The Concept and Practice of Conversation in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1688-1848 [Unabridged] 1847184979, 9781847184979

Table of contents :
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX

Citation preview

The Concept and Practice of Conversation in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1688-1848

The Concept and Practice of Conversation in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1688-1848

Edited by

Katie Halsey and Jane Slinn

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

The Concept and Practice of Conversation in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1688-1848, Edited by Katie Halsey and Jane Slinn This book first published 2008 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2008 by Katie Halsey and Jane Slinn and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-84718-497-9, ISBN (13): 9781847184979

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations .................................................................................... vii Acknowledgements .................................................................................. viii Introduction ................................................................................................ ix Katie Halsey and Jane Slinn Chapter One................................................................................................. 1 Improving Talk? The Promises of Conversation Stefan H. Uhlig Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 20 An “Intercourse of Sentiments” and the Seductions of Virtue: The Role of Conversation in David Hume’s Philosophy Amanda Dickins Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 40 Distressful Gift: Talking to the Dead Mary Jacobus Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 65 Heinrich von Kleist and the Transformation of Conversation in Germany Paul E. Kerry Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 87 American One-Sidedness: The Unrealisable Ideal of Democratic Conversation Jay Fliegelman Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 103 “A Proper Exercise for the Mind”: Conversation and Education in the long Eighteenth Century Michèle Cohen

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Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 128 Conversation in the Law: Sir William Jones’s Singular Dialogue Jean Meiring Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 151 Picture-Talking: Portraiture and Conversation in Britain, 1800-1830 Ludmilla Jordanova Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 170 Portraiture as Conversation Peter de Bolla Bibliography............................................................................................ 183 Contributors............................................................................................. 208 Index........................................................................................................ 211

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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8.1 8.2

8.3

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The flow of electrical matter during a Leyden experiment, J.A. Nollett, Essai sur l’éléctricité des corps, Paris 1746, facing p.216, by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Richard Caton Woodsville, Politics in an Oyster House, 1848, Oil on canvas, 16 x 13 in. (40.6 x 33 cm), The Walters Art Museum. Charles Willson Peale, Mrs James Smith and Grandson, 1776. Oil on canvas, 36 3/8 x 29 ¼ in. (92.4 x 74.3 cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1980.93. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Wilson Levering Smith, Jr. and museum purchase. James Burgh, Art of Speaking. London, 1768. William Dunlap, The Dunlap Family, 1788. Oil on canvas, 42 ¼ x 4 in (107.3 x 124.5 cm), New York Historical Society, Gift of John Crumby 1858.87. John Singleton Copley (1738-1815), William Vassall and his son Leonard circa 1770-72. Oil on canvas, San Francisco Museum of Fine Art, John D. Rockefeller 3rd 1979.7.30. William Hazlitt, replica by William Bewick, chalk, 1825, 575mm x 375mm, National Portrait Gallery, London. Sir William Knighton, 1st Bt. by Charles Turner, after Sir Thomas Lawrence, mezzotint, published 1823, 387mm x 305mm, National Portrait Gallery, London. Sir Walter Scott, 1st Bt. by John Henry Robinson, after Sir Thomas Lawrence, published 1833, line engraving, 424mm x 328mm, National Portrait Gallery, London. Sir Walter Scott being Painted by James Northcote, by James Northcote, oil on canvas 1828, 28 ¼ x 21 ¼ inches, Royal Albert Memorial Gallery, Exeter. James Northcote, by Frederick Christian Lewis, after George Henry Harlow, stipple engraving, published 1824, stipple engraving, 406mm x 280mm, National Portrait Gallery, London.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This volume had its genesis in a conference, The Concept and Practice of Conversation in the Long Eighteenth Century, organised at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge in October 2005. We would like to acknowledge the financial support provided at that stage by the British Academy, CRASSH, and King’s College, Cambridge. We are also grateful to all the participants at the conference, in particular to the chairs of and respondents to the various sessions, and to Peter de Bolla, Simon Goldhill, and Ludmilla Jordanova. We would like to express our gratitude to the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, the Walters Art Museum, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Fine Art, the New York Historical Society, the National Portrait Gallery, London, and the Royal Albert Memorial Gallery, Exeter, for permission to reproduce material from their holdings. We would also like to thank Rosalind Crone, Kate Griffiths, Luke Houghton, Amanda Millar, Maartje Scheltens and Richard Serjeantson for their help in the preparation of the manuscript. Sadly, Professor Jay Fliegelman did not live to see this volume published, but we owe a debt of gratitude to him, and to his widow Christine, for their dedication in preparing his chapter for publication under very difficult circumstances.

INTRODUCTION KATIE HALSEY AND JANE SLINN

Conversation, as concept and practice, arrived at pivotal, and unprecedented, stages in its development during the historical period that has come to be known as the long eighteenth century.1 The eighteenth century’s attention to, and production of, conversational forms manifests itself in the period’s plethora of texts and images that address themselves to the description and conceptualization of conversation across a range of disciplines and genres. The chapters in this book attest to this period’s breadth of interest in conversation by their disciplinary range: there are contributions from literary studies, art history, philosophy, history and law. An exceptionally wide range of long-eighteenth-century authors, artists, texts and works of art are also covered, with the volume containing essays discussing artists, philosophers and lawmakers as different as Jane Austen, Henry Ballow, Immanuel Kant and Thomas Gainsborough. Even allowing for the rearrangement and rethinking of disciplinary boundaries between the eighteenth century and today, the reach of conversation into so many areas of the period’s life and thought is striking. Also striking are the serious purposes and functions (for example, ethical, pedagogical or political) with which concepts of conversation are imbued in the period. Thus we find David Hume insisting that conversation “gives and receives Information, as well as Pleasure”, and that the “conversible” world must be brought into contact with that of the “Learned” to reinforce conversation against triviality, or “gossipping (sic) Stories and idle Remarks”.2 Michèle Cohen’s emphasis on the inextricable connections between pleasure and improvement in domestic conversations (in Chapter Six of this volume) demonstrates the reach of Hume’s philosophy into the didactic literature of the period, and its corresponding influence on the education of young people. Significantly, in the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of conversation, the only meaning that does not include an eighteenth-century example is that which emphasizes conversation’s triviality, as well as being the most familiar gloss of the term to a modern reader: 7c, “to make conversation: to converse for the sake of conversing; to engage in small talk.”3

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Despite the breadth of conversation’s conceptual and semantic reach in the eighteenth century, most existing scholarship on the subject tends to focus on examining a limited set of generic forms, most notably “Conversation Poems” and, in painting, “Conversation Pieces”, or to identify conversation too easily with the sociability of the expanding “public sphere” in the period. Further, the distinctiveness of conversation as a concept and practice–and indeed the question of whether conversation can be said to be distinct from its cognate concepts (dialogue, discussion and argument, for example) is rarely examined in literature about the period. This volume was inspired largely by the wish to redress these deficiencies. Thus the introductory text will proceed by examining two key places in which we can observe the development of conversational concepts and practices in the long eighteenth century. First, we will consider how, at the beginning of the period, notions of conversation were forged in the “conversible” world of salons and coffee-houses, described by David Hume and his near contemporaries, which cannot be made to fit into Jürgen Habermas’s theorization of the public sphere. We will then turn to reflect on the ethical content of conversation in the novels of Jane Austen, a novelist who has gradually come to represent to many readers the world of the long eighteenth century. In discussing these texts and authors, we attempt to address and define some of the interactions between conversational concepts and practices. Our title for this volume draws attention to the fact that conversational forms, concepts and practices developed, and continue to develop, in dialogue with, in distinction from, and in the shadow of, each other. In other words, language, practices and concepts are inextricably intertwined. However, we currently lack a satisfactory theory and vocabulary for the ways in which these three variables are interrelated. When we find ourselves in such a situation, we can only begin, as it were, “from the bottom up”. Suffice it to say, the relationships concerned are complex and multifarious; and the essays collected here explore the contours of some of these complexities, dealing with a range of different media, authors, subperiods, genres and languages. Although the focus of the work is largely on eighteenth-century Britain, the volume takes note of the rich relationships between continental European thought and British intellectual life in the period, and of the influence of British ideas in the newly independent American republic.

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After Habermas The eighteenth century has long been regarded as an “age of conversation” in which forms of polite sociability developed (conversation in this period could mean “company” or “society”), structured around metropolitan coffee-houses, clubs, salons and country-house entertaining. Much influenced by Jürgen Habermas’s account of the “public sphere”, an idealized model of human interaction in the Enlightenment emerges in which European bourgeois subjects congregate in the newly created social spaces of salons and coffee-houses to exchange ideas freely, equally and reasonably in an environment governed by the rules of politeness.4 These gentlemen spoke on their own authority on what the period characterized as matters of “general ethical humanism, indissociable from moral, cultural and religious reflection.”5 According to Habermas, such conversations developed into a critical discourse, through which the people monitored state authority, and modern democracy was ultimately born. Habermas’s account has itself been subject to much criticism in recent scholarship, usually on the grounds that his idealized model of the bourgeois public sphere as rational, male and egalitarian rests on a set of unsustainable exclusions.6 Further, as Peter de Bolla points out in Chapter Nine of this volume, Habermas’s account is seriously flawed in the ways he understands, and demarcates, private and public experience in the eighteenth century. Indeed de Bolla suggests that the Habermasian notion of the “public sphere”, whether accepted or contested as an account of aspects of the period, has become “so ubiquitous in the scholarship on the Enlightenment … that its utility may no longer be very significant.” With this scepticism towards Habermas’s account in mind, it is noteworthy that a number of authors in this volume offer versions of conversation that, explicitly or implicitly, depart from the Habermasian ideal: Ludmilla Jordanova discusses James Northcote’s gossipy, competitive conversations, motivated by personal relationships and rivalry; Paul Kerry cites the familiar “rational-critical” characterization of conversation in eighteenthcentury Germany, only to show how Heinrich von Kleist’s concept of conversation differs from this; and Jay Fliegelman charts the discrepancies between democratic ideals of conversation and their practical embodiments. Further, if we no longer read eighteenth-century conversational concepts and practices through a Habermasian lens, two possibilities–not necessarily mutually exclusive–become open to us. Firstly, we may find ourselves giving less weight to those well-known documents of eighteenth-century rational conversation that are often invoked by

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commentators on the period, namely, the periodicals, The Tatler and The Spectator, the writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury and some of David Hume’s essays. These texts’ emphases on the improvement and cultivation of the human subject by means of reasonable conversation on “History, Poetry, Politics”7 may chime with Habermas’s account of the public sphere, but are–we now know–only one version of conversation in the eighteenth century, and not necessarily the dominant one. As Markman Ellis, for example, has shown, rational and improving conversation had to vie for attention with other forms of sociability that were “vulgar, popular, subversive, grotesque and sexual”.8 Future research will give us a more accurate map of the relative significance of rational and “unruly” conversations in the period.9 Secondly, if we are no longer to regard these texts as providing us with descriptive accounts of life in the eighteenth-century coffee-house or salon, or perhaps more accurately, accounts of the point at which a conceptual ideal of conversation is embodied in practice, we are free to see them as something else: contributions to the normative intellectual projects of their authors, to their conceptualizations of the disciplines within which they wrote. To take one key example, Lord Shaftesbury’s ambition to rescue “philosophy … from colleges and cells” and place it in the domain of “modern conversations”10 is imitated, linguistically and conceptually, by Addison and Hume. These texts of Shaftesbury, Addison and Hume are now taken as exemplars of the spirit of the Habermasian public sphere, with conversation read invariably as synonymous with rational sociability. Such glosses may well be valid for Addison’s reinterpretation of Shaftesbury. They can certainly be substantiated by comments to be found throughout his periodicals and his well-documented attempts to encourage, and participate in, what would now be regarded as the culture of the Enlightenment public sphere. Shaftesbury’s original declaration, however, has little to do with the construction of a “bourgeois public sphere”, and everything to do with his conceptualization of philosophy, and in particular, moral philosophy. As Lawrence Klein writes: Shaftesbury thought that philosophy should make people effective participants in the world. It was a practical enterprise and, given the disabilities from which humans generally suffered, often a therapeutic one.11

For Shaftesbury, philosophy’s task was to produce moral agents. Crucially, these putative agents must experience philosophy conversationally: the two-way interchange of moral ideas (in contrast to a

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“top-down” model of transmitting knowledge) encouraged the sought-after activity and autonomy in the learning subject.12 In this instance, then, conversation is to be understood as a method of communicating philosophy, as well as the means of making the concept of practical philosophy a reality: it is necessary to execute Shaftesbury’s prescriptive philosophical project. Shaftesbury suggests that the language of philosophy should resemble that of “good company and people of the better sort”13, but he does not inextricably link philosophical conversation and the public sphere. The conversations or scenes of instruction he has in mind could take place almost anywhere–not necessarily in a salon or coffee-house–and what distinguishes them from other forms of linguistic exchange is their pedagogic function. Shaftesbury’s notion of conversation is indebted to classical as well as contemporary models and his rescuing of philosophy is, in part, understood as a return to its classical heritage. Most important for us, however, is Shaftesbury’s formulation of a distinctive concept of conversation which accounts for a particular interaction between the reader and philosophical text. Any readerly experience which falls short of engagement with this active pedagogy cannot be classified as properly conversational in Shaftesbury’s terms. If we now turn to consider David Hume’s “Of Essay Writing” in relation to Shaftesbury, instead of in relation to Habermas, we find discussions of the nature of philosophical language, its relationship to conversational forms and the role of philosophy, rather than a document in the development of the Habermasian public sphere. Thus the demise of philosophy, gone “to Wrack by this moaping (sic) recluse Method of Study”, is exemplified by its linguistic deficiencies: philosophy is “as chimerical in her Conclusions as she was unintelligible in her Stile and Manner of Delivery.” Hume argues that philosophical discourse should model itself on conversation, and that philosophers require experience of conversation to acquire the “Facility of Thought and Expression”14 necessary to communicate with their audiences. Hume’s central concern is the formation of a viable philosophical discourse which would succeed in “alluring us into the paths of virtue by the views of glory and happiness …”, “…make us feel the difference between vice and virtue” and “excite and regulate our sentiments”15 without sacrificing “the Substance to the Shadow.”16 This is philosophical discourse conceptualized in terms of conversation, and such conversation as ethical sentimental education. For Hume and Shaftesbury, then, conversation is understood primarily as a specific means of communicating between readers and philosophical texts. Such writings draw on conversational forms in order to enable twoway conversations between writers and readers. Thus conversation in this

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sense becomes conceptualized, to a large extent, as the antithesis of Habermasian sociability. In The Machiavellian Moment, J. G. A. Pocock relates Machiavelli’s account to Francesco Vettori of “how he comes home in the evening, puts on formal clothing, and enters into the presence and conversation of the ancients by reading their books. The conversation is meant to restore Machiavelli not only to the understanding of politics, but indirectly to actual civic participation”.17 Hume’s and Shaftesbury’s readers are prepared, if not for civic participation, at least for ethical conduct, but, like Machiavelli, they are prepared indirectly, and frequently alone, through reading. The human interactions, quick-fire exchanges and bustle of the salon or coffee-house are far away. Instead, the philosophical text as conversation seeks to shape the subject who may afterwards become a social subject in the form of, for example, a Humean moral agent. Towards the end of the long eighteenth century, however, this particular connection between private and public selves began to disintegrate. Paul Hamilton writes of the “romantic habit” of “recovery through one’s own aesthetic…of an intimacy with past writers which can restore their readers to the citizenship of a neglected republic.”18 For Hamilton, romantic readers are still characterized according to the conversational model: they experience “intimacy” with writers. But their “citizenship” is of a “neglected republic”, that is, an historical or forgotten state. And there is no mention of virtue or ethics, as there is in Hume and Shaftesbury. It seems that these romantic textual conversations, in contrast to those of the earlier eighteenth century, will end in fantasy or illusion. The early to mid eighteenth-century concept of conversation as a two-way interaction between reader and text, in which a specific type of philosophical discourse formed ethical, self-governing subjects, is no longer in extensive use. Hume’s belief in the moral and educational value of conversational forms is taken up and reformulated in much eighteenth-century writing, perhaps most notably in the didactic and advice literature discussed by Michèle Cohen in Chapter Six of this volume, but also in the fiction—by writers such as Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Hannah More, Mary Brunton, Jane West and even Laurence Sterne—of the long eighteenth century. Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (175354), for example, notably educates its female protagonists, Harriet, Emily and Charlotte, through the medium of the conversations held in the cedar parlour. We turn now to one of Richardson’s most dedicated readers, Jane Austen, 19 who learned much from the pedagogical scenes of conversation in Grandison, discovering in them a stylistic technique that she could appropriate and perfect.

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Jane Austen’s Ethical Conversations Jane Austen, the great chronicler of the leisured classes from 1790 to 1817, recognised the centrality of both “conversation” as an ideal and “conversations” as practice in the lives she portrayed. In her novels, as in Hume’s philosophy, there is a close and important link between conversation and moral or ethical judgement. Austen is famously economical with her use of visual description; it is through the voices of her characters, either in direct speech or through her characteristic free indirect speech that a reader comes to know them. Austen’s style is, in this sense, truly “conversational” but she also uses the term “conversation” in a very specific sense. Conversation, for her, is differentiated from mere social communications. In Persuasion (1818), Anne Elliot regrets, for example, that she and Wentworth had had “no conversation together, no intercourse but what the commonest civility required”.20 Conversation must be meaningful, either emotionally or intellectually. The difference between communication that is not conversation and conversation itself is clearly spelt out in Northanger Abbey (1818), where the imbecilic Mrs Allen spends the chief of her days “by the side of Mrs. Thorpe, in what they called conversation, but in which there was scarcely ever any exchange of opinion, and not often any resemblance of subject, for Mrs. Thorpe talked chiefly of her children, and Mrs. Allen of her gowns.”21 Although Emma Woodhouse and her father communicate all the time, he “cannot meet her in conversation, either rational or playful”.22 Similarly, in Sense and Sensibility (1811), Elinor Dashwood is constantly listening to others, but has very little conversation: “Neither Lady Middleton nor Mrs. Jennings could supply to her the conversation she missed; although the latter was an everlasting talker, and from the first had regarded her with a kindness which ensured her a large share of her discourse.”23 Conversation is vital in an Austen novel, because without it, it is impossible to know another person—it is only through what they say and how they interact that judgements about their character can be made. In Mansfield Park (1813), for example, it is Mary Crawford’s conversation that exposes her, for it demonstrates both her charm and her insincerity. Edmund Bertram is bewitched by Mary’s liveliness and wit, but her moral unsuitability is nonetheless revealed beneath the charms of her conversation. Both Edmund and Fanny Price (the moral arbiter of the novel) recognize that there was something “in her conversation that struck you as not quite right” as soon as they meet her, and even when he is most in love with her, Edmund worries that “the influence of her former

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companions makes her seem—gives to her conversation, to her professed opinions, sometimes a tinge of wrong.”24 Mary reveals her moral slipperiness by her verbal slipperiness: in a conversation about conversations, she shows that she is happy to play around with the truth, and that she fundamentally misunderstands the ethical necessity of sincerity in conversation: “Never is a black word. But yes, in the never of conversation, which means not very often, I do think it.”25 In an Austen novel, real conversation is impossible with someone who is dishonest. The wickedness of her villains hinges almost entirely on their untruthfulness. Unlike those of her contemporaries, Austen’s villains rarely behave badly within the timescale of the novels. We may hear of their previous misdoings—such as Willoughby’s seduction of Colonel Brandon’s ward in the pre-history of Sense and Sensibility, or William Walter Elliot’s unkindness to Mrs Smith in the pre-history of Persuasion—but their wickedness within the novels always depends on their verbal deceptions. Conversations are essential to knowledge of another person in an Austen novel, but they are also peculiarly vulnerable to exploitation. Emma Woodhouse is taken in by Frank Churchill because of his plausibility as a conversationalist, and she is hurt by the difference between what he says and what he is. As a novelist, Austen naturally exploits the gap between speech and meaning—as she puts it in Emma, “Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken”.26 As a moralist, however, she is deeply suspicious of things that are disguised or mistaken, demonstrating the virtues of sincerity and the dangers of insincerity in conversation through the plots of her novels. For Austen, therefore, the term conversation has a moral imperative: not only should it be meaningful and intelligent, it should also be sincere. Like Shaftesbury, Austen also recognises the importance of the particular relationship between text and reader, and moulds the relatively new genre of the novel into a form that could create an ethical conversation between text and reader. Austen’s famously spare, elliptical and elegant novels demand from their readers a particular type of readerly engagement: a willingness to fill in the gaps that are deliberately left open for interpretation. At the same time, the narrative voice subtly manipulates readers, ensuring that we are encouraged to recognise the difference between good and bad choices, ethical and unethical behaviour.27 Austen’s faith in the morality of conversation28 and her recognition of the dangers of the exploitation of conversation puts her squarely in a tradition of female Christian moralists. Eliza Haywood is relevant here, but we wish to focus briefly on Hannah More. Although elsewhere Austen

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mocks and parodies More, their views on conversation are strongly congruent. Hannah More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799) contains a long chapter on conversation, in which she points out conversation’s vulnerability to the dangers of affectation, false wit, pedantry, vanity, irreligion, flattery, duplicity, and a whole catalogue of other sins. However, she claims that conversation also has an inherent moral value precisely because of these dangers; by struggling against the temptation to show off in conversation, we strengthen our Christian humility: Conversation must not be considered as a stage for the display of our talents, so much as a field for the exercise and improvement of our virtues; as a means for promoting the glory of our Creator, and the good and happiness of our fellow-creatures. Well-bred and intelligent Christians are not, when they join in society, to consider themselves as entering the lists like intellectual prize-fighters, in order to exhibit their own vigour and dexterity, to discomfit their adversary, and to bear away the palm of victory. Truth and not triumph should be the invariable object; and there are few occasions in life, in which we are more unremittingly called upon to watch ourselves narrowly, and to resist the assaults of various temptations, than in conversation. Vanity, jealousy, envy, misrepresentation, resentment, disdain, levity, impatience, insincerity, and pride, will in turn solicit to be gratified. Constantly to struggle against the desire of being thought more wise, more witty, and more knowing, than those with whom we associate, demands the incessant exertion of Christian vigilance; a vigilance which the generality are far from suspecting to be at all necessary in the intercourse of common society. On the contrary, cheerful conversation is rather considered as an exemption and release from watchfulness, than as an additional obligation to it. But a circumspect soldier of Christ will never be off his post; even when he is not called to public combat by the open assaults of his great spiritual enemy, he must still be acting as a centinel (sic), for the dangers of an ordinary Christian will arise more from these little skirmishes which are daily happening in the warfare of human life, than from those pitched battles that more rarely occur, and for which he will probably think it sufficient to be armed.29

For both Hannah More and Jane Austen, conversation is to some extent a battleground, a struggle with oneself and one’s conversational partner to discover truths about both self and other. To converse is to make oneself vulnerable, but in doing so, to make oneself stronger. Conversation encourages skirmishes with evils of many kinds, but it allows people to resist and conquer these evils. It is for this reason that it can be a moral force for the good, as well as a dangerous tool in the hands of evil. More’s martial rhetoric, referencing the battlefield and the jousting list, may seem

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to us overblown and faintly ridiculous, but More is by no means unique among eighteenth-century writers in conceptualizing conversational choices starkly in terms of good and bad, right and wrong, and when focusing on the long eighteenth century, it is always as well to bear in mind the moral framework within which long eighteenth-century writers understood themselves to be working. We may not generally associate the Evangelical Hannah More with the sceptical David Hume, but we see here an unusual degree of agreement in their shared interest in the moral value of conversation. While the motive for paying careful attention to conversational habits and practices is different for Hume and More, the result is the same: the purpose is to make individuals into better citizens of the social world.

The Concept and Practice of Conversation Stefan H. Uhlig’s chapter, “Improving Talk: The promises of conversation”, begins by discussing the “conversational ideal” in the humanities, posing a question that underpins all the work collected in this volume: to what extent can we consider “conversation” to be a useful methodological or theoretical framework for scholarly work in the arts, social sciences and humanities? Through a probing discussion of eighteenth-century theories and practices of conversation, he suggests that a yearning for a more “conversational” intellectual framework in today’s Academy might be characterised as a nostalgic yearning for a politer past. The mannered politeness of eighteenth-century “conversational ideals”, he argues provocatively, defines itself “against professionalism”, and can be seen to work “against the formal purposes of research or debate”. Thus conversation, he claims, has limited utility as a model for academic discourse and scholarly interaction in the contemporary academy. For Amanda Dickins, however, conversation remains a useful, if contestable model, “a thread to guide the reader through the labyrinth” of David Hume’s philosophy. She examines the role played by conversation in Hume’s philosophical writings, arguing that attention to conversation in Hume enriches our understanding of his philosophical work, and his moral philosophy in particular. Firstly, she suggests that conversation is crucial as “raw material” for philosophical reflection, which must be empirically based and not pursued in isolation. Hence Hume’s well-known articulation of the mutual dependence of the Learned and Conversible worlds in his essay “Of Essay Writing”. The Learned reflect on, refine and distil the empirical material of conversation to produce knowledge; the sociable world must be raised from idleness and triviality by its interactions with

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the Learned. While Stefan H. Uhlig argues that Hume sees the separation of the Learned and the Conversible worlds as productive in terms of intellectual enquiry, Dickins suggests that in fact, in Hume’s thought, “both suffer if they are isolated from each other.” The next section of the chapter focuses on the role played by what Hume calls the “intercourse of sentiments” in developing moral judgement. As Peter de Bolla also suggests in Chapter Nine, in relation to the visual arts, Dickins argues that this interplay of conflicting perspectives in conversation exposes us to the perspectives of others, takes us beyond our own point of view and evokes our capacity for sympathizing with other human beings. Dickins then discusses the relationship between conversation and virtue in Hume’s writings, emphasizing Hume’s belief in the connections between conversation, benevolence and pleasure. Finally, she proposes what she calls a “triptych of seduction” in Hume’s account of conversational virtue. The central element in this triptych is our own seduction by virtue–the fact that we are drawn into society by the attractiveness of its “natural” virtues. The second side of the triptych is comprised of self-effacing women, who facilitated, but did not participate in the conversation of Enlightenment salons; its last side is shored up by the anxiety of the eighteenth-century aspirant middle-class. Dickins ends her chapter by considering whether Hume’s account of morals and conversation is irredeemably compromised by its reliance on social anxiety and gender inequality. Mary Jacobus uses the concept of conversation to construct a theoretical framework for her reading of William Wordsworth. In her chapter “‘Distressful Gift’: Conversations with the dead”, Jacobus explores the conversational nature of elegy’s unheard address to the dead by considering William Wordsworth’s writings to his dead sailor brother, John, and Derrida’s collected memorials to his dead friends in The Work of Mourning (2001). Derrida’s memorials to Levinas and Marin are representative of his other tributes to the dead friends commemorated in The Work of Mourning, which take the form of posthumous responses, unfinished conversations, and personal re-readings—often continuing dialogues that had previously been conducted in print and in person, over many decades. In this moving essay, Jacobus shows us poetry as “a kind of conversation that is constantly turned towards another: an averted apostrophe”. Mourning is, in the formulation of Maurice Blanchot, a kind of “infinite conversation”, characterised achingly by the fact that “here there can be no direct communication, only a hiatus, or unknown mode of being”. Conversations with the dead must always be one-sided; but, in line with Peter de Bolla’s argument in Chapter Nine that conversation must involve some element of “talking back”, they are not monologic. Talking

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to the dead can be understood, Jacobus argues, “as a form of désoeuvrement, in Blanchot’s sense—a restless un-working that refuses totalization and proceeds not by way of critique, but rather by juxtaposition, divergence, and difference. This is a dialectic without negation, yet capable of responding to disaster, broaching the unknown of one’s own thought through repetition, return, and response.” Taking conversation as a model for analysis, we see here, brings its own openended rewards to the scholar of literature. Paul Kerry sets out to offer an account of how conversation was thematized in late eighteenth-century German texts, with particular emphasis on a neglected essay by Heinrich von Kleist that, he suggests, transforms the German discourse on conversation in this period. Kerry begins with discussions of the relationship between conversation, Enlightenment and the public sphere in Immanuel Kant’s well-known essay “What is Enlightenment?” and the place of conversation in eighteenth-century German theatre. He then provides an account of Adolph Freiherr von Knigge’s The Art of Conversing with Men, the most widely recognized work on conversation in eighteenth-century Germany, drawing parallels between Knigge’s connections between conversation, sociability and politeness and the civic vision of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury. Heinrich von Kleist’s often-neglected essay, “On the Gradual Production of Thoughts whilst Speaking”, utilizes a conversational style to suggest that thoughts are best developed in the process of conversation. Further, intellectual empathy is as crucial to the process of thought creation as verbal exchange. Kerry also shows that Kleist uses the metaphor of electricity to figure conversation as unpredictable, in contrast to the tradition of advice literature that, as Michèle Cohen also shows us, assumed conversation could be mapped and planned. The implications of Kleist’s conceptualisation of conversation are then examined within the context of the university, where Kleist argued conversations should typically take place. Kerry concludes by drawing parallels between Kleist’s notion of conversation and those of twentiethcentury thinkers, including Hans-Georg Gadamer and Sigmund Freud, and arguing that Kleist’s essay marks a turning point in German Enlightenment discourse on conversation. Turning from Continental Europe to the new American republic of the late eighteenth century, Jay Fliegelman begins his essay by focusing on the discrepancy between the late eighteenth-century American political ideal of conversation as a bulwark to democracy, aiding the circulation of opinion and information, and the reality of American political conversation as one-sided, performative and illusory. Fliegelman argues

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that this discrepancy manifests itself widely across cultural forms in the period. Thus Richard Caton Woodville’s painting Politics in the Oyster House does not represent a democratic conversation, but a harangue. More provocatively, the correspondence of Adams and Jefferson is characterized, not as an ideal, but “perhaps the most manipulative of all American political conversations”. If, as the essays in this volume have established, authentic conversation must comprise a two-sided exchange, then the solipsistic and one-sided Adams-Jefferson correspondence is not truly conversational. Fliegelman then turns his attention to the revolution in oratory and rhetoric of the 1760s and 1770s that stressed theatricality and performance in speaking over conversation and exchange of views. He focuses discussion on a text central to this rhetorical revolution, and written and visual responses to it: James Burgh’s The Art of Speaking. The essay ends with some reflections on Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782) and the observation that “productive horizontal conversation”, fantasized as a foundational article of early democratic faith, is rarely met with in reality. Michèle Cohen shows how Hume’s beliefs about the interdependence of the Learned and Conversible worlds were put into practice in educating eighteenth-century children, particularly girls. She argues, in response to Stefan H. Uhlig’s essay, for the benefits of considering conversation seriously, claiming that the centrality of “conversation” to social and cultural life in eighteenth-century England and France is now incontestable, having been firmly established in both nations in the last decades of the twentieth century. She raises a number of important questions: given the essential orality and evanescence of conversation, is its study not an impossible project? How does conversation differ from other forms of verbal exchange such as the dialogue? And to what kind of conversations are we referring? Since Lawrence Klein’s remark that in the eighteenth century, conversation was the “master metaphor” of politeness, what scholars have increasingly confronted is both the polysemic range of “conversation” and its elusiveness and irreducibility. Cohen chooses not to investigate the nature of conversation, but to explore the role it played in a specific aspect of the culture of sociability and politeness, as a mode of informal instruction. In her chapter, Cohen argues that many eighteenthcentury authors chose the “familiar format” (i.e. the forms of conversation) for instructional works. While modern historians represent didactic dialogues as structurally different from familiar conversations, Cohen believes that a number of eighteenth-century writers intended to minimize this difference, claiming that their dialogues were not only based on actual conversations, but also resorted to a variety of techniques such as digressions

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or using the language of “ordinary” conversation to simulate conversational authenticity more effectively. In eighteenth-century English and French societies, social conversations became an archetype of an art of living and thinking, linked to morality. Morality required, as we have seen in the works of Jane Austen, that social conversation should be improving. Within the culture of politeness, the social or familiar conversation, at once an art of pleasing and a discipline, was expected to be not just entertaining but instructive. This is why it is plausible, Cohen suggests, to consider that social conversations were instructive. Conversations may be oral, but they are not just a “shallow stream” of words at the “tongue’s end”, as Wollstonecraft would have it. They involve the mind and the judgement. Using letters, diaries, memoirs and biographies as well as texts that used conversation to instruct, Cohen argues that social conversations in domestic settings played a key role in the development of critical thinking in both adults and, crucially, in children. She raises questions not just about the meaning of “didactic” in conversations and dialogues, but also about informal domestic instruction, generally ignored in the historiography of education. Moving from texts of educational literature to those of the law, Jean Meiring argues that the concept of conversation is a useful way of understanding Sir William Jones’s arguments for the integration of Roman and Common law ideas in his 1781 An Essay on the Law of Bailments, as well as the distance between this text and earlier eighteenth-century dialogues between Roman and Common law. Meiring begins by charting the dissemination of continental Natural Law ideas, often associated with Roman law, in eighteenth-century England, and sketching the seventeenthcentury background to Jones’s text. Before turning to discuss William Jones in detail, this chapter considers dialogues between Roman and Common law in a number of eighteenth-century legal treatises, including those of Thomas Wood, Henry Ballow, Robert Eden and William Blackstone. Emphasis is placed both on the difficulties of establishing dialogues between the systems and the impetus to impose intellectual coherence on the Common law and equity in the eighteenth century. After a brief biography of Sir William Jones, focusing on the broad range of his intellectual interests and his involvement with the polite, conversational culture of his age, Meiring goes on to offer a close reading of An Essay on the Law of Bailments. He comments in some detail on the structure of the text, as well as its indebtedness to the various legal systems under consideration in this essay. Meiring concludes that Jones’s treatise brings together and reconciles Common law and, through the medium of Roman law, Natural reason. Crucially, the most fitting concept for understanding this accord is conversation.

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Ludmilla Jordanova’s chapter sets out the case for a special relationship between portraiture and conversation, and then examines that relationship in the early nineteenth century–arguably the last part of a long eighteenth century. She does so through the examination of one remarkable yet little-studied man, a painter, biographer and conversationalist, James Northcote (1746-1831). As Uhlig notes in the first essay in this volume, for many scholars of the long eighteenth century, there are profound links between conversation and politeness. By contrast, Northcote’s published conversations were notably rude, difficult, abrasive, critical, gossipy and judgemental. Far from being a convivial form of urbane exchange, Northcote’s conversations were concerned with the harsh evaluation of people and their works. Drawing upon Northcote’s art works, his own writings and comments by others about him, Jordanova explores the role of conversation at the beginning of the nineteenth century, its peculiar pertinence for portraiture in particular and for the visual arts in general. One late work by Northcote, his portrait of Sir Walter Scott (1828), which includes a self-portrait, is examined in more depth. The artist is shown as Titian-like; Northcote produced a biography of Titian not long before his death. Jordanova discusses the ways in which Northcote can be said to be “in conversation” with both Titian and Scott, and engages with current views of artistic “influence” to suggest that “conversations” between artists may be more common than has been hitherto supposed. Her chapter argues that “conversation”, both as complex idea and as range of practices, is indispensable when considering portraiture and the so-called “portrait transaction”, and that it is exceptionally apt in the case of James Northcote. Peter de Bolla’s concluding meditation on the central themes of this volume also deals with the connections between portraiture and conversation. He opens with some reflections on the nature of conceptualization in order to investigate “some of the lineaments of the concept of conversation”. De Bolla concludes that the distinctiveness of the concept of conversation is to be found in the fact that it can be said to occur only when something addressed in conversation, whether animate or inanimate, talks back, and when what that thing says is heard. The remainder of the essay examines how aesthetic responses to paintings can be construed as conversations in which things “talk back”. It proceeds by discussing texts on portraiture by the eighteenth-century artist and connoisseur Jonathan Richardson, as well as writings on ethics and aesthetics by the philosophers Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant. De Bolla argues that these accounts provide valuable models for understanding the cognitive, affective and moral relationships at stake in conversations between human beings and portraits. He then

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discusses the positioning of portraiture in relation to the much-debated public-private distinction in the eighteenth century, contending that both portraiture and conversation must always have the potential for being overhead. Furthermore, the scene of overhearing may include things as well as persons. Where portraits are concerned, this means that in our conversation with the depicted sitter, we sense the ears and eyes of things overhearing and overlooking ourselves. This focus on the senses in portraiture, in particular touch, is also discussed in the essay, both in terms of the physical creation of paintings and the work and thought of Thomas Gainsborough. De Bolla’s essay concludes by making a claim for what he calls “the utility of the aesthetic”. He contends that conversations with portraits are forms of aesthetic appreciation that participate in encounters with others: they are a refusal of narcissism. Moreover, such conversations are not restricted to the genre of portraiture. They are just one example of the aesthetic’s capacity to make contact with the realm of sociality. We have seen how, from early in our period, conversation was central to the formation of new concepts and practices, as well as to the negotiation between the two. In other words, thinking about conversation enables us to think too about the process of concept building, the distinctiveness, or otherwise, of concepts such as conversation–regularly invoked but not interrogated in the humanities and social sciences–and the usefulness of concepts developed over three hundred years ago for scholars working in today’s academy. Thus, despite this volume’s focus on the long eighteenth century, and the hospitability of that period to explorations of conversation, this collection’s aims are not exclusively historical or genealogical. That is, our contributors ask not only what conversation signified during the eighteenth century, and how current ways of thinking about conversation reflect their Enlightenment and Romantic legacies, but what work the concept does, and could do, today. As befits any good conversation, their conclusions are disparate, provoking and unexpected. Moreover, in the process of their enquiries, they make persuasive and ambitious claims for the distinctiveness of the conceptual architecture of conversation, and the complexity and richness of conversational practices.

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For a discussion of the periodization of the “long eighteenth century”, see de Bolla et al., “Introduction” to Land, Nation and Culture, 1740-1840: Thinking the Republic of Taste, eds Peter de Bolla, Nigel Leask and David Simpson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), passim. 2 David Hume, “Of Essay Writing”, in David Hume, Essays: Moral, political, and literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), 533-537 (533534). 3 The Oxford English Dictionary has the following meanings for Conversation: “1. The action of living or having one’s being in a place or among persons. Also fig. of one’s spiritual being. 2. The action of consorting or having dealings with others; living together; commerce, intercourse, society, intimacy. 3. Sexual intercourse or intimacy. 4. fig. Occupation or engagement with things, in the way of business or study; the resulting condition of acquaintance or intimacy with a matter. 5. Circle of acquaintance, company, society. 6. Manner of conducting oneself in the world or in society; behaviour mode or course of life. 7a. Interchange of thoughts and words; familiar discourse or talk. 7b. A particular act of discoursing upon any subject; a talk, colloquy. 7c. to make conversation: to converse for the sake of conversing; to engage in small talk. 8. A public conference, discussion or debate. 9 An “At Home”; = conversazione”. The OED also includes, under heading 10, the term “conversation piece”: “A painting representing a group of figures, esp. members of a family, arranged as in conversation in their customary surroundings”. Interestingly, all of these except 7c (to converse for the sake of conversing; to engage in small talk) include long-eighteenth-century examples. Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989. 4 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1989), passim. 5 Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism (London: Verso, 1984), 18. 6 See for example, Bruce Robbins, ed., The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1993); Women, Writing and the Public Sphere 1700-1830, eds Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Clíona Ó Gallchoir and Penny Warburton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Cindy L. Griffin, “The Essentialist Roots of the Public Sphere: A Feminist Critique,” Western Journal of Communication, 60 (Winter 1996): 21-39, and Kendall R. Phillips, “The Spaces of Public Dissension: Reconsidering the Public Sphere,” Communication Monographs 63 (September 1996): 231-48. 7 Hume, “Of Essay Writing”, 534. 8 Markman Ellis, “Coffee-women, The Spectator and the public sphere in the early eighteenth century”, in Women, Writing and the Public Sphere 1700-1830, eds Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Cliona O Gallchoir and Penny Warburton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 27-52 (31). 9 Ibid, 31. 10 Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 232-233. 11 Ibid, viii.

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12 For a discussion of the emergence of various conceptions of morality as selfgovernment in eighteenth-century philosophical thought, see J.B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 5-9. 13 Shaftesbury, 75; compare Adam Smith: “Our words must not only be English and agreable (sic) to the custom of the country, but likewise to the custom of some particular part of the nation. This part undoubtedly is formed of the men of rank and breeding.” Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. J.C. Bryce (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 4. 14 Hume, “Of Essay Writing”, 533-37. 15 Hume, “Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding” in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, eds L.A. SelbyBigge & P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 5-6. 16 Hume, “Of Essay Writing”, 537. 17 J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 62. Emphasis added. 18 Paul Hamilton, Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 189-190. 19 “Her knowledge of Richardson’s works was such as no one is likely again to acquire… Every circumstance narrated in Sir Charles Grandison, all that was ever said or done in the cedar parlour, was familiar to her; and the wedding days of Lady L. and Lady G. were as well remembered as if they had been living friends.” James Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen (London: The Folio Society, 1992; first published 1770), 79. 20 Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. John Davie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 63. 21 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 23. 22 Jane Austen, Emma, ed. Ronald Blythe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 38. 23 Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. Tony Tanner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 85. 24 Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 56, 243. 25 Ibid, 82. 26 Emma, 418-19. 27 For a fuller discussion of how Austen’s novels demand and create particular types of ethical engagements from her readers, see Katie Halsey, “The Blush of Modesty or the Blush of Shame? Reading Jane Austen’s Blushes”, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 42.3 (July 2006): 226-238 and Katie Halsey, “Spectral Texts in Mansfield Park”, in British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: authorship, history, politics, eds Cora Kaplan and Jennie Batchelor (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 28 This phrase is taken from Bharat Tandon’s Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation (London: Anthem, 2003). 29 Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, ed. Gina Luria, 2 vols (New York: Garland, 1974), II, 66-67.

CHAPTER ONE IMPROVING TALK? THE PROMISES OF CONVERSATION STEFAN H. UHLIG

In Stephen Miller’s recent portrait of decline, the author briskly sets out what we often think we know about the history of conversation, and reminds us why we tend to care about its fate.1 Having discussed some early forms, like Job’s pained altercations with his friends or Plato’s radiant dialogues, Miller devotes much of his book to the Enlightenment. For him, as for so many, it is the eighteenth century which both defines best practice and, if anything more resonantly, prompts us to believe that conversation will, in any setting, foster more constructive dialogue.2 Since then, Miller attests, things have invariably gone downhill. Our modern practices seem dangerously inauthentic, partisan, or simply single-minded and we are therefore urged to call upon the conversational legacy so as to integrate, and to improve our talk. This classic stance or “mode”, as Harold Bloom commends it on the cover, partakes equally of “elegy” and “celebration”. And a number of our recent calls in the humanities for better or just broader conversation have displayed this blend of wistful, and in many ways admiring, curiosity about the past. What Miller’s book exemplifies in academic terms, is how a certain view of conversation has acquired something like redemptive status as a subject for historical and literary research. When we are asked to study conversation, that is to say, we are likely being tempted or explicitly encouraged to improve our own professional talk. The eighteenth-century record seems, by implication, likely to benefit the ways in which we interact and share our work. We have learnt much about this “conversational ideal” in the humanities—especially where their rhetoric has been shaped by literary concerns—from David Simpson’s study of postmodern trends in the academy. It was some time ago that the extensive influence of what was principally a literary mode of “theory” went into sharp decline. Simpson suggests that for as long as its “professionalism” (otherwise “called

2

Chapter One

theory”) is still subjected to “such heavy attack”, we ought to “read” the fact that we are routinely called to focus on, indeed to foster conversation “as nostalgia for the preprofessional”.3 We seem to long, that is, for a politer, and more situated, paradigm of intellectual exchange than what we find in formal arguments, discussions or debates. Simpson historically describes the “culture of politeness” as a “long-durational” constituent of this ideal. As we shall find, politeness is just one of the shared traits of eighteenth-century thought on conversation. It is instructive, though, to note his gloss that the “prerequisite of the polite was leisure” or—not least discursive—“freedom from the exigencies of work”, “divided labor”, or some “(vested) interest”. Along these lines our quest for conversation aims, whether historically or now, at dialogue as it might function “prior to the emergence of divisive expertise”. By contrast, what “today’s apologists of common sense like to call jargon” marks the specialisms we are encouraged to suspend, or even leave behind (46). Of course the advocates of conversational styles are perfectly well placed to know the limitations as well as the costs of its discursive norms. Simpson reminds us that polite forms of address are what we commonly “resort to” where a “difficult” exchange must be maintained, or first made possible. Yet once we interact, in a more diverse context, “outside the subculture whose ideals have composed the model of what is polite” (or meet those “who simply will not recognize them”), these routines prove “fairly useless” just where we would need them most (44). For Simpson the pervasive zeal for academic conversation shores up confidence in our “sincerity and identity” (49), and substitutes these local virtues for such “master narratives”, ostensibly “discredited”, as “race” or “nation”, theory or “scientific method” (52). In the face of ever more “inclusive knowledge”, and the task of working with “materials and relationships” that are continually evolving and “unstable” (51), literary studies, history or even philosophy may pin their hopes on a new “consensus among at least a few people in some places”.4 A sense of who we are becomes as pressing as what we believe, or how we stage an argument across diverse communities. The “rhetoric of conversation”, it would seem, “seeks to suggest that, as long as we talk to others in the same social circle, we can avoid radical concerns about the languages we do not understand.” And Simpson is by no means on his own in linking conversation with the tendency of “small-group cultures” within larger disciplines to foreground their identities in lieu of more abstract or faceless premises (52).5 Much of this scepticism seems to be borne out by ways in which we have, in recent years, been asked to concentrate on conversation. Our belief in its historical success feeds much hope to resolve long-standing,

“Improving Talk”? The Promises of Conversation

3

institutionally and substantively intricate disputes. To live up to the legacy, we are urged not only to be more attentive to our interlocutors, but equally to voice the places we are (as the phrase goes) coming from, and to reflect them in our argumentative exchange. Much of this advocacy we are apparently to take on trust, and to accept both its unflagging confidence and contradictions as a mark of their deep cultural roots. For some enthusiasts it seems as if constructive dialogue, in any context and at least since the Enlightenment, depends primarily on our capacity to contribute and re-articulate our most capacious selves. In view, by contrast, of the formalized and open-ended protocols of academic work there will be downsides to this need for self- as well as mutual assurances. We may collectively (in a more open sense) not wish to bear the costs of nurturing more localized communities, however pleasurable, either across or in the disciplines. Ludmilla Jordanova, in remarks that helped prepare the present volume, notes the fact that without being “owned by any single discipline”, our focus has seemed plausible, indeed germane to “every field in the humanities and social sciences”.6 And she is quick to highlight the “utopian impulse” which appears to be at work “inside the concept ‘conversation’”. By privileging it we may, in other words, be doing less to back “open exchange” than to endorse the “common enough”, yet obviously non-trivial, “presupposition that unhealthy relationships, whether personal, occupational, institutional, economic or political can be ameliorated by more”, or “better conversation” (3). We may well credit the assumption in these separate, restricted terms, but how would we extrapolate from, say, an amorous relationship to the effectiveness of humanistic work? If we are happy to, for instance, foreground conversation as an interdisciplinary concern, yet scientific disciplines are not, is that our therapeutic gain or good for them? Do we need more of it even beyond the point at which commensurable questions and procedures would allow for a debate? Or do we long for conversation only where, and for as long as, we are suffering from a deficit of interlocking arguments? Not least because this longing tends to translate study into disciplinary critique, we should be clear about what is, for academic purposes, held to be wrong with argument, debate, or more discussion. Why, rather than just study conversation either in historical or analytic terms, are we to make this interest central to the way we work? Compared with organized deliberation, or conversely with small talk, with hectoring or monologues, conversation has of course a number of intriguing traits. It calls for roughly balanced status and participation, some familiarity and curiosity amongst the interlocutors, a shared

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Chapter One

enjoyment, generosity and courteous respect: overall criteria that have mirrored the development of courtly or increasingly urbane politeness since the seventeenth century.7 Plainly all these are aspects of a kind of interaction we would often and in several different contexts want. And there are doubtless some attempts to rectify shortcomings in the disciplines whose stress on conversation underlines a real concern. Despite his mistrust of all “zealous references” to a desired “academic norm”, Simpson still measures “fantasy formations about how we wish things to be, or still think that they should be”, as against their genuine counterpart beyond the classroom or the seminar. It may be symptomatic, he points out, that “few of us” are in a “classic”, non-professional sense that “good at strenuous listening, though most of us are delighted to talk about ourselves” and “our own work” (66). Whatever motivates the zeal, however, the sought-after joys of conversation may not blend too well with targeted exchange. The modest numbers who, either in person or in print, can interact in balanced ways, the need not to upset even those to whose beliefs we most object, or possible embarrassment about directing our attention to the most compelling points—all these constraints may prove worthwhile within some settings and their wider expectations. Yet there surely are, by contrast, formalized, deliberately public, or to all intents anonymous environments in which the obvious related costs would prove exorbitant to intellectual work. One route by which to test these doubts is the decisive turn which Richard Rorty has pursued in order to re-humanize philosophy, not least with literary support. For some, the lines which separate a more historically involved and conversational philosophy from the meticulous debates in analytic work will seem too sharply drawn to be compared with other trends in the humanities. Yet we should note to what extent Rorty’s inviting version of enquiry as so much open-ended conversation (with the help of literary works) looks to his colleagues like a blatantly obstructive move. Rather than some stylistic, and undoubtedly well-meant, attempt to interface the field, he has been seen to block what others think of as its core activities.8 This clash gives us a helpful sense of what our bestintentioned preferences for certain kinds of talk may, in existing institutional frameworks, help to do. Jacques Bouveresse sums up his wider “disagreement” by confronting Rorty’s sense that “what needs to be encouraged in philosophy is not”, as most philosophers might think, “the tendency to offer and ask for reasons and arguments”. Now, Bouveresse complains, “it is the opposite tendency whose development is encouraged as having only positive and “liberating” consequences.” Although he putatively works in a more conversational environment, Bouveresse

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5

provides a dim assessment of the likely benefits: On the basis of what we have known in France over the last years, however, in some and perhaps in most cases, philosophers seem so little inclined towards discussion and even find it so abnormal that inciting them to go further in that direction would be quite useless.9

Some of his colleagues have, as it turns out, already gone quite far. To show just how profoundly we might in the end commit ourselves, Bouveresse goes on to cite a truly radical defence of conversation. For Gilles Deleuze, the term describes the ideal type of any worthwhile rendezvous with other minds, however tenuous or rare. Bouveresse wonders out loud “what Rorty might think” of the following stance against discussion’s “fundamental uselessness”. For this fastidious dissenter from all orthodox exchange, even at the best of times, it’s already hard to understand what someone is saying. Discussion is a narcissistic exercise, where each person takes turns showing off: quite soon, no one knows what they are talking about. The real difficulty is determining a problem to which one or another proposition responds. But if one understands the problem someone poses, one has no desire to discuss it with him. Either one presents the same problem, or else one presents another and would rather move forward in this direction. How does discussion take place if there is no common set of problems and why should discussion occur if there is one? One always gets the solutions one deserves for the problems one presents. Discussions represent a great deal of time lost over indeterminate problems. Conversations are another matter. We must have conversations. But the littlest conversation is a highly schizophrenic exercise that takes place between individuals possessed of a common heritage and a great taste for ellipsis and short cuts. Conversation is rest cut by long silences. Conversation can produce ideas. But discussion is in no way part of philosophical work.10

Even without resolving all these close-packed claims, Deleuze’s forceful line may give us pause in thinking about how to regulate, or privilege the various tonalities of academic dialogue. For all its knowing idiosyncrasy, his formulation helpfully describes a point of no return for conversational enthusiasts. Deleuze protests against the logic of discussion on the grounds that it depends on “common” problems. What is presumably at stake is whether an auspicious “proposition” could be shared, in some more intricately personal way, without subjecting oneself to the public compromises of consent. Of course Deleuze’s effort to escape these terms serves only to confirm that our most drastic disagreements already

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assume—in order to be worth our while—that they might somehow, somewhere be resolved. Without this rational aspiration, in our standard terms, why talk at all? Deleuze would forfeit such clichés for ties of “common heritage” and “taste”. Yet rather than give voice to better situated selves, his conversation about new “ideas” depends on “schizophrenic” echoings, short-circuited by “rest”, ellipses and “long silences”.11 If this is how defensively ambivalent our longing for politer or more understanding talk can get, what guidance can the eighteenth-century provide?

Eighteenth-Century Reflections Much as in years before or since, the period’s archive of its conversational practices, and how they were perceived, is necessarily scattered across genres, fragmentary, and coloured by adjacent cultural forms. However, as Peter Burke has pointed out, the first half of the century in particular sees a boom in treatises on conversation which extend the early modern strands of writing about conduct, manners or civility.12 Although these sources offer little evidence of how constructive or enjoyable these interactions really were, they tell us much about what written interventions seemed appropriate. They give us some sense of what this reputed golden age considered could or, more exactly, should be done with conversational help. In period dictionaries, we find a broadly overlapping set of definitions and scenarios. Here, “conversation” promises an “entretien” or “discourse”, “intercourse”, “manner of acting” which involves “familiar” dialogue in company—although not always as its central aim—and is, above all, “easy” so as to confirm the voluntary nature of the sociability it helps create.13 It is true that lexical compendia tend, throughout these years, to yield some doubtful continuities since they both freely copy from their predecessors or competitors abroad, and stay in print for decades without being substantially revised.14 Especially where shorter entries are unchanged, the more encyclopaedic works often convey (and sometimes trigger their own copyings of) a better sense of fault lines or contested boundaries. When Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) insists that its “familiar discourse”, “chat” or “easy talk” should be “opposed to a formal conference”, this has already been spelled out in d’Alembert’s essay (1754) on conversation for the Encyclopédie.15 Here, the more casual and variable interactions of “conversation” contrast with “entretien”, whose elements are weightier and more sustained. Abraham Reese’s re-edition of Chambers’s Cyclopaedia later translates d’Alembert’s “distinction”

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7

between “discourse” that is “limited to some particular subject”, and a “conversation” welcoming “any general intercourse of sentiments whatever”.16 An “entretien” occurs, as d’Alembert explained, whenever talk “deals with an important subject” or involves someone’s superiors. The “laws of conversation” seem, by contrast, likely to obstruct real arguments, or even efforts to persuade, in aid of sympathetic ease. We are instructed, Not to dwell on any subject-matter, but to pass on lightly, without effort & without affectation, from one subject to the other; to know how to talk about frivolous matters just like serious ones; to remember that conversation is a relaxation, & that it is neither a military exercise, nor a game of chess; to know how to be casual, even more than casual, if necessary: in a word to let one’s spirit, as it were, run free, & as it can and likes to; not to insist on being heard alone & like a tyrant; not to sound dogmatic & magisterial; nothing shocks listeners more, & indisposes them against us.17

Such bans on earnestness, thematic focus or one’s stake in arguments can on occasion make it look as if such talk is a mere means to social ends. The corresponding German works, for instance, recommend a largely concrete conversatio or “Umgang” strictly as a way to gain, and influence, useful associates. In 1726, the philosopher Johann Walch dissociates all “vain” from “rational” conversation, and ignores all socializing that is merely after money, fame or sensual enjoyment. But even his “ultimate rational end” proves solidly self-serving when the “wisdom of conversation”, learnt from the “living examples” of good company, “their deeds, and speech”, conveys merely “how everyone should draw advantages from dealing with others”.18 And Johann Zedler’s volumes join (in 1749) this search for instrumental “goodwill and respect”. In line with d’Alembert’s restrictions on all intellectual seriousness, Zedler explains that it is just because the worldly meet, when they converse, “without particular, real business to conduct”, that they are able to befriend “all manner of people who may be useful to them”.19 From Walch to d’Alembert or Johnson, it is hard to ignore how much divides this sense of conversation’s purposes and benefits from intellectual work. To find a more reliable juxtaposition of polite exchange and its distinctive features with more formal arguments, we need to look to broadly philosophical accounts of language and enquiry. Right at the start of Locke’s foundational An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), the author charts a topographic overview of recent building work. He styles his own task to be that of keeping all roads clear, so that no

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needless rubble blocks our path now that significant advances are being made on every front. The “Commonwealth of Learning”, he reports, is not at this time without Master-Builders, whose mighty Designs, in advancing the Sciences, will leave lasting Monuments to the Admiration of Posterity; But every one must not hope to be a Boyle, or a Sydenham; and in an Age that produces such Masters, as the Great—Huygenius, and the incomparable Mr. Newton, with some other of that Strain; ’tis Ambition enough to be employed as an Under-Labourer in clearing Ground a little, and removing some of the Rubbish, that lies in the way to Knowledge.20

Locke largely blames this debris on the ruinously bookish jargon of traditional philosophy. Much has been done in modern times, and yet we “certainly” could be, in all fields, “very much more advanced in the World, if the Endeavours of ingenious and industrious Men had not been much cumbred with the learned but frivolous use of uncouth, affected, or unintelligible Terms”. Much of the Essay and especially book three are famously devoted to analyses of the ideas behind wilfully “hard or misapply’d Words”. And both call for concerted intellectual action to oppose the “vague and insignificant Forms of Speech” which have “so long”, and most of all among trained scholars, “passed for Mysteries of Science”. One measure of this catachrestic legacy, as Locke suggests, is the steep barrier, in recent memory, between the terms of scholarship and any sociable exchange. Once “introduced into the Sciences”, learned abuses were, beyond all natural difficulty, “there made an Art of, to that Degree, that Philosophy, which is nothing but the true Knowledge of Things, was thought unfit, or uncapable to be brought into well-bred Company, and polite Conversation” (10). The outcomes of such miscommunication, and the likely costs or benefits to either of these spheres, form a recurrent theme in Locke’s remedial linguistics. From several vantage points, he sets out to remake the paths of understanding and enquiry. At the same time, the Essay also spells out the divergent purposes of conversational talk. Errors of language obfuscate even those “simple Ideas” which are likely shared by all. Our careless talk will implicate these tools in intellectual delusions that sadly seem as prevalent as the ideas themselves. Therefore this “sort of Ideas” must be disentangled, but will nonetheless remain at risk, from “every floating Imagination in Men’s Brains”. Even untrained minds will grapple with “Notions and Prejudices” which they have “imbibed from Custom, Inadvertency” and, not least injuriously, from “common Conversation” (180). By contrast, other parts of the Essay treat artless conversation as a measure of how culpably enquiry has been

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undermined. Traditional learning manages to turn even our sensory notions inside out, e.g. “to prove, that White was Black”. And rather than improve communicative forms, the experts use their skilled “Advantage” merely to indulge in shows of “Art and Subtlety”. They work extensively in order “to destroy the Instruments and Means of Discourse, Conversation, Instruction, and Society”. Perversely, language comes to look “less useful, than the real Defects of it had made it, a Gift, which the illiterate had not attained to” (495-96). And its most carefully belabored parts therefore appear “much more obscure, uncertain, and undetermined” even “than they are in ordinary Conversation” (494). Thus “ordinary” talk features, by turns, as minor villain or as victim in Locke’s explanation of past ills. Where conversation is, for future purposes, evaluated next to discourse, knowledge or philosophy, its basic trait is unreflected pragmatism. Locke only once refers to a specifically polite variety (alongside “well-bred Company”, in the above), as if to treat it merely as the obverse of philosophy’s scholastic past. For the Essay, the present realm of conversation situates at once the workings and the limitations of what Locke calls “common use” (479). Here speakers circulate their rough and ready meanings with much practical success, but they have little hope of seeing their insights or ideas improve. Book three divides the uses of “communication” into “civil” as opposed to “philosophical”. The latter rest, of course, on their ability to “convey the precise Notions of Things”, whereas the civil realm merely involves such “Thoughts and Ideas” as “serve for the upholding of common Conversation and Commerce, about the ordinary Affairs and Conveniences of civil Life, in the Societies of Men, one amongst another”. Since civil uses are both overly diverse and resolutely practical, Locke is content that “a great deal less exactness will serve” in the conversational world (476). The sharp distinction, furthermore, between analysis and “common use” as guides of how we talk leaves him profoundly sceptical that even the success of his own project would affect the civil realm. In one of Locke’s appeals for more “Exactness” in pursuit of truth, he underscores again how much his efforts have been cheered by the unwitting, practical effectiveness of untrained talk. Yet he predicts, on the same grounds, that his campaign will not do much to change its conversational aims and benefits: And though it would be well too, if it extended it self to common Conversation, and the ordinary Affairs of Life; yet I think, that is scarce to be expected. Vulgar Notions suit vulgar Discourses: and both, though confused enough, yet serve pretty well the Market, and the Wake. Merchants and Lovers, Cooks and Taylors, have Words wherewithal to

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Chapter One dispatch their ordinary Affairs; and so, I think, might Philosophers and Disputants too, if they had a Mind to understand, and to be clearly understood. (514)

Its very stake in sociability, and diverse interests, will effectively dissociate the talk of trade or company from genuine thought. Not least because these idioms can already know all that they are meant to achieve, their social habits are not likely to respond to change. With less insistence on the principles of ordinary discourse as against philosophy, Hume’s vindication of the essay genre famously displays more confidence in the potential trade-offs between learning and congenial talk. In some ways, Hume’s “Of Essay Writing” (1742) codifies for us an aspiration that is sometimes voiced in the contemporary periodicals, and much invoked by modern scholars. As Addison classically puts it in The Spectator (no. 10, 1711), it is to bring “Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at TeaTables, and in Coffee-Houses”.21 Hume’s own text separates the “elegant Part of Mankind”—those able to forego “the animal Life” in order to “employ themselves in the Operations of the Mind”—into “the learned” on one hand, and the “conversible” on the other.22 In the “last Age”, and here Hume sides with Locke, the two groups kept themselves injuriously to themselves. With no “Recourse”, that is to say, “to History, Poetry, Politics, and the more obvious Principles, at least, of Philosophy”, presumably more courtly forms of conversation could not but reduce to “endless Chat” or “gossiping” (534). The realm of learning, at the same time, equally lost out. It stayed “totally barbarous” until thought ceased to overlook “Experience” precisely “where alone it is to be found”, namely “in common Life and Conversation”. Then even classical pursuits lacked the habitual “Liberty and Facility of Thought and Expression” which, as Hume contends, “can only be acquir’d by Conversation” (534-35). Now times have changed, Hume wants his own essays to trade and share the benefits “betwixt the learned and conversible Worlds”. Scholarly work is said to have lost much of its “Bashfulness”, while conversationalists seem positively “proud of borrowing from Books”. As a philosopher and essayist, Hume undertakes to act as an “Ambassador from the Dominions of Learning to those of Conversation”, and to promote “good Correspondence betwixt these two States, which have so great a Dependence on each other” (535). There is much diplomatic talk here but we need to focus—in this well-known statement—on the “native” sovereignty of these states as well as on their disparate economies:

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I shall give Intelligence to the Learned of whatever passes in Company, and shall endeavour to import into Company whatever Commodities I find in my native Country proper for their Use and Entertainment. The Balance of Trade we need not be jealous of, nor will there be any Difficulty to preserve it on both Sides. The Materials of this Commerce must chiefly be furnish’d by Conversation and common Life: The manufacturing of them alone belongs to Learning. (535)

It is not just that “jealous” questions might arise about how profits are being shared, or that the learned are “alone” in a position to expand what is already known.23 This “Resident” of the philosopher’s domain does not expect the realms of sociability and scholarship to merge. In fact, the genre of the essay will depend in its success on their divided rule. Accordingly the joys of conversation can, like dining or backgammon, serve to free the sceptic of the Treatise, at least intermittently, from philosophically induced “delirium” or “melancholy”.24 And Hume’s extended introduction to “Of Essay Writing” takes some care to clarify the rationale for separate spheres: The Learned are such as have chosen for their Portion the higher and more difficult Operations of the Mind, which require Leisure and Solitude, and cannot be brought to Perfection, without long Preparation and severe Labour. The conversible World join to a sociable Disposition, and a Taste of Pleasure, an Inclination to the easier and more gentle Exercises of the Understanding, to obvious Reflections on human Affairs, and the Duties of common Life, and to the Observation of the Blemishes or Perfections of the particular Objects, that surround them. Such Subjects of Thought furnish not sufficient Employment in Solitude, but require the Company and Conversation of our Fellow-Creatures, to render them a proper Exercise for the Mind: And this brings Mankind together in Society, where every one displays his Thoughts and Observations in the best Manner he is able, and mutually gives and receives Information, as well as Pleasure. (533-34)

Hume’s diplomatic task largely derives from this assumption that, for learned sceptics, the most taxing questions will depend on solitary research. Even enlightened conversation must, by contrast, reap its pleasurable dividends from intellectual, albeit neither sensible nor sentimental, lack of depth. While Hume’s account of this division tracks the risks and benefits to either side, there is no reason why their profitable differences should come to look less resolute in a politer world.25 For much contemporary thought, the joys of conversation thus depend on its discontinuity with rigorous debates, or the pursuit of genuinely new ideas. However well-informed, its sociability precisely thrives on the

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constraints and limits which can circumscribe a diverse, yet progressively more interactive group. Beyond this overall contrast with enquiry or debate, the practice further spawns a string of commentaries, guides to the “art”, or even poems, that deal exclusively with conversation. Whoever reads this body of materials will be struck not just by how repetitive it is, but also by the way in which it constantly recasts its charge in the same normative, frustrated terms. Perhaps the most revealing feature of these efforts to explain, improve and validate the practice is their uniform ambition to supply much-needed rules. One early writer is defensive, “that I should pretend to give Rules, to the practice of which there is so little disposition in my nature”, but his gambit is already backed by Ciceronian precedent.26 In De Officiis, Cicero demurred that whereas rhetoric governed public “Argument and Contention” [contentio], “there are no rules” that can help with “common and ordinary Talk” [sermo]—such as “when we walk in any of the publick Places, or are sitting at Table, and over a glass of Wine”.27 As Burke points out, the long-term “similarities” in this tradition prove consistently “worth emphasizing”.28 Swift, in one of several interventions, spells out that the search for rules springs not from a desire to fine-tune some conversational ideal, but from “mere Indignation” at the quality of actual talk. There “seemeth to be so much to be said”, yet Swift finds “few so obvious Subjects to have been so seldom, or, at least, so slightly handled”. Like many other pundits who keep laying down the rules, he sounds exasperated that “so useful and innocent a Pleasure, so fitted for every Period and Condition of Life, and so much in all Men’s Power”, should also be “so much neglected and abused.”29 That conversation is in dire need of art provides a common subject for the periodicals. The Tatler (no. 225, 1710) asks why, in the “pleasing” hours we devote to it, we take so “very little Care” thereby “to improve ourselves”, and even speculates (in no. 12, 1709) about a level of “decay” that will reveal each previously genial interlocutor to in fact be “an impostor”.30 Echoing d’Alembert’s demand for talk that would be truly casual or “négligé”, The World (no. 94, 1754) sees the desire to act a “character”, jointly with other ills, conspiring to “reduce conversation to the state we lament it in at present”.31 Mr. Spectator also minutes a pervasive loss of “old English Plainness and Sincerity” (no. 130, 1711),32 and one of several “correspondents” cheers (in no. 145, 1711) that he could not “employ” himself “more usefully than in adjusting the Laws of Disputation in Coffee-houses and accidental Companies, as well as in more formal Debates”.33 He later finds, not without biting irony, that only “Method” could now save this prospering mode of sociability:

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I, who hear a Thousand Coffee-house Debates every Day, am very sensible of this want of Method in the Thoughts of my honest Countrymen. There is not one Dispute in Ten, which is managed in those Schools of Politicks, where, after the three first Sentences, the Question is not entirely lost. Our Disputants put me in mind of the Skuttle Fish, that when he is unable to extricate himself, blackens all the Water about him, till he becomes invisible. (no. 476, 1712)34

Not only is its promise of sincerity in doubt, but there is some anxiety and jesting that the zeal for conversation may have lost its plot. There are no fewer such complaints, in all persuasive registers, than there are manuals and catalogues of rules. For present purposes, there would be little gained from detailing these lists, not just because they are so repetitious but especially because their content is defined by manners— and the broader aspirations of politeness in the public sphere—far more than by specifically discursive points.35 Swift understands “good manners” generally as the ability to make those “easy with whom we converse”, and clarifies that their criteria ultimately lie “in action, not in words”.36 The counsels which, by contrast, directly affect the intellectual claim of eighteenth-century conversation ban what we have come to understand as talking shop.37 We have already noted d’Alembert’s and Rees’s stress on skipping gracefully from one theme to the next, but the full range of antispecialist injunctions would ban any expert, and especially scholars, from deploying their skills. In its re-educational tale about a student’s country holiday, The Guardian (no. 24, 1713) urges anyone with even a moderate claim to scholarship not to speak “much of any particular science”. The poet Abraham Cowley is especially praised for having “by his discourse” rarely shown his erudition.38 Swift similarly faults a company of authors—selfstyled “Oracles” of wit—for his worst such encounter “ever”, and decries the common style of “argument” as “the worst sort of conversation”.39 Tennis or bandy, not the much less equitably balanced “foot-ball”, is the dominant game-metaphor,40 and Fielding’s “Essay” (1743) links the ban on perilously earnest “Arguments” with a requirement to tailor content to whatever modest competence is shared by all: the Pleasure of Conversation must arise from the Discourse being on Subjects levelled to the Capacity of the whole Company; from being on such in which every Person is equally interested; from every one’s being admitted to his Share in the Discourse; and lastly, from carefully avoiding all Noise, Violence, and Impetuosity.41

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A writer for The Adventurer (no. 85, 1753) is less appreciative of these polite dynamics, and details their disadvantages to “argument” and cognitive advance. Here, the philosophers’ distrust of “copiousness”, “facility”, or even “sophisms” tracks yet another way in which such selfrespect comes at a cost: While the various opportunities of conversation invite us to try every mode of argument, and every art of recommending our sentiments, we are frequently betrayed to the use of such as are not in themselves strictly defensible: a man heated in talk, and eager of victory, takes advantage of the mistakes or ignorance of his adversary, lays hold of concessions to which he knows he has no right, and urges proofs likely to prevail on his opponent, though he knows himself that they have no force: thus the severity of reason is relaxed; many topics are accumulated, but without just arrangement or distinction; we learn to satisfy ourselves with such ratiocination as silences others; and seldom recall to a close examination, that discourse which has gratified our vanity with victory and applause.42

Perhaps the most sustained critique along these lines is featured in The Rambler (no. 188, 1752). Johnson puzzles over what “peculiar” talents make for champions of the conversational scene since their acclaim, he reckons, “holds no stated proportion” either to “their knowledge or their virtue”.43 His answer turns, like Fielding’s, on what skills and knowledge can or cannot readily be shared. Looking at conversationalists, we need “some abatement of character” to explain reciprocal success in an environment where obviously superior “knowledge”, reasoning or “wit” merely “depresses” or effectively excludes most of the company. As if to validate a link which Simpson makes between the conversational ideal and new historicism’s use of the anecdote (both modes of “storytelling”), Johnson pinpoints “the narrative” as the exemplary conversational “stile” (3:221).44 All can identify with some part of a tale, and see themselves “become a speaker” in re-telling it, including those who might not, in a different vein, readily “comprehend a series of argument”. Since stories are not, Johnson adds, “supposed to imply intellectual qualities above the common rate”, they will arouse—like all successful conversation—little jealousy (3:222). In this defensive line of argument, Johnson again finds much to separate the claims of an expansive sociability from erudite exchange. Although this stream of commentary (which spreads out well into midcentury) does little but promote a set of norms, its wished-for category or fully-fledged “art” looks hardly less disabled than the practices it ritually laments. For one thing, its perennial championing of the same set of diagnoses and reforms (while it harks back as far as Cicero) provides no

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indication of success—though it shows much investment in a public sphere as much as in diversifying sites of sociability.45 And for another, this perpetually wishful theory instructs us from the start that conversation is, despite it all, alive only in practice, and accordingly impervious to reform. The experts constantly deplore its roughness and neglect, but their reformist credo also warns that too much trying in these matters does more harm than good.46 One consequence is that the aspiring art of conversation will, wherever possible, instantiate and not explain its aims. The abbé de Bellegarde’s much reproduced Modèles (originally 1697) is not the only text to honour—naturally in dialogue form—the “maxim, that precept is best enforced by example”.47 As if to teach a history that has presumably not happened yet, another sampler calls for thought about “due Methods”, but instead holds up “a true Account of what” in fact, or so we are to hope, “happens in Conversation”.48 John Taperell declines to rule beyond what is “to be avoided” (so as not “to make a marble Statue of a moving Man”49) and Swift agrees that pointing out mere “Faults and Errors” is the best way to revive our “born” ability “of being agreeable, though not of shining” at this concrete task. He hopes that this one beneficial practice will at least escape our modern, idealistic “boosterism”. After all, most other “Things”, pursued by Men for the Happiness of publick or private Life, our Wit or Folly have so refined, that they seldom subsist but in Idea; a true Friend, a good Marriage, a perfect Form of Government, with some others, require so many Ingredients, so good in their several Kinds, and so much Niceness in mixing them, that for some thousands of Years Men have despaired of reducing their Schemes to Perfection.50

Although it still appears “so much neglected and abused”, Swift underwrites a common promise that the situation “is”, or at least “might be otherwise” with conversation.51 Like the entire line of commentary, he offers no “Idea” of conversation but sets out to scrutinize—and to improve—a spreading practice that would seem forever caught between bad habits and their ineffectual reform. If we are moved by scholarly or academic hopes, these eighteenthcentury precedents are less than promising. Accounts that test how conversation links up with enquiry find in it pleasures that are clearly separate from intellectual work, and far less strenuous. Texts which devote themselves head-on to conversation’s civilizing force attest that sociability and genuine debate will not successfully combine. But they moreover testify that conversations tend to be—despite all hope and scrutiny— frustratingly impervious to rules. However highly prized, they prove as

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hard to theorize as they seem to predict, or to improve with any measurable effect. The so-called art of conversation in the end amounts to little more than an ad hoc, and largely routine, gesture of concern. And it appears to intervene without much grasp of either detailed facts, or what success might look like in this unrewarding field. For all the popularity of conversation in the period, its actualities thus come to look intangible in intellectual terms. Since even its strong commentary tradition fails to gain much analytic grip, we are left without a substantive, or intellectually expressive, conversational ideal. Instead, what can be known about the conversational scene is roughly what, with a discursive bent, we may or may not want to learn about how to conduct ourselves. On present evidence, the eighteenth-century bequeaths a sense of “conversation” that would actively run counter to the formal purposes of research or debate. And if we called on it to help us out professionally, what it could teach us is at best how to be more polite. We should recall, if tempted, that this legacy of genial talk has long defined itself against the rules of expertise. 1

Stephen Miller, Conversation: A History of a Declining Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 2 For accounts of the larger historical context see Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); and Anthony J. La Vopa’s review article, “Conceiving a Public: Ideas and Society in EighteenthCentury Europe”, The Journal of Modern History 64 (1992): 79-116. 3 David Simpson, The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature: A Report on Half-Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 47. 4 For discussions of this tendency in literary studies, see Charles Bernheimer, ed., Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). 5 Compare Walter Benn Michaels on Stephen Greenblatt’s ambition to “re-create a conversation with the dead” as, by his own account, a “conversation with oneself”. Whereas conventional historians might look for cognitive or causal links between the past and present, Greenblatt hopes for access to “the voice of the dead”. Thus “continuity”, Michaels points out, “is turned into identity”. The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 138. 6 Ludmilla Jordanova, “Conversation—An Introduction”, opening address at the Conversation launch conference (Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, 2004), 4, http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/themes/convlaunchljj.pdf. 7 See Lawrence E. Klein, “Liberty, Manners, and Politeness in Early EighteenthCentury England”, The Historical Journal 32 (1989): 583-605; and, classically,

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Norbert Elias, The History of Manners: The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 8 Simpson describes how Rorty substitutes a “conversation between persons” for a subject’s representational “interaction with nonhuman reality” (Academic Postmodern, 42-44). 9 Jacques Bouveresse, “Reading Rorty: Pragmatism and its Consequences”, in Rorty and his Critics, ed. Robert B. Brandom (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 142. 10 Quoted in Bouveresse, “Reading Rorty”, 142. 11 In his reply, Rorty describes what separates his sense of conversational philosophy from this more polarized account: “I quite agree with Bouveresse about the silliness of Deleuze’s characterization of discussion as a “narcissistic exercise”, but I do not think that one need try to delimit what will count as “philosophy” in order to counteract this silliness.” “Response to Jacques Bouveresse”, in Brandom, Rorty and his Critics, 152. 12 Peter Burke, The Art of Conversation (Cambridge: Polity, 1993), 90-109. There is considerably less focused writing about conversation after the mid-century. Among the exceptions are Cowper’s “Conversation” (1781), and the later essays by Hazlitt and De Quincey listed in the bibliography. 13 Guy Tachard, Dictionnaire Nouveau François-Latin (Paris: Pralard, 1692), 197; John Kersey, Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum: or, A general English dictionary (London: Philips and others, 1708), X2v; Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London: Knapton and others, 1755), 1:5Or. 14 Carey McIntosh notes the continuous republication of John Bullokar’s An English Expositour from 1616 to 1775, and of Nathan Bailey’s An Universal Etymological Dictionary from 1721 to 1802. “Eighteenth-Century English Dictionaries and the Enlightenment”, Yearbook of English Studies 28 (1998): 4. 15 Johnson, Dictionary, 1:5Or. 16 Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopædia, ed. Abraham Reese (London: Strahan and others, 1778), 1:11L2r. 17 Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, eds, Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Paris: Briasson and others, 1754), 4:165-66 (my translation). 18 Johann Georg Walch, Philosophisches Lexicon (Leipzig: Gleditsch, 1726), 442. 19 Johann Heinrich Zedler, Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon aller Wissenschaften und Künste (Halle: Zedler, 1749), 49:966, 970. 20 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 9-10. 21 Donald F. Bond, ed., The Spectator (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 1:44. Confer, for instance, Stephen Copley’s “Commerce, Conversation and Politeness in the Early Eighteenth-Century Periodical”, British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies 18 (1995): 63-77. 22 David Hume, “Of Essay Writing”, in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1987), 533. 23 We may compare the literal case for interactions between separate states in “Of the Jealousy of Trade”: “I will venture to assert, that the encrease of riches and

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commerce in any one nation, instead of hurting, commonly promotes the riches and commerce of all its neighbours; and that a state can scarcely carry its trade and industry very far, where all the surrounding states are buried in ignorance, sloth, and barbarism.” (Essays, ed. Miller, 328). 24 See Hume’s well-known account of his escapes from speculation’s “deepest darkness” in A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 269. 25 My emphasis on separate spheres departs from Copley’s view that Hume “regrets” any remaining gap between the learned and conversable worlds, and works straightforwardly to “overcome” it (“Commerce”, 63). 26 The Art of Complaisance, or the Means to Oblige in Conversation (London: Starkey, 1673), A3r. 27 Cicero, Tully’s Offices (London: Buckley, 1714), 95. For a scholarly translation of “sermo” as “conversation” see De Officiis, trans. Walter Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 135. 28 Burke, Art of Conversation, 91. 29 Jonathan Swift, “Hints towards an Essay on Conversation”, in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis with Louis Landa (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957), 4: 87-88. Benjamin Stillingfleet’s poetic treatment similarly asks: “Whence comes it, that in every Art we see / Many can rise to a supreme Degree; / Yet in this Art, for which all seem design’d / By Nature, scarcely One compleat we find?”. An Essay on Conversation (London: Gilliver and Clarke, 1737), 3 (lines 15-18). 30 Donald F. Bond, ed., The Tatler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 3: 172, 1: 106. 31 Alexander Chalmers, ed., The British Essayists; with Prefaces Historical and Biographical (London: Nichols and others, 1817), 27: 221. 32 Bond, Spectator, 1: 430. 33 Ibid., 2: 71. 34 Ibid., 4: 187. 35 I cite the most important arts of conversation in the notes below and more, such as The Art of Complaisance, or The means to oblige in conversation (1673) and the originals of foreign works, are listed in the bibliography. 36 Swift, “On Good Manners and Good Breeding, in Davis, Prose Works, 4: 213; “Hints on Good Manners”, in Davis, Prose Works, 4: 221. 37 See Burke, Art of Conversation, 111. 38 The Guardian (no. 24, 1713), in Chalmers, British Essayists, 16: 127. 39 Swift, “Hints on Good Manners”, 4: 222; “Hints towards an Essay”, 4: 90. Stillingfleet demands judgement in place of regressive expertise: “Cramp not your Language into Logic Rules, / To Rostrums leave the Pedantry of Schools; / Nor let your Learning always be discern’d, / But chuse to seem judicious more than learn’d”. Essay, 12 (lines 316-19). 40 The Connoisseur (no. 138, 1756) explains: “Though a man succeeds, he should not, as is frequently the case, engross the whole talk to himself; for that destroys the very essence of conversation, which is talking together. We should try to keep up conversation like a ball bandied to and fro from one to the other, rather than seize it before us like a foot-ball.” Chalmers, British Essayists, 32: 228.

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41 Henry Fielding, “An Essay on Conversation”, in Miscellanies, ed. Henry Knight Miller (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1972), 1:146. Cowper’s “Conversation” has: “Preserve me from the thing I dread and hate— / A duel in the form of a debate”; and, “Vociferated logic kills me quite; / A noisy man is always in the right”. Poetical Works, ed. H. S. Milford (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 91-92 (lines 83-84, 113-14). 42 Donald D. Eddy, ed., The Adventurer (New York: Garland, 1978), 2: 89-90. 43 Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969), 3: 220. 44 Cf. Simpson, Academic Postmodern, 41-42. 45 Swift’s satirical Polite Conversation (1738)—his most copious expression of “mere Indignation”—has perhaps the final word in describing an art that seems to have “descended by Tradition, for at last an hundred Years, without any Change in the Phraseology”. “A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation”, in Davis, Prose Works, 4: 111. 46 In line with the traditional polite demand for studied artlessness, the manuals keep cautioning their students not to strive too hard. Morvan de Bellegarde’s Models of Conversation for Persons of Polite Education (London: Millar, 1765), xiii-xiv, insists that conversation must be left to “chance, the times and the disposition of the company”, as it admits of “nothing studied or affected”. Others warn conversationalists “not to appear overloaded” (Eddy, Adventurer, 87), or to arrive “brim full of discourse”. Pierre Ortigue de Vaumorière, The Art of Pleasing in Conversation (London: Bentley, 1691), 285. Cowper sums up: “Words learn’d by rote a parrot may rehearse, / But talking is not always to converse”. Poetical Works, 90 (lines 7-8). 47 Bellegarde, Models of Conversation, vi. Other dialogic manuals include Stefano Guazzo, The Art of Conversation (London: Brett, 1738); and the anonymous The Art of Conversation (London: Withy and Ryall, 1757)—aptly dedicated to the epistolary teacher Samuel Richardson. Of course poetic treatises like Stillingfleet’s or Cowper’s in their own way sidestep theoretical abstraction. 48 John Constable, The Conversation of Gentlemen (London: Hoyles, 1738), iii-iv. 49 He adds: “What a Folly is it then to set Bounds to Conversation, which is in itself boundless?”. John Taperell, A New Miscellany: containing The art of conversation (London: for the author, 1731), 5-6. 50 Swift, “Hints towards an Essay”, 4:87. 51 Ibid., 87-88.

CHAPTER TWO AN “INTERCOURSE OF SENTIMENTS” AND THE SEDUCTIONS OF VIRTUE: THE ROLE OF CONVERSATION IN DAVID HUME’S PHILOSOPHY AMANDA DICKINS

This chapter explores the role played by conversation in David Hume’s philosophy and particularly his moral philosophy. Hume’s use of conversational imagery runs throughout his oeuvre: conversation appears in both of his major philosophical works (the Treatise and the Enquiries), playing different roles as the focus shifts from epistemology to moral philosophy.1 I situate his use of conversation in the overall structure of his philosophical works read as a whole, an approach that is gaining in popularity amongst Hume scholars.2 Tracing Hume’s usage through his philosophical works supports the case for this approach: conversation supplies a thread to guide the reader through the labyrinth of a philosophy with an internal structure that is both more complex and more coherent than is commonly supposed.3 Following this conversational thread enriches our understanding of his philosophy, particularly with respect to his writing on morals. The structure of this chapter mirrors the philosophical narrative enacted by the evolving roles of conversation in Hume’s philosophical works. The first section focuses on the supporting role played by conversation in the opening chapters of his philosophy, where it provides raw material for his philosophical speculations.4 Hume’s analysis of understanding makes it clear that reason is not a purely solitary activity and conversation comes to the fore in Hume’s account of moral judgement.5 This is discussed in section two, where conversation moves centre stage, just as it does in the later chapters of the Treatise and the Enquiries, an importance reflected in the increasing frequency with which

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he deploys the term.6 The “intercourse of sentiments” experienced through the medium of conversation plays a vital role in this account, forming an integral part of Hume’s sociably recast reason. Conversation enables us to form stable moral judgements by correcting the distortions of self-centred perspectives, nurturing and helping to define virtue. The third and final section discusses the seductive qualities of virtue as recast by Hume. His conversational virtue enhances the pleasures of company and thereby our sociability and benevolence. However, this seduction was accomplished, in eighteenth century practice, by means that are much less attractive to the contemporary eye: the suppression of female voices and the exploitation of the social anxieties and hierarchy of Georgian society.

Conversation as raw material for philosophy Both the Treatise and the Enquiries open with substantial disquisitions on “understanding”, a topic that subsumes reason, perception and knowledge. Conversation’s role in these early chapters of Hume’s philosophy is something of a walk-on part but, despite the paucity of lines, the role is still a significant one. Conversation provides a “transcript of the mind” and “testimony” of human nature, raw material for philosophical speculation. Such testimony is vital for Hume’s approach to philosophy in which nothing can be achieved without the evidence of experience. Even as the inexperienced prodigy, who published his Treatise while still in his twenties, Hume maintained that philosophy “cannot go beyond experience”.7 An admirer of Newton, he sought to start a “new philosophical enterprise”, an “experimental philosophy” modelled, in part, on the example of the natural sciences, a self-conscious attempt to inaugurate an empirically founded but reflective “science of man”.8 This new science would rely upon the raw material of observation and experience to temper the “fiery particles” of philosophers engaged in pure speculation: conversation provides this raw material.9 Conversation’s role as raw material, evident in the Treatise and the Enquiries, receives extended treatment in his reflexively-titled essay “Of Essay Writing”. As Stefan H. Uhlig points out in the previous chapter of this volume, in this piece, Hume classifies those with the leisure for thought into two types. The Learned are of a solitary bent, pursuing “the higher and more difficult Operations of the Mind”, while those immersed in the Conversible world are more sociable, occupied with everyday experience and inclined towards “the easier and more gentle Exercises of the Understanding” including “obvious Reflections on human Affairs, and the Duties of common Life”.10 In my view, Hume makes it very clear that

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there is a mutual dependence between the Learned and Conversible: both suffer if they are isolated from each other. Such a separation of the Learned and Conversible was, Hume claimed, “the great Defect of the last Age”. Without access to learning, conversation is reduced to “gossipping Stories and idle Remarks”.11 Meanwhile, the Learned suffer an equally great loss: they become barbarous from being “shut up in Colleges and Cells”, and they are unable to develop “Liberty and Facility of Thought and Expression” because they have been “secluded from the World and good Company”. The “higher and more difficult Operations of the Mind” undertaken by the Learned might require solitude, but they also require the raw material of experience, experience that can only be found in “conversation and common Life”. Without such material, “even Philosophy” is ruined, rendered unintelligible and “chimerical in her Conclusions”.12 The essay’s account of philosophy suffering in isolation bears a strong resemblance to Hume’s portrait of his early development as a philosopher in the Treatise. At the outset, in Book 1 of the Treatise, Hume presents his philosophy developing in seclusion, without conversation, portraying himself in pursuit of knowledge through solitary reasoning. In his account, both the philosopher and the quality of his work suffer from this seclusion. The narrative at the end of Book 1 recounts how he pushed his exploration of reason to its utmost limits, whereupon he was driven to dramatic despair by this essentially solitary activity: “The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning”.13 Hume may have based his narrative on his actual experience since he claims to have suffered from “the Disease of the Learned” which manifested itself as a “coldness and desertion of the spirit”.14 If so, Hume was not the first, nor the last, to suffer such a breakdown, nor was he the last to respond with a change in his philosophical direction. 15 Whether or not the narrator’s suffering is based on Hume’s own experience, this moment is the psychological fulcrum of the Treatise, the point at which the laborious argumentation of Book 1 is turned on its head.16 Significantly, it is sociable activities, including conversation with his friends, which draw the narrator away from solitary despair in his study. Conversation, in the form of a talking cure, helps to banish his “philosophical melancholy and delirium”.17 This dramatic turn clears the way for Hume to develop his “experimental philosophy”. Building on his painfully-won awareness of the limits of solitary reason, Hume argues that one needs to be sceptical about scepticism itself, arguing that a “true

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sceptic will be diffident of his philosophical doubts, as well as of his philosophical conviction”.18 Following his own advice, the rest of the Treatise is the work of a diffident sceptic, trying to “establish a system or set of opinions, which if not true (for that, perhaps, is too much to be hop’d for) might at least be satisfactory to the human mind, and might stand the test of the most critical examination.” 19 The mature author of the Enquiries maintains the same conclusion, but reaches it without such dramatic flourish.20 He advocates experimental philosophy, a “human” science, noting that society despises not only the ignorant but also the “mere philosopher” who “lives remote from communication with mankind”.21 In both the Treatise and the Enquiries, Hume persists with his “experimental” approach to philosophy, developing his work through reflection on experience and observation. It is clear that conversation is an important source of both. Hume makes repeated reference to phenomena occurring in “common life and conversation”.22 He cites reading and conversation as the materials that inform his work in the Treatise: together with books, conversation provides “a transcript of the mind” and “the same qualities, which render the one valuable, must give us an esteem for the other”.23 Similarly, in the Enquiries, he notes that books and conversation enlarge the “sphere” of experience, although the mature author of that work has learnt (no doubt from experience) that such enlargement occurs to a differing extent in different individuals.24 In fact philosophy is never an entirely solitary activity for Hume: even when he is explicitly focusing on reasoning in Book 1 of the Treatise, conversation provides raw material for reflection and has a part to play in thought and judgement.25 The portrait of philosophic seclusion in Book 1 of the Treatise is an ingenious sketch, designed as an expository tactic rather than accurate autobiography. It is an allegory designed to demonstrate the limitations of undiluted reason and the dangers of solitary thought. The purpose of the allegory is to turn reason on itself, to “whittle down the claims of reason by the use of rational analysis”.26 To whittle down is not, however, to discard but rather to carve with care in order to fashion a more durable conception of reason: as Baier suggests, “[t]he whole of the Treatise searches for mental operations that can bear their own survey”.27 Rational analysis demonstrates the limits of reason and its dependence on the material of common life and conversation. However, while reason may not be able to function in total independence, neither will experience and observation suffice without the application of reason. Hume makes it clear that the material provided by

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conversation is raw: it needs to be refined and distilled.28 Hume dissects various forms of conversational deception: he discusses how gossip can give us the misleading impression that we know a celebrity and he also discusses the influence of prejudice on our judgements of conversation.29 While it is clear that information gleaned from conversation can mislead, reflective use of material gathered from multiple conversations (and other sources of experience) can be used to correct misleading or deceptive information teaching us, for example, a distaste for the conversation of habitual liars.30 What is required is experience from the conversible world analyzed and treated with discernment by means of reason and reflection. This need to refine the raw material of conversation is made clear in “Of Essay Writing”, when Hume describes the division of labour between the Conversible and Learned worlds: “The Materials of this Commerce must chiefly be furnish’d by conversation and common Life: The manufacturing of them alone belongs to Learning.” 31 The division of labour outlined in “Of Essay Writing” suggests a hierarchical relationship between the clearly demarcated territories of the Conversible and the Learned.32 However, the relationship between the two is far more complex. “Of Essay Writing” is a witty cartoon of one aspect of Hume’s philosophical approach, but the reader should bear in mind that an essay can only provide a partial view, one that cannot hope to capture his philosophy in the round. A clue to the fuller picture is hinted at when Hume suggests that “those of sound Understandings and delicate Affections” are always found together.33 This simple-seeming statement glosses a complex and subtle argument about the relationship between reason and sentiment: to make sound (moral) judgements, our analysis must be conversant with discriminating sentiment. As discussed in the next section, reason depends upon conversation for more than raw material: reason may be deployed by the Learned but, in practice, it must be part of the Conversible world as well.

Reason transformed: how the intercourse of sentiments begets perspective Conversation moves centre stage in Hume’s writing on morals, in Book 3 of the Treatise and in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Not merely a source of raw material to be processed by reason, conversation has an important role (glimpsed only briefly in the first part of the Treatise and in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding) in the process of reasoning itself. With his hard-won position as a true sceptic, conscious of the limits of reason acting alone, Hume relies upon

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the “intercourse of sentiments”, the interplay of conflicting perspectives in conversation, to develop moral judgement. Hume’s experimental approach to philosophy induces him to start with an analysis of human nature. Hume argues that sympathy renders us sociable creatures, adjusting our perspectives when exposed to those of others in conversation. Hume’s understanding of human sociability, based on this capacity for (and tendency towards) sympathy forms the basis of Hume’s analysis of moral judgement and of the origins of meaningful moral language. In developing his analysis of morals, Hume’s experimental approach to philosophy seeks, as ever, to avoid distortions by developing through a process of reflection on the raw materials provided by experience, including conversation.34 Hume is highly critical of the work of his philosophical predecessors, especially in ethics. He warned that every “virtue or moral duty” could be “refined away…if we indulge a false philosophy, in sifting and scrutinizing it, by every captious rule of logic, in every light or position, in which it may be placed.”35 He suggests that the problem is that his predecessors have paid little regard “to the phenomena of nature, or to the unbiased sentiments of the mind”.36 Secluded from company and conversation, the philosophers of the last age had, according to Hume, devised philosophies that were too close to the abstractions characteristic of theology. Hume alleges that, as a result of “false philosophy”, “reasoning, and even language, have been warped from their natural course” in the work of his predecessors.37 For example, in The History of England, Hume criticizes Hobbes for relying on solitary reason to theorize morals: “Though an enemy to religion, he partakes nothing of the spirit of scepticism; but is as positive and dogmatical as if human reason, and his reason in particular, could attain a thorough conviction in these subjects.”38 Hobbes provides an instructive (and appropriate) contrast to Hume.39 Commentators, from Hume’s contemporaries to our own, have focused on the parallels between the two philosophers, emphasizing their adoption of a secular or “irreligious” approach to morals.40 This is indeed a notable parallel and it is precisely this shared secularism that makes the differences in their conclusions so interesting.41 Without God to fix meaning, both find themselves grappling with the same problem: the potential for linguistic instability in the face of conflicting viewpoints. Hume observes that judgements made from a purely personal perspective meet with “many contradictions”,42 or, as Hobbes puts it, “what is to be called right, what good, what virtue, what much, what little, what meum and tuum, [mine and thine]…in these things private judgements may differ and beget controversy”.43 Neither Hobbes nor Hume has any faith in

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reason to reconcile conflicting viewpoints or to make a non-arbitrary determination between them: as Hobbes puts it, “right reason is not existent”. However, confronted with the problem of stabilizing meaning in a secular system, free of both the theological certainty induced by Godgiven guarantees and the philosophical certainty of “right reason”, the two philosophers reached very different conclusions. Hobbes concluded that the solution to linguistic instability, and any disputes resulting from that instability, could only be found in the determinations of the sovereign who could fix meaning and (therefore) morality.44 Without such a Leviathan to impose meaning and morality, contradictions of opinion drive Hobbesian humans to conflict. Hume instead argues that agreements of opinion and language can be reached through conversation, which requires us to see things from the perspectives of others, since familiarity with “general preferences and distinctions” is a prerequisite for intelligible communication.45 Hume’s approach postulates a mutual adjustment of opinion and language: conversation is the medium for this adjustment and our capacity of sympathy provides both means and motivation. The groundwork for this conversational approach to morals is prepared in his extended treatment of “sympathy” in Book 2 of the Treatise, “Of the Passions”. Here Hume observes how our own sentiments are shaped by our responses to others, analyzing the process by which we absorb the emotional manifestations that we perceive in other people and make them our own. For the author of the Treatise this is a “remarkable” phenomenon, one that turns his analysis of perceptions upside down. At the beginning of the Treatise, Hume sets out a schema of mental phenomena in which he divides perceptions into “impressions”, which come directly before the mind as our original experience of “sensations, passions and emotions”, and the “faint images” of impressions that occur as “ideas” in thought.46 Sympathy creates, however, an exception to the hierarchy postulated in Hume’s general schema. We form our “idea” of someone else’s sentiment, garnered from our impressions of “external signs in the countenance and conversation”. Sympathy transforms these, and then converts the resulting idea into an answering “impression”, that is, a sentiment in the observer.47 Hume’s observations regarding sympathy play a crucial role in his moral philosophy, although the rather elaborate analysis of its operation provided in Book 2 of the Treatise does not. (The Enquiries lack the schema of mental phenomena presented in the Treatise, but contain a description of the sympathetic response that adequately fulfils the role played by the elaborate analysis of sympathy in the Treatise.48) Sympathy

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underpins his central assertion, mentioned at the beginning of this section, that humans are essentially sociable creatures, whose “very first state and situation may justly be esteem’d social.”49 Specifically, sympathy blurs the distinction between self and others, so that Hume’s humans are very different from the antagonistic creatures on which Hobbes’s analysis is founded. Hume found Hobbes’s anti-social depiction of human nature beyond credulity and this difference in their understandings of human nature had a profound effect on their moral and political theory.50 As we have discussed, Hobbes resorted to sovereign diktat to stabilize language, including the adjudication of (an essentially arbitrary) moral terminology, because his view of human nature, driven by fear and self-interest, permits him no sociable alternative. In contrast, Hume emphasises the dependence of language on the development of shared understandings: “we every day meet with persons, who are in a different situation from ourselves, and who cou’d never converse with us on any reasonable terms, were we to remain constantly in that situation and point of view, which is peculiar to us.” 51 In place of arbitrary subjection to Hobbes’s Leviathan, Hume’s analysis of human nature, particularly his emphasis on our capacity for sympathy, makes him confident that the inter-subjective process of conversation provides sufficient stability for language and the development of moral judgement. How, then, does moral judgement proceed in Hume’s analysis? Following his preferred method of “experimental philosophy”, Hume analyses the evidence provided by observations of common life and conversation. On this basis, he concludes that moral judgements are not simply the product of solitary reasoning, nor of reason acting on information about directly observable relationships: “the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason”.52 Instead he argues that sentiment is the principal motivation for moral judgement: “men…naturally praise or blame whatever pleases or displeases them…all moralists, whose judgement is not perverted by a strict adherence to a system, enter into the same way of thinking”.53 However, though his analysis emphasises sentiment, Hume is not a straightforward sentimentalist: he does not simply equate sentiments of praise or blame with moral judgement. Instead, he observes that reason and sentiment are found together “in almost all moral determinations and conclusions”.54 Reflection and reason are required to process the raw materials of sentiment to arrive at considered moral judgements. Reflection allows us to “retain a general standard of vice and virtue” and reach “calm judgements concerning the characters of men”.55 Hume enumerates the roles played by reason in the process of making moral

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judgements: “in order to pave the way for…sentiment, and give a proper discernment of its object, it is often necessary, we find, that much reasoning should precede, that nice distinctions be made, just conclusions drawn, distant comparisons formed, complicated relations examined, and general facts fixed and ascertained.”56 Indeed Hume is explicit that he considers reason and sentiment to be “uncompounded and inseparable”, even though they may be disaggregated for the purposes of furthering our analysis of judgement.57 By this point in Hume’s philosophical exegesis, however, our understanding of reason itself has been transformed by his analysis of human understanding. Reason is socialized, no longer the work of the despairing solitary creature described at the end of Book 1 of the Treatise.58 The process of reasoning involved in moral judgement is not a solitary process: it depends on an understanding of reasonableness developed through contact with the perspectives of others. Judgements made solely on the basis of what will benefit us or our friends will not bear the scrutiny of “society and conversation”. Meeting with the “perpetual contradictions” encountered in “society and conversation”, we seek “some other standard of merit and demerit, which may not admit of so great variation”,59 and, ultimately, are obliged “to forget our own interest” in making moral judgements.60 Conversation teaches us that we must “neglect all these differences, and render our sentiments more public and social” in order to attain “calm judgements…concerning the characters of men”.61 To put it more precisely, it is the “intercourse of sentiments…in society and conversation” that leads us to develop “some general inalterable standard, by which we may approve or disapprove of characters and manners”.62 In other words it is the intercourse of sentiments, created through conversation, which exposes us to the perspectives of others, takes us beyond our own particular point of view and gives us reference points that enable us to fix our judgements on something more stable than our own subjectivity. Humean humans converse with each other and, in the process, their capacity for sympathy adjusts their perspectives to take account of each other’s views: such adjustment defines or circumscribes what is (considered) reasonable. Sympathy is crucial in this process, giving us the ability to absorb the perspectives of others from the intercourse of sentiments in conversation. This allows us to overcome personal perspectives that are always and inevitably partial. However, the sympathy that we feel for others diminishes with distance: our concern for ourselves is stronger than our concern for others and our concern for “persons near and contiguous” is stronger than our concern for those “remote from us”.63

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This variable quality of sympathy (re)introduces the problem of partiality, but this form of partiality can also be overcome through reflection on the intercourse of sentiments in conversation. Hume makes ingenious use of visual perspective as a metaphor to explain that we compensate for the apparent diminution in size of distant objects: “we do not say, that they actually diminish by the distance; but correcting the appearance by reflection, arrive at a more constant and established judgement concerning them”, and we correct our moral judgements in “like manner”. With our capacity for sympathy, conversation with those beyond our immediate circle enables us to overcome our partiality, as conversational contact expands the range of our sympathies. We are able, therefore, to fix on “steady and general points of view”, stepping back from the particular perspectives of ourselves and our nearest and dearest.64 Conversation allows us to develop a balanced perspective and correct the “inequalities” created in our sentiments by the strength of our personal relationships. (Indeed, as explored at greater length in the next section, sympathy provides the means by which we become increasingly socialized and benevolent through exposure to conversation and the society of others.) This means that conversation is no longer merely the provider of raw material for manufacture by the reasoning of the Learned, as suggested in “Of Essay Writing”. Conversation does provide raw material for moral judgement (in the form of evidence about the sentiments of others) but, in the full account provided by Hume’s philosophical works, the Conversible world also shapes the process of “manufacture” that transforms the raw materials of sentiment into moral judgement. Our ability to develop and maintain meaningful moral language depends, critically, on our capacity to correct for the partiality of our individual points of view and this, in turn, derives from our exposure to the intercourse of sentiments in conversation. Conversations between sympathizing individuals enable us to develop stable standards for moral judgement. Hume’s conversational approach offers a secular foundation for moral judgement grounded in moral sentiment and inter-subjectivity. By drawing on the intercourse of sentiments, Hume has devised a morality fit for a diffident sceptic, avoiding the moral scepticism of Hobbes’s sterner secularism and rejecting the ambitious certainties of dogmatic philosophy as well as religion.65

The seductions of virtue So far I have discussed how, in Hume’s moral philosophy, conversation not only provides us with the raw (sentimental) material for

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moral philosophy, but also acts in conjunction with our capacity for sympathy, enabling us to develop stable moral judgements. These discussions do not exhaust the roles played by conversation in Hume’s writings on morals. As discussed below, conversation has further important roles regarding virtue, helping to define and nurture it. However, Hume’s account also has some less appetizing aspects and the question remains open as to whether Hume’s conversational approach to morals depends upon and reinforces gender and class relationships that contemporary readers will find unpalatable. How does conversation help to define virtue? Hume appears to define virtue, to a large extent, by reference to pleasure: his “natural” virtues are the qualities that we find immediately agreeable and pleasing. These natural virtues need to be adjudicated by reference to conversation, without which we would be unable to judge what is agreeable to the generality of mankind. Hume lists a provocatively broad range of virtues and there is a strong streak of hedonism in Hume’s flirtatious account of virtue in a feminized personification. This “puritan-baiting” “apostate from Calvinism” acknowledges moral virtues that Baier aptly characterises as “sexy”.66 The language that Hume uses to describe our engagement with virtue is sexualized and seductive: deploring how religion and philosophy have cloaked virtue in “dismal dress”, he describes how her garb “falls off” as he represents her “in all her genuine and most engaging charms”. Thus disrobed by Hume, we may approach virtue “with ease, familiarity, and affection”. What remains, once “her” dismal dress has been removed, are “gentleness, humanity, beneficence, affability” and even “play, frolic, and gaiety”. The hedonism of Hume’s virtue is public spirited rather than egoistic, for the “sole purpose” of virtue is “to make her votaries and all mankind, during every instant of their existence, if possible, cheerful and happy”.67 Hume’s feminized personification of virtue is designed to attract: she embodies the qualities that seduce individuals into sociability and draw them towards participation in society. Hume was himself seduced by the pleasures of company, taking his greatest pleasure in the “unbought satisfaction of conversation”, a pleasure he sought throughout his life.68 Conversation was a reward in itself, a reward that he described as “without price”, contrasting it favourably with “the feverish, empty amusements of luxury and expense”.69 According to Hume, conversation nurtures virtue both by increasing our sentiments of benevolence and by providing a pleasure for those of virtuous character that reinforces their inclination towards virtue. Hume appears to acknowledge that some may fail to appreciate conversation sufficiently, but he also thought that mankind is

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fundamentally sociable and must, therefore, be civilized by exposure to conversation. He even went so far as to claim that people “must feel an encrease of humanity, from the very habit of conversing together”.70 In his essay “Of the Study of History”, Hume sketches a link between conversation (and the development of the art of conversation) and the process of civilization and refinement, observing with pleasure “the civility of conversation refining by degrees, and every thing which is ornamental to human life advancing towards its perfection.”71 Further, conversation has a part to play in the founding of civilizations and communities. People “possessed of a fund of conversation” will not remain in solitude: “They flock into cities; love to receive and communicate knowledge; to show their wit or their breeding; their taste in conversation or living”.72 Benevolence towards others is also cultivated or “cherished” by conversation: the “common blaze” of social interaction and discourse that nourishes “moral sentiments” allows individuals to overcome “selfish and private” passions.73 Conversation creates, therefore, a selfreinforcing circle of benevolent sociability amongst the virtuous: the virtuous are inclined towards the pleasures of conversation and conversation is made even more pleasurable by the qualities of the virtuous. In addition to reinforcing general virtues, conversation has its own retinue of conversational virtues that are desirable because they promote or support conversation. The desire for conversation should, according to Hume, reinforce virtue by moderating our more egocentric tendencies. It would be hard to disagree with his description of such moderation as virtue or with his inclusion of “good sense” and well-deployed reasoning in the list of conversational virtues (alongside a wry observation regarding their rarity).74 The virtues of a good conversationalist also reach beyond these important, but potentially pedestrian, qualities, to take in wit, manners and gallantry.75 Wit and gallantry are, however, rather racy qualities that can bring out the competitive urge in those conversing. Such urges could create problems for, as he put it: “most men desire likewise their turn in the conversation, and regard, with a very evil eye, that loquacity, which deprives them of a right they are naturally so jealous of”.76 Given our competitive instincts and the desire to have our say in conversation, some rules are needed to maintain “the lively spirit of dialogue” and ensure that conversation does not degenerate into a monologue: Hume notes that “the eternal contrarieties, in company, of men’s pride and self-conceit” have led to the development of “Good Manners or Politeness”.77 The rules that constitute good manners are therefore introduced to facilitate conversation,

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enabling us to maintain “an easy stream of conversation” “without vehemence, without interruption, without eagerness for victory, and without any airs of superiority”.78 Hume emphasizes the importance of manners in making conversation pleasurable: good manners “facilitate the intercourse of minds” and promote “undisturbed commerce and conversation”.79 Hume described the role of (good) manners as “a kind of lesser morality, calculated for the ease of company and conversation”; manners are a form of “lesser” morality because their utility is less great.80 However, in practice, the rules of manners are not always enough to ensure the free flow of conversation on their own. Intervention is required to maintain these rules and ensure the continued flow of conversation does not degenerate into a series of competitive monologues. It was women, Hume's fair “Sovereigns of the Empire of conversation”, who were charged with keeping order in the Conversible world.81 In keeping with the tenets of his “experimental philosophy”, Hume appears to have drawn his model of conversation from experience, specifically of the salons of eighteenth century France. These were typically presided over by women, the so-called salonnières. Hume spent many years in France both as a young man and later as an official (secretary to the Embassy), and his amiable character and taste for company made him a welcome participant in the salons.82 To our modern eyes, however, the social practices of the salons appear less than ideal. It was the diligent efforts of the salonnières, and their attention to others, that maintained mutual deference and civility.83 However, this required self-sacrifice from the salonnières: a “virtuous”, conversation-facilitating, self-effacement. This self-sacrifice maintained the smooth flow of conversation in the salons so enjoyed by Hume and his contemporaries.84 Women may have played a vital role in maintaining the flow of conversation but these so-called “Sovereigns” were constitutional monarchs at best, subordinate to the citizens they served. As contemporary historians of eighteenth-century France, writing in the context of debates inspired or provoked by the work of Habermas, have pointed out, the salon’s “hybrid, transitional public sphere” could be exploitative of the women on whom it depended: “The philosophes put a handful of salonnières on pedestals for subordinating themselves to the social and intellectual needs of men.”85 As we have already seen, Hume suggested a hierarchical division of labour between the Learned and Conversible worlds. This hierarchy is not erased when the flirtatious Hume praises “the Fair Sex, who are the Sovereigns of the Empire of conversation” and claims that, but for the stubborn independence of his Learned countrymen, he would resign to them “sovereign Authority over the Republic of

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Letters”.86 Any contemporary follower of Hume’s approach to morals should consider whether self-effacement (gendered or otherwise) is necessary to ensure free-flowing conversation and, if so, how this can be managed in practice to avoid the systematic subordination manifest in the eighteenth century conversational practice that formed Hume's own conception of conversation. In addition to the rule of self-effacing feminine “Sovereigns”, eighteenth century conversational virtue was propped up by contemporary social anxiety. Hume’s secular morality depends for practical effect on the desire to please. Such a desire could be found amongst members of a newly elevated middle class, anxious to acquire gentility to accompany their newfound wealth and secure their place in Georgian society. That this desire was a by-product of economic inequality and social hierarchy posed no problem for Hume. Indeed Hume argued for the political benefits of hierarchy. Elaborating how different types of polity may promote or fail to promote the good manners necessary to conversation, he claimed that civilized monarchies are better placed in this respect than republics because they create “a long train of dependence from the prince to the peasant, which is not great enough to render property precarious, or depress the minds of the people; but is sufficient to beget in every one an inclination to please his superiors”.87 Similarly, in his paean to the virtues or benefits attendant upon the “middle station in life”, Hume suggests that this social position was the most conducive to virtue, wisdom and happiness because those in the middle station occupied a middling position in a social hierarchy. Those in the middle are in a position of dependence (but not over-dependence) with respect to the Great and a position of superiority (but not overwhelming superiority) with respect to “the lower ranks”: this, Hume suggests, gives those occupying the middle station the greatest opportunity for the exercise of virtue.88 Hume’s tempting portrait of sexy sociable virtue is propped up by the seductive subordination of particular groups within society, forming an effective but unappealing triptych. On one side of the triptych, it is supported by the seduction of women into a self-effacing, other-centred, conception of womanly virtue which, when embodied in the salonnières, creates female subjects who facilitate the flow of conversation amongst others at the cost of their own voices. On the other side, its efficacy is shored up by the anxiety induced by social hierarchy: Hume’s endeavour to make morals out of manners works best when people are seeking to please others, creating a burgeoning market for instructive writing about manners. These subordinating seductions of gender and social hierarchy are aspects of his work that should give any would-be contemporary

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Humean pause, for it is unclear whether his conception of virtue can stand alone without the support of these unappealing elements and his lighthearted catalogue of virtues might require substantial revision if it was subjected to contemporary scrutiny. A contemporary Humean approach to morals would have to confront the challenge of developing coherent conclusions based on a more inclusive intercourse of sentiments than could be found in Hume's eighteenth century salon. Such a revision would be very much in sympathy with Hume's experimental philosophy: Hume himself emphasises the provisional nature of his own conclusions and one could even claim that a Humean is required to question Hume's conclusions and to seek to revise them that they might “bear the examination of the latest posterity”.89 1

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). Henceforth referred to as Treatise. David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 3rd edition, 1975). Henceforth referred to as Enquiries. 2 Worthy of particular note is Annette Baier’s Progress of Sentiments, which is gaining a similar reputation to Páll Ardal’s influential Passion and Value in Hume’s Treatise. Both are distinguished by their efforts to read the Treatise as a whole rather than in discrete parts, thus contrasting with the more typical practice of focusing on Book 1 (or less often Book 3) at the expense of Book 2. See Annette Baier, A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s Treatise (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Páll Ardal, Passion and Value in Hume’s Treatise (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966). 3 For discussion of why Hume is so often misread, see Terence Penelhum, “Hume’s Moral Psychology,” in David Fate Norton, The Cambridge Companion to Hume (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 117-9. 4 I refer here to Book 1 of the Treatise, “Of the Understanding”, and the first Enquiry, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. 5 See Book 3 of the Treatise, “Of Morals”, and An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. 6 The term “conversation” occurs in the Treatise with the following frequency: Book 1, “Of the Understanding” 7; Book 2, “Of the Passions” 3: Book 3, “Of Morals”: 13. The Enquiries lack a substantial equivalent to Book 2 of the Treatise, but the roles of conversation in this later work match the roles played in Books 1 and 3 of the Treatise. “Conversation” occurs with the following frequency: “Enquiry concerning Human Understanding” 7; “Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals” 21. 7 Treatise, xvi.

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8 See Baier, A Progress of Sentiments, 24. See Duncan Forbes: “Hume’s object was to give morals a sure basis in experimental philosophy, that is, a ‘science of man’ based on experience and observation”, Duncan Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 59. 9 Treatise, 272. 10 Hume, “Of Essay Writing”. David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), http://www.econlib.org/Library/LFBooks/Hume/hmMPL.html (accessed 26 April 2007). Henceforth referred to as Essays. 11 Hume also argued that ignorance of history was “unpardonable” and that “[a] woman may behave herself with good manners, and have even some vivacity in her turn of wit; but where her mind is so unfurnished, ’tis impossible her conversation can afford any entertainment to men of sense and reflection.” Essay “Of the Study of History,” Essays. 12 “Of Essay Writing,” Essays. 13 Treatise, 268. 14 Additional physical symptoms apparently included “scurvy spots” on the fingers, “wateriness in the mouth”, and a sudden ravenous appetite. See the letter reprinted in David Fate Norton, The Cambridge Companion to Hume (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 345-50. 15 The biographies of John Stuart Mill and Wittgenstein offer other examples. Baier and Taylor both suggest that there is a resemblance between Hume’s “philosophical journey towards self-acceptance” and Wittgenstein’s “philosophical pilgrimage”. See Baier, A Progress of Sentiments, 2 and Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 346. 16 This argument is drawn from Baier, A Progress of Sentiments. 17 Treatise, 269. 18 Treatise, 273. 19 Treatise, 272. 20 In the Enquiries, Hume describes how “nature” prohibits “[a]bstruse thought” and “profound researches” are punished by the “pensive melancholy which they introduce, by the endless uncertainty in which they involve you, and by the cold reception which your pretended discoveries shall meet with, when communicated.” Enquiries, 9. 21 Enquiries, 8. 22 See Treatise, 361, 596 and 609, also Enquiries, 247. 23 Treatise, 611. For examples of Hume reflecting on reading and conversation, see Treatise 170 and 358. 24 Enquiries, 107. 25 He speaks of aiming to reach conclusions that would be sufficient for “all the purposes of reflection and conversation” and asks us to “consider the common progress of the thought, either in reflection or conversation”, Treatise, 18 and 23-4. 26 Sheldon Wolin, “Hume and Conservatism,” American Political Science Review 48 (1954). 27 Baier, A Progress of Sentiments, 97.

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28 “[W]e must endeavour to render all our principles as universal as possible, by tracing up our experiments to the utmost, and explaining all effects from the simplest and fewest causes.” Treatise, xvii. 29 Treatise, 117. 30 Treatise, 121. For further discussion of this point, see Baier, 46-7. 31 “Of Essay Writing,” Essays. In contemporary political theory, such a simple “balance” of trade, exchanging raw materials for manufactured goods, is frequently seen as the epitome of economic imperialism. The impression of hierarchy is not erased when the flirtatious Hume praises the “the Fair Sex, who are the Sovereigns of the Empire of conversation”. 32 Hume’s Essays should be read with care. Although they furnish useful sketches to illustrate elements of his thought, he designed them to function as popular embassies from the Learned to the Conversible. (He considers himself as “a Kind of Resident or Ambassador from the Dominions of Learning to those of conversation” and claims that it is his “constant Duty to promote a good Correspondence betwixt these two States, which have so great a Dependence on each other”.) As such, his essays distil those elements, including “the more obvious Principles, at least, of Philosophy”, that he deemed beneficial to conversation. “Of Essay Writing,” Essays. 33 “Let no Quarter be given, but to those of sound Understandings and delicate Affections; and these Characters, ’tis to be presum’d, we shall always find inseparable.” “Of Essay Writing,” Essays. 34 Cf Duncan Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 59. 35 “Of the Original Contract,” Essays, 197. 36 Enquiries, 322. As already noted, Hume thought that “the great Defect of the last Age” was the separation of the Learned and the Conversible worlds, which led isolated philosophy into erroneous and “chimerical” conclusions. “Of Essay Writing,” Essays. 37 Enquiries, 322. My emphasis. 38 David Hume, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688 (London: T. Cadell, 1782), volume 7, 346. My emphasis. 39 Russell makes a plausible case for his claim that Hume owes a significant intellectual debt to Hobbes. See Paul Russell, The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise: Scepticism, Naturalism and Irreligion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 40 Paul Russell, “Free Will and Irreligion in Hume’s Treatise,” in Hume’s Treatise: A Critical Guide, ed. Donald Ainslie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Hume did indeed commend philosophy over “superstition of every kind of denomination”. Treatise, 271. 41 Samuel Johnson, a committed Christian with a deep antipathy towards Hume, branded him a “Hobbist”. Remark recorded by Boswell. James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (Oxford, MS: Project Gutenberg, 2004), http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/jnthb10.txt (accessed 26 April 2007). See discussion in Paul Russell, “A Hobbist Tory:

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Johnson on Hume,” Hume Studies 16 (1990). Elsewhere, Russell himself makes a reasonable case that Hume owes a significant intellectual debt to Hobbes. Paul Russell, The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise: Scepticism, Naturalism and Irreligion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 42 Treatise, 583. 43 Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic: Part 1, Human Nature, Part 2, De Corpore Politico; with Three Lives, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), Chapter 10, Paragraph 8. 44 Ibid.: “The reason of some man, or men, must supply the place thereof; and that man, or men, is he or they, that have the sovereign power …by them the use and definition of all names not agreed upon, and tending to controversy, shall be established”. 45 Enquiries, 228-9. 46 Treatise, 1. This apparatus lies outside the boundaries to philosophy demarcated by Hume’s moderate scepticism, taking it dangerously close to the kind of metaphysics that Hume is at pains to reject. See John Nelson, “Two Main Questions Concerning Hume’s Treatise and Enquiry,” The Philosophical Review 81 (1972). 47 Treatise, 316-20. 48 See Enquiries, 220-221. This description is entirely adequate to support Hume’s account of moral judgement. Nelson suggests that Hume preferred the Enquiries and repudiated the Treatise precisely because the metaphysical apparatus was not only unjustified but also unnecessary to his larger project. John Nelson, “Two Main Questions Concerning Hume’s Treatise and Enquiry,” The Philosophical Review 81 (1972). 49 Treatise, 493. 50 The only direct reference to Hobbes in the Treatise is an elaborately-phrased criticism of Hobbes’s view of human nature, implying that the fearful anti-social creatures described in Hobbes’s Leviathan were completely incredible: “Shou’d a traveller, returning from a far country, tell us, that he had seen a climate in the fiftieth degree of northern latitude, where all the fruits ripen and come to perfection in the winter, and decay in the summer, after the same manner as in England they are produc’d and decay in the contrary seasons, he wou’d find few so credulous as to believe him. I am apt to think a traveller wou’d meet with as little credit who shou’d inform us of people exactly of the same character…[as] those in Hobbes’s Leviathan”. Treatise, 402. 51 Treatise, 603. Although some small amendments suggest that Hume paid some attention to the passage, the text is almost identical here in the Treatise and in the Enquiries, 228-9. 52 Treatise, 469. Analytic philosophers, reading this passage in isolation, invoke Hume in support of their argument that one cannot infer “ought” from “is”. In fact, the passage follows his criticism of rationalist approaches to theorizing morals. Hume is arguing that one cannot “rationally deduce” obligations from “merely factual premises”. Hume is demanding that we pay attention to how we make the move, not that it should never made. See Baier, A Progress of Sentiments, 176-7.

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See also David Fate Norton, “Hume, Human Nature, and the Foundations of Morality,” in the Cambridge Companion to Hume, 168-9. 53 Treatise, 609. 54 Enquiries, 172. 55 Treatise, 603 and Enquiries, 229 (footnote). 56 Enquiries, 173. 57 Treatise, 493. 58 For an excellent analysis of the transformation of reason in Hume’s philosophy, see Baier, A Progress of Sentiments, passim. 59 Treatise, 583. 60 This important argument is repeated word for word in the Treatise, 603 and the Enquiries, 229. 61 Enquiries, 229. 62 Treatise, 603 and Enquiries, 229. 63 Treatise, 603 and Enquiries, 228-9. 64 Treatise, 581-2. 65 See Istvan Hont’s argument that Hume was “sincerely anxious about some crucial aspects of modernity”, but tried to address the issues “without invoking a theological political ontology or a purely Hobbesian political idiom.” Istvan Hont, “Commercial Society and Political Theory in the Eighteenth Century: The Problem of Authority in David Hume and Adam Smith,” in Main Trends in Cultural History: Ten Essays, ed. Willem Melching and Wyger Velema (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 58. 66 Baier, A Progress of Sentiments, 200-3. Baier cites Alasdair MacIntyre as the inspiration for her characterisation of Hume as “an apostate from Calvinism”. See Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (London: Duckworth, 1988), 218-2. 67 Enquiries, 279-80. 68 According to his friend Adam Smith, even in Hume’s last months, despite his deteriorating health, “he continued to divert himself…with the conversation of his friends”. Smith’s letter is included in Hume’s Essays. 69 Enquiries, 283. 70 Essay, “Of Refinement in the Arts,” Essays. 71 Essay, “Of the Study of History,” Essays. 72 Essay, “Of Refinement in the Arts,” Essays. 73 Enquiries, 275-6. 74 Enquiries, 263. 75 Enquiries, 269. For a full catalogue of the virtues listed in the Treatise, see Baier, A Progress of Sentiments, 199. 76 Enquiries, 262. 77 Enquiries, 261. See also Treatise, 597 and Essay “Of The Rise And Progress Of The Arts And Sciences”: “in order to render conversation, and the intercourse of minds more easy and agreeable, good-manners have been invented”, Essays. 78 Enquiries, 261-2. 79 Enquiries, 261. A similar argument is made in Treatise, 597.

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Enquiries, 209. “Of Essay Writing,” Essays. 82 Hume had ample evidence from his own life for his claim that “Men of Letters, in this Age, have lost, in a great Measure, that Shyness and Bashfulness of Temper, which kept them at a Distance from Mankind”. “Of Essay Writing”, Essays. 83 “Among the arts of conversation, no one pleases more than mutual deference or civility, which leads us…to curb and conceal that presumption and arrogance, so natural to the human mind.” “Of The Rise And Progress Of The Arts And Sciences”, Essays. “Among well-bred people, a mutual deference is affected: Contempt of others disguised: Authority concealed: Attention given to each in his turn”. Enquiries, 261. 84 See, for example, Dena Goodman, “Enlightenment Salons: The Convergence of Female and Philosophic Ambitions,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 22 (1989). See also Daniel Gordon, “Philosophy, Sociology, and Gender in the Enlightenment Conception of Public Opinion,” French Historical Studies, 17 (1992): 882-911 and Sarah Maza, “Women, the Bourgeoisie, and the Public Sphere: Response to Daniel Gordon and David Bell,” French Historical Studies, 17 (1992): 935-50. 85 Sarah Maza, “Women, the Bourgeoisie, and the Public Sphere: Response to Daniel Gordon and David Bell,” French Historical Studies, 17 (1992): 935-50. 86 “Of Essay Writing,” Essays. 87 Essay, “Of The Rise And Progress Of The Arts And Sciences,” Essays. 88 Essay, “Of the Middle Station in Life,” Essays. 89 Treatise, 273. 81

CHAPTER THREE “DISTRESSFUL GIFT”: TALKING TO THE DEAD MARY JACOBUS

In February 1805, Wordsworth lost his sailor brother John when he was drowned off Portland Bill in the wreck of the Earl of Abergavenny.1 Wordsworth was grief-stricken: “the set is now broken”, he lamented, calling his brother “a Poet in every thing but words”.2 Writing to a friend, he poured out his overwhelming sense of loss: For myself I feel that there is something cut out of my life which cannot be restored, I never thought of him but with hope and delight …. I never wrote a line without a thought of its giving him pleasure, my writings printed and manuscript were his delight and one of the chief solaces of his long voyages. But let me stop—I will not be cast down were it only for his sake I will not be dejected. I have much yet to do and pray God to give me strength and power—his part of the agreement between us is brought to an end, mine continues and I hope when I shall be able to think of him with a calmer mind that the remembrance of him dead will even animate me more than the joy which I had in him living.3

A strange hope, but a characteristic one: Wordsworth’s poetry is animated by the after-life of memory. In John’s words (reported by his brother), this was to have been their agreement: “He encouraged me to persist in the plan of life which I had adopted; I will work for you was his language and you shall attempt to do something for the world.”4 John’s side of the bargain had consisted of the potential profit and risk of commanding an East Indiaman that plied the Bengal-to-China trade route during the Napoleonic wars.5 Preoccupied for months by family grief, Wordsworth was anxious to clear his brother of any imputation of incompetence—and relieved to find that John’s sizeable financial investment of £20,000 had been fully insured.6 Any charge of negligence on the part of the East India Company or its employees would have affected the ship’s insurance, and

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an official inquiry followed.7 John’s last recorded words were reported to have been: “O pilot, you have ruined me”.8 During the months that followed, Wordsworth gradually resumed his side of the bargain, taking up what his sister called “the Task of his life” in order to “writ[e] a poem upon [John]”.9 But he described himself as overwhelmed by “such a torrent” of verse that he could not hold the pen and dared not ask his wife or sister to write for him.10 Later, he wrote a series of intensely personal elegies which he regarded as too melancholy to share with his family or anyone else.11 One of them—never published in his life-time—provides my title: “Distressful gift! this Book receives / Upon its melancholy leaves, / This poor ill-fated Book …” (ll.1-3).12 So begins a poem that apostrophizes both book and brother (“thou, my Friend”), as if the two were equally pitiable, equally ill-fated. The giftbook that is the poem’s pretext was apparently a commonplace book, belonging to John. It contained a collection of manuscript copies of Wordsworth’s poems: “framed with dear intent / To travel with him night and day, / And in his private hearing say / Refreshing things” (ll.31-4).13 The notebook (sealing their bargain) was left behind for Wordsworth as a work-in-progress, its pages “All fill’d or to be fill’d with store / Of verse for his delight” (ll.27-8). By the event of his brother’s death it became “distressful” (distress-filled) instead—at once a reminder of poems written or unwritten, and an unfinished monument to a life cut short: “a Tale / Of Thee thyself; fond heart and frail!” (ll.8-9). The book’s fragile materiality becomes a synecdoche for the vulnerability of the body.14 Milton’s “Lycidas” is the precursor elegy for a drowned poet, albeit a wordless one (“a Poet in every thing but words”). Subtly invoking the conventions and broken rhythms of lyric elegy—“The sadly-tuneful line, / The written words that seem to throng / The dismal page” (ll. 10-12)— Wordsworth’s poem foregrounds the relation between voice and writing, composition and reading: “the sound, the song, / The murmur, all to thee belong; / Too surely they are thine” (ll.13-14). Sounding, singing, murmuring, his sadly-tuneful lines to a dead man stage the most private reading of all: the poet’s re-reading of his own poetry. This unheard communication is the type of elegiac address: one-sided, intimate, posthumous. The same unheard address to the dead informs Derrida’s collected memorials to his dead friends in The Work of Mourning.15 Derrida shows himself to be (as always) a master of the genre—one might almost say, the gesture—of mourning, alert to its self-congratulatory pitfalls and to its opportunities for eloquence. I will be concerned both with the gift of death, as he and Emmanuel Levinas define it, and with what Derrida (in his hommage to his friend Louis Marin) calls “the point

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of view of death”. Derrida’s memorials to Levinas and Marin are representative of the varied tributes to his dead friends included in The Work of Mourning: posthumous replies, unfinished conversations, and personal re-readings. These tributes—often continuing dialogues that had been conducted in print and in person over many decades—are characterized by Derrida’s intellectual generosity, by their affective response, and often by subtle yet provocative statements of difference. Derrida’s memorial stance is to put the différance back into reading. He reads not only in the wake of his friends, but beyond them. His elegies are both replies and after-thoughts: conversations with the dead. The missing figure in The Work of Mourning is Maurice Blanchot, given his pervasive influence on Derrida’s thinking and writing since the 1960s. Blanchot’s insistence on an impossible outside of writing, or unknown of thought, returns in Derrida’s later writings as the “impossible” itself—a concept to which he appeals when he resists the economization of his own thought within political or metaphysical systems. I will close by invoking Blanchot’s definition of conversation as interruption, pause, or intermittency. Talking to the dead can be understood as a form of désoeuvrement, in Blanchot’s sense—a restless un-working that refuses totalization and proceeds not by way of critique, but rather by juxtaposition, divergence, and difference. This is a dialectic without negation, yet capable of responding to disaster, broaching the unknown of one’s own thought through repetition, return, and response. In one of the imaginary dialogues included in The Infinite Conversation (L’entretien infini, 1969), Blanchot writes that “This redoubling of the same affirmation constitute[s] the strongest of dialogues”.16 I will be reading Wordsworth’s “Distressful gift!” in just such an attempt at dialogue with the questions posed by Derrrida, whose own recent death makes the memorials collected in The Work of Mourning at once proleptic and strangely posthumous. Finally, I will return to Blanchot’s aphorism: “True thoughts question, and to question is to think by interrupting oneself” (IC 340). Talking to the dead, I propose, prolongs this infinitely interrupted conversation. Derrida’s insight in The Work of Mourning was that his own work might constitute just such a prolongation for those who read in his wake.

Motions of the Life of Love “Death—as the death of the other [autrui] … is emotion par excellence” —Emmanuel Levinas, God Death and Time, 9.

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Among the most eloquent of Derrida’s tributes to his dead friends is his 1995 elegy for Levinas, “Adieu” (at once “goodbye” and a benediction, salutation, or prayer: à-Dieu).17 Derrida opens by expressing his wish to find “unadorned, naked words, words as childlike and disarmed as [his] sorrow”. The wish—the gesture—resonates with the language of Wordsworth’s elegy. Recognizing that the gesture is inherent in the rhetoric of elegy, Derrida goes on to suggest that more than oratorical convention is at stake. He poses a question about the nature of elegiac address itself: Whom is one addressing at such a moment? And in whose name would one allow oneself to do so? Often those who come forward to speak, to speak publicly, thereby interrupting the animated whispering, the secret or intimate exchange that always links one, deep inside, to a dead friend or master, those who make themselves heard in a cemetery, end up addressing directly, straight on, the one who, as we say, is no longer, is no longer living, no longer there, who will no longer respond. (WM 200) 18

The address to another “who will no longer respond” interrupts the secret, intimate exchange that links one to the dead friend. This apostrophe is the supplementary fiction licensed by the public funeral oration in its classical form: the fiction that the elegist is speaking directly to the dead. Derrida’s disarmed and disarming remarks define the elegy as an impossible address to a dead friend who can no longer respond, even if, in reality, his words are addressed to “the dead in me” or to “the others standing around the coffin” (WM 51-2). The elegiac mode of “Adieu” announces this urge to speak directly to (rather than of) the dead, drawing attention to a form of address which seeks to avoid—yet always risks—the self-interestedness of language that returns self-reflexively to the self or to the community of mourners when the public elegist comes forward to speak: With tears in their voices, they sometimes speak familiarly to the other who keeps silent, calling upon him without detour or mediation, apostrophizing him, even greeting him or confiding in him. This is not necessarily out of respect for convention, not always simply part of the rhetoric of oration. It is rather so as to traverse speech at the very point where words fail us, since all language that would return to the self, to us, would seem indecent, a reflexive discourse that would end up coming back to the stricken community, to its consolation or its mourning, to what is called, in a confused and terrible expression, “the work of mourning”. (WM 200)

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Derrida’s self-proclaimed “law” of “straightforwardness” (droiture) is “to speak straight on, to address oneself directly to the other” (WM 200); to speak for the other before speaking of him (or her). As he insists (allowing his unshed tears to be “heard” in the hesitations of his prose), calling upon the other who keeps silent means addressing someone who does not respond. This “no-response” (sans-réponse), Derrida reminds us, is how Levinas himself had defined death (WM 203).19 Yet to keep on addressing the one who does not respond is also a means to keep alive Autrui (Otherness), perpetuating the secret interior exchange that links the speaker to the dead and keeps him alive within oneself. As Wordsworth affirmed, overwrought in the wake of his brother’s death: “I shall never forget him, never lose sight of him, there is a bond between us yet, the same as if he were living, nay far more sacred …”.20 In his elegy, the unheard link of stanza and rhyme keeps this bond in mind and memory: “Making a kind of secret chain, / If so I may, betwixt us twain / In memory of the past” (ll.1921). Elegy is a one-sided agreement that chains the living and the dead. Derrida suggests that elegiac address perpetually does and undoes the work of mourning, seeing its incompleteness as the type of (the) “work” itself—always unfinished, never brought to a close; an un-working or désoeuvrement (in Blanchot’s sense). His reference to Freud’s “confused and terrible expression, ‘the work of mourning’” (WM 200) contests any idea of normative mourning, one that must let the lost object go or else lapse into melancholia.21 Where Freud emphasizes the slow and painful process by which the ego detaches itself from its objects so that life can go on, Derrida insists that we continue to talk to the dead– hearing their voices, reading their books, and seeing their faces. Freud’s account of mourning is complicated, however, by his view that the unconscious knows no tense but the present tense, and therefore takes no account of death. Talking to the dead—apostrophizing the other who does not respond—becomes a way to keep them alive in oneself. Reflecting on the ineradicable impulse to memorialize the dead in his Essays upon Epitaphs (1809-10), Wordsworth locates the epitaphic mode in what he calls (quoting Weever’s Ancient Funerall Monuments) “the presage or fore-feeling of immortality, implanted in all men naturally”.22 Without some counterbalance to the apprehension of death, “a frost would chill the spirit, so penetrating and powerful, that there could be no motions of the life of love”. Were it not for this natural belief in immortality, he goes on to say, “neither monuments nor epitaphs … could have existed in the world” (Prose Works, ii.52). One could read Wordsworth’s belief in the religious promise of an afterlife— Derrida’s “as if” (WM 52)—not as a denial of death, but as a form of realism: when it comes to our love-objects, there is no such thing as

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memory; our exchanges with them continue as if they were still alive.23 The work of mourning is always unfinished because we never fully let go of the dead. Writing within a different theological framework, Levinas defines death as “a departure towards the unknown, a departure without return” (GDT 9). Derrida quotes his definition of our affective relation to death as “a purely emotional rapport” that orients us towards the unknown: “It is an emotion, a movement, a disquietude within the unknown” (GDT 16; WM 205); the apprehension of death is “emotion par excellence. Affection of being affected par excellence” (GDT 9): emotion—apprehension—takes the place of cognition. The elegy is the literary form of affectivity without telos—not so much a clinging to life, as an orientation towards the unknown. Wordsworth’s sense of the disquietude that underlies his communing with the dead, even in the most peaceful of rural settings, is recorded in a well-known passage from Essays upon Epitaphs that silently recalls his brother’s drowning five years previously. A country churchyard may look like a smooth sea on a summer’s day, yet its depths are stirred with anxieties, perturbations, and rancour: The image of an unruffled Sea has still remained; but my fancy has penetrated into the depths of that Sea—with accompanying thoughts of Shipwreck, of the destruction of the Mariner’s hopes, the bones of drowned Men heaped together, monsters of the deep, and all the hideous and confused sights which Clarence saw in his Dream! (Prose Works, ii. 64).

Clarence’s dream, in Richard III, envisages these hideous and confused sights from the vantage-point of the drowning man—“O Lord! Methought what pain it was to drown, / What dreadful noise of waters in my ears, / What sights of ugly death within my eyes. / Methought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks...” (R III, I. iv. 21-4). The ocean-depths become a place of hideously gnawed and disfigured corpses, scattered treasure, mocking skulls with gems for eyes. As Levinas puts it succinctly, “Death is decomposition” (GDT 11), however green the graveyard. Clarence’s murderous dream had formed the discomfiting “motto” or epigraph to the official account of the wreck of the Earl of Abergavenny compiled soon afterwards from survivor testimonies and reports.24 It took six weeks for John Wordsworth’s body to wash up; by then it must have been almost unrecognizable: “the Body of our dearest John ha[s] been found by dragging and was buried … This is a great comfort to us—his grave is a resting place for our thoughts—the end of all in this world.”25 But “six weeks beneath the moving Sea / He lay in slumber quietly” (Curtis, p. 610,

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ll. 36-7), before being buried in a mass grave. This fiction of the sleeping corpse (in another unpublished elegy, “To the Daisy”) makes the period that elapsed between wreck and burial the sleep of a quiet conscience: “All claims of duty satisfied” (l. 40). Two years before, however, in a proleptic sonnet based on the story of Simonides (“I find it written of Simonides”), Wordsworth had emphasized the restlessness of the sailor’s unburied corpse: “travelling in strange countries, once he found / A corpse that lay expos’d upon the ground” (ll. 2-3). Piously, Simonides has the body buried and pays for the performance of “due obsequies”. In recompense, the dead man appears to him and warns him against an impending voyage; Simonides stays on shore, while the ship is wrecked at sea with all on board: “Thus was the tenderest poet that could be … Saved out of many by his piety” (ll. 12-14).26 In the first of his Essays upon Epitaphs, Wordsworth again alludes to this story in support of his thesis that Simonides—because, rather than in spite of, his exaggerated respect for bodily remains—was capable of “communing with the more exalted thoughts that appertain to human nature” (PW 52). Otherwise, he writes, the corpse of a stranger would have meant no more to him than “the dead body of a seal or porpoise which might have been cast up by the waves” (PW 52). Then there would be no need of epitaphs or monuments. Writing of the relation between lyric poetry and elegy’s traditional consolations—its monumentalizing impulse and its promise of immortality—Barbara Johnson notes that despite appearances, “even the most traditional elegy contains the guilty secret that desire is not all for life”.27 The desire for writing and the desire for death are both associated with a particular kind of performance. The ghost of an un-dead corpse asks Simonides for burial, laying claim to more than mere corporeality. It asks for the gift of death—not forgetfulness, but recognition: burial-rites, reverence, restitution. What makes mourning terrible as well as confused is the nature of this demand on the survivor, for whom it may be experienced not just as a claim to a proper burial, but as a persecutory tax levied by the dead on the living. Melanie Klein’s autobiographical account of mourning in the wake of her son’s death brings to light the uneasy triumph of the survivor and its murderous accompaniment—its residue of hatred, denial, and control.28 Klein takes a leaf from Wordsworth’s book when she appeals to the classical gesture of elegy: “The poet tells us that ‘Nature mourns with the mourner’”.29 For her, the surfacing of a traditional trope of mourning signals not only a freer and more sympathetic relation to inner and outer worlds, but the mobilization of creative processes.30 Calling on the fiction of sympathetic nature, elegy re-imagines the inanimate not as sans-réponse, but as responsive—giving it a voice. Just as the trope of the voice allows us

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to hear the tears in Derrida’s “Adieu” to Levinas, so we hear “the sound, the song, / The murmur” (ll.12-13) in Wordsworth’s elegy for his brother. The mourning of nature with the mourner (pathetic fallacy) is the figure of elegiac emotion par excellence, a call anterior even to dialogue: the figure that gives affect.31

The Survivor’s Gift “… the question of the gift will never be separated from the gift of mourning” —Jacques Derrida, Given Time 129n.

“It is for the death of the other that I am responsible” (GDT 43). So says Levinas. But where Levinas sees responsibility, Derrida sees potential betrayal. His reflections on the economy of the gift in Given Time (Donner le temps, 1991) and The Gift of Death (Donner la mort, 1992) combine a rereading of Mauss’s seminal anthropological work on the gift with a critique of Levinas’s ethics of responsibility.32 Derrida points out in The Gift of Death that the Biblical sacrificial scenario (the sacrifice of Isaac) means that the ethics of responsibility “must be sacrificed in the name of duty”.33 In this monstrous story, responding to the call of the Other means, paradoxically, sacrificing him: “I offer a gift of death, I betray” (GD 68). There is a scandal at the heart of the ethics of responsibility. In the culture of death, the experience of internalization and secrecy associated with the work of mourning (in psychoanalytic terms, incorporation and repression) involves more than the apportioning of responsibility. Mourning gives rise to the need “to interpret death, to give oneself a representation of it, a figure, a signification or destination for it” (GD 10)—contradicting Freud’s view that there is no representation of death in the unconscious, and putting in question Levinas’s unknown destination without telos. In Given Time, Derrida questions whether there is such a thing as a gift at all, arguing (in a familiar move) for its radical and exorbitant impossibility. Mauss, he writes, “speaks of everything but the gift” (GT 24)—his subject is economy, exchange, contract, sacrifice, and counter-gift. As soon as the gift is recognized as such, it ceases to be a gift. Instead, it becomes an exchange, a circulation, or a return. A Derridean gift must exceed the economic category of the gift as Mauss had envisaged it (just as elegy must exceed the category of address to the self or to others, its recuperation within an economy of sameness). Derrida’s language of hyperbole and excess is rooted in suspicion of self-interest. The gift that returns to the giver is like the elegy that refers, self-reflexively, to oneself or the mourners round the coffin. For Derrida the gift must by definition be

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unrecognized, just as it must neither circulate nor be exchanged. The gift is not only impossible, “but the impossible” (GT 7), a figure of impossibility itself (just as “the work of mourning” is a figure of the work’s necessary incompleteness): “For there to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, or debt. If the other gives me back or owes me or has to give me back what I give him or her, there will not have been a gift” (GT 12). On the other hand, a poem written to a dead man who has ended his part of the agreement might be seen as eluding the gifteconomy.34 What makes Wordsworth’s distress into an impossible gift, in Derrida’s sense, is its one-sidedness: there is no one to receive it.35 As well as reminding us “that Levinas defines the first phenomenon of death as ‘responselessness’”, Derrida invokes “a passage in which he declares that ‘intentionality is not the secret of what is human’” (GD 47). The gift lies beyond intentionality. Like that of “Adieu” (whether salutation, benediction, or supplication), the gift’s agency comes from what it performs, rather than from any ontological necessity—from what it does, not from what it is. For Levinas, death is categorical; it exceeds and obliterates not only intentionality, but the psychoanalytic category of the unconscious. The gift that Wordsworth gives his dead brother prompts some categorical language of his own. This is a poem that involves a prohibition: “And so I write what neither Thou / Must look upon, nor others now, / Their tears would flow too fast” (ll. 15-16). Not just will not, but must not; as if by proscription as well as by the tragic accident of John’s death. The written words belonging to a dead man—“Too surely they are thine” (l. 14)—are destined not to be read by him or by anyone else. More than a secret solace, this private writing is withheld from those whose “tears would flow too fast”. The unread poem secretes its solitary grief in the interests of other readers. For Levinas, responsibility to others gives meaning to self-identity; singularity is given only by death, or by the apprehension of death: “We encounter death in the face of the other” (GDT 105). But for Derrida the Levinasian concept of singularity is problematic: every other, including God, is every “other”; human alterity is indistinguishable from God’s. Yes, Levinasian ethics are already religious.36 And so it proves when Wordsworth makes a request on his own account, at the end of the poem: “but gracious God, / Oh grant that I may never find / Worse matter or a heavier mind … / Grant this, and let me be resign’d” (my emphases; ll.3842).37 In this combined “question, prayer” (Levinas’s phrase—translated as Derrida’s “question-prayer”), Wordsworth utters a call that Derrida defines as “anterior to all dialogue” (WM 209). It is not only anterior, but one-sided. “Prayer”, writes Levinas, “never asks anything for oneself; strictly speaking

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it makes no demands at all, but is an elevation of the soul.”38 Here he is discussing Rabbi Hayyim Volozhiner’s Nefesh ha’Hayyim, (The Soul of Life), the posthumously published work of a Lithuanian Kabbalistic and Talmudic scholar of the long eighteenth-century. Levinas is drawn to Volozhiner’s concept of prayer as a moment of benediction. According to Levinas, Volozhiner conceives prayer as essentially disinterested: “True prayer … is never for oneself, never ‘for one’s needs’”.39 In answer to the question, “is it right for us to ask, in our prayers, for human suffering to be eased?” (historical Jewish suffering, for instance), his response is that prayer may be justified in the case of the unhappy “I”—provided its basic concern is not with one’s own unhappiness: “The suffering self prays on behalf of God’s suffering” (because God suffers with man’s affliction).40 This is not quite how Wordsworth would have viewed it. In Christianity’s bargain, Christ does the suffering for humanity, while God makes the unthinkable sacrifice of his only beloved son. Nevertheless, Wordsworth’s “For those who yet remain behind, / Grant this” (ll.41-2) strikes a less orthodox note than some of his subsequent poetry.41 His prayer on behalf of “those who yet remain behind” (l.41) includes those whose “tears would flow too fast” (as well as himself). Wordsworth’s distressful gift is not only a supplication; it is also a benediction for “those who yet remain behind”. Derrida points out that Christianity’s themes of infinite love, sin, repentance, salvation, and sacrifice revolve around “the fathomless gift of a type of death” (GD 49). God’s exorbitant gift-giving and incommensurable sacrifice make for a paradigmatic gift. Only God is allowed to make the radical substitution that apparently exceeds the terms of the gift-economy: “the gift of death—and of the death of that which is priceless—has been accomplished without any hope of exchange, reward, circulation, or communication” (GD 96). But as Derrida argues, such a gift “reappropriates the aneconomy of the gift as a gift of life or, what amounts to the same thing, a gift of death” (GD 97). God hands out his own rewards, whether transcendental or metaphysical. But Wordsworth, we know, had worldly rather than other-worldly ends in view: “I will work for you was his language and you shall attempt to do something for the world”.42 This ethical work for the world was to have been underwritten by John’s venture-capitalism at sea. Both, for sure, involve willingness to take deferred profits. Derrida’s reading of Biblical gift-economy paraphrases Matthew 6, 19-21, where heaven is called “the place of true riches, a place of treasures, the placement of the greatest thesaurization or laying up of treasures. The correct location of the heart is the place that is best placed” (GD 97). In this celestial tax-haven, affective capital can never be devalued;

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it yields infinite profit, immune to accidents such as shipwreck or uninsured capital, but in the future tense: “The heart will thus be, in the future, wherever you save real treasure” (GD 98)—a good savings-plan in the face of worldly insecurity. Derrida’s tongue-in-cheek deconstruction of what he calls the “cardiotopology” of the Gospels identifies a hidden accumulation of selfinterest. Wordsworth’s entire unfinished oeuvre, of which “Distressful gift!” is a synecdoche, might be thought of as a form of poetic accumulation laid up for his future readers: “All fill’d or to be fill’d with store / Of verse for [our] delight” (ll. 27-8). Like The Prelude itself, his “Distressful gift” was to remain unpublished, although not altogether unread. But, as Derrida points out, the writing subject “never gives anything without calculating, consciously or unconsciously, its reappropriation, its exchange, or its circular return” (GT 101); indeed, the subject becomes visible precisely via the operation of such psychic calculation (including, presumably, concern for the living). Hence the truly disinterested Derridean gift is only thinkable on condition of the “death”—not just the anonymity—of the donor/subject. But, as Derrida is careful to say, “only a ‘life’ can give, but a life in which this economy of death presents itself and lets itself be exceeded. Neither death nor immortal life can ever give anything, only a singular surviving can give” (GT 102). Wordsworth’s “Distressful gift” is the survivor’s gift par excellence; a gift not without (self-)interest, to be sure, but a gift that presents and exceeds the economy of death, just as it exceeds both intentionality and the unconscious. Derrida’s question remains to be answered: what is the relation between gift and grief? And why is the question of the gift inseparable from that of mourning? (GT 36, 129 n.). For Derrida at least, the answer turns out to lie in the poem itself, which is at once gift and performance. A poem is already, from its first line, a figure for the melancholy gift of itself. He cites Mallarmé’s baleful “Don du poème” (“The Gift of the Poem”)—a hyperbolically wretched poetic gift, pale, full of suffering, bearing the traces of its solitary conception, and requiring a readerly (i.e.feminine) supplement.43 Derrida reads Mallarmé’s “Don” as the type of all poems, and the poem’s gesture as the type of the gift. His definition of the gift is not so much that it is a “free” gift, but rather that it lacks both essence and ontology. It is pure différance, trace, or dissemination—a re-definition designed to supercede both Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist analysis of the floating signifier (hau), and Benveniste’s semantically ambiguous “give” and “take” (the dô and dâ of Indo-European languages).44 According to this logic, the Derridean gift becomes—perhaps predictably, certainly hyperbolically in its turn—synonymous with the problematic of writing

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(différance), reading (dissemination), and the give and take of mourning (unfinished work). Grief and désoeuvrement converge on the impossibility (that is, the unthinkability) of both the work and the gift. Exceeding the metaphysics of presence, signs, essence, or value, Derrida’s theory of the gift takes the poem as both its question and its point de depart. The giftpoem is placed outside all systems of exchange: incalculable, exceptional, neither authentic nor counterfeit. At the end of Given Time, in the footnote that gives him his final lines, Derrida signs off with a poem called (what else?) “Donnant”: “Que désirer-vous donner / C’est le geste qui compte” (“What do you desire to give, / It’s the gesture that counts”; GT 172 n.).45 The geste (gesture) is at once sign and action.

The Look of the Book “A la place de quelque chose qui est présent ailleurs, voici présent un donnée, ici: image?” “In place of something that is present elsewhere, there is here a present, a given: image?” —Louis Marin, Des pouvoirs de l’image.46

“By Force of Mourning”, Derrida’s 1993 hommage to his friend and colleague Louis Marin, opens with a reminder that “all work is also the work of mourning” (WM 142). Here too, he goes out of his way to dismiss any normative conception of “successful” mourning, if what is meant by that is banishing the melancholia of uncompleted mourning. He represents himself as drained, forlorn and distraught, yet preoccupied by the question posed by Marin’s last, posthumously published book, Des pouvoirs de l’image (1993): what is the force of the image? Taking as his starting-point Marin’s concern with portraiture—or rather, with “a particular class representing the dead or death”—Derrida defines what he calls “the point of view of death” as follows: For it would be from death, from what might be called the point of view of death, or more precisely, of the dead, the dead man or woman, or more precisely still, from the point of view of the face of the dead in their portraiture, that an image would give seeing, that is, not only would give itself to be seen but would give insofar as it sees, as if it were seeing as much as seen. (WM 147-8)

It is worth lingering on what Derrida means here by “the point of view of death”. The “face of the dead” not so much gives itself to be seen, as “sees” the onlooker (“as if it were seeing as much as seen”); in so doing, it displaces the point of view of the living. This constitutive look disturbs

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both self-presence and temporality (just as for Levinas, death constitutes an interruption from otherness). Derrida comments at length on a passage from Marin’s introduction to Des pouvoirs de l’image which emphasizes the dramatic effects of representation on the present tense: “something that was present and is no longer is now represented. In place of something that is present elsewhere, there is here a present, a given” (WM 149).47 Wordsworth’s distressful donnée (his “given”) consists in representing the book as having been present in the past or as present elsewhere (présent ailleurs), and at the same time as a re-presentation; that is, it is both monument to and reminder of what is no longer there—his brother’s look, his reading of the book. The look or image of the book that is so insistently “here” (ici), with its “melancholy leaves” its “written page and white”, stands in for the missing body that is elsewhere (ailleurs). The book is “framed” for, and read by, the look of the no-longer present Friend—“He framed the Book which now I see, / This very Book upon my knee” (ll.29-30). The temporality of this seeing has been utterly changed by the interruption of the Friend’s death: “But now—upon the written leaf / I look indeed with pain and grief” (ll.36-7). The reading of the book brings pain and grief because its readability re-presents the look of the other, but “from the point of view of death”. Wordsworth’s opening stanza contains another interruption—a grammatical incoherence—in the form of an abrupt change of tense: “Distressful gift! this Book receives … I wrote” (my emphases; ll.1. 4). The point of view of death, which is also the point of view of representation, shifts abruptly from a statement about receiving in the present to a completed act of writing in the past; and then, in the space of a few lines, to the future anterior as the writer pre-reads ahead of himself: “and when I reach’d the end / Started to think that thou, my Friend”—must what? “Must never, never look” (ll.4-7). This end-stopped look is the look of the book, the startling (“started to think”) and arresting point of view of death. But there is something extra in representation. Reflecting on the “force” of the image in Marin’s work, Derrida refers to “an acute thought of mourning and of the phantom that returns, of haunting and spectrality”, an effect of the image that “would stem from the fantastic force of the specter” (WM 153). In “Ejaculation at the Grave of Burns”, a poem prompted by a visit to Burns’s grave in 1803 (the same year that he wrote the sonnet on Simonides), Wordsworth shrinks with pain beside the grave containing the poet’s bones. His address, however, is not to Burns, but to his ghost—or rather, to the spirit of his poetry:

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And have I, then, thy bones so near? And thou forbidden to appear! As if it were Thyself that’s here I shrink with pain; And both my wishes and my fear Alike are vain. (Curtis, p.534; ll.7-12).48

Instead of a ghost appearing (“Thyself that’s here”) we “see” and “hear” its verbal trace: the spirited stanza that is at once Burns’s signature-tune and his monument. Quotation as a form of hommage brings the fierce spirit of the Scots poet to life.49 As Marin observes, the effect of representation, or making the image present, is to create an image that is more forceful, more intense, and yet more spectral, than any original. He calls this spectralizing effect the “primitive” of representation. This doubled image of the body (at once real and fictive), takes a specific form in Derrida’s hommage, namely, his emphasis on the posthumousness of Marin’s book as he revisits it and gives it another look. His re-reading has peculiar and painful immediacy (“As if it were Thyself that’s here”). Derrida writes: “I would especially like to convey to you, trying not to take advantage of the emotion, how difficult and painful it is for me to speak here of this book” (WM 157). The difficulty and pain of his re-reading “has to do with the strange time of reading that the time of the writing of this book will have, as if in advance, imprinted in us, the friends of Louis” (WM 157). Derrida imagines Louis Marin “working on a book he knew he might not, while still living, see”. By its own citation of images and photographs of those who have “passed away”, Marin’s book multiplies what Derrida calls “the survival effect, the effect of living on”. Yet even “the grammar of the future anterior” is not adequate to convey the tense of this anticipatory yet posthumous reading. Derrida suggests that “the strange temporality” of Marin’s selfportrayal in advance of his own death gives peculiar force to the affect of mourning. The effect is that of “signing the extraordinary utterance … that allows one to say ‘I died’”. Derrida sees this “incredible grammar, this impossible time or tense” (WM 157)—about which Marin himself had written—as the time of writing: “It is the strange time of his writing, the strange time of reading that looks at and regards us in advance” (WM 1578). This is none other than graphological time, “the time or tense, the graphological time, the implicit tempo of all writing” (WM 158). The tense or tempo of writing is the signature of the writer’s posthumousness. Testifying to his emotion on re-reading Marin’s book, Derrida attributes its intensity to something more than “the emotion of mourning that we all know and recognize, … an emotion that overwhelms us each time we

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come across the surviving testimonies of the lost friend” (WM 158). Just as Wordsworth is overwhelmed by the surviving testimonies of his lost Friend (John’s manuscript notebook containing his own poems), so Derrida’s mourning is overwhelmed by a vertiginous reflexivity that has to do with the time of reading: There was another emotion that came to overwhelm this first mourning, this common mourning, coming to make it turn upon itself, I would almost want to say to reflect it to the point of vertigo, another emotion, another quality and intensity of emotion, at once too painful and strangely peaceful, which had to do, I believe, with a certain time of reading. (WM 158)

It is this “strange time of reading”, so overwhelming as to be vertiginous, that startles Wordsworth when he comes to the end of his poem as the pain of loss is caught up in the returns and relays of graphological time-past. Derrida’s hommage continues to address the question of mourning, alluding (as if to a shared psychoanalytic discourse) to “the image commonly used to characterize mourning [which] is that of an interiorization (an idealizing incorporation, introjection, consumption of the other …)” which is ultimately Eucharistic in nature (WM 158-9). Marin writes about the Eucharist as “the great mourning object”. Without denying psychoanalytic modes of interiorization and subjectivity, Derrida suggests that if this interiorization “must not—and this is the unbearable paradox of fidelity—be possible and completed”, it would be “because of another organization of space and of visibility, of the gazing and the gazed upon” (WM 159). A degree of interiorization is inevitable (“the friend can no longer be but in us”); indeed, it is prepared for, both at the moment of death and beforehand, “in the undeniable anticipation of mourning that constitutes friendship”. The interiorization of the (dead) friend is reducible to visible scenes and images, their traces in us. Whether memories or monuments, “the other of whom they are the images appears only as the one who has disappeared or passed away, as the one who, having passed away, leaves ‘in us’ only images” (WM 159). In Wordsworth’s poem, the one who has passed away reappears as the visible image of the memorial book. “The written page and white” (l. 24) whose pages he had so often handled, eyed, and turned in anticipation of his brother’s reading becomes an image of his look. It is this image that says so poignantly, in the words of Derrida’s threnody: “he is no more, he is no longer here, no longer there” (WM 160). For Derrida, this topology (imago-tropology) of space—neither here nor there—points, not so much to an essential lack, as to a look: “the fact that

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one is seen there in it. The image sees more than it is seen. The image looks at us” (WM 160). This is the look of the book—not the absence that it reveals (the absence of the reader for whose eyes it had been intended), but the asymmetrical inversion that transforms it into a portrait of the writer-as-reader. The inversion both exceeds and traumatizes the interiority of friendship and of mourning. This a- or dis-symmetry of the look is at once anachronous, disquieting, and as much constitutive of the reading subject as any cogito, ego sum: “I know that I am an image for the other and am looked at by the other” (WM 160). Each (necessarily posthumous) reader is looked at “by the one who, with each page, will have providentially deciphered and prescribed, arranged in advance, a reading of what is happening here, of what makes the present scene possible” (WM 160). Just so does Wordsworth write of this pre-arranged reading: “He framed the Book which now I see, / This very Book upon my knee” (ll.29-30). Derrida insists of Louis Marin that “We are all looked at”, and that the look is interior to the reader: “He looks at us. In us. He looks in us” (WM 161). The interiorization of the look (the image or/of seeing) that looks in us, “the experience of this time of reading”—a reading always staged in advance, yet anterior—is caught up in the tempo of a prior writing. Hence not only the sadness of graphological time, but also (in Derrida’s pregnant phrase) “the torsion of the time of reading” (WM 161)—a torsion that is at once painful, fascinating, and interrupted. Derrida’s tribute to Marin ends with a question that links the gift to death. “Why”, he asks, “does one give and what can one give to a dead friend?” (WM 164). Granted that one’s relation to the other is also one’s relation to oneself—the gaze of Narcissus regards one from the gaze of the other—what can reading do, other than repeat, in its echoic way, what comes from the resonance of the other? Derrida’s hommage tells the story of an interrupted reading (“I wrote”, “I … started”) as well as a pre-staged one. He suggests that Marin knew that the work of death begins prior to death; this is why “this book cannot be closed, why it interrupts itself interminably” (WM 164). Derrida’s last words narrate a vertiginous speedreading: “And however prepared I might have been for it, I read it too quickly. In a sort of haste that no mourning will be able to diminish or console. It happened to me too quickly, like Louis’s death. I feel as if I were still on the eve of reading it” (WM 164). In this strange torsion of the time of reading, Derrida’s words resonate with the dislocated future anterior of Wordsworth’s vertiginous opening: I wrote, and when I reach’d the end Started to think that thou, my Friend, Upon the words which I had penn’d

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The poem’s reading and writing run ahead of themselves, forever unprepared to reach their end, in the sad graphological time that deprives the dead Friend of the reading in which he might see himself interiorized by the look of the book. As Wordsworth’s unintended readers, we occupy the same impossible subject-position: the point of view of death, the painful pre-text for his distressful gift.

An Interrupted Line “… an interrupted line that turns about in a coming and going” —Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 30.

Blanchot’s essay, “Interruption (as on a Riemann Surface)”, in The Infinite Conversation (L’Entretien infini, 1969) offers the following definition of conversation: “when two people speak together, they speak not together, but each in turn: one says something, then stops, the other something else (or the same thing), then stops” (IC 75). Conversation, at once a turning movement and a movement that upholds and sustains (l’entretien), is not dialogue as we usually understand it. Rather, it consists of interruption and interval, pause and return. Elsewhere in The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot locates in the word “turn”—“this turn that turns toward that from which it turns away” (IC 31) what he calls “the original torsion” that speaking tries to disentangle and slacken. The same might be said of the relation between prose and verse: “prose, a continuous line; verse, an interrupted line that turns about in a coming or going” (IC 30). Poetry, then, is a kind of moving conversation, interrupted and undone by the to-and-fro that distinguishes it from prose: “The first turn, the original structure of turning (which later slackens in a back and forth linear movement) is poetry” (IC 30). This poetic form of conversation has its own rhythm, its own detours and deflection: “In this turn that is rhythm, speech is turned toward that which turns aside and itself turns aside” (IC 31). Poetry’s fort/da movement is a kind of conversation that is constantly turned towards another: an averted apostrophe. The Infinite Conversation pays tribute to Blanchot’s intellectual friendship with Levinas, including his definition of Autrui as the mark of a caesura or interruption (“it is this fissure—this relation with the other— that we ventured to characterize as an interruption of being”; IC 69). Prefaced by the staging of an imaginary conversation, and paying tribute to his long dialogue with Levinas, the “infinite conversation” of Blanchot’s title refers to “the turn and turn about of plural speech.” His

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metaphor for this alternating plurality is a mathematician’s conceptual tool, the Riemann surface: a virtual talking book. Blanchot’s footnote to “Interruption (as on a Riemann surface)” explains his title by means of an anecdote told about Paul Valéry: Mathematicians use a tool called a Riemann surface: it is an ideal note-pad made up of as many pages as necessary, fastened together according to certain rules, and whose total thickness amounts to nearly nothing. Upon this leaved surface numbers are inscribed, some of which occupy the same place upon different sheets. In the course of a conversation, Valéry said … “Don’t you find that conversations occur on a Riemann surface? I make a remark to you, it is inscribed upon the first sheet; but at the same time I prepare on the second sheet what I will say to you next, and even on a third sheet what will come after. From your side you respond upon the first sheet, while at the same time putting in reserve on other sheets what you intend to say to me later.” (IC 441)50

Like Wordsworth, Blanchot uses the metaphor of a book to define both the topographical and temporal turning of the page, in space and time. Turning becomes a metaphor for the temporality of writing, or what Blanchot’s note calls “the principle of deferred speech” (IC 441n.). Wordsworth, too, computes the material disaster of John’s voyage (with all its loss of lives and money) in metrical “numbers” inscribed on “The written page and white”. The turn and turn about of Wordsworth’s verse form the “secret chain” that binds him to his drowned brother. Verse is the interruption that links living and dead. The pause permits not just exchange, but an opening for disaster. Some pauses stop the conversation: “and when I reach’d the end / Started …”. If poetry’s turns and returns, its strange fits and starts of passion, are its mode of conversation—indeed, its mode of thought—each pause or intermittence resembles a small apprehension of death; poet and reader “start” at the end. Blanchot’s essay intimates the gravity of the pause, the irreducible distance that already separates two interlocutors. One mode of communicative relation implies an inter-relational space, or dialectical relation, whereby the other is regarded as a second self to be brought into harmony and unity with the first. But a second, nondialectical modality relates, more disturbingly, to the ineluctable singularity and separateness of the self: “what is now in play, and demands relation, is everything that separates me from the other” (IC 77)— including time. Here there can be no direct communication, only a hiatus, or unknown mode of being, to which “the interruption in language itself responds, the interruption that introduces waiting” (IC 77). This is the

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separation that for Blanchot (as for Levinas) constitutes “an interruption of being”. Waiting out the turns and pauses of Wordsworth’s elegy, the reader “hears” in its syncopated rhythms the writing of intermittence-asseparation. Blanchot’s name for the pause where intermittence speaks is “the speech of writing”—something previously unthought or unwritten, “the interruption by which the unknown announces itself” (IC 70). The unknown announces, not just suspension, but (in his phrase) an interruption that “asphyxiate[s] speech”, like drowning. Pain or affliction (Malheur)—distress—may make it impossible to speak, unless to bring that impossibility to expression: “But now—upon the written leaf / I look indeed with pain and grief, / I do” (ll.36-7). In the gap or caesura that Blanchot calls “the ultimate, the hyperbolical” interruption, the recognition of death makes itself felt as sheer, meaningless (but not affectless) reduplication: Wordsworth’s sad “I do”. Blanchot’s speculative mode of thought makes self-interruption the prelude to any understanding. Hence his question—whether speech (i.e. writing) “does not always mean attempting to involve the outside of any language in language itself” (IC 78-9). What is excluded from speech is silence. In the pause of waiting, writes Blanchot, “it is not simply the delicate rupture preparing the poetic act that declares itself, but also, and at the same time, other forms of arrest” (IC 79)—death, for instance. This is a Wordsworthian formulation. Pausing in his “mimick hootings to the silent owls” (1805 Prelude V. 398), the Winander Boy experiences in their non-response the intimation of a longer silence: Blanchot’s “impossible interruption” foretells his death. I want to end by noting that the turns and returns of Wordsworth’s verse in “Distressful gift!” create a reliably returning seven-line stanza (aabcccb). But he ends with an eight-line stanza, and an extra rhyme: “find / mind / behind / resign’d” (aabccccb instead of aabcccb). This extra-lineal emphasis reinforces Wordsworth’s question-prayer: “Oh grant … Grant this, and let me be resign’d / Beneath thy chast’ning rod” (ll. 41-2). The distressful gift morphs into resignation and implied obedience, if not punishment. God rhymes unambiguously with “rod”. But this shift of address (from book to God) involves another kind of resigning. In “The Absence of the Book”, Blanchot writes that whereas the book can be signed, by contrast, “the work … requires resignation, requires that whosoever claims to write it renounce himself as a self and cease designating himself” (IC 429).51 While the book is bound up with completion, the work designates incompletion, désoeuvrement, and disaster.52 For Blanchot, it is the breaking of the tablets (“the set is now

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broken”)—an originary fracture—that renders the writing of the Torah legible. The first law emanating from the disaster, “thou shalt reject presence in the form of resemblance, sign, and mark” (IC 433-4), thereafter interdicts the sign as a mode of presence. There is no way back, given this radical break, outside the game of indeterminate and inessential chance that Blanchot calls writing, “the game in which everything is each time risked and everything lost” (IC 434). This, you might say, was Wordsworth’s side of the agreement with John: the game of risk and loss that underwrites his poetical work for the world, making it not an exchange, but a distressful gift.

Acknowledgements A version of this essay appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, 106: 2 (2007), 393-418 in a special issue edited by Ian Balfour on Derrida’s later writings. I am grateful for permission to reprint it here. 1

See Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 239-241 for a brief account of the wreck and its aftermath, including the succeeding months of Wordsworth family grieving; and see also Richard E. Matlak, Deep Distresses: William Wordsworth, John Wordsworth, Sir George Beaumont, 1800-1808 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003) for another reading of these entwined relationships. 2 To Richard Wordsworth, 11 Feb 1805; to Sir George Beaumont, 11 Feb 1805; The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years 1787-1805 , ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 540, 541 (hereafter EY). 3 To James Losh, 16 March 1805 (EY 565). John’s letter of 12 September 1802 to Mary Hutchinson quotes the covenant in Wordsworth’s “Michael”, ll. 415-17, changing the pronoun: “but, whatever fate / Befall [me] I shall love thee to the last, / And bear thy memory with me to the grave”; see The Letters of John Wordsworth, ed. Carl H. Ketchum (Ithaca:, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969), 116, 126. 4 EY 563. For a relevant analysis of the role of exchange as it relates to both Wordsworth’s poetry and eighteenth-century accounts of political economy, see Simon Jarvis, “Wordsworth’s Gifts of Feeling”, Romanticism, 4.1 (1998), 90-103. Jarvis points to the sustained attempt to separate gifts from exchange, and interest from self-interest, in economic and cultural theory. 5 For details of John’s career, see Ketchum’s introduction to The Letters of John Wordsworth; he succeeded an uncle as captain of the Earl of Abergavenny in 1801 (a thirty-two-gun privateer). The Bengal-China route involved shipping rice, woollens, cotton, tea, opium, and sometimes “Bang” (marijuana). Besides their trading cargo, captains transported passengers (as well as troops) on the Bengal leg

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of the so-called “double voyage”. The ship was carrying a combined total of 402 including its crew, of whom only 155 were saved. 6 See Dorothy’s letter to Jane Marshall of 15 and 17 March 1805 (EY 561-2). 7 For the main contemporary accounts, see E.L. McAdam, Jr., “Wordsworth’s Shipwreck”, PMLA 77 (1962): 240-7. John Wordsworth was exonerated of any responsibility for the wreck at the official inquiry, and the East India Company was acquitted of negligence. 8 Wordsworth reported John’s view that “he had indeed a great fear of Pilots and I have often heard him say that no situation could be imagined more distressing than that of being at the mercy of these men” (To James Losh, 16 March 1805; EY 563). 9 “… it does [William] good to speak of John as he was, therefore he is now writing a poem upon him. I should not say a poem for it is a part of the Recluse.” (Dorothy Wordsworth to Lady Beaumont, 11 April 1805; EY 576). 10 “At first I had a strong impulse to write a poem that should record my Brother’s virtues and be worthy of his memory.… I composed much, but it is all lost except a few lines, as it came from me in such a torrent that I was unable to remember it; I could not hold the pen myself, and the subject was such, that I could not employ Mrs Wordsworth or my Sister as my amanuensis.” (To Sir George Beaumont, 1 May 1805; EY 586). 11 On 5 July 1805 Wordsworth wrote to Sir George Beaumont: “I have composed lately two small poems in memory of my Brother, but they are too melancholy else I would willingly copy them” (EY 603). On 7 August 1805, Wordsworth copied “To the Daisy” (“written in remembrance of a beautiful Letter of my Brother John”; EY 613). 12 Composed between 20 May and 5 July 1805, and possibly shortly before 5 July 1805 when Wordsworth mentioned having composed “two small poems in memory of my Brother” (EY 603). The text is based on a ms. in Mary Wordsworth’s fair copy, with pencil corrections by Wordsworth, in DC MS. 57; see William Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800-1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 617-18, and, for DC MS 57, see Curtis, xxii. Quotations from “Distressful Gift” are from Curtis’s text. 13 According to Curtis, “A … ‘collection,’ about which it is possible only to speculate, since the volume does not survive, is mentioned by Wordsworth in his poem ‘Distressful gift!’ … It was apparently left behind before the final voyage …. If this commonplace book contained more samples of [Wordsworth’s] poems, it seems likely that they were transcribed by John himself from copies sent him from Grasmere” (Curtis, 6). 14 “Why, gifted with such powers to send abroad / Her spirit, must it [the mind] lodge in shrines so frail?” (1805 Prelude, v. 47-8). 15 Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001) (hereafter WM). 16 See Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 341 (hereafter IC). See also Gerald L. Bruns, Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 151-2: “The infinite

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conversation will be a dialogue without dialectic, a conversation without negation…. So we may imagine once more a discourse outside of discourse … where the interlocutors neither contest nor supplement one another but have entered into a relation that is structured as an eternal return”. Arguably, the same logic structures Derrida’s understanding of the gift. See also Leslie Hill, Maurice Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 1379, where the concept of “impossibility” involved in the Derridean gift (irreducible to any ontology) is shown to replace that of extreme affirmation in The Infinite Conversation. 17 First published in Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas (1997); see Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); the text referred to here will be that of The Work of Mourning. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas also includes Derrida’s “A Word of Welcome”, a consideration of Levinas’s ethics of hospitality, in which Derrida discusses Levinas’s understanding of the à-Dieu (see ibid. 101-5). Levinas refers to “the pleasure of a contact at the heart of a chiasmus” in “Jacques Derrida: Wholly Otherwise” (1973); see Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 55-62. 18 Cf. Derrida’s remark in “The Deaths of Roland Barthes” apropos of the classical funeral oration: “In its classical form, the funeral oration had a good side, especially when it permitted one to call out directly to the dead, sometimes very informally [tutoyer]. This is of course a supplementary fiction, for it is always the dead in me, always the others standing around the coffin whom I call out to.” But, he continues, “The interactions of the living must be interrupted …” (WM 51-2). 19 See Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death, and Time, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 9 (hereafter GDT). 20 To Sir George Beaumont, 23 February 1805 (EY 547). 21 In a footnote to Given Time, Derrida refers to “Fors” (his introduction to Abraham and Torok’s The Wolf Man’s Magic Word), arguing for the blurring of the distinction between introjection and incorporation: “I pretend to keep the dead alive, intact safe (save) inside me, but it is only in order to refuse, in a necessarily equivocal way, to love the dead as a living part of me, dead save in me, through the process of introjection, as happens in so-called normal mourning”; see Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 129n. (hereafter GT). 22 The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), ii. 50 (hereafter Prose Works). Weever’s 1631 work is a source for Wordsworth’s Essays on Epitaphs. For the anti-monumentalizing tradition to which Essays on Epitaphs belongs, see Samantha Matthews, Poetical Remains: Poet’s graves, Bodies, and Books in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 159-63. 23 The classic statement is Joan Riviere’s, in “The Unconscious Phantasy of an Inner World Reflected in Examples from Literature” (1952); see The Inner World and Joan Riviere: Collected Papers 1920-1958, ed. Athol Hughes (London: Karnac Books, 1991), 317, where she alludes to “countless never-ending

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influences and exchanges between ourselves and others”. Our internal objects, Riviere writes, continue to lead their lives “within us indivisible from ourselves” (The Inner World, 320). 24 See [William Dalmeida], An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the Earl of Abergavenny East Indiaman, Captain John Wordsworth, Off Portland, on the Night of the 5th of Feb. 1805; Drawn from Official Documents, and Communications from Various Respectable Survivors, by a Gentleman in the EastIndia House ( London: Lane, Newman, and Co., 1805); Wordsworth thought this account the most reliable, mentioning the motto on its title-page drawn from Richard III (see EY 560-1n., 564-5). 25 Dorothy Wordsworth to Lady Beaumont, 28 March 1805 (EY 574); see also EY 552 for Wordsworth’s concern about the burial. Drowned on 5 February, John’s body was not recovered until 20 March 1805, and was buried in unmarked grave along with other recovered bodies (see Ketchum, The Letters of John Wordsworth, 50-1). 26 Wordsworth might well have associated “tender-hearted Simonides” (Prose Works ii.52) with his tender-hearted sailor brother—“the tenderest Poet that could be / Who sang in ancient Greece his moving lay” (Curtis, 584, ll. 12-13). 27 Barbara Johnson, “L’Esthétique du Mal”, in Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 26-7. 28 See “Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States” (1940), in The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell (London: Penguin, 1986, esp. 159-60. 29 Ibid. 162. Cf. Wordsworth in “The Ruined Cottage”: “The Poets in their elegies and songs, / Lamenting the departed call the groves, / They call upon the hills and streams to mourn, / And senseless rocks, nor idly …” (ll. 73-6). 30 “At this stage in mourning, suffering can become productive. We know that painful experiences of all kinds sometimes stimulate sublimations, or even bring out quite new gifts in some people, who make take to painting, writing, or other productive activities under the stress of frustrations and hardships” (Selected Melanie Klein, 163). 31 For the role of affect in writing such as de Man’s and Derrida’s, see Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotions after the “Death of the Subject” (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2001). Terada discusses Derridean emotion, particularly in his Memoires for Paul de Man, in relation and response to de Man’s figure of prosopopoeia; (see ibid. 128-151, esp. 134-40). Terada calls this Derrida’s “conversation with the dead de Man” (ibid. 146) – a perceptive reading that bears on The Work of Mourning. 32 For a philosopher’s discussion of Derrida in relation to Levinas, see Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), particularly chs. 3 and 4. Critchely’s argument relates particularly to the ethical (and political) aspects of deconstruction. See also Colin Davis, Levinas: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), which addresses the obscurity of Levinas’s expression and thought including his concept of “face”. 33 The Gift of Death, trans. David Willis (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 67 (hereafter GD).

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34 For the status of “impossibility”, an influential strand in Blanchot’s thought that involves what lies both outside discourse and anterior to being, see Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 138, where “the impossible” is defined “as that which escapes affirmation and negation alike and exceeds all such dialectical oppositions or contraries”. 35 For a discussion of the gift from a phenomenological perspective, see Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 71-118. Marion aligns himself with Derrida only to the extent of finding in his reading the basis for a counter-interpretation, seeing within it the possibility of a problematic return of metaphysics that rests with exposing a contradiction rather than probing its depths (ibid. 79-81). For a penetrating account of Marion’s argument about the phenomenology of exchange, see Simon Jarvis, “Problems in the Phenomenology of the Gift”, Angelaki 6:2 (2001): 67-77; and, for a critique of Derrida for his latent economism, see also Simon Jarvis, “The Gift in Theory”, Dionysius 17 (1999): 201-22. I am grateful to Simon Jarvis for timely guidance in the area of gift theory; my own emphasis differs to the extent that it emphasizes the role of both psychoanalysis and Blanchot in Derrida’s thought. 36 “Levinas is no longer able to distinguish between the infinite alterity of God and that of every human. His ethics is already a religious one…. the border between the ethical and the religious becomes more than problematic” (GD 84). 37 Wordsworth’s letters often make use of this turn of phrase, for instance: “God grant me life and strength …”, “[I] pray God to give me strength …” (EY 547, 565). 38 See “Prayer without Demand”, in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 232. For Volozhiner, according to Levinas, “the act of study constituted in itself the most direct communication with a transcendent, nonobjectifiable God” (ibid. 228). 39 Ibid. 233. 40 Ibid. 234. 41 Cf. the elegy for John written the following year, “Elegiac Stanzas, Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle” (1806): “Not without hope we suffer and we mourn” (l. 60). 42 See Wordsworth’s letter to James Losh, 16 March 1805 (EY 563), quoted above. 43 See GT 58-9. Mallarmé’s poem has various titles and versions (“Le Jour”, “Le poème nocturne”, “Dédicatrice du poème nocturne”). Mallarmé’s gender-politics are, of course, problematic (conception as masculine, reading as feminine). His miserable neonate is invoked in the course of Derrida’s reading of a different transaction, alms-giving (“Aumone”) – a stinted giving that leaches the gift of any generosity to the donee (see GT 57-8). 44 See GT 73-8, 78-82. Derrida re-reads Claude Lévi-Strauss’s tribute to (and critique of) Mauss in his Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss as “exchangist, linguisticist and structuralist” (GT 76). Benveniste’s “Gift and Exchange in IndoEuropean Vocabulary”, in Problèmes de linguistique générale, is similarly seen as pointing to a semantic ambivalence that belongs more generally to language itself:

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“Language gives one to think but it also steals, spirits away from us … it carries off the property of our own thoughts even before we have appropriated them” (GT 80). 45 The poem is by Michel Deguy, Donnant Donnant (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 57. 46 Louis Marin, Des pouvoirs de l’image (Paris: ´Editions du Seuil, 1993), 11 (WM 149). 47 The passage from Marin’s introduction begins: “Le préfixe re-importe dans la terms la valeur de substitution. Quelque chose qui était present et ne l’est plus est maintenant representé. A la place de quelque chose qui est present ailleurs, voici présent un donnée, ici; image? Au lieu de la représentation, donc, il est un absent dans le temps ou l’espace ou plutôt un autre, et une substitution s’opère d’un autre de cet autre, à sa place” (Des pouvoirs de l’image, 11). Derrida’s reading includes the example of the substitution of the body as announced by the angel at the tomb, and relates to the primitive power of this scenario of ontological transfiguration (see WM 149-53). 48 Probably composed in August 1803, and completed in this form between March 1804 and early 1807 (Curtis, 534). 49 For Marin’s sense of the voice as inscribed in poetic figures, see the end of his introduction: “Mais si les périodes et les strophes, les phrases et les vers, les mots, les consonnes et les voyelles peignent en montrant et si le langage fait voir, c’est par la force qui le traverse et que ses organizations hierarchisées articulent: c’est par la force qui en déplace, si l’on peut dire, la transparence instituée: c’est par la chair de la voix que signes et letters, mots et phrases informent …” (Des pouvoirs de l’image, 22) 50 The anecdote is cited from Judith Robinson, L’Analyse de l’esprit dans les Cahiers de Valéry (Paris: José Corti, 1963). Blanchot comments: “Of course the image remains very unsatisfying since here discourse … only calls upon what one might name the principle of deferred speech” (IC 441). 51 “Let us say briefly that if the book can always be signed, it remains indifferent to whoever would do so; the work … requires resignation, requires that whosoever claims to write it renounce himself as a self and cease designating himself” (IC 429). 52 See Gerald L. Bruns, Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), esp. chs, 6 and 7, for an account of Blanchot’s relation to “the work”; cf. also Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).

CHAPTER FOUR HEINRICH VON KLEIST AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF CONVERSATION IN GERMANY PAUL E. KERRY

Conversation in the eighteenth-century Germanic lands is usually associated with court culture and the rise of salons in Vienna and Berlin, notably those presided over by the Jewish salonniéres, Henriette Herz and Rahel Levin, not to mention the coffeehouses in those cities.1 Of the coffeehouses in Leipzig, which Friedrich Schiller also frequented, Theodor Johann Quistorp wrote in 1743: A coffeehouse is like a political stock exchange, where the most gallant and wittiest heads of every state come together. They engage in wideranging and edifying talk, issue well-founded judgments on matters concerning the political and the scholarly world, converse sagaciously about the most secret news from all courts and states, and unveil the most hidden truths.2

There has also been significant work done on German Romantic theories of dialogue, especially those of the Jena Romantics including Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis.3 The aim here will be to sketch the ways conversation was thematized in late eighteenth-century German texts and, in particular, to discuss a neglected essay by Heinrich von Kleist and how it relates to and transforms the German discourse on conversation. Norbert Elias cites the late eighteenth century in Germany as the time when “the process of functional democritization” transformed society and allowed for a “diminishing power gradient between rulers and ruled, between the entire state establishment and the great mass of outsiders”.4 The growth of social institutions–the “public sphere”–in the late eighteenth century marked a turning point in which it became possible for

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conversation to be a conduit of social, cultural, and political change. James Sheehan observes that, By the last decade of the century, every German city and many towns had a variety of public institutions, reading societies, discussion groups, and masonic lodges…There were no historical precedents for the associations that grew up in the eighteenth century: unlike parishes or villages, they were voluntary; unlike guilds or Gesellenvereine, they were open to a variety of social groups; and unlike monasteries or convents, they were not cut off from the world. As public associations of private individuals, these organizations straddled state and society. As social associations of equals, they offered a mode of sociability that was not rooted in the corporate order. As cultural associations of readers and writers, they supported a new kind of political discourse.5

Kant’s epistemological insights were central to the development of this public sphere, which Jürgen Habermas considers a bourgeois category. Habermas identifies Kant’s consideration of the transformation of conversation as a central feature of this development and quotes him as follows: “If we attend to the course of conversation in mixed companies consisting not merely of scholars and subtle reasoners but also of business people or women, we notice that besides storytelling and jesting they have another entertainment, namely, arguing”.6 For Habermas, this move is essential in the development of a public “engaged in rational-critical debate”.7 German Enlightenment thinkers conceived of new forms of “rationalcritical” conversation. One way that they sought to converse with the reading public as well as with rulers was in their writings. For example, Kant in the definitive essay Was ist Aufklärung? [What is Enlightenment? 1784], invokes Frederick the Great directly. By calling the “Age of Enlightenment” the “century of Frederick”, Kant praises Frederick for showing tolerance in matters of religion. In the same breath he suggests that this “Monarch”, while demanding obedience, sees the advantages of freedom [“Freiheit”] for the people to make public use of their reason [“von ihrer Vernunft öffentlichen Gebrauch zu machen”].8 The rhetorical strategy employed here allows Kant to forbear on calling for public dialogue by unctuously claiming that it was already sanctioned by the wise Prussian monarch. The oft-quoted line in Kant’s essay—“Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbst verschuldeten Unmündigkeit” [Enlightenment is man’s exit from his self-incurred immaturity]—contains the word, “Unmündigkeit”. The root of this word, “Mund” is related to the word “mouth”, and although “Unmündigkeit” is translated often as “immature”,

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its etymology implies being in another’s power or custody. A resonant meaning of this key word, then, is literally to be without a voice, and powerless as a consequence. Kant thus locates the central meaning of Enlightenment in the ability to speak for oneself.9 Similarly, a few years later Carl Friedrich Bahrdt linked freedom to think with the freedom to speak: the “freedom to share one’s insights and judgments verbally” is “a universal right of man” (Über Pressfreyheit und deren Gränzen [On Freedom of the Press and its Limits, 1787]). He asserted further that “communication” was inherent in social activities and claimed that conversing whether in public or over Rhine wine, disputing, and examining were not only essential for knowledge, but also for human happiness.10 Bahrdt’s claims here display some similarities to what Lawrence Klein has shown to be the civic vision of Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, the “conjoining of politeness and liberty” in modes of interaction described as “sociable, conversible, urbane, and decorous”.11 Appealing directly to rulers to allow for the “rational-critical” discourse was a strategy applied no more eloquently than by Moses Mendelssohn in Jerusalem oder über religiöse Macht und Judentum [Jerusalem or on Religious Power and Judaism, 1783]: Rulers of the earth!...Reward and punish no doctrine, tempt and bribe no one to adopt any religious opinion! Let everyone be permitted to speak as he thinks, to invoke God after his own manner or that of his fathers, and to seek eternal salvation where he thinks he may find it, as long as he does not disturb public felicity and acts honestly toward the civil laws, toward you and his fellow citizens. Let no one in your states be a searcher of hearts and a judge of thoughts; let no one assume a right that the Omniscient has reserved to himself alone! If we render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, then do you yourselves render unto God what is God’s! Love truth! Love peace!12

Interestingly, at the time that Mendelssohn wrote Jerusalem, he worried that the Congress of the United States of America would curtail precisely such freedoms through the establishment of a national religion. The aesthetic transformation of these Enlightenment appeals in Germany during the late eighteenth century is an area often overlooked by historians. Efforts to create a national theatre in the Germanic lands helped to foster cultural cohesion and opened up new questions about nationhood.13 The few cities that attempted to establish a national theatre such as Mannheim, Weimar, and Vienna featured works that fostered “rational-critical” conversations. Historical plays were used to discuss

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contemporary political constellations and the German triumvirate of Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller structured certain dramas to “talk to tyrants”.14 In Nathan der Weise [Nathan the Wise, 1779], Lessing not only advances radical positions on theology, but also discusses religious toleration. The best remembered part of the play revolves around a conversation between the Muslim ruler, the Sultan, and the Jewish trader, Nathan (modelled on Moses Mendelssohn). In Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris [Iphigenia in Tauris, 1779/1787] the plot, as well as definitions of civilization and the possibilities of intercultural openness, turn on a conversation between the royal Greek priestess, Iphigenia, and the supposed barbarian king, Thoas. Meanwhile Goethe’s Egmont (1788) can be understood as a series of conversations that advance various eighteenthcentury ideas in a sixteenth-century historical setting.15 A prime example of conversing with tyranny by staging an actual conversation with a tyrant occurs in Schiller’s Don Carlos (1787). Schiller had been researching the sixteenth-century Dutch Revolt and would write a history, Die Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande von der Spanischen Regierung [The History of the Revolt of the United Netherlands against Spanish Rule, 1788]. It was so compelling that it won him an invitation to take up a professorship at the University of Jena, where he lectured and wrote on history. In Don Carlos Schiller sets the stage so that the Marquis of Posa is able to converse directly with Philip II, King of Spain, the tyrant of choice for many Enlightenment thinkers. Posa claims to speak for thousands; it has not gone unnoticed that this plea is a fruitful anachronism, designed to speak to Schiller’s contemporaries. Almost two centuries later its stance against tyranny would also resonate with those in Nazi Germany who wanted to criticize the regime by cheering when these set-piece lines were spoken on stage:16 Oh, give us back what you have taken from us […] [He approaches boldly, while directing firm and fiery looks at the KING] I wish exhortation of the thousands Whose destinies depend on this great hour Could crowd into my words and raise the gleam Beginning in your eyes, into a blaze! Tear from your face the evil mask of Godhead, Beneath whose eyes we perish. Be the image Of truth and everlastingness. […] A single word of yours can suddenly Create the world anew. Give us the freedom To think.17

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Using sixteenth-century history as a palimpsest, this conversation is about the past, and yet was designed to be entered into during Schiller’s own time. The principle of speaking the truth was fundamental to the German Enlightenment and perhaps most rigorously applied in Kant’s treatise Über ein vermeintes Recht aus Menschenliebe zu lügen [On a Supposed Right to tell Lies from Benevolent Motives, 1797], in which Kant defends the proposition that the truth must be told in all circumstances even to the point of answering a homicidal person truthfully (if he bothered to ask) about whether one’s friend was hiding inside one’s house. Speaking the truth is also central in Iphigenie, Egmont, and Don Carlos, which Emmanuel Schikaneder had staged.18 Schikaneder is best known as the librettist for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte [The Magic Flute, 1791]. Mozart refined the German Singspiel in profound ways and its greatest model, The Magic Flute, was first performed in Vienna. Singspiel was an innovation that dispensed with the typical operatic structure of aria and recitative. Stage conversations would now be featured as integral parts of the performance and Mozart’s operas were permitted to be performed in the Viennese Burgtheater, on its way to becoming a leading German stage.19 But The Magic Flute not only featured conversations, it also associated a particular set of eighteenth-century values with speech acts. It was well-known that Mozart and Schikaneder were “Freymaurer” or Freemasons and Masonic views on speaking were inculcated in the opera. In an expressly didactic moment, Papageno the bird catcher is punished for prevarication when he lies to the prince, Tamino, by claiming that he had slain a serpent that was pursing Tamino. After a lock is placed on Papageno’s mouth, a homily is sung that extols universal harmony through verbal restraint (I, 8). That the enumerated vices stem from the “Mund” (mouth) is not insignificant, for civility and discretion, particularly in verbal expression were important to Freemasons: “Der Schluessel ist die Zunge” [the key is the tongue].20 Masons were charged with “avoiding all Wrangling and Quarelling, all Slander and Backbiting”,21 and explicitly charged with using the tongue [“eine Zunge”] the same way when speaking with a lodge brother face to face or behind his back.22 Masons regarded the tongue, as Michèle Cohen has argued in a different context, as a critical site “for the self-fashioning of the gentleman”.23 The theme of discretion in conversation arises throughout the opera as Tamino is instructed to be discrete [“verschwiegen”, 1, 15]. Discretion in conversation is a moral quality argued in his favour by the high priest Sarastro as he seeks to persuade his fellow priests to accept Tamino into

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the temple order [“Verschwiegenheit”, 2, 1]. This resonates with the formulation of Ignaz von Born, Vienna’s most influential Mason and presumed model for Sarastro, when he writes that the Seal of Solomon is discretion [“salomons Siegel, das Siegel der Verschwiegenheit”].24 This is identical to the quality described in the eighteenth-century German translation of Anderson’s The Constitutions of the Free Masons or Bruederschaft der Freimaurer, namely, “Verschwiegenheit”.25 The eighteenth-century preoccupation with discretion in conversation, politeness, and the esprit de conduite is also found, for example, in Antoine de Courtin’s Nouveau traité de la civilité (1690), articles in Addison and Steele’s journal, the Spectator, Freemason George Washington’s notes on the “Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation” (ca. 1747, published posthumously), and the immensely popular book by Enlightener and Freemason, Adolph Freiherr von Knigge, Über den Umgang mit Menschen [The Art of Conversing with Men, 1796]. If for Kant conversing truthfully was a duty, then for Knigge it was a means to useful social interaction, if not success in society.26 The Art of Conversing with Men was the most recognized work on conversation in the eighteenth-century Germanic lands. It was an extraordinarily popular book and mimicked to some degree French forerunners on conversation and politeness such as those by Abbé Bellegarde and later, Abbé Gaultier.27 Yet, it went beyond these works in significant ways. Knigge’s approach to conversation is rooted in the tradition of regulating class, mapping social intercourse, and disciplining passions.28 The book features sections on conversation with people from foreign countries; of different ages and dispositions (including for example drunkards, puritans, madmen, hair-dressers, gamblers, and ghost seers); between parents and children; masters and servants; hosts and guests; with spouses, lovers, and friends; clergymen, Jews, people of fashion, inferiors, the great, the powerful, and the rich. The notion of categorizing and measuring social relations is the common stock of such books. Knigge, however, expands into some new regions. He includes a chapter on conversations with oneself (this as a sign of good mental health). He has another chapter on the treatment of animals in which readers are enjoined to cease shutting them up and other cruel behaviour, although Knigge also warns against treating animals as human beings. Finally, he proposes that the relationship between the author and the reader is a conversation and that reading, particularly history, is a kind of necromantic conversation between the deceased and the living.

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Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811), essayist, playwright, and novella writer wrote an essay that challenged many of Knigge’s assumptions. “Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden” [On the Gradual Production of Thoughts whilst Speaking] is a largely overlooked, even neglected, text that should be considered in the context of the discourse on conversation in eighteenth-century Germany.29 The text is an unusual piece in Kleist’s oeuvre and often does not make its way into abbreviated collections of his works, which tend to be dominated by his literary output. The style of the essay is conversational (it is in fact dedicated to a friend of Kleist’s) and informal: a first person narrator addresses the reader and brings him or her into the flow of the narrative. The essay, then, performs a conversational act which models to some degree its content. The first sentence urges the reader to converse as a means to achieve selfknowledge: “If you want to know something and you cannot discover it through meditation, I counsel you my dear, thoughtful friend, to talk it over with the next acquaintance whom you happen to meet.” [Wenn du etwas wissen willst und es durch Meditation nicht finden kannst, so rate ich dir, mein lieber, sinnreicher Freund, mit dem nächsten Bekannten, der dir aufstößt, darüber zu sprechen.]30 Kleist suggests that nearly anyone will do for the point is not to ask for advice on a matter, but to simply narrate one’s concern (“you are first of all to tell him about it” [sollst du es ihm selber allererst erzählen]). Kleist here goes against Knigge and earlier handbooks on politeness and conversation, which urged the basic maxim that one think before speaking. One of the major dictionaries of the day, Adelung’s, defines “sprechen” [to speak] as “to make one’s feelings and thoughts known through words” [seine Empfindungen und Gedanken durch Worte merklich machen],31 thus the act of thinking precedes that of speaking. Kleist realizes that his counsel is going against convention: “I see your eyes widening and answering me that in earlier years you were advised to speak only of matters that you already understood….I would that you should speak with the reasonable intention of instructing yourself.” [Ich sehe dich zwar große Augen machen, und mir antworten, man habe dir in frühern Jahren den Rat gegeben, von nichts zu sprechen, als nur von Dingen, die du bereits verstehst….ich will, daß du aus der verständigen Absicht sprechest, dich zu belehren].32 Kleist here openly attacks prevailing texts on politeness and prepares the reader to recast conversation in a new way. Kleist, then, suggests that thoughts grow to fruition by speaking, that conversing finishes and perfects thoughts. He first illustrates the alternative view by explaining how, in the past when he considered legal

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cases, he would sit at his desk and ponder them in silence. He compares that approach to solving a mathematical problem through a methodical calculation of the equation and variables. This is contrasted with moments when he speaks with his sister about a problem and discovers, “I come to know what I would not have figured out even perhaps after hours of brooding” [so erfahre ich, was ich durch ein vielleicht studenlanges Brüten nicht herausgebracht haben würde]. He adds quickly: “Not as if she in an actual sense said it to me; for she knows neither the law, nor has she studied Euler or Kästner. It is also not as if she guided me through skilful questions to the decisive point, even if this has often been the case” [Nicht, also ob sie es mir, im eigentlichen Sinne sagte; denn sie kennt weder das Gesetzbuch, noch hat sie den Euler, oder den Kästner studiert. Auch nicht, als ob sie mich durch geschickte Fragen auf den Punkt hinführte, auf welchen es ankommt, wenn schon dies letzte häufig der Fall sein mag].33 Kleist is here taking away from readers the notion that the conversation partner actually possesses key knowledge or superior insights. Hence, when he earlier recommended speaking to an acquaintance about a problem it could be any acquaintance “whom you happen to meet” and to make his point he adds dryly, “It does not need to be a perspicacious mind” [Es braucht nicht eben ein scharfdenkender Kopf zu sein].34 Later in the essay he speculates that Molière conversed with his maid in “precisely this way,” gaining insights through articulating his thoughts.35 Significantly, Kleist’s ideas share an affinity with certain German Romantic notions. The Jena Romantics surrounding Friedrich Schlegel were experimenting at precisely this time with the concept of Symphilosophie, or a kind of collaborative thinking which entailed in part unregulated conversations on a given subject. One example of this approach is captured in Schlegel’s “Gespräch über die Poesie” or “Conversation on Poetry” (1800) in which the essay’s structure dissipates into a conversation between named participants. Kleist has thus far described the process he has in mind by telling the reader what it is not. In describing what it is he does not immediately cite examples, but describes something akin to anamnesis, which has its origins in Platonic anamnesis, namely, the thesis that all knowledge needs to be recalled.36 He writes that he has a “dim conception, a far away connection with that which I seek” and that when he starts a conversation that his “mind of necessity forms, while speaking, an end to the beginning such that the confusing idea is much to my astonishment clarified and the realisation completed” [Aber weil ich doch irgend eine dunkle Vorstellung habe, die mit dem, was ich suche, von fern her in einiger Verbindung steht, so prägt, wenn ich nur dreist damit den Anfang mache, das Gemüt,

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während die Rede fortschreitet, in der Notwendigkeit, dem Anfang nun auch ein Ende zu finden, jene verworrene Vorstellung zu völligen Deutlichkeit aus, dergestalt, daß die Erkenntnis, zu meinem Erstaunen, mit der Periode fertig ist]. Kleist is here touching on the internal dynamics of narration, namely, that a narrative forces a conclusion. In 1830 Thomas Carlyle would summarize the ensuing paradox of causality for historians succinctly: “Narrative is linear, Action is solid”.37 But for Kleist, narrative force is the engine that drives speaking, and therefore thinking, to a conclusion. In Kleist’s estimation the “unarticulate sounds” [unartikulierte Töne] one makes when trying to explain a problem, the use of too many conjunctions, and the general grammatical jumble of trying to express oneself spontaneously are not to be avoided and excised, but rather are key elements in the development of thinking and help to construct one’s ideas “in the workshop of reason” [Werkstätte der Vernunft].38 The posited partner in Kleist’s conversations participates in this fabrication of ideas, but not in the way envisaged by earlier manuals on conversation in which there is necessarily a verbal exchange. He returns to the example of his sister and observes that when she makes a movement as if she wants to interject, his mind’s abilities are heightened and he finds that his thoughts flow all the more smoothly and rapidly as he feels the pressure not to yield. Holding a conversation is not merely about formulating thoughts as Enlightenment thinkers often described it, but about how others react, even physically, to what is being said: “There lies a particular source of enthusiasm for him who speaks to a human countenance that faces him; and a look that announces that our halfexpressed ideas are comprehended often gives us the expression for the other half of the same” [Es liegt ein sonderbarer Quell der Begeisterung für denjenigen, der spricht, in einem menschlichen Antlitz, das ihm gegenübersteht; und ein Blick, der uns einen halbausgedrückten Gedanken schon als begriffen ankündigt, schenkt uns oft den Ausdruck für die ganze andere Hälfte desselben”].39 A significant part of the completion of thoughts, therefore, rests on speaking with another person, albeit one who sympathizes and wants to understand. Conversation is catalyzed by a person who attempts to reach out to another struggling to express an idea and, in that very act of wanting to understand, creates the possibility of the construction of meaning. In essence, Kleist calls for an intellectual empathy, a Verstehenwollen or a posture of wanting-to-understand as an essential element in conversation. He contends that “the conviction that the necessary wealth of ideas would be created from the circumstances” allows good speakers to

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complete thoughts without knowing beforehand what they are going to say. It would be a distortion to see in this an exhortation to be unprepared [die Überzeugung, daß er die ihm nötige Gedankenfülle schon aus den Umständen…schöpfen würde]. In fact the reverse is true. Kleist assumes that a problem has been on one’s mind or that an idea has been harboured for some time before conversing about it, but that one must “trust to luck and make a start” in speaking [machte ihm dreist genug, den Anfang, auf gutes Glück hin, zu setzen].40 In order to explain his understanding of the relationship between thought and speech Kleist reaches for fresh metaphors to illustrate his way of thinking and presents one that yoked science and politics. He alludes to the so-called “thunderbolt” [Donnerkeil] of Mirabeau in which Mirabeau defied a representative of the Ancien Régime through an impromptu speech. Kleist performs a close reading of the brief speech to show how Mirabeau developed his thoughts as he spoke. He points out how the speech began as a civil one-word answer, but then moved to unsure moments of grammatical repetition until it reached a point when “suddenly the fountain of colossal ideas opened” [nun plötzlich geht ihm ein Quell ungeheurer Vorstellungen auf] and he had found the climactic final phrase: “so tell your King that we will not be removed from our places except by force of bayonets” [so sagen Sie Ihrem Könige, daß wir unsre Plätze anders nicht, als auf die Gewalt der Bajonette verlassen werden].41 Kleist’s image of a fountain with its sudden [plötzlich] overflow, although not necessarily affective, shares something in common with Wordsworth’s classic definition of poetry in the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”.42 Kleist’s ideal of conversation can, however, be perceived to be poetic, coinciding to some degree with Friedrich Schlegel’s outlook articulated in the now (ironically) programmatic statement on Romanticism, Fragment 116 of the Athenäum “Fragments” (1798): “Die romantische Poesie ist eine progressive Universalpoesie” [Romantic poetry is a progressive, universal poetry] which encompasses all aspects of life itself.43 Whereas chemistry was a central natural science metaphor of the Jena Romantics, electricity was Kleist’s. Associating politicians with lightning had been en vogue in the German discourse since Benjamin Franklin’s treatises on lightning and electricity. The lightning rod empowered individuals not only to describe nature, but to control it—Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack of 1752 contained instructions on how to install the rods—and this shift made a significant impact in Germany, where Franklin became known as the new “Prometheus”, a title that is said to have originated with Immanuel Kant.44 The metaphor of the lightning rod

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competed with that of the earthquake as a way to effect rational political changes as opposed to violent upheavals. In Germany, Franklin’s scientific and political roles were merged by Johann Christian Schmohl, who published anonymously Ueber Nordamerika und Demokratie [On North America and Democracy, 1782]. “Franklin Prometheus, der du dem Himmel den Donner und den Tyrannen das Zepter entrissest”45 echoed the famous phrase of the French finance minister Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot: “Eripuit coelo, fulmen, sceptrumque tyrannis” [He snatched the lightning from the skies and the sceptre from the tyrants].46 The demythologization of lightning as a mysterious force of nature or as a symbol of divine displeasure and mysterious power is found in Goethe’s poem, Prometheus (1774), which evinces confidence in human potential as opposed to faith in the gods. Kleist introduces the idea of conversation into the discourse not only of lightning, but also of electricity. He reviews how “a body with an electrical charge of zero is suddenly charged when it comes into contact with an electrified body’s atmosphere” [in einem Körper, der von dem elektrischen Zustand Null ist, wenn er in eines elektrisierten Körpers Atmosphäre kommt, plötzlich die entgegengesetzte Elektrizität erweckt wird] and compares this reciprocal relationship to Mirabeau’s increasing confidence as he spoke. Kleist considers this analogy from the physical perspective as well: when Mirabeau and the King’s Master of Ceremonies faced one another and Mirabeau’s “boldness grew enthusiastically in relation to the destruction of his opponent” [so ging unseres Redners Mut, bei der Vernichtung seines Gegners zur verwegensten Begeisterung über]. Kleist also makes a fleeting comment on the vicissitudes of charting causality in history as he writes, with perhaps a tinge of irony, that “by a twitch of the upper lip or an ambiguous play on the cuff, the overturning of the order of things in France was caused” [daß es auf diese Art zuletzt das Zucken einer Oberlippe war, oder ein zweideutiges Spiel an der Manschette, was in Frankreich den Umsturz der Ordnung der Dinge bewirkte]. He continues with his electrical metaphor by likening Mirabeau to a Kleist bottle or as they are more commonly known, a Leyden jar in that “he had discharged himself and again become neutral” [daß er sich, einer Kleistischen Flasche gleich, entladen hatte, war er nun wieder neutral geworden]. Kleist made a literary metaphor out of electricity, as had the German scientist, Georg Matthias Bose, who in 1744 presented his experiments with electricity as a poem, complete with rhyming footnotes.47

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THIS IMAGE IS EXCLUDED FROM THIS VERSION, AS TEXT RIGHTS ARE NOT AVAILABLE.

Fig 4.1: The flow of electrical matter during a Leyden experiment. J. A. Nollett, Essai sur l'éléctricité des corps, Paris, 1746, facing p. 216. (by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library).

Leyden jars, basic condensers, were a central part of the electricity discourse in the eighteenth century. Patricia Fara gives a succinct explanation of how Leyden jars work and I have chosen an illustration that she uses in her book, An Entertainment for Angels. Electricity in the Enlightenment, because it illuminates Kleist’s use of the Leyden jar as an analogy for speaking (see Figure 4.1). Fara identifies the illustration as Pieter van Musschenbroek’s (1692-1761) first published drawing of the so-called Leyden experiment. Musschenbroek is credited with inventing the Leyden jar independently of Ewald von Kleist and it was named in his honour by J. A. Nollet. Fara explains:

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At the right, an electrical machine is charging up a horizontal metal rod or gun barrel, which, suspended by silken threads, acts as the prime conductor. At its other end, a wire dips down into the Leyden jar, a glass flask containing water, which stores the charge being transmitted to it. Holding the jar in one hand, the experimenter feels nothing. But when he touches the wire or the prime conductor with his other hand, and the accumulated charge surges through his body, he immediately feels a strong pain in his arms and chest, and runs the risk of nosebleeds, temporary paralysis, convulsions and prolonged dizziness.48

Kleist sees in the person with whom one converses a kind of conductor that allows for the release of stored thoughts through speaking. Fara notes that Nollet went on to demonstrate that an electrical charge stored in the Leyden jar could be transferred from person to person: The first person in the line held a Leyden jar, and when the last one touched its prime conductor, they all jumped into the air one after the other as the charge passed among them. At Versailles, Nollet entertained the king with 180 leaping soldiers; he achieved a similar feat with 200 Carthusian monks at their monastery, and later reached a record of over 600 people in his living chain.49

Kleist’s choice of a “thunderbolt” that galvanised the French Revolution shows his awareness of the political implications of the spread of ideas through speaking. Yet, Kleist’s point is less about politics then it is about the process of conversing itself. Karl Heinz Bohrer points out that for Kleist conversation is electrical in that it is “plötzlich” [sudden: a word that Kleist deploys several times in his essay], unpredictable, and not able to be mapped. Mapping and regulation of conversation were primary assumptions of previous advice literature.50 His next example is drawn from Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables. In particular, Kleist focuses on “Les Animaux malades de la Peste” or “The Animals Sick of the Plague”. A great plague has afflicted the animals and the king of beasts, the lion, believes that they have offended heaven. The plague will cease, he supposes, if the one who has sinned the most confesses and offers himself as sacrifice for the others. He does not exempt himself and relates how he had eaten sheep, dogs, and even the occasional shepherd, and he asks all to come forward and confess their sins. Kleist’s purpose is to show how the fox, seeking to remove suspicion from himself, begins to speak although he does not know beforehand what he will say. Kleist performs a close reading to show how the fox, unsure how to proceed, uses filler phrases to buy time until he can figure out how to mount an argument that would spare any carnivore. Kleist draws

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specifically on this part of La Fontaine’s fable: “Et quant au berger, l’on peut dire/ Qu’il étoit digne de tous maux,/ Etant de ces gens-là qui sur les animaux/ Se font un chimérique empire.” [As for the shepherd, one may say that he got the recompense he deserved, since he was one of those who thought to have rule over our empire.]51 In the end the donkey is slain because he has eaten grass. According to Kleist, the fox figured out what he would say as he spoke, and he concludes: “Language is, then, no fetter, not a brake shoe on the wheel of the intellect, but rather a second wheel, one that runs parallel, on an axle” [Die Sprache ist alsdann keine Fessel, etwa wie ein Hemmschuh an dem Rade des Geistes, sondern wie ein zweites, mit ihm parallel fortlaufendes, Rad an seiner Achse].52 The image of intellect and spoken words forming a single axle joined by wheels once again reverses commonly held notions that thought precedes words. Kleist uses the metaphor of wheels linked by an axle to show mind and language working together. Indeed Kleist argues that allowing thoughts to be wholly formed when speaking may actually be detrimental to conversation. The intellect, in its attempt to hold onto an idea that is not being spoken, must clamp itself, which prevents further thinking. He excuses those who, when speaking, confuse themselves, and sees this confusion as symptomatic of those who allow their thoughts to become fully conceived before speaking them. For such confusion is attributed to the way that some people separate speaking from thinking: When therefore an idea is expressed confusedly, it does not follow that it was confusedly thought; much rather it could easily be that the most confusedly expressed ideas are actually the most precisely thought out. One sees often in society, where, through a lively conversation, a continual pollination of minds with ideas is at work, people who as a rule hold themselves back because they do not feel they have a mastery of the language, suddenly [plötzlich], with a start, take fire, seize the conversation, and bring out something incomprehensible. Indeed, once the attention of all is brought to bear on them, they appear to indicate through awkward gestures that they do not themselves rightly remember what they wanted to say. It is probably that these persons had thought with precision of something brilliant. But the sudden [plötzlich] change in tasks, the transition of their intellect from thinking to speaking, caused the collapse of all its excitement, which is necessary to keep a firm hold on the thought, as well as required to bring it forth. [Wenn daher eine Vorstellung verworren ausgedrückt wird, so folgt der Schluß noch gar nicht, daß sie auch verworren gedacht worden sei; vielmehr könnte es leicht sein, daß die verworrenst ausgedrückten grade

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am deutlichsten gedacht werden. Man sieht oft in einer Gesellschaft, wo, durch ein lebhaftes Gespräch, eine kontinuierliche Befruchtung der Gemüter mit Ideen im Werk ist, Leute, die sich, weil sie sich der Sprache nicht mächtig fühlen, sonst in der Regel zurückgezogen halten, plötzlich mit einer zuckenden Bewegung, aufflammen, die Sprache an sich reißen und etwas Unverständliches zur Welt bringen. Ja, sie scheinen, wenn sie nun die Aufmerksamkeit aller auf sich gezogen haben, durch ein verlegnes Gebärdenspiel anzudeuten, daß sie selbst nicht mehr recht wissen, was sie haben sagen wollen. Es ist wahrscheinlich, daß diese Leute etwas recht Treffendes, und sehr deutlich, gedacht haben. Aber der plötzliche Geschäftswechsel, der Übergang ihres Geistes vom Denken zum Ausdrücken, schlug die ganze Erregung desselben, die zur Festhaltung des Gedankens notwendig, wie zum Hervorbringen, erforderlich war, wieder nieder.]53

This reasoning also brings Kleist to another conclusion: that those who have a “mastery of the language” and can speak more rapidly will have an advantage in conversations of the kind he envisions. He uses a military metaphor when describing conversations in which ideas are exchanged rapidly and lucidly—one is able to “lead more troops into the field” than one’s opponent [mehr Truppen als er ins Feld führt].54 This casts conversations as exchanges of ideas but also as competitive ebbing and flowing arguments, as when armies struggled on Napoleonic battlefields. This certainly goes against early advice literature in which, as Philip Carter observes, self-regulation was the rule: “The anonymous Art of Complaisance; or the Means to Oblige in Conversation (1673) was one of many guides to encourage seventeenth-century gentlemen to practise modesty and brevity followed by silence ‘to give the rest of the Company time to speak their thoughts’”.55 Kleist’s next turns to what he urges should be a typical location for conversations: the university. He criticizes the way that examinations are conducted at the university where one is suddenly placed on the spot and asked questions such as “what is the state? Or: what is property?” [was ist der Staat? Oder: was ist das Eigentum?] He calls this form of examining “repulsive” and “offensive” and compares it to a “horse trader” who “checks our knowledge and depending on whether we know five or six [things] determines to buy or dismiss us” [Abgerechnet, daß es schon widerwärtig und das Zartgefühl verletzend ist, und daß es reizt, sich stetig zu zeigen, wenn solch ein gelehrter Roßkamm uns nach dem Kenntnissen sieht, um uns, je nachdem es fünf oder sechs sind, zu kaufen oder wieder abtreten zu lassen]. He censures examiners who test in this way and concludes that this method of examination favours “very commonplace intellects, people who memorized yesterday what the state is and then

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tomorrow have forgotten it” [Nur ganz gemeine Geister, Leute, die…gestern auswendig gelernt, und morgen schon wieder vergessen haben].56 The better way that Kleist pleads for is to allow students to enter a conversation about the subject, to allow students to be “conversing a while about the state or property” and then “through comparison, separation, and summaries” reveal what they know [wo man sich vom Staat, oder vom Eigentum, schon eine Zeitlang unterhalten hatte, so würden sie vielleicht mit Leichtigkeit durch Vergleichung, Absonderung, und Zusammenfassung der Begriffe, die Definition gefunden haben]. He makes an enigmatic statement about epistemology: “For we do not know; it is above all a certain condition of ours which knows” [Denn nicht wir wissen, es ist allererst ein gewisser Zustand unsrer, welcher weiß].57 Knowledge is not a product of reason alone, but rather a condition and, further, that condition is at least partially achieved through conversation. He wryly insinuates that some examiners who avoid a conversational approach to examinations may themselves be covering their own ignorance. Kleist does not underestimate the enormous complexity of mastering the art of conversation as a pedagogical tool: “it is so difficult to tune a human mind and coax from it unique musical sounds; under clumsy hands, it is so easily made out of tune” [es ist so schwer, auf ein menschliches Gemüt zu spielen und ihm seinen eigentümlichen Laut abzulocken, es verstimmt sich so leicht unter ungeschickten Händen]. He concludes his essay by alluding to Kant’s “midwifery of thoughts” [Hebeammenkunst der Gedanken] which is referred to in Kant’s Metaphysik der Sitten [Metaphysic of Morals, 1797]. John H. Smith analyzes this allusion to Kant as bringing Kleist into an intellectual tradition that includes Plato and Kant and extends to Gadamer. He writes: “A special art of midwifery [“Hebammekunst”] is required, then, that will not expect of an act of communication to tell or express a thought but that will allow a thought to be born out of a circuitous interchange that does not directly state the case. The problem for Kleist … lies … in a speaker’s dependence on social discourse to express any knowledge”.58 This Socratic “dialogic method” that informs Kant and to which Kleist alludes, leads Smith to assess the status of Kleistian conversational knowledge as peculiar, since “it both already exists and does not quite yet exist. Rather it comes into being by means of indirect interaction with the other in the struggle for expression”.59 Smith cites the stunning parallel to Gadamer’s views on conversation: “While we say that we ‘conduct’ a conversation, actually the more effective a conversation is the less its conduct lies in the will of one

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or the other partner. The actually effective conversation is never one that we would want to conduct. Rather, it is more appropriate to say that we get into, or even get caught up in, a conversation”.60 Kleist’s essay can be productively compared to other more recent theories on conversation such as the “talking cure”, associated with Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud. The “talking cure” is the name given, according to Freud, to the process whereby improvement in a patient was related to his or her ability to discuss repressed emotions connected to past events.61 Of course, psychoanalysis as Freud understood it required more than a patient’s speaking. It required skilled interpretation by a highly trained analyst. Freud nevertheless found that speaking about “repressions” was a catalyst to achieving a “psychically mature condition”: “With this purpose in view he [the patient] must be brought to recollect certain experiences and the affective impulses called up by them which he has for the time being forgotten”.62 Similar to Kleistian conversation, the interaction between the analyst and the patient produces a discourse that results in constitutive knowledge, which Kleist called a “Fabrikation” [fabrication or construction] and Freud a “construction”. This “constitute[s] the link between the two portions of the work of analysis, between his [the analyst’s] own part and that of the patient”.63 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had considered the salubrious effects of conversation. He had long been interested in Pietism and framed a restorative conversational practise in his Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre [Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, 1829]. The novel features a religious community that use Sundays for conversation, as a day to discuss anything which may be oppressing one, whether of a religious, moral, social, or economic nature.64 There were other eighteenth-century German models of therapeutic conversation that antedate Kleist’s essay. For example, the Unitas Fratrum or the United Brethren, now known as the Moravians, discussed a brief scriptural message, or daily “Watchword” [Losung], within their families and with visiting members of the church. This not only fostered family and community cohesion, but led to the opportunity to converse about spiritual, emotional and other challenges. Katherine Faull comments: “The peculiarly Moravian coalescence of what were in the eighteenth century now considered to be the separate realms of mind and body was achieved through the spiritualization of the corporeal and effected through what today is called the ‘talking cure’, or the ‘Sprechen’, or speaking. By means of regular and persistent religious conversations Moravian men and women were offered spiritual guidance”.65 The practice of Sprechen is well-documented in the eighteenth-century Moravian missionary journals

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of David Zeisberger.66 Friedrich Schleiermacher, a prominent early German Romantic, was raised in a Moravian milieu and would be credited with transforming Protestant theology. “On the Gradual Production of Thoughts whilst Speaking” marks a turning point in the German discourse on conversation and occupies a transitional space between dominant Enlightenment and Romantic modes of conversation (slippery as periodizations are in the first place). It challenges Enlightenment ideologies on the regulation of conversation. Politeness or “Höfflichkeit” (courtliness) does not play a central role in Kleist’s model. Conversation is separated from its social function, as a tool for mapping relationships, for the court and bourgeoisie and is held instead to be an anamnestic operation and a heuristic device. In other words, it is a way of remembering and a tool for solving problems. The essay foregrounds conversation as a condition for the process of thought, which overturns previous hierarchies that confined thinking to a purely abstract mental activity. Conversation and speech are not merely hermeneutic, but retain political possibilities, which, as we have seen, are highlighted through the late eighteenth-century discourse on electricity. This conversational discourse is not about politeness, and the essay cuts against the grain of the increasingly popular “conversational dictionaries” (Konversationslexikon), which contained topics for conversation, that Peter Burke points out were emerging in Germany at this time.67 Instead conversational outcomes are unpredictable: they are always, in Schlegel’s phrase “im Werden” [becoming]. And it is thus that they possess revolutionary possibilities. Free flowing speech and ideas, stimulated by a sympathetic and nurturing conversational partner, resonate with Romantic conceptions of sociability and the organic growth of knowledge. 1

James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 221 and 243. See W. H. Bruford, Germany in the Eighteenth Century. The Social Background to the Literary Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 73-105. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 2 Quoted in Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe, 243. Urbanitas was an important feature of conversation in German courtly circles. See Peter Burke, The Art of Conversation (Cambridge: Polity, 1993), 97. 3 Azade Seyhan, Representation and is Discontents. The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 83-104. 4 Norbert Elias, The Germans. Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Michael Schröter and trans. Eric Dunning and Stephen Mennell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 30.

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James J. Sheehan, German History 1770-1866 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 192-93. 6 Immanuel Kant, quoted in Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 106. 7 Ibid., 106-107. 8 Immanuel Kant, “Zur Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” in Schriften zur Anthropologie, Geschichtsphilosophie, Politik und Pädagogik, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, vol. 11 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), 59-60. 9 Ibid., 53. On “Mund” see the entry for the same in Friedrich Kluge, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995), 574. 10 “On the Freedom of Press and Its Limits: For Consideration by Rulers, Censors, and Writers,” in What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 100-102. In 1793 Johann Gottlieb Fichte would propound the “right of free communication” was based in the moral law. “Reclamation of the Freedom of Thought from the Princes of Europe, Who have Oppressed it until Now,” in What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and TwentiethCentury Questions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 127. 11 Lawrence Klein, “Liberty, Manners, and Politeness in Early Eighteenth-Century England,” The Historical Journal 32.3 (1989): 585-86. 12 Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem or on Religious Power and Judaism, trans. Allan Arkush (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1983), 138-39. 13 T. J. Reed, The Classical Centre. Goethe and Weimar 1775-1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 21-35. 14 T. J. Reed, “Talking to Tyrants: Dialogues with Power in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” The Historical Journal 32 (1988): 367–74. 15 Paul E. Kerry, Enlightenment Thought in the Writings of Goethe: A Contribution to the History of Ideas (Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2001), 53-75. 16 Georg Ruppelt, Schiller im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland. Der Versuch einer Gleichschaltung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1979), 115. 17 Act 3, Scene 10, lines 690-708. Friedrich Schiller, Don Carlos and Mary Stuart, trans. Hilary Collier, Sy-Quia and Peter Oswald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 116. 18 Robert W. Gutman, Mozart. A Cultural Biography (London: Secker and Warburg, 1999), 724. 19 Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe, 189. 20 Des verbesserten Konsitutionenbuchs der alten ehrwuerdigen Bruederschaft der Freimaurer, Jakob Anderson aus dem Englischen uebersetzt (Frankfurt am Main: Andreckischen Buchhandlung, 1783), 562. 21 James Anderson, The Constitutions of the Free Masons (London, 1723; reprint, Philadelphia, 1734), 56.

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Anderson, Bruederschaft der Freimaurer, 562. Michèle Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1996), 29. 24 Ignaz von Born, “Ueber die Mysterien der Aegyptier,” Journal fur Freymaurer I/1 (1784): 101. 25 Anderson, Bruederschaft der Freimaurer, 563. 26 Karl-Heinz Göttert, afterword to Über den Umgang mit Menschen by Adolph Freiherr Knigge (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1991), 474. 27 Bellegarde: Modèles de conversations pour les personnes polies (1697); Réflexions sur le ridicule et sur les moyens de l’éviter, où sont représentez les mœurs et les différens caractères des personnes de ce siècle (1697); Réflexions sur la politesse des mœurs, avec des maximes pour la société civile, suite des Réflexions sur le ridicule (1698). Gaultier: Jeu des fautes que les enfans & les jeunes gens commettent le plus ordinairement contre la bonne éducation et contre la politesse (1796). 28 Adolph Freiherr Knigge, Über den Umgang mit Menschen, ed. Karl-Heinz Göttert (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1991). See Bruford, Germany in the Eighteenth Century, 45-72. 29 The essay was first published posthumously in 1878, but is thought to have been written in 1805-6. See David Constantine’s fine English translation of the essay in Heinrich von Kleist. Selected Writings, ed. and trans. David Constantine (London: Dent, 1997). 30 Heinrich von Kleist, “Über die allmählige Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden,” in Heinrich von Kleist Erzählungen, Anekdoten, Gedichte, Schriften, ed. Klaus Müller-Salget, Heinrich von Kleist Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1990), 534. 31 Johann Christoph Adelung, Grammatisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch der Hochdeutschen Mundart, vol. 4 (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1801), 230. 32 Kleist, “Über”, 534-35. 33 Ibid., 535. Euler and Kaestner were well-known eighteenth-century mathematicians. 34 Ibid., 534. 35 Ibid., 536. 36 Dominic Scott, “Platonic Anamnesis Revisited,” The Classical Quarterly, New Series 37.2 (1987): 346. 37 Thomas Carlyle, “On History,” in Thomas Carlyle. Historical Essays, ed. Chris R. Vanden Bossche (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 8. 38 “Über”, 535. 39 Ibid., 536. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 536-37. Gordon Craig shows that in 1805, during the time that Kleist’s essay is thought to have been composed, he wrote a letter to his friend Rühle von Lilienstern, the person to whom “On the Gradual Production of Thoughts whilst Speaking” is dedicated, and wondered why the Prussian King, Frederick William III, had not “summoned his Estates and, in a moving speech … revealed his 23

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situation to them?”, that is that Napoleon had breached Prussian neutrality and needed to be challenged. In: “Heinrich von Kleist and the Duel against Napoleon”, in The Politics of the Unpolitical. German Writers and the Problem of Power 1770-1871 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 61. The political failure of Frederick William in Kleist’s eyes would have contrasted sharply with Mirabeau’s success. Mirabeau wrote a sympathetic study of the Prussian monarchy, De la Monarchie Prussienne sous Frédéric la Grand (1788). See G. P. Gooch, Studies in German History (London: Longmans, Green, 1948), 96-118. 42 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Routledge, 1991), 246. 43 Friedrich Schlegel, “‘Athenäums’-Fragmente,’” in Kritische und theoretische Schriften, ed. Andreas Huyssen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984), 90-91. 44 Aeka Ishihara, Goethes Buch der Natur. Ein Beispiel der Rezeption naturwissenschaftlicher Erkenntnisse und Methoden in der Literatur seiner Zeit (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005), 76-77. See Reiner Wild, “Prometheus-Franklin: Die Gestalt Benjamin Franklins in der deutschen Literatur des 18.Jahrhunderts”, Amerikastudien 23.1 (1978): 30-39. 45 Ishihara, Goethes Buch der Natur, 75-85. On Franklin’s political role, see M. C. Sprengel, Allgemeines historisches Taschenbuch oder Abrisz der merkwürdigsten neuen Welt-Begebenheiten enthaltend für 1784. Die Geschichte der Revolution von Nord-America. (Berlin: Haude und Spener, 1784). Dippel shows that some prominent Germans, for example the philosopher Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and the mathematician Gotthelf Kästner, would have preferred Franklin, whose prestige they saw stemming from his scientific achievements and election to the Göttingen Academy of Science, not to merge the roles of scientist and political activist. Horst Dippel, “Franklin: An Idol of the Times,” in Critical Essays on Benjamin Franklin, ed. Melvin H. Buxbaum (Boston: Hall, 1987), 202-10. 46 J. A. Leo Lemay, “The Life of Benjamin Franklin,” in Benjamin Franklin in Search of a Better World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 46. 47 Geoffrey V. Sutton, Science for a Polite Society. Gender, Culture, and the Demonstration of Enlightenment (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1995), 306. 48 Patricia Fara, An Entertainment for Angels. Electricity in the Enlightenment (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 53-54. Fara also comments on the assistant who is pictured in the illustration. She argues here and in her other books that assistants, male and female, although often unacknowledged, made possible the work of the experimenter who has subequently come to be seen as the lone, heroic scientist. 49 Ibid., 56. 50 Karl Heinz Bohrer, “Kleists Selbstmord,” in Kleists Aktualität. Neue Aufsätze und Essays 1966-1978, ed. Walter Müller-Seidel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981), 298. 51 Jean de La Fontaine, Fables (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966), 180-81. 52 “Über”, 538. 53 Ibid., 539. 54 Ibid.

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55 Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660-1800 (Essex, England: Pearson, 2001), 64. 56 Kleist, “Über”, 539-40. 57 Ibid. 58 John H. Smith, “Dialogic Midwifery in Kleist’s Marquise von O and the Hermeneutics of Telling the Untold in Kant and Plato,” PMLA 100.2 (1985): 208. 59 Ibid., 207 60 Quoted in Smith, “Dialogic Midwifery”, 215. 61 Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Pyscho-Analysis, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1989), 8. 62 Sigmund Freud, “Constructions in Analysis”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Pyschological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. 23 (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), 257-58. 63 Ibid., 360. 64 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, in Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher, Gespräche, vol. 1/10 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989), 345. 65 Katherine Faull, Moravian Marriage, 5. Binder CUS 1, Moravian Customs, Beliefs, and Practices in Early America, Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. 66 David Zeisberger, The Moravian Missionary Diaries of David Zeisberger, ed. Hermann Wellenreuther and Carola Wessel, trans. Julie Tomberlin Weber (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 176 and 527. 67 Peter Burke, The Art of Conversation, 120.

CHAPTER FIVE AMERICAN ONE-SIDEDNESS: THE UNREALIZABLE IDEAL OF DEMOCRATIC CONVERSATION JAY FLIEGELMAN

The Illusion of Conversation In America the circulation of public opinion, leading to an informed citizenry and a strong oppositional party, makes democracy possible. Jefferson himself declared he would prefer newspapers without laws to laws without newspapers; opinion is power and conversation is the marker of the health of the political system. As a political ideal conversation is imagined as horizontal (among equals), substantive and an uninterrupted loop of back and forth commentary leading to clarification and the discovery of common ground. The Marquis Chastellux described his conversations with Jefferson in April of 1782 as embodying precisely such an ideal: “Conversation which was always varied, always interesting, always sustained by that sweet satisfaction experienced by two persons who in communicating their feelings and opinions invariably find themselves in agreement and who understand each other at first hint.”1 But in reality conversations are more often sequential, nonresponsive, or dominated by one-upmanship performances, competitive rather than cooperative, full of withholding and displacement, false listening, and little real hearing apart from the pleasures of hearing one’s own voice. Several years after Chastellux’s account, Pennsylvania senator William Maclay reported on Jefferson’s “rambling vacant look” in conversation and the fact that he spoke almost “incessantly.”2 Like the outcries of anger John Adams expresses in the blistering marginalia he wrote in his copies of Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet and other defenders of the French Revolution, or the direct address of authors who strategically use the second person singular in an effort to connect with readers (if you

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consult your pulses you will discover we share the same sentiments), conversations are more often than not one-sided and illusory.3 Full of damning with faint praise and preoccupations with discovering the self through acts of differentiation, they troublingly mirror, mediate and displace (talking about one subject as it provides a protective colouration for another). Let’s start with an iconic image beyond our period and work backwards. In the year of American victory in the Mexican War, the Communist Manifesto and nationalist revolution throughout Europe, Richard Caton Woodville produced Politics in the Oyster House (Figure 5.1).

THIS IMAGE IS EXCLUDED FROM THIS VERSION, AS TEXT RIGHTS ARE NOT AVAILABLE.

Fig. 5.1: Richard Caton Woodsville, Politics in an Oyster House, 1848, Oil on canvas, 16 x 13 in. (40.6 x 33 cm), The Walters Art Museum.

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One contemporary reviewer tried to tease out the narrative as two men, ensconced in one of those subterranean temples devoted to the immolation of bivalves, served by Abyssinian priests in white robes…and vulgarly known as oyster cellars. … This companion looks as if he was fresh from Tammany Hall of the park in the heat of a presidential canvass…he clutches a newspaper in one hand, and with the other, the elbow resting on the table, is enforcing his arguments with impressive forefinger on the old gentleman, who, a little hard of hearing, and still harder of conviction, has his hand to his ear and listens with an incredulous smile. The orator is capital and thoroughly American.4

In a broader reading, the theatrical contrast is between classicist and romantic, conservative and liberal, Whig and Democrat. The Democrat violates in his conversational passion the rules of the house posted beneath the light. His hat is on; he uses no ashtray. He violates the space of his supposed interlocutor. His foot is outside the confines of the table in opposition to the crossed feet of the old man whose umbrella suggests a caution about the natural, rather than an embrace of it. The top corners of the painting show a doric capitol on the left column and a levelled column on the right. The old gentleman in every detail is linked to a reliance on the authority of the past and hard-won wisdom rather than to the authority of the counter canvas–the daily paper which stimulates public opinion, and reports on it as the nearest thing to the viva voce of the people. Is the Whig turned inward in an act of disengaged self-reflection, appealing to the viewer in an effort to seek sympathy for his predicament? Is his hand cocking his ear or sealing it? The two figures are as inseparably linked as the salt and pepper shaker. But is this a conversation, an instance of healthy democratic debate? The British firm that handled the English tour of the painting answered the question by rechristening it, at one showing, as “A New York Communist Advancing an Argument.”5 Here argument is a stand-in for harangue. The smartest commentator on the painting declares that the men do not jostle for concrete material advance, but merely “talk and … talk.”6 There is much talk, but no conversation. The speechifying is a one-sided conversation and the work of democracy seems ironically and humorously thwarted. The older man’s eloquent spectacle of self-control marshals bourgeois decorum against the passions of the political enthusiast. Perhaps the most manipulative of all American political conversations is in the correspondence of Adams and Jefferson, a textual anticipation of Politics in the Oyster House. Adams, the Massachusetts Federalist, distrusted public opinion, which he believed was no more than a

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rationalized synonym for public passion. Fearing the democratic many rather than the aristocratic few, he prized social order over social experimentation. “Democracy,” he famously declared, “is Lovelace and the people are Clarissa.”7 He saw his antagonist Jefferson as a Southern aristocrat with a democratic rage for social innovation with little sense of a post-lapsarian world. Adams was deeply insecure and desperately competitive with Jefferson who in turn resisted being implicated in a level of intimacy, spontaneity, and rivalry with which he was uncomfortable. Both, at bottom, cared deeply for the other, but aware that their correspondence would eventually be published, wrote, particularly at the end of their lives, in an effort to explain themselves for the ages. After a long estrangement during Jefferson’s two administrations, Adams was convinced to re-establish his correspondence with Jefferson in 1812 at a historical moment when epistolarity was becoming less a formal exercise in decorum, rhetorical persuasion and the choreography of cultural semiotics, and more a site of personal presence. The opening line refers to the fact that Jefferson had boycotted British trade and placed an embargo on American shipping to Britain in punishment for British impressments of American sailors and its effort to thwart trade with France and spur American manufactory. This would eventually lead to the War of 1812. Adams writes: Dear Sir, As you are a Friend to American Manufactures under proper restrictions,… I take the Liberty of sending you by the Post a Packett containing two Pieces of Homespun lately produced in this quarter by One who was honored in his youth with some of your Attention and much of your kindness. All of my Family whom you formerly knew are well. My Daughter Smith is here and has successfully gone through a perilous and painful Operation, which detains her here this Winter from her Husband and family at Chenango: where one of the most gallant and skilful Officers of our Revolution is probably destined to spend the rest of his days, not in the Field of Glory, but in the hard Labours of Husbandry.8

Homespun carries a critique of refinement (Jefferson had already gone broke thanks to his addiction to French furniture and French wine). The trap in the letter is the ease with which Adams allows his correspondent to read over the counter-intuitive male pronoun describing the producer of this homespun.

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Unaware that a trap has been set for him, Jefferson responds with appropriate self and regional effacement about the quality of southern textiles: Here we do little in the fine way, but in coarse and middling goods, a great deal. Every family in the country is a factory within itself, and is very generally able to make within itself all the stouter and midling [sic] stuffs for it’s own cloathing [sic] and household use. ... The economy and thriftiness resulting from our household manufactures are such that they will never again be laid aside; and nothing more salutary for us has ever happened than the British obstructions to our demands for their manufactures.9

A week later Jefferson receives the “homespun”, which turns out to be produced by Adams’ son John Quincy Adams–his two-volume recentlypublished Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory–delivered in his capacity as the first Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard. Jefferson, who had two daughters but no son, now trumped by Adams, apologizes for his overliteral reading. Adams comes back with more, adding in his next letter that “it is with some Anxiety” that the lectures were “submitted to your judgment”, especially given that Quincy had to write them while simultaneously serving as Senator from Massachusetts.10 The unwitting irony of the gift is that in his final section on oratory and conversation, Quincy Adams makes clear that the greatest of all communicative sins is “to equivocate, and lie, and abuse the confidence, acquired by honesty, to promote the success of fraud.”11 But, as the senior Adams might ask, when does equivocation suppress the joys of the metaphoric? How can one resist the punning pleasure of “husbandry”? And to this one might add, when does burying a specific horrific truth beneath an understatement violate the obligations of honesty? The painful and perilous operation Adams rather casually mentions his daughter has recently undergone was a mastectomy without anaesthesia. In the same letter Adams declares he has given up, at least for a while, his great love of reading classical history. “When I read [it], I seem to be only reading the History of my own Times and my own Life.”12 This is less solipsism than an expression of Adams’ cyclical view of history (in contrast to Jefferson’s progressive one). Elsewhere Adams explains that the history of Greece should be to our countryman what is called in many families on the continent a boudoir, an apartment, of an octagonal form …and all the eight sides, as well as the ceiling over head, are all of the most polished glass Mirrors. … The humor

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By thus beholding their own beautiful persons, and seeing, at the same time, the deformity brought upon them by their anger, they may recover their tempers and their charms together. Boudoir, which derives from the French word to pout, is made here a textual place to put oneself in countenance, to make oneself up, that is, make oneself agreeable–to invoke a conversational ideal of the period. Greek history is a room of mirrors that magnifies one’s smallest fault or defect in order to make possible even the most minute self-corrections. The readerly relationship is here more obviously solipsistic, the endless multiplication of images of the self to ensure self-improvement through silent, (one-sided) conversation and self-rapture. Other paradoxically conversation-ending textual ploys include these by Franklin and Washington. In 1775 Franklin ends his correspondence with his close friend the English printer, William Strahan by using a line break at the end of his letter which subverts the conventions of conversational epistolarity: “You are now my Enemy, / and I am, Yours,”.14 In a letter pleading for money to support already fully-trained soldiers rather than import newer cheaper ones, George Washington writes a letter to his superior, John Hancock, President of Congress, which he asks be passed onto the Congress from the field. It opens with a choreographed act of self-effacement and flattery: “I beg their serious attention to the subject, to ask pardon for intruding an opinion, not only unasked, but in some measure repugnant to their Resolves.” Washington then offers a perspectival explanation why Congress doesn’t see things his way: Their “attention is engross’d by a thousand important objects”. Thus Congress cannot absorb the minutiae of recent reports of “the havock and waste” of General Montgomery’s defeat.15 Those closer to the action, however, recognize the imminent tragedy. The letter turns from an unpardonable interruption to an undebatable demand, on which the entire public weal depends. In contrast, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, who bragged about her very free-wheeling conversations with Laurence Sterne at the York Races, presided over the most brilliant literary salon of Philadelphia in the years immediately before the American Revolution, a place where Whigs and Tories were brought together on the assumption of a shared sensus communis. One of her most voluble guests was the poet Hannah Griffitts, who troped her conversation with books quite differently than Adams. She classed her books as friends, all with their respective merits:

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–Doctor Young is a Friend in Affliction, that I could open my Heart to, Mr. Rowe flatters my Imagination, and takes walks with me in a summer evening–Mr. Addison suits me in all Humours. Mr. Pope I am a little afraid of, I think he knows so well the turnings of the human Heart, that he always sets me into an Examination.–Harvey says the same Thing over and over so prettily, and I am persuaded had so much Goodness of Soul, that I revere him, amid all his Prolixity, as for Mr. Richardson, he is a perfect Proteus, ever assuming a new form, but in all sensible.16

Here is a Jane Austen novel as a library with interior and exterior scenes. Enlightenment classification underwrites this accounting of merits and demerits, but the agenda on and off the page is to be amiable and agreeable. There are jabs: the fear of Pope and the boredom produced by Harvey, papered over by the damning blandishment of “prettily.” One imagines here “reverence” is less heightened affection than the absence of affection. Each friendship (and each conversation within that friendship) makes possible different kinds and levels of self-revelation. As for Richardson, Griffitts knew her Homer and Virgil well enough to mean by Proteus not just a shape shifter, but the prophet who changed shapes in an effort to escape those who sought to overcome him and force him to enact his role as truth teller. The interchangeability of books permits an endless conversational familiarity to those minds that need, as Samuel Johnson’s mind required, endless sharpening. For him conversation is one of life’s greatest delights. Yet one can dine “at splendid table without hearing one sentence of conversation worthy of being remembered.”17 Troping his literary conversations differently from Griffitts, Lord Chesterfield introduces the matter of appropriate size and appropriate address: Solid Folios are the people of business with whom I converse in the morning. Quartos are the easier mixed company with whom I sit after dinner; and I pass my evenings in the light, and often frivolous chitchat of small octavos and duodecimos.”18

Is conversation more satisfying in the conversation with books or people? Is it because it is more one-sided or less one-sided? In her journal (situated in the middle of the spectrum of privacy and publicity), the early American novelist Catherine Sedgwick penned her most affecting passage in November of 1832: …our friend and benefactor, is no more. He has gone down to the grave with all that the world could render of honor and love. His spirit still survives and pervades the civilized world. He is the companion of the aged and the young–the light of our social life–the solace of our solitude–the

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Such elegiac excess is usually reserved for one’s parent, especially from one who never chose to marry. But here the spirit of civilized life suggests a broader canvas, stretching beyond the smaller canvas of “our social life.” The friend, whose powers of psychological understanding turn him into a master and half-creator of those who converse with him, is something of a benign sovereign, whose austerity rather than whose intimacy comforts. The figure is Sir Walter Scott. As in Griffitts’ description of her library, the author trumps his or her books.

Voice, Vision and Self-Evidence: Conversing without Words In The Rights of Man Paine diagnosed the fundamental social problem as living within “the Bastille of a word.”20 Falsely believing that all words have real referents, and worse, believing that in knowing a word one understands what it refers to, benumbs the mind. Words like “king” are unmeaning, pretended titles, as is the word “father” when metaphorically extended to the king. The difference between Kings and subjects is as false a distinction as the difference of the sexes is a natural distinction. The former, designating nothing in nature, is “jesuitically adapted” to play on our credulity. Metaphoric language is the tool of seduction and mystification. “To ensure that our eyes are not dazzled with show, and our ears deceived by sound,” and our understanding is not darkened by prejudice, Paine adds that we must listen to the simple voice of nature, for “the blood of the slain and the weeping voice of nature cries, ‘TIS TIME TO PART.’” We are able to hear this voice because “the Almighty hath implanted in us these inextinguishable feelings for good and wise purposes.”21 Paine concludes: “I dwell not upon the vapours of imagination: I bring reason to your ears, and, in language plain as A B C… I hold up truth to your eyes.” There is no real conversation when truth is self-evident to eye and ear.22 Paine insisted on visibility and presence as a corrective to disembodied language. Paine was in the forefront of what in the 1760s and 1770s was a revolution in oratory and rhetoric, one which stressed a new eloquence of manner over matter, which rested on the belief that there is an exact adaptation of actions (movement, pose and physiognomic) for each emotion.

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Fig. 5.2: Charles Willson Peale, Mrs James Smith and Grandson, 1776. Oil on canvas, 36 3/8 x 29 ¼ in. (92.4 x 74.3 cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1980.93. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Wilson Levering Smith, Jr, and museum purchase.

James Burgh, Thomas Sheridan and even John Quincy Adams stressed, not the rational sharing of views, but a performative natural theatricality, one with all the precision of Lavater’s physiognomic studies. Pronunciation, or the management of voice and movement, became the centre of the new rhetoric of presence or embodiment (the essence of conversation) both in prose as well as in public speaking. Let us turn to an eighteenth-century American painting: Charles Willson Peale’s Mrs. Smith and her Grandchild (Figure 5.2, above). The portrait depicts a son showing his grandmother a page of the just published 1775 Philadelphia edition of James Burgh’s Art of Speaking (Figure 5.3, below).

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Fig. 5.3: James Burgh, Art of Speaking. London, 1768.

This edition was widely consulted by members of the Continental Congress. Peale began painting on September 15th 1776, the same day that he, deeply committed to the patriotic cause, learned of the capture of New York before which Continental troops ran away shamefully, violating the authority of their officers. Fearing the next attack would be on Philadelphia. Peale had just taken the dangerous job of attempting to confiscate Tory property. The Art of Speaking, at which the boy points and three hands come together, is opened to a page entitled “Hamlet’s Soliloquy.” That soliloquy or self-addressed conversation, with its concern about moving from

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thought to action, dramatized the deeply conflicted feelings of those (including Peale) who were reluctant to shed blood, no matter Britain’s provocations as enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. It marked not only a secret reluctance “to be or not to be” a traitor, but a huge sense of loss and indebtedness to the same symbolic father Paine called “unmeaning.” Before 1776 the assumption of virtually all Americans was that the King’s ministers had, in the style of Claudius, poured poison in George III’s ear in the form of misrepresentations of the colonial situation. The painting’s missing father, who commissioned the painting, plays the ghost. Burgh has dissected and glossed the soliloquy into its core affects: vexation, serious reflection, doubting and apprehension. Each feeling (described in exquisite detail in Part 1 of the book) has its particular expression and posture, with eyes upcast or down, foot forward or back, body bent or straight. The body is the double of the speech, an eloquent silent movie with text reduced to mere subtitles. Here are the mechanics of reading aloud, not its spontaneity. Hamlet is used to carry the freight of an unspoken conversation in another crucial eighteenth-century American painting. William Dunlap was a playwright first, a scene painter, an historian of American art and then, lastly, a portraitist. His post-Revolutionary plays all deal with fraught father-son relations, with the problematic burden of filial obligation in a post-heroic age. In The Dunlap Family (1788), the painting within the painting is Hamlet, pointing to the ghost, a dark mirror image of the anxious relations between father and son suppressed in the presentation of the larger family group (Figure 5.4, overleaf). The occasion of the painting is the return of Dunlap from four years of European study. Did he justify his father’s investment and indulgence? The painting of the ghostly visit on the ramparts thematizes a fear the son will never share in conversation with his father, but which he has made central to the painting. Thus the larger painting is a conversation piece in a new mode: a symbolic silent conversation substituting for a real one.

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Fig. 5.4: William Dunlap, The Dunlap Family, 1788. Oil on canvas, 421/4 x 49 in (107.3 x 124.5cm), New York Historical Society, Gift of John Crumby 1858.87.

Likewise, in a 1770-72 painting by John Singleton Copley (Figure 5.5, overleaf), the father William Vassall fills his space and ignores the plaintive son who fails to share an indecipherable text with him. There is physical proximity but a vertical line of fixed separation and parental indifference thwarts the conversation. The most poignant textualized conversation in early American letters takes us to the deathbed of Jefferson’s wife Martha in 1782. As a final billet doux and a final farewell, Martha marshals her strength to write out from memory a couple of lines of Tristram Shandy, one of Jefferson’s favourite books. Too exhausted to speak, the book speaks for her: “Time wastes too fast; every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen. The days and hours are flying over our heads like clouds of windy day, never to return more–everything presses on…” In darker ink Jefferson responds on the page, for nothing more is left to be spoken: “…and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, every absence

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which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make.”23 One text, one speech, two voices, two inks, two hands; such is the anomaly of this final textual conversation. Writing made over in the image of speech marks Martha’s death and offers the promise of an eternal life.

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Fig 5.5 John Singleton Copley (1738-1815), William Vassall and his son Leonard circa 1770-72. Oil on canvas, San Francisco Museum of Fine Art, John D. Rockefeller 3rd, 1979. 7.30.

Of course there are other ways to reconfigure texts as conversation. John Sommers’ The Judgment of whole Kingdoms and Nations concerning the Rights, Power and Prerogative of Kings and the Rights Privileges and

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Prosperities of the People first appeared in 1701 as a celebration of the constitutional monarchy brought about by the installation of William and Mary. In 1774, as colonists demanded their rights as British subjects to actual rather than virtual representation in Parliament, the first American edition was printed in Newport, Rhode Island. On the back flyleaf of one surviving coffeehouse copy, there appears a full-page manuscript harangue, the anti-conversation: Read this book I say Read it you Tories read it read it once over and if your hearts don’t relent and your eyes flow with tears, then read it again and when you come across the History of the Bloody Massacres performed by Arbitrary and Tyrannical Princes, Then stop awhile and consider, you may see yourselves, as in a Looking Glass; then put yourselves in the place of the subjects (for you are in the place of the Prince excepting his powers) consider a little while though I know it contrary to your Principles to Consider–Now consider ourselves [notice the shift in persons from exclusive to inclusive] as slaves wholly at the will of the Prince and deprived of bearing any commission under him (which is a thought I presume that never entered your heart) O! how will it feel to see others in places of power and authority where you expected to be and yourselves slaves and sorely tormented as you expected to torment others.

The core political problem is the false readerly identification by Tories with those in power, rather than with those abused by power. The problem of misdirected identification, a key issue especially in eighteenth-century fiction, requires a conversion to Painite sensibility, a responsiveness to the voice of nature marked by the release of tears, a hard look at the boudoir mirror and the embrace of a new elective intimacy. The lesson is how to read with one’s heart, not with one’s self-aggrandizing fantasies. The eighteenth-century American work most devoted to examining the new protocol that written texts should be regarded as a form of conversational speech is Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782). James, the protagonist, receives a letter from a titled Englishman he once briefly met who asks him to engage in a correspondence in which James would tell him about the new American nation. Fearful of sounding unlettered and untutored in his letters James hesitates. His wife aggravates his anxiety: What! Says she, James, would’st thee pretend to send epistles to a great European man, who hath lived abundance of time in that big house called Cambridge; … Would’st not thee be ashamed to write unto a man who has never in his life done a single day’s work, no, not even felled a tree; who

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hath expended the Lord knows how many years in studying stars, geometry, stones and flies, and in reading folio books.24

But there is, of course, much irony here as the English man of leisure is condemned as idle and self-indulgent at the same time he is complimented. The couple decides to ask their minister, who seconds the Englishman’s view that “writing letters is nothing more than talking on paper”, though he confesses “that it appeared to me quite a new thought.”25 The conversation on paper proceeds, but only after James swears to his wife he will never become an author, because authors are incapable of doing farm work. This pride in bumpkinism is itself a clichéd travesty of the American farmer. Thus Crevecoeur has it both ways. Additionally, the conversation between husband and wife that opens the book consists mostly of the couple telling one another what each wants to hear. In a culture that has made all texts over in the dominating mode of the familiar letter conversation, the imperative to keep the conversation alive becomes more intense, but even more thwarted. The overarching argument of this essay has been that productive horizontal conversation is never the easy back-and-forth colloquy fantasized as a foundational article of early democratic faith. In reality it is rough and tumble obliqueness coursing through triangulation, textualization, withholding, flattery, indifference, conversion, placation, entrapment, performance, displacement, and one-sided harangues. As in our classrooms, supposed conversations are often lectures punctuated with a few obligatory interactions. The sequence of listening, hearing and responding appropriately and honestly is seldom mastered. 1

Marquis Chastellux, Visitors to Monticello, ed. Merrill Peterson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,1989), 12-13. 2 William Maclay, Journal of William Maclay, ed. Edgar Maclay (New York: Frederick Unger, 1927), 272. 3 For a full transcription of his anti-French revolutionary marginalia see Zoltan Harszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952). 4 Quoted in Justin Wolff, Richard Caton Woodville: American Painter, Artful Dodger (Princeton, NJ & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 72. 5 Wolff, 74. 6 Quoted in Wolff, 83. 7 Correspondence between the Hon. John Adams and the late William Cunningham, quoted in Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority 1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 237.

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8 Lester J. Capon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 2: 290. 9 Ibid., 2: 290-91. 10 Ibid., 2: 294. 11 John Quincy Adams, Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), 1: 158. 12 The Adams-Jefferson Letters, 2: 295. 13 John Adams, “The Defence of the Constitutions: An American Boudoir”, in Adrienne Koch, ed. The American Enlightenment (New York: George Braziller, 1965), 209-10. 14 Benjamin Franklin,“You are now my Enemy: To William Strahan”, in Franklin Essays, Articles, Bagatelles, and Letters Poor Richard’s Almanack Autobiography (New York: The Library of America, 1987), 904. 15 George Washington, “To John Hancock”, in George Washington Writings, ed. John Rhodehamel (New York: The Library of America, 1997), 209. 16 Anne M. Ousterhout, The Most Learned Woman in America: A Life of Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 92-93. 17 Samuel Johnson, “Quotes on Conversation”, 225. Conversation; Conviviality, www.samueljohnson.com/conversa.html. 18 Quoted in Frank Lambert, “Pedlar in Divinity” George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737-1770 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 136. 19 The Power of Her Sympathy, The Autobiography and Journal of Catharine Maria Sedgwick, ed. with an Introduction by Mary Kelley (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1993), 130. 20 The Thomas Paine Reader, ed. Michael Foot and Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penquin Books, 1987), 227. 21 “Common Sense” in The Thomas Paine Reader, 81, 83, 93. 22 “The American Crisis” in The Thomas Paine Reader, 123. 23 Quoted in Alf J. Mapp, Jr., Thomas Jefferson: A Strange Case of Mistaken Identity (New York & London: Madison Books, 1987), 185. 24 Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd; New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc, 1945), 8. 25 Ibid., 10.

CHAPTER SIX “A PROPER EXERCISE FOR THE MIND”: CONVERSATION AND EDUCATION IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MICHÈLE COHEN

I The best way for women to acquire knowledge is from conversation with a father, a brother or friend, in the way of family intercourse and easy conversation, and by such a course of reading as they may recommend. —Anna Laetitia Barbauld From conversation, if properly managed, children may learn with ease, expedition, and delight, a variety of knowledge. —Maria Edgeworth

Newly married to Rochemont Barbauld, Anna Laetitia Barbauld was asked by Elizabeth Montagu in 1774 to become the Principal of a Ladies’ College which she wished to establish.1 Barbauld refused, arguing that “the best way for women to acquire knowledge is from conversation with a father, a brother or friend, in the way of family intercourse and easy conversation, and by such a course of reading as they may recommend”.2 For making this statement, she “has been criticized by modern feminist critics for her refusal to countenance change in the education and role of women”.3 Interpreting Barbauld’s letter to Montagu is interesting because Dan White has recently complicated the issue. While conceding that Barbauld’s “refusal to see gender as the primary determinant of literary or political affinity … has confirmed her in the eyes of some as an antifeminist”, he introduces a cautionary note. Arguing that scholars have generally relied on Lucy Aikin’s ‘selective reprinting” of the letter, he cites William McCarthy’s argument, based on the entire letter, that Barbauld’s “case against schools for girls is more rhetorical than

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theoretical”.4 Given this argument, I want to consider not just Barbauld’s response but that of the modern critics of her opposition to schooling for girls. Carolyn Franklin argues that Barbauld’s stance shows her holding to the “traditional puritan ideal of the wife as a self-abnegating helpmate rather than as an individual in her own right”.5 Yet Barbauld is not denying girls an education. She is only arguing that a formal systematic education like the one she experienced when she attended her father’s boys’ school does not suit women. Franklin’s comment is based on one principal assumption, shared by many historians, that access to schooling is the best index of progress for women’s education. One of my aims in this chapter is to challenge this assumption, and to argue that for girls— and possibly for boys too—in families of leisure and education, the conversation Barbauld recommends was more likely to be “a Proper Exercise for the Mind”6 than anything they might have obtained at school.7 In other words, I am proposing that an informal education obtained by conversation was more important as a means of training the mind and developing critical thinking than the rote-based formal learning and recitation that was the pedagogical norm in boys’ schools at the time. Conversation has been a subject of increasing interest, women’s conversation in particular, because of their role in the production of politeness and sociability, the significance of which eighteenth-century scholarship has now firmly established.8 Yet, one aspect of women’s conversation has remained relatively unexplored: its importance in education or instruction. This is not because the role of women as educators to their children has been ignored. On the contrary, it is rather because of the assumption that this instruction centred almost exclusively on the imparting of basic skills such as reading, writing and perhaps the rudiments of Latin grammar to sons, as Locke had suggested.9 One recent exception is Evelyn Arizpe and Morag Styles’s study of the materials Jane Johnson constructed to teach her children to read. They note that these materials “would have encouraged talk” so that the children would “become skilled in the art of conversation as well as the art of reading aloud – a sign of good manners and gentility”.10 “Conversation” had multiple meanings in the eighteenth century,11 but my focus is on social, essentially informal conversations in domestic settings, the kind of conversation implied by Hester Chapone’s comment that “it is almost impossible that an evening should pass in mutual endeavours to entertain each other [in conversation], without something being struck out, that would, in some degree enlighten and improve the mind”.12 The mix of entertainment and “improvement” that was necessary for sociable conversations means that, as Chapone intimates, conversations must be educational without being didactic—in the sense of

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being organised methodically for the purpose of instruction. Indeed, pleasing in conversation was a most valued and significant accomplishment in polite society. “The ideal conversation,” comments Lawrence Klein, “embodied the typical polite aspiration for seriousness and pleasure: ‘a conversation, in which wit might be joined with hilarity, learning with humour, information with decent gaiety’”.13 As we have seen elsewhere in this volume, the association of pleasure with improvement and instruction was exemplified, for Hume, by the felicitous joining of the “Learned” with the “Conversible World” which made it possible to find “Topics of Conversation fit for the Entertainment of rational Creatures”, such as History, Poetry, Politics, and “the more obvious Principles, at least, of Philosophy”. Conversations which do not aim at mutual improvement are mere gossip and “idle remarks”.14 Yet the link between pleasure and improvement has not been unproblematic for historians.15 The concluding remark of Daniel Woolf’s study of history and reading in the Georgian period is that history was a “serious but also an entertaining tool … to be employed in the art of conversation”.16 That “but” cannot but suggest a disjunction between “serious” and “entertaining”. I would argue that “serious” and “entertaining” were not only not incompatible, but at the time, they had to be inseparable. Serious learning on its own evoked fusty study and the uncouth scholar whose conversation is about such recondite scholarly subjects that “no one can converse with him.”17 In the eighteenth century, that was the social sin, the unpardonable solecism. “Pleasing while instructing, the motto of the classical age, was never so faithfully respected as in the eighteenth century”, comments Stéphane Pujol.18 But this link was not indissoluble, as I will show later. My aim in this chapter is twofold. The first aim is to explore domestic, social conversation as an informal mode of education, a way in which the “commodities of learning” could be “manufactured out of the materials of ‘common Life’”.19 The argument I propose is that social conversations could promote more sophisticated intellectual development than has hitherto been considered to have taken place in domestic settings, in particular the development of critical thinking. It might be objected that this is an impossible project because eighteenth-century conversations cannot be retrieved. Even when real conversations are recorded in writing, they become ordered and thus transformed. What is more, can actual conversations ever be remembered? It is not my purpose to retrieve conversations but to explore how and why they came to be perceived as an educational mode at the time. This is possible because for all the expansion of print culture, orality and reliance on memory (the ability to

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listen to and remember what was said and then write it down) was still central to eighteenth-century culture, as James Secord emphasizes in his article on conversation and science in the nineteenth century.20 The “habit of listening to a reader” was more likely to be accompanied by needlework than by note taking.21 Not only were books expensive, so was paper, and the materiality of writing unwieldy.22 Poignantly, not having a retentive memory could be a handicap to a individual’s practice of politeness as it prevented remembering observations that were made.23 Since listening and retaining what was said was common practice, it is conceivable that conversations would have been remembered in ways that we can perhaps imagine but no longer experience today. As my sources show, conversations are recorded in memoirs, diaries and letters, while novels, conduct manuals and the moral and educational literature for both sexes often referred to their importance in instruction. For all that, however, the relation of the spoken conversation to its written form is not unproblematic. My second aim is to consider the relation of (verbal) conversations to the didactic texts constructed in the “Familiar Format” —as “Dialogues” or “Conversations”. In particular, I want to explore why women writers of educational books in the late eighteenth century “appropriated” the format “for their own purposes”, as Shteir argues, and why there was an expansion of such texts by the turn of the century.24 The scholarship on children’s literature and on women’s pedagogical writings has burgeoned in the past decades,25 but on the whole, the focus has been more on women as writers and on their pedagogy than on the genre. Scholars have long been interested in the dialogue as a pedagogical tool, but are “conversations” and “dialogues” synonymous? The terms tend to be used interchangeably,26 though in one instance conversation is taken to be a subcategory of dialogue.27 According to Pujol, the difference between them is merely a question of terminology,28 yet he also notes that dialogues which aim to be read as a real conversations are those where the author tries to elide the work of writing.29 On the other hand, the instructional dialogue is just one of many kinds of dialogues extant in the eighteenth century, and it has been argued that the term “dialogue” has many significations which are not easy to distinguish.30 Indeed in the eighteenth century, there were not only many texts using the form but also many discussions about the dialogue as a genre and what it could accomplish.31 Whether or not modern historians represent didactic dialogues as structurally different from conversations, Pujol’s evidence shows that authors intended to minimize the differences between them in the eighteenth century, but not in the nineteenth. This alone would suggest that the difference

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between them is not just a matter of category. Though the terms share semantic domains, each is part of a specific discourse and carries specific cultural baggage which may determine its status and its use. One important difference is that in the eighteenth century “conversation could also function as a metonym for all kinds of social interaction”.32 In exploring the educational role of social conversation in eighteenthcentury England, I will be attempting to consider a question which has been mostly ignored. Despite the expanding scholarship on the centrality of politeness, sociability and conversation to eighteenth century culture, there has been little systematic attempt to examine how children were trained in these skills.33 Reasons for this include the history of education’s narrow understanding of “education” as the acquisition of academic skills while in the eighteenth century it referred to intellectual improvement, enlightening, social learning, “academic” knowledge, instruction, and improvement in virtue—any combination of these but none singly. It is also because education has generally been taken to refer to schooling and “formal” training. There is much evidence to show that in the eighteenth century children acquired the skills necessary for polite conversation as part of their domestic upbringing and “informal” education. Elizabeth Robinson, who as Elizabeth Montagu would become the first “bluestocking”, was required by her step-grandfather, the eminent classicist Conyers Middleton, to attend to the “learned conversations” he hosted and then “to repeat to him all that she could retain of it, after the company had dispersed. When she had to speak of what she did not well understand, Dr Middleton enlightened his little pupil.” Though he thought this might be difficult as she was not yet in her teens, he was convinced that developing a “habit of attention” would be of much use to her in the future.34 What Dr Middleton did not stress, perhaps because it was taken for granted, is that little Elizabeth was exposed at the same time to the conversational practices she was expected to acquire as well. A letter Harriet Cavendish wrote her sister Georgiana, Lady Morpeth, makes it clear that children’s participation in adult social conversations was normal practice. In this letter, Harriet does not just comment on a certain Lady Bagot’s reserve and silence in society but feels the need to explain it. She attributes it to habits Lady Bagot acquired in childhood because her father, Lord Dartmouth, “never liked his children to join in general conversation.”35 The fact that Harriet sought to explain Lady Bagot’s behaviour in this way suggests that imposing such silence on children was unusual at the time, at least in English families of rank. In 1787, Lady Stafford wrote to her fourteen year old son Granville that she wished he had been present—

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suggesting this was habitual practice—at a dinner she had hosted because the table talk had Prime Minister Pitt explicating Homer in the most delightful and entertaining manner.36 Eighteenth-century conduct books and most prescriptive educational texts continually reminded their readers that manners and a refined and polite conversation were best acquired in good company. It is thus likely that many parents practised the advice Mrs Delany gave her sister in a letter, to expose her niece to a “variety of good company, which is of more use in forming a gracious manner from the ages of seven to fourteen than seven years after that”.37 Children were thus not only present at social and familial gatherings, but were expected to participate actively. This participation was indivisible from their learning about sociability and politeness, all key features of children’s education in the home,38 and crucial to their future status and advancement. “All human creatures have a natural inclination to knowledge,” writes Mrs Delany to her young niece Mary Dewes in 1765, “and if rightly directed it will be the means of great improvement to yourself, and make you agreeable and amiable to all your acquaintance.”39 This comment should not be treated as mere moral precept or conduct-book prescription: this is how children were educated. Men as well as women in the upper ranks and middling classes wrote letters and diaries,40 and the reading and conversational practices they describe were part of the life and/or aspirations of educated middling as well as upper class families.41 However it is not the relation of the letter or diary to its writer that concerns me but rather the relation of the conversation, the verbal exchange, to its written form. That this relation is not unproblematic is clear from the fact that scholars have felt the need to address the issue, though usually to dismiss it. Thus, Smarr argues that Renaissance Humanists held that “a letter is like one part of a dialogue”, as did classical authors.42 In his late eighteenth-century conduct book An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex, evangelical Anglican minister Thomas Gisborne discusses “epistolary correspondence” in the same chapter as conversation, stating they are “kindred subjects”.43 Evidence points to the shared purpose of letters and conversations. This is especially true in the case of sisters, whom marriage often separated by enough distance to justify an elaborate and regular correspondence, such as that between Harriet Cavendish and her sister Georgiana, Lady Morpeth,44 Mrs Delany and her sister Mary Dewes,45 Emily, Countess of Kildare and her sister Lady Caroline Fox,46 to name a few. But distance was not obligatory. It was to her friend and neighbour Adélaïde Méliand that Geneviève de Malboissière wrote almost daily letters in the 1760s.47 For them, letters were conversation.

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One problem for the historian using these sources is finding equivalent evidence for females and males. It is easier to find evidence of girls’ participation in social conversations than boys’. In part, this may be because, as Gisborne claims, the letters “which pass between men, commonly relate in a greater or less degree to actual business. Even young men …will frequently be led to enlarge …on topics not only of an interesting nature but also of a serious cast”: their professions, their studies, their concern about their future life and success.48 Young women’s journals, like their letters, were more likely to describe their readings and social lives, and they often reported conversations they had participated in or listened to. Jane Austen comments with her usual irony on this practice in Northanger Abbey. “But perhaps, I keep no journal,” says Catherine to Mr Tilney whom she meets at Bath. He replies: …Not keep a journal! How are your absent cousins to understand the tenour of your life in Bath without one? How are the civilities and compliments of every day to be related as they ought to be unless noted down every evening in a journal? How are your various dresses to be remembered, and the particular states of your complexion, and curl of your hair to be described in all their diversities, without having constant recourse to a journal? My dear madam, I am not so ignorant of young ladies’ ways as you wish to believe me; it is this delightful habit of journalizing which largely contributes to form the easy style of writing for which ladies are so generally celebrated. Everybody allows that the talent of writing agreeable letters is peculiarly female. Nature may have done something, but I am sure it must be essentially assisted by the practice of keeping a journal.”49

Conversations recorded in letters and diaries were not necessarily frivolous, as Kathryn Gleadle has shown in her study of the diaries of Katherine Plymley, a late eighteenth-century gentlewoman. “Conversation”, notes Gleadle, “was pivotal in Plymley’s record”, and it was the conversational gifts of the many visitors received in her brother’s home that she recorded in much detail in her diaries. These diaries also include “lengthy political conversations she had witnessed between her brother and his guests” which she “elaborated upon” explaining their meanings. Her brother also reported back to her conversations she had missed. Plymley’s brother Joseph was archdeacon of Shropshire and his guests included William Wilberforce, the Rathbones and the Wedgwoods.50 It is not difficult to imagine the intellectual calibre of the conversations she recorded. It is thus plausible to argue that by their very nature, social conversations provided an education unavailable in formal institutions. Plymley’s records

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show that she “particularly esteemed” guests’ abilities to converse well on a wide range of subjects including natural history, chemistry, mineralogy and botany,51 subjects which were not included in the classical curriculum her brother’s guests would have studied. Conversations in domestic settings could impart intellectual as well as social training to children. Elizabeth Robinson’s father cultivated her wit and quick repartee when she was still a young girl, as did her older brothers. Her biographer notes that “their domestic circle was accustomed to struggle for the mastery in wit, or the superiority in argument”.52 Was Elizabeth Robinson’s early domestic experience and training unusual and unusually exacting? While more research is needed about domestic education in the period, the evidence adduced so far presents a very different picture from the conventional representation of this education as unsystematic and haphazard—indeed as having so little to do with education that it has been thought not to matter. Consider a letter eighteen-year-old Granville Leveson Gower sent his mother, Lady Stafford, from Christ Church, Oxford (which he entered at 15): You have no idea how very kind the Dean has been to me; he always was very much so, but I think this term more so than ever. I have constantly long conversations with him upon the subject of Algebra, and I really find myself always more improved by such conversations than by the Books of the Algebraists and the assistance of Woods, my tutor. The two latter can instruct how to proceed in sums, and how to answer questions required, but the Dean gives me the reasons for proceeding in that way. This is the more likely to prevent my forgetting it than if I learnt it all by rote.53

For the Dean to spend time conversing in this way with a pupil presupposes that he thinks it will be instructive because this way of learning is not unfamiliar to the pupil. Granville does not just claim to thrive on these conversations. He stresses that unlike the mechanical tasks and rote learning which constitute formal learning under the supervision of his tutor, these conversations address his intelligence and understanding. It is because they rely on and generate critical thinking that Granville knows he will not forget. It is rare to find evidence in printed sources about a young man’s education by conversation, like that just quoted from Granville Leveson Gower,54 but it may appear in manuscript sources, such as Anna Larpent’s Diaries. Following the practice of the time, Anna Larpent read aloud to her two sons and her sister. John Brewer argues that she “treated this form of instruction as a way of increasing her pupils’ curiosity and of opening up new paths of inquiry”.55 What Brewer does not discuss is the boys’ participation

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in these conversations. The entry for Jan 4 1793 reads as follows: John (Larpent’s son aged ten) “read to me in English and French as usual. I then heard George [aged seven] … read. Mr L. read the newspapers, full of French politics, of English debates. I then worked (needlework) at the chair and chatted on what we had read with my family.” The entry for Jan. 6, two days later: “I read to myself a sermon of Sharpe’s stating the reasons that persuade us to religion. Tea. Conversation with my family circle [which at that time included her sister] sometimes reading out some passages in the critical and European reviews which led to conversation.”56 Larpent’s sons were present at these conversations, and given her profound interest and participation in their education, it is likely that they were not just encouraged but actually expected to join in the discussion.57 The use of reading—or being read to—as a source of conversation is a practice with a long history, especially with regard to women. Renaissance tutor Paleario suggested that women should “read good authors, perhaps together with other women, and talk about their reading as well as others things”.58 Scholars have established the importance of reading in eighteenth-century English women’s lives as well, as John Brewer’s study of Anna Larpent’s reading has demonstrated.59 Larpent read widely, often parts of several books in one single day, and usually made pithy critical comments about her reading in her journal. In turn, as Amanda Vickery has argued, these notes might be an aid to conversation.60 Reading was often done aloud in company and then discussed. Smarr comments that what Paleario had in mind was the training of women’s rhetorical skills; I would argue in addition that such discussions encouraged the development and expression of critical skills. One of Mrs Delany’s letters illustrates how this might take an unexpected turn: “I am just come from the tea-table, where we [a number of ladies] have had a warm dispute occasioned by Mme de Sévigné’s Letters”.61 While such disputes are few, good-tempered “collision” —to use a contemporary keyword—of thoughts and opinions was sought rather than avoided. Woolf describes the increasing feature of “opinions on specific authors, historians as much as novelists … in genteel Georgian conversations”.62 “It is often around the book read aloud, leafed through, and discussed,” notes Roger Chartier, “that the diverse forms of intellectual sociability were constituted: that of the salon, that, more regulated, of the Academy, that more familiar of the unexpected visit”.63 Reading was thus about conversation as much as intellectual improvement, and often done deliberately as preparation for it. “The sociable study of books for the purpose of sharing their contents was often contrasted with a more selfish ‘bookish’ form of private study”.64

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Children were not excluded from these practices, though they are not usually mentioned explicitly. “I would have my daughter read and compare various books, and correct her judgment of books by listening to the conversation of persons of sense and experience”, writes the gentleman champion of the rights of women to the gentleman who finds such “female prodigies” scarcely less “offensive…than monsters”, in Maria Edgeworth’s Letters to Literary Ladies.65 John Aikin used his own children, his “household critics”,66 as a sounding board for his writings,67 especially those designed for children such as Evenings at Home, a juvenile collection intended for family reading aloud which he wrote with his sister Anna Laetitia Barbauld. Aikin took great care that his style should be clear and accurate. “To make sure his argument was easily comprehensible, he would have everything he wrote read aloud by one of the members of the family to the others, and he encouraged comments even from the youngest”.68 Similarly, during reading sessions in the Edgeworth household, “children were encouraged to ask questions”.69 Reading and listening were also key components of the pedagogy of Mme de Genlis,70 another French educator whose work was “welcomed in England with an enthusiasm which almost eclipsed the reception given to Voltaire and Rousseau”.71 One of her educational practices involved reading from a history book for about two hours to her pupils who then wrote extracts of these readings based on this listening.72 Since conversation was an integral aspect of social life, there is no lack of advice about how to conduct it or about its importance. The topic “conversation” also figures importantly in educational/ prescriptive texts. One example is The Polite Lady,73 a text constructed as a series of letters from a mother to her daughter at boarding school, a late eighteenth-century genre generated by the anxieties over the increasing fashion of sending girls to these schools.74 In this text, Portia, the mother, advises her daughter that besides reading, the most instructive way for her to spend her time is in conversation. Portia’s prescription brings together two key dimensions of conversation: its relation to manners and to mental improvement. “Conversation” she writes, “will fix your attention, warm and improve your heart, polish and refine your manners, and give you a certain ease and elegance of address which is not to be obtained in any other way… [it ] is a touchstone, that tries and examines the real strength and abilities of the mind”. It is also “one of the best schools in the world for learning the virtues of modesty and humility”, because one hears one’s own opinions contradicted or refuted and because one has to learn to discipline oneself according to the rules of polite conversation.75

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Improving social conversations were so interwoven with the social and cultural life of eighteenth-century society that they could be invoked as a justification for writing didactic texts using the conversational or “familiar” format. In The Young Gentleman and Lady's Philosophy, Euphrosyne, the young lady, wishes to learn about philosophy by conversing with her brother Cleonicus just down from Oxford, not just to improve her understanding but to be able to converse about it in company.76 By contrast, young Caroline, in Jane Marcet’s Conversations on Political Economy, is convinced to study political economy which she finds “the most uninteresting of all subjects”, because “most subjects of general conversation … among liberal minded people” are connected with it; if she does not learn it, she “might almost as well condemn [herself] to perpetual silence”.77 Knowledge is attained not only by conversation, but also for conversations. Hannah More summed up the vital link in her poem “Bas Bleu”: Hail Conversation, heavenly fair Thou bliss of life, and balm of care! Still may thy gentle reign extend, And Taste with Wit and Science blend. Soft polisher of rugged man! Refiner of the social plan! For thee, best solace of this toil! The sage consumes his midnight oil! And keeps late vigils, to produce Materials for thy future use. Calls forth the else neglected knowledge, Of school, of travel, and of college. If none behold, ah! wherefore fair? Ah! wherefore wise, if none must hear?’ Our intellectual ore must shine, Not slumber, idly, in the mine. 78

II Having considered the educational role of social conversations, I now wish to address my second aim, the relation between conversations and didactic texts which use the “familiar” format—as conversations or dialogues—a relationship which has generally been treated as unproblematic. There are several reasons why analysing this relation is important. The first is because of the number of authors who claimed that their didactic texts were based on real conversations. Stéphane Pujol, one of the few scholars to have considered this relationship,79 argues that their claim is due

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to a desire for authenticity, implying that it is mainly a literary device.80 To better simulate conversational authenticity, Pujol explains, authors resorted to a variety of techniques such as using the language of “ordinary” conversation, and “digressions”, especially because they have a “mimetic” function in the attempt to feign authenticity.81 But why would authors go to these lengths to imitate real conversations? Could digressions not be a feature of the verbal exchange that might have been retained in the attempt to reproduce or approximate the original conversations? My argument is that texts in the familiar format were likely to be modelled on actual verbal exchanges, especially if the authors were women. There is some reference in the literature to this possibility, though it is difficult to substantiate.82 Jeanne Marie LePrince de Beaumont’s Magasin des Demoiselles (1760) is one of the most digressive exemplars of conversational texts. All the conversations take place between Mme Bonne, the governess, and a circle of young ladies. One of the conversations starts—as they all do— with a lesson from the Scriptures given by Mme Bonne, the governess. It moves to discussions of punishment “an eye for an eye”, of how to discipline children, of whether fathers are wrong to take boys away from their mothers; then one of the pupils remembers a story related to the topic, and then a fairy tale is told—LePrince de Beaumont was first known for her fairy tales, notably La Belle et la Bête. This is the spur for a discussion about beauty and eventually the girls discuss Mme Bonne’s question: what is a woman to do with her heart if she has to marry an ugly old man who is always in a bad mood.83 LePrince de Beaumont was governess to Sophia Carteret, daughter of Lord Carteret, and the daughters of the second Earl of Egremont, of Lord North, and of Lord Hillsborough.84 In her preface, she notes that her characters were modelled on her actual pupils and that “I have merely writ down the conversations that have passed between me and my scholars”.85 This claim is of course exaggerated, since her texts are not transcriptions of actual conversations,86 and all written conversations are themselves literary products. Nevertheless Jill Shefrin has argued that LePrince de Beaumont has one of the strongest claims to conversational authenticity, and that “the grounds for treating her series of fictional school stories as historically accurate records of her teaching experiences are …solid.”87 For Jane Marcet too real conversation is the model for the didactic texts. As she explains in the introduction to her highly popular Conversations on Chemistry (1805), her use of the genre is based on her own experience of the effectiveness of conversation for conveying complex scientific ideas. For “studies of this kind” she argues, “familiar conversation was … a most useful auxiliary source of information; and more especially to

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the female sex, whose education is seldom calculated to prepare their minds for abstract ideas, or scientific language”.88 One striking feature of all Marcet’s “Conversations”—as nearly all her didactic texts are titled—is the naturalness and spontaneity of the exchange, as the following excerpt from Conversations on Natural Philosophy (1822) shows. The conversation takes place between Mrs B. the tutor, and Emily one of the pupils. Mrs B The odour or smell of a body is part of the body itself, and is produced by very minute particles or exhalations which escape from odoriferous bodies. It would be impossible that you should smell the lavender-water, if particles of it did not come in actual contact with your nose. Emily But when I smell a flower, I see no vapour rise from it; and yet I can perceive the smell at considerable distance. Mrs B You could, I assure you, no more smell a flower, the odoriferous particles of which did not touch your nose than you could taste a fruit, the odoriferous particles of which did not come in contact with your tongue. Emily That is wonderful indeed; the particles, then which exhale from the flower and from the lavender water, are, I suppose, too small to be visible? Mrs B Certainly: you may form some idea of their extreme minuteness, from the immense number which must have escaped in order to perfume the whole room; and yet there is no sensible diminution of the liquid in the phial…89

Not all authors claimed conversational authenticity, and some expressed no interest in simulating it. In such texts, characters are just mouthpieces for questions and answers. In N. Meredith’s Rudiments of Chemical Philosophy (1810), there are no characters, and the dialogic format does not even attempt to simulate a real conversation; it depends only on the visual breaking of the text into questions (in italics) and answers, as this excerpt illustrates. What would happen if a piece of metal and a piece of woollen cloth were both made hotter than the hand? Since both the cloth and the metal would be disposed to part with their superabundant caloric, the metal, being the best conductor, would part with it the most readily, and would feel hottest to the hand, because it would really make the hand so; it is for this reason, that when we have been standing by a fire, our cloaths do not feel particularly hot, while the money in our pockets feels almost too hot to be touched.

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Chapter Six What is the most general effect of caloric on the different bodies? Its most general effect is the increase of their bulk; hence, if a bar of iron be accurately measured when cold, and afterwards heated, it will be found, if measured again while hot, to have increased in length. Has caloric the same effect on fluid bodies as on solids? Yes, but in a much greater degree, their particles being more easily separated from each other; every one who understands the principle on which the steam engine is constructed, must be aware how much the bulk of water is increased, when converted into steam by its union with the caloric; and if a bladder nearly empty be closely tied, and held near the fire, the small quantity of air contained in it will be so expanded as presently to fill the whole bladder and cause it to burst with a loud report.90

Meredith, in contrast to Marcet, warns the reader in his introduction that “the dramatis personae of the text are not well supported” and argues that this is “of no consequence at all” because “every one knows that the information or entertainment of the reader is the object aimed at”.91 Yet, since he is not aiming to imitate a conversation, why does the title page of his text describe it as one in which “the first principles of that useful and entertaining science” are “familiarly explained”? Arizpe and Styles have argued that by the nineteenth century, didactic texts, though still using the conversational or “familiar” mode, were changing in one key feature. “Amusement becomes suspect” and the dissemination of “rational information” almost the exclusive objective.92 Though the content of Meredith’s text seems to exemplify this shift, I would argue that the shift itself is not as straightforward as Arizpe and Styles’s explanation suggests. If the motive to simulate real conversations was a desire for authenticity and entertainment, why, when this desire seems absent, do authors persist in claiming they are adhering to the “familiar format”? In the first place, the familiar format was neither static nor monolithic. The form was highly flexible and there was much variety in the exchanges, whether entitled dialogues or conversations. Thus in the Renaissance, women adapted the dialogue for their own pedagogical purposes: “despite its classical and humanist roots”, Smarr notes, the dialogue form “rapidly developed into a vernacular genre of conversational language”. They aimed to make learning “broadly available for others without formal education”.93 In the eighteenth century, when conversation was “an ideal of intellectual sociability”,94 LePrince de Beaumont aimed to create a social circle for discussion, so that while her pupils learned virtue, morality and how to think, they also rehearsed the art of conversation. In some early nineteenth-century texts, authenticity and entertainment seem more important than ever. There is an attempt to make the characters real by framing them in a fictional narrative context which engages the reader

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in the characters’ development. In Henry and Edward: or, Familiar Conversations on the Elements of Science interspersed with moral and religious sentiments (1828), Henry is a little boy who refuses to go to school, preferring to stay at home like his sister and another little boy. Henry does go but his reluctance sets the scene for conversations between Henry and Edward, his new friend at Mr Fairley’s school; these early conversations are “digressions” in that they are not directly related to the didactic aim of the text. However they are essential because they create a plausible progression from the personal conversations between the boys to their eventual conversations about science. On the other hand, Little Ann, though entitled Familiar Conversations upon interesting subjects between a child and her parents (1843), contains neither dialogues nor conversations, consisting of moral tales followed by exchanges between the child and her parents told by a narrative voice in the third person.95 Why does this text, like Meredith’s, claim to be in the familiar format? One explanation is that the familiar format had commercial appeal, just as the advertisement of “A New Plan” or a “New and Easy Method” had been a ploy to sell French grammars in the eighteenth century.96 The familiar, conversational format, with its freedom and spontaneity,97 promised inquiry and reflection. There is some evidence that authors also advertised themselves by referring to other texts. In Granville Penn’s Conversations on Geology, Edward asks his mother whether there is an easy book on geology “like the delightful ‘conversations on chemistry’”.98 No name is given, but the reference is unambiguously to Mrs Marcet’s celebrated text.99 As the answer is negative, the reference to Marcet enables the writer/mother to justify why the present text is written, and to assure the reader that it will match Marcet’s skill and success. There are also digs at the competition, presumably for self-promotion.100 Robert John Thornton’s Juvenile Botany; Being an easy introduction to that Delightful Science through the medium of Familiar Conversations has a father teaching about Stamens and Pistils to his son, who exclaims that he prefers the terms Chives for Stamens and Pointals for Pistils as “they have nothing to do with the sexes of plants.” Father: And pray who put this wise notion into your head? Son: Why, my aunt Prudery, who would have all the scientific books on Botany put into the fire. Father: Tell her from her brother, that such refinement of knowledge is highly absurd. 101

This may be an oblique send up of Priscilla Wakefield who, according to Shteir, “sidesteps or ignores the topic of plant sexuality in her Introduction

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to Botany, in a Series of Familiar Letters (1796) and uses William Withering’s bowdlerizing language of ‘chives’ and ‘pointals’ rather than stamens and pistils to designate the reproductive parts of plants”.102 This cross-referencing also highlights the fact that these didactic texts were widely read and circulated.103 Another way to address the issue is to look not just at texts, but at the cultural contexts in which the texts were written. It is generally agreed that there was a flourishing of didactic texts in dialogue or conversation form from the late eighteenth century, and that it was mainly women writers who “appropriated” the genre “for their own purposes”.104 I would argue that in the eighteenth century, women did not merely appropriate the conversational form, they transformed it into a method. The familiar format opened up a space for women to formalize a voice of authority and rationality, and above all their “will to order and method”.105 In the perspective Shteir presents, women drew on a “rich heritage”—mainly great forefathers—of texts written as Dialogues or Conversations.106 While they may have found justification and perhaps authority in that heritage, I propose rather that their inspiration came from their own experiences of social conversations and as early instructors to children.107 LePrince de Beaumont noted “I copy from nature; my young people furnish me with all sorts of originals, and this abridges my work very considerably ... In a dozen characters that I have chosen, I point out the general methods to be followed by those, who undertake the instruction of youth”.108 Mme de Genlis and Maria Edgeworth demonstrated how the very sociability of the family could be transformed into an educational experience: the quotidian conversations of the household informed the pedagogy which in turn shaped the conversations. “In a large and literary family”, wrote Maria Edgeworth, It will not be difficult to invent occupations for children, which may exercise all their faculties. Even the conversation of such a family will create in their minds a desire for knowledge; what they hear will recall to their memory what they read. And if they are encouraged to take a reasonable share in conversation, they will acquire the habit of listening to every thing that others say. By permitting children to talk freely of what they read, we are more likely to improve their memory for books, than by exacting from them repetitions of lessons.109

Mme de Genlis made a similar point when she remarked that “the great art of instructing young folks, without their suspecting it, is by talking familiarly to them; those important means, so neglected in common educations, are perhaps the most efficacious and most useful of all.”110 This reliance on personal experience highlights a long-neglected aspect of

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women’s role in education which scholars such as Mary Hilton are reviewing and re-evaluating: their pedagogical innovations and their contributions to educational theories.111 But women were not just educators to their children. In the eighteenth century, they were also central figures in the practices of sociability, and their conversation was held up as a model of politeness men ought to emulate. By the end of the century, as politeness was ceasing to be a dominant cultural form, the meaning and importance of conversation, and women’s role in maintaining it, changed as well.112 No longer framed in politeness or defined by its requirement to “instruct and entertain”, conversation could be abstracted from the practice of social skills and become a method. Various authors, mostly but not solely female, explored the familiar form, infused it with their own pedagogical ideas, and produced different textual and educational/instructive experiences.113 It is these broader cultural changes that account for the differences in the work “conversation” performs in this educational mode. Thus while Marcet’s conversations are the means of conveying the knowledge to be acquired, the conversations in Mrs Markham’s A History of France (1828) have a different purpose. In this text, chapters of continuous narrative spoken by the mother are followed by conversations between the mother and her children discussing aspects of the history she has just narrated. Here, the conversational method is used as a vehicle for comprehension, analysis and elaboration of the narrative.114 Mrs Honoria Williams’s Conversations on English Grammar (1825) follows a similar pattern.115 There is a further cultural context to consider. In the late eighteenth century, as public schools attracted increasing numbers of gentlemen’s sons, girls’ boarding schools, despite their expansion,116 were the object of much contention and debate.117 Moral and educational pressures were exerted against educating girls “publicly”, schools being seen as the source of the general immorality and corruption of the age and the “misconduct of women, of their ignorance of their duties, their errors and dissipation”.118 Thus, though many girls in middling and upper class families might spend a year or two at a school, most continued to be educated mainly or exclusively at home. Educationists and moralists no longer just listed a variety of subjects with a rationale for recommending these as suitable for girls’ education,119 they went further. In the familiar format they reinforced the idealised pattern of familial, domestic teaching where the purveyor of knowledge might be a father (as in Patricia Wakefield’s Mental Improvement), a mother (as in Granville Penn’s Conversations on Geology), or a benevolent governess (Mrs B in several of Jane Marcet’s Conversations).120 It should not however be assumed that “real”

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conversations were converted into text without tensions. Although Mary Wollstonecraft wrote Original Stories from Real Life in the familiar format,121 she complained that books were inferior to real conversations: “If parents attended to their children I would not have written the stories; for what are books—compared to conversations which affection inforces”.122 It was obvious to Maria Edgeworth that domestic conversations trained the mind and fostered intellectual inquiry and critical reflection while the rote learning and recitation of formal classical education did not. As she remarked in 1795: Whilst the knowledge of the learned languages continues to form an indispensable part of a gentleman's education, many years of childhood and youth must be devoted to their attainment. —During these studies, the general cultivation of the understanding is in some degree retarded. All the intellectual powers are cramped, except the memory, which is sufficiently exercised, but which is overloaded with words, and with words that are not always understood. The genius of living and of dead languages differs so much, that the pains which are taken to write elegant Latin frequently spoil the English style.—Girls usually write much better than boys; they think and express their thoughts clearly at an age when young men can scarcely write an easy letter upon any common occasion.123

It is difficult to state, at this stage, whether this comment was as radical in its time as it appears today. Though Edgeworth was not alone in remarking that Latin studies hampered boys’ expression in English,124 there were not many who actually claimed that the gendering of education left boys at an intellectual disadvantage. The key point however is that it is because conversation was observed to be a successful method of conveying knowledge without “cramping” the mind that it survived translation into a written mode, and that the familiar format, whether aiming or just claiming to emulate the conversational method, flourished from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. What remains to be explained is why it became a lost pedagogy.

Acknowledgements Much of the original research for this analysis was undertaken on a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, and a Derek Brewer Fellowship at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. I am most grateful to CRASSH and to Emmanuel College for their support. An earlier version was delivered as a

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keynote address to the Conference “Education and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century (1688-1832),” Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge in September 2005. I thank Mary Hilton and Jill Shefrin for inviting me to speak. 1

The Works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld with a Memoir by Lucy Aikin, 2 vols (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1996) I, xiii. 2 Barbauld, Works, I, xiii. 3 Carolyn Franklin, introduction to The Works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, I, xiii. 4 Daniel E White, “‘With Mrs Barbauld it is different’: Dissenting heritage and the devotional taste,” in Women, Gender and Enlightenment, eds Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (London: Palgrave, 2005), 474, 488 n.3. 5 Franklin, “introduction”, xiv. 6 David Hume, “Of Essay Writing,” in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F Miller, (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987), 534. 7 See Michèle Cohen, “‘A Little Learning’? The curriculum and the construction of gender difference in the long eighteenth century”, British Journal for EighteenthCentury Studies, 29, 3 (2006): 321-335. 8 See for example Elizabeth Eger, “‘The noblest commerce of mankind’ in Women, Gender and Enlightenment, 288-305. 9 John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, [1693] in J.W. Adamson ed., The Educational Writings of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 145-46: §177. 10 Evelyn Arizpe and Morag Styles, “‘Love to learn your book’: Children’s experiences of text in the eighteenth century,” History of Education, 33, 3 (May 2004): 344. 11 As Michael Prince remarked in “Conversation in Diverse Genres: The Case of Eliza Haywood”, paper presented at the “Concept and Practice of Conversation in the Long Eighteenth Century” Cambridge University Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH); See also Jon Mee, “Severe Contentions of Friendship: Barbauld, conversation, and dispute”, in Repossessing the Romantic Past, eds Heather Glen and Paul Hamilton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 21-39. 12 Hester Chapone, “On Conversation,” in Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (Dublin, 1775), Essay II, 16. 13 Lawrence E. Klein, unpublished manuscript. I am grateful to the author for allowing me to read his manuscript. 14 Hume “Of Essay Writing”, 534. 15 What Mitzi Myers calls the “contemporary critical separation of the educational and the entertaining” in “Impeccable governesses, rational dames, and moral mothers: Mary Wollstonecraft and the female tradition in Georgian children’s books”, Children’s Literature, 14 (1986): 33. 16 Daniel Woolf, “Speaking of History: Conversations about the past in Restoration and eighteenth-century England,” in The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain

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1500-1850, eds Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 133. (My emphasis). 17 David Fordyce, Dialogues Concerning Education, or a plan laid down on that subject in several conversations of some philosophical gentlemen, for training up the youth of both sexes in learning and virtue, 2 vols (London, 1745-48), I, 95-8; See also Hume “On Essay Writing”. 18 Stéphane Pujol, “Le dialogue d’idées au dix-huitième siècle”, SVEC 2005: 06 (2005): 33. (my transl.). 19 Betty A Schellenberg, The Conversational Circle: Re-reading the English novel 1740-1775 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 1. Schellenberg is here discussing the implications of Hume’s essay “On Essay Writing”. 20 James Secord, “How Scientific Conversation became Shop Talk” in Science in the Marketplace, eds Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2007). I am grateful to the author for allowing me to see a copy of his piece prior to publication. 21 Heidi Brayman Hackel, “‘Boasting of silence’: Women readers in a patriarchal State”, in Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England, eds Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 109; see also Elizabeth Hamilton, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, 3 vols [1800] (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1992), I. 22 Steve Cowan, “The Revolution in Writing Technologies in the Late Eighteenth Century”, paper presented at the BSECS Annual Conference, January 2007, St. Hugh's College, Oxford. 23 I am grateful to Lawrence Klein for allowing me to quote from his manuscript. 24 Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 82; R. B. Freeman, “Children’s Natural History Books before Victoria”, History of Education Society, Bulletin 17 (Spring 1976): 7- 34; Bulletin 18 (Autumn 1976): 6- 21. 25 See Mary Hilton, Women and the Shaping of the Nation's Young: Education and Public Doctrine in Britain 1750-1850 (London: Ashgate, 2007); Carol Percy “Disciplining women? Grammar, gender, and leisure in the works of Ellenor Fenn (1743-1813)”, Historiographia Linguistica 33:1 (2006): 109-137, and “The Art of Grammar in the Age of Sensibility: The Accidence ... for Young Ladies (1775),” in Insights into late modern English, ed. Marina Dossena and Charles Jones. Series: Linguistic insights: studies in language and communication (Bern: Peter Lang, 2003), 45-82; Jill Shefrin “Governesses to their children”, in Childhood and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550-180, eds Andrea Immel and Michael Witmore (London: Routledge, 2006). 26 See Jennifer Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 29 and passim. 27 Janet Levarie Smarr, Joining the Conversation: Dialogues by Renaissance Women (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 30. 28 Pujol, “dialogue d’idées”, 45-54. 29 Pujol, “dialogue d’idées”, 173. (my transl.).

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30 D. J. Adam, “Bibliographie d’ouvrages français en forme de dialogue 17001750”, SVEC 293 (1992): 18. 31 Michael Prince, The Philosophical Dialogues in the British Enlightenment: theology, aesthetics, and the novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 214; Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature, 20-42. 32 Gleadle “opinions deliver’d”, 61, n.5. 33 One exception is Ingrid H. Tague, Women of Quality: Accepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England, 1690-1760 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2002). 34 Dr John Doran, A Lady of the Last Century (Mrs Elizabeth Montagu), (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1873), 4. 35 Virginia Surtees, ed., A Second Self: The Letters of Harriet Granville, 18101845 (Salisbury: Michael Russell, 1990), 46. 36 Granville Leveson Gower (first earl Granville), Private Correspondence 17811821, ed. Castalia, Countess Granville, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1916), I, 7; Letter of 14 May 1787. 37 Mrs Delany to Ann Dewes, Delville, 7 April 1754, in Lady Llanover ed., The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs Delany, 1st ser., 3 vols, (London: Richard Bentley, 1861), III, 219. 38 Tague, Women of Quality, 167 and passim. 39 Mrs Delany, Autobiography 2nd series, 3 vols, (London: Richard Bentley, 1862) I, 18-19. 40 Susan Whyman, A Culture of Letters: Letter Writing, Literacy, and Literature 1660-1800 (forthcoming with Oxford University Press). 41 Naomi Tadmor, “‘In the even my wife read to me’: women, reading and household life in the eighteenth century”, in The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, eds James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 162-74. 42 Smarr, Joining the Conversation, 131. See also Marie-France Silver and MarieLaure Girou Swiderski, “Femmes en toutes lettres: les épistolières du XVIIIe siècle”, SVEC 2000: 4 (2000). 43 Thomas Gisborne An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (London, 1797), 110. 44 Hary-O: The Letters of Lady Harriet Cavendish, eds. George Leveson Gower and Iris Palmer (London: John Murray, 1940). Harriet and Georgiana were both daughters of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. 45 Mrs Delany, Autobiography. 46 Correspondence of Emily, Duchess of Leinster 1731-1814, ed. Brian Fitzgerald (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1949). 47 Dena Goodman, “Letter Writing and the Emergence of Gendered Subjectivity in Eighteenth-Century France”, Journal of Women’s History, 17, 2 (2005): 9-37. 48 Gisborne, Enquiry, 110-112. 49 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey [1818] (London: Macdonald, 1974), 16. 50 Kathryn Gleadle, “‘Opinions Deliver’d in Conversation’: Conversation, Politics, and Gender in the Late Eighteenth Century”, in Civil Society in British History:

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Ideas, Identities, Institutions, ed. José Harris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 68-70. 51 Gleadle, “Opinions Deliver’d”, 67. 52 The Letters of Mrs Elizabeth Montagu, ed. Matthew Montagu, 3 vols (London: T. Cadell and W Davies, 1810) I, 6-7. 53 Granville Leveson Gower, (first earl Granville), Private Correspondence 17811821, ed. Castalia, Countess Granville, 2 vols, (London, John Murray, 1916) I, 367 (Saturday, probably in Nov or Dec 1791). 54 This has to do with the way boys’ education is defined: it begins with their going to school and starting classical studies. 55 Brewer, “Reconstructing the Reader’, 241. 56 HL HM. 31201 Mrs Larpent’s Diary vol. 1, 1790-95 entries January 4 1793, January 6 1793. (My emphasis). 57 As did Jane Johnson’s children, in Arizpe and Styles, “Love to Learn your Book”, 342. 58 Smarr, Joining the Conversation, 103. 59 Brewer, “Reconstructing the Reader”. See also Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500-1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 60 Amanda Vickery, cited in Brewer, “Reconstructing the Reader”, 240. 61 Mrs Pendarves (later Mrs Delany) to Mrs Dewes, 17 December 1740, Autobiography, 1st series II, 135. 62 Woolf, “Speaking of History”, 124. 63 Roger Chartier “Loisir et Sociabilité: lire à haute voix dans l’Europe moderne”, Littératures Classiques, “La voix au XVIIe siècle” (Janvier 1990), 131 (my transl.). 64 Woolf, “Speaking of History”, 124. 65 Maria Edgeworth, Letters for Literary Ladies [1795] (London: J.M. Dent, 1993), 34. 66 Betsy Rogers, Georgian Chronicle: Mrs Barbauld and her Family (London: Methuen and Co, 1958), 122. 67 Daniel E. White, “The ‘Joineria’: Anna Barbauld, the Aikin Family Circle and the Dissenting Public Sphere, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32, 4 (1998-9): 517. 68 Rogers, Georgian Chronicle, 122. 69 Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth, a Literary Biography (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1972), 99. 70 Stéphanie Félicité Ducrest de St-Aubin, Comtesse de Genlis. 71 Magdi Wabha, cited in Gillian Dow, SVEC 2004:7 (2004):136. She also influenced Mary Wollstonecraft’s ideas on education. 72 M. de Chabreuil, pseud. [i.e. Marguerite du Parquet], Gouverneur des Princes 1787-1830 (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1900), 187 (my transl.). 73 [Charles Allen], The Polite lady; or a course of female education; In a series of letters, 3rd ed. (London: 1775). 74 Cohen, “Gender and the Public Private Debate”. 75 Polite Lady, 153.

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Benjamin Martin, The Young Gentleman and Lady's Philosophy: in a continued survey of the works of nature and art; by way of dialogue, 2nd. ed. (London, 1772). 77 Jane Marcet, Conversations on Political Economy; In which the Elements of that Science are Familiarly Explained, (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1817), 6-8. 78 Hannah More, “Bas Bleu or Conversation; Addressed to Mrs Vesey”, in The Works of Hannah More, 2 vols (Philadelphia: J. J. Woodward, 1832), I, 17. 79 See also Shteir, Cultivating Women; Marion Amies, “Amusing and instructive conversations: the literary genre and its relevance to home education”, History of Education 14:2 (1985): 87-99. 80 Pujol, “dialogue d’idées”, 36-7. 81 Pujol, “dialogue d’idées”, 117. 82 Marie-Emmanuelle Plagnol-Diéval, Madame de Genlis et le théâtre d’éducation au XVIIIe siècle, SVEC 350 (1997): 56; Patricia A. Clancy, “A French writer and educator in England: Mme LePrince de Beaumont”, SVEC 201 (1982): 195-208. 83 Jeanne Marie LePrince de Beaumont, Le Magasin des jeunes dames: Instructions pour les jeunes dames qui entrent dans le monde, se marient, leurs devoirs dans cet état et envers leurs enfans, pour servir de suite au Magasin des adolescents, 4 vols (London, Nourse, 1764), IV, 13-47. 84 Clarissa Campbell-Orr “Aristocratic Feminism, the Learned Governess and the Republic of Letters,” in Women, Gender and Enlightenment, 309-10. 85 Jeanne Marie LePrince de Beaumont, The Young Misses’ Magazine, or Dialogues Between a Discreet Governess and Several Young Ladies of the First Rank under her Education (London, J. Nourse, 1760), Introduction, xx-xxi. 86 Linguistic transcriptions of actual conversations show that they are virtually impossible to read as coherent and continuous text. 87 Shefrin, “Governesses to their children”, 189. 88 Jane Marcet, Conversations on Chemistry, 2 vols (London, 1806), preface. Wikipedia’s description of the text as written “in an informal, childish form” (Wikipedia updated Feb 2007) is a testimony to the modern misunderstanding of “conversation” as a serious pedagogical technique. 89 Jane Marcet, Conversations on Natural Philosophy; in which the elements of that science are familiarly explained and adapted to the comprehension of young pupils, 3rd ed. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1822), 10. 90 N. Meredith, Rudiments of Chemical Philosophy; in which the first principles of that useful and entertaining science are familiarly explained and illustrated (London, 1810), 5-6. 91 Meredith, Rudiments, xiii. 92 Arizpe and Styles, “ Love to learn your book”, 343. 93 Smarr , Joining the Conversation, 232, 233. 94 Pujol, “dialogue d’idées”, 18, 82. (my transl.). 95 Little Ann; or Familiar Conversations upon Interesting Subjects between a Child and her Parents (London: Religious Tract Society, 1843).

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96 Michèle Cohen, “French Conversation or ‘Glittering Gibberish’? Learning French in Eighteenth-Century England”, in Natasha Glaisyer and Sara Pennell (eds), Expertise Constructed: Didactic Literature in the British Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (London: Ashgate, 2003). 97 Shteir, Cultivating Women. 98 Granville Penn, Conversations on Geology; comprising a familiar explanation of the Huttonian and Wernerian systems; the Mosaic geology; and the late discoveries of Professor Buckland, Humbolt, Dr Macculloch, and others (London, 1828), 4. 99 Marcet, Conversations on Chemistry. 100 Just as there were between the authors of French grammars I have examined. Cohen, “French Conversation”. 101 Robert John Thornton, Juvenile Botany; Being an easy introduction to that Delightful Science through the medium of Familiar Conversations (London: Sherwood, Neely and Jones, 1818), 9-10. 102 Shteir, Cultivating Women, 85. 103 Hilton, Women and the Shaping of the Nation's Young, 7. 104 Shteir, Cultivating Women, 82; Myers, “Impeccable governesses”, 31-59. 105 Michèle Cohen, “‘To think, to compare, to combine, to methodise’: Notes towards rethinking girls’ education in the eighteenth century,” in Women, Gender and Enlightenment, 231. 106 Shteir, Cultivating Women, 82. 107 See Hilton, Women and the Shaping of the Nation's Young, for a discussion of the importance of experience in women educators. 108 LePrince de Beaumont, Young Misses’ Magazine, Introduction, xvii. 109 Maria Edgeworth and R L Edgeworth, Practical Education, 3 vols [1798] (London: J Hunter, 1822), II, 463. 110 Genlis, Adèle et Théodore, ou Lettres sur l” Education, 3 vols (Maestricht: chez J.E. Dufour et Ph. Roux, 1782), Book 2, letter xxxiii, 18. 111 See Hilton, Women and the Shaping of the Nation's Young. 112 Michèle Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century, (London: Routledge, 1996); “‘Manners’ make the man: politeness, masculinity and chivalry, 1750-1830”, Journal of British Studies 44, 2 (April 2005): 312-329. 113 My study of didactic texts constructed in the familiar format in the period is in progress. 114 Mrs Markham, pseud.. [i.e. Elizabeth Penrose.], A History of France; from the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar continued to the year 1856 with conversations at the end of each chapter, 2 vols (London 1828), I, v. 115 Mrs Honoria Williams, Conversations on English Grammar; in a Series of Familiar and Entertaining Dialogues between a Mother and her Daughters (London: Geo. B. Whittaker, 1825). 116 Susan Skedd, “Women teachers and the expansion of girls’ schooling in England, c.1760-1820,” in Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles,

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Representations and Responsibilities, eds Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (London: Longman, 1997). 117 Michèle Cohen, “Gender and the Public Private Debate on Education in the Long Eighteenth Century”, in Public or Private Education? Lessons from History, ed. Richard Aldrich (Woburn Press, 2004), 15-35. 118 Rev J.L Chirol, An Enquiry into the Best System of Female Education; or Boarding School and Home Education Attentively Considered (London, 1809), xiii. 119 Cohen, “A Little Learning?”. 120 Priscilla Wakefield, Mental Improvement or the Beauties and Wonders of Nature and Art in a Series of Instructive Conversations (1799); Marcet, Conversations on Chemistry (1806) and Conversations on Political Economy (1817); Williams, Conversations on English Grammar. 121 Mary Wollstonecraft, Original Stories from Real Life (London: J. Johnson, 1788). 122 Wollstonecraft, cited in Myers, “Impeccable governesses”, 37. 123 Letters for Literary Ladies, 26. 124 See Michèle Cohen, “‘A Habit of Healthy Idleness’: Boys’ underachievement in historical perspective”, in D. Epstein et al. (eds), Failing Boys? Issues in Gender and Achievement (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1998), 19-34.

CHAPTER SEVEN CONVERSATION IN THE LAW: SIR WILLIAM JONES’S SINGULAR DIALOGUE JEAN MEIRING

During the eighteenth century, the English Common law underwent a fundamental transformation. Almost imperceptibly, lawyers shifted their gaze from the mediaeval forms of action to an emergent body of generalised legal categories, endowed with a marked moral content. In large part, the shift was brought about by the arrival on English shores of the ideas of the Natural lawyers, who from the second quarter of the previous century had started to dominate the intellectual life of Europe. They were trained in Roman law, and they used the language and logic of that system as a means by which to frame their Natural law theories.1 Therefore, it should come as no surprise that Roman law started playing a new–and more central–role in the English legal world in the eighteenth century. In this essay, I explore a particular feature of that history: attempts at dialogue that emerged piecemeal and initially somewhat tentatively between Roman law and the Common law. A dialogue can, of course, take many forms: some instances are explicit and clearly stylised, employing the conventions of dramatic texts, while others interweave different voices or positions more subtly, or use juxtaposition to imply a form of interchange. The specific focus of this essay is a line of eighteenth-century legal texts, which can each be said to embody a form of dialogue, and which culminated in the publication, in 1781, of An Essay on the Law of Bailments written by the illustrious Sir William Jones (1746-94).2 The Essay was a sophisticated if flawed attempt to improve upon the often stilted dialogues of the earlier part of the century–an attempt to embody something much closer to the idea of conversation. More than a mere juxtaposition of two wholly, or partially, opposed positions, it essayed the fashioning of a conversation as a truly transformative experience.

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Polite conversation emerged in the eighteenth century as a concept of central importance. At its core is the notion that the coffee-houses dominated London especially towards the end of the century.3 Polyglot scholar, poet and jurist Sir William Jones exemplifies that world perhaps better than any of his contemporaries. For many years a leading figure in Dr Johnson’s Literary Club, a radical Whig and a prolific man of letters, Jones never denied himself the opportunity of embarking upon new avenues of study. He is said to have mastered 28 languages, and he became most widely known for translating literary works from several Oriental tongues.4 Moreover, he was a practising barrister and he penned a handful of books and pamphlets that dealt in some respect with law, of which An Essay on the Law of Bailments is the most significant. In construing the Essay, it is difficult, and surely injudicious, to ignore the cultural and political world Jones inhabited. Here I suggest that the notion of conversation provides a way of understanding Jones’s arguments for the integration of Roman and Common law ideas in the Essay, as well as explaining the distance between it and the earlier eighteenth-century dialogues set up between Roman law and the Common law.

The Arrival of Natural Law The eighteenth century saw the first sustained attempts by lawyers and scholars in England to subject the seemingly ill-disciplined and Protean Common law to systematic analysis and ordering. It is widely accepted that this development was in large part due to the infiltration of the ideas of the continental school of Natural lawyers, at the head of which stood Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) and Samuel Pufendorf (1632-1694).5 Broadly speaking, they saw law as a rational science rather than as an assemblage of mostly unrelated, casuistic rules. Thus they regarded legal rules as deducible from fundamental moral precepts; men could acquire knowledge of them through the application of their reasoning faculty. The Natural lawyers’ understanding of law, therefore, had serious and potentially destabilising implications for the role of legal authority, and it meant that legal rules defined essentially moral categories. By the start of the eighteenth century, it is safe to say that the accessibly written works of Grotius and Pufendorf were an indispensable component of every adequately read Englishman’s intellectual armoury.6 It should come as no surprise, then, that educated men, excited by those newly framed ideas and impelled to explore their implications, should have attempted to apply them to the Common law, which had for long been notorious for its apparently wanton unruliness. To locate a sea change in the manner in

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which the Common law was construed somewhere in the course of the eighteenth century is in one sense to commit an oversimplification. Yet, like most simplifications, it conveys more than a kernel of truth. As noted below, projects to systematize the Common law had indeed been launched before, yet the intellectual stock-in-trade of the lawyers at Westminster Hall at the start of the century were still the everyday nuts and bolts of the law, and inevitably they thought not in terms of broad and general legal principles and categories, but of the specifics of the mediaeval forms of action, and of the mechanics of procedure.7 A suit sure-footedly and gainfully brought was, after all, worth a wealth of abstract principles. Not surprisingly, in the minds of most English lawyers, the continental theories of Natural law were associated intimately, yet often crudely, with Roman law–that ancient body of legal doctrine that had been rediscovered in the studia of Northern Italy in the twelfth century, and had been borne thence across Europe. Of course, even the earliest Common lawyers would have been aware of the broad contours of Roman law. It was taught in England, too, from the twelfth century onwards.8 Bracton’s De legibus, from the thirteenth century, is peppered with Civilian ideas.9 And, in the first half of the sixteenth century, Christopher St. German’s monumental dialogue Doctor and Student appeared, in which Roman legal ideas abound.10 Moreover, in practice, the Civil law had for several centuries held sway in England in a variety of marginal, but by no means negligible, jurisdictions. In the early seventeenth century, the Civilian lawyers of Doctors’ Commons posed a very real threat to the hegemony of the Common lawyers; yet, by the start of the eighteenth century, the battle, it seemed, was over.11 The imminent threat that the lurking presence of Roman law had posed to the Common law was to all intents and purposes no more. Thus the ground was prepared for Common lawyers to adopt a more receptive attitude to Roman law, as a potential source of both method and substance.

Some Observations on Legal Literature in England before the Eighteenth Century Notwithstanding the popularity of a work like Littleton’s Tenures, from the fifteenth century, the legal literature readily available to Tudor and early Stuart Common lawyers was rarely more intellectually ambitious than the omnipresent abridgements, books in which legal topics were arranged alphabetically, and in which cross-references were the height of systematisation.12 Already in the seventeenth century, a sprinkling of legal writers indeed attempted to escape the intellectual strictures of the

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abridgements. In 1605, the Cambridge Civilian John Cowell’s Institutiones iuris Anglicani appeared, a text which I consider in more detail below.13 In 1613, Sir Henry Finch’s Nomotexnia was published in Law French, and in 1627 an English adaptation appeared as Law, or a Discourse thereof.14 It was an attempt to state the Common law as a broadly coherent body of doctrine and it represented a clear if tentative step in the direction of greater abstraction. Towards the end of the century, Sir Matthew Hale (1609-76) and Sir Jeffrey Gilbert (1674-1726) embarked upon similarly ambitious projects, experimenting with methods by which to present the body of the Common law as something more than a mass of detail. The writings of both were, however, published only posthumously, in the course of the eighteenth century. Hale’s The Analysis of the Law appeared in 1713, and was claimed by Blackstone as the model for his Commentaries; several parts of a projected legal encyclopaedia by Gilbert were published, as individual books, from 1730 onwards.15 While all these works are notable for their striving toward presenting legal rules in a coherent scheme, by a method theoretically more probing than the merely alphabetical, it is Cowell who for present purposes is most noteworthy. Roman law influences are present to varying degrees in Finch, Hale and Gilbert, but it is in Cowell’s Institutiones that we first encounter the structuring of a dialogue between Roman law and the Common law.16 In many respects, the Institutiones iuris Anglicani (1605) is the most direct and salient forebear of the eighteenth-century texts that form the focus of this paper; it has been characterized as an attempt by Cowell to facilitate harmonization between the law of England and Scotland, the latter largely Roman, in the wake of the union of 1603.17 In it, he fixes his gaze both upon the body of substantive rules that make up the Common law and upon the framework of Justinian’s Institutes (c.530AD), itself based upon an eponymous student textbook by Gaius (c.160AD).18 He squeezes the body of the Common law into that patently alien structure, and refers the reader by way of marginal references to the English sources, both tracts and cases, from which particular points are drawn. It is an awkward text; to the modern eye, it seems transparently ill-conceived. The author appears to have traced out the framework of Justinian’s model, only intermittently making minor changes, reshuffling the sequence of a few sections; such slavish fidelity to its antecedent renders the result anachronistic and Janus-faced. So, by way of example, the seventh heading in Justinian’s first book, dealing with the repeal of the Lex Fufia Caninia, which limited the number of slaves that a paterfamilias could manumit in his testament, is retained by Cowell. Beneath it, he writes: “Neither is there amongst us any the least use of this Law, which for so

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many ages together, was by the Romans abrogated, as envious and cruell.”19 The awkwardness of this explanation, which is necessitated by nothing more than Cowell’s unduly strict adherence to his chosen model, is glaring. Another illustration is provided by the final part of Justinian’s first book, where he treats of the topic of tutors and curators, which were roles indelibly coloured by the Romans’ approach to the notion of legal capacity.20 Cowell seems intent upon eliding the fact that the English law clearly does not fit. For instance, he acknowledges there is nothing in the Common law akin to the tutelage of a patron over his client, yet he suggests that the incidents of feudal tenure known as wardship and custody could be regarded as equivalent, without explaining or considering the implications of such parallel. Cowell’s Institutiones deserve closer scrutiny for their own sake, but for present purposes it suffices to observe that his often rather clumsy attempt at forcing the body of the Common law into Justinian’s framework inevitably creates a multitude of tensions, which the author neglects to resolve–or often even to acknowledge. The dialogue he sets up is, therefore, an unhappily tongue-tied one. Yet, despite the work’s obvious failings, it remains notable for the fact that before the heyday of Natural law, Cowell toyed with the notion that the apparently ill-disciplined Common law might in some way draw upon the method of the Roman lawyers to bring order to chaos.

Dialogue between Roman Law and the Common Law in the Eighteenth Century Against this historical backdrop, we turn to the elusive figure of Thomas Wood (1661-1722). With the wary, gently hooded eyes of one who had become accustomed to a “private country life”,21 he peers from the elegant frontispiece of his book An Institute of the Laws of England, the first edition of which appeared in 1720. Underneath his portrait, six slender volumes, arranged in two groups of three, serve as pillar-like supports. To the onlooker’s left are the Bible, the Corpus iuris Civilis, and the Corpus iuris Canonici; on the reader’s right, the names of the Common lawyers Dyer, Coke and Croke are etched upon the spines of three books. Wood is an anomalous figure.22 He was trained in Civil law at Oxford, but he eschewed the actual practice of the law. He was not a member of Doctors’ Commons, and he was called to the Bar at Gray’s Inn as an honorary rather than a practising member. At Oxford, he taught Civil law and significantly he also instructed students privately in the Common law, several decades before Blackstone, more famously, would do the same. In 1704, he left his tutor’s gowns behind and became rector at

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Hardwick in Buckinghamshire, where he enjoyed sufficient leisure to continue his private study. Yet, in outlook, Wood remained unmistakeably a teacher. In 1704, also, his A New Institute of the Imperial or Civil Law appeared, based broadly upon the Institutes of Justinian.23 It ran to four editions, the last published in 1730. It presents Roman law in a comprehensible fashion to a contemporary student audience, therefore deviating somewhat from the framework of its model; it has a more discursive style, drawing parallels and underlining distinctions, where the original does not. The text is interspersed with a smattering of references to the Common law, and to the legal systems of, inter alia, France, Holland, and Venice, and to the canon law. Those do not, however, transcend the status of casual illustrations: at this stage Wood’s focus is upon Roman law for its own sake; the idea of a serious dialogue with the Common law is merely latent. Next, Wood embarked upon a roughly parallel institutional tract on the Common law, which posed a more serious challenge to his powers of exposition. It appeared in 1720, enjoying a much longer life, spanning ten editions. The last one was published in 1772, well after the first appearance of Blackstone’s Commentaries. During most of the eighteenth century it was very popular indeed. At the start of its preface, the author’s intention is immediately clear: It has been thought impracticable to bring the laws of England into a method; and therefore a prejudice has been taken up against the study of our laws, even by men of parts and learning, as if there was no way to attain to the knowledge of them, but by a tedious wandring about, or with the greatest application and long attendance on the highest courts of justice.24

And, a few pages further, he continues: My intention, by this Institute, is not only to help the students in the Inns of Court and Chancery, but moreover to recommend the study of the English laws to our young nobility and gentry, and to the youth in our universities, (not excepting those who are design’d for the clergy, but for many reasons, earnestly inviting them to it) by supplying them with a method to help their memories; and to convince them with, that the study of our laws is now of less difficulty, and of more use in publick and private business, than they are aware of, a sufficient knowledge may be attained by them at leisure hours, without neglecting other exercises or studies.25

Like Blackstone after him, Wood clearly aims his work at a broad readership, consisting mainly of non-practitioners. He would have had no

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more than a superficial knowledge of the “niceties of pleading and practice”–the study of which he accounts “a nauseous and endless task”.26 The book had its critics, including Blackstone himself, but endowed with the deceptive wisdom of hindsight, it is easy to overlook Wood’s achievement. Unlike Cowell, whose Institutiones appeared in the politically volatile atmosphere of 1605, Wood did not attempt to force the Common law material into a Justinianic straitjacket. Whereas Cowell follows Justinian’s model to the last jot and tittle, Wood adopts the model in a subtler and more realistic way. He maintains Justinian’s division of the whole into four books, but the substance of only the first two of Wood’s books correspond directly to Justinian’s. Further, he does not attempt to replicate the threefold division of Roman private law into persons, things and actions. What is perhaps more important, though, is that even a cursory perusal of Wood’s exposition of the substance of the law, which for the purposes of his student and lay readership he had simplified and shorn of unnecessary detail, reveals that his project is indeed all about method. Wholly absent is the disordered abundance of Coke’s Institutes, upon which Woods himself claims to have relied heavily, and in its stead he essays a careful presentation of the law as a coherent whole. It is, therefore, with some irony that one notes Wood’s earlier comment that young men of learning were ignorant of the Common law and preferred to spend their time reading Grotius and Pufendorf.27 Although he does not cite those writers as sources in the Institute, his reliance on their method and measured style of exposition is unmistakeable. Understandably, Wood saw no reason to rely explicitly on their substantive arguments. He was after all turning his gaze upon a body of substantive rules that he claimed had been consistently neglected. Besides references to Coke, especially, Wood relies, heavily in places, upon the legal maxims collected and published by Sir Francis Bacon. In sum, then, the Institute of Wood represents an interesting and novel approach to systematizing the mass of Common law material. The twin devices of Roman law literary precedent and Natural law reasoning present him with a way of furnishing students and others outside the small circle tutored in the shadowy arts of legal procedure and pleading with a picture of the Common law. The significance of the Institute as a book for students and the uninitiated indeed should not be overlooked. Wood does not present his attempt at systematization as an antidote to the detail and apparent caprice of the rules of pleading. That would have been risible and pointless. His aim, rather, is to provide an ordered system in terms of which, in a quite different space, the classroom, students could commit the

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law to memory with the assistance of structure and method, before–if they were to pursue a career in the law–they tackled the necessary task of learning the rules of pleading. Yet, the conceptual structures that students are taught as aides-mémoire have a well-known tendency to stick. Once taught, a student is rarely freed from intellectual constructs. Wood’s achievement was indeed to use Roman law and Natural law method to present the Common law in an intellectually coherent way broadly on its own terms. Our attention now turns to a tract that represents a dialogue between Roman law and English law in a rather more limited and indeed implicit way. A Treatise of Equity,28 composed of six short books, appeared anonymously in 1737; its authorship has been ascribed to Henry Ballow, who rose to the position of senior deputy chamberlain of the exchequer, but who was of less than ten years’ standing at the Bar when his treatise appeared.29 It is only in the first book, dealing with contracts, that one sees the use of Natural law ideas, and intermittent reference to Roman law parallels. Near the start of the first book, Ballow states: And thus in Chancery every particular Case stands upon its own particular Circumstances, and altho’ the Common Law will not decree against the general Rule of Law, yet Chancery doth, so as the Example introduce not a general Mischief.30

This rather traditional articulation of the role of equity sits somewhat uneasily with the formulation which immediately precedes it: Equity therefore, as it stands for the whole of natural Justice, is more excellent than any human Institution; neither are positive Laws, even in Matters seemingly indifferent, any further binding, than they are agreeable with the Law of God and Nature. But the Precepts of the natural Law, when enforced by the Laws of Man, are so far from losing any Thing of their former Excellence, that they receive an additional Strength and Sanction. Yet as the Rules of the municipal Law are finite, and the subject of it infinite, there will often fall out Cases, which cannot be determin’d by them; for there can be no finite Rule of an infinite Matter, perfect. So that there will be a Necessity of having Recourse to the natural Principles; that what was wanting to the finite, may be supplied out of that which is infinite. And this is what is properly called Equity in Opposition to strict Law; and seems to bear something of the same Proportion to it in the moral, as Art does to Nature in the material World.31

Ballow thus reveals the tension between the old and the newer conceptions of equity: between an unfettered case-by-case approach, and one which

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sees equity as gradually developing a body of hardened rules. It is by no means surprising that overtly Natural law formulations, buttressed by references to Roman law, should in the first half of the eighteenth century start to be used to articulate such rules, especially in equity. Whereas Wood used such Natural law ideas as purely pedagogical tools, to Ballow they seem to be acquiring significance in the real legal world. The Jurisprudentia Philologica of Robert Eden, a fellow of University College, Oxford, and archdeacon of Winchester, which appeared in 1744, in Latin, is framed as an attempt or experiment [“tentamen”] to exposit the elements of the Civil law, according to the method and order [“methodum et seriem”] of Justinian’s Institutes.32 In order to elucidate the Civil law rules for the benefit of students, its intended audience, Eden illustrates them by interweaving citations from the works of eminent humanists from the sixteenth century onwards, including Grotius, but especially Heineccius, to whom Eden claims to owe a particular debt.33 Thus far, the stated intention of the tract is relatively ordinary for its day. What is noteworthy, though, is Eden’s further aim of juxtaposing at several junctures the parallel provisions of English law. He attributes this decision to the fact that Cowell’s Institutiones has become outdated.34 Whereas Cowell’s project was at least in part political, Eden’s didactic purpose renders his focus much sharper. Cowell tried to marry Common law substance with Civil law structure, refusing to acknowledge that the result was impossibly incongruent; in keeping with its didactic purpose, Eden’s work tends to emphasise differences between the two systems. Yet, there is something self-consciously strained about the result. Eden seems to realise that drawing parallels is not, of itself, necessarily very meaningful. So, for instance, into the section devoted to stipulatio, the enduringly important Roman verbal contract, he weaves an account of what he regards as the equivalent English law. The terseness and awkwardness of this passage raises pertinently the question as to the effectiveness of Eden’s dialogic exercise: It should be noted that this verbal obligation is called by us a simple contract, and that it is not binding unless either (as we call it) consideration, or a quid pro quo is present. Indeed by mere stipulation contracts are not often formed among the English, especially in matters of great importance.35

And, when Eden comes to treat of the literal contract in Roman law, he posits both the ancient form by means of which the paterfamilias bound himself merely by inscribing a debt into his account books, as well as the later form introduced by Justinian.36 In presenting the English parallel, he

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notes that written contracts are more frequently used and have more binding force in the Common law “since consideration does not have to pass”.37 Both the historical focus of his rendition of the Roman rules and his somewhat jumbled attempt to explain the different attitude adopted in England, indicate the limitations of his attempt at setting up a form of dialogue between the two systems. Like Finch, Hale and Gilbert, Blackstone’s aim is to present a picture of the Common law as a coherent body. Oceans of ink have been expended on analyzing and deconstructing the Commentaries, but for present purposes it suffices to observe that while Blackstone’s goals of coherence and systematization clearly reflect the influence of Natural law in the broadest sense, he did not take the implications of adopting Natural law principles very seriously. One’s vision should, therefore, not be clouded by his grand statement of the importance of Natural law at the beginning of the Commentaries; by the mid-eighteenth century, such declarations had become customary.38 While Blackstone plainly does not set up anything like a dialogue in any conventional sense between Roman law and the Common law, it is instructive to get a glimpse of the use to which he indeed does put Roman legal ideas. In his treatment of Contract, in chapter 30 of Book Two, for instance, it is notable how he scratches at the surface of the Common law notion of consideration, and claims to discover the Civilian idea of causa underneath it, as encapsulated in the adage ex nudo pacto non oritur actio.39 In a roughly contemporaneous judgment in Pillans v. Van Mierop,40 a case in which it is of some considerable moment to the bench that the doctrine of consideration not be abused to the detriment of commercial activity, Wilmot J. undertakes a slightly more elaborate comparative exercise, calling both Natural law and Roman law to his aid, and in similar fashion concludes that the rationale of the doctrine of consideration, like the rule in Roman law against nude pacts being enforceable, is to prevent contracting parties from being ensnared when they have no intention to be bound. What is noteworthy is that, in the mid-eighteenth century, Blackstone and Wilmot J. both call Roman law ideas into service in rather similar ways: when its wellfounded rationality can prevent injustice or inconvenience in the Common law.41 A year before Pillans v. Van Mierop, a young man named William Jones arrived at Oxford.

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Oriental Jones Polymath Sir William Jones towered over the late-eighteenth century. His talents seemed unbounded, and by an early age his capacity for scholarship was legendary.42 Born in 1746 and raised on slender means by his intellectually-oriented mother, after his father, a mathematician, had died when he was three, Jones’s natural curiosity was kindled in his infancy. His career at Harrow was glowing: he mastered Latin and Greek, and taught himself the rudiments of Hebrew and Arabic, before proceeding to University College, Oxford, in 1764. There, he undertook a rigorous programme of self-directed study and within two years he had progressed to a fellowship at that college, where he befriended Robert Chambers, who, in 1766, succeeded Blackstone as Vinerian Professor of English Law. By then, Jones had also acquired a knowledge of Persian and had embarked upon a tour d’horizon of the belle-lettres of the several languages he knew, revelling most in Persian poetry. His renown as an interpreter of the cultures and languages of the Orient spread, and during the 1770s he published commentaries on and translations of several Eastern literary masterpieces, as well as a Persian grammar. Soon there were few educated people in England who did not know of the extraordinary Jones. Still financially constrained as a student and young fellow, Jones supplemented his resources by tutoring the young Viscount Althorp, to whom he would remain a devoted friend. In 1770, impelled perhaps equally by the realization that literary endeavours do not pay, and by the urgings of his friends and family, Jones decided upon a legal career, and joined the Middle Temple. He had dipped into legal texts as a boy, and soon he was applying himself to the law with characteristic élan, observing in a letter, of January 1771, that he had read the first two volumes of Blackstone’s Commentaries and that he failed to see why the study of law was dismissed as “dry and unpleasant.”43 His progress as a barrister was steady if not stellar. Probably while still an undergraduate, Jones was introduced by Chambers to the circle of Dr Samuel Johnson and Joshua Reynolds. In April 1773, having over the intervening years befriended several of its members, Jones was accorded the honour of election to the Literary Club, which Johnson and Reynolds had founded in 1764, and which included among its membership the fiery comets of London’s literary and intellectual circles: Adam Smith; Burke; Sheridan; Goldsmith; Boswell; Garrick; Gibbon.44 And now also: Oriental Jones. The Club convened for dinner fortnightly, during the parliamentary term. Those were events noted

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for their genteel conversation, for the wit and taste by which they were adorned. In a city abounding in pamphlet-strewn coffee houses, fora of heated political debate–in which Jones was soon also a keen participant – and a new-found trope of sociability, polite conversation was the very raison d’etre of the Club. When, in 1778, Jones tried to persuade the understandably cowed Viscount Althorp, then a mere 22 years old, to apply for membership, he wrote to his former charge: To be serious, my dear friend; you will take your seat among us, whenever it suits you, and you will be a hearer, or a talker, as your inclination leads you, for there is no restraint among us; but I must apprize you beforehand, that, whatever the world may think, our conversation is seldom very learned, and you will fancy that you are dining with men of the world, as most of them indeed are.45

A few days before, Jones had written to Althorp: Johnson says truly that Europe cannot produce such another club, and that there is no branch of human knowledge concerning which we could not collectively give the world good information.46

These two apparently contradictory descriptions suggest subtly the nature of the Club and its widely-reputed circle of conversation. It was a space in which men of learning and accomplishment deported themselves with civility and politeness, their discourse characterised by a free exchange of ideas, a keen interest in the contributions of other participants, and a readiness to be swayed by a more reasonable opinion. Members were valued equally when making active contributions and when merely auditors. Despite an undertaking by Club members, politics inevitably crept into their conversation. In a world increasingly shaken by the threat of war in America–which indeed broke out in 1775–and by the shocking conflagration of the Gordon Riots (1780), that was hardly to be avoided. An ardent Whig and a supporter of the American revolution, Jones in this period wrote several political pamphlets. Yet, in 1783 he left the hurlyburly of London for India, to take up a keenly-sought judgeship in the High Court of Bengal. Shortly after his arrival in Calcutta, encouraged by Warren Hastings, the colonial governor, he founded the Asiatick Society, a forum for gentlemen of learning to converse and share knowledge on their temporary home, the fascinating yet alien Orient. The Society, it could be said, was Dr Johnson’s Club writ large–and was, indeed, the site of the full flowering of Oriental Jones.47

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An Essay on the Law of Bailments An Essay on the Law of Bailments is a singular work of legal scholarship. Within its relatively narrow compass, it amply demonstrates the author’s breadth of linguistic skill, his learning more generally and, perhaps most notably, his intellectual ambition. As might be expected, the approach to law it evinces is, broadly stated, that of the Natural lawyers. In all likelihood, Jones accompanied Robert Chambers to Blackstone’s lectures; he might then already have witnessed the cursory treatment accorded the topic of bailment–which, with the accrued knowledge of a practising barrister, he would, in the Essay, come to dismiss as “the least satisfactory part” of the Commentaries.48 Whatever the Essay’s faults–it can indeed be impugned in several respects49–it stands out for its novelty, which was grounded in the author’s self-assured, even robust, application of Natural law ideas to the formulation and presentation of legal doctrine. Simpson marks it as the first legal treatise in the Common law. He adopts Plucknett’s definition (who used the word text-book rather than treatise): The characteristic of the modern English text-book … is its method. It begins with a definition of the subject matter, and proceeds by logical and systematic stages to cover the whole field. The result is to present the law in a strictly deductive framework, with the implication that in the beginning there were principles, and that in the end those principles were found to cover a large multitude of cases deducible from them.50

Simpson notes other subsidiary characteristics of a treatise, of which the most important are: it deals with a specific branch of the law, which is regarded as possessing some degree of unity; and, it treats of substantive, rather than procedural, legal principles. Plainly, the Essay fits this definition. Of course, only with the clarity of hindsight can we claim it as the Common law’s first treatise. Beyond a small number of reviewers and Jones’s friend Edward Gibbon, it is difficult to know exactly who read it and how it was received. We cannot be sure the innovation it wrought was immediately perceived.51 Internally, it might be suggested, the Essay reflects the difficulty of Jones’s pioneering undertaking. First, he draws a distinction between what he terms “the numberless niceties, which attend our abstruse, though elegant, system of real property” and “that exquisite logick, on which our rules of special pleading are founded”, on the one hand, and the substantive rules governing, or constituting, the law of bailment, on the other.52 He concludes that the former rubrics are, appropriately, the preserve of legal cognoscenti, but that the latter should be accessible to all

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men, who are touched by it in sundry ways “every week and almost every day”.53 It is for that reason, Jones says, and because of Blackstone’s neglect of the topic, that he embarks upon the composition of the Essay. It appears, though, that this argument from necessity coincides with, or perhaps shrouds, a deeper, more complex distinction. For Jones, as for the Natural lawyers generally, there are some areas of the law that are to be examined and understood along Natural law lines, like contract for instance, whereas those such as real property, crime and succession, which are products of positive institutions and therefore specific to different states, are not susceptible to such analysis. In the introduction to his translation of the Speeches of Isaeus, on the ancient Greek law of succession, published in 1779, Jones notes that those who enquire will: observe a striking uniformity among all nations, whatever seas or mountains may separate them, or how many ages soever may have elapsed between the periods of their existence, in those great and fundamental principles, which being clearly deduced from natural reason, are equally diffused over all mankind, and are not subject to alteration by any change of place or time; nor will he fail to remark as striking a diversity in those laws, which, proceeding from positive institution, are consequently as various as the wills and fancies as those who enact them.54

In the latter category, he reckons the law of succession. Yet, Jones provides nothing more by way of explanation of this distinction than the assertions cited above. In a pocket of the Essay in which he casts his eye briefly over the law of a number of “barbarous” nations, only to find “traces of sound reasoning and solid judgment” among them, he concludes that, in Hindu law, too, the law of succession and criminal law are positive institutions since they are markedly different from the their equivalents in the Common law.55 Significantly, Jones makes no attempt to explicate quite what the ground for this difficult distinction is. In another sense, also, the boundaries that Jones draws in the Essay create tensions. Bailment was not a category with anything like a clear status or circumference, and one sees this uncertainty reflected in Jones’s language. At the start of the Essay, he announces that he will endeavour to explore “that contract, which lawyers call bailment” before he provides a definition of it: “[a] delivery of goods on a condition, expressed or implied, that they shall be restored by the bailee to the bailor, or according to his directions, as soon as the purpose, for which they were bailed, shall be answered”.56 On the following page, he seems to contradict this definition of “the contract of bailment” by noting that bailment is, in fact,

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a feature of a number of contracts (like hire, deposit, commission, etc.)57 This apparently innocent contradiction seems telling. Several features of the Essay might indeed be more easily explicable if one keeps in mind that it is an experiment, an attempt to do something new. The use of the word “essay” in the title and Jones’s aside that the work “aspires to no higher name” tend to support this suggestion.58 Before looking in more detail at the body of the Essay, it is illuminating to note that on the title page, Jones quotes a passage from Cicero’s very widely read De Officiis (44BC), a work framed as a letter to his teenage son studying philosophy in Athens. De Officiis is saturated with early ideas of Natural law and it is best characterized as an attempt to reconcile the contradictory notions of honour and expediency. In this process, Cicero discovers that those notions are in fact not at variance after all. Moreover, chapters 35 to 42 of Book One are an attempt to frame rules for a new “art” of conversation, by mediating between moral duty and eloquence, and were widely influential in England in the eighteenth century.59 The specific excerpt used by Jones, ascribed to the jurist Quintus Mucius Scaevola, emphasizes the importance of good faith in the range of Roman contracts which Jones groups together under the head of bailment. The citation might therefore be read as a harbinger, on the one hand, of the tendency towards the synthesis or reconciliation of differences that pervades the Essay, and, on the other hand, of the role that Roman law plays in it. What strikes the reader most about the Essay is its multi-layered structure, part of which is boldly visible, and part of which is more deeply embedded in the text. The body of the Essay is divided into three parts, with its central part being by far the largest. These three parts are slotted neatly into a syllogistic framework, most probably derived from the work of the German Natural lawyer Johann Gottlieb Heineccius, whose work is known to have been influential at University College in the late-eighteenth century.60 The second book of Heineccius’s tract A Methodical System of Universal Law, provides an example of the application of his tripartite syllogistic method. Here, he employs it to define the meaning and role of conscience: “Because conscience reasons concerning the goodness and pravity of actions; but actions are called just, in respect of an external obligation arising from a law; conscience must therefore compare the one with the other, the law and the fact; that is, form two propositions, and from them deduce a third; which, since it cannot be done but by syllogism, it follows that every reasoning of conscience is a syllogism, consisting of three propositions, the law, the action, and the conclusion.”61 Thus, in the first part of the Essay, Jones considers the law analytically: he exposits the

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Natural law precepts pertaining to bailment, the equivalent of the “law” component in the conscience syllogism above. In the second part, he presents a picture of the rules relating to bailment, empirically found, in Roman law and in the Common law respectively. This part can, without too great a stretch, be equated with the “fact” component of Heineccius’s tripartite structure. And, in the brief third section, characterised as the synthetic part, Jones isolates a skeleton of principles (the “Conclusion”), which reflects the outcome of the foregoing comparative exercise. This basic framework requires elaboration. In the first section, Jones discovers and states the rules governing bailment “having traced every part of it up to the first principles of natural reason”.62 In other words, he formulates a small body of universally valid first-order rules applicable to bailment–as ordained by Natural law. An exercise that might at first blush appear to be divination-by-reason, it soon transpires, is clearly grounded in Roman law. This Jones does not pronounce explicitly. Yet, the Roman law basis is apparent, first, from the framing of his discussion around the contractual relationship between the bailor and the bailee, and especially around the question of the standard of care to be expected of the bailee. Whereas traditionally in English law, bailment raised a variety of questions, including ones belonging to property law, the contractual focus of the Essay is strongly suggestive of the approach of the Roman lawyers.63 Bearing in mind the variety of different contracts involving a bailment, the question as to the standard of care of the bailee is likely to cast up a diversity of answers. Appealing, it appears, to no more than the inherent logic of the proposition, Jones states: “[The bailee] can only be obliged to keep it with a degree of care proportionate to the nature of the bailment”.64 It is no coincidence that this formulation echoes what had come to be known as the utility principle in Roman law, adapting the standard of care to the level of benefit gained. Like the Roman lawyers, too, he uses this principle to concretize three standards of care. It is plain, therefore, that Jones belongs to the tradition of thinkers who use Roman law as a source of Natural law rules: he claims to discover them by the exertion of his reasoning faculty, while in fact drawing them largely from the rather orthodox version of Roman law to be found in the writings of the French lawyer Pothier.65 The Natural law precepts thus determined serve as a yardstick by which Jones proceeds to measure the rules of other legal systems. Lastly, it should be noted, as David Ibbetson has shown, that an aspect of Jones’s reliance on Roman law at this stage of his analysis is problematic: in addition to the utility principle–which Grotius and Pufendorf also use–he employs the notion of good faith, which

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muddies the clarity which he tries to achieve with the traditional triptych of standards of care.66 In the second, the empiral (or historical) section, Jones looks first at the Roman law rules governing the question of the bailee’s standard of care and then juxtaposes a treatment of the relevant English case law. This is the second and–because of the proportion of the Essay devoted to it–the most obvious of the comparative axes in the work. Dialogue, in the broadest sense, between Roman law and the Common law had, we know, been a feature of the English legal world for several centuries, and in legal texts, especially in the eighteenth century. However, in the Essay the comparison is much more complex than in the earlier texts. Crucial to understanding Jones’s text is the realization that his intention is more than mere juxtaposition. On one level, the Essay is simply an attempt to set out the rules of a pocket of the Common law. Yet this enterprise is pervaded by Jones’s fundamental commitment to the conclusion that the Common law is in agreement with Natural reason. It is in the light of this overriding concern that Jones’s ahistoric approach to the Common law, as well as the markedly reconciliatory nature of the Essay must be understood. Thus the notion of conversation, understood in this instance as bringing Common law and Natural reason together in order to reconcile them, rather than the more familiar manoeuvre of placing these two intellectual traditions in contrast or conflict, lies at the very heart of Jones’s project. Jones’s pamphlet The Principles of Government, in a Dialogue between a Scholar and a Peasant,67 provides a useful point of departure. When the eighteenth century drew, turbulently, towards an end, the dramatic dialogue as a literary form had become a favoured vehicle for writers, both Whig and Tory, to articulate their political ideas. It provided an effective means of enacting notions through characters, however contrived. The reactive interplay–the to-and-fro–of the dialogue gave the writer the scope to introduce a palpable sense of change, subtly yet vividly, into the very body of his argument. What is more, by giving those who did not ordinarily have a say in the public sphere the chance to speak in a dialogue, the writer could be deeply subversive.68 Jones’s pamphlet did just that, showing how a quiescent rustic is won over to the struggle for a broader franchise. It appeared anonymously in 1782, under the aegis of the Society for Constitutional Information, and was widely disseminated, becoming the focus of fevered controversy. Yet, it is the form of Jones’s reasoning in the Dialogue that is most important for our purposes. The scholar uses the village club, aimed at recreation and mutual relief, and of which the peasant is a member, as a metaphor by which to enlighten him about the political economy of the day (“Did it ever occur to you, that

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every state or nation was only a great club?”). The peasant initially blocks the scholar’s entreaties: he believes it would be best for him to keep his “humble” station in life, tending his flock, and thereby staying free from gaol. Yet, by a steady sequence of questions, each in some sense in response to the peasant’s foregoing answer, the scholar edges the peasant to the realization that he should in fact claim the right to vote, and to bear arms, that the freedom which he currently has is hollow and insufficient. By his measured tone, his respectful stance towards the peasant and by his listening and responding to the peasant’s answers, the scholar engages in the very epitome of polite conversation. And, crucially, the reader witnesses quite palpably how powerfully effective such discourse is: it moves the peasant from darkness to enlightenment, from being unwittingly shackled to having a prospect of freedom. It is that very same type of conversational interplay between opposites that distinguishes the Essay from its forerunners–that makes it something wholly different from the often wooden dialogues that appeared earlier in the century. This is demonstrated in a number of respects. On the one hand, in the section of the Essay devoted to an exposition of the relevant Roman law, Jones displays a disposition unusually open to weighing up different, often mutually exclusive readings of texts. Whereas Civil law scholarship in England had come close to extinction in the eighteenth century, and whereas Jones’s forerunners used the relatively unproblematic text of Justinian’s Institutes as the basis of their rather simple expositions, Jones seems to relish the opportunity of engaging in comparatively complex scholarly debate with the shades of earlier generations of Civil law scholars: his expansive treatment of a variety of difficulties caused by Digest 50.17.23, one of the texts of prime importance to the question of the standard of care of the bailee, is illustrative.69 Whereas his forerunners did no more than shrug their shoulders or proffer simple and inadequate explanations for the different approaches taken to legal questions by the Civilian tradition and the Common law, Jones takes very seriously the practice of casting different opinions and interpretations against each other and by this process of conversation arriving at a reasoned conclusion. That Jones’s conclusion was usually a rather traditional one does not detract from the fact that the process of conversation was of crucial importance to him. Jones’s treatment of the English law pertaining to bailment is perhaps even more telling. Inevitably, it rests upon the definitive speech of Holt C.J. in Coggs v. Barnard,70 in which he abjured the maze of uncertainty that was the Common law of bailment, essentially replacing it with a largely coherent structure of rules drawn from Roman law. This serves

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Jones’s greater purpose very well, since it is plainly his aim to demonstrate that English law is in accord with Roman law, and that they both, in turn, fit neatly into the template set by Natural law. Since all three systems are therefore planted on Roman soil, it is not hard to see how he might achieve this purpose. Yet, it is telling that at crucial points when he finds a Common law rule to be out of place, Jones uses arguments from Roman law essentially to edge it within the larger Natural law framework. A pertinent example is his use of a dispute between the Roman jurists Labeo and Trebatius to displace the difficult decision in Bonion’s Case.71 What is especially significant is the very specific spirit of interchange, of conversation, that animates the Essay. Like the scholar conversing with the peasant, Roman law enters into a conversation with the Common law, not so that their differences might be juxtaposed and noted, but so that change, transformation, might be effected. Like his forerunners, Jones uses the notion of dialogue as a method by which to present legal principles in a rational and coherent way. Yet, in the Essay, such dialogue seems plainly to take the form of something closer to the spirit of conversation that so fundamentally permeated Jones’s age.

Conclusion By the end of the eighteenth century, Common lawyers were very much closer to the modern position of thinking of the law in terms of general, overarching categories. This was largely due to the influx of Natural law methodology from continental Europe, in some part through the medium of Roman law. Sir William Jones’s An Essay on the Law of Bailments is an important part of that historical and developmental process. In this essay, I have argued that it demonstrates vividly an inventive application of the notion of conversation, which played a crucial part in public life in the eighteenth century, in the sphere of the law. Conversation served Jones as a means of achieving much-needed reconciliation between Roman law and the Common law. Placed against its forebears, the Essay can be said to continue a tradition, while at the same time reinvigorating it. It is startling for its daring and innovative use of Natural methodology, and without overstatement it can be said to have heralded a new era in treatise-writing in the Common law. It stands at the dividing line between the older tradition of legal tracts, and the more recognisably modern textbooks that started appearing from the last decade of the eighteenth century–between the mediaeval emphasis upon form and procedure and the modern focus upon general legal principles.

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Acknowledgements The writer thanks David Ibbetson and Stelios Tofaris for their selfless and hugely helpful advice. Any errors remain his own. 1

In this essay, I use the adjectives Roman and Civilian (or Civil) interchangeably. William Jones, An Essay on the Law of Bailments (London: Charles Dilly, 1781). 3 See generally Lawrence E. Klein, “Liberty, Manners, and Politeness in Early Eighteenth-Century England,” The Historical Journal 32 (1989): 583-605, and “The Earl of Shaftesbury and the Progress of Politeness,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 18 (1984): 186-214. Also, Jack Prostko, “‘Natural Conversation set in View’: Shaftesbury and Natural Speech,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 23 (1989): 42-61, and Glenn Broadhead, “Samuel Johnson’s Rhetoric of Conversation,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 20 (1980): 461-74. 4 Mindful of the pejorative overtones the terms Orient and Oriental have acquired, I use them here owing to the difficult and anachronistic circumlocutions doing otherwise would produce. 5 Strictly speaking, of course, it is more apposite to speak of Natural law schools, in the plural. On the reception of Natural law ideas in England more generally see Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Englightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and James Gordley, The Philosophical Foundations of Modern Contract Doctrine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 6 Michael Lobban, “Custom, Nature, and Authority: the Roots of English Legal Positivism,” in The British and their Laws in the Eighteenth Century, ed. David Lemmings (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2005), 27-32. 7 See in respect of contract law, John Baker, “From Sanctity of Contract to Reasonable Expectation,” Current Legal Problems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 17-39. 8 See Francis de Zulueta and Peter Stein, ed. and trans., The Teaching of Roman Law in England around 1200 (London: Selden Society, 1990). 9 John Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History (London: Butterworths, 2002), 176. 10 Theodore Plucknett and John Barton, ed., St. German’s Doctor and Student (London: Selden Society, 1974). 11 See, for the Civilian jurisdictions and lawyers generally, Daniel Coquillette, The Civilian Writers of Doctors’ Common, London (Berlin: Duncker & Humbolt, 1988). 12 John Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History (London: Butterworths, 2002) 184-6. 13 John Cowell, Institutiones iuris Anglicani (Cambridge: John Legat, 1605). 14 Henry Finch, Law, or a Discourse thereof (London: Society of Stationers, 1627). For its general context, see David Ibbetson, “Common Lawyers and the Law before the Civil War,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 8 (1988): 142-53. 2

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15 See generally Michael Macnair, “Sir Jeffrey Gilbert and his Treatises,” The Journal of Legal History 15 (1994). 16 See Alan Watson, “Justinian’s Institutes and Some English Counterparts,” in Studies in Justinian’s Institutes in memory of J.A.C. Thomas, ed. Peter Stein and Andrew Lewis (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1983), 181-86. 17 See S. B. Chrimes, “The Constitutional Ideas of Dr. John Cowell,” The English Historical Review 64 (1949). 18 See Peter Birks and Grant McLeod, ed. and trans., Justinian’s Institutes (London: Duckworth, 1987) and Tony Honoré, Gaius (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). 19 John Cowell, The Institutes of the Laws of England (London: John Ridley, 1651), 14. In citing from Cowell, I use the translation of 1651, rather than the original Latin text. 20 John Cowell, The Institutes of the Laws of England (London: John Ridley, 1651), 36-9. 21 Thomas Wood, An Institute of the Laws of England (London: Richard Sare, 1720), ii. 22 See generally Robert Robinson, “The Two Institutes of Thomas Wood: A Study in Eighteenth Century Legal Scholarship,” The American Journal of Legal History 35 (1991). 23 Thomas Wood, A New Institute of the Imperial or Civil Law (London: Richard Sare, 1704). 24 Thomas Wood, An Institute of the Laws of England (London: Richard Sare, 1720), i. 25 Ibid., viii. 26 Ibid., vii. 27 Thomas Wood, Some Thoughts concerning the Teaching of the Law in the Two Universities (London: J. Morphew, 1708), 4. 28 Henry Ballow, A Treatise of Equity (London: D. Browne, 1737). 29 N. G. Jones, “Ballow [Bellewe], Henry (1704?–1782), legal writer,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Also available online at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1242 (accessed 20 July, 2007). 30 Henry Ballow, A Treatise of Equity (London: D. Browne, 1737), 3. 31 Ibid. 3-4. 32 Robert Eden, Juriprudentia Philologica (Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre, 1744), v. 33 See also Garland Cannon, The Life and Mind of Oriental Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 150. 34 Robert Eden, Juriprudentia Philologica (Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre, 1744), vii. 35 Ibid., 180. This is my own, slightly abridged, translation of Eden’s Latin. 36 Ibid., 187-8. 37 Ibid., 189. 38 See Michael Lobban, The Common Law and English Jurisprudence 1760-1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 27-33 and Nigel Simmonds, “Reason, History

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and Privilege: Blackstone’s Debt to Natural Law,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgescichte 118 (1988): 200-213. 39 See William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 443-6. 40 (1765) 3 Burr 1663, 97 ER 1035. 41 See Warren Swain, “The Changing Nature of the Doctrine of Consideration, 1750-1850,” Journal of Legal History 26 (2005): 55-72. 42 For Jones’s biographical details, I rely heavily upon Garland Cannon, The Life and Mind of Oriental Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 43 Garland Cannon, ed., Letters of Sir William Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 78. 44 For Jones’s involvement in The Club see Garland Cannon, “Sir William Jones and Dr. Johnson’s Literary Club,” Modern Philology 63 (1965): 20-37. See also L.F. Powell, “Sir William Jones and the Club,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 11 (1946): 818-22. 45 Quoted in “Sir William Jones and Dr. Johnson’s Literary Club”: 27. 46 Quoted in “Sir William Jones and Dr. Johnson’s Literary Club”: 27. 47 See J.M. Steadman, “The Asiatick Society of Bengal,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 4 (1977): 464-83. 48 William Jones, An Essay on the Law of Bailments (London: Charles Dilly, 1781), 3. 49 See David Ibbetson, ed., An Essay on the Law of Bailments (Bangor: The Welsh Legal History Society, 2007), 38-41. 50 Brian Simpson “The Rise and Fall of the Legal Treatise,” The University of Chicago Law Review 48 (1981): 632. 51 On its reception more broadly, see David Ibbetson, ed., An Essay on the Law of Bailments (Bangor: The Welsh Legal History Society, 2007), 58-73. 52 William Jones, An Essay on the Law of Bailments (London: Charles Dilly, 1781), 1-2. 53 Ibid., 2. 54 William Jones, The Speeches of Isaeus (London: E.&C. Dilly, 1779), ii. 55 William Jones, An Essay on the Law of Bailments (London: Charles Dilly, 1781), 111-12. 56 Ibid., 1. 57 Ibid., 2. 58 Ibid., 4. 59 Glenn Broadhead, “Samuel Johnson’s Rhetoric of Conversation,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 20 (1980), 462-3. 60 See David Ibbetson, ed., An Essay on the Law of Bailments (Bangor: Welsh Legal History Society, 2007), 27-28 and John Barton, “Legal Studies,” in The History of the University of Oxford, Volume 5, The Eighteenth Century, ed. L. S. Sutherland and L. G. Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 593-607. 61 Johann Heineccius, A Methodical System of Universal Law, ed. and trans. George Turnbull (London: George Keith, 1763), 23-4.

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62 William Jones, An Essay on the Law of Bailments (London: Charles Dilly, 1781), 4. 63 See David Ibbetson, ed., An Essay on the Law of Bailments (Bangor: Welsh Legal History Society, 2007), 22. 64 William Jones, An Essay on the Law of Bailments (London: Charles Dilly, 1781), 5. 65 David Ibbetson, ed., An Essay on the Law of Bailments (Bangor: Welsh Legal History Society, 2007), 26-33. 66 David Ibbetson, ed., An Essay on the Law of Bailments (Bangor: Welsh Legal History Society, 2007), 32-33. 67 William Jones, The Principles of Government, in a Dialogue between a Scholar and a Peasant (London: Society for Constitutional Information, 1783). 68 See more generally Clare Brant, “‘What does that argue for us?’: the politics of teaching and political education in late eighteenth-century dialogues,” in Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning, ed. Yun Lee Too and Niall Livingstone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 67-82. 69 See David Ibbetson, ed., An Essay on the Law of Bailments (Bangor: Welsh Legal History Society, 2007), 33-41. 70 (1703) 2 Lord Raym. 909; 3 Lord Raym. 163; 1 Com. 133; 1 Salk. 26; 2 Salk. 735; 3 Salk. 11; 3 Salk. 268; Holt K.B. 13; Holt K.B. 131; Holt 528. 71 YB P 8 Edw. II f 275; Fitz. Abr., Detinue, 59 (1315). See David Ibbetson, ed., An Essay on the Law of Bailments (Bangor: Welsh Legal History Society, 2007), 44-45.

CHAPTER EIGHT PICTURE-TALKING: PORTRAITURE AND CONVERSATION IN BRITAIN 1800-1830 LUDMILLA JORDANOVA

I “The painter was in a loose morning-gown, with his back to the light; his face was like a pale fine piece of colouring, and his eye came out and glanced through the twilight of the past, like an old eagle looking from its eyrie in the clouds. … His figure is small, shadowy, emaciated, but you think only of his face, which is fine and expressive”.1 These are the words of the prolific author William Hazlitt (1778-1830) describing the painter James Northcote (1746-1831). Their names will always be associated both with one another and with the theme of conversation. Starting in 1826, Hazlitt published accounts of their conversations, which themselves provoked considerable comment, for in them distinctly waspish comments were attributed to Northcote. He also mentioned Northcote in other writings, for example, to invoke him as “the best converser I know”.2 Their relationship was complex: they were friends and collaborators—men with forceful views whose ideas and contacts ranged widely and touched on many areas, including those that were sensitive and subject to wide public comment. Northcote and Hazlitt certainly shared a number of interests: these included the fine arts and their history, but also took in the stage and Britain’s literary past. Hazlitt had tried his hand at painting when young and was possessed of strong opinions on all the arts, history, philosophy, politics, theatre, collections and the state of the British art world. Northcote’s conversation was certainly wide-ranging, although his life was, unlike Hazlitt’s, devoted to a single pursuit—his work as an artist. For a man who had been a pupil of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), it is not surprising to find that Northcote was a dedicated portrait painter, yet he worked in a number of visual genres, and tried his hand at writing about

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art later in his life. As well as painting portraits, he depicted historical, Biblical and Shakespearean subjects, moral themes, and animals, and wrote essays and biographies. Many of his pictures were turned into prints. We might say that Northcote was in wide circulation.

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Fig. 8.1: William Hazlitt, replica by William Bewick, chalk, 1825, 575mm x 375 mm

Hazlitt’s account of Northcote might be mistaken for a description of a portrait. Indeed on several occasions, Hazlitt conjures up Northcote’s “small, shadowy, emaciated” figure.3 The blurring between portraits and people, one theme that runs through this essay, was made perfectly explicit when Hazlitt claimed that his friend’s “manner was quite picturesque”.4 Their conversations are full of “portraits”, verbal and visual, real and imagined. While it is plausible that artists and art enthusiasts speaking together about those who matter to them are, in some sense, painting and viewing portraits, it is less apparent that portraits are themselves conversational. I shall argue that in a number of significant respects

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portraits have conversational qualities—for example, they prompt conversations among viewers as they do among those who commission, make, own, give and exchange them, and they may be responding to other works of art, with which they are, accordingly, in conversation. If it is possible to say that works converse with each other, it is certain that artists do so. Northcote was perpetually engaged with artists who had gone before him, old masters, as well as figures, such as Reynolds, who loomed large in his life. In this sense, all art is conversational, of course, even if some is more obviously so than others. In the case of portraits, the idea of conversation helps to reveal the ways in which they were embedded in people’s lives.5 Portraiture not only represents other human bodies, with which a somatic kinship is readily experienced, but it purports to do so in a way that evokes their character, something of them beyond their mere appearance. The genre demands that viewers bring the wide range of skills they use in their lives to portraits, and invites responses connected to what is called “identification”. There are other terms that are commonly used to express what seem to me to be enmeshments between people upon which portraiture has a special bearing. “Influence” is one candidate, some variant on “inter-textuality” another. Yet neither does justice, I suggest, to the phenomena with which Northcote and Hazlitt present us. Furthermore, since any given hang, whether actual, virtual or completely imagined, offers the chance for new conversations between makers and products to arise in our minds, it seems worthwhile exploring the notion of conversation through a specific historical example that relates to this theme in notably rich ways. Artists, like viewers, were active in making associations, in finding interactions, living presences in both works and in the ways they were arranged. In areas where filiation, genealogy and heritage are important, such conversational qualities are likely to be in sharper focus, both for makers and for audiences. In some cases these qualities were noted and recorded by participants. Such conversations blurred the distinctions between people and portraits of them, they constructed imagined communities, carried enthusiasms for earlier times, and expressed a need for historical accounts that managed contemporary concerns. They were also in perpetual motion between words and images, head, hand, ear and eye. Anecdote is, epistemologically speaking, a tricky domain for scholars, and anecdote is central to Hazlitt’s conversations with Northcote and possibly to conversation more generally.6 Little stories, vignettes, miniatures abound in their conversations, and they were clearly used in a number of settings, including Northcote’s account of Reynolds.7 This

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makes them both memorable and repeatable—valued remnants of times past. Yet they may not be “true” in any of the usual senses of that vexed term. It seems deeply implausible that long conversations could be remembered with a high level of accuracy. Yet some literal notion of accuracy is not the issue here. It was in the process of assuming lasting literary form that such conversations were constructed, and it would be fruitless to speculate about what was “really” said. Once there, however, the conversations may be used as evidence in their own right, as items taken seriously by participants and others and as a resource that has been endlessly drawn on ever since. They are, like paintings and prints, made objects, and as such dense with the preoccupations of their makers and their times. In them names from the past are brought to life and so, in a similarly mediated form, are their authors. Yet conversations, like all categories of artefacts, have their own distinctive properties. “Conversation” may not be a separate literary genre, but it was a form of intercourse that was commonly remarked upon during the period considered here. Hazlitt expressed some clear opinions about the nature of conversation, which do not necessarily accord with his experiences with Northcote—their relationship was also a literary construction.8 We know, then, what Hazlitt says he values in conversation, such as a lack of affectation, an open ease and candour, and, in addition, the company of a good listener as well as a good talker. Thus “conversation” carries certain ideals and represents something desirable, a particular kind of closeness between human beings, however artfully constructed that closeness may be. We do well to remember that “criminal conversation” meant adultery in this period.

II “When I called, I found Mr. Northcote painting a portrait of himself. … I was continually in danger of over-setting a stand with a small looking-glass, which Northcote particularly cautioned me not to touch; and every now and then he was prying into the glass by stealth, to see if the portrait was like. He had on a green velvet-cap, and looked very like Titian.”9 Hazlitt’s account in the second conversation introduces tensions between himself and the painter, as well as the latter’s affinities with Titian. Complex though the concept is, identification is certainly at work here. Northcote identifies himself with Titian (c.1488-1576) and there is direct pictorial evidence to support the point. Hazlitt identifies him with Titian in his writings, and he does so in two distinct ways. First, he informs the reader that his friend looks like the Venetian. Second, Hazlitt

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reveals: “I had almost as soon hear him talk of Titian’s pictures (which he does with tears in his eyes, and looking just like them) as see the originals, and I had rather hear him talk of Sir Joshua’s than see them.”10 In this case, the emotions mobilised by talk, their manifestation in tears, bear testimony to the depth of Northcote’s admiration for Titian and to Hazlitt’s capacity to be sympathetically moved by his utterances. It is no coincidence that for the younger man, “the soul of conversation is sympathy”.11 Northcote painted many self-portraits, it is not known how many, but I estimate at least eighteen, and there may be more.12 The direct link between Northcote’s self-portraits and Titian was made by Hazlitt in their second conversation where Northcote looks like Titian as he is painting himself. It is forged by Northcote himself in an extraordinary portrait of 1828, commissioned by Sir William Knighton (1776-1836; a portrait of Knighton is shown in Figure 8.2, overleaf) the physician and collector who was Keeper of the Privy Purse to George IV (1762-1830). Both Northcote and Knighton hailed from Devon, and, it seems, knew each other well. Knighton either bought or commissioned a number of pictures from Northcote, including a self-portrait, a portrait of himself and another of the artist’s father, while Northcote’s depiction of Devonian Worthies was originally intended for him. Furthermore, Northcote gave Knighton a portrait of his wife, Dorothea, with their daughter.13 That Northcote felt warmly towards him is indicated by the fact that he left the manuscript of his autobiographical memoir to him in his will, and by Lady Knighton’s Memoir of her husband, which includes diary entries and letters concerning visits to Northcote and their conversation, which, naturally enough, included Titian.14 Northcote had a reputation as a miser, and even Hazlitt claimed never to have eaten or drunk with him despite being a regular visitor, but the artist did, it seems, welcome visitors. Knighton asked Northcote to paint Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) for him, but to do so in secret so that the picture could never be exhibited in order that the King did not know of it. Knighton was preparing “objects of pleasing contemplation” for his retirement, presumably guarding his privacy in the process.15 Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830), President of the Royal Academy from 1820, had painted Knighton himself as well as Sir Walter Scott earlier in the decade, while he left a picture of Lady Knighton unfinished on his death.16 Commissioned by the King in 1821, and exhibited in 1827, Lawrence’s magnificent depiction of Scott (Figure 8.3, p. 157) was surely known to

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Northcote when he was working for Knighton in 1828. In Lawrence’s picture Scott is seated beside a round writing table, with a pen in one hand and his stick propped against the red chair. A large curtain of the same colour as the chair is draped behind him. According to a recent book on Lawrence, it manifests, “impressive, almost aggressive sobriety”, and constitutes an “honest, blunt presentation” of the sitter.17 Scott is portrayed close to full length, centered, a square, solid figure, with clenched hands and unsmiling face.

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Fig. 8.2: Sir William Knighton, 1st Bt. by Charles Turner, after Sir Thomas Lawrence, mezzotint, published 1823, 387mm x 305mm. Lawrence’s portrait was used as the frontispiece of Lady Knighton’s Memoirs of her husband, published in 1838.

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Fig. 8.3: Sir Walter Scott, 1st Bt. by John Henry Robinson, after Sir Thomas Lawrence, published 1833, line engraving, 424mm x 328mm.

We might say that the Lawrence portrait resulted from a transaction between three principal parties, the patron, the sitter and the artist; in the case of Northcote’s painting (Figure 8.4, overleaf) the other roles are played by Knighton and Scott again, but here there are also ghosts and doubles involved. Sir Walter Scott sits in a red chair, he is holding his stick and resting his chin gently on his right hand. To one side of a large, mostly blank canvas an image of Sir Walter Scott, chin on hand, is emerging. Before the canvas, and dwarfed by it, stands the painter, in a long bluish gown and a little red cap. With a palette in his left hand, a brush in the other, and turning to face his sitter, his profile almost merges with the unfinished painting. Northcote painted himself into the portrait— this was not part of the original commission, and he depicts Scott twice. Even so, Scott’s figures take up a small proportion of the canvas, Northcote’s own somewhat less. Three highlights grab the eye—the face of the seated Scott, Northcote’s head with its bright cap, and a small dog

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in the foreground. Not only is Northcote putting himself into the picture— “I thought it a great honour to be on the same canvas with Sir Walter” — but he is also evoking the ghost, or perhaps I should say the spirit of Titian in his depiction of himself.18

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Fig 8.4: Sir Walter Scott being Painted by James Northcote, by James Northcote, oil on canvas 1828, 28 ¼ x 21 ¼ inches, Royal Albert Memorial Gallery, Exeter.

This strange work emerged from a number of conversations, both actual and imagined, both literary and visual, and, I suspect, from rivalries as well as from friendships and forms of hero-worship. Both Northcote and Hazlitt manifested hostility to Lawrence, for example.19 In his important work on portraits of Scott, Francis Russell cites both Scott and Northcote on the encounter, to which the former came reluctantly. The latter was initially so delighted with his own work — “one of the best pictures I ever did in my life” —that he made a copy for himself, to the dismay of his patron, who demanded both canvases. According to Russell

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the one in Exeter is the copy, the original, dated 1828, was not traced, although it had been bought at a sale in 1953.20 By including himself, Northcote makes the claim to spectators that he was on a par with Scott, and it is revealing that Scott’s most positive recollection of the encounter was Northcote’s conversation about “Sir Joshua, Samuel Johnson, Burke, Goldsmith”.21 There is no doubt that his capacity to evoke in a direct, spontaneous manner, esteemed men from an earlier age was highly valued. He kept them alive by his chatter, they were perpetuated in him, and he took on some of their allure by association. Such associations were certainly at work when he asserted that Titian and then Reynolds were the world’s top portrait painters in a context where his own direct links with the latter were known and constantly reaffirmed.22 Northcote’s anecdotes could be invested with a certain kind of historical authenticity. This derived from his having been alive at the time, having enjoyed the intimacy that came from living in Sir Joshua’s house and having painted many prominent people. Northcote’s longevity, which allowed him to bridge what were seen as distinct eras in British history, was a significant phenomenon.

III “These two fine old men … talked of Titian and Bernini … Genius and Fame flung a spell into the air.”23 The old men in question were Northcote and the sculptor Joseph Nollekens (1737-1823) discussed by Hazlitt in his essay “On the Old Age of Artists” (1826). The association between Titian and Northcote was perhaps fed by Northcote’s sense of his own longevity, but it had many other dimensions. Since Titian’s name was everywhere this is hardly surprising. A limited number of artists were repeatedly evoked in making contemporary judgements, as is evident in the writings of Reynolds, Northcote and Hazlitt. Such a phenomenon is worth dwelling on. It suggests the existence of connoisseurial scales of judgement that could be used, with little explanation, in assessments of the value of any given work or artist. In part this is a (potentially) common language, but I suggest it has another, more anxious dimension, that concerns the status of British art and of works that were available to the public in British collections. Talk about artistic league tables had, unavoidably, contemporary resonances. Thus, to champion any specific figure, such as Titian, Michelangelo or Rembrandt, was necessarily to reveal allegiances, aspirations and identifications. To see these processes at work one need go no further than Reynolds’ Discourses and read them in conjunction with Blake’s hostile annotations,

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which were less a conversational reply than a stream of abuse. Take, for instance, Discourse IV, which discussed the following subjects: “General ideas, the presiding principle which regulates every part of art; invention, expression, colouring, and drapery.—Two distinct styles in historypainting; the grand, and the ornamental.—The schools in which each is to be found.—The composite style.—The style formed on local customs and habits, or a partial view of nature.”24 In this Discourse, Reynolds is by no means uncritical of the Venetians, although he is meticulous is setting Titian apart: “For my own part, when I speak of the Venetian painters, I wish to be understood to mean Paulo Veronese and Tintoret (sic), to the exclusion of Titian; for though his style is not so pure as that of many other of the Italian schools, yet there is a sort of senatorial dignity about him, which, however aukward (sic) in his imitators, seems to become him exceedingly. His portraits alone, from the nobleness and simplicity of character which he always gave them, will intitle him to the greatest respect, as he undoubtedly stands in the first rank in this branch of the art.” Blake’s comments on this passage are: “Titian, as well as the other Venetians, so far from Senatorial Dignity appears to me to give always the Characters of Vulgar Stupidity. Why should Titian & the Venetians be Named in a discourse on Art? Such idiots are not Artists.”25 In his comments on the Discourses, Blake was relentlessly hostile to Titian and the Venetians, whereas Reynolds was, if mixed, considerably warmer. Hazlitt also commented on Discourse IV, but I can find no references to Titian there.26 His views on the subject may be more easily gauged from his Sketches of the Principal Picture-Galleries in England (1824), and from The Fine Arts, an essay that appeared in the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1817. The latter was also published in book form, with Haydon’s Painting, where Hazlitt’s contribution occupied 63 pages, a significant proportion of which was given over to British painters, such as Hogarth and Reynolds—to whom close to twenty pages were devoted—and to the role of academies in promoting the fine arts. This weighting perhaps indicates Hazlitt’s concerns about the status of native art, to which he certainly does not give unqualified support. From Hazlitt Titian receives a broadly positive report; full marks for colour, truth and character, although not for invention or composition.27 Yet Hazlitt played a major part in writing the life of Titian that appeared under Northcote’s name in 1830, to which he appended, under his own name, An Enquiry whether the fine arts are promoted by academies and public institutions, based on his essays in The Champion in 1814.28 This collaboration, the precise details of which remain unclear, is particularly interesting in the light of Hazlitt’s comments on Northcote’s superiority as a conversationalist rather than as

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a writer, which may be found in another of his essays in The Plain Speaker (1826), “On the Conversation of Authors”. According to Hazlitt, Northcote “cannot write himself, because he loses himself in connecting passages, is fearful of the effect, and wants the habit of bringing his ideas into one focus or point of view.” He continued, “A lens is necessary to collect the diverging rays, the refracted and broken angular lights of conversation on paper.”29 Hazlitt was the lens to Northcote’s rays of light—an intensely visual metaphor that makes the former into a potent mediator. Both demonstrated considerable commitment in producing a two-volume biography, even if some of the material it contained was recycled. The frontispiece to volume I, a portrait of an aged, behatted Titian in profile, allegedly drawn from a self-portrait drawing once in Charles I’s collection, secures the visual kinship with Northcote. The kinship that Northcote, and indeed Hazlitt, felt with Titian, could be experienced in many ways, by appreciative viewing and discussion of his pictures, for instance, which enabled the affinities to be articulated and shared. Doubtless Northcote took particular pleasure in the fact that his self-portrait entered the Uffizi collection, which already possessed one by Titian, and another by Reynolds.30 Titian also features in Sketches of the Principal Picture-Galleries, including a portrait of the artist with a senator seen in Windsor.31 Thus Hazlitt, independently of the published conversations with Northcote, had viewed and judged works by Titian in English collections. Titian, then, is not just an admired artist from an earlier century, but “Titian”, a set of ideas and values to be evoked as required, for example, to make comparisons with other artists, and, in Northcote’s case, with himself. In fact, there were several “Titians”, as we saw in Blake’s riposte to Reynolds. According to Northcote’s own memoir, the association with Titian began when he was a young man: “Sir Joshua Reynolds commonly painted the hands and drapery in his pictures from his scholars. One morning, when I was sitting to Sir Joshua for this purpose, Edmund Burke came into the room to pay a visit to Sir Joshua, when, seeing me sitting in the chair he said: ‘This gentleman is not only a painter, but he is also like a picture by Titian!’ I relate this trifling anecdote as it tends to give some idea of my person, or at least how my appearance struck so sagacious a man as the eminent Mr. Burke.”32 Thanks to Reynolds, Northcote is able to yoke himself to both Titian and Burke, through a remark, reshaped into an anecdote, and trading on a specific notion of authenticity that draws energy from the “unconsciousness of his conversation”.33 Much later on, the question of a shared old age became a further device to aid Northcote’s

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identification with Titian; it generated a kind of circumstantial plausibility to the affinities between them.

IV “Hazlitt gave to Northcote a foretaste of posthumous fame and the power of expressing opinions in a language which no one but Hazlitt could command.” Stephen Gwynn (1864-1950), the Irish writer and politician, made this judgement when he edited the manuscript memoir for publication in 1898.34 In his writings that mention Northcote, Hazlitt gave the painter a new and different kind of life. 35 He mediated, even constructed a “Northcote” for new audiences. In this respect, Hazlitt was, as it were, a portrait painter, a claim made explicit in The Spirit of the Age or Contemporary Portraits, written in the 1820s. There it is possible to find his portrait of Sir Walter Scott, “undoubtedly the most popular writer of the age.”36 While Scott did not need Hazlitt, it is arguable that Northcote did. In many ways he was a successful artist, although it is never a straightforward matter to assess success. Northcote had become a full member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1787, he exhibited regularly, worked in a number of genres, made money, and depicted many leading figures of the time from royalty and aristocrats, to actors, men of science, thinkers and writers.37 Yet posterity has not been especially kind to Northcote’s artistic achievements. The National Portrait Gallery in London, the world’s largest collection of portraits, owns eleven of Northcote’s oil paintings, including two self-portraits in profile, and over fifty derivative prints. Three paintings are on display at the time of writing this essay—those of William Godwin (1756-1836), philosopher and novelist, Edward Jenner (1749-1823), surgeon, and Edmund Kean (1787-1833), actor.38 Godwin and Kean feature in the conversations with Hazlitt.

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Fig 8.5: James Northcote, by Frederick Christian Lewis, after George Henry Harlow, stipple engraving, published 1824, stipple engraving, 406mm x 280mm. Harlow’s portrait was made around 1817, and formed the basis of the frontispiece to Gwynn’s book on Northcote, published in 1898.

Yet, given Northcote’s affinity with Titian, the visual properties of his works are surprising. Indeed he cast doubt on the sincerity of Lawrence’s admiration of Titian, on the grounds it was not visible in his work!39 Northcote’s palette tends to the sombre, although Kean, depicted in the part of Brutus, sports a white toga bordered in red. Nonetheless, the overall effect remains muted. Jenner, of vaccination fame, whom he painted twice, represents one of Northcote’s enduring contributions, but this may partly be accounted for by the paucity of alternative images. The head by Lawrence is decidedly routine, although there is a gorgeous pastel

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and mezzotint by John Raphael Smith (1752-1812). Nonetheless, for a man of his eminence and worldwide celebrity, there are relatively few portraits of Jenner from life, and Northcote’s, which draw on the learned man in the study tradition, convey a gravity apt for a man who made the unique contribution of discovering a way of eliminating a disease— smallpox. The one painted in 1803—the year after he met Hazlitt, is markedly conversational since it pays a double homage in its similarities to Reynolds’ depiction of John Hunter (1728-1793), who had been the teacher of Edward Jenner.40 Northcote may have lived to be old, and actively traded on his memories, but his reputation remained a delicate matter for him and, it seems, for later commentators. Longevity is just as uncertain when applied to reputations, as to the human lifespan. Gwynn was emphatic that Northcote’s “excellence as a gossip was never disputed”, a comment which begs the question about the relationships between conversation and gossip.41 Gossip is about people, and it is about their personal lives even when it purports to concern their achievements. In a world steeped in curiosity, a thirst for evocative historical detail and a desire for artistic hierarchies, gossip and conversation merged. Northcote was entertaining because of his sharp tongue, often commented upon. He knew enough people of note, in the public eye and hence who were a sort of common property, for his views to be of interest. The fact that many of the eighteenth-century figures were British worthies added to the appeal of his opinions.42 Yet there is no doubt that Northcote was in the business of enhancing himself, and that Titian, like Hazlitt, was useful to him. Titian fitted neatly with some of Northcote’s attributes, but he was not alone in being a calibrating artistic figure in the imaginary of those interested in the visual arts and their progress. Michelangelo and Raphael were there too, as were Rembrandt and Van Dyck, among others. Talk was required to keep these figures active and to provide evocative accounts of them that moved, even slid, between their works and their reputations and those of contemporary artists, where the concept “reputation” was an unstable blend of opinion, prejudice, and judgement. Portraits, both literal and figurative, played a central role in anecdote, conversation and gossip. This is to say something about the content, both manifest and latent, of conversation. Just as central, however, was the manner in which conversations were conducted.

V “Mr Northcote’s manner is completely extempore. … All his thoughts come upon him unawares, and for this reason they surprise and delight

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you… you think only of his face, which is fine and expressive.” The words are, once again, Hazlitt’s, for whom Northcote was “all air and spirit”; his conversation was lacking in “affectation or effort”. “He seems just as if he was by himself or in the company of his own thoughts, and makes you feel quite at home.”43 All these comments are from Hazlitt’s essay On the Old Age of Artists, published in The Plain Speaker in 1826. This “picturetalking” as Hazlitt called it, is given added poignancy by the impending mortality of Nollekens and Northcote.44 Similar themes may be discerned in another set of conversations with Northcote that were recorded by the Westmoreland artist James Ward (1784-1850), who kept an account of their meetings from 1810, when they were introduced by a mutual friend, the portrait painter John Jackson (1778-1831). The tone of the published version is altogether more adulatory towards Northcote than was Gwynn’s edition of the notebooks, for example. Gwynn was careful not to take statements and relationships, such as that between Hazlitt and Northcote, at face value, yet he was sufficiently taken with Hazlitt’s remarks in the essay on old age to quote them at length.45 Fletcher, Ward’s editor, was also familiar with Hazlitt’s language; through his pen, Northcote is an “eloquent painter”, “one of the most simple and unassuming characters of his time … a most natural man…”.46 The common themes are inescapable. Northcote’s conversation was perceived and constructed as embodying certain ideals, even moral values, despite his sharp tongue. Candour, directness and lack of pretension were presented as desirable characteristics, by implication, because they were rare. His conversation stood for a particular type of authenticity, which was prized all the more because he had mixed with the great and the good, and, in a sense, seen through them.47 Thus the sharpness of his insights and the lightness of his conversation were complementary, offering, when joined together, a commentary that was aesthetic, social, and historical as well as gossipy. This conversational commentary was bracing, and as if spontaneous. Its wit prevented a ponderousness that might all too easily come with serious subjects, and located them in the domain of taste and fashion. These moves were possible, I suggest, only because Northcote himself was an outsider—a man who kept his regional accent, never married, lived in extreme simplicity, an “old wizard”, in Scott’s words.48 His conversation was in fact deemed to be that of a sort of wild child who had, nonetheless, seen the world.

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VI I have long found the concept of conversation attractive – it is a word used to express something that is valued between people, without prejudging what that something is like. Like portrait painters working in the presence of their sitters, in conversations some blending of consciousnesses necessarily occurs. The blurring between people and portraits acts as a spur to conversation, which then perpetuates the fuzzy boundaries. The historical awareness of past figures, when it prompts conversation, serves to keep them in mind, it gives them a distinctive kind of posthumous life. Through these processes—conversing, and making, viewing and discussing pictures—links are forged and affinities explored as they were between Northcote, Hazlitt and Ward. These were complex mediations, between ideas, speech and written accounts, and between past and present. It is telling that Northcote’s conversations, allegedly so piquant and weightless, have survived because they have been pinned down in writing, to be endlessly quoted and repeated. Northcote’s artistic works seem unexciting and provoke little interest today, unlike those by Lawrence— who, for Northcote, was a “man-milliner painter”, sure to be neglected by posterity.49 Yet the intimate, easy, spontaneous conversations of the Devonian have fared rather better than his pictures. The posthumous fate of Northcote reveals a great deal about the enduring appeal of “conversation”.

Acknowledgements Arthur Burns, Kenneth Fincham, Katie Halsey, Holger Hoock, the staff of both the National Portrait Gallery, London, and Cambridge University Library, and a number of audiences to whom this material was presented, have helped me in the preparation of my essay, for which I offer them warm thanks. Figures 1, 2, 3 and 5 are reproduced courtesy of the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery, London, and Figure 4 is reproduced courtesy of the Royal Albert Memorial Gallery, Exeter. 1

P.P.Howe, ed., The Complete Works of William Hazlitt (London: J.M. Dent, 1930-34) 21 volumes, volume 12, 1931, 89. 2 Howe, Complete Works, volume 12, 1931, 39. See also William Hazlitt, Conversations of James Northcote (London: Colburn and Bentley, 1830); Edmund Gosse, Conversations of James Northcote R.A. (London: R. Bentley, 1894); Frank Swinnerton, Conversations of James Northcote, Esq. R.A. (London: Hutchinson, 1952). On the theme of conversation, see Peter Burke, The Art of Conversation

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(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993). Hazlitt’s motives for publishing the conversations were, we should assume, complex. They are usefully seen as part of a suite of interventions on the visual arts that appeared throughout Hazlitt’s life. Recent scholarship on Northcote is sparse, but see Martin Hopkinson, “James Northcote’s The Death of Maximilian Leopold of Brunswick”, The British Art Journal 4 (2003): 29-36. 3 Howe, Complete Works, volume 12, 1931, 91. 4 Howe, Complete Works, volume 12, 1931, 39. 5 Ludmilla Jordanova, “Portraits, People and Things: Richard Mead and Medical Identity”, History of Science, 61 (2003): 143-68, seeks to show some of the ways in which this embedding worked for medical practitioners in an earlier period. 6 L. Gossman, “Anecdote and History”, History and Theory 42 (2003): 143-68. 7 James Northcote, The Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds (London: Colburn, 1818). 8 The index to Hazlitt’s Complete Works edited by Howe provides an excellent way of tracking his opinions on any given subject. We know that Hazlitt and Northcote disagreed about some fundamental matters, such as politics. See Ernest Fletcher, ed., Conversations with James Northcote R.A. (London: Methuen and co., 1901), 83, where they discuss social hierarchies, and Stephen Gwynn, Memorials of an Eighteenth Century Painter (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898), 15-16, where he indicates the antipathies between Northcote and Hazlitt. The broad political setting of Northcote’s conversation deserves treatment. On his context, see the magisterial work by Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783-1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) and Arthur Burns and Joanna Innes, eds, Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 9 Swinnerton, Conversations, 11. 10 Howe, Complete Works, volume 12, 1931, 39-40. 11 Howe, Complete Works, volume 12, 1931, 34. 12 For a sense of Northcote’s oeuvre, see Gwynn, Memorials, 265-88, which includes a list of his works made by the artist, and Jacob Simon, “The Account Book of James Northcote”, The Walpole Society 58 (1995/6): 21-125, which has 742 entries. I take Northcote’s concern with depicting himself to be an expression of his interest in his own artistic identity and those of his forebears, that is, it has a conversational component. Two of his painted self-portraits may be found on the website of the National Portrait Gallery, London: www.npg.org.uk. 13 Simon, Account Books, entry numbers 469, 601, 625, 671, 694, 698, 699, 701, 719, 726, 727, 729. 14 Gwynn, Memorials, 7; Lady Knighton, Memorials of Sir William Knighton, Bart. Keeper of the Privy Purse During the Reign of his Majesty King George the Fourth (London: Richard Bentley, 1838), 2 volumes, II, 99-101 and 180-3, for example. Lady Knighton was an amateur artist, and it seems that Northcote was especially fond of her. 15 Francis Russell, Portraits of Sir Walter Scott, A Study of Romantic Portraiture (London: Printed for the Author by White Brothers, 1987), entry number 153.

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Kenneth Garlick, Sir Thomas Lawrence: A Complete Catalogue of the Oil Paintings (Oxford: Phaidon, 1989), catalogue numbers 455 and 456. 17 Michael Levey, Sir Thomas Lawrence (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 2, see also 273-4, and Garlick, Sir Thomas Lawrence, catalogue number 707. 18 Fletcher, Conversations, 130, the whole story of the portrait is recounted on 129131. 19 Fletcher, Conversations, 144-50, and 163. One indication of Hazlitt’s views on Lawrence is his studious omissions of any references to him where they would be expected, for example, in commenting on the change of Royal Academy President in 1830, Howe, Complete Works, volume 18, 1933, 184-5. For explicit criticisms of Lawrence see Swinnerton, Conversations, 116. 20 Russell, Portraits, entry numbers 153 and 154; Simon, Account Book, numbers 726 and 7, only the Exeter version includes the dog, although Scott was very often painted with a dog or dogs. 21 Russell, Portraits, number 153. I am hinting that Northcote was seen as a piece of “living history”. He did produce a number of historical works, and his works for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery were well-known, see Walter Pape and Frederick Burwick, eds, The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery (Bottrop: Peter Pomp, 1996). 22 Fletcher, Conversations, 69 and 54. 23 Howe, Complete Works, volume 12, 1931, 89. 24 Pat Rogers, ed., Sir Joshua Reynolds Discourses (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992), 116. 25 Robert Wark, ed., Sir Joshua Reynolds Discourses on Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975), 67, 303. 26 Howe, Complete Works, volume 18, 1933, 77-84 concerns Discourse IV. 27 William Hazlitt, “The Fine Arts” in Benjamin Haydon, ed., Painting and the Fine Arts (Edinburgh, A. & C. Black, 1838), 20-22. 28 James Northcote, The Life of Titian: With Anecdotes of the Distinguished Persons of his Time (London: Colburn and Bentley, 1830), 2 volumes; the essays are in Howe, Complete Works, volume 18, 1933, 37-51. Tom Paulin, The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt’s Radical Style (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), 245, 286, 293, 294 comments on The Life of Titian in terms of Hazlitt’s sensuous engagement with paint and words, and his admiration for Titian; on 293 he suggests that Hazlitt’s writing resembles “both a sketch and a portrait”. 29 Howe, Complete Works, volume 12, 1931, 40. 30 Elizabeth Drury, Self-portraits of the World’s Greatest Painters (London: Parkgate Books, 1999) contains a wide range of examples including by Titian, Northcote, and John Hazlitt (1767-1837), William’s brother. On self-portraiture see Anthony Bond and Joanna Woodall, eds, Self Portrait Renaissance to Contemporary (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2005) and on the Uffizi collection, Giovanna Giusti and Maria Sframeli, eds, Artists’ Self Portraits from the Uffizi (Milan: SKIRA, 2007). 31 William Hazlitt, Sketches of the Principal Picture-Galleries in England (London: Taylor & Hessey, 1824), 83, see also 68.

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Gwynn, Memorials, 112—he is quoting from Northcote’s manuscript memoir. Gwynn, Memorials, 21—he is quoting Hazlitt. 34 Gwynn, Memorials, 24, on Gwynn, see his autobiography, Experiences of a Literary Man (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1926). He also wrote a biography of Scott, The Life of Sir Walter Scott (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1930), in which Sir Thomas Lawrence but not Northcote features: 288, 298 and 345. 35 Howe, Complete Works, volume 21, 1934, 148-9 lists the references to Northcote in Hazlitt’s writings. 36 E.D.Mackerness, ed., William Hazlitt: The Spirit of the Age or Contemporary Portraits (Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers, 1991), 2nd edition, 96-112, 96. 37 For the artistic context in which Northcote was operating see David Solkin, ed., Art on the Line: the Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House, 1780-1836 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001); Brian Allen, ed., Towards a Modern Art World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995). 38 The National Portrait Gallery’s website is the best source of information on their holdings and whether an item is on display, all items in the primary collection, and many others, are illustrated in colour—www.npg.org.uk. 39 Fletcher, Conversations, 145. 40 Ludmilla Jordanova, Defining Features: Scientific and Medical Portraits 16602000 (London: Reaktion Books and the National Portrait Gallery, 2000), chapter III discusses Jenner and reproduces the portraits of him mentioned here. 41 Gwynn, Memorials, 2. 42 Northcote painted a picture of British Worthies, now at the Foundling Hospital Museum in London, see Simon, Account Books, entry number 722. 43 Howe, Complete Works, volume 12, 1931, 88-97, quotations are from 91, 89, 92. 44 Howe, Complete Works, volume 12, 1931, 93. 45 By contrast, A.C.Grayling, The Quarrel of the Age. The Life and Times of William Hazlitt (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000) emphasises a warm friendship. It is true that Hazlitt’s writings contain many statements of praise for Northcote, but it seems implausible that there was no friction between two such difficult men. Their quarrel after the publication of the conversations is well known, see 331-2. 46 Fletcher, Conversations, 17, 22. 47 For example, there is an anecdote about Northcote rebuking the Duke of Clarence for his rudeness, and the future William IV returning to Northcote’s house the next day to apologise, Fletcher, Conversations, 22-3. 48 Russell, Portraits, entry number 153. 49 Fletcher, Conversations, 147. Lawrence is often taken to be the paradigmatic British “romantic” painter, just as Hazlitt is an important figure in Romanticism. I have eschewed the use of these tricky terms in relation to Northcote’s conversations, although I recognise the prevalence of “romantic” themes in their construction. A useful recent work is Iain McCalman, ed., An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776-1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 33

CHAPTER NINE PORTRAITURE AS CONVERSATION PETER DE BOLLA

The conjunction of portraiture and conversation is not, at first glance, immediately perspicacious. Paintings, as we know, do not have the power of speech. One way of diminishing this improbable connection would be to twist and torture each term–portraiture and conversation–so that the one might speak, as it were, to the other. If for example, under certain conditions, conversation might be understood to involve inanimate things then, one might suppose, portraiture may fall within the realm of the speaking. Or, to take the other route, if portraiture may be thought of not only as a visual form, but also in relation to the activities engaged in the production of likeness, then one might begin to understand it as a kind of conversational practice. Both of these options will appear in the following argument but my starting point will be somewhat distant from them. Essentially I wish to begin by investigating some of the lineaments of the concept of conversation in order to cast a rather more unusual light on the practice of portraiture in eighteenth-century Britain. This requires some preliminary work around conceptualisation itself. Is conversation a concept? This of course begs the question of what a concept might be. Are concepts to be distinguished from words?1 Although there are different views about this I shall assume throughout that a concept provides something like a scaffolding or architecture which enables one to think something else. I need a concept of space, for example, in order to understand distance. Concepts may differ in kind or in genre: some, for example, are grounding or foundational. Space would be a good example here. Some are abstract, some evaluative and so on. We might also construct a taxonomy of concepts according to their grammar. In doing so one needs to attend to how particular concepts are used, say transitively or intransitively, and to note the rules of integration or association between concepts.2

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How might one begin to parse the concept of conversation if one begins from the assumption that it is indeed a conceptual form? A good place to start would be the employment of conversation within a constellation of other terms from which it may be distinguished, or with which it displays family resemblances. So, for example, conversation might be plotted against disputation (where the rhetorical force of speaking with others has a particular role to play in the concept’s architecture) or discussion (where the sense of a structure and purpose to talk, its consecutive pacing and spacing, takes a primary role). All three of these concepts require the presence of at least two people, although in some special cases the notion of solo conversation seems intelligible (one might speak with oneself, or with an imaginary other, say, even, with God). But in all these cases the bedrock of the concept is provided by the “con” in the word itself. Conversation’s conceptual grammar requires the “with” that is structurally a part of its formation as a concept. From here I want to make a short leap and to claim that the concept of conversation is itself reliant upon, or grounded in, a prior concept, namely the notion that the addressee is able to talk back. Conversing with another is predicated upon the belief that the other can speak. But, not only this, it also requires that what is spoken participates in the same discursive event or consecutive structure as one’s own speech. In other words conversation is distinguished from declamation, muttering, babbling, and all the other forms of speaking which do not require the voice of the other to be heard within the same discursive space or event. Conversation, then, cannot really be said to occur unless something talks back, and what is said is heard. This formulation, in which the thing that returns speech is not exclusively thought of as human or even animate, may seem slightly strange, but I want to press it as hard as I can in order to make the bridge to portraiture, since the one thing that portraits manifestly cannot do is speak. Although on the one hand a world in which things, say rocks or stones or trees, might speak back to us would appear to be irrational (and we might question the sanity of those who claimed this to be the case) on the other there are many ways in which this notion is already a part of our conceptual habitus.3 At least in some versions of the psychoanalyst’s role, the therapeutic silence which confronts the analysand may lead the way to a more inanimate conception of conversation’s habitus. In this scenario it does not feel particularly odd to claim that things listen and may, even, talk back. Given this one may quite easily come to the view that things are possessed of certain human qualities, say intention or intuition. In respect to this observation much of the remainder of this essay will explore the

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ways in which an aesthetic response to a painting can be understood as a conversation in which things talk back.4 Perhaps the easiest way of beginning this task is to return to my initial observation. As stated above, whatever else it may be that portraits do, one thing we know that they do not do is speak. So what do portraits do? I am not going to attempt a direct answer to this immediately since it is clear that a number of ways of beginning to take stock of this issue may be helpful. One might, for example, place the production and consumption of portraits in a socio-economic analysis of eighteenth-century British culture. Or one might develop an account of the role that portraits played in the construction of a particular artist’s career. Useful as both are for sketching out a full answer to the question, I shall begin with an associated question: what are portraits for? The artist and connoisseur Jonathan Richardson will provide us with an initial steer: To come to Portraits; the picture of an absent relation, or friend, helps to keep up those sentiments which frequently languish by absence and may be instrumental to maintain, and sometimes to augment friendship, and paternal, filial, and conjugal love and duty.5

Richardson places the use of the portrait clearly within a familial setting in which the moral responsibilities of connection are brought firmly into the foreground. According to Richardson, then, what portraits do is help secure the bonds which tie individuals into a community of connection: they arouse those feelings which help us to figure our relation to others as a form of extension, almost as if one were able to touch absent persons. This observation helps us understand some important features of the facture, the making of portraits outlined below. But it also helps make a link to the counterbalance in my title, conversation, since it gestures towards a conception of community which is not composed exclusively of persons. So here, at once, is the prospect of the thingliness of conversation. Richardson, for his part, does not consider that the subject of a portrait might be unknown to the viewer; in this regard he is not alert to the questions of longevity that will preoccupy Reynolds in his desire to subtract the particular from the portrait mode. For Richardson, as for many of us, portraits are naturally at home in the depiction of likeness, and in order to feel that at-homeness we must be able to recognize what an image is like to. There is a homology here with one version of conversation which conceptualizes the exchange of views as predicated upon the recognition of the other’s voice. In one account of this process that is a misrecognition since the voice of the other always comes clothed in the garb of the sound of one’s own voice. In this schema conversation is

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predicated upon narcissism and any political philosophy built upon its self-regarding foundations is bound to lead to the society of inflated ego, and at the end of the day a dialogue of the deaf. Adam Smith’s rather more complex account of empathy and the development of the imagined stranger within, the impartial spectator, is likely to lead to a rather more communitarian politics and ethics. Portraiture in the eighteenth century in Britain certainly pitched for a place at this table since its practice (both socially and psychically) opened out the realm of the political to multiple agents within the domain of culture. This provides one very good answer to the question “what are portraits for?” They are for the regulation and construction of a cohesive society of independent agents who engage in conversation with others. Richardson, in common with many writers on the practice of portraiture, is highly sensitized to the scene of recognition which accompanies an encounter with this kind of representation. Indeed recognition may be thought of as a determining feature of an encounter with an image that we designate a portrait. But does this recognition scene also confirm or even construct a particular form of knowledge, that one “knows” the person depicted? Or, to put that another way, is this kind of recognition of likeness constitutive of a particular form of knowledge? This of course raises the common topos of the distinction between propositional knowledge and knowledge by acquaintance, but I do not want to suggest that in order to recognize an image as a portrait one of these forms of knowledge is more likely to be helpful than the other. What I mean to introduce is the thought that an encounter with a portrait produces a specific form of knowledge, specific to this encounter. This thought will return in the closing passages of the essay as the role of the aesthetic is explored with regard to the conversation one has with portraiture. In the period under investigation, the mid eighteenth century in Britain when the practice of portraiture was by far the most popular form of visual representation within the curtilage of high culture, various pressures internal to the history and development of the fine arts conspired to orient the debate and discussion about painting likenesses in a very particular direction. Much of this debate can be understood in terms of the claims painters made, or wanted to make, on behalf of the status of their craft or skill. And this, in turn, can be seen in terms of the increasing professionalization of cultural producers: playwrights, poets and novelists as well as painters of many stripes. Seen in this light the rather abstruse conceptual formulation of what was to be understood as the proper subject of a portrait (not simply likeness but also “character”) participated in the

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struggle over the rights of artists, over their economic or social status. But to see it only this way would be to ignore the strange conceptual ontology of the portrait, something which predates and postdates the period in which both Reynolds and Gainsborough worked.6 It is an issue as deeply embedded in the representational practice of portraiture for Lucian Freud or Francis Bacon. For the problem with portraits is essentially the same as that addressed by Kant’s third Critique. How do we come to knowledge? Through the operation of a set of reasoning practices grounded in those universals which circumscribe the knowable, or through acquaintance with particulars for which we lack universals? In terms more narrowly focused on the portrait, do such images portray the particular, the individual in all her singularity, or, rather, do they portray the ideal, the universal? This question was inflected in a very specific way for the period in which Richardson wrote and Reynolds painted since the immediate context for them made a distinction between mere resemblance, the province of the face painter, and the productions resulting from the genius of the artist which moved beyond the particular to the ideal. To put this in more loaded terms, in order for the practice of portrait painting to gain prestige among the other genres it must aspire to something more than simple presentation.7 When we see the debate in these terms Richardson’s turn away from the person, the idea we have already encountered by which a portrait is the vehicle for transporting absent persons into our immediate environs, towards the more technical visual aspects of the encounter contributes to that pitch for prestige. The value attached to painting persons, he goes on to suggest, is derived from the fact that portraiture is a kind of seeing. It is a form of vision that does not remain at the surface of things, but rather comprises a kind of speculation that sees into the interior of its subject. Moreover this way of seeing, I shall call it inspection, also has ramifications in relation to the ethics of personation.8 Richardson writes: ’Tis not enough to make a Tame, Insipid resemblance of the features so that every body shall know who the picture was intended for, nor even to make the picture what is often said to be prodigious like: (This is often done by the lowest of face-painters, but then ’tis ever with the air of a fool, and an unbred person). A portrait-painter must understand mankind, and enter into their characters, and express their minds as well as their faces: and as his business is chiefly with people of condition, he must think as a gentleman, and a man of sense, or ’twill be impossible to give such their true, and proper resemblances. (21-22)

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If we follow Richardson here we might say that portraits are forms of forensic inquiry: they give us knowledge of being human which sets out from the particular but arrives at the general. This is, of course, close to Kant’s formulation of aesthetic judgment. What do portraits do? As I have already indicated above, one thing that portraits clearly do at this time, and in this culture, is to present the claims of the artist to a certain social standing: this image has been made by a person of some merit, connected to such and such, able to see below the surface of manners and fashion, and so on. Reynolds was perhaps the most conspicuous artist of the century to mine this particular seam. But a slightly different perspective on what portraits do is opened up by attending to the specific locales in which they are used: they are placed in the waiting rooms of portraitists, advertising the skills of the artist. They are exhibited at public exhibitions, often without the names of the sitters revealed, and they hang in semi-public domestic spaces as well as the private apartments of individuals who had, mostly, commissioned them. In relation to the topic of this essay it is the public locale that I shall dwell upon. What should one do on encountering a portrait in public? Here is Richardson again: Upon the sight of a portrait, the character and master-strokes of the history of the person it represents are apt to flow in upon the mind, and to be the subject of conversation: so that to sit for one’s picture, is to have an abstract of one’s life written, and published, and ourselves thus consign’d over to honour, or infamy. (13-14)

Portraits, then, are prompts for conversation, and the process of their making is a textual one. Sitting for one’s portrait is equivalent to turning one’s self, one’s person, into a text. In this sense it is a technique of subjectivity, a means of realizing subjectivity. But it is also simultaneously a process of objectification since the image prompts conversation: as Richardson points out it is the proximate cause or even object of that conversation. This immediately raises the issue of propriety: what is sanctioned by this public encounter, what might be allowed, what condoned? Where does polite conversation shade into malicious gossip? Given these concerns it is unsurprising, perhaps, that Richardson feels the need to constrain conversation by placing the viewing activity under the aegis of an ethical proscription. He continues: I know not what influence this has, or may have, but methinks ’tis rational to believe that pictures of this kind are subservient to virtue; that men are excited to imitate good actions, and persuaded to shun the vices of those

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This comment ought to be placed in the wider context of the pitch adverted to above: if painting (and by extension painters) was to rise above mere craft or skill and become a liberal art it must have pretensions to some versions of improvement.9 And the most efficacious way of achieving that is to bring the techne of representation within the orbit of the ethical. This is why the aesthetic, at least for writers in this period, could never be cast loose from the moral. The recognition scene, most especially the internalized scene of recognition that comes with the imago of the impartial spectator, has always both an aesthetic register (knowledge is arrived at by the singular or particular), and a moral (whereby the particular is disciplined by the universal). It was this combination of the aesthetic and the ethical which enabled the period to conceive of portraits as one of the means for regulating social and political behaviour, as instructing citizens in the codes of conduct conducive to a well ordered society. Portraits, according to this way of seeing things, get us to talk together, to enter into the dialogue that constantly negotiates the scylla of solipsism and the charybdis of community. They help us identify self-interest and ameliorate its tendency towards the superimpression of selfishness. They show the truth of the subject even if it is viewers who must speak such truth. Portraits, then, act as a kind of resonating mirror, to mix a metaphor, both reflecting the world and responding to it, showing how the social appears and attempting to correct its excesses, presenting identities and molding them. One might say that portraits are in dialogue with both the ego and superego of cultural production.10 Given the argument I have sketched above it is a matter of some consequence as to how these images are made. Here I mean to be quite literalistic in the first instance since casting our attention to the facture of an image can help us understand something about its conceptual ontology. If we think of an oil portrait on canvas a number of making processes are clearly involved: the stretching of the canvas, its preparation, the mixing of pigments, selection of brushes and so forth. All of these are manual activities. But in the making that is the subsequent painting, itself of course also an incontrovertibly manual operation for painters in the eighteenth century, there is another component–the optical–which provides a second necessary condition for the production of the image. It requires a kind of “fit” or regulation of the hand to the eye (perhaps tellingly the reverse is not commonly thought to be true). What this amounts to is an optical surveillance of the movement and gestures of the

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hand. Portraits, of course, are no different in this regard from other paintings, say landscapes, or indeed visual forms, say bas reliefs, whose mode is representational. Consequently the move I now want to make in which this opticalmanual practice is made to resonate with what I have so far said about the architechtonic of the concept of conversation should not be taken as a unique feature of portraits. Nevertheless there is a specific aspect to this optical-manual facture in the case of portraiture to which we need to attend. Here is a manual for artists explaining a difficulty in portrait practice: There is a thing which the Italians call Morbilezza; the meaning of which word, is to express the softness, and tender liveliness of flesh and blood, so as the eye may almost invite the hand to touch and feel it, as if it were alive; and this is the hardest thing to compass in the whole art of painting.11

It is the overtly somatic register of touch which produces an area of disquiet for the portraitist (and by extension the viewer as well), that at the very least must be negotiated with some care and, perhaps one should say, tact. For the painter does not merely touch his subject in rendering a likeness, he dips his hands into the very materiality of person, feels the pulse, handles the flesh of his subject. Given this a portrait participates in a conversation of a very particular kind and it is conducted through the sense of touch. This is why eighteenth century artists were concerned to minimize the potential for misconduct, for the improper conversation or licentious touch to become manifest since upon such propriety rests their reputation and, therefore, livelihood. To be touched by Reynolds, for example, has very different effects from being touched by Nathaniel Dance. To be touched by the mechanic face-painter is very different from being touched by the liberal artist. The former only sees in monochrome and at the surface of self-presentation while the latter sees into the chromatic interior of person, into personality. The portraitist not only captures a likeness he also conveys and constructs an identity. And the techne for accomplishing that is the optical-manual regulatory system described above. It is predicated upon touch.12 How, then, does the facture of the portrait negotiate the seductions of narcissism? By which I mean the narcissism of both the sitter and the artist. One of the ways this may be achieved is by insisting on the conceptual architecture of conversation outlined above: the painter resists talking to her/himself in the reflection of the canvas by invoking the voice of the picture. The painting talks back. In order to understand that

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compacted idea more fully we need to introduce another distinction, between the public and the private, that structured so much of the period’s sense of itself and of person. The notion of the Habermasian “public sphere” has become so ubiquitous in the scholarship on the Enlightenment (both as an accepted and a contested description of the period) that its utility may no longer be very significant. We do not need to explore the many ways in which Habermas’s thesis has been misunderstood or misappropriated (it is not, for example, primarily a contribution to historical knowledge) in order to grasp the fact that in the singular, the public sphere, the concept does not adequately convey the nature of eighteenth-century British culture. We should be careful not to criticize the Habermasian thesis for what it was not intended to do. Once we begin to work with the multiplicity of public spaces and private enclaves which interact with each other as a set of stratifications of eighteenth-century socio-political and cultural life it becomes clear that the public-private distinction was one of a number of tools used in the fabrications of self (among other things).13 And this is where conversation and portraiture enter the frame. How can one legitimately have a conversation with oneself in public around an encounter with a portrait? This is where the development of the concept of the aesthetic as a distinct region of experience enters the argument. But before turning to that development I shall outline in a little more detail the ways in which portraiture was inserted within some of the forms that the public-private distinction regulated.14 Portraits in this period may be used in public in a variety of ways. We have already noted that they may be introduced into the traffic of conversation in the exhibition space.15 They may also prompt a different kind of conversation in the waiting rooms of portraitists: how demure she looks! How unkempt her attire! Yet further differences in the topic and manner of conversation may be licensed and prompted by more “private” spaces, say in a gallery in a country house.16 A distinct and perhaps more “private” use of the portrait was attached to the miniature.17 Here the close proximity of the visage to the body (many miniatures were set into lockets or pendants and worn by those associated with the person depicted) immediately raised questions about the proprieties of public and private spaces. The locket, when closed, could clearly be held within the confines of the “personal”. When opened and shown to an interlocutor what negotiation between public and private would be required? But these and other uses for the object we call the portrait are connected to something else without which there would be nothing to negotiate: to the activities of

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looking and seeing. For what portraits ask of their viewers is how to look and see and be overseen looking. We may now begin to identify a structural feature of both portraiture and conversation, a conceptual architecture they have in common, since conversation must always have the potential for being overheard. Which is not to say that it always is overheard. My point here is not to highlight the social aspects of conversation; it is, of course, a commonplace to note that conversation always has to negotiate the parameters of the precise location in which it held (a private or a public space, the bedroom or the bus). I have more in mind the thought that if objects talk back then the scene of overhearing might include not only persons but things as well. This suggests that the capacity of being overheard is in the world. This would remove all possibility of a truly private space, unless it was uniquely the interiorized space of subjectivity, the unconscious. But even in there it might be difficult to be certain that all objects have been banished. Whether or not this a helpful way of conceiving the listening and speaking world, the world heard, it suggests that portraiture, among the many things that it does, pictures to us the overhearing world. And it is important to stress here that I do not mean that the objects represented in portraits perform that task. It is, rather, in the depicted sitter and our conversation with her or him that is the structure of viewing the portrait, that we sense the ears and eyes of things overhearing and overlooking our selves.18 One painter in the period who was particularly sensitive to this conceptual manifold was Thomas Gainsborough. He thought that vision connected him, connected his sensorium, to the world through the sense of touch. And when he painted he experienced that sense of touch intimately: it was a way of knowing the world through the haptic. In contrast to Gainsborough, Reynolds recognized the tactile aspect of painting, but wished to keep it at a distance. For Reynolds touch was a technology.19 Gainsborough, however, entertained the idea that touch was a techne: it led in and for itself to the construction of knowing. And given this, painting, the application of paint, for Gainsborough provides one of the means for interrogating how one sees, and therefore how one knows.20 Touch and paint are instrumental in the forensic inquiry into the forms of life. Given this, paint, the materiality of pigment, ought to be taken rather more seriously than it commonly is in the discussion of Gainsborough’s art.21 In conclusion I want to return to what above I claimed to be the utility of the aesthetic in relation to the negotiations set in motion by the encounter with portraiture (and here the distinction between public and private locales for that encounter is not decisive). If the encounter with a

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likeness on the picture plane asks us to enter into a conversation, or conversations, and at least one of those conversations is with oneself then how can one avoid the threat of narcissism? The answer to this can be most easily found in the conceptual work around conversation with which this essay began. For if the “con” in conversation includes things in the world, if objects speak back, then the aesthetic appreciation of the portrait participates in a conversation with the other. Of course this would not be restricted to aesthetic appreciations of a single genre. It is the aesthetic which allows one to have a conversation with oneself in public and for that conversation to be bound with others: that is the force of Kant’s characterization of an aesthetic judgment as both subjective and universal. Aesthetic judgments, on this account, must always involve disputation, conversation. Being overheard in conversation with a painting is one of the ways we are bound together as a community. This is not the same thing as the exposure of an interior monologue, nor is it the sound of psyche’s plaint. On the contrary, it opens up a realm of sociality in which the fear of being touched is transformed into the corroboration of being in the world. 1

A number of recent works in “historical epistemology” seek to maintain the distinction between words and concepts. See, among others, Arnold Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), Mieke Bal, Traveling Concepts in the Humanities (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), and Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 2 Within the confines of the present essay it will only be possible to gesture towards this larger project of providing a taxonomy of concepts. Part of that project also involves the parsing of concepts in relation to their epistemological architecture. 3 The Wordsworthian cast of this sentence is meant to indicate that within a particular philosophical tradition (of which I take Wordsworth’s poetry to be a part) the notion that things may speak is far from eccentric. In recent times Heidegger’s interrogation of the thingliness of the thing is perhaps the most recent and formidable example. On this see Martin Heidegger, What is a Thing?, trans. W.B Barton, Jr and Vera Deutsch (Lanham: University Press of America, 1967). For an interesting commentary or echo see John Sallis, Echoes: After Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). 4 The phrase “aesthetic response” is used here in the technical sense of an experience which comes in the form of the subjective universal. On this see my “Towards the materiality of aesthetic experience,” Diacritics, Spring (2002): 32: 1. 5 Jonathan Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting, 2nd ed. enlarged (London, 1725), 13. 6 Something of its oddness can be glimpsed in the thought that a necessary but not sufficient condition for an image to belong to the genre of portrait is likeness or

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resemblance. This is why paintings depicting sitters long dead whose accuracy cannot be gauged continue to be seen as portraits. 7 This of course raises a set of issues around presentation and representation. The secondary literature on this topic is vast, but for a set of essays that intersect with the current argument in very interesting ways see Louis Marin, On Representation, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 8 Within the period the most influential accounts of personation along these lines are to be found in the Scottish school, most especially in the work of David Hume and Adam Smith. 9 The classic discussion of painting’s status in the period remains John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). 10 One of the most thought-provoking accounts of portraiture along these lines is to be found in Harry Berger, Jr., Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), especially Part Two: facing the gaze, 107-228. 11 Observations upon the Art of Painting (London, 1719), 21. 12 This should be seen in relation to the theory of vision Ann Bermingham calls “extramission”, and which is generally understood to have withered by the early eighteenth century. Within the society of painters and working artists, however, there is good evidence that touch, the central plank of the theory, continued to be thought of as one of the bases for vision. See Ann Bermingham’s introductory essay to Sensation and Sensibility (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 13 The most extensive and thorough account of this is Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 14 The most important area on which the current argument remains silent is the political. A much longer account would be necessary to explore with care the myriad ways in which the cleavage of the public and private distributed political filiations. In respect to painting this would require discussion not only of how portraits were used, commissioned and displayed but also their manifest meanings as depictions of living persons. This is a very complicated issue; something of the historical precision required by such an analysis can be gleaned from the most informed recent account of the politics of privacy in the period, John Barrell’s The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790’s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 15 Much recent work on eighteenth-century British painting has attended to the specifics of the exhibition room. The most useful account of the Royal Academy is to be found in David Solkin, ed., Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780-1836 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). 16 Elizabeth Bennett’s encounter with the portrait of Darcy at Pemberley in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is perhaps the locus classicus for this example. There Austen carefully observes the proprieties regarding female competence in visual culture: Elizabeth, as befits a woman, is far happier with drawings than formal portraits in oil.

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On this see my The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), especially 28-39. 18 I do not mean to suggest that portraits are uniquely placed in relation to this. The genre we call “still life” also participates in this conversational network. On this see Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four essays on Still Life Painting (London: Reaktion Books, 1990). 19 A recent Tate exhibition of Reynolds’s portraits (London, May-September, 2005), entitled Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity allowed one to inspect at close quarters his particular modes of handling paint. See the excellent catalogue to the show edited by Martin Postle, and for a different way of approaching Reynolds’s affective relations to the portrayal of male bodies, see Martin Myrone, Body Building: Reforming Masculinities in British Art 1750-1810 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 20 Gainsborough’s letters give ample evidence for this argument. In a letter of 1758 to William Mayhew he writes: “I don’t think that it would be more ridiculous for a person to put his nose close to the canvas and say the colours smell offensive, than to say how rough the paint lies; for one is just as material as the other with regard to hurting the effect and drawing of a picture. Sir Godfrey Kneller used to tell them that pictures were not made to smell of; and what made his pictures more valuable than others with the connoisseurs was his pencil or touch.” John Hayes, ed., The Letters of Thomas Gainsborough (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 1011. 21 A recent exception to this is Susan Sloman, Gainsborough in Bath (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).

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Jarvis, Simon. “Problems in the Phenomenology of the Gift”, Angelaki 6:2 (2001): 67-77. —. “The Gift in Theory”, Dionysius 17 (1999): 201-22. Johnson, Barbara. “L’Esthétique du Mal”. In Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003, 26-7. Ketchum, Carl H., ed. The Letters of John Wordsworth. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969. Klein, Melanie. “Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States” (1940). In The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell. London: Penguin, 1986. Levinas, Emmanuel. Proper Names. Translated by Michael B. Smith. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. —. God, Death, and Time. Translated by Bettina Bergo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. —. “Prayer without Demand”. In The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Marin, Louis. Des pouvoirs de l’image. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1993. Marion, Jean-Luc. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Matlak, Richard E. Deep Distresses: William Wordsworth, John Wordsworth, Sir George Beaumont, 1800-1808. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003. Matthews, Samantha. Poetical Remains: Poet’s graves, Bodies, and Books in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. McAdam, E.L., Jr. “Wordsworth’s Shipwreck”, PMLA 77 (1962): 240-7. Owen, W.J.B. and Jane Worthington Smyser, eds. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974. Robinson, Judith. L’Analyse de l’esprit dans les Cahiers de Valéry. Paris: José Corti, 1963. Terada, Rei. Feeling in Theory: Emotions after the “Death of the Subject”. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2001. Wordsworth, William, Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 18001807. Ed. Jared Curtis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983. —. The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850. Eds Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams , and Stephen Gill. New York and London: Norton, 1979.

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Chapter Five Adams, John Quincy. Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory. 2 vols. New York: Russell & Russell, 1962. —. “The Defence of the Constitutions: An American Boudoir.” In Adrienne Koch, ed. The American Enlightenment. New York: George Braziller, 1965. Capon, Lester J., ed. The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams. 2 vols. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959. Chastellux, Marquis. Visitors to Monticello. Ed. Merrill Peterson. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989. de Crevecoeur, Hector St. John. Letters from an American Farmer. London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd.: New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc, 1945. Fliegelman, Jay. Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American revolution against patriarchal authority 1750-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

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Chapter Six Adam, D. J. “Bibliographie d’ouvrages français en forme de dialogue 1700-1750”. SVEC 293 (1992). [Allen, Charles]. The Polite lady: or a course of female education; in a series of letters, 3rd ed. London: 1775. Amies, Marion. “Amusing and instructive conversations: the literary genre and its relevance to home education”. History of Education 14:2 (1985): 87-99.

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Arizpe, Evelyn and Morag Styles. “‘Love to learn your book’: Children’s experiences of text in the Eighteenth century”. History of Education 33.3 (May 2004): 337-352. Austen, Jane, Northanger Abbey. London: Macdonald, 1974. Barbauld, Mrs. The Works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld: with a Memoir by Lucy Aikin. 2 vols. London: Routledge/ Thoemmes Press, 1996. Brayman Hackel Heidi. “‘Boasting of silence’: Women readers in a patriarchal State”. In Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England, eds Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Brewer, John. “Reconstructing the reader: prescriptions, texts and strategies in Anna Larpent’s reading.” In The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, eds James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth, a Literary Biography Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1972. Campbell-Orr, Clarissa. “Aristocratic Feminism, the Learned Governess and the Republic of Letters.” In Women, Gender and Enlightenment, eds Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor London: Palgrave, 2005. Chabreuil, M. de [i.e. Marguerite du Parquet]. Gouverneur des Princes 1787-1830. Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1900. Chapone, Hester. “On Conversation”. In Miscellanies in Prose and Verse. Dublin, 1775. Chartier, Roger. “Loisir et Sociabilité: lire à haute voix dans l’Europe moderne”. Littératures Classiques, “La voix au XVIIe siècle” (Janvier 1990). Chirol, Rev J.L. Enquiry into the Best System of Female Education; or Boarding School and Home Education Attentively Considered London, 1809. Clancy, Patricia A. “A French writer and educator in England: Mme Le Prince de Beaumont”. SVEC 201 (1982): 195-208. Cohen, Michèle. Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century. London: Routledge, 1996. —. “‘A Habit of Healthy Idleness”: Boys’ underachievement in historical perspective”. In Failing Boys? Issues in Gender and Achievement, eds Debbie Epstein, Janette Elwood and Valerie Hey. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1998. —. “French Conversation or ‘Glittering Gibberish’? Learning French in Eighteenth-Century England”. In Expertise Constructed: Didactic Literature in the British Atlantic World, 1500 -1800, eds Natasha Glaisyer and Sara Pennell. London: Ashgate, 2003.

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Markham, Mrs. [i.e. Elizabeth Penrose]. A History of France; from the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar continued to the year 1856 with conversations at the end of each chapter. 2 vols. London 1828. Martin, Benjamin. The Young Gentleman and Lady's Philosophy: in a continued survey of the works of nature and art; by way of dialogue. 2nd. ed. London, 1772. Mee, Jon. “Severe Contentions of Friendship: Barbauld, conversation, and dispute”. In Repossessing the Romantic Past, eds Heather Glen and Paul Hamilton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Meredith, N. Rudiments of Chemical Philosophy; in which the first principles of that useful and entertaining science are familiarly explained and illustrated. London, 1810. More, Hannah. The Works of Hannah More. 2 vols. Philadelphia: J J Woodward, 1832. Myers, Mitzi. “Impeccable governesses, rational dames, and moral mothers: Mary Wollstonecraft and the female tradition in Georgian children’s books”. Children’s Literature 14 (1986): 31-59. Penn, Granville. Conversations on Geology; comprising a familiar explanation of the Huttonian and Wernerian systems; the Mosaic geology; and the late discoveries of Professor Buckland, Humbolt, Dr Macculloch, and others (1828). Percy, Carol. “Disciplining women? Grammar, gender, and leisure in the works of Ellenor Fenn (1743-1813)”. Historiographia Linguistica 33:1 (2006): 109-137. Percy, Carol. The Art of Grammar in the Age of Sensibility: The Accidence ... for Young Ladies (1775), Insights into late modern English. Ed. Marina Dossena and Charles Jones. Series: Linguistic insights: studies in language and communication. Bern: Peter Lang, 2003: 45-82. Plagnol-Diéval, Marie-Emmanuelle. “Madame de Genlis et le théâtre d’ éducation au XVIIIe siècle”. SVEC 350 (1997). Prince, Michael. “Conversation in Diverse Genres: The Case of Eliza Haywood”. Paper presented at the Concept and Practice of Conversation in the Long Eighteenth Century, Cambridge University, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, 2005. —. The Philosophical Dialogues in the British Enlightenment: Theology, Aesthetics, and the Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pujol, Stéphane. “Le dialogue d’idées au dix-huitième siècle”. SVEC 2005: 06 (2005).

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Richards, Jennifer. Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Rogers, Betsy. Georgian Chronicle: Mrs Barbauld and her Family. London: Methuen and Co, 1958. Schellenberg, Betty A. The Conversational Circle: Re-reading the English novel 1740-1775. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996. Secord, James. “How Scientific Conversation became Shop Talk”. In Science in the Marketplace, eds Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2007. Shefrin, Jill. “Governesses to their children”. In Childhood and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550-180, eds Andrea Immel and Michael Witmore. London: Routledge, 2006. Shteir, Ann B. Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Silver, Marie-France, and Marie-Laure Girou Swiderski. “Femmes en toutes lettres: les épistolières du XVIIIe siècle”. SVEC 2000: 04 (2000). Skedd, Susan. “Women teachers and the expansion of girls’ schooling in England, c.1760-1820”. In Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities, eds Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus. London: Longman, 1997. Smarr, Janet Levarie. Joining the Conversation: Dialogues by Renaissance Women. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Surtees, Virginia, ed. A Second Self: The Letters of Harriet Granville, 1810-1845. Salisbury: Michael Russell, 1990. Tadmor, Naomi. “‘In the even my wife read to me’: women, reading and household life in the eighteenth century”. In Practice and Representation. Tague, Ingrid H. Women of Quality: Accepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England, 1690-1760. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2002. Thornton, Robert John. Juvenile Botany; Being an easy introduction to that Delightful Science through the medium of Familiar Conversations. London: Sherwood, Neely and Jones, 1818. Wakefield, Priscilla. Mental Improvement or the Beauties and Wonders of Nature and Art in a Series of Instructive Conversations (1799). White, Daniel E. “The ‘Joineria’: Anna Barbauld, the Aikin Family Circle and the Dissenting Public Sphere”. Eighteenth-Century Studies 32.4 (1998-9): 511-33.

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Chapter Seven Baker, John. “From Sanctity of Contract to Reasonable Expectation,” Current Legal Problems (1979): 17-39. —. An Introduction to English Legal History. London: Butterworths, 2002. Ballow, Henry. A Treatise of Equity. London: D. Browne, 1737. Barton, John. “Legal Studies”. In The History of the University of Oxford, Volume V, The Eighteenth Century, eds. L. S. Sutherland and L. G. Mitchell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, 593-607. Birks, Peter and Grant McLeod, eds. and transs. Justinian’s Institutes. London: Duckworth, 1987. Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Brant, Clare. “‘What does that argue for us?’: the politics of teaching and political education in late eighteenth-century dialogues”. In Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning, ed. Yun Lee Too and Niall Livingstone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Broadhead, Glenn. “Samuel Johnson’s Rhetoric of Conversation”. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 20 (1980): 461-74. Cannon, Garland. “Sir William Jones and Dr. Johnson’s Literary Club”. Modern Philology 63 (1965): 20-37. —. ed. Letters of Sir William Jones. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970.

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—. The Life and Mind of Oriental Jones. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Chrimes, S.B. “The Constitutional Ideas of Dr. John Cowell”. The English Historical Review 64 (1949). Coquillette, Daniel. The Civilian Writers of Doctors’ Common, London. Berlin: Duncker & Humbolt, 1988. Cowell, John. Institutiones iuris Anglicani. Cambridge: John Legat, 1605. —. The Institutes of the Laws of England. London: John Ridley, 1651. de Zulueta, Francis and Peter Stein, eds. and transs. The Teaching of Roman Law in England around 1200. London: Selden Society, 1990. Eden, Robert. Juriprudentia Philologica. Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre, 1744. Finch, Henry. Law, or a Discourse thereof. London: Society of Stationers, 1627. Gordley, James. The Philosophical Foundations of Modern Contract Doctrine. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Haakonssen, Knud. Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Englightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Heineccius, Johann. A Methodical System of Universal Law, ed. and trans. George Turnbull. London: George Keith, 1763. Honoré, Tony. Gaius. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Ibbetson, David. “Common Lawyers and the Law before the Civil War”. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 8 (1988): 142-53. —. ed. An Essay on the Law of Bailments. Bangor: The Welsh Legal History Society, 2007. Jones, William. The Speeches of Isaeus. London: E.&C. Dilly, 1779. —. An Essay on the Law of Bailments. London: Charles Dilly, 1781. —. The Principles of Government, in a Dialogue between a Scholar and a Peasant. n.p. 1783. Klein, Lawrence E. “Liberty, Manners, and Politeness in Early EighteenthCentury England”. The Historical Journal 32 (1989): 583-605. —. “The Earl of Shaftesbury and the Progress of Politeness”. EighteenthCentury Studies 18 (1984): 186-214. Lobban, Michael. The Common Law and English Jurisprudence 17601850. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. —. “Custom, Nature, and Authority: the Roots of English Legal Positivism”. In The British and their Laws in the Eighteenth Century, ed. David Lemmings. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2005, 27-32. Macnair, Michael. “Sir Jeffrey Gilbert and his Treatises”. The Journal of Legal History 15 (1994).

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Chapter Eight Allen, Brian, ed. Towards a Modern Art World. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995. Bond, Anthony and Joanna Woodall, eds. Self Portrait Renaissance to Contemporary. London: National Portrait Gallery, 2005. Burke, Peter. The Art of Conversation. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993. Burns, Arthur and Joanna Innes, eds. Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780-1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Drury, Elizabeth. Self-Portraits of the World’s Greatest Painters. London: Parkgate Books, 1999. Fletcher, Ernest. Conversations of James Northcote R.A. With James Ward, On Art and Artists Edited and Arranged from the Manuscripts

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and Note-books of James Ward by Ernest Fletcher. London: Methuen & co., 1901. Garlick, Kenneth. Sir Thomas Lawrence: A Complete Catalogue of the Oil Paintings. Oxford: Phaidon, 1989. Gosse, Edmund. Conversations of James Northcote, R.A. by William Hazlitt; Edited with an Essay on Hazlitt as an Art-Critic and a Note on Northcote. London: R.Bentley, 1894. Gossman, L. “Anecdote and History”. History and Theory 42 (2003): 143-68. Grayling, A.C. The Quarrel of the Age. The Life and Times of William Hazlitt. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000. Gwynn, Stephen, Memorials of an Eighteenth Century Painter (James Northcote). London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898. —. Experiences of a Literary Man. London: Thornton Butterworth, 1926. —. The Life of Sir Walter Scott. London: Thornton Butterworth, 1930. Hazlitt, William, Sketches of the Principal Picture-Galleries in England. London: Taylor & Hessey, 1824. Hazlitt, William. Conversations of James Northcote. London: Colburn and Bentley, 1830. Haydon, Benjamin. Painting, and the Fine arts: Being the Articles Contributed to the Encyclopedia Britannica by B.R.. Haydon & W. Hazlitt. Edinburgh: A. & C. Black, 1838. Hazlitt, William. Conversations of James Northcote. Edited with an Essay on Hazlitt as an Art-Critic and a Note on Northcote by Edmund Gosse. London: R.Bentley, 1894. Hilton, Boyd. A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783-1846. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. Hopkinson, Martin. “James Northcote’s The Death of Prince Maximilian Leopold of Brunswick.” The British Art Journal 4 (2003): 29-36. Howe, P.P., ed. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt. 21 vols. London: J.M. Dent, 1930-34. Jordanova, Ludmilla. Defining Features: Scientific and Medical Portraits 1660-2000. London: Reaktion Books and the National Portrait Gallery, 2000. —. “Portraits, People and Things: Richard Mead and Medical Identity”. History of Science 61 (2003): 293-312. Knighton, Lady (Dorothea). Memoirs of Sir William Knighton, Bart., G.C.H., Keeper of the Privy Purse During the Reign of His Majesty King George the Fourth. 2 vols. London: Richard Bentley, 1838. Levey, Michael. Sir Thomas Lawrence. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005.

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Chapter Nine Anon. Observations upon the Art of Painting. London, 1719. Bal, Mieke. Traveling Concepts in the Humanities. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Barrell, John. The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. —. The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790’s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Berger, Harry Jr. Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

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Bermingham, Ann. Sensation and Sensibility. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Bryson, Norman. Looking at the Overlooked: Four essays on Still Life Painting. London: Reaktion Books, 1990. Davidson, Arnold. The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2001. de Bolla, Peter. “Towards the materiality of aesthetic experience”. diacritics, Spring, 2002, 32:1. —. The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Hacking, Ian. Historical Ontology. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2002. Hayes, John, ed. The Letters of Thomas Gainsborough. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Heidegger, Martin. What is a Thing? Translated by W.B. Barton, Jr. and Vera Deutsch. Lanham: University Press of America, 1967. Marin, Louis. On Representation. Translated by Catherine Porter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. McKeon, Michael. The Secret History of Domesticity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Myrone, Martin. Body Building: Reforming Masculinities in British Art 1750-1810. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Richardson, Jonathan. An Essay on the Theory of Painting. 2nd edition, enlarged. London, 1725. Sallis, John. Echoes: After Heidegger. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Sloman, Susan. Gainsborough in Bath. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Solkin, David, ed. Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780-1836. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001.

CONTRIBUTORS

Peter de Bolla is Reader in Cultural History and Aesthetics at the University of Cambridge. His most recent publication is The Fourth of July and the Founding of America (London: Profile, 2007). Previous books include Art Matters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001) and The Education of the Eye (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). He has recently been awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship. Michèle Cohen is Professor in Humanities at Richmond, the American International University in London. Her most recent publications include: “‘A Little Learning’”? The Curriculum and the Construction of Gender Difference in the Long Eighteenth Century, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2006); “‘To think, to compare, to combine, to methodise’: Notes towards Rethinking Girls’ Education in the Eighteenth Century,” in Women, Gender and Enlightenment, ed. Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); and “‘Manners’ Make the Man: Politeness, Masculinity and Chivalry, 1750-1830”, Journal of British Studies (2005). Her current work is on domestic informal education, with particular focus on the role of conversation. She held the Derek Brewer Fellowship at Emmanuel College and a Visiting Fellowship at CRASSH in 2005. She was awarded a Roger W. Eddy Visiting Fellowship at the Lewis Walpole Library in 2007. Amanda Dickins is a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Biomedicine and Society at King’s College, London. Previously, she was a Research Associate of the Global Economic Governance Programme at the University of Oxford and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Business Research, University of Cambridge. Her research interests span political economy, international political theory and the politics of the global bioeconomy. Jay Fliegelman was the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature and American Studies at Stanford University, and the author of Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) and

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Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). He also coedited the forthcoming Bedford Cultural Edition of Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno. Katie Halsey is an AHRC postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London. She works on the Reading Experience Database, 1450-1945, and was previously a Teaching Fellow in Romantic Literature at St Andrews University. Recent publications include “‘Critics as a Race are Donkeys’: Margaret Oliphant, Critic or Common Reader?”, Journal of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society, 2 (2007), 42-69; “The Blush of Modesty or the Blush of Shame? Reading Jane Austen’s Blushes”, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 42.3 (July 2006): 226-238; “Spectral Texts in Mansfield Park”, in British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: authorship, history, politics, ed. Cora Kaplan and Jennie Batchelor (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 48-61. Her monograph on Jane Austen and her readers will be published in 2009. Paul E. Kerry is an Associate Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He was a visiting fellow at Princeton University for the academic year 2007-2008, and he has been a visiting fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge. Recent publications include Enlightenment Thought in the Writings of Goethe (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2001) and scholarly articles on European intellectual history. He has edited volumes on Schiller, Carlyle, Goethe, Mozart’s Magic Flute, and Benjamin Franklin (forthcoming), and he is currently writing a book on German intellectual history. He is an associate editor of Thomas Carlyle’s German Essays, forthcoming with the University of California Press. Mary Jacobus is Professor of English at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at Cambridge. Her books include: The Poetics of Psychoanalysis: In the Wake of Klein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Romanticism, Writing and Sexual Difference: Essays on the Prelude (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); and First Things: The Maternal Imaginary in Literature, Art and Psychoanalysis (New York and London: Routledge, 1995).

210

Contributors

Ludmilla Jordanova holds a chair in Modern History at King’s College, London. Her recent publications include Nature Displayed: Gender, Science and Medicine 1760-1820 (London: Longman, 1999), Defining Features: Scientific and Medical Portraits 1660-2000 (London: Reaktion, 2000) and History in Practice (London: Arnold, 2000), 2nd ed. 2006. She is currently working on a manuscript for Cambridge University Press, provisionally called The Look of the Past, on the ways in which historians use visual and material culture. She is a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, London. Jean Meiring is a Fellow in Law at New Hall, Cambridge and is completing a PhD on the external influences on English commercial law in the early modern period at Clare College, Cambridge. He teaches Contract, Tort and Civil law, and his research focuses on continental influences on the Common law of obligations. Jane Slinn has recently completed a Ph.D. at King’s College, Cambridge on the place of emotion on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s aesthetics. She has written articles on Romantic aesthetics and sympathy and the aesthetic writings of Adam Smith and David Hume. With Katie Halsey, she organised the conference from which this collection of essays is drawn. She is now training to be a barrister. Stefan H. Uhlig is a Fellow and Director of Studies in English at King’s College, Cambridge. He is co-editing Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory as well as Aesthetics and the Work of Art with essays on Kafka’s A Report to an Academy, Adorno’s draft introduction to Aesthetic Theory and Gerhard Richter’s Betty (both out from Palgrave Macmillan in 2008).

INDEX Adams, John 87, 89–92 Adams, John Quincy 91 Addison, Joseph xii, 10 The Adventurer 14 advice literature xiv, xx; see also conduct literature; conversation manuals aesthetics xxiv, 159, 172, 174–6, 178–80 Althorp, Viscount (George John Spencer, 2nd Earl Spencer ) 138–9 America see United States anecdote 14, 153–4, 162, 164 Austen, Jane x, xv–xviii Emma xv–xvi Mansfield Park xv–xvi Northanger Abbey xv Persuasion xv–xvi Sense and Sensibility xv– xvi Bahrdt, Carl Friedrich 67 Baier , Annette 23, 30 Ballow, Henry 135–6 Barbauld, Anna Letitia 103–4, 112 Bellegarde, Abbé de 15, 70 Benveniste, Émile 50 Bible 1, 49–50 Blackstone , Sir William 131–4, 137–8, 140–1 Blake, William 160–1 Blanchot, Maurice xix–xx, 42–4, 56–9 Bluestockings 107 Bohrer, Karl Heinz 77 Bose, Georg Matthias 75 bourgeoisie xix, 82 Bouveresse, Jacques 4–5 Breuer, Josef 81 Burgh, James xxi, 96–7 Burke , Edmund 161

Burke, Peter 6, 12, 82 Burns, Robert 52–3 Carlyle, Thomas 73 Carter, Philip 79 Christ 49 Chambers Cyclopedia 6 Chambers, Robert 138, 140 Chastellux, Marquis de 87 Chesterfield, Fourth Earl of (Philip Stanhope) 93 Cicero 12, 14, 142 coffee–houses x–xiv, 10, 12–13, 65, 100, 129, 139 conduct literature 33, 106, 108, 112–13 conversation and children 107, 111–12 and correspondence xxi, 89–92, 103, 107–12 and dialogue 42, 56, 106– 7, 128, 146 and friendship 90, 151, 165–6 and gender xix, 30, 32–4 and hierarchy 32–4 and knowledge xvi, 80 and learning 22, 66–7, 71–4, 80–1, 139 and listening 4 and moral improvement xii–xix, xxii, 9–10, 12, 15, 20, 30, 81, 172, 175–6 and narrative 14 and philosophy xiii, 4–5, 8–11, 14, 20–39, 72 and politeness 7, 9, 13, 31–4, 67, 82, 129, 139 and psychoanalysis 81, 171 and reading xiii–xiv, xvi, 111; see also reading

Index

212 and religion xvii and rivalry 31, 79, 90 and sociability x–xii, xiv, xxi, 2, 6–7, 10–12, 14–15, 22, 30–2, 65–6, 82, 104– 107–8, 111 and sympathy xix, 26–9, 73, 155, 166, 172 and understanding 5–6, 8, 20–21, 26–7, 73, 78, 80, 82 and virtue 29–34 as concept 170–1, 177 as entertainment 7, 10– 11, 15, 30, 79–80, 105 as talking cure 22, 81 definitions ix, xxiii, xxv n3, 3, 6–7, 16, 56, 106, 171 in education xiii–xiv, xvii, xxi–xxii, 8, 10, 67, 79–80 in the family 81, 103–4, 109–11, 172 in law 72, 128–46 in literature x, xiv-xix; see also Austen, Jane; elegy; poetry; theatre; Wordsworth, William in modern academia xviii, xx, xxiv, 1–4, 8 in politics xx, 87–9, 173 in visual arts xxiii–xxiv, 88–9, 151–80 manuals 12–13, 15, 70–1, 73, 77, 79, 82, 108 one–sided xix–xx, 3, 42– 3, 48, 87–8, 91, 93, 97, 101, 171 rules of 6–7, 12–15, 31– 2, 77, 79, 142 small talk ix, 3, 7 study or analysis of xxi, 1–2, 8, 81 with oneself 70, 180

with the dead 41–6 , 70, 98-9 written record of 108–9, 154, 165 conversation poems x, 12 conversible see Hume, David Copley, John Singleton 97-8 Courtin, Antoine de 70 correspondence see conversation and correspondence Cowell, John 131–2, 134, 136 Cowley, Abraham 13 Crevecoeur, Michel Guillaume Jean (John Hector St. John) xxi, 100–1 D’Alembert, Jean le Rond 12 death 41–64, 98-9 debate 12 De la Fontaine, Jean, Fables 77–8 Deleuze, Gilles 5–6 Democracy xi, xx, 65, 87 Derrida, Jacques 41–55 The Gift of Death 47–50 The Work of Mourning xix, 41–3, 48, 51–5 dialogue x, 80, 106–8, 130–7, 144– 6; see also conversation and dialogue discourse 7 discretion 69–70 discussion 171 disputation 171 Dunlap, William 98 Eden, Robert 136 Edgeworth, Maria 103, 112 education see also conversation in education in the home ix, xxi–xxii, 103–6, 109–12 in schools 104, 110, 112 in universities 79–80, 132–6 electricity xx, 74–7 elegy 41–7, 58 Elias, Norbert 65

The Concept and Practice of Conversation in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1688-1848 Encyclopédie 6–7 Enlightenment xx, xxiv, 66–7, 82, 178 entretien 6–7, 56 essay genre 11, 71–2 Europe x-xi, xx-xxii, 5, 7, 65-86, 111-2, 160 experience 22–4 Fara, Patricia 76 Faull, Katherine 81 Fergusson , Elizabeth Graeme 92 Fielding, Henry 13–14 Finch, Sir Henry 131, 137 Franklin, Benjamin 74–5, 92 Franklin, Carolyn 104 Frederick the Great 66 Freemasons 66, 69–70 Freud, Sigmund xx, 44, 81 Gadamer, Hans–Georg xx, 80–1 Gainsborough, Thomas xxiv, 174, 179 Gaultier, Abbé 70 genius 159, 174 gift 47–50, 55–6, 58–9 Gilbert , Sir Jeffrey 131, 137 Godwin, William 162–3 Goethe 68, 75, 81 gossip ix, xi, xxiii, 10, 22, 24, 164, 175 Griffits, Hannah 92–4 Grotius, Hugo 129, 134, 136, 143 The Guardian 13 Gwynn, Stephen 162–5 Habermas, Jürgen x–xiv, 32, 66, 178 Hale, Sir Matthew 131, 137 Hamilton, Paul xiv Hazlitt, William 151–5, 158–62, 164–6 Hearing xxiv, 179 Heineccius, Johann Gottlieb 136, 142–3 Herz, Henriette 65

213

Hobbes 25–7, 29 Leviathan 26–7 honesty xvi, 69–70, 165 Hume, David ix–x, xii–xiv, xviii– xix, xxi, 10–11, 20–39, 105 distinction between the learned and conversible 10–11, 21, 24, 29, 32 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 20–1, 23–4, 26 Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals 20– 1, 23–6 The History of England 25 ‘Of Essay Writing’ xiii– xiv, xviii, 10–11, 21, 24, 29 On the Study of History 31 Treatise 11, 20–22, 26– 28, 34 n6 Ibbetson, David 143 interdisciplinarity ix, 3 Jefferson, Thomas 87, 89–91, 98–9 Jenner, Edward 162–4 Johnson, Samuel 6, 14, 93, 129, 138 Jones, Sir William xxii, 128–9, 137–46 Essay on the Law of Bailments xxii, 128–9, 140–6 judgement xv, 24, 159–60, 174, 180; see also moral judgement Justinian 131–4, 136, 145 Kant, Immanuel xx, xxiii, 66–7, 69–70, 74, 80, 174–5, 180 Kean, Edmund 162–3 Klein, Lawrence xii, xxi, 67, 105 Klein, Melanie 46 Knigge, Adolph Freiherr von xx, 70

214 Kleist, Heinrich von xi, xx, 65, 71– 2, 82 Knighton, Sir William 155–7 language xiii, 43, 57, 78–9, 94 Larpent, Anna 110–11 law xxii, 128–46; see also conversation in law Bailment 140–6 Common law 128–37, 140–1, 143–6 Contract 135–7, 141–3 Equity 135–6 Natural law 128–30, 132, 134–7, 140–3, 146 pleading 134–5 Roman law 128–9, 130– 7, 142–6 Lawrence, Sir Thomas 155–8, 166 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 68 letters see correspondence Levin, Rahel 65 Lévinas, Emmanuel 41–5, 47–9, 56 Lévi–Strauss, Claude 50 Lewis, Frederick Christian 163 Leyden jar 75–7 Locke, John 7–10, 104 Marin, Louis 51–3, 55 Mauss, Marcel 47 memoir xxii, 155 memory 40, 42, 44, 54, 82, 105–6, 135, 154 Mendelssohn, Moses 67 Miller, Stephen 1 Milton, John 41 miniature 178 Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de 74–5 Molière 72 monarchy 25–7, 68 Montagu, Elizabeth (nee Robinson) 103–7, 110 morality xxii, 129, 175–6; see also conversation and moral improvement; moral judgement

Index moral judgment 21, 24, 27–30 Moravians 81 More, Hannah xvi mourning xix, 41–64 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 69–70 van Musschenbroek , Pieter 76–7 narcissism 173, 177, 180 narrative 71, 73 Nollet, Jean–Antoine (Abbé) 77 Northcote, James xxiii, 151–5, 157–66 Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg) 65 novel xiv, 81; see also Austen, Jane oration 43, 74 Paine, Thomas 94–7 painting 151–80; see also conversation in the visual arts Passions 26, 74 patronage 155, 157 Peale, Charles Willson 95–6 Politeness xi, xviii, xxi–xxiii, 2, 32–34, 104, 106–8, 112, 175; see also conversation and politeness Plato 1, 72, 80 Pocock, J. G. A. xiv poetry 40–1, 46, 48–50, 52, 56–8, 72, 74 –5; see also elegy Pope, Alexander 93 portraiture xxiii–xxiv, 51, 151–69, 170–80 pragmatism 9 prayer 48–9 presence 94–5, 153 private and public, distinction xi, xiv, 178–9 public sphere x, xii–xiii, xx, 13, 15, 32, 65–6, 98–9, 175, 178 Pufendorf, Samuel 129, 134, 143 Pujol, Stéphane 105–6 Quistorp, Theodor Johann 65

The Concept and Practice of Conversation in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1688-1848 The Rambler 14 rationality reading 23, 41, 44, 51–6, 78, 93 reading aloud 110–12 reason 24, 28 recognition 172–4 religion 25–7, 67, 82 representation 51–2, 173–4, 176–7 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 138, 151, 153, 155, 159–61, 164, 172, 174–5, 179 rhetoric xxi, 94 Richardson, Jonathan xxiii, 172–6 Richardson, Samuel xiv, 93 Romanticism 72, 74, 82 Rorty, Richard 4–5 Russell, Francis 158–9 sacrifice 47 salons xi–xiv, xix, 32–4, 65, 92 scepticism 23, 29 Schikander, Emmanuel 69 Schiller, Friedrich 65, 68–9 Schlegel, Friedrich 65, 72, 74, 82 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 82 Schmohl, Johann Christian 75 schools see education Scotland 131 Scott, Sir Walter xxiii, 155–9, 162 secularism 25, 29 Sedgwick, Catherine 93–4 seeing see vision self–portrait 177 sentiment 24–5, 27–8 sexuality 30 Shaftesbury, Third Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper) xii–xiv, xvi, xx, 67 Shakespeare, William 45 Sheehan, James 66 silence 57–8, 171 Simonides 46, 52 Simpson, David 1–2, 4, 14 Smith, Adam xxiii, 173

215

Smith, John H. 80–1 sociability 104, 107–9, 111; see also conversation and sociability Socratic dialogue 80 Sommers, John 99 The Spectator xii, 10, 12, 70 Swift, Jonathan 12, 13, 15 Taperell, John 15 The Tatler xii, 12 theatre 67–9 Titian xxiii, 154–5, 158–64 touch 177, 179–80 United States xx, 87–102 Valéry, Paul 57 verse see poetry Vision 51–2, 55–6, 174. 176, 178–9 Volozhiner, Rabbi Hayyim 49 Walch, Johann 7 Ward, James 165 Washington, George 70, 92 Weimar 67 Whig party 89 White, Dan 103 William III 99 wit 31, 165 Wollstonecraft, Mary xxii, 120 women see also conversation and gender women’s education 103–4, 111 women’s writing 109 Wood, Thomas 132–6 Woodville 88 Wordsworth, William xix, 40, 42, 44–5, 48, 50, 52, 54–8, 74 The World 12 Zedler, Johann 7 Zeisberger, David 82