Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature 1787-1845

Of the three questions that are central to Jared Gardner’s Master Plots, Sydney Smith posed the first one, rather famously, in 1820: “In the four corners of the globe, who reads an American book?” While Gardner mentions neither the English critic nor his taunt in the Edinburgh Review, this study does focus on a pair of assumptions that were familiar to late-eighteenth-century Anglo-American readers: that Americans would one day produce writing worthy of the name literature and that it would indeed be distinctive. Historian Michael Kammen traces the development of the latter assumption in “The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration,” an essay from his 1997 collection Life in the Past Lane: Historical Perspectives on American Culture. The second question is one posed by the fictional narrator of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (London, 1782)–“What, then, is the American, this new man?”–and then answered in a famously naïve essay that brings together the truism “Men are like plants” and the trope we have known ever since as America-the-Melting-Pot. Gardner does mention Letters, but when he explicitly uses this central question he does so sans any reference to Crèvecoeur: “The drama that takes place in the neutral ground of the prairie,” Gardner writes in his chapter on James Fenimore Cooper’s 1827 novel The Prairie, “works to reconstruct the unsettled national identity of post-Revolutionary America in order finally to answer the question: What is an American?” (108).

“This book grew out of my desire,” according to Gardner’s preface, “to interrogate more closely what looked to be an intriguing coincidence of the third term that grows up alongside literature and nation: race” (xii). These three terms, he claims, came together “around 1787,” when “we can locate what is plausibly the simultaneous emergence and codification of these three discourses in the United States: racial science is born with Thomas Jefferson’s and Samuel Stanhope Smith’s seminal essays; national identity is founded in the debates and pamphlets circulating around the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia; and American fiction is inaugurated with the publication, in 1789, of the ‘first’ American novel, William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy”(3). While two of the three expressions figure in the title of the book Homi K. Bhabha edited in 1990, Nation and Narration, Bhabha’s work on nationalism and colonialism shows up here quite sparingly. Gardner does cite Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, on the spread of nationalism from North American colonies back to the metropole, yet a great deal of what he attributes to Anderson comes through the filter of an essay by Thomas Brennan in Bhabha’s 1990 collection. Gardner deserves credit for addressing the question of “whether the term race as it is understood in the eighteenth century does not more often than not refer to the older usage of race as family, clan, or nation” (11). Readers of this review might have read the 1996 article Gardner cites, “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” which appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies. He also cites Thomas Gossett’s 1963 Race: The History of an Idea in America but does not, however, demonstrate any familiarity with the extensive scholarship that has emerged on racial theory. In his contrasting of monogenism and polygenism and his detailed discussions of the nineteenth-century emergence of the American School of racial origins–Louis Agassiz and company–Gardner cites some texts from the period but also relies on The Mismeasure of Man, one of Stephen Jay Gould’s perfectly interesting contributions to popularizing the history of science.

The third central question in Master Plots involves “slippages,” as for example in Gardner’s discussion of “link[s],” in Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823), between “metaphors of race” and “the language of politics and national identity”: “. . . Cooper himself is able to use the slippages inherent in such racial language on behalf of the larger project coming into shape as he writes this novel” (91, emphasis added). Question: aside from the occasional glitches that Gardner discusses, might his own book have the problem of slippages between its aims and its achievements? It might, and unfortunately it does. To begin this book is to be aware of a tension between Gardner’s stated purpose–tracing the “long history of the ‘master plots’ that helped defend and define a national identity for white Americans while proscribing those who did not ‘belong'” (xi)–and his choices of authors and texts to analyze. Beyond insisting that his examples are central to the development of the novel in America, he is not particularly convincing. Consider the pre-1800 examples: Henry Moss(!), in the chapter “The History of White Negroes”; Updike Underhill, from Royall Tyler’s 1797 novel The Algerine Captive; and the title character of Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly. Two of the three chapters that carry the reader to the brink of the so-called American Renaissance focus on texts that Gardner claims, unconvincingly, are central: Cooper’s The Prairie, Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative. Gardner acknowledges the impact on literary studies of revisionist scholarship, but the focus he describes is less on recovering neglected texts (as with The Prairie, purportedly Cooper’s own least favorite among the Leatherstocking Tales) or on celebrating such recovery (as with Poe’s Pym and all the attention it has been receiving since the 1970s) than on breaking down barriers between “‘black’ and ‘white’ literary traditions” (xiii).

Some of Gardner’s blurring involves imprecise diction (e.g., his conflating “antebellum America” and “the early national period in the United States” in less than half a page). He claims, in the reference I cited above to the Eighteenth-Century Studies piece, to be listening to precise examples of “the term race as it is understood in the eighteenth century”(11), yet he seems oblivious to the ways that expression works interchangeably with group or simply people in sentences like “Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men” and “Fate has manifestly decreed, that America must belong to the English name and race” (qtd. on 80). Gardner does not quote the former passage, from Letters from an American Farmer; but he does quote the latter, from an 1803 pamphlet by Charles Brockden Brown titled Monroe’s Embassy. Among Gardner’s most troubling slippages are the points at which he conflates an author’s position with that of a fictional narrator: Brown’s, in the pamphlet on President Monroe (80); Crèvecoeur’s Farmer James (e.g., “No longer the land of Crèvecoeur in which immigrants come together and are transformed by the magic properties of the land”); a fictional British persona of Cooper’s (101); and the “I” of “MS. Found in a Bottle,” whom he identifies simply as “one of Poe’s narrators” (127).

For a reader who relishes jotting down an Aha! in the margins of a book, this one’s often tortuous syntax instead occasionally elicits a question mark, as in “The idea of race and the meanings of racial difference often circulate at this time in excess of the bottom lines of materialist history” (6). Does at this time refer to the “early national period,” from two lines earlier–or to the late 1990s? While his reference to “Cooper’s ‘pioneering efforts'” (95) echoes his earlier description of Cooper as “America’s pioneer novelist” (87), this attempt at drollery clashes with his own earlier reference to The Power of Sympathy quoted above as well as with his descriptions of Charles Brockden Brown. His title’s play on master narratives, as distinct from slave narratives, is intriguing (and no, the bibliography does not include Frank Magill). But long before Gardner gets around to describing his own race-nation-novel construct as “the larger narrative here” (100), the reader could benefit from the introduction to the 1998 collection Contesting the Master Narrative: Essays on Social History, which distinguishes between several ideas that Gardner’s book insists on blurring: master narratives, grand narratives, and the expression that historians Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob use in Telling the Truth About History (1994), meta-narrative.

Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture

After enjoying cult status in the nineteenth century, Thomas Chatterton dwindled in significance in the twentieth, becoming little more than footnote in literary history. As Nick Groom notes in his Introduction, only a handful of serious scholarly and critical works on Chatterton were available in the early 1990’s. The time is ripe, however, for a rediscovery and reevaluation of the life and work of Thomas Chatterton. Current interest in marginalized literary figures from the past, who were disadvantaged by class, country or region of origin, or gender, as well as in works that engage the politics of their time render Chatterton an apt and fruitful subject for analysis. In addition, postmodern attitudes toward history as an imaginative construction, usually composed by those in power, permit a more sympathetic view of Chatterton’s poetic enterprise than prevailed under earlier notions of history as an objective, factual record of events, according to which the Rowley poems were mere fraudulent forgeries. The present collection of thirteen critical essays, along with various appendices and collateral short pieces (Preface, Introduction, and Afterward), makes a significant contribution toward filling the gap in Chatterton studies and demonstrates fruitful approaches to this poet’s complex body of work.

A number of the essays explore Chatterton in relation to eighteenth century writers and intellectual milieus. Claude Rawson’s “Unparodying and Forgery: The Augustan Chatterton,” notes parallels between Chatterton’s works and those of other eighteenth-century writers such as Pope, Fielding, Swift, and Defoe, among others. According to Rawson, Chatterton’s poetry, both those works written in modern English and the Rowley poems, has more in common with Augustan literary modes and sensibilities than many readers have heretofore assumed. Nick Groom explores connections between Chatterton and Thomas Percy, whose Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) largely initiated the eighteenth century interest in early literature and had a profound impact on Chatterton’s creations. Groom notes differences between Percy’s and Chatterton’s representations of the minstrel figure and attitudes toward manuscripts. For Percy, minstrels were “instruments of the state” (189) and manuscripts were “little more than the raw material of the printing-press” (191), whereas for Chatterton minstrels “were really no more than performing musicians, and had none of Percy’s court status” (191), and manuscripts were fetishised into “the very matter of literature, the stuff of history itself” (203). By means of careful archival research, Groom also presents new information on Percy’s role in assessing the authenticity of the Rowley poems before their initial publication.

Paul Baines’s “Chatterton and Johnson: Authority and Filiation in the 1770’s” analyzes the literary relationship between Chatterton and Samuel Johnson, drawing upon Walter Jackson Bate’s theory of the burden of the past and Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence model of poets’ responses to their precursors. Although Chatterton satirized Johnson in a number of poems, Johnson was remarkably tolerant, even paternal, in his treatment of Chatterton. Maria Grazia Lolla, in “‘Truth Sacrificing to the Muses’: The Rowley Controversy and the Genesis of the Romantic Chatterton,” presents a lucid and perceptive analysis of the debate over the Rowley poems’ authenticity in the decades following Chatterton’s death. Later scholars have wondered at the ignorance and naivete of eighteenth-century literati who could take seriously the question of Rowley’s authenticity, but Lolla argues that this question was not the main point of the controversy. Instead, Rowley proved a mere pretext for researching and discussing historical issues. “Those who took part in the controversy,” Lolla writes, “seemed more interested in arguing and pursuing research than in winning the argument or answering questions” (157). In addition, the Rowleyans and the Anti-Rowleyans were less concerned with Rowley per se than in arguing for different versions of literary history. Anti-Rowleyans such as Thomas Warton and Edmond Malone fought to preserve their view of English poetry as following a steady course of improvement to its culmination in the Augustan age. They also wished to retain literary studies as the preserve of an educated elite, against the incursions of a growing body of amateur antiquarians contributing their opinions on Rowley and other matters to magazines and newspapers. Rowleyans like Jacob Bryant, by contrast, argued that the past was more complex and unknown than Warton allowed and that more unbiased research was needed. Pat Rogers’s essay, “Chatterton and the Club,” defends Warton, Malone, and other members of the Literary Club (otherwise known as “Johnson’s Club” or “the Turk’s Head Club”) against charges of elitism in their repudiation of Rowley’s authenticity. Instead, Rogers claims, these men were practicing rigorous literary scholarship, which they had learned in their close study of classical texts (a field which, Rogers reminds us, also contained its forgeries and apocryphal works that required detection and expulsion from the canon). Moreover, Rogers notes, many members of the Literary Club, such as Samuel Johnson, came from humble, provincial backgrounds and were therefore similar to Chatterton in their class origins (a point that Baines also makes). Overall, Rogers argues, “The rejection of Rowley’s authenticity [by members of the Literary Club] . . . was a scholarly and not a social decision” (124).

Other essays in the collection address Chatterton’s legacy for later writers. In his important piece, “Chatterton’s Poetic Afterlife, 1770-1794: A Context for Coleridge’s Monody,” David Fairer argues that several images of Chatterton circulated in the late eighteenth century besides that of the frail victim of a hostile society that dominated in the nineteenth century. In addition to this image, which Fairer calls the “lyric Chatterton,” other versions featured in late eighteenth century poems were the satiric, political, manly Chatterton and the “dramatic Chatterton,” characterized by grotesque, highly emotional depictions of the young poet’s death. In the first, 1790 version of Coleridge’s “Monody on the Death of Chatterton,” the satirical and dramatic images of the poet dominate, with the result that the poem has a biting edge of social criticism lacking in the 1794 version of the poem, in which the ethereal, childlike, lyric Chatterton has replaced the more disturbing, mature figure of the earlier poem. Richard Holmes’s short but provocative analysis of several portraits once thought to be of Chatterton (now considered spurious) similarly groups these into contrasting images of the poet: an eighteenth-century “tough,” unsettling image of the poetic genius as “something uncanny, solitary, and even savage” (257) and a nineteenth-century image that is much more pretty and sentimental.

Bridget Keegan, in “Nostalgic Chatterton: Fictions of Poetic Identity and the Forging of a Self-Taught Tradition,” explores Chatterton’s importance for later plebian poets such as Ann Yearsley and John Clare. Unlike more mainstream Romantic poets for whom Chatterton’s life was more important than his work, Keegan argues, peasant poets like Yearsley and Clare actually studied Chatterton’s works and allude to them in their own poems. Moreover, they were sympathetic to Chatterton’s strategy of impersonating a fifteenth-century monk, which “allowed him to hide behind a more authoritative voice than his own to gain access to a literary world from which he would have otherwise been excluded” (214). Like Chatterton, Yearsley, Clare, and other plebian poets felt the need to adopt voices other than their own in order to be accepted by the literary establishment. Keegan perceptively notes the layers of insecurity in Chatterton’s works, as he not only creates Rowley as an authority for his own voice but buttresses Rowley with patrons and precursors of his own. “Each Rowley text,” Keegan writes, “reveals that Rowley’s poetic identity is always dependent upon other, more authoritative voices” (215).

Most of the other essays in Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture examine satirical, anti-lyrical aspects of the poet’s work and persona or interpret these as the expressions of a marginalized, lower-middle-class figure (or both). In “‘This Necessary Knowledge’: Thomas Chatterton and the Ways of the London Book Trade,” Michael F. Suarez describes Chatterton’s efforts to find publishers for his work and make a living from his pen in London. In Suarez’s account, Chatterton was an astute, savvy networker who quickly picked up a knowledge of the book trade and “Contrary to popular belief . . . was earning quite a decent living through the sale of his writings at the time of his death” (100). “In both Bristol and London,” Suarez argues, “Chatterton’s strategies and practices for publishing his work were far removed from the archetypal image of the hapless and naive Romantic poet he was later imagined to be. Rather, Chatterton approached the problem of seeing his writings into print with remarkable inventiveness and acumen” (96). Many of the works Chatterton did publish in London were political in nature and appeared in journals associated with the Patriot cause. Suarez speculates that, given his talents and activities in London, had Chatterton lived he might have become “a party political writer . . . the successor to the masterful satirist Charles Churchill” (111). Suarez’s essay concludes with two helpful appendices, the first listing in chronological order all the works by Chatterton published in his lifetime and the second grouping those works in various categories, such as how many appeared in each journal, before and after Chatterton arrived in London. Suarez’s piece is clearly the result of impressive primary research.

Timothy Morton’s “In Your Face” analyzes food fights in two of Chatterton’s satirical poems, “The Constabiliad” and “The Consuliad,” the latter a revised version of the former. These poems, Morton writes, “enact Chatterton’s entry into political life, the move from Rowley to Chatterton the satirist, from Bristol to London” and “describe how consumption plays with figuration in a highly politicized way” (79). Georges Lamoine notes a number of original aspects of Chatterton’s poetry. One of his major points is that not just the overtly political poems but also the Rowley works can be considered social satires. The world of fifteenth-century Bristol created by Chatterton can be regarded as a utopia, used to comment on the ills of contemporary society in the mode of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

Carolyn D. Williams offers a provocative reading of Chatterton’s work through the lens of post-colonial theory. Excluded from mainstream British culture by “educational and social disadvantages” (48), Chatterton shares many characteristics with colonized peoples. In particular, Chatterton reflects an ambivalent attitude toward the dominant culture, both resisting it and participating in many of its “critical and political assumptions” (48). Chatterton’s creation of an ideal English world located in fifteenth century Bristol also mirrors the efforts of many post-colonial subjects who gain “inner strength” to resist colonialism “by returning ‘to a pre-imperial period to locate a ‘pure’ native culture” (55; quoting Edward Said). “The Rowleyan writings,” Williams concludes, “fit neatly within this paradigm” (55). Finally, Inga Bryden in “The Mythical Image: Chatterton, King Arthur, and Heraldry” argues that Chatterton’s interest in heraldry and genealogy, in relation to both Arthurian legend and his own family, reflect the efforts of the working-class poet to “engineer a kind of social sabotage” by “constructing his own social origins” as he likewise constructs the family lineage of his nation through references to King Arthur (69, 75).

The collection is rounded out with a Preface by Peter Ackroyd, who makes rather hyperbolic claims for Chatterton’s achievement and importance for English literature (as does Nick Groom in places in his Introduction); an Afterward by Michael Wood, who speculates on some of the paradoxes posed by Chatterton’s life, work, and posthumous reputation; and a useful, extensive “Checklist of Creative Works Inspired by Thomas Chatterton’s Life and Writings,” compiled by John Goodridge.

Chatterton and Romantic Culture is a truly significant collection. One may not fully agree with Nick Groom that Chatterton is “a seminal figure in English literature” and a writer of “stupendous achievement” (5). Still, most would agree that Chatterton was an important figure for the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who was neglected for most of the twentieth. Literary interests and approaches are now flourishing that help us understand and appreciate Chatterton’s work in important new ways. The present volume contains many valuable and original essays that are likely to stimulate further research into Chatterton’s art and legacy.

The Works of Charlotte Smith

In a letter to the Dublin clergyman Joseph Cooper Walker dated 9 October 1793, Charlotte Smith famously wrote, “I love Novels ‘no more than a Grocer does figs.’”[1] The words may be Henry Fielding’s—the quotation is from Joseph Andrews (1742)—but the sentiment has come to seem uniquely Charlotte Smith’s own. The author’s daily struggle to support her large family and her exhausting legal battle over her father-in-law’s estate were well known to her readers, before whom she controversially made public her private woes in prefaces, footnotes, and advertisements. Within the narrative of virtue in distress this elaborate paratextual apparatus constructed, Smith frequently presented novel writing as sheer drudgery, fatiguing mind and body and exposing the genteel woman writer to the unscrupulous and mercenary designs of publishers and critics.

By the time Smith penned her letter to Walker, however, she had already authored five novels—love them or hate them—two translations, the highly successful Elegiac Sonnets (1784), and a remarkable revolutionary poem, The Emigrants (1793). By 1807, the year after her death, she published a further six works for children, a comedy, a pamphlet, a volume of poetry, and another six novels. Her first four works of fiction are reprinted here alongside her translations, Manon L’Escaut (1785) and The Romance of Real Life (1787), as the first five of the fourteen-volume complete Works of Charlotte Smith. The picture that emerges in these finely edited volumes belies the image of the reluctant author Smith so carefully constructed throughout her career. Her intervention in contemporary debates on the status of romance, history and the novel, her reworking of the conventional courtship plot, her use of fiction to address various forms of political and social injustice and her careful revisions of the novels (made available here in useful listings of textual variants) reveal a Smith who was an innovator and a consummate professional. Smith’s apparent disdain for the novel, these editions suggest, should be viewed with due skepticism.

Stuart Curran’s general introduction to the Works rises to the daunting task of engaging Smith’s prolific output with his customary skill and clarity. What unites Smith’s work, he persuasively suggests, is the “improbable marriage … of contraries”: sensibility and the “romance of real life” (I xxvii). In the fiction, Curran argues, this wedding of opposing states of being forced a new kind of realism, or “complex sociology,” upon the novel (I xvi). Smith’s life-long commitment to exposing social and economic injustice took her novels below stairs, to the debtors’ prisons and rural hovels that would not become embedded in the novel’s social landscape until decades after Smith’s death. Michael Gamer elaborates Curran’s discussion of Smith’s innovative re-imagining of form and genre in his introduction to the translations, which, with Ethelinde (1790), are the only volumes in this set not to have been recently republished elsewhere. For Smith, as Gamer comments in his discussion of the preface to The Romance of Real Life, romance and history were complementary modes of perception and narration: “Romance and fact, it turns out, can accommodate to the other to mutual advantage and with ‘interesting’ results” (I xxxiv). Although its implications are not worked through in Gamer’s introduction, this important recognition provides a fruitful way of reading Smith’s fiction, especially later novels such as The Old Manor House (1793) and the wonderful, if desperately bleak, Marchmont (1796). In these novels, romance softens the blows that history inflicts upon the vulnerable; historical fact, simultaneously, unwrites the illusions of romance, which—as Smith relentlessly argued through her literary works—served only to subjugate women.

The early novels reprinted here are rather lighter in tone, if not in substance, than Smith’s later, post-Revolutionary works. Their greatest debt, as several editors point out, is to the courtship novels of Frances Burney, to whose Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782) Smith’s first works were frequently compared. In her introduction to Emmeline (1788), Judith Stanton, whose indispensable Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith (2003) must be the unacknowledged fifteenth volume of this set, argues that Smith overreached herself in her first novel by trying to produce a “bestseller.” The “piling on of courtships, seductions and marriages”—the heroine alone is pursued by six men—is somewhat excessive, but it is also, as Stanton indicates, a mechanism of the novel’s critique of marriage and its detrimental effect on women, their children, and the nation’s moral economy (II xxiii). In Ethelinde Smith showed greater control in her rendering of the courtship plot, but rather less restraint when approaching word limits. At five volumes, and some 1500 pages in its original typesetting, Charlotte Smith’s melancholy novel about the true cost of old and new forms of wealth, is also her longest. Despite the fact that it speaks to so many of the dominant concerns of Romantic scholarship—including the expansion of global trade and empire, the conflict between moral and political economy, the relationship between landscape and nation—it is also the least known of the novels in this set. Emmeline, Celestina, and Desmond are available in rather more economical Broadview editions, with excellent introductions and supplementary materials, which make them ideal teaching texts. It is rather disappointing, therefore, that Ethelinde, no less extraordinary, though more unfamiliar, than these other works, has, at less than six and a half pages, the shortest introduction.

Kristina Straub’s longer and fascinating introduction to Celestina more than compensates for the (I suspect imposed) shortness of the introduction to volume three. It is, furthermore, the only one of the five introductions to offer a sustained reading of its text rather than a more general, though no less useful, account of its principal preoccupations and publication history. In it, Straub develops Stanton’s account of Smith’s indebtedness to Burney by examining how the former created “fictional world[s] in which the complexity of the characters, male and female, exceeds the simplicity of marriage as a happy-ever-after ending to the difficulties of courtship” (IV viii). Those few scholars who have mined the rich seams of Smith’s work have tended to focus attention on her female characters, many of whom are read as fictional extensions of the author herself. Straub urges us to refocus our attention on Smith’s construction and radical “reassessment of masculinity” (IV viii). Smith, Straub demonstrates, is much more “sympathetic” to the men who persecute her heroine than Burney, who punishes them with violence and humiliation. Her heroes—a major source of disappointment for Smith’s readers and, almost certainly, for Smith’s heroines—are, by contrast, unnaturally feminized, although frequently consumed by the same will to possess and own their future wives that their rakish counterparts express more openly. Smith’s refusal to reproduce the conventional types of male—the virtuous man of feeling, the irredeemable rake—results in a new kind of novel whose characters “exceed the models offered by the courtship plot and, implicitly, the life models of marriage and the estate” (IV xxii).

Desmond, is, of course, the best known of the works in this first tranche of volumes. As its editor Stuart Curran points out, it also marks an important shift in Smith’s writing, not only to more overtly politicized and Eurocentric narratives, but to novels whose title protagonists are all men—the exception to the rule being The Old Manor House. Curran reads this shift as evidence of an enlargement in Smith’s “conceptual field” and a desire to move the female-authored novel into previously uncharted territory (V xiv). It is difficult to hold with Curran’s view that the heroes whose names give the titles to so many of Smith’s novels are their “main” focus (V xiv)—Geraldine Verney is as central to Desmond as the work’s title character, as is Medora Glenmorris to The Young Philosopher (1798), while Althea Dacres is much more compelling than her peripatetic, not to say pathetic, lover, the eponymous Marchmont. But what this doubling of narrative perspective enables, as Curran suggests, is a vivid analysis of the “notion of separate spheres of language and conduct” and the heartbreaking double standards this ideology served to uphold (V xv). The skillful accommodation of narrative form to political content Smith achieves here and in the later novels is surely one of her greatest achievements.

It is perhaps not surprising, given Smith’s own disavowals of the novel form, that her poetry has been given much greater prominence in recent critical studies. The pioneering work on the poems by Stuart Curran and Jacqueline Labbe (editor of the forthcoming Sonnets and Beachy Head) has secured Smith’s place within the Romantic canon. The novels have attracted much less critical attention, a fact amply demonstrated by the short (but not always up-to-date) bibliographies included in each of these volumes. This welcome and handsomely produced edition of The Works of Charlotte Smith will undoubtedly rectify this situation by establishing Smith’s undeniable place in the history of the novel.

[1] The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, ed. Judith Phillips Stanton (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), 80.

The Idea of Being Free: A Mary Hays Reader

If you have ever read one of Mary Hays’s novels (The Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796); Broadview Press, (2000); The Victim of Prejudice (1799), Broadview Press, (1996), and wondered where the author was coming from, this is the book for you. It contains substantial excerpts from her other writings, letters to and from Hays, and contemporary reviews of her works. It provides a reflection, through the life and work of a contemporary author, of the history and culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Hays was one of the first women writers in late eighteenth century England to write on political matters. Her first book (1791) was an answer to Gilbert Wakefield’s critique of the social worship of the Dissenters. Her second was Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous (1793), which took on issues such as women’s education, separation of church and state, and materialism and necessity. She also wrote for the Monthly Magazine. Politically radical, Hays never abjured Christianity, using it, like Martin Luther King, Jr., as a means of holding the larger culture up to its own ideals.

It is obvious from her novels that Mary Hays was an early feminist. But she was also a friend of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. She wrote An Appeal to the Men of Great Britain on Behalf of Women (1798) and a monumental, six-volume Female Biography, or Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of all Ages and Countries (1803), covering 288 famous women. One constant theme in the materials collected here is the abuse any argumentative woman would reap in this period just for being a woman.

The influence of Rousseau and Helvetius on late eighteenth century British writers is well known. But Gina Walker has excavated other influences not as well known. One is the influence of Huguenot culture on English Dissent and on this writer in particular. Mary Hays was familiar with the writings of Pierre Bayle. One of her patrons was Robert Robinson, Dissenting preacher and writer who translated and transmitted the writings of Jacques Saurin and Jean Claude. As members of the persecuted Huguenots, it is not surprising that they made a virtue of tolerance, unlike, for example, Rousseau.

Hays was also familiar with the history of philosophy as mediated by such Christian writers as William Enfield and Joseph Priestley. She used this wide knowledge against the misogyny of Rousseau and some of her contemporaries.

The letters bring out the personal. Our sources seem to indicate that Mary Hays was rather plain, and her letters almost obsess with the issue. If the history of the influence of personal ugliness on culture (think Socrates, Sartre, etc.) is ever written, Mary Hays will have a place in it.

There are some nettles. Hays writes to Henry Crabb Robinson with great respect, and wants him at her funeral. A personal note in his handwriting describes her as “somewhat pedantic and rather ridiculous… The Author of Forgotten Works”. Poet Robert Southey describes her as “a woman of talents… I like and esteem her”, but “erroneous in all points of first importance”. How many of us know what our friends really think of us?

The foregoing review of pieces of this anthology cannot do justice to the depth and variety of materials here, which, together with introductions to the texts by the editor, amount to a critical biography of Mary Hays. They make an outstanding teaching tool. It will be harder now to assume that anything worthwhile in early feminism can be found in Mary Wollstonecraft. Here is one of her friends, but not a slavish imitator. Mary Hays has a voice of her own.

The Global Eighteenth Century

The Global Eighteenth Century, edited by Felicity Nussbaum, resulted from a series of conferences, seminars, and an exhibition sponsored by the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth- Century Studies Center and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. The purpose of the essays included in this work is to widen the scope and the scale of the critical study of the eighteenth century beyond Europe to bring understanding about the people encountered in other parts of the world. However, this study extends beyond merely geographic and historical perspective; it broadens it to a multi-disciplined and global one.

The editor explains that the purpose of this work is “to juxtapose these alternative paradigms of indigenous traditions and other non-European with more familiar models of understanding in order to tell stories from the less visible interiors of the world”(9). She describes that the twenty-one chapters, each comprising an essay written by a leading authority on the subject, are divided under three separate categories, even though the topics and themes tend to overlap (11). The first chapters on “Mapping” treat the ways in which the world was represented and imagined, with a particular emphasis upon the development of maps and mapping. The second grouping, entitled “Crossings,” seek to discover how “sexual and cultural intermixtures–or the regulations forbidding them–had lasting effects on constructions of race, nation, and identity when these notions were in the very process of formation” (13). The final group, “Islands,” investigate the islands themselves and how they were conceived by others: as idealized Utopian paradises or as places suitable for settlement and colonization (15). Nussbaum includes a brief description of each of the chapters, which provides a very helpful guide for the reader.

This work presents a new and innovative treatment of the history of the eighteenth century by widening its critical study to global proportions. The widening of a historical focus from one centered on a national and land-mass approach to one focused on bodies of water started with Fernand Braudel’s study of the Mediterranean world and the work of the Annales School, which also utilized other disciplines to bring about a fuller understanding of history. Braudel’s work influenced the development of the study of the Atlantic world as a unit and the ground-breaking studies by Bernard Bailyn, Edmund Morgan and others. Nussbaum cites other scholars who have inspired the further widening of eighteenth century studies: Srinivas Aravadmudan, Richard Grove, Harriet Guest, Jonathan Lamb, Nigel Leask, David Porter, Anne Salmond, Nicholas Thomas, and many other historians, including those whose work appears in this volume (11).

The sources and evidence used by the various contributors depend upon the subject being discussed. All the authors draw upon both primary and secondary sources, not only those that exist in printed form but also manuscripts and archival material. The primary sources include journals, letters, reports, records, paintings, maps, memoirs, novels, plays, poetry, contemporary historical accounts, and other works written during the eighteenth century, not only British but from other parts of the world, depending upon the topic of the chapter. Similarly, the authors use a wide range of secondary sources: books and articles written on the subject being presented and ones relating to the subject. The source material for each chapter reflects extensive research, which extends into other disciplines including the fine arts, literature, archeology, and anthropology. The notes provided by each author are full and detailed and contain not only the sources being used within the text but also other works on the subject together with comments.

The contributors employ traditional and innovative methodologies in their presentations in order to extend the scope of their subject. Some of the writers use a biographical approach: for example, Glyndwr Williams, in “Tupaia: Polynesian Warrior, Navigator, High Priest–and Artist,” describes Tupaia’s early life, and he uses the journals of Cook and Banks for information about Tupaia’s role during Cooks’ first voyage of the Pacific. However, he extends his treatment by including an analysis of Tupaia’s mapping of the islands and his art work. Kate Telscher also begins by taking a biographical approach in “The Lama and the Scotsman: George Bogle in Bhutan and Tibet, 1774-1775.” She presents a biographical account, based on his journals, of Bogle’s experiences as an envoy sent to Tibet to obtain a trade treaty and information for the East India Company. Her study widens to show his fascination for another culture and the political situation involving China and Britain.

Other contributors take a primarily feminist view, but they also broaden their scope, as in essays by, Linda Colley, “The Narrative of Elizabeth Marsh: Barbary, Sex, Power;” and Betty Joseph, “Proxies of Power: Woman in the Colonial Archive.” Colley uses Marsh’s memoir published in 1769 to describe Marsh’s concerns as a woman captive of Barbary pirates in Morocco in 1756, particularly her fears that she would be forced to become a Muslim and a member of a harem. Colley extends her study to the whole problem of the seizing of captives by the pirates, to the attitudes of Europeans towards the Islamic culture, to the political issues relating to British expansion, and to the need for positive relations with West African powers. Betty Joseph begins with a description of the law case concerning the Rani of Burdwan, who presented a petition in 1774 to keep the position as a “zamindar,” on behalf of her young son. Joseph goes on to expand her study to the politics and corruption within the East India Company, and the contribution this incident made to the impeachment of Hastings. Both authors expand their initial feminist view to include political and cultural implications far from Britain’s shores.

Some authors take a cultural approach. Beth Fowkes Tobin, in “The English Garden Conversation Piece in India.” discusses the popularity within the British elite of the “conversation piece” to portray their power, prestige, and possessions in terms of land and property. She describes how this art form was adapted by the British in India for a similar purpose by including their Indian servants in their portraits to emphasize their excessive wealth and possessions. However, the portrayal of those servants by the artist reflects their attitudes towards their British masters, and to their significance in relationship to the importance of trade and commerce in India.

Other writers utilize trans-disciplinary methods to expand the focus of their studies. For example, Laura Brown, in “Oceans and Floods: Fables of Global Perspective,” begins with a description of the nautical images used by such poets as Samuel Johnson and Edward Young in their poetry. However, she extends her study by describing the importance of the sea, shipping, and commerce to the British during the eighteenth century. She describes how the concept of oceans became associated with fate, virtue, and to the future power of the nation through imperial expansion. In “Marketing Mulatresses in the Painting and Prints of Agostino Brunias,” Kay Dian Kriz discusses a number of the paintings with regard to the activities being portrayed and to the clothing, pigmentation, and roles of mulatto women in the West Indies. However, she also discusses how these paintings were used to make settlement in the West Indies attractive to the British in order to increase the British presence there to counter other European nations in this strategic location. Just as these critical global studies present a novel focus on the eighteenth century, many of the other contributors included in this volume use innovative and creative methodologies.

The editor’s choice of the contributors to this work reflects the broad implications of the theme. The authors represent many different disciplines: history, literature, art history, geography, and anthropology. Also, they come from many different parts of the world including New Zealand, India, Canada, the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom (18), which extends the focus from a national to a global perspective. In the Introduction, the editor includes a short and informational biography about each of the contributors for the reader. Owing to their different backgrounds and interests, each author brings fresh insights and a novel approach to their writings about the eighteenth century.

The collection as a whole is of extremely high quality, but some of the contributors’ papers particularly fascinate and engage the reader. Glyndwr Williams’ “Tupaia: Polynesian Warrior, Navigator, High Priest-and Artist” describes Tupaia’s contributions to Cook’s successful voyage in the Pacific as a guide, mediator and interpreter, gifts which did not endear him to the crew. Recent scholarship shows that Tupaia was also an artist, and illustrations and discussion of his paintings are included by Williams. Greg Dening’s “Voyaging the Past, Present, and Future” was inspired by the building of replicas of the Endeavour, Cook’s ship, and of the Hokule’a, a Polynesian voyaging canoe. The Hokule’a was involved in a reenactment to solve the “Polynesian Problem” as to whether the Polynesian islands were settled as a result of accident due to storms and shipwrecks or by the navigational skills of the Polynesian wayfinders. The biographical study of George Berkeley by Carole Fabricant delves into some unexpected aspects of his life beyond being a clergyman and philosopher. His fascination for islands led him to publicly promote the building of a college in Bermuda to train English and American-Indian youths to be missionaries, even though he had never visited the island. Also, he promoted the use of tar-water to prevent and cure a variety of diseases, which he learned about from the Narragansett Indians. Finally, Joseph Roach, in “The Global Parasol: Accessorizing the Four Corners of the World,” shows how the illustrations included in atlases and on maps provided inspiration for scenic design to depict exotic locales on the stage and to suggest properties to further the sense of exoticism: feathered fans and headdresses, turbans, palm trees, and especially the parasol. These and other chapters provide unexpected delight.

However, there are some problems with this book. The balance of topics is top-heavy with chapters relating to the West Indies and the Polynesian Pacific. Chapters on South America and Africa are conspicuous by their absence. Even Nussbaum recognizes that further studies need to be done focusing on Asia, the Americas, Africa, and the Pacific (18). Also, in a study with such disparate essays on lesser-known topics, it would be more convenient and less frustrating to the reader if the notes were listed at the end of each chapter or footnotes were used rather than listing them at the end of the text.

Still, this work presents a ground-breaking approach to the eighteenth century. It does pre-suppose knowledge about the period; but by using a selective choice, based upon one’s interests, many of the individual chapters can delight, inform, and reveal to the reader the endless possibilities of extending the focus of eighteenth-century studies to global proportions.

The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: Reassessments and New Approaches

Sophia Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette (Sony) brought eighteenth-century France into the limelight in the same year that this scholarly book was published. One might venture to say that their target audiences overlap, and that people who have bought the DVD might also have bought this book. This collection of essays brings together a variety of scholarly perspectives on the subject of the French nobility. It also surveys historical arguments written in the twentieth century, neatly defining a movement from Marxist to revisionist to post-revisionist histories of eighteenth-century France and the French Revolution.

The book roars to a start with Michael Kwass’s analysis of the clothing to be worn by the members of each estate at the historic sitting of the Estates-General in the spring of 1789. It makes what one could call a political companion piece to Caroline Weber’s Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (New York: Henry Holt, 2006). In his “Economies of Consumption,” Kwass shows that for the men of France, just as for the women, social distinctions were registered by the “color, fabric, style, and trimming” of clothing (19). Kwass then traces the criticism of excessive luxury in the works of writers like Rousseau and Mirabeau, as a significant element in attacks on the lives of the nobility, and in a parallel way on the court of the King.

Using the theories of Max Weber, Gail Bossenga takes a different approach to the question of status, discussing the effect of the marketplace and the expansion of consumer goods in creating a climate of social mobility, which included the creation and sale of new titles of nobility. Robert M. Schwartz’s essay on “The Noble Profession of Seigneur in Eighteenth-Century Burgundy” continues this line of inquiry in a study of the actual business of a noble seigneur and the management of farms and properties: “For these nobles, a key element of individual and group identity was managing the seigneurie” (106).

John Shovlin draws attention to the surprising fact that members of the nobility wrote one third of the nearly three thousand tracts on the political economy published in the second half of the century, as shown by Jean-Claude Perrot. But, the nobility were given little credit for this knowledge and expertise, and the “attack on aristocracy unleashed in 1789 made little distinction between the thrifty provincial noble living on his estate and the courtly grandee wallowing in luxury” (135). In the next essay, Rafe Blaufarb provides a case study of how taxation and the handling of property undermined the nobility in Provence. Mita Choudhury then considers the role of the abbess, a position usually held by one of noble lineage. Taking a particular legal case from 1769 as her example, she discusses negative characterizations of abbesses, which were based partly on social class differences.

In “Nobles into Aristocrats, or How an Order Became a Conspiracy,” Thomas E. Kaiser reviews the revisionist argument that emphasized the common ground between liberal members of the nobility and those in the Third Estate, and searches for historical reasons that led to the abolition of noble titles in June 1790. He also investigates the connotative meaning of the word “aristocrat,” an issue touched on by other contributors as well. One is reminded of the comment by the British author Helen Maria Williams who observed during her visit to France in 1790 that the term aristocrat had come to stand for “Every thing tiresome or unpleasant” (Letters from France, volume one, letter ten). In the next chapter, a line of inquiry similar to Kaiser’s is pursued by Johnson Kent Wright, who centers his study on the work and influence of Montesquieu and the relationship between the monarch and the nobility.

Near the end of the book, the focus changes to the writing of individual noblemen. Jay M. Smith focuses on the Comte D’Escherny and starts by analyzing Escherny’s repudiation of the decree against the nobles and views this in light of a longstanding sense of the contrast between a good noble and a bad noble, or an aristocrat. Smith cites an interesting passage from the Comte D’Antraigues who views nostalgically a feudal manor that represents all that can be good about a virtuous nobility:

A thousand times more sweet were my sensations on finding, amid abandoned ruins, an old manor in all its gothic beauty . . . When I enter these manors, with their long and dark halls, when I see these massive chimneys that gathered the entire family around a hot fire, I feel as though I’m leaving my century. (267)

These insightful first-hand remarks add great depth and interest to Smith’s essay. A somewhat different tone emerges in Doina Pasca Harsanyi’s discussion of memoirs of the Revolution, and the work of Alexander de Lameth in particular. Lameth is a controversial figure who, hostile to his own privileged class, made the chilling argument that the nobles had only themselves to blame for their walk to the guillotine.

The book concludes with the essay “French Nobles and the Historians, 1820-1960,” in which Jonathan Dewald provides an excellent overview of scholarship in the field. He states from the outset “In this essay I will say little about real-life nobles or about the real functioning of Old Regime Society. Instead, I will address a series of questions about how historians have approached the French nobility” (305). Perhaps most significant is that Dewald’s survey reveals the disproportionate influence of unsympathetic representations of noble life, a type of burden of the past for those writing today.

Indeed, the triumph of Sophia Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette rests on her creation of a flesh and blood title character, a very human young queen. This scholarly book has just enough glimpses of real life to allow the voices of the French nobility to be heard amidst the discussions of historians. Both Jonathan Dewald and Jay M. Smith in his introduction look forward to future research and debates, and such scholarship will be indebted to the lucid essays in this collection.

The French Revolution and the London Stage 1789-1805

It would be difficult to imagine a period in history more dramatic in scope and intensity than the years covered by this book. Britain was still finding it difficult to come to grips with the loss of her American colonies and the humiliation of defeat and separation. The reverberations following the ups-and-downs of the Seven Years War with France (1756-63) were still being felt as well. The events of 1789 and beyond came as another kind of shock, creating a sharp division within the country as the traditional distrust of her Gallic enemy clashed with the hope that a new era of liberty, equality, and fraternity might result in France becoming a friend and even an ally. That hope was quickly dashed by the Reign of Terror, the guillotining of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and the ominous threat of invasion by the ruthless despots who took over, leading eventually to the rise of Britain’s greatest enemy to date, Napoleon Bonaparte. There was enough reason, certainly, for Edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) to describe events in Paris as “theatric” as well as deplorable, in stark contrast to his reaction to the American Revolution (1775-82), which he had supported and even welcomed.

On the home front, meanwhile, there was drama of a more personal sort. The impeachment of Warren Hastings for his alleged misdeeds in India took on all the characteristics of a prolonged show trial, seven years in all, involving some of the great orator and actors of the day, including Burke himself and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Then there was the crisis in the monarchy, caused by George III’s bouts of apparent insanity, precipitated no doubt by his worries over the irresponsible, and incorrigibly vain, heir to the throne, the future George IV. Real life in Britain had been destabilized, too, by upheavals caused by the Industrial Revolution, which gave political radicals like Thomas Paine, Joseph Priestley, and Richard Price the opportunity to foment opposition to the government with their own brand of theatrics.

All such activities, then, were far more dramatic than anything the three legitimate theaters in London (known as the London Patent Houses) might offer. Consequently, as George Taylor’s book demonstrates, the work of playwrights in response to the various upheavals, including the events both in France and in Britain, was often rather less than impressive. It is true that the fall of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 “inspired a more radical reaction from the minor houses” (47) while Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and the Haymarket tended to distance their productions from contemporary issues, partly for fear of censorship or direct political interference at a highly sensitive time. Indeed, the Examiner of Plays, John Larpent, who worked from 1778 till his death in 1824 under the aegis of the official Licenser, the Lord Chamberlain, either censored or ordered the revision of large numbers of plays that had been submitted to him for approval—this in accordance with the controversial Licensing Act of 1737 (which had effectively strangled the theatrical activities of Henry Fielding, for instance).

Fortunately for the record, and for theater historians like George Taylor, the Larpent Manuscript Collection, containing many of the proscribed or tampered plays, found its way to the Henry Huntington Library in San Marino, California, towards the end of World War One. It has proved a treasure trove for researchers ever since. Incidentally, John Larpent’s second wife, Anna Margaretta Larpent, kept a series of diaries over a period of forty years, from 1790 to 1830, six years after her husband’s death, in which she recorded not only the usual day-to-day details of her life but also her reactions to her reading of many of the plays under Larpent’s scrutiny. Taylor mentions the diaries in passing, but appears not to have consulted the originals or the 1995 edition (Marlborough, Wiltshire: Adam Matthew). In any event, some of the most valuable portions of Taylor’s study include critical analyses of several of the confiscated or revised plays. If printed editions of any of them became available, the author listed them in his useful bibliography (249-56) and he provides Larpent MS references in his plentiful endnotes (226-48).

Immediate theatrical responses in London to the events of 14 July 1789 in Paris included at least three stage re-enactments of the storming of the Bastille. One of these, planned for Covent Garden, was disallowed by the Lord Chamberlain, presumably for political reasons, but it appears to have resurfaced as a burletta with the title The Triumph of Liberty; or, the Bastille at the Royal Circus on August 5, 1789. Twelve days later, Philip Astley, who owned amphitheaters in both Paris and London and was well known for his popular presentations of equestrian circus acts combined with clowning, staged Paris in an Uproar; or, the Destruction of the Bastille. A contemporary cartoon, showing a miniature cannon in action against the walls of the prison fortress, is reproduced as the frontispiece (sadly, the only illustration) in Taylor’s book. A third such entertainment, with the exciting title, Gallic Freedom; or, Vive La Liberté, was mounted at Sadler’s Wells on 31 August, but we can only guess at its content from one surviving playbill: “The Cannonade and General Attack….The Skirmish with the Garde Criminelle…The actual Descent of the Soldiers and Citizens by Torchlight, into SUBTERRANEAN DUNGEONS, and the Plundering and final Demolition of the Bastille by an exasperated Populace” (43).

In two chapters devoted to reactions of the English stage to the Reign of Terror in France, Taylor notes that Thomas Holcroft (1745-1809), a militant atheist and a pro-Revolutionary zealot, helped to found in 1792 the London Corresponding Society, whose main aim was to connect with radical elements in Paris in the same year. Yet his own somewhat politically sensitive production, The Road to Ruin, was allowed to be staged at Covent Garden. This play, which dramatizes the great gulf between poverty and wealth, is viewed by Taylor as having a proto-Marxist edge to it (a theme he develops philosophically in a later chapter on “Theater and Alienation,” 188-219). While money is certainly the main motivating force in the play, the connection with Revolutionary ideas seems to me tenuous at best. In any event, the Examiner of Plays saw no obvious subversive tendencies in it, and the play, more of a social comedy than a serious piece of ‘levelling’ propaganda, enjoyed a run of thirty-seven performances.

By contrast, Richard II, a history play by Richard Cumberland (1732-1811), who was on the side of the non-radical angels in such matters, was turned down immediately by Larpent in 1792 as “‘extremely unfit for representation at a time when ye Country is full of Alarm, being the story of Wat Tyler [who had led the Peasants’ Revolt as far back as the year 1381], the killing of Tax Gatherers, and very ill Judged’” (73). The fact that the tax gatherers had mulcted the people in order to pay for a war against France may have had something to do with Larpent’s decision. Whether he knew much about the respective backgrounds of the two playwrights is doubtful: Cumberland, the great-grandson of a highly respected Bishop and himself a devout Christian, and Holcroft, atheist, son of a pedlar, former stable boy, amateur actor and singer, one of the most active radicals of his age. In 1783 Holcroft had been assigned to France as a correspondent for the Morning Herald. Having a certain talent for translation, he produced an English version of Beaumarchais’ play, Le mariage de Figaro, which he titled The Follies of a Night. It was not a great success, lacking as it did the satirical pungency of the original, on which Louis XVI had presciently commented: “The Bastille would have to be torn down before its presentation could be anything but dangerous folly” (40). Set in Seville, of course, Holcroft’s translation was sufficiently distanced from present and future realities to persuade Larpent to pass it.

Carrying censorship to a farcical extreme, Larpent even excised references to the Rights of Man in a ballad opera by the Hon. John St. John, The Island of St. Marguerite (Drury Lane, 1789), though the setting was far from Paris. The Mediterranean island’s governor was worried that the populace might storm his castle and free a prisoner locked in his iron mask. The offending lines, “Generous Hearts Assert your Freedom/Vindicate the Rights of Man,” had to be replaced with an innocuous verse in praise of Liberty in general. Larpent also cut references to the execution of the tyrant and the death march that preceded it. Taylor comments on the “distancing strategy” (46 et passim) to which such performances were forced to conform, whereas one of the minor theaters, the Royal Circus, could stage without much hindrance John Dent’s celebratory burletta, Triumph of Liberty, or, the Bastille (August 5, 1789), a distinctly pro-Revolutionary presentation which also had a prisoner locked in an iron mask.

Larpent showed no objection, either, to a musical afterpiece by Charles Bonner and Robert Merry, presented at Covent Garden on 20 December 1790 as A Picture of Paris, Taken in the Year 1790, with a lavish scene showing the Fête de la Fédération on the Champs de Mars. To convince the Examiner that no dangerous incitement to insurrection was intended, the chorus sang some pointedly patriotic lines glorifying “Britain’s favour’d land” and her “ador’d” King, George III.

This book goes well beyond the implications of its title in many ways. Its seven chapters clearly show the impact of the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror, and the spreading shadow of Napoleon on a whole generation of ordinary people as well as politicians and dramatists. More particularly, it discusses the many currents of social change, such as the growing anti-slavery movement, as reflected in theater productions. As the author’s endnotes and bibliography indicate, he makes good use of recent as well as earlier scholarship, and provides a helpful perspective on both French and British stages at a time when great acting in the tradition of Garrick-Siddons-Kemble in England and the Lekain-Clairon-Dumesnil era in France was more of a fact of life than great playwriting. Throughout the book, too, we are made very conscious of the real, often cataclysmic, action taking place in the streets and on the battlefield.

The book is not without its shortcomings, of course. What book is perfect? All the same, occasional stylistic flaws, of the sort that a competent copy editor might have caught, tend to blemish an otherwise solid and reliable contribution to the field of dramatic history. All too frequently, for example, the author uses run-on sentences involving the vexed comma splice. He makes no distinction between “effect” and “affect”, and occasionally confuses “principle” with “principal.” The reformer John Thelwall is wrongly named “Thewell” several times, and Susanna Centlivre is indexed as “Elizabeth Centilever,” while Mario Praz is re-christened “Prax.” He would have agonized over that!

Hannah More: The First Victorian

Anne Stott’s biography of Hannah More provides a very detailed and rather lively account of a prolific eighteenth-century author. Stott claims that More’s current reputation for publishing counter-revolutionary works, as well as for moral high-handedness, have obscured the import of her writing and philanthropy as foundations for the generations that succeeded her in the Victorian age. She argues that More “was never a mere mouthpiece for patriarchal ideologies” (x).

Interesting chapter titles–including “The Princess and the Bachelor” and “The Greeks and the Barbarians” — animate Stott’s discussion of More, pique the curiosity of the general reader, and engage specialists who are familiar with More’s oeuvre. The “Princess” is eight-year-old Princess Charlotte, daughter of the Prince of Wales and his wife, Caroline of Brunswick. The effects of her parents’ failed marriage as well as the chaos within their household raised the question of the Princess’ suitability to rule one day. In 1805, Hannah More, ever didactic, published a two-volume work, Hints towards Forming the Character of a Young Princess, as her way of contributing toward a suitable education for the young girl. The “Bachelor” is the protagonist of More’s didactic novel, Coelebs In Search of a Wife. While general readers might be curious about the identity of these “people” named in the chapter title, specialists will most certainly recognize them and will appreciate Stott’s pairing More’s fictional character, who is the beneficiary of More’s values, with a member of the royal family, who was apparently in need of a good dose of More’s didacticism.

With her chapter title “The Greeks and the Barbarians,” Stott tips her hat to More, who is known for her ability to mix with and write for the well educated, higher ranks of society as well as the disenfranchised, lower orders. Stott cites this expression from one of More’s letters to William Wilberforce and then uses the chapter to discuss More’s attempts to influence both the aristocracy, the “Greeks,” and also the “Barbarians,” who include the miners whose children attended More’s many schools in the Mendip Hills of Somerset. Stott’s chapter title here also echoes the methods of More, whose Cheap Repository Tracts titles, for example, were designed to capture the attention of both “greek” and “barbarian” readers. She evokes as well the strategy of modern scholars such as Susan Pedersen, who titles her well-known article “Hannah More Meets Simple Simon.”

In addition to her chapter titles, Stott sprinkles into her narrative a number of emotional words which enliven her discussion by hinting at More’s character. For instance, when More writes to William Wilberforce about the folly of a royally connected acquaintance having converted to Unitarianism, Stott says that More “wrote sniffily” (158). At this point, Stott’s readers might conjure the image of a haughty woman, whose nose is in the air because she is certain that her beliefs are far superior to those of the new Unitarian about whom she writes. Here, Stott startles yet delights readers who might be expecting a more sober portrayal of her subject.

Stott contextualizes More’s times with regard to historical data by supplying just the right amount of detail. The population statistics and the price of coach rides for both London and Bristol, for example, are useful when reading about Hannah More’s many trips between the two cities. The depth of Stott’s research is made evident by this attention to detail. The organization of the material, though, is somewhat unusual and occasionally confusing. Stott labels each chapter with a specific time period, indicating which years are covered, in chronological order. However, she overlaps some time periods so that a completely satisfying discussion in one chapter is reintroduced and discussed again in a later chapter. This organization might result in some readers needing to double back to check the dates at the beginning of the chapters concerned. A specific example of this style occurs when Chapter Eight (1795-98) discusses in exquisite detail More’s Cheap Repository Tracts project and then Chapter Nine (1795-99) reintroduces and discusses it again. This aspect of organization is a minor drawback; it does not hamper the overall effectiveness of Stott’s presentation of an immense amount of material.

Stott’s work reflects a significant departure from the methods of previous biographers and editors. While she relies heavily on the batch of More’s letters used by William Roberts in his 1834 Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Hannah More, she does not apply Roberts’ extensive editing practices. Roberts, for example, does not allow More’s entire personality to emerge in his edition of her letters. He tends to focus on the maudlin, such as on More’s accounts of her sisters’ deaths. He latches onto any serious commentary while he omits passages or letters of a less serious nature. Nor does Stott repeat the clearly partisan views of Charlotte Yonge’s 1888 Hannah More, in which the author praises More unabashedly, using terms such as “bright-eyed” and “brilliant.” Rather, Stott interprets her research findings in a more balanced way, encouraging readers to judge More’s works and character for themselves, with just a bit of coaching.

The jacket cover and Stott’s Preface both suggest that this text is inclusive of much available material on Hannah More. The cover states that the work is “the first to make extensive use of her [More’s] unpublished correspondence.” As well, Stott says in her Preface that she has taken account of “a wealth of previously uncited manuscripts in Britain and the United States” (x). These statements are well substantiated by many new sources and comments. It is interesting to note, though, that Stott chooses not to pursue a reference in Henry Thompson’s 1838 The Life of Hannah More: With Notices of her Sisters (1838), which might have illuminated further her discussion of the last few decades of More’s life. She makes use of Thompson’s work, citing from it once and referring to Thompson at three other points in her book. However, she omits any reference to his Preface, which clearly signals the existence of “nearly one hundred letters” (x) borrowed by Thompson from the Addingtons, who were very close friends and neighbours of More. In fact, one hundred and twenty-two letters make up a cache of letters written between More and the Addingtons. And while the extant letters are still owned by descendents of the Addington family, my 1999 doctoral thesis The Old Ballad Monger: Hannah More’s Unpublished Letters 1798-1827 contains an edition of them. Had Stott reviewed the letters, she would perhaps have chosen to amplify her discussion and amend a few conclusions regarding the relationship between More and the members of the Addington family. For John Hiley Addington, MP–brother of Lord Sidmouth, Prime Minister (1801-04)–was a close friend of Hannah More until his death in 1818. More continued her close relationship with his widow and daughter until the end of her life. Stott mentions “Hiley” Addington on a few occasions, but she is not able to present the importance of More’s relationship with this family as it influenced her personal and financial affairs.

Stott’s beautifully illustrated text contains some well-known portraits of More and some additional images on glossy paper accompanied by maps. The work is an interesting read and reflects Stott’s enthusiasm for her subject. She achieves the admiration of readers who can only imagine the exhaustive task of synthesizing the wealth of material written by and about this author, who published for over fifty years. Scholars who study the Romantic or Victorian periods will find Stott’s work both valuable and enjoyable.

Saint-Simon, un historien dans les marges

Constructing a fresh, coherent, and cogent approach to a work so massive as Saint-Simon’s Mémoires, one situated problematically at the “crossroads of prose genres” of the time (Fumaroli), is no simple task. Already in his introduction to the 1856 edition of the Mémoires, Sainte-Beuve claimed: “il semble qu’on ait tout dit, et bien dit.” In the event, Malina Stefanovska’s welcome new study seeks to elucidate the ancien régime’s “imaginaire nobiliaire” by reconciling the work of historians and literary critics in an anthropologically-inspired perspective. To this end, she situates the Mémoires historically at the ending of an ideal “cosmology” at odds with both official historiography and lived history, and – as writing – under the sign of the Derridean “supplément.” Exiled from his time, she observes, Saint-Simon makes a “pacte mémorialiste” with a future readership in which the secrecy of the work’s writing will guarantee its veracity – its authority. But the very excess of Saint-Simon’s writing, she argues, provides grounds for reading the work in terms of a modernity deeply antithetical to the memorialist’s personal desires.

Beginning with an introduction which is a model of lucidity, the author lays out a plan of five chapters centering on Saint-Simon’s project of “reconfiguring history”; the scandal of politics viewed against an implicit monastic ideal of purity and devotion; the passage of Louis XIV from the great promise of the youthful Roi soleil to the twilit decline of a “Roi solipse”; the memorialist’s own complex literary and historical stance of quasi-moralist or “voyeux” recording the curiosities of life at court; and finally, a consideration of “les racines de l’écriture” which drew such prodigious nourishment from re-imagining the court. Professor Stefanovska points out Saint-Simon’s ambiguous situation very close to the center of absolutist power, but at the margins of court life. His writing constitutes a full engagement with this situation in which the “margin” (understood politically, socially, and textually) will not only serve as background, but will eventually also move to center of his immense work.

Living at the historical watershed labelled by Hazard as the “crisis of European consciousness,” and faced with the impossibility of overt resistance, Saint-Simon’s choice of writing secret memoirs, a traditional way for nobles to settle scores with the crown, was nearly overdetermined. The immensity of his effort was not, however, and here Professor Stefanovska’s invocation of the “supplément” demonstrates its interest. She argues that Saint-Simon’s immense body of memoirs can be seen as a gargantuan extension of his own father’s scribbling “L’auteur en a menti” in the margins of every available copy of La Rochefoucauld’s own Mémoires, which claimed that the elder Saint-Simon had failed to keep a promise (11-15). Analyzing with flair various literary, historical, and personal dimensions of the Mémoires, the present study’s author reads them as at once a cry for truthfulness against the official lies of the dynastic historical writings; a deeply reactionary denunciation of an historical, cosmological/religious, and national order’s perversion and decline; a self-justification; and, as writing, through the “envahissement par la marge [in several senses] cette prolifération infinie du texte qui ‘réforme’ la réalité plutôt qu’il ne la narre,” an establishment of “une modernité littéraire . . . que Saint-Simon méprise et annonce”. The author finds surprising adumbrations of Rousseau, even Mallarmé and Proust in this “premier écrivain français moderne” (66-7, 118, 180).

Founding the Mémoires, in Professor Stefanovska’s view, is the tension between an ideal and its corruption. The ideal is the ancien régime’s divinely ordered “holistic cosmology”, which dictates a rank for the ducs and pairs de France – Saint-Simon’s group – just below that of the royal family (20-1, 70). The corruption of this ideal order in Saint-Simon’s time elicits his attempt to rewrite and thus “reform” history, even take it over in a “prise de pouvoir de l’historien” in order to exact a durable, decisive revenge (16-7). The study traces how Saint-Simon’s Louis XIV is measured against an idealized Louis XIII (who, the author argues, underlies the entire text of the Mémoires as its implicit “théorie” or “impensé”; 105) and also an idealized filial figure, the duc de Bourgogne (whom Saint-Simon had aspired to tutor himself, 118). The Roi soleil is depicted as not just a failure, but in practice the very opposite of what an absolutist monarch should be. Ruled by his thirst for gloire, the king, “faible, égoïste, et aveuglé” allows his own ministers to manipulate him (37, 110-14); ruled by his own carnal appetites and amour-propre, the King not only elevates his own natural offspring above the hereditary nobility, but also lowers himself literally and symbolically for Mme de Maintenon before an entire assemblage of European dignitaries at Compiègne, thus shaming the whole nation in the eyes of the world (92-3). Behind the magnificent façade of Louis le grand sits a “fort petit roi” (117).

If the increasingly isolated and despotic king lives out an unenviable life, Saint-Simon’s nobility suffers far more, being bled dry not just of their fortunes but of their very being, their familial past and place in society, and thus reduced to a state of permanent triviality: “le solide, l’essentiel, le grand avait changé de place avec la bagatelle, le futile, la commodité momentanée” (66). The etiolation of the nobility’s historical place and function yields a near-desperate “quête de l’être” in the face of pervasive ennui and nostalgia (147, 177). This quest, however, most often results in a flight into “chimères,” especially fantasies of an imaginary past (144, 167-70, 182-3). The passages evoking this development constitute some of the study’s finest pages.

Saint-Simon himself, finally, lives out the tensions of this historical situation in particularly acute personal form, which Professor Stefanovska analyzes with precision and delicacy. Knowingly incurring the king’s displeasure by resigning from the army, he lives a “masked” life at Versailles (18) – a life which amounts to lifelong espionage in the service of writing. The pleasure of “masked” observation, in the author’s view, founds a veritable “poétique du voyeux” (138). “Larvatus redeo” might well be his motto as he retreats from his marginal but indispensable haunting of the byways of the castle to the specially-constructed hidden writing-closet in which he produces the enormous volume of the Mémoires. Like his “cabinet secret”, Saint-Simon’s lifework is secret, but not private: hidden from the king’s spies, but not from his closest friends. Professor Stefanovska tellingly evokes Saint-Simon’s pride in engineering the Lit de Justice of 1718, and thus the historical “réexistence” of the ducs et pairs (195), recalling them from the purgatory of “notre néant et nos ténèbres” (144). His search for an “ordre perdu” pays off in its being “retrouvé,” even if only for a few years (66).

Professor Stefanovska’s arguments, although not devoid of occasional repetition (and slightly marred by some typographical errors), are most often clear and persuasive. Her use of several theoretical angles allows fine-grained and often illuminating readings of familiar passages and historical phenomena. Despite an argument with much theoretical input, however, at certain points one could wish for more extended discussion of the various theoretical sources on which she draws, especially the anthropologists Louis Dumont, Clifford Geertz, and Mary Douglas. These scholars’ wide-ranging viewpoints and contexts deserve more detailed adaptation to analysis of the rarefied, tightly constricted court society under consideration in the Mémoires. The lack of an index might also serve to restrict the study’s usefulness for non-specialists. Despite a few such cavils, however, this study is highly recommended for its deeply thoughtful and original treatment of major aspects of Saint-Simon’s work.

A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660 – 1789

The latest offering from Susan Staves, Professor Emeritus of English at Brandeis University, is profoundly important, not surprising given the caliber of her previous contribution to the field of early women—literary and otherwise. The decades of expertise evident here in the seemingly effortless syntheses of historical movements, and incisive arguments about a wide spectrum of authors are presented in wonderful prose, like backbone under fine linen.

The book is carefully organized, with much attention paid to chronology and genre, neither of which Staves side-steps. The chapters are arranged chronologically, with the era she covers divided into seven shorter periods, yet within each are discussions separated by genre—poetry, polemic, translations, drama, histories, and novels. The chapters are “Public women: The Restoration to the death of Aphra Behn, 1660-1689”; “Partisans of virtue and religion, 1689-1702”; “Politics, gallantry, and ladies in the reign of Queen Anne, 1702-1714”; “Battle joined, 1715-1737”; “Women as members of the literary family, 1737-1756”; “Bluestockings and sentimental writers, 1756-1776” and finally “Romance and comedy, 1777-1789”. Each chapter is headed with a useful chronological list of the primary texts and authors that Staves addresses there, followed by a succinct introduction to that period. A brief review is then devoted to each text, with summary and commentary balanced by consideration of the author’s career. Helpful notes, one or two pages in length, about a key concept or genre often appear between the discussions of texts, for example on Provincial Novelties, Travel Literature, Rome and France, Letters.

Her vision, then, takes in political, literary, and religious climates and women’s responses to each. Most importantly, Staves is concerned with how we read the texts now, and she embraces serious criticism where she finds it warranted. This mandate she sets up in her Introduction: “It cannot be a sin against feminism to say that some women wrote well and others wrote badly, that some were intelligent, reflective, and original, others dull, unreflective, and formulaic” (4). In this she answers some of the troubled responses about literary value that have been proposed to Germaine’s Greer’s 1996 Slip-shod Sibyls, and goes a very long way toward writing the history that Margaret Ezell called for in Writing Literary Women’s History (1993).

Staves’ self-confidence is justified, and persuasive is her grasp of political and philosophical movements that in large part explain texts which are too often still read in terms of personal expression alone. Particularly striking is the line of argument in the second chapter, “Partisans of virtue and religion, 1689-1702” where works in opposition to libertinism are given their full due, particularly the writings of Mary Astell. The conclusion to this chapter is worth quoting at length:

While to modern eyes this alliance women forged with the late seventeenth-century forces of religion and virtue may at first appear dreary or repressive or catastrophically sexless, Astell and many of her contemporaries judged it both intrinsically right and in the best interests of contemporary women. Given the real contempt for women in the older patriarchal ideology and the crucial role of theology in that ideology, and given the real dangers to seventeenth-century women posed by libertine philosophy and rakish practics, I find it hard to say that Astell judged wrongly. (121)

It is this strong voice that propels Staves’ remarkable book, and only on occasion does her assuredness, particularly when dismissive, give pause. On occasion she rejects a sympathetic reading as unproductive pity. For example, in her case against Delariviere Manley: “She was sometimes alert to the dangerousness of a male gallantry that conceals male predation, yet desperately clung to a debased form of the old language of love, [and] insisted that her heroines have power to compel male admiration” (165). There is much to recommend this position, yet surely it was more than sometimes that Manley identified this predatory instinct. While addressing scholars who have defended Manley’s political brand of libertinism, Staves has no time for apologetic readings of women, nor does she offer them anywhere in her work.

In later chapters the attention to the bluestockings, especially with reference to genre and the importance of women’s reconsideration of the history of romance, draws the study to a strong conclusion. Throughout, Staves addresses the quandry faced by modern feminist critics in reading the competitive space between “the relative allegiances [eighteenth-century women] ought to owe to gender” and a “range of other values” (439). Fittingly, Staves concludes with a gesture to the via media, condemning the practice of “[r]uthlessly interrogating the works of earlier women writers primarily to fault them according to whether they commit solecisms in terms of modern feminist or democratic political standards” along with “tortured readings of their works that reinvent earlier women writers as modern feminists” (439). We are called to rethink what have become stock responses to these works, the reading and teaching of which have been hard-won. Further, she introduces so many texts, both better- and lesser-known, in this study, that inspiring possibilities are suggested even to the most well-read enthusiast and the most complacent teacher. Ever reader-friendly, Staves includes a generous list of recommended modern editions.

I am teaching a course on eighteenth-century women writers that has become a stock part of my own repertoire, and A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain is not allowed to stray far from my desk. Any serious scholar of early women writers must own this book. As an aid to research it is a treat, as a teaching resource, a trove; as a meditation on what we are all about in our current reading of early women’s texts, a challenge.