The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy 0198846576, 9780198846574

Table of contents :
Cover
The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy: Modernity and the Art of Ordinary Suffering
Copyright
dedication
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Illustrations
An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy: Or, “Silently and Smoothly Thro’ the World”
1: The Bourgeois Revaluation of Tragedy: Dignity and the Ordinary in George Lillo’s London
2: Close to Home: The Uncanny of Georgian Domestic Tragedy
3: A Fine Subject for Tragedy: Providence, Poetic Justice, and Clarissa’s Real Affliction
4: Prosaic Suffering: Edward Moore, Diderot, and the Natural Picture of Drama
5: Tragic Sensibilities: Sentimental Fiction and the Serious Genre
Conclusion: Modern Tragedy and Ordinary Suffering
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy

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The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy Modernity and the Art of Ordinary Suffering A L E X E R IC H E R NA N D E Z

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Alex Eric Hernandez 2019 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019946084 ISBN 978–0–19–884657–4 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846574.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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To Kelsie, Eliana, and Charlie, for together we make CAKE

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Acknowledgments One happy consequence of a years-long steep in tragedy has been a clearer sense of my own good fortune. The writing of this book has been accompanied by countless affirmations of this, from friendships personal and professional, to serendipitous moments where an argument came together, to the various structural supports that made writing about everyday misfortune bearable (even rewarding). Here’s a very brief attempt, then, to account for some of these graces. This book would not have been possible without the guidance and encouragement of Felicity Nussbaum, whose insightful criticism saw the project through its early years as a dissertation. I only hope it reflects her wise influence adequately. Helen Deutsch pushed me to think about the theoretical stakes of the project early on in its development, and on more than one occasion offered a suggestion that was so perfectly timed that it seemed fateful. Lowell Gallagher’s perceptive reading of my work repeatedly challenged me to do better, while Jonathan Sheehan kept me honest about the history and, in the process, helped turn a five-page document into what it is today. At a pivotal moment during this book’s life, Sarah Kareem gave feedback on its opening gambit and helped me more than I think she realizes. Other friends and co-conspirators from my time at UCLA were instrumental in testing arguments. Ian Newman, Michael Nicholson, Taylor Walle, Katherine Charles, and James Reeves have all gone on to carry out their own research, but as it turns out, played a key part in supporting my own. At the University of Toronto, I’ve found a vibrant intellectual community whose support remains indispensable. Tom Keymer, Simon Dickie, Terry Robinson, Brian Corman, Paul Stevens, Carol Percy, and Jeremy Lopez, among others, have read or listened to parts of this book. Their engagement with my thinking has made it immeasurably better. Audiences at a number of venues have sharpened my claims, and I owe debts in particular to Julia Fawcett, Misty Anderson, Josh Gang, Lynn Festa, Colin Jager, Vincent Pecora, Paula McDowell, Jane O. Newman, and Morgan Vanek for conversations that yielded a number of well-timed suggestions. Denise Cruz was a  crucial support during the writing of this book and continues to be a

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viii Acknowledgments valued friend. She and Sam Pinto helped push me to the finish line, one thirty-minute writing session at a time. Several institutions have aided in this book’s completion as well. I am grateful to the Social Science Research Council and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their support of a timely interdisciplinary working group on “Religion and Modernity” that got the project off and running. Research assistance provided by Yale University’s Lewis Walpole Library and its staff was similarly formative. A great debt is owed to the staff of The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and UCLA’s Center for 17th- and 18thCentury Studies, who supported me through a fellowship and copious research help. And a Connaught New Researcher Award at the University of  Toronto greatly aided in bringing the project to completion. Parts of Chapter 3 first appeared in an earlier form as “Tragedy and the Economics of Providence in Richardson’s Clarissa,” in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 22 (Summer 2010): 599–630; and a portion of Chapter  4 appeared earlier as “Prosaic Suffering: Bourgeois Tragedy and the Aesthetics of the Ordinary,” in Representations 138, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 118–41. I appreciate their permission to reuse some of that material here. I have been fortunate to work with Jacqueline Norton at Oxford University Press, who saw its potential and shepherded the manuscript through the process of publication. Anonymous readers made critical suggestions that improved the manuscript, and for that I thank them. A special note of thanks goes to my research assistant, Veronica Litt, who, in addition to being a fine scholar herself, proved essential to the book’s completion. Ian Johnston provided the translation of Medea used in the Introduction’s epigraph, for which I am also grateful. My greatest debts are owed to my family, however, whose household labor is present, silently, on every page of this book. I thank my parents especially for their indefatigable encouragement and inspiration, adding that they are a constant reminder of what it means to strive against the pressures of economic precariousness by risking it all. Without them, none of this would have been possible. Most of all, I thank my partner, Kelsie, and our little ones Ellie and Charlie, to whom this book is dedicated. In a project so concerned with the fragility of our domestic ties, you have been a source of deep comfort, security, and affection, daily reminders of just how tough these bonds can be.

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Contents List of Illustrations

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An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy: Or, “Silently and Smoothly Thro’ the World”

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1. The Bourgeois Revaluation of Tragedy: Dignity and the Ordinary in George Lillo’s London

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2. Close to Home: The Uncanny of Georgian Domestic Tragedy68 3. A Fine Subject for Tragedy: Providence, Poetic Justice, and Clarissa’s Real Affliction

105

4. Prosaic Suffering: Edward Moore, Diderot, and the Natural Picture of Drama

139

5. Tragic Sensibilities: Sentimental Fiction and the Serious Genre

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Conclusion: Modern Tragedy and Ordinary Suffering Bibliography Index

210 227 249

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List of Illustrations 1.1. William Hogarth, Gin Lane. 1750–1. Engraving, 37.4 × 31.8 cm

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1.2. William Hogarth, detail from upper-right corner of Gin Lane. 1750–1. Engraving, 37.4 × 31.8 cm

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1.3. William Hogarth, Plate 1 (“Moll Hackabout arrives in London at the Bell Inn, Cheapside”) of A Harlot’s Progress. 1732. Engraving, 30.8 × 38.1 cm

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1.4. William Hogarth, Plate 5 (“Moll dying of syphilis”) of A Harlot’s Progress. 1732. Engravings, 31.8 × 38.2 cm

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1.5. Anonymous, Frontispiece to The London Merchant. 1763

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2.1. Anonymous, detail from The complaint and lamentation of Mistresse Arden of Feversham in Kent [1633?]. Woodcut print 

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2.2. Image depicting the home of Arden of Faversham, Abbey Street, Faversham79 2.3. Anonymous, details from Newes from Perin in Cornwall Of a Most Bloody and Unexampled Murther. 1618. Woodcut print

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2.4. [François Boitard?], Illustration depicting Act V, scene 2 of Othello in Jacob Tonson’s The Works of Wiliam Shakespeare [sic]. 1709

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2.5. [Engleman?], after a painting by Thomas Stothard, Plate depicting Act III, scene 2 of Fatal Curiosity in Inchbald’s The British Theatre. 1807

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4.1. Jean-Baptiste Greuze, La malédiction paternelle. Le fils ingrat [The Paternal Curse: The Ungrateful Son]. 1777. Oil on canvas, 130 × 162 cm

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4.2. Jean-Baptiste Greuze, La malédiction paternelle. Le fils puni [The Paternal Curse: The Son Punished]. 1778. Oil on canvas, 130 × 163 cm 150 4.3. Mather Brown, The Last Scene in the Tragedy of the Gamester. 1787. Oil on canvas, 200 × 256 cm 

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5.1. W. W. Ryland, after Angelica Kauffman, Maria—Moulines. 1779. Stipple and etching in red-brown ink on paper

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5.2. Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Le Malheur Imprévu ou Le Miroir brisé [Unforeseen Misfortune, or, The Broken Mirror]. 1763. Oil on canvas, 56 × 46 cm

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C.1. Thomas Rowlandson, The Sorrows of Werter; The Last Interview. 1786. Etching with stipple engraving, 25 × 35 cm

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An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy Or, “Silently and Smoothly Thro’ the World”

I don’t want a grand life for myself— just to grow old with some security.  They say a moderate life’s the best of all, a far better choice for mortal men. Going for too much brings no benefits. And when gods get angry with some home, the more wealth it has, the more it is destroyed. Medea, 149–55 The middle class has long seemed impervious to tragedy. Consider the ­opening to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), which famously begins with a vision of modest productivity and social stability for what his contemporaries called “the middling sort of people.” Recalling those days before he set out to try his fortune, Crusoe narrates the chiding of his father, an immigrant, who warns him to adhere to the via media of a simple, commercial life: He bid me observe [this middle state] and I should always find, that the Calamities of life were shared among the upper and the lower Part of Mankind; but that the middle Station had the fewest Disasters, and was not expos’d to so many Vicissitudes as the higher or lower Part of Mankind; nay, they were not subjected to so many Distempers and Uneasiness either or Body or Mind, as those who, by vicious Living, Luxury and Extravagancies on one Hand, or by Hard Labour, Want of Necessities, and mean or insufficient Diet on the other Hand, bring Distempers upon themselves by the natural Consequence of their Way of Living . . . Peace and Plenty were the Hand-maids of a middle Fortune.1 1 Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 4–5. Subsequent citations refer to this edition and appear parenthetically in the text. The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy: Modernity and the Art of Ordinary Suffering. Alex Eric Hernandez, Oxford University Press (2019). © Alex Eric Hernandez. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846574.001.0001

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2  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy It’s a touching scene, Crusoe tells us: “I was sincerely affected with this Discourse, as indeed who could be otherwise?” (6). Desperate to preserve the only son that remains to him, the elder Kreutznaer voices the alreadyclichéd promise of middling prosperity: “observe, and you will always find . . . ” Neither precarious like the indigent, nor liable to the reversals of aristocratic fortune, bourgeois life was industrious and low-risk, “calculated for all kind of Vertues and all kinds of Enjoyments.” In this way, as Defoe elegantly phrases it, the middle station went “silently and smoothly thro’ the World” (5). Father Crusoe had reason to be optimistic. For decades now, economic and social historians have traced the extensive growth of the British middling sort, that amorphous social category that encompassed, in fine ­gradations of perceived rank and standing, merchants of all stripes, tradespeople, shopkeepers, and artisans, professionals, even (according to some contemporaries) members of the lower gentry, country farmers, freeholders, and well-off laborers and their families. In his classic history of eighteenthcentury England, for example, Paul Langford paints a picture of steady economic growth in which a “powerful and extensive middle class [resting] on a broad, diverse base of property . . . increasingly decided the framework of debate.”2 “An English tradesman is a new species of gentleman,” Samuel Johnson claimed, not without concern over the changing cultural landscape.3 Standards of living were on the rise too, with a prolonged if not also modest estimated per capita income growth of 0.30% per year between 1700 and 1760, according to recent accounts. If we talk of the “long eighteenth century,” those figures are far more impressive, curving upwards into what many call the “hockey-stick graph” of GDP during industrialization.4 By about 1780, output grows decisively to between 1.32% and 2.06% annually, helping most of Britain (though not yet Ireland) escape the Malthusian trap, eventually doubling the population during the century that followed the Hanoverian accession.5 Inventories, legal and marital records, as well as 2 Langford, Polite and Commercial People, 68. 3  Quoted in Porter, English Society, 50. 4  See Broadberry et al., “British Economic Growth, 1270–1870,” esp. table 22. The authors of this study note that their work largely confirms what has come to be known as the CraftsHarley view of British economic development. See Crafts and Harley, “Output Growth.” An important corrective to this is offered by Eric Hobsbawm, who influentially traced the slowing in growth in the per-capita figures to increasing numbers of laboring poor. See his “British Standard of Living.” 5 Rule, Vital Century, 5–15; 28–31. On population growth in the period, see Wrigley and Schofield, Population History of England.

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An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy  3 countless anecdotes confirm a sense of the expanding material comforts available to households with standards of living above mere subsistence, the numbers of which swelled, and more and more defined Britain’s culture.6 A few years before Robinson Crusoe’s foreboding advice, Defoe characterized the nation’s social fabric in terms of the comforts a bit of surplus could buy. Nestled between twin extremes—“The great, who live profusely” and “The miserable, that really pinch and suffer want”—were those most insulated from the “Disasters” and “Vicissitudes” we colloquially refer to as tragic: “The middle sort, who live well.”7 Perhaps it’s unsurprising then that the era witnessing the “rise of the middle class” is also often seen to mark the so-called “death of tragedy.” For George Steiner, whose endlessly controversial argument I invoke here, the late seventeenth century is the “great divide” for the genre, the era after which a variety of historical forces (capitalism, Enlightenment, the loss of  shared “mythological, symbolic, and ritual reference,” to name a few) ­coalesce to make tragedy an impossibility.8 His view seems to confirm the sense of Defoe’s opening vignette in Crusoe that tragic misfortune would be largely avoidable in this new era, the middling sort having squeezed out the “Hellenic forms” of high tragedy, leaving nothing behind but a plodding, epic-comic prosperity. How then can a life defined by its stability, by the rhythms of an everyday getting-and-spending, foster the sort of convulsive passions necessary for tragedy? Isn’t the very idea of “the bourgeois,” as Franco Moretti observes, predicated on values like efficiency, lawfulness, and comfort?9 Hardly fodder for the tragic, it would seem. Echoing Walter Scott’s complaint about the bourgeois tastes of modern audiences, Steiner goes on to claim that the values of middling life ensured that the market for tragedy turned middlebrow and sentimental.10 Thrust into a world much

6  A number of studies confirm Langford’s account of the growing cultural influence exerted by consumers and thinkers tied to the middle rank, and together present a narrative of rank’s transmutation into a self-conscious discourse of middle-class ideology. See, for example, Hunt, The Middling Sort and Earle, English Middle Class. For a survey of the rich historical literature debating the extent to which a middle rank or “class” cohered in the period, see Wahrman, “National Society, Communal Culture.” 7 Defoe, Review, 6. 8 Steiner, Death of Tragedy, 292. For a sense of the persistence of this argument, as well as a series of powerful critiques, see Felski, Rethinking Tragedy. 9  See Moretti, The Bourgeois, chap. 1. 10  See Scott, “Essay on the Drama,” 1:219–395. This is not to say that tragedies were no longer written—Susan Staves points out that the latter half of the century alone saw more than a hundred new tragedies brought to stage—but that they failed to embody the essence of the genre. See her “Tragedy,” 87.

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4  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy more ordinary, tragedy loses the possibility of transcendence so that finally it “disappeared altogether or took tawdry refuge among the gaslights of melodrama.”11 In place of tragedy, many have argued, the middling sort looked to another incipient literary form often linked to our narratives of eighteenthcentury optimism: the novel.12 Sandra Macpherson notes, for example, that the history of the novel has largely been read as an explicitly anti-tragic ­tradition; the famed “rise of the novel” passes as more or less the flip side of the old “death of tragedy” coin.13 “The suspicion that there is something inherently untragic about the novel-form is hard to shake off,” adds Terry Eagleton, concluding that this assumption is largely a function of class: “The temper of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English fiction, the heyday of the making of the English middle class, is anti-tragic.”14 Tragedy hibernates in his view, suspended by the dynamism of what Georg Lukács called the novel’s “extensive totality,” its ability to draw in complex causal chains and diverse agencies, glossing over the isolation of one’s personal misfortunes. Thus: “[The novel] gives form to a totality of life that is rounded from within; [it] seeks . . . to uncover and construct the concealed totality of life.”15 Construction, revelation, meaning—like Crusoe’s Providences, novels disclose the secret fullness of the everyday, rescuing the quotidian details of the modern world from its veneer of banality and senselessness. A narrative exercise in the consolations of bourgeois life, in which “the triumph of meaning over time” gradually emerges through the epic perspective made possible for its reader, the novel legitimates its evils. It exposes what seems to be the “intensive totality” of the drama—with its pitched suffering and claustrophobic plots—as merely one of a thousand counterfactual trade-offs necessary in order for the ascendant middle rank to “live well.”16 11 Steiner, Death of Tragedy, 194. 12 Eagleton, Sweet Violence, chap. 7. See also Peyre, “Tragedy of Passion,” 77; and cf. Steiner’s related point in The Death of Tragedy: “The history of the decline of serious drama is, in part, that of the rise of the novel” (118). 13 In Harm’s Way, Macpherson looks to the novel to overturn this assumption. See her introduction for a slightly different framing of this problem in eighteenth-century literary studies. 14 Eagleton, Sweet Violence, 180; 179. In his provocative account of modernity and the tragic, Mourning Happiness, Vivasvan Soni offers a slightly different take, arguing that modernity converts tragedy into “trial narratives,” most of which devolve into mechanical illustrations for a bourgeoisie coming to grips with secular happiness. Interestingly, he doesn’t mention bourgeois tragedy. 15 Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 60. 16 Thus, Franco Moretti argues that the modern novel finds its truest expression in Bildungsroman, which formalizes the process of becoming reconciled to the world (Way of the World, 55).

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An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy  5 Silently and smoothly thro’ the world indeed. And yet despite this, for eighteenth-century Britons, depictions of middling misfortune seemed to be vital in a way that they had rarely been before. Onstage, tragedies featured new and complex characters pulled from the social middle; a thriving print market fueled a healthy demand for tales of domestic discord; novels examined intensely personal, existential pain and suffering in the lives of their everyday figures; few scenes could evoke more feeling than that of the bourgeois déclassé. The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy seeks to account for this vitality and the lasting cultural importance of what has come to be known as “bourgeois tragedy.” In what follows, I assemble a body of text and performance that contradicts both Defoe’s optimism and the narrative of tragedy’s demise in the period, redefining the genre in order to better account for its movement between media, examining the changing conventions through which its practice mobilized a shared present more felt than articulable. Where many have seen aesthetic stagnation, overwrought or misfiring emotions, and the absence of an idealized tragicness, I see instead a sustained engagement in the affective processes and representational techniques through which the middle rank feels its way into modernity. I’m interested, that is, in the way the Crusoevian “rise of the middle class” was always far from certain, burdened from the start by an anxiety over the potential of loss or failure. Giving the lie to so much of what we think we know about the effervescent middling sort in the period, the making of British bourgeois tragedy records a haunting ambivalence toward the modernizing processes that went hand in hand with the creation of Defoe’s confident middle class. At the core of this account is the simple, often overlooked fact that the afflictions of common people came to be treated in the genre with a measure of dignity and seriousness previously denied them in tragedy. Indeed, the central insight of this book is that the very historical emergence of something like “bourgeois tragedy” represents a gradual, shifting cultural debate over the extent and shape of suffering: who precisely gets to suffer meaningfully, and what is the character of the affliction they undergo? Whose life, and whose way of life, is grievable? After all, tragedy posits the destruction or forfeiture of something valued, the mournful loss of one’s attachments, whether those attachments happen to be people, or fantasies of the good life, or even a newly materializing sense of the dignity of the ordinary. To see something as tragically lost is to register its considerable worth. In rehearsing these losses in relation to everyday life, bourgeois ­tragedy argues for a realignment of many of the genre’s core values.

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6  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy Yet tragedy also shows us what it is to suffer, playing out and exploring these emotions, meditating upon what it means to be afflicted—or, in fact, what it fails to mean. Bourgeois tragedy is no exception to this, telling of how the era’s valorization of this-worldly happiness erodes those cherished frameworks that made sense of not only the good, but also one’s affliction. The genre imagined a particularly modern sort of affliction, I argue, an “ordinary suffering” proper to ordinary life, divested of the sorts of meanings, rhetorics, and affective resonances once deployed to understand it. Whereas neoclassical aesthetics aligned tragedy with the heroic and the admirable, ordinary suffering was domestic, familiar, a private phenomenon turned public, entangled in the nascent values of capitalism and the particularities of the era’s rationalizing bureaucratic systems, yet no less haunted by God. Responding to the changing atmosphere of the age, the works assembled here offered practical affective responses to a range of concerns that were virtually unprecedented in tragic literature, and thereby enlivened a kinesthetic imagination through which those emotions were embodied. In this way, bourgeois tragedy heralded a European modernity in which pain and suffering were increasingly taken as difficult facts to be overcome, tenuously bound to notions of its sanctifying or positively dolorous effects, though not for that reason secular.17 That last point is worth emphasizing here, for in taking up the notoriously difficult term, “modernity,” I certainly don’t mean to imply that that cultural condition is inherently secularized, or that the refiguration of tragic suffering necessarily involves a loss of sacrality. As Misty Anderson has recently noted, “the modern” “name[s] an ideology that unfolded in time,” one that thrives by positing a “religious antimodernity as a foil in the narrative of modernity’s rise.”18 Similarly, Jonathan Sheehan cautions that our notions of secularization have too often devolved into a “shorthand for the inevitable (intentional or not, serious or ironic) slide of the pre-modern religious past into the modern secular future,” a zero-sum story of modernization as the eclipse of belief.19 To be sure, few genres pressure the assurances of faith like tragedy. Yet time and again, the strategies employed in order to  meditate upon affliction in bourgeois tragedy testify not only to the persistence but the positive flourishing of religion, even when such beliefs, 17 See Taylor, Secular Age, 647–66, for example, though the discussion across part V, Dilemmas I in the text is germane; Cf. Odo Marquard’s argument in “Theodicy Motives in Modern Philosophy.” 18 Anderson, Imagining Methodism, 13. 19  Sheehan, “Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization,” 1076.

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An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy  7 mythologies, and ritual practices seem to make increasingly less sense and offer little comfort to those depicted. A case in point is the fact that the encroaching assumption that (for more and more people) happiness is at hand in this life rather than the next not only fails to extinguish faith in one’s futurity but, in many cases, also invests everyday suffering with a ­metaphysical import largely alien to earlier periods. Like all ideologies, then, modernity tends to minimize its fissures, but these complexities are present in spades in bourgeois tragedy—indeed, modernity’s ambivalences tend to lie at the heart of the genre and contribute to a sense that, as several scholars have claimed, modernity simply is a tragic condition.20 Insofar as the genre explores many of these characteristic aspects of the modern social imaginary, therefore, it seems to mark a largely unacknowledged site in which the contradictory processes of modernization play out in print and performance. In other words, bourgeois tragedy names both an innovation in tragic aesthetics and an episode in the history of suffering. This is a complex claim, of course, whose nested elements unfold slowly in the ensuing chapters and may only be fully appreciable in the hindsight enabled by history and recounted at the close of this book. What follows here, consequently, merely sketches a brief, preliminary history of the genre that situates it within some of the larger trends of the period. In doing so, I’ll begin clarifying the terms I draw upon and gesturing toward the layers of argumentation that make up this book’s intervention, turning later to questions of method. Here then is an introduction to bourgeois tragedy. * * * Ever since Denis Diderot’s founding definition in the Entretiens sur le Fils naturel (1757), historians of eighteenth-century theatre have referred to a series of dramas focused on the misfortunes of the middle rank as “bourgeois tragedy.”21 This name has always been somewhat misleading when applied to the British context, however, a jarring anachronism in light of what we know about the period’s social rhetoric. For one, Britons did not often speak of their middle sort using the term “bourgeois” until somewhat later (and then only rarely), when it assumed a more pejorative connotation or was enlisted in Marxist analysis to denote the class of manufacturers that 20  A recent collection of essays explicitly links the two and continues a longstanding critical tradition. See Billings and Leonard, Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity. 21  Diderot, “Entretiens,” 1131–92.

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8  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy drove capitalism in the nineteenth century.22 (Even the decidedly British “middling,” H. R. French observes of the eighteenth century, was used relatively infrequently as a means of self-identification.23) Moreover, Diderot’s French bourgeoisie was a complicated social entity with its own endemic complexities and definitional problems, a category not always easily exported across the Channel because it implied a status closer to the English landed gentry or a narrow circle of the moneyed elite, largely confined and defined by their association with the cities.24 To be sure, there are several figures we would identify now as part of an haute bourgeoisie in the British tragic canon (and we shall return to them, for they are important to the story I tell), but notable examples of the genre drew from the ranks of apprentices, migrant laborers, and skilled tradespeople, bearing little resemblance to the incipient ruling class of classical French historiography or Marxist dialectics. In such cases, “bourgeois tragedy” depicts a seedy, unsentimental urban world we might think of as decidedly un- or even anti-bourgeois in the typical sense, closer in spirit to that navigated by E.  P.  Thompson’s beleaguered laboring class.25 Evidence of the diverse economic base that made up the British social middle, these tragic figures aspire to the stability of our ­stereotypical middle, suggesting that the enduring usefulness of Diderot’s terminology lies in the way it maintains a fantasy of the good life even when enacting its failure. Mindful of these caveats, I nevertheless adopt much of this traditional critical vocabulary precisely because such acts of naming see the genre as elaborating a way of life that the bourgeois came to connote. Which is to say that much like Defoe’s r­ hetorical middling, bourgeois tragedy imagined a way of being in the world whose values, assumptions, and practices were seen as fundamentally those of ordinary people and everyday life. Apropos of such terminological acts of creation, one might point out that until relatively late in the century, the term Britons most often associated with this literature was “domestic tragedy.” This designation traced the 22  Moretti’s dataset is revealing here, and unsurprisingly, sees a late rise in the frequency of that term’s usage relative to both the French context and the more preferred British “middle rank” and “class.” See Moretti, Bourgeois, 9–10. 23  This contention lies at the heart of his account of social representation in the period. See French, Middle Sort of People. 24  See Sarah Maza’s subtle exploration of these issues in Myth of the French Bourgeoisie; Darnton tackles some of these issues as well in Great Cat Massacre, 125–7. The French understanding of the bourgeois, for example, typically implied an urban rentier class not necessarily synonymous with the working merchants and tradesmen one sees fallen from grace in many of the earliest British bourgeois dramas. 25 Thompson, Making of the English Working Class.

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An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy  9 genre’s pedigree back to the theatre of the English Renaissance and framed it according to a particular set of nascent values that would later seem ­inextricably linked to the middle sort. Plays like the anonymous Arden of Faversham (1592) and Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603) and The English Traveller (1633) focused their plots on the homebound tensions that threatened the early modern family, utilizing a mixture of prose and verse by which to represent “the horror of the everyday ­ordinariness of it all.”26 Among the earliest forms of stage realism, the genre familiarized tragedy, locating its action among Englishmen and women in the present, the mundane spaces they inhabited, and the commonplace circumstances that brought about their suffering. In many cases, too, they brought to life true or folkloric incidents, enacting a violent crime literature that remained popular well into the early decades of the eighteenth century, by which time the plays themselves were seldom (if ever) actually performed. According to Raymond Williams, these experimental tragedies were part of a process “long and deep” in the making, in which a “new structure of feeling” began permeating the soil of European art and culture.27 Playwrights in the Restoration and early eighteenth century, for instance, linked the Renaissance domestic tradition to their more recent work in shetragedy, mapping the “pathetic” female leads of the latter onto the homely concerns of the former and thereby privileging what several of them claimed was “private woe.” Like the homes simulated onstage, private woe imagined a pain interiorized and personal, constituted by the tender intimacies and attachments that the domestic increasingly seemed to promise.28 Domestic dramas like Nicholas Rowe’s The Fair Penitent (1702) and Lewis Theobald’s The Perfidious Brother (1715) thereby helped transition to what many critics to this day have taken to be a more self-consciously sentimental tragedy aligned with bourgeois feeling. Nevertheless, Thomas Otway’s The Orphan (1680) and Venice Preserv’d (1682), Thomas Southerne’s The Fatal Marriage (1694), and Rowe’s The Tragedy of Jane Shore (1714) remained lavishly draped in the trappings of earlier theatrical traditions. These plays retained

26 Helgerson, Adulterous Alliances, 15. 27 Williams, Modern Tragedy, 28; 45. 28  Thus, Samuel Johnson claims that Thomas Otway’s The Orphan is “a domestic tragedy drawn from middle life,” adding that “Its whole power is upon the affections” (Lives of the Poets, 1:339–40). That is, rather than move the intellect, Johnson claims that its force lies in the drama’s power to “interest” the heart. On the relation of she-tragedy to later domestic or bourgeois tragedies, see Laura Brown’s classic essay, “The Defenseless Woman and the Development of English Tragedy.”

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10  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy elements of the grandly heroic, sometimes exotic worlds they ostensively depicted, even if that world increasingly appeared in the literal and metaphorical backdrop of the action. Republic, kingdom, and empire are finally at stake in their plots, but many later tragedians will move their political themes further and further behind the proscenium, until finally the only matter left onstage is the home itself. Looking forward to these developments, Allardyce Nicoll thus takes this to be nothing short of a “progressive and revolutionary . . . endeavor to find a new field of tragic emotion.”29 Writers in the period sensed a realignment in tragedy’s operative passions too: the preface to Charles Johnson’s 1717 revision to Racine’s Bajazet (1672), to take just one example, positioned she-tragedy alongside its ancient models, offering Britons a “A sad, true Tale, a Modern Scene of Woe.”30 The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy contends, however, that the watershed moment in the creation of this “new field of tragic emotion” came in the decades that followed she-tragedy’s vogue, when a group of ­tragedians, many of whom were themselves commoners, began depicting a specifically middling misfortune as worthy of the tragic. What defined this new field was its earnest exploration of ordinary affliction; its familiar emotional tenor, recognizable situations, and representational tactics. In contrast to the baroque chromaticism of early modern passions, these plays enacted feelings at once more direct and decidedly smaller, paradoxically sensational and somehow tenderly intimate. Like the heroic tragedies celebrated in the period, bourgeois tragedy sought to evoke terror and pity; unlike them, no admiration was to be engendered by watching the great suffer. Instead, the average spectator, for the first time perhaps, could have mourned a version of him- or herself battered and broken onstage, imagining their experience as part of a genre bound at once by social, cultural, and affective ties. Of course, this isn’t to say that the full impact of that genre upon collective practice was registered immediately, as if its mere appearance signaled the arrival of the bourgeoisie as a class with coherent and singular aims. Nor did this newfound seriousness render the middling and lower orders immune to the indignities that could be part of life in those stations, even decades later. As we’ll see, in many ways the pleasures of t­ ragedy could be constituted by the spectator’s condescending pity, by the assertion of difference and the asymmetries of situation and power. As Robert Hume has repeatedly insisted too, sentimental tragedies would never form the dominant 29 Nicoll, History of Early Eighteenth-Century Drama, 114–15. 30  Johnson, Prologue to The Sultaness.

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An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy  11 tradition in the period (though it’s worth countering that many of these plays were much too grim to dismiss as sentimental).31 And yet the importance of this moment is unmistakable in retrospect, as the Georgian stage saw common folk and their concerns become an increasingly prevalent source of serious dramatic material over the 1720s and 30s. Thus, by 1721, Aaron Hill (perhaps the most important English tragedian in the first quarter of the century) published his domestic drama, The Fatal Extravagance, very loosely based on The Yorkshire Tragedy (1608). In Hill’s tragedy, a failed gambler struggles against the urge to commit murdersuicide in a series of set pieces that only thinly veil his family’s bankruptcy as a figure for the sudden collapse of South Sea Co. stock. The jewelerturned-playwright, George Lillo, would achieve lasting fame in a pair of God-haunted dramas produced in the 1730s, The London Merchant (1731) and Fatal Curiosity (1736), that dwelled largely on the economic pressures faced by those on the edges of respectable society. Other experiments in bourgeois and domestic tragedy, many of which utilized a stripped-down prose so as to both capture the status of their principal characters and foster modes of theatrical realism, cropped up often if not always successfully. Charles Johnson’s Cælia, or the Perjur’d Lover (1732), John Hewitt’s blank verse Fatal Falsehood (1734), and Thomas Cooke’s The Mournful Nuptials, or Love the Cure of all Woes (1739) dilated upon violence and betrayal by those nearest to oneself, and together began to imagine what would become the melodrama of the industrialized nineteenth century. More influentially, Edward Moore’s prose tragedy, The Gamester (1753), staged a tension between aristocratic Epicureanism and middling providentialism as a sort of classinflected Pascal’s wager, a wager in which suffering ultimately gives rise to both Christian faithfulness and profound doubt. Unfairly relegated to the footnotes of sentimentalism, this body of serious drama paved the way for Diderot’s “tragédie domestique et bourgeois” and G. E. Lessing’s “bürgerliche Trauerspiel,” innovations which Peter Gay numbers as among the signal artistic achievements of the Enlightenment.32 By midcentury, then, the British stage offered an honest exploration of ordinary people and their feelings, with profound consequences for modern art. Exactly what brought about this cultural turn is a difficult question to answer, and doesn’t boil down to one single factor in my view. For instance, though capitalism is the single most commonly cited reason for the genre’s 31 Hume, Rakish Stage, 297–300; 343; and Stone, “Making of the Repertory,” 195–6. 32 Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 2, chap. 6.

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12  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy emergence—and in many ways rightly so—to claim it as the sufficient ­condition for a particularly bourgeois tragedy is undoubtedly too tidy an ­explanation. If this were so, we might expect to see the same thing in Holland, Venice, or Genoa, three other commercial centers where merchants had a relatively high social standing. We simply don’t. On the contrary, France and Germany take up the genre with just as much gusto as their British counterparts, despite less enthusiastic (and for historians, more hotly debated) adoptions of capitalism in the period. One faces the same sorts of explanatory issues if they posit the Protestant religious tradition instead as the determining factor, though it is true that several early bourgeois tragedians were raised in a strain of dissenting Christian theology that we associate with the sanctity of the ordinary. Much more likely, however, these large-scale social changes coalesced around existing British institutions and forms (like she-tragedy and true crime ballads) that could give voice to everyday concerns at a moment when the early public sphere provided a venue for their amplification. Bourgeois tragedy would appear then to be a response to processes that ran parallel in the period. On the one hand, there was slow, steady economic growth leading up to the boom times of industrialization at the turn of the nineteenth century; on the other hand, a culture of public performance and print that everywhere seemed to trumpet the gains of the middle sort thereby creating a widespread sense (so Defoe argued) that the social sphere was relatively fluid and the bourgeois way of life in particular was on the upswing. Bourgeois tragedy spoke to the gap between these two realities, which is to say the dynamic, imagined space where collective and individual fantasies meet and produce (if the conditions are right) new arts. In fact, this story might seem oddly familiar. In The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt describes a similar process of cultural investment in the commonplace, though in his reckoning, a newfound “serious concern with the daily lives of ordinary people” helped to explain not the drama’s shifting affective ­priorities, but rather prose fiction’s developing feel for formal realism and its relationship to capitalism.33 In Watt’s view, interest in the lives of nonaristocratic figures reflected the rising fortunes of the middling sort and their curiosity for stories of others in comparable socio-economic conditions. Hence, the novel is the great scene of everyday struggle, and in this way, the cradle of realism. Or consider instead the “conceptual leitmotif ” of Erich

33 Watt, Rise of the Novel, 60.

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An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy  13 Auerbach’s still-indispensable Mimesis: “the serious treatment of everyday reality, the rise of more extensive and socially inferior human groups to the position of subject matter for problematic-existential representation.”34 His argument envelops the history of realism into an account of how the quotidian and bourgeois came to be taken seriously, an account that doesn’t so much abolish tragedy as it liquidates and sublates its form. Thus, Auerbach’s thesis culminates in what he calls the grand “formless tragedy” of Gustav Flaubert, and later, Virginia Woolf and Émile Zola—but interestingly, not before tracing a bead through Friedrich Schiller’s bourgeois drama, Kabale und Liebe (1783), and thereby finding high realism’s true sources in both “the sentimental middle-class novel and the middle class tragedy.”35 Drawing these literary threads together, Moretti notes that in taking up Diderot’s auxiliary terms for bourgeois tragedy, “le genre sérieux,” “le genre moyen,” “the class in the middle adds a style which is itself in the middle.”36 Moretti means to signal the novel’s prosaism here—readings of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1796), Illusions perdues (1837–43), and Madame Bovary (1856) illustrate the turn—but the implication is a telling one, for even in its erasure from the account of realism that ensues, bourgeois tragedy hides, like the artifice of its prose, in plain sight. Hence, the genre figures something of a prolepsis for this shift in cultural moods, one of the first sustained, self-conscious attempts to fuse the severity of tragedy with an interest in “everyday reality.” Now to be sure, the differences between drama and novel matter—quite a bit, in fact, as later chapters will show—but my account seeks to re-stitch these histories together, taking as a matter of fact that these forms intersected in fateful ways around questions of how to approach that “everyday reality.” Accordingly, and though the work of theatre and performance studies forms an important part of its conceptual framework, this study refuses to limit itself to the theatre. For while the genre no doubt initially arose out of theatrical traditions, the questions it pursued, the stories it told, its ­spectatorial methods, and, in many cases, its critical language were catalyzed in the experimental milieu of eighteenth-century print and performance, an instance of what Joseph Roach has called the “interdependence of orature and literature” through which cultural memory is kept alive in practice.37 In 34 Auerbach, Mimesis, 491; Moretti, from whom I take the phrase “conceptual leitmotif,” argues that Auerbach’s most lasting contribution lies in the way Mimesis materializes the elusive quality of “everydayness” (Bourgeois, 71). 35 Auerbach, Mimesis, 488; 437. 36 Moretti, Bourgeois, 73. 37 Roach, Cities of the Dead, 12.

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14  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy re-situating bourgeois tragedy in the messy context of these early attempts at mediating the ordinary, therefore, The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy traces an exploration of pathos that ultimately finds voice across drama, novel, ballad, and even elements of visual arts in the period. To offer a robust account of bourgeois tragedy’s emergence in the period thus entails a refusal to essentialize the link between tragedy and the stage at a time when disparate media were fledgling, developing in close dialogue, in mimicry, and sometimes in competition.38 Moreover, none of this is to say that bourgeois tragedy is the only genre where ordinary suffering is worked through in the period, or that any and all meditation on such affliction constitutes an implicit membership in that body of works; one might, for instance, productively contrast the work of pastoral elegy or laboring-class georgic in the period in order to flesh out a different, though nonetheless complementary account of suffering’s affective history. Nevertheless, reframing our existing histories of form around a broader sense of the affective and representational concerns animating bourgeois tragedy yields some interesting results. For example, we could read domestic drama’s cautious proseification not only as an expression of ­rhetorical aptness (in which modulating its language corresponds with the lower status of the play’s personages), but also as a means of embodying extemporaneous feeling akin to, and inspired by, the novel’s “writing to the moment.” Similarly, the elements of middling tragedy migrate amorphously between popular forms amenable to depicting their so-called meanness (such as the ballad), to dramas like The London Merchant, to a number of adaptations as sentimental and realist novels (such as T.  S.  Surr’s anti-Jacobin bowdlerization of Lillo’s play in 1798). Consider also that one way to read amatory fiction’s popularity in the early decades of the eighteenth century is as a careful re-negotiation of the emotional terrain of domestic and she-tragedy, newly attuned to the concerns of female writers and readers. Aphra Behn, Catherine Trotter, and Eliza Haywood would offer a genealogical link between the she-tragedies of an earlier generation and the decidedly middlerank Georgian texts of later years, for instance. One example: Southerne’s domestic tragedy, The Fatal Marriage (1694), which reworked Behn’s novella, The History of a Nun (1689), later laid the groundwork for David Garrick’s

38  The neat, assumed distinction between drama and novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has undergone a reassessment in recent years. See Ballaster, “Rivals for the Repertory”; Anderson, Play of Fiction; Saggini, Backstage in the Novel; and with respect to the nineteenth-century context, Kurnick, Empty Houses.

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An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy  15 popular domestic drama, Isabella (1757). If these literary migrations seem to result in something less than tragedy, the collective, performative reading practices memorialized in works like Sarah Fielding’s Remarks on Clarissa (1749) suggest that in many respects, the early novel aimed at the kind of shared catharsis central to that genre.39 Remediating the gravitas of tragedy may in fact be just one method in which the novel authorized its claim to truth and cultural standing by trading on the theatre’s cachet.40 In some cases, the notion that long prose narratives work through domestic or bourgeois tragedy is neither surprising nor especially, well, novel. I just mentioned, for example, Samuel Richardson’s work at midcentury, which critics have long identified as adapting many of she-tragedy’s central ideological and affective investments.41 But I am thinking of Clarissa (1747–8) especially here, whose elopement-rape plot reworked the same ground as Johnson’s domestic tragedy, Cælia, a detail often forgotten or obscured in work on the midcentury novel. Like that little-read play, Clarissa meditates at length on the suffering of a young middling woman and the small circle that mourns her, insisting on her dignity and moral standing despite being sexually “ruined” and socially outcast. This is made all the more unbearable by her innocence and the simplicity of her desires, which, like Father Crusoe, consist in “sliding through life to the end of it unnoted.”42 In his eulogy to Richardson a year after the author’s death in 1761, Diderot joined the chorus of those celebrating Clarissa as “the first book in the world,” adding that the novel is a “great drama,” as if to place it alongside the bourgeois tragedies he was working to translate and publish that very same year.43 Perhaps unsurprisingly too, Watt himself takes Richardson’s “formal innovation” to lie precisely in “basing his novels on a single action,” coopting for prose fiction one of the fundamental elements of the era’s tragic theatre: unity of plot.44 Clarissa strives to “represent the action of action itself,” Macpherson echoes, in what sounds remarkably close to Lukács’ capsule definition of the drama’s essence as an “intensive totality.” Readers who 39  Thus, as Abigail Williams’ recent account of collective reading practices makes clear, the home was a lively site of literary performance, and perhaps the main zone of contact between the average person and a play script. See her Social Life of Books, esp. chap. 6. 40 McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 126–8. 41  A number of important critical accounts have drawn these sorts of correspondences in the era’s amatory fiction. See, for example, Bowers, Force or Fraud; Ballaster, Seductive Forms; and Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction. 42 Richardson, Clarissa, 40. 43  Diderot, “Éloge,” 4:155–70. See also Donald Schier, “Diderot’s Translation of The Gamester.” 44  The quotation is from Macpherson, Harm’s Way, 61, and summarizes Watt’s insight on p. 208 of Rise of the Novel.

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16  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy wade through Richardson’s genteel epistolary prose will likely agree, for the slow temporality of that readerly process is punctured by the intensity of just a few critical moments, in which its plot thickens into decisive, tragic action.45 At least here, affinities between bourgeois tragedy and the early novel seem hard to deny. And so if we take Clarissa as a high water mark for the development of realist fiction (and I think we should), the novel comes into its own precisely as a bourgeois tragedy. Clarissa’s lasting importance to the serious treatment of the everyday is  confirmed in a number of important prose works concerned with the suffering of the haute bourgeois, among which we might count The Gamester (written following Moore’s correspondence with Richardson), Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (which she dedicated to the novelist in 1761), and Frances Burney’s Cecilia (1782), especially attuned to the precariousness and pain that haunts one’s pursuit of happiness. Together they bear witness to the gradual dissolution of genre into realism, as Fredric Jameson has recently put it, a “middle state more natural [and] according to real life” that Burney saw as the promise of Cecilia’s depiction of everyday suffering and which Diderot sought to canonize tonally as le sérieux.46 But it’s also clear that the more overtly “sentimental” works that came out of the middle decades of the century owed a profound debt to the serious genre that British authors were carving out only a few years before. Foundational texts in this tradition, such as Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple (1742), bore witness to the pervasiveness of modern affliction and answered an urgent need to mediate those distresses through the s­ pectatorial aesthetics of tragedy. A standing catalogue of the ways that everyday people suffer and look upon the suffering of others, sentimental fiction depends upon a recognition that the ordinary has worth and dignity, mourning its loss even as it mitigates the harshest effects of its social and descriptive realisms. In some cases, such as David Simple’s 1753 sequel, Volume the Last, the sentimental novel collapses inward, becoming itself a bourgeois tragedy, as if to dramatize David’s fall from pitying bourgeois to the objectified pauvre honteux sketched exquisitely in Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768). One might read such diversions from the traditional genealogy of bourgeois tragedy as evidence of its flagging imaginative vision rather than its lasting literary presence, but this would fail to account for a number of 45 Macpherson, Harm’s Way, 61. 46 Burney, Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay, 2:136.

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An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy  17 revived and new middling tragic works that appear in the last quarter of the century and stretch well into the decades of social unrest that open the next. Thus, Henry “The Man of Feeling” Mackenzie’s 1784 adaptation of Fatal Curiosity contends with George Colman the Elder’s more successful revival two years earlier (as The Shipwreck); Sophia Lee’s smash debut, A Chapter of Accidents, was a “serio-comic” rewrite of Diderot’s 1758 drame, Le Pére de famille, for the Haymarket’s 1780 season; still later, Hill’s Fatal Extravagance becomes a matinee “dramatic piece” as The Prodigal (1793), one of many transmutations of bourgeois tragedy back into “lower” pantomime, melodramatic, and afterpiece forms. Despite all odds—and perhaps good sense— both Pamela’s unauthorized sequel (The Fatal Interview in 1782) and Clarissa (in Johann Heinrich Steffens’ 1765 German version, and later, Robert Porett’s 1788 attempt for Britons in the Oporto community) are rewritten as bona fide domestic dramas. The Continent’s infatuation with British bourgeois tragedy was well known and reciprocated, as Diderot’s archetype for the genre, Le Fils naturel (1757), was novelized as The Natural Son in 1799, while Lessing’s Anglophilic Trauerspiel, Miss Sara Sampson (1755) became The Fatal Elopement over a two-year period in the pages of the Lady’s Magazine. Emilia Galotti (1772) gave rise to no fewer than three versions in the 1790s, only one of which finally made it to production for audiences at  Drury Lane.47 Countless so-called melodramas in the first decades of the nineteenth century—many of which depict rural poor, disenfranchised laborers, tradesmen, and ruined women—announced themselves not as exemplars of that wrongly discredited form, but rather as “domestic drama . . . founded on real facts” (as the playbill for Edward Fitzball’s 1833 Jonathan Bradford; or, Murder at the Roadside Inn claims, and several others confirm).48 If the sheer number of new and revived productions, and the market for their adaptation and translation, is any indication, the last decades of the eighteenth century may be the unacknowledged heyday of bourgeois tragedy. No wonder, perhaps, for by then a much more recognizable sense of the social middle seemed to have solidified.49 Even though many of these latter-day works were met with a mixed reception, and few (if any) have ascended to canon, the cumulative impression 47  Baker, “Early English Translation of Miss Sara Sampson,” 103–4. On the three Emilia Galottis, see Baker, Biographia Dramatica, 2:193. 48  These include, among several others, Peckett, Susan Hoply; Buckstone, Luke the Labourer; and Bernard, Lucille. 49  Take, for example, Wahrman’s argument in Imagining the Middle Class, which focuses on the turn of the century.

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18  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy one receives is of a genre whose cultural energies remained vital and whose structure of feeling gradually crystalized into the potent ideology that Scott, Auerbach, and Moretti argue drives the nineteenth-century middle class. The Victorian “serious century”—with its Hegelian “prose of the world” and its formless tragedy—embodied a web of subtle emotions, attitudes, and assumptions whose exploration was initiated more than a century earlier in bourgeois tragedy, an imaginary now firmly entrenched as cultural memory, as so many silent habits of thought, of gesture, indeed of feeling. To return afresh to those founding moments is thus to be reminded that navigating the middle rank was much more fraught than the elder Crusoe’s triumphalism and Whig histories alike would have us believe, and that the happiness the former imagines as essential to middling life was all too often an illusion. * * * Still, for many critics even to this day, tragedy doesn’t easily accommodate ordinary suffering, even less so when that suffering is prosaic. So I want to turn now to think briefly about some of the claims made by the genre’s detractors, and thereby situate this book’s argument in relation to recent work on tragedy and the history of emotion. For example, one view of ­tragedy implies that its bourgeois form devalues the genre, bringing it low into vulgarity, making it unrecognizable as really tragic. I mentioned a version of this argument earlier in relation to Steiner’s classic thesis, but the sentiment is certainly not uncommon. Defenders of heroic or “high” tragic forms assure us that tragedy is essentially aristocratic, the genre’s grandeur unable to countenance the middling (much less lower) orders of society. The height of the tragic protagonist’s fall is interpreted as a function of their elevated social standing, accordingly, in turn buttressing many of tragedy’s other cherished poetic notions: Aristotelian principles like hubris (pride), hamartia (error or flaw), and peripeteia (reversal or turning point) seem to arise naturally from contexts in which “the very great” assert their agency in the world.50 Comparing Lillo unfavorably to Shakespeare, Charles Lamb notes by contrast that the trouble with bourgeois tragedy is that its figures lack “a great or heroic nature, which is the only worthy object of tragedy.”51 If our pity is underwritten by the magnitude of the hero’s loss, then who cares if an 50 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 207. 51  Lamb, “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare,” 4:43.

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An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy  19 ordinary apprentice dies? Doesn’t that sort of thing happen every day? “Ordinary people die naturally,” Northrop Frye observes, “a hero’s death has an outrage or the portentous in it.”52 Unacknowledged here, though difficult to miss, are the gendered implications of the great hero, who is typically imagined as a great man striving against some outside force that impinges upon his will. This life, this kind of life, is simply of more value than the ordinary and homely ones of everyday men and women. A kind of category error, representing the sufferings of commoners as if they were tragic slips, accidentally, on the banana-peel of bathos. Following this line of thought, G. W. F. Hegel avers in his Lectures on Aesthetics (pub. 1835) that tragedy resists the ordinary in all its forms, for the genre paradigmatically “strip[s] off the matter of everyday life and its mode of appearance.”53 Is it any surprise then that tragedy increasingly comes to be seen as a lost, quasi-mythic art form? A common assumption in the views I’ve outlined here is that tragedy embodies a set of transhistorical, almost prelapsarian values according to which these comparative judgments make sense, values that (as it turns out) likely owe less to classical or early modern thought than to the heady ­philosophy of nineteenth-century German Idealism. Recent work by Simon Goldhill, Joshua Billings, Miriam Leonard, and Blair Hoxby, for example, has shown persuasively that so much of what we take as essential to tragedy arises in fact from a specific, post-Kantian reading of a handful of Attic ­dramas.54 Around 1790, a group of thinkers based in Jena (the most influential of which were Hegel and Schiller, whom I’ve already mentioned, as well as brothers August Wilhelm and Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Friedrich Schelling) began theorizing what Hoxby refers to as the “transcendental idea of tragedy,” a philosophical approach to the tragic often in sharp contrast to what was actually performed and theorized in early modernity.55 In their wake, tragedy increasingly came to be defined by a narrow set of “timeless” thematic ideals: “action, collision, fate working as an invisible spirit, the death of the hero, and the intimation of moral freedom that his destruction yields.”56 The newborn spirit of tragedy, as Nietzsche will characterize the genre’s classical origins, sees the hero lean into the Dionysian forces that inevitably, though gloriously,

52 Frye, Notebooks on Renaissance Literature, 20:282. 53 Hegel, Aesthetics, 1:289. 54 Goldhill, Sophocles; Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic; Leonard, Tragic Modernities; and Hoxby, What Was Tragedy?. 55 Hoxby, What Was Tragedy?, 4. 56 Hoxby, What Was Tragedy?, 25.

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20  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy annihilate him. This philosophy of the tragic, with its search for meaning and existential assertions of agency, becomes a theme central to the so-called “modern condition.” Worth noting here is that this distinction between tragedy’s classical poetics and a turn-of-the-century “philosophy of the tragic” isn’t exactly new. Peter Szondi’s influential “Essay on the Tragic” spelled this out in 1961, the same year that Steiner first eulogized the genre.57 For Szondi, the tragic named a distinctly modern, philosophical disposition that departed from the Aristotelian frame through which tragedy was traditionally approached as art. Unlike the classical model, the modern concept of the tragic concerns the subject’s autonomy against the objective necessities of law and death. This distinction seems to refigure—for world literature—the tectonic process of disenchantment that Max Weber names Entzauberung, a shift that sees the Enlightenment’s erosion of older mythic forms as a kind of ineluctable loss, as a desperate grasping after meaning that plays out across the broader culture of modernizing Europe. Yet what’s become clearer in light of recent work is our understanding of the ways in which that late Idealist philosophy of the tragic, with its modern “tragic sense of life,” has retroactively come to color practically every notion we hold about what tragedy as a genre really is, was, or ought to be. Whether one is a classical humanist or a New Critic, a Lacanian or a New Historicist, our discussions of tragedy remain dominated by Jena’s questions, terms, and assumptions, the practical effect of which has been to limit the canon to a handful of exemplary types and tropes.58 In reality, tragedy has always been much messier—a much more capacious and certainly less hermetic tradition. What’s most striking, however, is how this generic triage often takes place around questions of tragic emotion, installing a hierarchy of sufferings that denigrates those feelings explored in depictions of middling misfortune. We saw this sort of condescension at work above when the quality of bourgeois tragedy’s pathos first came into question, but here the class connotations of that imagined Aristotelian hero converge with an anachronistic, Idealist understanding of what it is for that hero to suffer. In one of the founding moments in the philosophy of the tragic, for instance, Schiller will argue that the genre’s true exemplars depict a specifically tragic suffering—or rather more precisely, a “moral resistance to suffering” that bifurcates the rational will from emotion.59 This “noble,” conventionally 57 Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic, 1. 58 Hoxby, What Was Tragedy?, chap. 1. 59  Schiller, “On the Pathetic,” 49; Bradley, Lectures on Poetry, 81.

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An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy  21 masculine state (pace Antigone) is always to be distinguished from “mere suffering,” an ordinary pathos that is passive and pathetic, trivial and unworthy of ­admiration or compassion.60 The brute facts of affliction are in many ways a scandal to this grand tragic tradition, for such facts represent an impoverished moral and bodily state to be denied by the protagonist’s unbending will. Tragedy celebrates the hero’s transcendence of their “sensuous being,” in Schiller’s technical vocabulary for the affective body, turning affliction into its other—anesthetized bliss, sublime self-determination, an occasion for melancholic philosophizing, and perhaps ultimately, a glorious dis-embodiment. This is tragedy as Kantian aesthetic experience rather than r­ hetorical and affective practice, a vision of the genre largely alien to the period, when pathos was taken as tragedy’s very essence and raison d’être. In fact, eighteenth-century tragedy was much more sensually attuned to its enacted and  narrated experience of suffering, seeing this action as the practical exploration of feelings, as a kind of training for “think[ing] with emotions.”61 Tragedy drew upon the spectator’s full bodily engagement in the work of (even virtual) mourning, thus “inculcat[ing] on men the proper government of their passions,” as Hugh Blair’s popular rhetorical manual put it in 1783.62 “No man goes to the theatre to study metaphysics” remarked another Briton the same decade in which the Idealists would claim precisely the opposite, with profound consequences for our understanding of t­ragedy’s relation to feeling.63 In fact, nowhere has this denigration of embodied emotion been felt more than in relation to bourgeois tragedy. In such conditions, tragedies of the middling sort are too easily classed as melodrama avant la lettre, swallowed into an ancillary account of the era’s “illegitimate theatre” where that illegitimacy is defined not by the legalities of the theatre’s ­patent system (according to which melodrama was illegitimate) but by a value judgment that sees their affects as a maudlin and undignified “mode of excess.”64 If this is tragedy, it is tragedy manqué, its ordinary suffering not to be engaged with on its own terms, but to be dismissed as “mere misfortune.” Why then, one might well respond, did so many eighteenthcentury Britons argue that these texts were tragic? What did they see in

60  Schiller, “On the Pathetic,” 49; 45; and Bradley, Lectures on Poetry, 81. 61 Hoxby, What Was Tragedy?, 41 (emphasis in original). 62 Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric, 2:335. 63  “Poetry,” 15:203. 64 The phrase “mode of excess” is of course a reference to Peter Brooks’ landmark, Melodramatic Imagination. See his use of the term, for example, on pp. 64 and 199.

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22  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy the way these ordinary people suffered? And what happens to our critical histories if we take their claims seriously? * * * To answer these questions, this book adopts a very different approach. Following Williams, whose Modern Tragedy remains critical reading on the genre, I take “tragedy” to emerge from a tension between the everyday experience of loss and misery, and the specific literatures and theoretical traditions that go by that name. A repository for many of a culture’s deepest beliefs and contradictions, tragedy is not a stagnant category beholden to archaic rules (whether these are antique or an invention of Enlightenment), or a “single or permanent kind of fact.” Rather, the genre tells of an unfolding cultural conversation regarding the ways in which we suffer and collectively mourn loss and hardship. “A series of experiences and conventions and institutions,” tragedy gives a culture’s suffering performative and imaginative shape, thereby opening up new possibilities for its enactment in ways that necessarily bleed out of its formal constraints. Less an idealized, transhistorical poetics than an evolving negotiation of our feeling in the social imaginary, what goes by tragedy documents a culture’s developing experience of affliction. This approach is sympathetic to the conceptual framework David Worrall uses to theorize Georgian theatre as a network of evolving social agencies, especially insofar as we both envision the performance space as a locus of collective mediation and debate. So, too, the nuanced work of theatre ­scholars like Daniel O’Quinn, Julia Swindells, and David Francis Taylor (among others), who manage to move from the received texts of eighteenthand nineteenth-century British drama to the political, artistic, and otherwise material conditions of actual performances and reception.65 The chapters that follow attempt to balance historical detail against careful close reading in ways that are clearly inspired by their work. The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy’s focus differs, however, in that it locates that assemblage primarily around sites of textualized and performed emotion, and hence eschews the formal constraints of standard theatre studies in favor of a genre bound by the difficult ordinary feelings it collectively works through. As this might suggest, therefore, my argument’s theoretical sources lie more deeply in the contemporary turns to affect and history of emotion that 65 Worrall, Celebrity, Performance, Reception; O’Quinn, Staging Governance; Swindells, Glorious Causes; and Taylor, Theatres of Opposition.

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An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy  23 have continued Williams’ foundational work on structures of feeling. Williams famously defines that analytical category as “social experience in solution,” the as-yet unformalized intensities of lived experience that he positions as anterior to the reifying effects of ideology.66 This point is worth flagging here since one oft-cited notion of bourgeois tragedy claims that the genre’s rise reflects the arrival of a middle-class consciousness struggling against the Ancien Régime. Without recourse to claims about the structures of feeling that made middling ideology possible, however, the genre’s origins in the first half of the century (to say nothing of its Jacobean roots) would seem to further disprove the “bourgeois tragedy as class consciousness” thesis since, for starters, the genre appears before the class it purportedly represents. The truth is more complicated and certainly more interesting, drawing our attention to questions of historical causality in relation to social representation and emotional habitus. In the British context at least, the experimental tragic works that made up bourgeois tragedy offered exploratory affective scripts that predated a stable social identity and a defined class consciousness, as if to call that identity into being around certain values and the experience of loss. The earliest bourgeois tragedies thus seem to forecast instead that rank’s emergence, to contribute to its so-called “rise” by taking the ordinary and its misfortunes deadly seriously. Seizing upon the archaic forms of tragedy, ordinary people imagined modes of being-in-the-world later bourgeois tragedies can be said to reflect as empirical objects of social representation. Lauren Berlant outlines a similar process when she advocates a close attention to the way the aesthetic engages in the work of worlding: “Affect’s saturation of form can communicate the conditions under which a historical moment appears as a visceral moment, assessing the way a thing that is happening finds its genre, which is the same as finding its event.” Hence, she goes on to clarify: “The aesthetic or formal rendition of affective experience provides evidence of historical processes.”67 Or as Moretti’s cheeky assessment of what “seriousness” means to the driving politics of the genre moyen puts it: “Serious is the bourgeoisie on its way to being the ruling class.”68 Like much of the recent revisionist work in tragedy, therefore, this book expands our understanding of what the genre was by attending closely to that affective work, withholding totalizing aesthetic judgments in favor of anthropological curiosity, description, and critical reparation. Interestingly, 66 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 133. 67 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 16. 68 Moretti, Bourgeois, 74.

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24  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy to take bourgeois tragedy on its own terms is not necessarily to reject wholesale the insights of what will become the philosophy of the tragic (though it does complicate them). Nor is it to paper over the very real disjuncture that the genre’s emergence in the eighteenth century represents (as  if tragedy’s domestication wasn’t a flagrant violation of many of the period’s most cherished poetic and Aristotelian pieties). In many ways, what emerges instead is something of a conceptual and practical bridge linking those ancient and modern values that were circulating simultaneously. To think deeply about what the emergence of bourgeois tragedy does with and through emotion is to consider how a structure of feeling—with its ­aspirations, contradictions, and possibilities—solidifies into a genre of not only aesthetic but also historical experience. Because of this, The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy is an account of tragedy’s passage into a bourgeois modernity, its passage, that is, into a world characterized at once as tragic and prosaic. Neither a sentimental devaluation of a traditional genre nor a disastrous fall from an ideal form, bourgeois tragedy is instead one aspect of a larger “bourgeois revaluation” in this view, an historical event in European (especially British) culture whereby the middle station gained an importance and moral standing that was traditionally viewed as characteristic of the Ancien Régime.69 If there was a “rise” to the middling sort, then, it followed upon a more diffuse process of investment whereby the ordinary and this-worldly happiness were valorized in the imaginary, a process which took up the embodied memory of everyday experience and creatively enacted its loss as loss. What came into place in Georgian Britain were thus conditions under which the lives of these people and their attachments could be understood, once destroyed, as needing redress, as having been instances of grave suffering that necessitated mourning and reflection in the arts. Tragedy’s bourgeoisification located worth and dignity in common people, in the things they found delightful, and the shared way of life that gave them comfort and meaning. It provided a frame for recognizing the merit of this ascendant class built on family, capitalism, and piety, and just as importantly, a frame for displaying and exploring the frailty and vulnerability of both their bodies and ideals. Ironically too, these are broken, time and again, under the strain of holding fast to these same values, ultimately calling their justice 69  See McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity. On the concept of the “revaluation” as opposed to “rise” of the middle class, see chap. 3. Cf. Jacob and Secretan’s “Introduction” in In Praise of Ordinary People, 7–8.

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An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy  25 and truth into question. But a new sensitivity to the available comforts and happiness of this life underscores a point of Stanley Cavell’s, who (in a discussion of Freud’s late essay “On Transience”) notes that our sense of the tragic is sustained by a deep affection for what we esteem and fear to lose in this world; mourning its future loss is the toll one pays in “accepting the world’s beauty.”70 For what ultimately is the elder Crusoe’s warning if not a claim about the deep worthiness of his modest way of life, or an urgent petition for his son to find happiness in its simpler pleasures? What is it, finally, if not a scene colored by the same concerns that propel bourgeois and domestic tragedy? “I say,” Crusoe painfully recollects, “I observed the Tears run down his Face very plentifully, and especially when he spoke of my Brother who was kill’d; and that when he spoke of my having Leisure to repent, and none to assist me, he was so mov’d, that he broke off the Discourse, and told me, his Heart was so full he could say no more to me” (6). Crusoe’s wanderlust will reject his father and cast a skeptical eye upon the worthiness of his way of life. Only after the hard labor and solitude of the island, long after his father is gone, will Robinson come home, confident in the dignity of his person, for by then he has transcended the mediocrity of an imagined middling existence. Yet one suspects too that Father Crusoe knew well about the frailty of his home and way of life—much more so than he lets on to his headstrong son. The vicissitudes of the middle class may swing in a narrower ambit, but they are not for that reason any less painful. The urban world of trade and financial obligation could be as hazardous to navigate as the sea, its failure as isolating as shipwreck. A woman need not be entangled in royal intrigue in order to find herself abused and wounded by those holding more power. And the family home, with its potential for cold, hidden violence, could be as alien and threatening as the savage abroad. The prosaic world had its own dangers and sufferings, for which a new aesthetic idiom, calibrated to the ordinary, came to be fashioned. * * * Each chapter that follows narrates this revaluation in more detail, exploring the emotional practices through which bourgeois tragedy imagined its world. Chapter 1 begins by placing George Lillo’s 1731 landmark play, The London Merchant, in the context of the experimental theatre of the early

70  Cavell, “Uncanniness of the Ordinary,” 172.

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26  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy eighteenth century as well as the gritty world of London’s commercial city-center. Reading that play alongside burlesques and satires on the middle and lower sorts by Edward Ravenscroft, John Gay, William Hogarth, Henry Fielding, and John Kelly, I trace a transvaluation underway in middling life as it occurs through the radical theatre of Lillo and a handful of ­contemporaries. Lillo’s genre-bending assertion of the dignity of the ordinary confounded expectations, I show, offering an audacious challenge to entrenched ideas about one’s lot in the Ancien Régime. In this way, the earliest bourgeois tragedies began to invest ordinary forms of suffering with a gravity that had once been unthinkable. Chapter 2 brings the argument “closer to home,” leaning upon that metaphor’s work in order to think about affliction in the context of the middling sort’s domestic values. Broadening the archive of the genre’s source material by situating Georgian domestic tragedy alongside the true crime narratives it in many cases adapted, I argue that a constellation of texts stressed the troubling familiarity of domestic tragedy, the sense of danger and proximity to suffering that inheres in spaces simultaneously imagined as inviolable and increasingly bound by the warmth of affection. As readings of Lillo’s Fatal Curiosity and Arden of Feversham demonstrate, “striking close to home” imagines an all-too-ordinary experience of pain that the tragedy, by its verisimilitude, inexorably unearths. If bourgeois tragedy sought to evoke pity in its audience, the task of regarding pain was never uncomplicated. I turn to the novel in Chapter 3, returning Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa to its place in the history of bourgeois tragedy by tracing its affinities to precursors like Charles Johnson’s drama, Cælia, a decade earlier. In a wellknown twist in literary history, the novel’s tragic turn elicited the public’s disgust, with a variety of correspondents pleading with the author to reward his heroine’s virtue with a happy ending. Working through painful responses to the novel’s finale, I examine poetic justice in the period as a secular theology, arguing that it offered a way of redressing the injustice of this world by enacting a deep moral order in the world it represented. A mode of generic wish-fulfillment, poetic justice signaled at once an urgent demand for thisworldly happiness as well as an ambivalent attachment to life. Richardson maintained, however, that a realistic tragedy entailed an inscrutable Providence, demanding faith on the part of the reader and afflicted. Staging a contest over the possibility of pain’s fullness in tragedy, Clarissa’s suffering launched a midcentury debate over how that experience was navigable. Chapter  4 heads back to the theatre, exploring the affective stakes of “prosaic suffering,” a turn of phrase meant to denote not only the literal

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An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy  27 prose of its dialogue but also the quotidian realities of the life it imagined. Offering a close comparative reading of Aaron Hill’s The Fatal Extravagance and Edward Moore’s The Gamester, I place the developing conventions of British bourgeois tragedy in conversation with the insights of Richardson, Diderot, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and those actors called upon to embody its emotion, and argue that prosaic suffering performed its grief with a raw immediacy, in ways that were absorptive rather than theatrical, and provocatively disenchanted in their implications. Prosaic suffering presents the tragic figure as an emblem of abandonment, this chapter contends, in which everyday life is experienced as simultaneously leaden and trivial (as  Georg Lukács claimed of the novel). In this way, bourgeois drama’s “natural picture” adapted the novel’s “writing to the moment” and embodied emotional practices characteristic of a middling mode of existence marked by the tragic. Chapter 5 considers the sentimental novel, arguing that its often overwrought narrative form—whereby sensibility mediates one’s pleasurable engagement with a world in pain—belies its development alongside bourgeois tragedy. The Adventures of David Simple (1744), reckoned the first sentimental novel, illustrates this well, for it narrates the process by which the middling object of affliction (unfit for tragic representation only a decade before) became the feeling subject theorized decades later in moral ­philosophy. In fact, Sarah Fielding was steeped in Lillo’s and Richardson’s work, and part of a broader literary milieu that included her brother and other early theorists of bourgeois tragedy. Her novel carries on an intertextual commentary on the ordinariness of suffering and the difficulty of navigating its approach, adopting aspects of bourgeois drama’s “aesthetic of affective identification” and anticipating what would later be termed the “serious genre.” Reading the culture of sensibility alongside bourgeois tragedy therefore—in works as varied as Henry Fielding’s Amelia (1751), Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), Sophia Lee’s Chapter of Accidents (1780), and others—I contest the standing assumption that realism is a response to sentiment, rather than a mutual negotiation of the era’s feeling and form. I conclude by arguing that contrary to our current understanding, bourgeois tragedy was alive and well at the turn of the nineteenth century, if anything invigorated by a middle class eager to be seen as having arrived. Looking briefly to a number of domestic and bourgeois tragedies often erroneously labeled melodramas, I suggest that the genre’s influence ­continued to be felt for years after its supposed heyday. But I also gesture to the larger

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28  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy implications of the genre for the continental Enlightenment, connecting the English tradition to the bourgeois tragedies and serious fiction of Diderot, Louis-Sébastien Mercier, G.  E.  Lessing, Friedrich Schiller, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (all of whose work made its way back to Britain in translation). Returning to one of the book’s core themes, I argue that the dignity of the ordinary assumes a central place in this tradition, which increasingly views modernity as a tragic condition—and the stage of revolution. Culminating with a reading that places Goethe’s landmark Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774) in dialogue with its theatricalization in Frederick Reynolds’ little-studied domestic drama, Werter: A Tragedy (1786), I close the book by noting that if British bourgeois tragedy imagined an “ordinary suffering,” by the close of the century, and on the eve of the age’s greatest social upheavals, ordinariness—indeed, being middling—seemed itself a kind of modern affliction.

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1

The Bourgeois Revaluation of Tragedy Dignity and the Ordinary in George Lillo’s London

Bourgeois tragedy was once radical. Long the exclusive domain of kings and nobles, figures whose suffering was “heroick” and whose fall was thought to “powerfully strike upon the public sympathy,” tragedy in Georgian London increasingly found space to enact the misfortunes of everyday people with a measure of seriousness and dignity.1 A number of conditions had to be in place to bring this “bourgeois revaluation” about, and though many of the aesthetic and social changes that accompanied this shift weren’t embraced immediately, only becoming apparent in the century that followed, their possibility can be traced to a specific moment in cultural history. This chapter narrates the beginnings of this change, snatching George Lillo’s The London Merchant (1731) from much later traditions of sentimental and melodramatic theatre in order to place it in dialogue with its grittier contemporaneous context, where the miseries of ordinary folk were more likely to be the butt of the joke than an occasion for mourning.2 Drawn from real life, the first bourgeois tragedies were written by and for the people they depicted. Lillo, for example, was a hustler, a merchant, and a Citizen. Almost everything we know about him has been pieced together from Theophilus Cibber’s 1753 Lives of the Poets, Thomas Davies’ “Account of His Life” in the collected Works of 1775, and a thin trail of archival records; almost every detail confirms a stereotype of the early modern capitalist.3 Born to a Dutch father and an English mother, Joris van Lilloo was baptized in 1691 at the dissenting Reformed Church of Austin Friars, a haven for

1 Reynolds, Seven Discourses, 103. 2 Lillo, London Merchant, 114–210. Subsequent citations refer to this edition and appear parenthetically in the text. 3 Cibber, Lives of the Poets, 5:338–40; Davies, “Life of Mr. George Lillo,” ix–xlvii. The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy: Modernity and the Art of Ordinary Suffering. Alex Eric Hernandez, Oxford University Press (2019). © Alex Eric Hernandez. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846574.001.0001

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30  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy refugees fleeing religious persecution on the continent.4 A creature of the City, Lillo likely grew up in what was then called Moorfields, an unfashionable section of east London in the shadow of the financial district, bordered on one end by Grub Street, and popular with prostitutes and thieves (the notorious highwayman and one-time apprentice, Jack Sheppard, would retreat there on at least one of his escapes from prison in the 1720s). Lillo seems to have determined to make good, however. He took up the family’s trade in jewelry, grew its business, and began showing up at a relatively new civic fraternity, the Order of Free and Accepted Masons. Possibly through connections made there, Lillo—whose name had been Anglicized some years before, masonic rolls indicate—began writing for the stage in the 1730s, accumulating an impressive £800 for his efforts at a time when authors were lucky to profit from the earnings of a single benefit show. Contemporaries paint a picture of an active playwright, stout and blind in one eye, who offered close direction to his actors and had a natural touch for dialogue, if not at the risk of an occasional overstep in decorum. Though he later moved to the commercial docklands of Rotherhithe on the south bank of the Thames, at his death he was laid to rest among Richard Burbage and the Elizabethan players buried in the churchyard of St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch (fitting for a man who so highly venerated Shakespeare). A savvy print capitalist, committed to low church Protestantism, yet by all accounts jovial and goodhearted, Lillo’s life was a model of upwards mobility, practically a cliché of the bourgeois “sliding silently and smoothly thro’ the world.” In point of fact, however, Lillo’s rise in status was incredibly exceptional. For decades now, scholars have chipped away at boilerplate accounts of the indomitable middle class and their “drama of sensibility,” leaving us a much richer sense of the realities of living and writing in the City. Taking aim at what he calls the “politeness-sensibility paradigm” dominating our histories of the period—a paradigm Lillo and other bourgeois tragedians are often uncritically lumped into—Simon Dickie notes that eighteenth-century Britain was a mean-spirited and unforgiving place for common people, hardly the setting in which one would expect to see the serious depiction of ordinary people in distress.5 In London especially, burlesques, low-life humor, and everyday cruelties made the middling and lower sort the stuff of laughter, amusements for a public largely indifferent to their personal 4  Pallette, “Biography of George Lillo,” 263. 5 Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter, chap. 3; Bernbaum, Drama of Sensibility, chap. 1; Dobrée, English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century, 254.

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The Bourgeois Revaluation of Tragedy  31 misfortune. Long-held assumptions about social order and the capacity of inferiors to feel pain meant that these indignities were strikingly commonplace, reifying the operative hierarchies of power and status even within similar social strata. “It is hard for modern scholars to appreciate how absurd it could be, in 1740 or even 1800, to suggest that ordinary people had fine feelings,” Dickie reminds us, drawing out the implications for the era’s literature: “neoclassical aesthetics allowed common people to be re­presented only as objects of laughter.”6 More strikingly, the principal figures in many of these early domestic dramas move in and among the underclass, in scenes whose bloody-mindedness belies any notion of the era’s “softening” or “genteel” morality. Given the rough-and-tumble milieu from which bourgeois tragedy arose, its attempt at dignifying the ordinary would seem itself to be an achievement, a strangely humanitarian outlier in comparison to the status quo. Nevertheless, many present-day readers of the play have seen a less benign process unfolding. John O’Brien’s sophisticated reading of The London Merchant, for example, situates its debut (though not necessarily the genre’s) within the lax regulatory environment of the 1720s and 30s that turned the playhouse into a site of harlequinade and pantomime entertainments. In his view, Lillo’s play was a “counterattack” to this manic comic energy from below, an attempt at policing labor by a “self-aware bourgeois class” consolidating its authority.7 Consequently, Samuel Richardson’s handbook for would-be tradesmen, The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum (1734), cites The London Merchant as the only exception to the rule against theatregoing (and even that, only very rarely). George Barnwell’s true-to-life story offered a lesson, in his view, aimed at all those idle apprentices who had knocked off early to see a show. Lillo’s play has thus been taken as the inspiration for a number of similar moralizing works of the period, such as William Hogarth’s 1747 series, Industry and Idleness, which at one point was to name Idle, its fallen apprentice, after his tragic theatrical precursor.8 In line with this, a number of critics over the past several decades have faulted the play’s glorification of the patriarchal, the mercantile, and the pious as the nefarious work of bourgeois ideology. These readings at least appear to make sense of the drama’s institutionalization at midcentury as the annual Christmas performance for

6  Dickie, 111. 7 O’Brien, Harlequin Britain, 158. See also Burke, “The London Merchant and EighteenthCentury British Law,” 362. 8 Paulson, Hogarth, 2:308.

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32  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy London apprentices, not to mention Charles Lamb’s verdict in 1811 that the play was reduced to a “nauseous sermon.”9 A dire warning for all those assembled—one which, if the Biographia Dramatica can be believed, occasionally succeeded—The London Merchant offers a prescient illustration of  the Foucauldian carceral mindset at work through the regulation of ordinary feelings.10 From the vantage point of ideology critique, then, Lillo’s play becomes a very different sort of intervention, less about the rising cultural standing of the middling than about a downward pressure exerted against those clamoring underneath. Yet though many of the details here are compelling, the picture remains incomplete in ways that obscure a broader account of the genre. For one, assuming the play’s reception after its institutionalization in the 1750s to be typical downplays its originality, retroactively diffusing the political and aesthetic subversiveness of representing London Cits as objects worthy of metaphysical handwringing decades earlier. By midcentury, this notion would have been much less controversial, even if (as Dickie and others remind us) it would remain under negotiation well into the next century. These readings also tend to emphasize the way tradesmen like Richardson came to appropriate the play’s moral, downplaying the contradictions between law and desire that the play explores, especially in the figure of Millwood, the charismatic confidence woman who precipitates Barnwell’s fall. And though a top-down carceral logic might explain why apprentices were allowed to indulge in the play, it doesn’t answer why they, tradesmen, and other middling sorts of people (to say nothing of countless others, from gentlemen to Queen Caroline herself) flocked to its performance in the first place—or more puzzlingly, why they kept coming. Stranger yet, if The London Merchant came to be enlisted in the ­maintenance of a middle-rank cultural hegemony (whose very existence as a “self-aware” bloc is one of the most hotly debated topics among social historians of the period, and a critical problem for theatre scholars since at least Lisa Freeman’s work on the play11), that fact tells us little about the initial ­skepticism that met its debut in the summer of 1731, when it wasn’t at all clear that the play even was a tragedy. Its later canonization notwithstanding, the question raised in those first performances—could the life of an apprentice be properly understood as tragic?—aligned it closely with, and not 9  Lamb, “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare,” 4:43. 10  Baker et al., Biographia Dramatica, 2:376–8. 11 Freeman, Character’s Theater, chap. 3.

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The Bourgeois Revaluation of Tragedy  33 against, the experimental works that flourished in and out of the patent theatres in those decades. The London Merchant was a curiosity, yes, but one audacious in the value it placed upon ordinary life. What did these first viewers see onstage that summer afternoon? What had changed for them, and what tangle of literary and affective possibilities were opening up in this new form of tragedy? The discussion that follows ventures some answers to these questions, thinking about the first emergence of bourgeois tragedy as an artifact of ordinary feeling and the changing prospects of common dignity. I develop this in three ways: first, by situating The London Merchant within theoretical and theatrical contexts that better register its innovations; second, by looking to contemporary accounts of the play that suggest that the same viewers that came to ridicule the drama reported being profoundly moved by its foray into a strange new affective space; and third, by showing that the text itself negotiates this seriousness in the figures of the disgraced apprentice, Barnwell, and his would-be lover, Millwood. To be certain, the barometric changes in mood I want to track are subtle and complicated from the start, a party to problematic disciplinary relations and discredited values, as well as colored by the sometimes contradictory demands of decorum and performance. This chapter won’t shy from such ambiguities, even as its argument insists on the long view of the middling sort’s cultural revaluation. But a paradox lies at the heart of this, whereby the ordinary’s worthiness is wrapped up in the rehearsal of its loss, while at the same time, as if constituted by this dialectic, loss only registers gravitas for that which is already seen to have standing. Or as Judith Butler observes of the politics of recognition: “lives cannot be apprehended as injured or lost if they are not first apprehended as living.”12 The grievability of life, its ability to be mourned as having been lost, she argues, explicitly relies upon structural “frames” by which that recognition is possible, or what ends up sounding like a lived genre: “the general terms, conventions, and norms [that] ‘act’ in their own way, crafting a living being into a recognizable subject.”13 Imagining a mode of shared affective experience, and read against the backdrop of its unsentimental and experimental early modern moment, bourgeois tragedy’s appearance signposts an approaching turn in historical consciousness. * * * 12 Butler, Frames of War, 13–15.

13 Butler, Frames of War, 5.

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34  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy Few aspects of early modern poetics seemed as certain at the turn of the eighteenth century as that tragedy, by definition, depicted an elevated personage in distressed. One needed a socially superior model, a noble, powerful figure that would then elicit pity and fear when falling from such great heights. This much goes back to Aristotle, who claimed it as one of the defining markers of tragedy as opposed to comedy. In a well-trodden passage of the Poetics, he observes that comedy “tends to represent people inferior” while tragedy represents those “superior to existing humans.”14 Tragedy is distinguished precisely by this difference. Like the epic, tragic poetry is reserved for “serious” poets who represent “noble people” (48b24–5) and “elevated matters” (49b10), utilizing an “embellished” language (49b24) appropriate to the magnitude of its object. While the terms “superior” and “inferior” are left somewhat unclear here—other translations will use better or worse, but in what sense, exactly? and better than whom?—this distinction has been among literature’s most lasting, solidified in the way Restoration and neoclassical authors took this to imply a limiting of the genre to the ranks of the well born, what John Dryden referred to in his 1672 essay, “Of Heroic Plays,” as “men of honor.”15 In practice, then, better tended to mean social better, those optimi (best persons) who possessed dignitas or status and moral standing, as Cicero’s narrowest definition of the latter term made clear.16 Dryden’s Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668) minced no words on this point: “Tragedy . . . is wont to image to us the minds and fortunes of noble persons.”17 The genre was, in his view, “sacred to Princes and Heroes.”18 Seventeenth-century authors trained in the classics were picking up on shades of rhetorical meaning here too, for tragedy sustained a  Latin critical tradition whereby dignitas defined the social standing of an  individual while gravitas the quality of their speech or representation, leading ultimately to the “unwritten, fourth unity” of neoclassical drama: “that of tone.”19 The motivations behind this classed elevation were many according to the period’s critical thinkers. Some argued that the aristocratic ethos of the genre was tied to the audience’s stake in their fortunes: to care about the king’s fall meant also to care about the fall of the kingdom after which he was named and which his vicissitudes metonymically signified. Kings and 14 Aristotle, Poetics, 48a17–20. Subsequent references will be to Stephen Halliwell’s translation, cited parenthetically in the text. 15  Dryden, “Of Heroique Playes,” 16. 16  Michael Rosen, Dignity, 12–14. 17  Dryden, “Of Dramatick Poesie,” 74. 18 Dryden, Conquest of Granada, 3. 19  Howarth, “French Renaissance and Neo-Classical Theatre,” 227.

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The Bourgeois Revaluation of Tragedy  35 queens were pitiable because the average spectator’s wellbeing was wrapped up in the fates of great men and women, the demands of governing the body politic complicating their private agency.20 Others cited the exemplarity of the great as a reason for depicting their suffering. In his philosophical reply to William Davenant’s epic poem, Gondibert (1651), and later, the preface to his translation of The Iliad and Odyssey (1677), Thomas Hobbes elaborated a vision of heroic poetry that underscored the heroic mode’s aim in “rais[ing] admiration” for virtues associated with the aristocracy, namely “valour, beauty, and love.”21 Tragedy teaches us to look up, as it were, to Leviathan. Davenant’s preface to the poem anticipates this by noting that in the sublime genres of epic and tragedy: Prince, and Nobles being reform’d and made Angelicall by the Heroick, will be predomanant lights, which the People cannot chuse but use for direction; as Glowormes take in, and keep the Sunns beames till they shine, and make day to themselves.22

Soaking up their auras, the average audience is nourished and uplifted by the example of their betters, emulating what’s best in their response to affliction. Here, “heroick suffering” works silently to form our practice, seeping into the body (as the simile has it) until that day on which we call upon embodied memory to sanctify our own pain. In fact, and far more nakedly political, heroic tragedy’s emphasis on admiration (a key to tragedy’s elevating affect for figures as diverse as Hobbes, Davenant, John Dryden, and Nathaniel Lee) was especially important to those writing in close proximity to courtly culture during the years after the Restoration, who saw the genre’s elitism as a means of maintaining cultural hegemony in the face of the aristocracy’s own well-documented crises. Aping the manners of the more refined French, some claimed that admiration was a royalist innovation Pierre Corneille had exported across the channel. “Corneille endeavours at a new [passion] . . . admiration,” Joseph Addison wrote in 1700, adding that the awe evoked by the elevated hero aroused even more pity and fear, ratcheting up the intensity of all its enacted feelings.23 In the preface to Troilus and Cressida (1679), in slight contrast to this line, Dryden argued that the importance of depicting “persons of highest

20 Wallace, “Bourgeois Tragedy or Sentimental Melodrama?”, 141. Cf. Canfield, whose Heroes & States develops this as the centerpiece of his analysis. 21  Hobbes, “Virtues of an Heroic Poem,” 670. See also “Answer of Mr. Hobbes,” 53. 22 Davenant, Gondibert, 38. 23  Cited in Dobrée, Restoration Tragedy, 14.

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36  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy quality” in tragedy lay in its potential to represent negative examples. Here too, didacticism and exemplarity were at the forefront, though in the service of checking one’s passions. Because the drama existed “to purge the passions by example” in catharsis, that process could occur best by taking down those who seemed to be insulated on high from affliction: We are wrought to fear by [tragedians] setting before our eyes some terrible example of misfortune . . . for such an action demonstrates to us that no condition is privileg’d from the turns of fortune . . . . But when we see that the most virtuous, as well as the greatest, are not exempt from such misfortunes, that consideration moves pity in us: and insensibly works us to be helpful to, and tender over, the distress’d; which is the noblest and most god-like of moral virtues.24

What’s striking about Dryden’s reasoning in this passage is the way its seemingly universalizing claims about misfortune approach, but ultimately resist, the kind of identification that will become central to approaches to character we associate with bourgeois drama and the novel. Initially, it seems, what moves us in this picture of noble suffering, according to the laureate, is the corresponding implication that we are just as much (if not more) exposed to harm. Suffering comes for us all; better to learn now to be compassionate in our response. But herein lies a trick, for Dryden’s logic depends not upon the similarities that bind the everyday spectator and a dignified hero, but rather the essential disjunct and social asymmetries that obtain between them. Which is to say, if tragedy moves us, it does so precisely because of (and not in spite of) the fact that the figures whose lives are destroyed onstage are understood to be different and better than we are. In the tragedy’s final reversal, the spectator finds him- or herself looking down, shamefaced over the great brought low, but nonetheless made “noble” and “god-like” in the process. Writers of bourgeois tragedy would go on to exploit the premise ­unacknowledged by the Aristotelian position here: that according to neoclassical rules, the audience is positioned in an imagined middle between the great in tragedy above and the “hoi polloi” in comedy below.25 To be the spectator is to be in the place of the ordinary, the average, the middling. Lillo, in fact, will draw upon this point to convert the liabilities of bourgeois

24 Dryden, Troilus and Cressida, 231. 25  Dryden, “Of Dramatick Poesie,” 73. I’ll develop this point further in relation to sentimental fiction in Chapter 5.

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The Bourgeois Revaluation of Tragedy  37 tragedy (its depiction of ordinary people from real life, its refusal of heroism in favor of the prosaic) into assets by making the first tentative gestures toward what Paul Fleming terms bourgeois tragedy’s “aesthetic of affective identification.”26 In the Dedication to The London Merchant, Lillo writes to the City alderman and sub-governor of the South Sea Company, Sir John Eyles, that: “tragedy is so far from losing its dignity by being accommodated to the circumstances of the generality of mankind that it is more truly august in proportion to the extent of its influence and the numbers that are properly affected by it” (151). Lillo’s text initially associates dignity primarily with tragedy itself and not the figures it represents, preempting the view that depictions of ordinary affliction threaten to debase the elevated standing of the genre. Ever the businessman, what dignifies tragedy is ultimately how “extensively useful” it is, its ability to circulate broadly among its readers and thus to widen the ambit of the tragic’s use-value. The audience can buy into the play’s action (with apologies, but in some ways the pun is unavoidable) because such scenes are no longer so greatly distanced from their own experience. “I have attempted, indeed, to enlarge the province of the graver kind of poetry,” he remarks, merging the theorized affective goals of tragedy with the logic of an emerging capitalist class (152). In the language of our own entrepreneurial moment, Lillo creates a new market category for catharsis. By the play’s first scene, however, dignity has taken on an entirely different meaning as a predicate of the mercantile professionals depicted, and not primarily a quality of tragedy as such. Hence, Thorowgood’s portentous advice to Barnwell’s friend and fellow apprentice, Trueman: “if hereafter you should be tempted to any action that has the appearance of vice or meanness in it, upon reflecting on the dignity of our profession, you may with honest scorn reject whatever is unworthy of it” (I.i.14–16). Dignity, worth, honesty—the values of the middling rise to the fore of the play, and become its symbolic and moral terrain. Indeed, honesty in particular tracks one trajectory pursued in this book by hinting at the reinvestment of certain values in the period in and through bourgeois tragedy’s performative emotional practices. As several scholars have noted, honor-honesty in particular was part of a rhetoric of politeness that gradually underwent a change from its honorific sense (in which, like the French honnêteté and the Dutch eerlijkheid, these terms meant something closer to aristocratic civility and virtue) to our current notion of plain-speaking sincerity (a shade of meaning

26 Fleming, Exemplarity and Mediocrity, 46.

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38  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy associated with business and middling life).27 The dignity and worth of the middling are tied in this way to a new kind of commercial virtue and moral standing. Lillo converts Dryden’s “men of honor” into everyday, honest men; that is, he substitutes status-worth with a vision of worth based on integrity and civic duty.28 “The name of merchant never degrades the gentleman,” Thorowgood avers accordingly, its very rehearsal here evidence that such claims are far from assumed in the period. Bolder still, the London merchant extends the metonymic logic of neoclassicism mentioned above, equating the fortunes of ordinary shopkeepers and financiers with that of the Queen (Elizabeth) herself; as go the fortunes of honest City merchants, so also the young nation. Much depends on the fates of ordinary Londoners. But old habits are hard to break. For well into the eighteenth century, the theorized compact between tragedy and social elevation, though modified in some interesting ways, largely held together as conventional wisdom. Though the “nobility” of a figure would gradually shade into its moral sense over its social one, helped along by a skepticism regarding the inherent ­virtue of the Ancien Régime, a number of tragedies continued to provide models for the elevation of the tragic hero over the ordinary. Popular plays like Addison’s Cato (1713), Aaron Hill’s Zara (1735), John Home’s Douglas (1753), and Arthur Murphy’s The Grecian Daughter (1772) demonstrate how the stage maintained forms of social distance by exoticizing setting and modulating its tonal pitch upwards toward the aristocratic. Samuel Johnson’s position on tragedy in Rambler 156 offers another example, which, though surprisingly pragmatic in the way it balances mandates to follow nature and bend toward didacticism, nonetheless retains the high heroic as a central concept. Hence though he concedes that many of poetry’s rules are historical accident, and that mixed modes like tragicomedy represent the mixed state of human life, he closes with this qualification: “As the design of tragedy is to instruct by moving the passions, it must always have a hero, a personage apparently and incontestably superior to the rest [of the play’s characters], upon whom the attention may be fixed, and the anxiety suspended.”29 Whereas the essentially complex condition of “real life” allows the possibility 27  For honesty in particular, see twin discussions of this in McCloskey’s Bourgeois Virtues, 293–5, and Bourgeois Dignity, 26–7. For this account of politeness in the age, see Langford’s Polite and Commercial People, chap. 10. Hirschman traces a similar slippage in French arguments over le doux commerce. See Passions and Interests, 60–2. 28  Charles Taylor notes that this shift is at the heart of our modern “politics of recognition” grounding our notion of dignity to this day (though not unproblematically). See “The Politics of Recognition.” 29 Johnson, Rambler, 5:70.

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The Bourgeois Revaluation of Tragedy  39 of mixed modes, there still remains something unrealistic about an inferior personage really moving the spectator to catharsis. Despite decades of poetic innovation by the time the Rambler essays appeared in 1751— including a number of middling and domestic tragedies by not only Lillo, but also the stage manager Hill, tavern keeper Charles Johnson, and imitators like Osborne Sidney Wandesford, John Hewitt, and Thomas Cooke in the mid- and late 30s—“heroick suffering” holds on as the sine qua non of tragedy. That both positions coexisted and continued to coexist lends reason to be weary of overstating the Whiggish “expanding circle” model of dignity. In that common-sense view, dignity is part of a narrative in which (like rights and the recognition of the Other’s suffering) moral standing comes to be extended “to apply to all human beings.”30 In fact, some have viewed dignity as bound closely to a growing awareness of suffering, drawing ever broadly the “moral community’s” circle of inclusion, the boundary inside of which one is “entitled to a kind of consideration denied those outside.”31 Certainly, examples of this abound. But like the “rise of the middle rank,” this story relies upon a series of elisions in order to smooth out its plot, even as it locates a real critical turn in the eighteenth century’s “modernizing” cultural milieu. The philosopher J. M. Bernstein notes, for instance, that notions of a universal or broadened dignity (culminating in the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s) have taken hundreds of years to be applied, and from the start have preserved important status distinctions in the process of affirming that standing.32 Moreover, as Richard Rorty observes, the kind of imaginative identification required to bring about solidarity is a skill long in the making, one that relies upon the more visceral tools of the writer and artist rather than the moralist or the philosopher. Notions such as “dignity” and “suffering,” he argues, are rarely elucidated with the clarity and force available to the novelist or, indeed, the tragic poet, precisely because those notions remain enmeshed in contingent vocabularies that are themselves under debate and cannot simply be assumed. Hence, the affective scripts that make up the “know-how” of compassion have to be learned, a

30 Rosen, Dignity, 8; cf. Rosen, “Dignity Past and Present.” The language of “expanding circles” comes from the philosopher Peter Singer’s eponymous account of that process of expanding ethical status in history. 31  The language here is from Regan’s Thee Generation, but the link to “social suffering” is courtesy of David Morris’ essay on the same, “About Suffering,” in Social Suffering, 39–41. 32 Bernstein, Torture and Dignity, 260.

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40  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy process which takes time and, in his estimation at least, appeals little to one’s reason (if at all).33 At the very least, then, the longevity of the neoclassical rules in tragic criticism puts a wrinkle in any account of grievability predicated upon its linear and uncomplicated development through the genre, suggesting instead that the gravity of ordinary suffering had to be repeatedly negotiated in practice. Though across seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British life, the middling sort were undergoing a cultural revaluation, and though bourgeois tragedy both propels and reduplicates these values, several notable figures would affirm well into that process that the ordinary man or woman simply fails to excite our gravest concerns—or worse, becomes an object of buffoonish derision in comedy. * * * Indeed, not only were middling and low figures quite often assumed to be unworthy of tragic representation, their denigration could be the punchline itself. Burghers, merchants, and petty bourgeoisie had long been objects of mockery and derision, of course—the stuff of underplots and City comedies. One recurring theme in Restoration comedy, for example, was the relative ease with which rakish aristocrats satisfied the wives of overworked urban businessmen like Sir Jasper Fidget, preserving long-held tensions between social ranks in the genre’s political unconscious.34 Edward Ravenscroft’s adaptation of Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670), The Citizen Turn’d Gentleman (1672), went a step further, drawing out the ironies of social ambition over the full length of the play. That comedy mercilessly ridicules the middle-rank Londoner, Mr. Jorden, for being a striver who dreams of marrying a woman of quality. Tricked into believing that his textile salesman father was in reality an “honest Gentleman,” and that a powerful Turkish lord is willing to marry off his daughter to him provided that he convert to Islam, he takes the fictitious title of “Jonathan Jorden the Great Mamamouchi,” abdicating his true character in the process.35 Possessed of what his swindlers ironically refer to as “new dignity,” the final act exposes Mr. Jorden for loathing his intermediate position in society, curing the bourgeois of his ambition by a good old-fashioned shaming.36 “New dignity” is an illusion, it turns out, as oxymoronic as the play’s title. Almost a 33 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 92–4. 34 Wycherley, Country Wife. 35 Ravenscroft, Citizen Turn’d Gentleman, 73. 36 Ravenscroft, Citizen Turn’d Gentleman, 92.

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The Bourgeois Revaluation of Tragedy  41 hundred years later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau bemoaned the “invincible charm” of the French original, condemning Molière all the same for the vicious “lack of respect” shown to an otherwise “decent man.”37 In the meantime, however, parodies of the original would retain much of its essence even as they turned topical, as in the case of an anonymous 1720 burlesque, Exchange Alley; or, The Stock-jobber turn’d Gentleman. Sometimes these jokes fell along predominantly political lines, like in the anti-Cit comedy of Thomas D’Urfey’s Sir Barnaby Whigg: or, No Wit Like a Woman’s (1681), Aphra Behn’s The City Heiress (1682), and John Crowne’s City Politiques (1683), all of which, though not ostensively about a middling sort, still identify the populist interests of Citizens with those of a pretending lower gentry. Here the Londoner is largely synonymous in the cultural imaginary with the mercantile Whig and religious dissenter, crafting a token bourgeois avant la lettre. Accordingly, plays like D’Urfey’s, Susan Owen is moved to remark, collapse the Whig interest into a vulgar, urban mass, composed of the normal folk who would animate a series of tragedies fifty years later.38 City Politiques lumps these concerns in with a more general anxiety over the erosion of poetic patronage and established hierarchies, complaining in its preface that in the frantic days surrounding the Exclusion Crisis, “when half the Nation was Mad,” “Joyners, Carpenters, and Bricklayers, applyed [sic] themselves to the building of State-Projects, and in order to that, very often took measure of Verse.”39 Leveling was as  much poetical as it was political; anti-Cit satire put everyone back in their place. Professionals of various stripes were a consistent source of laughter in the eighteenth century, even for other merchants, apprentices, and members of the middle and lower orders of London society. This is surprising for those of us accustomed to think of these social groups in terms of class coalitions that fiercely defend that identity. Yet prior to The London Merchant’s establishment as a favorite of the City’s commercial figures, that role seems to have been filled by the decidedly less dignified farce, The London Cuckolds (1681). Written a decade after his adaptation of Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, and in many ways an echo of its satire, Ravenscroft’s play is shockingly irreverent to the ordinary folk it represents and for whom it was repeatedly 37 Rousseau, Letter to M. D’Alembert, 35. 38 Owen, Restoration Theatre and Crisis, 199. For an illuminating discussion of the intricacies of social class and literature at the turn of the century, see Hudson, “Literature and Social Class.” 39 Crown, City Politiques, A3 recto.

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42  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy performed up to midcentury.40 The comedy focuses on an intergenerational web of relationships between men, in which three rakish youths (Messrs. Townly, Ramble, and the young merchant, Loveday) plot to bed the wives of a scrivener and his City alderman friends (Dashwell, Wise-acre, and Doodle, respectively). Many of the usual Restoration-era tropes are here in abundance, from the falsely pious puritanism of Dashwell’s wife, Eugenia, to the exploitation of the “simple” wife-turned-mistress in Peggy, to Ramble’s ne’er-do-well slapstick in pursuit of love, leading some to dismiss its plot as  merely derivative.41 Comparing the play with Lillo’s, O’Brien suggests that apprentices in particular would have reveled in the drama’s brand of topsy-turvy order, engaging in a vicarious identification with the women and young upstarts secretly dominating feckless businessmen.42 Ravenscroft adds insult to injury too when he implies that household and financial mismanagement on the part of the latter enables their cuckolding, making the opening scenes of the play (where the patriarchs boast of their kept wives and neatly ordered lives) deeply ironic for the bourgeois. Yet no matter one’s social position, it seems, The London Cuckolds was a riot, its satire seemingly aimed at everyone else. Thus, one finds it performed at the request of “Persons of Quality” in 1723 and “Gentlemen” from the London industrial suburbs of Deptford and Woolwich just days before Lillo’s tragic debut (not to mention the Prince, the Queen, and the King at various points in the decade spanning 1725–35).43 A popular play for over seventy years, it was no doubt performed countless other times in similar conditions, kept alive onstage by the urban middle rank thanks to its broad satire of that same urban middle rank. The German traveler and scholar, Zacharias Konrad von Uffenbach, noted this refractory quality in its critique when he summed up the experience of a 1710 London performance: When this play is given, there are always prodigious crowds; it is not that everyone wishes to see how it is represented . . . although it happens often enough, but that everyone fits the cap to his neighbour and not to himself.44

40  The London Stage notes, for example, several performances of The London Cuckolds in the run-up to Lillo’s tragic debut, with several of them notably profitable. See Avery et al., eds., London Stage, pt. 2, vol. 2, 588 and passim. For a rich discussion of this play in a similar context, see O’Brien’s Harlequin Britain, 144–8. 41 Hume, Development of English Drama, 355. 42 O’Brien, Harlequin Britain, 146. 43  Avery et al., London Stage, pt. 2, vol. 2, 751; and pt. 3, vol. 1, 145. 44 Uffenbach, London in 1710, 38.

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The Bourgeois Revaluation of Tragedy  43 The pleasures of the play lie in acts of disassociation so that, like the epilogue’s speaker, one assumed the position of rake berating the middling: “Haste hence like Bees unto your City Hives, / And drive away the Hornets from your Hive . . . A Vision like to that methinks i’ th’ Pit / I see, and every Cuckold is a Cit.”45 The appeal of watching another’s financial ruin and downward mobility (among the greatest fears of the middle sort was undoubtedly the ­precariousness of one’s position there) seems equally difficult to fathom in terms of comedy, but this kind of drollery wasn’t out of place in the period’s stage. Exchange Alley, mentioned above, offers one clear example of this, though a number of similar burlesques targeted the ordinary people swept up in the rampant financial speculation that went with the early years of George I’s reign. The anonymous South Sea, or the Biters Bit: A Tragi-Comi-Pastoral Farce (possibly unperformed, but more likely an afterpiece entertainment) and William Rufus Chetwood’s The Stock-jobbers: or, The Humours of Exchange Alley would have been written as company stock crashed in the early months of 1720, for example, and spared little contempt in their satire. Hogarth’s celebrated Emblematical Print on the South Sea Scheme would appear the following year, but Chetwood’s play already explores a series of correspondences between the gaming table, lotteries, and emerging markets, drumming up distasteful laughs in the process. Warning against the dangers of over-ambition, the play’s merchants, cobblers, City folk, and country plowmen learn the hard way that such risky commercial ventures are the prerogative of the great (and the “great Mon” [sic]) alone.46 And if one is tempted to dismiss this as good-natured fun or counter that ridicule of this sort is only possible because the stakes were low for the average investor, consider instead that it’s precisely in this context that the first bourgeois tragedy emerges: Aaron Hill’s 1721 The Fatal Extravagance.47 That drama (which I will discuss in some detail in Chapter 4) follows the story of the seemingly prosperous Bellmour family as they desperately try to maintain their dignity and home in the face of the patriarch’s gambling losses (a clear stand-in for the deflated prospects of South Sea investment). Unable to do so, Hill’s play takes a dark turn when Bellmour attempts the 45 Ravenscroft, London Cuckolds, 48.3–4; 10–11. 46  South-sea; or, The Biters Bit, 11; Chetwood, Stock-Jobbers. Some attribute the former play to Chetwood too, though the Larpent Collection’s version is unsigned. 47  Mitchell [and Aaron Hill?], Fatal Extravagance. Allardyce Nicoll regards this play as the first “true bourgeois drama, set in England and without the least attempt at heroicising.” See Nicoll, Early Eighteenth Century Drama, 119.

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44  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy murder-suicide of his family in order to rescue them from public disgrace, suggesting that the stakes were in reality very high for ordinary people who could ill afford to absorb the market’s losses. Ultimately, Bellmour only succeeds at taking his own life, though the family’s fortunes end up looking not much better. “So many Men are made and undone / That Arts & honest Trading drop,” notes the accompanying text of Hogarth’s print satirizing the bubble, flashing the same glint of seriousness that dots almost all his satires. Yet Hill’s tragedy would prove a blip in theatrical history, for as the early decades of the eighteenth century wore on, authors increasingly played with the disconnect between “heroick suffering” and the everyday by burlesquing tragedy itself. The formula then was simple: craft a seemingly tragic drama populated not by the aristocracy and their virtuous coterie, but rather those “low” figures that were supposed to negate the very possibility of that genre’s moving affect. Some of these, like Henry Fielding’s The Tragedy of Tragedies (written and performed in the immediate context of The London Merchant in 1731), were more silly than anything else, ironizing the very notion of tragedy’s “enlarged sphere” at the hands of “Grubstreet tragical writers.”48 They were also, it should be noted, just as contemptuous of the bombastic high tragedy of the period. Playing up the inherent incongruity between the seriousness of tragedy and the vulgar, these popular works toyed with forms of social realism ultimately to dismiss their gravity. More importantly, such instances illustrate the operative assumptions of the period’s theatre, its general inability to imagine how the commoner might suffer with a dignity demanding fitting performative representation. Consider, for example, a three-act harlequin “tragedy,” The Fall of Bob: or, The Oracle of Gin: A Tragedy, written by John Kelly (under the pseudonym “Timothy Scrubb of Rag-Fair,” the location of both a clothes market for the poor and a fence for stolen goods in the east of the City). This entertainment was part of Fielding’s 1737 season at the Little Haymarket Theatre, performed alongside Lillo’s otherwise gravely serious bourgeois tragedy, Fatal Curiosity (1736).49 Claiming itself “the best Tragedy that was ever wrote” ([iv]), Kelly’s cast of characters is almost fully composed of stock London 48 Fielding, Tragedy of Tragedies. The language here, though, is from Fielding’s preface to Tom Thumb, the short piece that Fielding would revise as Tragedy of Tragedies. See Tom Thumb in the same volume, 380. 49 Kelly, Fall of Bob. Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor identify the afterpiece as one of a slate of politically daring offerings performed at the Haymarket that season that ultimately led to the Licensing Act. See Pamela in the Marketplace, 71.

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The Bourgeois Revaluation of Tragedy  45 tradesmen—Funk the cobbler, Steel the butcher, Stitch the tailor—lamenting that the Gin Act of 1736 will leave them with a “Load of Care . . . Terror and Despair,” without a narcotic that would “ease the Burthen of our Grief ” (9). The fall refers here to the prohibition of gin (“bob” was one of the drink’s street names), but also, in its veiled way, to the kind of social atrophy and personal addictions Hogarth would also chronicle in Gin Lane (1750–1; Fig. 1.1). The play’s central set-piece, for example, features an elaborate,

Fig. 1.1.  William Hogarth, Gin Lane. 1750–1. Engraving, 37.4 × 31.8 cm. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

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46  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy parodic mourning train lamenting the death of Livretta, a doxy overcome by her depression. Not to be outdone, in a scene that’s shocking because it was to be played for laughs, Worm the distiller attempts to hang himself, before failing at that and deciding to take up law in mortification instead (actually, that is funny). The Fall of Bob, however, also offers a rare glimpse into a pre-history of class struggle, with the play’s various figures explicitly singling out “members” of Parliament, “Nobles,” and the insulated “Great” as the cause of their misfortune (13, 8, and 8 respectively). Fielding helped pave the way for many of these genre-bending experiments, for despite the friendship he formed with Lillo in staging Fatal Curiosity—which he judged a “Master-Piece . . . inferior only [to] Shakespear’s best pieces”—burlesquing the ordinary was a favorite motif of his, and one he supported through his management of the Haymarket.50 His 1732 The Covent-Garden Tragedy, for instance, stages its mock-seriousness in a whorehouse next to Drury Lane, tweaking the prevailing assumptions of the period’s tragedies by mingling them with outright obscenity. Here the tragic love triangle is turned into one that centers on the cash nexus of prostitution between a john and two molls, evoking the values of London commerce only to dispel them as sordid, as various forms of debasement. Noting the close correspondence between Fielding’s bawd, Mother Punchbowl, and Lillo’s Thorowgood, who both function as fronts to an exploitative trade in flesh and labor, one commentator points out that The Covent-Garden Tragedy is, in effect, an “anti-domestic tragedy,” a “Brechtian” project that works by subverting one’s expectations.51 Indeed, while Fielding’s play was so distasteful that it ran for only one night, those who happened to be present for the June 1 performance would have no doubt smirked as the same actor who pioneered the role of Thorowgood (and had played him only the night before), Roger Bridgewater, donned a wig and dress as the mocktragic madam.52 Fielding’s irony thus persistently unsettles the assumptions that formed a tacit compact between author, player, and viewing public, naming the ordinary tragic in order to deflate any pretense to its actual dignity. “To tell you the truth,” reported one would-be critic at The CoventGarden Tragedy, “I know not what to make of it: one would have guessed

50  Quoted in McBurney’s edition of Lillo’s Fatal Curiosity, xiii. 51 Schechter, Eighteenth-Century Brechtians, 115–16; cf. Trussler, who argues that Fielding’s play finds its greatest source in the period’s domestic tragedies. See Burlesque Plays, 171–2. 52 Trussler, Burlesque Plays, 171–2. Cf. the cast lists preserved in London Stage, pt. 2, vol. 2, 162 and pt. 2, vol. 2, 222.

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The Bourgeois Revaluation of Tragedy  47 from the audience it had been a comedy, for I saw more people laugh than cry at it.”53 Pinning down the tone in works like these is exceptionally difficult, and always has been, it seems. The writer Thomas Cooke (who himself penned a domestic tragedy based on a true crime in Love the Cure and Cause of Grief, or the Innocent Murder in 1739) was surprised to hear of one “Yorkshire Gentleman” who related the incredulity with which several “who live at a great Distance from London” read the latest “dramatic Pieces.” Ballad-opera, farce, and modern tragedy especially seemed to present interpretive hurdles for them, leading many to conclude that such “bad Plays . . . were never performed onstage” for they would surely “affront their Audiences.” Stranger yet, perhaps, the gentleman went on to complain about The London Merchant’s “comical Incidents,” reading the work on a shared spectrum with the burlesque plays flourishing then on the same stage.54 After all, if John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) relied on an outrageous, arch elevation of low life in order to represent its “Newgate Pastoral,” then how was one to read The London Merchant, which some contemporaries referred to pointedly as a “Newgate Tragedy”?55 As Dickie and others have pointed out, appreciating the subtlety of these texts depends upon an understanding of how they evoke “serious social problems” in order to contain them, resulting in an attitude closer to “wry acceptance” than tragic pity per se.56 Oscillations between seriousness and humor inscribe social distance, in other words, even as they hint at the erosion of traditional generic and social distinctions (though one might note that in the anecdote above, literal distance could be just as troubling). John Bender, in fact, sees just this sort of heterogeneous pressure playing out in the “radical” “novelistic” oeuvres of Hogarth and Gay. For him, “the interplay of genres . . . formally rehearses a new, overtly paradoxical structure of feeling” that ultimately “dissolves all boundaries,” exposing the hierarchical powers of the period as resting upon an arbitrary exercise of force.57 This is the joke—if one can call it that—running through A Harlot’s Progress (1732) 53  Quoted in Fielding, Works of Henry Fielding, 943. 54  [Cooke], “Reflections on Some Modern Plays,” 11–15. Quoted in Paulson and Lockwood, eds., Henry Fielding, 37–8. On Cooke’s foray into domestic tragedy, which was performed only in 1743, see Bernbaum, Drama of Sensibility, 178–9. 55  The reference to “Newgate Pastoral, among the whores and thieves there” originates in a well-known letter from Jonathan Swift to Alexander Pope. See “Letter to Alexander Pope, Aug. 30, 1716,” 9. The reference to Newgate tragedy comes from Davies’ recollection of the play; see his “Life” of Lillo in vol. 1 of Lillo’s Works, 8. 56 Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter, 129. 57 Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary, 88–9.

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48  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy and its precursors, The What D’Ye Call It (1715), The Beggar’s Opera, and Edward Ward’s The Prisoners Opera (1730); showing the differences between high and low forms of vice to lie principally in the scale at which they’re practiced, they ironically level corruption even as they throw up their hands at the intractability of the situation. Rather than elevate the ordinary, all facets of modern life are flattened into a single, trivial, and debauched plane. For these reasons, the nonchalance of ballad-opera’s depiction of act and consequence mystified as many as it delighted. “The farce has occasioned many different speculations in the town,” wrote Gay and Alexander Pope to John Caryll of London’s initial difficulty with The What D’Ye Call It, teasing that the partially deaf critic, “Mr Cromwell hearing none of the words and seeing the action to be tragical, was much astonished to find the audience laugh.”58 Even so, it’s difficult to square the grimy earnestness of Hogarth’s imagery in A Harlot’s Progress and Gin Lane with the general disregard with which burlesques like Kelly’s treated practically the same people. That latter print, for instance, with its a subtle hangman wasting in obscurity at the topright corner and the poor dead mother deposed in its center, is altogether unfunny, especially in comparison to its Beer Street counterpart. Here, at least, the intention seems unmistakably tilted toward an almost religious seriousness, grounding that sobriety (as Lillo will) in an attempt at moral instruction (Fig. 1.2). Nor for that matter is Gay wholly given to ridiculing the low, for certain moments in The Beggar’s Opera are incredibly difficulty to read unless one takes them straight, inflected with a measure of pity and earnest foreboding. Lucy Lockit’s plea to “mention not [her] education—for ’twas to that [she] owes [her] ruin” is only one example of an air in that play that calls for real pathos in the midst of an uneasy chuckle: When young at the bar you first taught me to score, And bid me be free of my lips, and no more; I was kiss’d by the parson, the squire, and the sot. When the guest was departed, the kiss was forgot. (3.1.26–32)59

The subtle indignation of the satire here animates Hogarth’s depiction of innocence corrupted in Plate 1 of the Progress (Fig. 1.3) in strikingly similar ways, linking the bawd of the print to the Peachum-Lockit tandem. As Gay

58  Pope and Caryll, “Letter to Gay, 3 March 1714/15,” 19. 59 Gay, Beggar’s Opera, 3.1.24–5; 26–32.

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The Bourgeois Revaluation of Tragedy  49

Fig. 1.2.  William Hogarth, detail from upper-right corner of Gin Lane. 1750–1. Engraving, 37.4 × 31.8 cm. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

himself realized, one’s reading of burlesque hinged upon the interpretive lenses and habits of feeling that coalesced in social rank: “The common people of the pit and gallery received [The What D’Ye Call It] at first with great gravity and sedateness, some few with tears.”60 Yet as Bender points 60 Gay, Letters of John Gay, 19.

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50  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy

Fig. 1.3.  William Hogarth, Plate 1 (“Moll Hackabout arrives in London at the Bell Inn, Cheapside”) of A Harlot’s Progress. 1732. Engraving, 30.8 × 38.1 cm. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

out, Hogarth’s prints in this period pursue the consequences of a broken social contract with entirely more consistency, granting its action a weightiness that Gay’s comic heroism never really approaches (Fig. 1.4).“Hogarth’s endings are of the kind found in bourgeois tragedy, specifically George Lillo’s London Merchant,” he claims, modifying his argument on the novelistic tendencies of the satires.61 In a happy accident, Lillo’s play had appeared onstage as the artist worked to turn his 1730 paintings into engravings, likely propelling subscriptions for the print series in the process (were the originals, one might speculate, the inspiration for Lillo’s domestic tragedy?).62 As Jenny Uglow smartly points out too, the most profound connection between Hogarth’s work and the experimental atmosphere of the era’s stage may ultimately lie in how “A Harlot’s Progress also dignified its subject, opening up new territory to serious art.”63 61 Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary, 125. 62 Uglow, Hogarth: A Life and a World, 210; Paulson, Hogarth, 1:306–7. 63 Uglow, Hogarth: A Life and a World, 371.

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The Bourgeois Revaluation of Tragedy  51

Fig. 1.4.  William Hogarth, Plate 5 (“Moll dying of syphilis”) of A Harlot’s Progress. 1732. Engravings, 31.8 × 38.2 cm each. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Given these modulations in tone, however, it’s much less surprising that crowds would have arrived at Drury Lane for The London Merchant’s ­premiere prepared to jeer it. In his chronicle of English literature, The Lives of the Poets, Theophilus Cibber (who staged Lillo’s drama as manager of Drury Lane) notes that the play’s opening night was initially inauspicious: The old ballad of George Barnwel [sic] (on which the story was founded) was on this occasion reprinted, and many thousand sold in one day. Many gaily-disposed spirits brought the ballad with them to the play, intending to make their pleasant remarks (as some afterwards owned) and ludicrous comparisons between the antient [sic] ditty and the modern drama.64

Like the mock-tragic works of Gay, Kelly, and Fielding, the strange coupling of ordinary subject matter and tragic declamation in The London Merchant seemed, on the face of it, to demand the audience’s participation in a 64 Cibber, Lives of the Poets, 5:338.

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52  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy well-known ritual of public ridicule via comedy. It didn’t matter if the playbill assiduously indicated its tragic plot—wasn’t that the modus operandi of all burlesque? London theatre-goers, with fresh memories of not only The Beggar’s Opera and The Tragedy of Tragedies, but also countless other burlesques and ballad-operas, may have understood the ascription of tragedy to be another instance of tongue-in-cheek generic play. In showing up to the theatre, mocking ballads in hand, they were simply fulfilling what was expected of them as spectators of the urban middling and lower sorts. Fleshing out this context goes a long way toward explaining the dynamic at play in oft-cited early notices of the drama that emphasize the unexpected gravity of Lillo’s bourgeois tragic works, for it seems that those early audiences were surprised by their grief. As Cibber goes on to recall, the audience was so moved that they were compelled to “drop their ballads, and pull out their handkerchiefs,” enacting in the performance space what many called the true measure of a successful tragedy: its ability to bring about tears.65 Yet even today, critics tend to look at such notices with a measure of cynical disbelief or aloof condescension, in many ways replicating the incredulous eye-roll of burlesque. By contrast, I’ve been advocating for a critical posture that’s much more willing to take these initial reports at their word and see in them moments of genuine charity and openness, not out of a willed naïveté concerning their work in creating a bourgeois ideology, but rather because they form part of a complex historical moment pregnant with possibility and even radical contingency anterior to that ideology, a moment where the reflexive responses associated with “sensibility” and bourgeois life had yet to assume the force of habit and concretize into clichéd thought. Moments such as these mark instead an opening in affective and aesthetic possibilities through the contested material practices of early Georgian theatre and culture. Or rather, they flag an inflection point at which the imaginary and sensual conventions making up one’s experience of the world—what Lauren Berlant calls “intuition”—come up for negotiation. In a series of essays that culminated in her pathbreaking book, Cruel Optimism, she identified that category as an underdeveloped concept in ideology critique’s approach to realism, offering the notion as a late gloss on the mechanics that lie behind structures of feeling. In her view, intuition names “the habituated processing of affective responses to what one encounters in the world,” a dynamic, unspoken, yet embodied mediation of a moment’s assumed possibilities, aspirations, and contradictions that allows one to 65 Cibber, Lives of the Poets, 5:339.

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The Bourgeois Revaluation of Tragedy  53 render its experience navigable.66 Crucially, as this suggests, this process is a learned one, even though its embeddedness in ordinary life obscures the fact that routines (like genres) always also involve a series of ongoing creative negotiations over what constitutes a shared present and what it means to respond to its realities. “Intuition is where affect meets history in all its chaos, normative ideology, and embodied practices of discipline and invention,” she adds, offering a novel vocabulary for describing how feeling can “thicken and extend into prehension of historical events.”67 It’s precisely this distended temporality that I mean to emphasize here, for my argument so far has amounted to a claim that long before an ideology of middling life had materialized, well before the epoch could be defined by the “rise” of the middle rank, the affective conventions of ordinary life and the petty dramas of everyday experience were already at work in attuning the sensorium to those unsecured possibilities. To view bourgeois tragedy’s emergence in this light is to read that process as a scene of investment where genre formalizes a social rank’s responses and collective fantasy, where a vision of the good life is paradoxically sustained by rehearsing its loss. If those early spectators arrived at a comedy of middling-class misfortune, they left something strikingly new, a genre in which ordinary life and the tragic fused, even if only briefly. What’s brokered in the drama—through the social assemblages that upheld its production, performance, and publication—is the revaluation of bourgeois life. * * * Bourgeois tragedy was thus part of a wave of theatrical experiments that made it to the stage in the 1720s and 30s, initiating a sea change in the way the experience of ordinary people was collectively imagined. But what had been so moving for spectators of The London Merchant? In this section, I turn to consider the play itself, tracing the way that play mediates its vision of suffering and lodges an argument for the dignity and gravity of that experience. Of course, the play initially elevates the standing of merchants and ordinary City folk in ways that I traced above, celebrating the values of citizenship 66  For Berlant’s most systematic discussion of “intuition,” see Cruel Optimism, 52. For the quotation cited, see “Thinking about Feeling Historical,” 231. A number of recent works have sought to respond to and further refine the notion, whether as a form of the “cognitive nonconscious” or as part of the work of “attuning” oneself to the affects that make up everyday life. See, for example, Hayles, Unthought and Stewart, “Atmospheric Attunements.” 67 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 52; Hayles, Unthought, 197.

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54  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy and trade, like honesty, plain dealing, and duty to one’s country. London merchants, including Thorowgood and his good apprentice, Trueman, are living out a comedy of national influence, it would seem, the play retrospectively imagining Elizabethan England’s triumph over the Spanish Armada as a parable of middling virtue. Having secured a treaty with Genoese financiers, England’s triumph is one of common men doing uncommonly heroic deeds, the defeat of an antiquated aristocratic order at the hands of rising capital. To hear Thorowgood talk of this, the Queen depends on these enterprising merchants, and solicits their influence in world affairs of near-epic importance. Lillo’s work, in point of fact, looks back on this period with nostalgic fondness; the Armada’s defeat becomes for him a story of Englishness’ inception—as essentially Protestant, free, and commercial. In this way, too, social relations in the play are refashioned as contractual partnerships of mutual interest; as the master benefits from the apprentice’s labor, so too the queen over her subjects, while by turns subjects and apprentices both stand to gain. Several commentators on the play have noted that The London Merchant argues that such relations are natural, essential features of a commercial, Protestant kingdom in which notions of political and economic consent are more or less enshrined as features of political moderation after 1688.68 Thorowgood assures us that the “method of merchandise . . . is founded in reason and the nature of things” and operates “by mutual benefits diffusing mutual love from pole to pole” (3.1.1; 3–4; 7). And Trueman underscores this vision of benevolent liberality when he recasts English mercantilism as  a good-will mission in which agents endeavor to “tame the fierce and polish the most savage; to teach them the advantages of honest traffic by taking from them, with their own consent, their useless superfluities, and giving them in return, what from their ignorance in manual arts, their ­situation, or some other accident, they stand in need of ” (3.1.11–14). The merchant’s “honest traffic,” however, belies its entanglement in a much less wholesome endeavor. Its immediate commercial context would have been the accelerating trade in slave labor and the looming specter of trade war with the Spanish, for which the play’s patron, Sir John Eyles, had been a controversial advocate as part of both South Sea and Royal African Companies (his father Francis, once a City haberdasher, had raised his stock as an early investor in the latter). Lillo will shy from direct reference 68  See, for instance, Freeman, Character’s Theatre, 116–19; and Wallace, “Bourgeois Tragedy or Sentimental Melodrama?”, 131–5.

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The Bourgeois Revaluation of Tragedy  55 to these issues, gesturing toward company debates in veiled references to its “utmost confusion” in the preface, and likening Millwood’s own condition to that of slaves who “have no property—no, not even in themselves” (1.3.18). It’s possible to read her actions, then, as a kind of slave rebellion to be contrasted against Thorowgood’s much softer, more benevolent vision of global trade, as if the commitment to convert and educate the savage—by virtue of the modest autonomy that assumes for the would-be convert—nullifies its much graver violation of human worth. Nevertheless, if anyone here seems susceptible to a tragic fall, it ought to be Thorowgood, whose agency as head of household and mercantile kingmaker confers on him the social and moral “superiority” long thought to be requisite for tragic pathos. Instead, the play argues, the audience ought to pity Barnwell and Millwood, the two figures who seem to demonstrate, if anything, the meanness of their standing. “Honest traffic” never comes easy for these two. In the former’s case, a proleptic language of natural, bourgeois virtue repeatedly runs up against a putatively unnatural compulsion to violate it. The public benefits of middle-rank virtue are repeatedly thwarted by the sensual underworld he misperceives as an entry into the homely pleasures of the domestic, a seductive vision of companionate love that was always just an erotic ruse. In contradistinction to the willful consent claimed by Trueman, Barnwell, in the words of his master, “faintly contends or willingly becomes the slave of sense” (2.4.17). Barnwell’s moral agency is summed up in this vacillation, between the industrious striving of labor above board and the insatiability of one’s private fantasies. If middling virtue means “solid happiness” and prosperity, as it does for Barnwell, it is forcefully contrasted against that which often proves disastrous to domesticity: a desire for illicit sexual gratification that the apprentice cannot suppress. Hence, Barnwell characterizes his ambivalent surrender to Millwood as a move toward isolation away from the comforts of the family home, a wandering between two worlds uneasily shoehorned into the language of a capital venture: Reluctant thus, the merchant quits his ease And trusts to rocks and sands and stormy seas; In hopes some unknown golden coast to find, Commits himself, though doubtful, to the wind; Longs much for joys to come, yet mourns those left behind. (1.8.22–6)

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56  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy The promise of middling-class stability—a promise vigorously asserted as natural and providential in the play’s opening scenes—is threatened by enthrallment in imagined pleasure. As the apprentice characterizes this immediately before dispatching his own uncle for the family fortune: ’Tis more than love; ’tis the fever of the soul and madness of desire. In vain does nature, reason, conscience, all oppose it. The impetuous passion bears down all before it and drives me on to lust, to theft, to murder. Oh conscience, feeble guide to virtue, who only shows us when we go astray but wants the power to stop us in our course!  (3.5.19–23)

Conscience is weak and here only serves to throw guilt into relief. As if to dress Attic drama in British cloth, desire becomes a fated compulsion, seeming to propel the tragedy’s plot inevitably forward. Barnwell’s agency becomes a drama of personal conscience, an exploration of commonplace motivation and its consequences for regular people. In this way, the personal is suffused with the intensity of tragic rhetoric. And this is key, for the play repeatedly turns over what it means to suffer if  middling-sort prosperity seems so readily at hand, if virtue is tied to an instrumental reason without complication. Trueman renders the optimism of this view in a manner that seems to preclude the very possibility of the tragic, the play anxiously rehearsing the essential benevolence of the providential: “as Heav’n can repair whatever evils time can bring upon us, we ought never to despair” (2.2.75–6). The good apprentice doesn’t miss a  beat, adding: “—But business requires our attendance—business the youth’s best preservative from ill, as idleness his worst of snares” (2.2.76–7). That conjunction—but business—is the nervous coda to their platitudes, the cure to proverbial idle hands. Barnwell, however, makes its unacknowledged tragic stakes clear when he considers whether to break off his relationship with Millwood, wary of breaking her heart and perhaps abandoning her to want or prostitution: “But what of Millwood? Must I expose her too? Ungenerous and base! Heaven requires it not. But Heaven requires that I forsake her! . . . Should I once more tempt Heaven, I  may be left to fall never to rise again” (2.3.2–4; 6–7). Immobilized by such Faustian angst, his soliloquies are not at all unlike the Protestant selfexamination Lillo would have known from his youth as part of the dissenting church. Barnwell’s careful tracing of motivation and compulsion has the effect of transforming duty into a sort of virtuous suffering—or rather, it performs it as a maudlin martyrdom. Left alone, Barnwell concludes: “If to resolve to suffer be to conquer, I  have conquered. Painful victory!” (2.10.1).

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The Bourgeois Revaluation of Tragedy  57 More interesting, perhaps, are those instances in the play where genuinely benevolent motivation on the part of the merchant and apprentice results in a further entrapment in Millwood’s confidence game. Indeed, the play seems more concerned with these moments precisely because suffering seems so unnecessary, the accidental byproduct of one’s good intentions. Thorowgood’s benevolence will become a parable of moral hazard, for the merchant’s easy forgiveness of the apprentice’s transgressions sets up Barnwell for a more precipitous fall. So when Barnwell returns to Millwood, his heart moved by the kind of extravagant Christian grace one can only experience as a prodigal—the merchant refuses, for example, even to hear his apprentice’s explanation and offers his forgiveness preemptively—Barnwell merely emulates the charity he’s been extended. (If Horace Walpole’s understanding of the play’s characters is right, Thorowgood’s primary line of work was in banking and accounting, underscoring the costly price of forgiving such debts.69) In the logic of the play, moreover, Barnwell becomes grievable as he in turn pities Millwood, joining the ranks of those with standing enough to have something to lose and someone less fortunate to condole. Upon Barnwell’s resolution to suffer in domestic duty by forsaking Millwood, she proceeds by exploiting the very same pity that the apprentice aspires after, casually intimating that her situation is far more dire than she’s let on. Barnwell, who just previous to this announces that Thorowgood’s “gratitude compels” his virtue, and that such “unlooked-for generosity has saved [him] from destruction” (2.5.4–5), is caught, unable to extend the philanthropic benevolence he has been a beneficiary of without compromising those same values. It’s his sensitivity to her precariousness that leads him to embezzle funds, as he muses to Millwood’s accomplice, Lucy: barnwell To be expos’d to all the rigors of the various seasons, the summer’s parching heat and winter’s cold; unhous’d to wander friendless thro’ the unhospitable world, in misery and want; attended with fear and danger, and pursu’d by malice and revenge; woud’st thou endure all this for me, and can I do nothing,—nothing to prevent it? lucy ’Tis really a pity, there can be no way found out.  (2.11.61–6)

Lucy’s linguistic play—in which “pity” suggests a loophole through which the law might be circumvented—is one of the play’s few comic moments, 69  Walpole, “Letter to Richard Bentley, 24 December 1754,” 3:275.

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58  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy but the set-up here is equally instructive for parsing the play’s tragic work. For just as erotic desire becomes a compulsion that leads the apprentice to disaster, so does, on the other hand, the inclination to do good. However, and in opposition to the neat providentialism so often claimed as the play’s central argument, it proves costly to do so, and in actuality, far more costly than his brief sexual encounter earlier in the play. In a reading of the play against the backdrop of England’s Poor Laws and  criminal justice system, Helen Burke suggests that the drama’s initial influence among British men of property, as well as its popularity in general, can be explained by its bleak depiction of the consequences attending law’s transgression—even in those cases in which economic precariousness seemed a just reason for law’s suspension. The play, in other words, depicted the harsh consequences for Barnwell’s straying from “honest traffic” and thus pressed mercantile claims to stronger, more defined property rights while also legitimizing the heavy-handedness of Tyburn executions.70 Yet, if this is so, on this point Barnwell is just as sympathetically portrayed as he is censured in the text, even if we consider that the play eventually makes recourse to the gallows for its reassertion of legal order. While Lillo’s text certainly never exculpates Barnwell or his conning paramour, its rhetorical strength arises out of the conflicting demands for philanthropic benevolence and lawfulness, and hence the spectator’s compassionate consideration of  Barnwell’s miscalculated action. With respect to the embezzling of Thorowgood’s assets, the apprentice defends himself by making explicit appeal to the messiness of an ethics of moral sentiment. “What am I about to do!”, he asks in an aside no doubt directed at the Drury Lane audience, skeptically weighing his options: “Now you, who boast in your reason allsufficient, suppose yourselves in my condition, and determine for me; whether it’s right to let her suffer for my faults, or, by this small addition to my guilt, prevent the ill effects of what is past” (2.13.1–4). Caught up in the moral calculations at the heart of the text, the audience—which, we might recall, is structurally positioned in an imagined Aristotelian middle—is assumed to be a moral agent attuned to the grievability of these lives, one for whom Millwood’s destitution might, had they not known it to be a ruse, compel charitable action. Pressing the aesthetics of affective identification further, the play’s audience is thereby challenged to substitute themselves for Barnwell, the better to feel the difficulty of his predicament.

70  Burke, “The London Merchant and Eighteenth-Century British Law,” 347–66.

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The Bourgeois Revaluation of Tragedy  59 Irony and sympathy depend here on the audience’s awareness that Barnwell’s position is compromised and nearly intractable in the normative terms elsewhere lauded in the text. So even though I concur with Burke’s contention that Lillo’s original finale—in which both Barnwell and Millwood are hanged—is crucial to the interpretation of the text despite its omission in eighteenth-century presentations, I’d suggest a softening of its hard-line stance on criminality. Lillo seems, in fact, surprisingly ambivalent as to the justness of both characters’ situations, and we can take this rhetorical vacillation to imply, if anything, a skepticism regarding the draconian harshness of the law. What’s more essential to remember is that the very fact that such a tension brings about the play’s most moving ruminations on law, fate, the causes of suffering, and the attendant specter of cultural guilt is the very evidence of its aspiring toward a properly tragic affect, a mode of re­presentation that assumes the dignity of other, different people. * * * Imagine, for a moment, how fundamentally audacious the following monologue, spoken by an apprentice embroiled in a disastrous affair, must have sounded to the play’s contemporaries: What have I done?—Were my resolutions founded on reason, and sincerely made,—why, then, has Heaven suffer’d me to fall? I sought not the occasion; and, if my heart deceives me not, compassion and generosity were my motives.—Is virtue inconsistent with it self, or are vice and virtue only empty names? Or do they depend on accidents, beyond our power to  produce, or to prevent,—wherein we have no part, and yet must be determin’d by the event?—But why should I attempt to reason? All is confusion, horror, and remorse;—I find I am lost, cast down from all my late erected hopes, and plung’d again in guilt, yet scarce know how or why. (2.14.1–10)

Not simply for its elevated styling, the passage is striking because Barnwell understands his situation in the language of the heroic: as a contest between the will of an unseen God, and the will of a man trying to understand and do what is good. As he later characterizes this problem, in which evil is rendered somehow necessary by the complex parsing of sufficient reasons and seemingly accidental circumstances: “The world is punish’d, and nature feels the shock, when Providence permits a good man’s fall!” (3.5.7–8). How is it that the providential can ordain human misfortune, can rescind the stability of moral categories? Why, in other words, does his attempt at honest

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60  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy virtue—embodied in Barnwell’s misplaced benevolence despite his otherwise naïve susceptibility—sometimes entail profound suffering? Lillo’s text continually returns to this theme, stretching the links that tie together moral intention and legal and theological consequence, refiguring them as, by turns, ordered and chaotic. The certainty of Thorowgood and Trueman’s virtuous mercantile life, its essential rightness and dignity, is repeatedly troubled by the “dreadful spectacle” of the apprentice’s body hanging from the gallows. Barnwell is haunted by the fear that he is “justly to fall unpitied, and abhorr’d,” exposed to the twin spectatorship of audience and gawking crowd (4.12.10–12). As O’Brien, Burke, and Bender have all pointed out too, the gallows worked by virtue of its theatricality, so that even if these scenes were omitted in the original representation, their fleeting evocation hints at the shame and vulnerability of this undignified end. Here, Lillo’s apprentice imagines himself as an object of communal derision, a person stripped of life, agency, and standing by the left hand of God (Fig. 1.5). If this is election, therefore, it is a deeply disturbing one whereby suffering becomes necessity. Yet what I find most striking about this soliloquy is not the roundabout evocation of disbelief in the divinity’s benevolence—a topic I’ll return to in later chapters—but instead the assumption that a good life was possible had it not eluded Barnwell’s grasp. It’s easy to miss this, but the mere fact that The London Merchant has the audacity to ask “why” where previously such a question might have been precluded or even, as I have tried to argue, mocked as ill-befitting a lower station lends a gravity to the moment that was remarkably new. Hence the writer for The Weekly Register anticipating the traditionalist’s rejoinder: “The objection, that the characters are too low for the stage, the Register answers,—That ’tis lowness of action, not of character, that is not allowed there. The circumstances here are of the utmost importance, and rise as high in action, as any to be met with in the stories of more pomp and ostentation.”71 The stakes are high, even if the characters are low. And whether quixotic or realistic, the apprentice imagines his afflictions as the reluctant end to a fantasy of a better life, finding himself “cast down from all [his] late-erected hopes” in what we should understand as the tragic fall’s collision with a far less enchanted modernity. What exactly those hopes were, I think, is ultimately beside the point; it is the newfound, intuited sense that something better is possible, that something better is to be hoped for by the commercial and working

71  Weekly Register, Aug. 21, no. 71, reprinted in “Some Remarks on George Barnwell,” 340.

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The Bourgeois Revaluation of Tragedy  61

Fig. 1.5.  Anonymous, Frontispiece to The London Merchant. 1763. Public Domain.

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62  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy ranks, that is the structure of feeling swirling about in solution. What’s remarkable here is the perception on the part of the playwright, his characters, and a mourning audience that a profound injustice may have occurred, a suffering needing to be answered either in the discursive soliloquizing of a working man or, indeed, through the body of an actor staging its problematic, affective presence. In many respects, in fact, the play stages the limits of the discursive when ordinary suffering attempts to navigate tragedy. This is partly a function of  its depiction of Barnwell’s election to grief, the providentialism that haunts its easy collapse of virtue into success in ways that repeatedly render that theology impenetrably obscure. If we trace, for instance, the discursive chain of rationalizations that accompany Barnwell’s fall, we repeatedly run aground, falling back, presumably, on the simple insistence that what happened has happened. As Maria puzzles out: “I know I am unhappy, yet cannot charge my self with any crime . . . that shou’d provoke just Heaven to mark me out for sufferings so uncommon and severe . . . then it is just and right that innocence should suffer; for Heaven must be just in all its ways” (4.1.2–6). And so, the circle closes. Lillo plays this out repeatedly in the text, anxiously though perhaps no less faithfully, culminating in what may be one of the finest depictions of cynical cultural criticism in the character of Millwood. She reads her ­situation not as the negative election of the providential, but as systemic oppression by its apologists, the “shadow” of “conscience” made manifest as collective guilt (4.10.18). She repudiates Thorowgood’s attempt to mystify evil in ascribing her influence to the demonic—as if she were some Miltonic Satan—by locating the demonic, on the contrary, in “all mankind” (4.18.5–6). When Thorowgood attempts this maneuver (“I charge you as the cause, the sole cause of all his guilt, and all his suffering,” he insists [4.16.36–7]) the dialogue is subtle, and opens the possibility for us to read Millwood as at least not totally culpable for the situation in which Barnwell and she find themselves, almost as if to follow Lucy Lockit’s or Hogarth’s Moll Hackabout’s progress to its logical end in the criminality of London’s disintegrated social fabric. Besides this implicit identification of accident and the providential, her response calls into question the ways in which agency is understood or exploited as broader social forces. It gives the lie, in other words, to the system of master-apprentice indenture the merchant is a part of, the indenture that provides him with cheap labor everywhere asserted as benevolently consensual. If she’s devilish, then, she’s no more so than the mercantile

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The Bourgeois Revaluation of Tragedy  63 companies that both Thorowgood and Sir John Eyles claim to be the savior of English freedoms. So too, as Freeman has shown, Millwood’s no more malevolent than those men who make women their “universal prey.”72 Hence, the devil is an “emblem,” an “imaginary being” that distills social evils so that their practice can be represented, projected out there, and thereby dismissed as Other. Like the providential in the text, Millwood maintains, evil is the collective will of disparate, violent men retrospectively assuming their actions to have been necessary (often for some greater good). None of this is to say that Lillo’s text ultimately sanctions this view—Millwood will suffer not as a martyr but as a lost soul, cursing in despair. In recounting it here, I merely wish to suggest that the play is remarkably ambivalent on the reasons that lie behind one’s affliction; the obscurity of its rationale here is as much a source of angst as it is a fount of reasonable consolation in the face of human pain. “I now am,—what I’ve made my self,” cries Barnwell, uneasily absolving the divine in one of the play’s strangest moments of theological doubt (5.8.2). More significantly perhaps, the pitiful body itself escapes the play’s discursive frame, soliciting one’s visceral response to its grievable lives. “Tears,—tears, for blood!”, stammers the apprentice, noting that his murdered uncle, in viewing his nephew, sees only the patricide’s inexorable misfortune: “By Heaven, he weeps in pity of my woes” (3.7.17–18). In this way, the evocative phrase “Tears,—tears, for blood” initiates an exchange between poet and audience through the body’s liminality. It calls forth an affective field that it redoubles in those same ordinary folk assembled as its witnesses; bourgeois tragedy’s depiction of suffering imagines, in a sense, a common language for pain, converging around a shared experience. “Tears,—tears for blood” is the inarticulate call and response of the bourgeois tragic poet, the stammering invocation of pity by Lillo and Barnwell alike. Indeed, the play suggests that by such spectatorship, the tragic figure’s suffering is somehow redeemed in the viewing, valorizing the work of recognition in bourgeois tragedy’s ordinary lives. Here recognition’s promise, as Rita Felski observes, is that something more might be gleaned, that in that moment of recognition one opens oneself to a renewed and deeper understanding of who they are and how they relate to the world.73 At its

72  Freeman’s argument is exceptionally strong in its analysis of the way in which gender operates in the play, resisting its neat inscription into the providential, mercantile ideology and thereby troubling its generic form. See especially pp. 119–22 of Character’s Theater. 73 Felski, Uses of Literature, 25.

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64  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy best, bourgeois tragedy’s aesthetic of identification seeks to change the spectator or reader. Hence, Barnwell’s “dreadful spectacle” becomes, as Thorowgood implores, an occasion in which both audience and company reflect seriously: “With pity and compassion let us judge him . . . for we,— who wonder at his fate,—perhaps had we, like him, been tryed,—like him, we had fallen too” (5.1.37–40). Or perhaps that misfortune becomes an instance of the ineffable: “Who can describe unalterable woe?” laments Millwood’s accomplice, Blunt (5.12.3). Pity here and throughout the play thus denotes not condescension or contempt (as we too often take it) but rather an admission of another’s worth, inviting its contemporaneous viewers to raise the ordinary in esteem. What then should we make of Millwood, whose body—by her own admission (1.3.18)—is deemed the alienated property of men? Perhaps surprisingly, I would maintain, her afflicted condition is also a powerful focal point of grief in the drama, even though it has not often been read in this way. As David Mazella notes, The London Merchant’s critical history has long been bound up in an implied question as to who deserves their sympathy, which in its own way is a question of worth.74 He cites, for example, the “Introductory Anecdotes” in Mary Wortley Montagu’s 1837 collected Letters and Works, in which the editor (her great-grandson, Baron Wharncliffe) avers her lifelong love for English drama by singling out Barnwell’s fate especially: “she had several volumes of differently sized and wretchedly printed plays bound up together, such as the Duke of Roxburghe would have bought at any price . . . But Lillo’s domestic tragedies were what she most admired; for ‘My lady used to declare,’ said the old servant so often quoted, ‘that whoever did not cry at George Barnwell must deserve to be hanged.’ ”75 Montagu’s gesture of simultaneous judgment and sympathy rests on the grievability of Lillo’s protagonist, casting Millwood’s refusal of and inability to pity as the confirmation of her place on Tyburn’s tree. The recognition of Barnwell’s standing here is thus accomplished by marking his antagonist as beyond the pale. Though Barnwell’s fate was (as Catherine Trotter wrote her niece in 1735) “most to be pitied,” the “common prostitute” served for many as an example of moral coarseness deserving no respect.76 74  Mazella, “Justly to Fall.” 75  Wortley, “Anecdotes of Lady M. W. Montagu,” 1:86. 76 Trotter, “Letter to Her Niece, May 30, 1735,” 2:275; “Some Remarks on George Barnwell,” 340.

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The Bourgeois Revaluation of Tragedy  65 And yet the care with which Lillo attends to Millwood’s character and motivation in the drama resists simplistic readings of her villainy, bestowing upon her a weightiness and complexity wholly out of place in the established genres of the period. As even Barnwell will enjoin by the play’s close: “O! gracious Heaven! extend thy pity to her” (5.11.40).77 The earliest productions of the play omitted this line, but the sentiment finds voice in a number of other, subtler ways. Cibber’s perceptive theatrical prologue, for instance, makes clear that we are to consider her in a state of “sad despair,” naming her an object of our mourning, even enacting her place as the drama’s central tragic figure in her despairing march to the gallows. Is she, after all, the London merchant of the play’s title, locked into a life whose worth can only be known as it is lost or otherwise wasted away in a cruel, urban flesh trade? Millwood seems to be living out her own tragic condition: “well my I curse your [Thorowgood’s] barbarous sex who robb’d me of [mind and body] ’em, ere I knew their worth, then left me, too, late to count their value by their loss. Another and another spoiler came, and all my gain was poverty and reproach” (4.17.10–13). In fact, the play parses the happenstance of her social position, problematizing the easy dismissal of those factors that played a part in shaping her  behavior. In her sharpest moments, she reappropriates the argument popularized in the leveling irony of The Beggar’s Opera. “What are your laws,” she asks, “[but] the instrument and skreen of all your villainies, by which you punish in others what you act your selves, or wou’d have acted, had you been in their circumstances” (4.17.47–50). As even Thorowgood reluctantly notes, her arguments contain a kernel of truth to them, and she nearly ensnares even him by the “powerful magic of her wit and form” (4.16.63–4). Millwood’s desperation comes through in these rehearsals of motivation, in ways that would have been recognized by many of those assembled in the playhouse that evening (especially, we should keep in mind, the working girls that haunted Drury Lane and its surroundings). As Paul Fleming characterizes the genre’s more radical politics: “In bourgeois tragedy, both the class clause and the height of the fall are redefined through an aesthetics of identification . . . [that] doesn’t invert the class clause . . . but suspends it, so that now all classes are seen as fit for tragic representation.”78 Of course, we 77  As McBurney notes in his edition, Lillo’s inclusion of “Scene the Last” in later printings of the play restored a scene that was not typically performed, a move that may have been a tactic in combating pirated editions of the text. 78 Fleming, Exemplarity and Mediocrity, 46.

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66  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy aren’t meant to agree with Millwood’s arguments, but their force and vigor resonate throughout the text in ways that elevate her circumstance and ­person. So much so, in fact, that upon the play’s revival in 1796, the part of Millwood was taken up—sharply against type—by the grande dame of tragic theatre, Sarah Siddons.79 Now codified in the body of Siddons, that “icon of female suffering,” the prostitute demanded an unmistakable gravitas; Millwood, it seemed, had arrived.80 But the grounds for ordinary suffering had been shifting for decades by then, instanced not only in the positive early appraisals of Montagu and Trotter, but in the flattened hierarchies of the genre’s aesthetic of identification and the audiences whose mourning confirmed the shrunken emotional distance that would become characteristic of the age’s art. As the noted grammarian James Harris would go on to claim of bourgeois tragedy in his posthumous Philological Inquiries (1781), the genre’s suffering was never far from “coming home.”81 Grave affliction, in his view, was a universal condition explored not only in Oedipus and Othello, but also the downwardly mobile middle-rank lives of those Lillo would turn to in Fatal Curiosity. Summarizing the tragedy’s essence, Harris cites Virgil’s epigram in relation to that latter play: “Sunt lacrymae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt” [Here, too, are tears for misfortune and human sorrows pierce the heart].82 Harris leaves the line untranslated, but its sense is decidedly more ordinary than Dryden’s 1697 translation of the lines into heroic couplets, which stressed Aeneas’ “defined and individual emotion” in Virgil’s phrasing: He stop’d, and weeping said,—O friend! ev’n here The monuments of Trojan woes appear! Our known disasters fill ev’n foreign lands: See there, where old unhappy Priam stands! Ev’n the mute walls relate the warrior’s fame, And Trojan griefs the Tyrians pity claim. (1.644–9)83

The older translation underscores Priam’s ill-fated empire and was, for generations before Harris, the commonly accepted sense of the text.84 Applied

79  McBurney, “Introduction,” xiii. 80  Booth et al., Three Tragic Actresses, 34. 81 Harris, Philological Inquiries, 171. 82  The reference is from Aeneid, 1.462; I have quoted H. R. Fairclough’s Loeb Library translation here. 83 Dryden, Works of Virgil, 364. 84  Løsnes, “Arms, and the Man,” 245.

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The Bourgeois Revaluation of Tragedy  67 in the philologist’s treatise to the misfortune of Old Wilmot and his wife, Agnes in Fatal Curiosity, whose tragedy is precipitated not by imperial ambitions but by crippling debts and bare subsistence, the epigram takes on, instead, a universal cast. For Dryden, the “world of tears”—lacrymae rerum—refers to kingdoms lost, to mythical warriors mourned by Carthage; for Harris, it’s the weight of living hand-to-mouth. In repurposing the Virgilian line so that it engages with Lillo’s tragic corpus, Harris reads bourgeois tragedy as the belated expression of human misery and hardship common to us all, a sense cultivated by Edward Young, Thomas Gray, and the Romantic poets, as well as classicists to this day.85 As Lillo had done in the 1730s, Harris reinscribes tragedy’s scope, in the process shifting its affective register from the imperial and heroic to that of the lives of common people. By the 1780s, this kind of move would be increasingly common, though not uncontroversial. Harris’ argument in favor of the genre suggests that the eighteenth century’s bourgeois revaluation was an ongoing process even as the century wound to a close. That this was so on the tragic stage should be unsurprising, for a similar resistance had met the ordinary and realistic worlds imagined in the novel, and would continue to do so until quite late in the period. Nevertheless, this chapter has offered what we might refer to, following Eve Sedgwick, as a reparative reading of bourgeois tragedy’s nascence, one that sees the ordinary people it depicted as attempts at negotiating a newfound cultural standing for those whose suffering had been treated with levity and nonchalance. To be certain, I’ve located merely the first glimpses of a structure of feeling here; the complexities of those emotions and values remain to be accounted for in more detail in the arguments that follow. But the fact that these changes were palpable for those first London audiences, felt in the bodies of those caught mourning their city’s underclass, offers the first evidence of the era’s changing affective atmosphere.

85  Hence, Robert Fagles offers this elegant modern gloss: “The world is a world of tears, and the burdens of mortality touch the heart.” See Fagles, trans., Aeneid, 1.462. In a discussion of the era’s fondness for the prospect poem, Helen Deutsch notes that this line was nearly used as the epigram for Thomas Gray’s own meditation on ordinary affliction, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” but had already been claimed for Edward Young’s equally mournful Night Thoughts. See her “Elegies in Country Churchyards.”

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2

Close to Home The Uncanny of Georgian Domestic Tragedy

The scene is Bath, 1808. A traveling theatre company is performing George Lillo’s Fatal Curiosity (1736) to a packed house. As theatre historian, John Genest, records it, the play advances without incident for most of the night, depicting the return of Young Wilmot, prized son of the once-proud Wilmots, after years away on a merchant vessel.1 The Wilmots had been poor—desperately so—and their son’s hard labor at sea was perhaps a final effort to shore up their finances. Now rich with Indian treasure, Young Wilmot returns to marry his dear Charlot and restore the family name. But he has also changed. The hard years have left him unrecognizable, and his mother, Agnes, and father, Old Wilmot, have long since given up hope of his return, long since assuming he was dead. Then an idea occurs to Young Wilmot: he will stay at his old home, as if a stranger passing through town, before revealing himself to those family and friends he has gathered there. And at first, all goes according to plan. When this rich lodger shows up at their door, the Wilmots take him in. They offer him a bed on which to rest, and a corner of the room to stow his articles. He asks them to look after his belongings, and wake him in an hour, before drifting off to sleep. It’s here that the plot turns grisly. Agnes, seized by a fancy, convinces Old Wilmot to stab their visitor and hide his body, and so to steal his personal effects. After some hesitation, he does so, when the rest of their circle—giddy with the prospect of the family’s dramatic reunion—enters the scene. Wailing and lamentations ensue; self-imprecations and regrets are tenderly expressed. In Bath, the play is almost over now. Epilogues will follow shortly, then it’s off to the next town. Suddenly, a door flings open and—in a break with the text and theatrical conventions, Genest makes clear—Young Wilmot staggers out, wounds bleeding. His body crumples, and he groans, dying in plain view. This shock

1 Genest, Some Account of the English Stage, 8:388. The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy: Modernity and the Art of Ordinary Suffering. Alex Eric Hernandez, Oxford University Press (2019). © Alex Eric Hernandez. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846574.001.0001

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Close to Home  69 is too much for some, and in a box near the stage, two ladies are shaking nervously, unable to countenance the sight. Earlier in the play, they had been talking, but with time the drama had apparently won them over, engaged them in its verse and the single-mindedness of its plotting. At the catastrophe, they oscillated between rapt attention and the furtive glances of those who cannot but look away from such a picture of suffering. Now they just want it to stop, and when they tug at the sleeve of a gentlemanly companion he promptly obliges. Genest is unclear about what exactly follows. Perhaps their companion shouts: “Halt the play!” Or demands over the assembly: “Drop the curtain at once!” What is certain, however, is that even though the final lines of Lillo’s tragedy remain unperformed, the company scrambles to end its production mid-act. The curtain soon falls, and as the crowd looks around, it’s clear that many others are relieved. For many, it seemed, interest had turned into unease. * * * Writing the year earlier, Elizabeth Inchbald’s introductory remarks to Fatal Curiosity had cautioned readers, noting that they would need a strong stomach to make it through the play. Lillo’s follow-up to The London Merchant had a reputation for being a provocative, bloody spectacle, an exercise in what she called the “horribly sublime.”2 At the staging of George Colman’s 1782 revival of the play, for instance, Inchbald and others recalled the manner in which “a certain horror seized the audience, and was manifested by a kind of stifled scream.”3 Though the play was part of a vogue for the genre in the 1780s and 90s, its production onstage was dogged by concerns that “an audience shrinks from beholding it performed.”4 In fact, several persons noted that Lillo’s later domestic tragedies could be too intense for the repertory, their misfortunes quite literally insufferable. Much like Fatal Curiosity, posthumous productions of Lillo’s version of Arden of Feversham (performed in 1759 under the co-authorship of John Hoadly, but likely written between 1736 and Lillo’s death in 1739) were said to have been stopped by anxious theatre-goers, unable to proceed to the play’s terrible denouement.5 Even if such anecdotes were apocryphal—and I suspect that 2  Inchbald, “Remarks on Fatal Curiosity,” 11:4. 3  Inchbald, “Remarks on Fatal Curiosity,” 11:5. 4  Inchbald, “Remarks on Fatal Curiosity,” 11:3. 5  See editor William H. McBurney’s introduction to his edition of Fatal Curiosity, xvii. The standard version of the text and Lillo’s adaptation of Arden of Feversham (with John Hoadly) is now collected in Steffensen, ed., Works of George Lillo. Citations to both plays will refer to this

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70  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy many of them are—their tendency to turn up in introductory volumes and commentary, anthologized alongside the plays they frame, suggests that these dramas were known as much for their chilling effects as for the ­audacity with which they portrayed the commoner in distress. If The London Merchant trafficked in the newly pitiable, then, many of the more domestic tragedies that followed in its wake were adept at exploiting that other locus of tragic pathos: terror. What made plays like the adapted Arden of Feversham and Fatal Curiosity (a “True Tragedy,” as Lillo’s subtitle proudly avows) especially terrifying was that they claimed to reenact incidents that had actually occurred in British homes, trafficking in the kind of sordid ripped-from-the-headlines realism that makes for the guilty pleasures of true crime even today. Their appeal lies in the promise of watching distresses unfold that are at once sensational, morbid, and ­ultimately, mundanely true. Thus, Inchbald notes the exquisite bodily effects of one’s absorption in the tragically real: “After having shuddered at this tragedy, even as a fiction, it is dreadful to be told, that the most horrid event which here takes place, is merely the representation of a fact which occurred at a village on the western coast of England.” In her view, the drama’s factuality underwrote its affective power, turning the screw on what was already an  eerie experience. “That a direful circumstance thus brought upon the stage might probably occur, is the great hold it has upon the heart,” she concludes.6 Affect congeals around the actual, around the probable, almost as if the truth of its referent intensifies those anxieties unearthed in the drama’s performance. This chapter explores the process of intensification described by Inchbald and others by turning to those entries in the bourgeois tragic archive that center on the household. Whereas in Chapter  1 I argued that Georgian bourgeois tragedy extended suffering’s affective dimensions and scope, valorizing the lives of non-heroic “common” actors by treating their misfortunes with the dignity of the tragic, here I attempt to bring this affliction closer to home (that metaphor!). Broadening the archive of its source ­material, I look to a constellation of texts that stress the troubling familiarity of domestic tragedy, the sense of danger and proximity to suffering that inheres in spaces simultaneously imagined as inviolable and—if Lawrence edition and appear parenthetically. On Lillo’s reputation for theatrical horror, cf. Campbell, Specimens of the British Poets, 5:59. 6  Inchbald, “Remarks on Fatal Curiosity,” 11:5.

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Close to Home  71 Stone is to be believed—increasingly bound by the warmth of affection.7 In  domestic drama, and Lillo’s later tragedies especially, the ordinary is shown to be alien and threatening. All the more so, I will suggest, when these ­tragedies stage their suffering in a space felt to be familiar, realistic, conditions which further problematize their collective display and sometimes necessitated the abdication of their performance. What follows therefore offers an historical account of what it meant for spectators (and readers) of domestic tragedy to claim that its depiction of suffering struck “close to home.” In a metaphor that all but collapses target and source domains, the phrase works to map domestic onto affective ­interiors in the period’s criticism treating the genre. So when the preface to another domestic tragedy paraphrases James Harris’ 1781 Philological Inquiries by saying that “Tragedies founded on domestic events in life . . . strike home to the feelings,” we ought to read this in its literal and figural sense, as a statement of domestic tragedy’s representational setting as well as its embodied, “interiorizing” affective locale.8 Something that strikes close to home interests us, evokes our curiosity by virtue of its familiarity, even marks a site of libidinal intensity or special investment. It also t­ hreatens us, its closeness—sliding into the language of proprioception and felt proximity— irritating sensoria, suffocating perception, or otherwise manifesting feelings we’d prefer to keep a bit more distant. To say that a scene struck “close to home” was thus to offer a folk theorization for domestic tragedy’s movement away from the rational processes of judgment and comparison associated with the aesthetics of heroic tragedy, to those embodied and often unspoken feelings that resist catharsis and threaten to unsettle us as ordinary suffering. It described the ambivalence behind one’s morbid curiosity concerning the private lives of the middling. In short, the domestic tragedies I explore here are invitations to cross an imagined threshold and dwell on the pain observed there, a fact its contemporaries understood intuitively. Of course, a variety of critics and social historians have long sought to emphasize the role of domestic space to emergent notions of the bourgeois 7  See the discussion of “The Growth of Affective Individualism” in Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, chap. 6. As Stone has influentially argued, the history of the eighteenthcentury family is, in a fundamental sense, the history of affect’s investment in the immediate family. 8 Porrett, Fatal Seduction, [3]. The wording here paraphrases Harris’ sentiment that the Wilmots “exhibit a distress, which comes home” (Philological Inquiries, 171). Variations of this sentiment repeatedly provide a critical language for the genre, as when the author of An Essay Upon the Present State of the Theatre notes that: “the distresses of private life . . . come more home to the bosoms of the spectators” (3–4).

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72  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy family, and for some thirty years now, the thresholds that demarcate domesticity and privacy have been a topic of literary analysis to scholars across disciplines.9 But with the exception of pioneering research into the material culture of Jacobean domestic tragedy, there remains surprisingly little work taking stock of the significance of the domestic to the way in which tragedy was experienced by during the period.10 Ironically, the same shifting notions of interiority that coalesce in the mutual embeddedness of home, heart, and playhouse in contemporary responses to the play remain a persistent blind-spot of its criticism to this day. Nevertheless, I’d argue, the emerging cult of domesticity encoded in works like Fatal Curiosity, Arden of Feversham, as well as its she-tragic models and imitators colors the social isolation felt by afflicted families with implications for the staging of kinship’s eruption into violence. Although it’s something of a truism that all theatre engages in acts of voyeurism, to watch a domestic tragedy unfold in this way must have been especially so. Domestic tragedy turns the interior of the home into a ­spectacle surreptitiously observed, into the object of public curiosity and personal concern. That this intrusion exists in tension with its invitation is a running problem in these plays. Unlike, say, those Restoration comedies that encourage the audience’s raucous involvement, coaxing their engagement in acts of flagrant exhibitionism and carefully laid asides, domestic tragedy presented a scene which perhaps ought to have remained hidden, a scene whose suffering was an instance of abjection and shame and fearful discomfort because the spectator’s gaze is transgressive. Lillo plays with this when he has Old Wilmot complain aloud at the play’s opening: “Since our misfortunes, we have found no friend, / None who regarded our distress . . .” (1.1.62–3). Much of the play imagines what engagement with such personal forms of affliction might entail, since to look upon suffering is an act t­roubling to both viewer and sufferer, especially when this gaze falls upon “A room in Wilmot’s house,” as stage directions make clear. The Wilmot patriarch’s ironized complaint thereby registers the simultaneous attraction and repulsion of witnessing a lurid scene, glossing the curiosity of 9  I am thinking here of a range of important scholarship that has considered the rationalization of private and public, the most fundamental of which is Habermas, Structural Transformation. On domesticity in particular, relevant texts include Guest, Small Change; and McKeon, Secret History of Domesticity. 10 See Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture and “Domestic Tragedies.” Richardson, Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy, is the most recent treatment of early modern domestic tragedy and exemplary in its sensitivity to the interior contours of its staging. Neither treat the eighteenth century, however.

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Close to Home  73 the play’s title anew. The complaint serves as an invitation to peer into the Wilmot home, to regard the pain of others and dwell in the strangeness of its verisimilitude. This savvy movement across thresholds calls to mind a series of aesthetic and psychoanalytic categories out of place in the period, however. Sigmund Freud’s well-known discussion of the uncanny, for instance, locates a similar alienation in the experience of the homely because it signifies the return of the repressed, the return of a threatening traumatic kernel held at  one’s core. As Julie Carlson clarifies, the Unheimlich (a phrase which, Freud famously notes, can be taken to mean both “homely” and “unhomely”) serves to “[somatize] . . . the proximity of the frightening,” and hence has been anticipated as a vital category for theorizing bourgeois t­ ragedy since at least G. E. Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy.11 The uncanny renders legible, that is, that which is too painful to express. Such a move here carries with it the risk of anachronism, the precise contours of its ambivalence more felt than expressed in the language available to the eighteenth-century theatregoer, while also only problematically applied to an era with vastly different notions of what psychological interiority meant—let alone what precisely constituted “privacy” or “the home.”12 My discussion of this body of work will thus also serve to elucidate the ways in which a critical discourse arose to consider one’s affective proximity to that which was feared, and likewise how this discourse was used to understand tragedy, particularly in its domestic guise. The persistent recourse to a language of closeness and affective proximity, elliptically at work first in Aristotle’s On Rhetoric, reappearing in The Spectator’s famed section on “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” and codified explicitly in Harris and Elizabeth Montagu, is a reminder that the play’s contemporary viewers were very much attuned to what they perceived to be primal anxieties activated by “True Tragedy” and domestic drama. This chapter reads instances of this “striking home” at work across a collection of domestic tragedies in which the same ordinary life that the genre seeks to dignify is made strange, haunted by the possibility of its degradation. * * * 11  Carlson, “Invitation to Domestic/Tragedy,” 341. I am deeply indebted to Carlson’s insights on domestic tragedy in this chapter. For Lessing on fear in tragedy, see Hamburg Dramaturgy, 177–8. 12  See, for example, Mackenzie, Be It Ever So Humble, which argues that “home” emerges conceptually as a response to legislative and reformist pressures in the latter half of the century.

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74  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy What did it mean, though, for a domestic tragedy to claim its basis in truth? I want to begin by offering some answers to this while highlighting the richness of that source material from which the genre drew. Sir William Sanderson’s Compleat [sic] History of the Lives and Reigns of Mary Queen of Scotland, And of Her Son and Successor, James the Sixth (1656), for example, records the murder of a Cornwall man who, after years at sea, fell victim to his own father and mother for the sake of the treasure he carried. Sanderson’s account anthologized and revised a popular pamphlet from earlier in the century, 1618’s Newes from Perin in Cornwall Of a Most Bloody and Unexampled Murther, and would itself go on to be collated as part of a little-read national history of the period, The Annals of King James and King Charles (1681).13 Indeed, as late as 1762, the diary of a traveler to Windsor Great Park, in Berkshire, recounts a rudimentary form of the drama’s plot being cited by the local “Country People” to explain the origin of the nearby “Virginia Waters,” an artificial lake added by the Duke of Cumberland some twenty years earlier.14 In their version, the son’s return from the American colonies is turned tragic when—again for the sake of his newfound wealth— he is murdered by his unsuspecting family, who thereupon secretly casts the body into a nearby river. Mixing folklore with the ephemeral substance of neighborhood gossip, the play’s fable offered a way to discuss the personal costs of colonial and economic expansion for the home. It also illustrated the fragility of the impoverished household, in which hospitality could be compromised and turned into its opposite. Domestic dramas like Fatal Curiosity and Arden of Feversham drew inspiration from an archive of true crime accounts that circulated as news in the period and depicted the breakdown of household order. We observed this link in passing with respect to The London Merchant, though that ballad source material is less obviously invested in issues of domestic strife. Yet readers in early Georgian Britain would have been well exposed to the sort of accounts that we take to be the stuff of tabloid television or “real-life mysteries”: sensational narratives of families gone rotten, brutalities in the home, poverty and melancholy driving close kin to desperate measures. Ballads like The Bloody-minded Husband; or, The Cruelty of John Chambers (1684) warned of the breakdown of conjugal relations, recounting the story 13  McBurney compiles a brief list of the play’s sources in his edition, and reprints this pamphlet in “Appendix B” of his edition of Fatal Curiosity, 56. 14 C.  F.  Burgess, “Fatal Curiosity in Berkshire,” 92–3. The original source for this is an unpublished diary by John Barnell, 2nd Baronet Parnell and Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer, held at the Folger Library.

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Close to Home  75 of a man from Tamworth in Warwickshire, whose secret life with a “harlot” metastasized into a plot to kill his unsuspecting wife, murdered while at her spinning wheel (a fitting detail by which to emphasize her commitment to the home).15 A strikingly similar ballad mentions the fetus that died ­tragically along with William Terry of Derbyshire’s wife when he murdered her sometime before 1690.16 That same year, a pamphlet titled The Distressed Mother: or, Sorrowful Wife in Tears told of the beatings that a middling woman, Katherine Fox, had endured at the hands of her boozing husband, whose riotous living had left his children with nothing to eat. Here again, violence haunts a “sad sorrowful House,” turning the family home into a scene of grief and shocking aggression; in a move that recalls Medea’s despair, the matriarch murders her two “young Babes” in what she takes as an act of both mercy and revenge. Turning to her unsuspecting husband, stumbling into the house later that night, the pamphlet goes on to implicate both parties in what follows: “seeing him fast Asleep, who regarded not her Afflictions, with the same Knife wherewith she had Kill’d her Children, she cut his Throat . . . speaking . . . Thou shalt Die, thou negligent Man, since thy ill Government hath been the Ruine of me and my Children.”17 At a time when domestic violence was more likely to be merely frowned upon than a matter for common law (which by and large only concerned itself in such cases if they ended in death), the particulars of other people’s tense home life made for interesting and even moral reading.18 Given that Jacobean domestic tragedies were only rarely produced for the stage by the turn of the eighteenth century, the plots rehearsed in print ephemera may have offered the closest thing there was to a realized culture of popular, domestic tragedy (save perhaps she-tragedy, to which I will return). Indeed, already as early as 1710, Richard Steele’s Tatler took this sort of domestic tension to be precisely the raw material for what could be modern tragedy’s exploration of common feeling. Writing in May of that year, Mr. Bickerstaff is shaken upon hearing of a “wonderful Tragedy” in which a Dublin gentleman by the name of Mr. Eustace murders his wife in a rage as she sleeps in their bed, still bitter from an argument they had engaged in earlier that night.19 “Fatal Surprizes of Passion,” Bickerstaff reflects, “are 15  Bloody-minded Husband; or, The Cruelty of John Chambers, 3:202–6. 16  Bloody-minded Husband; or, the Unfortunate Wife, 2:194. 17  Distressed Mother: or, Sorrowful Wife in Tears, [n.p.]. 18  For an insightful survey on these issues, see Sharpe, “Domestic Homicide in Early Modern England,” 29–48. On issues of domestic conflict in the period, especially in print ephemera and drama, see Herzog, Household Politics and Dolan, Dangerous Familiars. 19 Steele, Tatler, 2:447.

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76  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy most liable to arise [in the intimate Commerces of Life].”20 Why not quarry this material for the tragic stage, the better to “prevail upon the ordinary Race of Men?”, the essayist wonders. “I was thinking it would be of great Use . . . to lay before the World such Adventures as befall Persons not exalted above the common Level.” Then, as if to gesture at something dark within all of us, he adds: “we cannot but tremble to consider what we are capable of being wrought up to against all the Ties of Nature, Love, Honour, Reason, and Religion.”21 Tragedy was already quite close to home, as even the most cursory glance at the day’s news confirmed. Tales of household violence gave the impression that ordinary life—what Lillo had called “the circumstances of the generality of mankind” (151) in his dedication to The London Merchant—could be as remarkable as any play brought to the stage. We’ve all heard stories like this, and from certain angles at least, the outward conditions from which they seem to arise can be disturbingly like our own (a colleague suggested to me that they all begin with the same foreboding intonation: “They were the perfect family . . .”). Because of this, perhaps, domestic tragedies could also confound one’s sense of probability, creating the perception that because these tales were based on real occurrences, they were somehow more likely to be repeated in the lives of their viewers and readers. Several critics echoed Inchbald’s intuition on the tragedy’s relative likelihood, drawing a link between probability and catharsis; audiences mourn this kind of suffering with a special intensity, this view supposes, because they recognize the forms of life depicted and they especially fear that a similar misfortune might befall them as well. We are “more or less interested in proportion as the subject is more or less within the probability of happening to himself,” argues one bourgeois tragedian.22 Certainly, when compared to the revolving fortunes of heroic actors, the risk that the modest catastrophes of an Old Wilmot or a Thomas and Alicia Arden might be repeated for the average viewer must have seemed at least relatively likely in comparison. After all, if one’s life was to turn tragic, it almost certainly wouldn’t be over the usurpation of a throne, or because one has misread a Delphic prophecy. Another assumption here was that murder was “most liable” to occur among one’s “intimate commerces,” a belief which might very well reflect the sheer number of domestic true crime accounts to which Steele and others would have been exposed.23 20 Steele, Tatler, 2:445. 21 Steele, Tatler, 2:445. 22 Porett, Fatal Seduction, 4. 23  Surprisingly, according to Sharpe, this assumption is an erroneous one. Looking at statistics spanning 1560–1709, for instance, he concludes that “domestic homicide constituted a

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Close to Home  77 Yet what’s striking about even these tragedies is just how improbable they actually are, in ways that bely any assumption of their imminence. For all its realism and resemblance to the social conditions of much of the audience, the catastrophes depicted in domestic tragedies aren’t any more likely to occur than, say, Othello’s jealous strangling of Desdemona. To murder a rich lodger—as in Fatal Curiosity—is one unlikely thing; for that lodger to be one’s long-lost son, laden with a fortune that will restore the family name, is the awful irony of tragedy. And isn’t the cruel unpredictability of the tragic, and the way that that unpredictability resists a lucid explanation in this way, precisely what proves so unsettling about such events? Indeed, the improbability of Fatal Curiosity’s reversal is felt in some sense as a betrayal of the providential by Charlot, the long-suffering betrothed of Young Wilmot (and the drama’s moral center). “Welcome Despair! I’ll never hope again,” she cries, fearing to blaspheme the God who would allow “woes . . . more than human fortitude can bear” (3.1.255; 262–3). Or take the final act of Arden. According to Green, Arden’s rival claimant who stands to inherit a fortune once he’s murdered, a “strange providence” seems to charm the alderman—until it doesn’t (4.1.24). At least in both of these works, death comes at exactly the moment in which their principal figures feel safest, surrounded by “friends” (Arden 5.1.60), nestled in  their homes after having navigated a much riskier world outside its walls (Fig. 2.1). Death unexpectedly descends upon the home in domestic tragedy, and this is shocking enough that it creates a false sense of its likelihood. For many, watching a brutal murder play out in this way, in this simulated space, unearths an uncomfortable sense of helplessness and exposure. And so the causal arrow gets reversed in Steele, Inchbald, and other eighteenth-century critics who want to argue that these texts strike close to home because of their probability, thereby taking a symptom of the drama’s affective power for its cause. Like one’s misplaced fear that a turbulent plane is on the cusp of disaster, it says a lot more about the intensity of our anxiety than it does about the likelihood of its occurrence. To come close to the traumatic in

smaller proportion of all homicides . . . than they do in modern England” (“Domestic Homicide in Early Modern England,” 34). In Crime in Early Modern England, Sharpe observes that relatively few murders were carried out by women, but that they tended to focus on victims within the broader household (see pp. 154ff.). Compare this to information collated by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, which notes that among those murders in which the victim/offender relationship was known, a shocking 78.1% occur between “nonstrangers” (U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Homicide Trends).

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78  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy

Fig. 2.1.  Anonymous, detail from The complaint and lamentation of Mistresse Arden of Feversham in Kent [1633?]. Woodcut print. © The British Library Board (C.20.f.9. ff [156–7])

such conditions—even only fictionally—can shake us out of our routines, overriding our reason and an otherwise reliable ability to assess risk. “Sensational crime endowed the ordinary with extraordinary significance,” argues Richard Helgerson about Arden of Feversham’s origins in true crime, noting how that tragedy punctuates the staid rhythms of the bourgeois with the haunting possibility of its upheaval.24 In domestic tragedy, the spaces of one’s everyday experience become menacing, the home itself transformed into a malevolent actor—even if only briefly. To this day in fact, Thomas Arden’s home sits there, a demure plaque on  its northwest exterior the only reminder of the terrible violence it’s seen (Fig. 2.2). What artifacts like Newes from Perin and the Arden of Feversham ballad make especially clear, therefore, is the way that these accounts imaginatively exploited the safety that such spaces seemed to promise. Marking inside and out by a careful framing, they beckon our eyes to cross a threshold engraved by woodcut, bringing us closer to the scene as it unfolds (Fig. 2.3). One effect of this is to rationalize tacit categories of domesticity into a series of discrete and legible concepts—home–nation, public–private, inside–outside—many of which continually run up against larger social

24 Helgerson, Adulterous Alliances, 15.

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Close to Home  79

Fig. 2.2.  Image depicting the home of Arden of Faversham, Abbey Street, Faversham. Public Domain.

Fig. 2.3.  Anonymous, details from Newes from Perin in Cornwall Of a Most Bloody and Unexampled Murther. 1618. Woodcut print. © The British Library Board.

forces that threaten their coherence.25 The pamphlet’s illustrations visually inch its reader closer as the tragedy proceeds, through successive layers of delimited space into the family bedroom, and hence implicates them in the 25  The notion of tacit categories anticipating our sense of the domestic is McKeon’s from Secret History of Domesticity, chap. 1.

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80  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy circulatory movement of the burgeoning economy. We see a British merchant ship in transit, somewhere between Cornwall and the “Indies” (the play’s contextualizing reference to Sir Walter Raleigh suggests the West). We see the disguised return home presaging the crime. We see as well the crime itself in the private space of a personal bedchamber. Eventually, the narrative closes by terminating the lives of its various actors in a reversal worthy of the Sophoclean, problematically linking the bounty of what Lillo will later call the “prolific ocean” (2.2.9) with terra firma’s urge to filicide. Despite its ­mistaken causes, the implication here is that whereas maritime commerce is a fecund mother, the kingdom-nation destroys those who return home, or perhaps cannot recognize the alien modes they come to inhabit. Agnes fails to see this, however, and blames her husband for driving their son: “To seek his bread ’mongst strangers, and to perish / In some remote, inhospitable land” (3.1.121–2; 125–6). If the home comes more and more to be understood as a zone of both physical and emotional safety, as Philip Ariès, George Duby, and Roger Chartier argue in their influential history of private life, its  violation in the performance space urgently inscribes its boundaries in the very process of being exposed.26 Georgian domestic tragedy, as this reading of Fatal Curiosity makes clear, implicates the spectator in repeated acts of voyeurism. Another example makes this point clearer by homing in on a decidedly prurient curiosity, distinguishing the Georgian tradition from its forerunners at the turn of the previous century. In one of the few improvements to the Elizabethan ­original, for instance, Lillo and Hoadly’s Arden introduces us to Thomas and Alicia as they awake in their bed chamber, a scene that doesn’t exist in their source.27 Here, Thomas by turns laments and threatens his mistress for what he’s shrewdly discerned: that she’s been having an affair with Mosby, the town “botcher” (a handyman-tailor by trade), whose lowly status adds insult to injury. This staging would be intimate enough, of course, but spectators would also be present for how Alicia lets slip her dalliances. 26  Ariès et al. observe that one key way in which domesticity was conceived in the early modern period was explicitly in terms of safe “refuge,” a term used later in Fatal Curiosity, for example: “[When] the family became the focus of private life . . . It became something it had never been: a refuge, to which people fled in order to escape the scrutiny of outsiders; an emotional center.” See Ariès et al., eds., History of Private Life, 3:8. 27  There is one other tantalizing option for the scene’s origin. As The London Stage records, Eliza Haywood seems to have attempted a remake of the earlier play at the Little Haymarket during the same 1736 season that saw Fatal Curiosity make its debut (with Haywood in the part of Mrs. Arden). The MS is lost, unfortunately. See Avery et al., eds., The London Stage, pt. 3, vol. 1, 545.

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Close to Home  81 Thomas compulsively observes and re-narrates an amorous dream she has, highlighting the coldness of the marital bed in which she writhes. “As you lay slumb’ring by my side . . . With gentle accents thrilling with desire, / You call’d on Mosby,” he tells her: You threw your eager arms about my neck, You press’d my bloodless cheeks with your warm lips, Which glow’d, adult’ress, with infernal heat; And call’d a third time on the villain Mosby. (1.2.70–4)

Against the privileged, almost cramped access we’re given to the c­ ouple in moments like this, the play juxtaposes the larger world. Out there, a distant, bureaucratic land deal is slowly playing out in Arden’s favor, even as he narrowly escapes harm by ruffians conspiring with Alicia and her lover. When this finally crosses the Arden family threshold (again, literally), the audience’s relationship to that space has become increasingly tense, drawn along in half-uncomfortable, half-titillating expectation of Mosby’s signal to kill his host: “Now I take you” (5.1.95). Is it any wonder that reports of the play stressed the nervous mood in the performance space? * * * We’ll return to the bedroom in just a moment, but for now let’s stay close to the front door where it’s perhaps a bit easier to see some of the broader distinctions at work. For as we saw in the blackletter Newes from Perin and reiterated in the way the familiarity of the home becomes grimly ironic in the eighteenth century’s Arden, the domestic is first given shape against the world imagined to be outside that entryway, marking what counts as strange or Other. This ultimately turns tragic for the Wilmots when their son—taken for a “stranger” by the family’s erstwhile servant, Randall, who himself feels compelled to “aspire to something more and better” by taking up the colonial project (2.2.17; 2.2.8)—returns home marked by an alien land halfway across the globe. For his part, Young Wilmot has transformed the sort of bourgeois striving that Randall takes as necessity into the engine of excess pleasure, into a too “luxurious” desire to take in the family home from the vantage point of a benevolent outsider come back to rescue them (2.2.76). Surprisingly, it’s this plan that serves as the eponymous instance of fatal curiosity in the text, as Randall urges him to offer immediate redress for the family’s suffering rather than indulge a “boundless curiosity [that is finally] a weakness” (2.2.78).

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82  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy Curiosity is troubling here for at least two reasons: on the one hand, it’s a kind of looky-loo interest that takes pleasure in seeing the pain of others (in their home, no less!), even if only as a foretaste to that pain’s relief; on the other hand, it threatens to relegate the subject to a passive affective position, a captive to their own desire in taking in the scene.28 Curiosity is moralized in instances like this, likened implicitly to forms of transgression and voyeurism that fail to respect the home. Young Wilmot reverses the curious gaze, however, and himself becomes a kind of curiosity in the play. His appropriation of the Other in “foreign habit” (1.3.112) enables the observation of his parents’ suffering and prolongs their grief. But it also prompts his fellow-traveler, Eustace, to worry that the home he returns to is no longer his: “the burning zone / . . . [has] marred the native hue of your complexion. / Methinks you look more like a sun-burnt Indian / Than a Briton” (1.3.114–18). Unrecognizable to many of those closest to him, he is a “stranger” standing in uncertain relation to the aspirational past to which he now returns, to say nothing of the growing nation. The use of costuming and makeup in Lillo’s play (the text stops short of blackface, though perhaps not by much) marks a key difference between the play’s staging and those visual representations that accompanied the original seventeenth-century pamphlets. Here it’s one of the clearest indications that the colonial world tragically implicates the home, even invades it.29 So when Young Wilmot asserts, shortly following an encomium to Britain, that “most men / Who have it in their power, choose to expire / Where they first drew their breath” (1.3.39–41), its tragic sense only finally becomes clear as his body lies still on the very bed upon which he would have been born. Caught between demonstrative ambiguity and adverbial gesture, Young Wilmot’s triumphant affirmation upon arriving onshore—“Here we’re safe” (1.3.1, emphasis mine)—subverts the space it presumes to define. What locality “here” invokes escapes the specificity that he assumes for it after all; rather, his welcoming gesture to Eustace signifies zones of comfort that came to define not only Britain as a nation but the bourgeois household in the period. In the context of the drama’s tragic irony, the moment alludes to 28 Thomas, Entangled Objects, 127. See also Benedict, Curiosity, which reads the affect as an appetite for the unknown that both destabilizes and relies upon the boundaries it transgresses. 29  This is certainly one of Lillo’s innovations to the story and a poignant reminder of the cultural work costuming engages in for early modern identity. See Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self, 176ff. None of the earlier versions of the legend have the young sojourner in “American” garb, and the playwright’s most likely source for the tale simply mentions his “humble” clothes and the difficulty with which the Charlot figure recognizes this man who “appears a poor stranger.” See McBurney’s edition of Fatal Curiosity, 57.

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Close to Home  83 the shores of England, the borders of Cornwall, the Wilmot lodgings, and the privacy of the bed to which he retires. Perhaps more strikingly, the ambiguity of the uttered “here” implies that we too—the hidden theatrical spectator viewing this gesture of invocation—are on the inside, privy to sufferings proper to a home where Agnes’ “poor husband [seemingly] mourns the while alone” (1.2217). Lillo’s equivocal use of nation as an analogue to home has many precedents in neoclassical theatre, but in this moment it finds expression in the performance of migrant labor’s return in the assumed identity of a tawny-faced alien. Of course, the portrayal of an exotic Other onstage would not have been altogether foreign to an audience during the period. A broad swath of African and “oriental” figures graced the stage in the years leading up to Lillo’s appropriation of this spectacle. Fatal Curiosity, however, was different in that it staged its exoticism in a space that would have been recognizable to contemporary viewers, the alien transplanted into the close quarters of the English home. In this, it surely sought to harness the visual language and complex allusiveness of another Othered figure whose intrusion into domesticity proves fatal: Othello. As even a cursory survey of the vibrant, almost emblematic tradition that followed this play’s final scene makes clear, it was the commingling of intimate space and shocking violence that marks Othello as an important (though generally unacknowledged) precursor to domestic tragedy in the popular imagination. Consider here, for example, how Jacob Tonson’s celebrated edition to the text explores this in its wellknown engraving (Fig.  2.4), speaking the visual language we’ve already observed in domestic tragic newsprint above.30 Samuel Johnson’s reaction to Othello’s ending—“I am glad to have ended my revisal of this scene. It is not to be endured”—unsurprisingly recalls the uneasiness with which one meditates upon the razor-thin line that separates loving from loathing.31 Like Steele’s turn as bourgeois tragic narrator above, Johnson’s difficulty with Desdemona’s murder links Othello to an archive of household cruelties that shared a common language for one’s unsettled affective response. In truth, the iconography of female suffering has never been very far from the realities of domestic violence. 30  We know that Lillo had access to at least one of these images in his personal library. Auction sales following the playwright’s death indicate that he owned not only an unidentified folio of Shakespear’s Plays (n.d.), but also the exact volume of Pope’s Works of Shakespear that, in this second edition of 1728, contained the famous depiction of the Othello bedroom scene. See McBurney, “What George Lillo Read,” 275–86. 31  See Johnson, Johnson on Shakespeare, 1045.

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Fig. 2.4.  [François Boitard?], Illustration depicting Act V, scene 2 of Othello in Jacob Tonson’s The Works of Wiliam Shakespeare [sic]. 1709. Courtesy of The Folger Library.

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Close to Home  85 Tracing a similar genealogy, Jean Marsden notes that Shakespeare’s play was often produced in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century and placed alongside many of the most admired she-tragedies of the period, investing scenes of familial strife with the erotics of the voyeur’s gaze.32 The actresses suffering onstage became the focal point for the audience’s pity even as they were objectified, sexualized, and made passive in that affliction by spectator and antagonist alike. As Laura Brown has argued too, early she-tragedies like Thomas Otway’s The Orphan (1680, subtitled, The Unhappy Marriage) and Venice Preserv’d (1682, and often taken as a second pass at the Othello material) worked to turn the focus of tragedy in the period gradually inward, away from the nostalgia of its imperial and heroic predecessors, toward the domestic lives of private people in distress.33 Often, as in the case of his touching image of Belvidera frantically attempting to stay Jaffeir’s suicidal hand in Act 5, Otway’s emotional effects turn on the spectator’s intimate access to the relationship playing out (in contrast to, for e­ xample, his restraint in depicting sexual violence earlier in the play, a choice that seems calculated to avoid its most tawdry effects). Indeed, inwardness, domesticity, and a self-consciously private pathos come to circulate together as the “affective mechanics” that define the genre.34 She-tragedies operate according to a logic whereby serious drama that takes place inside the home closes the felt distance between spectator and sufferer onstage. As the prologue to Nicholas Rowe’s The Fair Penitent (1702) was to characterize it, what entices the audience in dramas like this is the chance to watch “A melancholy scene of private woes” play out, to be a fly on the wall witnessing “sorrows like [one’s] own.”35 Whereas the “distant battles of the Pole and Swede” may be what “frugal citizens o’er coffee read, / Careless for who shall fail or who succeed,” the sort of curiosity engendered by the domestic marks our investment in the emotions explored there. Reiterating one of the central themes of this book, the prologue states plainly the realignment underway in tragedy when it valorizes personal, homebound, and often unseen forms of affliction: “We ne’er can pity what we ne’er can share.”36 To treat scenes of private woe seriously depended, 32 Marsden, Fatal Desire, 84–5. 33 Brown, English Dramatic Form, 86–98. Cf. also Rothstein’s discussion of pathetic tragedy in Restoration Tragedy, 88–90. 34 Brown, English Dramatic Form, 90. 35  Rowe [?], Prologue to The Fair Penitent, ll. 16 and 18. 36  Rowe, Prologue to The Fair Penitent, l. 11.

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86  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy paradoxically, on carefully managed acts of exposure whereby the emotional lives of abused men and women could be examined. Given the links I’ve been drawing between the true crime archive and the repertoire of domestic and she-tragedy, it may be unsurprising that the one extant visual we have of Fatal Curiosity’s staging sustains a similar traumatic moment in the cultural imagination (Fig. 2.5). The climactic scene of mistaken filicide—that moment when Inchbald reports the audience gasps at the abject horror of the deed—is memorialized in Thomas Stothard’s 1806 depiction by repurposing the mise-en-scène of eighteenth-century Othellos.37 Years after the tragedy’s premiere, Stothard appears to capture the rich allusiveness associated with the play’s production, with its voyeuristic use of space to amplify tragic irony and discomfit the spectator. And yet, this marks a series of telling departures from the Othello tradition. For whereas Shakespeare’s play tends to play with voyeurism in order to explore the erotics of miscegenation, Fatal Curiosity underscores the homelyunhomeliness that comes to be expressed in the Georgian domestic tragic imagination.38 Unlike the threat of the alien’s violence in Othello, directed upon an otherwise helpless woman, Lillo’s play reverses the gendered trajectory of the domestic scene, so that it is the mother who coaxes the betrayal of the exotic visitor. What’s at stake is the illusory quality of hospitality, kinship, and domestic privacy. As the safety of the domestic “castle” (as Edward Coke was to characterize the home in his Institutes of the Laws of England39) fails to obtain for the family, the play shades into themes that will later be read as gothic.40 Stothard’s composition is clearly aware of this, stacking a series of interior-exterior tandems along the central axes of the plate in a way that draws our attention to both the enclosure of the jewels mistakenly stolen by Agnes and the fateful bed occupied by the Wilmots’ son. Moving the eye between 37  In Coxhead, ed., Thomas Stothard, the author records the plate’s original under Stothard’s miscellaneous works, noting that it was commissioned for Inchbald’s collection, published in 1807 by Longman. 38  See, for instance, Neill, “Unproper Beds,” 383–412. 39  Coke had enshrined common law customs protecting the domestic threshold in what was already a cliché by the eighteenth century: “For a man’s house is his castle, et domus sua cuique tutissimum refugium: for where shall a man be safe, if it be not in his house?” See Institutes of the Laws of England, 101. 40  The gothic’s interest in domestic strife has been read as essential to that genre’s formation by a number of feminist scholars. See Ellis, The Contested Castle, Hoeveler, Gothic Feminism, and Clery, Women’s Gothic. Terry Castle reads the genre as a historical allegory for the emergence of the uncanny, focusing especially on the status of the feminine in the period’s narrative of rationalization. On this, see Castle, Female Thermometer.

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Fig. 2.5.  [Engleman?], after a painting by Thomas Stothard, Plate depicting Act III, scene 2 of Fatal Curiosity in Inchbald’s The British Theatre. 1807. Photo courtesy of The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

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88  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy these two curious focal points, it enacts the play’s violations, placing us in the position of the father whose emasculated capitulation to Agnes’ commanding gesture seals the family’s fate. Audiences would have known that casket had, only a short while ago, been tucked away in the son’s bosom, lending irony to the eagerness with which she volunteers to violate them both, commemorated here in the plate’s partial motto: “You [Old Wilmot] are quite dismayed. I’ll do / the deed myself ” (3.1.168–9). This lockbox, which Amanda Vickery suggests was a boundary so absolute as to have been considered “sacrosanct” in the period, doubles here and in the play as a signifier of status and personal integrity, the private marker of an early bourgeois identity.41 Hence, Agnes’ fatal curiosity—her “prying into th’affairs of others” (3.1.8)—reenacts the Pandoran myth for the middling sort, and transforms the classical transgression into one of privacy’s ­violation. What’s tragic here is that the bourgeois self, bound up as it is in its various possessions (whether costume, casket, or house itself), is torn asunder by its own aspirational desire. As if to one-up the Othello tradition in which it partakes, the plate doubles down on filicidal metaphor, transforming the domestic scene into one of freighted symbolism. In the almost womblike enclosure of the bed, with its provocative glimpse of the son, carefully posed so as to suggest a child ensconced in the folds of its curtains, Stothard’s image hints at this, in the process confirming that Lillo’s ability to conjure morbid curiosity was an effect of the drama’s literal playing house.42 With its four-post bed, suggestively drawn curtains, and muddied distinctions between public and private, the depiction of the Georgian interior carefully evokes the sort of scene that would have been familiar to the middling sort, and calls to mind that most bourgeois of visual genres: the conversation piece.43 Lillo’s play repeatedly calls attention to this staged simulation and rhetorically produces its various spaces, emphasizing the material comforts that characterized bourgeois life only to undermine them. We are invited, then, not only to secretively witness the Wilmot family’s pain, but also to consider the home itself as a potential signifier of 41 Vickery, Behind Closed Doors, 46. 42  Perhaps Freud’s clearest exposition of the uncanny explicitly identifies the home with the  female sexual organs, binding domestic space with the interiority of the female body. Stothard’s visual depiction of the play underscores this latent aspect of Lillo’s text. See Freud, The Uncanny, 151. 43  Retford, “From the Interior to Interiority,” 291–307.

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Close to Home  89 domestic suffering. Struck with its dilapidation, Young Wilmot’s response upon seeing the family home becomes a pattern for our own interpretation of architectural space: What wild neglect, the token of despair, In each disordered or disfurnished room Of this once gorgeous house! What anguish and confusion fill the faces Of its dejected owners! (2.2.31–6)

This declaration, delivered in an aside (a performance of outward-interiority, we might also note), deploys the home as a symbolic marker of the Wilmot family’s difficult state and shameful downward mobility. In the binding of bourgeois identity to their destitute living quarters, what is at once signaled is a dejected state of mind, a loss of status, and the cold emptiness of the encroaching grave. With its empty rooms and near-invisible inhabitants, the home is a troubling void. Like the “dead loins and . . . sterile womb” of their pitiful bodies, the elder Wilmots go on to confess that they mournfully await—or perhaps, rather tragically, mistakenly prepare—the decidedly macabre resting place that corresponds to this: “The loathsome grave . . . [their] refuge” (2.3.66; 70–1). Crumbling and barren, the Wilmot home has become little more than an imagined threshold, little more than a  flimsy illusion of its coherence. And despite its worn facade and faded walls, the house is the last token of a dignity the family once possessed. Surrounded by hollow remembrances of their former prosperity, the Wilmots have long lived in a mausoleum. Because of this, the Wilmots are caught in the awkward social position that lies between desiring to flourish in private life and the desire to be seen in their suffering. A corresponding language of visitation and genteel entertaining in the play augments this tension. Loaded with cultural meaning, visiting during the period was itself a sort of performance that entailed the carefully choreographed display of private space. Charlot’s acknowledgment of Agnes at her door—“This visit’s kind” (1.2.104)—vouches for their affection and longstanding rapport and provides one crucial example. If Christoph Heyl is to be believed, the tragedy’s audience at the Little Haymarket (where manager Henry Fielding first brought the play to the stage) would have detected a certain ironic doubling of theatricality: “While the servants scuttled about in their subterranean world, the rooms thrown open to visitors resembled a stage upon which the visit took place . . . [and]

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90  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy as befits a stage, what went on in these rooms were stage-managed and highly controlled events.”44 Conceived in this way, visiting was a method for the cultural performance of bourgeois intimacy, a set of conventions that sought to formalize the traversal of private and public spheres. As we soon discover in her response to Charlot, however, such moments serve as a foil for Agnes’ shameful isolation in the community at large:                                    Few else would think it so. Those who would once have thought themselves much honored By the least favor, though ’twere but a look I could have shown them, now refuse to see me. (1.2.105–8)

Cut off from the sociability of visitation, the Wilmots suffer in isolation, rendered invisible by “the cold neglect of friends” (3.1.19; cf. also Old Wilmot’s admission, cited above, that “none . . . regarded [their] distress”). Or yet worse, their suffering is witnessed—but only as the object of “galling scorn or more provoking pity” (3.1.20). Agnes, after all, is acutely ashamed of their misfortune, as if she knows the family is seen only so as to illustrate the moralizing platitudes of gossiping onlookers. Objects of gawking pity, they anxiously suspect what the audience already knows: they are living out a domestic tragedy. * * * Lillo’s subtle ability to implicate spectators in moments like these suggests a keen sensitivity to how tragedy was thought to rely on vicarious comparisons with those observed. So, for example, one aspect of imagination celebrated by Addison’s Mr. Spectator is that of regarding the pain of others from the relative safety of the virtual, mediated by either time or fiction: “when we read of torments, wounds, deaths, and the like dismal accidents, our pleasure does not flow so properly from the grief which such melancholy descriptions give us, as from the secret comparison which we make between ourselves and the person who suffers. Such representations teach us to set a just value upon our own condition, and make us prize our good fortune, which exempts us from the like calamities.”45 For Addison, tragedy exploits the gap between sufferer and spectator, utilizing the mental space of comparison that both insulates and gratifies 44  Heyl, “We Are Not at Home,” 23.

45  Addison and Steele, Spectator, 3:68.

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Close to Home  91 those who witness such misfortune. Tragedies remind us that we’re safe, valorizing our position relative to the afflicted.46 Years later, Burke’s argument in A Philosophical Enquiry (1757) would nuance The Spectator’s insight by reflecting on the baser instincts that motivate our curiosity: “I am convinced we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others.” “There is no spectacle we so eagerly pursue, as that of some uncommon and grievous calamity,” he adds.47 Though for Burke, this pleasure arises as a function of sympathy, the process of vicarious identification he goes on to narrate still works by virtue of the mind’s ability to “turn upon ideas,” to engage in silent and near-autonomous rational processes. Gazing upon the pain of others—and here as in the case of Addison, the key is in the othering of pain—activates the social bonds between people in a quick sympathetic calculus.48 Only two years later, Adam Smith would codify aspects of this line of argument by insisting upon the imaginative medium through which sympathetic reflection occurs. All sympathy is vicarious, he notes in a famous passage of The Theory of Moral Sentiments: As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation . . . and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case.49

Smith imagines a chasm between sufferer and spectator, but one not impossible to traverse in the mind. Thus, he continues: In every passion of which the mind of man is capable, the emotions of the bystander always correspond to what he imagines must be the feelings of the sufferer, which he does by bringing the case home to himself, i.e. ­imagining being himself in the sufferer’s situation.  (Emphasis mine)50

Even when sympathy works, then, it does so by virtue of imaginative analogies between feelings and persons—as Smith puts it: “an analogous emotion 46  Addison refines a point that was generally attributed to Hobbes in the period. See the latter’s discussion of pity and self-love under the subtitle “Of the Passion of them that flock to see danger” in Humane Nature: or, The Fundamental Elements of Policy. 47 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 43. 48 Section XIV of Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry, on the “Effects of Sympathy on the Distresses of Others,” considers this othering in some detail. 49 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 13. 50 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 15.

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92  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy springs up”—so that tragedy ultimately assumes a series of situational differences that obtain between subject and object.51 As he will insist, the affliction we experience in a tragedy is similar but never same, and always predicated upon the work of parsing and bridging carried on by one’s cognitive faculties. Though the details might differ between their arguments, Addison, Burke, and Smith all argue then that we’re drawn to linger upon misfortune because ultimately, from the safety of our position, pitying ­others feels good. But I’d like to suggest that bourgeois and domestic tragedy comes to be seen as a genre that complicates this viewpoint, a genre whose practice and theorization serve to illustrate a shift toward the sensational affective aesthetics foreshadowed by Othello and similarly invested she-tragedies. At its most extreme, this meant that domestic tragedy (especially Lillo’s late works) threatened to elide the critical distance thought to be necessary for tragedy, rendering terror seemingly imminent in the playhouse. What stuck out about the genre for many Georgian-era theatre-goers, in other words, was the real possibility that its scenes would descend into afflictions “too horrid . . . to be contemplated with any satisfaction” (as David Hume warns in his discussion of tragedy’s paradoxical pleasures).52 Writing in 1785, Henry Mackenzie echoes this concern in an essay for his Edinburgh periodical, The Lounger, when he observes that: The high heroic virtue we see exemplified in Tragedy warms the i­magination and swells the mind; but being distant from the ordinary feelings and exertions of life, has, I suspect, but little influence upon the conduct . . . In stage misfortunes, in fancied sufferings, the drapery of the figure hides its form; and real distress, coming in a homely and unornamented state, disgusts the eye which had poured its tears over the hero of tragic misery, or the martyr of romantic woe. Real calamity offends . . .53

Mackenzie’s comparison between heroic and ordinary suffering suggests that bourgeois tragedy came to figure, as David Marshall puts the trouble with art’s intrusion into the everyday, less a problem in aesthetics than a problem about aesthetics. “Real distress” muddies the frame between art and life, more presentation than representation for its beholder. Though the suffering it depicts bears directly upon the interests of the average spectator, drawing them into the scene, its pain is also too ordinary, too 51 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 15. 53 Mackenzie, Lounger, 109.

52  Hume, “Of Tragedy,” 132.

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Close to Home  93 familiar, a little too close to home to sustain the “unaccountable pleasures” of the tragic. While concerns about disgusted viscera certainly seem overstated given what we know about the popularity of some of the genre’s entries, the starkness of its characterization here hints at the trouble with depicting trueto-life misery. Mackenzie’s discussion of realism and tragedy foreshadows Immanuel Kant’s claim, only five years later, that disgust was the aesthetic’s uncompromising other and that this feeling intrudes when reality and art fail to be mentally disentangled. As the philosopher would argue in the third Critique, certain art objects present the ugliness of pain and suffering “in conformity with nature,” so that “the artistic presentation of the object is no longer distinguished in our sensation from [the] object itself.”54 Stranger yet, Kant’s theory offers a rival, though related, formulation of morbid curiosity when he describes the strange erotics at work in these images: “In that strange sensation . . . the object is presented as if it insisted, as it were, on our enjoying it, even though that is just what we are forcefully resisting.”55 Anyone who has watched a bloody murder scene reenacted onstage, or stared helplessly as the protagonist of a thriller creeps slowly down a foreboding corridor, knows the ambivalent attraction and repulsion that leads us to half-cover our eyes at images from which we can’t look away. Mackenzie’s theory, however, isn’t merely a theoretical exercise in morbidity. Having attempted his own revival of Fatal Curiosity at Covent Garden only a year prior to writing this, the drama’s technical effects would have been the subject of concern for those who, like the Scotsman, were struggling to articulate a modern idiom for tragic feeling. Indeed, The Shipwreck (as he retitled the play) followed closely on the heels of Colman’s rival production the year earlier, in which the latter confessed it necessary “to mitigate the horror of the catastrophe.”56 Weaving in and out of tropes that work through the felt proximity and emotional intimacy of “homely” domestic scenes, Mackenzie’s Lounger finally admits that: “A modern audience [does] not relish a distress so real.”57 In the paradoxical ordinariness of the extraordinary event, a simulation of the familiar (read Inchbald’s “occurrences, as in real life”) leads to a felt 54 Kant, Critique of Judgment, 180. 55 Kant, Critique of Judgment, 180. 56 See Colman’s postscript to his 1782 revival of the play (p. 48). As McBurney notes, Mackenzie later intimated that the idea to remount Lillo’s play had been stolen from him by Colman. See McBurney’s edition of Fatal Curiosity, xvi. 57 Mackenzie, Lounger, 109.

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94  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy closeness between tragic subject and onlooking spectator. Consider, for example, the way Addison characterizes the trouble with real-life pain and seems to anticipate the problematic status of a true tragedy. “We are not capable of receiving [pleasure from suffering],” continues The Spectator: “when we see a person actually lying under the tortures that we meet with in description; because in this case, the object presses too close upon our senses, and bears so hard upon us, that it does not give us time or leisure to reflect on ourselves. Our thoughts are so intent upon the miseries of the sufferer, that we cannot turn them upon our own happiness.”58 Similarly, Burke’s proviso that sympathetic pleasure thrives only when terror “does not press too closely” echoes concerns about the failure of the aesthetic to override the discomfort that accompanies even vicarious afflictions.59 Dwell too much on the tragedy’s darkest images, and bad feeling “swallows up” the more agreeable affections at work, Hume adds.60 This manner of characterizing the intensity of one’s fear and negative affect according to an imagined proximity had a distinguished pedigree, m ­ oreover. In his discussion of the rhetorical uses of fear, Aristotle argues that the most powerful depictions of suffering create a sense in the spectator that misfortune is somehow “near at hand” or “about to happen” or likely “might happen.”61 Translators vacillate between physical proximity, looming imminence, and probability in order to capture the ambiguity of the language here, but in light of what we’ve seen so far, that’s probably telling. The language of spectatorship in such cases repeatedly lapses into what seem to be spatial and haptic metaphors, into a rhetoric of proprioceptive sensation, so as to conceive of the drama’s power to disturb inside oneself. Here, at least, feeling refuses to be disembodied, or rather perhaps imagines an emotional practice defined as so near to the truth of our concerns as to be uncanny. Thus, Johnson on domestic tragedy: “What is nearest us, touches us most.”62 “The nearer it approaches reality, and the further it removes us from all idea of fiction, the more perfect its power,” adds Burke, silently marking a shift from the comparative faculties of Addisonian aesthetics to the affective rhetoric of the traumatic.63 58 Addison, Spectator, 3:67. 59 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 42. 60  Hume, “Of Tragedy,” 133. 61 Aristotle, On Rhetoric, 154; cf. 139. Aristotle also notes that tragedy works best when its familiarity confirms a latent egocentricity or heightened sense of self-preservation. Regarding “those like themselves” is an intensifier to fear, “for in all these cases something seems more to apply . . . to the self ” (154). 62  Johnson, “Letter to Hester Thrale, 11 July 1770,” 1:213. 63 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 43.

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Close to Home  95 But even when its effects were less forceful, bourgeois and domestic t­ ragedy’s power to “strike close to home” or “strike home to the feelings” came to be understood as a claim about the embodied affective medium through which the enactment of ordinary suffering was experienced.64 If heroic tragedies please the imagination, bourgeois tragedy cuts straight to the heart. Classical tragedy ennobles the mind; domestic tragedy’s “whole power is upon the affections.”65 Notice, for example, the way that the Bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu slips into the phrase in a bit of gossip between her and Elizabeth Carter in 1782. Apropos of an abandoned gentry home, Montagu replies in a letter: I can sympathize with your feelings in seeing a good family seat deserted, it is tragedie bourgeoise, it comes more home to us, is more distinctly felt than the great ruins of time—which lye in ye higher regions of pity & terror. The falling castle, ye mouldering Palace, excite very different ideas, & rather affect the imagination than touch the heart. Our minds are raised while we contemplate ye great works of time & fate; the petty larcenies they daily commit on such property as we possess wakens tears for ourselves, & our own possessions.66

In linking the home with that which is “more distinctly felt”—and not, crucially, imagined—Montagu’s snap definition demonstrates the way genre provided an affective framework for making sense of ordinary suffering. Bourgeois tragedy, in this view, relied on a different bodily circuitry through which it was imagined to be consumed, shifting empirical ­emphases away from the sensory work of observation and reflection to those of intimate personal concern. This tragedy “comes more home,” “touch[es] the heart,” phrases which operate in a rich semantic network wherein home signifies at once the private spaces lionized by eighteenth-century bourgeois ideology and the interiorized, emotional subjectivity that accompanied domesticity’s emergence over the longue durée. And in this, Montagu’s discussion also brings to mind Young Wilmot’s dismay at seeing the family home, with its destitute walls and unfurnished rooms, as a freighted sign of decay both 64  The Oxford English Dictionary mistakenly locates the first usage of this precise phrase a full century later than Harris et al.’s here, to 1889, while noting that the sentiment likely predated this in a similar construction, “nearer home.” In this case, however, the literal sense is much more predominant and dates to the sixteenth century. The violent pairing of “strike” here, however, may in fact be an eighteenth-century invention. 65  Johnson, “Life of Thomas Otway,” 21:257. 66  Montagu, “Letter to Elizabeth Carter, Sep 2, 1782.” I owe this reference to Elizabeth Eger, who discovered this passage as part of the ongoing Elizabeth Montagu Letters Project.

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96  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy physical and emotional. What gets negotiated in domestic ­tragedy, therefore, is an interiority and affective practice whose pain could be unearthed in performance, explored spatially on stage, and conveyed in the voyeuristic flouting of social custom. * * * Marking this shift aids our understanding of why plays like Fatal Curiosity were ultimately so theatrically and conceptually ambitious. In a move that plays with the transgressive potential of the tragedies I’ve sketched above, the genteel conventions governing privacy and intimacy are upended in the frantic catastrophe that unfolds in the play’s final act. For while Young Wilmot imagines a grand gesture of display and a corresponding celebration of his return to the domestic, his parents soon plot to permanently hide away the body of the presumed Other in their midst. Blinded by “ecstatic” pleasure (2.2.93) at the thought of his “discovery” (2.2.72), he mistakenly stages the visit as if he were host, as if he were in control of the space he has so long deserted and could therefore dictate the terms of his homecoming:                                                                         Ev’ry friend Who witnesses my happiness tonight Will, by partaking, multiple joys!

Turning to Randal, he adds: . . . imagine to thyself The floods of transport, the sincere delight That all my friends will feel when I disclose To my astonished parents my return, And then confess that I have well contrived, By giving others joy, t’exalt my own. (2.2.73–5; 84–9)

His miscalculation, as we’ve seen, is that the Wilmots no longer have friends, and this anonymity—paralleled in the exotic anonymity inscribed on his body—provides both the motive and the means for his destruction. There only remain gossiping spectators, transforming the play’s audience into the community that watches only to indulge in another’s pain. Even though we know little about the Little Haymarket’s layout in Lillo’s time, we might reasonably conjecture that his fateful retreat into an “inner room” would have been an instance of freighted symbolism if not the overt simulation of a social custom played out many times before; the “extremely modest”

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Close to Home  97 theatre was known for its intimate informality, and its audience’s physical proximity to the action may have heightened the tension of the moment.67 Furthermore, if Stothard’s print is any indication, its later run at Drury Lane would have staged the space so as to register the familiarity and intimacy of its setting, though it’s also possible that the print reflects the staging as it would have been for Colman’s production, well before the theatre’s enlargement in the 1790s. Regardless, the eeriness of such staging is what makes Wilmot’s murder so provocative: even hidden offstage and affected in the “deep groan [emanating] from the inner room,” it reads as an exposure of private space, an agonizing violation played out for all to see. Hence, Agnes’ fear—that she will become a pitiable spectacle, somehow seen but unrecognized in her pain (cf.1.2.117–19)—comes to fruition in the intimacy of her own house. The taut deliberation scene, in which Agnes’ entreaties to kill their son finally prevail upon Old Wilmot, is a veritable debate over the dignity of those for whom bourgeois aspiration has proven elusive, and the consequent inability of the homely to cohere in such conditions. Like so many other domestic tragedies, the reversal of household order in the matriarch’s overbearing agency offers an indication that something is amiss, that the family’s politics have broken down.68 Agnes nevertheless maintains that she’s merely what her situation has made her, in a moment that calls back to Lillo’s characterization of Millwood in The London Merchant. Repudiating her husband’s horror at the plan, Agnes reminds him that it was his i­nsolvency that originally cost them a son: Where was thy pity, where they patience then Thou cruel husband! Thou unnat’ral father! Thou most remorseless, most ungrateful man! To waste my fortune, rob me of my son, To drive me to despair, and then reproach me For being what thou’st made me! (3.1.129–34)

Agnes’ argument works by avowing a sense of fluid identity, one in which self is at least partially constructed by those social connections she longs to reestablish, as also those possessions which define her. Hence, the oftentimes 67 Burling, Summer Theatre in London, 77ff. On the Little Haymarket’s development in the context of trends in theatre architecture, see Mullin, The Development of the Playhouse. 68  See Dolan’s argument in Dangerous Familiars, chap. 2.

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98  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy morbid providentialism of Lillo’s work, here collapsed into a rhetoric of ­personal circumstance: “’Tis not choice / But dire necessity, suggests the thought [of killing their guest]!” (3.1.37–8). But the argument also serves as a powerful check against her husband’s at times equally compelling attempt to secure ethics in a fixed identity of middling status: There is a kind of pride, a decent dignity, Due to ourselves, which, spite of our misfortunes, May be maintained and cherished to the last. (3.1.53–5)

Old Wilmot’s response essentializes their worth, lodging agency in the bourgeois self as an act of quasi-Stoic detachment. This contention, finally overturned by Agnes’ sharp rebuking charge of “unnat’ralness,” is amongst the play’s most impassioned articulations of just what selfhood might entail for the ascendant bourgeoisie, detailing how it overlaps with but escapes the domestic, even as domestic considerations inevitably prove self-immolating. This desire to be worthy of one’s social standing, to stack up against one’s peers, tragically ordains its own unrecognized sacrifice. Agnes fails to see this in the mania of her ambition. Immediately after opening her son’s casket, a moment enacting the voracious curiosity and transgressive interest that we as viewers also embody, she soliloquizes: “Possessed of these [treasures] . . . lofty pride [would] bare its aspiring head” (3.1.21–2). To save the Wilmot family now, its patriarchs must destroy its future; hospitality comes at the price of “Th’inhospitable murder of [a] guest!” (3.1.82). Old Wilmot’s defeated concession to Agnes—“I am betrayed within” (3.1.101)—is a key moment, consequently, an admission of identity’s fragmentation that colors not only the patriarch’s Calvinist-inflected weakness of will, but also the overlapping cultural assumptions that make up domesticity and the middling sense of self. Here again, the staged dwelling becomes a spatial focal point through which this is mediated. In the harried rifling-through of the home, frantically in search of the favorite son whose groans they recognize but cannot locate, Eustace, Randal, and Charlot upend the inviolability of the household so tenaciously asserted by the father. Lillo inverts those customs governing genteel visitation in this way, so that the family is laid bare to public scrutiny, exposing the naked self-interest that has overcome them. As we’ll see in Chapter 3, Samuel Richardson will revisit these themes in the following decade when he has the Harlowe family all but implode under the pressure of consolidating fortune and social standing through the marriage of their Clarissa. In her lifeless body, as the

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Close to Home  99 novel painfully teases out, lie the hopes of the family’s advancement. But Porett’s heavy-handed stage adaptation of the novel in 1788 rendered this even more explicit, killing off the family upon Clarissa’s death in surely one of the most vicious examples of poetic justice in the period, almost as if the Harlowes’ cruel fate is held at bay so long as their child still lives and the fantasy of upward mobility can be maintained.69 As one critic rightly argues, Porett’s version flattens the novel’s conflicting agencies, at once holding up an idealized notion of “the family,” pitting private against public, while depicting the Harlowes as a failure to live up to the mutual obligations and attachments that define the middling family. In the play’s inward-turned logic that sees the family and its home as “the most appropriate focus of tragic emotions,” Young Harlowe and Arabella are transformed into the villains plotting against their sibling, destroying the family from the inside out. Like the deaths of Young Wilmot and Thomas Arden, therefore, Clarissa’s demise in The Fatal Seduction strikes at the entwined ideologies of the domestic, of privacy and hospitality, of even the providential, tensing it to its limits in the performance of gut-wrenching loss. Similarly, in Fatal Curiosity, the “unbarred doors” and “hands . . . stained with [Young Wilmot’s] blood” vividly signify that the house, its integrity, and the Wilmot family hemorrhage from the body of their unfortunate son. As Agnes herself says, the image of their murdered child is “a prodigy of horror” that shocks even as it demands our attention. And the play’s overtly gothic touches, to which I’ve already gestured, underscore the way in which Lillo’s use of uncanny horror anticipated much of the psychological turmoil that was to be the stock-in-trade of monodramas like Matthew Lewis’ The Captive (1796).70 That dramatic piece, for instance, which depicted the abuse and imprisonment of a woman by her husband in ways that clearly place the form in a genealogy of she- and domestic tragedies, elicited the sort of response that by now should be rather familiar: When [the performance] was about half over a Man fell into convulsions in the Boxes; Presently after a Woman fainted away in the Pit; and when

69  In one of the few critical pieces on Porett’s play, Caroline Gonda notes that perhaps the drama’s most significant shortcoming is its “loss of interiority, complexity and psychological depth” in comparison to the novel. She is right, though as I’ve also tried to argue, the literal spatial play of interiority marks the stage as a field of signification in which such effects may also be worked out. See her “Promoting the Interests of Virtue,” 173–83. 70  See Jeffrey Cox’s introductory discussion of the drama in his edited collection, Seven Gothic Dramas.

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100  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy the curtain dropped, two or three more of the spectators went into hysterics, and there was such screaming and squalling . . .71

Yet for many of the middling figures within the archive’s various texts, the eruption of violence within the ordinary could elicit a shock as ineffable as melodrama’s dumbshow. Eustace’s confused, verbally impotent admission— “How shall I vent my grief?” (3.1.269)—suggests a domestic trauma whose significance is never fully available, or only available in mourning its loss. The Wilmots enact the response so often documented by Inchbald and the like: at realizing the deed they have mistakenly committed, Agnes and Wilmot become “dumb phantoms of despair and horror.” In retrospectively tracing the terrible implications of the plot, they are forced to witness the murder of their son, forced to undergo their sufferings anew through the refracted position of a third party’s judgment—perhaps the curious spectator, but certainly the chorus-like God hovering over Lillo’s plays in silent judgment. Later German thinkers would point to the brutal economy of its final turns in lauding Fatal Curiosity as a pathbreaking Schicksalstragödie, a drama obsessed with the way families are given over to the whimsies of fate akin to Oedipus Rex.72 If this is a providential turn, then, their election is a dark one, one that engenders a series of questions regarding the meaning of fate and suffering for those whose pain stems from the seemingly ordinary. How, for instance, do we understand the providentialism that tempers the play, and in particular, Charlot’s entreaties to patient submission in the face of suffering? Wouldn’t it seem that the drama understands this suffering—figured in the dead bodies that end up littering the stage—as senseless, accidental, a series of terrible, meaningless mistakes? Or perhaps worse, like the filicide that features in the play’s catastrophe, it figures a betrayal by one lying close to home—in this case, God himself? In fact, I’d like to suggest that this final twist on the unhomely theme provides an interpretive key through which the play’s cultural and theological assumptions become clear. For what’s at stake, finally, is just this imposition of interpretive order upon an otherwise tragic opacity; to hail this as an example of providential direction, even as betrayal, summons the ability to mourn and reinstates a difficult agency for those snake-bitten by misfortune.

71  Quoted in MacDonald, Monk Lewis, 160. 72 Nicoll, Late Eighteenth-Century Drama, 121–4.

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Close to Home  101 Whereas the Wilmots, and Agnes in particular, exemplify the tensions inherent in the middling sort’s pride, Charlot is the play’s moral exemplar and model of Christian patience. She is, we learn, not only selflessly c­ haritable and devoted in her betrothal to Young Wilmot, but also one whose careful maintenance of desire is filtered through a rhetoric of godly purification. As Maria, her servant, recognizes, she has “the heavenly art still to improve / [Her] mind by all events” (1.2.95–6). In this way, her trials become a method for the repudiation of her misfortune: Taught by afflictions, I have learned to bear Much greater ills than poverty with patience. When luxury and ostentation’s banished, The calls of nature are but few; and those, These hands, not used to labor, may supply. (1.2.81–5)

What is interesting, however, is that this gesture of rendering tragedy null is unavailable when faced with another’s suffering. Unlike Burke, who took the tragic spectator’s pleasure as an indicator of sympathy’s powerful bodily influence, Charlot’s spectatorial anxieties threaten to overturn her convictions: But when I think on what my friends must suffer, My spirits fail, and I’m o’erwhelmed with grief. (1.2.86–7)

This line practically distills the drama’s tragic irony, as it also belies Agnes’ later Stoic resignation: “Death is the worst / That fate can bring” (1.2.134–5). Not so, Charlot admits, in the process foreshadowing the reversal in store for the family. According to the comparative logic of the play, Agnes’ own death will be turned into a relatively easy lot, even a deliverance from the intractable pain of witnessing her son’s death. Whereas one can turn their own pain into divine trial, that of another’s tends to resist this. The urge to fall back onto platitudes in such awkward and powerless moments suggests as much. Thus, while the possible meanings of suffering appear to be deferred until the tragedy’s third act, most of Charlot’s dialogue attempts to impose a frame of cosmic order upon the family’s misfortune, to weave a sense of its value and virtues in the rehearsal of plot. Lillo, for example, allows her to recount the rudiments of the drama in the form of an “obscure” and “­terrible” dream shared with Agnes. This has the paradoxical effect of

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102  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy heightening the tragedy’s tension by rendering “the frightful image / Of such a tragic scene” inevitable. But in the moment, it is a portentous warning for the company to keep the faith when misfortune is visited upon them: We must not choose, but strive to bear our lot Without reproach or guilt. …                                         The hand of Heaven Spreads clouds on clouds o’er our benighted heads And wrapped in darkness, doubles our distress.  (1.2.136–7)

They instead must see the plot through, as an extension of their devotion: And not attempt to extricate ourselves And seek deliverance by forbidden ways.  (1.2.163–4)

Charlot’s words echo the complex rhetoric of concealment and revelation utilized by Young Wilmot and Eustace with respect to bourgeois aspiration (cf. 1.3.105–9), and therefore place their sentiments on a common ­continuum by which they are opposed. Her patience, her drive to “aspire to something more and better,” is likewise fueled by a perhaps quixotic hope, but one that expresses itself in the embrace of “transitory pain” and “frail imperfect virtue.” Like the work ethic of the wandering company man, Charlot’s patience is a labor she reckons to God. Charlot thus subsumes her providentialism under a similar structure of expectation and reward. This is what finally proves doubly tragic for her; her anguished cry upon discovering Wilmot’s body, like the Psalmist’s De profundis, simultaneously registers confusion, betrayal, skepticism, and pious resignation. In short, it manifests those forms of suffering explored in the play, and until that moment, held at bay by the assurance that they would ultimately produce some good: Welcome Despair! I’ll never hope again. Why have you forced me from my Wilmot’s side? Let me return! Unhand me! Let me die! Patience, that till this moment ne’er forsook me, Has took her flight, and my abandoned mind, Rebellious to a lot so void of mercy And so unexpected, rages to madness. O Thou, Who know’st our frame, Who know’st these woes Are more than human fortitude can bear, Oh, take me, take me hence, ere I relapse

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Close to Home  103 And in distraction, with unhallowed tongue, Again arraign Your mercy! (3.1.255–65)

Even in this roundabout invocation, one can sense the tremendous symbolic weight of Lillo’s God, its overloaded ability to operate as master-signifier in a dense network of attitudes and discourses. Up until this point, her God has been an idol, a household god whose domestication was hidden in the performance of saintly patience. Rebuffing the temptation to blaspheme in an “unhallowed tongue” allows Charlot to voice both an implied imprecation and the faint disclosure of skepticism. If nothing else, this God is not the benevolent one she had assumed him to be, prone instead to elect misfortune upon the wicked and the pious alike. I want to be careful here, however. For in developing this line of argumentation, I don’t wish to suggest that Lillo’s play is ultimately skeptical of the order it claims for its world. Nor that what the play depicts is the triumph of a merely cynical fatalism, or worse, a retrojected nihilism. Rather, I wish to suggest that this sense of the grimly providential is the bourgeois tragedian having it both ways: it preserves the intensity and seriousness of the tragic, with its fearful affect and pitiable subjects, without having to abrogate the religious and cultural commitments in which the poet is enmeshed. Which is to say, it allows one the comfort of an ordered world, without refusing the brute fact of human suffering, even that which seems random. Because of this, Charlot’s exhausted submission to a God she cannot love, and Old Wilmot’s final protestation that “While Heaven was laboring to make [them] happy / [They] brought this dreadful ruin on [themselves]” (3.1.299–300), paradoxically serve the purpose of calling Providence forth into existence, of making it real by witnessing its presence. In their performance, they tenaciously rehearse a belief in God’s agency so that the domestic, as indeed those modes of interiority at work in the play, become imbued with the holy. In invocations and assurances, dreams and plaintive gestures, the play’s providentialism disciplines the household and audience alike. The strangeness of Fatal Curiosity’s God is such that while present, he remains elusive, even—we might add—too close to home, “a reality or truth that is not otherwise available” in Cathy Caruth’s formulation of the traumatic wound.73 Lillo’s play dwells in this near-paradoxical stance, where 73 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4.

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104  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy God is both transcendentalized as a horrible law foisted upon the family, and the one who was silently working the levers of the plot all along. No wonder, then, that when Old Wilmot stabs his son, the words emanating from the inner room are deeply equivocal: “Oh, Father! Father!” (3.1.195). This line of dialogue, preserved in the oldest authorized copies of the play, would later be replaced by the sanitized “Oh Heav’ns! Oh mercy, mercy!,” “Heaven” a common method for censoring mention of the deity.74 More than simply marking the studious avoidance of blasphemy or oath-making, we might note, the metamorphosed “Father-Heaven” remains a record of the theological agency that is of central importance in the play. In Chapter 3, I will consider at length the “horribly sublime” implications of this darkly providential law when I turn to discuss Clarissa, but suffice it to say, the ordinary suffering on display in domestic tragedy attains a certain clarity through its terrifying exercise. In the tracing of Providence’s various deliverances and summoned afflictions, desire and its regulation become newly, horribly, legible. For Lillo, the “Father” carries with it the force of a vast symbolic network in which the family lives, and moves, and has its being.

74  McBurney notes this as a major variant in his edition, tracing the substitution of “Heaven” for “Father” to copies of the play dated 1768. See notes to p. 48 of his edition.

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3

A Fine Subject for Tragedy Providence, Poetic Justice, and Clarissa’s Real Affliction

I want to continue pursuing some issues opened up at the end of Chapter 2 by turning now to Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady (1747–8), a novel that, though perhaps the single most influential bourgeois tragedy of the eighteenth century, is today rarely acknowledged as one at all. Richardson’s conscription into the grand history of novelistic fiction has come at the cost of our recognizing his masterwork’s affinities to the era’s realist drama, especially the handful of plays that seem to have been exceptions to his general disapprobation of the theatre.1 On the other hand, astute readers of Richardson’s body of work—and Clarissa especially— have long traced a debt its author owed to performance, the way his novels (as Thomas Keymer puts it) were lived media experiences playing out dramatically, in real time, and not simply as textual representations.2 Richardson himself made similar claims, remarking that Clarissa’s story stirred up pity and terror, its literary effects remediating “Tragic Performance” through a “dramatic narrative.”3 As the reformed rake, Belford, observes toward the end of the novel: “What a fine subject for Tragedy would the injuries of this Lady . . . make!”.4 So fine a subject that it had already been produced: though the evidence linking the two is circumstantial, Richardson may have found inspiration in Charles Johnson’s 1733 domestic drama, Cælia; or, The Perjur’d Lover, one of several works depicting the tragic consequences borne by “ruined” women in the 1  See Richardson, Apprentice’s Vade Mecum, 22; also Richardson, Selected Letters, 224. 2 Keymer, Richardson’s Clarissa. See also Kinkead-Weekes, Richardson: Dramatic Novelist, esp. chaps. 10–11; Konigsberg, Richardson and the Dramatic Novel; and Richetti, “Richardson’s Dramatic Art in Clarissa,” 288–308. More recently, Daryll P. Domingo has argued persuasively that Richardson was less anti-theatrical than the standard critical view supposes. See “Richardson’s Unfamiliar Quotations.” 3 Konigsberg, Richardson and the Dramatic Novel, 40; 74–5. 4 Richardson, Clarissa, 1205. Subsequent parenthetical references to the novel refer to Ross’ edition of the text, unless otherwise noted. The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy: Modernity and the Art of Ordinary Suffering. Alex Eric Hernandez, Oxford University Press (2019). © Alex Eric Hernandez. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846574.001.0001

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106  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy period. It would take until 1788 for an English theatrical adaptation of Clarissa; or, The Fatal Seduction to follow through on Belford’s suggestion (and poorly so), but by the mid-1730s, the story of a middling woman’s fatal elopement, sordid imprisonment, and sexual degradation at the hands of a charismatic rake had a number of precedents in performance and print.5 In his classic reading of the novel, Terry Eagleton hints at a line of ­continuity between Clarissa and important later works of bourgeois tragedy such as G. E. Lessing’s Miss Sara Sampson (1755), where class tensions bubble over into tragic action. Engines of social warfare in his view, these texts advance a bourgeois “public mythology” against the rapaciousness of the Ancien Régime, hurling its culture toward a revolution that would only fully materialize across the channel.6 And yet one need not frame it in this way, for the values that impel Clarissa toward tragedy were already being explored decades earlier, oftentimes without the explicit presence of the nobility to stand as antagonists. The novel initially turns, in fact, not because of frictions between the aristocratic Lovelace and the ascending Harlowe family, but rather those within the middling home itself. The aspirational motif behind this should be familiar by now: the Harlowes are social climbers, and son James represents their best chance at “raising a family” (77), even if that means the disinheritance of their daughter.7 Their plan involves marrying off Clarissa and sister Arabella behind a generous dowry, leaving James Jr. a considerable fortune in consolidated real estate. Properties in Scotland, Yorkshire, and the London exurbs (where Harlowe-Place stands as a “piece of affectation,” Clarissa’s friend Anna Howe reveals [211]) will form a claim to the Peerage, which is to say, the social standing they have the pretense to believe has long been theirs in substance if not in form (41). “Nothing less would satisfy his ambition,” Clarissa confides of her brother, and she’s not wrong (77). Almost paradoxically, however, what seals the family as bourgeois is their eagerdisavowal of that status, the vulgar conspicuousness with which they announce their nouveau riche striving. “Every-body knows Harlowe-Place . . . is sprung up from a dunghill, within every elderly person’s remembrance,” Lovelace tells Belford, cutting through these airs (161). In their “united” pursuit of the 5 Johnson, Cælia. For Clarissa onstage, see Porrett, The Fatal Seduction, though Johann Heinrich Steffens’ German adaptation predated this by several years. See Steffens, Clarissa; ein bürgerliches Trauerspiel (1765). 6 Eagelton, Rape of Clarissa, 2–4. Eagleton draws upon Antonio Gramsci’s notion of the “organic intellectual” in order to flesh out Richardson’s importance in imagining a rich and “coherent enough” world view to challenge the old social order. See his reference to Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 452–3. 7 Perry, Novel Relations, 65–6.

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A Fine Subject for Tragedy  107 dignity a title would confer them, a pursuit the novel’s heroine unwittingly stymies when her grandfather’s estate is passed on to her, the family is decisively fractured. Within days of the will’s announcement, Harlowe-Place has become violent (304), setting into motion a series of events that will end in  Clarissa’s death, and painfully reveal the true worth of her character. Lovelace may be the catalyst, therefore, but tragedy lies quite close to home. Still, to Clarissa’s first readers, the novel’s most striking feature wasn’t its continuities with bourgeois or domestic tragedy per se, but rather the fact that it ended up a tragedy at all. Clarissa’s fate exposed a nerve in its contemporary audience, many of whom were so shaken by the book’s ending that it seemed to cast cultural, aesthetic, and theological values into crisis. Lady Bradshaigh’s response is the classic example, insisting in letters to Richardson dated as early as October 1748 (Clarissa’s final volumes would be released that December) that Clarissa’s story end happily for its principal characters. Anything less, she argued, “would give joy only to the ill-natured reader, and heave the compassionate breast with tears of irremediable woes” (4:178).8 Despite her investment in Richardson’s imagined world, she would eventually ask the author to refrain from sending the novel’s final volumes, no longer able to bear the pain in reading them. “Seven vol.ms more,” read Lady Bradshaigh’s annotations to the novel’s postscript, the margins of her copy betraying the threat to forgo its conclusion.9 Like the domestic tragedies of Chapter 2, Clarissa aspired after many of the very same “horribly sublime” effects that Inchbald later praised as the stock-in-trade of the repertory’s verisimilitude.10 Said Mrs. Delany of the novel’s absorbing qualities: “I never had so great a Mixture of Pain and Pleasure in the Reading of any Book in my Life. I was almost broken-hearted at some Passages, and raised above this World in others . . . it is impossible to think it a Fiction.”11 Richardson brought questions that had haunted domestic drama to bear upon the developing realist novel in this way, promising what the 1751 edition’s postscript called a “pleasing anguish” but which was for many an outright ordeal (8:278).12 “We accompany her in Horrow [sic],” wrote Sarah Fielding of the discomfort with which the reader experienced 8 References to Richardson’s correspondence are to Barbauld, ed., Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, and appear parenthetically in the text. 9  Barchas and Fulton, eds., Lady Bradshaigh’s Copy of Clarissa, 140. 10  Inchbald, “Critical Remarks to The London Merchant,” 11:5. 11  Perry helpfully collates these responses in Novel Relations, 67. 12  Here and throughout, I’ve opted to use Richardson’s decisive postscript defense of the novel in the 1751 edition. Parenthetical citations to this postscript refer to the third edition of the novel.

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108  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy Anna gazing upon Clarissa’s lifeless body, replaying the erotics of morbid curiosity. “We sigh, we rave, and we weep with her,” Fielding added, in effect joining those grieving over her coffin.13 “I have too much Feeling,” wrote a gentleman about Clarissa, adding a general complaint against affecting tragedies: “There is enough in the world to make our hearts sad, without carrying grief into our diversions, and making the distresses of others our own” (8:278). No need for realistic tragedy—there’s plenty of that in our lives already. For his part, Richardson made no secret of the distress he sought to inflict upon readers, appropriating Joseph Addison’s reflections in Spectator 40 that a good tragedy would “fix the Audience in such a serious composure of thought as is much more lasting and delightful, than any little transient starts of joy and satisfaction” (8:281). Clarissa was meant to suffer, and ­readers along with her, for the novel merged serious fiction with Christian tragedy, the representation of the ordinary with the exemplarity of hagiography, absorbing us in a world that could be just as cruel as our own. “A story designed to represent real life” (8:297) where God “hath so mingled good and evil” (8:280), the plot’s inscrutably silent Providence would never materialize according to the fashion for poetic justice because, well, it rarely does. And yet this not out of an impiety or disbelief on his part. Instead, Clarissa’s tragic ending would shake a “worse than Skeptical Age” (8:291) out of its complacency, force readers to come to terms with the fragility and transience of the good, and thereby transfix them in the mood Diderot canonized as that of the middling genre sérieux.14 Disciplining reader and Clarissa alike, the novel’s afflictions work to cultivate an affective ­disposition toward the world, a “serious composure” that attenuates one’s attachment to the material in painful theological reflection (8:281). For Richardson and his heroine, in other words, affliction is not simply a thing one experiences, but rather always also a way of being in or relating to the world. Here I want to think about these complexities in more detail, asking how Clarissa, its resonant antecedents in the drama, and the controversy that ensued over the novel’s true-to-life ending shaped the experience of ­ordinary suffering. Drawing a point of connection between the uncanny theology of domestic tragedy and debates over poetic justice in the early realist novel, this chapter argues that Clarissa staged a contest over the 13 Fielding, Remarks on Clarissa, 45. 14  Diderot, “Entretiens sur le Fils naturel,” 4:1166. In Chapter  4, I’ll discuss this turn in more detail.

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A Fine Subject for Tragedy  109 possibility of suffering’s fullness in bourgeois tragedy, a debate over the basic interpretability through which affliction’s experience is navigable and thus ultimately made bearable. The sides in this contest were many, and though I can’t tease them all out here, their multiplicity suggests that pain’s meanings were already deeply fractured in the mid-eighteenth century. From the get-go, the public’s warring investments complicated Richardson’s apologetic project, exposing tensions between this-worldly values and those transcendent ones through which the tragedy made sense of trauma and loss. The novel might draw one’s spirit upwards toward the heavenly, but it was also about our stubborn entanglement in the earthly, exposing a mode of secularity that occurs in the background of our beliefs, in the affects, assumptions, and habits shaped by a rising valuation of comfort in this life—rather than the next. Despite his frustrations, Richardson’s project depended on such tensions, for our absorption in the novel’s world and attachment to his heroine are the preconditions for the tragedy’s weight and religious ends. References to the “meanings” of suffering may initially conjure for us the kind of hermeneutical puzzles that have plagued the novel’s criticism for three decades now, but I mean to evoke an experience far richer than these readings typically allow. Indeed, Clarissa’s “shining-time” (as Anna christens her suffering [579]) exists in a network of fractured meanings, but the difficulty of that experience cannot be reduced to its epistemic or propositional dimensions, as if a satisfactory reason would dispel or even (in many cases) mitigate the acuteness of its pain.15 Explaining suffering isn’t the same as sustaining oneself in it, as anyone who’s ever broken a bone or lost a loved one will tell you. This caveat is especially important given criticism’s history of rationalizing Clarissa’s suffering—did she bring it upon herself? was she secretly in love with Lovelace? doesn’t she always prefer something else to truth?—which, in its own manner, seeks to defuse its tragicness by explaining it away. Nor do I mean to re-litigate the “struggles over i­nterpretation” that have shaped studies of Clarissa since Eagleton, William Warner, and Terry Castle first read the novel as an instance of deconstruction par excellence, aligning the narrative’s lack of present meaning to the ephemeral functions of signification as such.16 To be sure, my own sense of the novel and its swirling controversies is marked deeply by these understandings of 15  Along these lines, Clifford Geertz stresses the need to distinguish between the Weberian “Problem of Meaning”—where suffering is troublesome for its inexplicability—and the emotive scripts that anchor oneself in the endurance of that pain. See “Religion as a Cultural System,” 104. 16 Eagleton, Rape of Clarissa; Warner, Reading Clarissa; and Castle, Clarissa’s Cyphers.

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110  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy textuality, for pain in my view can bring about a “disassociation between language and reference,” and trauma especially forces one to reckon with re-situating that wound into self-understanding, so disorienting is the experience.17 (I’ll return to this point later, in fact.) Yet if Clarissa’s trauma emerges in this instance as a “voice which repeatedly fails to make itself heard,” that accompanying silence is too easily read as the loss of self in pain rather than what I think it really is: her whole being’s practical negotiation of upheaval.18 Which is to say that losing sight of meaning or finding one’s suffering profoundly obscure can be devastating, but it doesn’t ipso facto entail a loss of self, and sometimes, strangely enough, it grounds a person. This is especially the case when coupled with the devotional practices on which Clarissa increasingly leans, and through which she attempts to theologize her tragic condition, as if to do so would elevate that experience beyond the ordinary. One thing tragedy shows us is that the afflicted inhabit their pain in any number of ways—from incredulous lament to desperate bargaining, from manic speechifying to the quiet stillness of prayer—all of which reveal one’s epistemic positions to be inextricably bound up in their affective ones, and our sense of the world to be constituted in part by emotional strategies one didn’t even know one had. Intellective meanings are just one aspect of our experience of affliction, and quite often not the most interesting one. For all its isolating subjectivity too, suffering is a manifestly social event (how would that isolation make sense otherwise?), one that—like an affecting tragedy—exists in the scripted interface between the aggrieved and their community. The actor’s relation to their affliction is a kind of “learned exegesis” in this way, a “manner of feeling” that engages the full person’s “sensual, cognitive, and motivational” activity.19 Clarissa’s suffering is never simply hers alone, therefore, and it’s rarely uncomplicated, wrapped as it is in language that moves between the fragility and fullness of her faith, trying desperately to maintain a sense of dignity in the face of its obscurity. We might take those two poles as descriptions of the operative feelings behind secularity and spirituality respectively, but they’re no less apt

17 Castle, Clarissa’s Cyphers, 134. See also Cathy Caruth on trauma and language in Trauma, 12. 18 Castle, Clarissa’s Cyphers, 22. For a discussion of this counterargument to Castle, see Steele, “Clarissa’s Silence.” 19  This language is Joanna Bourke’s. She urges us to see pain and suffering as adverbs for our sensation, as “manner of feelings” or “being-in-pain.” See Story of Pain, 16.

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A Fine Subject for Tragedy  111 descriptors for the ambivalences encoded in the novel’s exploration of affliction.20 This chapter is about that wavering, for Clarissa and her readers. * * * I want to turn first to the contexts of the novel’s first reception, for this slightly wider angle of vision allows us to situate its affective intervention in  relation to the era’s realist drama and aesthetic conventions. Take, for ­example, the stakes of poetic justice according to the poet laureate, Colley Cibber. As Laetitia Pilkington recalled it, Cibber had heard that the “piteous, d——d, disgraceful pickle” Richardson had placed Clarissa in would end in her death, news that sent him into an apoplectic fit (2:172). “G—d d—n [Richardson],” he erupted at the bleakness of the novel’s plot, “if [Clarissa should die] . . . [I] should no longer believe Providence, or eternal Wisdom, or Goodness governed the World, if [such] Merit, Innocence, and Beauty were to be so destroyed” (4:198). Relaying the exchange to Clarissa’s author, Pilkington went on to observe: “I am not quite sure, whether Mr.  Cibber is not so strongly enamoured of [Clarissa’s] perfections, and touched by her distresses that, were they exhibited on the stage, he would not, like Don Quixote, rise up in wrath and rescue the lady” (4:198). Betraying Richardson’s hasty conclusion that “the gentler sex” was to blame for the popularity of poetic justice (8:277), Pilkington invites Richardson to imagine the uproar his novel would cause among gentlemen were it performed onstage. Thus, she went on to recount the tears that welled up in Cibber’s eyes, relaying how the laureate cursed the novelist and Lovelace alike for their “final destruction” of the book’s heroine. What lies behind this reaction? Did this ending strike too close to home? In a word, yes. Cibber’s personal history intersects with the dramatic antecedents of the novel in his role as erstwhile manager of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and father to prodigal spendthrift, Theophilus, who ran the company during the tumultuous 1732–3 season in which Johnson’s Cælia anonymously debuted. Theophilus was out of his depth, and though some of his decisions as theatre-manager might be taken as instances of foresight (like his staging of The London Merchant and Cælia, whose novelty was at least intriguing enough to make it to print and, perhaps, into the hands of Richardson), in general he was more interested in gambling and haunting 20 Taylor, Secular Age. Taylor’s concepts of “fullness” and “fragilization” have been the subject of much spirited debate. See, for example, the introduction to Warnert al., eds., Varieties of Secularism and Justice, “Did the Middle Ages Believe in their Miracles?”. While I employ these terms here, this chapter echoes Justice’s observations in arguing that religion has long been fragile.

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112  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy Drury Lane brothels as a man about town.21 It’s difficult to say if the elder Cibber objected to the staging of Johnson’s play outright, but one wonders if the sordid material of the drama—several scenes of which depicted a bawdy house—was enough to raise concerns about the son’s decision-making.22 Cælia centers on the Lovemores, a prosperous middling family from London’s exurbs, whose daughter (the play’s title figure) becomes embroiled in a love affair with Wronglove, the libertine who seems to presage Lovelace. Running off with her seducer in what Wronglove’s good-hearted friend Bellamy (read Belford here) calls “the highest Breach of Hospitality” (49), the pregnant and desperate Cælia misperceives the rake’s intentions, for his affections begin to wane even before we see him onstage. If Richardson was inspired by this play, one of his great insights was to depart on this point, transforming the rake from Johnson’s calloused Lothario figure, briefly intrigued by a glittering belle, to an obsessive rapist protected by the rank and privilege that once gave him access.23 Nevertheless, whereas Johnson’s Cælia is besotted with her libertine in a way Clarissa never really is, the drama’s tragic heroine understands her vulnerability in ways the novel seems to reduplicate. Having been lodged at what she believes to be a midwife’s home, Cælia begs Wronglove not to leave her alone in the city: I am your Child, your Ward, your Care, your Trust; I have no Father, Mother, Friend, Relation—none but you. You are my Comfort and Support: I rest alone in you, and when you leave me, I and your Child must perish. O blame me not if I complain to you; and when I see you treat me coldly, almost with Indifference, to who can I complain?—I have relinquish’d all for you; and am by all deserted for your sake—My Fame, my Character, my once unspotted Reputation’s gone, no vertuous [sic] Woman will admit me into her Fellowship.  (7)

Later, she desperately tries to reckon her suffering as a kind of value held in trust by her tepid lover, in language that presages the logic at work in Cibber’s oath against Richardson: “surely, you will remember I have some Merit to you: You will remember what I have suffer’d, what I still suffer for you” (12). Wronglove will not, a fact everyone but Cælia knows. But already there are indications that suffering is to be repaid in the here-and-now: Cælia’s 21 McGirr, Partial Histories, 166. 22  For a discussion of their tense relationship, see McGirr, Partial Histories, chap. 5. 23  Bernbaum notes that newsprint accounts of this sort of thing ran alongside the tales of domestic discord I discussed in Chapter 2. See Bernbaum, Drama of Sensibility, chap. 4.

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A Fine Subject for Tragedy  113 affliction is decidedly this-worldly in orientation, a demonstrative practice directed toward Wronglove as the sign and guarantor of her secular pleasures. In tying her suffering to its end in Wronglove’s affections, she valorizes an affective notion of bliss that comes to be enshrined as a central pursuit of modern life and which dramatically fails her in the tragedy.24 In fact, though the tragedy will take her grieving mother’s life and break apart the Lovemore family, what ultimately plunges Cælia into despair is a falling-out with Wronglove, dispelling once and for all a domestic fantasy she’s nursed since before the curtain arose. Clarissa will pointedly refuse these ends, of course, adopting the stance associated here with Wronglove— “indifference”—though in ways much more Stoically inclined. According to Wendy Anne Lee, Clarissa’s detachment in the latter volumes of the novel offers a model of “concentrated disregard,” an “affectless affect” that led Sarah Fielding to conclude that “her Heart was as impenetrable and unsusceptible of Affection, as the hardest marble.”25 Just as likely, though, we can read her indifference as a concerted effort at transcendence, less a lack of attachment or loss affect as an intensification of the bond between the believer and an object of otherworldly devotion.26 In truth, and as Lee herself leaves open, a cold indifference to the world may signal the heart’s fullness at the prospect of escaping it. If Clarissa isn’t drawing upon Cælia, the novel is nevertheless indebted to the drama. The novel, for example, plays with dramatic irony simply by transposing the gap between (knowing) spectator and (unsuspecting) character to the asymmetrical knowledges enabled by epistolary form. As ­readers found out, the information given them through the book’s editorial conceit created the illusion of being privy to parallel scenes in the diegesis, heightening the kind of tension that the theatre exploited on a nightly basis. Like Clarissa, Cælia will soon find out that the Mrs. Lupine who owns her lodgings is a notorious bawd, and the noises she’s been hearing at night are in reality visitors to one of Wronglove’s favorite brothels. Cælia’s pregnancy and elopement cost her her reputation, but the even graver imputation that she might now be “given up to Shame! a Mistress of the Town! a common Prostitute!” (as Mr. Lovemore fears [45]) is rather scandalously realized when a constable breaks up the ladies’ revels and carts off the despondent 24  For two recent treatments of happiness in the eighteenth century, see Soni, Mourning Happiness and Norton, Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness. 25  Lee, “Case for Hard-Heartedness,” 40; Fielding, Remarks on Clarissa, 13. 26  Lee, in fact, acknowledges this possibility. See “Case for Hard-Heartedness,” 61. See also Steele, “Clarissa’s Silence,” 22.

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114  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy Cælia by force. Epistolary is also far from absent in the play: in fact, Cælia’s plot twists according to the arrival of letters, and the drama features a number of them read aloud onstage and printed in epistolary form (rather than as dialogue) in the earliest published editions of Johnson’s script. One wonders, too, if the asides interlacing the play’s dialogue qualify intention by exteriorizing interiority, thereby offering a model for the kind of doublespeak that Richardson exploits through Lovelace’s various address. Our first glimpse of Wronglove engages in just this sort of equivocation, with the rake reassuring his “Petticoat-Victory” (5) of his affection even as he qualifies in aside: “How this Wench dotes?—Gad I am most heartily sick of the Affair” (6). Later on, he cheapens a soliloquy by confessing that though the whores there at Mother Lupine’s are a nice diversion, what he really loves is “the Chace” (13, sic). Certainly, such scenes—with Theophilus coaching William Mills in the role of Wronglove, playacting the kind of prodigality he excelled at in his daily life—would have arched eyebrows for all those with knowledge of the Cibber clan. Several accounts of the period have cited these unseemly portrayals of “lower Characters” as a possible reason for the play’s short run, and it’s easy to imagine the poet laureate red-faced at it all.27 By 1734, the elder Cibber had had enough, and would sell off his shares before that year’s season opened, thus hastening his son’s dissolution. But shameful financial mismanagement was one thing; personal tragedy was another, and it was the latter that would have been particularly difficult for the elder Cibber to recall in light of Clarissa’s impending demise. For in perhaps one of the most ill-considered publicity stunts of early Georgian theatre, Theophilus cast Janey—his long-suffering and now eight-monthspregnant first wife—in the role of Cælia, hoping to play upon the audience’s natural sympathies. Janey’s performance of Cælia’s betrayal traded upon the complex associations signaled by the actress’ real body, by then in little condition to perform several nights a week. Hearing of Wronglove’s unfaithfulness, Cælia (and Janey too?) would have struggled to come to terms with her partner’s cruel indifference: All that I fear’d is come.—Unjust, perfidious Wronglove! . . . Now I am lost to every Hope.—I thought one Day to fix him mine: in that dear Wish I live’d, and was supported . . . Oh! to be thus abandon’d! thus abus’d! . . . Yet,

27 See Johnson’s “Advertisement to the Reader” in Cælia, [i]. For critical accounts, see Genest, Some Account of the English Stage, 3:364–5; Shudofsky, “Charles Johnson and Eighteenth-Century Drama,” 154–5.

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A Fine Subject for Tragedy  115 oh! there is a Scene of Horror yet behind, that sinks me quite—my Family! my Fame! my Parents! (34)

Ultimately, the role “proved too taxing” for Janey and just a few days after the play’s debut, she collapsed onstage. She would never recover, giving birth to their daughter before slipping away for good shortly thereafter. Cælia’s roundabout evocation of doubt and disillusionment would have been eerily appropriate had Janey uttered them in those last moments: “Why was I born for this?” (38). And though we cannot know what those final moments were like, we do know that Clarissa will employ practically the same pointed phrasing toward the close of the novel, casting doubt upon the reasons for afflictions, marking those sufferings as in some sense unnecessary and unjust. It’s easy to assume that early modernity was more at home with pain, and in some senses it certainly was; but Cælia, the jilted lover and destitute would-be mother, punctures that certainty simply by asking a loaded why?. Back in the real world, Theophilus nevertheless went on to play the despondent husband, even as his habits continued unabated: prostitutes hung from his arms at Janey’s funeral and followed him “back to the marital and child-bed” where, just days earlier, she been confined.28 Of course, one of the most palpable benefits of the kind of poetic justice Cibber wanted to enact for Clarissa is that it promised to make such wrongs (and Wrongloves) right. In a letter read aloud near the close of Act 5, the play’s rake anticipates Lovelace’s plea to “LET THIS [his death] EXPIATE!” (1488) when he urges his father and the town to take up Cælia’s ­maintenance: “This is all the Reparation I am able to make” (59). To which Mr. Lovemore affirms: “He has paid the Debt. Good Heaven! Shall we not say thy Justice is eternal; tho’ our weak mortal Eyes seldom behold it near, so near as this.” Coming prior to the heroine’s death, Wronglove’s retribution enacts the restoration of justice in the performance space for the witness of characters and audience alike, and for a moment it seems to presage the family’s reconciliation in the father–daughter dyad too. But this “comfort” (59) will come too late for Cælia, who (in another foreshadowing of Clarissa) has already imagined herself “decently laid in Earth, at Night, in a plain Coffin” (52) and will give in to her sufferings moments later. “Sorrows like mine, Death can only remove,” she sobs, “I fall, a bleeding sacrifice to Love” (39). If only Wronglove’s reformation had occurred sooner, goes the implication. Or better yet, here’s Henry Fielding’s ironic epilogue to the play, which castigates 28 McGirr, Partial Histories, 166.

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116  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy the heavy hand of “this unknown Bard” he assumes has little knowledge of the ways of the world: Had some Town-Bard this Subject undertaken, He would’ve match’d, not kill’d, the Nymph forsaken. Wronglove, as now, had been the first Favour carried, And Bellamy been, what he is fit for, married.  (xii)

Had Fielding known that its author was Johnson—whose day job was running a well-known tavern on Bow Street, scarcely a stone’s throw from Drury Lane and Covent Garden theatres—perhaps he would have thought more soberly of the play’s grim ending.29 Even so, Fielding imagines an alternative ending that couples “poor Miss” Cælia to nice-guy Bellamy in a final happy twist, lodging an argument for the comic that says, in essence, give the people what they want. It’s difficult for us to imagine now how the harshness of a potentially tragic ending might have been mitigated by a sudden comic turn, but by the time Richardson was writing, the reformed rake was a well-known trope, one which silently adopted poetic justice in order to (in theory at least) redeem the pain of the previous four acts. Whose pain—ours or the drama’s tragic characters?—is not always clear, though in both cases the promised sense of closure renders the affliction ultimately worth the trouble. Cibber himself was a culprit on this score, with his Love’s Last Shift (1696), enacting a fantasy of virtuous femininity in which the faithless husband, Loveless, repents of his dalliances and returns chastened to his wife. Theatre h ­ istorians will point out that moral reform like this was increasingly taken up onstage as the vices of Restoration comedy gave way to softer, more positive depictions of domestic virtue. Richardson’s debut novel parroted many of these same values when Pamela’s narrative ended with her social elevation through marriage. Yet the reform plot was also a prime example of moral hazards: as Frances Ferguson and Sandra Macpherson have shown well, calls for a “fortunate ending” remain complicit in patriarchal laws that protected men who were willing to nullify charges of rape simply by marrying their victim after the fact.30 Lovelace depends upon this legal backstop, using it to hedge his 29  Kelly, “Johnson, Charles (1679?–1748).” Pope memorialized Johnson in a passing shot in The Dunciad, 1.240. 30  Ferguson, “Rape and the Rise of the Novel,” and Macpherson, Harm’s Way. See also Lee, “Case for Hard-Heartedness,” 36–9.

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A Fine Subject for Tragedy  117 liability in the relationship, even though he will characterize such contrived changes of heart as real-life coups de théâtre, co-opting the language of the stage for the vicissitudes of courtship. As he tells Belford: “MARRIAGE, with these women, thou seest, Jack, is an atonement for all we can do to them. A true dramatic recompense!” (1039). Indeed, time and again, the rake ­imagines himself in a comedy (his title: The Quarrelsome Lovers) that, however unlikely, “will hocus pocus all the wrongs” via matrimony (571, 1040, 1041).31 By the mid-1740s, Richardson was likewise skeptical of such turns. What’s more, many of Clarissa’s readers (like Lady Bradshaigh) softened their stance on the marriage plot over time, though they still “insisted that Poetic Justice required that [Clarissa be made happy]” (8:277). The margins of Lady Bradshaigh’s copy reward the heroine’s afflictions by restoring her estate and depicting her as living in comfortable financial independence, there to “have recover’d her health, & liv’d to her hearts Content” in the company of friends.32 Presumably this was a more realistic and less hazardous end. And elevating Clarissa as a final narrative twist seemed also to vindicate the providential in the way she was “made Happy,” as a response to her pain (8:277). Despite the stark differences between Bradshaigh and the laureate in execution, the assumptions behind both views of poetic j­ustice are eerily similar, therefore insisting that afflicted women like Clarissa were due a bit of this-worldly comfort from the Almighty. In his postscript to the novel, Richardson was willing to concede that the novel did mete out justice to at least some of its characters. The kindness Anna and Belford extend to the novel’s heroine leaves them “signally happy,” in effect naturalizing consequences in a psychology of affect, while Lovelace, his accomplices Tomlinson and Mrs. Sinclair, and even the Harlowes were “exemplarily punished” for their part in the tragedy (8:289). Richardson’s language underscores the natural consequences he takes the novel to depict, its moral order an instance of “organic-” or “natural Providence” whereby “the cumbersome apparatus of dogma and metaphysics” is silently integrated into the tragedy’s realistic teleology.33 Even so, that teleology stunningly fails Clarissa. And it was her suffering that readers wanted rewarded; it was her loss that provoked a need 31  For an argument that explicitly addresses this, see Zunshine, Bastards and Foundlings, chap. 3. Lovelace’s phrase is an insertion of Richardson’s to the 1751 edition (6:121). 32  Barchas and Fulton, Lady Bradshaigh’s Copy of Clarissa, 140. 33 Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 90–1. For an insightful discussion of the development of “natural consequences” in eighteenth-century moral discourse, see Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 47–8.

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118  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy for  answers. Cibber’s curse conflates these two demands, equating the this-worldly benefits of poetic justice with the very meaning of one’s suffering in ways that recall Cælia’s plea to Wronglove discussed above. Affliction is a kind of emotional labor, its merits accruing as moral capital, so that the failure of poetic justice to valorize this pain, to bring about the tangible pleasures of happiness in the present, is tantamount to that pain’s ultimate senselessness. If suffering is worthless, it also collapses into an abyss of meanings. When Clarissa dies, therefore, the implication in Cibber’s view was of a Providence that was unintelligible or capricious, one that didn’t square with the effervescent rising of the middling and the etiological linkage of virtue and reward in so many ways central to that social rank’s mythology. Reflecting a vision of the world’s moral order, poetic justice embodied a secular faith that systematically ties fortune to moral standing, happiness in the here-and-now to one’s industry and behavior. Despite his exaggerations, Cibber’s threat—“I shall never believe Providence . . .”—seems to betray a skeptical assumption that what matters is ultimately the material world at hand. Isn’t this a far cry from the sort of Christian piety Richardson sought to engender in his readers? * * * To answer that question we’ll have to think in more detail about the secular frameworks that lie behind poetic justice, a prospect that might seem (on the surface at least) misguided given the fanciful, theologized artifice of its form. After all, few literary tropes seem to distill their theological assumptions more clearly than poetic justice. But Richardson was absolutely clear on this point: poetic justice was the image of a “dispensation” antithetical to his tragic novel’s “Christian system” (8:280), going so far as to echo Addison’s claim that poetic justice was “anti-providential.”34 Michael McKeon echoes this point in his history of the novel, concluding that the emergence of poetic justice in the years leading up to Clarissa’s publication can be read as evidence of the contradictions inherent to secularization “in which the orthodox spirituality of an equitable afterlife was being replaced by the aesthetic spirituality of an equitable denouement.”35 Ironically, then, poetic justice granted the regularity of law to providential discourse, arising in part as a response to the rationalizing energies unleashed by the Reformation in Protestant England. 34  This particular quotation refers to the first edition’s postscript, where Addison’s equivocation on “the chimerical notion of poetical (or, as we may say, anti-providential) justice” (1497) is later amended to read “the chimerical notion of poetical justice” in the 1751 version (8:282). 35 McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 125.

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A Fine Subject for Tragedy  119 Of course, in some corners this rationalizing tendency was slow in coming or, in fact, never arrived at all; for many believers, poetic justice would always be a trite fiction, domesticating a God whose will was absolute and uncompromising. Predestinarian branches of the Reformation, mostly Calvinist in orientation, were quick to emphasize the mysterious sovereignty of divine election, especially in light of the depraved indifference of an unjust, fallen world. In this respect, George Lillo’s tragedies may reflect the harshness of his upbringing among the Dissenting community in East London, for his dramas dwell at length upon the inscrutability of God’s judgments time and again. Nevertheless, and as the sheer amount of extant volumes of providentialist literature—both popular and technical—confirms, the belief that human fortune and misfortune appeared random was by no means limited to Calvinists alone. Hence Samuel Butler’s verdict that “The world is so vile a thing that Providence commonly makes Fooles, and Knaves happy, and good men miserable in it, to let us know, there is no great Difference between Happiness and misery here.”36 No friend to Dissenters, Butler’s own predestinarianism draws a similar sort of distinction between the mysteries of God’s will and the vicissitudes of the created order. As Richardson himself would aver in Clarissa’s postscript: “God by Revelation teaches us he has . . . [placed mankind] here only in a state of probation, [where] he hath so intermingled good and evil as to necessitate them to look forward to a more equal distribution of both” (8:280). For many, Providence could be rather fickle in its favors even as some churchmen assured them to the contrary. Systematizing Providence marked an important step in the history of modernization, for a number of reasons. In his recent account of the ­dialectics of realism, for example, Fredric Jameson argues that Providence was vital to early realist novels because it named the causally obscure in a way that made sense of action. Not unlike the earlier epic, Providence gave form to what Lukács had called the epic’s extensive totality, bathing its represented world with the “immanent, in the sense that meaning is inherent in all its objects and details, all its facts, all its events.”37 The recurrence of the providential in the era’s texts works out as a function of plot: “the euphoria of a secular salvation otherwise inexpressible in material or social terms.”38 One way to read the early novel, then, is as an attempt to understand the interrelations between commerce and agency during a period in which 36 Butler, Characters and Passages, 346. 38  Jameson, “Ideology of the Text,” 52.

37 Jameson, Antinomies of Realism, 210–11.

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120  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy both the novel’s generic conventions and capitalist social conventions are under widespread negotiation. Notions like “Providence” and “fate” become ways for causality to be understood as new and unrecognizable market practices emerge, practices as yet uncodified by the repetition of collective social routine. Hence, the invocation of Providence will often “signal its absence” or obscurity in such narratives.39 Similarly, fortune comes to name an epistemic threshold for the early novel, the point at which causality becomes seemingly irrational if not wholly inscrutable, when causality must warrant reason from on high.40 At the same time, as Keith Thomas has influentially chronicled, theories of Providence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries attempted to fold older notions of chance into an overarching, more mechanistic view of moral causality that we might, were we not careful, perceive as simply disenchantment.41 “The doctrine of providences,” he explains: was a conscientious attempt to impose order on the apparent randomness of the human fortunes by proving that, in the long run, virtue was rewarded and vice did not go unpunished. In place of unacceptable moral chaos was erected the edifice of God’s omnipotent sovereignty.42

Even though this conclusion would remain hotly contested well into the nineteenth century (and versions of it persist to this day), arguments in support of the order and intelligibility of Providence continued to develop in the moral philosophy of the turn of the eighteenth century, much of which tried to reconcile theological ethics with shifting notions of commerce. What emerged over that period was an increasingly detailed understanding of the role of the human that better accounted for early psychologies of selfinterest and economic law.43 Many echoed the line advanced by Bishop Richard Cumberland, who argued that one’s self-interest worked as one part of a rational whole, materializing Providence in a complex series of reciprocal mechanisms. A contemporary of the Cambridge Platonists, Cumberland’s De Legibus Naturae (1672; translated into English under the title A Treatise of the Laws of Nature, 1727) saw the natural order as both mechanistic and

39  Thorne, “Providence in the Early Novel,” 335. 40  Thorne, “Providence in the Early Novel,” 325–6. 41 Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 110. Taylor accounts for this shift in similar terms in Secular Age, 157–269. 42 Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 107. 43  On this point in particular see Taylor, Secular Age, 176–85; and Viner, Providence in the Social Order, 55.

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A Fine Subject for Tragedy  121 harmonious, so that causality was suffused with the intelligence of a benevolent Creator.44 In contrast to older models of divine intervention, Providence came to treated as part of a Newtonian world, directing finite causes according to universal laws. Such laws were knowable in principle too, organizing disparate interests into a beneficial whole. Lovelace’s cynical appropriation of Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1714) is likely meant to undermine this optimism. In a letter to Belford, he justifies his treatment of Clarissa by claiming: “At worst, I am entirely within my worthy friend Mandeville’s assertion, that private vices are public benefits” (847). Moments like these remind us that Lovelace’s actions are often (in the words of Christopher Hill) “sordidly financial” in the novel, his “providences” standing in for the veiled machinations that aim at ownership of her “by deed of purchase and settlement.”45 But this episode also reminds us that arguments from design served an important political purpose, for they were often taken to reconcile or refute Epicurean and Hobbesian notions of selfinterest that seemed to undermine law and social order. Figures like the Third Earl of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson argued that natural bonds of sentiment suffused the moral order, in this way balancing the mechanistic aspects of providential design alongside Stoic notions of an innately sympathetic impulse or “moral sense” in humankind.46 Thus, for Shaftesbury, tacit calculations assumed a central role in the morality of everyday life: “[It is] philosophy to inquire where, and in what respect one may be most a loser, which are the greatest gains, the most profitable exchanges, since everything in this world goes by exchange.”47 Surprisingly, Richardson’s own earlier work in Pamela seems to advance this secular faith, reflecting notions perhaps received through friends like the Reverend Patrick Delany, for whom Richardson had printed sermons claiming: “Rewards and Punishments are the great springs and wheels that

44 Myers, Soul of Modern Economic Man, 41. Myers notes that Cumberland imagined the mechanized physical world as a series of finely tuned vortices in mutual tension: “The outstanding feature of the operation of Cumberland’s ‘whole material system’ might be described as one of reciprocation and accommodation. Parts move towards and then away from each other in a pattern of mutual adaptation and adjustment.” For a discussion of theological and philosophical arguments from design that resonates with my account here, see Jager, Book of God. 45  Hill, “Clarissa Harlowe and Her Times,” 323. Lovelace’s devilish use of Providence is one of the more provocative changes Richardson makes to the novel, which prior to this had read “precautionaries” here. See Clarissa [1751], 5:160; cf. Ross’ edition, 814. 46 Taylor, Secular Age, 246. 47  Quoted in Viner, Providence in the Social Order, 69–70.

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122  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy set the whole world in motion.”48 Likewise, church moralists like Bishop Joseph Butler attempted to redeem psychologies of self-interest as part of a mainstream Anglican theology that incorporated elements of the new ­natural philosophy. Butler’s theory, for instance, was overtly apologetic in character, seeking to rationalize the design of this moral economy as proof of God’s omnibenevolence.49 While he made allowances for social evil, he also argued that one’s benevolence and enlightened self-interest were ultimately identical, thereby producing simultaneous civic and personal goods. Divines thereby underwrote a moral economy in which virtuous action entailed a certain recompense for the actor. As a 1710 sermon titled Providence Vindicated as Permitting Wickedness argued: The nature of things has link’d duty and happiness, disobedience and misery together. From whence ’twas obvious to observe farther, that it is a policy of heaven transcendent and truly Godlike, thus to govern Man by the Springs and Instincts of his own nature; rewarding him for loving and taking care of himself, and punishing him, on the other side, for being his own enemy, and making himself miserable.50

Recast as “Nature” by many, Providence was figured as a series of hidden causes and exchanges embedded in the world, decisively linking merit to reward, vice to punishment. Unsurprisingly, Thomas adds, “the belief that men usually got their just deserts” tended to flourish most among the swelling numbers of the British middling rank, for whom commercial aspiration and upward mobility confirmed what Max Weber long ago canonized as the Protestant work ethic.51 A model for an emerging capitalist order, it’s easy to believe in the “nature of things” when this confirms what a social rank was already coming to believe about itself. For a variety of reasons, therefore, Providence offered tremendous explanatory power and formed a vital part of the affective architecture of British social life at around the moment that bourgeois tragedy burst onto the scene. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the doctrine of poetic justice, flourishing as it did in close proximity to these providentialist debates, 48 Fortuna, “The Unsearchable Wisdom of God,” 47. For the Delany reference, see his “The Duty of Masters,” 228. 49 Taylor, Secular Age, 225; Myers, Soul of Modern Economic Man, 59–60. 50 D’Oyly, Providence Vindicated, 3. The emphases are original. 51 Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 112. Thus, for Weber, Protestantism’s distinct emphasis on the “vocational calling” engendered a this-worldly asceticism, a rationalization of one’s time and labor, the material benefits of which not only confirmed the agent’s salvation but, ironically, eroded their ideological basis in religion over time. See Protestant Ethic.

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A Fine Subject for Tragedy  123 although rarely was it invoked with such urgency as that of Clarissa’s readers. Yet as their response to the tragedy suggests, the rhetoric of poetic justice had gradually assumed the part (whether consciously or not) of more traditional notions of Providence in the very process of ­distilling its insights.52 Poetic justice offered assurances of the moral order’s regularity and order, compensating textually for the otherwise obscure vicissitudes of the divine and, in the process, granting a coherent sense to tragedy that had often been eschewed (think here, for example, of Nahum Tate’s popular rewrite of King Lear, which ended with Cordelia and Lear happily reunited). On this point, note Thomas Rymer’s insistence in 1678 that a play confirms the spectator’s desire for closure by displaying moral consequences in stark and unmistakable terms. According to him, the play is granted sense (what Jameson called the immanence of realism, but Rymer terms the “constant order . . . harmony and beauty of Providence”) by the “necessary relation and chain, whereby the causes and effects, the vertues and rewards, the vices and punishments are proportion’d and link’d together.”53 In poetic justice, meaning is full and clear. John Dennis, who did more than anyone else to systematize poetic justice for the eighteenth-century tragic stage, made a similar claim, noting that the regularity of a divine and moral order ought to find its expression in the poet’s work lest it blaspheme the Creator.54 Thus, in his 1701 tome, The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry, he argued that: “every Tragedy ought to be a solemn Lecture, inculcating a particular Providence, and showing it plainly protecting the good and chastizing the bad, or at least violent; and that if it is otherwise, it is either an empty amusement, or a scandalous and pernicious Libel upon the government of the world.”55 Policing good and evil in this way, poetic justice had a didactic purpose, yes, but one grounded in the confident assertion of the world’s deep moral order, something tragedy reflects as “an Image of the Divinity.”56 Anticipating much of the language central to the providentialist literature, poetry is 52 McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 125. 53 Rymer, Tragedies of the Last Age, 140–1. 54  Tyre, “Versions of Poetic Justice,” 34–5. For a general literary historical view of the doctrine, see also Quinlan, Poetic Justice in the Drama. 55 Dennis, Advancement of Modern Poetry. The quotation occurs on the unnumbered ninth page of the volume’s Epistle Dedicatory to John Sheffield, Lord Mulgrave. Martin C. Battestin’s classic study, The Providence of Wit, sees in much of the era’s literature a similar concern with depicting the well-ordered design of the natural world. For him, poetic justice “is a reflection of the faith of [this] age in Order” (213). Where he sees confidence in its aesthetic reiterations, I see a deep and abiding unease. 56 Dennis, Grounds of Criticism, 17.

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124  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy understood to be “an exact imitation of Nature . . . [which] is nothing but that Rule and Order and Harmony which we find in the visible Creation,” its  task like that of religion: “to move the affections.”57 Hence, Dennis takes tragedy as that art form that depicts the “many effects of a Dreadful Providence”58 with the marked “Regularity” of a system, policing emotion via plot: “The great Disorders of the world are caus’d by great Passions, and they are punish’d by Tragedy.”59 In cases like this, the rhetoric of poetic ­justice is functionally indistinguishable from that of the providentialist tracts above. It’s worth citing Richardson’s own defense of Pamela to this effect, which maintained the converse corollary that “Providence never fails to reward . . . God will in his own good Time, extricate [the virtuous reduced to a low estate], by means unforeseen, out of their present Difficulties, and reward them with Benefits unhop’d for.”60 Less than a decade before Clarissa, Richardson seemed to go along with Rymer’s secularizing mandate to avoid a “hell behind the scenes.”61 It would seem then that the crisis of faith evoked by Clarissa’s tragic ending confirmed the anxieties that occasioned poetic justice and much of the providentialist literature to begin with. None of this should be taken to imply that these debates were in any way settled by the middle decades of  the eighteenth century, but rather that these concerns persisted and informed depictions of suffering on page and stage well throughout the century. If this is an instance of secularization, then, it’s a secularization that evacuates certain areas of content, but largely retains its archaic forms. Indeed, as Peter Brooks argues, the melodrama of early industrial Britain would preserve the essence of poetic justice’s secular theology in what he termed the “moral occult,” defined as “the domain of operative spiritual values which is both indicated within and masked by the surface of reality . . . the repository of the fragmentary and desacralized remnants of sacred myth” that undergird the world with a hidden moral legibility.62 Giving meaning to the misfortunes that plague an increasingly private and domestic domain 57 Dennis, Advancement of Modern Poetry, 53. 58 Dennis, Advancement of Modern Poetry, xi. 59 Dennis, Advancement of Modern Poetry, 55. 60  Quoted in Fortuna, “The Unsearchable Wisdom of God,” 22. 61 Rymer, Tragedies of the Last Age, 26. 62 Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 5. For the concept of legibility and moral law, see his discussion of Claudel and Balzac on p. 141ff. Carolyn Williams’ recent discussion of the moral occult as wish-fulfillment in Victorian melodrama is especially good, locating a common ancestor in the bourgeois tragedies of the eighteenth century. See Williams, “Melodrama,” 193–219, esp. 206.

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A Fine Subject for Tragedy  125 of values, and arising in times of uncertainty, the moral occult enacts a world one hopes for as a way of redressing the world one suspects to actually exist. Or as Lauren Berlant notes in a related context, the wishful sentimentality that animates melodrama constitutes: “a command and a demand for the real to show up and be adequate to fantasy.”63 Like an idealized bourgeois home, it comforts and eases after enduring the harsh labors of a prosaic world. If anything, therefore, the endurance and compelling force of poetic justice borders on re-enchantment, haunted by what it might mean if it all means nothing at all. All this points to a deep ambivalence at the heart of bourgeois tragedy’s vision of this-worldly happiness, and helps explain the longstanding popularity of poetic justice as an indication of the public’s anxiety over disenchantment and an eagerness to restore sanctity to the ordinary. One might categorize this secular faith as an early Romantic rejection of realist modes, or otherwise call it a sentimental mode of generic wish-fulfillment—and not without reason. But to do so without keeping the tensions I’ve traced so far in mind would obscure the fact that for many eighteenth-century Britons, poetic justice was claimed to be a realist (or rather more precisely, a mimetic) literary principle. This was the key to Dennis’ argument, after all, even if Clarissa flouted its core principles. What’s puzzling, then, is not that readers clamored for a poetically just ending to Clarissa. Rather, it’s that a body of realistic tragedy that aggressively denied this sort of comfort should have arisen at all in these conditions, its Dionysian energies repeatedly opening old wounds, affirming the value of this life precisely—and paradoxically—by destroying it. Texts like Cælia and Clarissa enacted the negating effects of trauma for their readers. They enacted loss and upheaval and repeatedly asked why their principal figures suffered and how, in the absence of a clear explanation, one might grieve its occurrence. There has been much great work on the novel and secularization, but to my mind, what’s fascinating here is how this intense investment in the here-and-now so effectively and unmistakably fragilizes belief before the first half of the century even comes to a close. It’s with that in mind that I think we should understand Richardson’s corrective aims in the tragedy, his insistence that the novel followed a “religious plan” that depicted “the great lessons of Christianity” (1495).64 He worried, 63 Berlant, Female Complaint, 17. 64  This phrasing is in the first edition’s postscript. Richardson modifies the latter phrase in 1751 to read “doctrines” rather than “lessons” (8:279).

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126  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy for example, that “religion was never so low as at present,” because the pleasures of this life were so fully corrupting that faith itself was eroded: “self-denial and mortification [was] blotted out of the catalogue of christian [sic] virtues: And a taste even to wantonness for out-door pleasure and luxury, to the general exclusion of domestic as well as public virtue, [is] industriously promoted among all ranks and degrees of people” (8:279). If anything, he argued, his tragedy would aid his readers in contemplating the impermanence and frailty of this admittedly good life. How else to understand this dire warning to Lady Bradshaigh and his readers, issued as the novel’s final chapters neared publication in 1748: “If [death] is become so terrible to human Nature it is Time to familiarize it to us” (4:132). Such foreboding would seem to disclose an anarchic pessimism to Richardson, a dark promise of the tragedy’s manic power to destroy, were it not typically qualified by its author’s pieties: “A Writer who follows Nature and pretends to keep the Christian system in his eye, cannot make a Heaven of this World” (4:225). If there was to be any true and lasting justice for Clarissa, it would only come through the passage of death, a passage she undergoes at once alone and under the careful, woeful scrutiny of countless others. But here, of course, we run into the novel’s central representational problem, for despite promises of an eventual heavenly reward—Richardson: “I could not think of leaving my Heroine short of Heaven”—the novel asked its readers to stare, with Clarissa, into a representational void, to make peace with pain and death and those affects one would much rather avoid (4:217).65 It didn’t matter for Cibber and others that her death would end in paradise: “My mind is so hurt with the thought of her being violated, that were I to see her in Heaven, sitting on the knees of the blessed Virgin and crowned with glory, her suffering would still make me feel horror, horror distilled” (4:198). The memory haunts its reader, turning this private violation into a collective lament for the profanation of cultural values. Which is to say that Clarissa’s publication signals a traumatic process being undergone in the social imaginary, material evidence—in the particulars of a reception history—of the difficulty with which suffering was practiced, a record of the ways in which a heterogenous public came to terms with affliction. At the center of this all lies Clarissa, who is, I turn to argue now, its great exemplar. * * * If debates over the novel’s ending reveal a culture’s ambivalent attachment to the present, Clarissa’s response to her trauma provides another angle by 65  For an illuminating discussion of this, see Taylor, “Clarissa and the Problem of Heaven.”

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A Fine Subject for Tragedy  127 which to view these investments. By this, I mean to shift the focus of my analysis to the first person of the narrative, remaining aware of the ­continuities between the “interior” and “exterior” sites of semantic production that constitute Richardson’s textual apparatus. In fact, as I have already been suggesting in my reading of the novel’s reception, these two orders of cultural making were practically inseparable, so that upon final analysis, the novel’s life among the reading public is constitutive of the narrative itself, a vital part of the story of Clarissa’s mourning. Richardson’s self-consciousness about his work and correspondence with readers at every point of his fiction’s development have been amply documented by critics and ­biographers alike to this end. And yet the preceding discussion has only hinted obliquely at some of the novel’s more performative elements, the way in which Richardson’s texts asked readers to consider how one suffers, not just why. As one of Richardson’s readers was to put it, the author’s aim in his tragic novel was to “new-Model [the] Affections” so that the intimacy it evoked by “writing to the moment” offered its readers at once a how-to manual for the art of suffering and an exercise in those affects.66 In this sense, Clarissa is only Richardson’s first incredulous reader, his first interlocutor struggling to represent a pain whose truth seems somehow not fully available and yet no less real. This complex relationship to suffering is one of the central motifs of the novel and animates much of the book’s most perceptive dialogues. Rather early on, after familial relations sour amid Clarissa’s refusal to marry the vile Mr. Solmes, the novel’s heroine confesses to Anna that though she knows not why, she seems elected to misfortune: “I am afraid I am singled out (either for my own faults, or for the faults of my family, or perhaps for the faults of both) to be a very unhappy creature!” (332). “Irresistibly the waves of affliction” descend upon her as presumed “correctives,” perhaps to break “the pamperedness . . . of [her] own will” and discipline her reliance upon a happiness beyond the immanent (332–3). At first, that corresponding hope looks forward only a short while—“My afflictions are too sharp to last long. The crisis is at hand. Happier times you bid me hope for. I will hope” (333)— but with time, the reader sees the irony here, the infinite deferral of that bliss and the crushing weight of having been chosen only to suffer. Affliction turns out to be a strange sort of divine affection. In more perverse moments of the narrative, many of which Richardson only inserted in later editions, Lovelace attempts to reckon his failure “to be 66  Quoted in Richardson, Preface, Hints of Prefaces, and Postscripts, 8. Cf. Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric, 3:335.

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128  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy rewarded in the manner [he] hoped” as its own kind of suffering, overriding his captive’s (3:137). Having “saved” Clarissa, he insists upon a hierarchy of afflictions whereby the inconvenience of orchestrating that rescue obliges her to grant him sexual favors, transforming that pain into a position of power. When Clarissa refuses, noting that he has little to lose while she almost everything, he simply takes her forcibly, as if by that process he might also bring her low in defilement. Resentful of her “haughty and i­mperious sovereignty,” Lovelace chafes at the audaciousness with which she is “conscious of her dignity” in relation to his debased position as an oversexed, pleading rake (645). By raping her he not only satisfies a desire he’s fantasized over for months now, but also reinstates a social order both gendered and classed whereby the aristocratic libertine has all the prerogative over the feminized middle rank. This is, in other words, to weaponize shame and suffering in order to break what he refers to as the “Harlowe pride.” Yet even if this serves finally to remind James and the family that theirs “is beneath [Lovelace’s] own!” (426), the full extent of the rape can only be felt when the Harlowes join in his torments and confirm the sense of isolation that Clarissa already feels. “Every-body . . . is ashamed of you,” Arabella writes, foreshadowing the younger daughter’s expulsion from the family, adding insult to injury by suggesting her pain is all for naught: “base unworthy creature! the disgrace of a good family . . . it is wished you may be seen a beggar along London-streets.” Arabella’s curse wishes for her sister the fate that befell Cælia, whose “shameful Elopement” in that domestic tragedy leaves her “dignity in the dust!”, heedless that under such conditions the body soon follows (509–10). But it’s in the letters that immediately follow Clarissa’s assault that the difficult obscurity of suffering most rises to the fore of the tragedy. Those letters in fact are notable mostly for the relative silence of the novel’s principal character, who struggles to regain her voice in the aftermath of that violence. Lovelace writes to Belford: “Just now Dorcas [Lovelace’s servant] tells me that what she writes she tears, and throws the paper in fragments under the table, either as not knowing what she does, or disliking it: then gets up, wrings her hands, weeps, and shifts her seat all round the room: then returns to her table, sits down, and writes again” (889). The act of epistolary writing, always fraught with unreliability and contested meanings (as Clarissa learned in the frantic exchanges of letters with those in her household), breaks down for her in this moment, portending the heroine’s gradual disappearance from the text and withdrawal from the world.

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A Fine Subject for Tragedy  129 This textual fragmentation seems at once to maintain a model of ­ ersonhood deeply interiorized and one shattered into the opaque surface p effects of mental breakdown, with the trauma’s resistance to representation famously visualized in that initial collection of scraps dated around June 16 (reproduced in the original volumes and made possible by Richardson’s expertise as a printer). In another letter, found in two pieces, she writes her confidant Anna: “My dearest Miss Howe! OH! What dreadful, dreadful thing have I to tell you! But yet I cannot tell you . . . Plague on it!” (890). These letters mark a “traumatic loss of faith in articulation, and the power of the letter to render meaning,” argues Castle, and it’s nearly a month, in fact, before Clarissa can stand to explain just what has happened.67 Even then, it’s only with difficulty that she can express her pain and recollection; the story stops and starts before culminating in a hazy retelling of that night, grimly piecing its details together. “Permit me here to break off. The task grows too heavy, at present, for the heart . . .” she says at one point (1000). At another, she apostrophizes: “Recollection! Heart-affecting recollection! How it pains me!” (1005). If the concept of trauma is predicated on memory’s eruptive potential, this seems to be a case in point. No mere storehouse of ideas—as the Encyclopedia Britannica defined memory as late as the 1770s, appropriating one of Locke’s most famous metaphors for the mind—Clarissa’s recollections haunt her with nightmarish beasts she fears she has taught to devour her.68 It is possible to read in this an indication that her trauma lies much deeper than the assault, that the agency dissolved by memory here serves to place partial blame on her own actions in leaving the home, in giving herself momentarily to Lovelace’s charms even if only under the condition of an eventual honorable marriage. “She fed [this beast] with her own hand: she nursed up the wicked cub with great tenderness; and would play with it,” read one of Dorcas’ collected scraps (891). Even much earlier, Clarissa indicates that something is amiss when she counsels Anna that the appropriate response to one’s suffering is first to “look into ourselves and fear” (2:255). Her flight with (and, just as important, to) Lovelace, therefore, is as primal a wound as the rake’s own transgressions, a forced detachment from the 67 Castle, Clarissa’s Cyphers, 121. 68  Citing the persistence of this static Lockean understanding of memory, Fritz Breithaupt argues in “The Invention of Trauma” that trauma’s history depends on the emergence, in the psychological discourse of the 1770s and beyond, of a notion of the self ’s coherence. Crucial to this, he notes, was a shift in the way memory was conceived: as a media of self-fashioning that overturns antecedent pains by making their integration into the self a triumph of character.

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130  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy domestic, the scars of which have never fully healed. “Who was most to blame, I pray?”, she accuses herself in a manic, dissociative third person: “The lady, surely!” (891). The implication is startling and offensive to our contemporary sensibility: Lovelace was empowered by her own boldness. In fact, as Macpherson and Jonathan Kramnick have argued, agency is rarely neat in Clarissa.69 Despite Richardson’s attempts to obviate charges of his heroine’s culpability, the subtlety of her visionary self-accusation, searching inside and outside herself for a way to understand that appointment with violence, opens the door to Samuel Johnson’s tantalizingly cryptic evaluation: “You may observe that there is always something which she prefers to truth.”70 Nevertheless, regardless of the extent of her agency in bringing about her misfortune, she maintains throughout that her fate is incommensurate with her part in leaving the home. This is far too tragic a price to pay for a moment of filial disobedience. The question of blame here is less interesting to me than how the ­persistence of such questions fragilizes her experience of pain. Clarissa at times frantically parses the elements and causal links behind her suffering, desperately searching, Puritan-like, for its significance and the godly confirmation of its fullness for her. Already by this point, it seems, one’s post-traumatic suffering is conceived as a compulsive return to an instance of upheaval, an attempt to play out in the psyche what has violently overthrown the everyday patterns of one’s life. For Cathy Caruth, trauma is tied to the incomprehensibility of one’s relation to past violence, the fact that such upheaval displaces our experience of the world and only gradually “imposes itself again . . . in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor.”71 Its emotional truth is felt out of time, that is, as the hazy representation of memory and fantasy integrates these moments as somehow constitutive of the self. Part of what’s so disorienting to Clarissa is that tracing what led her to that point explodes a domestic or private sphere she once assumed to be safe, a refuge from the sordid world she mistakenly takes to be confined to the other side of Ms. Sinclair’s bawdy house. The false safety of the Harlowe home is exposed in its parodic double: Lovelace’s brothel hideaway is a masquerading inversion of the marital home that conspires to realize the innuendo implied by her family name—evidence, if any was needed, that Clarissa was always to be prostituted in service of the ambitions of those 69 Kramnick, Actions and Objects, chap. 6. See also Napier, Falling into Matter. 70 Piozzi, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, 1:297. 71 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4.

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A Fine Subject for Tragedy  131 men in her life. Taken together, the spaces she inhabits in the novel figure the dissolved thresholds that distinguish between self and other, home and stranger, trauma and its repetition. “Self, this vile, this hated Self!”, she complains, unable to run from that which lies deep within (974). For Clarissa, memory is ultimately a site of suffering, a space of painful reconstruction where questions of agency are not so much solved as they are endlessly refashioned in a series of nightmarish visions. Certainly in these, its most Gothic moments, Richardson’s novel seems to confirm our post-psychoanalytic sense of the traumatic. But just as striking, however, are the historical discontinuities between Clarissa’s response to trauma and our own, which together position the novel’s complex textual apparatus in some proximity to a literary milieu that included theodicies, religious devotional tracts, and manuals on the good death, as well as bourgeois tragedies and criticism of the period. Toward this end, one might note that perhaps Clarissa’s most important personal artifact to arise from the rape itself is a collection of religious devotions that form her private meditations on the process of grieving and navigating affliction. Meditations Collected from the Sacred Texts, despite its postdated 1750 title page, is first mentioned in a letter from Belford to Lovelace around the time of Clarissa’s imprisonment (1124).72 In that letter, Belford cites the entry from July 15, composed little over a month after the rape, repurposing the biblical Job: “Oh that my grief were thoroughly weighed, and my calamity laid in the balance together!” (1125). Shortly after this, now two months after Clarissa’s assault, Belford reports: “Mrs Lovick obliged me with the copy of a meditation collected by the lady from the Scriptures . . . We may see by this, the method she takes to fortify her mind, and to which she owes in a great measure the magnanimity with which she bears her underserved persecutions” (1189). This belatedness in the novel’s temporality (complicated by the practices of actual readers, for whom 300 pages intervene) has tended to obscure an important fact about the Meditations: that they arise as perhaps the first coherent form of self-expression following the rape, barely two days after the paper-scrap incident of June 16. Readings of the Meditations tend to emphasize what Jonathan Lamb calls the “rhetoric of suffering” that takes hold some time after the shock of the novel’s tragic peripeteia has worn off, seeing in its language of pious resignation and regulated passion at once the activation of Job as biblical type and

72 Richardson, Meditations, viii. Henceforth cited parenthetically.

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132  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy the slow process of detachment from the debased objects of this world. Lamb sees this expressed in what becomes Clarissa’s life-slogan during the period of her most intense affliction, a verse later quoted by Lovelace, who takes its claim to exceptionality to sanction—under cover of religious ­precedent—navel-gazing complaint: “Miss Harlowe, indeed, is the only woman in the world, I believe, that can say, in the words of her favorite Job (for I can quote a text as well as she), But it is not so with me” (1217; Job 9:35). Clarissa’s recurring identification with the biblical patriarch has the effect of illustrating the heroine’s simultaneous exemplarity and exceptionality, an acceptance of her emblematic status as one who, like Job, suffers alone.73 Anna certainly sees her friend in this way, encouraging her not to view her pain as a warning only (or even mainly), but rather as a positive example for living through affliction. Wresting back Clarissa’s worth, Anna assures her: “that adversity must call forth graces and beauties which could not be brought to light in a run of . . . prosperous fortune” (579). Affliction ennobles and elevates one out of the ordinary, asserting a moral standing the world assumes to be lost. “She has so much true dignity,” Belford concludes, drawn upward by “a kind of holy Love” (1080). Bucking the prosaic world of the novel, Clarissa’s relation to her pain sanctifies tragedy, turning its catharsis into an erotics of devotion. One can easily read Clarissa’s suffering as a journey of religious enlightenment and Christian sublation where, “tried as gold in the fire of affliction” (Meditations 30), the work of mourning serves also as a ritual of purification. Both the Meditations and Richardson’s correspondence repeatedly stress the “usefullness” of the volume for guiding (and not merely consoling) the aggrieved in venting their passions by the careful application of scriptural lyrics and psalmody. In this, it serves as a manual for navigating toward the fullness of one’s experience of pain. Indeed, the Meditations’ Advertisement page cites as its raison d’être a desire that the collection “might be serviceable to all such as labour under great afflictions and disappointments.” Modeling this, the volume makes an appearance as one of Clarissa’s few earthly possessions bequeathed to Mrs. Norris, her childhood wet-nurse, alluding to a life’s closure in dust’s return to dust. Back in the hors-texte of Richardson’s contemporary London, the octavo volume was reserved as a gift to the author’s friends, many of whom received them while in active mourning (Edward Young, for example, was given a copy upon his stepdaughter’s

73 Lamb, Rhetoric of Suffering, 229.

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A Fine Subject for Tragedy  133 sudden death in November of 1749).74 The play between narrative and Meditations, between real and literary lives, hints at the intimacy between author, reader, and representation cultivated by the tragic novel even as the generalizing tendency of the biblical citations seems to impose a certain distance between Clarissa and her reader. For if one goes looking for the heroine’s distinctive voice and the novel’s textured psychological realism in the Meditations, one is almost sure to be disappointed, with most of the reflections consisting of scriptural collages, barely “adapted” to her ­situation. As one recent commentator characterized Richardson’s baffling claim to illustrate Clarissa’s “inwardest mind”: “Paradoxically, the nearer readers get to Clarissa’s private devotions, the further they seem to be from any semblance of interiority.”75 Further evidence of Clarissa’s inability to speak in the wake of trauma, her retreat from the novel’s sensational immediacy into the mechanics of transcription is taken as a sign of pain’s power to nullify agency. But to see in these texts only instances of resignation fails to register their complexity, for they also disclose the contradictions that often attend the experience of pain even for the believer, the way its fated unfatedness (more on this shortly) seems to occasion for Clarissa a sense of doubt and disappointment in its occurrence. To read the Meditations alongside the novel is to see her raise many of the same complaints Richardson’s readers logged following the tragedy’s end. Read them closely, in other words, and the very same biblical citations register an indignant demand for answers to her pain while the wound remains fresh. Take, for instance, the first meditation written only days after the rape. Dated June 18, its text “transcribes and adapts” Job’s third chapter, out of “the anguish in her soul”: Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which I was conceived. Let that day be darkness: Let no God regard it from above. Neither let the light shine upon it. … Why died I not from the womb? Why did the knees prevent me? Or, Why the breasts that I should suck?

74  On this, see Keymer, “Richardson’s Meditations,” 102. 75  Swidzinski, “Articulacy and Interiority,” 178.

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134  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy For now should I have been still and quiet. I should have slept. Then had I been at rest. … —Or, as an hidden untimely birth I had not been; as infants, which never saw the light.  (Meditations 2–3)

It’s the rhetoric that’s striking here, the raw power of its agony coupled with an honest if not meekly submissive suggestion that she knows better than her God. Richardson’s novel echoes his precedent in the domestic drama here—recall Cælia’s difficult admission: “Why was I born for this?” (38)— but if anything, and despite a million words later, he seems to elevate and intensify its drama by taking up sentiments not entirely his heroine’s own. “Why died I not from the womb?” sounds suspiciously close to modern trauma rhetoric’s why me?, after all, the latter a hackneyed lamentation that (strangely) expects no real answer. Arguing that it’s precisely this clichéd quality that paradoxically gives a sort of collective force to the individual speaker’s emotion, Denise Riley observes that: “Closest among the fertile tangles of rhetorical classification to epiplexis (the posing of questions in order to reproach, grieve, or inveigh) the summation of ‘Why me?’ is Job’s lament.”76 “Why died I not from the womb?” Hidden in this query lie a series of difficult questions, presupposed but finally left unsaid. If, for ­example, such questions are simply demonstrative exercises in the interrogative, what sort of auditor do they presume to reproach? And what sort of answer do they expect? Wouldn’t the answer, were it to materialize all of a sudden, be just as terrible—either a confession of its malevolence or else its powerlessness to remedy the afflicted’s situation? And isn’t that sense of powerlessness the problem in the first place? Thus, Slavoj Žižek argues that the scandal of Job is not simply that he suffers, but that the possibility of that suffering’s meaninglessness exposes a truth far more problematic: “What Job [comes to understand is] that it was not him, but God Himself, who was actually on trial in Job’s calamities, and he failed miserably.”77 Clarissa’s adaptation of the Book of Job here directs the force of doubt in their theodicies to the divine itself; it makes of the human rhetor both accuser and defender of its God, by turns apologetic and s­ keptic. Why me? Why tragedy? Why does this woman suffer? What if the problem is 76 Riley, Impersonal Passion, 60. 77 Žižek, Puppet and the Dwarf, 127. More recently, Antonio Negri has argued that Job may be read as a parable in which systems of measure and equivalence are shown to be fictions of sovereign power, a claim that resonates here. See Negri, Labor of Job.

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A Fine Subject for Tragedy  135 that there’s too much meaning in her suffering? These questions are entangled in Richardson’s text, and their answers blur into the selfsame insistence on the tautologies of Providence that thereby grant, if anything, an overabundance of sense to pain. Fullness weighs down the believer in moments like these. Questions of justice—the kind that animate, famously, Milton’s epic— fall back into rote assertions of the divine’s sovereign power to destroy, into performative rituals whereby suffering’s impenetrability becomes an instance of the sublime. “To you, great gods! I make my last appeal,” Clarissa transcribes to Anna, taking now the words of Dryden and Lee’s King Oedipus: Or clear my virtues, or my crimes reveal. If wand’ring in the maze of life I run, And backward tread the steps I sought to shun, Impute my errors to your own decree; My feet are guilty; but my heart is free.  (568)78

Clarissa must know that she approaches blasphemy here: “It were an impiety to adopt [those] lines, because it would be throwing upon the decrees of Providence a fault too much my own” (568). And yet the possibility of this bleak theology haunts her: “But often do I revolve them . . .” (568).79 As Walter Benjamin recognized, herein rests the element of sublimity in his mythical Tragödie: “In tragedy pagan man realizes that he is better than the gods, but his realization strikes him dumb, and it remains unarticulated.”80 Confident that they remain innocent of their suffering, the tragic figure can only take comfort in the bare fact of its necessity. Because what, after all, is more disconcerting: the prospect that God ordains one’s pain for some higher good—or that God is impotent, uninterested, or simply absent in the face of it? This is the true significance of Richardson’s claim that Clarissa absolves the deity of all wrongdoing: “It may not be amiss to remind the reader, that . . . the dispensations of Providence in her distress are justified by herself.”81 The meek avowal of her culpability above—that her fate was due to “a fault too much [her] own”—may ultimately serve to protect the God she elliptically accuses, to nurture an object of attachment that for her makes this life bearable. On the contrary, the claim 78  The passage adapts the close of Act 3 of Dryden and Lee, Oedipus, 47. 79 Taylor, Reason and Religion in Clarissa, 118. 80 Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 109–11. 81  This qualification is added in footnote “a” of the fourth edition’s postscript.

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136  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy to justify God by her actions also recalls the poet’s task in Milton’s Paradise Lost, demonstrating the power of God in the midst of human weakness and moral corruption. As St. Paul will put this paradox of faith: “the weakness of God is stronger than the strength of men” (1 Corinthians 1.25). At any rate, “Providence” here and throughout is a figure for the absence of clarity in this world’s agency, a way to displace onto the radically Other a power we aren’t sure we have or even want. In Clarissa’s lamentations, we approach the sublimity of Job’s insight in the whirlwind. For eighteenth-century Hebraists, the biblical wisdom literature’s sublime imagery overwhelms. It takes one out of time, far away from the ordinariness of their prosaic life; it “ravishes and transports,” as the critic John Husbands wrote in 1731 of Job’s violating effect on the reader, a paraphrase of Longinus’ theory.82 Ravishing and transporting, violent and ecstatic, the sublime fragments sense and traumatizes even (especially?) the believer. John Dennis underscored the point in 1704 when he claimed that the sublime: “commits a pleasing Rape upon the very Soul of the Reader . . . wherever it breaks out where it ought to . . . like the Artillery of Jove, it Thunders blazes and strikes at once.”83 At stake in this upheaval is one’s sense of self and place, which is to say a sense of one’s standing as an actor, however small, in the midst of a whirlwind. “These why mes,” Riley observes along these lines, “are demonstrations of my unease that a critical stage of ­explanation, the stage which would have shown me my fate, has been missed out, with the result that my presence seems . . . violently exposed as naked.” “Why died I  not from the womb?”, “Why was I born for this?”, “Why me?”—the questions raise for their speakers an urgent desire for an agency that would mask their contingency, that would conceal or at least obscure the haplessness of their terrible situation. Acknowledgments of one’s frailty and transience, they manifest a desire to be present in and to a situation that seems indifferent to their pain. Recalling—or rather, as I am arguing, prefiguring—the ambivalence of Richardson’s chastened public, acting as poetic judges, Clarissa’s appropriation of the biblical text mourns the harshness of the real world, while wanting to locate herself solidly, unambiguously, in its events. The weight of the tragedy rests in these careful equivocations. Searching herself, Clarissa’s passion in the novel’s latter volumes represents a tragic

82 Husbands, Miscellany of Poems, d4r–v. Jonathan Sheehan argues that the Book of Job was crucial to the Bible’s reimagination in the Enlightenment as a poetic text, and was often cited as a key instance of scripture’s ability to evoke the sublime. See Enlightenment Bible, 160–81. 83 Dennis, Grounds of Criticism, 79.

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A Fine Subject for Tragedy  137 middling figure compelled to answer, in any way she can, what Arthur Miller called “that underlying fear of being displaced, the disaster inherent in being torn away from our chosen image of what and who we are in this world.”84 What can seem to us as an instance of Clarissa’s mere a­ ppropriation of the biblical calls its reader instead to a searching close reading of text and self. Here, at least, the impenetrability of pain leads its subject to play with scriptural citation, to close the gap between ancient precedent and the afflicted modern by inhabiting, in the eighteenth-century lyric’s “emotional consensus,” at once the universalizing and profoundly personal sentiments of the suffering poet.85 In particular here, the recitation of biblical literature in the context of her tragedy enacted a delicate series of devotional maneuvers by which the afflicted could navigate between impious complaints and the testimonies that make up the raw material of one’s faith. Speaking one’s creed gives that creed life in performance, allowing Clarissa to claim (or rather implore) that: “He woundeth, and his hands make whole” (Meditations 44). To proclaim it is to render it true in the life of a believer, even for just a moment. And that utterance itself, just like poetic justice, admits of a deep ambivalence, its rehearsal proof positive of the need to remind oneself of its veracity. In this way, what seems from one angle to be the passivity of a broken woman becomes a typological activation of suffering as passion, suffering as something desired and acted and narrated through body and text. She “chooses to be a Sufferer,” to engage thus in a “weaningtime from the world” (1306–7). Clarissa finds in this the sublimity of the divine, a strange “pleasing anguish” (8:278) found in mourning the loss of earthly attachments until ultimately she’s gone too. Caught between the homogenous “empty time” of our quotidian histories and the intense, punctual time of mythology, bourgeois tragedy represents the liminal, the middling, the world of Benjamin’s Trauerspiel straining upwards so as to make of its suffering a Tragödie. It rocks, in these moments, between fragility and fullness, straining to set those pains apart as un-­ordinary by plucking them from the prose of the world. And in this, bourgeois tragedy preserves a crucial insight of baroque drama, replaying if not reinvesting its middlingness as a “tension between surface and depth, nostalgia and anticipation [that] leaves the audience neither here nor there but in the transitional space betwixt and between.”86 To be middling, in this sense, is to inhabit the liminality of Richardson’s “state of probation,” that secular time during which 84  Miller, “Tragedy and the Common Man.” 85 Starr, Lyric Generations, 19. 86  Hoxby, “Function of Allegory in Baroque Tragic Drama,” 92.

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138  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy and because of which readers were called to “look forward,” to begin mourning the life they otherwise clung to with desperation (8:280). As a bourgeois tragedy, Clarissa, it would seem, is an exercise in Christian meditation, one whose ritual pieties offer assurances that our sufferings are not finally in vain because this life isn’t all there is. Nonetheless, for many of Richardson’s readers—even for a brief moment, Clarissa herself—the tragedy served as a reminder that despite the sincerity and urgency of these pieties, despite even her final claim to deliverance, the novel u ­ ltimately ends in heavy silence.

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4

Prosaic Suffering Edward Moore, Diderot, and the Natural Picture of Drama

In 1778, Samuel Johnson was asked to weigh in on the prose of a new ­bourgeois tragedy, The Female Gamester. Its author, Gorges Edmond Howard, was a Dublin-based lawyer and literary dabbler whose attempt at domestic drama might have been wholly forgotten were it not for the fragment of Johnsoniana he preserved in its preface. Having originally written the play in a mixture of prose and verse, Howard had been advised by “several of [his] literary acquaintance” that his “not much exalted” prose was much more suitable to the “scene . . . laid in private life, and chiefly among those of middling rank.” For many, the bourgeoisie suffered in prose, a convention that stretched back to the first attempts at middling drama. But Johnson, Howard recalls, would have none of this: “having communicated this to Dr. Samuel Johnson, his words (as well as I remember) were, ‘That he could hardly consider a prose Tragedy as dramatic . . . that let it be either in the middling or in low life, it may, though in metre and spirited, be properly familiar and colloquial; that, many in the middling rank are not without erudition; that they have the feelings and sensations of nature, and every emotion in consequence thereof, as well as the great, and that even the lowest, when impassioned, raise their language . . .’ ”1 Johnson’s argument tweaked the older, neoclassical assumption that poetic decorum mandates a correspondence between the language and social rank of a drama’s principal figures. Here a tragedy’s verse style has less to do with the nobility of those represented—as had been the case for Dryden in An Essay on Dramatick Poesie (1668), where heroic rhyme’s “exalt[ation] above . . . common converse” images “the minds and fortunes of noble persons . . . exactly”2—than with the intensity of the depicted afflictions. Tragedy needs verse not because its “elevation” allegorizes the status of its 1 Howard, Female Gamester, v.

2  Dryden, “Of Dramatick Poesie,” 74.

The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy: Modernity and the Art of Ordinary Suffering. Alex Eric Hernandez, Oxford University Press (2019). © Alex Eric Hernandez. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846574.001.0001

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140  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy heroes, but because it corresponds to the magnitude of the drama’s subject matter, quite literally inscribing an emotional richness otherwise lost in the flatness of prose. Johnson’s intervention plays out a mid-eighteenth-century discussion of the representation of emotion on the tragic stage, disclosing an unease with the degrading effects of prosaic suffering. Though the use of prose for the middling and lower characters of the drama was often lauded for its adherence to decorum, contemporaries in the period also worried that tragic prose specifically was “fine and nervous,” disconcertingly “artless,” and “offensive,” while at the same time, mere “trifling,” “below the dignity of Tragedy,” even, for that reason, somehow “unnatural” in its expression.3 Toward that last point, consider what Johnson himself argues above: that affliction “raises [one’s] language,” lapsing—naturally, he suggests—out of the grittiness of prose into the elegance of the poetic. A sort of poetry in the raw, suffering reaches after what’s already aesthetic and universal to misfortune, while prose trivializes and bogs down in the particular. Prose can render a tragedy “hardly dramatic,” untrue to the genre and affliction it purports to represent. Writing a few years later, Henry Mackenzie saw the genre’s strength as its ability to simulate those very same particulars, “the ordinary feelings and exertions of life” that nevertheless remained in tension with the tragic. As we saw in Chapter 2, for him, suffering of this sort was if anything too true, its realism overburdening one’s perception. “Real distress, coming in a homely and unornamented state,” he concluded there, “disgusts the eye.”4 Obscuring its art with disturbing efficacy, the outward formlessness of prosaic suffering threatened to neutralize the pleasures of the tragic. Concerns like these spoke to a moment of renewed interest in bourgeois and domestic tragedy in the latter decades of the century, capping a period of formal experimentation in Britain that I’ve been tracing in previous chapters, whose practice had now migrated to France and Germany where the genre was to be a crucial part of the Enlightenment’s “emancipation 3  In addition to Johnson above, contemporary appraisals of prose tragedy appeared in periodicals like The Scourge no. 35 (February 15, 1753) and The Monthly Review (February 1753) as well as Baker, Biographia Dramatica, 2:256–7. The claim of prose tragedy’s artlessness was often touted by those working in the medium, as in the prologue to George Lillo’s The London Merchant. Though domestic tragedy first appears on the Jacobean stage, and in some cases provided a model for the bourgeois drama of the eighteenth century (see fn. 22 below), its use of prose is mixed and inconsistent, in every case utilizing verse for the tragic main plot. 4  Mackenzie examined contemporary tragedy in Lounger nos. 27–8. For this part of his argument, see p. 105.

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Prosaic Suffering  141 of art.”5 Scholars have long cited Denis Diderot’s Le Fils naturel (1757) and Discours sur la poésie dramatique (1757) as well as G. E. Lessing’s Miss Sara Sampson (1755) and Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767–9) as key moments in this story of drama’s modernization.6 But some of the most revolutionary innovations on the stage concerned the usage of prose, which had become a  medium for tragedies depicting the middling sort decades earlier with The London Merchant. Early modern domestic drama provided a precedent here, of course, though its admixture of prose and verse would be rebuffed by their eighteenth-century counterparts, who utilized a plain style with wholly more consistency and, perhaps also self-reflection. Charles Johnson’s Cælia; or The Perjur’d Lover (1732), Edward Moore’s The Gamester (1753), and later, continental Trauerspiele like Clementina von Poretta (1760; by Christoph Martin Wieland) and Clarissa (Johann Heinrich Steffens’ 1765 dramatization of Samuel Richardson’s novel), for example, played with the representational mechanics of what I have been calling ordinary suffering, radically departing from established tragic convention by dwelling on the prosaic.7 Indeed, in London, the 1770s and 80s alone saw the production and publication of a number of prose tragedies, including notable revivals of The London Merchant and The Gamester, curious adaptations such as The Fatal Interview (1782; a domestic tragic sequel to Pamela), quasi-gothic meditations on domestic violence like Richard Cumberland’s The Mysterious Husband (1783), as well as experimental drames bourgeois effectively repatriating a tradition that had taken firmer root across the channel.8 Despite the concerns of those like Johnson and Mackenzie, by the latter half of the century, a deft use of prose on the stage could render the theatre uncannily intimate, calling forth a space where private woe played out for all to see. This chapter explores the affective stakes of this turn to prosaic suffering. Or rather more precisely, this chapter traces a bead through the contested process by which suffering became prosaic in eighteenth-century bourgeois and domestic drama in order to draw some further implications for the 5 Gay, The Enlightenment, vol. 2, chap. 6. 6  See vol. 4, “Esthétique—Théâtre,” of Diderot, Oeuvres, for standard French editions of both Le Fils naturel and Discours de la poésie dramatique; standard editions of Lessing’s works are available as part of the massive twenty-five-volume collection, Lessing’s Werke. The texts cited above can be found in vols. 1 and 4, respectively. 7 Johnson, Cælia; Moore, Gamester; Weiland, Clementina von Poretta; Johann Heinrich Steffens, Clarissa; ein bürgerliches Trauerspiel. See also Porrett, Fatal Seduction (1788). 8  See Hull, Fatal Interview (1783), which exists only in ms. as part of the Larpent Collection. In Chapter 5 and the Conclusion I discuss adaptations of continental bourgeois tragedies in more detail.

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142  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy history of emotion and the dialectics of realism at midcentury. I read the emergence of prosaic suffering on the period’s tragic stage as central to the way the genre imagined modern affliction, as a means of navigating a range of confessedly “ordinary” feelings by evoking and engaging and testing them in performance. Unlike the “heroick suffering” prevalent during the earlier part of the century, prosaic suffering performed its grief with ­troubling immediacy and a raw intensity, in ways that were personal and familiar, absorptive rather than theatrical, and provocatively disenchanted in their implications. Prosaic suffering presents the tragic figure as an emblem of abandonment, in which (as Georg Lukács claimed of the novel) everyday life is experienced as simultaneously leaden and trivial.9 I anchor my discussion in a close reading of Moore’s The Gamester, a drama whose importance to the development of realism was well known in the eighteenth century, and whose use of prose at midcentury tracks this shift in suffering most clearly, though by no means exclusively (as will become clear). Adapting the novel’s “writing to the moment” for the ­theatre—a method almost certainly absorbed in Moore’s reading of Clarissa and correspondence with Richardson on the novel’s formal effects—prose conferred a lively presence upon the performance of suffering, in ways that denied its spectators the sort of rhetorical elevation that stood in for transcendence.10 In making this case, therefore, I place the practices of British bourgeois tragedy in dialogue with contemporary performance and aesthetic theory, so as to reconstruct the shifting terrain of emotion’s ­exploration onstage. If, as one critic has claimed, versification serves to beautify the experience of suffering, prose insists on its crude intolerability, its reality and resistance to poetic gilding.11 In recent years, several scholars working across the humanities and social sciences have attempted to triangulate a new approach to affects associated with realism and the ordinary. Yet despite this renewed attention, the ­staging of prosaic suffering in the eighteenth century remains curiously un-theorized—a fact all the more puzzling given the importance of those same analytical categories to discussions of the novel’s development over the period. In fact, the mixed record of prose on the tragic stage offers an instructive comparison with one influential account of the early novel, 9 Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 57–9. 10  Amberg’s edition helpfully collates much of the correspondence between Richardson and Moore in the volume’s sixth appendix to support this claim. See esp. pp. 394–402. Throughout the following discussion, I cite this edition’s page and line numbers parenthetically in the text. 11  Alden, “The Development of the Use of Prose,” 14.

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Prosaic Suffering  143 where realist fiction—often defined by an increasing attentiveness to the prosaic as mediated through the prosaic—arises as the literary arm of a middle class demanding to be taken seriously. Franco Moretti’s recent distant reading of bourgeois culture, for example, draws on the insights of Lukács, Erich Auerbach, and Northrop Frye, noting that the middling sort come into their own precisely by a relentless unfolding of prose.12 According to this tradition, the realist novel plots out the instrumentalization of the world, its great authors cataloguing the opaque materiality of things, their prose running over so many descriptions of impenetrable surface. Prose demyth­ ologizes and eschews the allegorical, in this account, refusing to yield us metaphysical depth, trading an “epic significance that has been lost” for more and more detail.13 As Auerbach put it in Mimesis, modernity oversees the creation of a type of “formless tragedy,” a realism defined more than anything else by “the serious treatment of everyday reality”14 in which, for its middling figures: “Nothing happens, but that nothing has become a heavy, oppressive, threatening something.”15 From this vantage point, many of the concerns raised in eighteenth-century Britain concerning prose ­tragedy’s formlessness would seem to have been spot on: too prosaic, too real, and art forecloses the cathartic. A similar effect (or is it not, rather, affect?) is at work in mid-eighteenth-­ century stage tragedy, though in ways manifestly different from the novel’s descriptive leveling in prose. Rather, prosaic suffering has the power to enact the paralyzing in-betweenness Auerbach detects in the realist novel through its staged experimentation in tableaux, dramatizing a world poised between elevation and mediocrity, between profound meaning and the senselessness of one’s suffering, between art and non-art. The middlingness of its prose, in other words, goes hand-in-hand with that of the ambivalent feeling it performs and reduplicates onstage so that ultimately, theme and form converge historically in the genre’s “serious” concern with simulating a “real” time in which creaturely life is mourned as a failure to live up to fantasy. I traced a similar situation in Chapter  3 by thinking about the earthly entanglements of Clarissa’s ending, and we’ll see shortly that there are good reason for these family resemblances. But here the formal particularities of the drama inscribe these tensions upon a body in theatrical space, materializing what Joseph Roach helpfully identifies as the cultural memory encoded in

12 Moretti, Bourgeois, esp. chaps. 1–2. 13  Lukács, “Narrate or Describe?”, 127. 14 Auerbach, Mimesis, 491. 15 Auerbach, Mimesis, 488.

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144  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy every instance of performance.16 In building my case, therefore, I turn most of my attention to the materiality of those emotional practices forged by their staging in prose, asking how the nexus of form, memory, and performance shapes emotion. Following the insights of ethnohistorian Monique Scheer, who urges theorists of feeling to think of emotion as “practices” that both rely upon and shape the sort of deep cultural memory Pierre Bourdieu termed “habitus” and Paul Connerton refers to as “­incorporating practices,” I take feeling to be a kind of sedimented “body knowledge,” entangled in modes of enactment that undergo continual stylistic negotiation in the voice, body, and gestures of the actor.17 An extension of one’s skillful engagement with the world, the body somatizes an ongoing story of emotion in every one it performs.18 As we’ll see, this view of emotion sidesteps the thorny question of affect’s intention, for the body’s habitus situates our feeling somewhere between choice and non-choice, deliberateness and reflex, the product of countless elective and imitated behaviors turned “natural” in the kinesthetic imagination. Prosaic suffering thus not only drew upon the familiarity of its linguistic form, but it also brought its modern character into being, offering up a style of affliction for the era’s tragedy that was at once recognizable and new. Or as Frye recognized some time ago: “One of the curious facts of literary history is that M. Jourdain’s celebrated discovery [in Moliere’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670), that he—a bourgeois—was speaking in prose] in fact is a discovery.”19 For Frye, prose is the medium through which the middling feel their way into the world, but it is also a quality of the world left in the wake of these processes. My claim is similar: that prosaic suffering finds its genre in the process of trying its emotion onstage, and this is something achieved in the era’s bourgeois tragedy. * * * Like many of his predecessors working in the genre, Moore was writing what he knew: the son of a dissenting pastor from Berkshire, his upbringing 16 Roach, Cities of the Dead, 25–8. 17  Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?”, 205. For Bourdieu’s classic discussion of practice theory, see Logic of Practice (1990). On the “sedimenting” of memory in the body, see Connerton’s How Societies Remember (1989). For similar approaches to the history of emotion, see Gammerl, “Emotional Styles,” 161–75; and in a slightly different vein—in which emotions are likened to performative speech acts—see Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling (2001). 18  Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?”, 219–20. Scheer borrows many of the intuitions of performance studies for the history of emotion, at times aligning emotion with style, the latter of which Joseph Roach defines as “social order as it is lived in the bodies of individual subjects.” See “Performance,” 23. 19 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 265.

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Prosaic Suffering  145 was a middling one, and full of possibility.20 In his youth, he made his way to London in order to apprentice with a city linen draper before striking out with his own manufactory, a move that ended in failure and almost bankrupted him from the start. He responded by writing, however, gaining some notoriety first with his Fables for the Female Sex (1744), before turning to the stage with The Foundling: A Comedy (1748) and The Gamester, and later helming The World from 1753–6 as the weekly periodical’s editor. But here, too, success largely eluded him during his lifetime, with much of it spent precariously close to impoverishment. Though he rubbed elbows with many of London’s leading lights—he counted Johnson, Richardson, David Garrick, Henry Fielding, and Horace Walpole among his friends and collaborators—he died humbly, in dire finances, buried without ceremony near his small home in South Lambeth, another instance of the insecurity that attended the period’s revaluation of middling life. Today, in fact, The Gamester has become similarly obscure, damned perhaps by the modest success of its Drury Lane debut. Moore would never know the profound influence his tragedy exerted upon Diderot, who translated it in 1760 (the first French translation of what would be a very successful play on the ­continent) as well as Lessing, whose decisive theorization of bourgeois ­tragedy drew upon the practical insights of both Lillo and Moore.21 Versions in German, Dutch, Spanish, and Italian would follow in his wake, and ­performances in the colonies were commonplace by the end of the century. Established as a stock piece following its celebrated 1771 London revival, no other Restoration or eighteenth-century tragedy saw more performances over the next century, a fact unsurprising in light of the drama’s interest in the vicissitudes of a middle class eager to be seen as having arrived.22 Its plot warns of the Beverley household’s downfall, and depicts the emotional distress of its namesake and his wife as the former gambles away their assets and the family becomes increasingly destitute. Having been encouraged in his gaming by his erstwhile friend, sometime financial partner, and eventual betrayer, Stukeley, Beverley leverages what remains of his wealth in a desperate attempt to keep creditors at bay. Stukeley’s plan, Beverley learns only too late, involves a confederacy of sharpers intent on the latter’s ruin, 20  Only one major account of Moore’s life exists: Caskey, Life and Works of Edward Moore. I’ve drawn from this and Demers’ entry in the ODNB (“Moore, Edward [1712–57]”) for these biographical details. 21  See Schier, “Diderot’s Translation of The Gamester,” and Lamport, “Lessing, Bourgeois Drama, and the National Theater.” 22  See Moore, Gamester, 12.

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146  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy so that Stukeley can despoil what’s left of his friend’s estate, especially his charming wife. Actresses who played Mrs. Beverley were given plenty to chew on in the role: she pleaded, assured, and affectionately forgave her husband for his many lapses of judgment, begging him to forsake the risks inherent in the gaming world and return to the pious stability of bourgeois life. This stability is illusory, however, and the pressures of maintaining their home in the face of its precariousness mark that space as little refuge, and its matriarch as deludedly sanguine as her husband. Ultimately, Mrs. Beverley’s entreaties prove to no avail; despair takes over the destitute gambler as his debts pile up and options run out. In the play’s closing scenes, Beverley poisons himself while awaiting his fate in prison, against the council of his wife and his sister, Charlotte, moments before the drama’s plot is unraveled and set aright by Charlotte’s suitor, Lewson, who condemns Stukeley to a life of “unpity’d Misery” (269.7). Moore’s play brings to mind the desperate final scenes of early modern domestic plays like The Yorkshire Tragedy (1608), where the family patriarch’s debts provoke an attempt at their murder-suicide. More likely, however, The Gamester drew its inspiration from a much later domestic piece, Aaron Hill’s 1721 critical success The Fatal Extravagance, whose plot figured the collapse of South Sea Company investment (a wound still fresh at that play’s April debut) in a series of tropes exposing the middling sort’s twin fascination with gambling and commercial speculation.23 Sedimenting its topicality into the beats of the plot, Moore repurposes Hill’s fable in order to talk about the risks that accompany middle-rank aspiration and bourgeois life. Much like the principal figures in the older play, Beverley’s skeptical, pseudo-aristocratic Epicureanism jostles against a belated desire to believe in the providential and the simple pleasures of home, voiced by women like Mrs. Beverley and Charlotte, whose suffering is moralized with the kind of fear and trembling that usually indicates that belief ’s tenuousness. Nevertheless, The Gamester differs rather radically from its source material in one crucial respect: Moore’s use of prose broke with Hill’s conventional blank verse in order to represent the failed bourgeois with an increased sensitivity and realism. In

23  For details on the genealogy of Moore’s play, see Amberg (Gamester, 380–5), which confirms a belief common since the 1760s that the play’s sources were to be found in the anonymous A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608) and [Hill?], Fatal Extravagance (1721). Citations to this latter text follow the numbering of this original publication. I follow Paul S. Dunkin and others in attributing the play to Hill. See Dunkin, “Authorship of The Fatal Extravagance,” 328–30. Christine Gerrard remarks that Hill’s play “ran for at least nine performances between April 1782 and May 1722,” no doubt capitalizing on its topicality. See Muses’ Projector, 59.

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Prosaic Suffering  147 this way, the former drew upon Lillo’s fateful artistic choices in The London Merchant, strengthening the bond between prose as a formal stylistics and the prosaic as a middling mode of existence. Indeed, as Moore was to reflect in the 1756 Preface to the play, The Gamester “was intended to be a natural Picture” of the tragic, one that worked “[by] adapt[ing] its Language to the Capacities and Feelings of every Part of the Audience” (204). At once average and universal, the prosaic imagines bourgeois drama as an art form akin to realist portraiture, a “natural Picture” in which ordinary suffering plays out in familiar language and gestures. I’ll offer a close reading of how the text might enact this in just a moment, but it’s worth noting first that The Gamester formed part of a constellation of works that sought to rethink depictions of the ordinary in the years that spanned bourgeois tragedy’s most intense development. I mentioned the novel in this respect earlier, and in fact The Gamester’s most recent editor does much to reaffirm Moore’s position within Richardson’s circle of friends, correspondents, and literary confidants, and thus tie their projects ­together.24 The playwright received advance copies of several of the novel’s volumes, and letters between the two authors suggest links between the novel’s work and Moore’s later appropriation of its spectatorial approach. In one of the most noteworthy letters to Moore in Richardson’s correspondence, for example, the novelist anticipates the tableau in the way he dramatizes Lovelace’s sufferings: ‘the first wound followed by a great effusion of Blood’—After the mortal Wound, see him represented as ‘fainting away two or three times running and vomiting blood’—‘See him supposed speechless, and struggling against his Fate, at times, in these words . . . Is not this a strong contrast to the death of Clarissa? ‘Poor Gentleman!’ adds the pitying valet, behold Lovelace tho object of his own servant’s pity! . . . ‘He little thought, poor Gentleman, his end was so near!’ But further as to his sufferings,—See the Voiture tho’ moving slowly, by its motion getting his wounds bleeding afresh; and again, with difficulty stopt. See him giving Directions afterwards for his last devoir to his Friend Belford. See him, contrary to all expectation . . . living over the night, but suffering much, as well for his Impatience and Disappointment as from his Wounds . . . See him in his following Delirium Spectres before his eyes! His lips moving, tho’ speechless—wanting therefore to speak—‘See him in

24 Amberg, Gamester, 82–3. See also Montini, “Samuel Richardson’s Networks,” 182–4.

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148  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy convulsions, and fainting away at nine in the morning.’ A Quarter of an hour in them; yet recovering to more Terror.25

What’s striking here is the way Richardson imagines this episode as a primarily visual spectacle—with no fewer than eight imperatives to see or behold in the passage—emphasizing its theatricality over its literariness, distending time in the visceral contemplation of the rake’s affliction. Plot practically halts here, turning into near-static scenery, a technique Moore will later employ in his own tragedy. Indeed, the playwright seems to have come close to adapting Clarissa itself for the stage, with Garrick envisioned in the role of Lovelace.26 For reasons we cannot know, Moore never went through with it and at least one letter (from Mary Delany to Richardson, dated April 24, 1747) suggests that the would-be playwright’s version would have complicated Clarissa’s character in ways that recall her model in domestic tragedy, Cælia. “I am glad,” Delany writes, that “Mr. Moore did no go on with his design of making a tragedy of Clarissa; the alteration he proposed in making the heroine more in love would have taken off the delicacy and polish of her character.”27 Instead, many of the insights of Richardson’s “Real picture of human life” in Clarissa would be revisited in Moore’s “­natural Picture” of a family undone. Moore’s pictorial metaphor, however, may more likely call to mind the absorptive aesthetic famously identified by Michael Fried as a feature of mid-eighteenth-century genre painting, practiced with greatest acclaim by Jean-Baptiste Greuze whose debut at the Parisian Salons came only two years after the play’s own premiere.28 For Fried, absorption’s central antitheatrical conceit—that the world depicted in the art object is cordoned off from that of the beholder’s—imagines the commonplace (a child thumbing a book, a girl pondering flowers, a family attending its patriarch) as scenes of intense libidinal investment for both viewer and subject, truer or more authentic in its expression of feeling because unobserved. Real feeling is what happens when no one is watching, or at least when that fiction can be  carefully maintained. In Greuze’s painted “drames,” this isolating effect works to buttress the privacy of the home depicted, exploring the dignity of ordinary lives in a series of moralizing “literary pictures.”29 Celebrated works 25 Richardson, Letters of Samuel Richardson, 118–22. 26  Barbauld confirms this, adding that “Garrick told him he should with great pleasure be the Lovelace of it.” See Barbauld, Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, 1:cvii. 27 Barbauld, Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, 4.37. 28 Fried, Theatricality and Absorption. 29 Brookner, Greuze, 103.

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Fig. 4.1.  Jean-Baptiste Greuze, La malédiction paternelle. Le fils ingrat [The Paternal Curse: The Ungrateful Son]. 1777. Oil on canvas, 130 × 162 cm. The Louvre Museum, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

such as La Malédiction paternelle and its pendant, Le Fils puni (exhibited at the Salons of 1777 and 1778; Figs. 4.1–4.2), evoked for contemporaries the comédie larmoyante of French dramatists like Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée.30 These scenes reach after the elevation of the tragic, intensifying emotion in dramatized depictions of family discord that veer away from sentiment toward a violence remarkable for its honesty. Indeed, La Malédiction paternelle was from its debut controversial for this reason, and a careful inspection of Greuze’s framing, which moves the eye from left to right in a manner that settles first upon the patriarch as the fight’s instigator, emphasizes the son’s helpless terror at his father’s rage. Disregarding the pleas of his daughters, one of whom attempts to physically restrain him, the elder 30  Though one might point out that La Chaussée wrote in verse, so that scholars have drawn important distinctions between comédie larmoyante and the drame of the following generation. See Castelvecchi’s recent Sentimental Opera, 51; see also Gaiffe, Le drame en France, 31–2. For the connection between Greuze and La Chaussée noticed by their contemporaries, see de Mairobert, L’Espion Anglais, 247.

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Fig. 4.2.  Jean-Baptiste Greuze, La malédiction paternelle. Le fils puni [The Paternal Curse: The Son Punished]. 1778. Oil on canvas, 130 × 163 cm. The Louvre Museum, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

figure lunges from a crouched position on its left corner as if to embody the curse he visits upon his child. The strewn chairs making up the mise-en-scène of the piece not only echo this dynamism, but also figure the brokenness of the family and insinuate that the young man’s fearful eyes conceal a history of violence.31 Transfixed by this eruption of passion in the midst of everyday life, we are in turn transfixed. This is what happens behind closed doors, a scene for which we shouldn’t be present—but we are. It was also a scene that Diderot’s drame bourgeois, Le Père de famille, had made famous a decade earlier, with similarly controversial effects: a not always successful attempt to “excite in us sensations that, without being painful, are strong and lively.”32 Though that play likewise turns on a moment in which the father’s wrathful curse casts out the son, what seemed to be disobedience on the part of the child is later defused as a mere 31 Barker, Greuze and the Painting of Sentiment, 206–11. 32  Quoted in Barker, Greuze and the Painting of Sentiment, 211.

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Prosaic Suffering  151 misunderstanding, softening its harshest effects in a transmutation of tragedy into genre moyen.33 As Diderot seemed to realize, prose could achieve a result similar to absorption on the stage, its rough simplicity standing in for truth, performing an image that was self-contained, seemingly unconcerned with the spectatorial pleasures of rhyme and meter. Not unlike the celebrated genre scenes that would be models of truth and domestic intimacy for the philosophe in the decades that followed, the prosaic’s ability to mimic middling feeling seemed to offer a new approach to the ordinary, one in which the veil of mediation was dramatically reconceived. The aesthetics of prose tragedy, however, also found a contemporary ­analogue in the era’s performance theory which, like absorption, owed much to Diderot’s pioneering influence and fateful encounter with British drama in the 1750s and 60s. Joseph Roach has demonstrated, for instance, that the period between Diderot’s Entretiens sur le fils naturel in 1757 and his Le paradoxe sur le comédian, sixteen years later, saw a paradigmatic shift in the way performance theory was conceived, decisively shaping our subsequent ideas about theatrical naturalism by merging diverse currents of Enlightened physiology, aesthetic theory, and vitalism. The reigning paradigm, prior to this synthesis, was one that saw the actor’s body as inspired and sensibly inflamed by the emotions called up in the drama. As Roach clarifies: “The [older] rhetoric of the passions literally incorporated the audience into the performance event. The fiery spirits, emanating from the eyes of the spectator, flowed across the intervening space and penetrated the eyes of the spectator, linking their emotions physically.”34 Powerful though inconsistent, feeling moved between actor-orators and the audience their “turned out” bodies clearly acknowledged. The new naturalistic aesthetic, on the contrary, saw the performer’s body as a technical instrument, subject to physical law, in which a complex “semiotics of affect” was open to analysis and consistently reproducible onstage. Crucially, according to Diderot, this mechanical regularity depended on the actor’s ability “to overcome the influence of sensibility . . . [and] to discipline his gestures and expression to the threshold at which their sensible content ceases to register on his consciousness.”35 What distinguished the genius’ performance from that of mediocre acting was an explicit de-emphasis of theatrical ornamentation and elevation, bringing the intensity of the moment 33  Castelvecchi notes, however, that Diderot’s distinction between tragedy and the middle (or serious) genre has been overstressed in the literature. See chap. 3 of Sentimental Opera. 34 Roach, Player’s Passion, 155. 35 Roach, Player’s Passion, 134.

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152  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy under the control of embodied habitual techniques bound by a sort of affective memory. Rather like prose, then, the actor became a sort of vanishing medium, one whose artifice rests on the ability to mimic the lack of artifice, to be both present and absent in the representation. Yet the ironies are thick here, for if this view imagines a performance of emotion brought wholly under the actor’s craft—which is to say, faked—that ­performance is no less grounded in the particularities of real experience, in the sedimented and habitualized and corporeal feelings of one’s past. The “real distress” that unfolded onstage offered what seemed a naked rehearsal of past emotion, the “drapery of the figure” (as Mackenzie put it) lifted for all to see. Art mines the body’s history and places it on display, replacing depth with a technical, prosaic surface redolent of what Roland Barthes saw as l’effet de réel in the novel.36 One way to conceive of this shift in performance theory is as a proseification of the body, a disenchantment and naturalization of dramatic craft under the sign of the real. And in the British context at least, this sort of performative practice found a natural outlet in bourgeois dramaturgy like Moore’s. Actresses such as Hannah Pritchard (the original Mrs. Beverley) and later, Sarah Siddons (for whom Mrs. Beverley was a late signature role), were singled out for praise in their “natural” turns as bourgeois women, which is to say, versions of themselves. Early notices of Pritchard’s self-effacement in the role of the family matriarch, for example, underscored the remarkable subtlety of the actor’s artifice which, like the prose mediating its perform­ ance, seemed to hide in plain sight: “nothing of herself appeared, but all the character.”37 Indeed, as one critic saw it, this kind of naturalism went handin-hand with absorption, playing with the uncanniness of the home’s interiors: [She] gave a specimen of the most natural acting that had ever been seen. She did not appear to be conscious of an audience before her: She seemed to be a gentlewoman in domestic life, walking about in her own parlour, in the deepest distress, and overwhelmed with misery.38

Another critic, recalling the disbelief of spectators whose first experience of the celebrated Siddons was in the middling role, remarked that those who came expecting the “pompous, buskined deportment . . . assumed by tragic actors . . . saw no cause to be smitten with her performance of this character in private life, because Mrs. Beverley, in her hands, was just what Mrs. Beverley 36  Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” 141–8. 38  Quoted in Amberg, Gamester, 105.

37  Quoted in Amberg, Gamester, 105.

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Prosaic Suffering  153 should be, and in nothing either short of it, or beyond it.”39 Tautologies like these reproduced the logic of Moore’s prosaics and Diderot’s theorized appropriation of English stagecraft in the actual practices of actors on the stage. In a performance so “near . . . to the chastity of nature,” Siddons vanishes and becomes bourgeois and prosaic type; in effect, the actors performing Moore’s play became one of those assembled to view it.40 But the fate of midcentury performance also converged decisively with that of Moore’s pictorial metaphor in what was to become the paradigmatic theatrical surface: in the Salons of 1767, Diderot imagined what we now know as acting’s fourth wall, an insight that—once we know to look for it— intersected decisively with the work being done on the English stage in the decade prior. Diderot’s celebrated insight—in which he “advised the dramatist to write the play as if the curtain had not been risen, as if the spectator did not exist”41—codified the intuitions of prosaic suffering as it was coming to be practiced onstage, giving form and theoretical heft to The Gamester’s claim to depict ordinary suffering realistically.42 The fourth wall, after all, imagines theatre as a species of absorption, its various scenes playing out according to a real time in which prose could be taken to be extemporan­ eous, the stuff of raw and unadulterated feeling seemingly untouched by the artificiality of verse. Following the influential work of prose tragedies such as The London Merchant and The Gamester, Moore’s “natural Picture” became, in Diderot’s mimeographic phrasing, “tableaux réels”—real pictures—and the rhetoric of prosaic authenticity was transmuted into a dramaturgy premised on twin conditions: “si naturelle et si vrai”; that is, the natural and the true.43 Over time, as one influential account of realism goes, the work begun here would result in the erosion of tragedy into various forms of genre sérieux, “formless tragedy,” or in fact (as Fredric Jameson recently put it in relation to the 39  Remarks on Mrs. Siddons, 6. 40  Remarks on Mrs. Siddons, 6. For a fuller discussion of the role of the actresses in The Gamester, see Nussbaum, “Unaccountable Pleasure,” 688–707. 41 Roach, Player’s Passion, 154. 42 The Salons of 1767 occurred in the context of a Parisian stage where Moore’s play had already established a following: translations by Abbé de Loirelle (1762) and Bernard-Joseph Saurin (who partly versified the play in 1768) found regular audiences, as well as the admiration of those in polite French circles like Diderot’s fellow encyclopedist, D’Alembert, who translated Beverley’s soliloquy above as if it was a meditation on the precariousness of modern life. On Diderot’s relationship to British drama, see Cru, Diderot as a Disciple, chap. 6, as well as Schier, “Diderot’s Translation of The Gamester.” 43 Diderot, Entretiens, 4:1137 and 4:1136, respectively. Translations throughout this chapter are my own.

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154  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy novel) the collapse of classical genres under the weight of the o ­ rdinary.44 Still, my point here has been not simply to rehearse a genealogy of influence, nor simply to place domestic drama in its broader context, but rather to begin homing in on the way that prose becomes a formal adjunct to the ordinaries of theatrical absorption, underwriting many of its signal effects and reconfiguring the operative relations and emotional resonances felt between the suffering actor and mourning spectator. The tableau creates, as it were, a highly public illusion of private woe, in which ordinary suffering has the texture of the real rather than the ideal. * * * If we turn to a comparative reading of The Gamester and its versified model, The Fatal Extravagance, the shape of prosaic suffering becomes much clearer. The closing scenes of these plays, in which the male lead breaks down and considers the tragic costs of his financial insolvency, offer us the closest thing to a direct comparison between the emotional practices of heroic and ordinary suffering as it was imagined onstage. Here, for example, is Hill’s Bellmour (the prototype for the later Beverley) ruminating on the temptation to suicide in cascading blank verse, deliberately reproduced at some length below as a poetic control case: Enter Bellmour, alone, Pensive. Bell. Why shou’d I pause! Nothing can be a Crime Which puts a stop to Evil. A thousand Men May have been poor as I,—and yet liv’d happy! Miseries, we make our selves, are born with Ease; But He, who beggars his race to Posterity, Begets a Race, to curse him—Profuse in Ills, He, propagating Ruin, with his Name, Entails Descent of Anguish!

Over the following eleven lines, omitted for space, Bellmour wonders if it would be an act of mercy to put his family out of their misery. He goes on: Oh!—Could I feel no Misery, but my own! How easy were it for this Sword to free me, From all that Anguish, which embitters Life? But, when the Grave has given my Sorrows Rest, Where shall my miserable Wife find Comfort? 44 Diderot, Entretiens, 4:1166; see Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism, chap. 7.

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Prosaic Suffering  155 Unfriended, and alone, in Want’s bleak Storm, Not all the Angelic Virtues of her Mind, Will shield her, from the unpitying World’s Derision. Can it be kind to leave her so expos’d, And, while I sleep in Death, not dream of Her? Better a thousand Times, to lead her with me, Thro’ the dark Doubtfulness of deep Futurity! Whate’er uncertain Fate attends, hereafter, It can but be the worst of what is bad, And that’s our State, already.—It shall be done! But how? That asks some Thought— (33–4)

Bellmour pauses at this point to consider how to bring about the death of his family painlessly, concerned that what seems an act of compassion to him will seem like cruelty to others. Seven more lines omitted, and he concludes: What if I use th’unwounding Aid of Poison? I have at Hand that Sovereign Remedy. For all Diseases, Want and Woe can plague with, Mix’d with some unfear’d Draught ’twill gently Murder: Bear off Death’s painful Edge, and, in sweet Slumber, Swim soft, and shadowy, o’er the misty Eye ball. (34–5)

Over forty-eight lines of monologue, Hill’s Bellmour contemplates the situation he finds himself in and resolves with reluctance—but crucially, with discursive transparency—that a painless death is ultimately the most favor­ able course forward for him and his family. All the trappings of the era’s heroic tragedy are shoehorned into the eighteenth-century home here, as if the grandiose rhetoric of a Hamlet or a Marc Antony decamped Denmark and an antique Alexandria and found their way to this unremarkable home. As Hugh Blair would argue in his survey of period poetics, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), ornamentation of this sort “bestows dignity,” acting like “the rich and splendid dress of a person of rank; to create respect, and to give an air of magnificence to him who wears it.”45 A sort of verbal costuming, Hill’s mannered verse transposes the language of the heroic onto the everyday exigencies of domestic life, in effect making what might be otherwise ordinary unordinary. 45 Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric, 1:339.

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156  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy We find an altogether different approach to the scene if we turn to The Gamester’s corresponding deliberations, reproduced here in full: BEVERLEY is discover’d sitting. After a short Pause he starts up, and comes forward. Bev. Why, there’s an End then. I have judg’d deliberately, and the Result is Death. How the Self-Murderer’s Account may stand, I know not. But this I know—the Load of hateful Life oppressed me too much—The Horrors of my Soul are more than I can bear—(Offers to kneel.)—Father of Mercy!—I cannot pray—Despair has laid his iron Hand upon me, and seal’d me for Perdition—Conscience! Conscience! thy Clamours are too loud—Here’s that shall silence them. (Takes a Vial out of his Pocket, and looks at it.) Thou art most friendly to the Miserable. Come then, thou Cordial for sick Minds—Come to my Heart (Drinks.) O, that the Grave wou’d bury Memory as well as Body! For if the Soul sees and feels the Sufferings of those dear Ones it leaves behind, the EVERLASTING has no Vengeance to torment it deeper—I’ll think no more on’t—Reflection comes too late—Once there was a Time for’t—but now ’tis past—Who’s there?  (263.20–39)

We might note at the outset that from the standpoint of their most basic semantic contents, the two scenes seem remarkably similar. As vehicles for the plot, they accomplish almost the exact same ends at practically the same point in the play’s fable: the protagonists offer a justification of suicide, before expressing second thoughts on account of the effect their death will have on their families, lamenting their inability to spare them, before resolving to die, convinced that death is deliverance from pain. In moments like this, Moore certainly appears to have Hill’s pioneering domestic drama in mind. Yet the drama’s movement toward Auerbach’s “formless tragedy” is also clearly legible in the brokenness of the latter’s syntax. What seem at first to be identical sentiments embody different grammars of feeling, suggesting that the cultural assumptions behind ordinary suffering’s performance are under some pressure by midcentury. How might one characterize this difference? One way would be to appropriate for the drama of the period the well-known rhetorical distinction between narration and description: whereas Bellmour’s verse monologue essentially tells the spectator-reader, Moore’s prose shows. This distinction is not at all obvious. After all, Hill’s lyricism elaborates and ornaments the mental states of its speaker, doing the rhetorical work of amplificatio that Cynthia Wall notes was central to description in late Renaissance and neoclassical theory.46 This might have 46 Wall, Prose of Things, chap. 1.

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Prosaic Suffering  157 been partly the result of Hill’s own changing understanding of what the actor needed to process in performance. As Christine Gerrard’s recent study of the playwright makes clear, his argument in The Prompter (1734–6) counseled the actor to “work from the inside out,” calling up lively emotion in order to animate the body.47 Grounded in Cartesian philosophies of affect, Hill posits that the actor’s imagination energized the animal spirits and spread mechanically across the face, the throat, the limbs, and all other extremities. Because “the mov’d actor MOVES,” it was vital to trace the passions in slow, steady detail.48 Hence, Bellmour’s verse lingers upon his decision in the excerpt above, painting the moment with words somehow taken to be truer to life, signaling the sort of care many took to be fundamental to tragedy’s cultural authority. Feeling is “wrought up to an higher pitch” in this way, so that even though “no man spoke any kind of verse extempore,” as Dryden claimed in the Essay’s defense of high tragic style, its metrical arrangement and metaphorical play expand the ambit of its passions (66). In this way, the baroque extravagance of Hill’s verse connotes the genre’s gravitas even as it crosses an imagined mind–body chasm. And yet if this rhetoric amplifies emotion, the monologue’s emblematic tokens (“Ruin,” “Grave,” “Want’s bleak Storm,” “Sovereign Remedy”) seem primarily to serve the deliberative process that stands for narrative in this case. Marked by its careful rationalization of a difficult ethical choice, Bellmour’s lines perform an elaborately self-conscious mode of interior monologue as the mental tracing of plot, inevitably rushing us past the surface of its emotion into metaphysical speculation, explaining aloud and in some detail the imagined consequences of his demise. Stitching together the argumentative links that might frame this death as one of a series of “gentle Murder[s],” Bellmour’s casuistical redefinitions beckon us to conclude that his choice is the lesser of evils. Crucially, none of this emerges by implication, but is rather told to us with a lucidity in its verse that belies its speaker’s anguished confusion and moves us toward the play’s final turns. Confirming the collective experience of witnessing the high tragic, Hill assumes a spectator in need of persuasion, a self-consciousness even Hill himself would downplay when writing The Prompter, a decade and a half later.49 In contrast to this, Moore’s text repeatedly denies us this sort of clarity, breaking its rhythm, blocking the metrical cadences that would a­ esthetically polish the moment and thus refusing to provide us a certain pleasure in its 47 Gerrard, Muses’ Projector, 169. 49 Gerrard, Muses’ Projector, 167–8.

48 Hill, Works of Aaron Hill, 3:408.

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158  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy closure. Prose here is characterized in large part by what it withholds, denying us information, trailing off in its reasoning, or otherwise relying on the subtlety of an actor’s bodily gestures to evoke rather than declaim feeling. If the tracing of passion was for Bellmour a pretense to metaphysical disquisition, here it culminates in the mere saturation of confused and panicked emotion, where sentiments are never fully formed before they are dropped and another oppressive thought predominates in a flash of new concern. “The Horrors of [Beverley’s] Soul” compel him to pray, before (attempting to kneel) his prayer admits that affliction has damned him to despair, stopping before it fully begins. Even when a figure presents itself in the monologue, as in the “iron Hand” of “Despair,” its utterance colors intense, momentary pulses of intoned meaning, never fully following their implications—at least not with the sort of dogged figurativeness of his pentameter source material. The prototypical Bellmour explains his intractable condition with a patient delineation of cause and effect, motivation and compulsion; Beverley shows us its toll. Demanding a more holistic semiotics of affect, in which attention to the action developing onstage is never subsumed by the flourishes of poetic text, Moore positions us—ironically, almost paradoxically—as voyeurs over a tableau seemingly indifferent to our presence. Take, for example, the line immediately following Beverley’s draught of the lethal vial: “O, that the Grave wou’d bury Memory as well as Body! For if the Soul sees and feels the Sufferings of those dear Ones it leaves behind the EVERLASTING has no vengeance to torment it deeper” (263.33–7). This line may seem innocuous at first, but in the context of that moment in the play, its digression into the subjunctive is much more telling. Complementing the disjointedness of the gamester’s elusive reasoning, the auxiliary “wou’d” activates the sense of skepticism and uncertain longing that frames much of the drama’s central concerns. The subtle indeterminacy of grammatical mood hangs in the air here, allowing Beverley to voice his dissatisfaction with a God he’s not sure he believes in as a wish that necessarily goes unanswered and unrepresented. Redemption, for Beverley, is just another trump card he can’t quite turn his way. In fact, his life seems to have long been experienced in middling aspiration, rendered ­metaphorical in the wagers he compulsively pursues and the happiness that remains always just outside his reach: I could be happy, if only, if only . . . Gambling is never simply a way for Beverley to maintain a standard of living that he and his family have become accustomed to, but rather a mode of play that marks him as simultaneously masculine, aristocratic, and indifferent to the fates. Which is  to say, Beverley’s Epicureanism is entangled in fantasies of aristocratic

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Prosaic Suffering  159 emulation and upward mobility. To puncture this dream is to strike at the heart of who he imagines himself to be, to dissolve once and for all the image of nonchalance he can never fully sustain in the play. When Stukeley wants to rally his mark, he goads him by saying: “Prithee be a Man . . . Fortune may be ours again” (221.28–9). Chance is fickle, though, at least in a way that contrasts against the providential sphere figured in the middling home; when Stukeley calls her a “fickle Mother,” he implicitly positions risk as the mistress to domesticity’s marital predictability. Hence, Mrs. Beverley’s assurance that: “now [that their fortune is] gone, give me but a bare Subsistance [sic] and my Husband’s Smiles, and I’ll be the happiest of the Poor” (207.17–18). But this too is mostly an alluring wish that will never materialize, for the household itself is barely held together until the devastating final moments of the play, a fact that the family’s matriarch stubbornly holds onto because it’s so closely linked to her sense of God’s benevolence and her own dignity. She too, it seems, was just playing the odds—though she’s bet big on the Almighty’s ability to reward her suffering in the hereand-now. Despite the almost axiomatic distinctions between these two visions of happiness, both involve a probabilistic calculation of risk and reward that seem almost to domesticate Pascal’s famed wager. In a 1765 poem, one  freethinking ironist would go on to gloss the false securities of the middling life as well as the pressure to risk even that as a freighted metaphysical condition: Those restless Beings [the middle rank] next in order place, Whose motley stations wear a doubtful face, Who dragg’d by Fortune into Middle Life, That vortex of malevolence and strife, Envying the great, and scoffing at the mean, Or swol’n with pride, or wasted with chagrin, Like Mahomet’s unsettled ashes, dwell, Midway suspended, between Heaven and Hell.50

“Restless” for more, common life provides little comfort to those who feel stuck in this middle. Here and throughout the play, therefore, the subjunctive is a way for the drama to play with what it might mean to risk one’s life in the pursuit of fantasies of the good life, to dwell in the counterfactual world of what could

50 Wodhull, Equality of Mankind (1765).

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160  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy be, rather than the quotidian details of bourgeois actualities. “I was so happy,” Beverley laments earlier in the play, slipping, tellingly, into the past tense, “that even a Wish for more than I possess’d was arrogant Presumption” (256.3–5). His suicidal ramblings momentarily condense these anxieties and give them life in performance, with its caesural dashes and p ­ arenthetical interjections marring the soliloquy’s rhythms, blocking its resolution in a series of stops and starts that anticipates, in its prose, Diderot’s image of suffering “close to everyday life”: What is it that affects us in the spectacle of a man animated by a great passion? Is it his words? Sometimes. But what never fails to stir us is cries, inarticulate words, a broken voice, a group of monosyllables with pauses in between, a murmur, impossible to describe . . . As the violence of the emotion cuts off the breath and fills the mind with perturbation, so the syllables of words become disjunct, and the man jumps from one idea to another; he initiates a great many lines of thought; he finishes none of them . . .51

“Cries, inarticulate words,” voice the fragmentary realization of a fantasy collapsing, giving shape to one’s ambivalent bond to a world that’s become unbearable. Here time stands at attention; plot presses inward into ­psychological crisis; the gambler’s wager merges into a Pascalian fugue. “Consider the Reward!”, Stukeley parodically enjoins (263.15).52 Now one might dispute this line of reasoning, pointing to the use of the subjunctive tense in The Fatal Extravagance. In a similar moment cited above, recall, Bellmour exclaims: “Oh!—Cou’d I feel no Misery, but my own!” The play’s background in the world of gambling, financial speculation, and securities (all of which coalesce, interestingly, in the early lottery system) certainly animates the uncertainties voiced in the earlier text in ways that are similar and unmistakable. Yet here the subjunctive expresses a wish that

51 Diderot, Entretiens, 4:1144–5. 52  Interestingly, the Larpent Collection’s ms. records a slightly different version of the suicide scene that maintains many of the central features of the above, while omitting the failed prayer. Thus, Beverley (with original material in brackets): “How the self-murders account may stand, I know not. But this I know; [the Means of Lengthening the Life are Ours; why not the means of shortening it?—’tis a doubt this vial will determine. (pulls out a vial) O Jarvis! how has thy kindness been abus’d! Him whom thou lefts’t to guard me, have I corrupted to buy this deadly Poison;—and now I drink it. (drinks and throws away the vial)] O that the grave would bury memory . . .” Such changes may reflect an attempt to skirt around the Lord Chamberlain’s strictures, actual changes adopted by Moore, or as may be most likely, the idiosyncrasies of Garrick’s performance as they came to be recorded. If this is so, these changes would be further evidence of the mid-eighteenth-century performer’s centrality in the creation of modern drama, with its careful negotiation of emotion onstage.

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Prosaic Suffering  161 is then quickly resolved in an elaborate, discursive rationalization rehearsed aloud. The resolution to kill his family is a way to limit their suffering, we are told, so that by this murder they might be delivered. If plot presses inward in The Gamester, in Hill’s older domestic tragedy, ­deliberation spins outward into plot, playing upon a rhetorical surface in a series of turns and counter-turns. Even the skeptical phrase several lines later, “Dark Doubtfulness of deep Futurity,” is counterbalanced against a recitative theology with clear consequences for those who transgress its limits. For Hill, then, the subjunctive works to proffer rhetorical questions which are answered in soliloquy, a mode of “park-and-bark” Socratic method that would have been well adapted to those trained in the oratorical style of p ­ erformance practiced in the early decades of the century. With this in mind, The Gamester’s slide into the subjunctive works to underscore a sense of the prosaic’s extemporaneity, its movement through an empty, real time in which the beholder’s presence is not assumed to benefit from a rhetor’s analysis. Whereas Hill’s older, versified suffering plays up its literariness and technical effects for an audience it seeks to elevate into mournful speculation, Moore’s prose works rather to obscure its presence as artifice. Acting as a sort of vanishing mediator, tragic prose divests suffering of its elevated meanings by inhabiting the conventions of absorption, many of which were preserved in the visual iconography of the play (Fig. 4.3). I want to be careful not to overstate this since, of course, Hill’s oratorical style in Bellmour’s soliloquy is far from unique to verse, and one could easily imagine this back-and-forth playing out in prose. Here’s Barnwell in The London Merchant, at the key moment in which he embezzles his master’s funds in order to (he thinks) rescue the conning Millwood: “What am I about to do! [is this a question?] Now you, who boast your reason all sufficient, suppose yourselves in my condition and determine for me whether it’s right to let her suffer for my faults, or by this small addition to my guilt, prevent the ill effects of what is past. [if it is, it’s rhetorical]” (2.2.180–4). Moments like this were faulted (tellingly) by Alexander Pope for their “poetical luxuriancy,” suggesting that the earliest examples of tragic prose were hybrid forms, experienced as a kind of “slant” or broken poetics.53 Examples highlight the point: when Barnwell takes stock of his approaching execution, he rattles off what sounds like a series of mighty lines, which I’ve split to emphasize their proximity to verse but which on the page would

53 Cibber, Lives of the Poets, 5:339.

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162  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy

Fig. 4.3.  Mather Brown, The Last Scene in the Tragedy of the Gamester. 1787. Oil on canvas, 200 × 256 cm. Courtesy of the Garrick Club, London. Note the broken plane of the fourth wall in Beverley’s expression which, as Fried points out, was a characteristic tell of the absorptive style. Here, it’s a gesture of intimacy that nevertheless seems powerless.

appear prosaically: “See, Millwood, see our Journey’s at an End. / Life, like a tale that’s told, is past away; / that short but dark and unknown Passage, Death / is all the Space ’tween us and endless Joys / or Woes eternal” (5.2.12–15). Indeed, Barnwell’s tortured decision to kill his uncle begins in  alternating stresses that scan as all but blank verse—“A dismal gloom obscures the face of day” (3.3.1)—before launching into a series of contrapuntal reasonings in which he entertains aloud rhetorical questions that explain the difficulty of his position. In an essay on the stage’s use of poetry in the period, Wall argues that Lillo’s playtext in fact interlaces several moments of overt poetry into its prose, noting that the former’s ­typographical “separ­ ateness” can often serve to introduce ambiguities of sense and scansion.54 Still, whether we take this particular instance as poetry or prose, the overall 54  Wall, “Poems on the Stage,” 30–1.

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Prosaic Suffering  163 effect of Lillo’s language in the drama instances a metrical care that marks it as artifice, as an object of the poet’s retrospective adornment, dialoguing with an audience it acknowledges as the subjects of collective mourning. The close proximity between prose and blank verse is certainly something that Moore is attuned to in The Gamester, though the tendency is for this to weigh down the tragedy, to transform the prosaic artifice of nonartifice into a sign of meaning’s present obscurity or absence in the ordinary. If Lillo’s prose lapses into meter, seeming to confirm Johnson’s intuition about the natural affinity between suffering and the poetic, Moore’s principal figures routinely fail to elevate their misfortune, falling back into an inbetweenness that confirms them to be socially, stylistically, and metaphysic­ ally middling. So despite a similar admission in The Gamester’s preface that he (Moore) “often found it a much greater difficulty to avoid . . . Measure” (204.17–18), Beverley can never finally let the prosaic go, clinging to the last to a version of the world he desperately wishes would sustain him, but that has long ceased to do so. This may be the closest that early realist work in bourgeois tragedy approaches the allegorical, insofar as that drama—as Blair Hoxby argues, modifying Walter Benjamin’s celebrated thesis on the Trauerspiel—ritually enacts liminality itself, depicting “a space betwixtand-between the living and the dead, a world of dying and mourning.”55 Wandering aimlessly like an “Out-cast,” Beverley stammers: “Whither am I going?—My home lies there; all that is dear on Earth it holds too; yet are the Gates of Death more welcome to me—I’ll enter it no more” (252.23; 26–9). Beverley’s house has been sold to appease creditors, however, so these statements will turn out to be ironic. As it turns out, there’s no home for him to return to, only variations of want and existential alienation, only the maintenance of a life un-housed the text describes “As of a good Man dead. Of one, who walking in a Dream, fell down a Precipice” (220.27–30). Beyond such self-consciously constructed images of ambivalence and middlingness, however, the play’s momentary uses of metrical arrangement inevitably underscore its negation as a kind of loss. Though the critical account of secularization-as-subtraction has become increasingly difficult to sustain (and rightly so, as evidenced even in Chapter  3), these textual maneuvers clearly attempt to negotiate forms of disenchantment that emerge in tension with one’s attachment to living life in this world—and not

55 Hoxby, “Function of Allegory,” 91. On this language of theatre as liminal space, see Turner, From Ritual to Theatre.

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164  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy the  next.56 The play thus presents a version of disenchantment we know well, a version that (following Max Weber’s announcement of modernity’s Entzauberung) conflates the affective sense of the term (as one’s disillusion or disappointment with the world) with its sense as an historical process hitting its stride at about this exact historical moment (thus, the “de-magification” of the world, or what’s the same here, a lapse into Epicurean randomness).57 The result is not precisely the mediation of a wholly or mostly “secularized affect” in the enacted prose of bourgeois drama, to be clear, but rather an attempt to imagine and embody forms of suffering that register a sense of the anxiety with which that possibility is met, that depict both a desperate grasping after transcendent clarity in one’s afflictions and a suspicion that this is ultimately all there is (and thus the desire to remain despite the cruelty of that realization). The prosaic’s inability to rise above or ennoble its earthliness thus enacts an intra-textual enjambment that Giorgio Agamben calls a prose-metric “hanging-back,” a hesitant turn “in two opposed directions at once” that momentarily suspends meaning itself and hints at the complexity of secularization.58 In-betweenness haunts the plenitude that older forms of ­tragedy can often evoke in their afflictions and exorcise in poetic closure. And unsurprisingly, then, the play repeatedly returns to the problem of a suffering severed from a theological economy, moving carefully between the prose of the world and brief, stylized impositions of the heroic aesthetic upon it. In a startling moment late in the play, Beverley follows a prayer that almost completely subsumes itself in verse: Thou Power that mads’t me, hear me! If for a life of Frailty, and this too hasty Deed of Death thy Justice dooms me, here I acquit the Sentence. But if, enthron’d in Mercy where thou sit’st, thy Pity has beheld me, send me a Gleam of Hope; that in these last and bitter Moments my Soul may taste of Comfort! And for these Mourners here, O! let their Lives be peaceful. and their Deaths happy!  (270.27–34)

with what amounts to a prosaic series of half-beliefs, desperate bargains, and parenthetical hedged bets: 56  The past decade has seen an explosion of interest in reassessing the legacy and limitations of secularization, adding much-needed complexity to our understanding of the processes by which this did (or didn’t!) occur as well as tracking the particularities of its contemporary scope. Some representative work includes Asad, Formations of the Secular; Taylor, Secular Age; and Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age. 57  Saler, “Modernity, Enchantment, and Fictionalism.” 58 Agamben, Idea of Prose, 41.

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Prosaic Suffering  165 Lend me your Hand, Love—so—raise me—No—’twill not be—My life is finish’d—O! for a few short Moments! to tell you how my Heart bleeds for you—That even now, thus dying as I am, dubious and fearful of Hereafter, my bosom Pang is for Your Miseries, Support her Heaven! . . . O, Mercy! Mercy! (271.8–13)

Abiding in the epistemic purgatory between belief and un-belief, this world and the next, the play of verse and prose here serves to disfigure the tidiness of a good death in a gesture of deflation and the literal slumping of the leaden body. Like Beverley’s deliberations above, its omissions and countermovements rehearse a stasis that will later be read as a signature effect of the theatrical tableau. For Peter Szondi, whose work on the post-Enlightenment fate of tragedy is foundational for thinking about the cultural import of bourgeois drama, this slow, halting effect stands in opposition to the coups de théâtre (or plot turns) that were central to heroic (which is to say aristocratic) forms of ­tragedy. The tableau, in his reading, figures the interior and affective spaces of the domestic against the vicissitudes of the public world that lay outside its walls, formalizing the relative political powerlessness felt by many in the middle rank as a retreat into an ostensively passive suffering.59 By the mideighteenth century, therefore, bourgeois drama foregrounds the ­psychological tensions and fraught intimacies of maintaining the home as emotional refuge. Yet—and recalling aspects of my argument on Clarissa in Chapter 3—I would caution against reading this as an instance of mere powerlessness. Because for all its etymological baggage, suffering can also encompass various states of emotional practice that bely the passiveness taken for granted in common-sense usage, a passiveness too often read into the stasis of tableaux by even as subtle a reader as Szondi himself.60 On the contrary, one might argue, suffering may also be helpfully conceived of as “an action dir­ ected within” (as Lukács perceived clearly) or (as Talal Asad perceptively argues) as wrapped up in ritual or cultural notions of pain in which afflictions sustain the actor by qualifying—and not simply erasing—his or her agency.61 In fact, as many early modern critics and authors saw it, the passions were 59  See Szondi, “Tableau and Coup de Théâtre,” 323–43. Szondi concedes that his thesis works best in the case of the Franco-German context, where rates of political disenfranchisement were much higher than mercantile Britain. 60  Pierre Frantz, for instance, echoes this when he concludes in his L’esthétique du tableau that “the successful tableau shows not an action but feelings” (178), as if these categories are mutually exclusive. 61  Lukács, “Sociology of Modern Drama,” 150; Asad, Formations of the Secular, chap. 2.

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166  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy inherently active. Several took up Aristotle’s judgment in Poetics that “Passion is an Action which destroys some person or causes some violent Pains” in order to read contemporaneous philosophies of emotion in light of the cathartic literary mechanisms of tragedy.62 Thus, Mrs. Beverley’s desperate embrace of affliction that would somehow confirm her sense of divine election: “Hear me Heaven! . . . On Me! on Me! if Misery must be the Lot of  either, multiply Misfortunes! I’ll bear ’em patiently, so He is happy!” Suffering is borne, then—but it’s also chosen and dwelt upon and enacted in the literal movements and performative utterances that make up prayer, lament, bargaining, and a host of other affective strategies for making sense of the world. To take these aspects of performed affliction seriously would mean attending not only to how style qualifies or otherwise mobilizes the a­ ffective, but also to how our own post-Enlightenment distinctions between active and passive, inner feeling and outer expression may themselves be habitual and acculturated, “the product of the way we . . . ‘do’ the experience.”63 These distinctions, though seemingly uncontroversial, are in reality much more vexed and prone to smuggling in forms of dualism that split feeling from the historical, embodied consciousness in which it’s situated. Emotions— even so-called passive ones like suffering—are something we do with and through our bodies in the world, however, the “actions of a mindful body” that always produce one’s selfhood in performance. The body matters to the history of emotion, therefore, not because emotion simply is neurophysiological arousal or pure intensity (as remains the case for Neo-Jamesians and some in affect studies who wish to secure a space for feeling in excess of intention, discourse, or culture), but because our flesh situates us within historical “schemes of perception, thought, and action” that provide a framework for that experience.64 As aspects of habitus, in other words, emotional practices provide the crucial link between the individual, localized iterations of feeling and the learned, contingent modes of structured affectivity that render experience navigable on a broader, generic scale. To retrace the praxis of ordinary feeling in this context thus means thinking 62 Aristotle, Poetics, 1452b11–13. 63  Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?”, 198. 64 Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 53–4. The practice theoretical model of emotion reframes the controversy over affect’s intention by positing a third category between conscious emotions and affect’s neurological “pure intensity”: habitual feeling. For the debate, see Ruth Ley’s skeptical appraisal of the selective science of much affect theory in “The Turn to Affect,” 434–72. The view of affect as an intensity or subconscious energy was popularized in Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual, though it has since become a mark of distinction between affect studies and a broader field of inquiry into emotion.

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Prosaic Suffering  167 harder about how the particularities of prose enact emotion and what that might imply. * * * In what remains, I want to highlight just two of the most striking implications of the formal-affective turn I’ve been exploring in the hopes of continuing this work of retracing praxis. On the one hand, as Moore saw clearly, the relatively plain style of such tragedies could be remarkably intimate and familiar in its enactment, the subtlety of its artifice enabling modes of identification that would later become the hallmark of our entanglement with character. In practice, as we saw with respect to Pritchard and Siddons, this shift arose as actors performing in The Gamester and similar bourgeois dramatic works literalized the advice of thinkers like Lord Kames, who remarked in his Elements of Criticism (1762) that drama thrives when it “affects to speak plain.”65 For Kames, the ideal dramatist “maintains a moderate degree of dignity without reaching the sublime,” hugging the truth of an emotion without overextending its tonal elevation.66 Others agreed, yoking plainness of expression with true feeling. When it came to sorrow especially, noted the divine and rhetorician Richard Hurd the year of The Gamester’s debut, even elevated minds sink into “the ordinary exactness of mere prose.”67 Though neither writer was as radical as Lillo, Diderot, or even Mackenzie in advocating a wholesale turn to the concerns of the middle rank in tragedy, the upshot of this was clear: expert drama does well to  affect the middling. This reasoning wasn’t new, of course. Both Kames and Hurd cited Horace’s claim in Ars Poetica that “in Tragedy, Telephus and Peleus often grieve in the language of prose . . . should he want his lament to touch the spectator’s heart,” a line that had been parodied in John Gay’s 1715 The What D’Ye Call It and Henry Fielding’s 1731 Tragedy of Tragedies, part of the early eighteenth-century vogue for burlesque tragedies which played with the lowness of ordinary suffering in the run-up to The London Merchant’s genre-bending debut.68 But in the emerging bourgeois moment, the artifice of authenticity took on a new, vital urgency for those thinking

65 Kames, Elements of Criticism, 1:350. 66 Kames, Elements of Criticism, 1:358–9. 67  See Hurd’s commentary on the depiction of the passions in his edition of Horace’s Ars Poetica, 57. 68 Ll. 89–92 of Ars Poetica in Horace, Satires, Epistles, Ars Poetica (trans. Fairclough). Fielding’s Tom Thumb and its revision as The Tragedy of Tragedies both play ironically with Horace’s argument on this point. See, for example, the preface to the latter in Plays, Volume I, 544–5. I discussed the links between burlesque and tragedy in Chapter 1.

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168  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy deeply about the affective possibilities and limitations of its performance. Audiences present at the early staging of Charles Johnson’s Cælia, for e­ xample, would have listened as its prologue spelled out its intentions in ways that seemed to grasp after Horace’s prosaic mediocritas: He [the playwright] wou’d his humble Sentiments impart, In Words that flow directly from the Heart; To lofty Numbers he has no Pretence, Who makes his Characters talk common Sense . . .69

Word and feeling merge in the aesthetics of the ordinary, flattening the hierarchies of affliction often reified in tragedy, as if its style dissolved the mediating presence of the theatrical apparatus itself in a lively display of the real. The “common sense” of prose here is immediate, “direct,” a matter of the heart that seems to bypass the higher faculties of the tragic sublime in favor of more homely feelings we all know well. In his fascinating study of “the art of the average,” Paul Fleming underscores this socio-historical turn by pointing out that from its inception, bourgeois tragedy thrived on its audience’s ability “to be moved by what resembles itself.”70 Lessing, Diderot, and others, drawing on the work of British bourgeois dramatists, initiate a fundamental shift in emphasis in the period away from the “cold” affect of admiration in tragedy to an aesthetics of affective identification.71 Prose was just one aspect in this turn, he notes, but it was an important one. Unlike the average spectator’s estrangement from the experience of “heroick suffering” (in Joshua Reynolds’ coinage for  the distancing misfortunes of tragedy and history), prose renders the scene in a language familiar and close at hand, a language recognized and ­inhabited in the everyday of their (and our?) lives.72 I’m hedging here, but not without reason. As Fleming goes on to note, what is ultimately at stake in valorizing identification is an averageness that comes to be read as universal, a suspension of the particularities of class and context that sees the suffering with which one identifies as ubiquitous as prose itself. Thus, in a well-known passage from the Entretiens sur Le Fils naturel, Diderot counsels: “what the artist must find [in scenes of suffering] is what anyone would say in a similar case; what no one could hear without immediately recognizing

69 Johnson, Cælia, 5. 70 Fleming, Exemplarity and Mediocrity, 70. 71 Fleming, Exemplarity and Mediocrity, 58–62. On the neoclassical development of admiration as tragic affect, see Rubidge, “Catharsis through Admiration,” 316–33. 72 Reynolds, Discourses on Art, 57.

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Prosaic Suffering  169 it in himself.”73 Or as Moore himself had put it years earlier, in “adapting” tragedy to the “Feelings of every part of the Audience,” the drama explores those passions the bourgeois recognizes as their own redoubled and performed onstage, imagining ordinary suffering as part of a genre to which its spectator already belongs (and endures). We “hear” what already lies within us all.74 In this way, the theatre engaged in a complex gesture of self-reflexivity, whereby the pain of ordinary people was displayed for them in scenes of households (like their own) exposed and ultimately destroyed. If prose is habitus, ordinary suffering brought tragedy quite literally close to home. On the other hand, if bourgeois drama’s ability to evoke a “natural Picture” draws its viewer into a homely interior with which he or she identifies, that absorption is never left uncomplicated by the imposition of the picture’s frame. Prose’s ability to close the distance between suffering actor and mourning spectator exists in tension, in other words, with that very form’s tendency to imply their radical separation along two sides of the imagined fourth wall. Prosaic suffering can be a lonely practice in this respect, resulting in a dialectical movement between modes of identification and disassociation, intimacy and its denial, the interior and exterior of what David Marshall termed the “frame of art’s” ability to blur fiction into reality.75 So if the average spectator comes to see him- or herself in the tragic figure, if they come to identify with the genre of real, ordinary feeling enacted onstage, they simultaneously see themselves as profoundly isolated in those afflictions. In fact, isolation becomes part of the very fabric of what makes that hardship authentically banal. These are the wages of experimentation in tableau. What’s more, to look upon prosaic suffering was to actively play out the abandonment of the tragedy’s central figures who are witnessed by an audience that understands themselves to be at once present and absent. Not unlike the providential agency claimed by its most pious figures, the play’s collective mourners stand as an absent presence haunting the play’s world, perhaps voyeuristically but certainly powerless to intervene. In beholding the tableau, therefore, the average spectator confirmed the inertia and 73 Diderot, Entretiens, 4:1143. For an illuminating discussion of Diderot’s understanding of identification in le drame, see Harris, Inventing the Spectator, chap. 8. For the dialogue between this tradition and Lessing’s contemporaneous work, see chap. 2 of Fleming, Exemplarity and Mediocrity. 74  In a penetrating analysis of melodrama, Carolyn Williams suggests that the highly self-reflexive nature of such performative gestures marks “the function of the tableau as a moment both of interpellation and of critical class consciousness.” See Williams, “Moving Pictures,” 140, n.8. 75 Marshall, Frame of Art, 8.

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170  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy l­iminality of the average sufferer’s experience of pain, in a sense becoming the “heavy, oppressive, threatening something” that Auerbach saw in the Nothing of formless tragedy. Over the space of the drama’s representation, suffering could be explored as a half-disenchanted network of affective investments and fragile attachments that mirrored and thereby displaced the spectator’s own personal misfortunes. Beverley’s apology to his wife “for meanly dying” at the drama’s end underscores this complex negotiation of affect and form in the way it subtly recognizes, at the play’s closing moments, the helpless strangers that convened only to watch him die. “I am unworthy of you, but will deserve you better” (229.8–9), the gamester had promised Mrs. Beverley, but his failure at the drama’s close is so fully complete that he’s not only proved himself unworthy, but sold off the interest in the family estate (the “reversion” that would become his son’s inheritance), dragging their future down with him (265.31). This, just moments after she cheerfully announces that her prayers have been answered—“Providence has seen our Sorrows, and sent the Means to heal ’em” (264.21–2)—enacts a crushing deflation, testifying to a redemption that has arrived too late to save. “Meanly dying,” then, comes to connote not only the shame of one’s downward mobility, and the loss of dignity Arthur Miller found so central to the tragedy of common people, but also a dialogic anticipation of the prosaic’s leaden triviality, its overburdening of the aesthetic with a realism that is both quotidian in its concerns and sensational in its expression.76 Gravitas shades, slowly, into mere gravity. This at least seemed to be Wordsworth’s verdict in his preface to the 1800 Lyrical Ballads: If . . . images and feelings have an undue proportion of pain connected with them, there is some danger that the excitement may be carried beyond its  proper bounds . . . and hence, though the opinion will at first appear paradoxical, from the tendency of metre [sic] to divest language, in a certain degree, of its reality, and thus to throw a sort of half-consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole composition, there can be little doubt but that more pathetic situations and sentiments, that is, those which have a greater proportion of pain connected with them, may be endured in metrical composition, especially in rhyme, than in prose.77

Then, underscoring his point, he adds: 76  Miller, “Tragedy and the Common Man.” 77  Wordsworth, preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1:xxx.

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Prosaic Suffering  171 This opinion may be further illustrated by appealing to the Reader’s own experience of the reluctance with which he comes to the reperusal of the distressful parts of Clarissa Harlowe, or The Gamester; while Shakespeare’s writings, in the most pathetic scenes, never act upon us, as pathetic, beyond the bounds of pleasure . . .78

Enacting the practical contours of ordinary suffering—provisionally, speculatively, and, indeed, proleptically—bourgeois drama imagines an age of prose that is just too heavy. Its pursuit of the “natural picture” of tragedy anticipates the interrogative sense of the theatrical, a kind of drama meant to pose questions rather than proffer answers, in line with the naturalism that took hold in the work of masters like Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg in the nineteenth century. If heroic tragedy enlivened and elevated to catharsis, prosaic suffering burdens its spectator with a truth it refuses to gild. It makes the reader suffer too, then, because it seems real, all too real.

78  Wordsworth, preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1:xxxi.

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5

Tragic Sensibilities Sentimental Fiction and the Serious Genre

The past several chapters have been telling a story about the revaluation of the middling sort in a series of experimental bourgeois tragedies, which I  argue went hand-in-hand with the proseification of suffering over the eighteenth century. Along the way, I’ve noted that one unintended consequence of this shift over the long term was a gradual erosion in the solidity of ­classical genres that had traditionally set apart certain forms of experience and elevated pain. This was especially the case with tragedy, for that genre’s aesthetic frames began to dissolve in new forms of realistic fiction where the stresses of ordinary life were mediated with a newfound seriousness. I’ve picked up this thread by referring variously to a turn from high heroic ­tragedy to the “middle states” of genre sérieux, by linking the theatrical drama of the period to the quotidian realities of the novel and its “formless tragedy,” or by thinking about the unexpected subtleties of those emotional practices that such works reduplicated across page and stage. This echoes the claims of other scholars, who have likewise observed that the aesthetics of tragedy are increasingly taken up in the mid- to late eighteenth century as a melancholic mood toward the sheer banality of affliction, as a tragic disposition to the exigencies of all creaturely life.1 Which is to say, tragedy doesn’t die over the eighteenth century—rather, it metastasizes. By the following century, the “modern condition” will come to be seen by many as one fundamentally tragic, a turn in the imaginary anticipated by the body of text and performance I’ve been assembling under the rubric of “bourgeois tragedy.” This chapter and the Conclusion to this book will make this more explicit by drawing some new connections. What follows, therefore, approaches these issues from a slightly different angle, and begins tracing the elucidation of the melancholic “middle state” as it arose in the sentimental fiction that ran parallel to—and in many ways

1  For the classic example of this, see Szondi, Essay on the Tragic. The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy: Modernity and the Art of Ordinary Suffering. Alex Eric Hernandez, Oxford University Press (2019). © Alex Eric Hernandez. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846574.001.0001

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Tragic Sensibilities  173 through—the genre moyen opened up by bourgeois tragedy. After all, both the literature of sensibility and domestic tragedy typify artistic responses to a renewed cultural sensitivity to the overwhelming scale of everyday afflictions. Much like theatre-goers at one of these plays, and emerging from a similar cultural milieu, sentimental figures became spectators to a catalogue of commonplace troubles and model for their readers the very somatic responses they presume to evoke. The tropes of bourgeois tragedy form the background material of the sentimental and become occasions for entering vicariously into a familiar pain. (By the latter half of the century, too, bourgeois tragedy will more and more be ascribed to this broader culture of s­ ensibility, a detail I’ve resisted developing in this book until now.) To be certain, these genres are not identical. Despite common materials and a shared interest in the cleansing power of emotion, the sentimental fiction that followed in the wake of bourgeois and domestic tragedy tends to soften its harshest effects, offering a different approach to the suffering it represents. In these slightly gauzy conditions, for example, novels of feeling spin fantasies of abandoned engagement with a world in pain whereby the ­experience of ordinary suffering is rendered common currency for the modern—and middling—subject of feeling. The middle decades of the eighteenth century especially witnessed the development of a series of works that flirted with tragedy in a number of ways that I explore here, from Sarah Fielding’s pioneering novel of feeling, The Adventures of David Simple, to Sophia Lee’s adaptation of the genre sérieux as “serious comedy,” to Laurence Sterne’s ironic appropriation of these themes in A Sentimental Journey. The heart of my claim then is that sentimental fiction refigures—rather than does away with—tragedy’s aesthetic frames. It takes up theatrical experience as a model for encountering a world marked by an-all-too-ordinary suffering, in effect normalizing aspects of bourgeois tragedy’s capacious approach to grievable life. The tearful reader imagines him- or herself as part of a generalized mourning audience, an intimate public bound together by a shared cultural mood and a sense that they merely respond as any average person would. In this way and others, sentimentality pursues the confirming fictions of the drame and the bittersweet endings of what Horace Walpole oxymoronically referred to as tragédie mitigée.2 The world it imagines is a world of fragile attachments and deep compromises, one

2  Walpole, “Thoughts on Comedy,” 2:321.

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174  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy that resembles less the bleak sphere of tragedy than that of the serious genre, or indeed our own. * * * I want to begin by describing some of the historical links between sentimental fiction and bourgeois tragedy, a task which in one sense, at least, continues to narrate some of the broader effects of the ongoing revaluation of ordinary life. As early as Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple (1744)— according to several critics, the first novel of feeling—the prospect of middling tragedy helps authorize sentimental fiction’s capacious sense of the grievable.3 There we read of its protagonist, David, among some persons of quality discussing the grief engendered by various tragic characters, ranging from Shakespeare’s Othello and Lear to Dryden’s Don Sebastian. Though it’s relatively early in the novel, his quixotic search for a true friend—“one who could not see another’s Suffering without Pain nor his Pleasures without sharing them” (59)—has been thus far fruitless, and led an acid-tongued Mr. Spatter to introduce him to these figures in “high life.” He is quickly disillusioned, however, when their impromptu salon begins mocking the tastes of two absent friends, Lady Know-All and Lady True-Wit, who had earlier voiced their sympathy for the “filthy Black,” Othello, and praised Shakespeare’s keen observation of “the Behaviour of . . . vulgar Wretches” and “servants” (65). Such low figures, the company observes, have no place in tragedy. Unsurprisingly, the conversation turns here to discuss George Lillo’s The London Merchant as both proof of the genre’s debasement by the lower and middling orders as well as the flawed tastes of their missing friends. “They [Ladies Know-All and True-Wit] have taken a fancy to set up the Author of George Barnwell for a Writer, tho’ certainly he writes the worst Language in the World,” they comment, noting that a fellow who writes of the temptations of money for those in poverty “must be something very low” (66). One genteel woman in the party voices a familiar resistance to scenes of ordinary affliction when she compares the Stoic suffering of Joseph Addison’s Cato to that of the “Wretch” Barnwell, producing incredulous laughter among her peers: “Oh intolerable! cry for an odious Apprentice-Boy, who murdered his Uncle, at the instigation too of a common Woman, and yet be unmoved, when even 3  Subsequent citations refer to Sabor’s 1998 edition and appear parenthetically in the text. On the claim of the genre’s importance, see Barker, “The Novel of Sensibility in Embryo,” 69–80; and Utter and Needham, Pamela’s Daughters, chap. 4.

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Tragic Sensibilities  175 Cato bled for his Country” (66). If Cato embodies dignitas, the social and moral standing whereby his suffering is meaningful as self-sacrifice, Barnwell and Millwood are “low lifes” whose distress is a function of London’s dingy commercial world (66). To sympathize with Cato is to share in the rareness of an affective commodity, to elevate oneself by joining in feelings of patrician virtue. By contrast, isn’t the apprentice’s plebeian pain nothing more than the natural consequence of his violation of the social order? Another lady chimes in: “Every body of either Sense or Goodness would wish to crush [Barnwell], and make [him] ten times more miserable than he is.” Everybody except perhaps those familiar with the real pressures of staying afloat in an indifferent world. Ironically, this described Fielding better than Lillo himself, who the company assumes to be a man of low feeling and dire conditions (he was, on the contrary, financially comfortable). Steeped in the language and imagery of everyday affliction, David Simple was an instance of “writing what you know” in several respects. Fielding would have known bourgeois tragedy’s key texts and players well from her brother Henry’s productions of the genre at the Little Haymarket theatre. While it’s unclear whether Sarah was personally acquainted with Lillo, the tragedian’s work is among the most frequently cited across her published and manuscript texts.4 Connections to literary figures like the philologist James Harris (one of the genre’s eighteenth-century boosters and a close family friend), John Hoadly (who completed Lillo’s revisions to Arden of Faversham and later wrote her epitaph), and Samuel Richardson (who in the middling Clarissa had paradoxically achieved for the novel “as high a Tragedy as can possible be wrote”) also strengthen a claim to her place in this literary setting.5 Yet her work also betrays a personal knowledge of the era’s common afflictions. Her novel, like bourgeois tragedy more generally, drew upon experience with financial hardship and domestic discord, as she admitted in its disarming preface: “That which really produced this Book [was] Distress in her Circumstances.”6 Sarah never married, only belatedly came upon a measure of success, and spent much of her life shuttling between family and friends, who took her in out of obligation and charity. Thus, aiming “to move [the reader’s] Compassion” in telling David’s story, it’s not at all clear

4  Battestin and Probyn, eds., Correspondence of Henry and Sarah Fielding, xli. 5 Fielding, Remarks on Clarissa, 31. Hoadly would later erect a monument to Fielding following her death in 1768. See Johnson, Political Biography of Sarah Fielding, 2. 6  See Fielding’s “Advertisement to the Reader” in David Simple, [4].

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176  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy whether that feeling should ultimately be directed toward her protagonist, the scenes he laments, or, in fact, her own unhappy circumstances.7 The vexed comparison between Cato’s heroic suffering and Barnwell’s ordinary suffering thus performs a subtle, metacritical work in the novel, laying the groundwork for mourning both real and imagined, both high and low. At stake here is the possibility of a more generous sense of what constitutes grievable life, especially for those living in a modern, mostly urban, early capitalist context. But the comparison also brings to mind the sheer lack of imagination of many who simply couldn’t conceive of a t­ragedy in which ordinary people suffered with gravity. The incredulousness of David’s company recalls the puzzled reactions of playgoers whose ­expectations were so skillfully exploited by the burlesques of the 1720s and 30s, a genre Fielding’s brother had practically perfected as the Haymarket’s resident provocateur. As we saw in Chapter 1, the juxtaposition of tragedy’s elevation and the realities of the underworld could be genuinely confusing—when it wasn’t played up for laughs. One lady’s response to The London Merchant’s popularity makes more sense in light of this: “There is nothing so surprizing to me as the Absurdity of almost every body I meet with; they can’t even laugh or cry at the right place” (66). Little more than a decade after the play’s Drury Lane debut, bourgeois tragedy’s affective possibilities remained a topic of debate and misunderstanding, it seems, even if (as her admission makes clear in chastising “almost every body,” and implicitly, David himself) a new structure of feeling was solidifying. Lady Know-All goes further, though, in her defense of Lillo’s play. In her view, a well-written tragedy doesn’t simply tweak one’s expectations, but rather transcends its classed elements in pursuit of a greater truth. When faced with profound hardship: “Nature is Nature in whatever Station it is placed. And . . . [one] could be as much affected with the Distress of a Man in low Life, as if he was a Lord or a Duke” (66). To our ears, this statement seems an artifact of Enlightenment’s pretense to universality, and indeed, for Diderot writing in the following decade, the notion that “Nature is Nature” regardless of rank was a central insight of genre sérieux. In his reformist theatrical project, the serious genre was to be built on characters whose feeling was universal and true, legible even in gesture, groans, or the stillness of tableau, because it was recognizable to the average theatre-goer. Misfortune in these plays would arise naturally from the character’s “conditions,” social contexts like those one was liable to face in one’s

7 Fielding, David Simple, [4].

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Tragic Sensibilities  177 day-to-day life. Lifting the restrictive class clause of tragedy would thus go hand-in-hand with a greater realism in tone and form. The difficulties of parenthood, one’s profession or lack thereof, and the duties and virtues of private life all underwrite a mode of fiction that, though it rebuffs the elevation of heroic tragedy, nevertheless “inclines” toward something hauntingly tragic.8 Diderot found a similar dynamic at work in Clarissa, confessing in his 1762 eulogy to Richardson that what moved him in the novel was a pain he recognized in light of his own: “the world we live in is his scene of action . . . the passions he portrays are those I feel within me.”9 How, given this, could one not be moved? Casting the domestic tragic novel as an exercise in elegy, he adds: “I am only astonished when I read of the last hours of this innocent creature, that the very stones, and walls, and the cold and senseless flags on which I walk are not stirred to cry out and join their sorrow with mine. Then all grows dark around me; my soul is filled with gloom, and it seems to me as if nature veiled her face with crape” (285). Nature is nature; the world is a world of tears. Fielding telegraphs this shift in moods by porting that sentiment between stage and novel in the affected voices of Ladies True-Wit and Know-All. As Peter Sabor notes, these characters were likely modeled on none other than Fielding’s second cousin, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose sympathy for domestic tragedy I discussed earlier in relation to Lillo. In Chapter 1, recall, her positive appraisal of The London Merchant’s power to move—“whoever did not cry at George Barnwell must deserve to be hanged,” an “old servant so often said”—marked a data-point in the valorization of everyday distress underway in the period. From early modern domestic plays to the “trash of Durfey,” Lady Mary was a voracious reader of drama with a soft spot for Lillo in particular.10 Was this guilty pleasure a result of her relationship with “poor cousins” Henry and Sarah (her words), and a privileged access to the experimental work coming out of the Haymarket?11 This, and whether that old servant’s memories can be relied upon, may be as impossible to confirm as Sabor’s conjecture about the true identity of Ladies True-Wit and Know-All. Regardless, the larger point stands: in the eyes of those reflecting on Lady Mary, her fondness for Barnwell signified a shared sentimentality on the part of those who mourned the ordinary. If a taste for domestic tragedy had 8  See Diderot, Entretiens, 4:1247; cf. Moretti, Bourgeois, 73. 9 Diderot, “Eulogy of Richardson,” 266–91. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically and refer to this edition. 10  Wortley, “Anecdotes of Lady M. W. Montagu,” 1:86. 11 Montagu, Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 179.

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178  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy indeed infiltrated high life, a sensitivity to that pain had now become a pattern worth emulating by average readers.12 Because “Nature is Nature,” the social context of suffering is secondary to its visceral claim on the person of sensibility, who imagines him- or herself as part of a community bound primarily by a capacity to imagine and feel (more on this shortly). In her account of sentimentality’s place in Anglo-American emotion, Julie Ellison sees a similar democratization of affliction at work in that cultural turn. She traces sentiment further back than I have here, and finds its roots in the conspiratorial Roman plays that encoded Whig politics following the Restoration and which reached a fever pitch during the Exclusion Crisis (1789–81). Plays like Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus (1680) imagined suffering as a spectacle of masculine self-sacrifice, reserved for a privileged few. Describing the so-called Age of Sensibility as the misrecognized “second act” of the cultural movement, she argues that sensibility first emerges as a homosocial discourse, a gendered language for imagining male political behavior as a tension between Stoicism and tenderheartedness. With time, the patrician rhetoric of sacrifice and the vicarious ­experience of that pain in works as varied as John Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel (1681), Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserv’d (1682), and Addison’s Cato would give way to a generalized theory of sentiment, crossing genres and genders in its practice, before denoting the sorts of “intersubjective” emotional relations explored in the novels of its late eighteenth-century heyday. By the 1770s—during which Henry Mackenzie rose to fame with The Man of Feeling (1771)—the power of sentimentality in the public sphere was often held up as an avowed ideal, even if only in the breach. Increasingly, a sensitivity to suffering emerged as a signal mark of one’s acculturation to modern, democratic life.13 Sensibility comes to take different objects as the period advances, this story goes, with sympathy’s frame shifting gradually from “transactions between socially equal persons . . . towards scenarios of inequality.”14 Whereas we see homosocial bonds between peers explored at the beginning of the eighteenth century, by its latter half, sentimental literature is more and more concerned with a sensitivity to “needy others”—the poor, slaves, and colon­ ized populations abroad, for example. In the classic view, Adam Potkay notes: “sympathetic interest in the pain of others extends downward and 12 Fielding, David Simple, 381, n.19. 13  For Lynn Hunt, writing of the French context, sentimental fiction prepared the ground from which the revolution would emerge. See Family Romance of the French Revolution. 14 Ellison, Cato’s Tears, 19. Lynn Festa expands this argument to encompass French sources in her Sentimental Figures of Empire.

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Tragic Sensibilities  179 outward.”15 Accordingly, sentimentalism reveals those asymmetries of power in our public life; the pitying agent stands in contrast to the helpless object of sympathy. Placing this development in the context of the British and French empire, Lynn Festa thus identifies sentimentality as a primarily “rhetorical practice” that codifies power by “locat[ing] . . . emotion [and] designating who possesses affect and who elicits it.” If there’s an aesthetic of affective identification at work here, then, it obtains between a privileged class of mourners, who find common ground by virtue of this othered object of feeling: “The sentimental community upholds a common identity, not by forging bonds directly between seemingly like individuals, but by creating a shared relationship to a common but excluded object about which the community has feelings.”16 Bourgeois tragedy adds a wrinkle to this genealogy, however, insofar as its appearance in the sentimental novel imagines a middling sort whose mourning sustains them at once as subjects and objects of that feeling. A case of feeling striking close to home, David’s interest in readings of The London Merchant stands as an occasion for mourning someone rather like himself. As Fielding is careful to clarify, he comes from a line of London merchants and country laborers, regular people who by an “honest and industrious life” (9) have provided David the kind of upbringing that grants him a partial access to a more genteel world. His father had been a successful Ludgate mercer, we learn early on, a profession “neither to be reckoned in very high, nor in low Life” (45). Yet like many others in the middle rank, his is a family of social strivers, whose education of their son has sought to place him “on a footing to be respected and used as well, as if [he] had been born in a much higher Station” (7), backed by that relatively new foundation to social prestige: money. Though the novel’s narrator later declares David to  lack “Ambition,” he and his brother, Daniel, decide to “leave off their Father’s Business” at practically the first opportunity to do so (245; 11). David thereby embodies the upwardly mobile assertion of bourgeois dignity in the face of its denigration, grasping after a gentleman’s standing even if only by emulation. As avatar of this prosperous mercantile class, David’s development as protagonist dovetails nicely with a story about the rising visibility and 15  Potkay, “Cato’s Tears (review),” 465–8. 16 Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire, 4. Other versions of this story, which space prevents me from explicating here, see sentimentality as the softer side of a racialized or classed politics, or as the enabling emotion of capitalism’s ruthless economy, or as the performance of feelings that seek to negate the anonymity of modern life. In each case, however, sentimentalism schematizes object relations.

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180  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy agency of a Georgian middle station defined in part as compassionate spectators of affliction (whether or not that reputation is actually substantiated by the historical record). Years later, Fielding will gloss this ambition on the part of the family as an hamartia of sorts, an error only belatedly understood as tragically determinative. Though she certainly didn’t know it at the time of this volume’s publication, her narrator’s deflating “as if . . . born in a much higher Station” (7) comes to foreshadow the eventual failure of the family’s social engineering, evoking comparison with other domestic tragedies. No amount of paper money—“imaginary property,” as J. G. A. Pocock characterizes the period’s emerging credit economy, and as Fielding indicates by noting that the patriarch’s “Estate was personal” (9)—will provide the stability of a gentleman’s real estate.17 A handful of poor decisions and the paper signifiers of Mr. Simple, Sr.’s worth vanish along with the advantages it once conferred. By the closing chapters of Volume the Last, precious little of the family inheritance will remain in his possession, despite the best of intentions. In fact, their fate is sealed by David’s ill-fated attempt to set up his own son, Peter, for a better life among the haute bourgeoisie in town. Promising to take care of his son, the sly “Man of Fortune” (248), Mr. Ratcliff, manages to bilk David out of everything he owns precisely by promising that eventually young Peter will be “in so different a Station of Life from the rest of his Family” (275). In reality, Ratcliff secures himself time and access to the lucrative properties the family had once stood to inherit and which might finally have allowed them to claim a more comfortable status as part of the gentry. Snatched away by the enterprising capitalist, the loss of their fortune becomes a freighted symbol of the middling sort’s actual precariousness and the ephemerality of value in the period.18 Fielding seems determined to unsettle many of the mythologies of the middle rank and the promises of modern life. Scarcely a few pages into David Simple, for example, and the supportive domestic aura of the family dissolves into a self-interested quarrel over inheritance. With the help of a family servant, whose cooperation is secured with “a hundred Guineas” and the promise that “by this means [she] would be enabled to live in a manner much above . . . her Acquaintance” (10), Daniel defrauds his overly trusting brother rather easily, initiating a series of events that results in the home’s fracture. 17 Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, 112. See also Hirschman, Passions and the Interests. 18 Johnson, Political Biography, 180–1. See also Kim, “Mourning, Melancholia, and Modernity,” 477–502.

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Tragic Sensibilities  181 David will recover his financial losses when the will is set aright and Daniel’s plot exposed, but here and throughout the novel, its gentle satire reveals a much more worldly approach to the conflicting desires that rend families apart. No wonder, given what we know of Sarah and Henry’s childhood. Following the death of their mother, the Fielding children were mired in an ugly, protracted legal battle between their dissolute father, Edmund, and the family’s maternal wing. At stake was custody over the children and, by implication, the rights to the East Stour farm held for them in trust.19 Fielding’s text compulsively stages instances of domestic ­alienation and failed inheritance, rehearsing a veritable litany of profligate fathers and troubled households. Practically every depiction of the natural family in David Simple illustrates its fragility and entanglement in matters pecuniary, subverting the home’s imagined safety. Not long after the salon mentioned above, readers are introduced to Cynthia, the witty female counterpart to naïf David, who befriends him by swapping stories of domestic misery. Raised in a household that neither understands nor fosters her interests, she is teased by her parents and bullied by envious sisters, put up to a loveless marriage that she characterizes as the sordid “Business of [her] Father’s” (86). She’s a “bargain,” we learn, in all-too-familiar period language that frames her relationship to her parent in terms of property and its “Trade” (85). When she refuses to marry dutifully, she is excluded from the family will, so that upon her father’s sudden death, she is reduced to the status of a wandering, surrogate servant among friends only reluctantly supporting her. “I know not to what Malignity it is owing,” Cynthia observes, “but . . . in all the Families I have ever been acquainted with . . . one part of them spend their whole time in oppressing and teazing the other and all this they do . . . to show their Power” (92). Similarly, Camilla and Valentine, the sibling duo that complete David’s inner circle, form their bond with the protagonist by recounting their own expulsion from the home. Recollections of household violence and abuse at the hands of her father and his second wife reopen old wounds for Camilla especially, whose budding intimacy with David sees Fielding appropriate some of domestic tragedy’s most sordid themes. The wrongful implication of incest, an aging father’s overheated libido, and their stepmother’s desire for total control of the home end in a scraping existence for the two “among the Lower Sort of People” that populate London’s back alleys (98). Poor and debt-ridden, Camilla struggles to avoid prostitution and rape (though some suggestive

19  Battestin and Battestin, Henry Fielding, 18–23.

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182  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy language in the text might allow the opposite interpretation), nearly giving in to suicide “under the Weight of [her] Afflictions” (129). David’s sympathetic intervention halts this familiar trajectory, rescuing the siblings from a tragedy in the offing. But in an important sense, it’s the difficulty of negotiating middling life itself that proves so prone to real misfortune in the novel. When she implies that the stain of her rumored incest with Valentine has barred her from petitioning friends, Camilla traces the depth of her hardship to an i­ntractable position in the social mean, where prosperity is so closely aligned to probity. “I could not shew my Head among any of my old Acquaintance,” she notes, underscoring the shame of their unwarranted suspicions, especially among those pious “Ladies” whose “Spleen” masquerades as “the Cause of Virtue” (129). No time for the disgraced among respectable company, it seems. Moreover, though her manner of dress gains her a hearing with “Gentlemen” of means, that compassion is revealed as merely a pretext for sexual favors. If the outward markers of rank seem at first to provide some security— the siblings’ genteel appearance grants them access to creditors—that illusion is quickly punctured by the vulnerabilities of her gender in the vaunted private sphere. Ironically, her anonymity enables the kind of illicit quid pro quo that falsely marred her reputation and forced her out of her home in the first place. In such conditions, the way forward might be simply to embrace her beggarly status as déclassé, a choice that will confirm for many that “[they] must certainly deserve their Distress” (132). Yet no rest can come from joining the ranks of the disfigured and ragged poor, whose life is spent ignored, cursed, and, as it turns out for her, violently robbed of what little she seeks to bring home to an ailing brother (131). “Persons who are so unfortunate to be in this Situation, are in a World full of People, and yet are as solitary as if they were in the wildest Desart,” she adds, “no body will allow them to be of their Rank, nor admit them into their Community” (133). Astonishing “Cruelty” seems to be the siblings’ lot, despite the injustice of their loss of standing, which is far more difficult to recover than it was to lose (99). In the novel’s tragic sequel, Fielding’s narrator will describe the life of real poverty as a kind of harrowing middle state: “a Situation in Life that you know not how to go out of, and yet are not able to support . . . [where] it will be easily believed, you deserved your Fate, and they do right in abandoning you to it” (246). To be in this kind of distress is to be pinned down in a zone of social and emotional isolation, a space where the costs of being poor are far too high to remedy.

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Tragic Sensibilities  183 Trade proves troublesome as well, its values no refuge for those seeking a lasting happiness. Commerce in the novel is marked by a profound ambivalence toward the changing socio-economic order, so much so that many critics have seen in Fielding’s work a kind of incipient radicalism pitched against the pieties of bourgeois life.20 I’m reluctant to go so far, though it is true that David Simple treats capitalist London and its tradespeople with a circumspection that renders them at best necessary evils. Much has been made of scenes depicting the “trading Part of the Town” (146), where David and his friends seem to be transplanted into a ghastly Hogarthian vision, replete with drunkards, randy “Gentlemen,” and dissolute gamblers. Middlerank men pretend at being rakes, stumbling out of the gaming house with little regard for those in their care. Storefronts set the scene for petty indignities: an aggrieved woman laments the cruelty of a husband who defers on buying her “everything new” like “Neighbour such-a-one” (149); “Jewels and Trinkets” move the baser passions and grant one a fleeting glimpse of happiness (148); the Exchange turns a “good man” into a target of the trader’s betrayal (23). Vanity, envy, an overreaching ambition—these are to what the middling and Britain’s late prosperity owes. They are also, claims Cynthia, “the common Cause of most Evils” in this life (150). Linking these mercantile values to scenes of domestic harm, Camilla envisions madness: “in all that number of Houses they passed, how many miserable Creatures there were tearing each other to-pieces” (148). As if swept up in a tragic bacchanal, each destroying their own, the city seems possessed by forces beyond its control. Fielding will back off of the most strident implications of this critique when she urges her reader to “perform the part allotted [them] by Nature, or [their] Station in Life” if they wish to find “real Happiness” (237), a move that all but surrenders to this early capitalist machinery. So in a reversal, the novel’s original ending closes by depicting the tearful reunion between Camilla, Valentine, and their estranged father in which the siblings are restored the standing and fortune they earlier lost. As their father observes, the suffering they’ve endured proves their worthiness as heirs even as it confirms his unworthiness as a caretaker. Like many of the era’s sentimental comedies, this hasty conclusion is unconvincing, a sense compounded by the way it neatly ties together the loose threads of the plot by pairing the siblings in marriages to David and Cynthia. On the surface, such details suggests a kinship with that tradition of pathos-driven humor and a hope that

20  See Johnson, Political Biography, chap. 6; cf. Johns, Women’s Utopias, chap. 3.

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184  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy works of “moral romance” (as she referred to the novel in its Advertisement) could bring about societal reform.21 But there’s an ­underlying tragic ­sensibility in the solemnity with which the novel treats its grimy depictions of the urban life. Here the masses of afflicted city dwellers betray a gloominess at the heart of the text, a sharp contrast to the self-assured optimism of sentimental comedy. In those moralizing plays, there seems little doubt that all will work out in the end, and depictions of low life are finessed at a distance, so ironized that their brutality rarely makes it to view. In reality, sentimental comedy’s humor verges on a romanticized negation of the melancholy that permeates David Simple and its fictional descendants, weighed down as those latter works are by the ever-present burdens of sympathy. In contrast to the typical sentimental ensemble, moreover, the elevation of David, Camilla, Valentin, and Cynthia only occurs after the real loss of family and the means to provide for oneself, crippling them with stigma and want until they assume their part among the fortunate few. Thus, voicing something close to survivor’s guilt, Camilla admits that she’s unsure if she ought to be “ashamed” of the fact that she’s escaped: “She could not but own the pleasing Sensations she felt, for being delivered herself from those Misfortunes, more than over-balanced her Sorrow for her Fellow-Creatures” (148). In light of this, the convenient pairings at the end of the novel seem less a jaunty twist than a defensive huddle inward, effectively recreating a more caring family unit tied together by elective rather than natural ties. For Fielding, it seems, tragedy’s looming atmosphere proves difficult to dispel given the precariousness of modern life. Whereas this ending offers the sheen of “real Happiness,” David’s exemplary little society is also exceptional, and even then, their vulnerability ultimately illustrates the much more sober maxim taken up in 1753’s Volume the Last: “That solid and lasting Happiness is not to be attained in this World” (245). Indeed, the same values and concerns that propelled David’s fortune at the start of Fielding’s novel prove to be as unstable, angst-ridden, and paradoxical as his attempts to claim the status of bourgeois gentilhomme. Tellingly, this late “tragic” turn—and Fielding explicitly confers it that status (261)—occurs in large part through the treachery and callousness of two figures who ruthlessly seek to transcend their moderate station, Mr. Ratcliff and Mr. Orgueil. Fielding earlier vouched for the dignity of ordinary people, but her cynicism also refuses to conflate middle-rank simplicity with purity of heart, dispelling

21 Fielding, David Simple, [4].

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Tragic Sensibilities  185 many of the fictions that prop up any overly broad claim to that station’s moral rectitude. Despite a prideful condescension to the bourgeois early in the novel, for example, Mr. Orgueil has only lately come into his wife’s fortune and taken on the life of a country gentleman, enamored with his own dignity in a way that, because it refuses vulnerability, inevitably makes true attachment to others impossible (250). By contrast, it’s precisely David’s willingness to love and care deeply for ­others that causes him so much pain. If the novel’s earlier conclusion found solace in their new-made community, Volume the Last finds this to have been a prelude to tragic mourning, a fateful bargain made in every act of sympathy. As his circle slowly withers away in death and the pressures of subsistence crowd him to the grave, David realizes that affliction is a c­ ollective practice and shared feeling, as communal as the earthly goods and pleasures the utopian Simples had earlier pooled together. To nurture “an Attachment to Objects subject to Infirmities, Diseases, and to certain Death” is to take part in an exercise in futility and failure, the narrator observes in the novel’s earnest final moments. Done in by the sheer weight of everyday afflictions, David’s dying moments convert the novel’s countless petty tragedies into a realization that the tragic is a condition of life itself. * * * Not enough attention has been paid to the importance of these glimpses of tragic realism to early sentimental literature, though the latter is conventionally understood to establish a popular iconography of suffering. Scenes that seem pulled directly out of grim domestic dramas repeatedly make appearances in the era’s sentimental fiction, however, betraying a much harsher world view than their reputations let on. Like bourgeois tragedy, sentimental fiction relies in this way upon a sober familiarity with hardship and an acute sense of the vulnerability and value of ordinary lives. As one helpful point of comparison, consider the final work of Fielding’s brother Henry, Amelia (1751), deemed from the start a failure for having accomplished exactly what he set out to do: explore the stresses of marriage for those struggling to remain in the middle station.22 Fielding would go on to defend his novel as a reinterpretation of epic tropes, but in my view, the alloy of sentimentality and gravitas it relies upon is much more ambitious, at times tragic in its sensibility, while at others a forerunner to the complex realism 22  Citations to Fielding’s Amelia (ed. Battestin) will refer to the Wesleyan edition and appear parenthetically.

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186  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy of the serious genre. Readers expecting the lighter fare of his earlier work, he admitted, were bound to be disappointed be the “very sad Stuff ” at the heart of Amelia, no matter how fortunate its ending.23 Set largely in the narrow confines of London, Fielding’s novel offers a slice of life and substitutes the arch heroes of The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews (1742) and The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749) with “a very worthy Couple [and] the Distresses which they waded through” (15). The marriage-plot ending of the comedy lies buried deep in William and Amelia Booth’s past, well before the novel kicks off in—of all places—a prison house where the debt-ridden “subaltern Officer” Booth awaits bail (340). A cast of ghoulish figures, from an abusive and diseased street-walker, Blear-Eyed Moll (“nothing more ragged, or more dirty, was ever emptied out of the Round-house at St. Giles’s” [28]), to a lonely gambler (“not such a Pickpocket in the whole Quad” [36]), to a skeletal old man dying in his daughter’s arms (“committed for stealing a Loaf, in order to support” her [34]), haunt the cells on the way to Newgate. Fielding’s narration describes the horrid shrieks and groans that echo there, so that if some of this imagery seems burlesque, it’s also weighed down by an atmosphere redolent of the  bloody realistic tragedies that emerged during his days as a theatrical manager. In their authoritative biography of Fielding, Martin and Ruthe Battestin suggest we read Amelia in light of the author’s work as a Bow Street magistrate, stationed quite literally across the street from the taverns, gaming-tables, and playhouses he helped police following his appointment in 1748.24 Writing at this nexus of performative, literary, and municipal worlds, Fielding’s late prose is thoroughly familiar with London’s criminal element, which must have seemed inseparable from the activity of the city’s bustling bourgeois class. As his sister had in David Simple, Henry portrays the metropolis as a hive of decadence and debauchery, where the middling ape their betters and nearly everyone struggles to avoid penury and disgrace. In this respect, Booth seems to be plucked out of bourgeois tragedy, a forerunner to Edward Moore’s destitute gambler, Beverley. (Fielding and Moore were in fact close friends, meeting weekly as part of “The Wits’ Club,” along with members William Hogarth, Charles Burney, and the former tradesman-turned-Vauxhall Gardens proprietor, Jonathan Tyers, who makes a brief appearance in the

23 Fielding, Covent-Garden Journal, 58. 24  Battestin and Battestin, Henry Fielding, 538–9.

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Tragic Sensibilities  187 novel.25) Like The Gamester’s (1753) namesake, Booth carouses his way into debt, acting the part of the Epicure with little sense of the true costs of his eventual incarceration. One haunting instance of this involves Booth’s former love interest, with whom he finds himself fatefully incarcerated. Over several chapters, Miss Matthews recounts a sordid story of bigamy and seduction in which one Mr. Hebbers maintains her as a kept mistress, nursed by the promise that someday they’ll marry—until one ruinous morning when, having learned that the woman at Hebbers’ side at the playhouse the night before was in fact his wife, Miss Matthews shows up at their home in “the highest Agony of Rage” (91). By the end of her tale, Hebbers lies bleeding on the ground, a pen knife stuck in his chest; his erstwhile lover, “full of so much Bitterness and Indignation” (92), awaits her hanging, as unrepentant as Lillo’s Millwood. And just as seductive, apparently, for a half-drunk Booth guiltily beds her moments later, an act that follows him throughout the balance of the novel after Miss Matthews finagles her release and blackmails him. Unlike Amelia’s constancy and patient faithfulness, she soon reveals herself to rule by, and be ruled by, impulsive erotic passions. Many of the novel’s most sympathetic moments are shot through with tawdry violence of this sort, alternating springs of pity and terror for their reader. Mrs. Bennet’s traumatic memories of sexual battery and domestic violence offer a striking case in point. Warning her friend Amelia to be wary of Mrs. Ellison’s fiendish invitations to the masquerade, Mrs. Bennet confesses that she was violated by the latter’s aristocratic cousin under similar pretenses, in turn passing on venereal disease to her cuckolded husband. That her rapist was a respected Lord, whose plot worked by worming his way into the family’s acquaintance through feigned affections and financial consideration, is just one of the ways that Fielding pits the middle sort against a rapacious Ancien Régime in the novel. (The episode also seems to evince Richardson’s influence upon his great rival, who, more than anyone perhaps, had cleared the way for serious fiction in the expansive texture of his sentimental prose.26) Yet here again, the consequences of such a liaison fall inordinately upon private citizens in the spaces they take as sanctuary, turning middle-rank certainties inside out. As Amelia soon learns, the illness her friend now carries is merely symptomatic of what literally plagues the Bennet home, since having

25  On this connection, see Battestin, Henry Fielding Companion, 149–50; David Coke and Alan Borg’s richly imagined Vauxhall Gardens is a great resource on the membership and role of The Wits’ Club in shaping London’s polite society in the period. 26 Rawson, Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal, chap. 3.

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188  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy “discovered the fatal Secret” (299), Mrs. Bennet’s husband goes on to viciously beat her to within an inch of life. Stammering through her recollections, she recounts his bloody attempts at suicide and her shame following the assault, and confesses the familiar refrain of battered women even to this day: “I thought I deserved it all” (299). “When I became sensible . . . of the Injury I had done my Husband,” she swoons in order to exculpate him, “I threw myself at his Feet, and embracing his Knees, while I bathed them in Tears . . . said truly, that if I owed my Death that Instant to his Hands, I should have no other Terrour [sic], but of the fatal Consequence which it might produce to himself ” (300–1). In the context of the novel, this moment is one of its most sympathetic, but its evocation of pathos operates precisely through the shock of a lurid domestic tragedy. Fielding explores one of tragedy’s principal motifs as it manifests among the folk he referred to as “the Commonalty,” in effect humbling its theme by blanketing it in the prosaic.27 What is it that compels one to action, the novel asks, “the Necessity arising from the Impulse of Fate, [or] the Necessity arising from the Impulse of Passion?” (32). Just two years earlier, his sister had issued a call for writers to take such questions seriously, echoing the logic of early bourgeois tragedies in arguing for the use-value of depicting average people in common situations. Novels like Clarissa, she argued in her celebrated Remarks on the text, had offered examples drawn from what Samuel Johnson termed “familiar histories,” homely stories whose power lay in the fact that they were apt to be recognizable to all private citizens, and ladies especially.28 Hence, a Lady in her dialogue comments: “I really think the penetrating into the Motives that actuate the Persons in a private Family, of much more general use to be known, than those concerning the Management of any Kingdom or Empire whatsoever: The latter, Princes, Governors, and Politicians only can be the better for, whilst every Parent, every Child, every Sister, and every Brother, are concerned in the former.”29 Booth’s lack of fixed principles offers a negative example in the novel, and initially suggests that one’s passions and economic circumstances are fatally entwined, that people are determined in large part by their situation, a conclusion not unlike that which Fielding explores in his reformist tracts at midcentury.30 This period, in fact, sees his most concerted efforts at social

27  Battestin and Battestin, Henry Fielding, 513. 28  Johnson, “The Rambler, No. 4, Saturday March 31, 1750,” 176. 29 Fielding, Remarks on Clarissa, 7. See also Bannett, Domestic Revolution, 60. 30  See Battestin and Battestin, Henry Fielding, 514–19.

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Tragic Sensibilities  189 reform, brought about by a renewed sensitivity to the desperation of those on the losing end of London’s emerging capital economy. Fielding draws inspiration from the waves of military men in the city who, having been disbanded or reduced to half-pay following midcentury campaigns, now found themselves underemployed, swelling the ranks of the city’s migratory labor while also unable to keep up with the increased costs of living in a densifying urban core.31 Set a bit earlier, Booth’s situation stems, surprisingly, from successes at the Siege of Gibraltar in 1727, which naturally brought his active service to a close. As his story unfolds, the inability to make prudent decisions for his family, to remain faithful to his wife, and to maintain financial solvency seem compulsive acts of self-destruction, the work of something far more potent than that weak and impoverished man. Confined for much of the novel to “the Verge” (the area surrounding the royal court where debtors were immune from arrest; here, a symbol of the legal frameworks that overrule his freedom), he finds himself hemmed in by the consequences of his past and the limitations of his status. Turning the screw on the domestic stakes here, Fielding tells of how he can only look on as Amelia attracts a gaggle of aristocratic figures better suited to provide for her (cf. 189ff., where her trip to the oratorio lands her the interest of a “Gentleman,” who assumes she is available).32 Booth’s resulting insecurity repeatedly threatens to boil over in fits of jealousy, helped along by “Othello’s blood in him” (437), in a reference to one of the genre’s founding instances of household betrayal. For all the agency Booth seems to assert, then, this merely confirms him to be (in David Hume’s contemporaneous turn) a slave to his passions, and by extension, the forces that appear to determine them. Booth’s theory of emotion admits as much, abdicating moral agency under the assumption that “every man acted merely from the force of that passion which was uppermost in his mind” (32).33 Passion overrules character, in his view, turning the self into a Humean illusion propped up by warring emotion. And if this is so, the poor man concludes, action has “neither Merit nor Demerit” (511), compelled as it is by whatever libidinal object or sense impression possesses him at the moment. As Hester Mulso Chapone shrewdly adjudged the character’s failures: “a violent love for his wife [nevertheless] could not keep him from injuring her in the most essential points.”34 By contrast, Amelia’s unwavering 31  Battestin and Battestin, Henry Fielding, 512. 32 See Gladfelder, Criminality and Narrative, chap.  11, on Fielding’s novel of law and London’s real-life legal spaces. 33  On Hume’s importance to the novel, see Battestin, “The Problem of Amelia,” 613–48. 34  Chapone, “Letter to Elizabeth Carter, 11 February 1752,” 1:45–6.

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190  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy virtue and self-assurance complicates Booth’s feckless psycho-affective logic and places her in the kind of intractable position that we usually see as tragic. Such probity may ground Amelia, but it nevertheless fails to save her from the destitution her husband’s choices bring about, and occasionally, it brings her dangerously close to physical harm. Despite the novel’s sensationalism, however, Amelia’s suffering represents some of Fielding’s subtlest writing on emotion. What hurts her most are the little slights she is made to endure in her impoverished condition, the halftruths and disappointments that fray her relationship to Booth and thereby threaten to ruin the one thing in this life that she still holds to: her family. Amelia’s emotional crescendo at the close of book eleven sees this all come to a head, resulting in what the text labels “A very tragic scene” (490) and which stands as the novel’s clearest attempt at evoking pity and terror. Having patiently weathered Booth’s imprisonment and dutifully pawned off the few possessions in her care, Amelia scrounges together her husband’s favorite meal with a cheerful near-obliviousness to how dire their situation actually is. “I question whether it be possible to view this fine Creature in a more amiable light, than while she was dressing her Husband’s Supper with her little Children playing round her,” opines the book’s narrator (488). The picture is one of domestic felicity in the face of hardship, an almost overly idealized image of marital tenderness, which is what makes the simile that follows so portentous: As in the delightful Month of June, when the Sky is all serene, and the whole Face of Nature looks with a pleasing and smiling Aspect, suddenly a dark Cloud spreads itself over the Hemisphere, the Sun vanishes from our Sight, and every Object is obscured by a dark and horrid Gloom; so happened it to Amelia: the Joy that had enlightened every Feature disappeared in a Moment; the Lustre forsook her shining Eyes, and all the little Loves that played and wantoned in her Cheeks hung their drooping Heads, and with a faint trembling Voice she repeated her Husband’s Words, “Not sup with me to Night, my dear!”  (489)

Fielding’s skill as a prose stylist here shouldn’t obscure the theatricality of the scene unfolding, which has its reader imagine the cramped space of the lodging house and devolves into snatches of broken dialogue. There, among the scenery of everyday squalor, Booth’s liaison with Miss Matthews finally comes out and the novel’s baggy narrative presses to a point. Amelia tries to assure the children that nothing is wrong, but alone and pushed to the brink, it’s just too much to bear:

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Tragic Sensibilities  191 “Why did I bring these little Wretches into the World! Why were these Innocents born to such a Fate!”—She then threw her Arms round them both . . . and cried, “O my Children! my Children! Forgive me my Babes— Forgive me that I have brought you into such a World as this. You are undone—my Children are undone . . . Mention [your father] no more,” cries Amelia—“your Papa is—indeed he is a wicked Man—he cares not for any of us—O Heavens, is this the Happiness I promised myself this Evening!”—At which Words she fell into an Agony, holding both her Children in her Arms.  (491)

A housemaid walks in; the sight is a “frightful” one, thick with “melancholy.” In a startling confession, Amelia reassures the housemaid (and us?) that she is “subject to these Fits sometimes” (491). How many times, and why does she stay? And what will happen if she leaves? Regardless, her sense of the family, her confidence that love can sustain them in their diminished condition, is shaken. In holding fast to hearth and home, she is brought low. Brought low, but not undignified. And this is worth stressing, since that distinction encapsulates the valorization of the ordinary at work in the novel’s depictions of suffering. Notice, for example, Amelia’s common-sense appeal to their dignity when Booth asks her how they are to get by under an avalanche of debt. “By our Labour,” is her unblinking response, transforming their adversity into a demonstration of worth far deeper than rank: “I am able to labour, and I am sure I am not ashamed of it” (527). This is a sweet reply, as unembarrassed by its sentiment as it is of dirtying one’s hands with common work. For this reason, too, it’s easy to see why readers scoffed at Amelia’s innocence, or why many thought they sensed Fielding’s tongue-incheek leveling at work (just what kind of labor does a woman with a disfigured nose perform circa 1730?). But I think Fielding means to play it straight here by soliciting our recognition of a shared vulnerability. Hence, her response to Booth’s feigned incredulousness: “And do you really think you can support such a Life?” “I am sure I could be happy in it,” answered Amelia, “And why not I as well as a thousand others, who have not the Happiness of such Husband to make Life delicious? Why should I complain of my hard Fate, while so many, who are much poorer than I, enjoy theirs. Am I of a superior Rank of Being to the Wife of the honest Labourer? Am I not Partaker of one common Nature with her?”  (527)

Here the prospect of an arduous proletarian existence underwrites Amelia’s own bourgeois sensibilities; hardship registers the value of those comforts

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192  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy that her status affords. As Eric Rothstein observes, Fielding “treads the rim of [domestic tragedy]” in Amelia right up until its final pages, when a twist of the plot reveals her to be the inheritor of almost all her mother’s fortune.35 Tellingly, though, it’s in slumming it that Amelia confirms her worth once and for all. Amelia’s argument in these final moments thus amounts to an impassioned suspension of the class clause that bourgeois tragedy and the genre sérieux sought to abolish as well. “Nature is Nature in whatever Station it is placed,” the novel’s suffering namesake seems to indicate in her own way. Insofar as she exemplifies this, insofar as her own worth is not only maintained but proven in the meanness of her affliction, that refrain becomes emblematic of Fielding’s novel. Or as Booth rhapsodizes early on: “the Sun of Righteousness hath shone forth with all its Glory in a Cottage” (124). Amelia’s suffering becomes a sentimental blazon. Far from merely representing the lives of ordinary persons—an old “rise of the novel” chestnut if ever there was one—Fielding’s text invests value and meaning in their suffering, and in this way, invites his reader to mourn them too. He ­imagines his middling characters, threatened with the loss of status and reduced to an ugly, bare subsistence, as nevertheless worthy of compassion and respect. * * * I’ve been arguing above that sentimental fiction thrives in relation to both an awareness of the cruelties of modern life and a broader revaluation of ordinary persons, and have thereby positioned that nascent tradition alongside bourgeois tragedy and its first generation of practitioners. To be clear, the links I’ve drawn between the genres are largely correlational ones that, insofar as they also imply causality, do so through a number of minute agencies for which I’ve only begun to account. But my argument has nevertheless been that their entanglement is far from coincidental in the period, and in several instances, their connections may in fact be profound. In this section, therefore, I want to elucidate this relationship a bit more by describing bourgeois and domestic tragedy’s role in habituating certain emotions and public moods in the media of sentimentalism. 35 Rothstein, Systems of Order, 195. The Battestins argue that Amelia marks the “first novel of social protest and reform in English.” See Henry Fielding, 539. A number of critics have likewise recognized the drama in Amelia’s pathos and dialogic prose. On this claim, see Battestin and Battestin, Henry Fielding, 539; and Bartolomeo, New Species of Criticism, 86; for a more in-depth discussion of Fielding’s appropriation of dramatic techniques for the novel, see Widmayer, Theatre and the Novel, chaps. 4–5.

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Tragic Sensibilities  193 Of course, I’m hardly the first to draw a link between tragedy and popular sentimentality in this way. Several scholars have quite explicitly seen the culture of sensibility as an appropriation of the era’s theatrical techniques for the work of sympathy. Hence, Vivasvan Soni’s distillation of sentimentalism as an anodyne phenomenology of tragic theatregoing: For a sentimental ethics, the street becomes the theater of sentiments, and every successful ethical encounter is akin to watching a good tragedy. Through the culture of sentimentalism, tragedy aspires to become more than a literary genre: it is turned into a worldview or tragic ethos . . . [Thus] the institutional site of classical tragedy comes to be occupied by the cultural discourse of sentimentalism in eighteenth-century Europe.36

While I’m not nearly as suspicious of the pernicious effects of this shift over the long term, I see a similar slippage at work in the way sentimentality co-opts tragedy’s emotional ends. Similarly, though with different emphases, David Marshall and Margaret Cohen have argued for the close analogy (and in some cases, causal connections) between the spectatorial gaze of tragic theatre and sentimental fiction.37 Speaking of the French context, for instance, Cohen sees the “topos of the tableau” as one of the sentimental novel’s primary strategies, a hold-over from the drame through which crisis and emotional paralysis are inscribed upon a suffering body.38 Transferred to the novel’s prose, situated within narratives of sacrifice and personal misfortune, the tableau solicits sympathy from readers whose recognition becomes its own refuge and consolation. Hence, what began as tragic catharsis becomes a model for sentimental protagonist and reader alike, whose enactment of lament becomes the token of their inclusion in a sphere bound by what Lauren Berlant terms “public intimacy.”39 I’ll come back to this last point in a moment, but first I want to echo this stress on sentimental fiction’s borrowed form. For though Cohen’s argument is specific to the French context, similar forces were at work across the Channel in the creation of sentimental fiction—and much earlier than Cohen and others have assumed. Here David Simple’s case is especially interesting insofar as it accounts for one of the original works of novelized sensibility. 36 Soni, Mourning Happiness, 296–7. 37 David Marshall explores this in some detail in Figure of the Theater, while Margaret Cohen places this in the context of French realist literature of the nineteenth century in Sentimental Education of the Novel. 38 Cohen, Sentimental Education of the Novel, 65–7. 39  Lauren Berlant, Female Complaint, xli.

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194  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy Its narrative repeatedly calls attention to the spectatorial gaze of its principal figure over scenes of everyday misfortune. When David first meets the destitute Valentine and Camilla, for instance, his scanning of the mise-en-scène of affliction—“He went up stairs . . . where he saw a most moving scene”— evokes the staging of a domestic tableau. Thus: There lay on a Bed . . . a young Man, looking as pale as Death, with his Eyes sunk in his Head, and hardly able to breathe, covered with a dirty Rug, which would scarce come round him. On one side of him sat holding him by the Hand, a young Woman in an old Silk Gown . . . so tattered it would barely cover her with Decency; with a Countenance turned wan with Affliction . . . The Walls were bare, and broke in many placed in such a manner, that they were scarce sufficient to keep out the Weather.  (99)

Indeed, countless “scenes” of distress move the plot forward, station-bystation, culminating in the “tragic” “Scenes of Misery” that cloud Volume the Last (261; 326). Though the metaphor of the novel as stagecraft may be largely dead to us, its remediation here suggests a much more intentional adoption—if not also an imagination thoroughly conditioned by theatregoing and the reading of drama. The use of tableau persists throughout the century, however. Consider Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, whose introduction in the recent Oxford World’s Classic edition notes that the novel’s movement works by repeatedly halting over scenes of suffering, verging at times upon “still life.”40 One instance of this, notable for its deployment of a classic situation in domestic drama, is the climactic discovery scene between Miss Atkins, her father, and the novel’s protagonist, Harley, in a London rooming house. Mackenzie nests this episode within a backstory delivered in Emily Atkins’ first-person narration. She is the daughter of an officer on half-pay, she tells Harley and the reader, who, having found herself seduced by the son of a country aristocrat, Mr. Winbrooke, is cast aside in favor of the high life in London. Pregnant with his child, she tracks him down in a desperate attempt to make things right, adamant that assuming the role of mistress denigrates her family’s little honor. Winbrooke is unmoved, though, and despite her tenacious assertion of self-worth, Emily’s impoverished condition leads her to mistakenly take up with a city bawd who, little by little, inducts her into sex work. Shamed by this and stints in debtor’s prison, scarred by the eventual miscarriage of her child, and cut off from a father she left behind, Harley 40  Vickers, Introduction to The Man of Feeling, xiv.

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Tragic Sensibilities  195 rescues her from her “abandonment to the common use of the town” (49). Now, finally, she is valued and understood: Oh! did the daughters of virtue know our sufferings! did they see our hearts torn with anguish amidst the affectation of gaiety which our faces are obliged to assume; our bodies tortured by disease, our minds with that consciousness which they cannot lose! Did they know, did they think of this, Mr. Harley!—their censures are just; but their pity perhaps might spare the wretches whom their justice should condemn.  (49)

The daughters of virtue will remain just as indifferent as they had been to Camilla in David Simple; not so the man of feeling, however, whose tearful response serves as a model for the kind of emotional attunement that bridges affective and imaginative distances alike. Still, pity is not uncomplicated here. The vulnerability shared by Harley and Miss Atkins in the moment heightens what Jay Caplan refers to as the tableau’s “strange eroticism,” its promise of intimacy and pleasure in the picture of the beautiful in distress.41 In the exquisite tension of their mutual understanding—“She saw his tears; her fortitude began to fail at the sight” (50)—both Harley and Emily are momentarily safe from the world’s predations. Mackenzie’s sense of drama plays out this respite for just a beat, however. Barreling into the scene comes the elderly father, enraged by the man he wrongly assumes has ruined his daughter. Gripping his sword tightly, he raises it, ready to end it all in one final bloody exercise of his paternal rights. Here the novel stands still in a heightened display of emotion that seems more at home in the performance space than the pages of a book: His daughter was now prostrate at his feet. “Strike,” said she, “strike here a wretch, whose misery cannot end but with that death she deserves.” Her hair had fallen on her shoulders! her look had the horrid calmness of outbreathed despair! Her father would have spoken; his lip quivered, his cheek grew pale! his eyes lost the lightening of their fury! there was a reproach in them, but with a mingling of pity! He turned them up to heaven—then on his daughter.—He laid his left hand on his heart—the sword dropped from his right—he burst into tears.  (50)

There’s a tremendous amount of information encoded in this passage, from subtle gestures and shifts in posture, to revealing glimpses of emotion, to visual cues for how to block this in the mind’s eye. Note, for example, the 41 Caplan, Framed Narratives, 21.

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196  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy modulations in punctuation, not only the herky-jerky movement implied by the text’s em-dashes, but also (and more interestingly) the cooling of Atkins’ temper in the dropped exclamation points of the passage’s last five clauses. Commentators like to point to scenes like this as evidence of sentimental fiction’s maudlin sincerity (or is it insincerity?), its anticipations of melodrama, even its proximity to farce or camp. But that doesn’t seem quite right for a number of reasons. Certainly, the scene plays up pity—but it also explores a host of other, intricately related emotions that don’t really conform to these dismissals: terror, rage, shame, disappointment, and despair, to name just a few. It’s also clearly wrapped up in the acknowledgment, even implicitly, of his child’s sexual desire and attendant erotic frustration, the fact that their relationship has been broken by an ill-fated pursuit of a rake and the father’s corresponding inability to recognize her autonomy. What tremendous weight resides in the period that follows the word “daughter,” in the silence and familial tension a small, well-placed dot intones. Indeed, approaching this scene with the era’s domestic drama in mind suggests that what seems to be tacky over-expression on the page is really just theatricality transposed, the performance of heightened feeling working itself out in relation to the fledgling codes that govern serious fiction. The overburdened stasis of the tableau was an ideal form for staging this intergenerational and classed confrontation during the latter half of the century. Across both form and content, which is to say in the tableau’s emblematic mediation of o ­ rdinary suffering, sentimental fiction absorbs bourgeois tragedy. Situations like these were fixtures of the middle genre as it developed in relation to the bourgeois and domestic tragedies of earlier in the century, often modulating their effects in light of sentimental trends. The 1770s and 80s, for instance, saw a series of experiments that adapted Diderot’s paradigmatic example of genre sérieux: Le Père de famille (1758), first as Charles Jenner’s closet drama, The Man of Family (1771), followed sometime later by Charles Macklin’s own version (now lost) and Sophia Lee’s much more successful adaptation for the Haymarket in 1780’s The Chapter of Accidents. Jenner in particular notes that his play, though ostensibly a sentimental comedy, is complicated by the demands it places upon a public “who go not to the theatre to think or feel.”42 Appealing to David Garrick as a “man of feeling” and “scholar” in the play’s dedication, he explains that The Man of Family follows the 1758 Discours sur la Poésie dramatique in representing its world

42  Jenner, Preface to The Man of Family, v.

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Tragic Sensibilities  197 without frivolity, according to a humane “nature and sentiment.”43 Its tone, in other words, is not in keeping with the lightness British theatrical audiences craved. Readers with knowledge of the philosophe’s treatise, however, might also have recognized Jenner’s pairing of “nature and sentiment” as a reference to Diderot’s late refinements of the genre moyen. Diderot had opened up two slightly different aspects of the middle genre, that is, both of which retained the gravity of tragedy despite their different forms: the one, a “serious comedy, which has as its object virtue and the duties of man,” and another, “a tragedy that would have as its object our domestic misfortunes.”44 Whereas domestic tragedies like those of Lillo and Moore had once taken up the full conceptual space of the middle state, the latter half of the century increasingly made room for various shapes of realistic fiction whose emotional weight didn’t necessarily preclude a fortunate ending. Hence, scarcely a decade later, Lee’s The Chapter of Accidents announced that it was drawn “from the book of Nature” as a realistic “serio-comic play” that would nevertheless leave its audience “Smiling in tears” (vii).45 She was right—the play was a popular one, regularly revived after an initial run of seventeen nights (a rather astounding fact considering how little critical attention it has received). The plot centers on Cecilia, a supposedly fallen woman who, in spite of a lack of connections and fortune, has secretly become engaged to her aristocratic seducer, Woodville, and left “an humble happy home” in order to be with him (21). Woodville’s father, Lord Glenmore, is naturally opposed to such dalliances and wishes his son to marry his ward, Sophia Mortimer, who is secretly married to his nephew, Harcourt. Together, they plot to bring Cecilia into the household disguised as Sophia’s guest. Meanwhile, we learn that Glenmore’s brother, Governor Harcourt, long ago sent off a daughter to be raised in seclusion. Having returned from the Indies to his brother’s estate as a well-to-do nabob, he now wishes to pair her with Woodville, unaware that the young man’s mistress is in fact Cecilia, now grown and therefore unrecognizable. This might all seem light fare. Yet it receives a dark twist when not only does Glenmore refuse to recognize the affection binding his son and his lover, whose station and neediness render her “worthless,” but he also unwittingly pursues a tryst with her himself once she enters the home as the friend of his ward. Ironically, Glenmore holds

43  Jenner, dedication to The Man of Family, [ii] and preface to The Man of Family, iii. 44  See Diderot, Discours, 4:333; cf. Castelvecchi, Sentimental Opera, 69. 45 Lee, The Chapter of Accidents (1780). Subsequent citations to the text will be to this edition and appear parenthetically.

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198  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy out for her the promise of a rank she is ­categorically barred from while in the guise of Woodville’s beloved “creature of low birth,” placing her in an especially bitter position (72). The play thus works through issues of class and domesticity in the broken household it depicts, which is shot through with secrecy and illicit sexuality. Such destabilizing forces threaten the order that ought to be embodied in the Glenmore estate. In one of the few critical essays on Lee’s use of the genre sérieux, Peter Hynes observes that for all its deference to French precedents, The Chapter of Accidents never fully commits to Diderot’s theatrical reform, retaining the farcical slapstick of the servant class in its subplot and only half-heartedly utilizing the tableau. This might be for the simple reason that translations of both the Entretiens sur Le Fils naturel (1757) and the later Discours weren’t readily available. Though curated sections of these theoretical works found their way into the general public in translation, much of its advances would have had to have been gleaned from the play texts themselves.46 These are important caveats to keep in mind, though as I suggested in Chapter 4, the philosophe’s propensity for adopting elements of British bourgeois drama is easy to confuse with an outsized influence upon it. It’s more likely, in my view, that Diderot’s theatrical reforms, like bourgeois tragedy’s increasingly sentimental repackaging in the latter half of the century, both represent responses to the same general processes of bourgeois revaluation underway in the period. Both react, in other words, to the era’s increasingly democratic sense of tragedy’s reach. Regardless of the extent to which Diderot can be credited for these shifts, however, Lee’s use of tableau accomplishes a subtle messaging that has never really been accounted for and which exemplifies the compromises of tragic sentimentality. In the clearest example of this—likely borrowed from readings of Le Père de famille’s noted tric-trac pantomime—Lee’s adaptation opens act three with a view of a drawing room where the family sits in silence: Miss Mortimer pouring out Coffee sends it to the Company; Captain Harcourt leans against a Pannel near her, sipping it; at a little Distance the Governor and Woodville playing at Backgammon, while Lord Glenmore leans over his Chair, thoughtfully observing the Behavior of his Son, who loses merely to make his Uncle leave off.  (39, sic)

Read the scene quickly and it’s an uninteresting one, a curiosity that ­inevitably fails, once the dialogue gets going, to promote the multi-layered cross-talk 46  Hynes, “Lee and the Genre Sérieux,” 42–3.

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Tragic Sensibilities  199 of its French model. Yet its pictorial setting and mannered placement also achieve a pregnant stasis, placing all the main players in single scene just as Cecilia prepares to arrive and upend the home’s stability. Surveyed by the father, and trying to outmaneuver an uncle he can barely stand, Woodville’s game of backgammon figures a complex negotiation of skill and chance. In reality, the game’s been on for some time, and the strain between generations and social stations has only achieved a delicate detente. It will remain for the final scenes of the play to sort out these tensions, as the truth finally comes out and Cecilia is revealed to have been worthy both in terms of social standing (which pleases Glenmore) and virtue (which pleases the Governor). The revelation that the lovers have always been related has the effect of dissipating social tensions even as it reaffirms the importance of class and circumstance. Writing of the drame’s role in pre-revolutionary France, Sarah Maza makes a point just as applicable to Britain’s sentimental fiction: In response to deep fears of social dissolution and corruption, these plays promoted the ideal of a community that transcended class divisions. Family love was both the means and metaphor for that transcendence: an electrifying force manifest in bodily symptoms (tears, heavy breathing) which brought the cast together for a tear-drenched final tableau.47

As it had been for the Fieldings and Mackenzie, so it was for Lee, Diderot, and a host of other writers depicting the potential breakdown of the family before reconstituting it dramatically. Across page and stage, the middle genre enacted, depicted, and evoked a cycle of “crisis and resolution” in its plots, broaching the possibility of domestic tragedy in order to contain its violence.48 * * * The tableau evokes a sense of immediacy and presence, abbreviating distances between readers and the scene unfolding in ways akin to the absorptive methods I described in Chapter 4. But—and this is crucial for understanding bourgeois tragedy’s place in sentimental culture—that’s often not the case in novels of feeling. Since at least Sarah Fielding, novels of feeling have characteristically taken up the theatrical tableau only to situate that depiction of suffering at a level of remove, privileging instead the ambivalent emotional processes that accompany the act of beholding. Thus, in David Simple, we read not only of Camilla and Valentine’s, Cynthia and Isabelle’s misfortunes, but 47 Maza, Myth of the French Bourgeoisie, 67. 48 Maza, Myth of the French Bourgeoisie, 66.

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200  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy also and mainly David’s vicarious negotiation of that pain in the “theater of sentiment.” This stylized mediation—in which “our Hero’s Sensibility” stands between us and the object of affliction (100)—effectively distances the reader from the abject bodies that haunt the novel’s diegetic plane. In their place: a self-conscious emphasis upon the processes through which that pain is regarded, consumed, sympathetically embraced, or, indeed, kept at bay. As Walter Scott would later remark about The Man of Feeling, the genre’s overall uniqueness lay in precisely this gesture, in its penchant for grounding an ersatz catharsis in the depiction of catharsis itself, in the doubling of feeling at the expense of the object that occasions those emotions. These texts record, he observes in a well-known passage: “the history of effects produced on the human mind by a series of events, [rather] than the narrative of those events themselves.”49 Thus, if David serves as a stand-in for the average reader, our experience of the text is always already filtered through an ironized bourgeois sensorium, colored by a mode of perception that the sociologist Colin Campbell argues simply is the historically embodied “middle class aesthetic.”50 Fielding’s narrative style in David Simple and Volume the Last shapes her reader’s engagement with its world in this way, habituating certain responses and enacting their inclusion in a body of sympathetic spectators. I count no fewer than eight explicit appeals to readerly sympathy across both texts, and many more instances in the text in which “imagination” is used to denote the kind of vital sympathetic faculty theorized by Adam Smith in his 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments. Fielding regularly stops short of description, signaling to the reader to fill in those emotive blanks by the exercise of a fellow-feeling whose medium is imagination: “I shall not attempt to describe [what Camilla and Valentine felt at their father’s displeasure], as I am very certain no Words can express it so strongly as your own Imagination” (116). Or later, David’s affection for Camilla gives “him a pleasure much easier felt than described; and which can only be imagined by those People, who know what it is to have a Passion . . .” (135). As Smith will argue, empathy of this sort domesticates the other’s feeling, reversing the violent theoretical language of bourgeois tragedy in the sentimentalist’s active imagination. Hence, sympathy “arises from bringing your case home to myself, from p ­ utting myself in your

49  See Walter Scott’s brief biography of Mackenzie in Miscellaneous Prose Works, 218. 50 Campbell, Romantic Ethic, chap. 7.

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Tragic Sensibilities  201 situation, and thence conceiving what I would feel in the like circumstances,” modulating their proximity in order to calibrate compassion (373). As G. A. Starr points out too, Fielding’s use of aposiopesis—the rhetorical withholding of an expression’s completion—underscores the importance of readerly intimacy in the novel, of a closeness that need not explain itself.51 Dashes signify the eruptive rapture of feeling, or call to mind the sort of collaborative interpretive practices she explored in her Remarks on Clarissa. The narrator’s refrain in these moments is a gesture of omission and ­imputation whereby readers are implicated in the community David longs to foster: “I shall leave that to my Reader’s own imagination” (used variously, and almost verbatim, on pp. 102, 136, 236, 247). As Camilla dies in David’s arms near the end of Volume the Last, she gives up the game: “The true Reason why I dwell not on that Concern, is, that Words cannot reach it—the sympathizing Heart must imagine it—and the Heart that has no Sympathy, is not capable of receiving it” (326). All this amounts to an attempt on her part to continue the work that early bourgeois tragedies set out to do, which is to say, to extend the scope of mourning to the ordinary, to find these lives grievable and, in doing so, will a structure of  feeling into something more substantial. A kind of training in the ­sympathetic ­imagination, readers are to rebuff the indifference of the novel’s urban landscape, courting melancholy without approaching its pain too closely. The most flagrant examples of such distancing effects are difficult to separate from a more overt irony, and call to mind Paul de Man’s notion of the self ’s doublement in language, its splintered oscillation between authentic and inauthentic modes of relation to the world.52 Take Laurence Sterne’s unfinished final novel, A Sentimental Journey (1768), for instance, which retreats into an introspective spectatorship that practically becomes synonymous with self-pleasure. Yorick’s travels double as a sojourn into the sentimentalist’s frame of mind, and layer his emotional experience over a veritable collection of vignettes held out of reach to us and often ­experienced by the reader in dumb show. The first among these, perhaps, is the celebrated tableau of “poor Maria” in Moulines, which, had it not appeared a few years prior to The Man of Feeling, might have served as a pendant to Mackenzie’s Miss Atkins.53 In fact, Sterne’s protagonist paints the scene so well in prose that 51  Starr, “From Socrates to Sarah Fielding,” 112. 52  De Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” 173–209; cf. Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire, 32. 53  I cite Paul Goring’s edition of Sterne, Sentimental Journey, parenthetically.

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202  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy

Fig. 5.1.  W. W. Ryland, after Angelica Kauffman, Maria—Moulines. 1779. Stipple and etching in red-brown ink on paper. © National Trust/David Cousins & Sonja Power.

the “poor daughter,” haunted by the anguish of her now deceased father, was the subject of a number of portraits aping the French absorptive style (Fig. 5.1).54 Thus: 54  For a discussion of this scene’s popularity in the period’s visual culture, see De Voogd, “Sterne and Visual Culture,” 142–59.

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Tragic Sensibilities  203 When we had got within half a league of Moulines, at a little opening in the road leading to a thicket, I discovered poor Maria sitting under a poplar—she was sitting with her elbow in her lap, and her head leaning on one side within her hand—a small brook ran at the foot of the tree . . . She was dressed in white, and much as my friend described her, except that her hair hung loose . . .  (108)

The scene of tragedy here is dissipated into an atmospherics of the tragic, turning Maria into the figure of mourning, as W.  B.  Gerrard suggests. Yorick’s commentary wrests beauty from suffering, pleasure out of pain in her visage: “affliction had touch’d her looks with something that was scarce earthly—still she was feminine” (108). Reduced to madness, Maria sits in the stillness of tableau, yoked to a dog whose presence serves at once as surrogate for and reminder of the loss of her father, her darling “Sylvio,” and the “goat [that] had been as faithless as [that] lover” (108). “Upon the string,” Yorick adds, “hung all her sorrows” (110). To see this depicted on canvas, moreover, is to be struck afresh by its implicit staging and aesthetic framing, by the way it invests the ordinary with a manifestly dramatic intensity “saturated with regret, stasis and a sense of ‘nonpassage.’ ”55 It is, in short, to recognize it at once as a reference to Greuze and the in-betweenness of prose in tragedie domestique et bourgeois (cf. his Le Malheur Imprévu ou Le Miroir brisé, Fig.  5.2). And yet, Yorick is ever-present, even intrusive, a constant reminder of the mediating gaze of the sentimentalist that renders absorption in the scene itself complicated at best. Sterne takes the edge off the tableau and installs a gap between reader and scene by having her mother’s forlorn expression relate Maria’s tale, ineffably so, perhaps as much imagined in our and Yorick’s mind as it is real. Picking up the string upon which hang her sorrows, he finds himself invigorated by his proximity to the girl and the resulting fantasy of assuming the place of the missing father: “Maria should lay in my bosom, and be unto me as a daughter” (110). Yorick imagines himself as the center, that is, the fixed point that would restore meaning to her affliction. His wish to anoint Maria with tears merges the sentimental with the sacramental too, enveloping the set-piece in a raft of recollected biblical references that long to “culminate in a simultaneously mundane and ethereal daily communion.”56

55  Ledbury, “Greuze in Limbo,” 190. 56 Gerrard, Sterne and the Visual Imagination, 138; cf. Keymer, “Parody in  A Sentimental Journey,” 9–31.

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Fig. 5.2.  Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Le Malheur Imprévu ou Le Miroir brisé [Unforeseen Misfortune, or, The Broken Mirror]. 1763. Oil on canvas, 56 × 46 cm. © The Wallace Collection.

Nevertheless, the pleasure of the moment lies in its inevitable failure, and just as quickly as she enters the scene, Maria is gone, escorted down the road and exit scene right of Yorick’s journey, no less despondent. Now she will exist for us (and Yorick) as the “back-ground of the piece” (111)—painted upon the screen of our theatre of sentiment, but kept at a safe distance, where

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Tragic Sensibilities  205 it confers the atmospherics of the tragic without the inconvenience of homely tragedy. In search of “melancholy adventures,” Sterne’s narrator confesses that “I am never so perfectly conscious of the existence of the soul within me, as when I am entangled in them.” Which is to say, like touching a live wire, the brief sting of another’s pain reminds him that he’s just fine. But isn’t that also what Sterne has given his reader? It’s tempting to reckon this interposed distance as a kind of detachment from the world, as a reckless indulgence in another’s pain, or yet more insidiously, as the petty domestication of tragedy’s most radical energies in modernity. Certainly, for the worst offenders, these interpretations are difficult to deny. But a less suspicion reading is also available. What happens, we might ask, when sentimental fiction is positioned alongside the middling tragedies whose advent slightly predated its heyday? In that case, the softening gazes of David and Yorick seem to broach instead an early rapprochement with the ordinary suffering explored across page and stage, and hence could be read as but one response to the energies it unleashed. Far from avoiding those difficult feelings, by negotiating an approach to the serious depiction of everyday suffering, sentimental fiction evinces a desire to enter into a pain that lies close to home. This manner of “soft surrealism” is the novel of feeling performing the corrective emotional work of “holding the real accountable to what affective justice fantasy has construed,” as Lauren Berlant argues, managing a collective anxiety with the real of bourgeois and domestic tragedy.57 The sentimentalism of the mid-eighteenth century, in this view, is an emotional strategy for managing the proximity entailed in every ambivalent act of sympathy, and its fiction an affective technology whereby pain is repeatedly approached in the safety of one’s imagination. If anything, sentimental fiction reveals one’s attachment to this world, a mournfulness brought about by the all-too-common experience of loss. The irony of the sentimentalist’s gaze is just the point, therefore—the very enactment of one’s elliptical engagement with suffering. In a classic reading of A Sentimental Journey, Robert Markley flags what he sees as Yorick’s anxiety when faced with the picture of a suffering that hits close to home. In Markley’s view, the “idealized object of pity” is not to be found in poor Maria, but rather in the inverted mirror image of the middling spectator represented by the pauvre honteux of Montriul, the bourgeois who, having lost it all, is reduced to silent spectacle. Having tasted life 57 Berlant, Female Complaint, 21, 17.

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206  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy in the middle rank, the honteux is all the more lamentable for the bitterness of his downward mobility.58 In that memorable scene, however, our attention is firmly trained upon Yorick’s mind as he goes about his “first publick act of . . . charity.” There, the parson teeters between guilt and moral congratulation as the crowd gradually thins so that the only remaining beggar is the déclasse bourgeois: I had overlook’d a pauvre honteux, who had no one to ask a sous for him, and who, I believe would have perish’d, ere he could have ask’d one for himself: he stood by the chaise a little without the circle, and wiped a tear from a face which I thought had seen better days—Good God! said I—and I have not one single sous left to give him—But you have a thousand!— cried all the powers of nature, stirring within me—so I gave him—no matter what—I am ashamed to say how much, now—and was ashamed to think, how little, then . . .  (36)

We learn stunningly little about this figure. His character is almost completely taken up in a metonymy for the loss of status, and by implication, the precarious of the middle rank. Read a bit closer and the moment is a quite awkward one, compounded by a tension between the sentimentalist’s recognition of the man’s fallenness and the dignity the honteux tenaciously holds on to despite this reduced state. In fact, as Markley observes, this refractory gaze—Yorick looks upon the honteux, he looks back, triangulating a difficult, mutual shame—countenances both identification and disassociation and discloses a deep ambivalence at the heart of this episode. Does Yorick see himself here? Is what marks him as compassionate the mere ability to pity, the means to remain, tenuously, in the position of subject and not object of feeling? Despite the narrative’s attempt to hold suffering at a distance, the beggar can be read therefore “not simply as an outsider but a projection of the narrator’s unstated fears, a nightmare image of the sensitive, generous individual stripped of his means.”59 Which is to say, this suffering is just as much unearthed as it is consumed; like David identifying with George Barnwell, in fact, Yorick is momentarily identified with both subject and object. That is, until the plot picks up again and assimilates the beggar into the congratulatory sensorium of Sterne’s vicar: “The pauvre honteux could say nothing—he pulled out a handkerchief, and wiped his face as he turned away—and I thought he thank’d me more than them all” (36–7). In the end, 58  Markley, “Sentimentality as Performance,” 224. 59  Markley, “Sentimentality as Performance,” 224–5.

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Tragic Sensibilities  207 therefore, this scene mourns a displaced middling self, but it also calls attention to Yorick’s own status as a quasi-tragic figure. Pulled out of time, placed alongside figures similarly resurrected from Sterne’s earlier work in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, he emerges as a model for the human crossing between life and death, a walking memento mori. Of course, some might respond that these representational tactics simply implicate the reader in modes of spectatorship constituted by power, that their doubled perspective allows one the cathartic pleasure of charity without its exercise. But again, though I’m sympathetic to this line of argument, I see it differently. (And not just because one is hard pressed to argued that the average reader of, say, David Simple in 1744 had the kind of power that this late capitalist counter-argument imagines, to say nothing of the novel’s impoverished author.) Couldn’t one just as easily read the countless stifled emotions of the genre, its uses of the first-person plural and aposiopesis, and its intense investment in scenes of harsh and often intractable misfortune as tokens of relative powerlessness in the face of modern life and, consequently, a small attempt at finding strength in numbers? Aren’t these techniques attempts instead at imagining a genre of likeminded readers, or at enacting a shared affective field or structure of feeling whose public intimacy renders the world bearable? The subtle inclusiveness of proclaiming “our Hero’s ­sensibility” would therefore appear as an attempt at bringing about a community of mourning that ought to exist but in reality doesn’t—at least not yet. And though he or she may occasionally be the object of satire, the sentimentalist’s idealistic sympathy becomes a pattern against which a cruel world is interrogated and found wanting. So while sentimentality can exploit asymmetries of power—in some cases, outrageously so!—readers of the genre also find a closeness and a common ground in their mutual fragility, in the precariousness of their lives, their attachments, and of all their worldly goods. Here it’s worth turning back to Amelia, which draws a productive contrast between Christian sympathy and Stoic indifference that renders this way of reading the genre a bit clearer. Much has been written about Fielding’s engagement with Stoic thought, but I am thinking especially of a striking dialogue between Booth and a philosophic “Gentleman” that takes place in the sponging-house where both debtors await their imprisonment. There, the latter recommends a practice of cultivated distance from one’s attachments that underscores the important role of habit in shaping emotion. Claiming to pity Booth, the Gentleman tells him that he must be “a Novice in Affliction,” contrasting his own mastery as the product of a “long Apprenticeship to

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208  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy Misery”: “To say the Truth, I believe, Habit teaches Men to bear the Burthens of the Mind, as it enures [sic] them to bear heavy Burthens on their Shoulders” (348). Like the craftsman’s calloused hands, to learn “to look on all Things . . . with such a Degree of Indifference” (349) is the product of a long, painful labor, the upshot of which is an emotional habitus that no longer feels its sharpest pangs. Crucially, this process is predicated upon the denigration of the world. “Now of what Value is so uncertain, so precarious a Station?” (349), asks Booth’s interlocutor, advocating the philosopher’s dispassionate relation to all things. But as Booth keenly observes, the transience of such goods, the fragility of happiness, its scarcity in a life experienced in want is one of the main reasons why one values them. “What comfort then can your Philosophy give,” Booth presses, “to the fond Lover, who is torn from his Mistress; or, to the tender Husband, who is dragged from his Wife? Do you really think, that any Meditations on the Shortness of Life will soothe them in their Afflictions? Is not this very Shortness itself one of their Afflictions?” (350). The traditions of philosophical and theological consolation may ease one’s way through loss, but they can never really abrogate the necessity of mourning. Grappling with loss is evidence of the value one placed on that now absent object. For all its optimism, then, sentimentality is a dead-on indication of a tragic world view, one that carefully balances its insistence upon the value of this-worldly happiness against a recognition of its ephemerality. Fittingly, sunt lachrymae rerum, the Virgilian motto for a world in pain, comes to be applied to both domestic tragedy and elegy by Georgian tastemakers in the period. That sighing admission represents a kind of compromise with the disillusionment one feels toward modernity, and in this way, all but collapses genre into a mournful cultural disposition. Indeed, Diderot’s prescription for sensitive readers of Clarissa merges the insights of genre sérieux with those of sentimental fiction in the bargain it strikes between real and imaginary mourners: “Fellow-men, come here to learn how to bear the ills of life; come, let us weep together over the lot of the sufferers in these works of fiction, and let us say to ourselves, ‘When adverse fate overwhelms us, we in our turn shall at least have the sympathy of good people’ ” (271). We may grieve the fate of Clarissa, or of Maria, over the Atkins or the honteux now, but suffering comes for us all, assures the philosophe. The question is not if but when one is to take center-stage in the theatre of sentiment. That ­ordinariness, the sheer relentlessness of agonies great and small—“that element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency,” as George Eliot put it in one of the great realist novels of the following century—is

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Tragic Sensibilities  209 the subject matter of sentimental fiction as well as that which it longs to negate.60 And in this way, sentimentality itself consists of countless delicate negotiations between form and feeling, realism and fantasy, that reinterpreted and ­ultimately broadcast the tragic across literature and performance as the eighteenth century waned.

60 Eliot, Middlemarch, 194.

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Conclusion Modern Tragedy and Ordinary Suffering The heroes and heroines of the age are cobblers and kitchen wenches. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Over several nights in the spring of 1786, young Werter killed himself on the London stage. Frederic Reynolds’ adaptation of Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774) was a tightly scripted affair that transformed the lovesick sentimental novel into a mainpiece bourgeois tragedy, the newest entry in a genre whose catalogue was still expanding. Following successful runs in Bath and Bristol, Werter: A Tragedy promised its Covent Garden audience a “domestic story” whose “Scenes of private Woe” centered on “The Sorrows of an humbler state.”1 Reynolds’ drama eschews many of the novel’s earlier episodes, relying upon his audience’s knowledge of the source material in order to compress its plot into a few decisive moments that play out in the real time of a frenzied Walheim evening. Thus, Werter opens as he and his beloved Charlotte await the imminent return of Albert, the virtuous officer to whom she is betrothed and whose worth is proven in the ­tenderness with which he treats the infatuated young artist. When Albert arrives to claim his bride, he tries to adopt him as a mutual friend but the impending separation from Charlotte is more than Werter can bear. Charlotte had been the key to his happiness, the one thing that had held back depression and promised something more. “Thou art the lovely soother of my cares,” he assures her: “My guardian angel! sent by pitying heav’n / To compensate my every other ill” (15). Elevated to this position, she finds herself to be the unwitting cause of Werter’s “ceaseless sorrow,” an affective state described as emotional paralysis: a “careless[ness],” the return 1 Reynolds, Werter: A Tragedy. The quotations come from Reynolds’ note to the reader and prologue in the Larpent Collection’s manuscript of the play, which remains the only extant source for its paratextual material. See Larpent ms LA711. The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy: Modernity and the Art of Ordinary Suffering. Alex Eric Hernandez, Oxford University Press (2019). © Alex Eric Hernandez. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846574.001.0001

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Conclusion  211 of an “icy apathy” that “congeal[s] the soul” (11), a “gorg[ing] upon despair” that overfills the self and “leave[s] it nothing wanting” (29). If he cannot have Charlotte, he desires nothing whatsoever. Werter’s is a strange sort of affliction, more akin to the depressive’s hazy sadness than the sharp losses suffered in heroic tragedy. Reynolds gradually ramps up the drama’s pathos by drawing out his Werter’s suffering and foreshadowing the threat of self-violence. Charlotte: “Alas! How hard to part with those we love! / Werter—’tis sharper than the stings of death” (27). Sympathizing with Werter’s affliction, Albert promises that his marriage to  Charlotte will someday be a source of their mutual pleasure: “Sigh not Werter—you will soon be at peace.” To which the young poet replies darkly: “Yes, Albert! very soon!” (49). In the end, death comes quickly for Werter who, though he abandons the pistols of the novel in favor of a poison administered offstage, expires in the nuptial home, embraced by its new mistress. “Cruel, cruel hour!”, Charlotte sobs over the body, stammering through her regret—“And must I lose thee, Werter!”—before collapsing too (58). Unlike Goethe’s original, she goes mad by curtain fall, enraptured by a sublime vision of Werter’s ascent into bliss. She knows that self-murder entails damnation, but if the innocence of their love can transcend the honor binding her to Albert, surely it forms an exception to natural laws that would keep them apart even in the hereafter: “Werter, I come! I come—” (60). In one final twist, then, the drama gives the audience what the novel pointedly denied: the chance to confirm Lotte’s affections once and for all; to see her and Werter together as tragic lovers. Catharsis joins an exquisite pleasure to pain here, merges loss to fulfillment, well enough at least that the drama’s popularity persisted for years after its debut. Werter was anthologized as part of Elizabeth Inchbald’s 1811 collection, The Modern Theatre, and produced in a number of versions as far away as Dublin’s Smock Alley Theatre, implicating a surprisingly large audience in the work of mourning that forbidden love.2 Our histories of the period have forgotten bourgeois tragedies like Reynolds’ drama. Looking back on eighteenth-century theatre, for instance, the eminent literary historian Allardyce Nicoll wrote of the opportunity missed by tragedians, portraying British bourgeois tragedy as an abortive attempt at the naturalism of later ages. “By neglecting to follow along the paths of [George] Lillo and [Edward] Moore,” he lamented in the History of 2 Inchbald, ed., Modern Theatre, 3:291–319; on the Dublin performance, see Greene, Theatre in Dublin, 4:2416.

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212  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy the English Drama, 1660–1900, “English dramatists of the late eighteenth century lost one of their greatest opportunities.” Aside from these isolated examples, he could find little trace of the genre’s cultural import, adding with a note of regret: “They might have led the van of continental playwrights in the common search for something vital and expressive of modern conditions. As it was, they and their followers allowed first France and then Germany and Scandinavia to assume the generalship of the more progressive forces.”3 Diderot, G. E. Lessing, and Friedrich Schiller would step into the vacuum created by British authors, this explanation goes, pushing the genre forward. Together they would Enlighten tragedy and create literatures that reflected the changing social and philosophical conditions that characterized modern life. British bourgeois tragedy is a mere blip in the grand story that follows, a footnote to an account of tragic modernity that only finally arrives with Hegel and German idealism, with the prose of George Eliot and Stendhal, with the moody stillness of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg and Anton Chekhov. This book has argued something different, and sought to return a lost archive of print and performance to its place in cultural history. In my view, British bourgeois tragedy was a vanguard of so much of what we consider to be uniquely modern about the period’s literature and performance. With its early explorations of ordinary suffering and its insistence upon the worth of common life, bourgeois tragedy not only proved to be a vital force in shaping tragedy and cognate forms of realistic, serious fiction, but by this process, it gave affective shape to a modernity in process. The hardship it imagined was in many ways familiar to that of the average audience and reader, at times prosaic and earth-bound, at others shot through with a fragile transcendent meaning. It depicted lives in search of this-worldly happiness, whose inability to attain those desires brought about disastrous consequences and a reassessment of their value. What’s more—and in sharp contrast to practically every account of the genre, surprisingly—the late successes of Werter and similar works imply that bourgeois and domestic tragedies continued to play a role in the collective imaginary well into the next century. Never mind, then, that Diderot, Lessing, and Schiller manifestly were following the paths of Lillo and Moore; it turns out that a number of British authors, performers, and artists continued along that very same exploratory trail, enough so that one might reasonably claim that the decades surrounding the turn of the nineteenth century form a second heyday for the genre. 3 Nicoll, Late Eighteenth-Century Drama, 91.

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Conclusion  213 During those years, for example, the works of Lillo and Moore were continually produced across the nation, often alongside new or adapted “domestic dramas” and “familiar tragedies” that featured the leading actors of the day.4 As Frederick Burwick has recently shown, these plays existed as part of a complex ecology of literary production during early industrialization, the precursors to a wave of more radical works depicting an emergent laboring class that were similarly invested in the tragic potential of modern life. Following the Theatrical Representations Act of 1788 especially, which established a system of provincial theatres across Britain, Beverleys and Millwoods extended their reach outward from the urban core that had been the scene of their undoing, enacting their despair in hundreds of new venues.5 Though many of those who came to see them had likely read these plays in print, the skilled performance of ordinary suffering—by troupes essentially made up of tradespeople patronized by local merchants and friendly societies—no doubt amplified emotional practices by then associated with middle-class sentimentality. In fact, many of the bourgeois and domestic dramas that first appeared during this period are difficult to separate from melodrama, lending credence to arguments that place them in a shared genealogy. Works like Richard Cumberland’s The Mysterious Husband (1783) and Hannah More’s short-lived The Fatal Falsehood (1789), for instance, present a Manichean world in which domestic violence is encoded in an irrational villainy set against innocent female victims. Along these lines, both Pamela and Clarissa are recast as domestic dramas, in Thomas Hull’s The Fatal Interview (1782) and Robert Porett’s The Fatal Seduction (1788) respectively. Neither play was successful, but they suggest that the novel and theatre of the period continued to wrestle with tragedy’s place in a prosaic world. To wit, Thomas Surr’s little-studied George Barnwell (1798) novelizes the latent gothic sensationalism of domestic drama with renewed focus on Millwood who, in homage to Sarah Siddons’ celebrated turn in the role at the play’s 1796 Drury Lane revival, is granted a richer, more sympathetic backstory. In that version, her downfall is but the latest indignity to a once proud family, reduced to begging and prostitution following the death of her intestate parents and the subsequent loss of their property.6 Here, it turns out that Millwood’s story tells a bourgeois tragedy of its own.

4 Mudford, Life of Richard Cumberland, 413. 5  See, for example, the introduction to Burwick, British Drama of the Industrial Revolution. 6 Surr, George Barnwell, 147. For a discussion of the novel in light of the Barnwell ballad tradition, see Fosbury, “George Barnwell’s Long Brief Life,” 621–38.

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214  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy As Chapter 5’s discussion of Sophia Lee’s A Chapter of Accidents suggests too, Reynolds wasn’t the only late eighteenth-century dramatist mining the catalogue of continental drame domestique et bourgeois. In fact, a steady series of adaptations, stagings, and outright appropriations of Franco-German serious fiction continued to make their way to Britain between 1780 and 1800. And not only Diderot’s landmark dramas—lesser-known (and infrequently studied) works of social realism, like Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’indigent, would be revived as comédie larmoyante, anonymously as The Distressed Family in 1787, and in 1791 by Elizabeth Inchbald, as The Next Door Neighbors (quite successfully that season, in fact). Despite a mixed reception by British critics, a cross-section of Germany’s new bürgerliches Trauerspiele found willing readers and audiences in adaptations. Lessing’s influential Emilia Galotti, for example, took over Drury Lane for several nights beginning the October of 1794, with Siddons in the role of Countess Orsina. Surprisingly, this wasn’t the first time the play was performed in translation, having been read dramatically at Drury Lane four years earlier and then almost produced again in 1792 in a new translation variously rumored to be by Hester Lynch Piozzi or (as was probably the case) “a Dissenting Minister” by the name of Dr. Berrington.7 As news accounts show, the play was mysteriously and controversially deferred after months of advertisement and then promised for the opening season of the new Drury Lane, in the aforementioned production with Siddons as its anchor. Another translation would follow in 1800, part of Benjamin Thompson’s collection, The German Theatre, which canonized several bourgeois ­tragedies as closet drama in England. Works by Lessing, Schiller, and August Wilhelm Iffland form the core of this collection, though other versions remain extant and testify to the genre’s capaciousness as the century came to a close.8 The Sorrows of Young Werther were also translated in a number of English versions beginning in 1780, sealing the novel’s—and the genre’s— global popularity. What did it mean for bourgeois tragedy to traffic across “the great theatre of Europe,” as one of the era’s newspapers described the unfolding scene of

7  On the attribution to Berrington, see Avery et al., eds., London Stage, pt. 5, vol. 3, 1698. That the play was rumored to have been translated by Piozzi was clear in notices of its upcoming production. See, for example, “News,” Public Advertiser, April 5, 1792. 8  Thompson, trans. and ed., German Theatre. For a sense of the numerous translations of Lessing’s bourgeois tragedy in English during the period, see Dvoretzky, “Eighteenth-Century English Translations of Emilia Galotti,” 1–24.

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Conclusion  215 social tumult?9 How, for that matter, did the genre imagine ordinary suffering at the turn of the so-called “serious century,” now that the middle sort’s numbers had grown, and with them, their concerns and cultural clout? Answering this is difficult given the limited space that remains me, but a number of intriguing possibilities gesture toward the genre’s future and offer a fitting conclusion to this book. In fact, in these latter-day works, bourgeois tragedy seems unmistakably modern. The case of Emilia Galotti is particularly interesting on this score, and suggests a more politicized frame by which to think of the relation between modernity and affliction in these late entries. That play’s translation and appearance in English during the early 1790s presents the possibility that it was part of the “theatre of opposition” that David Francis Taylor associates with Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s tenure as manager of Drury Lane.10 Originally written in 1772, Lessing’s play turned the classical story of Virginia into radical social commentary, setting its action in a northern Italian town vaguely evocative of the Braunschweig Dukedom in which he served at the time. Its plot revolves around the libertine and absolutist, Prince Gonzaga, and his obsession with Emilia Galotti, the cherished daughter of a landowning bourgeois family headed by Oduardo and Claudia. Emilia is pious, chaste, and dutiful, a picture of stereotypical middling values and domestic affection. Betrothed to Count Appiani, her marriage would underscore the dignity of the family through this connection and solidify their claim to virtue. Indeed, Appiani’s austerity and rejection of the corruptions of court set him apart as an ideal suitor for the Galottis. His is a life of elected domestic privacy, evidence of the elevated standing ascribed to common life even among some sectors of the Enlightened elite. What makes Appiani a figure of Enlightened morality, the play argues, is precisely this valuation of the ordinary and its attendant defense of the rights of common households. Gonzaga is not to be denied, however, and when his chamberlain, the Marquis Marinelli, arranges Appiani’s murder, they scuttle Emilia away. They do this because she is an alleged witness to the crime, but the audience is well aware that this is done with an eye toward her seduction or assault. At this point, the Prince’s mistress, Countess Orsina (Siddons’ role, and but

9  This phrase appears in a notice on the treason trials of 1794 alongside notices for Emilia Galotti’s November 1 performance. See “News,” Whitehall Evening Post [1770], October 30, 1794–November 1, 1794. 10 Taylor, Theatres of Opposition.

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216  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy the latest in a string of darkly tragic performances during this period of her career), arrives only to be rejected by the lukewarm noble. In a fateful turn, Orsina crosses paths with Oduardo and slyly lets slip “news” of the liaison between his daughter and the lecherous Prince. The father is scandalized by the imputation, perceiving this as an affront to the family whose shame will be reflected back onto him. The play culminates in an act of cruel sovereignty, then, when Oduardo impetuously murders his daughter, fulfilling that which the honor-bound Emilia—despite her confusion—sees as preferable to disgrace. Though the play’s translators play up the pathos of her predicament and wring out every bit of gravitas and true nobility from the submission she chooses, ultimately its plot will devolve upon a dispute between men. Despite her self-sacrifice, therefore, Oduardo’s act also serves to assert a dark prerogative he exercises as patriarch of the family, one that functions at the same time as a kind of bourgeois refusal to hand the aristocracy what he believes to be rightly his. In this way, the homosocial rivalry at the heart of the play functions as a veiled reference to the tensions between social ranks and class interests (accordingly, Appiani’s disappearance from the play effectively renders the competing claims of noblemen a background concern). Moreover, if the classical story of plebeian Virginia is the corollary here, the implication in these final acts is that the burgher is not to be, indeed cannot be, reckoned a slave to those in power. Though Gonzaga touts his role in “the welfare of the state” (8) as Benjamin Thompson 1800 translation phrased it, it’s the Galottis—having virtue “worthy of esteem,” as one figure characterizes the middling family early in the play— who prove to be unyielding in their claim to autonomy and standing (5). It turns out that they are the beating heart of the dukedom. According to the sweeping explanatory accounts of the genre popularized by Arnold Hauser and Georg Lukács, plays like Emilia Galotti spoke to the social tensions that characterized the age, and sanctioned forms of dissent by relegating their energies to the playhouse. In volume three of his magisterial Social History of Art, for example, Hauser argues that bourgeois tragedy reflects the materializing class consciousness of the middle rank, serving as “an advertisement for bourgeois morality and the . . . claim to equal rights.” Whereas many prior art forms meditated upon social conflict, what separates bourgeois tragedy in this period, Hauser goes on to claim, was that it “made this conflict its very theme and . . . placed itself openly in the service of a class struggle.”11 Bourgeois tragedy appears here as the literary arm of revolution 11 Hauser, Social History of Art, vol. 3, 78.

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Conclusion  217 (or at least a certain Marxist version of the Revolution). Hauser was following Lukács in this, for the latter claimed that the genre was “the first to grow out of conscious class confrontation; the first with the set intention of expressing the patterns of thought and emotion, as well as the relations with other classes, of a class struggling for power and freedom.”12 Hence, one of the ways that bourgeois tragedy achieves this is by representing tragic action not as a struggle between an heroic figure and some metaphysical necessity, but as a dispute between the competing claims of private, middle-class families, and some ominous figurehead of the Ancien Régime. This account helps to explain the flattening of a character like Gonzaga into a melodramatic villain who, in another early scene, flippantly signs a death warrant “with all his heart” even as he gleefully plans further debaucheries (15). If Hauser and Lukács are right, he serves as a figure for the repressive top-down power of the nobility whose desire jostles against the humbler aspirations of a virtuous bourgeoisie. Tragedy’s modernization may occur in a heady dialogue with idealism, or through the pragmatist’s abrogation of neoclassical rules, but those factors are largely secondary to what was accomplished by championing the interests of the middle class in the genre. The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy has cast a somewhat skeptical eye over this overly broad explanation, however, complicating any notion that the genre reflects a social reality already in place rather than—as I’ve argued— enabling that reality through imaginative acts of myth-making and affective ­exploration. Indeed, the classical Marxist argument has always been difficult to square with the genre’s advent in Britain and the particularities of several of the plays themselves (what to do, for example, with The London Merchant, which isn’t framed as a tension between a middle-rank upstart and an aristocratic old guard; or what do we make of works of genre sérieux and domestic drama which take place among a moneyed elite largely cordoned off from the outside world?). These arguments are much more persuasive when applied to the late eighteenth-century French and German contexts than that of the British, where social ranks tended to mix more freely and where a swelling middling sort was comparatively less politically disenfranchised. These explanations also rely upon a model of class consciousness that in recent years has become increasingly difficult to sustain in relation to eighteenth-century social life, and often isn’t borne out in the historical record. To this point, for example, when Charles Burney saw Emilia Galotti performed during his 1775 musical tour of Vienna, what shocked him was 12  See Lukács, “Sociology of Modern Drama,” 147.

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218  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy not so much the tensions between prince and gentry (though he did register these categories), but rather the harshness of its language and the sensationalism of its action; the fact that it was, in a word, vulgar.13 If the play embodied this conflict, those meanings seemed to be submerged deep beneath the domestic intimacies and severe morality on its surface. That was 1775, though. By 1790, the circumstances that surrounded its reading, translation, and performance in London must have been very ­different and would seem to cast Hauser’s and Lukács’ viewpoints in a much more plausible light, even in Britain. Sheridan’s early public rehearsals of the play, for instance—almost lost to history, but for a few fleeting mentions in the papers of January 1790—suggest a carefulness in rolling out the drama at a time when its politics would have been more readily apparent.14 Additionally, the only extant copy from Sheridan’s production is the one submitted to the Lord Chamberlain for licensing, a manuscript signed by John Philip Kemble and dated October 20, 1794 that raises the further question of whether that was the text read aloud years earlier.15 Were the play’s politics a bit too toxic? And was this the reason for its deferral into 1794? We can’t know for sure, though the fact that the play never makes it to publication—despite positive reviews by contemporaries—is grist for the mill and only deepens the mystery. Less circumstantially, however, are the small bits of text and performance records that we do have, mostly thanks (again) to the day’s periodical reviews. In the weeks after its premiere, Emilia Galotti’s Drury Lane epilogue ran in The Morning Chronicle and The London Packet, warning of the specter of arbitrary rule even as it celebrated English virtue: Wretched the state, and fatal is the hour, When headstrong passion nerves the arm of power. … He, then thrives best who best can fawn and cozen, And up start Marinellis by the dozen; Up starts (to manly Englishmen unknown) The titled pander to the lawless throne. Blest England! long may virtue silken band

13 Burney, Present State of Music, 1:207–13. 14 These informal performances were noticed, for example, by writers at the English Chronicle or Universal Evening Post and the World. See “News,” English Chronicle or Universal Evening Post, January 12, 1790–January 14, 1790; and “News,” The World, January 12, 1790. 15 [Berrington?], Emilia Galotti, ms.

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Conclusion  219 Unite the rul’d and ruler of thy land. Be it thy boast to doubt, or doubt to boast, If rul’d or ruler love each other most! … Galottis here no scepter’d vice can dread, No foul invader of the nuptial bed. Can he disturb the subject’s wedded life, Whose mark’d example bids him love his wife! … Can the fond father well his trust discharge, And not protect his family at large? Oh, no!—the nation’s welfare is his plan, Whose private worth shines through the public man. Blest England! cast thine eye across the flood, Where wild confusion marks its way in blood; … While Gallia’s sons beneath such horrors groan, Lament their state, and glory in your own.16

At first blush, this celebration of the English social contract—figured as a loving domestic household—seems a picture of patriotic confidence, a calm assurance that the late troubles in France won’t translate. Here, the “fond father” and husband is identified by turns with the subject ruled and the ruler himself; “private worth shines through the public man,” conflating senses of domestic virtue. The trouble lies then in “upstart Marinellis” who exploit “the arm of power” in order to break the bond between ruler and people; in order, that is, to spoil the conjugal affections that characterize good governance. In this reading, Marinelli plays the Jacobin. But there’s a clever sleight of hand at work here, for those who had read or seen the play would know that Marinelli divides the metaphorical household not to overturn Gonzaga’s “lawless throne” but rather to shore it up. Or more precisely, Marinelli becomes a proxy for that sovereignty’s exercise when he offers to “devise some scheme” for the prince to ravage the middling Emilia. “Prince, will you let me act as I please? Will you approve all I do?”, Marinelli asks. To which Gonzaga answers: “Any thing, Marinelli.” As it turns out, the precise details of Appiani’s murder will be hidden from the aristocrat

16 “Arts and Culture,” Morning Chronicle [1770], 30 Oct. 1794; and “Arts and Culture,” London Packet or New Evening Post, October 27, 1794–October 29, 1794.

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220  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy by his henchman, but the implication is that Duke Gonzaga’s agency is ­delegated through—and crucially, not absolved by—those who carry out even plausibly deniable orders. That this coded epilogue found its way into print during William Pitt’s “Reign of Terror” suggests a quite different reading of the text’s cultural work, therefore, and positions it alongside the radical political journalism that would eventually lead to charges that The Morning Chronicle had engaged in seditious libel.17 To read the play in light of the treason trials of 1794 with which the tragedy’s advertisement and commentary shared the literal page, Gonzaga and Marinelli become figures for the capricious overreach of state power, even unsubtle screens for the “duplicitous” Pitt’s regressive governmentality. The Whig reformer Charles Grey’s shock at the treason charges brought against Thomas Hardy, founding member of the Correspondence Society—“If this man is hanged, there is no safety for any man”—evokes unfavorable comparisons between the Prime Minister and Lessing’s ruthless prince, who cares little of Appiani’s life, to say nothing of his rights.18 If anything, therefore, the drama underscored the implicit argument in coverage sympathetic to reform: that the real source of social unrest was to be found in a malevolent ruling class pressing its advantage. With good reason, then, we might see this as an instance of bourgeois radicalism playing out in the tragedy that bore that rank’s name. To read Emilia Galotti and late eighteenth-century bourgeois tragedy in this way is to see it as the eruption of tensions that had been latent in works as various as Charles Johnson’s Cælia and Moore’s The Gamester and Henry Fielding’s Amelia, bubbling over in sentimental depictions of laborers and the déclassé that fanned the kind of inflammatory “politics of pity” Hannah Arendt argued was characteristic of revolutionary fervor.19 By the turn of the century, that is, bourgeois and domestic tragedy seemed to materialize the “social experiences in solution” of decades earlier as concrete, albeit emergent, argument and ideology. And whereas in some cases—like The London Merchant, for example—the genre’s more radical energies could be muted or moralized in production, the eruptive potential of everyday tragedy persisted well beyond this moment, maintaining generations of cultural memory in the embodiment of performed emotion.

17 Black, English Press in the Eighteenth Century, 128. 18  Trevelyan collects this note to Grey’s wife in his early biography of the Reform leader, Lord Grey of the Reform Bill, 85. 19 Arendt, On Revolution, chap. 2.

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Conclusion  221 Consider the spate of “new and interesting domestic drama[s]” that coincide with debates on reform in the 1830s, ranging from Douglas William Jerrold’s The Rent Day (1832) and The Factory Girl (1832) to John Walker’s The Factory Lad (1832) and, later, George Dibdin Pitt’s Susan Hopley, or, the Vicissitudes of a Servant Girl (1841), all of which are quite heavily invested in navigating similar affective terrain, often unearthing the very same problems of representation.20 Thus, wrote a reviewer in The Literary Gazette of The Factory Girl: “It is a most difficult thing to handle the pathetic and tragic in every-day life; and either above, or below, or one side of the mark, is failure. The least coarseness revolts the mind.”21 Others claimed (yet again) that “a new branch of acting” was on offer at the playhouse, which focused on “the pathos of common life” and sought to reduplicate social realist genre painting onstage (indeed, this mode of acting was dubbed “the Wilkie style,” a reference to Scottish artist, David Wilkie, whose painting of The Rent Day had inspired the play of that same name).22 The connections between genre painting and naturalistic acting were by then almost a hundred years old, but repeated collisions between tragedy and ordinary life continued to shape realism and the natural for years to come. Discussing the role of melodrama in the era’s reformist politics, Raymond Williams observes that they represent “quite open attempts to dramatize a new social consciousness,” but attempts that nevertheless stood upon a longstanding tradition of English plays depicting the “vulgarity of low life” with sympathy and concern.23 To this day, in fact, to claim that the loss of these ordinary and subaltern lives is tragic, that they matter and are worth our collective witness, can remain a strident political act, whether that claim happens in the arena of our normal discourse or against the cultural guardians of capital-T Tragedy. But there are other ways in which bourgeois tragedy’s representation of ordinary suffering seems to announce the coming of modernity. Here I wish to recall our attention back to the staged Werter that predated this cultural moment, and which might initially appear to complicate such politicized claims. Reynolds’ tragedy, after all, depicted little of the overt social conflict that Lessing’s play would explore. The play omits Werther’s humiliation over being asked to leave “the distinguished company” assembled at Count von C.’s for dinner and downplays the strict social conventions that keep him in 20 Jerrold, Rent Day; Walker, Factory Lad; Pitt, Susan Hopley. Jerrold’s Factory Girl was unpublished, but performed at Drury Lane in 1832. See vol. 71 of The Annual Register, 129–30. 21  Quoted in Burwick, British Drama of the Industrial Revolution, 113. 22 Burwick, British Drama of the Industrial Revolution, 191. 23  Williams, “Social Environment and Theatrical Environment,” 135–6.

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222  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy his place in the novel (53). In many ways, this dramatic adaptation is unfussy about these details and places the conflict brewing among social ranks in the background of its plot. Moreover, unlike the supposedly black-and-white morality of much bourgeois tragedy, Albert is not a villain at all. He makes no abusive claim to Charlotte’s love and his response to Werter is marked by charity and the kind of sentimentality that recalls Harley or David Simple. In some ways, in fact, Albert proves to be the stereotypical bourgeois—sober, honorable, and prudent—that his rival ­ Werter cannot imagine himself to be. Nevertheless, and to that last point, the middling status of the title figure is everywhere evoked as both the social position that defines Werter and the static condition he wishes to transcend. That middlingness, with its limitations and morality and modest pleasures, is the obstacle to be overcome (not, it turns out, rival Albert). His is a class consciousness so deeply engrained and so wholly totalizing that it comes to dominate him in life and in death. Werter desperately wishes to be exceptional in some way, a vision which ultimately proves impossible but for the consummation of his love for Lotte. “I have so much, and my feelings for her swallow everything; I have so much, and without her everything turns to nothing for me,” Goethe’s novel puts it (65). Without her, he’s exposed as a mediocrity then, haunted by that self-knowledge and yet forced to inhabit it as true. Moved by Ossian, he cannot reach those poetic heights but by translating his sentiments; he feels his soul to be a great one, and yet he remains cut off from the full power of vital nature; having fumbled his access to the aristocracy, he grouses at the realization that he is pitied by them now. This is a world left much too degraded for a man of Werter’s intense passion and drive. Writing in his 1826 biography, Reynolds confessed that the impetus to adapt Goethe’s tragic novel sprung from a similarly classed self-loathing to that of Werter: what brought about the idea, its author tells us, was an illfated pursuit of one Eliza Proctor, whose attentions “naturally soared higher” than his own unexceptional middling stock (young Reynolds was studying at the Temple Bar then, the son of a wealthy, albeit mercantile family). “Only by obtaining celebrity, or notoriety,” he concluded, did he stand a chance against “rivals . . . too formidable in rank and fortune.”24 Recreating the beloved scene in which the lovers pore over Ossian, Reynolds’ stage directions allow him to disclose his affection for Eliza in the guise of his characters’ frustrated desires: “In this unhappy story they feel their own 24 Reynolds, Life and Times, 2:284–5.

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Conclusion  223 ­ isfortunes” (46). They feel Goethe’s misfortunes too, though, for such m scenes once stood in for the forbidden love he fostered for Charlotte Buff and the frustrated desires for a life much greater. Tragedy’s aesthetic frame so fully dissolves into the real that for a moment, at least, they are indistinguishable. To read this episode in light of the play, and the play in light of the novel, etc., is thus to glimpse the vertiginous mise-en-abîme of art’s relationship to life at the turn of the nineteenth century, to be pulled in by the gravity of mimesis and fantasy that grounds bourgeois tragedy. What’s translated in Reynolds’ play is not only the novel’s text, then, but the tense, homely conditions that threatened to hurl real, ordinary life into the tragic, a point underscored in the novel by the provocative text that sits by Werter’s bedside—none other than Emilia Galotti. In the gap between fantasy and reality, between an image of happiness and the realities of his unhappiness, between fiction and the real, lies a particularly modern form of suffering and, with it, the potential for a revitalized art. Indeed, Werter sees this kind of thwarted ambition as a new phenomenon in human history, the novel clarifies: “Just so limited and so happy were the splendid patriarchs! just so childlike were their feelings, their poetry!” (56–7). Growing into modernity means growing into the tragic, as it were. And so it’s here, in my view, that the extent of what bourgeois tragedy had achieved in shaping the modern social imaginary finally comes clearly into view. For if the earliest bourgeois tragedies imagined a suffering that was ordinary, by the end of the century the genre imagined ordinariness itself as its own kind of suffering. Contemporaneous images of the play’s staging underscore this, and read Werter as just this sort of modern-day Tantalus, whose painted visage hangs, foreboding, in the background of the action (Fig. C.1). Earlier I suggested that Werter’s affliction evokes a kind of depressive lack of desire, a melancholic failure to mourn the object’s loss, but such  details qualify the shape of that loss and in this, perhaps suggest an alternate reading. For Reynolds’ Werter has likewise tasted ambrosia. He has glimpsed the numinous in art, in love, in the sublime aesthesis of that love (or so he thinks). How can he not feel a loss—indeed, a disenchantment— in returning to the bureaucratic servitude of his workaday life, a life which he must now endure without Lotte? Reynolds and his theatrical collaborators amplify this aspect of Goethe’s novel in reading Werter alongside the Greek patriarch. Yet with a twist: kept alive in a vague middle state only to want, to aspire helplessly, that lack of fulfillment seems to eat steadily at Werter’s own sense of worth. Of course, the question of his worthiness is inscribed in his very name (which plays on the German word for “worthy”) and forms

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224  The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy

Fig. C.1.  Thomas Rowlandson, The Sorrows of Werter; The Last Interview. 1786. Etching with stipple engraving, 25 × 35 cm. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

the crux of the problem across both novel and drama. Werther’s various literary incarnations ask: is such a middling life worth it after all? In Goethe’s novel, the protagonist’s answer is a violent and shocking no, a repudiation of his mortality and the stifling social circumstances in which he finds himself. For Reynolds, by contrast, the answer is a bit more ambivalent and comes with the admission that Werter “feared to brave / Life’s common chances,” a realization that comes too late as the young poet slides out of a heavy world (58). In both cases, however, the stubborn insistence upon tragedy turns otherwise ordinary lives into art precisely by destroying those lives. In death, Werter comes to believe, he achieves the greatness previously denied him and transcends suffering. In death, Werter revolts against ordinary life in all its forms and thus comes to embody rebellion at its purest, as “the majestic right of man [and] the mark of his dignity.”25 25  The phrase comes from a letter between Goethe’s friend, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Quoted in Lukács, Goethe and His Age, 41.

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Conclusion  225 In this way, Werter’s end engages in a struggle for a new, humanitarian social order that would fuse the visceral emotion of the age with its Enlightenment ideals. “The world success of Werther,” observes Lukács, “is a literary triumph of the bourgeois revolution.”26 What exactly caused the era’s upheaval, and whether or not it was driven primarily by an ascendant bourgeoisie, will perhaps always remain among the most hotly debated historiographical questions. But the values that drove this change, and the affective schemes that rendered it possible, had been negotiated long before in bourgeois tragedy. 26 Lukács, Goethe and His Age, 44.

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Bibliography  243 Rymer, Thomas. The Tragedies of the Last Age Consider’d and Examin’d by the Practices of the Ancients and by the Common Sense of All Ages. London, 1692. Saggini, Francesca. Backstage in the Novel: Frances Burney and the Theater Arts. Translated by Laura Kopp. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Saler, Michael. “Modernity, Enchantment, and Fictionalism.” The Immanent Frame, December 20, 2013. http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2013/12/20/modernity-enchantmentand-fictionalism. Schechter, Joel. Eighteenth-Century Brechtians: Theatrical Satire in the Age of Walpole. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2016. Scheer, Monique. “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion.” History and Theory 51 (May 2012): 193–220. Schier, Donald. “Diderot’s Translation of ‘The Gamester.’” Diderot Studies 16 (1973): 229–40. Schiller, Friedrich. “On the Pathetic.” Translated by Daniel O. Dahlstrom. In Essays, edited by Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom. New York: Continuum, 1993. Scott, Walter. “Essay on the Drama.” In Miscellaneous Prose Works, vol. 1. Edinburgh, 1841. Scott, Walter. “Memoir of Henry Mackenzie.” In The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Walter Scott, vol. 3. Boston, MA, 1829. The Scourge 35. February 15, 1753. Sharpe, J.  A. Crime in Early Modern England, 1550–1750. 2nd ed. New York: Longman, 1999. Sharpe, J. A. “Domestic Homicide in Early Modern England.” The Historical Review 24, no. 1 (1981): 29–48. Sheehan, Jonathan. The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Sheehan, Jonathan. “Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization: A  Review Essay.” The American Historical Review 108, no. 4 (October 2003): 1061–80. Shudofsky, M. Maurice. “Charles Johnson and Eighteenth-Century Drama.” English Literary History 10, no. 2 (June 1943): 131–58. Singer, Peter. The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Edited by Ryan Patrick Hanley. New York: Penguin, 2010. “Some Remarks on the Play of George Barnwell.” The Gentleman’s Magazine: or, Monthly Intelligencer, edited by Edward Cave. London, 1731. Soni, Vivasvan. Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. Starr, G. A. “From Socrates to Sarah Fielding: Benevolence, Irony, and Conversation.” In Passionate Encounters in an Age of Sensibility, edited by Maximillian E. Novak and Anne Mellor, 106–26. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2000. Starr, G. Gabrielle. Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long EighteenthCentury. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

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244 Bibliography Staves, Susan. “Tragedy.” In The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730–1830, edited by Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn, 87–102. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Steele, Kathryn  L. “Clarissa’s Silence.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 23, no. 1 (Fall 2010): 1–34. Steele, Richard. The Tatler. Edited by Donald  F.  Bond. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Steffens, Johann Heinrich. Clarissa; ein bürgerliches Trauerspiel in drei Aufzügen. Zelle, 1765. Steiner, George. The Death of Tragedy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. Edited by Paul Goring. New York: Penguin Books, 2001. Stewart, Kathleen. “Atmospheric Attunements.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29, no. 3 (January 2011): 445–53. Stone, George Winchester, Jr. “The Making of the Repertory.” In The London Theatre World, 1660–1800, edited by Robert D. Hume, 181–209. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980. Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500–1800. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Surr, Thomas. George Barnwell: A Novel. London, 1798. Swidzinski, Joshua. “ ‘Great Labour Both of Mind and Tongue’: Articulacy and Interiority in Young’s Night Thoughts  and Richardson’s Clarissa.” In EighteenthCentury Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered, edited by Kate Parker and Courtney Weiss Smith, 161–86. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013. Swift, Jonathan. “Letter to Alexander Pope, Aug. 30, 1716.” In vol. 2 of The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope in Prose. 2 vols. London, 1741. Swindells, Julia. Glorious Causes: The Grand Theatre of Political Change, 1789 to 1833. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Szondi, Peter. An Essay on the Tragic. Translated by Paul Fleming. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Szondi, Peter. “Tableau and Coup de Théâtre: On the Social Psychology of Diderot’s Bourgeois Tragedy.” Translated by Harvey Mendelsohn. New Literary History 11, no. 2 (Winter 1980): 323–43. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. Taylor, Charles. “The Politics of Recognition.” In Multiculturalism, edited by Amy Gutmann, 25–74. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Taylor, David Francis. Theatres of Opposition: Empire, Revolution, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Taylor, E. Derek. Reason and Religion in Clarissa: Samuel Norris and ‘The Famous Mr. Norris of Bemerton. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2009. Taylor, E.  Derek. “Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and the Problem of Heaven.” In Theology and Literature in the Age of Johnson, edited by Melvyn New and Gerard Reedy, 71–89. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2012. Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971.

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Bibliography  245 Thomas, Nicholas. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Thompson, Benjamin, trans. and ed. The German Theatre. 6 vols. London, 1801. Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Penguin, 2002. Thorne, Christian. “Providence in the Early Novel, or Accident If You Please.” Modern Language Quarterly 64, no. 3 (2003): 323–47. Trevelyan, George Macaulay. Lord Grey of the Reform Bill, being the Life of Charles, second Earl Grey. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1920. Trotter, Catherine. “Letter to Her Niece, May 30, 1735.” In vol. 2 of The Works of Miss Catharine Cockburn, edited by Thomas Birch. 2 vols. London, 1751. Trussler, Simon. Burlesque Plays of the Eighteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969. Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ, 1982. Tyre, Richard H. “Versions of Poetic Justice in the Early Eighteenth Century.” Studies in Philology 54 (January 1957): 29–44. Uglow, Jenny. Hogarth: A Life and a World. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. Uffenbach, Zacharias Konrad von. London in 1710: From the Travels of Zacharias Conrad Von Uffenbach. Translated by W. H. Quarrell. London: Faber & Faber, 1934. U.S.  Bureau of Justice Statistics. Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980–2008. Report by Alexia Cooper and Erica  L.  Smith, Washington, DC: NCJ 236018. http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf. Utter, Robert Palfrey, and Gwendolyn Bridges Needham. Pamela’s Daughters. New York: MacMillan, 1936. Van Lennep, William, Emmett Langdon Avery, Arthur  H.  Scouten, George Winchester Stone, and Charles Beecher Hogan, eds. The London Stage, 1660–1800: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments & Afterpieces, Together with Casts, BoxReceipts and Contemporary Comment Compiled from the Playbills, Newspapers and Theatrical Diaries of the Period. 1st ed. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960. Vickers, Brian. Introduction to The Man of Feeling, by Henry Mackenzie, vii–xxiv. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Vickery, Amanda. Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Viner, Jacob. The Role of Providence in the Social Order: An Essay in Intellectual History. Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 1972. Virgil. The Aeneid. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York: Viking Press, 2006. Virgil. Virgil: Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid: Books 1–6. Translated by H. R. Fairclough. Loeb Classical Library 63. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. de Voogd, Peter. “Sterne and Visual Culture.” In The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne, edited by Thomas Keymer, 142–59. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Wahrman, Dror. Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c.1780–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Wahrman, Dror. The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in EighteenthCentury England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.

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246 Bibliography Wahrman, Dror. “National Society, Communal Culture: An Argument about the Recent Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Britain.” Social History 17, no. 1 (1992): 43–72. Walker, John. The Factory Lad: A Domestic Drama. London, 1832. Wall, Cynthia. “Poems on the Stage.”  In The Oxford Handbook of British Poetry, 1660–1800, edited by Jack Lynch, 23–39. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Wall, Cynthia. The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Wallace, David. “Bourgeois Tragedy or Sentimental Melodrama? The Significance of George Lillo’s The London Merchant.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 25, no. 2 (1991): 123–43. Walpole, Horace. “Thoughts on Comedy.” In The Works of Horatio Walpole, Earl of Orford. 5 vols. London, 1798. Walpole, Horace. “Walpole to Richard Bentley, 24 December 1754.” In vol. 3 of The Letters of Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Oxford. Edited by Paget Toynbee. 16 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903. Warner, Michael, Jonathan Van Antwerpen, and Craig Calhoun, eds. Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Warner, William Beatty. Reading Clarissa: The Struggles of Interpretation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with Other Writings on the Rise of the West. Translated by Stephen Kalberg. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Weiland, Christoph Martin. Clementina von Poretta; ein Trauerspiel. Zürich, 1760. Widmayer, Anne F. Theatre and the Novel from Behn to Fielding. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2015. Williams, Abigail. The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the EighteenthCentury Home. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. Williams, Caroline. “Melodrama.” In The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature, edited by Kate Flint, 193–219. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Williams, Caroline. “Moving Pictures: George Eliot and Melodrama.” In Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion, edited by Lauren Berlant, 105–44. New York: Routledge, 2004. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Williams, Raymond. Modern Tragedy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966. Williams, Raymond. “Social Environment and Theatrical Environment.” In Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays. London: Verso, 2005. Wodhull, Michael. The Equality of Mankind: A Poem. Oxford, 1765. Wordsworth, William. Preface to Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems, by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 1, i–lxiv. 2nd ed. 2 vols. London, 1800. Worrall, David. Celebrity, Performance, Reception: British Georgian Theatre as Social Assemblage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

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Bibliography  247 Wortley, James Stuart, Lord Wharcliff. “Biographical Anecdotes of Lady M.  W.  Montagu.” In vol. 1 of The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, edited by James Stuart Wortley, Lord Wharncliff. 2 vols. London, 1837. Wrigley, E.  A., R.  S.  Schofield, and Roger Schofield. The Population History of England 1541–1871. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Wycherley, William. The Country Wife and Other Plays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. A Yorkshire Tragedy. London, 1608. Žižek, Slavoj. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Zunshine, Lisa. Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England. Columbus, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005.

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Index Note: Figures are indicated by an italic ‘f ’, respectively, following the page number. absorptive aesthetic  148–51, 153–4, 162f, 201–3 acting in burlesque  46–7 of Garrick, David  144–5, 148, 148n.26, 160n.52, 196–7 Hill’s approach to  156–7 naturalistic craft of  151–3 of Pritchard, Hannah  152, 167–8 of Siddons, Sarah  65–6, 152–3, 167–8, 213–16 see also emotional practices onstage; performance theory Addison, Joseph Cato  38–9, 174–5, 178 on poetic justice  118, 118n.34 The Spectator  90–4, 91n.48, 108 Adventures of David Simple, The (Fielding, Sarah)  16, 27 argument for disregard of suffering in  174–5 argument for suffering as universal in  176–8, 184–5 author’s purpose for  175–6 character of Camilla in  181–4 character of Cynthia in  181–4 character of David in  174, 179–82, 193–4, 199–200 characters of Ladies True-Wit and Know-All in  174–5, 177–8 ending of  183–5 financial vulnerabilities in  180–5 as first novel of feeling  174, 193–4 narrative style of  200–1 ordinary vs. heroic suffering in  174–6 plot of  174–5, 180–5 reader responses, shaping of  199–201 stagecraft technique, use of  193–4 as “writing what you know”  175–6 aesthetic of affective identification  27, 36–7, 63–4, 168–9, 178–9

affect studies  166–7, 166n.64 affliction, see ordinary suffering amatory fiction  15n.41 Amelia (Fielding, Henry)  27 character of Amelia in  189–92 character of Booth in  186–90, 207–8 character of Miss Mathews in  186–7, 190 dignity in  191–2 marriage stresses in  185–8, 190–1 as social protest and reform  192n.35, 220 tragic realism in  185–8, 190–2 Ancien Régime  22–3, 38–9, 106–7, 187–8, 216–17 Annals of King James and King Charles, The 74 anti-Cit satire  41 aposiopesis  201, 207 apprentices (tradesmen)  31–3, 41–2, 44–6, 53, 58–63 architectural space in theatre  88–9, 97n.67 Arden of Feversham (anonymous) The complaint and lamentation of Mistresse Arden of Feversham in Kent (print) and  77, 78f home’s safety, betrayal of  77–8, 78f, 79f horror and terror of  8–9, 69–70 sources for  74–5 Arden of Feversham (Lillo and Hoadly)  26, 80–1, 80n.27 Arden of Feversham, image of home of  79f Arendt, Hannah  220 aristocracy  34–6, 38–9, 187–8, 194–5, 197–8, 215–16, 219–20 see also Ancien Régime Aristotle  18, 20–1, 34, 36–7, 94, 94n.61, 165–6 art objects, Kant’s theory on  93 “art of the average”  168–9 audiences of The London Merchant 32–3 middle position of  36–7, 137–8 Moore on  168–9

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250 Index audiences (cont.) proximity in The Gamester  146–7, 160–1, 168–71 reaction to domestic tragedies  68–70, 99–100 reaction to Fatal Curiosity 68–70 reaction to The London Merchant 51–2, 58–9, 67 as readers of The Adventures of David Simple 199–201 as readers of Clarissa  107–8, 111, 117–18, 126–7, 132–3, 137–8, 171 see also spectators of suffering Auerbach, Erich Mimesis  12–13, 13n.34, 142–3 ballads and ballad-operas  47–8, 51–2, 74–5, 213n.6 Battestin, Martin C. and Ruthe  186–7, 192n.35 Behn, Aphra The City Heiress 41 The Fatal Marriage 14–15 Bender, John  47–50 Benjamin, Walter  163 Berlant, Lauren  22–3, 124–5, 193, 205 Cruel Optimism  52–3, 53n.66 Bernstein, J. M.  39–40 Blair, Hugh Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres  21–2, 155 blank verse  146–7, 154, 161–3 Bloody-minded Husband, The (ballads)  74–5 Boitard, François (?) Othello, Act V, scene 2 (illustration)  84f Bourdieu, Pierre  143–4, 144n.17 bourgeois/bourgeoisie term  7–8, 8nn.22–24; see also middle class (middle sort) “bourgeois revaluation,” see cultural revaluation of middle class bourgeois tragedy criticisms of  18–23 definitions of  5–8, 95–6, 137–8 early experiments in  10–14, 25–6, 29–30, 32–3, 43n.47 eighteenth century, mid-late  16–17, 140–1, 172–4, 196–7, 212–15 factors in development of  11, 24–5, 52–3, 67, 172, 225 media formats for  13–14 neglected history of  211–14

nineteenth century, influence on  17–18, 22–3, 27–8 see also Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady (Richardson); domestic dramas and tragedies; London Merchant, The (Lillo); ordinary suffering; prosaic suffering; sentimental fiction Bradshaigh, Lady  106–7, 117, 125–6 Bridgewater, Roger  46–7 British identity  82–3 British Library Board The complaint and lamentation of Mistresse Arden of Feversham in Kent 78f Newes from Perin in Cornwall Of a Most Bloody and Unexampled Murther 79f Brown, Mather The Last Scene in the Tragedy of the Gamester (oil on canvas)  160–1, 162f Burke, Edmund A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful  90–2, 91n.48, 94 Burke, Helen  58–9 burlesques  43–50, 167–8, 176 Burney, Charles  186–7, 217–18 Burney, Frances Cecilia 16 Butler, Joseph  121–2 Butler, Judith  33 Butler, Samuel  119 Cælia or, The Perjur’d Lover (Johnson)  11 with aesthetics of ordinary  140–1, 167–8 as inspiration for Clarissa  15–16, 26, 105–6, 112–16 performance of  111–15 plot summary of  112–14 as social protest  220 capitalism  11–12, 119–20, 179n.16, 180, 183, 188–9 capital punishment (hangings)  48, 59–60, 61f, 219–20 Carlson, Julie  73 catharsis  35–9, 171, 193, 199–200, 211 Chapter of Accidents, The (Lee)  16–17, 27, 196–9 Chetwood, William Rufus South Sea, or the Biters Bit A Tragi-ComiPastoral Farce  43, 43n.46 The Stock-jobbers or, The Humours of Exchange Alley 43

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Index  251 Christian message of Clarissa  108, 118, 125–6, 132–3, 137–8; see also Providence and Clarissa Cibber, Colley  111–18, 126 Love’s Last Shift 116 Cibber, Theophilus  111–15 The Lives of the Poets  29–30, 51–2 prologue for The London Merchant 65 Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady (Richardson) adaptations for stage  16–17, 98–9, 99n.69, 105–6, 106n.5, 140–1, 148, 213 audience (readership) of  107–8, 111, 117–18, 126–7, 132–3, 137–8, 171 as bourgeois tragedy  105–10, 105n.2 Cælia as inspiration for  15–16, 26, 105–6, 112–16 character of Lovelace in  121, 121n.45, 127–30 Christian message of  108, 118, 125–6, 132–3, 137–8 critical reception of  111–12, 175–6 Diderot on  15–16, 108, 176–7, 208–9 dramatic antecedent of  111–16 ending, controversy of  107–9, 111–12, 116–18, 124–6 Fielding, Sarah, on  14–15, 107–8, 113, 188, 201 influence on The Gamester  16, 142, 142n.10, 147–8 plot summary of  98–9, 106–7 rape in  15–16, 116–17, 127–31, 133–4 realism in  15–16, 105, 107–8, 111, 143–4 self-blame in  129–31, 135–6 see also poetic justice; Providence and Clarissa Clarissa (character), suffering of and Book of Job  131–6 breakdown from  128–31 cause of  127–31 debate over  26, 108–10, 126–38 with difficult questions  133–4 as divinely appointed  127 fragility of  111n.20, 130, 137–8 fullness of  26, 108–9, 111n.20, 130, 132–5, 137–8 meaning, discovery of  108–10, 109n.15, 110n.18, 115, 125, 127, 131–2, 134–5 as meaningless  117–18, 124–5, 134–8 with Meditations Collected from the Sacred Texts 131–8

obscurity/isolation of  110–11, 127–9, 131–2 as shared experience  110–11, 126 transcendency over  108–9, 113, 131–3, 136–7 as way of being  108 see also poetic justice; Providence and Clarissa Clarissa; or, The Fatal Seduction (Porett)  16–17, 98–9, 99n.69, 105–6, 106n.5, 213 class consciousness and struggles  22–3, 44–6, 65–6, 106–7, 106n.6, 187–8, 216–25 classical tragedy erosion of  3–4, 10–13, 153–4, 172, 193 vs. serious genre  151n.33, 176–7 see also heroes; neoclassical aesthetics; ordinary vs. heroic suffering Cohen, Margaret  193, 193n.37 Coke, Edward Institutes of the Laws of England  86, 86n.39 Colman, George  16–17, 93, 93n.56, 96–7 comédie larmoyante  148–50, 149n.30 comedies Aristotle on  34 Restoration  40–4, 72–3, 116 sentimental 183–4 serious  173–4, 196–8 commerce, see merchant class “Commonality, the”  188 common people, see middle class (middle sort); ordinary suffering community for sharing of suffering  63–4, 110–11, 177–9, 184–5, 193, 207–9 complaint and lamentation of Mistresse Arden of Feversham in Kent, The (print)  77, 78f Connerton, Paul  143–4, 144n.17 Cooke, Thomas  47, 47n.54 Corneille, Pierre  35 corruption, leveling of  47–8, 62–3, 65–6 costuming  82–3, 82n.29 Covent Garden Theatre  116, 210–11 crimes as source material  26, 74–6, 76n.23 criminal justice system  58–9 Crowne, John City Politiques 41 cultural revaluation of middle class bourgeois tragedy and  24–5, 29, 52–3, 198, 201 in The London Merchant  29, 33, 60–4, 67

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252 Index cultural revaluation of middle class (cont.) as “rise”  24–5, 24n.69 slow process of  40, 67 see also ordinary suffering as worthy of recognition Cumberland, Richard  120–1, 121n.44 The Mysterious Husband  140–1, 213 curiosity  81–3, 82n.28, 86–8, 93; see also Fatal Curiosity (Lillo) Davenant, William Gondibert 34–5 Defoe, Daniel Robinson Crusoe  1–4, 25 De Man, Paul  201–2 Dennis, John  123–4, 123n.55, 136 The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry  123–4, 123n.55 description vs. narration in drama  156–8 Dickie, Simon  30–1 Diderot, Denis “bourgeois tragedy” of  7–8, 11–13, 211–12 on Clarissa  15–16, 108, 176–7, 208–9 Entretiens sur le Fils naturel  7–8, 168–9, 169n.73, 198 fourth wall concept  153 and The Gamester 144–5 genre moyen of  12–13, 150–1, 151n.33, 172–3, 196–7 genre sérieux of  12–13, 108, 153–4, 176–7, 196–8, 208–9 Le Fils naturel  16–17, 140–1, 141n.6 Le Père de famille  150–1, 196–8 naturalistic innovations of  151–4, 159–60 at Salons of 1767  153, 153n.42 dignitas 34 dignity of middle class in Amelia 191–2 in bourgeois tragedy  5, 24–5, 27–9 debates on  39–40 in domestic tragedies  97–8 “expanding circle” of  39–40, 39n.30 ironic use of  40–1 in The London Merchant  25–6, 33, 36–8, 59 loss of  170 in paintings  48–50, 148–50 in rebellion of Werter  223–4, 224n.25 in sentimental fiction  16, 179–80, 206–7 see also ordinary suffering as worthy of recognition

disenchantment, process of  20, 120, 125, 163–5 Distressed Mother or, Sorrowful Wife in Tears, The (pamphlet)  74–5 domestic dramas and tragedies audience reaction to  68–70, 99–100 “close to home” intensity in  70–1, 71n.8, 77–8, 95–6, 95n.64 of eighteenth century, early  14–15, 30–1 of eighteenth century, late  212–14 with horror precluding tragic feeling  92–4, 94n.61 ordinary as alien and threatening in  70–1 origins of  8–9 private “safe” spaces in  72–3, 77–83, 86, 79nn.25–26 in sentimental fiction  172–3, 181–2, 185–8, 192, 195–7, 199, 208–9 social reform of 1830s and  221 as stage realism  8–9 true crimes as sources for  26, 74–6, 74nn.13–14 unpredictability of  77 voyeurism in  72–3, 80–1, 85–6 see also Arden of Feversham (anonymous); Fatal Curiosity (Lillo) domestic violence of Othello 83 probability of  76, 76n.23 restraint in presentation of  85 true crimes of  74–6, 75n.18 doublement in language  201–2, 207 drama and novels, intersection of  13–14, 14n.38, 15–16 drames  148–50, 149n.30, 173–4, 193, 198–9 Drury Lane Theatre  51, 65–6, 96–7, 111–12, 213–15 Dryden, John  34–6, 66–7, 134–5, 139–40, 156–7 D’Urfey, Thomas Sir Barnaby Whigg or, No Wit Like a Woman’s 41 Eagleton, Terry  4, 106n.6, 210–11 economic growth  2–3, 11–12 eighteenth-century (early) domestic tragedies  14–15, 30–1 eighteenth-century (mid-late) bourgeois tragedies  16–17, 140–1, 172–4, 196–7, 212–15

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Index  253 1830s, social reform focus in  221 Elizabethan England  53–4 Ellison, Julie  178 Emilia Galotti (Berrington?)  222–3 epilogue of  218–20 plot summary of  215–16 political implications of  215n.9, 216–20, 218n.14 as translation of Lessing’s  16–17, 214, 214nn.7–8 emotional practices onstage body knowledge and  143–4, 166–7 with fragmented prose  157–60 habitual feelings as  166–7, 166n.64 habitus and  143–4, 166–9, 207–8 influence of Greuze’s paintings on 148–50 with naturalistic techniques  151–3 overview of  25–7, 143–4 with plain speaking  167–8 prosaic suffering as genre for  143–4 emotions embodiment of  21–2, 143–4, 166–7 performance and history of  22–3 range in response to suffering  110 in structures of feeling  9–10, 22–4, 47–8, 60–2, 67, 176, 201, 207 in tragic prose  139–40, 140n.3, 157–60 see also emotional practices onstage Enlightenment  3–4, 11, 20, 27–8, 136n.82, 140–1, 176–7, 225 Entzauberung  20, 163–4 epistolary form  113–14, 128–9 Exchange Alley; or, The Stockjobber turn’d Gentleman (anonymous)  40–1, 43 “expanding circle” of dignity  39–40, 39n.30 faith, crisis of  124–5; see also poetic justice; Providence and Clarissa family affection  70–1, 71n.7 family discord, see domestic dramas and tragedies; sentimental fiction farce 47–8 Fatal Curiosity (Lillo) audience reaction to  68–70 bourgeois identity in  86–90, 97–9 character of Charlot in  101–3 character of Young Wilmot in  81–3, 88–9, 96–7

characters of Agnes and Old Wilmot in  86–8, 97–100 climactic scene in  86–8, 87f final act of  96–104 historical context of  11, 16–17, 26, 44–7 home’s safety, betrayal of  77, 82–3, 86 horror and terror of  69–70, 77 incursion of “Other” in  81–3 Newes from Perin in Cornwall Of a Most Bloody and Unexampled Murther pamphlet and  74, 78–81, 79f Othello, influence of  83, 83n.30, 86–8, 84f, 87f painting of Act III, scene 2 by Stothard  86–9, 86n.37, 87f, 88n.42 performances of  68–9 plot summary of  68 private space as spectacle in  72–3, 80–3, 85–90, 96–9 providential role in  100–4 revivals of  16–17, 93, 93n.56 sources for  74–5, 74nn.13–14 staging of  82–3, 82n.29, 86, 96–9 variations in text of  103–4, 104n.74 violation of boundaries in  86–8, 96–8 Virgil’s epigram and  66–7 Fatal Extravagance, The (Hill) character of Bellmour in  154–5, 160–1 as first bourgeois tragedy  43n.47 with heroic tragedy ornamentations  155 influence on The Gamester  146–7, 146n.23 language in comparison with The Gamester 154–61 personal connections of  11 plot summary of  43–4, 146–7 subjunctive tense in  160–1 Fatal Seduction, The (Porett), see Clarissa; or, The Fatal Seduction (Porett) fate-dramas 100 fate vs. passion, impulses of  188–90 feelings, structures of  9–10, 22–4, 47–8, 60–2, 67, 176, 201, 207 Festa, Lynn  178–9, 178n.14, 179n.16 Fielding, Henry childhood difficulties of  180–1 The Covent-Garden Tragedy 46–7, 46nn.51–52 epilogue for Cælia; or, The Perjured Lover 115–16 friendship with Moore  186–7

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254 Index Fielding, Henr (cont.) as Haymarket manager  44–7, 176 influence of Richardson on  187–8 as magistrate  186–7 The Tragedy of Tragedies  44, 44n.48, 167–8, 167n.68 see also Amelia (Fielding, Henry) Fielding, Sarah childhood difficulties of  180–1 influences on  175–6 Remarks on Clarissa  14–15, 107–8, 113, 188, 201 Volume the Last  16, 180, 182, 184–5, 201 see also Adventures of David Simple, The (Fielding, Sarah) Fleming, Paul  168–9 Folger Library: Othello, Act V, scene 2  84f formless tragedy  12–13, 17–18, 140, 142–3, 153–4, 156–7, 169–70, 172 fourth wall concept  153, 162f, 169 France bourgeoisie term in  7–8, 8n.24 bourgeois tragedy in  11–13, 140–1, 141n.6, 165n.59, 211–12, 214, 217–18 influences from  35, 178nn.13–14 sentimental fiction in  178–9, 193, 193n.37, 198–9 see also Diderot, Denis Freud, Sigmund  73, 88n.42 Frye, Northrop  18–19, 143–4 gallows (hangings)  48, 59–60, 61f, 219–20 Gamester, The (Moore)  11, 16, 26–7 actors/actresses in  152–3, 153n.40, 167–8 audience proximity in  146–7, 160–1, 168–71 character of Beverley in  156–61, 160n.52, 162f, 163–5, 170 character of Mrs. Beverley in  152–3, 165–6, 170 disenchantment in  163–5 influence of Amelia on  186–7 influence of Clarissa on  142, 142n.10, 147–8 influence of domestic tragedies on  146–7, 146n.23 language in comparison with The Fatal Extravagance 154–61

The Last Scene in the Tragedy of the Gamester (painting) and  160–1, 162f middling aspirations in  158–60, 163 “natural Pictures” in  146–51, 153–4 plot summary of  145–6 prose of  140–1, 146–7, 156–61, 163, 170–1 reception of  144–5 as social protest  220 subjunctive tense in  158–61 Garrick, David  144–5, 148, 148n.26, 160n.52, 196–7 Isabella 14–15 Garrick Club, London: The Last Scene in the Tragedy of the Gamester 162f Gay, John The Beggar’s Opera 47–8 The What D’Ye Call It  47–8, 167–8 gender, implications of  18–19, 63n.72, 86 Genest, John  68–9 genre moyen  12–13, 150–1, 151n.33, 172–3, 196–7 genre sérieux  12–13, 108, 153–4, 176–7, 192, 196–8, 208–9; see also serious genre Georgian domestic tragedies  26, 34, 74–5, 80–1, 86, 92; see also domestic dramas and tragedies Georgian theater  11, 22, 24–5, 29, 52–3, 70–1 Germany adaptation of Clarissa in  106n.5 bourgeois tragedy in  11–12, 140–1, 141n.6, 165n.59, 211–12, 214, 217–18 idealism of  19–21, 211–12 Trauerspiele of  16–17, 137–8, 140–1, 163, 214 see also Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von; Lessing, G. E. Gin Act of 1736  44–6 Gin Lane (engraving by Hogarth)  44–6, 45f, 48, 49f God, see Providence and Clarissa; providence (God) in Fatal Curiosity Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Die Leiden des jungen Werthers 27–8, 210–11, 214, 222–3 see also Werter: A Tragedy (Reynolds) gothic themes  86, 86n.40, 99 gravitas  34, 156–7

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Index  255 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste absorptive aesthetic of  148–50, 149n.30, 203 La Malédiction paternelle. Le Fils ingrat (oil on canvas)  148–50, 149f La Malédiction paternelle. Le Fils puni (oil on canvas)  148–50, 150f Le Malheur Imprévu ou Le Miroir brisé (oil on canvas)  203, 204f grievability, see ordinary suffering as worthy of recognition habitual feelings  52–3, 151–2, 166–7, 166n.64, 192, 200–1 habitus and emotions  143–4, 166–9, 207–8 hangings (punishment)  48, 59–60, 61f, 219–20 happiness in eighteenth century  112–13, 113n.24, 117–18 as middle class goal  17–18, 24–5, 112–13, 113n.24, 158–9, 184–5, 208–9, 212 Hardy, Thomas  219–20 harlequin “tragedies”  44–6 Harlot’s Progress, A (engravings by Hogarth)  47–50, 50f, 51f Harris, James  175–6 Philological Inquiries 66–7 Hauser, Arnold  216–17 Haymarket Theatre, see Little Haymarket Theatre Hegel, G. W. F.  211–12 Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art 18–19 heroes annihilation of  19–20 aristocratic position of  34–6, 38–9, 139–40 gender implications of  18–19 transcendence of  18–21, 36, 38–9 heroic vs. prosaic suffering  139–42, 153–4, 167–9, 171, 188; see also ordinary vs. heroic suffering Hill, Aaron  11, 156–7; see also Fatal Extravagance, The (Hill) Hoadly, John  175–6, 175n.5 Hobbes, Thomas  34–5 Hogarth, William Emblematical Print on the South Sea Scheme 43 Gin Lane (engraving)  44–6, 45f, 48, 49f

A Harlot’s Progress (engravings)  47–50, 50f, 51f Industry and Idleness (engravings)  31–2 “home” British nation as  82–3 as concept  73, 73n.12 as emotional refuge  78–80, 80n.26, 165–6 intensity of being “close to”  70–1, 71n.8, 77–8, 95–6, 95n.64 as “man’s castle”  86, 86n.39 as symbol of suffering  88–9 see  also domestic dramas and tragedies; safety of private spaces, betrayal of homely state  73, 86, 97, 222–3 homicides, see murders honesty as middling value  37–8, 38n.27, 53–4, 58 hope for better future  60–2, 127 Horace Ars Poetica  167–8, 167nn.67–68 horror, feelings of  69–70, 74, 77, 92–4, 94n.61 Howard, Gorges Edmond The Female Gamester 139 Hoxby, Blair  19–20, 163 Hull, Thomas Fatal Interview, The  16–17, 140–1, 213 Hume, David  92, 94 humor, serious  47–8; see also comedies Hurd, Richard  167–8 imagination, necessity of of actors  143–4, 157 of readers  90–2, 200–1, 205 incest, implication of  181–2 Inchbald, Elizabeth  69–70, 77–8, 211–12 The British Theatre  86n.37, 87f The Modern Theatre 211 indifference toward suffering by others  30–1, 44, 174–6, 182, 195 by sufferer  113, 163–4, 207–8 industrialization  2–3, 11–12 “intuition” process  52–3, 53n.66 irony  59, 65–6, 77, 82–3, 113–14, 127, 205 isolation, social  71–2, 89–90, 110–11, 127–8, 169, 182 Jenner, Charles The Man of Family 196–7

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256 Index Jerrold, Douglas William The Factory Girl  221, 221n.20 The Rent Day 221 Job, biblical  131–6, 134n.77, 136n.82 Johnson, Charles  116, 116n.29 on she-tragedies  9–10 see also Cælia or, The Perjur’d Lover (Johnson) Johnson, Samuel  94, 139–40, 188 Rambler (essays)  38–9 justice system  58–9 Kames, Lord  167–8 Kant, Immanuel  21–2, 39–40, 93 Kelly, John The Fall of Bob or, The Oracle of Gin: A Tragedy  44–6, 44n.49 La Chaussée, Pierre-Claude Nivelle de  148–50, 149n.30 Lamb, Charles  18–19, 31–2 Langford, Paul  2–3 language and trauma  109–11, 110n.17, 110n.19, 128–9, 131–4 language of tragedy, see prosaic suffering; prose, tragic; prose vs. verse Last Scene in the Tragedy of the Gamester, The (oil on canvas by Brown)  160–1, 162f Lee, Sophia The Chapter of Accidents  16–17, 27, 196–9 Lessing, G. E. bourgeois tragedy of  11, 211–12, 214 Emilia Galotti  16–17, 214, 214nn.7–8 Miss Sara Sampson  16–17, 106–7, 140–1 see also Emilia Galotti (Berrington) Lewis, Matthew The Captive 99–100 Lillo, George biography of  29–30, 83n.30, 119 see also Fatal Curiosity (Lillo); London Merchant, The (Lillo) liminality in bourgeois tragedy  163, 163n.55 Literary Gazette, The 221 Little Haymarket Theatre  44–6, 80n.27, 89–90, 96–7, 97n.67, 175–6 London social strata of  30–2, 186–9 theatre performances in  30–1, 42, 46–7, 51–2, 140–1, 144–5, 210–11, 218

London Cuckolds, The (Ravenscroft)  41–3, 42n.40 London Merchant, The (anonymous frontpiece)  59–60, 61f London Merchant, The (Lillo) in Adventures of David Simple 174–80 affective identification of  36–7 apprentices in  53, 58–63 audience of  32–3 audience reaction to  51–2, 58–9, 67 body as focal point in  63–4 bourgeois revaluation in  29, 33, 60–4, 67 character of Barnwell in  55–62, 61f, 161–3, 174–5, 213, 213n.6 character of Millwood in  55–7, 62–6, 213 dignity in  36–8, 59 as experimental work  32–3 heroic language in  59–62, 161–3 historical context of  11, 25–6, 29 Hogarth’s paintings and  48–50 illicit desire in  55–6 lawfulness vs. benevolence in  58–9 merchant class in  53–5, 58–60, 62–3, 65 middling virtues in  53–5 misreading of  47 as moralizing play  31–2, 48 novelization of  213 pity in  55, 57–8, 63–5 prologue for  65 prose of  140–1 prostitution in  46–7, 64–6 recognition of ordinary suffering in  33, 60–6 tragic fall in  54–7, 59–62, 61f variations in text of  65 London Packet, The 218 Louvre Museum, Paris La malédiction paternelle. Le fils ingrat  148–50, 149f La Malédiction paternelle. Le Fils puni  148–50, 150f Lukács, Georg  4, 216–17, 225 Mackenzie, Henry  92–3, 140, 140n.4 The Man of Feeling  178, 194–6, 199–202 The Shipwreck  16–17, 93, 93n.56 Malédiction paternelle, La. Le Fils ingrat (oil on canvas by Greuze)  148–50, 149f Malédiction paternelle, La. Le Fils puni (oil on canvas by Greuze)  148–50, 150f

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Index  257 Malheur Imprévu ou Le Miroir brisé, Le (oil on canvas by Greuze)  203, 204f Mandeville, Bernard Fable of the Bees 121 Man of Feeling, The (Mackenzie)  178, 194–6, 199–202 Maria—Moulines (etching by Ryland)  201–5, 202f Markley, Robert  205–7 marriage plot endings  116–17, 183–4, 186 marriages, arranged  181–2 Marshall, David  169, 193, 193n.37 matriarchal agency  68, 74–5, 86, 97–8 Maza, Sarah  198–9 McKeon, Michael  118 mechanistic universe, view of  120–1, 121n.44 melodramas as domestic dramas  16–17, 27–8, 213 “illegitimacy” of  21–2 in reformist politics  221 self-reflexive nature of  169n.74 wishful sentimentality of  124–5, 124n.62 memory and trauma  129–31, 129n.68 merchant class in The Adventures of David Simple  179–80, 183 in The London Merchant  53–5, 58–60, 62–3, 65 middle class (middle sort) appeal of  1–2 with comforts, material  2–3, 24–5, 86–90, 108–9, 124–5 corruption of  180, 183–7 description in eighteenth-century England  2–3, 3n.6, 7–8 in Elizabethan England  53 emerging sensibilities of  52–3, 60–2 ethics of  97–9, 101, 122 happiness as goal of  17–18, 24–5, 112–13, 113n.24, 158–9, 184–5, 208–9, 212 as objects of laughter and disrespect  30–1, 40–4 precarious position of  153n.42, 180–2, 191, 205–7 with Providence as theology  122–3 repudiation of  223–5 self-awareness of  22–3, 31–3 stigma in  89–90, 182 suffering in mediocrity of  222–5

and tragedy’s evolution  3–4, 10–13, 27–8, 223–5 upward mobility of  122, 179–80 see also cultural revaluation of middle class; dignity of middle class; ordinary suffering; prosaic suffering middle genre, see genre moyen “mode of excess”  21n.64 modernity attitude of middle class toward  5, 208–9 bourgeois tragedy and  6, 23–4, 211–12, 214–15, 221–4 evolution of ideology of  6–7, 19–20 and faith (Providence)  6–7, 119–22 and formless tragedy  142–3 with tragedy as “trial narratives”  4n.14 as tragic condition  6–7, 27–8, 60–2, 223–4 Molière Le Bourgeois gentilhomme 40–1 monologues  59–60, 154–61 Montagu, Elizabeth  95 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley  64, 177–8 Moore, Edward biography of  144–5, 145n.20 correspondence with Richardson  142, 142n.10, 147–8 on feelings of audience  168–9 friendship with Fielding, Henry  186–7 see also Gamester, The (Moore) moral causality and Providence, debate on  119–21, 124–5 moral instruction  31–2, 48, 58–9 moral occult  124–5, 124n.62 moral order and Providence  117–18, 122–4, 123n.55 Moretti, Franco  3–4, 8n.22, 12–13, 142–3 Morning Chronicle, The 218–20 murders as compassionate choice  154–5 in domestic tragedies  68–9, 74–8, 86, 96–9 in The London Merchant  56, 63–4, 161–3, 174–5 statistics on  76n.23 narration vs. description in drama  156–8 National Trust/David Cousins and Sonja Power: Maria—Moulines 202f natural consequences as justice  117, 117n.33

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258 Index naturalism in acting techniques  151–3 in Diderot’s innovations  151–4, 159–60 of nineteenth century  171 “natural Pictures”  146–51, 153–4, 169, 171 “Nature” as Providence  122 neoclassical aesthetics audience of  36–7, 95, 168–9, 168n.71 language of  139–40 longevity of  40 social class in  30–1, 34, 139–40 tragic hero in  6, 34 see also classical tragedy Newes from Perin in Cornwall Of a Most Bloody and Unexampled Murther (pamphlet)  74, 78–81, 79f; see also Fatal Curiosity (Lillo) “Newgate Pastoral”  47, 47n.55 Nicoll, Allardyce  211–12 novels anti-tragic tradition of  4, 4nn.12–14 extensive totality of  4, 15–16, 119–20 of feeling  172–3, 199–200, 205 intersection of drama and  13–16, 14n.38 middle class demands of  142–3 purposes of  4, 4n.16, 12–13 realism in  12–13, 15–16, 67, 105, 107–8, 111, 142–4 secularization of  118 “writing to the moment” for  14–15, 26–7, 142 see also Adventures of David Simple, The (Fielding, Sarah); Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady (Richardson); tableau O’Brien, John  31–2 ordinary suffering disregard for  30–1, 44, 174–6, 182, 195 as duty  56–60, 62 genres with accounts of  13–14 home as symbol of  88–9 indifference of sufferer to  113, 163–4, 207–8 mediation of  172–4, 195–6, 205 as “Nature is Nature”  176–8, 192 ordinariness as source of  222–5 prose for  139–40, 154–61, 167–71

self-reflexivity of  168–70, 169n.74 as shared experience  63–4, 110–11, 177–9, 184–5, 193, 207–9 “tears” for  63–4, 66–7 transcendency over  108–9, 113, 131–3, 136–7, 163–4 see also Clarissa (character), suffering of; prosaic suffering; spectators of suffering ordinary suffering and faith and morality, see poetic justice; Providence and Clarissa ordinary suffering as worthy of recognition aesthetic of affective identification as  27, 36–7, 63–4, 168–9, 178–9 in bourgeois tragedy  5–6, 65–7 in The London Merchant  33, 60–6 in sentimental fiction  174–80, 192, 201 slow acceptance of  40, 176 social acceptance of sensitivity to  177–80 with universal scope  39–40, 176–9, 184–5, 192, 207–9 see also sympathy ordinary vs. heroic suffering in appeals and affects  95–6, 168–9, 168n.71 in bourgeois tragedy  5–6, 10–11, 18–22, 29, 35–7 burlesquing of  44–50 in causes of suffering  176–7 with comparison of The Gamester and The Fatal Extravagance 154–61 critical distance for spectators of  92–4, 94n.61, 141–2, 193 in eighteenth century high heroic plays  38–9 in language usage  139–40, 154–61, 167–71 in sentimental fiction  174–6 in she-tragedies  85 see also prosaic suffering Othello, Act V, scene 2 (Shakespeare)  83–8, 84f, 92 “Other” as stranger in home  81–3 Otway, Thomas The Orphan  9–10, 9n.28, 85 Venice Preserv’d  9–10, 85, 178 parodies 40–1 passions, explanation of  188–90 patience 101–3 performance theory  151–3, 160n.52, 167–8; see also emotional practices onstage philosophy of the tragic  19–21

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Index  259 Pitt, William  219–20 pity benefit of  91–2 in heroic vs. bourgeois tragedy  10–11, 18–19, 35–6 in The London Merchant  55, 57–8, 63–5 in The Man of Feeling 195–6 politics of  220 and social bonds  91n.46 vs. sympathy  178–9 plain speaking  167–8 poetic justice Cibber’s demands for  111, 115–16 failure of  117–18 with moral order  123n.55 with moral reform of culprits  116–17 with rewards and punishments  115–17, 122–4 for sanctity of ordinary  125 as secular faith  26, 117–18, 122–5 politeness  37–8, 38n.27 politics of recognition  33, 38n.28; see also dignity; ordinary suffering as worthy of recognition Porett, Robert Clarissa; or, The Fatal Seduction 16–17, 98–9, 99n.69, 105–6, 106n.5, 213 poverty, attitudes toward  174–5, 182 Pritchard, Hannah  152, 167–8 privacy in domestic space in absorptive paintings and staging  148–51, 162f in domestic tragedies  72–3, 77–83, 86, 79nn.25–26 as emotional refuge  78–80, 80n.26, 165–6 scholarship on  71–2, 72n.9 as spectacle on stage  72–3, 80–3, 85–90, 96–9 and voyeurism  72–3, 80–1, 85–6 see also safety of private spaces, betrayal of private woe  9–10, 85, 140–1, 153–4 prosaic suffering abandonment in  26–7, 141–2, 169–70 active vs. passive  165–7 definition of  26–7, 141–2 emergence of  140–4 everyday life in  26–7, 141–3, 148–50, 159–60, 168–9 formlessness of  140, 142–3, 153–4, 169–70, 172

vs. heroic suffering  139–42, 153–4, 167–9, 171, 188 isolation of  169 performance intensity of  26–7, 141–2 realism and  141–4, 146–7, 153–4, 170 scholarship on  142–4, 144nn.17–18 see also emotional practices onstage; Gamester, The (Moore); ordinary suffering prose, tragic emotional expression with  139–40, 140n.3, 157–60 of The Gamester  146–7, 156–61, 163, 170–1 grammatical choices in  156–61 for ordinary suffering  139–40, 154–61, 167–71 as realistic for middling characters  140, 142, 150–1, 153–4, 167–9 prose tragedies  139–43, 140n.3, 151 prose vs. verse early hybrids with both  140n.3, 161–5 The Gamester vs. The Fatal Extravagance 154–61 in ordinary vs. heroic suffering  139–42, 140n.3, 153–4, 167–9 prostitution  46–7, 64–6, 113–14, 130–1 Protestant work ethic  122, 122n.51 Providence and Clarissa debate on moral causality  119–21, 124–5 debate on suffering and faith  26, 126–38 as moral order  117–18, 122–4 as self-interest  121–2, 121n.45 silence of  108, 117–18, 137–8 Providence (faith) and modernity  6–7, 119–22; see also poetic justice providence (God) in Fatal Curiosity 100–4 “public intimacy”  193, 207 radicalism, see class consciousness and struggles rape  15–16, 116–17, 127–8, 131, 133–4, 187–8 Ravenscroft, Edward The Citizen Turn’d Gentleman 40–1 The London Cuckolds  41–3, 42n.40 readers of The Adventures of David Simple 199–201 of Clarissa  107–8, 111, 117–18, 126–7, 132–3, 137–8, 171

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260 Index readers (cont.) mistaken practices of  47 performative practices of  14–15, 15n.39 social rank of  48–50 realism as aesthetic intrusion  93, 140, 170 in domestic tragedies  8–9, 11 evolution of  12–13, 27, 153–4 for middle class  12–13, 142–3 in novels  12–13, 15–16, 67, 105, 107–8, 111, 142–4 poetic justice and  125 prosaic suffering and  141–4, 146–7, 153–4, 170 Providence and  26, 119–20, 122–3 in sentimental fiction  16, 27, 185–6, 196–8, 208–9 social realism  44, 214, 221 sources of  12–13, 15–16, 176–7 and tragedy as formless  142–3, 153–4, 172 see also tableau recognition, politics of, see politics of recognition Reformation, influence of  118–19 reform plot  116–17 religion in bourgeois tragedy  6–7, 11–12 Restoration comedies  40–1, 72–3, 116 revaluation of middle class, see cultural revaluation of middle class Reynolds, Frederick Werter: A Tragedy  27–8, 210–11, 210n.1, 221–5 Richardson, Samuel The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum 31–2 attitude toward theatre  105, 105n.2 attitude toward tragedy  108, 125–6 connection with Sarah Fielding  175–6 correspondence with Moore  142, 142n.10, 147–8 Meditations Collected from the Sacred Texts 132–3 Pamela  16–17, 116, 121–4, 140–1, 213 see also Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady (Richardson) Rorty, Richard  39–40 Rowe, Nicholas The Fair Penitent prologue  85 Rowlandson, Thomas The Sorrows of Werter; The Last Interview (etching)  223–4, 224f

Ryland, W. W., after Angelica Kauffman Maria—Moulines (etching)  202f, 203–5 Rymer, Thomas  122–4 safety of private spaces, betrayal of in Arden of Feversham  77–8, 78f, 79f in Clarissa 130–1 in domestic dramas and tragedies  77–83, 86, 79nn.25–26 in Fatal Curiosity  77, 82–3, 86 with home as “man’s castle”  86, 86n.39 in sentimental fiction  181–2, 187–8 Salons of 1767  153, 153n.42 Sanderson, Sir William Compleat [sic] History of the Lives and Reigns of Mary Queen of Scotland, And of Her Son and Successor, James the Sixth 74 satire  41–3, 48–50 Scheer, Monique  143–4, 144nn.17–18 Schiller, Friedrich  12–13, 19–21, 211–12, 214 Scott, Walter  199–200 secular faith, poetic justice as  26, 117–18, 122–5 secularization  6–7, 108–11, 118, 124–5, 163–4, 164n.56 self-reflexivity of performances  168–70, 169n.74 sensibility in The Adventures of David Simple  193–4, 199–200, 207 culture of  27, 172–3, 177–8, 193 evolution of  52–3, 60–2, 178–9 mistaken notion of  30–1 see also sentimental fiction sensitivity to suffering as desirable quality 177–80 sentimental fiction and bourgeois tragedy  172–4, 185–6, 192–3, 196–7, 208–11 and comedies  183–4 disregard for suffering in  174–6, 182, 195 distancing of reader from suffering in 199–207 domestic tragedy in  172–3, 181–2, 185–8, 192, 195–7, 199, 208–9 family crisis and resolution in  183–5, 191–2, 199

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Index  261 home’s safety, betrayal of  181–2, 187–8 imagination of readers in  200–1, 205 objectified suffering in  178–9, 179n.16 ordinary suffering, mediation of  172–4, 195–6, 205 ordinary suffering as worthy of recognition in  174–80, 192, 201 origins of  178 overview of  16, 27 realism in  16, 27, 185–6, 196–8, 208–9 sensitivity to suffering, evolution of  174, 177–80 serious genre and  16, 27, 173–4, 185–6 sharing of suffering in  177–9, 184–5, 193, 207–9 spectator, character as  172–3, 201–7 subject and object of feeling, identification with both  179–80, 206–7 sympathy in  178–9, 187–8, 193, 200–1, 205, 207–8 theatrical tableau as strategy in  193–6, 198–203 see also Adventures of David Simple, The (Fielding, Sarah); Amelia (Fielding, Henry); Chapter of Accidents, The (Lee) Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, A (Sterne) sentimentalism 125 Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, A (Sterne)  27 character of Yorick in  201–7 doublement of language in  201–2 Le Malheur Imprévu ou Le Miroir brisé (oil on canvas) and  203, 204f Maria-Moulines (etching) and  201–5, 202f pauvre honteux beggar in  205–7 tableau in  201–5 sentimental tragedies  9–11 serious comedy  173–4, 196–8 serious genre vs. classical tragedy  151n.33, 176–7 in historical processes  22–3 sentimental fiction and  16, 27, 173–4, 185–6 see also genre sérieux sexual abuse, see rape Shaftesbury, Third Earl of  121 Sheridan, Frances Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph 16 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley  215, 218

she-tragedies  9–10, 9n.28, 14–16, 85, 92 Siddons, Sarah  65–6, 152–3, 167–8, 213–16 slave labor  54–5 Smith, Adam The Theory of Moral Sentiments  90–2, 200–1 social classes acceptance of suffering across  176–9, 192 hierarchies, collapsing of  47–8 and literature  41, 41n.38 in neoclassical aesthetics  30–1, 34, 139–40 see also class consciousness and struggles social problems, presentation of  47–8, 60–6, 216–20 social realism  44, 214, 221 social reform  188–9, 192n.35, 221 Soni, Vivasvan  193 Sorrows of Werter, The; The Last Interview (etching by Rowlandson)  223–4, 224f Southerne, Thomas The Fatal Marriage  9–10, 14–15 South Sea investments  43–4, 146–7 spectators of suffering characters as  172–3, 201–7 as compassionate  177–80 embodiment of emotions of  21–2 in private spaces  72–3, 80–3, 85–90, 96–9 proximity of  90–6, 94n.61, 141–2, 193 see also audiences; sympathy staging of Fatal Curiosity (Lillo)  82–3, 82n.29, 86, 96–7 Steele, Richard Tatler 75–6 Steiner, George  3–4 Sterne, Laurence, see Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, A (Sterne) Stoic indifference  207–8 Stothard, Thomas Fatal Curiosity, Act III, scene 2 (painting)  86–9, 86n.37, 87f, 88n.42 structures of feeling  9–10, 22–4, 47–8, 60–2, 67, 176, 201, 207 subjunctive tense  158–61 suffering in cultural conversation of tragedy  22 hierarchy of  20–1 see also ordinary suffering; prosaic suffering; spectators of suffering; tragedy suicides  43–4, 154–6 Surr, Thomas George Barnwell  213, 213n.6

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262 Index sympathy debate on  90–2, 91n.48, 94 in The London Merchant 59 in sentimental fiction  178–9, 187–8, 193, 200–1, 205, 207–8 Szondi, Peter  20, 165–6, 165n.59 tableau definition of  143–4 effects of  153–4, 168–70 in novels of feeling  199–200 self-reflexivity of  169–70, 169n.74 as sentimental novel strategy  193–6, 198–205 stasis of  165–6, 195–6, 198–9, 165nn.59–60 “tears” for suffering  63–4, 66–7 “theatre of opposition”  215 Theatre Royal, Drury Lane  51, 65–6, 96–7, 111–12, 213–15 Theatrical Representations Act of 1788  213 Thompson, Benjamin The German Theatre 214–16 tone of burlesque  47–50 Tonson, Jacob The Works of Wiliam Shakespeare 83 trade, see merchant class tradesmen (apprentices)  31–3, 41–2, 44–6, 53, 58–63 tragedy burlesquing of  44–50 “death of ” prediction for  3–4, 3n.10 definition of genre of  5, 22, 34 erosion of classical  3–4, 10–13, 153–4, 172, 193 formless  13–14, 17–18, 140, 142–3, 153–4, 156–7, 169–70, 172 historical limitations on  18–22 see also bourgeois tragedy; heroes; ordinary vs. heroic suffering tragic prose, see prose, tragic tragic sensibility, see sentimental fiction transcendency of heroes  19–21, 36, 38–9 over ordinary suffering  108–9, 113, 131–3, 136–7, 163–4 Trauerspiele  16–17, 137–8, 140–1, 163, 214 trauma and language  109–11, 110n.17, 110n.19, 128–9, 131–4 and memory  129–31, 129n.68 treason trials (1794)  215n.9, 219–20

Uffenbach, Zacharias Konrad von  42 uncanny category of Freud  73, 86n.40, 88n.42 universal scope of suffering  39–40, 66–7, 176–9, 184–5, 192, 207–9 University of California, The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library: Fatal Curiosity, Act III, scene 2  87f verse, see blank verse; prose vs. verse violence, see domestic violence; murders violent crime literature  8–9 Virgil 208–9 Aeneid  66–7, 67n.85 visiting as bourgeois performance  89–90, 98–9 voyeurism  72–3, 80–1, 85–6 Wallace Collection: Le Malheur Imprévu ou Le Miroir brisé 204f Watt, Ian The Rise of the Novel  12–13, 15n.44 Weber, Max  20, 122, 122n.51, 163–4 Weekly Register 60–2 Werter: A Tragedy (Reynolds)  27–8, 210–11, 210n.1, 221–5, 224f Whigs  41, 178, 219–20 Wilkie, David The Rent Day (painting)  221 Williams, Raymond Modern Tragedy 22 on structures of feelings  22–3 Wits’ Club, The  186–7, 187n.25 women, middling battering of  187–8 seduction/rape by aristocrats  127–8, 187–8, 194–5, 197–8, 215–16, 219–20 Wordsworth, William Lyrical Ballads 170–1 Worrall, David  22 worth, see dignity of middle class; ordinary suffering as worthy of recognition “writing to the moment”  14–15, 26–7, 142 “writing what you know”  175–6 Yale University, Lewis Walpole Library Gin Lane 45f, 49f A Harlot’s Progress 50f, 51f The Sorrows of Werter; The Last Interview 224f