Likewise, A Section of the Petticoat, or Venus of 42 and 94 updates William hogarth’s take on the “mode” in 1742 with a sampling of the “ton” of 1794.68 each half of the print displays a cross section of a woman’s petticoat representative of the style for each respective year; the unchanging and indelicately exposed female body on each side emphasizes the change in dress. the predominant effect (driven home by the ironically mutable appearance of “Venus”) is a historicizing relativization of standards of beauty. Yet another iteration of the dated, comparative fashion mode, The Fashions of the Day, or Time Past and Time Present (1807, after George Woodward) most explicitly conflates history and fashion—the fashions of the day are time past and time present (Figure 11). the engraving punningly contrasts “the Year 1740—a Ladys full dress of bombazeen” (i.e., bombazine, a twilled fabric associated with mourning) and “the Year 1807—a Ladys undress of Bum-be-seen.” In displaying past and present via the metonymy of fashion, the engraving aims to suggest a broader cultural shift: a new air of informality, and perhaps, a defiance of ritual, which are signaled by modern dress.

Dresses of the Year Crucially, in a way that is reminiscent of Barbauld’s “Comparison of Manners,” The Fashions of the Day also overtly acknowledges its debt to a foregoing serialization of dress styles. the print dedicates itself to “the Fashionable editors of La Belle assemblée—Le Beau Monde &c &c.” By aligning itself with these two english periodicals, as well as the innumerable, more ordinary predecessors suggested by “&c, &c.,” The Fashions of the Day insisted on the way the regularly issued fashion plates of modern periodicals were habituating audiences to this contingent mode of envisioning “the times.” the fashion press invoked by The Fashions of the Day reached a certain level of institutionaliza-

64

The Dress of the Year

tion in the Lady’s Magazine, which began in 1770 and intermittently included fashion plates from the first issue. By the end of the century, the Gallery of Fashion (1794–1803), “the most luxurious true fashion paper then existing,” offered deluxe plates to socially exclusive subscribers.69 Yet for my purposes I wish to emphasize the earlier and more accessible provision of fashion plates in women’s pocketbooks, which were “devised for the guidance of ordinary young gentlewomen and not the extravagant few.” While Paris led the way in high style, “It was in england [in the pocketbooks] that the systematic and comparatively widespread production of fashion prints began.”70 the pocketbooks themselves were in some ways continuous with an older tradition of diaries and almanacs, but their formulaic admixture of visual fashion and dated cultural ephemera of the moment was new, arising in the 1750s in Britain and coming into heightened prominence, alongside the circulating library and the novel, in the 1770s (Figure 12).71 Following a largely standard format and published in various locations around Britain, several dozen distinct women’s pocketbook titles combined an encapsulation of the cultural-historical present (via prevailing songs, poems, and dances of the year that were printed alongside charts of the regnant monarchs of europe) with practical aids for daily living (including both tables for calculating coach rates and ledgers for tracking appointments and expenditures—which pocketbook owners often filled with the details of dress-related purchases). these pocketbooks regularly provided slightly outdated prose dispatches on new fashions to complement their iconic visual frontispieces. typically, these frontispieces featured a title page displaying women in “the dress of the year” alongside a fold-out illustrated plate showing the fashionable headdresses of the same year, along with an illustration of a high-fashion event or a literary scene on the reverse (see Figure 5). the pocketbooks’ suitability for daily use continuously brought their vision of fashion, formal and literal, into the scene of the everyday. Most profoundly, they concisely and recurrently expressed a newly fundamental structure of culture; and as a print-cultural domain, they brought the incessant serial overturnings of commerciality into more contemplative view. at the same time, the pocketbooks’ paradoxically reflective orientation toward the ephemeral ultimately made them a pervasive resource for projects of historical representation in the age. the ethos of the pocketbooks is suggested in part by typical titles like The Ladies’ Museum; The Ladies’ Own Memorandum Book; The Polite Repository; The Ladies Select Pocket Remembrancer; and The

Modern Fashion and Comparative Contemporaneity

65

Figure 12. early pocketbook fashion plate. (See also Figure 5). © Museum of London.

Ladies Mirror. In sum, this was a genre of immanent memorialization and reflection upon the fate of personal and cultural memory in time. and in these pocketbooks, more assuredly than ever before, fashionable dress carried a date. a quick series of plate titles (they can be taken almost at

66

The Dress of the Year

random) makes clear how this datedness was an essential part of the dress’s meaning, or something more than the incidental inclusion of a date of copyright in earlier prints: “a Lady in the Full Dress of 1779,” “Fashionable Dresses in the rooms at Weymouth 1774,” “two Ladies in the Dress of 1782,” “Ladies in the Dress of 1784,” “Dresses of the Year 1787,” “the Most Fashionable Dresses of the Year 1793,” and “Ladies in the Dresses of the Year 1797.” Or in a suitable exemplification, the title page for The Ladies Mirror or Mental Companion for the Year 1785 gives both “Fashionable and elegant head Dresses for the Year” and “Ladies in the Dress of the Year,” while the latter women cavort directly beneath the date in the title (see Figure 5).72 as these pocketbook fashion plates forcefully suggest, consumer culture at this moment was thus especially noteworthy for “the deliberate time-watch that fashion magazines place[d] over the images that depict[ed] relationships between people and material goods.”73 Later “repositories” of fashionable commodities, aspiring to endure, directly embraced their anticipated, future function as visual records of these carefully timed material-cultural “relationships.” La Belle Assemblée, for instance, included a “title page for the [annual] volume [which] was given free with the completing monthly issue, engraved with a decorative frame. the advertisement section [a supplemental, monthly compendium] was planned to be such an attractive feature in its own right that subscribers would value it as a permanent directory ‘coexistent with and forming an integral part of the work, to be bound up and preserved with it.’”74 When bound together in yearly volumes, as edward Copeland suggests of the Lady’s Magazine a generation before, these periodicals achieved “an indefinite shelf-life” as “magazine[s] of reference.”75 Occasionally, the illustrations themselves internalized the same imperative, as in a pocketbook plate entitled A Representation of the Fashionable Head Dresses, for the last Seven Years, which encircled two looks currently in fashion in 1785 with visual reminders of those of the six preceding years.76 alternately, some consumers assembled their own annuals; Barbara Johnson’s extant “album of fashions and fabrics,” an invaluable scrapbook spanning the years 1746–1823, combined clippings of dated fashion plates alongside actual scraps of fabric from the dresses she herself wore at those times. When satirical prints and literary authors looked back and forth between past and present fashions, they relied upon the “permanent director[ies]” of fashion that sustained this pervasive cultural practice and gave it wide resonance.77 Whether as formally bound compendia or (as the Keepsake editor and later historical novelist William harrison ainsworth recalled of his grandmother’s copies)78 as a “series of pocketbooks in a great drawer,” grown “cor-

Modern Fashion and Comparative Contemporaneity

67

pulent” with added clippings, these texts hung around. and so they made possible, wherever they turned up in the future, everyday sites of entry into material, social “history.”79 Moreover, as ainsworth’s language suggests, they did so as a “series,” actual or implied. a brief glance backward from the refined chronometrics of the late eighteenth century (when the “dress of the year” had become a firmly established convention) can make clear both the power of a new print-cultural archive of fashionable dress and the pressure that modern fashion put upon earlier epochs of social life. these earlier moments did not conform to heightened expectations of temporal specificity in styles of clothing at the end of the century; and so they offered few texts that could promise faithful visual attention to the fine lines of dress-in-time during the original moment. I previously addressed rowlandson’s 1784, or The Fashions of the Day as an antecedent for Cruikshank’s Monstrosities of 1783 and 1823. I did not yet point out explicitly that 1784, or The Fashions of the Day itself overtly reprised (in updated dress) a much earlier visual text that should by now be familiar.80 Boitard’s Taste A-La-Mode, 1745, the explicit model for rowlandson’s engraving, remained an acknowledged ancestor of the contrastable fashions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—one that persisted, in mediated form, in the posterity of Cruikshank’s Monstrosities of 1783 and 1823 (compare Figure 3 and Figure 9). In this case humphry repton, who had designed 1784, or the Fashions of the Day for rowlandson to execute, addressed the link between these two images in a textually explicit way. In a 1787 essay, repton’s fictionalized character tabitha hasbeen identifies herself as one of Boitard’s original subjects in 1745, and she then goes on to trace the many changes of fashion that have since intervened. these many changes remain present to tabitha’s fashion-centric imagination even as her readers have presumably forgotten (or never known) them, and so must be reminded or informed by her. Despite her comic nature and her unreliability, this character profoundly looked forward to more elaborate realizations of the narrative desire that increasingly flowed from juxtaposed dates of dress, in the near future of fiction and in the still unfolding history of serial form.81

Comparatively Obsolete In Britain, the publications most responsible for disseminating the dateable visual culture of dress were aimed predominantly at women. It is unsurprising, then, that the structural logic of the fashion plate shaped a subsequent gener-

68

The Dress of the Year

ation of women writers who were overtly indebted to the fashion plate’s characteristic modes of reflection.82 In Harrington (1817), for instance, Maria edgeworth offered a memorably direct invocation of the fashion plates that were sustaining new kinds of relations to past moments. Fleshing out the setting of her novel of the Gordon riots, she alludes directly to an “old pocket book for 1780” and the “plate of fashionable heads” depicted therein, where readers can “obtain a more competent idea” than she “can raise by my most elaborate description.”83 here, in making explicit the provenance of an operation of cultural dating that shaped her historical fiction, edgeworth suggested how Scott’s historical novels, too, relied upon the comparative contemporaneity of fashion—a present understood as the conjunction of the in- and out-ofstyle, as much as of hegemonic and vestigial national cultures. In this sense, following Ina Ferris’s demonstration that Scott’s novels coopted the fictional practices of a preceding generation of women writers by posturing (with the help of male periodical critics) as “the incursion of newly awakened male energy into a fictional field enervated by female practices,” we should see Scott’s appropriations of fashion as a prominent dimension of this co-optation.84 and alongside Ferris’s identification of “the male release into the satisfactions of [the feminized mode of ] fiction that Scott’s historically grounded novels made possible,” we should also consider a complementary masculine release into the broader pleasures of consumerism within the historical terrain of the Waverley Novels. By displacing these pleasures into history, Scott both simulated them and made them safe by binding them to a reassuring discourse of “truth and fact.”85 Such a recognition makes clear how an emblematic text like Frances Burney’s Evelina, with its provincial, novice heroine swept up in the “eventful” rush of fashionable metropolitan time, was an early intimation of Waverley-styled history.86 the print-cultural connection between fashion and fiction in the final decades of the eighteenth century was in many ways intimate. Like a number of his contemporaries, edward Burney, “a favorite cousin”87 of Frances Burney, produced fashion plates for periodicals as well as illustrations for fiction, including Evelina itself. Likewise, thomas Stothard, another prominent fashionplate artist, also produced numerous illustrations of contemporary literature for the Novelist’s Magazine (begun in 1779). In a kind of early product placement, these kinds of periodicals constructed modern literary culture around images of dress that served as a “spy-glass for glimpses of the modes and manners of high life.”88 and just as literature invited visual interpretation (and

Modern Fashion and Comparative Contemporaneity

69

sartorial supplementation), fashion plates themselves always invited written extensions of the styles they depicted. the textual commentary of fashion publications characteristically evaluated the latest look in relationship to the former, or prognosticated about the next one. Likewise, there was a contemporary sense of “special qualities that [a fashion plate] illustration [could not] provide, like color, texture, and ‘air’ ” that had to “be attended to in the accompanying text”—a demand for a materially oriented mode of description that, paradoxically, captured an ethereal quality (an “air”) strikingly congruous with the “spirit” increasingly attributed to the historical age.89 as structured by the serial-installment logic of the date or as contextualized by knowing prose, the dated present that fashionable periodicals produced was thus emphatically momentary, defined by its difference from a proximate past and an imminent future, in a way that powerfully shaped the late eighteenth-century rise of the novel. to recur now to Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven as an explicit methodological point of departure, what it meant to be muslined ladies at a certain, comparatively apprehended moment in history was perhaps most expressly taken up in the fiction of the age by Jane austen’s Northanger Abbey. While overtly recollecting the print-cultural genre of the women’s pocketbook at its late eighteenth-century heyday, the novel also did for the very proximate past of the long 1790s (and “the year 1803”) something much like what Barbauld’s “Comparison of Manners” had done for the age of the Tatler and Spectator. Northanger Abbey begins with a remarkable disclaimer: this little work was finished in the year 1803, and intended for immediate publication. It was disposed of to a bookseller, it was even advertised, and why the business proceeded no farther, the author has never been able to learn. that any bookseller should think it worth while to purchase what he did not think worth while to publish seems extraordinary. But with this, neither the author nor the public have any other concern than as some observation is necessary upon those parts of the work which thirteen years have made comparatively obsolete. the public are entreated to bear in mind that thirteen years have passed since it was finished, many more since it was begun, and that during that period, places, manners, books, and opinions have undergone considerable changes.90

70

The Dress of the Year

With characteristically deft modesty, austen initially seems to apologize for the datedness of the Northanger Abbey, along with Persuasion the last of her novels to appear in print, at the end of 1817. 91 In addition to warning readers about the work’s obsolescence, austen pleads ignorance about the printcommercial world that shaped its conception (i.e., that for which it was “intended”) and that instilled its presence in the print marketplace only through an advertisement that never issued in the novel’s publication. this is a commerce that promised to austen participation in serial immediacy but instead delivered falsehoods, delay, and unreliable distribution. Yet on second glance, the “extraordinary” history of austen’s novel encourages a less apologetic reading. as an “advertisement, by the authoress,” austen’s disclaimer overtly rewrites the abortive advertisement by her publisher. and in undertaking this revision, she enacts a different mode of addressing commerce, one that quickly becomes an injunction for her readers. Pay attention, austen insists, to the intended immediacy of this work. Note carefully that it was finished “in the year 1803,” rather than some years ago, ten years ago, or “sixty years since.” Where Waverley had purportedly reinvented the historical imagination under the dispensation (and generational scale) of “sixty years since,” Northanger Abbey presents itself as a self-conscious chronicle of fashion (the installment for the otherwise unremarkable year of 1803) and pursues more exclusively the peculiar kinds of change that grow visible within a narrower span of time: “thirteen years have passed since it was finished,” and “during that period, places, manners, books, and opinions have undergone considerable changes.”92 (Notably, austen here describes “changes” rather than “change,” in a way that is consistent with continual, serial alterations in the interval.) When austen describes her fictional return to this recent past, her falsely modest tone bears something in common with Scott’s equally self-deprecating claim (in the introductory chapter of Waverley) that “a tale of manners, to be interesting, must either refer to antiquity so great as to have become venerable, or it must bear a vivid reflection of those scenes which are passing daily before our eyes, and are interesting from their novelty” (W, 4). and slowly, as with Scott, the apologetic tone that austen first presented dissolves in air. Not only does her disarming story of her “little work” increasingly appear as a defiant critique of the poor judgment of her bookseller, but more urgently, the advertisement becomes an overt “entreat[y]”: “Bear in mind,” austen insists, “that thirteen years have passed.” Know better, she implores, the wholesale alter-

Modern Fashion and Comparative Contemporaneity

71

ations of culture that are best discernible within precisely dated records of manners, books, and opinions. Feel the uncanny alterity of a recent past you presumed was still your own. and make your own, she advises finally, the essential challenge of a past that is “comparatively obsolete”; this is a past year whose specific obsolescence takes shape from continuously “bearing in mind” other years, past and present. In the process the novel dramatizes two competing modes of obsolescence in order to question their relationship to one another: first, the imminent (but still “considerable”) change that commerce actively elicited and rendered visible; and second, the purportedly more genuine historical change usually presumed to be more dramatic and powerful and fundamentally different in kind. In broad terms, Northanger Abbey makes clear what was entailed by the commercial developments of the long eighteenth century, when literary texts grew inseparable from novelty and when commerce unfolded in unprecedented proximity to the ruins of history.93 Packaged as a time capsule of its original day, the novel itself perhaps takes on the same organizational logic expressed within pocketbooks. In the same conversation where Catherine Morland’s friend Isabella thorpe meticulously recounts having seen “the prettiest hat you can imagine, in a shop window in Milsom-street just now—very like yours, only with coquelicot ribbons instead of green,” Isabella recommends further Gothic reading for Catherine from her Minerva Press pocketbook (N, 36–37). We might speculate that this list of book titles is accompanied by a standard visual depiction of “the dress of the year,” so that the present supply of fiction is strongly implicated in the same structure of annual transformations that governed fashionable dress.94 In her advertisement for the novel, austen has already, conspicuously refused to exempt her work from these processes, except perhaps through her self-awareness about their operation. Northanger Abbey’s extended critique of the questionable historical effects of Gothic popular fiction (the most direct concern of the novel’s plot) also implicates a broader range of historical effects devised for the marketplace, including the earliest Waverley Novels themselves. as the novel unfolds, Catherine’s radcliffean reading conspicuously overtakes the reality of the historical site of Northanger abbey, which she transforms into an embodiment of the Gothic sensationalism in modern novels, against all evidence to the contrary. In the end she claims to learn from henry tilney’s admonition to remember “the country and the age in which we live . . . where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing . . . and where roads and newspapers lay everything

72

The Dress of the Year

open” (N, 172). Yet it is precisely this commercial condition, and the novelty entertainments it has proffered, that caused her to misread the old abbey in the first place. Moreover, henry’s overconfident admonition to “remember . . . the age in which we live” stands in dramatic contrast to the advertisement’s account of irresistible serial obsolescence. While the novel broadly reestablishes a distinction between the fictive unreality of romance and probability, it ultimately suggests deeper irresolution about the distinction between commerce and history. henry himself fails to appreciate that Catherine’s sensationalist imagination—a commercialized literary sensibility finally inseparable from desire for dress before the shopwindow—has little to do with any genuine, prior age. Yet the novel itself does not make the same mistake. If Catherine “think[s] it odd” that history “should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention,” eleanor tilney embraces its commercial afterlife: “If a speech be well drawn up, I read it with pleasure, by whomsoever it may be made—and probably with much greater, if the production of Mr. hume or Mr. robertson, than if the genuine words of Caractacus, agricola, or alfred the Great” (N, 97). eleanor’s “greater” pleasure in historiographical reproductions is a sign of the times. For Catherine Morland, the ephemeral tissue of fashion is the inevitable pursuit of her days and the uninvited content of her dreams. She knows too well that “dress is at all times a frivolous distinction”; but dress nevertheless fills her imagination, so that even her interiority echoes to readers the recoverable, commercial world summoned by the pocketbooks: “she lay awake ten minutes on Wednesday night debating between her spotted and the tamboured muslin.” these minute discriminations, Catherine herself realizes, are fundamentally futile, for eligible young men are “unsusceptible of peculiar tenderness towards the spotted, the sprigged, the mull or the jackonet” (N, 67). But these same men—whom Catherine exempts too quickly or completely from fashion’s sway—perhaps stand in for an imminent future vision (like the one borne by the belated audience of austen’s advertisement), which will not be able to “see” this particular configuration of fine distinctions in quite the way Catherine can do in the original moment. Still, just as the men in the novel are more susceptible than they let on (henry tilney, in fact, claims to understand muslins “particularly well” [N, 28]),95 the advertisement shows increasing cognizance of the ways in which (in Georg Simmel’s formulation) the “charm of difference” that is the essence of fashion is only ever “partially expunged from memory.”96 Catherine’s vision of dress remains essentially of a moment in a way that contemporaneous readers of the

Modern Fashion and Comparative Contemporaneity

73

novel did recognize, however much they themselves failed fully to inhabit the same visual-perceptual moment. In a culture newly and profoundly captivated by memorializations of the ephemeral past, the visual elements of past styles still approached the present on their own formal-aesthetic terms—but henceforth these styles also “cameth from afar,” bearing traces of the dated historical moment(s) from which they derived and inviting the new kind of history that austen and her contemporaries were practicing. and as historical fiction, Northanger Abbey further points to the way, like henry tilney, Scott himself always knew more than he ought about fashion, past and present.97

the Period Is Modern a significant question, in the end, is whether fashions might change when nothing else has. to Scott’s printer James Ballantyne, Waverley did not initially seem to be about “history” but rather a long present for precisely this reason. In the novel’s too proximate but also overly familiar construction of a past, Ballantyne complains to Scott, “the period is modern . . . and in fact scarcely anything appears to have altered, more important than the cut of a coat.”98 In understanding Scott’s would-be past as thoroughly “modern,” Ballantyne offers a more incisive critique than he fully realizes. an emergent schism between fashion and history depended upon a contingent sense that fashion itself might not matter. In his long history of fashionable masculinity, David Kuchta locates the modern origin of this insight at the very beginning of the long eighteenth century (ca. 1666), in the form of a “sartorial revolution” that “declared changes in dress to be unimportant.”99 Insisting on the historical difference of a formerly unabashed projection of aristocratic power through dress, Kuchta’s places front and center a “great masculine renunciation” of dress (material and discursive) that Scott’s fashion-centered mind deconstructed but also depended upon.100 Contingent upon this sartorial revolution, Scott’s historical fiction approached the eventful past via the “extensive neutral ground” of these “unimportant” changes of fashion.101 at the end of Waverley, Scott understood passing time to offer clarity: “Like those who drift down the stream of a deep, smooth river, we are not aware of the progress we have made until we fix our eye on the now-distant point from which we set out” (W, 340). Looking back on his novel in 1829, Scott offered a belated admission of the importance of fashion to the original work. the Magnum Opus edition of Waverley insisted upon recalibrating the

74

The Dress of the Year

novel’s now-outdated invocation of a “present day” white dimity waistcoat, by now a contradiction in terms: “alas! that attire, respectable and gentlemanlike in 1805, or thereabouts, is now as antiquated as the author of Waverley has himself become since that period! the reader of fashion will please to fill up the costume with an embroidered waistcoat of purple velvet or silk and a coat of whatever colour he pleases” (W, 390). Scott’s “alas!” records his jarring sense of the datedness of his own novel and his compulsion to address the unsettling paradox of old fashion. In retrospect, the author of Waverley’s former disavowal of “the lively display of a modern fete, such as we have daily recorded in that part of a newspaper entitled the Mirror of Fashion” seems a revealing account of his own method, which envisions the past through an anachronistic embrace of the same serial disposition (W, 4–5). In Scott’s sophisticated correction of his outdated white dimity waistcoat, we are not only asked to substitute the purple velvet waistcoat but also to imagine the white dimity coat being in fashion, to imagine different fashions as modern, and thus to return to 1745 from different “times.” Scott finally reenvisions Waverley through the figure of an indistinct young person who might recur in ever evolving clothes, one who is never antiquated like the author of Waverley. When Scott hedges his dating of the white dimity waistcoat—to “1805, or thereabouts”—his scruples about indicating the year precisely demarcate Waverley’s own historical limits. When McKendrick notes how a “composite image of the tudors” will suffice for the sixteenth century but that the “accelerating pace of fashion change” in the eighteenth century would have to refer “to the styles of George I, George II, the 1760s, the 1770s, the 1780s and 1790s,” and even “individual years,” he inadvertently suggests a correlation between the acceleration of fashion cycles and the production of historical specificity.102 and when Scott turns to a remoter past for the first time in Ivanhoe, he worries over precisely this arithmetic: “It may be, that I have introduced little which can positively be termed modern; but, on the other hand, it is extremely probable that I may have confused the manners of two or three centuries, and introduced, during the reign of richard the First, circumstances appropriated to a period either considerably earlier, or a good deal later than that era.” In truth, Scott “introduces” the modern into Ivanhoe precisely through his concern that the plodding “manners” of the past aren’t sufficiently dateable. his provisional solution, intriguingly enough, is to fall back upon the “historical” chaos of early nineteenth-century fashions to justify his regrettable oversights. Scott hopes— like “those architects, who in their modern Gothic, do not hesitate to intro-

Modern Fashion and Comparative Contemporaneity

75

duce, without rule or method, ornaments proper to different styles and to different periods of the art”—at least to be in style.103 Ivanhoe makes very explicit the looming problem of imprecision as the setting of Scott’s fiction recedes further in time. But for the historical fiction written in a moment of annualized fashion, even “sixty years since” raises the issue. Waverley is famously misdated—sixty years prior to 1814 is 1754, despite Scott’s initially unaccountable claim in his General Preface of 1829 that the title was “altered to ‘’tis Sixty Years Since,’ [so] that the actual date of publication might be made to correspond with the period in which the scene was laid” (W, 352).104 We can account for this discrepancy in part by paying closer attention to the character of the “periods” that Scott recorded. Waverley is set at a moment pitched between Bernard Mandeville’s modes of decades and the women’s pocketbook fashions of years or months. and Scott’s odd publication history of Waverley bears a strong resemblance to that other text concentered on 1745, the Collection of Dresses. In Jefferys’s contemporary costume plates, the middle ground of recent fashion history, 1745, is pitched between 1735 and 1755, between a deeper past and an almost present that doesn’t quite coincide with the 1757 date of publication. the return to the “no collar, large sleeves, and low pocket-holes” of George II in Waverley is also a return to a middle ground of periodicity, ordered by decades rather than centuries or years, where for the history shaped by fashion there can only be 1735, 1745, 1755. Scott’s misdating concedes as much about the “period in which the scene was laid” in Waverley: “Sixty Years Since,” a specification on the order of the decade (1814 is not quite seventy years since), is the best his materials will allow. In this way the “style” of Scott’s historical fiction remains irresolvably at odds with the absent and punctuated event at the center of his novel, the decisive moment of Culloden in 1746. and yet it is a project of my own book, not only to recognize the inadequacies—and possibilities—of the history that fashion can summon, but also to restore fashion to a place within the history often presumed to lie beyond it. to qualify the distinction of fashion from history that seemed, in part, to emerge over the course of the long eighteenth century, I conclude with a final set of resistant complexities: that Charles edward Stuart’s aberrant fashionability was already a present object of scrutiny in the original moment of 1745;105 that the artist Issac Cruikshank (George Cruikshank’s father) fought on the side of the Jacobites at Culloden and turned to graphic art in consequence of this defeat; and, most remarkably, that Boitard’s Taste A-La-Mode,

76

The Dress of the Year

1745 seems to have registered its presence at the very front of war, in a remarkable convergence with the story I have related in this chapter. Just weeks before he participated in the Battle of Culloden itself, henry Seymour Conway (the future commander-in-chief of the British army) wrote to his cousin horace Walpole from his station in aberdeen. Between reports on the movements of troops and the state of the conflict, Conway paused to note that “I have seen a scurrilous print in which she is introduced” and then identified a real-life acquaintance as one of the figures Boitard had depicted in Taste A-La-Mode, 1745.106 Unsurprisingly, Conway gave no explicit sign of having registered the print’s extraordinary historicity. Yet the presence and the mode of vision of Taste A-La-Mode, 1745 were, in some small way, already constituting the Jacobite conflict itself. to construe history apart from fashion, in this instance, is to do some violence to the historical moment itself, that is, to pursue something like Scott’s elegiac aesthetics (the project of that other, dignified side of Waverley) rather than the different, intractable, and in some ways surprisingly modern phenomenon we might otherwise confront in the event of the Forty-Five—at a moment when, perhaps for the first time, it may no longer have been possible to have history without fashion.

Chapter 2

2

portrait historicism and the Dress of the times

Some look to see the sweet Outlines and Beauteous Forms that Love does wear. Some look to find out patches, paint, Bracelets & Stays & powder’d hair —William Blake, annotations to Joshua reynolds’s Discourses on Art

the annals of art history have long recorded how Benjamin West’s plan for his celebrated painting The Death of General Wolfe (1770), featuring an unconventional admixture of high historical subject and “modern garb,” met with the swift disapproval of Sir Joshua reynolds, the preeminent visual artist of the age in Britain and the president of the new royal academy. Yet at least as West’s adulatory biographer John Galt would have it, upon completing the painting West soon “conquers.”1 When reynolds himself views the painting for the first time, he “foresee[s] that this [historical painting] will not only become one of the most popular, but occasion a revolution in the art.”2 If the story of reynolds’s and West’s disagreement is well rehearsed, in this chapter I argue for a context of this problem of historical representation that extends the stakes of modern “garb” far beyond the narrow confines of academic protocol. attending to this dilemma as a problem of fashion rather than costume, as I will show, begins to make clear why the preeminent debate about historical representation as such, at this moment, resided not only within the domain of the visual but in dress itself. and while the scholarly commentary upon this exchange largely centers upon the extent of West’s originality, here I fore-

78

The Dress of the Year

ground instead the consequences for reynolds’s own art of the “revolution” that he foresaw through West’s painting. the terms of West’s defense of his art (as Galt records them) are telling in their extension of the problem beyond the mere question of the general and the particular: “the same truth that guides the pen of the historian,” West insists, “should govern the pencil of the artist.”3 this broad subordination of the function of art to historical purpose, as I will show, was both the peculiar consequence of modern fashion and the fundamental source of reynolds’s resistance to dress. With dress as with no other possession, the emphatic time-boundedness of the rapidly evolving fashions of the late eighteenth century concentrated attention as never before on processes of stylistic change. and when fashions came to express historical time within portraits, they increasingly collided with a neoclassical aesthetic for which reynolds was the exemplary figure. In this aesthetic, visual grandeur and a refusal to belong to time were the aesthetic correlates of an older vision of history as the domain of exceptional, heroic actions that, like great art works, belonged more to one another than to any concrete moment in time. reynolds’s initially unabashed commitment to those “general and invariable ideas of nature” that could sustain an art for all times came under specific pressure from the increasingly irresistible force of fashion. as reynolds argued, “Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the [artist’s] memory.”4 But the rush of modern fashion had no time for such memory and relentlessly generated irresistible images of its own. On the canvas, the historical referentiality of dress increasingly entangled even formal academic aesthetics with the scurrilous visuality of fashion—all the more so as fashion itself rather startlingly appropriated the dignity of historical meaning. Despite the art-historical prominence of The Death of General Wolfe, it was not the exceptional, innovative genre of full-scale history painting but the rather more modest mode of portraiture that became the central arena for elaborating a new order of historical representation. In this chapter I recover the special generativeness of portraiture in the moment when it became historicist art—normatively bound to document a particular social time, via dress, in a way that competed with history-as-idealism and with individuality alike. as theory, as techne, and as trade, the art of portraiture opened elite aesthetic concerns and traditions to the incursions of domestic and everyday sites of history, and in this way exemplified the broader commercialization of the British arts in this age. I begin with a broad sketch of the cultural reimagination

portrait historicism and the Dress of the times

79

of old portrait dress as an index of former historical moments. I aim in part to defamiliarize the (historical) referentiality of portrait dress, a function we are wont to presuppose, by stressing the age’s suddenly pervasive preoccupation with dress’s historicizing function and Britons’ purposive reclamation of old portrait dress to serve a new vision of history. I then turn to reynolds himself and to the evolving aesthetics of his Discourses on Art (delivered annually and then biannually to the royal academy between 1769 and 1790 in his capacity as president) to attend to reynolds’s contradictory approaches to the problem of fashion in his aesthetic precepts and in his practice. I consider reynolds’s own self-accounting but also the assessments of his contemporaries Samuel Johnson and richard Brinsley Sheridan. Over the course of his career, reynolds defended neoclassical precepts that commercial fashion made impracticable, even for himself; and he slowly and inescapably succumbed to this new order. But in the process reynolds also attained a privileged, historical self-consciousness (however inefficacious or self-destructive) as he confronted a newly totalizing threat of serial obsolescence in a way no one else quite did.5 It is that fleeting privilege, and the more complex perspective upon reynolds and his “historical” moment that it affords, that I recapture here. In the long run, as reynolds failed to locate any secure place to stand outside the successions of style, his ineffectual resistance to historicism within the visual arts gave way to different, oppositional practices in prose fiction, in ways I will describe in part II of this book. Yet in its own right, reynolds’s vexed career dramatically underscores the contingency of our familiar presumption that historical representation is most adequately accomplished within prose as well as the debt that romantic historical fiction owed to foregoing confrontations over visual style.

the perception of Clothing the fashion historian anne hollander observes the strong way in which “artistic convention” has always shaped “the perception of clothing at any epoch,” and thus how for real as much as represented dress, “there is no historically authentic look that is not the look of an artistic style.” Because dress objects bear a distinctly close relation to highly refined aesthetic criteria, she insists, they are unlike other consumer commodities: a “Western garment has more connection with the history of pictures than with any household objects or

80

The Dress of the Year

Figure 13. pocketbook dress of the year for 1772. © Museum of London.

vehicles of its own moment—it is more like a rubens than like a chair.”6 But the eighteenth century marked an important interruption of this old story, and hollander’s instructive linking of the praxis of dress to art-historical inheritances finally only substantiates the wider importance of dramatic eighteenthcentury transformations in the visual print culture of fashion. as irregular fashion images became yearly iterations in the form of the “dress of the year,” a system of fashion disrupted the special connection between dress and an art-historical tradition by constituting a serial succession unto itself (Figure 13). Suddenly, garments seemed to relate as much to an autonomous history of dress forms as to a tradition of costume mediated within artistic portraits. Where elite art might previously have filtered the prevailing fashions through a heritage of conventions, in the latter half of the eighteenth century artists felt increasing pressure to compete with a commer-

portrait historicism and the Dress of the times

81

cialized visual register with its own prerogatives—its own overt drive to reshape “the perception of clothing” from year to year, or season to season, via that now familiar, perceptual push-and-pull of the abjectly out-of-date and the charmingly new.7 and as a finely sliced sequence of very recent dress styles came to the fore, the dress of the more distant past was reconceived in turn. through newly systematic visual compendia of historical costume, eighteenth-century Britons learned at least to desire (in retrospect) to abstract the dress of the past from the old sources which rendered it, and so to isolate the essential, formal lines of historical dress styles apart from the outmoded “artistic conventions” that contained them. this desire was equally unsettling of reynolds’s sense of the prospects for great art. For within the modern commercial culture against which reynolds systematically aligned his own neoclassical practice of portrai-

82

The Dress of the Year

ture, former fashions were achieving new circulation as signs of their time. those fashions that had most assertively belonged to a time were suddenly the same ones that became available once more in the future market of the historicist imagination, as historical costume. as reynolds himself recognized, “It is in dress as in things of greater consequence” (D, 137); and in dress, the novel and paradoxical criterion for the visibility that ensured preservation and resurrection was precisely ephemerality.

portraits of their ancestors accounts of an emergent historicism have more widely acknowledged the newly systematic consideration of the visual evidence preserved by British antiquities, rather than British portraits, at the close of the eighteenth century— but such attention largely postdated, and I argue significantly stemmed from, renewed attention to portraiture. In A Compleat View of the Manners, Customs, Arms, Habits, &c. of the Inhabitants of England (1774–76), the commercially oriented antiquarian Joseph Strutt took considerable pains to justify his methods for authenticating the visual evidence of costume that he gleaned from his illuminated manuscript sources: “though these pictures do not bear the least resemblance of the things they were originally intended to represent, yet they nevertheless are the undoubted characteristics of the customs of that period in which each designer or illuminator lived.”8 Crucially, Strutt understands his sources’ greatest historical value to arise from their inadvertent disclosure of contemporaneously prevailing customs. In part, this is simply the naiveté of a medieval moment without historicism, of designers who innocently dressed past events after their own clothes. But Strutt’s account is also more subtle. Only his sources’ “perfect similitude” in “minutiae” of dress (across many different designers’ hands)—“impossible” without the “sure standard” of the “dress of the times” to guide them—confirms that they disclose the prevailing costume of their own moment rather than merely fanciful dress.9 While Strutt’s logic remains within the realm of empiricism, his privileging of the fine lines of dress minutiae, of designers’ eyes held to something like “delicate shifts” of form, brings him very close to hollander’s account of a visual subconscious of dress, or “the lust of the eye for change, the power of the eye to make instant associations, and its need to demand and to create and combine images” that make escape from the compulsions of fashion impossible.10 and in a sign of the broader relevance of Strutt to my inquiry in this chapter, he also overtly

portrait historicism and the Dress of the times

83

tropes his project in the Compleat View of the Manners of England as portraiture when he concludes, “thus I present to my countrymen, the portrait of their great ancestors.”11 With this gesture, Strutt signaled how a proliferation of portraiture and of portrait reproductions was helping to drive the slow transformation in historical epistemology that his own work embodied, where “artifacts, monuments, and illustrations” grew increasingly attractive at the end of the eighteenth century “as evidence in their own right,” rather than, as they had been in the past, as mere corroborations of written texts.12 In this way Strutt translated within his commercially oriented practice of antiquarianism a much wider impulse of his moment. amidst a fashion-driven shift in the visual culture of clothing, large numbers of Britons reenvisioned the dress displayed in the portraits that more immediately surrounded them. In one noteworthy aside, David hume in his essay “Of the Standard of taste” (1757) posed the rhetorical question, “Must we throw aside the pictures of our ancestors, because of their ruffs and fardingales?” hume insisted that, at least for people “of learning and reflection,” a cultural duty to overlook “innocent peculiarities of manners” like this outmoded dress should go without saying—and, moreover, was already an everyday experience.13 Yet hume’s representatively vexed plea for historical sympathy, even as it claimed to look past these elizabethan fashions, also invoked them to give form to the past’s difference: dress was where that difference emblematically resided. Moreover, the formulaic interruption of hume’s profounder meditations on cultural-historical difference by these “ruffs and fardingales” suggests the very familiarity of such intrusion, in an era faced with a novel superabundance of aging portraits (and even of images per se).14 For if great families had always dwelt amongst images, the mid-eighteenth century was the moment when the commercial portrait trade assured that even “the parlour of the tradesman is not considered as a furnished room, if the Familypictures do not adorn the wainscot.”15 as the potentially documentary function of portrait dress captured the imagination of a wider public, it complicated hume’s insistence that Britons look beyond antiquated dress.16 rather, as the costume historians C. Willett and phillis Cunnington suggest, Britons “cast a loving eye on the quaint designs seen in family portraits.”17 this was the case even as the constant invocation of the difference between “ancient and modern life,” as a designation of this mode of vision, implied a more fundamental divide between the fashionable present from which Britons looked and the obsolete orders of dress that their walls reflected back (Figure 14).

84

The Dress of the Year

Figure 14. Family Canvas, Or Dress Antient And Modern (1786). Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

hume himself considered these portrait ruffs and farthingales in 1757, the same year that saw the publication of the initial two volumes of thomas Jeffery’s Collection of Dresses, which began to make manifest the historical possibilities of english dress through hundreds of prominently dated illustrations of costume (such as “the habit of a Lady of Quality of england in 1640” [Figure 15]), in concert with the striking rehearsal of the recent fashions of 1735, 1745, and 1755 that I discuss in the Introduction. In its stated project to redress the insufficiently historicized aesthetic of dress that was most embarrassingly evident in anachronistic theatrical costume, the Collection of Dresses turned, not to the musty manuscripts notoriously favored by antiquaries, but to the portraiture of previous centuries, “the Designs of holbein, Vandyke, hollar, and others.” Jefferys’s engraving of the dress of 1640, for example, was unmistakably

portrait historicism and the Dress of the times

85

derived from an original portrait of Lucy percy, countess of Carlisle, by anthony Van Dyck (Figure 16).18 In part this is a case in point of Van Dyck’s persistence as a mediated presence on the eighteenth-century scene—a thread I will pursue later in this chapter when I address Van Dyck’s special implications for reynolds himself. But for my present purposes I emphasize how the more specific mediation of the Collection of Dresses translates these visual documents in a way that anonymizes both the artist and the sitter, and then displaces their aesthetic or biographical specificity by the rival specificity of the dated style of “1640.” Comparison of the two images also makes clear how the costume plate reduces the visual complexity of the painting in the service of a more schematic rendition of the old dress fashion. as a complement to images like “the habit of a Lady of Quality of england in 1640,” the introductory essay to the Collection of Dresses was a landmark in its own right and was published and disseminated in a number of periodicals including the Annual Register.19 putting large numbers of illustrations to the same kind of purpose, the essay made “one of the first attempts to define a chronology of the subject” of dress.20 Jefferys’s further claim that the arbitrary changes in dress were “impossible to trace in other Countries” but merely “difficult in our own,” asserted a kind of privilege for the english visual record that his contemporaries also noted and exploited. the Collection’s intensive redeployment of the raw material of portraiture, achieved by abstracting portrait-derived dress into the dated, printed “gallery” of the Collection of Dresses, much resembled the extraillustration (or supplementation of published texts with engravings acquired in other ways) practiced by many private collectors of old prints in the same moment. By the time the culminating third and fourth volumes of the Collection of Dresses were published in 1772, James Granger’s Biographical History of England (1769) was already, comprehensively enshrining this widespread habit of extra-illustration.21 Ostensibly a history, the Biographical History was more essentially an unprecedentedly extensive catalogue of historical engravings (with blank leaves to accommodate the physical insertion of these engravings) to which Granger appended brief, historical biographies.22 the methodical, biographical-historical attention Granger and his readers gave to these portrait “heads” was not a wholly new enterprise, for in one sense the pursuit had a venerable pedigree. Granger’s introduction to the Biographical History stressed his continuity with an established practice of collecting old medals. In the most canonical instantiation of this practice, appended as a verse prologue to the 1726 edition of Joseph addison’s Dialogues

Figure 15. From thomas Jefferys, A Collection of the Dresses of Different Nations, Antient and Modern, vol. 2 (1757). Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

portrait historicism and the Dress of the times

87

Figure 16. anthony Van Dyck, Lucy (Percy), Countess of Carlisle (1637). petworth house, Sussex, UK / Bridgeman Images.

on the Usefulness of Ancient Medals, alexander pope recalls the endurance of rome’s legacy in coins when all else had fallen to ruin. Calling for Britain to follow rome’s numismatic example, he underscores “recording” coins’ capacity to memorialize and recirculate imperial exploits while preserving exemplary physiognomies:

88

The Dress of the Year

Oh when shall Britain, conscious of her claim Stand emulous of Greek and roman fame? In living medals see her wars enroll’d and vanquish’d realms supply recording Gold? .................................... then future ages with delight shall see, how plato’s, Bacon’s, Newton’s looks agree23 this admiration for ancient medals, though, largely failed to take concrete form, whether in the new scheme proposed by addison and pope or in the long projected, “complete table of english coinage” that the Society of antiquaries did not successfully produce until 1763.24 If ancient coins lacked direct modern counterparts, extant medals were nevertheless taken seriously in the early eighteenth century as models—of both “air” and dress—for dignified portraiture itself. as Jonathan richardson advised in his influential Essay on the Theory of Painting (1715), “Instead of making Caricaturaes of peoples Faces (a Foolish Custom of Burlesquing them, too much used) painters should take a Face, and make an antique Medal, or Bas-relief of it, by divesting it of its Modern Disguises, raising the air, and the Features, and giving it the Dress of those times [that is, of antiquity], and suitable to the character intended.”25 the idiom of the medal, however, proved limited within an exploding print culture. thus, in order “to supply the defect of english medals” that still obtained at midcentury and to dignify the imagined national gallery of portraiture, Granger’s Biographical History turned instead to portrait engravings—albeit with greater tolerance for the “modern disguise” of their dress.26 the product of an art whose “greatest excellency” was “the multiplication of copies,” engravings represented an economical substitute for the more precious rarities they replaced.27 and with the marked increase in availability of affordable, present-day portraits over the course of the eighteenth century, the Biographical History took advantage of a visual form with expanding cultural resonance—and so became a particularly important example of how, “by the time Noel Desenfans published the first proposal for a National portrait Gallery in 1799, the encounter with portraiture had long served as a prompt to a many-times-repeated act of imagination by which the British people saw their country,” and saw it as a history.28 Granger’s project seeks to generate a sense of history “which cannot be had, or at least cannot so well and easily be had, any other way”: “It will establish in the mind of the attentive peruser that synchronism which is so essential

portrait historicism and the Dress of the times

89

a part of the British history. . . . and statesmen, heroes, patriots, divines, lawyers, poets, and celebrated artists, will occupy their respective stations, and be remembered in the several periods in which they really flourished.” this periodized awareness, or sense of the interconnectedness of a coherent age, as Granger insists, would “prove of wonderful service in reading histories and memoirs”—a formulation that perhaps subordinated these private or partial narratives to the broader spirit of the times that “synchronism” suggests.29 In the service of this purposive periodization, the Biographical History is much concerned with dates, and enamored with the possibilities enabled by a careful alignment of portrait documents in time. emphasizing the historical evidence often uniquely preserved in prints, Granger wishes to “indulge myself in the expectation, that when it is seen how much light may be thrown on history by the heads of royal, noble, and remarkable personages, greater care will for the future be taken . . . in transmitting, with all possible care and exactness, this kind of prints to posterity; and that due attention will be paid to propriety and correctness, more especially in respect to dates, in all the inscriptions that are placed under and over them.”30 By 1769 the ostensibly physiognomic project of Granger’s Biographical History willingly sustained a subsidiary engagement with details of dress. addison’s Dialogues on Ancient Medals, too, had appreciatively emphasized that in ancient medals, unlike in the narrative historiography handed down from the classical past, “every exploit has its date set to it”—yet had dismissed concern for dress as mere pedantry.31 But with their tendency to bifurcate history between the ancients and the moderns in fundamental ways (as in addison’s Discourse on Ancient and Modern Learning), Britons of the early eighteenth century had less use for Granger’s finer discriminations between “the several periods” in which his noteworthy countrymen “really flourished”—and thus little regard for the synchronisms, the many epochs or “times” in British history, that historicized dress increasingly helped to secure. In an ambiguous acknowledgment of the attractions of costume, Granger initially seeks to deemphasize the subject of dress by foregrounding his departure from a predecessor: “I have not followed the example of Mr. ames in describing the dress of each person; but have generally made some remarks on the dresses of the times at the end of several reigns.”32 Granger’s first, apropos set of “remarks on Dress,” for instance, observes, I take the reign of Mary to be the aera of ruffs and fardingales, as they were first brought hither from Spain. . . . a blooming virgin in this

90

The Dress of the Year

age seems to have been more solicitous to hide her skin, than a rivelled old woman is at present. the very neck was generally concealed; the arms were covered quite to the wrists; the petticoats were worn long, and the head-gear, or coifure [sic], close; to which was sometimes fastened a light veil, which fell down behind, as if intended occasionally even to conceal the face. . . . If I may depend upon the authority of engraved portraits, the beard extended and expanded itself more during the short reigns of edward VI, and Mary, than from the Conquest to that period.”33 this passage begins to make clear how, despite Granger’s reluctance to describe “the dress of each person,” his method ultimately complemented the historical project of representative, dated dress in Jefferys’s Collection of Dresses, precisely by putting dress to higher purposes. For, as with the revolutionary chronology of dress that prefaced Jefferys’s work, the Biographical History of England liberated portrait dress from strong association with individual works of art or persons.34 When Granger describes what “appears from portraits” to have been, he produces instead a generalized account of dress that can attune his readers to sociocultural synchronism, by actively “clothing” each of several successive historical periods.35 Likewise, Granger’s abbreviated “remarks on dress” invite Grangerizers to examine their own collections of portraits in the same manner, to gauge any individual instance of costume against a broader conception of the dress of the times. amidst a project more obviously attuned to history as a collection of individuals, dress directly modelled a transpersonal spirit of the age.36

a piece of history the epistemological transformation of portraiture I have described prompted historical reflection and historiographical innovation, but the same transformation collided with an extant, neoclassical aesthetics in a way that unleashed more unsettling implications for the visual artist. During his famous journey to Scotland, Samuel Johnson overtly staged this emergent conflict between the aesthetic and historical value of portraiture, in what I argue was a tacit dispute with reynolds that had the fresh-minted precepts of reynolds’s fifth discourse (published in the preceding months) very much in mind.37 at the Isle of Skye, on the sixteenth of September, 1773 (as James Boswell recorded in his Journal

portrait historicism and the Dress of the times

91

of a Tour to the Hebrides), Johnson registered his preference for portraits “of which the chief merit [is] resemblance” over “fine” portraits more concerned with refined aesthetic effects. In portraits, Johnson declares, “their chief excellence is being like.” “are you of that opinion,” Boswell inquires, “as to the portraits of ancestors, whom one has never seen?” to which Johnson replies that “it then becomes of more consequence that they should be like; and I would have them in the dress of the times, which makes a piece of history.”38 the next morning at breakfast Johnson aligns painstaking adherence to “likeness” with a broader historical project: “It was but of late that historians bestowed pains and attention in consulting records, to attain to accuracy.” along with the portrait-records that ought to adorn the walls of considerable homes, “there should be a chronicle kept in every considerable family, to preserve the characters and transactions of successive generations.”39 In calling for this “piece of history,” Johnson outlines a multifaceted project that would sustain a vibrant record of private life. and these materials would, in turn, encourage the tentative new movement among historians to “consul[t] records,” rather than just previous historiographical narrative, when practicing their own discipline.40 We should, of course, take note of the nontransparency that characterizes Johnson’s would-be archives from the start, shaped as they would have been by the values and interests of the considerable families who commissioned them. But the more compelling development here, I think, is Johnson’s reimagination of the present by compelling its deliberate participation in the creation—and productive recovery—of the archival materials of the future. In conceptualizing this process, Johnson specifies the essential role “the dress of the times” plays in transforming mere likeness into historical verisimilitude, in “mak[ing] a piece of history.” Johnson’s articulations of this archival imperative for contemporary portraiture—his demand for pieces of history—conspicuously coincided with his observations upon the broader material condition of the highlands, in a way that suggests the wide resonance of the sense of “history” in play here. In this case, the extant horn, claymore, and bow of rorie Moore (the turn of the seventeenth-century Macleod chief ) have inspired Johnson to call for portraits in the “dress of the times” in the first place. as he observes the fitness of these older possessions for the mode of portraiture (in a lament for the portrait of Moore himself that, in Johnson’s wishful thinking, should have been), Johnson simultaneously evokes Scotland’s gleaming, new commodities to sound the altered state of highland manners in the wake of the 1745 rebellion. Now,

92

The Dress of the Year

Johnson notes, “a dinner in the Western islands differs very little from a dinner in england”: “the table is always covered with elegant linen. their plates for common use are often of that kind of manufacture which is called creamcoloured, or queen’s ware. they use silver on all occasions when it is common in england, nor did I ever find a spoon of horn but in one house.”41 For Johnson, it seems, the envisioned portrait of Moore brings the suggestions of his more conventionally historical accessories (i.e., horn, claymore, bow) into proximity with the queen’s ware and linen of modern manufacture, which likewise make a “piece of history” of the present scene. In this sense, the material-historical attention prompted by Johnson’s portrait-making imaginary has quickly generated a remarkable convergence of problems—fashionable commodities, heroic antiques, and a theory of uneven development—that anticipates the distinctive mode of historical representation in Waverley in fairly precise ways. (For Johnson, Scotland’s rapid progress in “catching up” to modernity outpaces any known example: “there was, perhaps, never any change of national manners so quick, so great, and so general, as that which has operated in the highlands by the last conquest”; Waverley’s famous account of the same historical transition argues in lockstep, “there is no european nation which, within the course of half a century or little more, has undergone so complete a change as this kingdom of Scotland.”)42 Johnson further observes, with a hint of the comic mode that concludes Scott’s novel, that the former targets, or shields, of the highlands have now been repurposed “as covers to their butter-milk barrels”: an assertion of transcending the violence of the past, of course, but also of enchanting the domesticated material life of the present with the charge of history proper. as I have indicated, Johnson’s observations on “the dress of the times” are all the more compelling because they offered a seemingly direct response to the aesthetic pronouncements of reynolds. In calling for “like” over “fine” portraits (those more interested in resemblance than in high aesthetic purpose), Johnson bluntly centered the conflict between emergent historicist imperatives and prevailing visual aesthetics that reynolds was himself laboring to surmount or subdue. In his fourth discourse (presented to the royal academy in 1771, three years after its founding in 1768), reynolds had refused to see portraiture as commensurable with a proper sense of history or adequate to the grandeur (and universal exemplarity) requisite to that dignified mode: “an history-painter paints man in general; a portrait-painter, a particular man, and consequently a defective model.” the portraitist’s tendency to err when “he” embarks upon history paint-

portrait historicism and the Dress of the times

93

ing underscores how these are fundamentally opposed genres: “a portraitpainter . . . unless he is upon his guard, is likely to enter too much into the detail. he too frequently makes his historical heads look like portraits; and this was once the custom amongst those old painters, who revived the art before general ideas were practiced or understood” (D, 70). to reynolds, the tendency to combine history and portraiture is here clearly retrograde.43 But in his fifth discourse, delivered in December 1772 (and published in the months before Johnson set out for the Scottish highlands), reynolds extended his speculations upon the problem of particularity to the inchoate, hybrid representational practice of historical portraiture.44 For reynolds the messy prospect of a historical portraiture (finally unavoidable in a British art market dominated by portrait commissions at the expense of support for proper history paintings)45 makes necessary a qualified revision of his philosophical preference for the general, of his call for the true artist to “disregard all local and temporary ornaments, and look only on those general habits which are everywhere and always the same” (D, 49). as a compromise between “exact minute representation of an individual” and the ideal, the “mixed” approach of the historical portrait might ameliorate the lack of prospects for genuine history painting. For reynolds, the form of the historical portrait must reflect a suspension between responsibility to a particular individual and responsibility to the “general air”—of a genre but also of a time. In part the historical portrait demands the same essential, historicist faithfulness of other styles: “Certainly when . . . subjects of antiquity are represented, nothing in the picture ought to remind us of modern times.” thus, in representations “in imitation of the ancients,” “the draperies” must not resemble “cloth or silk of our manufacture.” and conversely, “the simplicity of the antique air and attitude, however much to be admired, is ridiculous when joined to a figure in a modern dress” (D, 88). Besides advocating scrupulous historicist alignment of “air and attitude” with dress (an imperative which always has in mind the particularities of fabrics of modern “manufacture” that must be avoided), reynolds would rein in the unwieldy hybridity of the historical portrait through a kind of proportional particularity. he refuses explicitly to endorse “this mixed style,” but advises those who will inevitably undertake it that “stuffs . . . which make the cloathing” must diverge from general principle precisely to the extent that the head does—no more and no less. thus, a visual economy of biographical individuation is directly proportional to the particulars of dress but inversely propor-

94

The Dress of the Year

tional to higher “historical” truth. and where Johnson aligns portrait dress and history, reynolds understands this kind of alignment as essentially conflicted. Johnson’s imperative to attend to dress is a rejoinder to reynolds’s imagination of an art that dignifies by avoiding the same dress, and so premises an inverse relationship between “historical” significance and cultural particularity. here Johnson was giving voice to a larger redefinition of the historical that was making such a neat division between significance and particularity increasingly untenable, especially, but not exclusively, in visual media. (In unabashedly siding with particularity and against reynolds, Johnson seemed to contradict his earlier observation in the “preface to Shakespeare” [1755] that “nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature.” Yet Johnson’s many collecting projects, most notably the Dictionary of the English Language, filled with fragmentary illustrative quotations, and the Lives of the Poets, for which he was criticized for including too much incidental detail, similarly complicated his relationship to “general nature.”)46 Crucially, Johnson himself wrote at the moment when “contemporary costume forced its way into the exclusive preserve of history painting and challenged the fundamental logic of painting’s highest genre” through West’s aforementioned Death of General Wolfe, exhibited at the academy just two years previously in 1771.47 In concert with an emergent discourse of social history, this alteration of aesthetic norms that formerly set “the historical” apart from ordinary life and from the everyday by means of special costume, now allowed ordinary, present-day life to compose history in unprecedented ways.48 In this sense, contemporary portrait dress not only opened up to “historical” meaning but even altered and enlarged the very concept of history, through a process that mutually imbricated everyday fashions and the historical associations from which fashions were formerly kept apart. Johnson’s interpretation further suggests the instability of such distinctions even in reynolds’s own works, whether in the Discourses themselves or in his painterly practice. In contrast to The Death of General Wolfe and other celebrated, contemporaneous examples of the historical genre—which depicted numerous participants in complex dynamics of heroism and spectatorship— reynolds typically refused to paint the action of more than two or three persons. as he notoriously complained, such compositions “cost him too dear.” reynolds therefore executed his own historical paintings not on a full scale but on one resembling the hybrid “historical portraiture” that the Discourses envisioned. The Death of Dido (1781), perhaps reynolds’s best regarded historical painting, is a case in point: the small number of spectators to the painting’s

portrait historicism and the Dress of the times

95

Figure 17. Samuel reynolds, after Joshua reynolds, Death of Dido (1835). Special Collections research Center, University of Chicago.

climactic narrative event look increasingly unlike the manifold figures that were appearing in the most celebrated modern examples of the genre (Figure 17). In part there was a diva-like delicacy to reynolds’s “costly” genius, as well as a subtle complaint about the unremunerative reality of history painting for British painters in that other sense of “cost.” But the more compelling motivation for his insistence on a reduced scale of history, I think, was reynolds’s deeper suspicion that British history painting had to keep pace with the socially dominant visual idiom of portraiture to be legible as anything other than an artificially rigid, academic mode—to be, in this new day, public. reynolds’s diminution of the actual, “historical” scene put it on the level with contemporary life and with his present-day subjects, and so brought historical action close to modern portrait production. Yet this retreat from complex action also meant that the force of his art had, in strict terms of the visual economy of these images, to inhere all the more in dress—or at least, as in the variety of negation or avoidance that structured The Death of Dido itself, in an indelicate escape into undress.49

96

The Dress of the Year

General habits and Second Nature Samuel Johnson’s assertions on Skye seemingly affirmed that the “mixed style” of historical portraiture indeed “ought to be adopted.” as the course of human actions was increasingly understood to proceed through a wide array of lives— and in intricate relation to material life—portraits held an altered historical significance (and a responsibility to authenticity) that their design and their dress ought to heed. the incorporation of “the dress of the times” gave Johnson little pause, for it was unqualified attention to sartorial likeness that made a piece of (visual) history. In part, reynolds’s countervailing resistance to particularities such as this dress—and to the broader commercialization of the arts that dress heralded and connoted—meant to shore up an ongoing institutionalization of high culture. Such institutionalization was evident in the general cultivation of polite arts during the long eighteenth century (including the production of the idea of “culture” in its elite sense) and also in the more particular event of the founding of the British royal academy of arts. reynolds himself speaks of “great characteristick distinctions,” and insists that “the pleasure we receive from imitation” derives not from accumulating particulars but from “seeing ends accomplished by seemingly inadequate means,” by “the power of a few well-chosen strokes, which . . . produce a complete impression of all that the mind demands in an object” (D, 193).50 In a political sense, as John Barrell indicates, reynolds’s adamant resistance to particularity was continuous with earlier eighteenth-century aesthetics that were summoned to defend civic humanism against the corrosive luxury of commercial culture, so that the aesthetic imagination became a surrogate means to cultivate the otherwise endangered vantage of the virtuously unspecialized gentleman.51 Barrell also offers an influential account of reynolds’s declining commitment to generality over the course of his career. In essence, for Barrell, the Discourses ultimately embraced the particularities of national custom in an edmund-Burke-inflected retreat from the increasingly radical implications of general principles. here, though, I wish to take reynolds less at his word than Barrell does, and in doing so I will proceed by underscoring reynolds’s failure to reconcile himself to such a revisioning of art—precisely because of the ways that fashion imposed upon reynolds in more fundamental ways than did custom as such.52 For if reynolds partly understood particularity as a problem of visual economy, he also made clear how particularity was equally (and increasingly) a temporal problem: fashion is a “capricious changeling” that shapes the “preju-

portrait historicism and the Dress of the times

97

dices” of the “age,” while posing the danger of “temporary” ornaments that the artist must disregard in favor of “general habits” that are “always and everywhere the same” (D, 48–49). Dress itself was an especially intense location of possible anachronism. For instance, “the neglect of separating modern fashions from the habits of nature,” reynolds elaborates, “leads to the ridiculous style which has been practiced by some painters, who have given to Grecian heroes the airs and graces practiced in the court of Lewis the Fourteenth; an absurdity almost as great as it would have been to have dressed them after the fashion of the court” (D, 49). While he thus maligns artists who fail to distinguish the conventional gesture of the moment from “nature,” he also posits a classical past dressed after the court of Louis XIV as far worse. Still, if neglect of the difference between “modern fashions” and nature led to absurdity, it is far from clear that the problem of temporary prejudice could be resolved. One wonders how apparent the anachronism of “airs and graces,” so evident in hindsight, would have been to seventeenth-century French painters themselves. Conventional gestures and the images that instantiate them, as hollander notes, “change through time, but at each moment they are seen to look natural.”53 as reynolds himself understands, “to avoid this error . . . is a task more difficult than at first sight it would appear.” Subjection to the condition of fashion “frequently even give[s] a predilection in favour of the artificial mode; and almost every one is apt to be guided by those local prejudices, who has not chastised his mind, and regulated the instability of his affections by the eternal invariable idea of nature.” Crucially, at this stage in the evolving philosophy of the Discourses, the requirement to “chastise” and “regulate” the mind against the force of the times is the particular condition of the modern artist. Unlike the ancients, he cannot see “the truth of things” until he “remove[s] a veil, with which the fashion of the times has thought proper to cover her” (D, 49). the “historical painter” does not “debase his conceptions with minute attention to the discriminations of Drapery. It is the inferior stile that marks the variety of stuffs. With him, the cloathing is neither woolen, nor linen, nor silk, sattin, or velvet: it is drapery; it is nothing more” (D, 62). Yet there is a material longing in this enumeration of textiles that sits at cross purposes with reynolds’s argument. reynolds vows to “regulate” his unstable “affections” even as his increasingly entangled precepts in the Discourses make clear how genuinely idealized clothing was impracticable amid modern fashionable life, and how regulating the mind was in some ways futile. In his terms, fashion threatened to become a “second nature” indistinguishable from the primary one until exposed by the

98

The Dress of the Year

eyes of the future. although the portrait painter, unlike the painter of history, represents “a particular man, and consequently a defective model” (D, 70), he dignifies a portrait when he “leaves out all the minute breaks and peculiarities in the face, and changes the dress from a temporary fashion to one more permanent, which has annexed to it no ideas of meanness from its being familiar to us.” But of course to be “more permanent” was finally only to be slightly less temporary. and more fundamentally, the very notion of a more enduring kind of fashion resolved upon a temporal moderation that might have seemed conceptually satisfying but that had less and less practical relevance within a commercialized, visual culture that was ruthlessly particularizing the “time” of dress. this new condition explains why reynolds shifts terms as he proceeds, to describe what is really a different compromise: not the halfway point between general and particular for all aspects of the painting but instead a strange temporal mixture of the old and new. the portrait artist “who . . . wishes to dignify his subject, which we will suppose to be a lady, will not paint her in the modern dress, the familiarity of which alone is sufficient to destroy all dignity.”54 Yet this unmodern dress will nevertheless bow to the moment in its some elements of its design. While borrowing “something of the general air of the antique for the sake of dignity,” the dress must also “preserv[e] something of the modern for the sake of likeness” (D, 140). painted dress, in this way, must concede something, in reynolds’s words, to “what we continually see.” the tone of concession arises here despite the fact that reynolds’s expansive principle of the grand style “extends itself to every part of the art; . . . to Invention, to Composition, to expression, and even to Clothing and Drapery” (D, 57). Dignified style, that is, might only require methodical treatment of accessory features, rather than special hostility for modern dress. reynolds at one point more moderately insists that, in conceiving the “ideal picture” of the historical painting, the artist’s “mind does not enter into the minute peculiarities of the dress, furniture, or scene of action,” and he “contrives those little necessary concomitant circumstances in such a manner, that they shall strike the spectator no more than they did himself” (D, 58). But in this formulation reynolds’s vision of history (as transcending dress, furniture, scene) was increasingly diverging from the emergent demands of the new, middle-class audiences for historiography— who insisted upon ancestors “with all their peculiarities” who would “show us over their houses . . . seat us at their tables . . . rummage their old fashioned wardrobes . . . explain the uses of their ponderous furniture.”55 Where the historian thomas Macaulay would recommend such intimacy with the material past as a remedy for the “distanciating rationality of the historian-essayist” of the early

portrait historicism and the Dress of the times

99

nineteenth century, reynolds instead makes clear how late eighteenth-century portraiture faced the opposite problem, of generating ennobling distance over the “extraordinary” attractions of the “minute peculiarities” of stuffs.56 as reynolds grudgingly recognized the importance of the “circumstan[tial]” in conveying an “air of truth” and interest to such an audience, he shifted his attention to the deft management, rather than excision of (or not “entering into”) the particular: “Such circumstances therefore cannot be wholly rejected; but if there be any thing in the art which requires peculiar nicety of discernment, it is the disposition of these minute circumstantial parts” (D, 58). While the devil is in the details, and human figures “must be clothed,” the painter should mask the process of “discernment” that has produced the all important “disposition of . . . parts” (D, 59)—that is, to manage detail so that it worked its effects inconspicuously, and always to do so with an eye toward mitigating the effects of the passage of time. But in a world of prominent fashion cycles, the task of managing details of dress became more demanding and more compromising. reynolds’s resistance to fashion at least initially derived from his faith in “general and invariable ideas of nature” (D, 15–16). Such ideas were necessary, he notes with derision, to combat “those instances, in which vanity or caprice have contrived to distort and disfigure the human form”—and especially the litany of “ill-understood methods, which have been practiced to disguise nature, among the dancing-masters, hair-dressers, and tailors, in their various schools of deformity” (D, 48). as they continued to unfold, the Discourses expressed increasingly substantive worry about the specific threat modern dress posed to the professional painter. reynolds went so far as to bestow reluctant praise upon the fashion designer, who traded upon talents fully commensurable with those of the great artist: “he who invents [dress styles] with the most success, or dresses in the best taste, would probably, from the same sagacity employed to greater purposes, have discovered equal skill, or have formed the same correct taste, in the highest labours of art” (D, 136). here the commercial force of fashion not only redirects the pool of talent but even presses that talent into opposition to art’s “highest labours.” remarkably, reynolds was not speaking in a vacuum but responding to the rising self-confidence of fashion’s discourse about itself as a liberal pursuit. Designers even entered into discursive rivalry with exclusionary voices. In France, Diderot’s coiffeur Lefevre proclaimed, “Of all the arts, that of hairdressing ought to be one of the most highly valued; painting and sculpture, which allow men to live on for centuries after their death, cannot challenge its right to the status of fellow art.”57 Fashion’s aspirations to liberal rather than mechanical value coincided with actual proposals to found academies of the mode (including the leg-

Figure 18. D. ritchie, New Head Dresses for 1772. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

portrait historicism and the Dress of the times

101

endary French hairdresser Legros de rumigny’s académie des Coiffures)58 and with early treatises on the same art. In immediate proximity to reynolds’s considerations of the historical portrait, the London hairdresser David ritchie published his Treatise on the Hair (1770) and Lady’s Head Dresser; or, beauty’s assistant, for 1772. Such works appeared in accompaniment to the wider range of images that were promulgating the latest looks and necessitating reynolds’s reluctant accommodations of fashionable dress and hairstyles (Figure 18; compare with Figure 13). In more modest tones, tailors, too, stressed their worthiness as accessories to great painters. In contrast to the often devalued trade of engraving, painters “cannot deny that they need [the tailor] to complete their own works” (rather than, as was supposedly the case with engravers, merely to retail their paintings after the fact).59 In the Discourses reynolds made explicit how these presumptuous tailors intruded on his territory. By tradition, draping and arranging fabrics in order to paint them skilfully (whether imaginatively or upon a posing dummy) had been a privileged avenue for painterly distinction, an art ancillary to painting itself. Yet in modern fashions, reynolds laments, “the drapery is always disposed by the skill of the tailor,” and so preempts the artist’s prerogative to lay (and to paint) the cloth as he will (D, 128). tellingly, even reynolds himself seeks to render actual fashion in purely normative terms—of good style and bad style—that would resist the increasingly unavoidable association of dress with linear dating. In the “fashion of dress,” he declares, “there is allowed to be good or bad taste. the component parts of dress are continually changing from great to little, from short to long; but the general form still remains: it is still the same general dress which is comparatively fixed, though on a very slender foundation; but it is on this which fashion must rest” (D, 136). as reynolds here begins suddenly to evaluate actual dress—and so turns fashion critic—his hesitant paradoxes (of “changing” that is “still the same,” of the “comparatively fixed,” and the admittedly “slender foundation” on which he finds himself ) suggest increasingly fundamental doubts about the possibility of “general dress,” at a moment when dress supplied the foremost signs of the changing times to his contemporaries.

Dress Grown Obsolete as the rapidly dated dress of reynolds’s own portraits made clear to his contemporaries, even sublimated fashions quickly failed to register as unmemorable background. In the immediate aftermath of reynolds’s career, hazlitt called

102

The Dress of the Year

him to account precisely for the unseemly “union with wealth and fashion” that had compromised his pictures.60 Despite hazlitt’s own commitment elsewhere to the illuminating possibilities of details of dress, he censured the fading fashions of reynolds’s portraits with impunity, while he also envisioned reynolds’s old sitting room as a procession of fashionable commodities that crowded out his subjects entirely: “Sir Joshua must have had a fine time of it with his sitters. . . . What a rustling of silks! What a fluttering of flounces and brocades! What a cloud of powder and perfumes! What a flow of periwigs!”61 the centrality of these fashions in reynolds’s art (despite the pretensions of his philosophy in the Discourses) made inevitable a melancholy lingering in hazlitt’s later day: “those portraits . . . that were most admired at the time, do not retain their pre-eminence now: the thought remains upon the brow, while the colour has faded from the cheek, or the dress grown obsolete.”62 this bleak fate of obsolescence—at least in the passing day of hazlitt63—reveals how even reynolds’s tempered and peripheral concessions to modern styles (like depicting fashionable hairstyles of his own present moment alongside ancient garb) quickly overwhelmed the vaguely classical dress he devised to resist particularization. I have already suggested how hazlitt’s somewhat willful inability to look past the outmoded dress of a reynolds portrait might characterize many english “readers” of old pictures in the long eighteenth century. But hazlitt’s specific perspective here also acutely points toward the material infrastructure of the portraiture trade, in a way that indicates how the buying, selling, and manufacture of painting had acclimated reynolds to fashion’s demands. Marcia pointon asserts that “portraiture was an historicizing discourse in the eighteenth century,” not least in frequently summoning the costume of the seventeenth century in the Vandyke style.64 that is, portraits frequently invited people to observe their contemporaries in the dress of another time and thus, however imperfectly, to enter regularly into other cultural moments by seeing their contemporaries so transformed.65 Yet pointon equally emphasizes how connoisseurs cultivated an influential capacity to look past personal resemblance entirely. “eighteenth-century collectors of historical portraits were . . . not primarily concerned with likeness”; they valued instead what she calls “secure provenance . . . and good craftsmanship.” a prominent guarantor of such provenance was precisely the careful documentary descriptions of the arrangements of dress and its accoutrements, which distinguished one portrait from another much more reliably than did faces. In one contemporary description, for instance, a portrait of the duchess of richmond “is drawn in black with a very fine lawn ruff and handkerchief, and many strings of pearls;

portrait historicism and the Dress of the times

103

on her left side hangs a miniature, probably of her husband, exceedingly well done; her right side is supported by her fan, and on a small table on the other side is placed her coronet.”66 In this verbal reflection of the connoisseur’s gaze, nary a word of personal features breaks up an extended catalogue of possessions: ruff, handkerchief, pearls, miniature, fan, table, coronet. as the marketplace defined portraits in a language that set dress and other objects apart from subjects, the material conditions of the portrait-making trade shaped a complementary problematization of subjects’ connections to the “dress of the times.” the “production line” of portraits involved peripheral artisans like frame-makers and engravers but also distributed the work of painting itself between the primary artist and his assistants or subcontractors, who might add the dress, drapery, and/or landscape to a figure set down by the artist.67 as reynolds assured one customer, “When the face is finished the rest is done without troubling the sitter.”68 the sitter could avoid such trouble, not only by leaving his or her own clothes in the artist’s care, but also by selecting an appropriate costume from reynolds’s collection of engravings. In his early days, his assistant recounted, reynolds made available a portfolio “containing every print that had been taken from his portraits; so that those who came to sit had this collection to look over, and if they fixed on any particular attitude, in preference, he would repeat it precisely in point of drapery and position; as this much facilitated the business, and was sure to please the sitter’s fancy.”69 a number of fashionable portraitists followed the same method, “sending the almost blank canvas with finished head together with the chosen print to a subcontractor, a drapery painter, for completion.”70 as likenesses took shape independently of possessions, the material engagements of portrait-making produced a shadow economy of real clothing suspended and delayed. articles of dress, to be painted in the absence of the subject, circulated independently of their owners, and thus the artist’s assistant had also to possess the skills of a courier. the assistant of George romney, for instance, having “taken the Marquess of townshend’s dress home” in January 1796, in February “delivered Colonel Bristol’s ‘clothes sword & gorget’ to their owner,” and in March “performed a similar service for the Bishop of Bangor.”71 Likewise, the studio of the painter thomas Lawrence “on his death in 1830 was littered with the personal effects of his sitters.” reynolds administered his own miniature economy of portrait effects. as pointon observes, his “sitters’ books contain no notes of an aesthetic nature and nothing to indicate that he was curious about psychology or, indeed, facial appearance and character. What they do contain are notes on details of costume: ‘button holes embroidered’; ‘little pow-

104

The Dress of the Year

Figure 19. Joshua reynolds, Mrs. John Spencer and Her Daughter (1759). private Collection / peter Willi / Bridgeman Images.

der . . .’; ‘the picture of the late Lord r. Manners. the Naval Uniform must have white cuffs & blue lapels.’”72 In short, the “dress of the times,” taking on the air of historical costume, seemed to operate on its own time, quite apart from its owners. If dress demanded artists’ careful attention, it was a kind of attention frequently divorced from the individual persons nominally tied to that dress. the hauntingly fragmentary faces of one typically unfinished portrait—of an atypically well-remembered sitter, the infant duchess of Devonshire, and her mother—makes this point clear (Figure 19).

portrait historicism and the Dress of the times

105

the early and modestly produced fashion plates of mid-eighteenth-century Britain have not been the primary concern of art historians or of connoisseurs of costume history, and partly for that reason, scholarship on reynolds has not fully appreciated the dramatic impact of an emergent print-cultural turn to fashion just as reynolds’s Discourses were unfolding. In part, the entire visual idiom of popular print had changed dramatically, as formerly dense and coded visual allegories gave way to topical satire accessible to anyone, or to what contemporaries called, remarkably, “comic history painting.”73 the precise early 1770s moment when reynolds was grappling with the special problem of historical portraiture marked the further consolidation of a self-reflexive attention to the effects of people’s contemplating dress in print. this was the high-water mark of the Macaroni, the type whose elevation to prominence was the foremost sign of the triumph of the satirical fashion print; and Matthew Darly’s view of his own Macaroni print Shop, in a 1772 image of that title, exemplifies the new threshold of self-consciousness I have in mind (Figure 20).74 Viewers of

Figure 20. Matthew Darly, The Macaroni Print Shop (1772). Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

106

The Dress of the Year

this print scrutinize the line-up of variegated male dress gathered before the print-shop window, but viewers equally observe how these men contemplate, resemble, disavow, and diverge from their “reflection” in Darly’s pictures. the visual satire of the moment also directly acknowledged a new chapter in the serial dissemination of fashions (especially in women’s pocketbook annuals and in new periodicals like the Lady’s Magazine, founded in 1770). Satirical prints began to confront not just presently prevailing fashions as such, but also the specific visual, print-cultural form of the fashion plate (and the definitive genre of “the dress of the year”), as was indicated in the noteworthy subtitle of The French Lady in London, or the Head-Dress for the Year 1771 (Figure 21). Within this image, suitably enough, the present year’s excesses play out under the watchful presence of portrait ancestors in the attire of ages past, in a design that essentially travesties a prototypical woman’s pocketbook frontispiece scene. Strikingly, reynolds himself was a prime figure in the broader commercial consolidation of visual print culture, at a moment when exports of fine British prints rose dramatically.75 Due to the labor and expense involved in fine engravings, “print-selling required an appetite for high-risk speculation,” risk that was typically managed by soliciting subscribers upon a painting’s exhibition.76 Yet as Solkin notes, reynolds was marketable enough that engravings of his work could be commissioned immediately “so as to appear simultaneously with the painting (just as museum exhibitions today are invariably accompanied—some would say overwhelmed—by merchandizing in the form of catalogues for serious connoisseurs, and posters, t-shirts, and coffee mugs for the rest).” Notably, the royal academy’s system of annual exhibitions (as orchestrated by reynolds) seemed to approximate the serial iterations of the fashion image. Forced to fill wall space each year whether or not the paintings had adequate merit, the exhibitions appeared to contemporaries to “tak[e] on the appearance of a shop filled to overflowing with second-rate goods.”77 an early nineteenth-century critic further remarked that the annual exhibitions were “much calculated to create a hankering after mere novelty” and so aligned the preponderance of portraiture on display with the same structure of serial desire that governed fashionable dress.78 Visual print satire expressly exposed the resemblance. The Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Painting in the Year 1771 depicted the exhibition gallery with a title that approximates the formula of the pocketbook fashion plate (as with the Head-Dress for the Year 1771 in my preceding example) (Figure 22). the print suggests how the production of “mere” novelty in the exhibited paint-

Figure 21. The French Lady in London; Or, the Head-Dress, for the Year, 1771 (1770). Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

108

The Dress of the Year

Figure 22. richard earlom, after Michael Vincent (or Charles) Brandoin, Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Painting in the Year 1771 (1772). Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

ings was deeply implicated in the eccentric evolutions of contemporary dress. the engraved lines of the image do nothing to distinguish the living flesh from the painted figures, and so the print underscores the closeness of the dress in the portraits to the actual dress of the spectators in the gallery. there may be a small echo of Boitard’s landmark satire Taste A-La-Mode 1745 in the arrangement of the foreground figures (most notably in the diminutive woman at the center of the composition and the offset women with a fan). there is certainly a provocative resemblance between the conspicuous paneling that frames the image (seemingly without purpose) and the appearance of the Macaroni print Shop window panes.79 and perhaps most remarkably, the

portrait historicism and the Dress of the times

109

painter James Barry’s Adam and Eve, the centerpiece of the royal academy exhibition for the year, seems to me to be wryly repurposed by the print’s satirical point of view. In this sense, adam and eve’s prelapsarian nudity sets in abject relief the conspicuously relative dress customs of 1771.80 all of this goes some way toward explaining the severity of reynolds’s antipathy for modern fashions, compounded as these fashions’ incursions were by voices like Samuel Johnson’s that would subsume aesthetics under a historical project. as reynolds insists, “the desire of transmitting to posterity the shape of modern dress must be acknowledged to be purchased at a prodigious price, even the price of every thing that is valuable in art” (D, 187). Making such a hyperbolic claim, reynolds realizes, competes with common sense: “It seems at first view very reasonable, that a statue which is to carry down to posterity the resemblance of an individual, should be dressed in the fashion of the times, in the dress which he himself wore.” But in rejecting this ordinary presumption, reynolds draws a firm line between the “man” and his clothing: “this would certainly be true, if the dress were part of the man; but after a time, the dress is only an amusement for an antiquarian. . . . Common sense must here give way to a higher sense” (D, 128). With time, representations of ephemeral dress promulgated delinquent cultural “amusements,” ways of taking pleasure that competed with the subjects of portraits but also with the merits of the artwork. these predestined amusements were all the more threatening because they were increasingly popular rather than pedantic, in the ordinary sense of “antiquarian.”81 the urgency of reynolds’s wish to avoid serving this version of commercialized history marked a break with the art of the past, which had less problematically gratified antiquaries: “however agreeable it may be to the antiquary’s principles of equity and gratitude, that as he has received great pleasure from the contemplation of the fashions of Dress of former ages, he wishes to give the same satisfaction to future antiquaries; yet, methinks pictures of an inferior style, or prints, may be considered as quite sufficient, without prostituting this great art to such mean purposes” (D, 187).82 In order to achieve a new subordination of other forms of visual representation to his own, dignified practice, but also to resist new threats, reynolds constructs documentation as a lesser value that should be assigned to and confined within those lesser pursuits. In this way the “grand style” took shape, not just as a force of “general nature” against particularity, but against the use that history wished to make

110

The Dress of the Year

of art; and the Discourses internalized reynolds’s resistance to the prospect of art as a sign of the moment. at the close of his fourth discourse, reynolds insisted, “the works, whether of poets, painters, moralists, or historians, which are built upon general nature, live for ever; while those which depend for their existence on particular customs and habits, a partial view of nature, or the fluctuation of fashion, can only be coeval with that which first raised them from obscurity. present time and future may be considered as rivals, and he who solicits the one must expect to be discountenanced by the other” (D, 73). Such a sentiment, however, failed to make allowance for the arresting conjunction of the antiquarian and the fashionable at this moment, as new practices of history precisely went in search of particularities of custom and habit.83 For the first time, the strong “coeval[ity]” of more powerful “fluctuation[s] of fashion” became the paradoxical condition of a new kind of staying power, within which reynolds’s presumption of “rival[ry]” between “present time and future” fell apart. his refusal of the “prodigious price” of an art of modern dress reacted to the way his contemporaries not only aligned dress and the times, but also constructed from that alignment the framework for a more broadly particularized and materialized history.

prejudice in Favor of the ancients the so-called antiquarian impulse in painting, then, insisted on the transmission and perpetuation of modern fashion—and so persistently antagonized the project of general nature. In reynolds’s evolving conceptions of classical culture we see how the difficulties of historical portraiture, and the doubts it shaped about the feasibility or legitimacy of general dress, culminated in a more fundamental revaluation of antiquity itself, and thus also in a crisis of faith about general nature even for reynolds himself. In the seventh discourse (1776), reynolds explains that “we voluntarily add our approbation of every ornament and every custom that belonged to [Greece and rome], even to the fashion of their dress,” because we associate even the extraneous ornaments with the artfulness we “venerate” (D, 138). But where he once only praised the “desireable simplicity” of ancient manners as closer to nature (D, 49), reynolds now attributes cultural particularity to the classical epoch: “the prejudice we have in favour of the ancients”—and “in favour of ancient dresses”—he confesses, derives largely neither from “nature nor reason”: it is a mere prejudice (D, 139). and crucially, modern approbation of ancient dress only extends so

portrait historicism and the Dress of the times

111

far. In the case of sculpture, “We make no difficulty of dressing statues of modern heroes or senators in the fashion of the roman armour or peaceful robe; we go so far as hardly to bear a statue in any other drapery” (D, 138). Sculpture conveniently eludes the problem of modern fashion—and not coincidentally, it is in a discussion of sculpture that reynolds most fully acknowledges the accelerated temporality of visual reference in his own moment. In sculpture, at least, the notion of “durable materials . . . conveying to posterity a fashion of which the longest existence scarce exceeds a year” is ludicrous on its face (D, 187, my emphasis). While unexamined custom and durable materials preserved sculpture apart from the sway of fashion, portraiture forced the issue. the difference, reynolds observes, resulted from a peculiarity of the archive of classical art: “In sculpture remain almost all the excellent specimens of ancient art,” and “we have so far associated personal dignity to the persons thus represented, and the truth of art to their manner of representation, that it is not in our power any longer to separate them.” By contrast painting, and particularly portraiture, cannot follow the roman model by rote because, “having no excellent ancient portraits, that connexion”—of classical forms of dress to extant excellence in painting—“was never formed. Indeed we could no more venture to paint a general officer in a roman military habit, than we could make a statue in the present uniform” (D, 138, my emphasis). In this sense, portraiture was bound to its time even as it was freed of the past. a dearth of classical models preserved it from the thoughtless adherence to antiquity that characterized other arts, and thus uniquely problematized its relationship to the past, present, and future. reynolds further suggests how the historical costume of Vandyke dress had pushed him toward his eventual recognition of classical particularity, particularly when, as an artistic style, Vandyke dress tumbled out of fashion. In his reflections upon the Vandyke style as a contemporary problem of historical dress, reynolds assumes a misleading air of distance: “We all remember very well how common it was a few years ago for portraits to be drawn in this fantastic dress” through which “very ordinary pictures acquired something of the air and effect of the works of Vandyck, and appeared therefore at first sight to be better pictures than they really were” (D, 138–39).84 as robert r. Wark, the modern editor of the Discourses, remarks, “reynolds himself employs the costume more often than any other major portraitist” (D, 138 nn. 688–701), a fact that reveals how reynolds had not been immune to the arbitrary pull of fashion. as against the ancient dress of eighteenth-century sculpture, Vandyke dress offered a more obviously arbitrary instance of the mistaken but powerful

112

The Dress of the Year

association of “excellence” with what merely “happened” to be of the same moment: “since we have no ancient portraits” in Greek or roman dress, “we make the best authority among the moderns serve the same purpose. . . . We are not content to admire [Van Dyck’s portraits] for their real excellence, but extend our approbation even to the dress which happened to be the fashion of that age” (D, 138). this reality became apparent to reynolds at a moment when real fashion turned back to the past, and a new vogue for Vandyke dress restricted the possibilities of stylized, artistic costume. For the costume historian aileen ribeiro, “By the 1770s it is no longer easily possible to distinguish fancy dress from fashionable informal dress because of the incorporation of a considerable amount of ‘masquerade’ features (feathers, ribbons, Vandyke collars and cuffs, sashes, turbans, etc.) into everyday wear.”85 In addition, “there are a number of references in the 1760s and 1770s to boys and young men adopting Vandyke dress as a kind of informal costume; the long, naturally arranged hair worn by boys in the period was not dissimilar to the hairstyles worn by Van Dyck’s male sitters in the 1620s and 1630s.”86 the self-recognition forced upon reynolds by a recycled fashion in actual dress strongly echoed adam Smith’s discussion of the confused association of arbitrary modes with the more essential qualities of great and high-ranking persons who donned them. Smith argues, “as long as [the great] continue to use this form, it is connected in our imagination with the idea of something that is genteel and magnificent, and though in itself it should be indifferent, it seems, on account of this relation, to have something about it that is genteel and magnificent. as soon as they drop it, it loses all the grace, which it had appeared to possess before,” and even grows vulgar. remarkably, Smith explicitly extends this principle to the “eminent artist” in a way that seems to posit literal fashions of dress as a privileged model of aesthetic influence in general, of the force through which the artist “introduces a new fashion of writing, music, or architecture”—or, as reynolds understands, painting. For “As the dress of an agreeable man of high rank recommends itself, and how peculiar and fantastical soever, comes soon to be admired and imitated; so the excellencies of an eminent master recommend his peculiarities, and his manner becomes the fashionable style in the art which he practises.”87 Given the evident culpability even of reynolds himself (in his Vandyke mimicry), no reliable method of discriminating between legitimate “excellencies” and fantastical “particularities” seemed forthcoming. the truth of Smith’s formerly peripheral observations (in 1759) by now (in 1776) seemed irresistible, a fully predictive account of reynolds’s own ca-

portrait historicism and the Dress of the times

113

reer. While reynolds discursively disavowed his Vandyke phase, in practice he nevertheless made very explicit concessions to contemporary style at the end of his career. these increasing concessions suggest how the entire Vandyke episode prompted a more fundamental resignation to fashion’s visual hegemony on reynolds’s part. Nicholas penny observes how, “In his last years, reynolds responded sympathetically and even enthusiastically to the images of high fashion.”88 In part, reynolds found himself accommodating fashion because the mediations he formerly outlined were no longer necessary. as ribeiro notes, dress styles of the 1780s moved “towards a kind of simplicity which, if not strictly classical, was far less dominated by trimmings and patterned textiles, which perhaps explains reynolds’s preparedness to paint it.”89 But here, ribeiro leaves unacknowledged the unsettling collapse of the distance between modern fashion and elevated artistic treatment that had previously been possible (and so central to reynolds’s academic theory), now that simplicity itself was in vogue. this suggests to me not a happy coincidence of real-world dress styles and general nature but rather reynolds’s fundamental resignation to fashion’s irresistible and ever-changing compulsions of the eye. In this sense the vexed status of Vandyke dress—current once again a century and a half after its advent—prefigured the more fundamentally disruptive conjunction of modern fashion and vaguely classical dress that followed in the 1780s and 1790s. Once these quasi-classical fashions were marked by modern dates (as the fashion of the 1780s and so on), their traditional capacity to suggest a temporally general air was thereby diminished. So while at “this point in the history of dress, aesthetic theory marche[d] hand in hand with fashion,” and “artistic convention merge[d] into the reality of actual costume,” for reynolds the eroded boundaries between “fashion” and convention threw the distinctions between these categories into chaos.90 the irreparably particularized “classical” of the 1780s and 1790s that resulted—and that eroded the oppositional aesthetic charge of general nature as something distinct from present fashion—finally secured a firmer alignment between fashionable dates and history that left less and less room for judicious mitigation of the signs of the time. reynold’s final discourse, delivered shortly before his death, pleaded historical contingency in apology for the autoapostasy of diverging from the early principles of the Discourses: “I have taken another course, one more suited to my abilities, and to the taste of the times in which I live” (D, 282). In his practice, as earlier discourses obliquely acknowledged, reynolds had verged upon abandoning the pursuit of “general nature.” Within the seventh discourse that was also the site of his reflections

114

The Dress of the Year

upon modern dress, reynolds was already moving beyond recognizing the lamentable inevitability of straying from general nature. Instead he embraced that straying as an (ultimately regretted) active principle. In consideration of its audience, for whom “apparent truth, or opinion, or prejudice” “operate[s] as truth,” “the art, whose office it is to please the mind, as well as instruct it, must direct itself according to opinion, or it will not attain its end” (D, 122). Modern fashion, which was precisely a system for widespread diffusion of the “transitory,” fundamentally overturned the conceptualization of a “science” of taste with time on its side, where true taste would win out in the long run. 91 as reynolds registered the unprecedented weight of the “taste of the times” in his own moment, the emergent temporal synchronicity of consumer commerce made his presumption of a direct relationship between the “duration” and the “extent” of cultural influence increasingly unsustainable. passing fashions would last longest in the end.

the Scandal of reynolds While reynolds reconsidered his own practice in light of these cultural conditions, his contemporaries at the same time reconsidered the state of commerce by way of reynolds’s art—most trenchantly in the extended form of richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play The School for Scandal (1777), which was produced five years after the reynolds-Johnson exchange with which I began this chapter. In the play’s celebrated portrait-auction scene, the irreverent and rambunctious Charles Surface precisely contradicts hume’s refusal to “throw aside the pictures” of our ancestors. But in scrutinizing hume’s hurry to look past portrait dress, rather than to pause at this meaningful surface, Sheridan offers a more substantial revaluation of these old pictures. Most essentially, he locates precisely in their stubborn perpetuation of outdated styles a surprising resource for a modern life overrun by cycles of buying and selling. and crucially, he finds the commercial conditions they might ameliorate to inhere in reynolds’s neoclassical project as much as in the fashionable world that is the play’s largest concern. In the play’s famous portrait-auction scene, in order to pay his debts, Charles willingly sells the portraits of his ancestors to an unknown buyer in a mock auction, complete with a parchment genealogy that doubles as an auction catalogue. after negotiating the price of a few portraits individually, Charles

portrait historicism and the Dress of the times

115

finds himself exhausted by the effort and accepts “three hundred pounds for the rest of the family in the lump.”92 the young man nevertheless finds redemption in the eyes of his long absent and newly returned nabob uncle, Sir Oliver Surface. the turning point is Charles’s refusal to part with his generous uncle’s portrait, for, unbeknownst to Charles, his long absent uncle is the buyer; and Oliver forgives all after Charles’s tender remembrance of him. For Jack D. Durant, Sheridan here provides an unproblematic exposition of reynolds’s aesthetics in the Discourses: “What really enables Charles to sell the family portraits—for all that he needs the money—is that they are hackneyed or inferior as art”;93 and a prominent dimension of their inferiority is their failure to rise to reynolds’s call for the artist to “chang[e] the dress from the temporary fashion to one more permanent” (D, 72). But to understand the fate of these “inferior” portraits merely as the consequence of aesthetic failure is to overlook not only the ambiguities of reynolds’s own paintings (which in their reluctant adherence to fashion looked not so unlike their inferiors), but also the ambiguity of the play’s ostensible praise for reynolds’s fine portraits. While the central problem of The School for Scandal is the fate of sympathetic obligation in the face of commercial life, the sort of portraits that reynolds calls for (if not the ones he actually paints)94 do little to promote it. Charles’s family portraits, whose ambiguous “merit” is precisely their “inveterate likeness, all stiff and awkward as the originals,” are distinctly unlike those of reynolds, “your modern raphael, who gives you the strongest resemblance, yet contrives to make your own portrait independent of you, so that you may sink the original and not hurt the picture” (S, 251). In context, the strangely autonomous pictures that reynolds “contrives” are hardly reassuring. these “independent” portraits possess an aesthetic value that finally bears no relation to the actual persons they depict and that even disregards those persons. the “independence” of reynolds’s portraits from their “originals” also makes them jarringly irrelevant to the disconcerting dispersal of Charles’s family history— the liquidation of a collection of pictures that, once alienated by the secondhand portrait market, will no longer be legible “as a narrative sequence documenting historical and genealogical time.”95 although liberated from the fate of particular persons, reynolds’s “fine” portraits lack even rudimentary difference from presently circulating commodities. Instead they seem perfected commodities, or objects of value, within which “resemblance” purposelessly or even ominously endures.96 Like Samuel Johnson, Sheridan ultimately elevates in their place the sort of portraits that were products of their time; and

116

The Dress of the Year

The School for Scandal seizes specifically on the Surface portraits’ capacity as stubbornly “inveterate likeness” to short-circuit the prevailing, commercial condition of change. If “the unities of time and place are loosely observed” in The School for Scandal, insistent and erratic measurements of time wholly consume its characters, and so make clear how profoundly alien reynolds’s conceptions of temporal transcendence are within the world of the fashionable subjects of his portraits.97 Snake’s precisely calculated gossip, he assures Lady Sneerwell, “must reach Mrs. Clackit’s ears within four-and-twenty-hours” (S, 210); Joseph Surface proclaims that his brother’s distresses increase “every hour” (S, 212); Mrs. Candour greets Lady Sneerwell by enquiring, “how have you been this century?” (S, 214); and “a long time” is “above a minute” (S, 286). the unfortunate Mrs. evergreen, the absent object of scandalous gossip, “is six-and-fifty if she’s an hour” (S, 227). at the same time, the entire play “turns upon extended analogies drawn from the world of art. Women who ‘paint’ themselves cosmetically . . . are themselves likened to paintings and art objects”—in a way that explicitly links the portrait artist to the arts of the dressing room.98 In a reference to reynolds’s aesthetics as much as to forgery, Mrs. evergreen practices a cosmetic mode of “painting” specifically embarrassed by its divided allegiance to the ancient and to the modern. Because she unskillfully blends the makeup on her face with her neckline, Mrs. evergreen “looks like a mended statue, in which the connoisseur sees at once that the head’s modern, though the trunk’s antique” (S, 227). In her unflattering visage, reynolds’s strictures against the combination of ancient air and modern dress come to abject life. this is true even as reynolds’s call for “the general air of the antique for the sake of dignity, and . . . something of the modern for the sake of likeness” also suggests Mrs. evergreen’s potential, highly unflattering fidelity to his paintings. at the threshold of the portrait-auction scene, Charles’s servant trip explicitly connects the urgent ephemerality of the play’s fashionable gossip to the material circulation of dress fashions—when for a moment trip seems oddly reminiscent of the clothes-couriering assistants to portrait artists. as our introduction to Charles’s household, trip is an overdressed, snuff-taking caricature of excess and misrule; but he is also definitively familiar with a sophisticated secondhand economy of fashionable perquisites, legitimate and otherwise. Stopping Moses the moneylender (who is conducting Oliver to the portraits Charles has offered for sale), trip inquires about a bill of credit he has sought

portrait historicism and the Dress of the times

117

to cash ahead of its date of redemption. With the bill deemed not creditworthy, trip seeks to acquire the sum instead by annuity. asked to supply collateral, trip regrets that “nothing capital of my master’s wardrobe has dropped lately. But I could give you a mortgage on some of his winter clothes with equity of redemption before November, or you shall have the reversion of the French velvet or a post-obit on the blue and silver”—along with “a few pair of point ruffles” for good measure (S, 243).99 especially by asking Moses to set a value upon “the reversion” and the “post-obit,” trip posits for fashion a rhythm of superannuation well-suited to actuarial calculation, suggestive of the more rigorous, commercial knowledges of insurance and finance.100 and this process is premised, not—as “reversions” or post-obits usually are—upon the death of a person, but instead upon clothes falling out of fashion, in the process by which, as the Lady’s Magazine had it in 1773, fashions are “born and expired” all in a year.101 trip’s presence in The School for Scandal perversely suggests that, in this late eighteenth-century economy, the phenomenon of expiration is less meaningfully a feature of biographical persons than of fashionable clothing. he is the sign of a marketplace shifting its speculative energies toward disposable commodities—and a reminder that, at this moment, dress inevitably elicits such a vision. When, in the portrait-auction scene, dress becomes a predominant feature of the portraits of the past, fashion shapes a scale of “historical” time that is at odds with human life spans. the resulting sequence of narrow, sartorial moments (lasting for a decade or a year) segments biographical continuity and thereby displaces the lifetime as an object of historical speculation. In this sense the play reproduces the same schism that operates in James Granger’s segregation of “the dress of the times” from his biographical histories. Likewise, the play makes only the same, passing acknowledgement that Granger had done of a history extending back to Norman times—of “the family of the Surfaces up to the Conquest” (S, 251). Charles shows little capacity or motivation to register that time of slow fashion (when, in Granger’s words, “the beard extended and expanded itself more during the short reigns of edward VI, and Mary, than from the Conquest to that period”); and so Charles passes over these older portraits en masse, and moves on to the dress on display in portraits of more recent provenance.102 Uncle Oliver’s presumable unfamiliarity with the recent print-cultural turn in fashionable dress helps explain why Charles’s account of his family portraits takes on a pedagogical air. Charles is careful to trace military and

118

The Dress of the Year

society fashions in turn and shows off a great uncle from the turn of the century, “a marvellous good general in his day,” who is “not cut out of his feathers, as your modern clipped captains are, but enveloped in wigs and regimentals as a general should be.” the neighboring portraits of a pair of his ancestral cousins, Charles explains, “were done some time ago, when beaux wore wigs, and the ladies wore their own hair.” Oliver’s response—“Yes, truly, head-dresses appear to have been a little lower in those days” (S, 252)—of course satirizes the notorious excess of contemporary 1770s headdresses.103 But this response also betrays that this way of looking is new to him. Despite looking upon a generation that he avers to have known firsthand, and upon a portrait with which he must be personally familiar already, Oliver genuinely reappreciates the dress “in those days.”104 In catching up to the effects of annualized fashion after his long absence in India, Oliver haltingly enacts the unfamiliar mode of objectification entailed in the new vantage on old dress. echoing Granger’s distant, antiquarian perspective, he assents to what “appear[s] to have been” while limiting expressions of his personal knowledge of the time to ineffectual asides: “ah, poor Deborah! a woman who set such a value on herself!” (S, 252). Like the commercial marketplace, history here remakes formerly personal effects into objects of social exchange. But while Charles may sell the rest of the family pictures at auction, he adamantly refuses to “part with poor Noll,” the portrait of his generous uncle (whom this portrait ironically fails to resemble). In the end, The School for Scandal asks us to reconsider “inveterate likeness,” that is, a likeness that is ever more at odds with serial, commercial experience in that the canvas is unchanging. the Surface portraits fix time—and for the descendants who look upon them for years afterward, they force a paradoxical habituation to fashions and visual customs that the ongoing sartorial flux of the present would not allow.105 Yet although the Surface family portraits are presumably delivered from the grim fate that threatens them (and by purchasing them, Oliver preserves the possibility of taking another look), they are nevertheless already violently pried from the wainscoting.106 the physical violence of the extraction of the Surface portraits is, thus, also a metaphor for the reconceptualization of portraiture within commercial historicism, and a reminder that, even if the pictures retake their old places, Oliver will not be able to unlearn this new way of seeing that remakes them, at least in part, into mobile signs of a social moment. the sentimental gesture of interruption at the play’s core understands its finally oppositional relationship to the irresistible trends of the culture of fash-

portrait historicism and the Dress of the times

119

ion. In the wake of the tremendous success of The School for Scandal, in a gesture that might have been inspired by the portrait auction scene, the actor David Garrick devised a new prologue (1781) for A Trip to Scarborough (Sheridan’s adaptation of John Vanbrugh’s The Relapse, or Virtue in Danger [1696]), which had premiered prior to The School for Scandal in early 1777. here, Garrick invokes broader social change—in “Men, women, children, houses, signs, and fashions, / State, stage, trade, taste, the humours and the passions”—via an extended metonymy of altered dress, from wigs to shoe buckles: Of former times, that polished thing, a beau, Is metamorphosed now, from top to toe. then the full flaxen wig, spread o’er the shoulders, Concealed the shallow head from the beholders! But now the whole’s reversed: each fop appears, Cropped, and trimmed up, exposing head and ears. the buckle then its modest limits knew; Now, like the ocean, dreadful to the view, hath broke its bounds, and swallows up the shoe. the wearer’s foot, like his once fine estate, Is almost lost, th’ encumbrance is so great. (S, 147) In a direct reminder of The School for Scandal’s comparative headdresses in the portrait auction scene (when Oliver wryly observes the lower headdresses of older days, in contrast to the modern styles adorning the women present on stage and in the audience), Garrick remarks, “No head of old, too high in feathered state, / hindered the fair to pass the lowest gate; / a church to enter now, they must be bent, / If ev’n they should try th’experiment.” Garrick offers an apt synthesis of his contemporaries’ attention to the concrete way in which “change thus circulates throughout the nation” (S, 148): that is, through these fashionable commodities, but also through the novel vision of history they structured and sustained.

Conclusion reynolds’s own place within this increasingly materialized conception of historical change was highly tenuous, and his unstable relationship to his evolving commercial culture finally explains some practices that were otherwise

120

The Dress of the Year

unaccountably imprudent. M. Kirby talley has addressed at length reynolds’s strangely willful “impermanence,” his insistent experimentation with fragile and untested media, against his better judgment. reynolds made use of “the disastrous painting medium megilp,” of very risky egg varnish, of wax that “cracks” and “adheres poorly,” of asphaltum that can tear, and of unreliable, fading pigments like the “very treacherous colour” carmine red. For talley, the artist’s “persistence in following practices which he knows perfectly well would seriously threaten the life of his pictures can only be described as perverse.” reynolds’s portraits, as the artist himself was well aware, faded so quickly because of his questionable pursuit of elusive aura effects that would allow his paintings instantaneously to resemble the works of the old masters by simulating the patina of aged varnish and oils. Unfortunately, as talley points out, these “fevered attempts to duplicate the surface effects which only time can bestow resulted in the rapid deterioration of many of his works, and the great vulnerability of most of them.”107 today, combing through a catalogue of reynolds’s works is an object lesson in the limited lifespan of his paintings: “this painting is not what it was,” the flesh has taken on a “grainy texture,” while “the pink dress and blue sky are less vivid in colour”; or, “the paint has cracked severely on the face; there is crinkling in the brown habit and much deterioration and darkening of the surface”; or, it is “ravaged by restoration.”108 Likewise the human faces of reynolds’s portraits often show a ghostly pale, the consequence of the fugitive pigments that reynolds used even against his better judgment. as one sitter protested, in contrast to portraits of old, reynolds “made his pictures die before the man,” while Walpole joked that reynolds ought to be “paid in annuities only for so long as his pictures last.”109 Foregrounding reynolds’s increasing self-consciousness about dress makes clear why he felt compelled to exchange the future health of these works for a present moment of viewing. reconfigured by the artist in response to the visual intrusiveness of fashion, reynolds’s portraits were something like the negative image of the antique books that began to be transformed in their own right. Whereas reynolds’s portraits looked old when they were new, these antique books looked new when they were old. In the 1790s, new bleaching techniques helped to commodify once dusty and neglected old volumes by transforming their aged paper in ways that could appeal to the luxury market of the present. the fragile but momentarily gleaming pages that resulted from bleaching would soon brown and brittle from the treatment. But for a time “the paper acquire[d] a degree of whiteness it never before possessed,” and thereby attained a signifier of fineness that was a desirable quality of the latest deluxe books.110

portrait historicism and the Dress of the times

121

reynolds’s own peculiarly self-destructive paintings manifested a complementary, terribly agential resolve. Inversely aspiring to the cracked surface and dulled tones that could (for a moment) keep visual faith with the aged media of the masters, reynolds reluctantly secured his art’s commercial legibility by the presentness of the dress forms he depicted underneath the varnish. In the compromise reynolds made, his late paintings’ presently fashionable dress briefly acquired from unstable materials the sheen of visual dignity that his portraits could no longer expect to assume in the ordinary course of aging. these paintings achieved immediately the cherished signs of age and then rapidly crumbled—before their inevitably overparticularized fashions could betray the artist by bowing to time, and threaten picturesque absurdity or merely antiquarian pleasure. In this tortured response to his liminal location between an epoch of fashion dating and the fading aura of patina, reynolds and his works compellingly embodied the contradictory implications of a commercial historicism that made dress the matter of history.

2 In his post-romantic afterlife, reynolds endured as a reluctant or inadvertent hero of modernity, ironically preserved as part of the vanguard of the visual arts by his very failure to escape his time. In Baudelaire’s celebration of ephemeral beauty in “the painter of Modern Life,” reynolds appears in concert with his contemporary thomas Lawrence as an admirable heir to a tradition of painting the dress of the times. For Baudelaire, “every old master has had his own modernity”; and in an inversion of Samuel Johnson’s terms as much as those of reynolds himself, it is fine portraits that “are clothed in the costume of their own period.” Sartorial presentism, in other words, is a defining quality of reynolds’s paintings’ achievement: “from costume and coiffure down to gesture, glance and smile . . . everything . . . combines to form a perfectly viable whole.”111 Still, even Baudelaire appears uncertain about how to rate reynolds among the old masters. Baudelaire is concerned to “appear to wrong” his heroic surrogate Constantine Guys (“Monsieur G.”) by his sure feeling “that Monsieur G. would willingly pass over a fragment of antique statuary if otherwise he might let slip an opportunity of enjoying a portrait by reynolds or Lawrence”—and yet G.’s possibly damning preference is endorsed.112 For Georg Simmel, in a related way, reynolds was perhaps the unnamed embodiment of the triumph of style over genius. In contrast to “a statue by Michelangelo . . . a religious painting by rembrandt, or a portrait by Velasquez,” Simmel argues, “with the neo-classical portraits from around 1800 we

122

The Dress of the Year

think mainly of the style of their times.”113 the expression deliberately confuses the boundaries between painterly style and styles of dress—at precisely the moment when reynolds’s portraits were a novel addition to the same Berlin museum where Simmel was contemplating the old masters.114 (he wrote just as the Berlin Gemäldegalerie relocated to the newly built Kaiser Friedrich Museum, opened in 1904; and his Rembrandt: An Essay in the Philosophy of Art [1916] drew upon the unparalleled rembrandt holdings.) Because the work determined by style “shares its nature or part of its design with others[,] it thus points to a common root that lies beyond the individual work.” In Simmel’s terms, such overdetermined works serve their own kind of purpose by sustaining a calmingly “general mood” that is a “counterweight and concealment” to “the exaggerated subjectivism of the [present] times.”115 here, Simmel almost reconstitutes a category of the socially general or the public, accessible via style, even if he does so in a sense largely antithetical to reynolds’s own project in that regard. Generality obtains, that is, precisely in the contemplation of the retrospectively visible determinations of the history of style. this general mood offers not relief from the problem of particular time (as with the diachronic extension of self through all time that is the consolation of reynolds’s general beauty), but rather relief from individuality via release into the social (through a synchronic extension of self within a time not one’s own, where social determinations are more objectively evident or perceptible). For Baudelaire and for Simmel, redemption seemed to require rescuing reynolds from his intentions. But in our own moment it is possible to see reynolds and the dilemmas of his epoch anew, as novel practices within the visual arts remediate the problems I have described in ways that reynolds himself could not have imagined or conceived. In the hands of the digital visual artist Jason Salavon, for instance, the taste of the times is stunningly reconciled to the domain of the auratic; and particularity shapes a new and quantitative method of generality (Figure 23 and Figure 24). Whether in the synthetic, visual averaging of dozens of Van Dyck portraits or in the equivalent compilation of “every Playboy centerfold” from the decade of the 1990s (one of a series of four that also includes the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s), Salavon’s compositions pursue something larger than the sum of their constituent images. through a computer-aided process without intrinsic texture or material form, Salavon generates an almost tactile, visual delicacy: a set of “atmospheric” effects that connote at once an old master’s brushstrokes, a rothko canvas, and a religious icon.

portrait historicism and the Dress of the times

123

Figure 23. Jason Salavon, Portrait (van Dyck) (2010). Courtesy of the artist.

What emerges, finally, is a general form that directly proceeds from particular objects, images, and examples. Computation transforms a profusion of particulars into aesthetic form or meaning that can only emerge, as it were, en masse. perhaps, in the end, this is a mode of “managing” particulars not so distant from what reynolds envisioned when he called for details only as they

Figure 24. Jason Salavon, Every Playboy Centerfold, The 1990s (2002). Courtesy of the artist.

portrait historicism and the Dress of the times

125

“struck” the artist in his original, generalizing conception of a composition.116 Salavon, that is, disposes the manifold dress (and undress) of the times into general beauty, and so his renovation of aesthetic form heals a schism that reynolds diagnosed but could not surmount in the eighteenth century. By confronting the career of reynolds with Salavon’s art, then, we can envision new avenues of escape from the dilemma between the general and the particular, or between the timelessness of art and the time of history. reynolds marks for his own time one limit-point of visual art’s rivalry with the historical force of fashion; but Salavon’s art points to a way, two and a half centuries later, in which we might begin to look from reynolds’s long-foreclosed vantage once again.

Part II 2

The Fictions of Serial History

CHaPter 3

2

Hume, Historical Succession, and the Dress of rousseau

Over the last two decades, David Hume “the historian” has attracted renewed attention for his place in the emergence of a recognizably modern historiographical practice in eighteenth-century Britain,1 especially through his adaptation of “classical understandings of history to the needs of a modern, commercial, and increasingly middle-class society.”2 as Mark Salber Phillips has shown, Hume’s celebrated sentimental treatment of the regicide of “poor King Charles” in the History of England transforms a public political trauma into an occasion for private feeling. Hume’s express hope is that Mrs. Mure, the woman who is perhaps the History of England’s most famous reader, will feel “sorry” for Charles. For Phillips this episode succinctly encapsulates how “for the first time, evocation became an important goal of historical narrative, and sympathetic identification came to be seen as one of the pleasures of historical reading.”3 Much like Mrs. Mure, who is an ideal type of the eighteenthcentury spectator of historiography (“both impartial and sympathetic, rational and feeling”),4 Hume himself recounted in his deathbed autobiography that he had, in the History of England, “presumed to shed a [single] generous tear for the fate of Charles I.”5 But the pleasures and power of Hume’s distinctly commercial historiography were not limited to processes of sympathetic identification. In this chapter I argue that his confrontations with novelty were just as fundamental to the modernity of his history as was his production of sympathy, and that Hume understands the potentially destabilizing cultivation of novelty to be one of the offices of the historian. In part Hume’s renewed historiography solicited a commercial audience growing attuned to a dependable procession of novelty in any number of cultural domains. More fundamentally, Hume also found in

130

The Fictions of Serial History

novelty a template for a distinctly modern kind of historical change, through which the course of history itself might be made to conform to commercial imperatives.6 While the History of England addressed the commercial nation by claiming an enabling historical distance from the impassioned faction of civil war, Hume also sought the kind of social mechanism that could assure the peaceful succession of the present order and suppress the atavistic violence that always threatened to resurge in the absence of such a mechanism.7 Hume composed his autobiographical text “My Own Life,” intended to be affixed to all future editions of his works, from a position roughly equivalent to that of the distant historian, that is, after nearly all the requisite events had occurred, at the end of his lifetime.8 this brief and strongly unified autobiography notably dispensed with any materials (like the physiological distresses of authorship that Hume’s youthful writings memorably registered) that might qualify the stoic composure of his maturity. and in an explicitly historiographical flourish, Hume “conclud[es] historically with my own character,” so that the form of the essay follows the convention of describing the “character” of a ruling monarch at the close of a chronological rehearsal of events. But the text’s conspicuous inclusion of a more singular occurrence implicates Hume’s life in a more unsolvable violation of its coherence. His coming into fashion in Paris is explicitly an instance of a finally inscrutable phenomenon, the consequence of what he calls “the strange effects of modes,” which were evident in the reception he met with in Paris “from men and women of all ranks and stations” (E, xxxix). Notably, the “strange effects of modes” stand in contradiction to one of Hume’s central precepts of social-historical analysis, as articulated in his essay “Of the rise and Progress of the arts and Sciences”: “What depends upon a few persons is, in a great measure, to be ascribed to chance, or secret and unknown causes: What arises from a great number, may often be accounted for by determinate and known causes” (E, 112). the rise of a fashionable mode finally “depends” upon the many who choose to adopt it. and yet such modes (especially in dress) are peculiarly subject to chance. For Hume they proceed from causes indeterminate and unknowable; they are, in a word, “strange.” thus while Hume conspicuously elides most inconsistencies of personal identity (or the ways in which his past self might not correspond with his present self ), discontinuity remains very present in the effects of social commerce, which defies narration and its ordinarily causal logic in more unreachable ways. and tellingly, Hume’s autobiography does not merely include the effects of fashion but hesitantly delights in them. In part, of course, invoking the “strange effects of modes” allows Hume modestly to enjoy his triumph in

Hume, Historical Succession, and rousseau

131

France because he can disavow the acclaim he receives as unmerited. His “ruling passion,” he confesses, was always his “love of literary fame” (E, xl). Yet this seems insufficient to explain the destabilizing presence of these strange effects, and the pleasure they induce, in a project of extraordinarily possessive individualism—“My Own Life.” In an essay that is a model of concision, these effects mark an uncharacteristic and indulgent diversion from autobiographical purposefulness. For a moment, at least, Hume is uncontrollably buffeted by forces of commerce and fashion that he cannot explain let alone subsume within his identity; Hume’s “life” and inner reflections give themselves over to the successions of the external world of social commerce. the episode in “My Own Life” finally suggests the larger way in which fashion and its strange effects were an absent center for Hume’s literary and historical projects as well as for his vision of the British commercial nation. In this chapter, I begin with a broad account of the commercialist qualities of Hume’s history by tracing the links between his historiographical theory and the more general workings of his commercial and perceptual epistemology of “succession.” I then move from Hume’s signal early essay “Of the Study of History,” with its transhistorical vision of fashionable scandal, to the extraordinary social episode of Hume’s ill-fated encounter with Jean-Jacques rousseau. I follow the broad contours of Jerome Christensen’s sense that Hume “attempts to transform [rousseau from] an imaginary being sustained only by [his own] eloquence into an economic being maintained by Hume’s connections.”9 But I also explain why this intervention proceeds through a confrontation with rousseau’s unconventional costume and through a project to capture a portrait of rousseau that would secure the reproducibility of this dress. Within this emblematic encounter with rousseau, but also throughout the many facets of Hume’s career, I retrace Hume’s consistent efforts to generate something like a state of fashion that could sustain the commercial order of history his writings strove to realize.

a Succession of Changeable Objects taken together, Hume’s writings characteristically muddle the boundaries between the “succession” of sensations in the mind and the succession of historical eras in human history—but also, as I will suggest, between revolutions in style and revolutions of state. an emblematic passage in the Treatise of Human Nature insists that “time in its first appearance to the mind is always conjoin’d

132

The Fictions of Serial History

with a succession of changeable objects, and that otherwise it can never fall under our notice.”10 While Hume is overtly describing mental processes of perception, one is also struck by the potential implication of a distinctively commercial perception of historical time. For Humean subjects—but also for British commercial society—“Wherever we have no successive perceptions, we have no notion of time, even tho’ there be a real succession in the objects. . . . time cannot make its appearance to the mind, either alone, or attended with a steady unchangeable object, but is always discover’d by some perceivable succession of changeable objects.”11 as the eighteenth century unfolded, commercial culture not only produced unprecedentedly rapid material “successions” but also brought the “succession[s] of changeable objects” into irresistible perception, most paradigmatically through visual reproductions of fashionable dress that recast social flux into serial styles. Hume’s distinctly punctuated account of the mind, then, is peculiarly suited to the new order of succession that fashionable commerce delivered to British apprehension. In this sense he is a representative figure of commercial modernity: the programmatic visionary conjoining empirical perception and commercial alteration whom this world must inevitably have produced. an allegorical reading of Hume’s departures from John Locke makes the commercial implications of the category of succession for Hume especially clear. Locke’s earlier account of the perception of duration in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) was composed in a moment still profoundly scarred by its proximity to civil war. Significantly, Locke dwells emphatically on the way “the sense of succession is lost” in scenes of violence: “Let a cannon-bullet pass through a room, and in its way take with it any limb, or fleshy parts of a man; it is as clear as any demonstration can be, that it must strike successively the two sides of the room. It is also evident, that it must touch one part of the flesh first, and another after, and so in succession: and yet I believe nobody, who ever felt the pain of such a shot, or heard the blow against the two distant walls, could perceive any succession either in the pain or sound of so swift a stroke.”12 Here, as Hume might have read the scene, it is not just velocity but also violence that precludes the possibility of perceiving succession. In a prescient gesture toward industrial commerce (a world of material competition rather than martial conflict), Hume replaced the example of the imperceptible bullet with a “burning coal,” “wheel[ed] . . . with rapidity” so that one perceived only a glowing circle of productive rather than destructive capacity. In this way, Hume closed up the wound that Locke had introduced into successions unperceived.13 as a historian, Hume inherited

Hume, Historical Succession, and rousseau

133

from Locke’s graphic staging of violence (a condition where perceiving succession becomes impossible) a conviction about the urgency of stabilizing succession (in all the many valences of that term) as an ideological project for the post-1688 British nation. My broad impulse to align Hume’s history “of what passes in a man’s own mind” (to borrow a phrase from tristram Shandy’s account of Locke’s Essay)14 with the history of Britain takes its impetus from Hume’s frequent refusals to acknowledge methodological distinctions of scale, or to grant special status to the phenomenological condition. His treatments of alternately minute and vast subject matter—ranging from fleeting mental impressions to seventeen hundred years of english history—often observe remarkably similar protocols, so that something like an idealist examination of the mind also maps larger social formations, knowledges, and practices.15 as robin Valenza explains, for instance, “Hume sought patterns for his own literary narrative in the endlessly self-revising cognitive processes of the human mind itself,” and vice versa.16 Far from fundamentally destabilizing identity, “cases when the narrative process breaks down” only make clear how selfhood ordinarily operates: through an “unconscious habit of narrating a sequence of perceptions into a single identity.”17 For Hume, just as the mind and written narration performed the same essential movements, authorship itself promised to pattern a wider social order. as a “man of letters,” Hume embraced a “social identity” (very much in tune with his account of personal identity) that was “at every point congruent with the marvelously adaptive idea of society that Hume composed in his works”—one that was always in various ways provisional or textualized: written rather than embodied, conversational rather than oratorical, reflectively deferred rather than rhetorically insistent.18 In A Treatise of Human Nature, the specifically historiographical resonance of Hume’s shuttling between orders of explanation is nowhere more obvious than in his much-noted defense of historical evidence, where print commerce essentially guarantees for posterity a reliable knowledge of Julius Caesar as a real historical figure. Here, Christensen points out, Hume confounds categories we would ordinarily hold distinct by “equat[ing] an appeal to the testimony of sense data with historical knowledge.”19 the invocations of history and of Caesar, in other words, would seem to be puzzling category departures from the more abstractly phenomenological problem at hand (namely, that in long chains of reasoning, the force of proof “degenerates insensibly” into the weaker conviction of probability). One might expect, Hume argues, that any evidence of ancient history should by now be lost from “pass-

134

The Fictions of Serial History

ing thro’ many millions of causes and effects and thro’ a chain of arguments of almost immeasurable length.” and even after a supposed fact is finally committed to writing, “each new copy is a new object.” For Hume, though, “It seems contrary to common sense to think, that if the republic of letters and the art of printing continue on the same footing as at present, our own posterity, even after a thousand ages, can doubt that there has been such a man as Julius Caesar.”20 Here, “belief,” or the conviction of a continuous chain of evidence, can be stabilized (even in retrospect) through technological reproduction; and modern print commerce can rescue Caesar from potential obscurity. as Christensen notes, “It is as if, like the republic of letters, which is a general, transhistorical corporate body, the art of printing antedates the invention of the press”; and “Hume [anachronistically] reads back the features of the press onto history in general in order to characterize a history in which nothing changes, in which no discontinuity has occurred or can happen—as long as there are cognoscenti to practice their art of preservation.”21 Most fundamentally, “Hume’s redemption of the ancient past from decay involves a denial of any alterity in the past,” and that denial is the condition of the past’s perpetuation in the present.22 there is a long reception tradition of Hume that would find this denial of alterity unsurprising—predictably characteristic of an enlightenment figure pursuing what r. G. Collingwood calls a “science of human nature,” for which all times are the self-same laboratory.23 But it is instructive to recall Collingwood’s attention to Hume’s characteristic inability to sustain interest (for himself, for others) in those pasts that preceded the polite and rational project of commercialism. For Collingwood, in other words, Hume finally was “not sufficiently interested in history for its own sake to persevere in the task of reconstructing the history of obscure and remote periods. . . . [He] only began to be interested in history at the point where it began to be the history of a modern spirit akin to [his] own, a scientific spirit. In economic terms this meant the spirit of modern industry and commerce.”24 this uninterest makes clearer how Hume’s anachronistic extension of the art of printing to classical antiquity was a necessary anachronism for Hume and his readers, requisite to forging a past that could compel present attention. Moreover, Hume found that changing circumstances “led to different expressions of emotions and dispositions,” which resulted in something very like a fundamental change in human nature—a difference “so great . . . that the cultivated historian cannot understand the actions which flow from barbarous human nature.”25 Given this gap of passions and understanding, it was only the phanstasmal projection of

Hume, Historical Succession, and rousseau

135

modern commercial life, its arts and its fashions, that could make the past of interest to modern conversation and to the social order it instantiated.

agreeable entertainment the project that underlies Hume’s odd extension of print commerce (and its definitive repeatability) into ancient history in the Treatise, I think, finds a fuller articulation in Hume’s early essay “Of the Study of History,” composed shortly after the Treatise in 1741. By adapting classical history for a commercial—and specifically female—audience, Hume’s essay to a point fits comfortably within Phillips’s conceptualization of a middle-class readership learning the pleasures of historical sympathy. Yet as with Caesar, the wry equation of ancient deviance and modern scandal in “Of the Study of History” is a selfconscious, commercializing anachronism. Hume conspicuously departs from a “science of human nature” by positing the undeniably contingent qualities of fashionable modern life and its literary genres as a universal template of human passions.26 at the same time, as the new custodians of a distinctively commercial vision of history, Hume’s women readers thoroughly displace the more capacious universality of experience entailed in the idea of the “customary” (as exemplified by the erudite cognoscenti in the Treatise who at least in part preserve the many manifestations of custom throughout time). Instead of pursuing the broad variance of human culture, Hume defiantly levels ancient and modern experience through fashion. “Of the Study of History” aims to convince “female readers” that classical historiography offers all the pleasures of the scandalous fictional romance with which they are already familiar, while also supplementing the apocryphal quality of present-day scandal with the force or the gravity of historical truth. While naïve women readers misunderstand the sexual intrigue of their “cotemporaries” [sic] (that is, the subject matter of the contemporary fictional genre of secret history) to be a distinctly modern phenomenon, Hume insists that the ancient scene of experience should be understood to be composed of the same essential materials.27 real history, as Hume reconceives it here, has always already operated in just the way fashionable life does now. In Hume’s usage here, “secret history” invokes primarily the present-day “intrigue that this city has produced of late years” in the sense of the roman à clef and amatory fiction. But the phrase also resonates with the old genre of historical romance that traced the sexual intrigues and unofficial lives of known historical

136

The Fictions of Serial History

actors—in private realms with an unknowable but powerful effect upon actual historical events.28 Hume demonstrates the error of these women’s misperception of the nonmodernity of ancient history by a cursory survey of classical sex scandals, which historians themselves “whisper” about. Strikingly, these historians make ancient persons the objects of their own, present gossip and thereby enact the romance mode relegated to the margins of their own dignified practice of historiography. Why should women not prefer, Hume wonders, to learn “that CatO’s sister had an intrigue with CaeSar, and palmed her son, MarCUS BrUtUS, upon her husband for his own, tho’ in reality he was her gallant’s? and are not the loves of MeSaLLINa or JULIa as proper subjects of discourse as any intrigue that this city has produced of late years?” (E, 564–65). Notably, in celebrating sexual intrigue as a formula, Hume places a rather low priority on sympathetic identification. this is a significant divergence from Hume’s sentimental impulses in the History of England, and the divergence points ahead to the limits of sympathy even within that later project. the early vision of historiography in “Of the Study of History” thus projects a past without alterity but does so in a way Hume understands to be peculiarly affecting to modern female readers. the premise of the essay is that Hume has tricked an innocent young woman into perusing real history (in Plutarch’s Lives) under the mistaken impression that it was fictional romance. She reads eagerly until she comes to the unmistakably historical names of Caesar and alexander, which alert her to Hume’s deception. Notably, the revelatory charge of the essay entirely depends upon Hume’s construction of an imagined, novice reader whose first encounter with known historical facts precisely destabilizes the status of the past as that which has already happened. For Hume’s naïve reader, the appeal of the “intrigues” of history can temporarily equal the allure of present day scandal in part because these intrigues are new to her. they are not known already as history, in large part because they are not the kind of history that is what everyone already knows. Ultimately, this subtle movement begins to recast history as a reservoir of the same kind of new material that filled modern scandal sheets and romances in order to meet the desires of a commercial audience for novel content. Hume soon disclaims the provoking “raillery against the ladies” in which he engages above. But even when “Of the Study of History” turns away from this arch equation of historical events and fashionable modern scandals, Hume’s more earnest advocacy for historical study interpellates a readership of passive consumers who will carry forward the same, essential sense of history

Hume, Historical Succession, and rousseau

137

as novel entertainment: “What more agreeable entertainment to the mind,” Hume wonders, “than to be transported into the remotest ages of the world, and to observe human society, in its infancy, making the first faint essays toward the arts and sciences: to see the policy of government, and the civility of conversation refining by degrees, and every thing which is ornamental to human life advancing towards its perfection” (E, 565–66). the audience Hume imagines for this transporting survey of human development continues to be pronouncedly feminine, taking a maternal interest in the “infancy” of society and in the “faint essays” toward greater intellectual pursuits that much resemble the early education of children. Likewise these “female readers”—the “Sovereigns of the empire of Conversation” (E, 535) and arbiters of taste—can also observe the minority of their present-day purview in the slow ascent of the “civility of conversation” and the “ornamental.”29 the history Hume promotes here not only delivers the “secret commerce” (in Hume’s phrase) of modern love, but also gives broader license to read the past in terms of present day desire. Hume instructs modern women to read ancient history in terms of their own “secret history,” or to see the illicitly private as a constant feature of human experience; and he structures human history in cycles, as a sequence of charmingly varied empires that is finally a commercializing spectacle of history itself. the initial overview of history “advancing towards its perfection” provides a fleeting glimpse of progress, but Hume cannot imagine such progress without a backdrop of change less amenable to perfectibility. Instead he requires another trajectory that maps more closely onto the commercial order of succession or repetition. Specifically, Hume emphasizes the attraction of “remark[ing] the rise, progress, declension, and final extinction of the most flourishing empires” (E, 566). In a reflection of the most fundamental logic of commercial succession, Hume expects his readers of history to take pleasure in the larger systematic cycle of empires rising and falling. the very term “progress” is relegated to a place within each passing cycle, a phase suspended between “rise” and “declension.” In this way progress marks neither growth nor death but a mere, ordinary series of happenings. at the same time, the teleologically empty series of empires “pass[es], as it were, in review before us,” so that these societies reassemble themselves at the whim of the reader. rather than immersive sympathy or identification, Hume embraces a fundamental distance from the past that offers clarity at the expense of alienation. through history, people of the past “appea[r] in their true colours, without any of those disguises” they bore in life. For authors and

138

The Fictions of Serial History

readers alike, the historiographical vision lies fundamentally apart from the subjects who have experienced that history. Hume’s subsequent History of England finally works similarly in placing “little emphasis upon court intrigues and military prowess. It sees events, above all, from the point of view of the intelligent spectator, not the participant, just as its readers are expected to be spectators.”30 But “Of the Study of History” more conspicuously aligns this spectatorial position with the particularity of modern life. In Hume’s own summation, “What spectacle can be imagined, so magnificent, so various, so interesting? What amusement, either of the senses or imagination can be compared with it?” (E, 566). the formulation puts the potential gravity of historical spectacle fully in the service of amusement, as diversion or recreation, and also moves from the potential publicity of spectacle toward an interior world of sensory and imaginative entertainments. In a way that illuminates the distinctness of Hume’s history, his historiographical speculations contrast strikingly with those of Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, whose nearly contemporaneous Letters on the Study and Use of History (written in 1735) combine an unreconstructed notion that “history is philosophy teaching by examples” with censure of the leisured historical pursuits of the parlor: “the motives that carry men to the study of history are different. Some intend, if such as they may be said to study, nothing more than amusement, and read the life of arIStIDeS or PHOCION, of ePaMINONDaS or SCIPIO, aLeXaNDer or CaeSar, just as they play a game at cards.”31 Beyond censuring history as amusement, Bolingbroke even more essentially diverges from Hume by placing his faith in the evocative power of causation itself. In contrast to Hume’s serial cycle of empires passing “in review,” Bolingbroke endorses “the more entire as well as more authentic histories of ages more modern.” these modern times appeal not by their proximity but rather by their completeness: they offer “many a complete series of events, preceded by a deduction of their immediate and remote causes, related in their full extent, and accompanied with such a detail of circumstances, and characters, as may transport the attentive reader back to the very time, make him a party to the councils, and an actor in the whole scene of affairs.”32 Hume’s countervailing vision in “Of the Study of History” precisely detours from the scrupulous recovery of causal sequences of the sort that Bolingbroke presumes will reproduce the perspective of historical actors. as a modern entertainment, Humean historiography is a striking analogue of fiction at this moment. Notably, the publication of Hume’s early historical essay in 1741 very nearly coincided with what William Warner calls

Hume, Historical Succession, and rousseau

139

the “Pamela media event,” which began in 1740 with the publication of Samuel richardson’s novel. the event, for Warner, soon instituted a recognizably modern literary culture in england, where exceptional texts of genius or virtue claimed to rise above the unregulated excess of the wider marketplace, yet they parasitically depended upon that wider marketplace to demarcate their own exceptionality. Despite Hume’s willingness to taint dignified historiography with the brush of scandal, in the qualified pleasure he outlines, Hume’s essay closely parallels Pamela. Like the dangerous novel reading that richardson’s novel redeems (by regulating or licensing but also to some extent legitimizing the libidinous appeal of mass cult fiction),33 Hume’s historiography works by co-opting more subversive modern energies to become the sort of “agreeable entertainment” which is also personally improving, as an “invention, which extends our experience to all past ages” (E, 566).34 In this way Hume co-opts the pleasures of “secret history” for true history. He incorporates them at the bottom of a hierarchy of historiographical pleasures but nevertheless within that broader historiographical enterprise. In this sense Hume’s regulation of pleasure comes with the compensation of the dignified stature of the history reader, who can still attend to once illicit subject matter as a side project. In the process, Hume finally subjugates a more fundamentally feminine account of history that would prioritize what cannot be known about historical events, or those secret machinations and ephemeral whispers behind the throne that governed history in ways that the professional historian (that is, the specialist who would supply new histories on behalf of female consumers) could not reliably recover. In banishing these illicit causes from proper historiography, Hume reassigned inscrutable causation from unsurveilled private spaces to the marketplace, where fashions emerged in more spontaneous succession.

revolutions of taste I have argued for the unified commercialization of mind and history in Hume, especially as this synthetic project coalesced within his historiographical thought. In what follows, I consider how Hume addressed fashion itself as an aperture onto the nature of history’s modern successions and as a mechanism for sustaining them. aligning Hume’s early theorization of commercial historiography with his practice of characterization at first glance makes the “denial[s] of alterity” in the Treatise of Human Nature and “Of the Study of History” seem somewhat less remarkable. Whether in autobiography or in accounts of

140

The Fictions of Serial History

the “character” of historical figures (as well as, perhaps, in the “life” of nations themselves), Hume’s purpose remains the closed construction of homogenous identity rather than the open exhibition of growth and change that became a defining feature of modern characterization at the end of the century.35 Fundamentally, as Valenza observes, “Humean narration is about knowing how the story turns out and, although telling the story in chronological order, always doing so with the eventual ending present in every moment of the telling, stamping a particular, fixed character on the narrative.”36 Hume’s historical characters, then, are particularly apt staging grounds for coherence, for they allow him to write with full knowledge of “how the story turns out,” in a stance secure from rupture and revision. In many ways the “continuous present” of commerce that Hume projects is a near analogue of personal (or characterological) identity, for normal change raises the same problem of (in)consistency across time. But the threat of discontinuity embodied in commercial change is further complicated by the unavoidable necessity of such change for social productivity. In commercial life, consistency itself threatens to produce a debilitating stasis. as Christensen explains, there is a “tension” that “inheres” for Hume “in that ostensible strain between the notion of a ‘continuous present’ and ‘devices of repetition.’ ” repetition inevitably presupposes interruption; and the generative possibilities of the moment of interruption (renewal, elaboration, or improvement that can “prevent stasis”) come at the risk, on every occasion, of going awry (or “disrupt[ing] the orderly operation of the mechanism”) by producing difference fundamental enough to break the links in a serial sequence.37 today we have refined a conviction that that the cycles of fashion and commodified culture constitute a rhythm of inconsequential articulation that precisely “evade[s] imagined difference and real discontinuity” in a way that might seem to serve Hume’s project.38 Hume himself expressed worry about inconsequential change, in a way that invites more careful thought about how he understands the utility of fashion’s rhythms. Just as we must not “throw aside the portraits of our ancestors, because of their ruffs and fardingales,” Hume suggests in “Of the Standard of taste,” we must not devalue poetry because of “innocent peculiarities of manners,” for “were men to make no allowance for the continual revolutions of manners and customs,” we could “admit of nothing but what was suitable to the prevailing fashion” (E, 246). Crucially, the point is to preserve an escape mechanism from the commercial present. In part the obsolete clothing in portraits serves as a fundamental sign of arbitrary cultural change, or an index of the broader transformations of

Hume, Historical Succession, and rousseau

141

“manners” that should be distinguished from more essential meaning or aesthetic value. Only the ability to begin to distinguish between what is and what is not essential—a capacity learned in everyday experience, he implies, from dress—renders the outmoded portrait legible at all and prevents it from being discarded. Conspicuously arbitrary, dress thereby becomes a prompt to engage in historical sympathy, as the initial sign of more substantive continuities or conjunctions between past and present that might be recovered with deliberate effort. In this sense old fashions are absolutely necessary to prevent the present from falling prey to a wholesale solipsism of “prevailing fashion,” from which prior “successions” of culture would appear wholly worthless or opaque rather than in need of conscientious sifting. In a way that draws this insight back toward Hume’s commercialism, however, persistent signs of arbitrary change also allow the present to understand its place within an ordinary sequence of “continual revolutions” that must not be misrecognized as disruptions of a “continuous present.” Hume’s construction of the identity of commercial society across time, then, bears a close resemblance to his account of the continuity of persons—a forceful but powerful vision in retrospect that gives a reassuring formal unity, in this case a structural one, to the flux of experience. When “admitted” under the dispensation of history, the dress in old portraits perpetuates the variation of culture as serial articulation and, therefore, secures a fundamental unity of modern life. Notably, Hume’s glancing invocation of portrait dress partakes in a wider philosophical conversation about “taste” that links him to his friend the artist allan ramsay, subsequently (as I will show) Hume’s close collaborator in securing a monumental portrait of rousseau. ramsay’s account of fashion in his Dialogue on Taste (1755) drew upon his firsthand familiarity with the praxis of portraiture and extended the lessons of the painted ruffs and farthingales to which Hume pointed. In a dialogue staged at the estate of “Lord and Lady Modish,” ramsay explicitly suggests that fashion cycles manifest the essential form and character of the wider “revolutions” of human culture: “the progress of fashion in dress, and the feelings which are the consequence of that progress, being the most familiar, and having at the same time the quickest revolutions, are of all others the fittest to explain the nature of fashion in general.”39 Here, by “fashion in general” ramsay has in mind the incredibly capacious sense that Hume extended as far as the successively exploded systems of science and philosophy (“nothing has proved more liable to the revolutions of chance and fashion,” Hume argued, than these domains [E, 242]).40 In this

142

The Fictions of Serial History

way the seemingly epiphenomenal “ruffs and fardingales” of any moment finally model the fate of whole systems of culture.41 In an echo of Hume’s commercial-perceptual “successions,” ramsay’s attention to the “feelings” provoked by encounters with fashion cycles insists that the quick revolutions of dress play upon the mind itself. to “feel” a change of fashion equips the mind to address cultural productions that evolve on a much vaster scale of time: “the fashions in building, tho’ more durable than those in dress, are not for that the less fashions, and are equally subject to change. But as stones and bricks are more lasting than silks and velvet, and as people do not make up churches and palaces so often as they do coats and capuchines, we must have recourse to history for the knowledge of those changes, which we can learn but very imperfectly from our own proper experience.”42 Here ramsay exhibits a characteristically Humean movement from perceptual experience (of dress) to historical knowledge (of architecture). In this extraordinary transposition of modern commercial life, the history of aesthetics over the course of many centuries comes home to experience through “feelings which are the consequence” of the readily perceivable succession of present-day dress fashions.43 as the wider dialogue suggests, fashion-driven refinements of attention to arbitrary change supplied indispensable resources to historical perception and to the recovery of historical contingency that more obviously causal change, or the real political economy of nations, did not as readily provide.44

the armenian Habit If there is an emblematic figure of antagonism toward the grand project of commercialism and its reordering of history, it is Jean-Jacques rousseau, whose stance ironically became the height of fashion in the mid- to late eighteenth century.45 In his celebrated Letter to D’Alembert, rousseau explicitly rebuked “the taste for luxury, dress, and idle dissipation” of his fellow citizens of Geneva in a way that expressed his “obsessive worries” not just about theater, but also about “display, commerce, and fashion” more generally as these problems became newly inescapable.46 and where Hume upheld the instructive potential of the kind of sociable entertainment his historiography provided, rousseau marked instead the corrosive effects of the “continual emotions” generated by modern entertainments. Hume’s solicitation of generous tears via historiography might well be implicated in this kind of excess, all

Hume, Historical Succession, and rousseau

143

the more for the way Hume extended the “continual emotion” of the present to all times in history. rousseau’s specific antagonism toward British commercial modernity grew clearer in the course of the uneasy and fleeting alliance between himself and Hume, during Hume’s ill-fated attempt to rescue rousseau from an increasingly hostile political climate on the Continent.47 In December 1765, Hume, having been a much-celebrated resident of Paris for two years, met rousseau there. at the urging of the salonnière Madame de Boufflers, Hume escorted rousseau across the Channel to england the following year. rousseau went first to London, where he was received with great acclaim, and subsequently (upon rousseau’s growing displeasure with the town and his desire for greater solitude) to the village of Chiswick, before rousseau finally removed to the unoccupied country house of richard Davenport. But Hume’s ostensibly benevolent efforts to obtain a pension and other assistance for rousseau only met with rousseau’s increasingly paranoid detections of conspiracy against his honor. eventually, rousseau’s accusatory stance precipitated an increasingly acrimonious quarrel with Hume, first in person and then in print. Most of the illustrious literary figures of the moment (including Diderot, D’alembert, Voltaire, Horace Walpole, and others) sooner or later weighed in on the controversy. From the beginning, rousseau’s denunciation of commercial modernity had taken his own dress as a preeminent sign of his dissent. In 1751 following a dangerous illness, rousseau recalled, he had resigned his employment in France and marked this fundamental transformation with a literal act of divestment: “I began my reform with my finery. I gave up my gold trimmings and white stockings, I took a short wig, I laid aside my sword, I sold my watch.” as he later describes the same act, “I left le monde and its pomp. I renounced all finery: no more sword, no more white stockings, gold trimmings, hairdo” but instead only “a simple wig and clothes of good rough wool.”48 In what follows I am especially interested in the French philosopher’s most visible reformed ensemble: the armenian dress that eventually took the place of his former finery and in various ways clinched his infamy among his increasingly hostile contemporaries. In Britain, as had already been the case in France, the armenian dress of rousseau became an object of strangely intense scrutiny. and with its distinctive fur hat and fur trim, the same wardrobe occupied an elusive but prominent place in Hume’s letters. In his curious efforts to manage this costume, I argue, Hume directed a project to make not only this counterstyle, but also

144

The Fictions of Serial History

rousseau himself, into a fashion. Hume did so especially by taking charge of the production and distribution of rousseau’s portrait, which the painter allan ramsay completed at Hume’s request. as I will explain, the prominence of fashionable dress in the accounts of ordinary change offered by Hume begins to explain why, in the encounters with and resistances to rousseau among Hume and his circle, dress and its visual reproduction featured in such an overdetermined way. In a letter to Madame de Boufflers that Hume composed upon arriving in London with his famous guest, Hume dismissively invoked the ongoing project that would become rousseau’s Confessions: “I believe, that he intends seriously to draw his own picture in its true colours: but I believe at the same time that nobody knows himself less.”49 rousseau’s lack of self-knowledge, Hume implies, required that a more apt picture be drawn from without; and Hume himself undertook the task—figuratively in his letters but also literally in his active commissioning, reproduction, and distribution of rousseau’s painted image. remarkably, Hume’s insistence upon rousseau’s sitting for a portrait directly contradicted his own, autobiographical avoidance of the same mode.50 Hume himself had specifically resisted the publisher andrew Millar’s request that he consult with allan ramsay about an engraving of his own “head”: “I am indeed averse,” Hume claimed, “to the prefixing a Print of the author, as savouring of Vanity” (L, 2:98). Now, however, Hume desired to have a portrait painted on rousseau’s behalf that would conspicuously include the armenian costume. Hume’s initial account of rousseau’s distinctive costume presents it as a paradoxical gesture: “His wearing the armenian dress is a pure whim, which, however, he is resolved never to abandon” (L, 2:2). the more ordinary whim of Hume’s commercial world is one that—like the “changes,” “alterations,” and “revolutions” that so typify its operations—cannot endure and must give way to successors. In this way the whim seems a correlate of “the strange effects of modes” that Hume confronts in Paris in “My Own Life”—with their consequence out of all proportion to what causes them. Such effects derive their power from the very insufficiency of causes, from an under-motivation, but at the expense of duration. Modes do not last. Yet rousseau’s contradiction is to “resolv[e] never to abandon” his armenian dress, to ground the course of his future conduct in an arbitrary costume.51 In dramatic contrast to the “continuous present” that a Humean succession of fashions would secure, rousseau dons his “long robe” with monastic finality. In rousseau’s own terms, “I took the armenian habit.”52 rousseau thus adopts a fundamental antifashion, a distinctive dress that borrows its allure from unbending opposition to the very struc-

Hume, Historical Succession, and rousseau

145

ture of ongoing change. this stance possesses unprecedented meaning against the backdrop of the onset of commercial print-cultural fashion. In a reflection of his own commitment to commercialization as a political program, Hume insinuates that rousseau’s stubborn persistence in one singular dress predisposed the French philosopher—and by extension the larger orientation toward the commercial world that rousseau and his philosophy figured—to becoming victim to absolutism. Strikingly, Hume’s letters stage this problem by recurring to the idiom of secret history that had so preoccupied Hume’s “Of the Study of History,” and thus to the unknown causes behind the scenes that especially relate to women’s sexual agency (as expressed in private recesses of power rather than in collectively scrutinized spaces of social life). the foremost sign of rousseau’s vulnerability is his relationship to his mistress thérèse Le Vasseur—in Hume’s words “the chief encumbrance to his settlement” in Britain. rousseau himself “owns her to be so dull, that she never knows in what year of the Lord she is, nor in what month of the year, nor in what day of the month or week; and that she can never learn the different value of the pieces of money in any country. Yet she governs him as absolutely as a nurse does a child” (L, 2:3). In a way that connects her to rousseau’s defiantly persistent costume (an arbitrary but fixed gesture of resignation from fashionable commerce), Le Vasseur’s peculiarly absolute governance of rousseau seems to Hume somehow paradoxically a function of her allied and distinctively anticommercial inattention to capital (or the fluctuating value of currency) and to the calendar. Moreover, Le Vasseur’s reputation for “wicked[ness]” suggests that there is more art than innocence to her enactment of temporal dislocation in the presence of rousseau; when Hume comes to know her in person, he finds her “more clever than she had been represented” (L, 2:16). “Governed” as he is by Le Vasseur, rousseau (with his customary dress and his antimodern philosophy) threatened a return to the noncommercial temporal order that obtained in Britain as recently as the prior decade, before the New Style calendar had secured what one contemporary called a “trading correspondence” (with the implication of shared time or simultaneity as much as communicative exchange) through which Britain overturned a legacy of “calendrical insularity and idiosyncrasy” and aligned its “future time” with that of the Continent. 53 and tellingly, Hume’s countervailing project to reform rousseau began with his efforts to secure for rousseau a regularly dispensed pension from the english monarch—and so to recover rousseau, along with his resistant costume, into an order of stable financial and calendrical succession.

146

The Fictions of Serial History

the singular modernity of rousseau’s armenian costume was peculiarly evident to Hume and derived from its unique straddling of the tension between rooted, customary dress and the linear-historical succession of styles that Hume’s own thinking foregrounded, as in the case of Hume’s glancing address of the portrait “ruffs and fardingales” of a prior epoch. In this sense rousseau’s dress drew, however consciously, upon more general dynamics of the moment. I previously discussed, for instance, The French Lady in London; Or, the Head-Dress, for the Year, 1771 (1770), where a woman’s clumsy maneuvering of her unwieldy, high hairstyle through a doorway scatters man and beast alike as she enters the room (see Figure 21). a subsequent version of this plate, published in the following year of 1771, called attention to a change of fashion that had intervened by depicting a new headdress of similarly excessive height. While much of the plate remains the same, a significant rupture grows visible in the altered background (Figure 25). Where the prior version had displayed a wall hung with portraits of women dressed in the styles of previous eras (thereby establishing the year’s new dress within a line of succession dating back to ruffs and farthingales), the subsequent version changes the backdrop into a large painting entitled Representation of the Peak of Teneriffe, and so delivers a visual pun on the teneriffe lace that now composes the French lady’s precipitous headdress. the depiction of the vertiginous promontory on the Canary Islands where the lace was produced connects the new fashion to the geographical origin of its materials. (there is also, I think, a direct citation of Hume’s essay “Of the Standard of taste,” where teneriffe is a metaphor for the objective errancy of at least some taste: “Whoever would assert an equality of genius and elegance between OGILBY and MILTON, or BUNYAN and aDDISON, would be thought to defend no less an extravagance, than if he had maintained a mole-hill to be as high as tENERIFFE, or a pond as extensive as the ocean” [E, 23–31].) this vision of a synchronic global array of possibilities of style—as against the diachronic succession of dress styles (and private life) that the family portraits suggest—complicates the “serial interruption” upon which Hume’s ideals of commercialization and social organization depended. In these examples the relative fragility of the linear succession of time that dress might uphold and connote is delicately balanced against a world of textile production still residually rooted in customary practice, and thus prone to imagine the geographical rather than historical origins of style. the oscillation of meaning suggests how fashion in this moment threatened to revert to something less conducive to the cultural synchronicity of serial commercial presentness.

FIGURE 25. The French Lady in London, or the Head Dress for the Year 1771 (1771). Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

148

The Fictions of Serial History

rousseau’s initial acquisition of armenian dress was, of course, made possible by a world of commercial exchange, and dependent upon the chance presence of an armenian tailor in rousseau’s neighborhood in France. But rousseau’s dress belonged properly neither to a vision of linear succession nor to a vision of the synchronic array of global production. In contrast to Hume’s ordinary, successive fashions (primarily beholden to inscrutable but reliable process) or even to the more lasting determinations of customary dress (the many possibilities of global inspiration that Western european fashion cycled through), rousseau’s “pure whim” finally represented another possibility entirely. In recognizing how the sheer contingency of rousseau’s sudden and permanent manner of seizing upon the customary imbued it with a charge of the new, Hume perhaps came to a fuller understanding of this act than rousseau himself did. Hume already began to discern, that is, how fashion as style altogether liberated from context (and from the structure of succession for commercial styles) might fuel an event like the French revolution, with its own distinctively modern reinvention of “absolute governance.” there, in a “tiger’s leap,” as Benjamin observed, the revolutionary moment “evoke[d] ancient rome the way fashion evoke[d] the costumes of the past,” and so stepped out of the “continuum” of commercial-historical life that Hume was so keen to instantiate.54

Suspicious of Design In a letter written during the episode of rousseau’s journey to Britain, Hume protested his innocence after rousseau had reproached him for deceit. Unworldly and impecunious, rousseau insisted on traveling simply and paying his own way, whatever the inconvenience. to expedite rousseau’s travels, his host Davenport quietly chartered a coach and misled rousseau about its nature by pretending that a more economical and convenient public retour chaise just happened to be journeying along rousseau’s intended route. Davenport even went so far as to place a false newspaper advertisement in order to carry off the deceit. But rousseau developed “Suspicions of [Mr. Davenport’s] Design” that extended to Hume himself. Hume may or may not have been innocent in the specific case of the coach. Yet while rousseau’s intimations of conspiracy everywhere often approached paranoia, these broader “Suspicions of Design” were well founded, especially because these manipulated circulations of rousseau’s physical person so closely anticipated the circulations of rousseau’s portrait image to come.

Hume, Historical Succession, and rousseau

149

In Britain, with the assistance of ramsay, Hume attempted to reign in rousseau—heretofore “the most singular of all human Beings”—by taking his portrait, and thereby reinscribing this unruly guest as well as his conspicuous costume within the realm of commercial reproducibility (L, 2:28). Hume initially reported, “[rousseau] has sat for his Picture at my Desire: It was to allan ramsay, who has succeeded to admiration, and has made me a most valuable portrait” (L, 2:27).55 In its formal properties, ramsay’s portrait betrayed a unique handling of rousseau’s figure and costume that made the composition an outlier in ramsay’s painterly oeuvre. Douglas Fordham notes how the “broad gestures and atmospheric effects . . . contrast strikingly with the precise handling and delicacy of ramsay’s conventional portraits”; the portrait also “abandoned, quite possibly for the first time in [ramsay’s] career, the use of a vivid red underpainting at the first sitting,” with the result of “leaving the shadowy portion of rousseau’s face just as loose and rough as the background.”56 In one sense, ramsay’s composition thereby complements the dress in which he paints rousseau, for the simplicity of the dress and of the painterly technique alike summon the philosophy of natural man. as a point of contrast, ramsay’s “companion piece” portrait of Hume on the same occasion makes rousseau’s exceptional dress all the more striking, especially because Hume’s own portrait, by contrast, is so conventional, with lavish attention to the rich gold trim and lace of his attire. But there is another way of accounting for ramsay’s looseness of style other than as a faithful expression of rousseau’s simplicity. Notably, the oval vignette effect that ramsay produces via heavy marks or shadowing diminishes a physical gesture by rousseau, who points to his own heart in a seeming pronouncement of sincerity. Foregrounded by the lighting of the picture, the fur hat and trim supplant the philosopher’s gesture; and the larger suggestion is that the content of rousseau’s belief is less urgent than the form of his costume. Moreover, on second glance the stylistic features of ramsay’s portrait begin to look like an anticipation of reproduction. ramsay’s “unprecedented technique suggests that the portrait could have been produced as a template for the reproductive mezzotint” of the same portrait engraved by David Martin: “as the original was painted in deep chiaroscuro with a limited palette, Martin did not have to work hard to accomplish his task. Stated cynically, ramsay’s ‘gift’ to Hume served as a pretext for the reproductive print.”57 this reproduction emphasizes all the more the vignette effect of ramsay’s portrait (and the philosopher’s eclipsed gesture) by heightening the contrast between the dark background and rousseau’s almost radiant fur hat and trim (Figure 26).

FIGURE 26. David Martin, after allan ramsay, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1766). © trustees of the British Museum.

Hume, Historical Succession, and rousseau

151

these visual hints of disingenuousness within the portrait were consistent with a telling discrepancy between Hume’s private letters and his public account of the rousseau controversy. In the public account, Hume directly contradicted his epistolary admission that rousseau sat at Hume’s own “Desire,” and instead attributed the project’s genesis to ramsay: “the design of having Mr. rousseau’s picture drawn did not come from me, nor did it cost me anything.”58 But Hume’s role in the portrait project was the primary one; and he took a special and personal interest in distributing the resulting engravings. He wrote to Madame de Boufflers that a young man will “deliver to you six prints of rousseau, done from an admirable portrait, which ramsay drew for me. I desire you to accept one of these prints for yourself.” He then entrusted her with giving the remaining copies to five more of rousseau’s “enthusiasts,” for “this trifle will give them satisfaction” (L, 2:45). In this way Hume rendered rousseau’s “whim” of dress a collectible that could sustain conversible society and so constructed rousseau himself as a fashion. Moreover, rousseau’s suspicions might also point to an even cannier project. through the portrait, Hume bound rousseau’s persona to his iconic apparel in the confidence that, like the dress of any fashion plate, the speculation that enlarged rousseau would quickly reverse course. If so, events largely bore out Hume’s confidence. In the aftermath rousseau complained that “this portrait was engraved, published, sold everywhere without it being possible for [me] to see the engraving”;59 he found himself vaguely surrounded by alienated copies of his own image. as antoine Lilti describes rousseau’s reaction, “even though his literary celebrity might have seemed an asset in his struggle against worldly forms of reputation, rousseau now presented it as a trap, a terrible machine that ha[d] multiplied the false images of his person.”60 In his Dialogues, rousseau made clear that he had in mind the quite literal circulation of purposefully distorted portraits of himself. rousseau writes that his “noisy protectors,” including Hume, “had those [many] portraits made with great expense and care. they announced them with pomp in newspapers, in gazettes; they extolled them everywhere.” and as rousseau elaborates, with an increasing sense of intrigue, “I thought I saw peculiarities in this whole story of the portraits which led me to pursue it, and I found, especially for the english portrait, some extraordinary circumstances. David Hume, closely allied in Paris with your Gentlemen not to mention the Ladies, becomes, no one knows how, the patron, zealous protector, and modest excessive benefactor of J.J. [i.e., Jean-Jacques], and in concert with them he finally managed, despite all of J.J.’s reluctance, to lead him to england.”61

152

The Fictions of Serial History

Critics have abundantly recognized the qualities of paranoia in rousseau’s response here, but the intentness with which Hume and ramsay not only insisted upon the portrait but also managed rousseau’s dress during the episode is just as extraordinary. In england, rousseau recalls, Hume’s “first and most important concern is to have the portrait of his public friend J.J. painted by his personal friend ramsay.” Moreover, rousseau registers (or projects upon Hume) an unsettling affective urgency better suited to illicit sexual romance: “[Hume] desired that portrait as ardently as an earnest lover desires that of his mistress.” at the same time rousseau emphasizes how Hume directly supervised the scene in which the portrait was taken: as rousseau recalls, “By dint of importunities, [Hume] extracts J.J.’s consent. J.J. is made to wear a very black hat, a very brown coat, and he is positioned in a very somber place.” When rousseau addresses the allegorical figure of the nation, the “Frenchman” who is his interlocutor in the Dialogues, he declaims, “You saw this terrible portrait.” there is a powerful suggestion here of the national simultaneity achieved via print reproduction precisely at the expense of rousseau’s self, or what Lilti calls the “veritable effort at deformation” that forges rousseau’s public image.62 rousseau rightly recognizes the surprising enormity of the project that victimizes him. Portraits that merely happen to be bad likenesses, he suggests, are not “sold everywhere”: “they are not loudly extolled all over europe, they are not announced in public papers, they are not displayed in residences, adorned with glass and frames.” they do not, in short, penetrate national, public, and private domains with the definitive impunity of Hume’s commercialist design.63 While the foregoing perspective is that of rousseau, a nearly contemporaneous letter betrays some of Hume’s own guilt over putting rousseau’s dress in danger through this project. Due to rousseau’s acute sensibility, Hume recognizes, rousseau “is like a Man who were stript not only of his Cloaths but of his Skin, and turn’d out in that Situation to combat with the rude and boisterous elements, such as perpetually disturb this lower World” (L, 2:29). the language here confounds inclement weather with “rude and boisterous” crowds—those that preoccupy Hume as he frequently registers his disaffection for Wilkite politics, but also those more immediately relevant crowds to whom Hume further exposes rousseau, who insult and jeer at rousseau at the first sign of his ever more recognizable armenian dress. In reproducing and disseminating rousseau’s dress through the mechanisms of print commerce that will render it an unsustainably universal fashion (having attained maximum market saturation, fashions recede), Hume behaves cruelly. Hume is fully cog-

Hume, Historical Succession, and rousseau

153

nizant that dress is rousseau’s sole protection (rousseau having no “skin”). Such a realization makes sense of the pathos in rousseau’s longing enumeration in the Confessions of “the waistcoat, caffetan, fur bonnet and girdle” of his “little armenian wardrobe,” terms of endearment that recollect it as a highly personal possession, and then lament how it can no longer be so.64 Hume’s supervision of rousseau’s portrait makes all the more cynical his subsequent accusation that rousseau is “a Composition of Whim, affectation, Wickedness, Vanity and Inquietude.” these, in short, are traits that Hume actively produces for him, and rousseau’s identity is in a crucial sense Hume’s own composition. as Jennifer M. Jones emphasizes, “the French fashion industry” soon learned to “amend” and “sidestep” the man himself by “repackaging” him and especially his “ideas about women in order to benefit French commerce”—as a purified version of rousseau’s ideas on female adornment sustained precisely the regime of consumption that he meant to contest.65 But Hume already understood in a profound way what the commercial trade of fashion eventually recognized about rousseau’s potential serviceability to the system of fashion itself.

an Original in My Possession When rousseau precipitously returned to France after falling out with his British hosts, Hume recorded with evident satisfaction that “he is not in his armenian dress, so that he may perhaps pass unnoticed,” and so registered the tentative conclusion of an anti-fashion, its conversion into something like an ordinary modern fashion that had seen its day. rousseau trades the “pure whim” he “resolved never to abandon” for “a blue coat made for him at Spalding” (L, 2:140, 2:140n.3). Hume further reports the news that “rousseau was retir’d to some Place in France, and had chang’d his Name and his Dress” (L, 2:168). Back in France, rousseau is further objectified (and recovered into modern fashionability) by rumors of erotic scandal of just the sort through which Hume had connected modern women to classical antiquity in “Of the Study of History.” recounting the events that followed rousseau’s “quit[ting] his armenian dress and resum[ing] the costume of France,” Friedrich Melchior Grimm reported “an impertinent tale . . . put into circulation, which throws a slander upon the virtue of Madame Jean Jacques [i.e., Le Vasseur], and still more upon the taste of him who may have sinned with her. It is said, that her husband, having caught her in the very fact of scandalum magnatum, with a

154

The Fictions of Serial History

monk, instantly quitted the armenian dress.”66 this transparently fictive and overdetermined slander travesties rousseau’s having monastically “taken the armenian habit” in the first place, under a misguided conviction that such finality remained possible in the accommodative ethos of modern commercial life. the actual monk, by contrast, is part and parcel of the scandalous modern world—perhaps akin to Le Vasseur herself, but certainly unlike what rousseau himself had claimed to be in his vow to take the armenian habit. In a way that substantiates Hume’s sense of the fundamental disruption or disorder embodied in rousseau’s armenian costume, Grimm further records how a coercive French state has been similarly preoccupied with the threat of this outlandish, nonmodern wardrobe. Grimm, who gives little credence to the scandalous rumors about La Vasseur, believes “that the hope of being permitted to return to Paris, had more influence in this change of dress than any frolicks of Madame rousseau. the armenian would never have obtained permission to re-appear in the metropolis, but the attorney-General has been prevailed upon to permit Jean Jaques [sic] in the French costume to shew himself. the condition, however, that he should not write, or at least not print any thing, has been rigidly exacted.” these conditions seem to have achieved their desired effect, as rousseau now “goes much into society, particularly among the fair sex, and having thrown off the bear’s-skin, with the armenian habit, he is become mild and gallant.”67 rousseau is denuded of his anticommercial spirit as much as his wardrobe; in retrospect, these two qualities seem very clearly to have somehow constitutively depended upon one another. In Hume’s terms, like the highly punctuated succession of commercial fashions that print culture both recorded and made possible, rousseau (and his dress) became the object of “a more sudden revolution of Fortune than almost ever happend [sic] to any man, at least to any man of Letters” (L, 2:168)—in short, a literary-intellectual fashion.68 at the same time Hume implies that he has done rousseau a kind of favor, for rousseau’s present fall seems like the condition for future ascents. He relates Davenport’s opinion “that these Memoirs [the future Confessions] will be the most taking of all [rousseau’s] Works” (L, 2:168, my emphasis). For the present Hume is content to register rousseau’s fallen stock and his reduced state: “Does not Mde de Montigny laugh at me, that I should have sent her but a few Weeks ago the Portrait of rousseau done from an Original in my Possession and shoud [sic] now send you these Papers, which prove him to be one of the worst Men that perhaps ever existed; if his Frenzy be not some apology for him” (L, 2:81).

Hume, Historical Succession, and rousseau

155

Irresistibly, Hume’s efforts to record this history slide into the realm of the scandal chronicle that he had long ago invoked in “Of the Study of History.” the ambiguity, intentional or otherwise, about which “Original” Hume has in mind (the painting or the exiled French philosopher himself ) potentially implicates Hume in wrongdoing. rousseau would certainly have described himself as having fallen captive to Hume and his machinations; and in this way rousseau cultivates an unsettling resemblance to the similarly captive Pamela (or to the equally helpless Clarissa) as he writes confessions to himself. as Clarissa had from her family, rousseau has even (in Hume’s own expression) “elop’d from Mr. Davenport” (L, 2:135). the same letter perhaps also marks a richardsonian turn for Hume, who finds himself compelled to release “the whole train of my Correspondence with rousseau, connected by a short Narrative” (L, 2:82). the narrative structure of Hume’s account is thus profoundly close to the epistolary form of richardson’s fiction: an episode of amatory distress collated by an editor-compiler. Moreover, Hume’s affective tone here takes on the enlarged proportions of the sentimental tale or the secret history: “the story is incredible as well as inconceivable, were it not founded on such authentic Documents: Surely never was there so much Wickedness and Madness combined in one human Creature” (L, 2:80). readers of Hume’s correspondence, I think, have some license to apportion their judgment of wickedness upon either of these characters. Hume is initially reluctant to publish this train of correspondence (which he first distributes only privately, by post). “I am really at a Loss,” he says, “what use to make of this Collection” (L, 2:80). But his consequent vulnerability to rousseau’s account of events precipitates a quick turn in which Hume shifts from richardsonian editor to villain. this was a turn perhaps anticipated in “Of the Study of History,” where Hume had rakishly proclaimed himself “seduced” into his misogynistic raillery against women (E, 565). Hume takes on the mocking voice of a Lovelace in his exasperated reports of rousseau’s own writings. Like an overwrought Clarissa (according to Hume), rousseau “fortells that his Memory will be justifyed after his Death. He says that he has composed a Volume of Memoirs, chiefly with regard to the treatment he has met with in england, and the State of Captivity, in which he has been detained” (L, 2:138). In part Hume plays up the resemblance of rousseau’s account to fiction in order to undermine its veracity. But more fundamentally, he does so to expose rousseau’s conventionality, and thereby to make rousseau the newest subject of the sociable conversation that effectively deferred the political.

156

The Fictions of Serial History

Hume desired to make of his own nation the sociable, conversible world he found in Paris, the center of modes; and the episode of his falling out with rousseau accomplished precisely the preemption of public politics by private society for which he hoped: “I little imagined, that a private story, told to a private gentleman, could run over a whole kingdom in a moment: if the King of england had declared war against the King of France, it could not have been more suddenly the subject of conversation” (L, 2:77, my emphasis). as Hume’s commentary makes clear, he is struck not merely by the eclipse of public affairs by a private one, but especially by the precipitousness with which this occurs. all happens “in a moment,” with a suddenness that the onset of war could at best only match. at the same time, Hume ultimately makes plans to publish an account of his “transactions with rousseau, together with the original Papers” (L, 2:95). While he protests that he would rather have avoided this step, the sudden extent of this episode of conversation (its having become a mode in its own right, perhaps) causes him to take stock of his account’s marketability. as he writes to the publisher William Strahan, “the whole will compose a pretty large Pamphlet, which, I fancy, the Curiosity of the Public will make tolerably saleable” (L, 2:96). this sudden homology of public affairs and “private story” in commercial conversation, part of the broader trend whereby historiography’s engagement with the documentary past made all of history into the kind of “writing to the moment” that richardson’s epistolary novels undertook, brings home the destabilizing resemblance between historiography and romance in Hume’s “saleable” world.

the appearance of Novelty In An Essay on Taste (1759), alexander Gerard, the belated winner of an essay contest Hume helped to judge, overtly insisted that the historian’s ostensibly reasonable practice did not escape a more primary allegiance to the production of novelty: “even the historian,” he argues, “who is confined to known materials and facts, endeavours to give them the appearance of novelty, by the light in which he represents them, and by his own reflections on the causes, the effects, and the nature of the transactions he relates. Novelty can bestow charms on a monster, and make things pleasant which have nothing to recommend them but their rarity.”69 to tell history anew is to risk “bestowing charms” on the past in ways that will give it alarmingly new life—and this

Hume, Historical Succession, and rousseau

157

formulation doubtlessly struck home for Hume, still composing the final volumes of his History of England. Gerard perhaps gives in to the irregularity of commercial historiography. Yet the final frame of novelty, with which Hume himself endowed all “known materials and facts,” was to incorporate the impulse toward novelty as a privileged driver of historical process. Historical change happened, in large part, because of a basic human drive toward novelty, and the commercial historian’s task was to retrace but also simultaneously to enact and to moderate the same impulse for readers. as Hume’s History of England proceeds inexorably toward the 1688 settlement, he hints all along the way about the need for a social rhythm regular enough to sustain activity and innovation without the destructive disruption of more fundamental change. the concluding volume pronounces the fundamental lesson of “Manners, arts and sciences” during the reigns of the Stuart kings. On the one hand, there is a dangerous stasis in “uniform” government: “Governments too steady and uniform, as they are seldom free, so are they, in the judgment of some, attended with another sensible incovenience: they abate the active powers of men; depress courage, invention, and genius; and produce an universal lethargy in the people.” But the price of uniformity must be balanced against the costs of the opposite condition, for “the fluctuation and contest, it must be allowed, of the english government were, during these reigns, much too violent both for the repose and safety of the people.”70 Hume’s representation of history finally balanced between “universal lethargy” and “violent fluctuation” in two essential ways. the first was purely rhetorical—Hume’s forcible assertion that “however singular . . . events may appear there is really nothing altogether new in any period of modern history,” which banished genuine historical difference (at least from all epochs of modernity) by bare prescription. Second, Hume located the culmination of english history in the settled allocation of national revenues. Former Parliamentary disbursements to the monarch, “too small, if [Parliament] intended to make [Charles II] independant [sic] in the common course of his administration” and “too large, and settled during too long a period, if they resolved to keep him in entire dependance [sic].”71 Now disbursed once a year, these payments have resolved into the regular “fluctuations” of a polity henceforth conducive to the circumscribed, iterable “invention” and “genius” of modern times.72 Notably, this periodical settlement is an outsized, state-scale version of the pension Hume sought for the unruly, anticommercial figure of rousseau himself.

158

The Fictions of Serial History

through Hume’s interventions, then, the historical world of commercial modernity and the structure of its representation accorded as never before. each bore out a fundamental human impulse toward novelty that subordinated the epistemological priority of traceable causation, which perhaps finally makes clear why Hume’s position as the grand skeptic of the logic of causation is not wholly irreconcilable with his undertaking of the seemingly cause and effect trade of the historian. Moreover, the altered marketplace for historiography after Hume’s History of England manifested the latent logic of Hume’s text by enlisting historians themselves to enact the regular fluctuations that he had envisioned. In his letters Hume registered a formative encounter at the bookseller of the imminent future with the coming to market of the “no less than eight Histories upon the Stocks in this Country” (L, 2:230). It was the peculiar and unprecedented feature of the moment of 1770, in other words, to have many new histories in concurrent production. this condition peculiarly obtained for the specific historiographical terrain of Great Britain, as older calls for one, fully adequate history of england suddenly gave way to a proliferation of discrete accounts. as David Wooton observes, “We take it for granted that there will be more than one history dealing with a particular subject, but to those living in the eighteenth century there was something novel about this idea.”73 In the state of commercial society, the past admitted of new histories each year, and Hume found himself endorsing ostensibly rival projects like robert Henry’s History of Great Britain, “writ on a new plan,” that “has really Merit.”74 When Hume asserted, “I believe this is the historical age and this the historical Nation,” he pointed to a new kind of national historical consciousness, Scottish and British, that would be more attuned to the “appearance of novelty” that historians (as Gerard insisted) henceforth self-consciously imbued in their pasts. It was the project of commercial historiography to cultivate the “appearance of novelty” in both senses of that expression: to regenerate attention to the only superficially new (when really there is nothing new under the modern sun), and to make the question of where and when the new characteristically appeared, or came into being, a primary object of historical inquiry (L, 2:230). In historiography as in any number of other commercial arts, then, Britons created the “appearance of novelty” by remaking the familiar, or refashioning the old through new idioms or processes.75 at the same time they grew watchful, in a structural way, of the manner in which the genuinely new arose, or came into sight, so that it, too, could be refashioned in familiar terms.

Hume, Historical Succession, and rousseau

159

Ultimately, this renewed function of historiography was only the formal and methodological culmination of a longer story. From the start of the long eighteenth century, historiography had served a prominent secondary function in providing added raw material to meet the demanding structure of print seriality: “Since the need to fill weeklies with enough material to keep them above the cut-off length of the first (1712–25) Stamp Duty in itself generated a paper vacuum that required filling with more than advertisements. … Historical titles of various kinds—grand surveys of national history, newer genres like the historical atlas, ambitious universal histories, collective or individual biographies, and even some county antiquarian works—w[ere] all . . . serialized between 1678 and 1739.”76 as these histories proliferated in a way that served a finally antihistorical demand that the past meet a present-day need for novelty, rousseau uncertainly articulated a continued resistance to Hume and his commercializing history. In a remarkable passage from the Confessions, rousseau deploys language that is parodically Humean to insist that his own autonarrative undertaking will slowly undo any sense of “the succession of events”: “the farther I advance in my narrative, the less order I feel myself capable of observing. the agitation of the rest of my life has deranged in my ideas the succession of events. these are too numerous, confused, and disagreeable to be recited in due order. the only strong impression they have left upon my mind is that of the horrid mystery by which the cause of them is concealed, and of the deplorable state to which they have reduced me. My narrative will in future be irregular, according to the events which, without order, may occur to my recollection.”77 “Deranged,” rousseau’s “ideas” lose hold of the order of succession; he retains only the “strong impression” that the cause of these events is “concealed,” and in consequence he embraces the inevitable irregularity of his future narration. at the same time, rousseau’s imputation of concealed causes reintroduces the supposedly inscrutable origin of historical change into the realm of human conspiracy and agency. rousseau thus returns to the mode of secret history and to the suspicion embodied there that whispered intrigues would finally determine the course of historical events—with the implication that Hume, despite his protestations, was a paradigmatic orchestrator. rousseau’s paranoid narrative practice in this sense upholds the mode of secret history not as one of many genres of commercial entertainment, but as something like the antithesis of Hume’s fantasy of commercial successions that would unfold spontaneously of their own accord. rousseau declares that he persists in a “deplorable state.” Whether this is a state of mind or a condition

160

The Fictions of Serial History

of political economy is not entirely clear. But in the way rousseau understands his agitation and disorder as loss, he inhabits an emotional condition of a piece with the effects of the forced removal of the “armenian habit” in which he had once hoped, futilely, to persist. Finally, rousseau’s sense of loss offers a symptomatic, and even systematic resistance, not just to modernity per se, but to a specifically Humean vision of a modern order of history. as rousseau here suggests in a shrewd anticipation of the near future of British commercialism, “irregular[ity]”—narrative and otherwise—was not only a condition that preceded the orchestrated “succession of events” in serial commerce but also their novel consequence. this is a legacy I will pursue on the terrain of early British historical fiction in the chapter that follows.

Chapter 4

2

historical Novelty and Serial Form

are not these Woods More free from peril than the envious Court? here feel we but the penalty of adam The seasons’ difference. —epigraph to The Recess (from Shakespeare, As You Like It)

In the preceding chapter, I addressed the many contours of David hume’s proleptic vision of a British history remade as novelty, transformed into a procession of the kind of predictable newness suited to commercial society and to the manageable future hume sought to enact. In this chapter, I trace how the commercial novelty of the 1770s and 1780s, once regularly inhabited as a structure of thought and imagination, produced a sensibility of history irreconcilable with hume’s own. What resulted from Britons’ close encounter with the “predictable new” clearly diverged from the atavistic, violent “enthusiasm” that hume feared was the essential alternative to his sociable or conversible world. But the encounter nevertheless precipitated practices of historical representation that would not read the past, nor observe the processions of novelty, with anything like the affective stability or social confidence that hume envisioned for the readers of his own History of England. In this chapter I turn first to Sophia Lee’s novel The Recess; or, a Tale of Other Times (1783–85)—along with William Godwin’s St. Leon, one of the two “most successful english historical novels” of the eighteenth century.”1 a protean text always just on the edge of literary-historical canonicity, The Recess issued in the rise of Gothic fiction (where mood takes over for history, perhaps), but also, as I argue here, in an enduring and largely unappreciated dynamic of the romantic historical novel—its generation of “historical” effects

162

The Fictions of Serial history

precisely through staging the futility of its drive to escape from contemporary commerce.2 The Recess is of special interest not just as an individual text, but also as an atmospheric expression of the generic subconscious of early historical fiction under new commercial conditions for historiography. after hume remade history as novelty, Lee’s historical novel in turn recast the inchoate experience of commercial novelty as the distinctively melancholic mood of her elizabethan past. By foregrounding The Recess, I both recover Lee’s dispersed redescription of commercial novelty and suggest the paradigmatic qualities of her distinctive remediation of fashionable dress. I conclude this chapter with a briefer consideration of Maria edgeworth’s tales of Fashionable Life (1809–12), including edgeworth’s retrospective meditations on that fictional series in her novel Harrington (1817), a historical fiction of the year 1780. Well before Walter Scott himself, Lee and edgeworth in different ways summoned market seriality as a framework for historical form. Both illuminate how the fashion system, as emblematized in the cyclical cultural life delineated by women’s pocketbooks, lay peculiarly close to the modern British novel’s earliest visions of historical experience.

Model for a thousand Others taking a wide view of the fictional production in late eighteenth-century Britain that literary critics rarely read today, anne h. Stevens argues convincingly that historical fiction did “not begin with Scott.” But this first of subgenres affirmatively did begin, she insists, just before Scott himself, in the second half of the eighteenth century—most conspicuously in the The Recess and its immediate imitators.3 as part of a national tradition, The Recess stands precisely at the midpoint of the long story of British letters that extends from hume’s historiographical writings to the Waverley Novels, the serial project that finally assured the cultural hegemony of the novel by adapting practices of historical representation to habits of commercialized material life. Within this interval, Lee’s influential resurrection of historical romance and secret history upon the very historiographical terrain that hume had plotted to purify is an overt intervention;4 and Lee’s novel is deeply and self-consciously parasitical upon hume’s History of England.5 as a knowingly belated assay in the archaic French tradition of historical romance, The Recess marks an explicit turning point in the longue durée story of historical fiction, by looking backward from humean modernity upon the historical forms hume had proscribed.6 Yet as I

historical Novelty and Serial Form

163

will demonstrate, Lee’s nostalgic embrace of romance equally responded to an allied evolution of commercial novelty form, one that grew evident within the changing market conditions for British fiction amid the rise of a serial print culture. as an allegory for the wider class of ephemeral genre fiction that it inspired but also anticipated, The Recess invites rethinking of familiar presumptions about the nonmodernity of late eighteenth-century historical fiction and thus about the legacy that the national tales and historical fictions of edgeworth and Scott later pursued. Crucially, Lee herself wrote at the last moment when english readers could realistically expect to consume every published novel, so that an emerging, quantitative condition of fiction was anticipated but not yet accomplished. The Recess appeared at precisely the threshold moment identified by Franco Moretti, when an “unreliable” stream of a “handful of new titles” each year became a river. By around 1785, “a new novel per week is already the great capitalist oxymoron of the regular novelty, the unexpected that is produced with such efficiency and punctuality that readers become unable to do without it.”7 For Moretti, this development precipitates “a drastic reorientation of audiences toward the present”; but for Lee, the same reorientation threatened both the literary production of the immediate past and the more general prospect of historical writing.8 While emphasizing the “powerful legacy” of “images of mass novel manufacture”—the perceived ubiquity of novels in Lee’s broader moment—James raven also rehearses the proliferating loss and forgetting that accompanied this era of emergent literary mass production: “Many novels were destined for either a very dusty or very brief shelf-life following a few polite readings by friendly subscribers or meager outings from a fashionable circulating library.”9 the body of commercial fiction as shaped by the predictable “disappearance and unavailability of so many of these novels,” I think, bears a more than incidental resemblance to the broken epistolary tale of The Recess, composed as it is of overlooked and partial documents that, as material-textual counterparts of the lives they recount, always seem on the verge of disappearing entirely. In the guise of a revisionary story about what normative humean historiography does and does not remember, The Recess develops a model of historical awareness and literary function that can subsist alongside and shadow the visible, regular, and tightly synchronic “present” that the commercial marketplace so urgently constitutes.10 The Recess mediates its commercial context by delicately but purposefully resisting capture by title, or genre, or excerpt, or illustration; and thereby focalizes the contingent or partial ways in which

164

The Fictions of Serial history

commerce ordered the appearance of novelty. In its own sentimental tropology, the novel sets itself against the logic of dress and surface that would obscure the complexity beneath. as Matilda protests, in an identification of the limits of what a historiography driven by costume-gazing can know about the past, “Did ye know the breaking heart this splendid garb covers!” (R, 83). What lies beneath, however, is not the essentialized, deep subjectivity of a character but an intent awareness of ongoing change that is self-consciously derivative of new commercial conditions. Where Moretti proceeds, untroubled, from instance or specimen to abstraction, The Recess proleptically mourns what such a procedure will erase and the characters who will never be adequately regenerated from mere titles. Indeed, for present-day critics looking back upon the eighteenth-century archive of fiction, knowing novels by title alone (in the way quantitative approaches to literary history would have us embrace) becomes a material necessity. Fully ten percent of the novels of Lee’s age are now lost, so that critics have had to deduce their existence from the secondhand evidence of contemporaneous book reviews and publishers’ records. Many more titles endure only as a single, fragile copy (restored to scholarly circulation only through the intensive bibliographic work of the last two or three decades).11 Such copies of course preserve what we call “the text,” but in their scarcity they also serve as a fragmentary reminders of hundreds more, identical copies that no longer exist, and indirectly, of the many titles that no longer exist at all. With a heightened awareness borne of this transitional moment, The Recess addresses the altered conditions for the novel as increasingly forceful processions of obsolescence remade literature, textually and materially, into a scene of impending absence—as novels, like other commodities, themselves became disposable. this precarious future, and the paradoxical destructiveness of reproducibility, I am arguing, already seems predictable within the pages of The Recess. While displacing its events into the archaic time of Queen elizabeth and into the archaic form of romance, the novel nevertheless anticipates in very precise ways the novelty-seeking, commercialized reading habits of its audience. Most notably, The Recess develops a narrative form and thematics built upon “chasms” and “gaps” in the record that speak distinctly to the problems of its serialcommercial context, including the incompleteness and insubstantiality that serial form imbues in any individual text or object in its own right. The Recess likewise expresses a self-conscious relationship to its own material fate as a reproducible, commercial object, or an entity subject to the peculiar proliferation of material destruction and loss within modern consumer culture. Ulti-

historical Novelty and Serial Form

165

mately, the novel simultaneously elicits and defies commercialized reading in a way that acknowledges the irresistible commercial conditions of its story, but that manufactures from those conditions a productive dissonance that is the starting point for a different way of relating to history. The Recess recounts—in broken, epistolary form—the apocryphal and melancholy story of two lost twin daughters of Mary Queen of Scots. Celebrated from the beginning for its sentiment and for the innovation of its strong historical setting, the novel follows Matilda and ellinor from their childhood isolation within the underground refuge that gives the novel its name, as they take up sexual romances with leading historical figures of the day and set their separate courses in the wider world. amid a litany of personal tragedy, both face constant persecution by Queen elizabeth, whose hostility is exacerbated by the threat these young women’s lives pose to her sovereignty. as events unfold, Matilda and ellinor move separately between england, France, Ireland, and Jamaica, in lives that will never be acknowledged by official history. the first part of the novel significantly closes with Matilda and ellinor’s arrival at Kenilworth Castle, home of the celebrated robert Dudley, Lord Leicester, who becomes Matilda’s husband by a secret marriage. Leicester, who possesses a “noble spirit” but also “an exquisite taste” has remade the castle after his own style so that its “situation, elegant architecture, and superb furniture, made it the model of a thousand others” (R, 68). as an icon of the elizabethan age still extant in Lee’s day, Kenilworth was already a weighty site for the novel’s eighteenth-century audience. But this textual moment, as I will show, also looks intently forward to an extraordinary scene near the novel’s end when Matilda returns to this once noble castle, only to find it transformed into a scene of textile production. By pursuing the strange transformation of Kenilworth Castle within the novel, I underscore how commercial production quite literally permeates (and even brings to ruin) the novel’s properly historical epicenter. Kenilworth Castle’s extraordinary reproducibility (as the “model of a thousand others”) stands in for a broader ethos of reproducibility in the novel that is at odds with the historical epoch depicted. the same ethos extends beyond the text itself to encompass those imitative texts and images (rather than actual castles) that Lee’s fiction generated in the print marketplace of the novel’s 1780s present. Strikingly, the seemingly incidental scale of Kenilworth’s reproduction (in one thousand copies) coincides with the typical press run for a women’s pocketbook, the preeminent medium for the reproducible image of fashion in Lee’s own day. as the extraordinary case of the Ladies Daily Com-

166

The Fictions of Serial history

panion for . . . 1789 will demonstrate, the complex vision of Kenilworth in The Recess remarkably anticipated how the fashionable pocketbook would excerpt and illustrate the novel, and do so in ways that made manifest the commercial conditions for Lee’s historiography. Ultimately, in Lee’s revisioning, the site of Kenilworth becomes a culminating reflection upon the novel’s immanent but deep apprehension of serial commerce as a peculiar reconstitution of history.

elegant representation By proceeding in this chapter from the many lost or neglected imitations and reproductions of Lee’s novel, as well as from the problem of their endurance apart from the mainstream of literary history, I follow the historiographical imperative announced at the very start of The Recess itself. the novel’s advertisement, noted by present-day critics for its introspective account of fictional form, enacts the literary convention of the found manuscript that was a generic hallmark of early historical fiction.12 as against the wide editorial license that usually prevails within this topos (as prefatory archival scrupulousness customarily gives way to artful seamlessness in the narrative itself ), the advertisement to The Recess insists upon an archival integrity that will not alter or elide the gaps and absences within the ostensible collection of letters that the epistolary narrative comprises. the author-editor “make[s] no apology for altering the language to that of the present age, since the obsolete stile of the author would be frequently unintelligible”; here “stile” is avowedly remade for the present. those “depredations of time [that] have left chasms in the story,” however, are a different case: “an inviolable respect for truth would not permit me to attempt connecting these, even where they appeared faulty.” as the advertisement further observes, the preservation of such chasms “sometimes only heightens the pathos” (R, 5). they are a special source of the novel’s extraordinary production of feeling, conspicuous at a moment when the age of sensibility was already understood to be receding.13 the formal imperative of the advertisement is borne out in actual breaks and gaps in the novel (literally marked in the text by asterisks) as well as in the highly unusual quality of its unreliable, twin first-person narration—where the separate epistolary accounts of the novel’s double protagonists irresolvably contradict one another. Lee’s conception of historical form stands in contradistinction to the succeeding practice of Scott, and to the typically exuberant mode of pastiche through which, as Scott himself puts it in Ivanhoe’s Dedicatory epistle, he

historical Novelty and Serial Form

167

“forms for himself a minstrel coronet, partly out of the pearls of pure antiquity, and partly from the Bristol stone and paste, with which I have endeavoured to imitate them.”14 Scott’s idiomatic register here notably shifts from Lee’s artifact of writing to a more thoroughly material metonymy of the past, grounded in the wearable artifact and its modern refabrication. his invocation of “Bristol stone and paste,” moreover, quite aggressively hybridizes the ancient and modern. the phrase suggests not only less costly substitutes as such but more particularly the glass and porcelain of modern manufacture that connoted fashionable modernity as much as they did imitative forgery. While Scott thus insists upon the passable equivalence of contemporary manufactured materials to the distinct productions of earlier ages, Lee was more suspicious about the capacity of material commerce to stand in for the past. the explicitly textual gaps that Lee vows to preserve bring the novel’s readers close to the problem of composing historiography from primary sources—in a procedure that resists the passive pleasures of consumption arising alike from composed narrative distance and from seductive intimacy with material life. But at the same time the “chasms in the story” of The Recess are not tracing the “depredations of time” in a straightforwardly historical way. rather, the novel just as centrally addresses the new kinds of gaps and absences that proliferated within modern commercial culture. this is not the slow decay of “history,” as with those gaps of good provenance that Scott promised to mend with his own commercial refabrications, but the more prolific and unsettling loss of cultural productions that were new, under the cycles of commercial seriality that unfolded in hurried and uncertain relationship to historical time in Lee’s day. In this way, the advertisement’s addressing in advance the gaps that permeate the novel’s letters points outside the narrative world of The Recess and toward the novel’s artifactual fate as a commercial object. the novel meets this fate both as a text (as it ultimately turned up, in excerpted form, in a women’s pocketbook) and as a material artifact in its own right (as a physical copy of the novel or the pocketbook that might or might not descend to future readers). In the spirit of the advertisement to The Recess, here I project the more presentist program of Lee’s historical novel from the opaque space of a print illustration that is, to the best of my knowledge, lost—or from a conspicuous archival gap in what we can know about the novel that nevertheless illuminates the text in its own way.15 By the time of the publication of the third edition of The Recess in 1787, the novel’s success was already spurring a number of imitations, thereby signaling the formulaic iterability that established the first novelistic subgenre of historical fiction.16 at roughly the same early moment in the history

168

The Fictions of Serial history

of the novel’s reception, The Recess received star billing in The Ladies Daily Companion for 1789 (a pocketbook published by the Canterbury firm of Simmons and Kirkby in 1788).17 For this issue of the annual pocketbook, The Recess affords both a narrative excerpt (taken from the novel’s opening chapter) and an illustration of the scene in question, depicted in a copper-plate engraving probably produced to accompany the pocketbook. In the engraving, the long isolated Matilda and ellinor first encounter the real historical character Lord Leicester. the portion of the pocketbook containing the narrative excerpt from the text of the novel survives (and as I will show, has its own story to tell). the original engravings (including both the illustration of the novel and a complementary depiction of the “dress of 1788” and the “most fashionable head Dresses” for the same year) are lost. Long since cut or torn away—in the way early, ephemeral images like these so often are—the illustrations have been appropriated for other purposes at some uncertain moment in the past. The Ladies Daily Companion itself is one of a number of similarly designed pocketbook titles in this moment, and the fold-out frontispiece featuring an illustrated scene along with dress and headdresses “of the year” was a standard formula. Just two copies of the particular issue in question seem to be extant. One copy lingers on in the official archive, in relative anonymity amid the specialized eighteenth-century collections of the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale, where it is possible to examine the pocketbook in its entirety— apart from the missing illustrations. the second copy leads a more abjectly exposed and public existence. permanently mounted and affixed beneath the glass of a wall display in a second-floor bedroom at the Jane austen’s house Museum, this copy has been transformed into a relic. here, the issue bears, in the words of the typewritten placard beneath it, one of “Six Diary entries written in the Ladies Daily Companion for the years 1788, 1789, 1791, 1792, 1799, and 1800” by Carolyn pym-hayles (an austen acquaintance who briefly mentions her encounters with the austen family in two of these pocketbooks, though not in the 1789 issue in question). the scene of commemoration at the Jane austen’s house Museum vividly exemplifies the incapacity of literary history to make Lee herself and her 1780s moment (caught between “eighteenth-century literature” and romanticism) quite worth remembering—in dramatic contrast to austen and her romantic contemporaries. But the dynamic I most want to underscore here is the subordination of the commercial artifact to the biographical one. In this case, the trace inhering in the handwriting of a diarist one or two steps removed from austen herself almost incidentally assures the preservation of the 1789 pocket-

historical Novelty and Serial Form

169

book, through protocols of author-worship that the succeeding romantic moment largely invented. the commercial form of the pocketbook itself becomes a mostly empty medium for that physical trace, and certainly not an agent in eliciting the trace in the first place. the deep irony of this condition is the rarity of the print object thus neglected, which has become rare precisely in consequence of its being (apart from the handwriting in this particular copy) merely a commercial reproduction. Yet the course of time and commercial cycle have rendered the Ladies Daily Companion for 1789, however reproducible and multiplied in its original moment, only half as rare as the original handwriting the copy contains. this quality of commercially driven rarity is wholly invisible within the archival presumptions of the austen museum. Still, the pages containing the narrative excerpt from The Recess apparently subsist beneath the surface of the museum display (it is not possible to examine the mounted copy closely), and so grant Lee’s novel a partial presence here, if only as mediated by the predictably commercial imperatives of the otherwise forgotten pocketbook that generated the narrative excerpt in the first place. as the Lewis Walpole Library copy of the pocketbook makes clear (even in the absence of the specific illustrations that originally accompanied this issue), the design of the pocketbook clearly upheld the primacy of the image. the illustrations’ prominence in the fuller title reflects the special allure they would have had for contemporary readers: “THE LADIES DAILY COMPANION, For the Year of Our Lord 1789, Embellished with the following COPPER PLATES; an elegant Representation of the Discovery of the Earl of Leicester, from the Recess; a Lady in the Dress of 1788; and four of the most fashionable Head Dresses.” paradoxically, these fashion plates’ agile embodiment of the collective desire of the moment was precisely what led, in all likelihood, to their expropriation, and thus to their separation from the rest of the pocketbook and eventual erasure from the archive. equally evident in the pocketbook’s fuller title is the emphatic conjunction of fashionable life and historical representation that the visual space of the pocketbook enacted with special clarity. here a “Lady in the Dress of 1788” stands directly alongside Leicester himself—and to some extent reconstitutes this historical figure, and his distant epoch, in a way that makes them radically commensurable with the regularized procession of material change in fashionable modern life that the “Dress of 1788” exemplified. the generic form of the pocketbook further opens a window onto the ways that fashion’s commercial time was intimately restructuring everyday life. the Ladies Daily Companion, for instance, brought The Recess directly into alignment with the more general offerings of publishers and booksellers and,

170

The Fictions of Serial history

presumably, with the wider system of textile producers and dress merchants who supplied the fashionable styles that most forcefully shaped the sequenced fantasy of the serial marketplace. the copy of the Ladies Daily Companion I am describing deployed The Recess, together with other ephemeral texts, to further the issue’s enactment of the routinized obsolescence of commercialcultural life. as the table of contents indicates, the “songs,” “country dances,” and “fashions” worthy of notice were all presented as “new” for each succeeding year (Box 1). (the novel itself is sensational enough to transcend the year and remains in vogue three years after its initial publication, or one year after the second edition in 1787.) Box 1.

the LaDIeS DaILY COMpaNION, For the Year of Our Lord 1789, embellished with the following Copper plates; an elegant representation of the Discovery of the earl of Leicester, from the recess; a Lady in the Dress of 1788; and four of the most fashionable head Dresses.

containing Correct table of holidays and remarkable Days in the year 1789 tables to cast up Wages or expences, by the Day, Week, Month, or Year One hundred and four pages ruled, proper for transacting the Business of the Year New aenigmas and answers to the Last Year’s Flirtilla, from the reflector Female Importance exemplified, an essay Matilda and ellinor, from The recess Verses to the Ladies, translated from the French an Ode to Love by Miss Kemble Sonnet, by Charlotte Smith

Lines on seeing a Yew tree in the Churchyard of Crowhurst in Surrey Sonnet on an air Balloon, by Mrs. piozzi Lines on a Lady’s Dancing, by the late Mr Shenstone address to the robin redbreast, by p. pindar, esq. to an Unfortunate Beauty, by the Same On a Bee stifled in honey New Songs sung at public places in 1788 twenty-four New Country Dances for 1789 account of New Fashions at paris in September and October, 1788 Sovereigns of europe table of the Moon account of the Comet

CANTERBURY: printed and Sold by Simmons and Kirkby, [Price One Shilling.]

historical Novelty and Serial Form

171

positioning the pocketbook scene of fashion alongside The Recess’s ostensibly historical project suggests how the novel’s historical setting elaborated an incipient historicity already embedded in the commercial print culture of dress. the (missing) fashion plates of the Ladies Daily Companion, as was typical of the pocketbook genre, already embodied a kind of distance in rendering the dress in fashion in 1788—just out of style—to give form to the new year of 1789. thus the commercial reproduction of fashion in this period was not so much constituting an amnesiac “now” as it was commemorating and memorializing what just had been (as was equally evident in this pocketbook’s extended written dispatches on the dress fashions prevailing in paris in September and October during the former year). the print culture that perpetuated this new material memory (by carrying it forward into the next year within the pages of the pocketbook) in turn helped to make visible the specificities of everyday life in the year to come. the images both preserve fine difference from newly prevailing fashions and present a protocol for scrutinizing emerging material novelty, and so cultivate the ardent watchfulness over the “new” that characterized commercial Britons in this moment. What The Recess superadds to the incipient historicity of pocketbook is a question about the nature of the difference that obtains from one year to the next, as against a wider history. the novel is thus representative of the way that contemporaneous readers questioned the relationship of fashion’s time to other registers of temporal experience. the annotations in a typical pocketbook from 1796, for example, exhibit a wider meditativeness upon the “blank” futurity of calendrical time that explicitly takes the form of the pocketbook (which, in the unwritten openness of its ledgers at the dawn of the new year, “appears to me like that of futurity”).18 Moreover, this meditativeness takes shape in relationship to the visual concretization of time in the accompanying engraving of “Five of the most fashionable Ladies head Dresses for 1796,” an illustration that is, in this case, still intact (Figures 27 and 28). the fuller context of the initial annotation in part voices a more conventionally religious sentiment. But the quality of “blankness,” as expressed within the constraints of the commercial form of the pocketbook, also points to a time that is and ultimately will be filled—however adequately—by articles of dress that grant a form and body to the collective desires of commercial life (Box 2). During the year to come, the owner of this pocketbook, as was typical, recorded within its pages the inventory of dress acquisitions reflected here—petticoat, stays, apron, shawl, stockings, bonnet, and so on. In the abject commerciality of futurity, in other words, dress is what time repetitiously reveals. at issue is

Figures 27 and 28. From The London Fashionable Repository for the Year 1796. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

historical Novelty and Serial Form

173

Box 2. “an Inventory of Cloaths sent me by my aunt D— for the use of M har[---] august 31 1796 1 Linen gown, with [pieces] 1 [half petticoat] ............. 1 pair stays 2 shifts [w / pieces] 2 check aprons 1 purple shawl 1 pr stockings 2 Caps Bonnet pr shoes” —Manuscript notes in a copy of the London Fashionable Repository for the Year 1796, a woman’s pocketbook

“This pocket Book appears to me like that of futurity— I turn the leaves—’tis to me all a blank—I cannot so much as guess at what they will reveal”

the peculiarly unsettling logic of commercial novelty, for unlike the merely “empty” time of the calendar, fashion actually fills time with dependable serial variety. What unfolds in The Recess, fundamentally, is translation: the entry of those striking but also partial concretizations of “the times” that Britons observe in (and by means of ) ephemeral print-cultural genres of fashion into a fictional form that could offer a more complex account of this fashion’s adequacy as an expression of ongoing history.

Novel-Writing I will return to the implicit close reading of the pocketbook generic form that I wish to attribute to The Recess—that is, to how the novel presents itself for appropriation by the pocketbook formula while nevertheless constructing that anticipated appropriation as the kind of misrepresentation endemic to commercialized vision. First, though, I establish the special place of The Recess within a longer history of serial fiction and commercial novelty, a place that becomes clearer when we understand anna Letitia Barbauld, rather than Scott (who vaguely adapted The Recess in his own novel Kenilworth [1821]), as a kind of critical endpoint for Lee’s significance. as a crucial mechanism of Lee’s official

174

The Fictions of Serial history

diminution within literary history, Barbauld perhaps gave Scott free reign to remake Lee’s realm of historical romance. I have already suggested (in Chapter 1) how Barbauld’s recognition of the peculiar historiographical possibilities of fashion-driven change entered into her prophetic ruminations on the age in the poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven. In Barbauld’s 1810 essay “On the Origin and progress of Novel-Writing” (which served as the introduction to her anthology The British Novelists, the earliest significant work of its kind), commercial cycles of literary culture also entered prominently into the canon she constructed for the novel. the very title of Barbauld’s essay, in foregrounding “novel-writing,” does double service. Barbauld indicates not just the rise of the novel form, but also a special species of writing that in its own right bears the charge of the new. Writing just before the Waverley Novels turned British history into a thoroughgoing showroom of beautiful and interesting object-artifacts, Barbauld took no pains to distinguish writing’s capacity to be novelty from its role in the steady provision of novelty attractions that, as embedded in writing, compelled attention in ways not so fundamentally connected to intrinsic formal qualities of literature. at the heart of the “Origin and progress of Novel-Writing,” Barbauld gathers her particular view of the ontogeny of the novel form from the “quick succession[s]” that announced the form’s modern onset in mid-eighteenth-century Britain. In the unexamined elision that discloses Barbauld’s subtle novelization of the course of literary history itself, this structure of quick succession seems to characterize the “marvellous events” within a novel’s pages (its regular provision of happenings) as much as the eventful succession of authorship she explicitly marks, when “at length, in the reign of George the Second,” richardson, Fielding, and Smollett all strode onto the scene in close proximity to one another. the essential “progress” of the novel over the course of the long eighteenth century was to perfect or intensify, for worse and for better, that same logic of quick succession. the distinctively modern state of fiction is one in which “a great deal of trash is every season poured out upon the public from english presses” as abject fashion-striving. Yet the system (at least by Barbauld’s later day in 1810)19 simultaneously multiplied real merit: “We have more good writers in this walk living than at the present time, than at any period since the days of richardson and Fielding.”20 Barbauld’s capacious imagining of the quality of “quick succession” puts her at odds with Lee; and the decades that Barbauld leaps over are obscured by her (perhaps willfully) anachronistic misrecognition of the “quick successions” of midcentury as exchangeable for those of her own postfashion moment. Lee, addressing the actual onset of periodical fashion and

historical Novelty and Serial Form

175

the rise of the circulating library (with a commensurate expansion of novel titles), located in the distinction between “novel-writing” and the more general course of novelty a much more essential gap. Significantly, the language of succession that provides Barbauld’s governing structure of the novel form seemed to internalize the by-then antique rhetoric of the earliest generation of novel critics in the reviews of the 1750s and 1760s. In an account of the largely forgotten British fiction of the mideighteenth century, thomas Keymer addresses an episode of critical satiety with “novel-writing” that long preceded the contempt that Barbauld herself later expressed for the “trash” poured out each season. already in the 1750s, “novelists were writing under newly intensified pressure to assert their own distinctiveness.” and despite present-day critics’ teleological misperception of a “mid-eighteenth century novel . . . firmly on the ‘rise,’ ” this moment was more likely to imagine the extinction of an exhausted novel form than the novel’s endless serial afterlife. as Keymer recounts, “in the run-up to Tristam Shandy the [novel] genre was quite widely held to be past its peak, or even burning itself out. this was certainly the reviewers’ refrain, as though the impossibility of endlessly renewing the defining quality of the genre—the sheer impossibility of being forever novel—meant that the ‘new species of writing’ contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction.”21 In language that approximated Barbauld’s later dismissal of the “trash” of each season, midcentury critics and authors feared that the “ ‘common machinery’ and ‘general sameness’ now shared by all novels will ‘render them at length tiresome.’ ”22 Long before Scott instantiated a new kind of serial fiction in the unified project of his own Waverley Novels, the Critical Review in 1759 was already envisioning the entire field of novel writing as an oddly similar output of nearly interchangeable tales. these early novels “bear so strong a resemblance to each other” that their shared commercial form implies for them a single author-figure of their own, who uncannily prefigures the mythically prolific author of Waverley: “a person might be often tempted to think of them as the production of only one writer, did not their multiplicity exceed the abilities of an hundred.”23 In response, the first generation of novelists in the 1750s and 1760s urgently cast about for novelty through forthright, explicit, and fundamental narrative and formal experimentation—and thereby strove against the phantasmal unification of author function implied by commerce (through a “general sameness” among all novels).24 Moreover, at this earlier midcentury moment the labor of novelty was also quite apparent. For during an age of aspirational seriality that remained in

176

The Fictions of Serial history

search of sustaining praxes or structures for producing novelty, the detritus of failed or abandoned projects was everywhere in the world of print.25 among many examples, Keymer notes the inauspicious beginning of a medical encyclopedia, planned in weekly numbers and proceeding alphabetically, for which the publishers “pulled the plug midway through the letter ‘B,’ ”—a commonplace instance of “abrupt curtailment.”26 While at first glance the rhetoric of the next generation of novel criticism (in Lee’s 1780s moment) seems broadly consistent with this earlier generation, the stable idiom of the “productionlike”27 “manufacture” of modern literature across these two epochs significantly masks a crucial redescription of fictional “novelty” to which Lee was alert: one that increasingly defined the quality of novelty apart from manipulation of the fundamental features of the novel form. Writing at the moment when the quantitative rise of the novel suddenly diminished the prospect of exhaustion for the novel genre itself, Lee was attuned instead to subsidiary cycles of exhaustion. these cycles now played out both within the fashions that novels depicted and as an evolving constellation of subgenres (so that not only individual titles but also subgenres themselves began to rise and fall as part of a larger system that henceforth defined “the” novel, both “synchronically and diachronically”).28 as a regular structure of change seemed to assure the most general form of novelistic fiction in perpetuity, the formerly contingent and haphazard future of the novel, along with the novel’s most fundamental formal properties, suddenly moved out of view. In The British Novelists, when Barbauld did briefly look back to the interstitial, 1780s moment of literary history, The Recess itself conspicuously seized her attention. In the most relevant section of her essay, Barbauld brings to the fore (four years before Scott’s first novel Waverley) the problem of the novel’s proper relationship to historical representation.29 “Where history says little” of “remote periods and countries,” Barbauld observes, “fiction may [fairly] say much”; but where history “throws her light steady and strong,” no “false lights” or “artificial colouring should be permitted.” If the statement might seem to license a more unbridled fictional practice for those times and places where historians fear to tread, in context the primary admonition is rather more to follow history, without contradicting it. Barbauld simultaneously acknowledges, however, that illicit fictionalizations of known history (i.e., those showing it in “false lights”) have a peculiar staying power. they “often remain on the mind” and so contaminate, or even constitute, the way people actually recollect the past. at precisely this moment in the essay, The Recess itself appears under cover of innuendo and gossip—as the unnamed and censured

historical Novelty and Serial Form

177

referent of an anecdote that Barbauld reports: “a lady confessed that she could never get over a prejudice against the character of our elizabeth, arising from her cruelty to two imaginary daughters of Mary Queen of Scots, who never existed but in the pages of a novel.”30 While left unnamed, The Recess nevertheless comes briefly into view as a leading and representative example of the “very faulty” romances that illicitly transgressed the proper boundaries of history.31 Yet in what becomes a meta-reflection of the romance mode and its dangers, Barbauld’s own account manifests the tendency of the illicit to “remain on the mind” as she paradoxically preserves the memory of Lee’s objectionable novel. even the very form of Barbauld’s gossipy whispering about The Recess broaches—if it quickly abandons—the prospect of a secret history of the novel form itself that might be staged by way of The Recess, a history that might be further elaborated by everything else that stubbornly “remains on the mind” despite the ongoing purification projects of literary histories like Barbauld’s own. as it is constituted by Barbauld, however, Lee’s novel is already a disturbingly partial presence—for The Recess also stands in for the much wider swath of illicit fictions that do not make the slightest mark on the essay and, thus, are wholly forgotten or unregistered. Both aligned with and redeemed from the obscurity of formulaic, serial novelty, The Recess is a provisionally autonomous literary object that evokes metonymically a wider procession of ephemera that it cannot fully summon on its own.

the task of Novelty In part we can understand Lee’s novel as a historical break, the last gasp of an undifferentiated marketplace for novels on the cusp of the emergent market stratification of genre fiction, where the possibilities for openly assertive metafictionality were diminished. But in enacting both the Gothic novel and the British historical novel before the letter, The Recess also contained within itself an intimation of this increasingly fundamental cultural logic of seriality. One generation after the sum total of novel production first, rather doubtfully and self-consciously, came into view as a serial procession, the haphazard evolution of fiction’s fundamental form as writing increasingly gave way to the more straightforwardly fulfilling novelty of the modern fashion cycle and the “dress of the year.” the rise of a visual culture of fashionable dress helped to redefine the imagination of novelty, so that (as with the novel and its subge-

178

The Fictions of Serial history

nres), growing bored with fashions remained endemic to the fashion system, but growing bored with the system itself had an ominously diminished likelihood. especially when fiction directly borrowed the more taciturn allure of dress fashions (as in two loaded moments in The Recess that I will address at length), the easily actualized pleasure of the embedded object firmly displaced the apparency of novel-writing as form. The Recess tried, with only partial success, to reopen an outmoded model of formal self-consciousness at a moment when novelty suddenly threatened to be terribly satisfying, and selfsustaining, and “the sheer impossibility of being forever novel” receded from open sight. Considering Lee’s novel alongside William Cowper’s The Task, the great long-form poem of this elusive decade of literary history, helps to situate The Recess in relation to a wider appreciation of the problem of fashionable novelty in this moment—but also, finally, to show the distinctness of Lee’s address of the problem. published in 1785, the same year that Lee completed The Recess, The Task offers a contemporaneous articulation of the theory of novelty I am also ascribing to The Recess and expresses an allied foreboding about the peril of the fashion condition. Most fundamentally, Cowper’s conversational blank verse searches for a vantage point apart from commercial fashion’s increasingly totalizing temporal manipulations. In the poem’s terms, as distorted by fashion, “the world’s time, is time in masquerade.” Cowper’s broader intervention in the problem of fashion’s temporality is at once inspired by a deictic gesture toward a particular luxury object—his (sometime) friend Lady austen’s command to “write upon this sofa!”—and marked by an explicitly historiographical method: namely, the conjectural history of the sofa that the poet offers in response to her command. Impelled by this present-day sofa, Cowper summons a primordial “time” that “was” before fashion: “cloathing sumptuous or for use, / . . . our sires had none. / as yet black breeches were not; / Or velvet soft, or plush with shaggy pile: / the hardy chief upon the rugged rock . . . repos’d his weary strength.”32 retracing the sofa’s primitive correlates through time, the poet envisions the progress of luxury in terms akin to stadial history. he first imagines a three-legged joint-stool, then a fourth leg, then decoration, then a proper chair, then elbows, then a settee, and then finally a proper sofa suitable for full reclining, the culmination of ease. the history of the sofa reveals how the commercialist hegemony of British culture threatened to dominate even all conjecture. and as this cursory, conjectural history concludes, The Task takes a sudden turn; the poet finds the perfected sofa ironically destructive of ease because it invites overindulgence in

historical Novelty and Serial Form

179

its comforts. Now casting aside this conjectural account of human history as a teleological progress toward the fashionable dress and furnishings of the present day, Cowper undertakes a different mode of history that draws a fundamental distinction between the natural rhythms of nature and the unnatural cycles of the fashionable world. this is the contrast between the “Constant rotation of th’ unwearied wheel / that nature rides upon” and “the constant revolution stale / and tasteless, of the same repeated joys, / that palls and satiates, and makes languid life / a pedlar’s pack, that bows the bearer down” (T, 20, 25). Fashion imposes the burden of the “pedlar’s pack,” a consumptive state of original sin; but nature possesses a “power peculiar” to offer beautiful scenes that “daily view’d / please daily” (T, 23, 10). In contrast to the salvifically durable novelty of nature that “survives / Long knowledge and the scrutiny of years” (T, 10), the artificial cycles of fashion are both enervating and fundamentally manipulative. they “change with ev’ry moon” as “the sycophant / that waits to dress us, arbitrates their date, / [and] Surveys his fair reversion with keen eye; / Finds one ill made, another obsolete, / this fits not nicely, that is ill conceived” (T, 76). here, the poem insists on fashion’s aggressive confiscation of the out-of-date (its “fair reversion”), and on the active production of obsolescence that is part and parcel of fashion’s provision of the new. Besides being compellingly linked to the mercer’s “arbitrat[ion]” of the “date,” the corrosive novelty of fashion is also threadbare: “We have run / through ev’ry change that fancy at the loom / exhausted, has had genius to supply, / and studious of mutation still, discard / a real elegance little used / For monstrous novelty and strange disguise” (T, 76–77). While Cowper points to a novelty that has “exhausted fancy,” he also points to the way his fellow commercial subjects are nevertheless undeterred. they remain “studious of mutation still” and learn to attend even to the repetitions of fancy as if they are new, while they also turn to new extremes of monstrosity and strangeness.33 Like Lee, Cowper urgently suggests how modern dress fashion, in contrast to the weary pursuit of fictional novelty at midcentury (which had seemed on the cusp of wearing itself out), was suddenly unimpeded and unexhausted by its own illness. But Lee proved less sanguine than Cowper about the prospect of creating what he imagined as “loopholes in the retreat,” or times and spaces genuinely apart from the commercial present.34 as much as the different historical period of elizabethan england more obviously promised by Lee’s titular invocation of “tales of other times,” the plural form (i.e., “times”) announces her simultaneous scrutiny of the kind of history that commerce characteristically calls into being for every time.35 In this sense, as I will

180

The Fictions of Serial history

show, the historical time within The Recess both is and is not apart from the “time in masquerade” of the fashionable world.

history in Glimpses the literal “recess” of Lee’s title is the subterranean built space where her two protagonists (the still unacknowledged daughters of Mary Queen of Scots) live out their earliest years in unknowing withdrawal from the world. Yet the word “recess” equally suggests a temporal meaning, in the sense of a “temporary suspension of work or activity” or “an interruption, an interlude; delay; respite.”36 In this sense “recess” marks the novel’s constitutive embrace of temporal alterity that was increasingly difficult to access under the forms, modes, and rhythms of commercial print culture and consumer life.37 the epigraph of The Recess (which I also take as my epigraph for this chapter) offers the first indication of the way Cowper’s vision of a place apart, from which history and its processes can be meaningfully contemplated, is invoked but always frustrated within Lee’s novel. the isolated recess itself, the apparent referent of the distant “woods” of Shakespeare’s play, trades the “peril” of court (and, perhaps, of the official history that transpires there) for what seems at first glance exposure to the elements: “Here feel we but the penalty of Adam / The seasons’ difference.” Yet in the context of the novel and its solicitation of a commercialized reading, these lines have an irresistible resonance with the burden of dress itself—that first consequence of the adamic fall, which Lee’s moment precisely came to know as the difference of each season’s fashions.38 at the same time, the dress fashion that began to connote or stand in for social history was laboring (in just the way the epigraph might suggest) to displace the historiographical predominance of the “envious” court (and by extension political and military historiography writ large) with its own social vision of historical culture. In limiting all that could be “felt” of history to the seasons’ difference, especially in the context of this novel’s central preoccupation with sentiment, Lee’s epigraph strongly implies that a perilous circumscription of feeling coincided with this displacement of traditional sovereign history. Within the novel, the complex question of the difference (or otherwise) of the novel’s elizabethan setting from commercial modernity arises most fully as an allegorical question about the relationship between images and the wider history they represent. For april alliston, images in The Recess (which especially abound in the form of portraits) are a particular locus of the linear or

historical Novelty and Serial Form

181

masculine history that it is the novel’s project to complicate; and the novel labors to tell a story that diverges from the way such visual forms typically recorded history. alliston nevertheless also finds the novel to reclaim visuality in other ways. as she argues with respect to the novel’s prefatory advertisement, “What Lee ‘advertises’ to her readers is not the text as [portrait] painting, which would fix and preserve ‘striking features,’ [alongside, I emphasize, dress] but rather a text as ‘moving picture,’ a revival or animation of precisely that living aspect of history and its figures that has not been passed down to posterity, but has been buried.” For Lee, alliston suggests, the preeminent quality not passed down in history is “sentiment, that which moves readers.”39 In part this is a valuable account of the novel’s characteristic production of feeling by staging the events (especially “private and feminine” ones) that are the primary engine of sentiment, which go unregistered in accounts restricted to “striking features” alone. But the novel will not have this ostensible recuperation of visuality quite so easily, for its flawed protagonist-narrators are hardly straightforward practitioners of the oppositional historical method alliston attributes to the text as a whole. at the start, for instance, The Recess overtly dramatizes the specific condition of having to produce history from images alone—a dilemma in which Matilda and ellinor are directly implicated, and a practice in which they are culpable. Matilda recollects how, “Being deprived of my customary resource, books, to amuse a part of our melancholy leisure, we mutually agreed to invent tales from the many whole-length pictures, which ornamented the best room.” Matilda and ellinor’s practice of generating sentiment via narrative can only be parasitical upon the masculine public images deemed from the start to be inadequate as history. Moreover, Matilda and ellinor not only read history from still images (that is, without very evidently setting those images in motion, in alliston’s sense), but they are themselves precisely implicated in producing image-like preservations of “striking features” in more feminized terms. this becomes most clear, as I will show, through Matilda and ellinor’s very evident imaginative proximity to the anachronistic discourse of commercial fashion.40 Matilda and ellinor redescribe the portraits around them, as well as their own dress, in precise accord with modern fashion’s printcultural system of prose and images—in what is at the same time an indirect address to the eighteenth-century present of the novel’s readers. Over the course of three volumes, the novel stages just two highly exceptional (and in context arrestingly excessive) moments of dilation upon dress. these are the moments, I am arguing, when the text’s specific elicitation of the

182

The Fictions of Serial history

commercialized vantage point of the pocketbook comes most forcefully into view. In a peculiarly self-conscious operation, Lee displaces eighteenth-century fashion description into the voice of her elizabethan characters; and in this way, Lee draws out some of the provocative tensions between how images may have fixed history in the past and how images functioned differently within the commercial conditions of the fashionable present. In the first of these instances, near the novel’s beginning, Matilda pauses to apologize immediately before she offers an extended description of dress, one that she herself understands to be interruptive: “those habits which covered happy hearts,” she asserts, “preserve a long superiority in the fancy” (R, 42). Only after this justification does she proceed to memorialize the attire of herself and her sister when they first encounter Leicester, during a brief excursion just outside the recess itself. (Leicester is being pursued, and his life is endangered; and the girls must decide whether to offer shelter, and thereby to disclose the secret of the recess, or to allow Leicester’s capture.) Notably, the unique air of their dress “surprises” Leicester, in a sign of the conspicuous failure of this dress to belong fully to the wider historical world represented within the novel. In the descriptive passage, there is an explicit effort to constitute the possibly eccentric, possibly brilliant “taste” of Mrs. Marlow (the girls’ caretaker and foster-mother figure), and also to remake the rusticity of the two girls into something like a style that might be expropriated by readers, or by a commercial illustrator: as I would not have you imagine . . . the surprise Lord Leicester expressed, sprung only from our beauty, I must observe to you, we drest to the taste of Mrs. Marlow, rather than that of any country. . . . Close jackets and coats, of pale grey, were trimmed round the skirts and sleeves with black bugle fringe; the collars were thrown back from the throat and chest with point lace, and tied at the bosom with black tassels; our hair, which was very thick, covered our necks and foreheads, falling in rings from under cambrick coifs; small beaver hats, with high crowns, and waving black feathers, completed our appearance, at once too rustic and too elegant not to strike every person. Simplicity is the perfection of dress. (R, 42) at the root of the surprise the dress generates is its dislocation, or failure to be bound to place or to tradition in the way that purely historical costume should. Instead, these outfits adhere to one person’s “taste” rather than a na-

historical Novelty and Serial Form

183

tional one (not “that of any country”), and the affected idiom of simplicity is not in any way at odds with adornment (by fringe, tassels, and feathers). as an exemplary modernization of the quasi-historical artifact, this lavish account of elegance renders historical costume exactly through the conventionalities of print fashion commentary in Lee’s own day, so that the historical dress seems on the verge of escaping the world of the story. at the same time, this paradoxically “elegant” rusticity is precisely such as to “strike every person.” the outfit’s “preservation,” in other words—first, in the fancy, and then, in the epistolary account that Matilda has composed in retrospect—seems merely to reproduce or repeat its “striking features.” the effect of dress is, therefore, antithetical to the essential procedure of the larger novel as alliston understands it (where the project is to displace striking features by moving readers, or by generating sentiment, in a more obviously distinct ways). as seems clear, the “persons” struck by this dress include not only the characters within the story (and the addressee of Matilda’s epistolary narration) but also the readers of the novel—and perhaps most remarkably those readers of the Ladies Daily Companion for 1789 who confronted exactly the same passage of dress description within the excerpt taken from The Recess and republished in the pocketbook itself. In the pocketbook, readers would have directly confronted the vivid resemblance between Lee’s mode of costume description and the pocketbook’s separate dispatch on the fashions of paris in September and October 1788 that adjoined the excerpt from The Recess there: With this dress they wear a Cap Bonnet, the board of which is made of the same sort of taffaty, and the headpiece of striped gauze, trimmed with a very fine blond edging: between the board and the head there is a wreath of artificial roses, tied together behind with a very large bow of white ribbon, spotted with silver; and also behind, but rather inclining to the right side, are placed four large pink feathers, which are made to play forward over the head, and form a pleasing effect. (142) Significantly, the pocketbook’s visual protocols for representing fashion are especially at issue. the “rustic” high style in question became the subject of the now-lost illustration for the Ladies Daily Companion for 1789 (the “elegant representation of the Discovery of the earl of Leicester”), and so appeared alongside the fashion plates depicting “a Lady in the Dress of 1788; and four of the most fashionable head Dresses” for the same year.

184

The Fictions of Serial history

In the pocketbook illustration, the complex visual dynamics of the novel itself, which (like most novels of the moment) did not originally include any illustrations, were superseded by this commercialized revisioning. One significant dynamic of the original narrative that is lost in the pocketbook, for instance, is the initially delayed account of the costume. readers of the novel are tantalized by a more sparing account of Leicester’s dress (which “was of a dove-coloured velvet, mingled with white satin and silver; a crimson sash inwoven with gold, hung from his shoulder with a picture” [R, 39]); but for them the dress of Matilda and ellinor is a blank for the duration of the scene. their striking attire comes into “view” only at the conclusion of their charged encounter with Leicester, so that it suggests both a dialogue with readers’ own, initial imagining of the scene (without having read the dress description) and Matilda’s remediated and heightened attention to her own dress, as it was provoked by Leicester’s expressed surprise and admiration. the pocketbook excerpt from the novel, by contrast, begins by directing even the rare reader who could have missed the illustrated plate at the front of the pocketbook to turn to the illustration before reading: “See an elegant representation of their Discovery by Lord Leicester, prefixed.” On its own terms, the written excerpt from the novel that the pocketbook reproduces at first glance reads seamlessly. Careful attention is necessary to detect the moments where the excerpt has elided Lee’s fuller text. Yet the excerpt manages in just eight hundred words to incorporate two long passages on the dress of Matilda, ellinor, and Leicester while conveying the essential plot of the scene. this plot includes the quasi exchange of portraits that consummates their meeting. (Leicester find the girls to be “portraits” of Queen Mary, while for his part Leicester produces a portrait of Queen elizabeth to verify his own identity.) I will hazard my subjective sense that this pocketbook’s condensation of Lee’s prose reads with something of the quality of modernity of the Waverley Novels to come, and thus illuminates Scott’s own debt to a commercial-material acceleration of the delayed exchanges and the slow feeling of the mode of sensibility that preceded him. More dress, and more social commerce, begins to look like Scott’s fictional modernity, even as Lee’s original text will not embrace the same acceleration. For what would appear in the pocketbook excerpt to be The Recess’s deep preoccupation with dress is belied by the fuller novel, which instead spends the majority of its time staving off these sort of moments (i.e., the peculiarly materializing indulgence of the memory that Matilda associates with “happy hearts”). throughout the novel, Lee’s descriptions of fashions are more typi-

historical Novelty and Serial Form

185

cally austere and sparing, and tend predominantly toward the immaterial effect of dress rather than its material properties. at various points, for instance, the text notes the “bold, magnificent, and martial dress” of Lord essex or the “false head of hair” that marks Queen elizabeth’s disgraceful pursuit of youthful beauty (when far past her prime) as a characterological sign of her vanity and duplicity (R, 187, 79). In a similar way, the novel avoids particularization of dress objects in favor of less precise typifications, as in the “customary ornaments” and vaguely “costly habiliments” that pass between ellinor and Lord arlington. the novel also dexterously situates Matilda and ellinor both within and without a commercial order of affect and imagination. they are innocents without the language to account for fashion, and yet they exhibit desire for the dressed image that from the start suggests an irresistible susceptibility to fashion’s compulsions. In the most obvious instantiation of the resistance to fashion in The Recess (very much in parallel to Cowper’s conjectural history of a “time that was” before luxury), the novel initially constructs for its protagonists a time that obtained before fashion. Due to their cloistered removal from a historical world that largely registers as a contest of sovereignty (in which elizabeth’s power is always under threat, while Mary Stuart’s prospects seem periodically on the cusp of resurrection), Matilda and ellinor are ignorant not only of wealth and power but also of dress. after the aforementioned game of inventing histories from the portraits hanging within the recess begins, Matilda is struck by the “figure of a man of noble mien” in the next portrait: “his dress I then knew no name for, but have since found to be armour.” Matilda’s visual scrutiny is partly explained as an instinctive, emotional attachment (his eyes “seemed bent on me . . . full of a tender sweetness” [R, 9]). Yet Matilda’s ignorance of dress in this moment is at least as conspicuous as her innocent affection, especially insofar as the dress’s nameless impactfulness contributes to the initial formation of her desire. She gazes longingly at the armor, helmet, and hairstyle in the portrait while lacking language to account for them. Improbably naive, Matilda knows less about elizabethan dress than any ordinary eighteenth-century reader would have known. this device thus makes explicit the increasingly ordinary condition of the readers of historical fiction, who came to know the material life of the past, in a sense, better than the past would have known for itself. this is a neatly paradoxical summing up of the inevitable condition of historical fiction in Lee’s fashion-oriented consumer culture. at the same time, by beginning from the precise perspective of

186

The Fictions of Serial history

a character who cannot describe the dress around her, The Recess itself forces a conspicuously off-center entry into history for its eighteenth-century readers, who were thus required to enter into the past while blinded to dress. In this way the novel tentatively complicates or exposes the ethos of display that was beginning to reorganize historical representation. Yet in a further sign of (what Lee understands as) the inevitably compromised project of commercial historical fiction, even the provisional inscrutability of dress quickly comes into view as an anachronistic anticipation of the print-cultural world of modern fashion. Matilda’s innocence before dress, that is, allegorically summons precisely the position of the expectant reader of fashion periodicals. however familiar these readers may have been with the logic of the fashion system, it was the task of periodicals to supply an ever-changing language of dress that had to be learned anew, each year and season. this structure of fashion meant that its adherents perpetually inhabited the same, always already commercialized state of ignorance that Matilda exhibits in peering upon the dress she “then knew no name for.”

Sovereign Dress the second, exceptional diversion into costume in The Recess drives home many of the same complications by producing the very scene most calculated to undercut dress’s historical function. Near the end of the novel, after enduring the relentless persecutions of Queen elizabeth over the course of many years, Matilda is heartened by the accession of her half-brother James I to the english throne. She prepares her daughter for a momentous audience with the new king that she hopes will recover her own birthright. the same audience with the king will certainly decide the fate of the novel’s secret events, in terms of their relationship to official history, once and for all. the gravity of the occasion, as well as Matilda’s suspicion that, in the person of James, historical sovereignty is “the slave of exterior,” makes it “a material point to heighten [Mary’s] beauty by every adventitious advantage” (R, 303): I drest her in a vest of black velvet thrown back at the bosom in the French fashion, with a semicircle of rich lace points. . . . her petticoat was of white satin, wrought in deep points round the bottom with black velvet, and richly fringed with silver. a fuller coat and train of silver muslin, wrought with black fell over the sattin one, and was looped up to the waist at regular distances by strings of

historical Novelty and Serial Form

187

pearl, and dragged toward the bottom into points by the weight of rich black bugle tassels and roses of diamonds; and from thence they were bare, except for similar bracelets circling each wrist. the rich profusion of her auburn hair . . . required no ornament, but to avoid the affectation of shewing it, she wore a hat of white satin with a narrow fringe of black bugles, and a waving plume of feathers. (R, 304) Matilda emphasizes how “by some peculiar happiness, either in its make or mixture,” the dress “became my Mary more than any I had ever seen her wear” (R, 304). But crucially, this momentarily excessive attention to dress—and especially Matilda’s seeming misperception that her attention to the exteriority of dress could ever bear upon the more fundamental course of sovereign history—proves to be a form of self-delusion. the man for whose eyes Matilda adorns her daughter, the new King James I, refuses to meet Mary, and instead treacherously imprisons both women while leaving the daughter unseen. In this way the novel insists with finality that historical costume will not or cannot bear upon the actual course of history that James here embodies. there is a profound structure of repetition here: in the way the novel both begins and ends with consistently discredited and easily misappropriated dilation upon dress; in the way that Matilda passes on to her daughter the fateful attachment to style she first learned in the recess itself from Mrs. Marlow (with the repetitions here of “black bugle fringe,” “black tassels,” and “waving feathers” in each outfit); and in the way that Matilda’s accursed striving for historical stature takes the unlikely and ineffectual course of pursuing fashionability. In this moment of attempting to reenter the official history of the sixteenth century, ironically enough, Matilda is substantially devoid of any historicity but that of Lee’s 1780s present. aligning this scene of Matilda’s failed aspiration to real historical presence (by means of the kind of historical impact or consequence she misperceives dress to have) with the generic formula of the pocketbook makes clear one final dimension of the repetition or doubling that inheres in her daughter’s futile effort to gain a royal audience. While the Ladies Daily Companion for 1789 does not illustrate the closing scene of dress within Lee’s novel, the aforementioned copy of the London Fashionable Repository for the Year 1796 (which through the vagaries of time has ended up alongside this issue of the Ladies Daily Companion in the archive) supplies a standard illustration that serves almost as well (see Figure 28). this formulaic pocketbook image perversely completes The Recess’s verbal elicitation of illustration with a scene that is the

188

The Fictions of Serial history

shadow of Mary’s preempted audience in the novel. and in its typification of the genre of the pocketbook illustration, the image cannot be far from what Lee herself meant to summon. Depicting the “first interview between the prince and princess of Wales” (in the near aftermath of the 1795 wedding of the future George IV and his future Queen, Charlotte), the illustration offers a conventional vision of fashionable life by way of the court, one among countless pocketbook renditions of royal birthday balls and other celebrations. as a scene, the illustration manifests how Lee’s closing episode in the novel, however distanced by its setting in history, channels the particular vision of history or sovereignty conjured within the pocketbook’s concise expression of modern times. Yet Lee’s textual version also carefully negates this vision. the royal audience in The Recess, unlike that in the pocketbook, is intended to be secret rather than open to the view of fashionable life. More crucially still, despite the most careful planning on Matilda’s part, that audience never comes to pass. In combination with the long description of Mary’s dress, the result is an elicitation of an illustration that cannot actually be rendered, one that would combine Mary’s elaborate costume with the novel’s sovereign historical figure in a distinctly hybrid procedure of historical representation. The Recess elicits a desire for such an image only to frustrate that possibility. In this way the novel generates a fuller sense of disappointment with events within the text precisely by drawing on the context of commercial fashion without it. In The Recess, dress intensifies memory but with precisely the formal economy of a pocketbook, as two unrepresentative instances of costume reach out to the wider world of commercial print culture that would insist the novel meet it on these terms. But while the novel thereby resists or falsifies the commercialized mode of reading that will see in The Recess only its dress—and that will not appreciate the novel’s more nuanced productions of feeling nor the historical project within the novel that would proceed apart from the incursions of fashion—the novel nevertheless forges the most significant memories of its own characters via an inordinate attention to dress. this, finally, is a confession that Lee’s historical project cannot do without its own generative oppositionality to the fashion system. and on a final view, the disinherited royal figures of The Recess bear a more profound relationship to dress than may at first appear. as richard Maxwell marks the long procession of the pretender figure in historical fiction (from the French historical romance of prévost to twain’s Huckleberry Finn and beyond, wherein Matilda and ellinor hold an important place), there is a striking story

historical Novelty and Serial Form

189

to tell about the way these illegitimate figures exposed the diminution even of rightful sovereignty within the modern historical novel. the rise of fashion as history suggested the broader transfer of temporal sovereignty, of the bearing of time, from the king to commercial commodities. the historiography once explicitly organized as a succession of monarchical reigns was increasingly reconceived under a concept of periodization for which dress was the preeminent sign (as in the common invocations in the eighteenth century of the era of “ruffs and fardingales” rather than the age of elizabeth). there is a noteworthy distinction, perhaps, in that the succession of commodities is never so perfect as that of actual sovereigns. against the ordinary clarity of monarchical succession (“the king is dead. Long live the king”), fashionable objects that have been displaced from their momentary rule commonly linger on, in just the sort of abject illegitimacy that clings to the pretender, who waits hopefully for restoration but (like the Stuarts) slowly falls into decrepitude. at its root, perhaps, fashion is itself a kind of pretender, emulating or appropriating the forms or place of sovereignty without its substance, as a commercialized placeholder for the historical time that it is the fantasy of the forms of commercial modernity to excise or stave off.41 By the end of Scott’s own first novel of Stuart disinheritance, “[edward] Waverley’s Jacobitism survives,” as Maxwell aptly puts it, “in the material presence of evocative souvenirs and in the reveries they excite, not in any political actions or statements”— and certainly not, as Maxwell’s larger argument suggests, in the tragic figure of the pretender-in-waiting himself who formerly animated the cause for Waverley.42 Scott’s “insipid” Waverley heroes reflect an emblematic, commercialist belief that history-telling would be most adequately accomplished through assemblages of objects rather than through the production of character, for such objects carried the kinds of history that counted within commercial life.43 In The Recess, by contrast, historical fiction begins precisely in the persons of the disinherited royalty for whom such objects fail to speak. Lee’s is a historical world of hesitant fashions that glimpses—and draws back from—an unavoidable allegiance to the commercial desires and forms of the present.

another Scene of Industry there is a striking resonance between the play of the implied pocketbook illustrations of The Recess and Maxwell’s suggestion that the novel exemplifies the method of “history in glimpses”—or “the flickering, equivocal way in

190

The Fictions of Serial history

which historical materials surface, then disappear” in the older French tradition of historical romance that Lee appropriated and remade.44 this methodological account aptly describes both the traditionally documentary qualities of The Recess (its self-presentation as a found text) and the affective tone of the characters’ encounters with their own personal or national histories in the novel. I have in mind a general pattern in which the isolated lives of Matilda and ellinor sometimes momentarily intersect with the wider procession of history (so that the characters themselves, in this sense, are historical materials who surface and disappear). But I also have in mind the exemplary moment of Matilda’s return to Kenilworth Castle, where a character suddenly and vividly catches sight of her own story. as this episode of return finally suggests, The Recess might be aptly described as resurrecting the possibility of such a “history in glimpses” under the new conditions of commercial life. Lee’s novel demonstrates a complex understanding of how such possibilities of “flickering” or surfacing may proliferate within commerce, in its many remainders: how, caught and fixed at the moment of their surfacing, they might supplement the regular successions of seriality. Yet at the same time the novel questions what kinds of materials can continue to surface within commercialized memory, and what cannot. the literal staging ground of royal sovereignty at Kenilworth Castle, where the great pageantry in honor of Queen elizabeth actually took place in 1575, is the novel’s most fundamental site for unfolding commerce’s reinscription of history proper (as is already anticipated, in some ways, by the novel’s aforementioned early recognition of the site as the “model for a thousand others”). When Lee undertook her own novel four decades before Scott’s celebrated novel about the same environs, Kenilworth was already an icon of its elizabethan age and a self-conscious locus for a mode of evocation that complemented a new interest in english national history and in a canon of modern english literature (as against the history and literature of classical antiquity).45 In the mid-eighteenth century, Bishop richard hurd’s Moral and Political Dialogues (1759) posited Kenilworth as a distillation of “the Golden age of Queen Elisabeth,” which he addressed in the form of a fictional dialogue on the occasion of his historical characters’ “View of Kenelworth Castle, in the Year 1716.” (the layering of epochs is significant here, as 1759 looks upon 1716 looking upon the late sixteenth century.) In hurd’s imagined dialogues, John arbuthnot and Joseph addison (along with robert Digby) debate the moral legacy of the elizabethan era, which replaces classical antiquity as the measuring stick for the progress or decline that has led to the commer-

historical Novelty and Serial Form

191

cial present.46 In noteworthy contrast to the future of the historical novel, however, hurd’s more evocative presentations of this history dwell upon the absence of present sensations:47 “all is solitude and silence. No voice of suitors to be heard. No hand solicits the brazen knocker, which disuse and rust have long since disabled for its functions.”48 arbuthnot here embraces not the revivification of the past (now or then) but rather the “melancholy” of his encounter with the present Kenilworth: “I would not exchange [this melancholy], methinks, for any brisker sensation.”49 Notably, the feeling of history comes forward precisely as the weak sensation that emerges amidst silence and in the absence of competing sensory distractions—those at the root of the “brisker” sensations from which hurd steers clear. as Scott’s own Edinburgh Annual Register noted in 1824, hurd’s Dialogues played a prominent role in instigating Lee’s novel,50 where hurd’s conspicuous registering of absences and his scrutiny of the commercial conditions of historical form seem to reappear.51 But in Lee’s treatment, Kenilworth Castle also becomes a more thoroughly contested sign of the conditions under which the past may be brought to life in modern times. the episode of Matilda’s belated return to the newly ruined castle exposes the emptiness of a proliferating desire (in Lee’s own day) for consumable pasts that were attenuated by the anachronistic modernity of their fashions. Yet Lee also, I emphasize, makes the emptiness of this attenuated vantage point inescapable for her character, through no fault of Matilda’s own. Near the novel’s end, after a long succession of distress and loss, Matilda arrives again at Kenilworth, now sadly fallen upon hard times.52 Following her long absence, she discovers that Kenilworth’s miserly new owner has not only stripped the once venerable structure of its “princely ornaments,” but even “let it to some manufacturers.” Now overrun with “mechanics” and “the noise of a hundred looms,” this hallowed historical site has become a peculiarly monstrous protofactory, a façade within which commerce proceeds apace. Crucially, this furious production of textiles is wholly untrammeled by the significant historical events that only recently transpired within the same walls during the visit of Queen elizabeth (R, 273–74). What is all the more unsettling is the castle’s power as a relic to compel by external features alone—to present the same appearance without any external sign of its fundamentally transformed purpose and import. as Matilda observes, “though the exterior was the same, how strange seemed the alteration within!” (R, 274). While the historian edward Gibbon, writing at almost the same moment, finds “instant annihilations” of temporal distance like the one Matilda experi-

192

The Fictions of Serial history

ences here to be generative of historiographical power, the anachronistic factory at Kenilworth proves at least in part to disable thought.53 amid the compromised palace she revisits, Matilda can “no longer . . . even in idea, behold the beloved, the noble [former] owner,” Leicester (R, 274, my emphasis). From this altered state, that is, the subjective or authentic past she seeks to recall is fundamentally inaccessible. the disturbance is heightened by the way that Matilda confronts, not the finished commodities that ordinarily stand in for history, but a scene of commodity production. and perhaps already swayed by the looms around her, Matilda quickly substitutes for her wholly irrecoverable memory of Leicester himself her apparently more persistent (and more impersonal) recollections of a “liveried train,” “gilded galleries,” and “rich tapestry” (R, 274). Moreover, in the very moment she confronts this transformation, Matilda almost immediately loses sight of any fundamental difference in the reincarnated Kenilworth. Despite her initial response, Matilda’s unreliable memory is rapidly co-opted by the commercial logic that the transformed space embodies. at first sight a “mausoleum,” the present castle quickly becomes instead only “another scene of industry not less busy, strange, and surprising” than those of the “gay pageants” of the past (R, 274, my emphasis). thus for a moment the present scene of production even retroactively reshapes Matilda’s past as merely a previous “scene,” a prior iteration, of the same “industry.”54 But despite this “strange and surprising” glimpse that verges upon reenchantment of the present factory, this modified Kenilworth ultimately reverts to a “desolated mansion”—leaving little doubt about the way commercial alteration has diminished this sign of history and offering no hope that the site can be redeemed now.55 through its historical character’s confrontation with production, The Recess elaborates its suspicion of a form of novelty and of a historicizing aesthetics too closely aligned with display and the shopwindow, and with the print-cultural vision of dress that was their corollary. Cutting against a contemporaneous, eighteenth-century “impetus to isolate the space of commercial transaction from both the site of production and the home”56—Kenilworth is also Matilda’s former residence, where she has formerly worked her own tapestry (R, 69)—the novel’s encounter with production at the site of domestic and national history shatters the illusion of pure consumption, as well as the dream that fashion can adequately summon pasts that predate the onset of modern commercial life.57 In this sense, Lee offers a preemptive negation of commercialized historiography and its methods. She insists not so much that

historical Novelty and Serial Form

193

her own novel can access history transparently as that the conflation of commercial life with the project of history inevitably falls short of the qualities of experience in essential ways. The Recess thus lays bare, even before the fact, the commercializing romance of history that Scott’s hand would so methodically, mechanically manufacture—for the same site and historical age in his own novel Kenilworth, and for many other such “scenes” of history.58 In part The Recess seeks room for a different historical method that would not so quickly presume, as Scott will do, that the same probabilistic universal heart beats beneath all dress.59 Yet in a way that marks Lee as decisively of her own time, The Recess finally suggests the paradoxical necessity of commerce for reconstituting Matilda’s tragic experience as fully historical. “By incidents of this kind,” she observes of her unhappy return to the factory of Kenilworth, “one becomes painfully and instantaneously sensible” of the pull of the “imperceptible current of time”—of what Gibbon calls, at nearly the same moment, time’s “gradual, but incessant change.” Lee’s own metaphor of time in The Recess foregrounds the necessity of this kind of retrospection for historical thinking, but she also insists on the repetitions necessary to make change fully perceptible: “When first we find ourselves sailing with the imperceptible current of time, . . . we glide swiftly on, scarce sensible of our progress, till the stream revisits some favorite spot: alas, so visible is the desolation of the shortest interval, that we grow old [or perhaps antiquated] in a moment, and submit once more to the tide, willing rather to share the ruin than review it” (R, 274). For Lee, history turns upon returns, even as she disavows any desire to “review” the past more than she must. Despite the essential paradox of this metaphor of a stream that would circle upon itself to revisit the same spot rather than flow downstream, the metaphor is finally suggestive of the way outmoded fashions redirected the flow of time, by lingering on and thereby proliferating just this sort of return to the old, even as time moved forward in other ways. In order to perceive the evocative “change which jarred [her] every feeling” at Kenilworth, Matilda depends upon an “incident” that calls attention to a commercial invasion of the grounds of history (R, 274). her new sensibility to historical time takes flight from an oblique sense that Kenilworth’s commercial reincarnation obscures a more authentic if now unreachable past. thus we can understand “the noise of a hundred looms” at Kenilworth as the sound of commercialized history—the drone of the emphatic present of commerce that drowns out the autonomy of the past with its busier productions. In The Recess this pseudohistorical condition obtains as the alternative historical possibility embodied in Matilda and her sister ellinor, the lost daughters

194

The Fictions of Serial history

of Mary Queen of Scots, is assuredly written out of the future. But the very failure of that alternate possibility is at the root of the historical sophistication of The Recess, which simultaneously embraces the power of the ruined productions of commerce to bring into view the otherwise imperceptible “desolation of the shortest interval.”

tales of Fashionable Life On the surface, Lee’s proliferating commercial ruin looks very different from the fictional world of Maria edgeworth, the educational reformer whose bestselling fables of development and improvement reflect at least provisional accord with commerciality.60 In Marilyn Butler’s foundational account of her career, edgeworth remains possessed of all the “serenity of the [english] enlightenment,” even for decades after the enlightenment moment has come and gone.61 Yet on a closer assessment, Lee and edgeworth may not lie so far apart as this “serenity” would suggest—especially because edgeworth’s very serenity became more and more conspicuously a relic with the passing of time and with the onset of the historical turmoil of the Irish rebellion of 1798 and Napoleonic war. Moreover, in establishing edgeworth’s “finally ironic” role in the generation of something like a novel of sociological realism, Butler ultimately stresses how edgeworth “expresses the ethos of a commercial world in which . . . she did not feel at home,” so that edgeworth’s biographical life in some ways approximates the self-consciously commercial alienation I have located in The Recess.62 Both Lee and edgeworth contributed in important ways to the emergent historical self-consciousness of the long eighteenth century, and we might do well to see Scott himself, in part, as their mutual production. edgeworth, as an author of “national tales,” set the stage for Waverley by popularizing a genre given to “rewrit[e] the metropolitan traveler by mobilizing the old romance plot of encounter to subject this figure to a disorientation that altered his . . . center of both personal and national being.”63 But Lee’s character, too, perhaps already approximates such a traveler in her disorientation before a Kenilworth Castle drastically altered by commerce. to pursue the potential convergences of edgeworth and Lee upon the terrain of serial commerce, I take seriously edgeworth’s own insistence that she wrote, not national tales or Irish tales, but “tales of fashionable life”—a fact that has been puzzlingly neglected by modern criticism. edgeworth’s mid-

historical Novelty and Serial Form

195

career tales of Fashionable Life were published to great acclaim in two separate series (in 1809 and 1812, respectively). these tales comprise a number of texts better known to modern readers as independent works, most notably the “novels” Ennui (part of the first series) and The Absentee (part of the second). the two series complement one another in a deliberately structural way (so that, for instance, The Absentee is the Irish tale of the second series meant to correspond to Ennui in the first series, etc.). Such care manifests how serial form mattered to edgeworth, but her instantiation of serial form also mattered to literary history itself. the tales are, collectively, the first series of modern novels to be produced by a single author. In this way edgeworth’s tales of Fashionable Life set an important formal precedent for Scott’s own serial project as the author of Waverley. remarkably, the genre of “fashionable life” also links edgeworth to Lee herself, at least in an apocryphal way. Lee’s own name appeared on the title page of a novel entitled Ormond: Or, the Debauchee, Comprehending Sketches of Real Characters, and Illustrative of the Manners and Customs of Fashionable Life, at the Close of the Year 1809. the attribution is spurious—and yet this commercially motivated attempt to align Lee’s legacy with the emergent genre of “fashionable life” indicates how Lee’s legacy was seen to be available for such alignment. this convergence, moreover, may have been noted by edgeworth herself, who published her own novel by the same title, Ormond: A Tale, together with Harrington in 1817. edgeworth’s tales of fashionable life, in the most celebrated examples of Ennui and The Absentee, characteristically proceed by staging the temporal disturbance of modern fashion (rather than nation) as a constitutive problem of British subjectivity within commercial-historical modernity. and through characters who lose sight of “personal or national being” amid commercial excess, edgeworth stages how “universal standards of measurement” for time and fashion unsettle center and periphery alike.64 In one sense, fashion’s coercive cycles structure time in ways that sit inevitably at odds with subjective capacities of experience. Yet for edgeworth, at least, varied crises of fashionable excess also promise a path to improvement, a training ground for apprehending extended historical projects that do not very readily cohere in their own right and that must, in consequence, adopt or utilize fashion’s capacities to signal the prospect of social uniformity or coherence. Ennui, for instance, begins with the character Lord Glenthorn, whose extraordinary wealth has caused him to exhaust all the possibilities fashion has to offer. his first problem, Glenthorn notes, is that his house has been fully furnished. he has obtained (momentarily) the full “gloss of novelty” in every

196

The Fictions of Serial history

last room (U, 145), and thus he has little to do but (in the precise temporal tracking of the novel) make his “diurnal” excursions to fashionable watch shops. here he purchases the exorbitant timepieces that “plague him with their repeaters” (which strike the hour or quarter-hour, in an aural analogue of the debilitating scrutiny of material time that fashion itself provokes) (U, 147). While Ireland ultimately becomes the ground of Glenthorn’s reformation, fashion is his problem. In edgeworth’s Ireland, in precise contrast to the fashionable time Glenthorn has come to know, progress depends upon inattention to passing time. the novel’s initially conventional formulation of “uneven development,” for instance, observes how Ireland much resembles the england of two centuries ago. But edgeworth insists that a peculiarly modern hurry retards Irish progress. Despite his own impatience at the time with Ireland’s arcane practices, Glenthorn comes to recognize that “time is necessary to enforce the sanctions of legislation and civilization” (U, 199). as a corrective to his own impulsiveness, Glenthorn recollects an elizabethan moment that is arrestingly bare of modern conveniences. In this way he vividly estranges a focal moment of english national romance that preoccupies The Recess itself: “I did not recollect, perhaps at that time I did not know, that even in the days of the great queen elizabeth, ‘the greatest part of the buildings in the cities and good towns of england consisted only of timber, cast over with thick clay to keep out the wind. the new houses of the nobility were indeed either of brick or stone; and glass windows were then beginning to be used in england:’ and clean rushes were strewed over the dirty floors of the royal palace” (U, 200– 201).65 parrying the presentist tendency of consumer culture to imagine the past in its own terms (through colorful correlates of its own ubiquitous commodities), Glenthorn laments his former inability to confront the material life of the past in its sparse alterity. With a consequent sense of perspective, Glenthorn checks his disappointment with his projects of improvement, for “in the impatience of my zeal . . ., I expected to do the work of two hundred years in a few months: and because I could not accelerate the progress of refinement in this miraculous manner, I was out of humour with myself and with a whole nation” (U, 201). Glenthorn’s impatience to effect change foreshadows Scott’s more renowned account of uneven development in Waverley, where after 1745 Scotland prodigiously achieved two centuries of english progress in just two generations. and yet edgeworth’s suggestion of the unalterable pace of development—where “the work of two hundred years” appears, potentially, as a definite and inflexible quantity—calls into question Scott’s subsequent, “miraculously” accelerated

historical Novelty and Serial Form

197

vision of Scottish history. attuned by fashion to the fullness of every moment in time (even as he recovers from a pathological obsession with that fullness), Glenthorn writes the idea of cultural acceleration as itself a fantasy. In essential ways, Glenthorn’s attention to the Irish condition is sustained by a continuous, albeit distanced attention to the fashion system, especially through the attractive figure of Lady Geraldine (the spirited Irish aristocrat with whom he soon falls in love, and whose marriage to another man Glenthorn nevertheless generously facilitates later in the novel). Lady Geraldine exhibits a defining, defiant antipathy toward the fashionable clothing that circulates from england, and she ridicules those who foolishly pursue metropolitan fashion. at one point, she deceives the naif fashion acolyte Miss tracy with advice that is faithful to each individual article of the prevailing mode, but that fails to alert this girl to the necessary principle of the tout ensemble. When Miss tracy appears at the ball, Geraldine predicts, “you shall see her, I trust, a perfect monster, formed of every creature’s best: Lady Kilrush’s feathers, Mrs. Moore’s wig, Mrs. O’Connor’s gown, Mrs. Lighton’s sleeves, and all the necklaces of all the Miss Ormsbys” (U, 206). Lady Geraldine thus exposes the inability of the variegated fashions of the moment to “tell” coherently. the art of the tout ensemble, like the spirit of the age, does not inhere in the merely accumulative material exhibition that Miss tracey naively pursues; and her unskilled efforts resolve into grotesque distortion rather than representativeness.66 Furthermore, Lady Geraldine seems to instruct her own capacities of ridicule by contemplating satirical fashion prints, in a way that quite explicitly links her sense of perspective to the productive distance of the printed image from the material phenomenon of fashion (even if the image in part disseminates precisely the same phenomenon).67 In various ways, Glenthorn’s own continued observance of fashion sustains his personal reform and secures his contributions to a more constructive national future. as the corresponding tale to Ennui in the second series of edgeworth’s tales of Fashionable Life, The Absentee, too, begins with a crisis of fashion. awaiting a carriage just inside the opera house, two London ladies anticipate the Irish parvenu Lady Clonbrony’s “gala next week.” One lady will “look in upon her for a few minutes” at least, because she has it on the authority of the interior decorator Mr. Soho that “the reception rooms are all to be new furnished, and in the most magnificent style.” a male bystander, in what is most obviously a reference to the exorbitant expenditure necessary for such a gala, interjects, “at what a famous rate those Clonbronies are dashing on.”68 the bystanders’ imputation of this “famous rate” reveals how Lady Clonbrony’s hurried renovations, in the

198

The Fictions of Serial history

newest and highest style, struggle to keep pace with an elusive material contemporaneity. From the start, the novel registers an unavoidable contradiction within homogeneous empty time’s fantasy of producing itself materially. Fashion’s aspiration to serial form cannot finally be sustained. as both of these tales of fashionable life suggest, edgeworth’s complex engagement with the nature of the relationship between fashion and development—both individual and national—questions an existence (one we might call subhistorical) too much conditioned by the rhythms of consumer culture. But while exposing how an unreformed culture of fashion inhibits development, edgeworth also appreciates the subtler possibilities of development that inhere within fashion’s own chronologies. as her subsequent novel Harrington expresses this measured address of fashion, “people of sense submit to the reigning fashion, while others are governed by it.”69 Straightforwardly, Harrington is a historical novel about the 1780 Gordon riots and a plea against anti-Semitism.70 But this novel, I will suggest by way of concluding this chapter, also meditates deeply upon the serial project of the “tale of fashionable life” through a peculiarly fundamental immersion in the rhythms of material dress—especially through its youthful protagonist’s formative serial encounter with the full commodity cycle of clothes. as an allegorical address of a national awakening to commerciality, the novel opens with harrington’s recollection of his early childhood and the “evening of the first day that I had ever been in London,” where “my senses had been excited and almost exhausted by the quick succession of a vast variety of objects that were new to me.” Upon returning home after this exposure to the dizzying variety of urban novelty, the “quick succession” of these objects brings to the surface his unacknowledged, prior acquaintance with fashion (as the novel emphasizes by harrington’s “twitch[ing] the skirt of my maid’s gown repeatedly”).71 as he watches the darkened street, the slow progress of a lamplighter brings into view the prophetic “face and figure of an old man with a long white beard and a dark visage.” harrington cannot quite make out the man’s refrain, “repeat[ed] in a low, abrupt, mysterious tone, the cry of ‘Old clothes!—Old clothes!—Old clothes! ’ ” (H, 69).72 the nursemaid exploits this man, Simon the Jew, as a bogeyman; and she threatens harrington that if he resists her commands any longer, Simon “shall come up and carry you away in his great bag” (H, 70). Simon at once pronounces harrington’s bedtime and secures his obedience by sounding the death knell of the material fashions he collects (even if he also seems to an-

historical Novelty and Serial Form

199

nounce their imminent return on the secondhand clothing market). the nursemaid’s continued threats (she terrifies harrington with malicious stories of murderous Jews) precipitate a debilitating anti-Semitic phobia in the child. and yet this phobia is explicitly written as a consequent failure to see dress in the proper light: “In vain she told me Simon was only an old-clothes man— that his cry was only ‘Old clothes! Old clothes!’ . . .; its terror was in that power of association, which was beyond her skill to dissolve. In vain she explained to me that his bag held only my old shoes and her yellow petticoat” (73).73 the literal threat to harrington, one that he refuses entirely to cast aside, is to be carried off with discarded fashions. as the generative fable of edgeworth’s historical novel, this episode exceeds its overt preoccupation with the origins of intolerance by insisting upon the abject other side of fashion’s synchronic effects: the inevitable fate of its transient material forms. Yet edgeworth stages harrington’s errant misrecognition of dress, in part, to signal the productive purposes to which she herself was putting old fashions in this novel. In a transposition of fashion and literature, Harrington locates itself at an earlier moment that does not strongly cohere except through fashionable dress. according to the narration, this is a time when commerce has not yet regulated the production and dissemination of polite literary texts, so that, while scattered Bluestocking geniuses like elizabeth Carter and elizabeth Montagu (and early novelists like Samuel richardson) had brought female literature into fashion in certain favoured circles; . . . it had not, as it has now, become general in almost every rank of life. Young ladies had, it is true, got beyond the Spectators and the Guardian: richardson’s novels had done much towards opening a larger field of discussion. One of Miss Burney’s excellent novels had appeared and had made an era in London conversation; but still it was rather venturing out of the safe course for a young lady to talk of books, even of novels: it was not, as it is now, expected that she should know what is going on in the literary world. the edinburgh and Quarterly reviews and varieties of literary and scientific journals had not “allured to brighter worlds, and led the way.” . . . But before there was a regular demand and an established market, there were certain hawkers and pedlars of literature, fetchers and carriers of bays, and at every turn copies of impromptus, charades and lines. (H, 123–24)

200

The Fictions of Serial history

In the absence of such reliable literary periodicals, and the “regular demand” and “established market” they instantiated, edgeworth must instead reproduce the moment through extended accounts of dress. In this way the stabler consensus produced by fashion periodicals could supply the place of an anarchic literary culture too beholden to the vagaries of pedlars and impromptus. the narrator can pronounce much more definitively that “it was at this time in england the reign of high heads” (H, 209), and she elaborates this account in a distinctive tone of ethnographic alienation. her description pauses uncertainly over a foreign vocabulary and measures these relics of style by the inch: a sort of triangular cushion, or edifice of horse-hair, suppose nine inches diagonal, three inches thick by seven in height, called, I believe, a toque or a system, was fastened on the female head, I do not well know how, with black pins a quarter of a yard long—and upon and over this system the hair was erected, and crisped and frizzed and greased and thickened with soft pomatum, and filled with powder, white, brown or red, and made to look as like as possible to a fleece of powdered wool, which battened down on each side of the triangle to the face. then there were things called curls—nothing like what the poets and we understand by curls or ringlets, but layers of hair, first stiffened, and then rolled up into hollow cylinders resembling sausages, which were set on each side of the system, “artillery tier above tier,” two or three of the sausages dangling from the ear down the neck. the hair behind, natural and false, plastered together to a preposterous bulk with quantum sufficit of powder and pomatum, was turned up in a sort of great bag, or club, or chignon—then at the top of the mount of hair and horsehair was laid a gauze platform, stuck full of little red daisies, from the centre of which platform, flowers and feathers, there was sometimes a fly-cap, or a wing cap, or a pouf. (H, 209) Quite explicitly, it is the pocketbook fashion-plate image that epitomizes edgeworth’s distanced but exhaustive description of the headdress of the moment: “If any one happens to have an old pocket-book for 1780, they will by one glance at the plate of fashionable heads for that year obtain a more competent idea of the same than I, unknowing in the terms of art, can raise by my most elaborate description” (H, 209). edgeworth’s self-effacement archly re-

historical Novelty and Serial Form

201

calls the language of the fashion commentator, who can never quite capture the “air” of the newest style. But she also makes clear how the extraordinary visual economy of fashion’s print-cultural chronologies had fostered such encounters, and thus how the persistence of old pocketbooks (and other dated illustrations of dress) had by 1817 made a commonplace of the remote narrative vantage point exhibited in the long passage. Within Harrington, the world of 1780 is itself filled with older visual worlds, as in harrington’s noteworthy reencounter with one Lady de Brantefield: “My recollection . . . proved wonderfully correct; she gave me back the image I had in my mind—a stiff, haughty-looking, faded picture of a faded old beauty. adhering religiously to the fashion of the times when she had been worshipped, she made it a point to wear the old head-dress exactly. She was in black, in a hoop of vast circumference” (H, 120). In part, that is, Lady de Brantefield continues to perpetuate in a latter day “the fashion of the times” and “the old head-dress” that flourished in her own youth. But like Harrington itself, which calls attention to its constructedness by overtly deferring to the 1780 fashion plate that summons its historical world, this character is a closed loop of “recollection” who “gave back the image I had in my mind” (much as the fashion plates of a conspicuously titled pocketbook like the Ladies Mirror and Mental Companion aimed to do for their viewers). Moreover, the novel here erases any tension between the fictional character of Lady de Brantefield and the visual text that gives form to her. as an extant fashion plate, she is not merely a “faded old beauty” but the faded picture of one (i.e., in the novel’s insistent redundancy, “a faded picture of a faded old beauty”). rather than bring her fully to life, edgeworth’s historical fiction insists that she remains a traceable avatar of the faded, archival source of her being. as much as a literary character, she is a revivified old print marked as such even in the flesh. and in a final turn of edgeworth’s self-enclosed “past,” Lady de Brantefield dons what is merely a prior “old head-dress.” She is, it seems, merely an earlier installment of the same serial commerce that leads inexorably toward “the plate of fashionable heads” for 1780 and that summons edgeworth’s extended ekphrasis in 1817. In part, here, commercialized fashion is altered by time. From a place of historical distance, edgeworth can appropriate old fashions that trail oddity and contingency as much as they express a relationship to a wider system (indeed “system” itself is conspicuously estranged and particularized in the passage describing the fashion plate). and just as these fashions have been further particularized over time—altered in kind by their isolation and their slow dis-

202

The Fictions of Serial history

connection from a former function within a system of meaning—the idea of commerce they summon also changes. Harrington invites readers to contemplate what a commercial moment cohering by means other than a “regular demand” and “established market” for literature might have meant. In a way that is finally akin to Lee’s own quest to jar the feelings by means of the ruined remainders of commercial processes, edgeworth remembers archaic fashions in order to conjure a “historical” moment that was bound only by nowobsolete dress. Fashion allows edgeworth to project cultural cohesion, collectivity, and mutual presentness where those qualities of social life, in her view, otherwise were not. In one sense this may be a distortion of the past. But “submitting” at least to fashion, in the historical novel as well as in social life, offered a starting point in a long trajectory toward greater social-cultural coherence and productivity. edgeworth in this way proposes a method of historical fiction but also a genealogy for the phenomenon of history. She remembers what the historicizable coherence of the past owed, historically, to an orderliness built upon fashion’s distinctly regular successions. and by means of fashion, Glenthorn can look back upon the more unruly past, national and personal, that led him to the productive order of “time and Industry” in which he finally locates himself. the “tale of fashionable life” is a mode of romance that arrives, finally, in ongoing history, but that does so by passing through fashion. edgeworth and her characters remained, if not quite at home in, then at least in equilibrium with that ongoing history by keeping fashion distantly in mind.74

Chapter 5

2

Walter Scott’s Fashion Systems

Let those who have laughed at the habits of our ancestors—let the Lady patroness of almack’s who would start back with horror at the idea of figuring in the wimple and gorget of the thirteenth, or the coat-hardie and monstrous headdresses of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and even eighteenth century, peep into a lady’s pocketbook or fashionable magazine, of which the cover is scarcely old—let her recall by such a glance the costume in which she paraded Bondstreet and the park, as lately as 1815, or 20 . . . and then favour us with her honest opinion of the difference between the periods. —“Male and Female Costume,” in Leigh Hunt’s London Journal (1834), as excerpted from James robinson planché’s History of British Costume [The fashion sign] is the result of neither a gradual evolution . . . nor a collective consensus; it is born suddenly and in its entirety, every year, by decree (this year, prints are winning at the races); what points up the arbitrariness of the Fashion sign is precisely the fact that it is exempt from time: Fashion does not evolve, it changes: its lexicon is new each year. —roland Barthes, The Fashion System

Like Maria edgeworth before him, when the playwright and neophyte antiquarian James robinson planché addressed the people of fashion of his own time in 1834, he explicitly invited attention to the dissonances provoked by a “lady’s pocketbook or fashionable magazine, of which the cover is scarcely old.” On planché’s account, the jarringly outmoded styles on view in these “scarcely old” fashion plates induced a special mode of memory. and through the borrowed form of “such a glance” as he describes (at newly obsolete styles), he commands the buried recollections of still more distant fashions (i.e., those

204

The Fictions of Serial history

prevailing decades rather than years ago) to surface in turn. this process of recollection, when extended to the material life of the more distant past, ultimately stirs a more systematic appreciation for the equivalent arbitrariness of the fashions prevailing at any moment (e.g., the monstrous headdresses of the fourteenth, fifteenth, or eighteenth century), and thus of the uniform strangeness of history on this account. In fashion, finally, there is no “difference between the periods.” For planché the proximity of complete alterity in the fashion record partly brings home the contingency of present-day manners in a way that undercuts the chauvinism of the present. But the essential discontinuity of the kind of change that planché puts on view also grants to fashionable dress a more durable privilege. through dress, past and present relate on fundamentally neutral terms, and fashion’s everyday ruptures (as summoned in the pages of a pocketbook or magazine) generate and license the relativist conviction that a robust historicist outlook necessarily entailed.1 Moreover, planché explicitly interweaves the personal memory possessed by the “Lady patroness of almack’s” (whom he asks to recall what she herself wore in 1815) with the more abstract chronology of British costume. In this way, he suggests that her now distanced memories of her own former “costume” do not differ so much in kind from the print-cultural record as we might expect. Fashionable dress moves with peculiar seamlessness between subjective memory and objective archive and dialectically reshapes each domain into the other. planché’s fuller, somewhat contradictory account in the History of British Costume partly upholds dress as a privileged, direct register of what belongs specifically to each moment, for the “true spirit of the times is in nothing more perceptible than in the tone given to our most trifling amusements.” Yet at the same time, especially as it inheres within visual media, dress is for planché a distinctive supplement to history, one that “stamps the various events and eras in the most natural and vivid colours indelibly on the memory.” Much as in roland Barthes’s account of a twentieth-century fashion system, fashion’s vivid demarcations stem from its formal self-enclosure, its being “born suddenly and in its entirety” at every moment in a way that “exempts” it from more enduring historical patterns. In this sense, planché understands heightened attention to fashion’s uniform absurdity paradoxically to sustain the early nineteenth-century historiographical elaboration of the periods’ more substantive differences from one another in other respects. the eyes of the “historian, the poet, the novelist, the painter, and the actor,” he recalls, all turned toward the dress styles of the past as “a fresh source of effect.”2

Walter Scott’s Fashion Systems

205

planché himself holds an important place in theatrical history for the new standards of historicist authenticity that he brought to stage dress (or at least emphatically claimed to do);3 and his History of British Costume itself perhaps marked the inauguration of a recognizably modern costume history in Britain, for better and for worse.4 Yet strikingly, by 1834 planché’s gesture toward the periodical fashion plate had already been something of a commonplace in historical fiction for two decades (and, as I suggested via Sophia Lee’s The Recess in the preceding chapter, had shaped the modern form of this literary genre from the start). this chronology points to the still surprising way that a costume career like planché’s could only follow upon the extensive novelistic enterprise of costume in Walter Scott’s watershed Waverley Novels, which planché conspicuously acknowledged in the History of British Costume as the cultural event most responsible for the age’s new and multidisciplinary historical attention to dress.5 In the 1830s, even as the cultural fantasy of a fashion system now fully flourished in a range of periodical publications that gave to dress a robustly serial life in print, planché recognized how the historiographical promise of dress’s intricate processions had only “of late years rapidly diffused itself throughout europe,” largely in concert with Scott’s novels.6 although planché is belated, he is more than just an index of the questionable terms of Scott’s transmission (what critics have generally understood to be Scott’s diminution) within a theatricalized costume history. In ways that serious-minded address of Scott’s historicism has tended to disavow or look past, Scott himself significantly depended upon his audience’s familiarity with a newly dependable procession of fashion in print, a rhythmic piling up of old fashion illustrations and commentary that fostered qualities of historical engagement at odds with concepts of development or progress. planché’s concentering of fashion thus deftly preserved central features of Scott’s method for representing history and for structuring historical difference. Moreover, planché did so at just the moment when the distinctive charge of print-cultural fashion began to fade under the influence of an increasingly conventionalized fashion press and costume history, in ways that would negatively impact the medium-term literary-historical reputation of Scott’s fashion-laden novels. Chapter 4 retraced the formative but provisional engagements with fashion cycles in the early historical fictions of Sophia Lee and Maria edgeworth; in this chapter I show how the same cycles became a thoroughgoing method in the hands of Walter Scott. In the first part of the chapter, I foreground Scott’s systematic embrace of fashion, which ascribed his contemporaries’ growing compulsion to historicize to consumer-commercial features of their

206

The Fictions of Serial history

experience and embraced the distinctive historiographical possibilities that emerged in consequence. as a means of historical representation, the printcultural fashion system Scott enacted across the Waverley Novels was an anachronism, one that did not properly belong to the past ages these novels addressed. But this system cultivated in Scott’s readers a capacity to relate to times other than their own upon an autonomous plane of material life with its own formal rules or logic for apprehending change—in ways that exceeded more conventionally historiographical constructions of difference. Over the course of this chapter, I turn from recent criticism of Waverley itself (and critics’ varying assessments of the historical methodology of “contrast” on offer there) to Scott’s elizabethan historical novel Kenilworth, which, I argue, presented Scott’s most sustained and self-reflexive account of the place of fashion in his historical art. the lessons I draw from Kenilworth (with its generally poor present-day critical reputation) shape my reading of two Scottish historical novels that in the consensus view lie much closer to the heights of Scott’s literary achievement. In the frame of the Tale of Old Mortality, commercialized attention to dress is shown not only to be the condition of appealing to modern readers but also a more fundamental condition of historical knowledge. Building on this project in a more extended way, The Heart of Midlothian (for many readers the greatest of the Waverley Novels) places the everyday scene of dress—and more particularly the anticipated, print-cultural generic space of the fashionable pocketbook—at the epicenter of Scott’s practice of historical fiction. Ultimately I suggest how, after Scott, one must take the measure even of literature itself from the much wider world of dress whose apperception Scott’s novels decisively reshaped. Fashion was in this sense the instrument of Scott’s fiction, and was enduringly remade or coopted by Scott to serve new literary and historical purposes. the Waverley Novels in turn depended upon the same fashion—and upon their own constitutive openness to being remade by ongoing cycles of material life.

Favorable Opportunities of Contrast In his influential mid-twentieth-century account of Scott, Georg Lukács identified the heroic innovation of the Waverley Novels with their formalization of a new sense of history brought before the masses by a Napoleonic age of revolutions.7 through the historically representative psychology of his characters, according to Lukács, Scott set the european novel on a heroic course toward

Walter Scott’s Fashion Systems

207

a modern realism, one alert to the social-historical circumstances that always conditioned the inner lives of individuals. In the Introduction to this book I argued for what Lukács’s conception of “the historical peculiarity of the age” owed to the peculiarly forceful presentness of fashion—in Scott’s time as well as in Lukács’s own. But for my present purposes in this chapter, I emphasize a different problem. In essence, what Lukács found groundbreaking in Scott (whatever its genealogical roots), more recent critics have found much less distinctive. Working with a more capacious picture of the romantic-era novel than was available to Lukács, Katie trumpener emphasizes how “most of the conceptual innovations attributed to Scott” in the wake of The Historical Novel— not excluding the idea of “historically representative character”—were by the moment of Waverley “already established commonplaces of the British novel,” well practiced in the fiction of Maria edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, and others.8 Where Lukács celebrated Scott’s accidentally progressive attunement to the melancholy costs of objective historical processes, trumpener resists Scott’s vision of these costs’ inevitability as ideologically freighted. Scott himself, she suggests, fixated upon the sudden and cataclysmic entry of the Celtic periphery into the irresistible course of historical progress; but Scott’s more progressive and experimental contemporaries, she finds, were keen to contest this limited and finally imperialistic historical outlook.9 to the extent that the Waverley Novels were the mere afterglow of literary innovation that happened elsewhere and earlier—especially at the behest of the “cultural nationalism of the peripheries”—Scott’s own importance seems largely unaccountable.10 Still more recent criticism makes clear why this is a substantial problem. In the near aftermath of the new book history, Scott’s transformative impact upon the nineteenth-century literary marketplace has never been more evident. Most dramatically, as William St. Clair emphasizes, by midcentury Scott had sold “maybe a million more” copies of his fictional works “than all the other novelists of [his] time put together.”11 Literary history, in sum, has restored to Scott a Lukácsian stature but has not yet replaced now-discredited explanations for that stature. at the same time, the specific centrality of dress fashion to Scott’s practice of history has largely remained out of sight. Lukács himself, as I have noted, understood Scott’s literary achievement as a transcendence of the “mere costumery” of the “so-called historical novels” that preceded his own (where it was “only the curiosities and oddities of the milieu that matter[ed]”).12 Yet this is a rather strange accounting of Scott, in a way that Lisa hopkins’s less nor-

208

The Fictions of Serial history

mative but equally apt account of a typical Waverley Novel makes clear: “Whenever a character is introduced into the text, Scott first describes their clothes. . . . Indeed what they are wearing is often the first, and sometimes for some considerable time, the only thing we know about a character.”13 Within Scott’s first novel, of course, edward Waverley himself has great difficulty living up to any supposed triumph over costume and curiosities. When Waverley is not supine in his sickbed or being literally carried around Scotland (together with the portmanteau that holds his clothes), we are most likely to find him dressing up. and near the novel’s conclusion, with his service in the highland cause at a premature end, Waverley gallingly takes time to order “his highland garb and accoutrements” preserved and shipped home as curiosities, even as the fate of his fellow soldiers, and the outcome of the final, decisive battle of Culloden in 1746, remain in doubt. For Scott, dress is a persistently privileged point of entry, one that opens as much onto the material habits of his modern readers as onto the psychology his characters. In this sense Cynthia Wall more adequately accounts for the originality of Scott’s historical worlds—almost littered with richly detailed surfaces and consumable things—as an event in the history of description. as the moment when the material life of the novel thickens decisively (and “the nineteenth-century habit of preparing an elaborately described setting for the characters to enter and act within gets firmly established”),14 the cluttered mise-en-scène of the Waverley Novels marks a major step away from the spare object-worlds of eighteenth-century fiction and toward the “Dickensian detail and Jamesian significance” that furnished fictional space for later readers.15 Wall gives Scott a relatively small place in her broad account, but she touches on a fundamental dimension of his appeal (and of his abrupt difference from earlier fiction) that has often gone unappreciated. Nevertheless, for Wall, Scott’s materialized settings are fundamentally enclosed spatial domains, or locations within which the embodied vantages of characters and readers can move. In what follows, I extend the implications of Scott’s material depths to the temporal mobility that fashion’s provisional exemption from history sustained within the same settings. Scott’s dress—the leading edge of a wider array of fictional objects that are often thinly veiled surrogates for desirable modern goods—does and does not belong to the historical time in which it moves. as a domain of incomplete belonging to history (in the way planché’s set-piece suggests), Scott’s fashion becomes a complex vehicle for the most operative dimension of temporal “contrast”—as well as of unlikely convergence across time—within the Waver-

Walter Scott’s Fashion Systems

209

ley Novels. to say so is to reset our more familiar picture of Scott, which remains too invested in the pitched contrast between cultures—primitive and modern, highlander and hanoverian—that features in Waverley itself. Moreover, the stakes of reconsidering Scott’s contrastive impulses are particularly high in light of his novels’ own legacy for the institution of literary history. as ted Underwood has recently argued, later nineteenth-century english literary studies in the academy borrowed its very essence from a certain reading of Scott’s novels, which became the template for a discipline-defining methodology of “vividly particularizing and differentiating vanished eras.” at the dawn of the discipline, english professors took from Scott an enduring, central procedure of drawing large contrasts of “period” rather than focalizing modest cause-and-effect processes in the way history departments did.16 Underwood is concerned to break away from the contrastive practice that he imputes to Scott’s influence and to turn loose within literary history something more like the diachronic retracing that has been the different province of historians. (For Underwood, such a turn would better mobilize the potential of quantitative digital research within literary studies.) But in this way, I think, the literary-critical practice he envisions seems less an innovation than an echo of trumpener’s account of the formal resistance to Scott in the early nineteenth century. take the case of the novelist John Galt, for instance, whose historical fiction “gradually makes visible (under the annalistic accumulation of incident and anecdote) the equally gradual transformation” of social power.17 Just as Underwood would have modern literary critics do, Galt offers a vision of history focused not “on consequence-laden historical turning points” (as motors of contrast) but instead upon “the unnoticed, almost imperceptible leaking away of one age, one political system, while another is slowly and deliberately constructed in its place, an accumulation of small but decisive incidents.”18 Still, none of these accounts, past or present, is finally adequate to the history Scott actually practiced, which was considerably more divided about the operative location of contrast than this shared vision suggests. Underwood himself (recounting a classroom methodological experiment to study five-year spans of time rather than traditional literary periods like the eighteenth century or the romantic and Victorian ages) stresses how, “taken to an extreme, historical specificity can disappear.”19 In turning to fashion as the sort of system repeatedly “born suddenly and in its entirety,” however, Scott’s novels precisely seized upon a new and antithetical insight. Over the long eighteenth century, fashion had made increasingly clear how taking chronological specificity to relative extremes could generate difference in the

210

The Fictions of Serial history

first place, in places and moments unexpectedly near at hand. I noted in Chapter 1, for instance, the force of Jane austen’s insistence in the advertisement to Northanger Abbey (a novel filled with fashionable dress and pocketbooks) that “places, manners, books, and opinions ha[d] undergone considerable changes” in the “period” between 1803, when she had first composed the novel, and 1817, when it was finally published. austen’s Persuasion (published together with Northanger Abbey a few months before Scott’s own Heart of Midlothian) further abbreviated the period concept. In an emblematic moment, anne elliot and Captain Wentworth reflect on the time that has passed between their initial romance and their present reencounter. anne first insists that “I am not so much changed,” but Wentworth quickly rejoins, “as if it were the result of immediate feeling” (and with something like the sudden shock one feels in confronting the obsolete fashion plate):20 “It is a period, indeed! eight years and a half is a period!”21 Or, to return to planché as an heir to Scott, the flexibility of the “eras” that dress can “stamp indelibly on the memory” in planché’s account is telling. the lengths of the “periods” in question range from entire centuries during the medieval ages to the mere months that separate the monstrous variations of style in present-day fashion magazines. Yet the nature of the difference in these rapid modern contrasts is the same, and equally complete. For these reasons it is more than incidental that Underwood’s Scott-inflected account of the definitive methodology of literary studies bears such a close resemblance to Barthes’s foundational account of the procedures of the fashion system. Just as literary history’s periods embody a pure difference set aside from process (a sequence of “spirits of the age,” each complete unto itself ), fashion’s sequences promise exactly the same kind of change without evolution, with each new look or style ostensibly unaccountable to the next.22 through fashion, Scott and his contemporaries attended intently to change (often dramatic though near in time, slight though distant in time) that was coded as fundamentally arbitrary. they did so without anything like Underwood’s conviction (or trumpener’s) that the gradual course of cause and effect was the default revelation of the close-up view. Instead fashionable dress served the recovery of aspects of history (proximate and distant alike) ill served by methodological commitments to gradualism that were finally no less ideological than commitments to dramatic turning points. By carving a place apart for fashion’s processions, Scott makes his more sweeping historical contrasts unavoidably self-ironizing, so that any dramatic discrepancy between “states of society” is always remediated by dress as a more neutral cultural ground.

Walter Scott’s Fashion Systems

211

Lukács understood Scott to leave “mere costumery” behind; but in Scott’s own day, William hazlitt quickly recognized how the repetitious hero of the Waverley Novels—across his many serial iterations in settings throughout British history—remained the same “insipid” clothes horse: a mannequin to be dressed up by readers just as he had already been dressed up by Scott himself.23 In this sense, the broader structure of civilizational contrast in the Waverley Novels is built in highly self-conscious ways on the more ordinary ruptures of everyday commercial life, which bear a transparently fraught relation to conventional historical distance. Scott himself makes just this point over the course of the introductory chapter to Waverley, where the author of Waverley’s rhetoric of contrast most directly emerges in the course of his contemplation of costume. Initially laboring to distinguish the novel’s project from the clichéd conventions of subgenres (Waverley is neither Gothic “tale of Other Days,” nor occult German romance, nor Sentimental tale, nor fashionable “tale of the times”), the author sustains his resistance to formula through a surprising reclamation of merely old dress. after all, “who, meaning the costume of his hero to be impressive, would willingly attire him in the court dress of George the Second’s reign, with its no collar, large sleeves, and low pocket-holes?”24—that is, at a near distance, after the gloss of novelty has worn away, but before the distant exoticism of long ago has yet taken hold. In moving not away from costumery but toward the out-of-date, Waverley upholds fashion as a system of meaning more fully coextensive with cultural life than the increasingly stratified literary system to which these novelistic subgenres point. at the same time, the author of Waverley’s delineation of ostensibly universal human passion constitutes itself through a procession of costume changes that initially appears the only dependable domain of contrast in human history. the same agitated human heart, he asseverates, “throbbed under the steel corslet of the fifteenth century, the brocaded coat of the eighteenth, or the blue frock and white dimity waistcoat of the present day” (W, 5). the more we learn of the author of Waverley, the more his own heart seems to throb precisely for this sequence of style rather than to do so in spite of it. Indeed the entire introductory chapter almost rehearses (on the plane of history) the Spectator’s archetypal vision of a dissected coquette’s heart, the vapors of which rose “at the approach of a plume of Feathers, an embroidered Coat, or a pair of fringed Gloves.”25 readers come to understand how the mutual proclivity of edward and his author to see a world of contrasting time betrays a foregoing susceptibility to fashion’s compulsions.

212

The Fictions of Serial history

as an essential component of Waverley’s historical project, the “effeminate glamorization” of old dress throughout the novel’s pages interpellates the author of Waverley, edward Waverley, and readers alike as the belated fashionvictims of the supposedly dowdy styles of George II’s day.26 Before he departs to serve in the english army, Waverley is “induced (nothing loth, if truth be told), to present himself in full uniform” at his parish church. the narcissistic allure of his own dress happily secures his escape from a boyish romantic attraction that is conspicuously marked by dated female fashions that impress him no more. at church the unfortunate small-town beauty in question, Miss Cecelia Stubbs, “had indeed summoned up every assistance which art could afford to beauty; but, alas! hoop, patches, frizzled locks, and a new mantua of genuine French silk, were lost upon a young officer of dragoons who wore for the first time his gold-laced hat, jack-boots, and broadsword” (W, 21). after Waverley has changed sides in the rebellion by swearing his allegiance to Bonnie prince Charlie, the author of Waverley apologizes for his hero’s undue attention to his own reflection in the mirror while adorned in very becoming plaid: “I hope my readers will excuse him if he looked in the mirror more than once, and could not help acknowledging that the reflection seemed that of a very handsome young man.” the passage quickly slips into a moment of free indirect discourse that hovers between the perspectives of edward, author, and historical facticity (“In fact, there was no disguising it”), and ultimately emerges with the author of Waverley himself seemingly in full thrall: “his light-brown hair—for he wore no periwig, notwithstanding the universal fashion of the time—became the bonnet that surmounted it. his person promised firmness and agility, to which the ample folds of the tartan added an air of dignity. his blue eye seemed of that kind ‘Which melted in love / and which kindled in war’ ” (W, 201). the novel explicitly hints that this is not a moment of mere “disguise” or costume (“no disguising it”) but rather of fulfilling presentness that partakes of fashion as much as wartime. Waverley’s natural hair (in place of a wig) takes on its “becoming” air precisely in relation to the “universal fashion of the time,” a system of meaning which his hairstyle (or headdress) specifically flouts as a kind of antifashion or edgy undress. In a way that is consistent with Waverley’s abiding interest in english fashions of 1745 (or in an englishman’s interest in fashion in 1745, perhaps), the introductory chapter’s famous but glancing invocation of “the state of society in the northern part of the island at the period of my history,” arrives almost as an afterthought in the chapter’s concluding sentence. to take the author of Waverley at his word, the “favourable opportunities of contrast” that

Walter Scott’s Fashion Systems

213

a primitive highland society ostensibly affords him are a mere accessory to— and perhaps not so different in kind from—the primary project of learning what the court dress of George II can tell, at a “modern” period when (as I noted in Chapter 1) “scarcely anything appears to have altered [from Scott’s present day], more important than the cut of a coat.” While construing the imperative to attend to culture via “opportunities of contrast” as the effect of foregoing successions of dress, the novel also presents dress as a unique means of accessing further “important alterations” that would not otherwise be evident.

a Most Mercer-Like Memory Seeing Scott from this perspective finally suggests a different mechanism of his broad appeal and of his renewal of historiographical method. among Scott’s critics, Ian Duncan most prominently addresses the fashionability of Waverley itself, but even Duncan ultimately finds in Scott’s oeuvre a self-enclosed literariness or hyperfictionality. (this is a quality that Caroline McCracken-Flesher and Jerome McGann have recently recognized in similar ways.)27 In Duncan’s terms, Scott embraces romance as “the essential principle of fiction: [that of ] its difference from a record of ‘reality,’ of ‘everyday life.’ ” In this sense the Waverley Novels uphold a “teleological horizon” of reading wherein “all voices— the tumult of dialects and jargons—are contained and absorbed into the past, as literature, words printed and bound.”28 But Scott, I think, also descried another horizon, an opening of his books onto the continually altering material life of his readers. after all, dress poured into and out of Scott’s fiction as much as it was contained there, not only in the theater of planché and in the productions of other historical arts, but also in the very concrete way in which Scott remade Scottish tartan itself into a world-historical textile.29 the cumulative, global, daily effects of the rise of tartan since Scott’s day, both perceptual-aesthetic and economic, must by any quantitative accounting have far surpassed the more direct aesthetic and economic effects of the fiction.30 Scott’s anticipation of this kind of accounting—along with his awareness of literature’s finally dependent relation to a vaster cultural present it could not fully contain—was a primary reason why his historical worlds, from the start, pervasively interfaced with modern fashion and with the wider orientation toward material life and its rhythms that the print-cultural discourse of fashion sustained and allegorized.

214

The Fictions of Serial history

When Scott turned to the elizabethan terrain of Kenilworth Castle (four decades after Sophia Lee’s The Recess), he offered his most self-reflexive account of the way fashion shaped his practice of historical representation. Critics have generally understood this quality of self-awareness in Kenilworth as a kind of indulgence, a moment in Scott’s career when historical seriousness gave way to abandoned pageantry and spectacle, perhaps shaped by the feedback loop of by-now instantaneous stage adaptations of each successive Waverley Novel. (planché himself wrote an adaptation of Scott’s Kenilworth that was produced in February 1821, just a month after Scott’s own novel had appeared.) For Stephen arata, for instance, Kenilworth is at once “arguably the most influential work of fiction of the nineteenth century” in shaping the standard price and format of the British novel for decades to come and the occasion of the collapse of Scott’s serious practice of historical fiction. the novel “inaugurated . . . that thriving subgenre of Victorian fiction, the lusty (and utterly unserious) elizabethan costume drama, the kind of thing thomas Carlyle so roundly disapproved of in the nineteenth century and Georg Lukács disparaged in the twentieth.”31 But here I show how the peculiar fashionability of Scott’s elizabethan world marked an essential continuity with earlier Waverley Novels, which always depended upon dress in ways that Kenilworth only made more conspicuous. arata emphasizes the enthusiasm of later nineteenth-century readers for “those aspects [of Kenilworth] that seem least ‘novelistic’ to us—namely the elaborate spectacles surrounding the figure of Queen elizabeth,” most of all the entertainment at Kenilworth Castle where the Lady of the Lake emerged to acknowledge elizabeth the greatest of english monarchs. Scott’s narrative, however, only arrives at the castle itself in the third and final volume.32 the novel’s most theatrical pageantry thus only succeeds a different project wherein the novel produces not a repository of costume but the distinctive, up-to-themoment quality of its elizabethan fashions. In part, the fashionable dress and furnishings of Kenilworth call out the contingent proclivities of Scott’s readerconsumers. More fundamentally, the novel’s fashions reveal how Scott had to produce the temporal coherence of this elizabethan period through objects that, while marked as belonging to the age, nevertheless knowingly and anachronistically reflected the serial cycles of his own later day, when dress and other commodities could more genuinely be all-of-a-moment. the novel implicates the author of Waverley himself as much as his readers in the kind of anachronism I am describing, which becomes conspicuous from the start in the terms upon which we meet the tragic heroine amy rob-

Walter Scott’s Fashion Systems

215

sart. Kenilworth introduces amy, the secret wife of the earl of Leicester whose ill-fated story the novel pursues, through the indirect report of the “cutting mercer” Lawrence Goldthread. having happened upon amy, Goldthread recalls her through what another character explicitly labels Goldthread’s “most mercer-like memory,” too centered upon her dress: She was in a gentlewoman’s attire—a very quaint and pleasing dress, that might have served the Queen herself; for she had a forepart with body and sleeves, of ginger-coloured satin, which, in my judgment, must have cost by the yard some thirty shillings, lined with murrey taffeta, and laid down and guarded with two broad laces of gold and silver. and her hat, sir, was truly the best-fashioned thing that I have seen in these parts, being of tawney taffeta, embroidered with scorpions of Venice gold, and having a border garnished with gold fringe;—I promise you, sir, an absolute and all surpassing device. touching her skirts, then, they were in the old pass-devant fashion.33 In part what distinguishes this dress is its price, and its being well made (in an older sense of “fashioning”), but it is clear that amy’s attire is also peculiarly fashionable in ways the novel will continue to bear out: for her tasteful navigation of colors and materials; for her “best-fashioned” hat that occupies the most scrutinized site of fashion in the long eighteenth century (i.e., the headdress); and for her resurrection of a former look just ready to resurface (skirts “in the old pass-devant fashion”). at the same time, the figure of the “mercer” who introduces amy is an anachronistic reflection of an emblematic figure for all stripes of modern consumption in the long eighteenth century.34 the initial presence of Goldthread offers a metafictional pretext for the mercer-like vision that abounds in the rest of the novel. and through numerous, lavish descriptions of dress and other luxuries like the one Goldthread here provides, Kenilworth turns a romantic consumer’s eye on this ostensibly elizabethan past. We meet a character “in the gayest habit used by persons of quality at the period, wearing a crimson velvet cloak richly ornamented with lace and embroidery, with a bonnet of the same, encircled with a gold chain turned three times around it, and secured by a medal” (K, 133); we meet another “quaintly dressed in a doublet of black velvet, curiously slashed and pinked with crimson satin,” together with “a long cock’s feather in the velvet bonnet, which he held in his hand, and an enormous ruff, stiffened to the extremity of the absurd taste of the times” (K, 168–69). as the invocation of

216

The Fictions of Serial history

the “taste of the times” here suggests, Kenilworth conspicuously aligns this costume with the regular processions of style that characterized Scott’s later commercial moment. It is a hallmark of Scott’s method to utilize fashion to let readers into an implied system of cultural meaning with remarkable efficiency. take the particularly clarifying example of the servant Lambourne’s advice at the start of the novel: “You must somewhat reform your dress, upon a more grave and composed fashion; wear your cloak on both shoulders, and your falling band unruffled and well-starched—You must enlarge the brim of your beaver, and diminish the superfluity of your trunk-hose” (K, 30). In a sense remarkably akin to Barthes, Scott playfully indulges in the arbitrary relation between signifiers and signifieds across time. In this case the signified in question (“dignified and composed”) is born of finally unpredictable qualities: a cloak on both shoulders; a band without ruffles but well-starched; less trunk-hose, but more hat brim. Scott here becomes a kind of Barthesian master of this historical world, so that fashion is “born by his decree” with all the seeming force of the real fashion system. and already in Scott’s own moment, the real-world fashion system inhered in printed prose as much as in dress objects. readers thereby encounter a depth of illusion—the impression of a complex elizabethan fashion system that extends far beyond the specific qualities Lambourne directly calls to readers’ attention. In this spirit, the novel repeatedly pauses to acknowledge the “vogues” of the moment and introduces characters who are essentially vehicles for importing into the novel the very concept of fashion, which operates at various levels of society (K, 15).35 Michael Lambourne, the jesting scoundrel who arrives at the Black Bear Inn as the novel begins, is a transposed modern fop, wearing clothes “of the newest fashion, and put on with great attention to the display of his person” (K, 19). a more elite character, Nicholas Blount, carries to court an overweening regard for fashion, one which is heightened by the zeal of his recent conversion to the ways of the mode. his “villainous tailor” has “apparelled him . . . in blue, green, and crimson, with carnation ribbons, and yellow roses in his shoes” and left him “as much embarrassed by the quantity of points and ribands which garnished his dress, as a clown is in a holiday suit” (K, 283). Blount offers a steady contrast to the tastefully reserved attire of Walter raleigh, who at one point refuses the queen’s offer of “a suit . . . of the newest cut” after he gallantly covers a puddle with his own (K, 144). Unlike Blount, raleigh prefers a “well-fancied and rich suit . . . too well adapted to his elegant person to attract particular attention”—but perhaps one that is no

Walter Scott’s Fashion Systems

217

less new (K, 283). here the description is reminiscent of nothing so much as the regency dandy Beau Brummell’s dictum that “to be truly elegant, one should not be noticed.” Like english gentlemen from the late eighteenth century onward who were safely on the other side of the “Great Masculine renunciation”36 of overly conspicuous dress, raleigh has learned to do more with less and to value instead those smaller touches of refinement, or “insides of costly construction,” only apparent to the discerning eye of the gentleman in the know.37 In a number of moments like this one, the author of Waverley shuttles between fashionable modern practices and those of the past. For instance, the grooming habits of anthony Forster, the villainous keeper of amy, conspicuously diverge from the desirable practices obtaining in both the past and the present day: Forster’s “hair, in arranging which men at that time, as at present, were very nice and curious, instead of being carefully cleaned and disposed into short curls, or else set up on end, as is represented in old paintings, in a manner resembling that used by fine gentlemen of our own day, escaped in sable negligence from under a furred bonnet, and hung in elf-locks, which seemed strangers to the comb” (K, 25, my emphases). Forster’s unfashionable hair looks neither like old paintings nor modern gentlemen, which, however, do much resemble one another. Sir Walter raleigh, by contrast, in a further sign of his fashion forwardness and surprising capacity to remain au courant in 1821, wears his hair “adjusted very nearly like that of some fine gentlemen of our own time, that is, it was combed upwards, and made to stand as it were on end” (K, 133). (Notably, the signifier is consistent in two very different places in the novel, an indication that Scott’s attention to this dress is systematic rather than ad hoc.) the author of Waverley’s habitual construction of character through convergences of style depends upon a practiced abstraction of the details of dress from documents like “old paintings,” but also upon his winking assertion that these “resemblances” can signify in analogous ways across time, within and without modern consumer culture.38 Within limits, fashionable surfaces reconfigure time in ways that grant access to the past. Scott’s simulation of an elizabethan fashion system allows the present to intersect with the past, but to do so as an arbitrary moment rather than as a teleological destination. and as with raleigh, the author of Waverley is a particularly shrewd and insistent observer of the connection between the reigning norms of dress, at any moment, and the most serviceable past for that present. In the early nineteenth century, as the fashion historian aileen ribeiro argues, Britons’ attention to historical dress shifted its focus

218

The Fictions of Serial history

away from the seventeenth century (and the style eponymized by the prominent portraitist anthony van Dyck) and toward elizabethan costume, which, “unconsciously, suited the fashion aesthetic of the time, which was based on a tight-fitting covering for the torso and an emphasis on the unbroken line of the legs. thus, the high-collared late sixteenth century doublet and short trunk hose could—very roughly—be approximated to the early nineteenthcentury tight-fitting coat, and the elizabethan hose could be equated with late Georgian pantaloons or trousers.”39 My strong reading of this kind of procedure is that Kenilworth’s fashion is not merely lending itself as an accessory to a standard labor of historical representation, but rather that fashion’s suggestion of parallels, homologues, and points of contact is at the root of Scott’s capacity to sort engagingly through the epoch in the first place—or as Benjamin and adorno later understood, to forge “a new look for history” that could “alte[r] the way one perceives the succession of past epochs and the relation of the present time to them.”40

a Splendor Suddenly Created after first taking shape in specific relation to fashionable dress, the “mercer-like memory” of Kenilworth further extends to a broader exhibition of modern luxury within amy robsart’s secret apartments at Cumnor hall. here, as Scott retails the alluring objects of the past to meet his present-day readers on their own consumerist terms, he reshapes the past itself into a fully plausible source of modern desire. In order to make amy’s necessary seclusion more accommodating, her husband Leicester has spared no expense to refurbish the rooms; every glance within this “enchanted palace” offers amy “new proof of her lover and bridegroom’s taste” (K, 48). the banqueting room, for instance, is brilliant enough to dazzle the eyes of the spectator with the richness of its furnitures. the walls, lately so bare and ghastly, were now clothed with hangings of sky-blue velvet and silver; the chains were of ebony, richly carved, with cushions corresponding to the hangings, and the place of the silver sconces which enlightened the antechamber, was supplied by a huge chandelier of the same precious metal. the floor was covered with a Spanish foot-cloth, or carpet, on which flowers and fruits were represented in such glowing and natural colours, that you hesitated to place the foot on such exquisite

Walter Scott’s Fashion Systems

219

workmanship. the table, of old english oak, stood ready covered with the finest linen, and a large portable court-cupboard was placed with the leaves of its embossed folding-doors displayed, shewing the leaves within, decorated with a full display of plate and porcelain. In the midst of the table stood a salt-cellar of Italian workmanship, a beautiful and splendid piece of plate about two feet high, moulded into a representation of the giant Briareus, whose hundred hands of silver presented to the guest various sorts of spices, or condiments, to season their food withal. (K, 46–47) In its extensive cataloguing of the “splendour which had been so suddenly created” by Leicester at Cumnor, Kenilworth gives each of amy robsart’s four apartments—the banqueting room, antechamber, withdrawing room, and sleeping chamber—similarly comprehensive treatment (K, 48). at first glance, in the way this sheer accumulation merely “dazzles the eyes” of the spectator (and so is not obviously put to use), it is unclear precisely what kind of history is being summoned. as object-driven simulations of an epoch that bear a close resemblance to museum period rooms, amy’s refurbished apartments are in one sense “reconstructions” evocative of a milieu. Yet in another sense they are mere catalogues of disarticulated commodities unified only by the more “mechanistic” notion of a date or period.41 In the latter sense, these various rooms amount to a series of representative assemblages of the luxuries of an artificially synchronous elizabethan moment. In the “withdrawing room,” for instance, the subject matter of a Flemish tapestry insistently indexes contemporaneous production: “the looms of Flanders were now much occupied on classical subjects” (K, 47). here, the presumption that contemporaneous productions, gathered from around the globe, would fill such a place as Cumnor is rather unhistorical. the “suddenly invested . . . splendour” of the fashionable luxury of Kenilworth (K, 48) cuts against a more historically authentic “aesthetics of ‘patina,’ conveying family status and antiquity,” which “dominated definitions of luxury goods before the late seventeenth century, while a fashion system and novelty took precedence [only] after.”42 even clothes, like other elizabethan luxuries, were once relatively durable goods, and sixteenth-century style evolved too slowly to generate anything like the dependable fashion cycles of the long eighteenth century.43 and on closer examination these rooms most evidently take the form of a modern showroom, where romantic-era retailers had learned to display the latest fashionable wares as they might be seen in the home, without quite meaning

220

The Fictions of Serial history

for them to be touched. Wedgwood’s famous porcelain shops, for instance, innovatively displayed “not a collection of stock” but rather “his table and dessert services laid out completely on two ranges of tables.”44 In this respect Scott’s description in the preceding passage of the “court-cupboard . . . placed with the leaves of its embossed folding-doors displayed, shewing the shelves within, decorated with a full display of plate and porcelain” is especially striking. thus it is the project of Cumnor to arrange and organize these historical artifacts as if they are consumer commodities available for purchase—perhaps with the allied sense that they are all the more desirable just before they are fully possessed.45 In essence, Scott borrows a new zeal for simulating context from the scene of modern shopping and thereby forges a historical “milieu” that is most fundamentally an anachronistic effect of commercialization. When amy robsart observes herself “from head to foot in a large mirror, such as she had never seen” (K, 49), she comes to share romantic readers’ impossible glimpse of her “character” through anachronistic consumer commodities, for a mirror on such a scale was technologically impossible until the turn of the eighteenth century.46 the same impossible mirror is an emblem of eighteenth-century newspaper columns, typically entitled “the Mirror of Fashion,” whose imperatives seem unduly reflected in this elizabethan world (even if Scott, protesting too much, had overtly disavowed the disposition of the Mirror of Fashion in the introductory chapter of Waverley). at the same time the author of Waverley is at his most confessedly unhistorical in presenting amy’s predilection for shopping, or her weakness for a pedlar’s wares (in a scene to which I will briefly return in the next chapter): “the Ladies of Fashion of the present, or of any other period,” he insists, must grant amy’s entitlement to distinction through her “liberal promptitude to make unnecessary purchases, solely for the pleasure of acquiring useless and showy trifles which ceased to please as soon as they were possessed” (K, 216). the model here, of a continual procession of trifles that “ceased to please as soon as possessed”—or a “permanent desiring mode” (born of “the inevitable gap between the perfected pleasures of the dream” of what a desired but not-yet-purchased consumer object might supply “and the imperfect joys of reality”)—belongs specifically to the romantic ethos of modern consumerism that Cumnor sustains within this elizabethan past.47 In the gloss of its novelty, Cumnor’s most significant fictional parallel is perhaps the suddenly refurbished, fashionably modern townhome of Lady Clonbrony in edgeworth’s The Absentee. But Scott’s invented fashions and artificial synchronies, if they represent superimpositions upon the past, are

Walter Scott’s Fashion Systems

221

ultimately necessary to his tale, in part because the novel’s most reliable artifact of history, Kenilworth Castle, is so elusive as the emblem of any one historical moment. as an index of architectural history, “the noble pile . . . presented on its different fronts magnificent specimens of every species of castellated architecture, from the Conquest to the reign of elizabeth, with the appropriate style and ornaments of each” (K, 263). Kenilworth’s most celebrated entertainment, featuring the Lady of the Lake, recapitulates every historical era in order to ordain the reign of elizabeth as their culmination. a subsequent “amusement” likewise rehearses the past, as “true-hearted men of Coventry . . . represent the strife between the english and the Danes, agreeably to a long custom preserved by their ancient borough, and warranted for truth by old histories and chronicles” (K, 362). atop the tower above the outer gate, “gigantic warders . . . designed to represent the soldiers of King arthur” stand guard, as real bodies here grow interchangeable with mannequins for the task of summoning history. (Some of these “primitive Britons” are “real men, dressed up with vizards and buskins”; others are “mere pageants, composed of paste-board and buckram, which, viewed from beneath, formed a sufficiently striking representation of what was intended” [K, 259].) In all these ways the castle itself becomes, not a dependable sign of the elizabethan period, but a chronologically extensive site of accumulation for many pasts. Because Kenilworth Castle exhibits the costume and architecture of so many times, it is only the strong contemporaneity of the fashionable dress that Scott displaces into history that can uphold the specificity of the moment of the novel’s historical setting. In its approach to Kenilworth Castle, the novel also enfolds an awareness of its own limitations. In the end, Scott confines his most extravagant staging of fashionable consumption to Cumnor hall, at a remove from the public or political past exhibited at Kenilworth itself and at a similar remove from the sovereign figure of Queen elizabeth.48 In a sign of this unbridgeable gap, the tenuous historical existence of the character of amy robsart (whom Leicester has forbidden to leave Cumnor) finally seems conditional upon her keeping her distance from the public scenes and struggles to which her consuming habits and Scott’s fashionable commodities cannot entirely belong. as the plot unfolds, amy’s proscribed arrival at Kenilworth Castle quickly collapses the systematic artifice the novel has wrought, and her tragic death at the hands of Cumnor’s unkempt keeper soon follows in turn. as against The Recess, which exhibited a Kenilworth Castle remade by commerciality (filled with the “noise of a hundred looms” and rendered irreconcilable with what it had been), Scott

222

The Fictions of Serial history

finally places Kenilworth itself just beyond the systematic fashion through which he renders the elizabethan moment. In this way he gestures toward a more authentic history that lies alongside, or on the other side of, his commercializing pastiche.

More Material particulars Scott’s novels attain a provisional mastery over dress by modulating dress’s allure in the service of fiction and history. they do so, however, not by subordinating costume to plot and character, but instead by embedding something like fashion as these plots’ and characters’ very condition of being. In this section I show how this dynamic extends to Old Mortality and The Heart of Midlothian, two entries in the tales of My Landlord, a subset of the Waverley Novels (ultimately consisting of four distinct series) that followed on the runaway success of Scott’s first three novels. The Tale of Old Mortality (1816) is Scott’s most bracing address of the furious religious enthusiasm of the past; but as I will show, this address is distinctly prefaced by Scott’s attention to dress and its commercial circulations as the impetus of the tale. Where Kenilworth looks backward from very modern fashion cycles that it takes as the template for its past, Old Mortality looks forward from rough-hewn commercial circulations that it posits as the precondition of historical knowledge. I then turn to The Heart of Midlothian to foreground the proleptic domain of dress consumption that emerges as the defining site of Scott’s characterological production of his celebrated heroine Jeanie Deans. the same domain of dress, as I will show, becomes the avenue of Jeanie’s most direct encounter with history during her meeting with the queen. as against ann rigney, who asks what it “mean[t] for Jeanie to migrate from a book to material culture” in the long, popular afterlife of Scott’s novel in the later nineteenth century (so that she becomes a ship, a rose, a potato, a locomotive, etc.), here I explore what Deans had meant all along as an emblem of the migration of material culture into the historical novel in the first place.49 In the preliminary chapter of Old Mortality, the author peter pattieson encounters for the first time the eponymous character “Old Mortality,” whose itinerant work to maintain obscure and remote monuments to Covenanter presbyterian martyrs throughout Scotland is already well-known to pattieson. Old Mortality, whose presence first registers through the “clink of a hammer,” comes into view partly through his distinctive work but equally via his dress.

Walter Scott’s Fashion Systems

223

pattieson initially finds him “busily employed in deepening, with his chisel, the letters of the inscription” on a monument to several of these martyrs; but pattieson’s own attention immediately turns to Old Morality’s attire: “a blue bonnet of unusual dimensions”; “a large old-fashioned coat, of the course cloth called hoddin-grey, . . . with waistcoat and breeches of the same”; and “Strong clouted shoes, studded with hob-nails, and gramoches, or leggings, made of thick black cloth.”50 In part, the dress marks this celebrated servant of memory as a complex amalgam of historical temporalities: of the many distinct and punctuated occasions of martyrdom that his work memorializes; of the repeated cycles of his “annual round” to repair these monuments and gravestones over the course of many years; of the continuous labor (or “train of long service”) traced in the wear of his suit; and of a style of dress that seems, even from its originary moment, to have been defiantly “old-fashioned” to begin with (O, 9). But while Old Mortality’s dress initially appears as an innocently rich site of historical meaning, we soon discover that pattieson’s pronounced scrutiny of this attire reflects a highly contingent perspective shaped by the peculiar sources of his historical information. When pattieson composes his tale of the Covenanter days (i.e., the novel as we have it), he partly draws upon the “many anecdotes which I had the advantage of deriving [directly] from Old Mortality” himself. Yet he has also “endeavored to correct” these overly subjective or biased anecdotes by means of the information networks of commerce. reflecting a break in living tradition, the few true Covenanter descendants remaining prove “a limited source of information,” and their scarcity and forgetting require pattieson to call instead on the “supplementary aid” of pedlars: “those modest itinerants, whom the scrupulous civility of our ancestors denominated travelling-merchants, and whom, of late, accommodating ourselves in this as in more material particulars to the feelings and sentiments of our more wealthy neighbours, we have learned to call packmen, or pedlars.” the change in dialect, pattieson observes, is not empty semantics but the sign of more fundamental transformation, as increasing material abundance in Scotland draws the nation’s passions closer to those passions formed by the defining opulence across the border in england. the kind of Scottish history that counts to pattieson is always already commercialized; and he further looks to “country weavers” and “more especially to tailors” for what “may be considered . . . a complete register of rural traditions” (O, 13). that this register “may be considered” complete at once implies the possibility that much is left out, and underscores the likelihood

224

The Fictions of Serial history

that the novel’s systematic account of the times would not be possible without the rapid exchange of dress and narrative alike in this marketplace. By dramatizing the commercial constraints upon pattieson’s antiquarian practice, the novel retrospectively reinforces the peculiarly dress-bound terms of pattieson’s relationship to its archetypal figure of historical memory, terms that on second glance seem to have governed pattieson’s encounters with Old Mortality from the start. however singular, the tales of Old Mortality will only appear in the novel insofar as they accord with the ebb and flow of commercial life, and as they are remediated by the contingent perspectives of pedlars and tailors.51 the conclusion of the novel expressly reprises its preliminary insistence on the conditions of pattieson’s historical knowledge. to verify the epitaph upon a stone marking the grave of John Balfour of Burley (the novel’s recalcitrant sectarian and rebel assassin who, in dying, had viciously clung to an enemy combatant to ensure that they both would drown), pattieson dispatches the “travelling merchant” peter proudfoot, “known to many of this land for his faithful and just dealings, as well in muslins and cambrics as in small wares.” proudfoot supplies a copy of Burley’s epitaph; but pattieson’s insistence that he “see[s] no ground to discredit” the report explicitly introduces the possibility that proudfoot may be deserving of suspicion (O, 349). Most fundamentally, pattieson’s extensive compilation of Covenanter lore, which he “compresses” into the gripping and unified tale that is the novel, appears as the accidental consequence or side effect of systematic circulations of dress—or as what can be known in the course of doing something else. By regularly offering themselves to the kind of supplementary inquiry proudfoot undertakes, the pathways of “muslins and cambrics” accelerate the exchange of knowledge and allow a richer practice of historical representation to take root. But these pathways follow, first and foremost, different imperatives. the final frame of Old Mortality brings pattieson’s narrative project, which will be distributed and consumed along the same commercial pathways that have produced it, into explicit proximity with fashionable dress. the episode revolves around pattieson’s supposedly fortuitous “invitation to drink tea” with Miss Martha Buskbody, who has “carried on the profession of mantua [or gown]-making at Gandercleugh, and in the neighborhood, with great success, for about forty years.” Given the chronology, her “great success” in dress-making precisely coincides with the rise of print-cultural fashion. at the same time Buskbody, whose questions about unresolved plotlines pattieson seeks to answer, suggests a distinctive symmetry between her dress-making profession and her literary expertise, both of which depend upon the same

Walter Scott’s Fashion Systems

225

circuits. In a sign of pattieson’s recognition of this point, he hands over the “loose sheets” of his manuscript so that she might “enlighten me by the experience which she must have acquired in reading through the whole stock of three circulating libraries in Gandercleugh and the two next market-towns” (O, 349). (Notably, these libraries were institutions that purveyed novels sold by the same publishers who produced pocketbook fashion plates and thus the illustrations that have presumably instructed Buskbody’s provincial mantuamaking.) Buskbody vets the adherence of pattieson’s history to the protocols of commercial circulation that will sustain the continued travel of his own tale in print. and strikingly, pattieson speculates about Buskbody’s commercial, reading “experience” in the same way he might about the past (i.e., what she “must have” acquired in reading becomes at once curious and inscrutable to this antiquarian). For pattieson, then, these domains are oddly exchangeable. at the same time pattieson reveals that he is well aware of Buskbody’s taste for “narratives of this description,” a suggestion that the novel has always evolved with her fashion-driven sensibilities in mind (O, 349). as a complement to the pedlars and tailors whose perspectives precondition the novel’s history, Buskbody finally reveals pattieson himself to be more than just a passive victim of his dress-centric sources; rather, he agentially shapes the story to continue exploiting the same circuits.

a pocketbook Wrought When pattieson and Buskbody return in The Heart of Midlothian (as I will show), their presence points to Scott’s conscious alignment of these two novels, and so draws the commercial carriage of historical experience in Old Mortality into alignment with the definitive dress habits of Jeanie Deans. The Heart of Midlothian itself begins amid the turmoil of the porteous riots in edinburgh in 1736 but quickly pivots to the different trajectory of its heroine. Jeanie faces a terrible ethical dilemma due to a vagary of the law, which deems her sister effie constructively guilty of infanticide because she did not disclose her pregnancy to anyone, and the child that she delivered has disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Jeanie could save her sister with an untruth (by claiming effie had confessed the pregnancy), but she refuses to compromise her principles. Instead Jeanie travels from Scotland to London alone on foot, in an unlikely but ultimately successful bid (assisted by the Duke of argyle) to plead in person for a royal pardon for her sister. Duncan claims that the Heart of Midlo-

226

The Fictions of Serial history

thian “invents for nineteenth-century fiction the universal representation of a national society that exceeds and contains any particular local, public or domestic scene” and so forges a historical world that is “socially, politically, psychologically and morally rifted by the differentiating expansions of historical time and national-imperial geography.”52 But the novel only does so, I will emphasize, through a mediating character who travels improbably (fashionlike) across these profound rifts. Moreover, this character’s most fundamental trait is the constancy of her habits of dress; and dress in its provisional autonomy from historical circumstance becomes necessary to Jeanie’s extraordinary encounter with her wider social world—as essential a meeting ground between characters in the novel as it is between Scott’s readers and Jeanie Deans herself. the novel is initially concentered around the totemic edinburgh tolbooth prison, the so-called “heart of Midlothian” itself. But the overtly historical site is significantly juxtaposed to the adjoining Luckenbooths, a scene of commerce that thrived in the moment of the novel’s setting and remained extant, if altered, in the present day of the novel’s narration by peter pattieson. though now “degenerated into mere toyshops” (with a rich and enchanting display of “hobby-horses, babies, and Dutch toys”), the early eighteenth-century shops of the novel’s historical setting contained “the hosiers, the glovers, the hatters, the mercers, the milliners, and all who dealt in the miscellaneous wares now termed haberdasher’s goods.”53 Just as they seem to be for Scott’s readers, the Luckenbooths are for Jeanie’s eventual husband reuben Butler the literal means of passage to and from the tolbooth itself, a kind of allegory for Scott’s typical entry into history through sites and circuits of retail commerce.54 In a related way, Jeanie’s modest but steady attention to her toilette is a quality repeatedly admired within the novel. and the narrative trajectory of the novel eventually makes clear how her toilette is at the same time a special site of permeability, where the represented past opens up to the specific forms of the modern fashionability of the future. In Jeanie Deans, Scott improved his own characterological formula for historical fiction in a way that mitigated his first mediocre hero’s edward Waverley’s “insipid” and undue attention to dress by relocating this desire for dress within a female character. as a relief or release from the tension of the earlier novels, this realignment of fashion with femininity was an important factor in the novel’s favorable reception. Yet Deans is the obverse of Waverley in more ways than her sex. Most obviously, her travels from periphery to center and back again invert Waverley’s own path into and then out of the highlands. In addition, Deans’s careful arrangement

Walter Scott’s Fashion Systems

227

of dress becomes a kind of wellspring of Scottishness itself rather than the metropolitan antithesis of Scottishness that Waverley’s own dress arrangements seem to be. and in contrast to Waverley’s largely touristical diversion through tartan on the way to his maturity (when the “romance” of his life comes to an end), the explicit reward of Jeanie’s long journey is finally a much a fuller entry into fashionability. as Jeanie heads south, the novel registers the gradual exposure of her dress to scrutiny “on account of the fashion of her attire,” and likewise observes her adept adaptation to consensus. “her bare feet and tartan screen” “exposed her to sarcasm and taunts,” yet “she had the good sense to alter those parts of her dress which attracted ill-natured observation. her checqued screen was deposited carefully in her bundle, and she conformed to the national extravagance of wearing shoes and stockings for the whole day.” Jeanie’s own reaction in a letter underscores the force with which dress brings home the contingencies of culture, but also the facility with which dress accomplishes real adaptation: “Yet will think I am turned waster, for I wear clean hose and shoon every day; but it’s the fashion here for decent bodies, and ilka land has its ain landlaw” (HM, 271). Lest readers think Jeanie merely, abstemiously uninterested in dress, the text consistently foregrounds her more self-directed striving to keep up appearances. at one unsettled moment, Jeanie takes the opportunity to sit and “by the assistance of a placid fountain . . . which served her as a natural mirror, she began—no uncommon thing with a Scottish maiden of her rank—to arrange her toilette in the open air, and bring her dress, soiled and disordered as it was, into such order as the place and circumstances admitted” (HM, 305). Notably, all the proper analogues of historical specificity arise here as dress: Jeanie Deans’s national-sociological typicality is expressed by her dress habits, even as that expression is conditioned by what “place and circumstances” allow. In some ways, though, Jeanie does emerge more as epitome than typicality. She wears the tartan plaid and the “rest of Jeanie’s dress was in the style of Scottish maidens of her own class; but arranged with that scrupulous attention to neatness and cleanliness, which we often find united with that purity of mind, of which it is a natural emblem” (HM, 347, my emphasis). Still, none of this purity precludes her susceptibility to the attractions of finer things. In admiring her suitor the Laird of Dumbidikes’s home, “she was not a person of taste beyond her time, rank, and country” (HM, 251). She finally resists his offer of “my mother’s wardrobe, and my grandmother’s forby— silk gowns wad stand on their ends, pearlin-lace as fine as spiders’ webs, and rings and ear-rings to the boot of a’ that”; but in doing so Jeanie is “beset with

228

The Fictions of Serial history

temptations, which perhaps the Laird of Dumbidikes did not greatly err in supposing were those most affecting to her sex” (HM, 257). an inversion of raleigh in Kenilworth, Jeanie perhaps holds out for the clothes “of the newest cut” that (as I will show) are her eventual reward. Jeanie’s daily existence, because grounded in her toilette, is always potentially coincident with modernity’s material pathways. and when Jeanie finally attains an audience with Queen Caroline, as well as a promise from the queen to intercede with King George the Second himself in seeking a pardon for effie’s crime, the novel draws out to great lengths the implications of the queen’s gift to Jeanie of an embroidered pocketbook. this pocketbook contains a banknote but also a predictive vision of the print-cultural genres of fashion that forged the kind of history which Jeanie Deans and the queen are alike obliged to inhabit in The Heart of Midlothian. (to be clear, this pocketbook is an actual “case” and not the specific print-cultural generic form of the pocketbook I have pursued throughout this book. But I am suggesting that for Scott the case is already a placeholder for the print-cultural genre the case will come to contain, or to be, in the near future.) the queen commands Jeanie, “take this housewife case . . . ; do not open it now, but at your leisure you will find something in it which will remind you that you had an interview with Queen Caroline” (HM, 370). For a moment, it is as if Jeanie might prematurely open the case to expose the future of fashion in print, and contemplate a mise-en-abyme, pocketbook illustration of the very scene of this royal interview as it happens (compare with Figure 28). In the narrative, the physical pocketbook quickly takes on a striking precedence over the actual queen. after the audience Jeanie seems oddly incapable of registering her direct brush with this historical person; she “misdoubt[s]” having met the queen herself and requires the duke’s assurance that she has really done so. Jeanie’s disbelief suggests how, even in the moment of the queen’s physical appearance, the novel’s most recognizably historic figure can only herald the print-commercial conditions of her being in historical fiction—or the terms of dress through which she and the novel must speak—by tendering the pocketbook. the duke, for his part, raises the issue of the pocketbook to the point of excess: he presses Jeanie, “have you no curiosity to see what is in the little pocket-book?” Jeanie wonders hopefully whether it might contain the pardon for her sister; but the duke flatly pronounces it unlikely. after the duke strives unsuccessfully to raise her curiosity, the conversation moves on; but the narration itself directs the reader’s attention back to the pocketbook: Jeanie was “still holding in her hand the unopened pocketbook”

Walter Scott’s Fashion Systems

229

(HM, 371). the duke persists. at first he feigns disinterest (waiting “to see how long [Jeanie’s] feelings of gratitude [for the pardon] would continue to supersede those of curiosity”), but he soon gives in to his own curiosity, which “obliged [him] once more to bring forward the subject of the Queen’s present. It was opened accordingly.” the contents reveal “the usual assortment of silk and needles, with scissors, tweezers &c.” and a “bank-bill for fifty pounds.” Jeanie presumes the banknote’s inclusion to be a mistake, and she is surprisingly more attached to the pocketbook case itself as “a very valuable thing for a keepsake” (HM, 372).55 If the contents evoke the financial-commercial ties suggested by the banknote, the (literal) containment of that financial instrument within the more fundamental gift of the pocketbook asserts a kind of priority for the latter object. What will bind metropolitan sovereignty and periphery in Britain is not just money but also the domain of silk, needles, and scissors—the tokens that anticipate the dress-driven synchrony that will come to fill this pocketbook space via the print-cultural reproduction of fashion. the novel’s great concern with dress, along with its great labor to produce Jeanie’s character via dress habits, slowly progresses toward the fourth and final volume, a notorious puzzle of interpretation. the volume has often troubled readers because of the way, “glaringly, the entire novel shifts its shape from history to romance, beginning as one kind of story and ending as another.”56 For many readers, Jeanie seems scandalously to retreat from the complex realities of history into an idealized domesticity built on her behalf. In Duncan’s account, for instance, this is finally “an extraordinary movement out of history to grasp a lost cultural formation in the psychically charged space of private life,” one that “does not coincide with public history” nor “the pressures of real history.”57 Yet the dress attention that persists in the final volume, by my account, seems remarkably consistent with the episode when Jeanie has most fully coincided with public history, during her audience with the queen. In the final volume, Queen Caroline’s gift is specifically culminated by a materialization of this protean pocketbook’s intrinsic promise of a reliable supply of fashionable dress in the future. after Jeanie has returned from her journey, the cottage that will be her new home comes ready furnished. In addition, the novel deposits in Jeanie’s bedroom “a neat trunk, described as ‘a token of remembrance to Jeanie Deans, from her friends the Duchess of argyle and the young ladies.’ ” (Such a “remembrance” also draws the scene into distinct proximity with future pocketbooks with titles like The Ladies Polite Remembrancer.) as Jeanie sifts through the contents—a trove of “wearing apparel of the best quality, suited to Jeanie’s rank in life”—the scene evolves into

230

The Fictions of Serial history

a trunk show; and “article after article was displayed, commented upon, and admired,” and sometimes critiqued. Finally the “exhibit[ion]” culminates in the “dress of white silk, very plainly made, but still of white silk, and French silk to boot” that is a gift from the Duke of argyle for Jeanie’s wedding day. the doubleness—“plainly made, but still [French] white silk”—suggests how the novel has gradually transmuted Jeanie’s very plainness into a distinctive kind of high style able to uphold or convey the historical setting (HM, 435).58 at this point the novel’s long-inconspicuous authorial voice (peter pattieson) reemerges to mark how these articles of clothing invite even as they defy complete description: “to name the various articles by their appropriate names, would be to attempt things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme; besides, that the old-fashioned terms of manteaus, sacques, kissing-strings, and so forth, would convey but little information even to the milliners of the present day.” recurring to Old Mortality, pattieson pledges in the future “to deposit an accurate inventory of the contents of the trunk with my kind friend, Miss Martha Buskbody [the mantua-maker], who has promised, should the public curiosity seem interested in the subject, to supply me with a professional glossary and commentary” (HM, 435). Suddenly the seeming transparency of dress, or the nominally transhistorical pleasure of the trunk show, grows opaque enough to require more thoroughgoing historical contextualization than anything else in the novel has done. (although pattieson claims to require a glossary and commentary, somehow he already knows enough of the “appropriate names” of these obscure articles of dress to supply the inventory to Buskbody in the first place.) Yet, on its face, such contextualization does not differ in a fundamental way from the expert commentary that always filled current fashion periodicals with novel terminologies that conveyed the latest styles, as language collaborated in the material production of the new.59 the scene thus grants the historical novel’s archaic fashion a double identity—at one level fully enjoyable from a different moment of fashion, and at another level so particular to the time of the novel’s setting that only Buskbody’s profound technical knowledge might slowly unbind it from the time. Nonetheless, we must trust pattieson’s insistence that nothing could be “more suited to the situation” of Jeanie, an assurance that suggests how this dress bears out her historical situation, too, even more aptly than her conversation can. Despite Jeanie’s reconstitution or fulfillment by fashion, her enduring difference from her sister effie becomes explicit through effie’s embodiment of a very different—and conspicuously performative rather than material—idea of

Walter Scott’s Fashion Systems

231

the fashionable world at the novel’s end. Now moving in the wider world under an assumed identity, effie composes a letter to Jeanie that observes the “cruel tone of light indifference with which persons in the fashionable world speak together on the most affecting subjects! to hear my guilt, my folly, my agony, the foibles and weaknesses of my friends—even your heroic exertions, Jeanie, spoken of in the drolling style which is the present tone in fashionable life” (HM, 454). the duke himself returns to report on effie (who goes unrecognized as Lady Staunton), now become “the ruling belle—the blazing star— the universal toast of the winter” and “really the most beautiful creature that was seen at court upon the birth-day” (HM, 459). Conspicuously, the scene set here of the royal birthday is commensurable both with Jeanie’s prior audience with the queen during her journey and with the illustrated scenes that filled the fashionable women’s pocketbooks of Scott’s own day. effie herself is only briefly in fashion, “blazing” for ten years before departing for a Continental convent—where she is erased from the world as old fashions often are. though Jeanie herself burns less brightly, fashion’s deeper and more enduring force is nevertheless more sturdily instantiated in her. effie is a fashion, but Jeanie, like the women’s pocketbook itself, is a placeholder for fashion’s more fundamental existence across time, as a habitual structure of expectation that never belongs fully to any one bright particularization.

a Zigzag pattern In a display case at Scott’s estate of abbotsford, the author of Waverley’s materialization of the past in The Heart of Midlothian comes full circle by precipitating a remarkable real-world object in turn. In 1828, Scott received the gift of a “pocket book worked by Flora Macdonald,” the real-life Scottish heroine who aided Bonnie prince Charlie’s escape to France in the wake of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion, and who inspired the character of Flora Mac-Ivor in Waverley itself. 60 the donor claimed to have obtained the artifact in 1809 from an elderly sister of Macdonald, along with a since misplaced lock of prince Charlie’s hair. this was the same year, remarkably, when Scott’s own literary career entered directly into the mediations of the print-cultural generic form of the pocketbook and the systematic fashion it enshrined. an issue of the Ladies Daily Companion for the Year 1809 included an illustration of a scene from Scott’s historical poem Marmion (1808), which faced a separate title-page

232

The Fictions of Serial history

Figure 29. Ladies Daily Companion for the Year 1809, with a “Scene from Scott’s celebrated poem of Marmion.” © Museum of London.

vignette depicting the year’s fashionable dresses (Figure 29). this was the same pocketbook title that three decades earlier had included the excerpt and illustration from The Recess that I discussed in the previous chapter.61 In this episode of Scott’s own “novelization” in the pocketbook—before he had become, or perhaps a condition of his becoming, the author of Waverley62—Scott’s literary merits were privileged but nevertheless partialized, bound in relation to the wider collection of voices within the remainder of the pocketbook. the print artifact does give Scott’s featured verse a certain priority by upholding the poem as a visual emblem for the moment, and thereby according the poem something like high fashion’s representativeness. But Scott’s authorial status within the pocketbook cannot equal that of the iconic dress of the title page, the real guarantor of the synchronic unity the pocketbook worked to encapsulate. his verse can at best only adjoin this more iconic dress, and then, first and foremost, only as illustrated costume. the gift of Flora Macdonald’s pocketbook to Scott in 1828, then, fully intertwined three respective pocketbook stories: that of the genuine Flora

Walter Scott’s Fashion Systems

233

Macdonald relic; that of the 1809 event that brought Scott’s art of historical representation directly within this lineage of print-cultural fashion (and thereby perhaps influenced the composition of Waverley); and that of Scott’s varied appropriations of the generic form of the pocketbook as a methodological template for his novels—most of all in the Heart of Midlothian itself.63 the donation of the pocketbook does not merely preserve a relic of an important historical figure; it also flags Scott’s deep connection to this kind of object and to the kind of historical apertures Scott recognized it to open for his own consumer-commercial present. as an object, Flora Macdonald’s pocketbook, in the most expansive signification of its conspicuous aesthetic qualities (being “embroidered in a zigzag pattern, in various colours”),64 fully partakes of the temporal hybridity of the fashionable dress of Scott’s novels (Figure 30). In part, Macdonald’s pocketbook contains within itself that same proleptic, close-to-vest, physical space that Jeanie Deans carried with her in Midlothian. It is another gift that anticipates the print-cultural fashion of the pocketbook that would remake the

234

The Fictions of Serial history

Figure 30. pocketbook worked by Flora MacDonald. Courtesy of abbotsford house, UK.

inner lives of Scott’s audience, and make Midlothian itself possible, by structuring material longing in time. But Macdonald’s pocketbook is also conspicuously worked—given to its own material surface as much as to the print-virtual space that it potentially carries within. this becomes clear both in the object itself (still on display at abbotsford) and in the lavish illustration that reproduced the pocketbook (together with many other noteworthy objects of abbotsford) within a book at the close of the nineteenth century (Figure 31). through pronounced qualities of surface and visual-material form, Macdonald’s pocketbook continues to reach out to the still unfolding successions of fashion in ways Scott would want us to appreciate. this point could not escape my notice in the moment when I first gave this pocketbook close scrutiny, just as a short-lived craze for extraordinarily consonant Missoni fashion designs swept through the blogosphere, television, and print press (Figure 32).65 the resemblance between the eighteenth-century artifact and the twenty-firstcentury fashionable commodity is provocative. Yet the main point is not the romance of this specific convergence of style (however tantalizing and however productive it has been for organizing my own engagement with this literary history). rather, the point is the more abstract mode of aesthetic convergence and contrast involved—a mode to which Scott’s historical novels were constitutively alert and open, above all in their abiding faith in the endless possibilities of “conjunction (as opposed to subordination)” that was the promise of commercial seriality.66

Figure 31. “pocket-Book Worked by Flora MacDonald,” from Abbotsford: The Personal Relics and Antiquarian Treasures of Sir Walter Scott (1893). regenstein Library, University of Chicago.

236

The Fictions of Serial history

Figure 32. Bedsheets and pillowcases from Missoni home Collection (2011). the black-and-white reproduction does not fully convey the remarkable convergence in color between the Missoni designs and Flora MacDonald’s pocketbook. Courtesy of Missoni home. Max Zambelli photographer.

2 the account I have offered in this chapter is in some ways sympathetic to the recent establishment of a “postmodern” or humean Scott, whom Duncan elegantly characterizes by “a skeptical disillusionment from reality and a sentimental attachment to reality as illusion.”67 But of course Scott’s fictional triumph also manifested the oblique legacy of eighteenth-century antiquarianism and its empirical object- and image-obsessions. these obsessions predated the consumer culture whose own object-obsessions—through Scott’s intervention—antiquarianism itself came to inform and mediate. as that context makes clear, the idea of a wholly virtual or a fully metafictional Scott—a Scott who is a closed book—finally makes too little of Scott’s profound invest-

Walter Scott’s Fashion Systems

237

ment of material life with fantasy and vice versa, and too little of Scott’s attention to the ways in which the material qualities of objects moving in time always remake our illusions. Set in history, Scott’s fashion is not always or only acceleration that makes the past more alien. rather, fashion’s objects and images possess a special and enduring power to remake the present’s points of contact with the past, and so to generate new histories from the future’s always altering state of material-aesthetic coincidence with the dress of the past. this is one reason why Scott himself persists in uncanny and unlikely ways at the edge of fashion even at the close of the twentieth century. When the fashion historian and theorist Caroline evans turns to the deathliness and decay of avant-garde designers like alexander McQueen and John Galliano (ca. 2000), Scott shows up as a literary point of origin for their phantasmagoric spectacles, as in runway shows (reminiscent of Kenilworth, I would add) where “phantasmagoric figures creat[e] a bridge between animate and inanimate models,” blending mannequins and living persons.68 When Barthes himself turns to the image of fashion photography in the concluding pages of The Fashion System, he exemplifies his account by turning to Scott’s Ivanhoe as the inspiration for a chaotically multivalent photo-shoot theme: “the décor develops Scottish, romantic, and medieval variations: the branches of naked shrubs, the wall of an ancient, a ruined castle, a postern gate and a moat: this is the tartan skirt.”69 For a typical present-day fashion scholar, this address of Scott can only register as a “quite random example”;70 but I have suggested in this chapter how such a choice is on the contrary overdetermined. In a final sense, Barthes’s analysis in The Fashion System perhaps illuminates the image-driven context for Scott’s own project. the twentieth-century fashion photograph, according to Barthes, works first by “photograph[ing] not only its signifiers [or garments], but its signifieds as well”; the photograph then proceeds to make those signifieds conspicuously “unreal,” unnatural, artificial, so as to make all the more real the signifier, or the garment itself. In the end, through fashion, “nothing plausible remains but the garment.”71 Scott’s fiction, perhaps, worked in reverse—by taking as a starting point the many times, near and distant, from which, for his contemporaries, nothing plausible remained but the garments—and then weaving a décor and a historical ethos around them that always in the end acknowledged the priority of dress and its patterns for this history.

Chapter 6

2

William Godwin and the Objects of historical Fiction

Inestimable benefit will in my opinion flow, from the habit of seeing with the intellectual eye things not visible to the eye of sense. —William Godwin, Essay on Sepulchres

In The Spirit of the Age, William hazlitt found in the long career of William Godwin a profound exemplification of the romantic epoch, as the star of this radical philosopher and influential novelist rose and fell so spectacularly in the revolutionary 1790s: “the Spirit of the age was never more fully shewn than in its treatment of this writer—its love of paradox and change, its dastard submission . . . to the fashion of the day.” hazlitt’s formulation is precise; he attributes Godwin’s unexceeded exemplarity not so much to Godwin’s own activity as to a collective mode of receiving and forgetting him—or to the way in which the “fashion of the day” prevents Godwin from being heard. By 1825, Godwin was “to all ordinary intents and purposes dead and buried.”1 Yet hazlitt also grapples with the strange way Godwin nevertheless lingered on, for so long out of fashion. In this chapter, I take up hazlitt’s implicit challenge to redeem Godwin from his age’s “dastard submission” to changing fashions, and not just in the narrowly political sense that hazlitt has foremost in mind. three decades after the philosophical speculations of Political Justice (1793) first had their moment, Godwin endured most notably as an author of fiction—of a set of novels that our present-day literary histories have been as unable to accommodate as were Godwin’s 1820s contemporaries.2 Yet as late as 1810, anna Letitia Barbauld’s early history of the British novel tradition still upheld Godwin as a model of the modern art, especially for his production of a “variety” (“of strik-

William Godwin and historical Fiction

239

ing circumstances”) that differed in kind from “the great deal of trash [that was] every season poured out upon the public from english presses” under the emerging mass-market conditions of novelistic fiction.3 Barbauld’s account can remind us of the pride of place Godwin once held; but more profoundly, her commentary can also summon for us, via Godwin, the elusive prospect of a British novel tradition, and of a historical method in the novel form, absent of Walter Scott. to pursue such a prospect, as well as its collapse, I retrace a Godwinian practice of historical fiction that departed in fundamental ways from Scott’s rival methodology. as I will show, Godwin encountered many of the same problems as did Scott; and both careers testified to shared structural limitations, under which a compelling practice of historical representation required reckoning with the vivid attractions of fashionable commodities. But where the Waverley Novels archly elided “ancient and modern” material life with a kind of exuberance, Godwin’s writings (before and after Waverley) more firmly contested the excessive preoccupation with fashionable commodities that Godwin found to be a peculiar feature of modern life. For Godwin this preoccupation could not be reliably projected upon the past; to do so was to risk the wholesale exclusion, from history and from the future, of vaster possibilities of social-intellectual life and aspiration. Godwin’s methodological project culminated in his historical novel Man­ deville: A Tale of the Seventeenth Century (1817), which by its title conspicuously posited itself as a serial successor to Godwin’s earlier historical novel St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (1799)—a work that had preceded not only Waverley itself but also most of the protohistorical romantic fictions now taken for Scott’s immediate antecedents.4 Looking broadly at Godwin’s career, I examine these two historical novels as a part of a sequential project, before and after Scott, in which Godwin’s retrospective self-recognition about his own procedures in St. Leon intensified his methodological self-consciousness in Mandeville. In the person of Charles Mandeville, the novel’s psychologically damaged antihero, Mandeville at once offers a powerful meditation on colonial trauma (i.e., of desire for a history that is not possessed) and a highly self-conscious examination of the affinities between modern historiographical desire and desire for other sorts of commercial productions. Mandeville’s oddly oblique relationship to the public or national eventfulness of the english Civil War is only the foremost sign of the novel’s investment in a compromised “state” existing alongside rather than in history proper, driven by the hypnotic rhythms of serial commerce.

240

The Fictions of Serial history

Before turning in earnest to these historical novels, I focus on two significant and neglected moments from Godwin’s earlier career when the problem of the fashionable object came explicitly to the fore—threatening to substitute for, yet also paradoxically promising to promote, genuinely valuable social and historical reflection. I first examine Godwin’s remarkable exchange of correspondence with thomas Wedgwood, son of the ceramics magnate Josiah Wedgwood, where Godwin explained his reluctance to accept a commoditygift that would compromise the terms of their relationship. I then turn to Godwin’s more ambiguous and imaginative staging of the problem of commoditydriven reflections in his collection of essays The Enquirer, where the shopwindows and busy crowds of a fashionable London scene pose extraordinary possibilities of speculative thought. Much like Barbauld’s refreshing appreciation of Godwin’s own capacity for variety, this scene suggests the complexity of Godwin’s ultimate dissent from the fictional display of material novelties that became a defining feature of Scott’s novels. these early episodes, in turn, help to contextualize the evolving place of commodity spectacle in Godwin’s two most significant historical fictions: first in St. Leon’s foreboding but relatively protean address of the purport of costume in historical fiction, and then in Mandeville’s more precise and strident resistance to the historiographical inducements of commodities and to the illicit gratifications of the Waverley Novels—at the very moment Godwin was enviously observing Scott’s ascendance as the author of Waverley. In the process, I isolate the precarious agency that emerged over the course of Godwin’s writings, as he himself recognized the borderline impossibility of recollecting what British fiction once had been, before the Waverley Novels cast their spell on the novelistic imagination. In this way Godwin remarkably anticipated the prominent twentieth-century critique of consumer capitalism that underscored the bleak prospects for serious historical thought under the conditions of the culture industry. as Fredric Jameson expressed this worry in widely influential form, postmodernity itself is best understood “as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place.”5 It is less safe to grasp, along with Godwin in the story I outline here, how much the supposed capacity to “to think historically in the first place” (especially through the form of historical fiction and through the sophisticated historiographical theory and practice the literary genre shaped for the succeeding century) always proceeded via a negative dialectic with commerce’s misreadings and misappropriations of the past. Godwin’s romantic historiography proceeded from a powerful sense or intuition of the

William Godwin and historical Fiction

241

difference of profoundly historical experience from the objects, images, and cycles of commercial life. But over and again, this “historical” sense only arose in direct relationship to these same phenomena. as Godwin’s career finally fatalistically dramatized, the provocations of commercial life, even as they came to seem in essential ways inadequate, nevertheless persisted in speaking more intimately and more compulsively to desire than did the modes of historiography elaborated upon them, which could not fully escape their commercial origins.

Wedgwood’s Gift What eventuated as Godwin’s oppositional method of historical fiction perhaps began in a more philosophical critique of gifts. In Godwin’s view, the gift represented a corrosive substitution of a material commodity-object for the genuine intellectual and social “conversation” of minds in living company. at a glance, the formulation is severe but unsurprising, especially to readers familiar with Political Justice. But the fuller context of Godwin’s largely unmapped commentary on gift-giving makes it rather more remarkable. his critique arose in the course of a 1795 sequence of correspondence with thomas Wedgwood, undertaken just as Godwin’s writing career shifted from philosophy and the fictionalization of philosophical precepts in Political Justice and Caleb Williams to the more explicit preoccupation with historical representation that defined his subsequent work.6 In the essay “Of history and romance” (1797), Godwin would soon attend to the “insipid and insufferable form” of english history in the post-1688 commercial order, wherein the reign of an appetitive imagination, conformable to the limited capacities of commerce, diminished the national condition. the complementary scene of correspondence with Wedgwood allows us to see Godwin working out the problem of commercialization at the level of the material everyday, somewhere closer to the representational scenes of his later fictions. In criticizing the gift Wedgwood intended for him, Godwin first proposes a surprising economy of permissible gifts that he distinguishes from the commercial commodity. he will willingly accept gifts large and small, and exempts alike “presents that contai[n] in them important & essential benefit to the receiver” (such as the bestowal of a large amount of money) and presents of the small and incidental variety (“ordinary civilities, invitations to dinner, &c.”). But Godwin adamantly proscribes “presents in the middle line,” for

242

The Fictions of Serial history

“things tangible, permanent, and of a certain established price . . . include in them something of the immoral” (“C,” 277). In part the intimate scene of these letters foregrounds Godwin’s own compromising proximity to commercial reproduction, for the exchange of letters meticulously documents his discomfort at becoming the recipient of a new kind of commercial patronage. Godwin had become the first beneficiary of thomas Wedgwood’s charitable plan, undertaken with his brother Josiah, to “advance knowledge by supporting talented individuals” (“C,” 261).7 Godwin’s condition of writing henceforth depended not only upon patronage but expressly upon a Wedgwood fortune derived from a firm that was the age’s emblem of fashionable consumption and retail innovation and that perhaps did more than any other entity to generalize the commercial condition throughout Britain.8 Moreover, the success of the Wedgwood enterprise was specifically tied to the commercial reproduction of historical artifacts. Many of Wedgwood’s most celebrated designs were copies after (or stylistic imitations of ) classical antiquities, as in the case of the firm’s iconic reproduction of the portland Vase, which Josiah Wedgwood had perfected in 1790 only after much technical trial and error.9 the particular gift on the occasion of Godwin’s commentary was also noteworthy, amplifying as it did the broader fantasy of reproducibility that inhered in the fashionable commodity.10 thomas Wedgwood presented Godwin with “a portable version of the world’s first successful letter-copying machine, patented in 1780 by the Scottish engineer and instrument-maker James Watt,” who was closely connected to the Wedgwood family through the Lunar Society (“C,” 264).11 at the moment thomas Wedgwood offered this gift to Godwin, it was a gleaming technological marvel, with all the connotations of fashionability that such mechanical ingenuity would have carried in the age. Strikingly, technological reproducibility was strongly at issue in at least one more way, as Wedgwood’s interest in the letter-copying machine reflected his wider interest in the reproducible image. Wedgwood still holds a strong claim to originating the modern process of photography through experiments he was undertaking at roughly the same moment. Seen through the figure of thomas Wedgwood, photography is an art partly allied to the pure spirit of practical science in the Lunar Society, but equally and intricately linked to the legacy of the reproducible consumer designs and fashionable commodities of the Wedgwood factory works. When Godwin calls the gift into question, Wedgwood offers a wryly Godwinian rehearsal of his own motives. Wedgwood recounts his thought process in bestowing the gift of the copying machine: “I am particularly sus-

William Godwin and historical Fiction

243

ceptible of the pleasure which curious mechanical inventions afford. I never feel any pleasurable sensation without a desire of communicating it to others, proportionate to its intensity.” Literally, of course, he passes this pleasure on to Godwin with an individual gift—with the implication that the object is itself necessary for the conveyance of pleasure, which cannot be adequately reproduced through more direct human communication (via writing or conversation).12 thus Wedgwood is his father’s son in his susceptibility to the pleasures that craft and design afforded, but also in his “desire of communicating” that pleasure by the multiplication and distribution of objects. Wedgwood further paints Godwin himself as exceptionally susceptible to such “pleasurable sensations”: “On viewing the copying machine, it struck me that you were a likely person to participate in this satisfaction”—and, of course, the entire exchange implies as much by assuming Godwin’s shared interest in this mechanical curiosity and in the distinctive intensity of the pleasure it affords (“C,” 276). Wedgwood had hoped, he pleads apologetically to Godwin, by “saving you the irksome and unprofitable labour of copying,” to “become useful to your pursuits,” while also “cautiously avoiding at the same time any interruption of [those pursuits] from unseasonable visits.” the peculiar extremity of Wedgwood’s instrumentalization of the self here—his wish to become useful to Godwin by absenting himself except insofar as the ingenious reproduction of the copying machine can supply his place—has as its object a rather conventional variety of friendship: “It was not improbable that you might connect some agreeable associations with my person & thence conceive some interest in my fellowship” (“C,” 276). But because these agreeable associations seem to originate in the object rather than in the person of Wedgwood, friendship itself seems perversely reconstituted. For Godwin, this illicit substitution of commodities and an ethos of reproducibility for genuine interpersonal exchange threatens to remake ordinary categories of social relations into new and unrecognizable forms.

Genius, Belt Buckles, and tea Urns the dilemmas on view in Godwin’s correspondence with Wedgwood reemerged in more intently imaginative form, bordering on fictionality, in Godwin’s essay “Of an early taste for reading” in The Enquirer (1797). here Wedgwood seems to have predicted aptly how Godwin could not easily dispense with the fashionable commodity and its ambiguous powers. In a re-

244

The Fictions of Serial history

markable section of this essay, Godwin contrasts the imaginative conjectures of a “dull man” and a “man of talent” as each walks from temple Bar to hyde park Corner in London. For Godwin, “the time of these two persons in one respect resembles; it has brought them both to hyde-park-Corner. In almost every other respect it is dissimilar”: “the dull man goes straight forward; he has so many furlongs to traverse. he observes if he meets any of his acquaintance; he enquires respecting their health and their family. he glances perhaps the shops as he passes; he admires the fashion of a buckle, and the metal of a tea-urn. If he experiences any flights of fancy, they are of a short extent; of the same nature as those of a forest bird, clipped of his wings, and condemned to pass the rest of his life in a farm-yard.”13 particularly noteworthy is the association of the seemingly innocent impulse to “glanc[e] perhaps the shops” with a “clipped” imagination. Godwin’s man of talent, in contrast, gives full scope to his imagination. he laughs and cries. Unindebted to the suggestions of surrounding objects, his whole soul is employed. he enters into nice calculations; he digests sagacious reasonings. In imagination he declaims or describes, impressed with the deepest sympathy, or elevated to the loftiest rapture. he makes a thousand new and admirable combinations. he passes through a thousand imaginary scenes, tries his courage, tasks his ingenuity, and thus becomes gradually prepared to meet any of the many-coloured events of human life.14 Crucially, it is the man of talent’s capacity to resist the pull of commodities that makes possible this catalogue of lofty pursuits. While the dull man lingers upon the “fashion of a buckle, and the metal of a tea-urn,” the man of talent is “unindebted to the suggestions” of these objects. elsewhere in The Enquirer, Godwin explains why this sort of talent is crucial for resisting the arbitrary impositions of a particular cultural-historical moment. Otherwise, a person’s “opinions have no standard; but are entirely at the mercy of his age, his country, the books he chances to read, or the company he happens to frequent. . . . he is subject to a partial madness. he is unable to regulate his mind, and falls at the mercy of every breath of accident or caprice” (Q, 49). the contingent rush of commerce at the shopwindow thus encapsulates the “partial madness” of the dull man’s submission to his historical moment. Yet Godwin soon retreats from his fantasy of the man of talent’s liberation from distraction amidst the crowds and shopfronts that compose the busy

William Godwin and historical Fiction

245

“scenes” of commerce. a dialectical accommodation emerges in which the man of talent might find himself indebted to the persons and objects around him but nevertheless respond to them with greater activity than the dull man: “If he observe the passengers, he reads their countenances, conjectures their past history. . . . If he observe the scenes that occur, it is with the eyes of a connoisseur or an artist. every object is capable of suggesting to him a volume of reflections” (Q, 32, my emphasis). While the conditional tense here upholds the possibility of withstanding the suggestions of these objects, Godwin’s own compulsion to include this speculation makes clear their unavoidable allure. No longer “unindebted” to objects, Godwin’s revised man of talent, the “connoisseur,” now perhaps has a diminished advantage over the dull man. he is capable of deeper reflection upon the objects before him, but they threaten to hold him equally in thrall. the man of talent surveys a parade of persons produced by the rhythms of commercial activity, and thus he depends upon commerce as he “conjectures their past history.” his “artist” eye merely recasts the same glinting “belt buckles and tea-urns” that caught the dull man’s glancing admiration. In this scene, conjectured commodities mark the centrality for Godwin of the capacity to feel yet provisionally transcend the attractions of flashy wares in order to exercise the imagination further, or to proceed onward to the “volume of reflections” such objects might promise. Godwin adds, “an ordinary man sees an object just as it happens to be presented to him, and sees no more. But a man of genius takes it to pieces, enquires into its cause and effects, remarks its internal structure, and considers what would have been the result, if its members had been combined in a different way, or subjected to different influences. the man of genius gains a whole magazine of thoughts, where the ordinary man has received only one idea” (Q, 50).15 Maintaining the associational aptitude that permits reflection amid commerce, though, remains a difficult balancing act. In the prior passage, by reconstituting his man of talent, Godwin himself circles back to those objects he initially would have liked to dismiss. and here the “thoughts” of the “man of genius,” shaped by his active consideration of objects, themselves take the form of a “magazine”—and so embody the market rhythm of print periodicals, whose circulation instructed romantic-era literary genius precisely by conscripting it within the serial form that was definitive of fashion itself. the tea urn is not an incidental object of attention: it was “an icon of the eighteenth century” as well as a category of object that the Wedgwood works produced in vast numbers (Figure 33).16 Likewise, the route in question in

246

The Fictions of Serial history

Figure 33. tea urns (left to right): David Garrick’s silver; 1790s Wedgwood jasperware; late eighteenth-century Sheffield plate. Center image: Courtesy of Skinner, Inc. www.skinnerinc.com. Left and right images: © Victoria and albert Museum, London.

Godwin’s essay takes each of his conjectured men, dull and talented, past the fashionable retail locales of piccadilly and haymarket—and thus perhaps directly past the famous Wedgwood showroom in St. James Square. as Maxine Berg notes, these commercial streets were widely seen in their moment as sites of invention and self-improvement that provided a kind of “pavement education”—all the more reason that Godwin, at this point in 1797, is of two minds.17 But the bleakness that characterized Godwin’s unfolding historiographical vision stemmed from his cognizance of the difficulty that modern Britons had in looking past those gaudier objects immediately before their eyes that (as against other practices of reflection or social communication) threatened to hold their attention disproportionately. In a sign of the stakes of this problem, Godwin’s essay “Of Choice in reading” (which likewise appears in The Enquirer and bears a confusingly similar title to the aforementioned “Of an early taste for reading”) theorized the “tendency” of literary works, or those works’ ultimate influence upon readers and nations, which can only grow clear in their contingent reception over the course of time: “the true moral and fair inference from a composition,” he emphasizes, “has often laid concealed for ages from its most diligent readers.” Likewise, the true tendency, whatever the author’s intention or seem-

William Godwin and historical Fiction

247

ing moral, “cannot completely be ascertained but by the experiment” (Q, 135, 136). as tilottama rajan emphasizes, this is a remarkably open and possibilistic notion of historical causality and authorial function (and not so far from approximating percy Shelley’s “Defence of poetry” before the letter).18 Godwin himself describes an influence that incalculably “passes from man to man, till it influences the whole mass,” so that “I cannot tell that the wisest mandarin now living in China, is not indebted for part of his energy and sagacity to the writings of Milton and Shakespear [sic], even though it should happen that he never heard of their names” (Q, 140). It might seem as if the consequence of fashionable objects would reside, as with literature, in the manner in which people confronted them. as Godwin writes, “It seems the impression we derive from a book, depends much less upon its real contents, than upon the temper of mind and preparation with which we read it” (Q, 136). Initially this also appears to be the lesson of the “man of talents,” who is capable of rising above the more “clipped” suggestions of fashionable objects. In “Of Choice in reading,” however, Godwin also precisely emphasizes how the “temper of mind” with which we read is often beyond conscious control and, in part, reflects the blindness of the age.19 the recalcitrance of “temper” in resisting the final truth of literary works is the fundamental reason why their tendencies lie “concealed for ages” in the first place, and why that truth must be unfolded in historical process. But the defining ephemerality of the object of fashion is deeply at odds with the kind of robust duration that could unfold the more profound “tendencies” of a literary text by immaterial transmission through time. In a fashion system, the fullest possibilities of literature, or those that only unfolded over time, were ruled out of bounds from the start in ways that shadowed Godwin’s more hopeful theory of history. the increasingly irresistible commodity conditions of Godwin’s own day made all the more urgent his need for communion with illustrious persons of the past—whose vision was not so bound by the strictures of the commercial present. this need was at the root of the materially austere practice of historical representation Godwin envisioned in the hopes of a more fundamental exchange, between past and present, of the human mind and spirit across time. But Godwin’s engagement with the problem of historical commemoration finally exhibits the same, recursive ambiguity on view in the Enquirer. In his “essay on Sepulchres” (1809), a proposal for a national scheme of memorials to “the illustrious Dead” of england, Godwin intractably balances a desire for “the vivid recollection of things past” with the “Inestimable benefit . . . of

248

The Fictions of Serial history

seeing with the intellectual eye things not visible to the eye of sense.” to memorialize the national dead, he calls for a material monument calculated to rein in the mere senses, namely “a very slight and cheap memorial, a white cross of wood, with a wooden slab at the foot of it” (P, 6:6). the “different tone” a less austere marker might lend to recollection is antithetical to Godwin’s historical vision. Yet Godwin has proceeded by recognizing how “Man is a creature, who depends for his feelings upon the operations of sense. the barely looking upon a bust, supposed to be the portrait of the real alexander, gives a different tone to his annals” (P, 6:20). the ideal prospect of historical fiction, as against the bust, is precisely that of the intellectual eye unimpeded by sensory incursion.

the history of Luxury Mandeville (1817), Godwin’s fictional response to the appearance of the Waverley Novels, would reveal a heightened skepticism about the historical flights induced by contemporary material life and by its requisite forms of fiction. But already in St. Leon (1799), the problem of an object-driven historiography had begun to shape Godwin’s practice of historical fiction. St. Leon is of a piece with the Enquirer in its consciousness of the impostures of commoditycostume (the threat to imagination that lies in the “fashion of a buckle”) and also in its compulsion, nonetheless, to use dress to generate historical and moral reflection. Nominally the legendary tale of a man who learns the secrets of the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life, thereby attaining inexhaustible wealth and endless years, St. Leon also turns again and again to its protagonist’s weakness for the “lavish splendour” of conspicuous display. at the same time, the novel constructs a historically layered play of costume, most obviously in the remarkable, anachronistic gesture that clothes Godwin’s unreliable sixteenthcentury protagonist in the eccentric armenian costume that was synonymous with the eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques rousseau. these qualities of St. Leon raise the complex question of how to read the historical novel’s terms of engagement with costume prior to Scott, within Godwin’s more protean examination of the genre’s contradictions. In the novel what is immediately apparent about Godwin’s approach, in contrast to Scott’s characteristic particularizations of historical relics, is the austerity of Godwin’s invocations of material culture. Despite the protagonist’s investment in fine clothes and display, the objects that come into view in St. Leon largely remain abstract commodities—that is to say, generalized and ex-

William Godwin and historical Fiction

249

changeable (as with the exemplary “dress of a Spanish cavalier” that is one of the many costumes reginald St. Leon acquires and discards in the course of the novel). and as the explicitly rousseauvian moment in the text most acutely reveals, the general form of Godwin’s dress also opens it to more capacious exchanges between times. Instead of offering a temporally displaced shadow-play of the fashion system of the present day (in the novel fabrics and dress forms of the past), Godwin’s object-commodities collapse onto modern life in more fundamental ways. Ultimately their alienation effect makes the function of clothing within historical fiction more clear, and more sharply interruptive, than Scott’s merely enticing simulation of modern fashion with past materials. In St. Leon and in Kenilworth, respectively, Godwin and Scott converged, strikingly enough, upon the improbably specific type of the sixteenth-century impostor pedlar—a figure who illustrates the difference I am positing in stark terms. Scott’s false pedlar in Kenilworth (the servant and mystical blacksmith Wayland Smith, who attempts to warn the maidservant of the doomed heroine amy robsart about amy’s peril) at one point “dispute[s] upon the preference due to the Spanish nether-stocks over the black Gascoigne hose” and at another unfolds to us a pack containing “a cambric partlet and pair of sleeves . . . roundels of gold fringe, drawn out with Cyprus . . . a short-cloak of cherrycoloured fine cloth, garnished with gold buttons and loops,” together with “a silver bodkin, mounted with pearl,” and so on. (this is just to begin.) amy’s delight, as one of the “Ladies of Fashion of the present, or of any other period,” causes Wayland to register the literal artifice of his impersonation but also the metafictional artifice of his unpacking the pseudofashions of the past for the scene’s readers: “Were I a pedlar in earnest,” he muses in seeming concert with the author of Waverley—were Scott selling as much actual merchandise as he was virtually retailing in prose—“I were a made merchant” (K, 203–4). In a sign of the priority such playfulness had in the reception of Scott’s novel, the latter scene supplied the title-page vignette for the first volume of Kenil­ worth in 1831, the first illustrated edition, as one of only four illustrations in total (Figure 34).20 Godwin’s own, sixteenth-century impostor pedlar in St. Leon—in this case St. Leon himself incognito, among his unknowing and long-abandoned daughters—quite literally proposes the “exhibition of my commodities” but leaves the exhibition at that, with no further accounting or elaboration of these wares in prose. at the very moment St. Leon should unfold his commodities (just after deducing the financial circumstances of his daughters from

Figure 34. From Walter Scott, Kenilworth (edinburgh: robert Cadell, 1831).

William Godwin and historical Fiction

251

the “elegant morning-habit” that each wears), St. Leon is overcome with emotion, so that “My tongue refused its office.”21 even in context, Godwin’s pause at the point of unfolding these wares is interruptive. his historical romance will not risk approximating the prose copy of the fashion press of the present day, as Scott’s lively exhibition of elizabethan “fashions” exuberantly (and knowingly) would do. If the difference makes clear enough that Godwin is not Scott, it also suggests how the treatment of costume plays a surprisingly central role in establishing the terms of the historical novel form, even for Godwin himself.22 St. Leon’s characteristic preoccupation with opulent display is to some extent borne of his sixteenth-century historical moment; and yet the extent of this preoccupation with dress also fundamentally sets him apart from the social-historical world in which he moves—it is incompatible with that past world. readers familiar with the opening volume of St. Leon may be more likely to recall the text’s extended engagement with the desolation of war or the anguish of St. Leon’s ruinous addiction to gambling. But the novel identifies St. Leon’s most formative moment as his “being present as a spectator” at the meeting of henry VIII and Francis I at the Field of the Cloth of Gold.23 this is a “circumstance that tended perhaps more than any other to fix the fluctuating character of my youthful mind” (SL, 56). the most memorable feature of the event is the “splendour of dress that . . . exceeds almost all credibility,” where each nobleman’s lavish costume represented “in a manner . . . an estate upon his shoulders; nor was the variety of garments inferior to the richness” (SL, 57). here, the defining trait of St. Leon’s paradoxical character, I emphasize, is a “fluctuation” that grows fixed. the phrasing leaves ambiguous whether St. Leon’s once-fluctuating character now attains definite qualities or whether it grows fixed in its very fluctuation. But the scene’s attractions, and St. Leon’s incessant transformations of his costume and his identity in many episodes to come, strongly suggest the latter sense. even from the start, St. Leon thus looks something like an embodiment of a fashion system, or a personification of normativized, serial change. to some extent St. Leon’s “character” is the particular result of his idiosyncratic history. St. Leon himself observes the fateful contrast between the frugality of his youthful home and the sudden material excess that confronts him at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. the discrepancy, he suggests, impresses the event upon his mind with special power. But the text also marks the event’s wider implications. St. Leon observes, “the prevailing taste of europe has for some time led very much to costliness in dress. this taste, in its present profu-

252

The Fictions of Serial history

sion, I believe took its rise in [this] field.” as the originary scene of a new “profusion” of taste in dress, the Field of the Cloth of Gold heralds not the last days of chivalry but instead the emerging order that will succeed it—in St. Leon’s own account, an order “of craft, dissimulation, corruption, and commerce” that approximates for the Continent something like Godwin’s vision of the historical condition of england after 1688 (SL, 74). On a personal level, St. Leon finds, the Field of the Cloth of Gold remains “ever present to my recollection”; yet the desire it fosters has “degenerated” merely “into an infantine taste for magnificence and expense” (SL, 120). explicitly dispelling any lingering suggestions of attachment to chivalric ideals, the degeneration St. Leon observes insists that a newly ascendant preoccupation with material opulence somehow differs in kind from what preceded it. St Leon’s weakness for lavish display most typically motivates his recurrent use of his morally ambiguous powers—and so his desire for expense holds a kind of unappreciated priority over the problems that preoccupy much of the scholarly commentary on the novel.24 St. Leon’s sentimental failures as a spouse and parent and his destructive tendency to isolate himself thus seem more like second-level symptoms of this brush with elaborate costume than they do primary moral failings. When St. Leon gambles away his noble estate and the family retires to Switzerland, his wife makes “a general sale of our movables, our ornaments, and even our clothes” and “attire[s] herself and her children in habits similar to those of neighboring peasants” (SL, 114). More than the fate of his family as such, it is their newly adopted clothes and furnishings that speak powerfully to St. Leon. In their forlorn contrast to the splendid dress of his memories and desires, “My own garb, and that of my wife and children . . . the simple benches, the unhewn rafters, the naked walls, all told me what it was I had done” (SL, 119). even more fundamentally, the identity impressed on St. Leon at the Field of the Cloth of Gold subtly but decisively governs the seeming narrative center of the novel. For at St. Leon’s moment of truth, it is the aforementioned “taste” that secures his downfall. he is unable to resist the temptations of the stranger who offers him the secret of the philosopher’s stone precisely because St. Leon’s memories of the Field of the Cloth of Gold return to him: “the advantages of wealth passed in full review before my roused imagination. I saw horses, palaces, and their furniture; I saw the splendour of exhibition and the trains of attendants” (SL, 166). there is a suggestion here, perhaps, of early humean history, which “passes in review before its reader”—but in this case even more fundamentally corroded into the mere review of desirable splendor.25 St. Leon himself thus looks like

William Godwin and historical Fiction

253

an allegorical figure for the readers of historical fiction, who likewise encounter past scenes through a “roused imagination” that betrays a degenerated quality of historiographical engagement, driven by the taste for serial “magnificence” that distinctly aligned historical fiction with the excess of fashionable modern life.

the habit of an armenian as the novel follows St. Leon serially putting on and taking off costume to adapt to nations, occupations, or assumed identities (and so confronts seriality itself in diachronic array, in ways The Recess had not), dress and costume actively produce a kind of abstraction within the represented, historical moment of the “sixteenth century.” On the one hand, St. Leon invites us to read a landscape of inalienable costume, a sixteenth-century world of clothing invested with the irreducibility of geography and the particularity of origin, as a historical feature. But on the other hand, the text finds in this very fixedness of dress (in a different historical moment) a ground for supplementary meanings. Within and without the novel’s narrative events, that is, St. Leon does not so much retail the material life of the past as stage a susceptibility to commodity spectacle that isolates a character from his represented historical moment. this dynamic is most remarkably exemplified in the strange anachronism of the pedlar scene, where St. Leon’s armenian dress becomes the vehicle for an irruption of Godwin’s rousseauvian present within this sixteenth-century historical world. St. Leon adopts the “habit of an armenian,” part of his pedlar imposture, as he returns to his ancestral homeland in order to look in upon his estranged daughters after an absence of twelve years. he proposes the aforementioned “exhibition of . . . commodities” (which the text refuses to indulge) as a pretext for admission before them (SL, 350–51). the scene is perhaps an ironic fulfillment of his daughter’s childhood request, years earlier amid their poverty, that he bring her from town “ribbands, and new clothes, and a hundred more pretty things” (SL, 195); and one level of the displacement of St. Leon here is that he can fulfill as a purely economic agent that childhood desire he could not fulfill as a father. Yet this is a contradiction that readers are left to recognize on their own, for there does not seem to be any nostalgic recollection of this earlier moment on St. Leon’s part, concerned as he is instead to tell us that his own armenian dress, “though formed of uncostly materials, was such as to display my person to considerable advantage” (SL, 352).

254

The Fictions of Serial history

Notably, St. Leon here adopts a peculiarly modern style that derives its advantage solely from its pleasing form rather than from the intrinsic worth of the cloth (in contrast to immense value of the dress of the Field of the Cloth of Gold at the start of the novel). this armenian costume’s freighted associations with rousseau would have been unmistakable to Godwin’s readers. anne Chandler helpfully addresses the thematic implications of this costume, where the paternal failings of the philosopher of sensibility mirror the similar failings of St. Leon, who has neglected his daughters for so many years.26 But I also want to underscore the more self-reflexive implications of this doubling of costume within a historical fiction. the contradictions of St. Leon’s armenian dress introduce a jarring dynamic of reader response, especially because the characters and events of the novel flatly fail to register the anachronistic suggestions of this dress. Ultimately, the carefully wrought tension that emerges between what the novel’s readers know about the future of the armenian costume and the different meaning it must have within the represented historical world of the novel opens up a gap. this gap forces self-consciousness about the elisions of meaning that result from projecting present dress associations upon the past. the problem of interpreting St. Leon’s armenian dress is further complicated because it is an avowedly excessive disguise. having only just taken the elixir of life that secures his immortality, St. Leon remarks of his altered physical appearance that “I now carried a disguise perpetually about me that would render my journey incapable of proving injurious to [my daughters]” (SL, 347). the textual function of this dress is likewise strange because for rousseau himself the costume had become the very inversion of disguise; it was the unmistakable emblem of his notoriety, by which his enemies hunted him. rousseau’s Confessions, which Godwin himself undertook to translate, related how “my armenian dress discovered me to the populace . . . . I quietly walked through the country with my caffetan and fur bonnet in the midst of the hootings of the dregs of the people, and sometimes through a shower of stones.”27 that this dress merely and mutely serves its intended purpose before Godwin’s daughters makes it strange, even conspicuously anticlimactic, especially because elsewhere in the novel, and otherwise dressed, St. Leon is the object of exactly the hostility that rousseau’s costume elicited. (During a mob scene, he recounts, “Sticks, stones, and every kind of missile weapon that offered itself, fell in showers around me,” after which an angry crowd sets fire to St. Leon’s home [SL, 289].) the dress that rousseau adopted as an anticommercial gesture ironically be-

William Godwin and historical Fiction

255

comes a means of embracing the illicit and invasive powers of economic circulation, of borrowing the privileged vantage that commerce can bestow through its permeations of private life. In this case, St. Leon thereby learns the history of his daughters that is previously unknown to him. St. Leon projects this borrowed commercial vantage onto the highly compromised figure of its protagonist, and therefore subjects it to readers’ scrutiny. But the scene also begins to suggest how Godwin’s fiction, likewise, can only put on this anticommercial dress—along with rousseau’s broader antipathy to commercial society—as momentary disguise. the scene, in other words, calls attention to the ruse of dress as the persistent condition of our seeing this sixteenth-century world through St. Leon’s eyes, especially in the form of a firstperson narrative offered by a man whose being is directed by luxury. In this sense, the force of the genre of historical fiction—the malicious, latent “tendency” that Godwin discerned in retrospect—was to elicit attention to dress and to foster commercial desire in ways that militated against the anticommercial rhetoric or ideology that Godwin more explicitly espoused as a moral. to align the novel with an antecedent rhetoric of dress, rather than with the succeeding novels of Scott, further illuminates the problem of Godwin’s (and St. Leon’s) costume dependency. St. Leon is the culmination of an older political idiom of deceptive costume, as the novel’s resonance with Godwin’s Instructions to a Statesman, a political pamphlet of 1784, makes clear. at one point Instructions to a Statesman explicitly satirizes the corruption of politics through a grotesque catalogue of disguises. the supposed author of these papers is even a potentially rousseauvian figure, a “celebrated and ingenious solitaire” living as a hermit on a noble estate. he remarks on his lord’s “taste for sumptuousness and magnificence,” in language that puts us very much in mind of St. Leon. the neo-Machiavellian advice he provides on the usefulness of disguise in the art of politics seems precisely calculated to indulge his lordship’s taste for magnificence, and he recommends to his lord a series of outfits that almost intimates the episodic plot of Godwin’s subsequent novel. During the reign of Queen anne, the hermit recalls, the statesman robert harley “was in the practice . . . of crossing the park in a horseman’s coat”—but “this is too shallow and thin a disguise” for modern times, because now “there is nothing of so much importance in this affair as variety.” at various times, he counsels, one ought to wear “the turban of a turk,” “the half breeches of a highlander,” “the lawn sleeves of a bishop,” “the tye-wig of a barrister,” “a learthern apron and a trowel,” and even leave aside “small-clothes” (that is, breeches) in favor

256

The Fictions of Serial history

of “the dress of a woman.” and such dress ought to be animated by “the appearance and gesture of a spruce milliner” or the “solemn air and sweeping train of a duchess”—and so forth (P, 1:169). to see in Godwin’s political satire an early version of the play of costume in St. Leon—something approximating the very form of the subsequent novel’s parade of disguises—of course calls our attention to St. Leon’s own duplicitousness. But as part of a novel very capable of metafictional introspection, as when the protagonist’s son refuses “to live beneath the consciousness of an artful and fictitious tale” (SL, 211), St. Leon’s insincere variation of his costume equally implicates the consciousness of the author, Godwin himself, in the same sort of illicit gamesmanship. this is the same gamesmanship that Scott would structure into his own, serial brand of fiction. In an 1831 preface to the new Standard Novels edition of St. Leon, Godwin directly seized the opportunity to reconstruct a state of fiction before Scott, in a way that positioned Scott as an inaugural figure of seriality: “In those days it was deemed a most daring thought to attempt to write a novel, with the hope that it might hereafter rank among the classics of a language. . . . It had not then been conceived that the same author might produce twenty or thirty [novels], at the rate of two or three per annum, and might still at least retain his hold upon the partiality of his contemporaries. to Sir Walter Scott we are indebted for this discovery” (SL, 48). the compliment here is terrifically backhanded, and turns the tables on Scott’s epically sardonic review of Godwin’s Life of Chaucer decades earlier.28 Scott’s hold does not extend beyond the “partiality” of his contemporaries, and his actuarialized overproduction is inimical to true merit. perhaps there is also impatience with Scott’s appropriation, in serial form, of Godwin’s essential narrative model, where those changes of costume in St. Leon unfold across the many volumes of the Waverley Novels rather than within a single work, and where such change of costume loses its transparent moral ambiguity as well as its structural apparency. But against Scott’s typical heroes, from the opening pages of Godwin’s novel, St. Leon assures his reader that he is to be “distinguished from the rest of mankind,” for each day “finds the circulations of [his] frame in perfect order” (SL, 51–52). In the increasingly hermetic circulations of St. Leon within the sixteenth-century world of the novel, we find profoundly embodied in a character an eternal logic of modern historical fiction, which is defined by the way it affords (but also requires) ever new dress, ever new disguise. this is the fallen splendor of that commercial-historical world in which St. Leon and those who read his tale have their being.

William Godwin and historical Fiction

257

a Variety of Successive tales Godwin’s growing self-recognition about St. Leon shaped his most extensive deliberation upon the irresistible form of historical fiction in Mandeville, published in the near aftermath of Scott’s sensational historical novel Waverley, at the start of an event that marked the commercial triumph of historical fiction.29 Scott’s subsequent novels soon positioned Waverley itself as the inaugural installment of a powerfully influential series. By viewing Scott’s extraordinary success through Godwin’s ambiguous philosophy of objects, we can more fully appreciate the impact of Scott’s popularization of awareness about the historical “volume of reflections” potentially available through otherwise mundane commodities. reworking the materials of modern commerce, Scott’s novels practiced a leveling pedagogy by training formerly dull imaginations to behold possibilities that fashionable objects had previously suggested only to “talent” or “genius.” Indeed, a prominent literary effect of the dissemination of Scott’s art was the diminution of Godwin’s own genius. For Scott had evidently taken historical fiction to places Godwin (despite his earlier forays in the genre) could not. In “Of history and romance,” Godwin had described the inherently limited capacities of the author of historical romance, who “is continually straining at a foresight to which his faculties are incompetent, and continually fails” (P, 5:301). In retrospect these limitations applied far more to Godwin himself than to the genius of Scott, and a fiction like Mandeville was always destined to remain in Scott’s shadow. Godwin’s response was to grow skeptical of the methods by which his own, earlier fictions had produced variety—and to grow critical of his own complicity in the half-measures that had, perhaps, led on to Scott. the original preface to Mandeville begins not only with a formulaic anecdote about an abandoned manuscript (which aligns the novel with Waverley itself ),30 but also with a rehearsal of two tales of origin for the modern genre of “historical romance”—both of which directly acknowledge the play of commodities that makes possible even Mandeville’s oppositional mode of historical representation. this preface, I argue, exposes Scott’s paradigmatic conjuring of the past through present fashions as well as the longer history of such conjuring. at the same time, the preface expresses Godwin’s impulse (if also his incapacity) to practice a different kind of historiography. as Godwin recounts, eight years previously, when beginning the present novel according to his alternate, now-abandoned plan,

258

The Fictions of Serial history

the thought I adopted as the germ of my work, was taken from the story of the Seven Sleepers in the records of the first centuries of Christianity, or rather from the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, in perrault’s Tales of Ma Mere L’Oie [Mother Goose]. I supposed a hero who should have this faculty, or this infirmity, of falling asleep unexpectedly, and should sleep twenty, thirty, or a hundred years at a time, at the pleasure of myself, his creator. I knew that such a canvas would naturally admit a vast variety of figures, actions, and surprises. (M, 1:vii–viii) Both the fairy tale and the fable prominently depend upon styles of dress, and a fabulous elision of a long span of time, to mark and compare the cultural specificity of different moments. Godwin’s primary model is Charles perrault’s “Sleeping Beauty,” a fairy tale that was a product of the querelle of the ancients and moderns in France at the dawn of the eighteenth century, and that revels in the paradox of the timeless and traditional confronting modern commerce.31 perrault embraces Sleeping Beauty’s hundred-year sleep to foreground not only romance but also the prince’s fashion-conscious bemusement when, upon awakening the princess of his dreams, he finds her strangely out of style. after talking to her for hours upon falling instantly in love, the prince helped the princess to rise, she was entirely dressed, and very magnificently, but his royal highness took care not to tell her, that she was dressed like his great grand-mother, and had a pointband peeping over a high collar; she looked not a bit the less charming and beautiful for all that. they went into the great hall of looking glasses, where they supped, and were served by the princess’s officers; the violins and hautboys played old tunes but very excellent, tho’ it was now above a hundred years since they had played.32 In the alternation between “past times” and “passed times” in the titles of various english editions, we can trace the temporal uncertainty provoked by perrault’s novel playfulness with history and fashion for translators to whom the modern english sense of passé is unavailable. Do these fashions signal the passage of time or a “past” from which they derive? the passage I cite above specifically corrects the confusion of a prior english edition, which stumbled over the proper way to situate a historicized stance within the story. as the earlier

William Godwin and historical Fiction

259

text has it, “She was intirely dress’d, and very magnificently, but they took care not to tell her, that she was dressed like my great grandmother.”33 as the clumsy pronoun shift emphasizes (by dressing Sleeping Beauty like the narrator’s own [“my”] great grandmother rather than the prince’s), “Sleeping Beauty” turns the reader’s attention, deictically, to highly available sights and sounds. But this gesture confines the historical imagination to those extant texts and objects that have survived the arbitrary and haphazard sifting of decades: a particular dress of one’s grandmother and the select, “old tunes” presumably still performed and thus presently recognizable. In the same breath with his invocation of perrault’s fairy tale, Godwin retraces the “thought” that he “adopted as the germ” of Mandeville to “the story of the Seven Sleepers,” a tale of persecuted Christians hiding in a cave who miraculously sleep for 187 years. this is a fable whose consonance with historical romance edward Gibbon had earlier made clear in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. here an unwitting Sleeper, sent surreptitiously to acquire a few loaves of bread, immediately gives away his temporally distant origin by “his singular dress, and obsolete language” and by the now “ancient” coin that he attempts to spend in town. For Gibbon the fable illuminates how “we imperceptibly advance from youth to age, without observing the gradual, but incessant, change of human affairs; and even in our larger experience of history, the imagination is accustomed, by a perpetual series of causes and effects, to unite the most distant revolutions. But if the interval between two memorable aeras could be instantly annihilated; if it were possible, after a momentary slumber of two hundred years, to display the new world to the eyes of a spectator, who still retained a lively and recent impression of the old, his surprise and his reflections would furnish the pleasing subject of a philosophical romance.”34 By provocatively erasing “the interval between two memorable æras,” a fable’s deployment of dress made “singular” by passing time reveals a truth about history-telling that is otherwise imperceptible. In making clear the artifice necessary to see history anew, Gibbon finally relegates the possibility of immediately “observing” always imperceptible historical change to the realm of the fabulous or fictive, as well as to the mood of egoistic fantasy to which commercial desire conduces.35 Following Godwin’s thumbnail diagnosis of the condition of “philosophical romance” under commercial historicism, the preface recounts Godwin’s publisher’s call for him to resume his “suspended faculty of fiction” and complete a novel. But upon returning to the abandoned manuscript of Mandeville, Godwin rejected his former plan for this novel as far too taxing. a work to be

260

The Fictions of Serial history

founded “on my sleeping-waking principal personage,” he laments, “must be made up of a variety of successive tales, having for their main point of connection, the impression which the events brought forward should produce on [him]. I should therefore have had at least a dozen times to set myself to the task of invention, as it were, de novo” (M, 1:viii–ix). Notably, the taxing labor here involves Godwin’s showing the “impression . . . produce[d]” on his character (and not Godwin’s lavishly realizing the serial worlds through which this character passes). Yet Godwin nevertheless conceives his task to begin anew with each awakening, as if there is little continuity of psychological experience he can rely upon in realizing this character. the sleeping-waking personage, it seems, is himself constituted anew by each successive historical world—and yet the fundamental difference of one epoch’s “impression” from the next is elusive. Godwin observes, “this faculty, or this infirmity” of his sleeping-waking character would produce “a vast variety of figures, actions, and surprises”: a tediously overgeneral catalogue that suggests the mere and circumscribed novelty of serial fiction. It is telling that the process proceeds through “infirmity” and through a “mental vacuity” that is only intermittently interrupted by conscious awareness. Godwin is diagnosing how the repertoire of maneuvers available to the author of “sleeping-waking” historical fiction is perilously narrow. hence the difficulty of genuine inventiveness on this model. how many tricks, Godwin asks, might he pull without exhausting or exposing the clunky and repetitive machinery—the formulaic production of compelling confrontations with anachronistic commodities—that manufactures the most prominent version of romantic historical fiction? Moreover, when taken together, the Waverley Novels—as both Scott himself and his critics understood—performed just the kind of fictive “invention” that Godwin feels compelled to suspend.36 In Scott’s celebrated, anonymous self-review of his own, early Waverley Novels, he wonders about the tendency of the author of Waverley from one novel to the next, “industriously . . . to elude observation by taking leave of us in one character, and then suddenly popping out upon us in another.” Scott’s production of a measured sort of variety, among which one can “have little hesitation to pronounce [the novels] either entirely, or in great measure the work of the same author . . . has certainly had its effect in keeping up the interest which [the author of Waver­ ley’s] works have excited.”37 In widely divergent settings, “Waverley, Brown, or Bertram in Guy Mannering, and Lovel in the Antiquary, are all brethren of a family; very amiable and very insipid sort of young men.” as consistent repetitions of the same character type, and as “foreigners to whom everything . . . is

William Godwin and historical Fiction

261

strange,” Scott’s serial protagonists thus strongly resemble both Gibbons’s fable and Godwin’s abandoned vision of the sleeping-waking personage.38 But where Godwin hesitates to produce “a variety of successive tales,” Scott precisely embraces as his “object to present a succession of scenes and characters connected with Scotland [and then Britain] in its past and present state.”39 Observing the same “succession of scenes and characters,” thomas De Quincey memorably emphasized the addictive serial effect of Scott’s novels, or the way they bound contemporary imaginations to a mode of anticipation closely aligned with fashion itself: “after the author of Waverley had for a considerable succession of years delighted the world with one or two novels annually, the demand for Waverley novels came to be felt as a periodical craving all over europe.”40 De Quincey’s foregrounding of the market effects of the Waverley Novels of course puts in question the autonomy of the historical moments they evoke. More fundamentally, he suggests, Scott’s novels generated and adhered to cycles of commercial desire. and given form by this desire, the material accoutrements of Scott’s historical settings merely lend a suitable degree of novelty to numerous reiterations of the same essential story of “modernization”—itself a fable now suspiciously applicable to any historical period. as Christensen emphasizes in his account of the “clerical posthistory” enacted by Waverley, Scott’s fiction invents (over and over again) a kind of “normal change” within which historical change itself becomes just another novelty, or diversion—and so forecloses those new historical possibilities that Godwin, in his agitations against commercial life, would embrace.41 as a meditation upon the historical effects of the romantic novel as they are implicated in modern commerce, I think, the preface to Mandeville casts Godwin’s refusal fully to embrace Scott’s playful and marketable conflations of commodities and history—and thus Godwin’s failure to “invent” the historical novel—as a principled failure. On this view, Godwin’s abandonment of his “sleeping-waking principal personage” amounts to a refusal of seriality, one that protests while it also exposes the inherent distortions of a commercialized awareness of history that is built upon such fables of material life.42

historiographical Desire as an interruption of the serial form of history, Mandeville intervenes against the Waverley Novels in two essential ways: first, by resisting Scott’s rather startling employment of the fantastical realm of fashion in the service of the

262

The Fictions of Serial history

probable; and second, by resisting Scott’s project (in his articulation of a stable human nature) to set the “passions” apart from the specific condition of modernity—or apart from the contingent structure of material desire in commercial life that Godwin, by contrast, found to have reconstituted the passions in fundamental ways.43 In its seventeenth-century setting, Mandeville provisionally moves away from the post-enlightenment historiography that was projected backward from modern commerce, and toward a historical moment preceding (and for Godwin exceeding) present-day presumptions about the limits of historical possibility. (See my notes for a plot summary.)44 the nod Mandeville’s title makes to Bernard Mandeville, the controversial apologist for luxury, most immediately signals Godwin’s effort to understand the desire for Scott’s mode of history alongside the rise of consumer luxury over the course of the long eighteenth century in Britain. Crucially, from the vantage of defenders of luxury in the vein of Mandeville, the moment of commercial exchange grew opaque to ethical considerations. For merely by taking place, and even when it appeared least to do so, exchange spread beneficial social effects without regard to intention. Unwilling, as earlier eighteenth-century theorists had been, to see meaningful sympathy being engendered by commerce, Godwin finds the sort of sympathy (historical or otherwise) fostered by commerce to be perilously instrumental and shortsighted.45 Within commerce, that is, one practices sympathy only insofar as it facilitates an ephemeral moment of exchange. Whatever the unintentional enhancement of sympathetic capacities le doux commerce might effect, commerce’s limitingly exclusive orientation to the present threatens meaningful ethical regard. as a result, in Political Justice Godwin had rewritten normative moral theory to deemphasize the familiar, sympathetic imperative of adam Smith to imagine one’s own likely response to another’s present situation. Godwin argues instead for a spectatorship of the self that achieves distance by temporal projection, or for a historicization of everyday moral life: “We have only to suppose men obliged to consider, before they determined upon an equivocal action, whether they chose to be their own historians, the future narrators of the scene in which they were acting a part, and the most ordinary imagination will instantly suggest how essential a variation would be introduced into human affairs.”46 that Godwin has in mind not merely the imminent calm of retrospect but a serious historiographical project is made clear by the subsequent trajectory of his writings. Yet the understanding Godwin also articulates in “Of history and romance,” of modern historiography’s constitutive prox-

William Godwin and historical Fiction

263

imity to commerce, makes the prospect of any “essential variation” in human affairs less plausible than he would wish. In Political Justice, too, Godwin had explicitly (and disdainfully) rehearsed a familiar eighteenth-century defense of luxury, the position for which Bernard Mandeville himself is supposedly the champion: “elegance of taste, refinement of sentiment, depth of penetration, and largeness of science, are among the noblest ornaments of man. But all these . . . are connected with inequality; they are the growth of luxury. . . . to this cause we are indebted, for the arts of architecture, painting, music and poetry.” In a cost-benefit analysis, Bernard Mandeville finds the ultimate ends of commerce, which are intellectual and imaginative as much as they are narrowly pecuniary or material, to justify the means. In Godwin’s paraphrase, “the intellectual improvement and enlargement we witness and hope for, was worth purchasing at the expence of partial injustice and distress.”47 While Godwin recites this argument to discountenance it, he also offers a reminder of how the name of Mandeville is associated with the tainted possibilities of commerce—its noble but compromised achievements.48 Godwin’s own writings, I am arguing, enfold an increasingly fatalistic recognition that sophisticated historical understanding is itself an “intellectual improvement” dependent upon luxury. In Scott’s fiction he confronted the unfolding of a commercial art of historiography at least as derivative of luxury as were the fine arts.49 history—or the projection of the present into the altered gaze of future historians—had once promised an ethical and imaginative alternative to the bleak determinations of the present moment. But now that alternative looked ever more embattled. as Godwin lamented in “Of history and romance,” “there is perhaps no darkness . . . so complete as that of the historian,” who must rely upon “the broken fragments, and the scattered ruins of evidence” and what interested and unexaminable witnesses “choose to tell.” In this sense, “all history bears too near a resemblance to fable” (P, 5:297)—a judgment that is provocatively enriched by the actual fables that ultimately prefaced Mandeville itself. In its choice of historical setting, Mandeville deliberately considers a particular moment in the history of historiography—one characterized by a prelapsarian integration of “lives” and the formal writing of history that posed a dramatic contrast with the commercialist writing of history in Godwin’s own day.50 as he struggles to compose his own history, Charles Mandeville’s narration frequently responds to the imperatives he has gleaned from seventeenthcentury norms for historiography. In part, he has internalized a historically

264

The Fictions of Serial history

specific sense that proper history must be written by the eyewitnesses who are the principal participants in momentous actions. as robert Mayer shows, biography in the seventeenth century was a fully legitimate historiographical genre, part of a “seventeenth-century historical discourse” characterized at once by its acceptance of the “fabulous” or fictive in historical texts and by its “rootedness in personal experience [and] eliding of formal barriers.” historical discourse tolerated “highly personal, even clearly biased accounts as works of history”; and “Baxter, Clarendon, and hutchinson claim our attention as historians of the Civil War because they write about events they witnessed and in which they participated.”51 For Godwin this older norm of historiography— overturned by the work of eighteenth-century historians like hume and William robertson—generated a type of particularization that valued the psychological over the material, and so marked a striking contrast to the emblematic vehicle of Scott’s first historical novel, edward Waverley (even in Scott’s own estimation, a blank and “insipid” character, loaded down with souvenirs that essentially tell his story on his behalf ). But to register fully Mandeville’s ambivalence about the possibilities of historiography, it is imperative to recognize how Godwin stages the seventeenthcentury historiographical moment through the voice of a narrator who persistently fails as a historian. One the one hand, Mandeville is evidently immersed in historiography and occasionally capable of sophisticated historicist conceptualizations, as when he describes his flatterers’ “professions of devotion to my service [that] exceeded those of the most fervent loyalty, in that period of feudal history, when the vassal conceived himself born for no other end than the use, the pleasure, the defence, and the glory of his lord” (M, 3:138). On the other hand, before Mandeville can even finish recounting his childhood, we find his story entangled by his inexpert arrangement of materials. “I have,” he says, “outrun the course of my narrative, and must now return to bring up some smaller anecdotes of my early years, which, by this method of arranging my materials, have been put somewhat out of their place” (M, 1:137). as narrator, Mandeville regrets his bigoted anger at his rival Clifford upon his rival’s latitudinarian conversion to Catholicism (which Clifford ostensibly undertakes to ease his benefactor’s anguish). Offering retrospective sympathy for Clifford’s actions that sharply contrasts with his initial, virulent response, Mandeville repeatedly distances himself from his earlier outrage, explaining, “Such were my sentiments” (M, 3:43), or “Such were the feelings” (M, 3:45)— “My mind was distracted, like that of many other Presbyterians of this time, be-

William Godwin and historical Fiction

265

tween attachment to my king, and a longing desire to see him restored, on the one hand,” and fear of a return to popish “subjection” on the other (M, 3:45, my emphasis). repentant now, with the hindsight of historical distance, Mandeville asseverates, “I make it a law to myself in this narrative, now when all is over . . . not to relate anything to the disadvantage of Clifford, without at the same time producing his side of the question, and stating, not merely how I saw the things that exasperated me, but also what they were in themselves” (M, 3:55). Mandeville’s persistence in this vow is unsteady, but he enjoys the game of retrospective omniscience often played by the historian, especially as it accords coherence to his own story that, in and of itself, that story often lacked.52 We also see in Mandeville a conspicuous deference to written history. When he recalls his Oxford friend, the son of an important royalist leader, Mandeville ventriloquizes the voices of other historians, through whom he can expect to command both the reader and the tale: “the name of my companion was Lisle, son of that Sir George Lisle . . . described by the historians, as the bravest and most amiable of all the champions of the royal cause in the civil wars” (M, 2:62). this deference emerges as well when he recalls his tutor. as Godwin crafts the account of rev. Bradford, Mandeville describes him not in his own words but “as [he] find[s] it expressed by an eminent historian, speaking of an individual who seems to have had a striking resemblance to my tutor” (M, 1:116). Mandeville scrupulously borrows the description, originally applied to the hysterical anti-Jesuit rev. ezrael tonge, from Wood’s Athenae Oxonienses. here, quite tellingly, Mandeville cites contemporaneous historiographical authority to substantiate his own story, or to insist upon the connection of his own life to a historical england that often seems largely unrelated to him. When Mandeville loses the military commission he expects to Clifford and abruptly departs from the army in disgrace, this outcome aggravates him in large part because it makes impossible his clear desire to write history; he has internalized the privilege granted to eyewitnesses within seventeenthcentury historiography. and when Clifford subsequently delivers his firsthand history of the narrow escape of Joseph Wagstaff (a leader of the 1655 royalist uprising against Cromwell’s protectorate), he does so at a dinner party where Mandeville is an uncomfortable guest—and so highlights Mandeville’s remove from events, his highly mediated relationship to his historically eventful era. “the narrative of Clifford,” Mandeville recalls,

266

The Fictions of Serial history

was listened to with great eagerness from all sides. every one expressed astonishment at the admirable dexterity, firmness, and presence of mind which had thus been displayed by a youth of nineteen. Nor were they less struck with the beautiful simplicity with which he related the adventure, rehearsing every thing that passed in the most direct and unaffected manner, and seeming to be himself wholly unconscious of those fine qualities discovered in his own conduct, which every one else contemplated with wonder and delight. Words cannot express what passed in my mind during this trying scene. (M, 2:201, my emphasis) to his audience, Clifford’s “direct and unaffected” account of history is as impressive as his heroic actions themselves. But the enmity with which Mandeville responds begins to suggest how Clifford’s proleptically “unaffected” history suggests a failure to be moved emotionally as much as it does sincerity. (Clifford’s eventual conversion to Catholicism, which delivers him a rich inheritance and a lifestyle that, without prospects, he had previously disavowed, adds more cause for suspicion.) While in a contemporary review John Gibson Lockhart “question[s] whether” Godwin’s historical narrative of the real historical event that Clifford facilitates, Sir Joseph Wagstaffe’s escape, “be surpassed in skill and beauty by anything in . . . Waverley,”53 we should note that Godwin reserves this conventional narrative prowess for a moment that serves to dramatize Mandeville’s resentment of a rival historian. Such skill sharply contrasts with Mandeville’s own clumsiness. In the novel’s final volume, in a characteristically savvy move, the unscrupulous lawyer holloway ably exacerbates Mandeville’s troubled relationship to his own contemporaneity. With Mandeville fully under his sway (and with an eye on the young heir’s estate), holloway stations him in the former home of a cavalier killed in the civil wars. In this haunted retirement, holloway creates an isolated space for Mandeville, who is by now incapable of addressing seventeenthcentury england, “to become acquainted with the history of the world”—or to dwell upon times and places other his own. “I placed before me maps, and globes, and charts, and various delineations of cities, of buildings, and of fortified places. . . . I read the admirable details of political affairs which ancient Greece and rome have handed down to us, and illustrated them with the biographical records of the venerable plutarch” (M, 3:16). historiographical representations of other places and eras help Mandeville to construct a defensive autonomy from the english present which infallibly discomposes him: “the

William Godwin and historical Fiction

267

only histories . . . that arrested my attention, were those of the nations of antiquity. Wherever I perceived the word england, I seemed to behold the names, penruddock, Wagstaff, and Clifford”—that is, the names of the public figures associated with Mandeville’s abortive and ignominious bid for the military glory that would have authorized his historiographical credibility. Faced with the english present, “My senses dazzled; my eyes saw double, or rather fluctuated in a vision, where every thing danced and nothing was distinct; and my mind was turned into uproar, confusion and anarchy” (M, 3:38–39). as a result of these failures, Mandeville comes to intense awareness of what discourse finally cannot communicate. When he describes the weakness of vindication as compared to slander, he draws attention to writing’s frequent deafness to events and experience. Scandal, he laments, “is whispered from man to man, and communicated by winks, and nods, and shrugs, the shaking of the head, and the speaking motion of the finger.” It travels rapidly by bodily intimations that leave no corresponding mark or record—whereas painstaking vindication “rests in detections, and distinctions, explanations to be given to the meaning of a hundred phrases, and the setting right whatever belongs to the circumstances of time and place” (M, 2:236–37). Mandeville’s overwhelming hostility toward the weak vindication offered by such gestures toward “time and place” more broadly indicts the contextualization that is the central gesture of historicism—even as Mandeville nevertheless tends to perform these gestures himself. In doing so he embodies the novel’s characteristic ambivalence about history’s composure.

Commodity trauma all of this is in some sense a repetition of Mandeville’s more foundational exclusion from historiographical coherence. as a child born anglo-Irish in Ulster in 1638, Mandeville narrowly escapes the bloody Irish rebellion of 1641 with his life, thanks to his Irish nurse.54 his family perishes. the accompanying scenes of violence repeat intermittently throughout the novel, and in their repetition these scenes in part foreground Mandeville’s inability to find language with which to manage the trauma of this history. explicitly, the crucial events in Ireland are scenes that (even from the retrospective position of Mandeville’s narration) defeat direct description and likewise defy the historiographical conventions that might otherwise contain them. except for the involvement of the officers’ families, Mandeville obliquely observes, “the scene

268

The Fictions of Serial history

would have resembled what we read of the sack of rome by the Gauls, when the fathers of the senate sat each man in his ivory chair in the porch of his own house, and, without changing the position of feature or limb, expected their fate, while, to the barbarians that traversed the city, they appeared rather divinities than men” (M, 1:33–34, my emphasis). the observation records an incommensurability between classical historiography and what Mandeville witnesses—or the historical path of a world that increasingly diverges from the roman historiography its elite observers expect or wish it to resemble. What the Irish scene did resemble, or what it was in itself, seems impossible to express; instead the scene can only return, throughout Mandeville’s life. In narrating his life, Mandeville repeatedly acknowledges how the gap between historiographical conventions and events has scarred his memory, which is confounded by his inability to recall these events “distinctly”: “I was a little more than three years of age, at the time when this tragedy was acted. I do not remember the scene distinctly in all its parts; but there are detached circumstances that belong to it, that will live in my memory as long as my pulses continue to beat” (M, 1:33). Whenever these memories of Mandeville’s childhood return, they erase the intervening years. after Mandeville leaves Oxford in disgrace and spirals into insanity, “Ireland, and its scenes of atrocious massacre . . . presented themselves in original freshness. My father and my mother died over again. the shrieks, that had rent the roofs of Kinnard fourteen years before, yelled in my ears, and deafened my sense; and I answered them with corresponding and responsive shrieks. I forgot the lapse of time that had passed between” (M, 2:113). When Mandeville discovers his sister henrietta’s romantic involvement with Clifford late in the novel, the Irish violence once again overwhelms present events: “In the margin of every precept were painted the scenes of Kinnard, the murder of my father and mother and the whole assembly of those among whom they lived, and all the unspeakable horrors of the Irish massacre” (M, 3:314–15). as a would-be historian, Mandeville offers his own retrospective explanation for his psychological distress, as the product of an overzealous yet “indefinite” religious education that leaves him predisposed to destructive enthusiasm and sectarianism. “the discourse of my preceptor [rev. Bradford], though shaped, it may be, into specious and well sounding periods, was vague and indefinite. If I desired to correct myself in conformity to its admonitions, I knew not where to begin” (M, 1:147).55 and in part, the trauma that Mandeville continues to manifest evinces the more straightforward historicist ethos of the novel,

William Godwin and historical Fiction

269

set as it is in an era of sectarian conflict. readers, that is, understand Mandeville to be a product of the seventeenth century precisely because he offers a groping and insufficient theological explanation as the inadequate intellectual resource available to him. Incapable of fully historicizing his own story, Mandeville “cannot yet tell” a story that postcolonial thought ultimately can. But if Mandeville is in some sense a traumatized colonizer without the language for it, the novel also links his trauma to the more general illegibility of the historical present. the 1641 rebellion arises, Mandeville intones in a formally historiographical voice, in an Irish nation that “exhibited every external quality of tranquility and submission” (M, 1:6). From the start, then, his retrospective narration forges the specter of persons unattuned to unfolding history faced with those, like the Irish rebels here, who can manipulate such inattention. Likewise, Mandeville’s own, military father cannot anticipate events nor even see them for himself as they occur. treacherously surprised and imprisoned at the start of hostilities, he must learn of the spreading rebellion through “the tales that were daily, and sometimes hourly, brought to [him] and his comrades in confinement at Kinnard” (M, 1:29). as events unfold, hysterical accounts of brutal violence (like the forced marching of dozens of anglo-Irish to their deaths off a ruined bridge in armagh) wind back to this space of confinement, in a place removed from any possibility of action. his father’s subjection to narratives of events proffered by others sets the tone of the novel, and as subsequent events make clear, marks a kind of family inheritance for Mandeville. after his harrowing escape from Ireland, and his precarious but ultimately safe passage back to england, Mandeville carries his nascent trauma with him to the home of his uncle audley, whose melancholy resignation saturates the entire household. audley, we are told, could not survive a move from the ruined seaside castle where he passes the remainder of his days in living death. In this vulnerable condition, audley soon finds himself at the mercy of the narrative maneuvers of holloway, the villainous lawyer who will alternately fascinate and outrage Mandeville. here, just as Mandeville’s setting in time locates its events on the cusp of an unwelcome, enlightenment historiographical modernity (most thoroughly institutionalized by hume’s examination of Mandeville’s historical moment in the History of England, in which hume offered controversial sympathy for Charles I and controversial censure of religious enthusiasm), the novel also places Mandeville immediately prior to commercial modernity, amidst the tentative circulation of commercial trinkets into the hinterlands. Notably,

270

The Fictions of Serial history

Mandeville finds that the silence and eventlessness prevailing at audley’s estate both fuel and sharpen his recollections of Irish violence: It is strange, young as I was, how the scenes which immediately preceded my quitting the shores of Ireland, lived in my mind. I thought of them by day; I dreamed of them by night. No doubt, the silence which for the most part pervaded my present residence, contributed to this. all was monotonous, and composed, and eventless here; all that I remembered there, had been tumultuous, and tragic, and distracting, and wild. I saw in my dreams . . . whether by night or by day, a perpetual succession of flight, and pursuit, and anguish, and murder. (M, 1:113–14, my emphasis) Moreover, this quality of eventlessness is curiously aligned with the “unvaried regularity” of the commercial cycles that alone mark out Mandeville’s days and weeks. here the young Mandeville exhibits his own proleptic fascination with the commodities circulated by a pedlar. this “visitor dearest to my youthful curiosity,” he recalls, “displayed . . . a multiplicity of temptations to expence that was truly astonishing. Besides gloves, and stockings, and handkerchiefs, and ribbands, and linens, and stuffs, for the men and the maidens, I generally found among his treasures, some toys, or implements of childish industry, upon which I did not fail to set an immeasurable value” (M, 1:140). as the commodity inducements of the novel’s preface enter for the first time into the world of the novel, the objects retain the characteristically nondescript form of Godwin’s historiographical aesthetic (“linens,” “stuffs,” “some toys,” etc.). this avowedly general form proclaims their structural role in producing a liability to commercialized history. “Commercialist hegemony,” as Christensen describes it, fundamentally inheres in fashion as seriality, “a regular succession of alterations and refinements,” that makes the “new . . . recognizable.”56 Mandeville’s conspicuous pedlar makes this presumptive British future into Mandeville’s aberrant seventeenthcentury mentality.57 Such a regular visitor as the pedlar, Mandeville oddly insists, “to the nicety of a critic in language, would have been a stranger no longer. But it was not so to me” (M, 1:139). personally manifesting his wares’ capacity to be both new and recognizable, the pedlar is a paradoxically known stranger, the source of “considerable entertainment” who “furnished to me a copious field for fancy and rumination” (M, 1:140). Moreover, the impressionable young Mandeville notes the regular visits of a butcher alongside those of the pedlar in terms precisely resonant with the essential form of seriality:

William Godwin and historical Fiction

271

“the very butcher who came once a week to bring us provisions, did not, even by the unvaried regularity of his approaches, altogether divest himself of the grace of novelty” (M, 1:139). reenvisioned by Mandeville through his glimpse of Britain’s posthistory, the pedlar and the butcher convey the resilient “novelty” that persists amidst the most “unvaried regularity” within commerce, which becomes a crucial context for Mandeville’s problems with history. Notably, this scene revisits St. Leon’s own youthful exposure to the luxury of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. But the restaging in Mandeville shifts the site of indoctrination from extraordinary public spectacle to everyday commercial life—and just as essentially shifts the dynamic from a singular exhibition of splendor (to be repeated only within St. Leon’s imagination) to a regular routine of ordinary temptations surely inadequate to the “immeasurable value” that Mandeville sets upon them (again in contrast to the literally immense value of the dress at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in St. Leon).58 amid this procession of commodities, Mandeville’s more recognizable formations by colonial violence and fanatical religious (mis)education are strangely subordinated to a different formation by commercial desire. perhaps the most profound suggestion of this episode is that Mandeville’s “eventless” encounter with commercial seriality at audley’s estate allows him to access his traumatic history in the first place (especially in the contrast this composure and “unvaried regularity” mark to what has preceded them). the “copious field for fancy and rumination” that commerce supplies finally seems perversely implicated in the conversion of that earlier trauma into “perpetual succession” of another sort. Nevertheless, the persistence of Mandeville’s trauma beneath these predictable cycles—perhaps even the exacerbation of his trauma by these cycles—suggests that they imperfectly adhere to or substitute for a history contained in him that continues irregularly. as the bearer of history, Mandeville is provoked continuously by a resemblance to commerciality that is never entirely complete—even as that commerciality is a condition of access to this history in the first place. as the novel proceeds, those who exploit Mandeville’s trauma do so by means of his vulnerability to cyclicality. With Mandeville a virtual prisoner, holloway arranges “the periodical visits” of a doctor who tends to Mandeville’s discomposed mind (M, 3:100). hollaway’s henchman Mallison, in turn, preoccupies Mandeville by soliciting “his opinion of men and things, of periods of literature, and the great heroes and colossal personages of the intellectual world” (M, 3:107, my emphasis). During this talk “of abstractions, of literature, and authors,” Mandeville recalls, “I never felt so unrestrained of speech,

272

The Fictions of Serial history

as at the period I am now describing” (M, 3:108). Mallison manipulates and diverts Mandeville by indulging his desire to periodize, to construct with his rhetoric a serial past for literature modelled upon commercial regularity, and so temporarily to elude the irregular turmoil that has intruded into his own historical present. as an allegorical figure for an emergent commercial order that is the already foreclosed future of events in the novel, Mandeville posits liability to seriality itself (collective as well as personal) as the direct or indirect expression of those traumatic episodes, however distant in time and space, finally endemic to commercial regularity.

the Genius of the author While Mandeville in his madness devotes most of his energy to his rival Clifford, the historiographical villainy of the lawyer holloway is ultimately more central to Godwin’s novel. the contemporary review by Lockhart (subsequently Scott’s son-in-law and biographer) offers one early indication of the Godwinian “tendency” of Mandeville, as I uncover it here, to draw scrutiny to the condition of commercial historicism. “In this part of the work,” Lockhart writes of Mandeville’s subjection to holloway, “there is, to our view, something peculiarly characteristic of the genius of the author.”59 however consciously, Lockhart begins to sniff out in the character of holloway a canny account of Scott himself. In James Kerr’s summation of Scott’s lawyerly practice, Scott “uses facts drawn from previous accounts of British history, individuals, events, geographical settings, and arranges them in the form of a compelling story about the past, a story which expresses and endorses a particular ideological bias, a political claim about the meaning of history.”60 as the “historian of his ward” Mandeville, holloway has the power to “weave together circumstances and incidents” to make what meaning he wants (M, 3:159, 3:160). “I could not discover,” Mandeville recollects, “whether the things [holloway and Mallison] described were real, or were the pure creatures of invention. . . . First I believed all they related to me; then, upon revisal, the whole appeared so romantic, that I could not refrain from suspecting that I was made the dupe to a series of the grossest impostures.” remarkably, these stories carry the same character, Clifford, “from country to country, from employment to employment”—in just the manner of the hero of the Waverley Novels or of reginald St. Leon himself (M, 3:143, my emphasis).

William Godwin and historical Fiction

273

Mandeville’s eventual resistance to holloway’s initially credible representations suggests how Scott’s too-conspicuous seriality began to expose his own “romantic . . . impostures.” Yet Mandeville nevertheless allows these doubts to be dissipated by partial proofs: “circumstances came to my knowledge . . . which proved a few of the most material points, and scarcely left me power to doubt the rest” (M, 3:143). exasperated by holloway’s methods, Mandeville delivers a striking epitaph equally applicable to Scott’s antiquarian fictions: “he had taken much pains to obtain information, and he invented some things, so conformable to what was certain, as to make all together a tale of terrible demonstration” (M, 3:309).61 Moreover, in his memoir’s baffled encounters with holloway, Mandeville’s grasp of things as “they were in themselves” unwinds revealingly. holloway’s machinations remain obscure even to retrospective narration, and thus his methods remain unknown to Mandeville and to readers.62 the most telling disclosure is Mandeville’s fundamental incapacity to address the ceaseless action of holloway: “I pass over a considerable period of time in which I was victim to the machinations of this precious pair of devils” (M, 3:138). With this gesture of exhaustion, Mandeville points to gaps in time filled with events beyond recovery, or to something like the opaque intervals between serial occurrences—as well as to the inadequacy before history that narrative itself (insofar as it is inevitably selective and bound to the limits of attention) shares with him. Ultimately, holloway takes shape in Mandeville’s disturbed mind as a displaced figuring of the historical agency that eludes Mandeville himself. Because holloway is undeniably a scheming manipulator, his intentions are highly suspect from the start. Nevertheless, he fascinates Mandeville, who admires holloway’s transcendence of the very “laws of time and space” as he plots to bring audley, and thus the Mandeville estate, under his manipulative control (M, 2:259). as holloway unfolds his plot, the novel records the entry into commercial history of an estate that, until now, “owing partly to the antiquity of its claims, and partly to the moderation of the desires of its possessors, had been exempt from all litigation, perhaps for centuries” (M, 2:245–46). there is a noteworthy discrepancy between this past of “moderate desires” and the “immeasurable value” that the youthful Mandeville sets upon the pedlar’s wares. the fundamental problem is not so much overspending as the imaginative liability the commodity form produces in Mandeville and for his environs. as a result, holloway successfully manufactures a present that has claims upon the estate and its possessor.

274

The Fictions of Serial history

to exploit audley’s hypersensitivity, holloway presses the specious claim of a neighboring estate to a nearby parcel of shoreline. after allowing the maddening clamor of new fishing hut construction to push audley to his breaking point, holloway expertly choreographs his own introduction. having arranged for his workmen’s noise to crescendo upon his entry into audley’s chamber, at the perfect moment, “holloway instantly dispatched a messenger to stop the operation of the workmen; and by a sort of enchantment, that it may seem difficult to account for, without regard to the laws of time and space, not one sound, of all those which had lately given so much annoyance was heard, from the moment that the order had passed the lips of the director of the scene. holloway had now gained the point he aimed at; he stood in the presence of audley Mandeville, and all else seemed easy to the mastery of his skill” (M, 2:259–60). here, holloway’s presence coincides instantly with a silence that marks the erasure of competing claims upon the estate. Meanwhile, at the construction site of the fishing huts, “the planks that were already on the shore, and it somehow happened that these were extremely few, remained where they fell, a monument of the masterly operations of the attorney” (M, 2:263). holloway’s peculiar “monument” commemorates the seamless correspondence of “time and space” achieved by his presence (to Mandeville’s envy), but it also perpetuates the threat of the unruly noise that would return in his absence—without his dexterous, albeit fabricated history. It is only too easy to forget that the din only comes onto the scene immediately before holloway arrives to quiet it.63 as his capacity for self-commemoration on the beach suggests, holloway is a formidable historian who also understands the mechanisms, and in particular the concrete engagement of the senses, through which historical commemoration most powerfully proceeds. and under cover of the more compelling commemoration of his planks, holloway obscures a more complex history told by a trove of documents: “there was not a scrap of paper or parchment, evidencing the entail and descent of the property, that was not carefully removed from the great house, and duly arranged, among the treasures of holloway’s closet” (M, 2:268). In this way holloway is representative of the way British romantic culture imagined a certain kind of villain during an epoch when the gap between ready perception and the course of history became more apparent. While others are disarmed by “a lived time that was experienced as rupture” and distracted by a serial procession of fashionable commodities that fill the void, holloway combines mastery of detail with a devotion to purpose.64 When audley doesn’t immediately assent to hollo-

William Godwin and historical Fiction

275

way’s wish that audley sign a new will, holloway observes patiently, “It will be hard indeed, if perseverance does not carry the point, which I have failed to gain by surprise” (M, 2:272). holloway has the noteworthy capacity to heighten his powers by extending them over time, to see beyond what lies before his eyes.65 In projecting, especially onto holloway, a brand of villainy characterized above all else by an unattainably efficacious mastery over events—an abstraction from the moment that is historically enabling—Mandeville himself provocatively figures the writers and reader-consumers of the historical novel as obsessed with a frustrated historical desire, one linked to their captivation by the “eventless” cycles of commercial objects. the representative villainy of a character like holloway, a scheming estate manager whose unnatural devotion to his plans moves mountains, day by day, one meticulous pebble at a time, reflects commercial Britons’ corresponding inability to attain such temporal extension of themselves. Growing wary of holloway, Mandeville repeatedly determines to resist the lawyer’s interested accounts of circumstances, to “plant myself on the spot; I could with my own eyes observe from day to day what was going on” (M, 2:296). But not even Mandeville’s prior knowledge of the real “cause and circumstances” of the lawyer’s procedure seems capable of contesting his coercive representations (M, 3:34). as a response to Scott, Mandeville reluctantly concedes that a historical practice compromised by commerce will prove more compelling than Godwin’s own. In registering this divide, Godwin writes a methodologically reflexive radical history as doomed, impossible. he repeats, twenty years later, the process that Jon Klancher identifies in “Of history and romance,” where Godwin had both projected and “forestall[ed]” within a single essay a novel oppositional genre of “republican romance.” Once again, that is, Godwin dissociates himself from the “powerful act of authorship,” or the pleasure of the historical romancer’s fictional mastery of contingency—but this time with a fuller cognizance of its attractions.66 Mandeville’s implacable enmity thus becomes the primary register of a frustrated historical orientation, one that Scott’s serial domination of fiction seemed to foreclose. Moreover, this is a foreclosure that Godwin’s “tale of the seventeenth century” constructs, in every other sense, as already inevitable.67 holloway’s own history, in the end, is a commercial art. Observing holloway’s ongoing education of Mallison in the final volume, Mandeville learns how to operate the peculiar “engine” that now drives history amongst a nation of shopkeepers. “It is no longer necessary for him who wishes to possess the

276

The Fictions of Serial history

good things of this world . . . to sally forth with guns, and swords, and the various instruments of offence.” history, holloway instructs, no longer operates through violence but through “a smile”—“the engine, by means of which the smooth shopkeeper behind his counter, contrives to enrich himself at the expence of his customers” (M, 3:77). In a perfect inversion of le doux com­ merce, modern commerciality now embodies a kind of historical mastery, an extension across time that is immune to history and to the incursions of the everyday. One “must be master of his passions, and perfect in the art of selfcontrol. Nothing must irritate him; nothing must divert his eye from the object of his pursuit; nothing must turn him aside from the steadiness of his aim” (M, 3:77–78). holloway directs Mallison “now, to cringe, to fawn, and to flatter; but with the same impassive observation of the effects he produced, and the same supernatural deadness of emotion to the interests and the happiness of those respecting whom his projects were conversant” (M, 3:79). Mallison learns this lesson well, and Mandeville finds his simulation of sympathetic concern virtually indistinguishable from the real thing: “all that he did was subordinate to an end; and every syllable that he uttered, was supplied by as profound a feeling as the most disinterested friendship could have inspired” (M, 3:95). In Mandeville’s submission to holloway’s arts of simulation, then, the novel completes its critique of Scott’s historical fiction with an acknowledgement of the power of its illusions. although at novel’s end holloway loses out in his bid for the Mandeville estate, his loss merely postpones the triumph of his type from the seventeenth century to Godwin’s own day, when, in a sign of the prescience of Mandeville, Scott’s commercial manipulations of history secured him his own estate of abbotsford—a de novo historical relic in its own right.68 Mandeville’s villains personify Godwin’s suspicion of what might lurk behind a historical art derivative of commerce, one dependent upon behaviors and commodities that, in their cringing, fawning, and flattering, only feign adherence to a time from which they finally remain abstracted.69

2 Near the end of his own life, Godwin solicited Scott, the Wizard of the North, with an indecorously abject letter that pleaded penury and begged assistance in ushering his late works into print. (Scott, to add insult to injury, had scooped Godwin’s intended Lives of the Necromancers with his own Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft.) “the temper of the times, or the state of commerce,” Godwin wrote, “seems to render any direct application [to publishers]

William Godwin and historical Fiction

277

unavailing. My magic rod, if ever I had one, is grown powerless with the newsprung speculators in literary produce; but yours is in all its energy.”70 In life, Godwin here bows before the author he had once disparaged as a “hypocondriacal Dandy.”71 But finally this plea seems as much a more fundamental concession, to seriality itself. By now, in 1831, the serial fantasy of indefinite extensibility ought to have crashed back to earth, or played itself out.72 Yet what “taxes” Godwin has failed to diminish the energy of Scott, whose apprehensions of the essentially serial form of modern life harnessed the boundless energy of a system of change, and a state of commerce, far larger than himself.73 In part, Godwin’s Mandeville plants his character’s more resilient enmity within this historical afterlife, at the very origin of commercial modernity rather than at the end of the age that preceded it. the novel’s drive to extricate history from commerce, although finally impossible, nevertheless focalizes a (negative) place from which, in Godwin’s vanguard view, renewed historiographies of humanity might always begin. Yet in his antiheroic resistance, Mandeville also speaks, preternaturally, a now-familiar language. Our twenty-first-century habits of critique make the warnings he offers—of the histories imperiled by commercial forms of representation, of the traumas buried in the serial processions of culture—finally overfamiliar, now all too easy to hear. In Godwin’s late reappraisal of Scott’s boundless energy, might we also see a different kind of injunction? If our critique feels exhausted, might we look with greater wonder on materials we have, along with Godwin, peremptorily dismissed? Over the course of this book, I have pursued the limitations but also the plenitude and the dynamism of the fashion cycles that lay at the heart of this epoch’s peculiar historical possibilities—and thus how, as fashion, commerce was always more than itself. as a borrowed conclusion to my own story, Man­ deville ultimately poses a challenge not so faithful to Godwin’s original project in the novel: that we think anew by means of the more flexible accountings of fashion and commercial life that preceded the finally schizophrenic critical method of Godwin’s fated antihero—and that we do so, in part, by means of the resources of a long eighteenth-century moment, extending to our present, that still allows commerce to be history as much as its antithesis.74

Coda

2

Beautiful Historical Experience

I want to be the purveyor of a certain silhouette or a way of cutting, so that when I am dead and gone people will know that the twentyfirst century was started by alexander McQueen. —alexander McQueen

at a threshold moment for fashion’s belated institutionalization among the fine arts, the Metropolitan Museum of art exhibition Savage Beauty (2011) catapulted the early twenty-first-century designer alexander McQueen into the first rank of cultural attractions. By the final weeks of the exhibition’s run, the admission lines of McQueen’s admirers, new and old, routinely stretched for several blocks along Fifth avenue; and the final attendance figures put his artful designs in company with such lodestones as King Tut and the Mona Lisa. during and alongside the exhibition, but beyond its walls, a series of window displays at the department store Bergdorf Goodman staged McQueen’s broader legacy—and perhaps the more enduring historical-aesthetic significance of fashion—in terms strikingly resonant with those I have described in this book. The Bergdorf Goodman windows brought several spectacular McQueen garments into public view, with the inevitable effect of inflecting and intermingling with the actually worn dress that paraded past on the street and that, in turn, cast its own ephemeral reflections on the plate glass of the displays. one window in particular, entitled “a Cabinet of British Curiosities,” embodied the long afterlife of my own book’s story in a peculiarly agile way.1 In homage to McQueen’s pointedly British inheritances (the London-born designer often acknowledged the imaginative force of his Scottish ancestry), here the couture styles summon a material-historical aesthetic transparently

Coda

279

Figure 35. “Cabinet of British Curiosities,” Bergdorf Goodman department store window to commemorate the exhibition Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of art (2011). Courtesy of david Hoey and Bergdorf Goodman. Photo © Ricky Zehavi.

280

Coda

indebted to Walter Scott’s curio-laden novels and to the abbotsford estate where Scott echoed his own prose in material life (Figure 35). as with Scott’s historical fiction, viewers of the window can survey in the background the remains of an ostensibly British past, but their point of entry is conditioned by the present-day fashions that stand as sentry in the foreground. In their posture, McQueen’s dresses almost offer to part, or to give way; yet finally, they remain firmly in place as the animating force of the whole. The fantastical quality of the historical Britain they point to is neatly summoned by the twin Union Jacks that hang in flimsy, almost distressed transparency above the scene. But this flimsiness is in its own way historical. on closer look, of course, it is the tailor’s shears that hover in place of the sovereign, beneath an outsized but unpossessed crown. Here, McQueen’s dresses do not properly or fully belong to the historical world they haltingly conjure. Instead their presence ushers viewers into history in a way that staves off the homogeneous empty time of ordinary historicism—even as they also trouble the distinction Walter Benjamin made, in conceptualizing his revolutionary “tiger’s leap,” between fashion’s leaps into the past (undertaken in the “arena” of the ruling classes) and those more genuine leaps taking place in “the open air of history.”2 This fashion, that is, self-consciously posits a time that is rival to history-as-usual. What would it mean to understand the historical postures of the window (which faithfully indexes McQueen’s own, characteristic tendencies) as more than mere bravado? When McQueen himself audaciously proclaimed his ambition that people might “know that the twenty-first century was started by alexander McQueen,” he rehearsed a grand and familiar story of historical periodicity driven by style, a durable mythos of fashion that has understood history writ large to take flight from the “purveyors of silhouettes.” But in the designer’s wider career, a different tension emerges between, on the one hand, this style-driven reckoning of how historical moments may be demarcated or encountered and, on the other, the more painful histories registered in the fashion shows (replete with Scottish tartan) that brought McQueen into global prominence. In particular, his collection Highland Rape (autumn / Winter 1995–96) controversially revisited precisely the historical terrain of Scott’s Waverley by probing, via couture rather than fictional romance, the atrocities visited on the Scottish Highlands in the wake of the 1745–46 Jacobite Rebellion. McQueen returned to the same historical terrain in Widows of Culloden (autumn / Winter 2006–7).3 Waverley itself, as Scott claimed, had been forged from “the general habits of the period, of which [Scott had] witnessed some remnants” (W, 339). The

Coda

281

pun, so central to the argument of my own book, insists upon the conspicuous costume that runs throughout Scott’s historical fiction. The close of Waverley in particular explicitly conserves textile remnants, alike in the “remnants of a faded uniform” in which the Jacobite fugitive the Baron of Bradwardine reappears and in the more complex attire of the savvy fool davie Gellatly, whose dress becomes a remarkable amalgam of visual historical materials salvaged amid the destruction of war: “The peculiar dress in which he had been attired in better days showed only miserable rags of its whimsical finery, the lack of which was oddly supplied by the remnants of tapestried hangings, windowcurtains, and shreds of pictures [portraits, perhaps] with which he had bedizened his tatters” (W, 296–97). In an alternative medium, McQueen’s project answers Scott’s fiction with uncanny force. For in a way that positions Highland Rape as a latter-day heir to Waverley, McQueen’s collection systematically materialized Scott’s injunction to build from the remnant. “Most of [this collection],” the designer recalled, “was built on remnants from fabric shops,” where McQueen obtained the lace that he delicately tore to achieve the show’s disconcerting effect of beauty (or the “savage beauty” to which the Met exhibition pointed), as with the remarkable green and bronze dress that makes a ready icon for the larger collection (Figure 36).4 For McQueen, as against Scott, remnancy belonged to material form in a way that promised a kind of access to the past without regard to questions of artifactual authenticity or provenance. Yet as presented on the runway in Highland Rape, “the models’ torn garments and bloodied bodies ignited a fury,” and the show certainly risked a shallow aestheticization of the historical violence it staged.5 Early commentators, alert to the danger of “rape” on the runway, rightly pointed to the instability of McQueen’s transmutation of ostensible victims of atrocity into disturbingly beautiful objects of aesthetic contemplation.6 McQueen himself, in mainly conventional ways, defended his project to expose a legacy of aesthetic, as well as militaristic, colonial exploitation: “[This collection] was a shout against English designers . . . doing flamboyant Scottish clothes. My father’s family originates from the Isle of Skye, and I’d studied the history of the Scottish upheavals and the Clearances.”7 Here McQueen does not directly address the misalignment between the collection’s prevailing beauty and the historical trauma that Highland Rape only inadequately manifested. This was a contradiction that the more unambiguous beauty of Widows of Culloden only intensified.8 Through this lack of fit, McQueen’s shows push us toward a deeper challenge to regnant criticaltheoretical paradigms of historiography and historical experience that remain

282

Coda

Figure 36. alexander McQueen, dress from Highland Rape (autumn / Winter 1995–96). Green and bronze cotton/synthetic lace. Photo © Sølve Sundsbø / art + Commerce.

Coda

283

unduly hegemonic. Specifically, I mean that the social critique of our present moment continues to reduce the experiential encounter with “history” to a procession of traumas. In Jameson’s still epochal phrase, “History is what hurts,” and postmodernity is the countervailing, anesthetic condition of “an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place.”9 Likewise, for the historical theorist F. R. ankersmit, it is only trauma or pain that can induce genuine historiography, by “compell[ing] the most sensitive minds of the time to proceed to a position from which the past can be objectified.” In this sense, ankersmit argues, “there is a necessary link between historical consciousness and historical writing on the one hand and the worst disasters that may befall humanity on the other.”10 But as I have shown throughout this book (notwithstanding a range of skeptical voices in the period), fashion’s fleeting pasts recurrently pointed eighteenth-century Britons to possibilities and resources to be found in what they otherwise failed to remember of the more ordinary course of their commercial life. The difference and rupture that fashion manifested across time— and the force with which new and old fashions of dress have confronted the habits of the present ever since the long eighteenth century—make clear how a “modern historical consciousness aris[ing] from the experience of . . . discrepancy between the perspective of the past and that of the present” (in ankersmit’s terms) could arise apart from tragedy, from the different ground of experience that fashion at once expresses and constitutes.11 Rather in the spirit of Jameson and ankersmit (and of William Godwin), Ian Baucom’s recent and influential account of the long eighteenth century articulates a gloomy ethical imperative of repetition, or unwavering “melancholy interest” in the loss of the past.12 Strikingly, Baucom grounds this historiographical imperative, in part, in a rebuke of adam Smith, whose Theory of Moral Sentiments precisely dismissed literal sympathy for the dead as misguided. For Smith (who wrote amid vivid memories of 1745), the tendency of the living to imagine themselves in the place of the dead (and thereby to summon their own dread at the prospect of being buried alive in the grave) was finally a category error. Baucom, who takes the illustration as a broader trope of historical engagement, insists on parting ways with Smith’s pat avoidance of affective responsibility to the dead who are history’s victims. Yet we might as readily point, in greater sympathy with Smith himself, to the ways in which primary traumas do come to an end—and to the impossibility of ameliorating violence that cannot be undone, which makes Baucom’s imperative finally, in an important sense, wishful.

284

Coda

In sympathy with Baucom’s larger project, we should acknowledge how the conditions of fashion’s possibility include the global history of exploitation that furnishes fashion’s raw materials. But in giving Smith’s eighteenth-century perspective its due, we should also see in fashion’s capacious use of the materials of the past (and fashion’s claims on the present and its fantasies of the future) an admirable economy. Fashion posits an imperative of its own—to make use of what history has furnished—that is a useful corrective to the excess of lying down with the dead in eternal mourning. as the template for a method productive of less wounding experiences of “discrepancy” and difference that nevertheless make for historical experience, fashion’s movements might suggest and sustain new critical projects—especially by forestalling the fatalistic repetition of a critique that only reproduces (without clearly ameliorating) one weighty but partial register of human history. The tiger’s leap, in the end, has always been as much the antagonist as the accessory of the angel of history who counts up accumulating disasters. In this sense, at the start of the twenty-first century, McQueen’s fashion exposes the cruel optimism of our critical-theoretical overinvestments in the tragic idiom of historical experience.13 at one limit point, Highland Rape (along with its successor the Widows of Culloden) insists with considerable sophistication that history can inhere in beautiful materials, and that beauty can be made to bear the weight of history.14 While acknowledging the cruelty of 1745, McQueen’s reengagements with Culloden also explore how even the moment of trauma or loss might (via the prosthesis of fashion) bypass the decorum that excludes such trauma and loss from continuity with ongoing life and that resigns the content of history to a delimited state of abjection. amidst the reflexive repetition of historical trauma in our age, McQueen suggests, Culloden must first be resurrected or remade as something other than tragedy in order to be historically impactful. ankersmit accounts for “sublime historical experience.” But the very expression suggests an outside—other modes of experience that our critique does not ordinarily countenance as history. In a forceful remaking of the legacy of Scott, McQueen exposes the aesthetic ground of ostensibly ethical judgments about where historical experience may be sought, exclusively in scenes that accord with tragic dignity. McQueen’s historical style confronts the twenty-first century not with tragic sublimity but with a provocation to experience history in and as beauty: that is, through an engagement with the past that refuses sympathy, whether composed or melancholic, as the self-evident bound of responsibility to what has been—in the service of a critical grasp upon what history may be.

Notes

2

IntroductIon 1. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society, 42. 2. Gilles Lipovetsky identifies the “hundred years’ fashion” as a stable structure of dress extending from the mid-Victorian heyday of the designer Charles Frederick Worth to an endpoint in the 1960s when “gaps, challenges, and anti-fashions began to be significant” (Empire of Fashion, 55, 63). 3. Barthes, Fashion System, 298, 215. 4. Ibid., 215. Barthes’s pronouncement that “history does not produce forms” directly rebukes the costume historians who had sought to explain changes of dress in the reductively analogical way he dismisses, but he also has in mind more subtle analogical reasoning that understands fashion to “express” the times. 5. Fashion structured change in ways distinct from the period’s ceaselessly speculative credit economy, the domain of J. G. A. Pocock’s “post-civic” man who did “not even live in the present, except as constituted by his fantasies concerning a future.” As against the spectralization of the present in the credit economy, newly oriented toward the fictional promise of a National Debt that would never “in reality” be repaid, fashion made the present fulfilling (Virtue, Commerce, and History, 112). 6. Walter scott, Ivanhoe, 7. 7. the first two volumes of the Collection of Dresses appeared in 1757; two additional volumes appeared in 1772. 8. My reading emphasizes the novel aspects of the Collection of Dresses as against its continuity with other projects to illustrate costume and custom. two significant earlier examples are Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti Antichi e Moderni (1590), an important precedent for Jefferys, and Bernard Picart and Jean Frederic Bernard’s Ceremonies and Religious Customs of All the Peoples of the World (1723–43), a comparative visual ethnography in the tradition of enlightenment universalism. on Vecellio, see the modern edition published as Clothing of the Renaissance World, trans. Rosenthal and Jones; on Picart and Bernard, see Lynn Hunt et al., The Book that Changed Europe. 9. the Collection of Dresses attributes these two plates to drawings by Anthony Walker. on Walker and Jefferys, see sheila o’Connell, London 1753, 172. 10. Jefferys, 1: ix, my emphasis. on the durable classical trope that drew parallels between dress and rhetorical form, see the first chapter of Chloe Wigston smith’s Women, Work, and Clothes. In Richardson, Dress, and Discourse, Kathleen oliver gives extended

286

Notes to Pages 5–12

consideration to samuel Richardson’s proposition in Clarissa, “What are words, but the body and dress of thought? And is not the mind strongly indicated by its outward dress?” 11. John L. Nevison, “origin of the Fashion Plate,” 86. Modern fashion periodicals are a late development arising only in the final decades of the eighteenth-century in Britain and France alike. As Reed Benhamou notes, “Despite the supposed French obsession with the subject, fashion was not often covered by the periodical press of the ancien régime” (“Fashion in the Mercure,” 27). While it is a commonplace that the fashion press began with the late seventeenth-century Mercure Galant in France, this moment of absolutist fashion quickly came to a dead end. As Joan DeJean notes, after the death of its founding editor in 1710, the journal ceased to be the same “invaluable source of information on the tastes and the fascinations of the intellectuals who had come of age in salon society” (France, ed., New Oxford Companion, 521; on fashion illustration more generally in this period, see Fashion Prints in the Age of Louis XIV, ed. Kathryn Norberg and sandra Rosenbaum). For Clare Haru Crowston, “Paris was slow, compared to england, to publish fashion journals”—both because of a general dearth of periodicals there and because, in Paris, “informal visual and aural witnessing sufficed . . . to transmit news about the constant flow of new fashions” (Credit, Fashion, Sex, 157, 125). on the enabling qualities of distance from Parisian fashions, both for the instigation of periodicals and for the generation of critical thought, see especially Daniel L. Purdy’s account of the later parallel case of Germany in Tyranny of Elegance. 12. on the larger problem of the year as a unit of historical representation, see especially James Chandler, England in 1819, who describes the “annualization” of British culture over the course of the century, or its taking account of the distinctness of individual years, as a “periodization of history” allied to the “history of periodical forms” (123). 13. Much commentary in seriality studies looks backward to Victorian novels from the “narrative complexity” ostensibly emerging in serial television, video games, and other new media today. Fredric Jameson points to Kierkegaard’s Repetition (1843) as the place where the idea of repetition “in its modern form” begins (“Reification and Utopia,” 135). 14. see especially Mark salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment, who suggests the particular appeal of an emergent social history to a newly complex, commercial society composed of persons who were curious to read about the private pursuits of their historical “counterparts” from the past. I emphasize the anachronism of this gesture for middle-class, eighteenth-century Britons who had no true counterparts there. 15. on this reappraisal of “Gothic” english literature of the past (as evident, for instance, in the critic thomas Warton’s influential reclamation of the poetry of edmund spenser), see especially Jonathan Kramnick, Making the English Canon. Kramnick cites an anonymous pamphlet that praises Warton: “every reader of taste, must congratulate the present age, on the spirit which has prevailed in reviving our old poets” (quoted 139). 16. scott’s fiction strongly impacted monumental historiographical innovators like thomas Babington Macaulay, Jules Michelet, and Leopold von Ranke. For an extended discussion of nineteenth-century historiography, see Brian Hamnett, Historical Novel in Nineteenth-Century Europe. 17. William st. Clair, Reading Nation, 221; thomas Babington Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays, 1:1. By the mid-nineteenth century, st. Clair estimates, “maybe a million more” copies of scott’s works had been sold than of all others combined (“Political economy of Reading”).

Notes to Pages 12–15

287

18. Macaulay, 1:1. 19. In addition to McKendrick et al., see especially Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter. Among historians the concept of “consumer society” has since become controversial, and Brewer himself has recently pronounced it largely unhelpful. 20. Literary counterparts to the texualist story of historicism’s emergence include the ancients and moderns debate in France and the aforementioned revaluation of Gothic literature in england by midcentury critics like thomas Warton and Richard Hurd. on the former episode, see Larry Norman, Shock of the Ancient. 21. on this point, see eric slauter’s revisionist call for resisting “assumptions of presentist consumerism” in favor of “more rigorous [scholarly] engagements with the historical relation between objects and subjects” that can attend to the varied and “particular languages by which objects have been described, utilized, and textualized” (“Craft and objecthood,” 375). 22. Beverly Lemire, “Fashioning Cottons,” 1:511. Lemire elegantly emphasizes the dramatic “visual change” at the turn of the eighteenth century that “recast the material idiom of daily life.” New cotton textiles (initially imported from India) suddenly displaced “the ubiquitous monotony of drab-coloured coats, jackets and gowns” with a “constant stream of vivid printed garments” (ibid.). see also Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite. 23. In this moment of fashion, ready-to-wear clothing was available but was generally the province of consumers of lesser economic circumstances. As objects, fashionable dresses remained the idiosyncratic and collaborative productions of patrons, milliners, and dressmakers. Ultimately, dressmakers had to shape fabric into sartorial forms on the spot, and while these forms often took inspiration from the idealized visions of the fashion press, they were never fully equivalent to its images. 24. Koselleck, Practice of Conceptual History, 164–65. 25. on the late eighteenth-century British public “revel[ing] in its own capacity for collective fascination” via periodicals, see Paul Keen, Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity (179). 26. Koselleck pointedly begins Futures Past with a sixteenth-century historical painting of an ancient battle that commits anachronisms of costume; but he does not much acknowledge the specific and complex resonance of dress in the eighteenth century (9–25). 27. Peter de Bolla, Education of the Eye, 4, 8. De Bolla claims, “the actors in my story, although far from indifferent to, say, clothing, did not see vestments as objects of aesthetic interest (although we may do so in our own contemporaneity and also through the lens of history)” (8). But if we think in terms of aesthetics as perceptual interruption in the form of novelty rather than as formal protocol, dress is very much at the surface of eighteenthcentury aesthetic thought, as examples from Joshua Reynolds’s ominous tailors to Adam smith’s “disturbing[ly]”absent haunch buttons make clear. 28. J. Paul Hunter, “News, and New things,” 493. Hunter notes how the contemporaneity of news culture at the turn of the eighteenth century is “crucial to the emergence of the peculiar, present-centered form of narrative that we have come to call (appropriately enough) the novel” (494). Lennard Davis recounts how early newspapers were treated with suspicion precisely because of the alien logic of serial publication (under which publishers fill columns without regard to eventfulness): serial “continuity seems to be identified as a fault of the discourse” (Factual Fictions, 75).

288

Notes to Pages 15–18

29. one can exaggerate the extent to which outmoded dress accumulated. Carolyn steedman dates the onset of the working-class rag rug to later in the nineteenth-century, when rags were no longer worth enough to resell (Dust, 112–41). Nevertheless, the very fact that dateable dress objects were used until they were worn out meant that they did hang around for some time (if not indefinitely), often out of place. In a different sociological register, Benjamin Franklin’s relief upon returning to the pleasures of dress consumption (after a boycott of fine english dress in favor of North American homespun) offers an apt counterexample of fashion-driven obsolescence. Just after delivering a speech before the British Parliament that stressed Americans’ capacity to produce their own clothing, and that helped convince Parliament to repeal the stamp Act, Franklin rushed to complete a delayed purchase of a new gown for his wife and mulled over “at least 20 pair of old Breeches” he might otherwise have had to recall from unfashionable exile in storage (t. H. Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 199). 30. Bill Brown, Sense of Things, 5. 31. Barthes, 17. For Barthes it is “written clothing,” or the “described garment,” that once again makes the purchase necessary (ibid.). 32. Colin Campbell, Romantic Ethic and Modern Consumerism, 92. For Campbell, “cultural products offered for sale in modern societies are in fact consumed because they serve as aids to the construction of day-dreams” (ibid.). But the inevitable disappointment of imagination by possession is also what drives the cycles of consumption. 33. In the spirit of e. P. thompson, Daniel Roche memorably implores his readers to “leave aside” the exclusionary domain of “fashion” and instead to “speak of ‘clothes’ ”—in language he deems more adequate to the “less well off, the real poor.” Roche’s perspective perhaps speaks of the difference between his French context and the British one, in a century when european observers often commented on the material prosperity of ordinary commercial Britons (Culture of Clothing, 3–4). 34. Ibid., 96. McKendrick’s claim about the extension of fashion into the laboring classes was controversial in the original moment of The Birth of a Consumer Society, but John styles’s recent and magisterial Dress of the People decisively substantiates the point. 35. Except in the arena of clothing, styles finds the idea of a consumer society, “with its emphasis on whole populations affluent enough to exercise choice, retail supply tightly integrated with commercial propaganda, and material abundance combined with rapid turnover of material possessions” to be “inappropriate” to the eighteenth century (321). 36. styles, 323, 324. styles emphasizes that the poor purchased new clothes and how, before the reign of ready-made, even the working poor had tailors and mantuamakers—“specialist commercial suppliers” of professionally made clothes (322). 37. see thompson, Customs in Common. 38. styles, 324. 39. Claude Rawson, Satire and Sentiment, 157. Rawson applies the expression to a more specific, conservative Augustan tradition. 40. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, 117. As Pocock elaborates (in a comment that describes “property” but also le doux commerce itself ), “If we are to be social beings, then we must become what we own in relation to others, what we share and exchange with others” (ibid.). 41. Chandler, “Moving Accidents,” 138, 138 n.2. 42. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 465.

Notes to Pages 18–21

289

43. In their account of the dress of the prior age of the Renaissance, Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter stallybrass draw attention to the older capacity of clothes to evidence rapid change while also “fashioning [the wearer] within” (Renaissance Clothing, 2). But the clothes they examine, such as livery or robes of state, are as often durable as disposable, and they do not yet bear the full weight of the historical time (rather than the institutions or persons) from which they derive. 44. erin Mackie, Market à la Mode, 87. 45. Burke, Reflections, 77. For an account of the period’s summoning of the entire cultural inheritance through the “imagery of drapery and dress” (168), see Rawson’s chapter “Revolution in the Moral Wardrobe.” 46. Breen, 65. Despite much politicized rhetoric about the virtue of homespun and other varieties of abstention, “As so many Americans discovered during the imperial crisis . . . preaching the language of market sacrifice was a lot easier than adopting the simple life” (ibid., 199). 47. Leora Auslander, Cultural Revolutions, 5. on the novel political implications of consumerism, see also Charlotte sussman, Consuming Anxieties. 48. Barrett Kalter emphasizes how the modern usage of “antique” (in the sense of antique shops) arose alongside the novel activity of “shopping,” a neologism of the 1760s. Wedgwood himself, Kalter notes, “sought ‘to make real Antiques;’ . . . whereas those ‘more fond of show & glitter’ would flock to his rival, Matthew Boulton” (Modern Antiques, 18–19). 49. see Jeffrey N. Cox’s chapter “Cockney classicism,” in Poetry and Politics, 146–86. 50. By contrast Hazlitt celebrated the “remote and uncultivated” scenes in the Waverley Novels themselves. 51. Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age, 127–28. 52. scott, Tales of the Crusaders, 1:i, xx. scott also likens the Waverley Novels to an ingenious device into which “they put in raw hemp at one end, and take out ruffled shirts at the other, without the aid of hackle or rippling-comb, loom, shuttle, or weaver, or scissors, needle, or seamstress”; as well as to an engine that places the “words and phrases” of narrative “common-places” within “a sort of frame-work . . . , and changing them by such a mechanical process as that by which weavers of damask alter their patterns, many new and happy combinations cannot fail to occur” (ibid., 1:vi–viii). Modern fashion and scott’s historical fiction are here peculiarly allied and analogous machines; both alike summon collective attention by happy recombinations of old materials. 53. Adam smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 195. Whereas dress fashions last for a “twelve-month” and furniture cycles last five years, the arts of architecture, music, and poetry last, respectively, for “centuries,” “many generations,” and “as long as the world.” these are temporal cycles at different scales, but they are nonetheless temporal cycles envisioned on the template of the fashion system. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., my emphasis. 56. smith’s discussion of the influence of “custom” on our ideas of beauty emphasizes how something as insignificant as “the absence of a haunch button” from a “suit of clothes” (which might be the result of “slovenly disorder” or just as possibly of failure to accord with fashion-driven expectations) causes the “habitual arrangement of our ideas to be disturbed by disappointment” (194). on this passage, see James Noggle, Temporality of Taste, especially 156–66. More broadly, Noggle foregrounds the paradoxical implications of “taste” (at

290

Notes to Pages 21–26

once socially shaped and absolutely individual, formed over time and instantaneous); but his account attends most intently to the discourse of philosophical aesthetics at midcentury, as against the historical projects of the succeeding decades. 57. stadial or conjectural history was the developmental theory that found social life to stem from four essential stages of political economy (hunter-gatherer, pastoral, agricultural, and commercial) in ways that approached the model of determination by conditions that characterizes full-fledged historicism. 58. Georg Lukács, Historical Novel, 23. Recent scholarship has done much to complicate the punctuated birth of historical fiction that Lukács postulated by restoring to view the earlier novels upon which scott himself was building—most conspicuously the national tales of Maria edgeworth, sydney owenson, and others. 59. Lukács, 19. 60. In the prehistory of The Historical Novel within Lukács’s own writings (“the old and the New Culture” [1919]), this problem takes the form of a critique of the “economic determinism of orthodox Marxism as a mistaken universalization of the unique, and regrettable situation of capitalism” (Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality, 100). the same essay underscores capitalism’s “manufacturing of so-called novelties through a rapid transformation of the form or quantity of the product, a process that has no relation to aesthetic or use values” (Michael Löwy, “Naphta or settembrini?” 192). 61. Mackie, ix. 62. Christensen, Lord Byron’s Strength, 6–7. For Christensen, the notoriously outmoded fashions of the rural gentry of the early eighteenth century, who refused or failed to keep up with new dress styles, were precisely the correlate of their militant opposition to the British polity after 1688: “until the formation of a [fully synchronic,] unified inland market” that would eliminate fashion’s time lags, Jacobitism—the specter of scott’s Waverley itself— “remain[ed] plausible as the imminent threat of an unspectated and resurgent past” (ibid., 7). 63. the complex resonance with Raymond Williams’s “structure of feeling” is striking. 64. Simmel on Culture, 192. 65. For simmel, pure fashion remains strikingly at odds with those “economic advances” ensuring that “the speculative element [of production] gradually ceases to play an influential role. the movements of the market can be better observed, requirements can be better foreseen and production can be more accurately regulated than before, so that the rationalization of production makes greater and greater inroads upon the fortuitousness of market opportunities and upon the unplanned fluctuations of supply and demand.” Uniquely escaping the rationalization of production, “fashion stands, as it were, in a logical contradiction to the developmental tendencies of modern societies” (203) and remains instead a realm of “polar fluctuations” and “feverish change” (3)—an ironically extracommercial social allegory. 66. Lukács, 19. 67. Herbert Blumer, “Fashion: From Class Differentiation to Collective selection,” 283. 68. Lady’s Magazine (1799): 461. the same commentary appeared in the London Courier and Evening Gazette (20 september 1799) and in the men’s Sporting Magazine for october 1799, which embellished the passage by observing, “the Greek empire suffered as much from blue and green as any part of Europe does now from the three-coloured ribband” (23, my emphasis). on the political significance of dress during the French Revolution, see Richard Wrigley, Representations of Dress in Revolutionary France.

Notes to Pages 26–40

291

69. Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits, 28. 70. For Lipovetsky, fashion “allows us to see what constitutes our most remarkable historical destiny: the negation of the age-old power of the traditional past, the frenzied modern passion for novelty, the celebration of the social present (4). 71. Lady’s Magazine (1799): 214. 72. Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 235–36. 73. Here I draw on Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment. 74. F. R. Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 355. chapter 1. Modern FashIon and coMparatIve conteMporaneIty Note to epigraph: Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, 917. 1. For a broad view of satirical prints in the period, see especially Diana Donald, Age of Caricature; and Cindy McCreery, Satirical Gaze. 2. see an online copy of The Beau Monde via the British Museum. Frequently misdated to ca. 1750, the illustration first appears ca. 1735 as the frontispiece to Joseph Dorman’s verse satire The Rake of Taste. 3. In his “theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin draws on the opening lines of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire to observe that the French Revolution “evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago, it is a tiger’s leap into the past” (Illuminations, 261). For Marx the costume of the past is of particular use “at the very time when men appear engaged in revolutionizing things and themselves, in bringing about what never was before” (Eighteenth Brumaire, 5). 4. susan Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 278. As Buck-Morss elaborates, “For those living in the 1920s, the novelties of even one’s parents’ youth—gaslight instead of neon signs, buns and bustles instead of bobbed hair and bathing suits—belonged to a distant past. those early bourgeois artifacts which managed to survive . . . were the anarchic residues, the petrified ur-forms, of the present” (65). 5. William McCarthy, Barbauld’s modern editor and biographer, attributes the “Comparison of Manners in two Centuries” to Barbauld. the essay appears as the anonymous lead article in the first issue of her brother’s new periodical the Athenaeum (McCarthy, Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment, 423). 6. see emily Rohrbach, “Barbauld’s History of the Future.” 7. Barbauld, Legacy for Young Ladies, 160; Chandler, England in 1819, 118. 8. In identifying Barbauld’s “Genius” as a figure of commerce, I stress the poem’s consistent presentation of refinements of arts and culture as consequences of commercial prosperity. 9. “thy” refers to the nation of Britain. 10. Barbauld, Selected Poetry and Prose, 163, lines 53–60. 11. Mary Favret, War at a Distance, 143–44. 12. the poem’s abrupt turn to these merchants’ vision conspicuously departs from the aural register that held sway in the opening lines. At the start, drums of war thunder from afar; and it is a singular, allegorical Britain that “bends her ear” to sounds of pain (Barbauld, Selected, 161, line 3). the subsequent case of the merchants (plural), who “bend” instead

292

Notes to Pages 40–45

their gazes, shifts not only to sight but also to a particularization of perception—or to many perceiving gazes—that lapses from the foregoing uniformity of allegory. In this moment there is also a falling away from the story of universal history in which the nation might participate, as Britain rises and declines in the course of the Genius’s movement across the Atlantic to the new world. 13. Ibid., 163, lines 48–49. 14. Ibid., 167, lines 171–75. 15. In “the Contrast; or Peace and War,” published in the same issue of the Athenaeum, Barbauld lists the traits of society at peace and then intently redescribes each of these traits under the antithetical condition of war. But commerce itself is strikingly exempted from this procedure of redescription; it appears explicitly in her account of peacetime only to disappear without a trace in the revision that is wartime. 16. Athenaeum 1 [Jan.–June 1807]: 1. Hereafter abbreviated A and cited parenthetically by page number. 17. scott, Waverley, 2. Hereafter abbreviated W and cited parenthetically by page number. 18. Barbauld, Legacy for Young Ladies, 121. “suppose a person placed in a part of the country where he is a total stranger,” Barbauld posits; and then she pursues the questions “he would naturally ask.” this is a conjectural history of historiography itself that brilliantly critiques the normal paths of conjecture (or its “abstruse speculation”). 19. John Aikin, Letters from a Father to His Son, 218–19. 20. Barbauld, Selected, 436. the point resembles Bernard Mandeville’s foregoing observation that “the Reformation has scarce been more Instrumental, in rendering the Kingdoms and states that have embraced it, flourishing beyond other Nations, than the silly and capricious Invention of Hoop’d and Quilted petticoats” (Fable of the Bees, 411). 21. Barbauld had just completed an edited volume, prefaced by her introduction, entitled Selections from the tatler, spectator, Guardian and Freeholder. 22. Raymond Williams, Keywords, 92. 23. For Hazlitt, through their plenitude of detail, the Tatler and the Spectator developed a “sort of writing” that “takes minutes of our dress, air, looks, words, thoughts, and actions; shews us what we are, and what we are not.” His description of these periodicals’ “hold[ing] the mirror up to nature” cited not only Hamlet but also the London Morning Chronicle’s “Mirror of Fashion” column, for which the passage served as an epigraph. As Hazlitt observed of reading the Tatler in his own day, “the privilege of thus virtually transporting ourselves to past times, is even greater than that of visiting distant places in reality. London, a hundred years ago, would be much better worth seeing than Paris at the present moment.” And although in his own periodical writing Hazlitt might be confined to mimetic record-keeping (“taking minutes of dress”), and subject to the confining timelines and appetites of the commercial print marketplace, we surmise that his peculiarly durable essays will be ready for recirculation. one day, that is, they will “virtually transpor[t]” future readers to Hazlitt’s own, early nineteenth-century moment (English Comic Writers, 178, 189). Like the essayist Charles Lamb, Hazlitt articulated a historicized position of “enlightened spectator[ship],” one that carved for himself and for his readers a place both within and without contemporary commerce, somewhere “beyond exhaustion in the gestures of daily business” (Peter J. Manning, “Detaching Lamb’s thoughts,” 143). 24. Christopher Breward, Culture of Fashion, 130.

Notes to Pages 45–49

293

25. Many of the conjunctions that I track in Barbauld’s career are also evident in the writings of the actor and poet Mary Robinson. In Sappho and Phaon (1796), Robinson forged a defense of modern British letters that anticipated in remarkable ways Percy shelley’s prophetic Defence of Poetry (1821), where shelley conceived of poets unconsciously expressing “less their [own] spirit than the spirit of the age” and thereby becoming the “mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present” (508). Robinson’s remarkable pair of poems “Modern Male Fashions” and “Modern Female Fashions” in turn anticipated shelley’s monumental sonnet “england in 1819” by enacting the descriptive mode of the periodical fashion column in satirical verse. the former poem’s fiat against the fashion conditions of the present (“oh! wou’d their reign had ne’er begun,/ And may it sooN Be oVeR!!” [361]) comes tantalizingly close to shelley’s exhortation that the political conditions two decades hence in 1819 (“An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king,” etc.) be “graves” from which illumination might spring (311). Robinson’s poems were initially published in the Morning Post in January 1800; but by the time of their inclusion in her collected works in 1806, the ephemeral modernity they once expressed could no longer go without historical specification. the titles were accordingly altered to “Male Fashions for 1799” and “Female Fashions for 1799.” these poems bear a close relation to Robinson’s engagement with the history of fashion in her contemporaneous essay on the “Present state of the Manners . . . of the Metropolis of england” (1800). 26. Academy (23 May 1874): 566. 27. Barbauld, Selected, 172, lines 289–91, 307. 28. McKendrick, et al., Birth of a Consumer Society, 39. 29. Mackie, Market à la Mode, 5. 30. Ibid., 61. 31. Mandeville, 377. the 1724 edition of The Fable of the Bees included Mandeville’s supplemental essay “A search into the Nature of society,” from which I quote here and elsewhere. 32. Ibid., 11. 33. Quoted in McKendrick, et al., 28. Here and elsewhere I use the anachronism “middle class” in place of the more precise concept of the “middling sort” for the sake of clarity. 34. Natalie Rothstein, ed., Barbara Johnson’s Album (30). As Rothstein notes, “Until the third quarter of the eighteenth century, textiles . . . took a much higher proportion of disposable income than they did later” (30). 35. McKendrick et al., 69. 36. see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 24–25. 37. Doris Langley Moore, Fashion Through Fashion Plates, 25–26. 38. Hoh-Cheung Mui and Lorna H. Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping, 10, 28, 27. 39. Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart, 41. 40. two milestones of the turn of the eighteenth century pointed toward the more thoroughly systematic fashion I am attributing to the midcentury moment: first, the “false start” of the early periodicals like the Mercure Galant in France and the Tatler, Spectator, and similar periodicals in Britain; and second, the merchandizing of the annual alterations of Lyons silk patterns. 41. Mandeville, 376–77. 42. Ibid., 376. Notably, Mandeville’s musings on barbering much resemble Barthes’s anti-historical, twentieth-century pondering of the longue durée of fashion: “the great his-

294

Notes to Pages 49–53

torical prototypes of fashion only change every 50 years. the oscillations are very regular and historical events do not affect them. … After a period of short skirts, we will automatically have a period of long skirts”; and “the most one can say is that major historical events can speed up or slow down the absolutely regular returns of certain fashions” (Language of Fashion, 88, 93). 43. Mandeville’s meditations extend as well to the “whimsical choice” between tulips, Auriculas, and Carnations: “every Year a new flower . . . beats all the old ones, though it is much inferior to them both in Colour and shape” (376, my emphasis) 44. Raymond Williams notes a decisive shift in the meaning of the word “revolution” in the French Revolutionary moment, as a sense of cyclical restoration gave way to “the sense of necessary innovation” that sustained “the increasingly positive sense of PRoGRess,” but also the negative sense of rupture (273). In Representations of Revolution, Ronald Paulson presents the naturalist Gilbert White’s efforts to contain the impact of the French Revolution by recording its events alongside cycles of the natural world that continued uninterrupted. Juxtaposing fashion and nature as competing resources of cyclicality in the period is one way to rethink the distinctness of the Romanic moment. 45. Chi-Ming Yang, “Virtue’s Vogues,” 345n.35, 346n.40. see also Roxann Wheeler, who examines the Collection of Dresses to gauge the stability of the category of race in its images (Complexion of Race, 62). 46. the Collection of Dresses substantially predated the antiquary and engraver Joseph strutt’s better remembered Complete View of the Dress and Habits of the People of England (1796–99). scott, as a posthumous editor, completed strutt’s unfinished, too antiquarian historical novel Queenhoo-Hall in 1808. Citing this task’s central place in the evolution of Waverley, scott included the conclusion he had improvised for strutt’s novel in an appendix to the Magnum edition of Waverley (1829). 47. Aileen Ribeiro, Art of Dress, 210. Mui and Mui note a 1770 trade card for “Jackson’s Habit-Warehouse” that advertises “a book of several hundred prints coloured, which contains the dresses of every nation” alongside the warehouse’s supply of “ready-made masquerade dresses” (quoted 14). 48. For a related discussion, see Chloe Wigston smith, “Dressing the British,” 156–58. 49. Barthes, Language of Fashion, 25. Dror Wahrman underscores how eighteenthcentury dress lies between Renaissance garments (“deeply” worn) and nineteenth-century dress (expressing a prior “inner selfhood”). In a “profound sense . . . , fashion in the eighteenth century was about appearances alone—a play of surfaces without real substance, referent, or true value” (Modern Self, 207). 50. Contemporaneous newspaper ads reveal that this print was the flagship offering from Holland. Donald emphasizes less political meanings, but the contemporaneous commentary she cites relates to the pirated Dublin version rather than the London original not held by the British Museum (222 n.135.) 51. see Iain McCalman, “Newgate in Revolution,” who discusses the ironically titled etching Promenade in the State Side of Newgate (1793). the scene depicts a gathering of radicals in Newgate prison, among them William Holland himself (imprisoned for selling thomas Paine’s Letter to the Addressers) and his “sumptuously dressed” wife, soon to die of gaol fever (102). this etching was produced by Richard Newton, a young employee of the imprisoned publisher. For McCalman, the print is “radical counterpropaganda” upholding the polite dignity of the prisoners against the slanders of the ministry (96). With one excep-

Notes to Pages 53–62

295

tion, “all are”—defiantly—“well dressed. some sport stylish cravats and high collars, though most are ‘crops’ having shed their wigs and cut their hair in the radical Whig and Jacobin mode” (98). Compare Hannah Grieg’s account of the political function of dress in London, where Whig leaders like the Duchess of Devonshire “shunned court-inspired clothing and attended [events] in other more fashionable gowns” (Beau Monde, 127). 52. the english word “habit” “is co-extensive with the two French words” habit and habitude, and “its chief sense [now] corresponds” not to the former, indicating dress, but to the latter. (OED, s.v. “habit” and “costume.”) In the now obsolete sense in which “costume” entered the english language, the term already indicated an awareness of cultural particularity oriented to problems of representation. Jonathan Richardson’s Essay on the Theory of Painting (1715) describes the sense that “every Person and thing must be made to sustain its proper Character; and not only the story, but the Circumstances must be observ’d[;] the scene of Action, the Countrey, or Place, the Habits, Arms, Manners, Proportions, and the like must correspond. this is call’d the observing the Costûme” (53). 53. scott, Ivanhoe, 9. 54. Dugald stewart, “Account of Robertson,” 1:29–30. english history poses no such problems, for even antiquarian accounts of “old english manners” address “readers already enamoured of the subject, and who listen with fond preposessions to the recital of facts consecrated to their imaginations by the tale of the nursery” (1:29). 55. OED, s.v. “remnants.” 56. Chandler draws the expression in part from Koselleck’s “notion” that “a certain conception of progress meant that . . . ‘the contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous’ became a fundamental datum of all history’ ” (107n.41) 57. Ibid., 107, 5. 58. Ibid., 123–25. 59. Ibid., 275. 60. the full series of eight plates (plus variants) consists of Monstrosities of 1816, . . . of 1818, . . . of 1819 (subsequently retitled . . . of 1819 & 1820), . . . of 1821, . . . of 1822, . . . of 1783 & 1823, . . . of 1824, . . . of 1825 & 6. see Albert M. Cohn, Cruikshank: A Catalogue Raisonné, 312–313. Cruikshank’s brother Robert Cruikshank produced an additional Monstrosities of 1827 in his own name. 61. I cite the revised caption of the 1818 caricature, originally entitled (Dandies or) Monstrosities of 1818 (Cohn, 312). 62. Buck-Morss, 159. the conceptualization if not the tone anticipates Benjamin’s reflections on the Parisian arcades, the forlorn forerunners of the shopping mall—once glittering, now down-market sites that “in the nineteenth-century housed the first consumer dream worlds,” but “that appeared in the twentieth as commodity graveyards, containing the refuse of a discarded past” (ibid., 37–38). 63. Quoted by Madeleine Ginsburg, in Rothstein, ed., Barbara Johnson’s Album, 18, my emphasis. 64. stephens and George, 10:399. on this vogue, see Chloe Wigston smith, Women, Work, and Clothes, 188–93. 65. see an online copy of Ancient Military Dandies via the Lewis Walpole Library. 66. Chandler, 275. 67. see online copies of ‘Monstrosities’ of 1799 and TOO MUCH and TOO LITTLE (catalogued as Summer clothing for 1556 and 1796) via the Lewis Walpole Library.

296

Notes to Pages 62–67

68. A Section of the Petticoat enlarges a detail from a painting that hangs in the background of Hogarth’s Taste in High Life (1742). see an online copy via Wikipedia. 69. Moore, 15. 70. Ibid, 12. In addition, paper fashion dolls seem to have originated in england at the end of the eighteenth century as inexpensive substitutes for the real, French fashion dolls that had disseminated new styles at its dawn. 71. the earliest pocketbook fashion plate I have located dates to 1754, but the state of the archive for these somewhat disposable texts makes it difficult to pinpoint their true moment of origin with confidence. For general accounts of fashion in British women’s pocketbooks, see especially Anne Buck and Harry Matthews, “Pocket Guides to Fashion”; Alison Adburgham, Women in Print; and chapter three of Jennie Batchelor, Dress, Distress, and Desire. see also Amanda Vickery’s account of the pocketbook collection of elizabeth Parker/shackleton (Gentleman’s Daughter, 161–94); and Donald on Mary White’s album of fashion illustrations (Age of Caricature, 89–90). 72. see Moore for facsimiles of these examples. 73. edward Copeland, Women Writing About Money, 129. 74. Adburgham, 220–22. 75. Copeland, 119. 76. see Rothstein, ed., Barbara Johnson’s Album, plate 24. 77. the pocketbooks I describe were predominantly intended for women, but men also had fashion and sometimes appeared in fashion plates. one early male pin-up from a pocketbook (preserved within Barbara Johnson’s album) offers a colorful reminder of the attention paid to men’s dress: “Young, tall, well-shaped, fair Ladies, here’s your man / Dress’d in the Mode, resist him [if you can?]” (plate 8). Many artists, of course, were eager to satirize men’s fashions alongside those of women. 78. Cruikshank himself provided illustrations for Ainsworth’s The Tower of London (1840). 79. Quoted in Adburgham, 159. Ainsworth looks back to women’s pocketbooks in the first issue of the Keepsake literary annual, which he envisions as a continuation of the older tradition. 80. George does not explicitly observe the relationship between Taste A-La-Mode, 1745 and 1784, or The Fashions of the Day, most likely because of the break in the British Museum catalogue at the year 1770, where she took over from the nineteenth-century editor stephens. Donald briefly discusses this longer tradition around Taste A-La-Mode, 1745; but for her, the practices of citation I highlight merely “drew reassuring attention to the constancy in inconstancy of fashion as a perennial phenomenon” (94; 221–22 n.135). 81. While tabitha Hasbeen claims to have invented any number of now-outmoded fashions, she finds an epitome for herself in Boitard’s illustration: “If you would judge both of my person and my dress, you will find me represented as the most elegant personage in that group of figures, painted by Boitard, engraved by Patton, under the title of Taste A-LaMode, 1745, though I believe the date is wrong” (Repton, Variety, 156). Hasbeen claims to be forty years old in 1787; but she clearly cannot be so young if (as she claims) she furnished Addison’s Spectator (ca. 1710) with some of its best ideas. one of the pleasures of interpretation that Repton offers here is the necessity of deciding which of Boitard’s female figures Hasbeen claims to be: the genuine beauty twirling the fan at image left or the ill-proportioned

Notes to Pages 67–73

297

woman who overfills the foreground—a possibility that would reflect poorly on Hasbeen’s taste and judgment. 82. In Women, Work, and Clothes, Chloe Wigston smith compellingly argues that the British novel defined itself against fashion in the first half of the eighteenth century by means of a countervailing focus on durable, “ordinary clothes.” Here I am arguing for a very different dynamic that emerged in the latter half of the century and eventually remade the relationship between the novel and material culture. 83. edgeworth, Harrington, 209. I discuss this moment at greater length in Chapter 4. 84. Ina Ferris, Achievement of Literary Authority, 81. 85. Ferris, 88, my emphasis. 86. As Deidre Lynch notes, “Burney had the dubious distinction of being . . . the chief local colorist of the Georgian retail scene.” Her “novels were [once] stock in trade for readers of an antiquarian bent, who doted on the charming commodities and diversions—the visits to auctions, toy shops, and other commercial meccas—that they catalogued” (Economy of Character, 168). 87. Oxford DNB, s.v. “Burney, edward.” 88. Moore, 14. 89. Copeland, 125. 90. Austen, Northanger, 11. Hereafter abbreviated N and cited parenthetically by page number. 91. Austen’s most conventional historical fiction, Persuasion describes a romance interrupted, in part, by military duty and set, pregnantly, during the false peace of 1814–15, which ended abruptly when Napoleon escaped from elba. 92. on this structure in Austen’s wider oeuvre, see especially William Galperin, Historical Austen. 93. eighteenth-century Britons encountered what Hume in his deconstruction of causality would call a “constant conjunction” that blurred market forces and historical effects. As Britons paraded before commodified ruins and circulated collectible relics, they experienced new opportunities to exercise sympathetic feelings in relation to historical sites and objects. Moreover, as trumpener emphasizes, theirs was a newly haunted landscape: “In the wake of the Reformation, the elizabethan campaigns in Ireland, and the reign of Cromwell, eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland were full of historically resonant ruins, full of abandoned abbeys and desolate manor houses, in a way that the fifteenth century was not” (149). such very recent ruins, in contrast to the far older Roman or Druidic antiquities they displaced, dwelt in closer proximity to the ongoing cycles of modern commerce. 94. William Lane, the proprietor of Minerva Press, issued a number of pocketbooks that included fashion plates. 95. Henry tilney elaborates on his expertise with muslin: “I always buy my own cravats, and am allowed to be an excellent judge; and my sister has often trusted me in the choice of a gown. I bought one for her the other day, and it was pronounced to be a prodigious bargain by every lady who saw it. I gave but five shillings a yard for it, and a true Indian muslin” (N, 16). 96. Simmel on Culture, 204. 97. As stuart tave notes, “common life changes and Jane Austen’s is not ours. But that difference does not change what is for her the unchangeable point about common life, that

298

Notes to Pages 73–78

it is always the locus and the moment of daily and ordinary moral life” (Some Words of Austen, 62–63). 98. Quoted in Lockhart, Life of Scott, 3:300. In the full quotation, it is ambiguous whether Ballantyne’s observation that “scarcely anything appears to have altered” refers to the representation of the past in the early draft of Waverley (which for Lockhart does have too much of “the air of antiquity . . . to harmonize with the time”) or to the modern period of “1750” itself (when, as Lockhart reminds scott, “Johnson was writing—and Garrick was acting” [3:300]). But even in the latter case, I emphasize, Ballantyne’s faith that little had changed besides dress was shaped by the same visual culture that scott worked within. Moreover, reading the early draft of Waverley itself doubtlessly reinforced Lockhart’s conviction. 99. David Kuchta, Three-Piece Suit, 5. 100. J. C. Flügel coins this phrase to describe the momentous and “sudden reduction of male sartorial decorativeness which took place at the end of the eighteenth century” (Psychology of Clothes, 110–11). Kuchta emphasizes the foregoing renunciation of changes in the shape of the men’s suit; Flügel emphasizes the displacement of bold patterns and colors in men’s clothing by the duller modern palette of blues, grays, and browns. 101. scott, Ivanhoe, 9. 102. McKendrick et al., 42. 103. scott, Ivanhoe, 9. 104. I am indebted to Michael Gamer’s speculations on the misdating of Waverley, which have spurred my own thinking. see “Waverley and the object of (Literary) History.” 105. the ideologically driven english reception of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion in terms of fashion is evident in a work of propaganda like Scotch Female Gallantry (1746), which depicted Bonnie Prince Charlie overwhelmed by a mob of indecorously desiring scottish women of fashion. see on online copy via the Lewis Walpole Library. 106. the editors of the Yale Edition of Walpole’s Correspondence identify the print, which Conway himself does not name, as “probably” Taste A-La-Mode, 1745. Lady Caroline Fitzroy is the contemporary figure supposedly depicted in the print (37:228). chapter 2. portraIt hIstorIcIsM and the dress oF the tIMes Note to epigraph: I cite from the edition of Blake’s Annotations appended to Reynolds’s Discourses on Art, 70. Hereafter abbreviated D and cited parenthetically by page number. 1. While defending the force of Galt’s anecdote, edgar Wind also emphasizes Galt’s lack of “trustworth[iness] in minor details.” Galt’s account, composed long after the fact in 1816, describes West’s “indecorous attempt to exhibit heroes in coats, breeches, and cock’d hats.” the painting, Wind notes, “is remarkable for the relative absence of cock’d hats” (Hume and the Heroic Portrait, 100). 2. John Galt, Life of West, 2:50. 3. Ibid., 2:48. 4. In light of Chapter 1, it should be clear how the tendency within visual printcultural fashion to “copy” dressed figures from old prints (in order to juxtapose them visually to figures adorned in modern styles) destabilized Reynolds’s methods. Reynolds controversially defended his own practice of copying, or borrowing directly from the com-

Notes to Pages 78–83

299

positions of old masters, but he intended that practice to elicit an exemplary, art-historical tradition rather than a chronological sequence of social life. Nathaniel Hone’s notorious satire of Reynolds in The Conjuror (1775) exposed the sources of Reynolds’s supposed plagiarism from old masters, but also censured Reynolds’s borrowing from fine prints rather than original paintings. 5. Reynolds’s studied embrace of nature and simplicity, quite strikingly, makes him as vestigial as more familiar objects of nostalgia, including supposed victims of progress like the scottish Highlanders. 6. Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes, 311, 293, xiv. 7. the strong division Hollander posits between dress and other “household objects” in an important sense collapsed as the “dress of the year” became a wider emblem for the material and cultural production of its moment—and all alike were bound by a date. Moreover, as fine paintings increasingly anticipated their own reproduction for the print marketplace, even the “art” of clothing moved in accord with the evolving protocols of a printmaking industry that “targeted new bourgeois consumers” with “products, both in size and subject . . . designed to appeal less to the artistic sensibility of their clientele than their practical need to decorate domestic wall space.” Artistic visual images of dress, contra Hollander, increasingly looked less like a Rubens and more like a chair (Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Shock of the Real, 71–72). 8. strutt, lacking in social privilege and formal training, produced commercially viable works that “acquired a far larger circulation than the specialist publications produced by the society of Antiquaries or its fellows” (Rosemary sweet, Antiquaries, 214). 9. strutt, Horda Angel-Cynnan, 1:i–ii. For skeptics who would deem this costume merely fanciful, strutt upholds his source manuscripts’ frontispieces (generally illuminated with seemingly contemporary representations of the royal or noble courts they addressed) as “habited in the [genuine] dress of the times.” they can be further authenticated “on examining all the illuminated Mss. of the same century together, which, tho’ various, every one written and ornamented by different hands, yet on comparing the several delineations with each other, they will be found to agree in every particular of dress, customs, &c.” (1:ii). 10. Hollander, 450. 11. Ibid., 1:iv. on the wider significance of the “portraitive mode,” see elizabeth Fay, Fashioning Faces. 12. sweet, “Antiquaries and Antiquities,” 194. 13. Hume, Essays, 245–46. Hume’s “of the standard of taste” is initially published as part of Four Dissertations and is included in Essays and Treatises on Various Subjects the following year (1758). 14. on this superabundance of portraits as a problem for social-historical representation (where running out of space to fit all these portraits necessitates the synthetic gesture of the world picture as against the accumulation of ancestors), see Christensen’s chapter “Clerical Liberalism” in Romanticism at the End of History. 15. William Combe (author of Dr. syntax) makes this observation in his Poetical Epistle to Reynolds (intro.). 16. the intrusiveness of this portrait dress diverged from the more innocent diversion it afforded earlier in the century. In the Spectator no. 109 (1711), Roger De Coverley guides Mr. spectator through the gallery of his ancestors. De Coverley credulously suggests “how the persons of one age differ from those of another” only by the “Force of Dress”; he also

300

Notes to Pages 83–90

describes how present day uniforms derive from the general dress of times past and observes odd premonitions of the latest styles. (“You see, sir, my Great Great Great Grandmother has on the new-fashioned petticoat, except that the Modern is gather’d at the Waist.”) the Spectator no. 129 observes how “Great Masters in Painting never care for drawing People in the Fashion, and so choose “a Roman Habit” or “some other dress that never varies”—for “the Head-dress or Periwig that now prevails and gives a Grace” will seem “monstrous” in the future. But here the focus irreverently turns to people living too far from London, who need their own special “everlasting Drapery” to avoid being always embarrassed by a lag in the communication of new town fashions to the country (1:389–91 and 1:453). 17. Cunnington and Cunnington, Handbook of English Costume, 3. 18. see Aileen Ribeiro, “some evidence,” 837. 19. the preface to the Collection of Dresses was contemporaneously adapted into the Annual Register for 1761 and elsewhere. the Collection’s chronology of dress was again reproduced in the early nineteenth century by James Peller Malcolm’s Anecdotes of the Manners and Customs of London During the Eighteenth Century (1808); and Jefferys’s illustrations were themselves repurposed in another landmark of costume history, James Robinson Planché’s History of British Costume (1834), which I discuss in Chapter 5. 20. Ribeiro, Art of Dress, 183. 21. the practice is later denominated “Grangerizing,” after the practice that Granger’s Biographical History was seen to inspire. the many Britons who sought these portrait engravings to affix them within their copies of the Biographical History caused prices to skyrocket, much to the annoyance of an older generation of collectors of historical engravings (Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head, 58). 22. For an extended consideration of Granger’s project of social organization, see Pointon’s chapter “Illustrious Heads.” 23. Addison, Ancient Medals, 6–7. 24. sweet, Antiquaries, 86, 92. 25. Jonathan Richardson, Theory of Painting. Reynolds acknowledged Richardson as a major influence. 26. James Granger, Biographical History of England, 1:x. 27. Ibid., 1:iii. 28. Christopher Rovee, Imagining the Gallery, 4. 29. Granger, 1:vii. 30. Ibid., 1:ix–x, my emphasis. 31. Addison, Ancient Medals, 20. 32. Granger, 1:xiii. Joseph Ames, the noted antiquarian, compiled a Catalogue of English Heads (1747), a description of some two thousand engraved portraits. 33. Ibid., 1:172–73, my emphasis. 34. In focusing on a general account of “the dress of the times,” Granger distances himself from the sort of historical costume often on display in the fancy dress of masquerades, where, as Horace Walpole described one event, “there were quantities of pretty Vandykes, and all kinds of old pictures walked out of their frames. It was an assemblage of all ages and nations, and would have looked like the day of judgment, if tradition did not persuade us that we are all to meet naked” (Correspondence, 17:339). I emphasize the literalness of Walpole’s response, which refers to costume patterned directly after particular portraits rather than after a broader historical period. this sense is supported by Walpole’s visit

Notes to Pages 90–92

301

to Lord Clarendon’s estate, where he saw “a prodigious quantity of Vandykes; but I had not time to take down any of their dresses” (ibid., 9:5). 35. Granger, 2:66. 36. the conceptualization of synchronism in Granger’s project may owe a debt to Priestley’s Chart of Biography (1765), which arranged biographical lifespans (denoted by a line extending from birth to death) on a universal timeline, and so offered a visualization of the contemporaneous collection of great lives at any moment in history. 37. Johnson and Reynolds shared close ties. Johnson composed the preface to Reynolds’s Seven Discourses (1778); Reynolds wrote three issues of Johnson’s periodical the Idler (all in 1759) and painted Johnson’s portrait four times (see Reynolds, ed. Manning and Postle, 280–82). Both also figure prominently in critical accounts of the problem of the universal and the particular in eighteenth-century aesthetic theory. Volumes have been written on the tulip passage in Johnson’s Rasselas, where the philosopher Imlac (perhaps dubiously) asserts that “the business of a poet . . . is to examine, not the individual, but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances: he does not number the streaks of the tulip . . . . He is to exhibit in his portraits of nature such prominent and striking features, as recal [sic] the original to every mind; and must neglect the minuter discriminations” (50). Imlac’s precepts bear an obvious resemblance to Reynolds’s Discourses; and as Lodwick Hartley emphasizes—with specific reference to Reynolds’s antagonistic relationship to highly particularized Dutch painting—these precepts specifically trope poetic representation as portrait painting (“Johnson, Reynolds, and the streaks of the tulip Again,” 335). see also Howard D. Weinbrot, “the Reader, the General, and the Particular.” 38. Johnson and Boswell, 289. 39. Ibid. 40. over the course of the eighteenth century, new kinds of materials entered into the purview of history, often under the auspices of a newly influential antiquarianism. For sweet, “the antiquarian of the eighteenth century probably had more in common with the professional historian of the twenty-first century, in terms of methodology, approach to sources and the struggle to reconcile erudition with style, than did the authors of the grand narratives of national history such as Rapin, Hume, or Robertson.” While “on the one hand, [antiquarianism] was the ‘handmaid to history,’ . . . on the other, it saw itself as a science and prided itself on an empirical rigour that was anathema to history” (sweet, Antiquaries, xiv, xx). 41. Johnson and Boswell, 73. Although Wedgwood’s mass-produced queen’s ware marks the material modernity of the Highlands, the table nevertheless bears the traces of the preceding epoch, which lacked the rapidly changing commodities that now made the passage of time so easy to demarcate: “the knives are not often either very bright or very sharp. they are indeed instruments of which the Highlanders have not been long acquainted with the general use…. thirty years ago the Highlander wore his knife as a companion to his dirk or dagger,” and used it to cut meat for the women, who fed themselves with their fingers (ibid.). 42. scott’s much noted account of scottish acceleration in Waverley continues, “the effects of the insurrection of 1745 . . . commenced this innovation. the gradual influx of wealth, and extension of commerce, have since united to render the present people of scotland a class of beings as different from their grandfathers, as the existing english are from those of Queen elizabeth’s time” (340). scott himself heavily annotated the episode of Johnson and Boswell at skye for J. W. Croker’s 1831 edition of Boswell’s Journal.

302

Notes to Pages 93–94

43. Not all of Reynolds’s contemporaries shared his sense of fundamental conflict between portrait painting and high historical style. John singleton Copley’s influential historical painting The Death of Chatham (1781) returned to the “old” practice of painting history through portraiture, and marked the “aboli[tion]” of “the academic warning that distance is essential to dignity.” “to secure the greatest possible authenticity . . . Copley made all the members of Parliament who had been present at the memorable meeting at which Chatham died, sit for their portraits. He thus transferred into the grand style of history painting a method which had been common in the intimate genre of the Conversation Piece: the group portrait in a commemorative setting” (Wind, “Revolution of History Painting,” 120). see also Rovee’s account of George Hayter’s House of Commons, 1833 (1833–43), a giant collective portrait assembled from individual portrait sketches of the members of first House seated after the Reform Bill of 1832. Hayter’s Descriptive Catalogue insists that “painting can represent the scene to posterity better than poetry or prose,” by preserving “details, which must belong to the features, dress, or habits, of our present day, and which do not come within the province of the author” (quoted in Rovee, 189, my emphasis). 44. Reynolds’s account of the historical portrait is somewhat ambiguous here, but I take him to refer not only to explicitly allegorizing or classical treatments (as exhibited, for example, in his own Mrs. Hale as “Euphrosyne” and Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces), but more generally to the historical grand style that might equally present generalized modern air and dress, so long as dress and air correspond. Reynolds’s The Marlborough Family, for instance, while depicting customary english dress for boys, as well as “modest, unpowdered interpretations of the popular high-piled hairstyle,” nevertheless “demonstrate[s] to the full the possibilities of applying the historical grand style to portraiture” (Nicholas Penny, ed., Reynolds, 281; Waterhouse, Painting in Britain, 228). I also mean to resist David solkin’s confidence that, for Reynolds, portraiture and history-painting are clearly distinct merely because, by “historical portraiture,” “Reynolds never meant the depiction of contemporary figures engaged in significant action” (“Great Pictures or Great Men?” 46). Contemporaneous evaluations of the admixture of painting genres often observed or evidenced the uncertain divide between portrait, history, and historical style. For Reynolds’s assistant James Northcote, “there is not so much difference [between history and portrait] as you imagine. Portrait often runs into history, and history into portrait, without our knowing it” (quoted Rovee 86). For the General Evening Post in 1792, Reynolds’s “very portraits are indeed historic, or rather perhaps epic” (quoted in Postle, Reynolds: Subject Pictures, 277). 45. West’s success notwithstanding, many British artists felt compelled to forego the formal genre of historical painting and to paint portraits instead. this was partly due to a lack of commissions and of suitable public spaces for display (in supposed contrast to absolutist Continental courts), but also due to a perceived idiosyncrasy of national character: “As Fuseli noted, ‘portrait with [the British] is everything. their taste and feelings all go to realities.’ Antiquity could only flourish in the form of what Lawrence called ‘half-history’ pictures” (Ribeiro, Art of Dress, 213)—that is, portraits with classical dress and accessories that hazarded the indecorous allure of close-up goods and abandoned epic narrative. 46. As Weinbrot notes, for Johnson, “the poet . . . must also be a lexicographer, and break down the general into its species” (88); Johnson also celebrates “the empathy made possible by particularized biography which draws upon the many ‘parallel circumstances, and kindred ideas, to which we readily conform our minds’ ” (ibid., 91–92). see also Deidre

Notes to Pages 94–96

303

Lynch, “Beating the track of the Alphabet.” on Johnson’s literary historicism in the Lives of the Poets, see Ruth Mack, Literary Historicity. 47. Douglas Fordham, “Costume Dramas,” 57. Fordham emphasizes the imperial context of many historical paintings that chose to include contemporary dress. In “Johnson and History Painting,” John sunderland examines how Johnson’s observations in The Idler no. 45 converged with the trajectory of history painting in the eighteenth century. In Cromwell’s Dissolution of Parliament (1783) and The Death of Epaminondas (1773), Benjamin West took up two subjects that Johnson had much earlier recommended; and West specifically painted The Death of Epaminondas for King George III as a heroic companion piece for a copy of the Death of Wolfe. the actualization of Johnson’s old call for a treatment of epaminondas perhaps renewed the currency of his assertion in the Idler that “the principal persons may be faithfully drawn from Portraits, or Prints” (1:255). see also Morris R. Brownell, “Johnson, James Barry, and english History Painting.” 48. Historical portraiture shared the broader definitional problem of the genre of historical painting. Both invoke history as historia, which encompasses the fictive narrative matter of myth along with factual historicity. But Reynolds himself suggests that even paintings of fictive, mythic scenes should faithfully express the historical culture that gave rise to the myth. Nicolas Poussin, Reynolds’s model for the production of the “antique” air in modern historical painting, “studied the ancients so much that he acquired a habit of thinking in their way, and seemed to know perfectly the actions and gestures they would use on every occasion.” Crucially, this is not a description of a more “general” way of life as such, one that could be readily accessed through an abstract category like the “natural” rather than reconstructed via evidence. Poussin’s qualification to paint fables derived instead from “his being eminently skilled in the knowledge of the ceremonies, customs, and habits of the ancients.” Reynolds understands even Poussin’s representations of myths as historicist reconstructions of the “ancient” manner of telling a story, via immersion in the cultural practices that originally gave rise to such lore. significantly, Reynolds insists on the corresponding importance of Poussin’s simulation of the ancient visual style “so that the mind [is] thrown back into antiquity not only by the subject, but by the execution” (D, 87– 88). Here, style as such serves as an authentic reflection or emanation of a habitus—and resurrects that habitus within the “mind” or the imagination of the historical painter and the spectator in the gallery. (scott later conceptualized Walpole’s merits as an author of historical fiction in strikingly similar ways; see Chapter 5, n.12). 49. For Hollander, Reynolds’s Dido quite transparently reflects his fashion-formed ideal of female beauty and thus translates contemporaneous dress styles into flesh. Despite the “unimpeachably Classical subject, the half-draped body of the dead queen is disposed in such a way as to thrust her breasts into quite unnatural and un-Classical prominence,” and so reflects “the contemporary notion of the sexy female body, molded by corseting to have large, high, separated breasts pushed well forward of the chest” (Seeing Through Clothes, 120). 50. to the dismay of several of his Romantic successors, Reynolds’s aesthetic philosophy exhibits an overriding hostility to particularity. As William Blake (in his ca. 1808 annotations to Reynolds’s Discourses) interrogated Reynolds, or the man “Hired to Depress Art,” “sacrifice the Parts, What becomes of the Whole?” For Blake, the “singular & Particular Detail is the Foundation of the sublime” (D, 300, 297, 289). But Blake’s annotations also suggest the complexity of the problem when the topic of drapery prompts fleeting agree-

304

Notes to Pages 96–102

ment with Reynolds. He praises as “excellent Remarks!” the following bit of Reynolds’s skepticism toward ornament: “In the same manner as the historical Painter never enters into the detail of colours, so neither does he debase his conceptions with minute attention to the discriminations of Drapery” (D, 301). Here, as in the sardonic verse epigraph to this chapter, Blake’s momentary concurrence with Reynolds is difficult to reconcile with Hazlitt’s account of the desirable effects of personal effects, through which Hazlitt registers his dissent from the Discourses: “What if Boswell (the prince of biographers) had not . . . introduced the little episode of Goldsmith strutting about in his peach-coloured coat after the success of his play”? We would have a less “perfect idea of the general character” of Goldsmith “from the omission of these particulars” (Works, 18:75–76). 51. Reynolds’s leadership of the Academy made it “necessary to consider how ‘public spirit’ might manifest itself otherwise than by acts of public virtue; or to ask how, in a nation where the division of labour had so occluded the perspectives of its members that none of them, or almost none, could grasp the ‘idea’ of the public, the art of painting could be used to restore that idea to them” (John Barrell, Political Theory of Painting, 2). 52. Barrell acknowledges a disconnect between his own account and the text of the Discourses. He describes a broad transition from a “civic humanist theory of painting” to a “discourse of the customary,” but in the case of Reynolds must bend his chronology: “because there is continuity as well as change in [Reynolds’s] writings considered as a whole; because, at least within the Discourses, his conversion to the discourse of the customary is never complete; and because it is when his version of the civic discourse is most threatened that it is most clearly defined; I shall not hesitate to borrow, where it seems appropriate or convenient to do so, arguments from his later writings to exemplify his earlier positions” (72, my emphasis). 53. Hollander, xii. 54. the gendered supposition here—that we confront a figure “supposed a lady”—is, of course, significant and reflects the disproportionate effect of the fashion-press image on perception of female dress. Nevertheless, more systematic presentations of costume (in works like the Collection of Dresses and in satirical prints) rendered men’s dress alongside women’s in ways that exposed men as also subject to fashion’s sway. (on the significance of women subjects to the debate about portrait dress, see Gill Perry, “Women in Disguise.”) 55. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays, 1:1. 56. Phillips, Society and Sentiment, 346. 57. Quoted in Lipovetsky, 67. 58. see Jennifer M. Jones, Sexing La Mode, 127; see also Crowston’s account of a 1777 satirical proposal for an Academy of Fashion in France (161). 59. the passage come from M. sarrasin’s L’Art du tailleur costumier (1767) (quoted in Jones, Sexing, 126). Likewise, for sarrasin, the tailor “knows both ancient and modern costumes and can make clothes for all necessary occasions, all time[,] and for all nations and estates”—that is, with a taxonomic comprehensiveness announcing a rival idiom of the general that is pan-temporal rather than atemporal (ibid.). 60. Hazlitt, Selected Essays, 657. 61. Ibid., 656. 62. Ibid., 658. Hazlitt even more starkly observes that “our artist’s pictures, seen among standard works, have (to speak it plainly) something old-womanish about them. By their obsolete and affected air, they remind one of antiquated ladies of quality, and are a kind of

Notes to Pages 102–105

305

Duchess-Dowagers in the art—somewhere between the living and the dead” (Works, 9:15). the topos here is endemic to satirical fashion prints (and novels) and hinges upon an ambiguity of former styles. they might connote the bright debut they made in the year they were new, or they might still adorn the now-aged woman who has not kept up with the changes in style since her youth. 63. I do not mean to endorse Hazlitt’s view uncritically. Fashionable dress is most forlorn, most abject, when just out of style, in a way that colors Hazlitt’s early nineteenthcentury criticism. 64. Pointon, 24. 65. of particular relevance are the masquerade-derived categories of “ ‘fancy dress,’ in which one impersonated one of a class of beings; and ‘character dress,’ in which one represented a specific figure, usually a historical, allegorical, literary, or theatrical character” (terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, 58). For most of the eighteenth century, portraiture’s intimate connection to a culture of masquerade qualified its “historicizing” potential. As Castle argues, “the impersonation of historical figures” at masquerades “subverted the separation between past and present, antiquity and modernity. In the place of temporal dialectic it substituted an eerie simultaneity, a palimpsest of epochs” (77). At the same time, the eighteenth-century masquerade refused to demand historicist particularization and instead “call[ed] attention to—indeed [wa]s organized around—variations in symbolic specificity. the masquerade crowd simultaneously presented costumes that offered complete, if false, messages about identity (character dress), partial or fragmentary messages (fancy dress), and no message at all (the blank, endlessly evasive domino)” (ibid., 59). the unfolding story of dress I am relating here accelerated as the more temporally flexible cultural form of the masquerade began to wane from the 1780s. 66. Pointon, 79, 80. 67. M. Kirby talley, Jr. provides an overview of Reynolds’s work habits: “Reynolds did sometimes paint draperies himself . . . . In other instances, however, sitters’ clothes were sent to the studio where they would have been used on the lay figure or indeed sent out to free-lance drapery painters” (in Penny, 59). As Margaretta M. Lovell observes, clothes depicted in portraits might also derive from “studio prop[s] to be made available to sitters eager to borrow finery they could not afford” (“Copley and the Blue Dress,” 61). 68. Quoted by talley, in Penny, 60. 69. Northcote, Life of Reynolds, 1:83. 70. Pointon, 59. Prints could also figure indirectly, as the model for real clothes. Lovell describes three Copley portraits from ca. 1763 that exhibited the same blue dress (“following closely a fashion magazine plate illustrating ‘the Dress of the Year 1761’ published in 1762, the year before these portraits were so painstakingly painted” [61]). Made after the fashion plate, the actual dress object was then purposefully repeated in each of the portraits to commemorate friendships. 71. Pointon, 41. 72. Ibid., 47. 73. As George relates, “the change in the character of pictorial satire between 1771 and 1783 is, broadly speaking, the progressive superseding of the old fashioned, ‘emblematical’ or ‘hieroglyphical’ print, intricate and complicated, often depending on a key or explanation, by the caricature or satire dependent on expressive drawing, irony, wit, or humour, embodied in a design which makes an immediate appeal to the eye. . . . the newer manner

306

Notes to Pages 105–113

was described in 1784 as ‘comic history painting,’ and there is no doubt it owed something to the new vogue for history painting which both influenced the art of the caricaturists and is a subject of caricature” (stephens and George, 5:xii). 74. see also Martin Myrone, Bodybuilding, who reads West’s Death of Wolfe in light of contemporary anxiety about masculinity, particularly the seeming death of traditional heroism amid the reign of the macaroni. 75. see sheila o’Connell, London 1753, 43; and timothy Clayton, The English Print, on the “Anglomania.” 76. Wood, 71. 77. solkin, ed., Art on the Line, 5. 78. Ibid., quoting from Fraser’s Magazine for July 1832. 79. C. s. Matheson makes the same observation in solkin, ed., 40–41. 80. the vision of Adam and eve (just) before their fall into dress implies the Academy exhibition’s already fallen function as an index of contemporary fashion. Unsurprisingly, the same scene is a ubiquitous set-piece for histories of dress, and appears on the frontispieces for the first two volumes of the Collection of Dresses, itself completed in 1772 upon publication of the third and fourth volumes. James Barry populated his cultural Elysium, or the State of Final Retribution—the sixth and final painting of his series for the Royal society of Arts, The Progress of Human Knowledge and Culture (1777–83)—with a variegated collection of historically specific garb. even his eschatological mode of likeness required carefully historicized dress. 81. At the end of the eighteenth century, sweet argues, “the subject of antiquities gradually came to be seen as one with potential commercial opportunities, and entrepreneurs began to exploit the historical and picturesque appeal which antiquities held. the consumption of antiquities was thereby extended beyond the professional and propertied classes to a readership based more solidly upon the middling sort” (Antiquaries, 310). 82. Reynolds’s resistance to fashion as history reveals the particular pressures of his own moment, but the desire for a timeless style of dress in portraiture is to some extent a longstanding one. Diana de Marly describes two separate projects of “constant dress” in the seventeenth century: a pastoral mode in the earlier decades, and a martial, Roman mode that succeeded it at mid-century (“establishment of Roman Dress,” 443). 83. the conjunction is visible in samuel Foote’s play The Nabob (1772), where a character pursues membership in the society of Antiquaries because of his aspiration to fashionability. In 1780, the society of Antiquaries moved into desirable new quarters at somerset House, where it shared space with Reynolds’s Royal Academy. 84. Günter Leypoldt notes, “the idea that mediocre artworks can have a beautiful effect because of the associations they induce is not Reynolds’s, of course, but goes back to Hutcheson’s applications of Locke’s associationism”; but while Hutcheson denigrates associative effects “wholly owing to Chance or Custom,” Reynolds finds them to be “irresistible” (“Neoclassical Dilemma,” 338). 85. Ribeiro, “Influence of the Dress of the seventeenth Century,” 840. 86. Ribeiro, in Penny, 221. 87. smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 197, my emphases. 88. Ribeiro, in Penny, 314. Penny here refers directly to Miss Gideon and her Brother, William—dressed, according to Ribeiro, “extremely up to date” and in “the highest ton” (ibid., 314–15).

Notes to Pages 113–118

307

89. Ribeiro, in Penny, 293. Ribeiro here directly comments on Reynolds’s portrait of The Ladies Waldegrave a-la-mode (1781). 90. Ribeiro, “Muses and Mythology,” 106. 91. By contrast, Reynolds argues, “In proportion as these [fleeting] prejudices are known to be generally diffused, or long received, the taste which conforms to them approaches nearer to certainty, and to a sort of resemblance to real science. . . . As these prejudices become more narrow, more local, more transitory, this secondary taste becomes more and more fantastical; recedes from real science; is less to be approved by reason, and less followed in practice” (D, 122–23). 92. sheridan, School for Scandal, 253. Hereafter abbreviated S and cited parenthetically by page number. 93. Jack D. Durant, “sheridan’s Picture-Auction scene,” 34. 94. Johnson observes in the Idler no. 45, “I should grieve to see Reynolds transfer to Heroes and Goddesses, to empty splendor and to airy fiction, that art which is now employed in diffusing friendship, in reviving tenderness, in quickening the affections of the absent, and continuing the presence of the dead” (251–52). 95. Christine s. Wiesenthal, “Representation and experimentation,” 323. In “the english Auction,” Cynthia Wall observes how the auction, which rises to prominence in eighteenth-century Britain in the persons of James Christie and John sotheby, “destabilizes the power of a collection at the same time that it makes collecting possible as art or hobbyhorse; what encourages things to be put together simultaneously threatens the possibility of permanent integration” (10). 96. Combe’s Poetical Epistle echoes this ambiguity. Portraits were once “considered as mere trash and Lumber by all who were ignorant of the originals”; but modern genius now makes a portrait “interesting even to the stranger” and “to future Ages” (so long as a portrait’s colors, unlike those of Reynolds, “are of a lasting nature”). the fine portrait belongs to those “who are not only ignorant of the original, but are careless about it” (intro.). 97. John Loftis, Sheridan, 86. 98. Wiesenthal, 322. 99. Notably, Charles manipulates the worth of another potential “post-obit” by emphasizing his uncle’s ill health (S, 248). 100. Here I follow Michael Cordner’s reading of trip’s “reversion” and “post-obit” (S, 400). 101. Quoted by Madeleine Ginsburg, in Rothstein, ed., Barbara Johnson’s Album, 18, my emphasis. trip’s clothes differ fundamentally from the Renaissance liveries that preoccupy Jones and stallybrass, which—however haunted by past possession and however commodified—retained a stable, material value conducing to repeated recirculation until they were physically worn out. 102. Granger, 1:173. 103. on the high headdress of the 1770s, see, for instance, chapter five in Kate Haulman, Politics of Fashion. 104. oliver’s suppositional phrasing connects his meditations on early eighteenthcentury fashion to antiquarianism proper: “the phrase ‘must have been’ cropped up with telling frequency as antiquaries and historians ‘supposed’ events to have taken place, or ‘presumed’ a state of affairs in the more obscure periods of the nation’s history” (sweet, Antiquaries, 19).

308

Notes to Pages 118–122

105. the notion that old portraits should preserve the manners of the past met with equal resistance from portrait owners guilty (at least apocryphally) of altering their ancestors’ likenesses in accord with the latest styles. In tobias smollett’s novel Peregrine Pickle, a ludicrous country squire paints modern periwigs upon the Vandykes that adorn his walls (640). More generally, the merit of historical preservation only became clear at the end of the eighteenth century, when “heightened awareness of the distinctive qualities of different periods of Gothic architecture . . . meant that it was no longer possible to add, modify, or remove in accordance with contemporary taste, as had previously been the practice” (sweet, Antiquaries, 290). 106. the play gives Crabtree’s account that Charles has sold off practically everything in the house, excepting “some empty bottles that were overlooked, and the family pictures, which, I believe, are framed in the wainscot” (S, 219). thus, when Charles calls for his friend to “knock down” the family portraits, he activates a more literal sense of physical force alongside the narrower sense specifically associated with the auction (from the oeD, “to dispose of [an article] to a bidder at an auction sale by a knock with a hammer or mallet”). As Pointon emphasizes, eighteenth-century portraits often were “not separable from the overall plan of the house, either physically or symbolically”; “the portrait was . . . probably seldom scrutinized in isolation but as a part of a spatial dialogue”—painted with a particular location in mind and often anchored into place (14, 17). 107. talley, in Penny, 62–65, 55, 69. 108. Penny, 246; 240; 263, quoting F. G. stephens. 109. Quoted in Penny, 55. In his Poetical Epistle, Combe satirizes the ephemerality of Reynolds’s paintings and enjoins the artist to reform: “In works of lasting form engage, / and be the RAPHAeL of the Age.” the poem’s speaker initially delights in Reynolds’s superb rendering of his love, but soon finds that “the lively tints decay, / the vivid colours melt away; / And ere twelve fleeting months were o’er, / the lovely Charmer blush’d no more. / Her features sunk, her roses lost, / MARIA stood a pallid Ghost.” the portrait then adorns an “old-fashion’d wall” and looks the “oldest Picture” in the gallery of ancestors. only the print taken from the portrait maintains its resemblance to the living woman, so that Reynolds abjectly depends upon engravers “For hopes of immortality” (5–12). 110. Quoted in Kristian Jensen, Revolution and the Antiquarian Book, 155. 111. Charles Baudelaire, “the Painter of Modern Life,” 12. 112. Ibid., 30. 113. Simmel on Culture, 211. 114. the expanding collection of the Berlin Gemäldegalerie newly extended to the english old Masters. By 1909, the museum displayed three portraits by Reynolds (alongside single portraits by Gainsborough, Romney, Raeburn, and Lawrence), all acquired over the preceding two decades. (two of the Reynolds portraits were lost during World War II, including the most representative work, Mrs. Boone and Her Daughter, bequeathed in 1906.) A contemporaneous descriptive catalogue of the museum describes the Reynolds paintings as “lack[ing] poignancy, but . . . ha[ving] a broad and happy generalization that always produces an agreeable sensation” (David C. Preyer, Berlin Galleries, 161). 115. Simmel on Culture, 211–16. As simmel notes, “the tendency of modern man to surround himself with antiquities—that is, things in which the style, the character of their times, the general mood that hovers around them are essential—this tendency is not a

Notes to Pages 122–133

309

contingent snobbery. Instead it goes back to that deeper need to give the individually excessive life an addition of calm breadth and typical lawfulness” (216). 116. Here the difference is that technology must retroactively (and not the artist proactively) supply the generalized vision that did not shape these hundreds of Playboy centerfold images in their original moment of creation. chapter 3. huMe, hIstorIcal successIon, and the dress oF rousseau 1. I borrow this epithet from David Wootton, who notes that the British Library catalogue, “to the puzzlement of generations of philosophers, distinguishes [Hume] from others of the same name by identifying him as ‘the historian’ ” (in Norton, ed., Cambridge Companion to Hume, 307 n.1). 2. Phillips, Society and Sentiment, xii. 3. Ibid. 4. J. C. Hilson, “Hume: the Historian as Man of Feeling,” 209. 5. David Hume, Essays, xxxvii. Hereafter abbreviated E and cited parenthetically by page number. I cite Hume’s own understanding of the operation of historical sympathy here; but as Karen o’Brien emphasizes, Hume also recognizes how sympathy “may be a painful, even unsettling experience”: “when Hume does provoke the readers of the History to a sentimental response, he sometimes envisages, not so much a confirmation of their sympathetic yet detached position as a certain disruption in the amiable narrative.” sentiment “evokes interpretive possibilities often discontinuous with the larger political narrative of the History” (Narratives of Enlightenment, 62). 6. For Donald W. Livingston, Hume’s “present is not a disposable launching pad for future adventures in technological progress but a place to dwell”; and “novelty is valued as a welcome relief, but only as an enrichment of the deeper and wider background of the familiar. the ceaseless pursuit of novelty and creativity for their own sakes makes no appearance in Hume’s thought.” But Livingston does not sufficiently appreciate Hume’s attention to novelty as the force that calls the present together at every moment and makes it possible to “dwell” there (Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium, 6). 7. With a gesture toward scott’s Waverley, Phillips suggests how “Hume’s stuart volumes can be read as seeking a kind of historical distance that would allow the turbulent epoch that closed in 1688, ‘sixty years since,’ to be both accepted and transcended” (34). 8. When he composed the autobiography, Hume was already ailing from the cancer that would take his life in 1776. 9. Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment, 254. 10. Hume, Treatise, 84–85. 11. Ibid., 84. 12. Works of Locke, 1:167. I am indebted here to Ala Alryyes’s presentation “War’s Knowledge.” 13. Hume, Treatise, 84. 14. Laurence sterne, Tristram Shandy, 70. 15. In David Fate Norton’s synthesis, “the work for which Hume is remembered is all fundamentally historical. that is, all this work attempts to explain something we at present

310

Notes to Pages 133–136

believe, feel, say, think or do, to explain some present state of affairs, whether that state be in the mental, moral, or political world, by tracing perceptions, actions, or states—various effects—to discernible causes” (22). Here, though, I am interested in the way Hume addresses historical phenomena without readily discernible causes. 16. Robin Valenza, “editing the self,” 137–38. Valenza argues that Hume provisionally resolves the problem of discontinuous, subjective identity that the Treatise explores through a kind of narrative theory—that is, by articulating a “reciprocity between prose belles lettres and personal memory” (137). 17. Ibid., 141. 18. Christensen, Practicing, 3–4. Rebecca tierney-Hynes makes a related point in a different register: the dangerous psychological isolation that is the feared consequence of Hume’s philosophy of mind “has something crucial in common with the [literary] productions of unruly fancy,” and especially with the contemporary novels and romances against which he positions his own polite essays and conversation. Hume finally “cannot separate himself and the productions of his own ‘inflam’d Imaginations’ from the dangers of fantastical, antisocial narratives,” for the problem of imagination applies equally to narrative and phenomenological existence (“Hume, Romance, and the Unruly Imagination,” 646). 19. Christensen, Practicing, 137. 20. Hume, Treatise, 195. 21. Christensen, Practicing, 139. 22. Ibid. 23. Likewise, in Christensen’s account, Hume’s “project as moral philosopher was above all to reinscribe the disturbing within the customary” (139). 24. R. G. Collingwood, Idea of History, 78. For Collingwood, “Hume’s History of England is a very slight and sketchy piece of work until he comes to . . . the age of the tudors. the real cause of this restriction of interest to the modern period was that . . . [Hume] had no sympathy for, and therefore no insight into, what from [his] point of view were nonrational periods of human history” (78). 25. I quote from s. K. Wertz, “Collingwood’s Understanding of Hume,” 272. Wertz himself draws upon Livingston and John J. Burke, the latter of whom argues that “the distinction between the past as it was and the past as it appears to have been led Hume to introduce a new criterion into his account of english history—the situation, a notion not unlike that of the Zeitgeist favored by later historians” (“Hume’s History,” 243). In England in 1819, Chandler’s more extensive account of the “historical situation” likewise poses the question of whether Hume’s thought qualifies as historicist, given his reliance upon a category of “human nature” that throws the status of history into question (see especially 241–43). 26. Ibid., 15. 27. one of the benefits of reading history, Hume asserts, is that women will understand the broader range of passions that motivate men, rather than mistakenly understand men to be solely motivated by romantic desire. But Hume’s defense of the force of historical truth is more asserted than reasoned. As he claims in the Treatise, “a poet has a counterfeit belief ”; and although a “poetical description may have a more sensible effect on the fancy, than an historical narration,” “there is something weak and imperfect amidst all the seeming vehemence of thought and sentiment, which attends the fictions of poetry” (173–74). 28. such intrigue, because of its private unfolding, proved especially fruitful terrain for fictional exploration, which could go where fact-bound historians increasingly could not.

Notes to Pages 136–142

311

In this sense, everett Zimmerman describes a cooperative narrative project linking eighteenthcentury novels to eighteenth-century histories. Novels “simulate the more private forms of history,” especially forms resistant to archival verification like memoir and biography (Boundaries of Fiction, 11). 29. In Hume’s account of the separate spheres in “of essay Writing,” women play an essential role in modern life and letters. As the “sovereigns of the empire of Conversation,” women’s socializing influence empowers the more austerely learned or scholarly against the “enemies of Reason and Beauty, People of dull Heads and cold Hearts” (E, 535). 30. Wootton, 284. 31. Bolingbroke, Letters on the Study and Use of History, 1:3. 32. Ibid., 1:149. 33. Warner, Licensing Entertainment, xi. As Warner emphasizes, “Perhaps nothing contributed more to triggering [the Pamela media event] than Richardson’s provocative claim, submitted within the ongoing cultural strife around novel reading, that however much Pamela might resemble [an intrinsically salacious] novel, it is not one, and further, that reading it will promote (rather than corrupt) the virtue of the reader” (186). 34. Here the extension of “our experience” to all ages might project the present within the past as much as the other way around. 35. As Valenza remarks, “Hume is at a cusp in literary history, writing right at the moment of the Richardsonian novel’s treatment of character as a social rather than political category and before the late-century’s radical interiorization of character” (148). 36. Ibid., 148–49. 37. Christensen, Practicing, 12–13. 38. Ibid., 13. 39. Ramsay, Dialogue on Taste, 36. 40. Hume continues, “theories of abstract philosophy, systems of profound theology, have prevailed during one age: In a successive period, these have been universally exploded: other theories and systems have supplied their place, which again gave place to their successors” (E, 242). (Compare smith’s comments in the Theory of Moral Sentiments; see my Introduction.) 41. Moreover, while in any present moment it may appear that questions of aesthetic value are intractably unsolvable (i.e., de gustibus non est disputandum), aesthetic value ironically proves much more enduring than the seeming certainties of science (which summon the radical discontinuity of a Kuhnian structure of revolution rather than any idea of progress). 42. Ramsay, 36. 43. A later moment in Ramsay’s Dialogue directly invokes such personal experience: “I have lived long enough in the world, Ladies, to see a great many changes in it, particularly with regard to shoe-buckles, which have been now large, now small, now round, now square, and all, in their terms, fraught with beauty and deformity. these changes are productive of much good to many industrious tradesmen and their families, and, generally speaking, very indifferent to the wearers.” Fashions of dress here serve as arbitrary articulation, or “indifferent” change, in the service of commerce. Like many observers before and since, Ramsay is particularly intrigued by those “whims” that demonstrate the power of taste to exact even deleterious concessions, such as the shoe-buckles of “seven or eight years ago” that caused “our smarts” to “limp” as they “suffer[ed] no small torture” (51–52).

312

Notes to Pages 142–148

44. For Michael B. Prince, for example, Ramsay’s Dialogue on Taste moves toward an aesthetics that involves “more and more detailed encounter[s] with historical phenomena. the student of history attempts to recover those mundane connections between environmental influences, local customs, received traditions, and the manipulation of available material shaping social forms and preferences” (Philosophical Dialogue, 196). 45. Rousseau’s resistance to modern entertainments in his Letter to D’Alembert indicted those cultural practices that “weake[n] and enervate[e] the mind by continual emotions; while our ineffectual concern for virtue, serves only to flatter self-love, without obliging us to be virtuous” (71). 46. Jones, “Repackaging Rousseau,” 940. 47. For an extended account of the falling out between Hume and Rousseau, see Zaretsky and scott, Philosophers’ Quarrel. 48. Quoted in Michael Kwass, “Big Hair,” 631. In his commentary on these passages, Kwass puzzles over why Rousseau does not give up the wig in his recourse to nature, and understands that decision through the claims to “utility, authenticity, and individuality” through which “taste leaders” quieted the moral critique of consumption in eighteenthcentury France (631, 659). 49. Letters of Hume, 2:2. Hereafter abbreviated L and cited parenthetically by volume and page number. 50. ordinarily, as Valenza suggests, Hume’s autobiographical writing “look[s] and claim[s] to be something much less like painting and much more like the obsessivecompulsive confessional journals of early modern, Protestant diarists” (138). this is especially evident when the young philosopher compares his passion and torment to “the Writings of the French Mysticks” and “our Fanatics”: “I have often thought that their Case & mine were pretty parralel [sic], & that their rapturous Admirations might discompose the Fabric of the Nerves & Brain, as much as profound Reflections” (quoted 140). on Hume and spiritual autobiography, see also Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, 41–42. 51. In point of fact, Rousseau also adopted his distinctive dress as a result of medical necessity, due to a condition of the urethra that caused frequent, painful urination and made the standard dress of breeches very uncomfortable. 52. Rousseau, Confessions, 2:273. 53. Mullan and Reid, 226; sherman, 119; Mullan and Reid, 228. Between Hume’s “of the study of History” and his encounter with Rousseau, the event of calendar change in 1752 brought the ideological content of the emergent, commercial temporality—a grand vision of unified succession—directly before the adherents of a residual, temporal order. the implementation removed eleven days between september 2 and 14, 1752, and standardized January 1 (which formerly competed with March 25) as the first day of the new year. Britain thus adopted the system widely accepted on the Continent and removed a perennial hindrance to commercial communication (one that was always apparent in dated correspondence like Hume’s letters). In Britain the installation of the New style calendar also reordered a customary past, formerly characterized more by layered associations than by linearity or simultaneity, according to commercial prerogatives. the technocratically visionary imposition of the calendar met with strong resistance within traditional popular culture (as was most memorably, if apocryphally, enshrined in William Hogarth’s condescending rendering of the people’s demand to “give us back our eleven days”). 54. Benjamin, Illuminations, 261.

Notes to Pages 149–157

313

55. Rousseau’s conforming himself to Hume’s “Desire” is noteworthy here, as is the high and somewhat inscrutable “value” of the portrait. 56. Fordham, “Ramsay’s enlightenment,” 509. 57. Ibid., 511. Fordham foregrounds the further possibility that Ramsay’s portrait mocks Rousseau through “a mischievous heightening of the sitter’s self-righteousness” (512). In defense of the mischievous interpretation, reading the paired portraits of Hume and Rousseau alongside a satirical topos from visual print culture, Fordham traces the “long and telling pedigree” of the contrast between “the well-dressed, patriotic Hume and the eccentric, self-persecuting Rousseau,” through thomas Bakewell’s 1737 print The Contrast and its successors (514). 58. Ibid., quoted 510, my emphasis. 59. Rousseau, Collected Writings, 1:91. 60. Antoine Lilti, “Writing of Paranoia,” 70. 61. Rousseau, Collected Writings, 1:90. 62. Lilti, 71. 63. Rousseau, Collected Writings, 1:92. Rousseau explains, “Disfigured copies [that] are the work of bad workmen who are greedy” merely “rot on the quays, or . . . decorate the rooms in cabarets and the shops of barbers” (ibid.). 64. Rousseau, Confessions, 2:274. Compare Rousseau’s personalization of possession (as a more modest resistance to the commercial determination of dress) to Diderot’s “Regrets for My old Dressing Gown.” Diderot laments exchanging an old, well-loved and well-worn dressing gown for a fashionable new one: “I was the absolute master of my old robe,” he laments; “I have become a slave to my new one” (in Rameau’s Nephew, 309–10). 65. Jones, “Repackaging Rousseau,” 941. As Jones elaborates, “the genius of the editors of late-eighteenth century [French] almanacs and the fashion press lay in challenging the connection between sartorial restraint, femininity, and virtue and pruning away those aspects of Rousseau’s thought on women and consumption that would have threatened the luxury and fashion trades of Paris” (ibid., 964). 66. Grimm, Historical and Literary Memoirs, 42. Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm was a close acquaintance of Diderot and Rousseau who regularly dispatched reports on events in Paris to Germany. 67. Ibid., 42–44. 68. the unification of literature and fashion that occurs in Rousseau’s persona produces the kind of epochal event Hume keeps expecting and failing to find in the political ministry. In an earlier letter of the same year, where Hume notes that, “for of all our annual confusions, the present seems to be the most violent, and to threaten the most entire revolution, and the most important events” (L, 2:151). 69. Gerard, Essay on Taste (1759), 9, my emphasis. In a subsequent, revised version of the essay (1780), Gerard pointed to “taste, in dress, in manners, and in arts” as the “something peculiar” that distinguished each age from all others (200). this full-fledged historicist articulation of the spirit of the age comes late, but even in the first edition of the text, the word “peculiar” appears with maddening repetition. As with Ramsay’s essay, the commercial impulse to sound the peculiarity of everything—thereby to supply all tastes—led Gerard toward a clearer articulation of cultural-historical specificity. 70. Hume, History of England, 6:530–31. 71. Ibid., 6:533–34.

314

Notes to Pages 157–162

72. on assuming the throne, King William was awarded an annual income of ₤600,000. 73. In Norton, ed., 285. 74. Robert Henry’s History of Great Britain (1771–93), which Hume denominates a history of england, divided this historical territory into distinct social spheres (civil and military, ecclesiastical, arts, commerce, etc.) that he treated discretely. on Henry, see Phillips, 3–8. 75. I have in mind the distinctively inventive “imitation” of eighteenth-century British commerce, especially the translation of prized “eastern or oriental luxuries” into new materials (“lightweight cotton instead of silks, earthenwares instead of porcelain, flint and cut glass, metal alloys and finishes such as gilt and silver plate, stamped brassware, japanned tinware and papier mâché, ormolu and cut steel instead of gold and silver, varnishes and veneers instead of exotic woods”) (Berg, 23–24). 76. D. R. Woolf, Reading History, 275. 77. Rousseau, Confessions, 2:320. chapter 4. hIstorIcal novelty and serIal ForM 1. Richard Maxwell, in Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period, ed. Maxwell and trumpener, 70. 2. the distinction between Gothic and historical fiction in this moment should not be drawn too sharply. Anne H. stevens isolates “a fairly distinct category of works . . . which are set in the past but lack supernatural machinery. these works tend to be set in england rather than on the Continent, and usually feature a mixture of historical and fictional characters, thus more closely resembling the historical novel [set in the Gothic period of the Middle Ages] than the Gothic,” in the modern sense of those genres. the supernatural Gothic arrived only with Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and the “importation of the German schauerroman” at the close of the century (“tales of other times”). 3. stevens, “tales of other times.” stevens here takes issue on the one hand with the familiar story of a punctuated Romantic invention of the form concentered on scott and his immediate predecessors, and on the other hand with a story of the “romance” so long and unspecific as to offer little purchase upon this moment. 4. the contrast that Hume’s essays draw between an idealized historiography and the romance mode frequently breaks down in his own historical writing, where sentimental scenes of intimate distress abound. Cynthia Wall calls attention to the “passions” that are the force of Hume’s history and recalls how, “from the moment of its publication, Hume’s History has been viewed as either factually unstable, historically wobbly, or stylistically novelistic”—which might lead us to consider the History of England as much a “generic sister, an inspirational mirror” for The Recess as an antagonist (“Chasms,” 23–24). see also my Chapter 3, n.5. 5. Alliston’s edition of The Recess notes a number of moments when the novel comments upon or dissents from Hume’s interpretations of events in the History of England. The Recess is parasitical in the sense that “Lee uses her assessments of historical characters to speculate on such of their actions—and thus on ‘incident’ and matters of plot—as cannot be or have not been adequately documented, and these of course fall mainly in that ‘private’ area excluded by other historians” (xviii). Hereafter abbreviated R and cited parenthetically by page number.

Notes to Pages 162–167

315

6. the old French genre of historical romance had been in decline since the earliest decades of the eighteenth century, with its demise finally clinched, perhaps, by Walter scott himself in the early nineteenth century. Maxwell makes the latter suggestion in Historical Novel in Europe. 7. Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, 7. In the quantitative method of literary studies that Moretti advocates, knowledge of texts by titles, subtitles, and genre systems displaces oncehegemonic critical procedures of close reading and canon formation. Moretti seeks a procedure more adequate to the macro-literary system than the supposedly wishful inductions by which traditional scholarship has practiced literary history (especially in foregrounding “great” texts that are as likely aberrations or incidental examples as privileged prisms of their moments). By privileging a second-order level of quantitative analysis, Moretti constructs a plane of sociocultural, historical truth that is finally imperceptible at any given present moment, and unavoidably distant from the experience of historical subjects. 8. Ibid. the end of perpetual copyright in 1774 was another factor shaping the modernity of new literature. After that point, works of the past circulated as a common domain in a way that highlighted the relative cohesion of a literary “present” that was different. see, for instance, Leah Price, Anthology, 67. 9. English Novel 1770–1829, ed. Garside et al., 1:17. 10. As against Moretti’s delight in the seeming novelty of abstraction today, in The Recess it is instead “the literary” that appears as new, amid the systematic structure of the publishing marketplace that grew visible in periodicals and reviews. Literariness is not so much what happens before abstraction as what happens alongside it: a mode of redescribing, confronting, or supplementing those abstracting or economizing genres (catalogues, ledgers, pocketbooks, advertisements, illustrations) that assigned individual texts a place within the larger system. to be literary was to strive to exercise internally a difference from anticipated commercial apprehensions. In The Recess this project specifically proceeds by means of an ambiguously historical past that sits in productive tension with (both doubling and diverging from) the present, commercial condition of those contemplating it as readers. 11. the numerous unique novel titles held at Corvey Castle in Germany—collected during the period and now extant nowhere else—make the material ephemerality of eighteenth-century fiction especially clear. (see Garside, “significance of the Corvey.”) 12. the convention of the found manuscript had been prominently and notoriously utilized in recent memory by Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764). the first edition was famously misperceived as an authentic manuscript; Walpole made his uncouth deception transparent in the second edition. 13. the playwright George Colman the elder saw Lee’s Chapter of Accidents (1781) as plausibly resurrecting the project of sensibility. 14. scott, Ivanhoe, 12. 15. I am grateful to April Alliston and steven J. Gores for their assistance with my pursuit of illustrations for The Recess. I am aware of two eighteenth-century illustrations that correspond to my missing pocketbook image, but I have been unable to connect either image to the pocketbook in question, or to any 1780s edition of Lee’s novel. one of these illustrations is associated with the popular French translation of Lee’s novel, Le Souterrain, ou Matilde. 16. stevens, Before Scott, 51–52.

316

Notes to Pages 167–177

17. though broadly typical of the women’s pocketbook, the Ladies Daily Companion is noteworthy among other titles for giving unusual prominence to new literature (the 1788 copy in question includes sonnets by Charlotte smith and Hester Piozzi). 18. this copy of the London Fashionable Repository for the Year 1796 is held in the collections of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. 19. Barbauld, actually born before Lee, led a very long literary career. Here I emphasize the different kinds of engagement that mark her career after 1800—though it is worth remembering her significant early essay (with her brother John Aikin) “on the Pleasure Derived from objects of terror,” published with a fictional Gothic sketch entitled “sir Bertrand, A Fragment.” 20. Barbauld, Selected, 414–15. 21. thomas Keymer, Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel, 54. 22. Ibid., 55. 23. Ibid., quoting the Critical Review in 1759. see n. 58. 24. Compare the passage I reference in Chapter 6, n. 37. 25. Keymer emphasizes the impact of serial form upon subjectivity as that form reverberated within novelistic character: “to document one’s life in serial form was to cultivate a mode more responsive than others to the instability of identity over time, but also one more vulnerable to the very contingencies it sought to catch” (115). the analogous documentation of the social or cultural moment in serial print culture made “history,” too, responsive and vulnerable to contingencies in ways that The Recess actively explores. 26. Keymer, 121. We often forget that in Tristram Shandy, the great incomplete work of english fiction, sterne’s parody of serial production explicitly extends from encyclopedias (whose beginnings grow obsolete before the work can be completed) to historiography. sterne’s source for Uncle toby’s military career is Nicholas tindal’s best-selling serial translation and continuation of Rapin de thoyras’s History of England. sterne wryly (and explicitly) invokes tindal’s serialized history when he elides tristan’s disjointed narration with the historiographer’s dilemma of treating provisionally autonomous social spheres whose chronologies may not neatly align with those of other spheres. tristram vows to “bring the affairs of the kitchen (as Rapin does those of the church) to the same period” (sterne, 5:202). see Keymer, 134. 27. Raven, in English Novel, ed. Garside et al., 1:74. 28. Moretti, 30. 29. the first undertaking of its kind, Barbauld’s British Novelists preceded by a decade scott’s editorial contributions to the Ballantyne’s Novelist’s Library (1820) and his Lives of the Novelists (1821–24). In her own canonical project, Barbauld modestly suggests that anyone else would have chosen a different canon, so that what survives seems unsettlingly arbitrary. 30. Barbauld, Selected, 393. Alliston cites this anecdote and a similar one, recounted in Richard Graves’s Preamble to Plexippus (1790) (R, xvi–xvii). The Recess is often suspected of being a primary source of Jane Austen’s own antipathy to Queen elizabeth I, as expressed in her juvenilia piece the History of England, which Austen’s sister Cassandra illustrates with monarchical portraits, in a send-up of the verbal-visual conventions of contemporaneous historiographical discourse. Alliston observes, at Isobel Grundy’s suggestion, that the humor is partly at Lee’s expense: Austen satirizes Lee’s outsized sympathy for Mary (R, xl n.38). 31. We should set against Barbauld’s belated sense of the novel’s impropriety the positive response of 1780s reviewers, whose “praise . . . is charged with qualified pleasure in the novelty of [the novel’s] historicism” (Wall, “Chasms,” 22).

Notes to Pages 178–190

317

32. Cowper, Task, 1–2. Hereafter abbreviated T and cited parenthetically by page number. 33. Not unlike Benjamin (who documented the pathos of the fashion relics of yesteryear that were preserved in the fading posters of unfrequented shops in the Parisian arcades of the early twentieth century), Cowper found in the detritus of cycles of fashion a tragic accumulation of monuments to the distraction of his contemporaries’ better impulses. Digging through the “ill made,” “obsolete,” and “ill conceived,” The Task anticipates Benjamin’s own “unearthing [of ] buried markers that expose ‘progress’ as the fetishization of modern temporality, which is an endless repetition of the ‘new’ as the ‘always-the-same’ ”—the latest thing whose promise always so quickly dissipates (Buck-Morss, 56). Cowper’s “mutation still” also recalls the “revolution stale” of the first book of The Task. 34. Kevis Goodman has convincingly established the limitations of the autonomy of Cowper’s “loophole in the retreat” (beginning with the etymological suggestion of a small aperture for the purpose of firing weapons). see chapter three of Georgic Modernity. 35. the “tale of other times” also overtly resonates with James Macpherson’s ossian poems. In Macpherson’s Temora, for instance, the bard is implored to “pour the tale of other times,” etc. 36. OED, s.v. “recess.” 37. the idea of “recess” also figures conspicuously in the contemporaneous historical theory of the scottish enlightenment. Adam Ferguson diagnoses the essential importance of periodical “recess” from external war for the creation and maintenance of political freedom at home. As part of his broad resistance to the commercial state of society, Ferguson explicitly contrasts merely temporary recess from war to the permanently enervating calm that allowed commerce, or “every lucrative art,” to become the “great object of nations, and the principal study of mankind” (History of Civil Society, 58). 38. As Crowston notes of the French fashion system, the seasonal “rhythm of the fashion year” was shaped “not only by the by the weather but also by the movement of the royal court and the sales schedule of the merchants who served it” (115). 39. Alliston, Virtue’s Faults, 184. 40. It is nevertheless significant that, in one crucial scene, Leicester is able to gain access to Matilda by disguising himself as the “eminent painter” supposedly commissioned to paint her portrait. 41. As James Chandler emphasizes, “the very notion of the cultural-historical period, as it has taken place in modern historiographical practice, seems to be a call for the employment of a representative who can serve as a figurehead for the state of things in a given age but who is precisely not a literal head of state” (England in 1819, 174). I am suggesting that fashion answers the call. 42. Maxwell, “Pretenders,” 318. 43. the term “insipid” is scott’s own, in an anonymous 1817 self-review of the early Waverley Novels in the Quarterly Review (Prose Works, 19:4). edward Waverley also numbers among the culprits in William Hazlitt’s 1827 essay “Why the Heroes of Romance Are Insipid.” 44. Maxwell, Historical Novel in Europe, 12. 45. For Austen, Kenilworth appears as a place hardly worth visiting because known well enough already. As the narrator of Pride and Prejudice remarks, “It is not the object of this work to give a description of Derbyshire, nor any of the remarkable places through

318

Notes to Pages 190–192

which their route thither lay; oxford, Blenheim, Warwick, Kenelworth, Birmingham, &c. are sufficiently known” (183). 46. Hurd, Moral and Political Dialogues, 91. Hurd’s Dialogues just precede a renewed vogue for classical history beginning ca. 1770. 47. there is a similar contrast evident in Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres, where Godwin visits Kenilworth and claims to hear the “trampling” and the “clangour,” and to see the visages of the former age amid the castle’s ruins. As against Hurd, Godwin experiences the ruins of Kenilworth as a scene of (imagined) sensory presence (Political and Philosophical Writings, 6:21). 48. Hurd, 98. 49. Ibid., 96. A few years later, in his Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), Hurd revisited this foreshortened response to Kenilworth by tracing the “correspondency” between gothic europe and ancient Greece. In essence, there are lessons for literary interpretation in the way similar aesthetic values proceed from convergent civil orders. 50. In 1824 the Edinburgh Annual Register recorded Lee’s childhood visit to Winchester: “the monastic institutions and historical interest attached to that spot . . . although very imperfectly known to, or understood by her, retained a place in her recollection many years after. Brooding over that, and accidentally perusing Hurd’s Dialogues, she imagined to herself the possibility of framing a story that might blend historical characters with fictitious events, and both with picturesque scenery. the brilliant court of elizabeth struck her to be the suitable era for such a fiction, and the events of ‘the Recess’ . . . gradually developed” (279). 51. In Hurd’s arch preface, where the editor and his Bookseller negotiate over the size of the initial print run, the historical ethos of “diffuse sensation” in the Dialogues seems to derive from careful scrutiny of the market prospects for historiography. While not possessing the usual form or interest of history (these are men conversing “but as they were wont” on familiar “subjects of morality and politics”), the Dialogues will sell briskly by resonating with the new historical interests of the present day: their form “must be very taking in an age that piques itself on it’s [sic] knowledge of men and manners” (vii–viii). 52. Alliston notes, “In addition to Lee’s personal acquaintance with textile manufacture through her brother” (who was “noted for his improvements in factory technology”), “she may have encountered . . . ‘a local legend that the Coventry silk-weavers used the castle as a factory.’ this tradition was perpetuated in official guide books of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries . . ., but the story has since been disproven” (R, 360 n.4). 53. The Recess follows quickly on Gibbon’s retelling of the legend of the seven sleepers in 1781, which foregrounds how the play of obsolete objects can create “lively” historical impressions for a modern audience (see my Chapter 6). 54. According to Raymond Williams, “industry” in the sense of “an institution or set of institutions for production or trade” (rather than in the older sense of “industriousness”) comes increasingly into usage from this late eighteenth-century moment, as in smith’s “modern generalizing use” of the term in the Wealth of Nations (1776), which refers to the “maintenance of industry” (Keywords, 165–66). 55. I have in mind here Benjamin’s repeated insistence (contra Max Weber) that “industrialization had brought about a reenchantment of the social world. . . . Underneath the surface of increasing systemic rationalization, . . . in the modern city, as in the ur-forests of another era, ‘the threatening and alluring face’ of myth was alive and everywhere. It peered

Notes to Pages 192–194

319

out of wall posters advertising ‘toothpaste for giants,’ and whispered its presence in the most rationalized urban plans that, ‘with their uniform streets and endless rows of buildings, have realized the dreamed-of architecture of the ancients: the labyrinth’ ” (BuckMorss, 254). 56. elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects, 80. over the course of the eighteenth century, Kowaleski-Wallace explains, British commerce moves “toward recognizing the shop as the discrete site of consumer activity” in contrast to the “early shops [which] had simply been the extension of the workshop” (ibid.). 57. Readers perhaps recollect that even in her initial residence at Kenilworth, Matilda had observed its scenes from behind a “curtain of muslin” that screened Matilda and ellinor from Leicester’s guests (R, 69). 58. Lockhart recorded his friend William Menzies’s disturbance at the sight of a “confounded hand” in a nearby edinburgh window: “since we sat down . . . I have been watching it—it fascinates my eye—it never stops—page after page is finished and thrown on that heap of Ms., and still it goes on unwearied.” to the surprise of Menzies, the hand is not that of some “stupid, dogged, engrossing clerk,” but that of the Author of Waverley himself (Life of Scott, 4:172–73). 59. In Waverley, scott grounds his fiction upon “those passions common to men in all stages of society which have alike agitated the human heart” (5). Likewise, Ivanhoe depends upon “sentiment which . . . must have existed alike in the past and present”: “the tenor . . . of their affections and feelings,” the Author of Waverley insists, “must have borne the same proportion to our own” (9, 10, my emphasis). But scott’s insistent universalism contrasts with thomas Warton’s early literary historicism in the mid-eighteenth century: “In reading the work of an author who lived in a remote age, it is necessary that we should look back upon the customs and manners which prevailed in his age; that we should place ourselves in his situation, and circumstances; that so we may be the better enabled to judge and discuss how his turn of thinking, and manner of composing were bias’d, influenc’d, and, as it were, tinctur’d by very familiar and reigning appearances, which are utterly different from those with which we are at present surrounded” (Observations, 217, my emphasis). In turn, the advertisement to the purportedly found manuscript of The Recess acknowledges how “a wonderful coincidence” with known historical events “stamps the narration at least with probability,” yet nevertheless postulates “hearts” that are impenetrable, and dwells upon those “partialities and prejudices, which live in [princes’] hearts, and are buried with them” (R, 5). 60. In the early nineteenth century, prior to scott’s own career as a novelist, edgeworth was probably the leading author of fiction in english. seemingly indebted to Lee’s sensibility, the preface to edgeworth’s first novel Castle Rackrent defends the historical value of “a love of secret memoirs and private anecdotes” and similarly claims to tell “tales of other times” (Castle Rackrent and ennui, 63). Hereafter abbreviated U and cited parenthetically by page number. 61. Butler, Edgeworth, 397. Butler examines edgeworth’s connection to the Lunar society of Birmingham, the influential collective of practical and mechanical scientists, of which her father (and sometime co-author) Richard Lovell edgeworth was a member. 62. Butler, 488. As Butler notes, after edgeworth “characters in fiction are increasingly dominated by their social and economic circumstances” (398). But Butler’s notion of irony, I think, also gets at something essential about the pastiche logic of edgeworth’s fiction, especially in its tendency to display conspicuously the origin of its episodes in artifacts and anec-

320

Notes to Pages 194–202

dotes from “real life.” see especially Gamer, “Romance of Real Life,” who aligns edgeworth with romance rather than realism for the way she discards probabilistic vraisemblance in favor of the vibrant oddity of actually collected anecdotes of a dense and inscrutable “real life.” 63. Ferris, Romantic National Tale, 11–12. the formula clearly resonates in the character of edward Waverley, who encounters a Celtic periphery that differs from edgeworth’s only in being more fundamentally encoded, in the terms of stadial history, as fatedly vestigial. (edgeworth’s Ireland, by contrast, is victimized by present-day mismanagement and remains capable of natively driven improvement.) 64. I am invoking trumpener’s account of Ennui as a critique of the metropolitan genre of the tour: “Like imperial surveyors of land, [travel writers] import an ostensibly universal standard of measurement into a landscape of great historical and cultural complexity” (58). 65. the description cites Holinshed’s Chronicles (republished in 1807, just before Ennui appeared). 66. Lady Geraldine strikingly insists that Miss tracey’s errant efforts to adhere to the times are of a piece with a more conventional index of the historical moment, the political striving of bad legislators: “What is there more ridiculous in her coming simpering into a ball-room, fancying herself the mirror of fashion, when she is a figure for a print-shop, than in the courtier rising solemnly in the House of Lords, believing himself an orator, and expecting to make a vast reputation, by picking up, in every debate, the very worst arguments that every body else let fall?” (U, 207, my emphasis). 67. In an episode where other women, like living fashion dolls, show off the latest styles, Lady Geraldine “ke[eps] aloof ” by “examining some prints at the farther end of the room” before denouncing these women (U, 223). the novel thereby suggests that Lady Geraldine’s familiarity with the print-shop satire is more than passing. she also harkens back to Lady Delacour in edgeworth’s Belinda (1801), who supervises a fashion caricature of her rival (tantalizingly entitled “The Ass and Her Panniers”) while she also imagines her own scandalous situation becoming a series of caricatures. 68. edgeworth, Absentee, 1. 69. edgeworth, Harrington, 210. Hereafter abbreviated H and cited parenthetically by page number. 70. According to her father’s preface to Harrington, edgeworth wrote the novel in response to a letter from an American Jewish woman, who complained about the unfair portrayal of Jewish characters in edgeworth’s prior work. 71. the “quick successions” of this formative commercial exposure seem to produce a materialized variant of Lockean consciousness of duration, here built from “objects” rather than “ideas.” 72. In the novel Harrington must overcome a personal history of anti-semitic hysteria, which begins when he does not heed his nurse’s command upon this old man’s arrival: “time for you to come off to bed, Master Harrington” (H, 69). 73. the youthful protagonist’s curious inability to hear simon’s cry marks the sartorial subconscious of the early historical novel. As a character, simon himself suggests an early, popular genre of costume plate, the Cries of London—and thus marks the novel’s engagement with the transformation of print-cultural costume from enduring sociological uniform to sensitive temporal register. Versions of Marcellus Laroon’s Cryes (1687) were republished throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries until the last edition of Laroon’s original series in 1821 marked the end of an era. of particular note are Laroon’s criers of

Notes to Pages 202–205

321

“old Cloaks, suits or Coats,” a trade associated with Jewish persons, and “old satten old taffety or Velvet” (see shesgreen, Criers and Hawkers, 136–37, 146–47). Remarkably, L. P. Boitard himself reworked the Cryes in the 1750s and 1760s and even issued an expanded edition “for the present Year 1766,” to reflect the altered styles prevailing at midcentury among the poor (shesgreen, Images, 118–23). 74. on the quasi-medical pathology of too much fashionable “consumption,” see Brewer and Porter, 58–81. chapter 5. Walter scott’s FashIon systeMs Note to epigraph: Leigh Hunt’s London Journal 17 (1834): 132. Planché’s History of British Costume was published in the same year. Almack’s Assembly Rooms, located in st. James, London, were an exclusive gathering place for elite Regency fashionability. Barthes, Fashion System, 215. 1. Indeed, offering a variation on Barbauld’s lament of the lack of visual documentation of early-eighteenth-century fashion (which I discussed in Chapter 1), Planché argues that the modern state of the visual arts from ca. 1760 masks a more fundamental equivalence in dress across time than is apparent. In contrast to the “monkish illuminators” of old (“delineators” totally lacking in taste and skill and “ignorant of the first principles of design”), the “creditable and even first-rate artists” of the reigns of George III and IV have learned to set the “natural deformities” of modern fashions in their best light. Nevertheless, equal deformity in the dress itself remains the order of the day (British Costume, 326). Remarkably, Planché’s discursive insights into the fundamental nondifference between fashion’s periods take shape almost directly alongside his reproduction of Jefferys’s noteworthy illustration of the “Habits of english Ladies” in 1735, 1745, and 1755. 2. Planché, British Costume, xi. 3. As Richard W. schoch recounts, Planché’s meticulous elevation of costume in a production of shakespeare’s King John (original for its “free-standing display of historically accurate stage costumes divorced from any dispositive textual referent” [78]) combined a high-minded plea for authenticity with a clear-eyed appreciation for the new “commercial value of historically accurate mise-en-scene” focused on dress (Shakespeare’s Victorian Stage, 75–76; see also Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes, 290–95). Planché’s antiquarian research for King John (and further shakespearean productions that followed) culminated in the History of British Costume itself, which sifted antiquarian materials to produce a more regular chronology of dress. Prominent among Planché’s sources were the works of strutt, who had also preoccupied scott himself. (Before publishing Waverley, scott first completed strutt’s unfinished dramatic historical romance, Queenhoo-Hall.) scott also directly collaborated with the actor and playwright Daniel terry to adapt several Waverley Novels for the stage immediately after their publication. terry’s 1820 production of The Antiquary presented the protagonist oldbuck as “an animated version of Grose’s Military Antiquities,” and so promised a past that “could be worn rather than merely collected, studied, or observed” (schoch, 76). 4. Planché’s work postdates W. H. Pyne’s Costume of Great Britain (1804), modern in its own way but more sociological than historical. see Chloe Wigston smith, “Dressing the British.”

322

Notes to Pages 205–210

5. While Planché pedantically indicts some of scott’s anachronisms of costume, he also acknowledges that “to Walter scott the honour is due of having first attracted public attention to the advantages derivable from the study of such subjects [as dress], as a new source of effect as well as of historical illustration” (Recollections, 1:224). 6. Planché, British Costume, xi. Waverley had already been translated into seven european languages by 1827 (Humphrey, 99). 7. For Lukács the turmoil of the age made history a “mass experience”: a succession of revolutions brought large numbers of ordinary people to “comprehend their own existence as something historically conditioned, [and] to see in history something that deeply affect[ed] their daily lives and immediately concern[ed] them” (24). 8. trumpener, 130. 9. trumpener directly faults Lukács for scott’s outsized place in literary-historical accounts of “nineteenth-century realism, narrative history writing, and modern historical thinking as we know it” (ibid.). But she is finally too deferential to Lukács’s own partial vision of scott; as a result, her account of the Waverley Novels is sometimes less complete or persuasive than are her compelling accounts of scott’s contemporaries. 10. Ibid., 14. 11. st. Clair, “Political economy of Reading”; and Reading Nation, 221. 12. Lukács, Historical Novel, 19. Lukács has in mind both Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (to which the epithet of “mere costumery” specifically applies) and the seventeenth-century French historical romances of scudéry et al. Notably, scott held a much higher opinion of Walpole’s historicist sophistication than did Lukács. In an introduction to the Castle of Otranto for Ballantyne’s Novelists Library, scott praised the success with which Walpole attained, “by the minute accuracy of a fable, sketched with singular attention to the costume of the period in which the scene was laid, that . . . association which might prepare his reader’s mind for the reception of prodigies congenial to the creed and feelings of the actors.” the suggestion is that period artifacts conduce to structures of feeling specific to the moment. scott also contrasts Walpole’s adept use of costume to the “ill-sustained masquerade[s]” produced by Walpole’s imitative inferiors, whose inferior Gothic characters “are all equipped in hired dresses from the same [fancy dress] warehouse in tavistock-street” (Prose Works: 3:314–16; see also Mack’s chapter “Walpole, sterne, and Historical objects”). 13. Lisa Hopkins, “Clothes,” 22. 14. Wall, Prose of Things, 201. Because detailed, visual illustrations of interiors are rare in this moment. Wall turns almost of necessity to Humphry Repton and Rudolph Ackermann, whose designs are exceptional instances of visual documents that live up to the space-describing powers of prose. In this period, visual culture lavished much more attention on dress. see my essay “Fashion, Microcosm, and Romantic Historical Distance.” 15. Wall, Prose of Things, 1. 16. Underwood, Why Literary Periods Mattered, 3. 17. trumpener, 154. 18. Ibid., 155. 19. Underwood, 158. 20. Wentworth’s fashion-formed reaction preemptively unsettles the gendered logic of the succeeding debate (over male and female memory and constancy) between Anne elliot and Captain Harville, as overheard by a silent Wentworth at the climax of the novel.

Notes to Pages 210–211

323

21. Austen, Persuasion, 181. the passage I cite replaces a draft suggestion that Anne and Wentworth “were carried back to the past” with a much more self-conscious, presentbound recognition of a past time that was different. such moments cut against Clifford siskin’s emphasis on characters in Austen (like Darcy in Pride and Prejudice) who “purposely abstain from dates,” and against siskin’s broader account of Austen’s novels as developmental fables of a “real self,” where “difference over time” collapses imperceptibly into continuity” (Historicity of Romantic Discourse, 145–46). 22. Nevertheless, this is the same Barthes who, long before the messianic arrival of quantitative digital humanities, drew on the analog quantitative sociology of the early twentieth century to decipher the larger structure of fashion, which is “regular from afar and anarchic up close.” “Changes in Fashion,” Barthes observes, “appear regular if we consider a relatively long historical duration, and irregular if we reduce this duration to the few years preceding the time at which we place ourselves” (295). In this way he precisely inverts Underwood’s schema: contrast belongs to lived experience and emerges “up close” in time. Barthes was also fascinated by the diachronic determinations of the longue durée fashion system. He notes, for instance, the absolutely regular, up-and-down march of hemlines and décolletage exposure—measured, fascinatingly, in fashion plates by Jane Richardson and Alfred Kroeber (“three Centuries of Fashions”)—and the predictable oscillation between three archetypal silhouettes of women’s dresses (bell-shaped, tubular, and bustled) that Agnes Brooks Young traced visually and textually in Recurring Cycles of Fashion. these diachronic determinations of the “regular” system were most evident in the threedimensional shape of dress, which only joined trimmings and fabrics as a primary locus of regular fashion change ca. 1780. (see, for instance, Crowston, 158.) still, for Barthes fashion can also be fiat in fundamentally arbitrary ways, especially in the random, isolated features that the textual commentary of fashion magazines elevates to prominence from one year to the next, by isolating a few signifiers from within the large mass of features in fashion photos or garments. 23. As Hazlitt observes, “the hero of the work is not so properly the chief object in it, as a sort of blank left open to the imagination, or a lay-figure on which the reader disposes whatever drapery he pleases!” (Sketches and Essays, 271). A lay-figure is a mannequin or posing dummy often used by portrait artists to drape their clients’ clothes in order to paint the dress (as against the face) in the absence of the clients. But the lay-figure also brings to mind the full-size fashion dolls that disseminated early French fashions around the world. 24. scott, Waverley, 3–4. Hereafter abbreviated W and cited parenthetically by page number. In the fuller passage, the Author of Waverley argues that “a tale of manners, to be interesting, must either refer to antiquity so great as to have become venerable, or it must bear a vivid reflection of those scenes which are passing daily before our eyes, and are interesting from their novelty. thus the coat-of-mail of our ancestors, and the triple-furred pelisse of our modern beaux, may, though for very different reasons, be equally fit for the array of a fictitious character,” but the dress of George II’s day cannot (W, 4). 25. Spectator no. 281, 2:262. such a context helps explain scott’s dedication of Waverley to Henry Mackenzie, author of the sentimental novel The Man of Feeling but also “our scottish Addison,” the editor of the edinburgh periodicals the Mirror and the Lounger, who “revived the art of periodical writing, and sketched, though with a light pencil, the follies

324

Notes to Pages 211–217

and the lesser vices of his time.” But in his fiction Mackenzie aimed too exclusively at being the “historian of feeling”—and so neglected the potential he showed in the periodicals to compose a “romance on life and manners,” perhaps in the manner of Waverley itself (Prose Works, 4:17–19). 26. Duncan, Modern Romance, 66. 27. see McCracken-Flesher, Possible Scotlands; and McGann, “scott’s Romantic Postmodernity.” 28. Duncan, Modern Romance, 2, 94–95. 29. In the context of fashion studies rather than literary history, George IV’s celebrated visit to edinburgh under scott’s management represents “tartan’s defining moment of transition from Highland habit into fashionable fabric,” with enormous and ultimately global commercial success soon to follow (Jonathan Faiers, Tartan, 153). For a classic contextualization of this royal visit and the “tartanization” of edinburgh at scott’s behest, see Hugh trevor-Roper, “Invention of tradition.” 30. Johanna Blakley, for instance, foregrounds fashionable dress to draw attention to the vast scale of the present-day aesthetic production that lies beyond the pale of copyright. In contrast to logos and brand names, which receive trademark protection, apparel designs are “too utilitarian to qualify for copyright protection” under U.s. law. Yet in economic terms, this dark matter dwarfs the significance of productions accorded “high intellectual property” protection like literature, film, music, and software (“Fashion’s Free Culture”). 31. Arata, “scott’s Pageants,” 99, 100. Carlyle’s satirical philosophy of clothes in Sartor Resartus (1833–34) was of a moment with Planché’s History of British Costume and responded in part to the “Dandy’s Maxims” of edward Bulwer’s silver-fork novel Pelham (1828). (see Mackie, “Libertine Fiction, Forensic Fashion.”) 32. Arata, 100. 33. scott, Kenilworth, 15. Hereafter abbreviated K and cited parenthetically by page number. significantly, scott’s extended ekphrases of dress in the novel vanished onstage (apart from stage directions), as in W. oxberry’s 1824 adaptation of Kenilworth for the theatres Royal, where an almost antithetical Goldthread character rather uselessly reports that Amy “was young and beautiful—but—I had little time to look” (5). 34. Frances Burney’s neophyte, conspicuous consumer evelina, for example, singles out mercers as the most “entertaining” of merchants, the epitome of fashionable London shopping (Evelina, 28–29). For The Female Tatler no. 9 in 1709, “these Fellows are positively the greatest Fops in the Kingdom, they have their Toilets, and their fine Night-Gowns; their Chocolate in a Morning, and their Green-tea two hours after. Turkey Polts for their Dinner, and then Perfumes, Washes, and clean Linen equip ’em for the Parade.” 35. In his introduction to Kenilworth, J. H. Alexander notes how “most of the major players in the novel make a point of dressing up in the utmost splendour and the very latest fashion. . . . Readers will share scott’s evident delight in the sheer élan, the brio, of his recreated elizabethan society” (K, xiv). 36. J. C. Flügel coins this phrase to describe “one of the most remarkable events in the whole history of dress”: “the sudden reduction of male sartorial decorativeness which took place at the end of the eighteenth century” (Psychology of Clothes, 110–11). 37. Lynch, Economy of Character, 162. 38. Walter Benjamin, by contrast, tends to seek out ossified difference in the styles of the past: “In the [outdated] window displays of beauty salons are the last women with long

Notes to Pages 217–220

325

hair. they have rich, undulating hair-masses with a ‘permanent wave’—fossilized hair curls” (Buck-Morss, 65). Barthes himself comes closer to scott here when he emphasizes, “what is significant about the history of clothing is that one can already see very modern bikinis on the frescoes at Pompeii” (Language of Fashion, 24). 39. Ribeiro, Art of Dress, 230. 40. I cite Ulrich Lehmann’s cogent summation of Adorno and Benjamin on fashion: “on a smaller scale,” Lehmann observes, fashion “also focuses on the sociohistorical accessories, on the nuances within the appearance of the past, that reveal and determine more than mere historicism ever would” (Tigersprung, 204). 41. I invoke here stephen Bann’s Clothing of Clio, which foregrounds an epistemological transformation signaled by two very different models of the museum “period room”: one from the late eighteenth century in which objects from the same period do not interact with one another (and in that sense, belong to one another only via the very abstract and “mechanistic” “notion” of a century); and another model from the early nineteenth century in which objects directly interact in a staged scene to summon a historical mise-en-scène. Remarkably, scott’s fictional period rooms in Kenilworth just predate Bann’s paradigmatic, real-life example for the latter, Alexandre du sommerard’s Musée de Cluny in Paris. 42. Berg, Luxury and Pleasure, 42. 43. scott’s construction of transhistorical honorifics among “Ladies of Fashion” also broaches the disarming implications of dating by style when forms endure or return within a post-patina historical aesthetic. For when signs of age ceased to be the primary means of telling time, new historical problems arose. Bann, for instance, foregrounds the nineteenthcentury critic Gustave Planche’s disdain for Paul Delaroche’s historical painting Edouard V et Richard, duc d’York in the tower of London (1831). In the painting, Planche complains, “everything is dreadfully new, the furniture, the clothing, even the faces are new and have never been used.” “Did Planche suppose,” Bann wonders, “that there was never a time when antique furniture, and period clothes, had been new?” (72). But while Bann finds Planche’s anxiety about contemporary reconstructions of period furniture (that is, modern imitations of old styles) to cause a misapprehension of historical representation, the strange dearth of patina at Cumnor Hall makes clear how Bann himself misapprehends Planche’s fundamentally correct sense that a roomful of objects in the days of edward V was unlikely to be new all at once. 44. Berg, 146. 45. Where fashionable luxury leaves off in Kenilworth, historical difference is strangely elusive. this becomes especially clear in an episode where the mysterious blacksmith Wayland smith journeys into the labyrinthine bowels of London in search of a mystical medicinal ingredient. When Wayland pauses at the door of a chemist, the Author of Waverley momentarily resigns it to a past prior to the shopwindow: “the shop under which he halted had not, as in modern days, a glazed window.” But strangely, this elizabethan apothecary soon proves as much downmarket as premodern: “a paltry canvas screen surrounded such a stall as a cobbler now occupies, having the front open much in the manner of a fishmonger’s booth of the present day” (K, 128). In a compellingly posthistorical moment, market differentiation (rather than the “state of society”) grows indistinguishable from historical difference; and unfashionable market stands of the nineteenth century precisely resemble their elizabethan counterparts. the fate of the nonfashionable commodities that they sell, in other words, is to be out of sync with a “present” that excludes them.

326

Notes to Pages 220–230

46. see the chapter “Power Mirrors” in DeJean, Essence of Style. 47. Colin Campbell, Romantic Ethic, 95. Campbell likewise describes the new “inexhaustibility of wants which characterizes the behaviour of modern consumers” starting at the end of the eighteenth century (ibid.). 48. “Cumnor Hall” was scott’s working title for Kenilworth, changed at the behest of his publisher. 49. Ann Rigney, Afterlives of Scott, 17. I offer just a few examples of the taxonomically sprawling set of real-world objects to which Jeanie Deans lent her name. 50. scott, Old Mortality, 8–9. Hereafter abbreviated O and cited parenthetically by page number. 51. on scott’s attention to the mediation of local culture in the print marketplace, see also Kyoko takanashi, who argues that Old Morality “attempt[s] to incorporate what lies ‘outside’ of a narrative within the body of the text itself ” (298). 52. Duncan, Modern Romance, 147. 53. scott, Heart of Midlothian, 57. Hereafter abbreviated HM and cited parenthetically by page number. 54. Dress in the novel recasts the problem of the “remnant” that Ina Ferris has emphasized—those “sign[s] of the dead ends and leftovers that the city [of edinburgh] was discarding as it entered modernity,” or the ominous specter of that which is beyond use, or currency, and yet persists (“Borders of oblivion,” 474). For their part, the Luckenbooths shops equally connote a modernity that floods the city with new remainders (material and print-cultural) of projects of present-making. “Remnancy” is not only the atavistic other side of modernity, but also an increasingly ordinary condition within modernity as obsolescence proliferates. In this sense, fashion announces an order of accumulation that might not exactly resemble the more organic, cultural accretion-in-place that trumpener finds to define the Celtic national tale (in contrast the sweeping and sudden change of scott’s historical novel), but that certainly complicates trumpener’s account of scott’s history as first and foremost accumulation’s antithesis. 55. In denominating the queen’s pocketbook a “keepsake,” Jeanie strikingly anticipates the printed literary annuals of the Romantic moment that began to be published in the 1820s. see also n. 61. 56. Duncan, Modern Romance, 149. Duncan is alert to scott’s “tory pessimism,” grounded in a “suspicion . . . that historical mutation might be far from over or elsewhere. . . . History may mean not the unfolding of an order but sheer temporal change, carried now by impersonal and unintelligible material forces whose end is not stable cohesion but flux and loss” (ibid., 108). But “sheer temporal change” can only be a partial vision of flux in scott, who just as surely recognizes the capacity of flux itself to order culture. (Duncan takes the phrase “tory pessimism” from Robert C. Gordon, Under Which King? 213.) 57. Ibid., 166, 156. 58. A different passage from the novel, characteristic of scott’s handling of fashion, works to extend fashion beyond its ordinary limits in the historical moment he represents: “His dress was of a kind which could hardly be said to indicate his rank with certainty, for it was such as young gentlemen sometimes wore while on active exercise in the morning, and which, therefore, was imitated by those of inferior ranks, as young clerks and trades-

Notes to Pages 230–237

327

men, because its cheapness rendered it attainable, while it approached more nearly to the apparel of youths of fashion than any other which the manners of the times permitted them to wear” (HM, 109). As with Jeanie Deans, scott here gravitates toward an exceptional situation where fashionability comes within the grasp even of persons of “inferior ranks.” 59. In France, for instance, the Dictionnaire universal de commerce observed in the mid-eighteenth century, “there is nothing that resembles so much the abuse of nomenclature in natural history, as that of the fashion merchant . . . ; the least little difference in an outfit, alters or changes, for fashion merchants, the denomination of an outfit” (quoted in Crowston, 162–63). 60. At scott’s estate of Abbotsford, Flora Macdonald’s pocketbook came to share physical space with the door of the edinburgh tolbooth itself, which had been salvaged and presented to scott in 1817 when the “Heart of Midlothian” was torn down. 61. Leah Price observes how “the Waverley Novels’ ridicule of women readers like . . . Martha Buskbody . . . never prevented readers from reducing [the novels] to raw material for ladies’ gifts,” although the examples and formats of the gift books Price cites are mainly Victorian rather than contemporaneous with scott’s creative peak, when the pocketbook was still the relevant generic form (Anthology, 66). 62. the timeline does not accord with the 1805 date scott himself gave for the starting point of Waverley’s composition, but the 1809 date nicely fits Garside’s informed suspicion that 1808–10 was more likely the true moment when Waverley began (“Dating Waverley’s early Chapters”). 63. scott’s own favorite Waverley Novel, The Antiquary (1816), directly invokes two women’s pocketbooks. scott’s alter ego, the antiquary Jonathan oldbuck, flings aside the women’s pocketbook of his niece for a bauble; and oldbuck’s sister Griselda in 1794 still “rustle[s] in silks and satins, and b[ears] upon her head a structure resembling the fashion in the ladies’ memorandum-book for the year 1770” (55). see my essay “Pennant’s Guillotine and scott’s Antiquary.” 64. Maxwell scott and Gibb, Abbotsford, 44. the fuller description is as follows: “the pocket-book, which when shut measures 4 ½ by 6 inches, is embroidered with wool on canvas, and bound with faded ribbons. It is lined with rose-pink sarcenet, and most likely the ribbon was of the same colour. It has four pockets for letters, very ingeniously contrived, and fastened together with a rounded flap, tied by a thin, purplish-coloured ribbon. the book is embroidered in a zigzag pattern, in various colours” (ibid.). 65. on this craze, driven by a limited-edition Missoni collection designed for target stores, see stephanie Clifford, “Demand at target for Fashion Line Crashes Web site,” New York Times, 13 september 2011. 66. I cite from elisabeth Bronfen and Christiane Frey in their account of the “poetics of seriality” in a workshop prospectus. 67. Duncan, Scott’s Shadow, xiv. 68. evans, Fashion at the Edge, 89. 69. Barthes, Fashion System, 301, my emphasis. 70. Malcolm Barnard, Fashion Theory, 186. 71. Barthes, Fashion System, 301–3. A common technique, Barthes adds, is to forge “the excessive vagueness of a décor (as opposed to the clarity of the garment), enlarged like a photographic dream” (303).

328

Notes to Pages 238–242 chapter 6. WIllIaM GodWIn and the objects oF hIstorIcal FIctIon

Note to epigraph: Godwin, Political and Philosophical Writings, 6:6. Hereafter abbreviated P and cited parenthetically by volume and page number. 1. Hazlitt, Spirit, 31. Hazlitt’s “contemporary portrait” project in The Spirit of the Age, a series of sketches of the epoch’s most remarkable individuals, did for the Romantic moment something like what Granger’s Biographical History had done for many prior english epochs, but via ekphrastic writing rather than literal portrait images. see my Chapter 2 as well as Chandler, England in 1819, 81. 2. After Caleb Williams (1794), Godwin’s novels included St. Leon (1799), Fleetwood (1805), Mandeville (1817), Cloudesley (1830), and Deloraine (1833); but in literary history Godwin comes down to us largely as the author of Political Justice and of Caleb Williams (and as the ambiguously talented member of an extraordinary literary family). 3. Barbauld, Selected, 414–15. 4. Most conspicuous were the works of Maria edgeworth and sydney owenson, whose fictions of Celtic peripheries clearly influenced the plot and form of Waverley (in which a young english traveler encounters the romantic scottish Highlands). 5. Jameson, Postmodernism, ix. 6. this exchange was published for the first time in 2011. see Clemit, “Commerce of Luminaries.” Hereafter abbreviated “C” and cited parenthetically by page number. the turn to historical representation in Godwin’s career was evident in his collection of essays The Enquirer (1797) and in his unpublished essay “of History and Romance” (composed in the same year of 1797), and quickly issued in St. Leon itself. 7. this is the same plan through which samuel taylor Coleridge received a better remembered annuity of £150 in 1798. 8. on Wedgwood’s queen’s ware in the scottish Highlands, see my Chapter 2. 9. on the wider relevance of Wedgwood’s refabrication of antiquity for Romantic aesthetics, see chapter five in Cox, Poetry and Politics. 10. the Wedgwood legacy was charged with ambiguous suggestions about the place of fashionable commodities in projects of political change. Wedgwood produced the foremost material emblem of the late 1780s and 1790s in Britain, an abolitionist design of a kneeling slave pleading, “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” Notably, this emblem raised the problem of gift-giving in a dramatic way. As Lynn Festa emphasizes, it was crucial that the original Wedgwood cameo was freely distributed by committee rather than sold, for the alternative would have risked “infelicitous parallels”—an ominous repetition in which purchasers bought and sold the enchained slave depicted upon it (Sentimental Figures of Empire, 165). thomas Clarkson notes that in this case fashion, “which usually confines itself to worthless things, was seen for once in the honourable office of promoting the cause of justice, humanity, and freedom.” In the same moment, Clarkson recalls Cowper’s abolitionist poem “the Negro’s Complaint,” which was distributed as a “subject for Conversation at the tea table,” where slave-produced sugar was consumed in Wedgwood wares (History of the African SlaveTrade, 1:191–92). 11. Clemit explains, “the lighter, portable model (with a fold-out writing desk) was developed in 1795 by Watt’s son . . . . For the next ten years or so, Godwin used the copying machine to make wet-transfer duplicates of outgoing letters. these machine-made copies

Notes to Pages 242–247

329

provide the sole surviving texts of many important letters” (“C,” 264). the Lunar society, a Birmingham-centered group of scientists and early industrialists, included erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley, Richard Lovell edgeworth, James Watt, Matthew Boulton, and other noteworthy members. 12. Figuratively, the gift also seems like an alibi for the Wedgwood fortune that he is simultaneously passing on to Godwin (in the form of the annuity of much greater monetary value). 13. strikingly, Godwin later cribs this passage from the Enquirer for his essay “of Human Vegetation” in Thoughts on Man (1831). Here Godwin describes the state of dull “reverie”: a “species of dozing and drowsiness” that occurs in men of genius but abounds among those “occupied in any of the thousand manufactures which are the result of human ingenuity.” His examples circle around textile production and dress-related work, especially among women. such vacancy “attends the . . . laundress, the housemaid, the sempstress, the netter of purses, the knotter of fringe, the worker in tambour, tapestry, and embroidery. In all, the limbs or the fingers are employed mechanically; the attention of the mind is only required at intervals; and the thoughts remain for the most part in a state of non-excitation and repose” (P, 6:122–23). 14. Godwin, Enquirer, 31–32. Hereafter abbreviated Q and cited parenthetically by page number. 15. Amidst the imaginative backdrop of a bustling urban marketplace, Godwin substitutes doubt for Wordsworth’s faith that the “essential,” rather than the gaudy or superfluous, would constitute “the picture surviving in [the] mind” after a walk. Wordsworth was specifically criticizing the walking habits of Walter scott, who took ill-advised “inventor[ies]” of nature (Wordsworth, Complete Prose Works, 3:486). 16. Berg, 164. Almost despite himself, Godwin gives just enough detail to invite speculation about the particular object on view here. He most likely points to one of the “silverplated tea equipages centered around a tea urn [that] led novelty and fashion” by century’s end—perhaps to a luxurious knockoff of the neoclassical style that Wedgwood popularized (ibid.). But the lavish jasperware variety of urn that Wedgwood produced itself included a silver spout that could potentially be the “metal” here admired. Alternatively, during the same moment the first tea urns made of sheffield plate appeared (ca. 1785), and approximated the gleaming surface of sterling silver at a fraction of the price. Appreciation of this “metal” would emphasize the skillful application of a novel material to a complex design— an instance of what Berg describes as the consumerization of luxury itself. 17. Berg, 264. Visiting London, the Anglophilic German novelist sophie von La Roche observed the educative potential of the shopwindow: “Many a genius is assuredly awakened in this way,” as people “gai[n] an idea of the scope of human ability and industry.” La Roche also stressed the active rather than passive consumption that took place, as was evident in the “great many reflective faces, interestedly pointing out this or that object to the rest” before John Boydell’s print shop (237; see Keen, 15). 18. tilottama Rajan describes Godwin’s “oblique history,” as in his seemingly odd biographical focus upon the nephews of Milton. embracing contingency and the unknowable “tendency” of an author’s writings, Godwin recovers a “dispersion of Milton through the minutiae of the nephews’ lives.” such “rhizomic” genealogy sustains Godwin’s “nonteleological, unpredictable” sense of history (“Uncertain Futures,” 77–78).

330

Notes to Pages 247–259

19. to be sure, Godwin also makes an adamant case for right-thinking pedagogy that can foster a more advantageous “temper of mind” to combat against the disadvantages of one’s moment; this is an essential project of the essay. 20. see Hill, Picturing Scotland, 191–92. 21. Godwin, St. Leon, 351. Hereafter abbreviated SL and cited parenthetically by page number. 22. the contrast must have startled readers prompted to return to St. Leon by the earliest Waverley Novels (even as Godwin’s overt, thematic preoccupation with material display might have seemed a relevant precedent). But because St. Leon precedes Kenilworth by more than two decades, there is a risk of anachronism in attributing too much willful severity to Godwin’s novel. 23. this 1520 meeting between the monarchs of France and england took place near Calais and featured exorbitant feasting, games, and pageantry meant to solidify a recent treaty between the two nations. 24. see Anne Chandler, “Romanticizing Adolescence” and “tissue of Fables”; and Gary Handwerk, “Mapping Misogyny.” 25. see my discussion of Hume’s “of the study of History” in Chapter 3. 26. Anne Chandler, “Romanticizing Adolescence.” 27. Rousseau, Confessions, 2:334. 28. In 1804 scott criticized Godwin’s Life of Chaucer for its prolix dilation upon the wider manners of the thirteenth century. Godwin offers “twelve pages” of commentary to “as many lines” of Chaucer’s text, which becomes a mere “thread upon which to string [Godwin’s] multifarious digressions”: a disquisition on 1,300 years of London history because Chaucer was born there; a disquisition on romances because Chaucer likely read them on vacation; and a disquisition on the tenets of Rome because “Chaucer must have gone sometimes to church” (Prose Works, 17:57–59). For scott, Godwin imputes anachronistic motives “with all the liberality and contempt for congruity of the worthy squire who equipped his Vandyke portraits with modern periwigs” (17:72); and Godwin does not understand how thought is like dress: at every moment, particular in its form. Ironically, scott harshly censures Godwin’s conjectures about Chaucer’s daily life (e.g., “perhaps in the course of his legal life Chaucer saved a thief from the gallows” by his “penetration” and “able plead[ing]”)—but of course this was precisely the modus operandi of scott’s later historical fiction (quoted 17:61). 29. Lockhart’s account of the instant success of Waverley is somewhat exaggerated. In Scott’s Shadow, Duncan usefully stresses the greater popularity in scott’s own moment of Rob Roy. 30. “eight years ago,” Godwin recounts, “I began a novel. . . . When my respectable friend, the publisher of the present work, found means to put in activity the suspended faculty of fiction within me, I resolved to return to the tale which, eight years before, I had laid aside” (Mandeville, 1:vii–ix.) Hereafter abbreviated M and cited parenthetically by volume and page number. 31. Perrault’s “sleeping Beauty” was published in France as part of Histoires ou Contes du Temps passé, avec des moralitez: ou, Contes de ma Mère l’Oye (1697) and translated into english in 1729 as part of Histories, or Tales of Past Times. 32. Perrault, Histories (1741), 46–47. 33. Perrault, Histories (1729), 7, my emphasis.

Notes to Pages 259–262

331

34. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, 363. 35. Notably, Godwin had long ago turned Gibbon’s own awareness on its head by refusing to exempt his historiography from the sway of contemporary commerce. Godwin’s parodic Herald of Literature pondered Gibbon’s future fate after “the rage of fashion” presently causing the “macaroni” to seek out his history subsided (P, 5:39). 36. this may also be a silent disavowal of St. Leon itself. the novel is not only internally episodic but also approximates Godwin’s amnesiac “sleeping-waking personage” in its larger, meta-episodic frame, as suggested by the passing of the philosopher’s stone from the stranger to st. Leon—from one possessor of its secrets to the next (in a way akin to the “regeneration” conceit of the television series Doctor Who). 37. Compare the passage I reference in Chapter 4, n. 23. 38. scott, Prose Works, 19:4–5. 39. Ibid., 19:3. 40. Quoted in Russett, 102. 41. Christensen, Romanticism at the End of History, 175. 42. We should take special note of Mandeville’s complaint within the novel about the “historian” who manages to “clothe his tale with an irresistible air of probability” (M, 3:159– 60, my emphasis). this intertextual gesture toward scott accentuates another moment when the novel characterizes Mandeville’s tutor by a provocative reference to his outdated style: “His clothes were of the cut that was worn about forty years before” (M, 1:115–16, my emphasis). Godwin marks this tutor—whose doctrinal lessons are a primary cause of Mandeville’s madness—with the same “x years hence” formula that scott deploys in subtitling Waverley, Or ’Tis Sixty Years Since. 43. on the context of commerce’s transformation of the passions, see A. o. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests and my discussion of Godwin in “the Business of War.” 44. For readers unfamiliar with the novel, a plot summary may be helpful. Godwin’s historical fiction of the english Civil War era comes to us as Charles Mandeville’s retrospective narrative of the early years of his own life. orphaned during the 1641 rebellion in Ireland, Mandeville escapes to the english estate of his uncle Audley, who has resigned himself to lifelong despair after being disappointed in love. Audley consigns the care and education of Mandeville to Rev. Hilkiah Bradford, a Presbyterian enthusiast whose ill-advised pedagogy further exacerbates the traumas of Mandeville’s infancy. tormented by inescapable memories of Ireland, as well as by the unjust taint of scandals that aggravate his outsized sense of personal pride, Mandeville repeatedly lapses into fits of madness. Mandeville is particularly devoted to his compassionate sister Henrietta, whose soothing influence capably restores Mandeville to sanity. But unbeknownst to Mandeville, his sister has fallen in love with his nemesis, Clifford, the golden boy whose triumphs continually coincide with Mandeville’s disappointments. And in the meantime, the despairing Audley and his unstable nephew make a tempting target for the schemes of Holloway, a lawyer with designs on the impressive Mandeville estate. Holloway gradually gains control first over Audley and then, following Audley’s death, over Mandeville himself. As Holloway consolidates his power over Mandeville, the friends of Henrietta and Clifford—with difficulty and against Mandeville’s wishes—convince them to marry. Driven to frenzy upon discovering his sister’s betrayal, Mandeville undertakes to wrest her from Clifford by force in order to prevent the marriage. In the resulting final skirmish, Mandeville finds that he is too late; contrary to his intelligence, the couple has already consecrated their vows. scarred a final time by

332

Notes to Pages 262–268

Clifford’s sword, much as the historical events of his time have scarred his psyche, Mandeville cuts off his narrative with little resolution. 45. In “of Refinement in the Arts,” Hume argues that the more industry and the “refined arts advance, the more sociable men become: nor is it possible, that, when enriched with science, and possessed of a fund of conversation, they should be contented to remain in solitude, or live with their fellow-citizens in that distant manner, which is peculiar to ignorant and barbarous nations. . . . It is impossible but they must feel an encrease of humanity, from the very habit of conversing together, and contributing to each other’s pleasure and entertainment” (E, 270–71). 46. Godwin, Political Justice, 1:329–30. 47. Ibid., 2:484. 48. Godwin does uphold the possibility of Bernard Mandeville as a satirist of commercial culture. If Mandeville is the “great champion of this doctrine,” Godwin insists, “It is not however easy to determine, whether he is seriously, or only ironically, the defender of the present system of society” (Political Justice, 2:484). By contrast, Hume generally dismisses the potential “distress” of luxury. More important, “in a nation, where there is no demand for such superfluities, men sink into indolence, lose all enjoyment of life, and are useless to the public” (E, 272, 280). 49. scott’s historiographical entertainments would seem to fall within the broader set of “works of amusement” that Godwin understands as “one of the modes of luxury especially cultivated in a highly civilized state and society.” these “communicat[e] impressions to the reader, even while his mind remains in a state of passiveness. He finds himself agreeably affected with fits of mirth or sorrow, and carries away the facts of the tale, at the same time that he is not called upon for the act of attention” (P, 6:124). 50. Pamela Clemit notes, “At the British Library, Godwin read widely in the memoirs and lives of leading figures of the Commonwealth period” (Godwin, Collected Novels and Memoirs, 6:vi). But Butler and Philp also rightly emphasize Godwin’s consistent pursuit of “an alternative history, a history of mentalities” not reducible to conventional practices of historiography (ibid., 1:42). 51. Robert Mayer, History and the Early English Novel, 76–77. 52. When he recounts the initial romantic encounters between Clifford and his sister, for instance, Mandeville belatedly informs us that “In this narrative . . . I have introduced many things, which did not come to my knowledge for several years afterward, but the recital of which was necessary for the perspicuity of my tale” (M, 3:247). While Mandeville thus fills in the gaps when he can, the text undermines even his belated bids for objective completeness. 53. Lockhart, “Remarks,” 275. 54. trumpener attends to the cultural-literary shift from bard to nurse as a crucial dynamic in the emergence of the Romantic historical novel: “the movement . . . involves the domestication, feminization, and popularization of tradition. the bard remembered and repeated national narratives to resist imperial occupiers; the nurse transmits culture and reconciles different classes” (212). But Mandeville withholds such reconciliation by denying the nurse any future role in Mandeville’s life, despite her heroic efforts to save him. (on Mandeville, see trumpener, 225–29.) 55. Bradford’s lessons are particularly problematic because they fail to make clear the path by which Mandeville might conform to them: Mandeville lacks a casuistical procedure

Notes to Pages 268–274

333

by which to reconcile moral imperatives with practical reality. Despite his hysteria about the exiled royal family’s vulnerability to “Jesuits and zealots” on the Continent (M, 3:41), and despite his alarmism about “the pernicious arts of the Roman priesthood” (M, 3:42), he articulates a philosophy with evident casuistical leanings: “Abstractions and generalities are subjects of our moral reasonings: . . . we are conscious of a certain elevation, which is flattering to the mind of man: but it is only through the imagination, and when we apply our reflections to an individual, when the subject upon which our thoughts are occupied, comes before us clothed in flesh and blood . . . that our passions are roused through every fibre of the heart” (M, 3:46). (on casuistry and the Romantic “historical situation,” see Chandler, England in 1819.) 56. Christensen, Lord Byron’s Strength, 5–10. Berg similarly describes a dialectic of “imitation and distinction” among manufacturers and marketers in the period that shaped a new range of consumer choices. Merchandise could be “novel, but fitted within the broad framework of style” (43). the proliferation of stylish new prints and patterns, for instance, assured that the same type of product might be offered in numerous and evolving variations calculated to induce remunerative acts of self-expression. 57. By the eighteenth-century, pedlars were not “relic[s] of the past” but “modern commercial salesmen, using large-scale advertising in the towns they visited as well as trade catalogues, and they extended credit” (Berg, 259). 58. Here, Mandeville significantly inverts Kenilworth and St. Leon alike, as the novel inhabits the lulled purchaser of the pedlar’s wares rather than the pedlar himself. 59. Lockhart, “Remarks,” 278. 60. James Kerr, Fiction Against History, 113. 61. Holloway also moonlights as a philosophical historian who “assimilate[s] everything to the laws of natural history.” In the past, “every man grasped for himself what he could, and every man oppressed his neighbor.” “Honesty was a starving quality, set up by powerful villainy for its own ease and safety,” and laws “were framed by the rich exclusively for the protection of their monopoly” (M, 3:74–76). 62. We see Holloway’s obscurity in the lacunae that Mandeville underscores, as when he wonders how Holloway keeps such complete tabs on the infuriating romance between Henrietta and Clifford: “I cannot tell how Holloway and Mallison procured their intelligence; but they seemed to be acquainted with every thing that passed” (M, 3:352). 63. Many readers have recognized in Holloway an adaptation of Glossin, the lawyervillain of scott’s Guy Mannering (1815), which Godwin read before writing Mandeville. Notably, Guy Mannering is a romance of the return of property, and particularly the portable property associated with the ellangowan estate. During Glossin’s fire-sale auction of these objects, which he hurries to liquidate before his tenuous legal hold upon the estate dissolves, the Author of Waverley interjects his disgust “to hear [the] coarse speculations and jests [of the vulgar] upon the fashions and furniture to which they are unaccustomed” (74). After a short-lived turn as commodities, and once the missing heir turns up, this moveable property is restored to the estate—and the local and family history these objects secure is thereby preserved. But as Godwin surely noticed, scott propelled his narrative by crafting a spectacle of history-imbued objects that commerce had imperiled. their novel patina took shape only against the threatening backdrop of commercial recirculation or liquidation. through his own character of Holloway, Godwin presses the paradox of the historical fictions that would introduce such objects and estates to the sway of commerce

334

Notes to Pages 274–277

in the first place. In a related argument about the legal status of property in Waverley, Wolfram schmidgen describes the novel’s treatment of the Bradwardine estate as a Burkean “ ‘volatization’ of landed property through its immersion into the real estate market and its consequent unmooring from a century-old scots entail (thus clearing the way for english possession)” (Law of Property, 192). 64. Koselleck, Futures Past, 257. 65. Romantic novels teem with similar villains who proficiently “bide their time.” the iconic supervillain of this formation is scott’s futile but frightening Jacobite, Hugh Redgauntlet. 66. Klancher explains, “all readings of Godwin that would assimilate him to the ideology of the modern authorial subject will have to contend with the end of the essay ‘of History and Romance,’ which draws back, as if by reflex, from the subject-position projected by the imagined author of the historical romance ([who must be] ‘scarcely less than divine’)” (“Republican Romance,” 162). 67. In a final historiographical flourish, the henchman Mallison describes Mandeville, now ruined by malicious rumors, as a “majestic oak” “scathed” by thunder (M, 3:121). the diagnosis links a character who figures the Romantic relationship to history to a blighted emblem of history. (see Maxwell, “Inundations of time,” especially 447 and n.57.) At the same time Mallison preemptively eulogizes Mandeville in oddly historicized terms—“Your chance for making a splendid figure, and playing an illustrious part among your contemporaries, is at an end” (M, 3:121, my emphasis)—and calls to mind a historiographical set-piece from William Robertson’s History of Charles V (1769), where the emperor orders his own funeral to take place prior to his death so that he himself can attend. Mandeville, like Godwin himself in Hazlitt’s formulation, is already dead to his own time. 68. scott’s extensive renovations of his Abbotsford house began in 1817, the year Godwin published Mandeville. Like Glossin and Holloway, scott was a lawyer whose own hold upon his estate was tenuous, due to ongoing financial uncertainty associated with the failure of the Ballantyne Press and his publisher Archibald Constable. 69. For Godwin, perhaps, scott is also the kind of fabricator suggested by the name of Mandeville. strikingly, scott applied the moniker to himself in proclaiming the Waverley Novels the work of “the greatest liar since sir John Mandeville,” author of the fantastical fourteenth-century travel narrative (Tales of the Crusaders, 1:xxv). 70. C. Kegan Paul, Godwin: Friends and Contemporaries, 2:312. 71. According to Mary shelley, Godwin commented on Gilbert stuart Newton’s “very clever” painting in progress of scott as “an hypocondriacal Dandy” (Jones, ed., Letters, 1:313). Lidia Garbin corrects Jones’s mistranscription of this 1825 letter (which has “family?” for “Dandy”) but misattributes the judgment on scott to Mary shelley, herself an enthusiastic reader of Waverley Novels (“Fortunes”). 72. I borrow some of this language of seriality from elisabeth Bronfen and Christiane Frey. 73. scott, himself bankrupt, claimed in his reply to Godwin that he was unable to help. 74. I use the “schizophrenic” metaphor guardedly, but in this case the metaphor is Godwin’s own, as implied by the psychology of his character.

Notes to Pages 278–284

335

coda Note to epigraph: Cathy Horyn, “As tom Ford Bows out, a tiff over star Power,” New York Times, March 8, 2004. 1. “A Cabinet of British Curiosities” is the work of David Hoey, the celebrated visual director of Bergdorf ’s window displays. 2. on Benjamin’s considerations of mere novelty as against more genuine interruption, see Andrew Benjamin, Style and Time. 3. McQueen’s Widows of Culloden memorably culminated in the spectral appearance of the supermodel Kate Moss in the form of a hologram projected on the runway. 4. Miles socha, “the Real McQueen,” WWD (3 April 2006): 92. 5. see “Alexander McQueen’s Controversial ‘Highland Rape’ show” (Throw Back Thursdays with Tim Blanks, style.com, 30 october 2014), which includes video footage of the show. 6. one must recognize the dangerous politics of fashion that aestheticizes too much and too quickly, but McQueen’s career suggests particular self-awareness about this problem. 7. Quoted in Bolton, Savage Beauty, 122. 8. Admittedly, in contrast to the “historical seamlessness” of McQueen’s contemporaries Vivienne Westwood and John Galliano, McQueen’s clothes deploy more “visible suture lines,” so that “the operation whereby references to the past are grafted on to contemporary garments is still fresh” (Faiers, Tartan, 268). see also evans, Fashion at the Edge. 9. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 102, and Postmodernism, ix. 10. Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 353. Ankersmit has in mind the Hegelian isolation of history proper from the periods of happiness that are history’s “blank pages.” 11. Ibid., 357. 12. Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 203, etc. 13. see Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism. 14. Ann Bermingham less hopefully accounts for modern fashion as picturesque: the expression of an aesthetic “uniquely constituted [in the eighteenth century] to serve the nascent mass-marketing needs of a developing commercial culture.” this aesthetic indexed a “femininity that embodied and responded to variety and change,” and facilitated the “exclusion of women from public art and from institutions of high culture (“Picturesque and Ready-to-Wear Femininity,” 81).

BiBliography

2

adburgham, allison. Women in Print: Writing Women and Women’s Magazines from the Restoration to the Accession of Victoria. london: george allen and Unwin, 1972. addison, Joseph. Dialogues Upon the Usefulness of Ancient Medals. london, 1726. addison, Joseph, and richard Steele. The Spectator. Edited by henry Morley. 3 vols. london: routledge, 1891. ———. The Tatler. Edited by george a. aitken. 4 vols. New york: hadley and Matthews, 1899. agnew, Jean-Christophe. Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750. New york: Cambridge University press, 1988. aikin, John, editor. The Athenaeum: A Magazine of Miscellaneous and Literary Information. 1807–9. ———. Letters from a Father to His Son, on Various Topics, relative to Literature and the Conduct of Life. 2 vols. london: J. Johnson, 1793–1800. alliston, april. Virtue’s Faults: Correspondences in Eighteenth-Century British and French Women’s Fiction. palo alto: Stanford University press, 1996. alryyes, ala. “War’s Knowledge: Descartes, hobbes, and locke.” american Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. portland, oregon. March 29, 2008. anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. revised ed. New york: Verso, 1991. ankersmit, F. r. Sublime Historical Experience. palo alto: Stanford University press, 2005. The Annual Register, or a View of the History, Politics, and Literature for the year 1761. london: J. Dodsley, 1762. arata, Stephen. “Scott’s pageants: The Example of Kenilworth.” Studies in Romanticism 40 (2001): 99. auslander, leora. Cultural Revolutions: Everyday Life and Politics in Britain, North America, and France. Berkeley: University of California press, 2009. austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. Edited by Marilyn Butler. New york: penguin, 1995. ———. Persuasion. Edited by James Kinsley and Deidre lynch. New york: oxford University press, 2008. ———. Pride and Prejudice. Edited by James Kinsley and Fiona Stafford. New york: oxford University press, 2004. Bann, Stephen. The Clothing of Clio. New york: Cambridge University press, 1984. Barbauld, anna letitia. A Legacy for Young Ladies. london: longman et al., 1826. ———. Selected Poetry and Prose. Edited by William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft. peterborough, ontario: Broadview press, 2002.

338

Bibliography

———. Selections from the Tatler, Spectator, guardian, and Freeholder. 3 vols. london: J. Johnson, 1804. Barnard, Malcolm. Fashion Theory: An Introduction. New york: routledge, 2014. Barrell, John. The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt. New haven: yale University press, 1986. Barthes, roland. The Fashion System. Berkeley: University of California press, 1990. ———. The Language of Fashion. Edited by andy Stafford and Michael Carter. New york: Berg, 2006. Batchelor, Jennie. Dress, Distress, and Desire: Clothing and the Female Body in EighteenthCentury Literature. New york: palgrave, 2005. Baucom, ian. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham: Duke University press, 2005. Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Translated by Jonathan Mayne. london: phaidon, 1964. Benhamou, reed. “Fashion in the Mercure: From human Foible to Female Failing.” EighteenthCentury Studies 31. 1 (1997): 27–43. Benjamin, andrew. Style and Time: Essays on the Politics of Appearance. Chicago: Northwestern University press, 2006. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Belknap press of harvard University press, 2002. ———. Illuminations. Edited by hannah arendt. New york: Schocken, 1968. Berg, Maxine. Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain. New york: oxford University press, 2005. Berlant, lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University press, 2011. Bermingham, ann. “The picturesque and ready-to-Wear Femininity.” in The Politics of the Picturesque, edited by Stephen Copley and peter garside, 81–119. New york: Cambridge University press, 1994. Blakley, Johanna. “lessons from Fashion’s Free Culture.” TEDxUSC. april 2010. online. Blumer, herbert. “Fashion: From Class Differentiation to Collective Selection.” Sociological Quarterly 10. 3 (1969): 275–91. Bolingbroke, henry St. John Viscount. Letters on the Study and Use of History. 2 vols. london, 1752. Bolton, andrew, ed. Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty. New york: Metropolitan Museum of art, 2011. Boswell, James. The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. in a Journey to the Western islands of Scotland and The Journal of a Tour to the hebrides, edited by peter levi. New york: penguin, 1984. ———. The Journals of James Boswell: 1762–1795. Edited by John Wain. New haven: yale University press, 1992. Braudel, Fernand. Capitalism and Material Life: 1400–1800. Translated by Miriam Kochan. london: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973. Breen, T. h. The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. New york: oxford University press, 2004. Breward, Christopher. The Culture of Fashion: A New History of Fashionable Dress. Manchester: Manchester University press, 1995.

Bibliography

339

Brewer, John, and roy porter, eds. Consumption and the World of Goods. New york: routledge, 1994. Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago press, 2003. Brownell, Morris r. Samuel Johnson’s Attitude to the Arts. New york: oxford University press, 1989. Buck, anne, and harry Matthews. “pocket guides to Fashion: ladies’ pocket Books published in England 1760–1830.” Costume 18 (1984): 35–58. Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: MiT press, 1998. Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Edited by l. g. Mitchell. New york: oxford University press, 1993. Burke, John J. “hume’s History of England: Waking the English from a Dogmatic Slumber.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 7 (1978): 235–50. Burney, Frances. Evelina. Edited by Edward a. Bloom and Vivien Jones. New york: oxford University press, 2002. Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. New york: oxford University press, 1972. Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Sprit of Modern Consumerism. Cambridge, Ma: Basil Blackwell, 1987. Campbell, Timothy. “ ‘The Business of War’: William godwin, Enmity, and historical representation.” ELH 76. 2 (2009): 343–69. ———. “Fashion, Microcosm, and romantic historical Distance.” in Rethinking Historical Distance, edited by Mark Salber phillips, Barbara Caine, and Julia adeney Thomas, 180–203. New york: palgrave, 2013. ———. “pennant’s guillotine and Scott’s antiquary.” Special issue on romantic antiquarianism. Edited by Noah heringman and Crystal B. lake. Romantic Circles Praxis (June 2014). online. Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus. Edited by Kerry McSweeney and peter Sabor. New york: oxford University press, 1999. Castle, Terry. Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction. palo alto: Stanford University press, 1986. Chandler, James. England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism. Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1998. ———. “Moving accidents: The Emergence of Sentimental probability.” in The Age of Cultural Revolutions: Britain and France, 1750– 1820, edited by Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman, 137–70. Berkeley: University of California press, 2002. Christensen, Jerome. Lord Byron’s Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society. Baltimore: Johns hopkins University press, 1993. ———. Practicing Enlightenment: Hume and the Formation of a Literary Career. Madison: University press of Wisconsin press, 1984. ———. Romanticism at the End of History. Baltimore: Johns hopkins University press, 2000. Clarkson, Thomas. The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament. 2 vols. london, 1808.

340

Bibliography

Clayton, Timothy. The English Print 1688–1802. New haven: paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British art and yale University press, 1997. Clemit, pamela. “Commerce of luminaries: Eight letters Between William godwin and Thomas Wedgwood.” in Godwinian Moments: From the Enlightenment to Romanticism, edited by robert M. Maniquis and Victoria Myers, 261–82. Toronto: University of Toronto press, 2011. Cohn, albert M. George Cruikshank: A Catalogue Raisonné. london: Bookman’s Journal, 1924. A Collection of the Dresses of Different Nations, Antient and Modern, Particularly Old English Dresses […]. published by Thomas Jefferys. 4 vols. london, 1757–1772. Collingwood, r. g. The Idea of History (1946). revised edition. New york: oxford University press, 1994. Copeland, Edward. Women Writing About Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790–1820. New york: Cambridge University press 1995. Cowper, William. The Task. london: J. Johnson, 1785. Cox, Jeffrey N. Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School. New york: Cambridge University press, 1998. Crowston, Clare haru. Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France. Durham: Duke University press, 2013. Cunnington, C. Willet, and phillis Cunnington. Handbook of English Costume in the Eighteenth Century. london: Faber and Faber, 1957. Davis, lennard. Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel. philadelphia: University of pennsylvania press, 1996. First published 1983. De Bolla, peter. The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in EighteenthCentury Britain. palo alto: Stanford University press, 2003. DeJean, Joan. The Essence of Style. New york: Free press, 2005. De Marly, Diana. “The Establishment of roman Dress in Seventeenth-Century portraiture.” Burlington Magazine 117. 868 (1975): 442–51. Diderot, Denis. Rameau’s Nephew and Other Works. Translated by Jacques Barzun and ralph h. Bowen. indianapolis: hackett, 2001. First published 1956. Donald, Diana. The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III. New haven: paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British art and yale University press, 1996. Duncan, ian. Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel. New york: Cambridge University press, 1992. ———. Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh. princeton: princeton University press, 2007. Durant, Jack D. “Sheridan’s picture auction Scene: a Study in Contexts.” EighteenthCentury Life 11. 3 (1987): 34–47. Edgeworth, Maria. The Absentee. Edited by heidi Thomson and Kim Walker. New york: penguin, 2000. ———. Belinda. Edited by Kathryn Kirkpatrick. New york: oxford University press, 1994. ———. Castle rackrent and Ennui. Edited by Marilyn Butler. New york: penguin, 1992. ———. Harrington. Edited by Susan Manly. peterborough, ontario: Broadview press, 2004.

Bibliography

341

———. The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth. general editor Marilyn Butler. 12 vols. london: pickering and Chatto, 2003. Edinburgh Annual Register. 1808–26. Evans, Caroline. Fashion at the Edge. New haven: yale University press, 2003. Faiers, Jonathan. Tartan. New york: Berg, 2008. Favret, Mary. War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime. princeton: princeton University press, 2010. Fay, Elizabeth. Fashioning Faces: The Portraitive Mode in British Romanticism. hanover, Nh: University of New hampshire press and UpNE, 2010. Ferguson, adam. An Essay on the History of Civil Society. Edited by Fania oz-Salzberger. New york: Cambridge University press, 1996. Ferris, ina. The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels. ithaca: Cornell University press, 1991. ———. “ ‘on the Borders of oblivion’: Scott’s historical Novel and the Modern Time of the remnant.” MLQ 70.4 (2009): 473–94. ———. The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland. New york: Cambridge University press, 2002. Festa, lynn. Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France. Baltimore: Johns hopkins University press, 2006. Flügel, J. C. The Psychology of Clothes. No. 18 of The International Psycho-Analytic Library. Edited by John D. Sutherland. london: hogarth press, 1930; 1966. Fordham, Douglas. “allan ramsay’s Enlightenment: or, hume and the patronizing portrait.” Art Bulletin 88.3 (2006): 508–24. ———. “Costume Dramas: British art at the Court of the Marathas.” Representations 101 (2008): 57–85. France, peter, editor. New Oxford Companion to Literature in France. New york: oxford University press, 1995. galperin, William. The Historical Austen. philadelphia: University of pennsylvania press, 2005. galt, John. The Life and Studies of Benjamin West. 2 vols. london: Cadell and Davies, 1816, 1820. gamer, Michael. “Maria Edgeworth and the romance of real life.” NOVEL 34.2 (2001): 232–66. ———. “Waverley and the object of (literary) history.” MLQ 70.4 (2009): 495–525. garbin, lidia. “The Fortunes of perkin Warbeck: Walter Scott in the Writings of Mary Shelley.” Romanticism on the Net 6 (1997). garside, peter. “Dating Waverley’s Early Chapters.” Bibliothek 13 (1986): 61–81. ———. “The Significance of the Corvey.” The Corvey Project. online. garside, peter, James raven, and rainer Schöwerling. The English Novel 1770–1829: A Bibliographic Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles. 2 vols. New york: oxford University press, 2000. gerard, alexander. An Essay on Taste. london, 1759. ———. An Essay on Taste. 3rd ed. london, 1780. gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Edited by David Womersley. New york: penguin, 2000.

342

Bibliography

godwin, William. Caleb Williams. Edited by Maurice hindle. london: penguin, 1988. ———. Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin. Edited by Mark philp. 8 vols. london: pickering and Chatto, 1992. ———. The Enquirer. london, 1797. ———. Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. 2 vols. london, 1796. ———. Mandeville: A Tale of the Seventeenth Century in England. 3 vols. Edinburgh: archibald Constable and Co., 1817. ———. The Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin. 7 vols. Edited by Mark philp. london: pickering and Chatto, 1993. ———. St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century. Edited by William Brewer. peterborough, ontario: Broadview press, 2005. goodman, Kevis. Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism. New york: Cambridge University press, 2004. gordon, robert C. Under Which King? A Study of the Scottish Waverley Novels. Edinburgh: oliver & Boyd, 1969. granger, James. A Biographical History of England. 2nd ed. 4 vols. london, 1775. grieg, hannah. The Beau Monde: Fashionable Society in Georgian London. New york: oxford University press, 2013. grimm, Friedrich Melchior. Historical and Literary Memoirs, Selected from the Correspondence of Baron de Grimm and Diderot. 4 vols. 2nd ed. london: henry Colburn, 1815. hamnett, Brian. The Historical Novel in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Representations of Reality in History and Fiction. New york: oxford University press, 2011. handwerk, gary. “Mapping Misogyny: godwin’s Fleetwood and the Staging of rousseauvian Education.” Studies in Romanticism 41.3 (2002): 375–98. hartley, lodwick. “Johnson, reynolds, and the Notorious Streaks of the Tulip again.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 8.3 (1975): 329–36. haulman, Kate. The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America. Chapel hill: University of North Carolina press, 2011. hazlitt, William. Complete Works of William Hazlitt. Edited by p. p. howe. 21 vols. Toronto: J. M. Dent, 1930. ———. Lectures on the English Comic Writers. New york: Everyman’s library, 1963. ———. Selected Essays of William Hazlitt. Edited by geoffrey Keynes. london: Nonesuch press, 1970. ———. Sketches and Essays. london: John Templeman, 1839. ———. The Spirit of the Age. london: henry Colburn, 1825; Menston, England: Scolar press, 1971. hill, richard J. Picturing Scotland Through the Waverley Novels. Burlington, Vt.: ashgate, 2010. hilson, J. C. “hume: The historian as Man of Feeling.” in Augustan Worlds: New Essays in Eighteenth Century Literature: Essays in Honour of R. A. Humphreys, edited by J. C. hilson, M. M. B. Jones, and J. r. Watson, 205–22. leicester: leicester University press, 1978. hirschman, a. o. The Passions and the Interests: Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph. princeton: princeton University press, 1997. hollander, anne. Seeing Through Clothes. New york: Viking press, 1978. ———. Sex and Suits. New york: Knopf, 1995.

Bibliography

343

hopkins, lisa. “Clothes and the Body of the Knight: The Making of Men in Sir Walter Scott’s The Talisman.” Wordsworth Circle 27.1 (1996): 21–24. hume, David. Essays Moral, Political, and Literary. Edited by Eugene F. Miller. indianapolis: liberty Fund, 1985. ———. The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688. 6 vols. indianapolis: liberty Fund, 1983. ———. The Letters of David Hume. Edited by J. y. T. grieg. 2 vols. oxford: oxford University press, 1932. ———. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by Ernest C. Mossner. New york: penguin, 1985. humphrey, richard. Scott: Waverley. landmarks of World literature Series. New york: Cambridge University press, 1993. hunt, leigh, ed. Leigh Hunt’s London Journal. 1834–35. hunt, lynn, Margaret C. Jacob, and Wijnand Wijnhardt. The Book that Changed Europe: Picart & Bernard’s religious Ceremonies of the World. Cambridge: Belknap press, 2010. hunter, J. paul. “ ‘News, and New Things’: Contemporaneity and the Early English Novel.” Critical Inquiry 14.3 (1988): 493–515. hurd, richard. Letters on Chivalry and Romance. london, 1762. ———. Moral and Political Dialogues. london: a. Millar, 1759. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. ithaca: Cornell University press, 1981. ________. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University press, 1992. ________. “reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” Social Text 1 (1979): 130–48. Jay, Martin. Marxism and Totality. Berkeley: University of California press, 1984. Jensen, Kristian. Revolution and the Antiquarian Book. New york: Cambridge University press, 2011. Johnson, Samuel. The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia: A Tale. Edited by r. W. Chapman. oxford: Clarendon press, 1927. ———. The Idler. 2 vols. london, 1761. Jones, ann rosalind, and peter Stallybrass. Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. New york: Cambridge University press, 2000. Jones, Frederick l., editor. Letters of Mary W. Shelley. 2 vols. Norman: University of oklahoma press, 1946. Jones, Jennifer M. “repackaging rousseau: Femininity and Fashion in old regime France.” French Historical Studies 18. 4 (1994): 939–67. ———. Sexing La Mode: Gender, Fashion and Commercial Culture in Old Regime France. New york: Berg, 2004. Kalter, Barrett. Modern Antiques: The Material Past in England, 1660–1780. lewisburg, pa: Bucknell University press, 2012. Keen, paul. Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity. New york: Cambridge University press, 2012. Kerr, James. Fiction Against History: Scott as Storyteller. New york: Cambridge University press, 1989. Keymer, Thomas. Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel. New york: oxford University press, 2003.

344

Bibliography

Klancher, Jon. “godwin and the republican romance: genre, politics, and Contingency in Cultural history.” MLQ 56.2 (1995): 145–65. Koselleck, reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated by Keith Tribe. Cambridge: MiT press, 1985. ———. The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Translated by Todd Samuel presner et al. palo alto: Stanford University press, 2002. Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth. Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century. New york: Columbia University press, 1997. Kramnick, Jonathan. Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770. New york: Cambridge University press, 1999. Kuchta, David. The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England 1550–1850. Berkeley: University of California press, 2002. Kwass, Michael. “Big hair: a Wig history of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France.” American Historical Review 111.3 (2006): 631–59. la roche, Sophie von. Sophie in London 1786. Translated by Clare Williams. london: Jonathan Cape, 1933. lee, Sophia. The Recess. Edited by april alliston. lexington: University of Kentucky press, 2000. lehmann, Ulrich. Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity. Cambridge: MiT press, 2000. lemire, Beverly. “Fashioning Cotttons: asian Trade, Domestic industry, and Consumer Demand, 1660–1780.” in Cambridge History of Western Textiles, edited by David Jenkins, 2 vols, 1:493–512. New york: Cambridge University press, 2003. ———. Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660–1800. New york: oxford University press, 1992. levine, Joseph M. Humanism and History: Origins of Modern English Historiography. ithaca: Cornell University press, 1987. leyopoldt, günter. “a Neoclassical Dilemma in Sir Joshua reynolds’s reflections on art.” British Journal of Aesthetics 39. 4 (1999): 330–49. lilti, antoine. “The Writing of paranoia: Jean-Jacques rousseau and the paradoxes of Celebrity.” Representations 103 (2008): 53–83. lipovetsky, gilles. The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy. Translated by Catherine porter. princeton: princeton University press, 1994. First published 1987. livingston, Donald W. Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1998. locke, John. The Works of John Locke. 12th ed. 9 vols. london: rivington, 1824. lockhart, John gibson. Memoirs of the Life of Walter Scott. 2nd ed. 10 vols. Edinburgh: robert Cadell, 1839. ———. “remarks on godwin’s New Novel, Mandeville.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 2 (December 1817): 268–79. loftis, John. Sheridan and the Drama of Georgian England. oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976. lovell, Margaretta M. “Copley and the Case of the Blue Dress.” Yale Journal of Criticism 11.1 (1998): 53–67. löwy, Michael. “Naphta or Settembrini?—lukács and romantic anticapitalism.” in George Lukács: Theory, Culture and Politics, edited by Judith Marcus and Zoltán Tarr, 189–206. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1989. lukács, georg. The Historical Novel. Translated by hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell. New york: humanities press, 1965.

Bibliography

345

lynch, Deidre Shauna. “ ‘Beating the Track of the alphabet’: Samuel Johnson, Tourism, and the aBCs of Modern authority.” ELH 57. 2 (1990): 357–405. ———. The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1998. Macaulay, Thomas Babington. Critical and Historical Essays. 2 vols. london: J. M. Dent, 1907. Mack, ruth. Literary Historicity: Literature and Experience in Eighteenth-Century Britain. palo alto: Stanford University press, 2008. Mackie, Erin. “libertine Fiction, Forensic Fashion, and the Dandy’s Development in Edward Bulwer’s Pelham.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 27.2 (2015): 285–306. ———. Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in The Tatler and The Spectator. Baltimore: Johns hopkins University press, 1997. Mackintosh, James. review of Mandeville. Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany, New Series 2 (January 1818): 57–65. Mandeville, Bernard. The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits. london, 1724. online. Manning, David, and Martin postle, eds. Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings. New haven: paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British art and yale University press, 2000. Manning, peter J. “Detaching lamb’s Thoughts.” Prose Studies 25.1 (2002): 137–46. Marx, Karl. Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Translated by Daniel De leon. Chicago: Charles h. Kerr and Co., 1907. Maxwell, richard. The Historical Novel in Europe, 1650–1950. New york: Cambridge University press, 2009. ———. “inundations of Time: a Definition of Scott’s originality.” ELH 68.2 (2001): 419–68. ———. “pretenders in Sanctuary.” MLQ 61.2 (2000): 287–358. Maxwell, richard, and Katie Trumpener, eds. Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period. New york: Cambridge University press, 2008. Maxwell Scott, Mary Monica and William gibb. Abbotsford: The Personal Relics and Antiquarian Treasures of Sir Walter Scott. london: adam and Charles Black, 1893. Mayer, robert. History and the Early English Novel. New york: Cambridge University press, 1997. McCalman, iain. “Newgate in revolution: radical Enthusiasm and romantic Counterculture.” Eighteenth-Century Life 22.1 (1998): 95–110. McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of Enlightenment. Baltimore: Johns hopkins University press, 2008. McCracken-Flesher, Caroline. Possible Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow. New york: oxford University press, 2005. McCreery, Cindy. The Satirical Gaze: Prints of Women in Late Eighteenth-Century England. New york: oxford University press, 2004. Mcgann, Jerome. “Walter Scott’s romantic postmodernity.” in Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, edited by leith David, ian Duncan, and Janet Sorenson, 113–29. New york: Cambridge University press, 2004. McKendrick, Neil, John Brewer, and J. h. plumb. The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England. Bloomington: indiana University press, 1982.

346

Bibliography

Moore, Doris langley. Fashion Through Fashion Plates 1771–1970. london: Ward lock, 1971. Morretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, and Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. New york: Verso, 2007. Mui, hoh-Cheung, and lorna h. Mui. Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth-Century England. Montreal: Mcgill-Queen’s University press, 1989. Mullan, John, and Christopher reid. Eighteenth-Century Popular Culture: A Selection. New york: oxford University press, 1997. Myrone, Martin. Bodybuilding: Reforming Masculinities in British Art, 1750–1810. New haven: paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British art and yale University press, 2006. Nevison, John l. “origin and Early history of the Fashion plate.” United States National Museum Bulletin 250 (1967): 65–92. Noggle, James. The Temporality of Taste in Eighteenth-Century British Writing. New york: oxford University press, 2012. Nordberg, Kathryn, and Sandra rosenbaum, eds. Fashion Prints in the Age of Louis XIV: Interpreting the Art of Elegance. lubbock: Texas Tech University press, 2014. Norman, larry. The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early Modern France. Chicago: University of Chicago press, 2011. Northcote, James. Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds. 2 vols. london: henry Colburn, 1819. Norton, David Fate, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Hume. New york: Cambridge University press, 1993. o’Connell, Sheila. London 1753. Boston: David r. godine, 2003. oliver, Kathleen. Samuel Richardson, Dress, and Discourse. New york: palgrave, 2008. oxberry, William. Kenilworth: A Melo-Drama. london: Simpkin and Marshall, 1824. paul, C. Kegan. William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries. 2 vols. london: henry S. King, 1876. paulson, ronald. Representations of Revolution. New haven: yale University press, 1983. penny, Nicholas, ed. Reynolds. New york: harry N. abrams, 1986. perrault, Charles. Histories, or Tales of Passed Times. london, 1741. ———. Histories, or Tales of Past Times. london, 1729. perry, gill. “Women in Disguise: likeness, the grand Style and the Conventions of ‘Feminine’ portraiture in the Work of Sir Joshua reynolds.” in Femininity and Masculinity in Eighteenth Century Art and Culture, edited by gill perry and Michael rossington, 18–40. Manchester: Manchester University press, 1994. phillips, Mark Salber. Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740– 1820. princeton: princeton University press, 1999. pinch, adela. Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen. palo alto: Stanford University press, 1996. planché, James robinson. History of British Costume. london: Charles Knight, 1834. ———. Recollections and Reflections of J. R. Planché: A Professional Autobiography. 2 vols. london: Tinsley Brothers, 1872. pocock, J. g. a. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. princeton: princeton University press, 1975. ———. Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History. New york: Cambridge University press, 1985. pointon, Marcia. Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England. New haven: yale University press, 1993.

Bibliography

347

postle, Martin. Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Subject Pictures. Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 1995. preyer, David C. The Berlin Galleries: Giving a History of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum with a Critical Description of the Paintings Therein Contained. Boston: St. Botolph Society, 1912. price, leah. The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot. New york: Cambridge University press, 2000. priestley, Joseph. Chart of Biography. london: J. Johnson, 1765. prince, Michael B. Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment. New york: Cambridge University press, 1996. purdy, Daniel l. The Tyranny of Elegance: Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Goethe. Baltimore: Johns hopkins University press, 1998. rajan, Tilottama. “Uncertain Futures: history and genealogy in William godwin’s The Lives of Edward and John Philips, Nephews and Pupils of Milton.” Milton Quarterly 32.3 (1998): 75–86. ramsay, allan. A Dialogue on Taste. 2nd ed. london, 1762. rawson, Claude. Satire and Sentiment, 1660–1830. New york: Cambridge University press, 2000. First published 1994. repton, humphry. Variety: A Collection of Essays. Written in the Year 1787. london: T. Cadell, 1788. reynolds, Joshua. Discourses on Art. Edited by robert r. Wark. New haven: paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British art and yale University press, 1997. ribeiro, aileen. The Art of Dress: Fashion in England and France 1750 to 1820. New haven: yale University press, 1995. ———. “Muses and Mythology: Classical Dress in British Eighteenth-Century Female portraiture.” in Defining Dress: Dress as Object, Meaning and Identity, edited by amy de la haye and Elizabeth Wilson, 104–13. New york: Manchester University press, 1999. ———. “Some Evidence of the influence of the Dress of the Seventeenth Century on Costume in Eighteenth-Century Female portraiture.” Burlington Magazine 119.897 (1977): 832, 834–40. richardson, Jane, and alfred Kroeber. “Three Centuries of Women’s Dress Fashions: a Quantitative analysis.” University of California Anthropological Records 5.2 [1940]: i–iv, 111–53. richardson, Jonathan. An Essay on the Theory of Painting. london, 1715. rigney, ann. The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move. New york: oxford University press, 2012. robinson, Mary. Selected Poems. Edited by Judith pascoe. peterborough, ontario: Broadview press, 2000. roche, Daniel. The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the Ancien Régime. Translated by Jean Birrell. New york: Cambridge University press, 1994 (1989). rohrbach, Emily. “anna Barbauld’s history of the Future.” European Romantic Review 17 (2006): 179–87. rosenthal, Margaret F., and ann rosalind Jones. Clothing of the Renaissance World. New york: Thames and hudson, 2008. rothstein, Natalie, ed. Barbara Johnson’s Album of Fashions and Fabrics. New york: Thames and hudson, 1987.

348

Bibliography

rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, … Part the Second. 3 vols. london, 1790. ———. A Letter from M. Rousseau, of Geneva, to M. D’Alembert, of Paris, Concerning the Effects of Theatrical Entertainments on the Manners of Mankind. london, 1759. rovee, Christopher. Imagining the Gallery: The Social Body of British Romanticism. palo alto: Stanford University press, 2006. russett, Margaret. De Quincey’s Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission. New york: Cambridge University press, 1997. St. Clair, William. “The political Economy of reading.” John Coffey Memorial lecture in the history of the Book. University of london, 2005. ———. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. New york: Cambridge University press, 2004. Schmidgen, Wolfram. Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property. New york: Cambridge University press, 2002. Schoch, richard W. Shakespeare’s Victorian Stage: Performing History in the Theatre of Charles Kean. New york: Cambridge University press, 1998. Scott, Walter. The Antiquary. Edited by Nicola Watson. New york: oxford University press, 2009. ———. Guy Mannering. Edited by p. D. garside. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University press, 1999. ———. Heart of Midlothian. Edited by Clair lamont. New york: oxford University press, 1982. ———. Ivanhoe. Edited by graham Tulloch. New york: penguin, 2000. ———. Kenilworth. Edited by J. h. alexander. New york: penguin, 1999. ———. Miscellaneous Prose Works. 28 vols. Edinburgh: Cadell and Co., 1834–36. ———. Old Mortality. Edited by Douglas S. Mack. New york: penguin, 1999. ———. Tales of the Crusaders. 4 vols. Edinburgh: Constable and Co., 1825. ———. Waverley, or ’Tis Sixty Years Since. Edited by Claire lamont. New york: oxford University press, 1986. Shelley, percy. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Edited by Donald h. reiman and Sharon B. powers. New york: Norton, 1977. Sheridan, richard Brinsley. The School for Scandal and Other Plays. Edited by Michael Cordner. New york: oxford University press, 1998. Sherman, Stuart. Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785. Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1997. Shesgreen, Sean, ed. The Criers and Hawkers of London: Engravings and Drawings by Marcellus Laroon. aldershot: Scolar press, 1990. ———. Images of the Outcast: The Urban Poor in the Cries of London. Manchester: Manchester University press, 2002. Simmel, georg. Simmel on Culture. Edited by David Frisby and Mike Featherstone. Thousand oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997. Siskin, Clifford. The Historicity of Romantic Discourse. New york: oxford University press, 1988. Slauter, Eric. “Craft and objecthood.” Early American Literature 39.2 (2004): 363–78. Smith, adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Edited by D. D. raphael and a. l. Macfie. Vol. 1 of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith. 7 vols. indianapolis: liberty Fund, 1982.

Bibliography

349

Smith, Chloe Wigston. “Dressing the British: Clothes, Customs, and Nation in W. h. pyne’s The Costume of Great Britain.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 38 (2009): 143–71. ———. Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel. New york: Cambridge University press, 2013. Smollett, Tobias. Adventures of Peregrine Pickle. Edited by John p. Zomchick and g. S. rousseau. Works of Tobias Smollett. athens: University of georgia press, 2014. Solkin, David, ed. Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House. New haven: yale University press, 2001. Solkin, David. “great pictures or great Men? reynolds, Male portraiture, and the power of art.” Oxford Art Journal 9.2 (1986): 42–49. Steedman, Carolyn. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History. New Brunswick, N.J.: rutgers University press, 2002. Stephens, Frederic george, and M. Dorothy george, eds. Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. 11 vols. london: British Museum, 1978. Sterne, laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Edited by Melvyn New. New york: penguin, 1997. Stevens, anne h. British Historical Fiction Before Scott. New york: palgrave, 2010. ———. “Sophia lee’s illegitimate history.” Eighteenth-Century Novel 3 (2003): 263–91. ———. “Tales of other Times: a Survey of British historical Fiction, 1770–1812.” Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic Text 7 (2001). online. Stewart, Dugald. “account of the life and Writings of William robertson.” in The Works of William Robertson. 12 vols. london: Cadell and Davies, 1817. Strutt, Joseph. Horda Angel-Cynnan: or A Compleat View of the Manners, Customs, Arms, Habits &c. of the Inhabitants of England. 3 vols. london, 1774–76. Styles, John. The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England. New haven: yale University press, 2008. Sunderland, John. “Samuel Johnson and history painting.” in The Virtuoso Tribe of Arts and Sciences: Studies in the Eighteenth Century Work and Membership of the London Society of Arts. Edited by D. g. C. allan and John l. abbott. athens: University of georgia press, 1992. reprinted from Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 134 (1986): 834–41. Sussman, Charlotte. Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery, 1713–1833. palo alto: Stanford University press, 2000. Sweet, rosemary. Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain. New york: hambledon and london, 2004. ———. “antiquaries and antiquities in Eighteenth-Century England.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 34.2 (2001): 181–206. Takanashi, Kyoko. “Circulation, Monuments, and the politics of Transmission in Sir Walter Scott’s Tales of My landlord.” ELH 79.2 (2012): 289–314. Tave, Stuart M. Some Words of Jane Austen. Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1973. Thompson, E. p. Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture. New york: New press, 1993. Tierney-hynes, rebecca. “hume, romance, and the Unruly imagination.” SEL 47.3 (2007): 641–658.

350

Bibliography

Trevor-roper, hugh. “The invention of Tradition: The highland Tradition of Scotland.” in The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric hobsbawm and Terence ranger, 15–41. New york: Cambridge University press, 1983. Trumpener, Katie. Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire. princeton: princeton University press, 1997. Underwood, Ted. Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies. palo alto: Stanford University press, 2013. Valenza, robin. “Editing the Self: David hume’s Narrative Theory.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 43.2 (2002): 137–60. Vickery, amanda. The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England. New haven: yale University press, 1998. Wahrman, Dror. The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England. New haven: yale University press, 2006. Wall, Cynthia. “ ‘Chasms in the Story’: Sophia lee’s The Recess and David hume’s History of England.” in Imagining Selves: Essays in Honor of Patricia Meyer Spacks, edited by rivka Swenson and Elise lauterbach, 21–40. Newark: University of Delaware press, 2008. ———. “The English auction: Narratives of Dismantlings.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 31.1 (1997): 1–25. ———. The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago press, 2006. Walpole, horace. Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence. Edited by W. S. lewis. 48 vols. New haven: yale University press, 1937–1983. Warner, William. Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684– 1750. Berkeley: University of California press, 1998. Warton, Thomas. Observations on the Faerie Queene of Spenser. london: r. and J. Dodsley, 1754. Waterhouse, Ellis. Painting in Britain 1530–1790. 5th ed. New haven: yale University press, 1994. Weinbrot, howard D. “The reader, the general, and the particular: Johnson and imlac in Chapter Ten of Rasselas.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 5.1 (1971): 80–96. Wertz, S. K. “Collingwood’s Understanding of hume.” Hume Studies 20.2 (1994): 261–87. Wheeler, roxann. The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture. philadelphia: University of pennsylvania press, 2000. Wiesenthal, Christine S. “representation and Experimentation in the Major Comedies of richard Brinsley Sheridan.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 25.3 (1992): 309–30. Williams, raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. revised ed. New york: oxford University press, 1983. Wind, Edgar. Hume and the Heroic Portrait: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Imagery. Edited by Jaynie anderson. oxford: Clarendon press, 1986. ———. “The revolution of history painting.” Journal of the Warburg Institute 2.2 (1938): 116–27. Wood, gillen D’arcy. The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760–1860. New york: palgrave, 2001. Woolf, D. r. Reading History in Early Modern England. New york: Cambridge University press, 2001.

Bibliography

351

Wordsworth, William. Complete Prose Works. Edited by alexander B. grosart. 3 vols. london: Edward Moxon, 1876. Wrigley, richard. Representations of Dress in Revolutionary France. New york: Berg, 2002. yang, Chi-Ming. “Virtue’s Vogues: Eastern authenticity and the Commodification of Chinese-ness on the 18th-Century Stage.” Comparative Literature Studies 39.4 (2002): 326–46. young, agnes Brooks. Recurring Cycles of Fashion, 1760–1937. New york: harper and Brothers, 1937. Zaretsky, robert, and John T. Scott. The Philosophers’ Quarrel. New haven: yale University press, 2009. Zimmerman, Everett. The Boundaries of Fiction: History and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel. ithaca: Cornell University press, 1996.

Index

2

Addison, Joseph, 18, 89, 146, 190; Barbauld on, 43–45, 292n.21; Dialogues on Ancient Medals, 85–89; Hazlitt on, 292n.23; Tatler and Spectator, 18, 43–48, 199, 211, 292n.23, 293n.40, 296n.81, 299n.16 Adorno, Theodor, 218, 325n.40 affect. See feeling; trauma Aikin, John, 38, 43, 316n.19 Ainsworth, William Harrison, 66–67, 296n.79; and Cruikshank, 296n.78 albums, 66–67, 85, 300n.21 Alliston, April, 180–181, 183, 316n.30 almanacs. See pocketbooks Americas, 18–19, 37, 39, 40, 46, 49–50, 288n.29, 289n.46, 291n.12 Ames, Joseph, 89, 300n.32 anachronism, 3, 22, 56, 97, 134–135, 253–254, 287n.26; and Scott, 56, 74–75, 206, 214–215, 218–222, 322n.5 Ankersmit, F. R., 283–284, 335n.10 “annualization,” 56–67, 69, 106–107, 286n.12 anthology, 38, 94, 174, 316n.29, 322n.12 antiquarianism. See historiography antiques, 120–121, 308n.115, 325n.43; the “modern antique,” 19–20, 116, 289n.48 antiquity, 12, 190–191, 297n.93, 302n.45, 303n.48, 308n.115, 318n.49, 325n.43; Addison on, 87–90; “ancients and moderns,” 19, 55, 59, 83–84, 116, 167, 258, 304n.59, 305n.65; Benjamin on, 148, 291n.3; and historiography, 135–139, 259, 266–268; and Hume, 133–136; neoclassical, 19, 78–79, 113, 121, 242, 329n.16; and Reynolds, 93–95, 97, 110–113, 303n.48–49; and Scott, 166–167, 298n.98, 323n.24 arts: and contingency of taste, 20, 289n.53, 313n.69; civic value of, 96; and historical costume, 204–205; and mimesis, 301n.37,

302n.43; and commercial refinement, 44, 137, 263, 321n.1, 332n.45 auction, 297n.86, 333n.63; in Sheridan, 114–119, 307n.95–96, 308n.106 Auslander, Leora, 19 Austen, Jane, 168, 297n.97, 316n.30; Northanger Abbey, 69–73, 297n.95; Persuasion, 210, 297n.91, 322n.20, 323n.21; Pride and Prejudice, 317n.45 Ballantyne, James: Ballantyne Press, 316n.29, 322n.12, 334n.68; on Scott’s Waverley, 73, 298n.98 Bann, Stephen, 325n.41, 325n.43 Barbauld, Anna Letitia: “Comparison of Manners,” 38, 41–46; Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, 37–41, 45–46, 69, 291n.12; on Godwin, 238–239; and the gothic, 316n.19; “Origin and Progress of novel–Writing,” 173–177, 316n.29; on war, 291n.12, 292n.15 Barrell, John, 96, 304n.51–52 Barthes, Roland, 2, 15–16, 203–204, 210, 216, 237, 285n.4, 288n.31, 293n.42, 323n.22, 324n.38, 327n.71 Baudelaire, Charles, 121–122 Benjamin, Walter, 35, 37, 57, 291n.4, 295n.62, 317n.33, 318n.55, 324n.38, 335n.2; and tiger’s leap, 148, 218, 280, 284, 291n.3, 325n.40 Berg, Maxine, 246, 314n.75, 329n.16, 333n.56 Bermingham, Ann, 335n.14 Blake, William, 77, 303n.50 Blumer, Herbert, 25 Boitard, L. P.: Taste a-la-Mode, 7–10, 35–37, 52–53, 67, 75–76, 108, 291n.2, 296n.80–81, 298n.106; and Cryes of London, 320n.73; and Repton, 67, 296n.81 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Viscount, 138 Boswell, James, 90–91, 301n.42, 303n.50

354

Index

Braudel, Fernand, 27 Breen, T. H., 18–19, 288n.29, 289n.46 Breward, Christopher, 45 Brewer, John, 287n.19 Buck-Morss, Susan, 291n.4, 295n.62, 317n.33, 324n.38 Burke, edmund, 18, 96, 333n.63 Burney, Frances, 68, 199, 297n.86, 324n.34 Butler, Marilyn, 194, 319n.61–62 calendar. See chronology Campbell, Colin, 15–16, 228n.32, 326n.47 Campbell, Timothy, 322n.14, 327n.63 Carlyle, Thomas, vii, 214, 324n.31 Castle, Terry, 305n.65 Chandler, James, 17, 38, 56–57, 286n.12, 295n.56, 310n.25, 317n.41 Christensen, Jerome, 22–23, 131–134, 140, 261, 270, 290n.62, 299n.14 chronology: and calendar, 145, 171–173, 312n.53; and costume history, 50, 85, 89–90, 198, 201, 204, 300n.19, 321n.3; and family pictures, 84, 115, 140; and historiographical narrative, 130, 140, 316n.26; and regnancy, 42, 43, 50, 74, 89–90, 130, 189, 200, 280, 317n.41; and universal history, 38, 301n.36 classical. See antiquity Cobbett, William, 47 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 328n.7 Collection of the Dresses of Different Nations. See Thomas Jefferys Collingwood, R.G., 134, 310n.24–25 Combe, William, 307n.96, 308n.109 consumer society, 1–2, 12–14; critiques of concept, 287n.19, 287n.21, 288n.35; and day–dreaming, 15–16, 288n.32; Godwin on, 243–247; Hume on, 139–141 contrast, 3–9, 25, 36, 56–63, 67, 179, 203–213, 313n.57; versus comparison, 41–42, 46; versus continuity, 78, 209, 213, 296n.80, 321n.1, 323n.21–22; in fiction, 56–57, 62, 67, 69–71, 206–213, 296n.81, 323n.21 copyright law, 315n.8, 324n.30 costume: as disguise, 99, 179, 249, 253–256; etymology of, 18, 54, 295n.52; histories of, 3–11, 49–50, 82–83, 89–90, 203–205, 294n.46, 299n.9, 321n.1, 321n.3–4; and masquerade, 50, 112, 178, 294n.47, 300n.34, 305n.65, 322n.12; and theater, 50, 203–205, 213–214, 321n.3, 324n.33. See also dress; habit; Thomas Jefferys

Cowper, William, 178–180, 317n.33–34, 328n.10 credit, 40, 116–117, 229, 285n.5, 307n.99, 307n.101, 333n.57 Crowston, Clare Haru, 286n.11, 317n.38 Cruikshank, George, 57–62, 67, 75, 295n.60, 296n.78 Cruikshank, Isaac, 62, 75–76 custom. See habit cycle: alternatives to fashion cycle, 179, 222–223, 294n.44, 299n.16, 306n.82, 317n.33; of arts and sciences, 141, 289n.53, 311n.41; of fashion, 46–49, 52, 74, 114–119, 140–142, 177–180, 195, 198, 213–222, 270–271, 311n.43; of literary marketplace, 164, 167–170, 176, 199–200, 202, 256, 261; of politics and empire, 37–41, 45–46, 137, 294n.44. See also revolution; seriality dandy, vii, 57–59, 62, 217, 277, 324n.31, 334n.71 darly, Matthew, 105–106 de Bolla, Peter, 14, 287n.27 de Quincey, Thomas, 261 development: as illusory progress, 45, 71–72, 309n.6, 311n.41, 317n.33; and literary character 140, 323n.21; and political economy, 12, 22–25, 56, 91–92, 137, 194–198, 202, 207, 290n.57, 290n.65, 295n.56, 301n.41–42, 320n.63. See also historiography diderot, denis, 99, 313n.64 dress: in edgeworth, 197–201; in Godwin, 251–256; in Sophia Lee, 180–189; men’s, 73, 216–17, 298n.100, 324n.36, 304n.54; in portraits, 77–125, 149, 185, 217, 300n.34, 305n.70, 306n.82, 308n.105; and Renaissance, 182–189, 214–218, 249–252, 289n.43, 294n.49, 307n.101; in Rousseau, 142–154, 254–55, 312n.45, 312n.51; and Scott, 53–56, 207–208, 212–218, 223, 227, 230, 249–251, 322n.12, 326n.58, 327n.63. See also costume; hairstyle; textiles duncan, Ian, 213, 225–226, 229, 236, 326n.56, 330n.29 durable goods, 47; and clothing, 20, 111, 142, 219, 289n.43, 297n.82, 299n.16, 306n.82, 313n.64; and patina, 120–121, 219, 325n.43, 333n.63; and Reynolds’s fragile paintings, 119–121, 308n.109 edgeworth, Maria: The Absentee, 197–198, 220; Belinda, 320n.67; Castle Rackrent,

Index 319n.60; Ennui, 195–197, 320n.64–67; Harrington, 68, 198–202, 320n.70–73; and Sophia Lee, 194; Tales of Fashionable Life, 194–198; and Scott’s Waverley, 320n.63 fable, 47, 257–261, 263, 303n.48, 322n.12 fancy, 5, 26, 51, 103, 179, 320n.66; in Godwin, 244, 270–271; Hume on, 310n.18, 310n.27; in Sophia Lee, 182–183 fashion dolls, 44, 296n.70, 323n.23 fashion plates, 3–11, 64–69, 80–81, 100, 169–172, 183, 200–201, 203–204, 228, 286n.11, 296n.71; Barbauld on, 44–45; Cryes of London, 198–199, 320n.73; edgeworth on, 68, 197, 200–201; men in, 296n.77; satires on, 36, 56–63, 67, 105–109, 146–147, 197, 291n.1, 293n.25, 304 n.62, 305n.73, 320n.66–67. See also pocketbooks Favret, Mary, 40 feeling: and commerce, 17–18, 142–143, 266, 276, 283–284, 312n.45; and Hume, 129–130, 309n.5, 310n.24, 310n.27, 312n.50, 314n.4; as sense of history, 21, 23–24, 141–142, 180, 191–194, 248, 283–284, 297n.93, 302n.45; as sympathy, 19, 129, 141–142, 297n.93, 309n.5, 310n.24, 314n.4, 319n.59, 322n.12, 323n.25, 332n.55. See also trauma Ferguson, Adam, 317n.37 Ferris, Ina, 68, 326n.54 Festa, Lynn, 328n.10 Flügel, J.C., 298n.100, 324n.36 Foote, Samuel, 306n.83 Fordham, douglas, 149, 303n.47, 313n.57 France, 37, 99, 101, 106–107, 130–131, 146–147, 304n.58–59, 312n.48, 317n.38, 322n.12, 327n.59; and fashion press, 53–54, 64, 286n.11, 293n.40, 313n.65; French Revolution, 18, 19, 26, 52, 148, 291n.3, 294n.44, 322n.7; painting, 97, 303n.48. See also Charles Perrault; Rousseau Franklin, Benjamin, 288n.29 Galt, John, 77–78, 209, 298n.1 Gamer, Michael, 298n.104, 319n.62 Garrick, david, 119, 246, 298n.98 gaze, 3, 39–40, 58, 103, 244–245, 291n.12, 305n.73 gender: and authorship, 67–68, 226–227, 297n.86, 316n.30, 332n.54; and feminine consumption, 68, 71–73, 145, 153, 212, 220, 227–31, 313n.65, 324n.34, 335n.14; and

355

masculine style, 73, 105, 212, 217, 296n.77, 297n.95, 298n.100, 298n.105, 306n.74, 324n.34; and memory, 64–67, 182, 322n.20, 332n.54; and reading, 68, 129, 135–139, 226–227, 310n.27, 322n.20; and visual representation, 98, 181, 296n.77, 304n.54, 304n.62, 308n.109. See also dandy generality, 5, 25, 55, 138, 249, 304n.59, 332n.55; “fashion in general,” 141; Johnson on, 94, 301n.37, 302n.46; and Reynolds, 78, 92–93, 96–97, 101, 110, 113–114, 302n.44, 303n.50, 304n.51–52; in Salavon, 122–125, 309n.116; Simmel on, 121–122, 308n.115 Gerard, Alexander, 156–157, 313n.69 Germany, 286n.11, 314n.2, 315n.11, 329n.17 Gibbon, edward, 191–192, 259, 318n.53; Godwin on, 331n.35 global, 3, 5, 49, 146, 148, 213, 284, 285n.8, 324n.29 Godwin, William: Enquirer, 243–247, 329n.13; Essay on Sepulchres, 238, 247–248, 318n.47; Instructions to a Statesman, 255–256; Mandeville, 257–277, 331n.42, 331n.44, 332n.54–55, 333 n.63, 334n.67–69; Political Justice, 241, 262–263, 332n.48; and Scott, 256–257, 261–262, 264, 266, 276–277, 330n.28, 331n.42, 333n.63, 334n.69; St. Leon, 248–256, 271; and Thomas Wedgwood, 241–243; Thoughts on Man, 329n.13 gothic: and architecture, 74, 308n.105; and canonization, 12, 286n.15, 287n.20; as historical period, 12, 74, 286n.15, 308n.105, 314n.2, 318n.49, 322n.12; as literary genre, 45, 71, 161, 177, 211, 314n.2, 316n.19, 322n.12; and Minerva Press, 71, 297n.94 Granger, James, 85, 88–90, 117–118, 300n.21, 300n.34 habit: as custom, 16, 18, 20–21, 25, 55, 93, 97, 110, 280, 289n.56, 303n.48, 304n.52, 306n.84, 312n.53, 319n.59; etymology of, 18, 54–56, 295n.52; as traditional dress, 5, 51. See also costume; dress; Rousseau hairstyle: hairdressers, 99–101; men’s wigs, 99, 102, 118–119, 143, 212, 294n.51, 299n.16, 308n.105, 312n.48, 330n.28; natural hair, 112, 118, 187, 212, 217, 291n.4, 294n.51, 312n.48, 324n.38; women’s headdress, 10, 44, 50, 99–102, 107, 118–119, 121, 146–147, 185, 200–201, 203–204, 212, 215, 299n.16, 302n.44. See also dress

356

Index

Hazlitt, William, 328n.1; on Addison and Steele, 44, 292n.23; on Godwin, 238, 334n.67; on Reynolds, 101–102, 303n.50, 304n.62–63; on Scott, 19–20, 211, 317n.43, 323n.23 historical novel, 12, 21–22, 162–163, 188–189, 206–207, 257, 261, 326n.54; Barbauld on, 176–177; and the gothic, 177, 314n.2; and historical romance, 135, 162, 188–190, 257–259, 275, 314n.3, 315n.6, 319n.60, 322n.12, 334n.66 historicism, 2–3, 7, 11–12, 16–27, 38, 46–49, 82–83, 88–90, 267, 287n.20, 290n.57; as “spirit of the age,” 25, 57, 90, 197, 293n.25, 310n.25, 313n.69, 328n.1 historiography: as antiquarianism, 50, 82–83, 109–110, 118, 159, 236, 294n.46, 299n.8–9, 301n.40, 306n.81, 306n.83, 307n.104, 308n.105, 321n.3; Barbauld on, 42–43, 176–177, 292n.18; Bolingbroke on, 138; conjectural, 42–43, 178–179, 290n.57, 292n.18, 330n.28, 333n.61; as a fashion, 331n.35; and Godwin, 241, 256, 261–268, 329n.18, 330n.28, 332n.50; and “historical experience,” 21, 259, 275, 283–284, 322n.7; Hume on, 135–139, 157–159, 310n.24, 310n.27; relation to the novel, 166–167, 176–177, 191–193, 263, 275, 310n.28, 314n.4–5, 316n.26, 316n.30; Scott’s influence on, 286n.16; Scottish enlightenment, 12, 21, 38, 178, 290n.57, 312n.44, 314n.74, 334n.67; and traditional domain of war and politics, 43, 138, 180, 316n.30 history painting, 77–78, 93–95, 97, 302n.43– 45, 303n.47–48, 306n.74; “comic history painting,” 105, 305n.73. See also portraiture Hogarth, William, 62, 296n.68, 312n.53 Holland, William, 52–53, 294n.51 Hollander, Anne, 79–80, 82, 97, 299n.7, 303n.49 Hume, david, 24, 72; Essays, 83, 135–142, 146, 156, 311n.29, 311n.40, 332n.45; History of England, 129–130, 157–158, 161–162, 269, 314n.4; “My Own Life,” 130–131; and Rousseau, 142–156, 159–160, 313n.68; Treatise of Human Nature, 131–134, 139–140, 310n.27 Hunter, J. Paul, 15, 287n.28 Hurd, Richard, 190–191, 287n.20, 318n.46–47, 318n.49–51; Sophia Lee on, 318n.50

Jacobite Rebellion, 37, 51–52, 75–76, 231, 280–284, 290n.62, 298n.105, 334n.65 Jameson, Fredric, 240, 283, 286n.13 Jefferys, Thomas: Collection of the Dresses of Different Nations, 3–7, 35, 49–52, 75, 84–86, 90, 294n.46, 300n.19, 306n.80; and earlier costume histories, 285n.8; and Planché, 321n.1 Johnson, Samuel: and aesthetics, 301n.37, 302n.46; Dictionary, 56, 302n.46; on Highland manners, 91–92, 301n.41; and history painting, 94, 303n.47; and Reynolds, 90–94, 96, 114–115, 301n.37, 307n.94; Rasselas, 301.n37; and Scott, 92, 298n.98, 301n.42 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 289n.43, 307n.101 Jones, Jennifer M., 153, 313n.65 Keymer, Thomas, 175–176, 316n.25–26 Klancher, Jon, 275, 334n.66 Koselleck, Reinhart, 14–15, 287n.26, 295n.56 Kuchta, david, 73, 298n.100 La Roche, Sophie von, 329n.17 Lady’s Magazine, 24–27, 64, 66, 106, 290n.68 Lawrence, Thomas, 103, 121, 302n.45, 308n.114 Lee, Sophia: Barbauld on, 176–177; and edgeworth; 194; The Recess, 162–173, 176–194, 214, 221, 232, 253, 314n.4–5, 315n.10, 316n.25, 316n.30–31, 318n.50, 318n.52, 319n.59 Lehmann, Ulrich, 325n.40 Lemire, Beverly, 287n.22 Lipovetsky, Gilles, 291n.70; on “hundred years’ fashion,” 2, 285n.2 Locke, John, 132–133, 306n.84, 320n.71 Lukács, Georg, 21–24, 206–207, 214, 290n.58, 290n.60, 322n.7, 322n.9, 322n.12; and Georg Simmel, 23–24 Lunar Society, 242, 319n.61, 328n.11 Lynch, deidre, 297n.86 Macaulay, Thomas, 98–99; on Scott, 12 Mackenzie, Henry, 323n.25 Mackie, erin, 18, 46 Macpherson, James, 317n.35 Mandeville, Bernard, 47, 49, 75, 292n.20, 294n.43; Godwin on, 262–263, 332n.48 Mandeville, John, 334n.69 manners, 41–46, 53–55, 69–71, 74, 83, 92, 295n54, 319n.59, 330n.28; novel of manners, 69–71, 210, 323n.24–25. See also habit

Index McCalman, Iain, 294n.51 McKendrick, neil, 1, 74, 288n.34 McQueen, Alexander, 278–284, 335n.3, 335n.8; Highland Rape, 280–284 market, 24, 48, 290n.62, 290n.65. See also retail Marx, Karl, 37, 291n.3 masquerade. See costume Maxwell, Richard, 188–190, 315n.6 middle classes, 47, 98, 129, 135, 286n.14 Missoni, 234, 236 Moretti, Franco, 163, 164, 315n.7, 315n.10 neoclassical. See antiquity noggle, James, 289n.56 nomenclature (and fashion), 185–186, 230, 327n.59 novelty, 23, 42, 70–71, 106, 129–130, 156–159, 163, 174–179, 260–261, 270–271, 287n.27, 290n.60, 309n.6, 323n.24, 329n.16; of historicism itself, 316n.31 nudity. See undress obsolescence, 2, 69–73, 79–82, 101–102, 163–164, 179, 191–194, 203–204, 288n.29, 290n.62, 315n.11, 316n.26, 317n.33, 326n.54. See also ruin orientalism, 49, 314n.75. See also Rousseau’s Armenian dress period(s): as demarcated by fashion, 3–11, 25, 58–59, 88–90, 189, 200, 203–204, 280, 293n.25, 317n.41; elusive difference between, 73–75, 134, 157, 203–204, 220, 298n.98, 321n.1; as historiographical concept and method, 56–57, 82, 88–90, 208–210, 311n.40, 313n.69, 319n.59; as lapse of time, 69–70, 210; in literary history, 174, 271–272; and museum display, 219, 325n.41, 325n.43; and Scott, 73–75, 208–210, 219, 298n.98, 325n.41; and structural oscillation in the history of dress, 293n.42; and visual style, 82, 121–122, 302n.48. See also chronology; historicism periodicals, 14–16; and fashion, 63–69, 186, 203, 286n.11, 290n.68, 293n.40; Barbauld on, 43–45; edgeworth on, 199–200; Godwin and, 245; Hazlitt on, 19–20, 292n.23; literary annuals, 326n.55, 327n.61; and Henry Mackenzie, 323n.25; “Mirror of Fashion” column, 57, 74, 220, 292n.23, 320n.66;

357

newspapers, 15, 287n.28. See also Joseph Addison; Lady’s Magazine; pocketbooks Perrault, Charles, 258–259 Phillips, Mark Salber, 129, 135, 286n.14, 309n.7 Planché, James Robinson, 203–205, 210, 300n.19, 321n.1, 321n.3; and Scott, 205, 213–214, 322n.5 pocketbooks, 10–11, 44–45, 64–66, 71–72, 80–81, 106–107, 167–173, 183–184, 187–88, 200–201, 203, 228–229, 231–235, 296n.71, 296n.77, 296n.79, 316n.17, 326n.55, 327n.61, 327n.63; and Austen, 71, 168–169; Barbauld on, 44–45; edgeworth on, 68, 200–201; Flora Macdonald’s, 231–235, 327n.60, 327n.64; and men’s fashions, 296n.77; and Scott, 228–229, 231–235, 327n.60–61, 327n.63–64 Pocock, J. G. A., 17–18, 285n.5, 288n.40 Pope, Alexander, 36, 87–88 portraiture, 83–87, 92–94, 101–104, 115, 119–121, 299n.14, 307n.96, 308n.109; and history painting, 302n.43–45, 303n.48; Johnson on, 90–91, 96, 301n.37, 307n.94; of Rousseau, 149–153; in Sheridan, 114–118, 308n.106. See also dress; history painting present, 22–27; as amnesiac, 240, 262–263; escape from, 51, 120–122, 293n.25; as evacuated by commercial seriality, 164, 285n.5; as forged in relation to recent past, 36–37, 69–70, 171; as fulfilling, 15, 23–24, 26–27, 309n.6; as future past, 91, 109, 120–121, 292n.23, 293n.25; as inscrutable, 23, 26, 274–275, 315n.7; as intentional project, 15, 22–23, 326n.54; limited extent of, 22, 197–198; of literary marketplace, 163, 315n.8, 326n.54; and synchronism, 15, 88–89, 301n.36 Price, Leah, 327n.61 Priestley, Joseph, 49, 301n.36, 328n.11 print culture, 1–2, 6–7, 10–11, 14–15, 43–45, 67–69, 105–106, 139, 167–173, 181–188, 286n.11, 287n.28, 313n.65, 315n.11, 318n.51, 320n.66–67, 321n.1; Barbauld on, 43–45; edgeworth on, 199–202; Hazlitt on, 19–20; Hume and, 134, 151–152, 154–156; and the novel, 163–164, 174–176, 181–188, 199–200, 228, 231–233, 315n.11; printshop, 105–106, 108, 320n.66–67, 329n.17; Reynolds and, 106, 298n.4, 308n.109; Rousseau and, 151–152; Scott and, 228, 231–235, 286n.17

358

Index

predictability: and fashion, 23, 48, 271, 323n.22; as prophecy, 26, 37–38, 45–46, 293n.25; versus spontaneity, 24, 26, 130, 141, 144, 244, 329n.18 Rajan, Tilottama, 247, 329n.18 Ramsay, Allan, 141–142, 144, 149–151, 311n.43, 312n.44, 313n.57 remnancy. See obsolescence Repton, Humphry, 59, 67, 296n.81, 322n.14 retail: arcades, 35, 295n.62, 317n.33; mercers, 179, 215, 226, 324n.34; pedlars, 179, 199–200, 223–225, 249–251, 253–255, 270–271, 333n.57–58; printshop, 105–106, 108, 320n.66–67, 329n.17; shopping, 15–16, 45, 218–220, 289n.48, 324n.34; shops and shopkeeping, 16, 48, 71, 106, 218–220, 226, 275–276, 297n.86, 319n.56, 324n.34, 325n.45, 326n.54; shopwindow, 15, 71–72, 243–246, 278–280, 324n.38, 325n.45, 329n.17. See also auction revolution: American, 18–19, 288n.29, 289n.46; as cycle of fashion and culture, 42, 49, 317n.33; english, 49, 263–267, 297n.93, 303n.47, 332n.50; as obscured by gradual change, 193, 259; “sartorial revolution” of english Restoration, 73, 298n.100; of sciences, 311n.41; semantic history, 294n.44. See also cycle; France; Jacobite Rebellion Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 77–79, 101–106, 299n.5, 305n.67, 308n.114; Death of Dido, 94–95, 303n.49; Discourses, 81–82, 92–94, 96–101, 109–115, 303n.48, 307n.91; on fashion, 96–101; painting media, 119–121, 308n.109; plagiarism, 298n.4; and the Royal Academy, 96, 106, 304.n51; satire on, 106, 108–109, 115–116, 298n.4, 308n.109. rhythm, 14, 46, 179, 198, 317n.38. See also cycle; seriality Richardson, Samuel, 155–156, 174, 199, 285n.10; Pamela, 138–139, 311n.33 Rigney, Ann, 222 Robertson, William, 72, 264, 295n.54, 301n.40, 334n.67 Robinson, Mary, 293n.25 Roche, daniel, 288n.33 romance: as sentimental attachment to history, 51, 72, 236; as amatory fiction and secret history, 135–139, 145, 152, 155, 159, 165, 177, 310n.18; Schauerroman, 211, 314n.2. See also historical novel

Romney, George, 103, 308n.114 Rousseau, Jean–Jacques, 142, 312n.45; Armenian dress, 142–154, 254–55, 312n.51; Confessions, 144, 153, 154, 159–160, 254; and Hume, 142–156, 159–160, 313n.68 Rowlandson, Thomas, 19, 59, 61, 67, 296n.80 ruin: architectural, 19, 71, 190–194, 237, 297n.93, 318n.47; historical evidence as, 263; personal and financial, 39–40, 193, 238, 251–252, 276–277, 334n.67, 334n.73; as material remnancy, 56, 280–281, 326n.54, 327n.60; as textual remnancy, 166–169, 326n.54. See also obsolescence Salavon, Jason, 122–125 satire, 36, 105, 255–256, 291n.2, 293n.25, 305n.73, 313n.57, 320n.67, 324n.31, 332n.48; on Reynolds, 106, 108–109, 115–116, 298n.4, 308n.109. See also fashion plates Schmidgen, Wolfram, 333n.63 Schoch, Richard W., 321n.3 Scott, Sir Walter, 12, 19–22, 24, 37, 41, 68, 175, 184, 189, 205, 207–211; Abbotsford, 231–235, 276, 280, 327n.60, 327n.64, 334n.68; The Antiquary, 321n.3, 327n.63; and Boswell, 301n.42; Edinburgh Annual Register, 191, 318n.50; and edgeworth, 320n.63; and Godwin, 256–257, 261–262, 266, 276–277, 330n.28, 331n.42, 333n.63, 334n.69; Guy Mannering, 333n.63; Heart of Midlothian, 225–231; Ivanhoe, 55, 74–75, 166–167, 237, 319n.59; Kenilworth, 214–222, 249–251; Lockhart biography, 298n.98, 319n.58, 330n.29; and Mackenzie, 323n.25; Old Mortality, 222–225; Redgauntlet, 334n.65; stage adaptations, 214, 321n.3, 324n.33; Waverley, 42, 53–56, 70, 73–75, 92, 194, 208, 211–213, 226–227, 301n.42, 323n.24; Waverley novels: 256, 260–261, 276–277, 289n.50, 317n.43, 323n.23 scrapbooks. See albums secondhand, 115–117, 198–199, 320n.73 seriality, 22–24; Barbauld on, 173–177; as displacing history, 22–23, 192–193, 270–271; of fashions, 3–11, 63–67; in Godwin, 251, 255–256, 260–261, 270–272; and historiography, 159, 316n.26; and lag, 58, 198, 290n.62; in news and new media, 286n.13, 287n.28; and life writing, 316n.25; and the novel, 163–165, 173–177, 192–195, 251, 256, 270–272, 276–277, 316n.25–26, 316n.29;

Index and proliferation of loss, 164, 326n.54; and repetition, 140, 170–171, 179, 193, 260–261; as succession, 132–133, 137, 159–160, 174, 188–189, 312n.53, 331n.36. See also cycle; revolution Shelley, Mary, 334n.71 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 56, 247, 293n.25 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley: The School for Scandal, 19, 114–119, 307n.101, 307n.104, 308n.106 Simmel, Georg, 23–24, 72, 290n.65, 308n. 115; and Reynolds, 121–122, 308n.114 Smith, Adam, 20–21, 112, 283–284, 289n.53, 289n.56, 318n.54; and Hume, 311n.40 Smith, Chloe Wigston, 297n.82 Smollett, Tobias, 174, 308n.105 Solkin, david, 106, 302n.44 sovereignty: as displaced by fashion, 89–90, 180, 186–189, 228–229, 280, 317n.41; as irreconcilable with fashion, 221–222; in pocketbooks, 170, 172, 187–188; and sociability, 129, 137, 311n.29; as trope of fashion, 43. See also chronology spectatorship: readerly, 129, 138, 218–219, 259, 262, 292n.23; visual, 94–95, 98, 108, 218–219, 251, 259, 303n.48; as watchfulness, 290n.62. See also Joseph Addison’s Spectator spontaneity. See predictability St. Clair, William, 207, 286n.17 Stallybrass, Peter, 289n.43, 307n.101 Steele, Richard, 44–47. See also Joseph Addison Sterne, Laurence: Tristram Shandy, 133, 175, 316n.25–26 Stevens, Anne H., 162, 314n.2–3 Stewart, dugald, 54–55, 295n.54 Strutt, Joseph, 82–83, 294n.46, 299n.8–9, 321n.3. style: as distinct fashion of dress, 99, 182, 197, 320n.67; as reflection of habitus or “common root,” 121–122, 303n.48, 325n.43; as stylized artistic convention, 81, 112; and visual art genre, 93, 96–98, 109, 111–112, 302n.43–44 Styles, John, 16, 288n.34–36 system (especially as fashion system), 23–24, 51, 64, 80–81, 316n.38, 333n.56; and edgeworth, 197–198, 200–202; and Sophia Lee, 177–180, 186; of the novel, 163, 174–176; of science, 311n.40; and Scott,

359 203–206, 209–213, 216–219. See also Roland Barthes; seriality

tailors, 99, 101, 148, 216, 223–225, 280, 288n.36, 304n.59 tartan. See textiles taste, 55, 182, 215, 289n.56, 302n.45, 313n.69; in Godwin, 243–247, 251–252, 255, 263; in Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste,” 83, 139–142, 146, 156; in Mandeville, 47, 263; in Reynolds, 99, 101, 113–114, 307n.91. See also Boitard’s Taste a-la-Mode textiles: brocade, 102, 211; lace, 146–147, 212, 215, 227, 281–282; and manufacture, 93, 165, 189–194, 219, 287n.22–23, 289n.52, 314n.75, 318n.52, 329n.13, 333n.56; muslin, 46, 69, 72, 186, 224, 297n.95, 319n.57; and pattern, 113, 231, 233–237, 289n.52, 293n.40, 298n.100, 327n.64, 333n.56; and Reynolds, 93, 97, 102; satin, 97, 184, 186–187, 215, 320n.73, 327n.63; silk, 93, 97, 102, 142, 212, 227, 229–230, 293n.40, 314n.75, 318n.52, 327n.63; tartan, 212, 213, 227, 237, 280, 324n.29; velvet, 74, 97, 117, 142, 178, 184, 186, 215, 218, 320n.73 trauma, 267–272, 277, 281–284. See also feeling Thompson, e. P., 16, 288n.33 Trumpener, Katie, 209, 297n.93, 320n.64, 326n.54, 332n.54; on Lukács, 207, 322n.9 Underwood, Ted, 209–210; and Barthes, 323n.22 undress, 19, 62–63, 95, 212, 303n.49; as nudity, 109, 122–125, 180, 303n.49, 306n.80 Valenza, Robin, 133, 140, 310n.16, 311n.35, 312n.50 Van dyck, Anthony, 85, 87, 111–112, 122–123, 218, 300n.34 visual culture, 7–11, 14–15, 57–67, 79–82, 105–109, 181–184, 187–188, 304n.54, 305n.73, 321n.1; Barbauld on, 44–45; Reynolds and, 106. See also fashion plates; gaze Wahrman, dror, 294n.49 Wall, Cynthia, 208, 307n.95, 314n.4, 316n.31, 322n.14 Walpole, Horace, 76, 120, 298n.106, 300n.34; Castle of Otranto, 62, 315n.12, 322n.12; Scott on, 322n.12

360 Warner, William, 138–139, 311n.33 Warton, Thomas, 286n.15, 319n.59 Wedgwood, Josiah, 19, 23, 220, 242, 245–246, 289n.48, 301n.41, 328n.10, 329n.12, 329n.16 Wedgwood, Thomas, 241–243 West, Benjamin, 303n.47; Death of General Wolfe, 77–78, 94, 298n.1, 303n.47, 306n.74 wigs. See hairstyle

Index Williams, Raymond, 290n.63, 294n.44, 318n.54 Wordsworth, William, 329n.15 working classes: and new clothes, 16, 287n.23, 288n.33–36, 326n.58; and old clothes, 198–199, 288n.29, 297n.82, 320n.73 Yang, Chi-Ming, 49

Ac k n ow l e d g m e n ts

2

this book owes its greatest debts to deidre lynch and mary Favret, who directed its beginnings, watched over its unfolding, and provided me with enduring models of intellectual purpose, integrity, and care. Jonathan elmer and dror wahrman, each in his own way as brilliant as they come, made many direct contributions to the book, but they also sustained an unlikely center of the universe for eighteenth-century studies in Bloomington, Indiana, that made a project like this possible in the first place. A number of my colleagues in the english department at the University of chicago deserve special mention for patient and recursive attention to this project in conversation and on the page, especially Jim chandler (who has helped in more ways than I have room to recount), Bill Brown, Bradin cormack, Frances Ferguson, elaine Hadley, Heather keenleyside, and eric slauter. But it is a testament to this departmental community that so many have had a hand in this book in one way or another, including lauren Berlant, david Bevington, Hillary chute, Raul coronado, maud ellman, leela gandhi, Beth Helsinger, Janice knight, loren kruger, mark miller, tom mitchell, Benjamin morgan, michael murrin, John muse, debbie nelson, chicu Reddy, larry Rothfield, lisa Ruddick, Zach samalin, Jen scappettone, Jay schleusener, Josh scodel, david simon, Richard strier, Robin Valenza, christina Von nolcken, and ken warren. many colleagues farther afield have read and responded to this work or helped in other ways, including Ian Balfour, christopher Breward, Joellen delucia, Ann-marie dunbar, lynn Festa, lisa Freeman, william galperin, lauren gillingham, Jonathan gross, John Havard, matthew Hunter, ken Johnston, melissa Jones, Bob kendrick, Anna kornbluh, greg kucich, Jonathan lamb, chad luck, Ruth mack, tilar mazzeo, Brian mcgrath, tobias menely, sarah murphy, Richard nash, Anahid nersessian, larry norman, mark salber Phillips, emily Rohrbach, christopher Rovee, Jonathan sachs, John shanahan, michal lynn shumate, sean silver, Janet sorensen, carolyn

362

Acknowledgments

steedman, Richard taws, Julia Adeney thomas, Helen thompson, Paul westover, and nick williams. chloe wigston smith deserves an extra nod for graciously reading the full manuscript. I also thank audiences at the Art Institute of chicago, Indiana University, the new school, Rutgers University, University college dublin, the University of michigan, the University of wisconsin, and Vanderbilt University; and the organizers who made those occasions possible, particularly carolyn Berman, katharina Boehm, Porscha Fermanis, Humberto garcia, gloria groom, terry kelley, John Regan, and Adam sneed. I am grateful for several other sustaining communities over the years: in chicago, the newberry library eighteenth-century seminar (with special thanks to karen christianson) and the 18th- and 19th-century cultures graduate workshop at the University of chicago (especially the stalwart organizers Andy Broughton, dustin Brown, david diamond, kate gaudet, mary gibbons, daniel Harris, kristian kerr, cass Picken, Aleks Prigozhin, sam Rowe, tristan schweiger, suzanne taylor, and Allison turner); and in Bloomington, the english department (especially Judith Anderson, Pat Brantlinger, linda charnes, ellen mackay, and Joss marsh) and the center for eighteenthcentury studies. since its beginnings, this book has benefitted from generous institutional support that afforded me time to think and work, most notably long-term fellowships from the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of chicago and the center for eighteenth-century studies at Indiana University. my residency at the lewis walpole library (where maggie Powell made my stay so accommodating, and where sue walker has continued to support this project from afar) was made possible by a Roger w. eddy Fellowship— and I doubly thank the lewis walpole library for providing so many of this book’s images at minimal expense. the short time I spent in the Harry matthews collection at the museum of london was invaluable (and I learned much from Beatrice Behlen and Hilary davidson, who generously made time for me). As this project moves into print, I owe particular thanks to the division of Humanities and to the Humanities Visiting committee at the University of chicago for generous grants in support of publication. I am likewise indebted to Jerry singerman, my generous and responsive editor at Penn Press, and to erin mackie and cynthia wall, each of whose insightful feedback has made this a better book. In addition, emma maccallum at Abbotsford House and the Regenstein library Preservation staff provided invaluable assistance with

Acknowledgments

363

images; and sam Rowe expertly helped with proofreading and indexing at the final stage. Portions of this book’s argument first appeared in different form as “Fashion, microcosm, and Romantic Historical distance,” in Rethinking Historical Distance: Varieties of Historical Engagement (Palgrave, 2012); and part of chapter 6 first appeared as “ ‘the Business of war’: william godwin, enmity, and Historical Representation” in ELH 76 (2009): 343–69, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. on a personal note, I thank the teachers who set me on the path long before this book began, especially Joe Baker, ellen davis, James dougherty, Patricia Freire, John lavecchia, debra dietrick marten, Alice mattingly, and tom werge. I also thank the friends and family who have sustained me along the way, including Ann-marie and Alan dunbar, Heather keenleyside and michael green, Ana owusu-tyo and Andrew tyo, Brandi and Roger stanton, and the nd and memphis cBHs crews (not least Adam, the only person who always promised to buy this book); Adams, campbell, and Fisher family far and near (especially Frannie, mark, and lilly); my sister courtney and Adam, my brother mike, and my mom and dad. this book is dedicated to charlie, who fills my heart with joy, and to melissa, with love and gratitude for what has been and what will—as we eagerly await the someone new about to be.