In 1519, on a beach in what became Veracruz, Hernando Cortés staged a now infamous display of power in front of five emissaries sent by Montezuma. Horses were made to charge, bells to ring, cannons to boom. This was a performance, not an attack, a carefully choreographed spectacle, and the Aztecs are said to have “lost their senses and fainted away” (Leon-Portilla 26). As Tzvetan Todorov once put it, Cortés’s use of weapons was “of a symbolic rather than a practical nature” (115).

Art imitates life in Christopher Loar’s new book, Political Magic: British Fictions of Savagery and Sovereignty, 1650–1750, which shows that such displays of power were thought to be necessary in England, too, where unruly multitudes—domestic savages—threatened the liberal political order gradually replacing absolutist monarchy. The writers Loar discusses, including Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Eliza Haywood, all speculated about how commoners might be made civil or governable, how they could be ruled without direct violence, or simply with less of it. The answer, in many cases, involved gunpowder, but less as an instrument of death than as a sign of an almost magical authority—hence the book’s title. Of course, gunpowder remained unpredictably combustible. In natural philosophy, it was not understood fully until later in the eighteenth century, and guns themselves could be “law forging and law destroying, divine and satanic all at once” (5).

Loar puts Cavendish, Behn, Defoe, Swift, and Haywood in dialogue with a variety of thinkers: Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke, on the one hand, and Michel Foucault, Carl Schmitt, and Giorgio Agamben, on the other. Fictions of intercultural contact, the argument goes, revisit very directly those moments of initial political subjection crucial to the natural rights tradition. At the same time, the literature under analysis anticipates current ideas about biopolitics and political theology, particularly Foucault’s concept of governmentality, Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty, and Agamben’s category of the homo sacer. Loar’s engagement with conceptual issues explains why the book has less to say about eighteenth-century political controversies or such disparate historical phenomena as public hangings and pistol dueling, but the gunshot topos certainly deserves the sustained attention it gets, and this is precisely what makes Political Magic stand out next to recent monographs such as Victoria Kahn’s Wayward Contracts (2004), Laura Doyle’s Freedom’s Empire (2008), Elliot Visconsi’s Lines of Equity (2008), and Lauren Benton’s Search for Sovereignty (2010).

The history Loar tells is abstract and foundational. How does a pre-legal, pre-political people become a collective of legal, political subjects? The answer: original laws come from elsewhere, from an outsider with power, or at least the appearance of it. That is why colonial fictions allow for the elucidation of “a universal politics” that closes the distance between cores and peripheries (3). What was happening in the New World—civilizing subjugation—had happened in the Old World during the Roman conquest, and for some that mission never ended, though modern times called for less violent means. We tell ourselves this was an era of disenchantment, when science overcame superstition, but European colonists encouraged naïve awe in the peoples they conquered, and at home vulgar credulity was exploited by skillful political practices that promised but strategically deferred violence. A gunshot lasts a second, but that second is politically formative, its effects reverberating long afterward, perhaps as long as civil society itself.

The first chapter, “Enchanting the Savage: The Politics of Pyrotechnics in the Cavendish Circle,” examines the writings of Thomas Hobbes, Margaret Cavendish, and William Davenant, each of whom attempted “to represent sovereignty’s exteriority to the order it founds,” each investigating “the modes in which such an anomalous sovereign can reshape and create a political sphere that is both obedient and free” (36). All three endorsed an absolutist politics, but they also sought to “amplify sovereign power through indirect and largely nonviolent means” (36). Hobbes, we are reminded, never elaborated the steps from savagery to civility. Davenant thought dazzling theatrical spectacles might do the trick, literally a trick. In “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity” (1656), Cavendish imagined gunfire doing it—giving Loar his first instance of guns used as political magic. Most compelling is the argument that this shorter narrative and The Blazing World (1666) both idealize female sovereigns not in spite of but because of their femininity: while male rulers are vulnerable to all the corruptions internal to the state, women, precisely because of their liminal political status, can stand outside it, untainted, disinterested.

Chapter two, “Fire and Sword: Aphra Behn and the Materials of Authority,” looks at Behn’s two plays The Widdow Ranter (1689) and The Roundheads (1681) and at her novel Oroonoko (1688), focusing on not just gunpowder but also the burning glass used by the English settlers in Surinam to instill wonder in the native tribesmen. Neglected by most critics, this episode is crucial to the colony’s political strategy; afterward, the English become to the Indians divinely legitimized authority figures, rather than outnumbered military adversaries. Behn, though, like Hobbes, Davenant, and Cavendish, was interested primarily in the problem of “rabble management,” that is the imperative to manage the English rabble, and her three works here dramatize the tragic, seemingly irretrievable, costs of failing to do so (102). Their lesson, unsurprisingly, is that sovereignty depends on discipline effected by fraud and force, on a ruler’s ability to stand not only outside the law but also above it. Unlike James II, the modern king must be “cynical, distant, unromantic,” qualities Oroonoko too lacks before he is executed and his dead body becomes another kind of political fetish, “a sign of the dangers of the opposite pole—raw force—in the practice of government (102, 103).

“Talking Guns and Savage Spaces: Daniel Defoe’s Civilizing Technologies,” the next chapter, and perhaps the best in the book, builds on a previously published article about Robinson Crusoe (1719). Here, Loar also looks at The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Captain Singleton (1720). As for the first, it is shown that Defoe “uses gunpowder in part to underscore the way that British liberty emerges from and depends on civility-making violence” (107). The Farther Adventures and Singleton reimagine this violence more skeptically: “Gunpowder no longer operates as a mysterious sign of divinity or even a tool for carving out a civilized space in the wilderness; it now becomes more closely associated with the ungoverned human passions detached from sovereign authority” (120). In these later texts, therefore, “gunpowder increasingly blurs the line between savage and civilized people and between legitimate sovereignty and mob rule” (120). Particularly intriguing is a discussion of the strange episode in which Singleton and company lay siege to a fortified tree trunk, a sovereign space ultimately penetrated by so much frenzied, relentless gunfire. Loar concludes that the fall of the fort signifies the permeability of sovereign space and implies “the need for formal state structures to exert force and to control the means of violence” (141).

Chapter four, “Doctrines Détestables: Jonathan Swift, Despotism, and Virtue,” turns to Gulliver’s Travels (1726), A Modest Proposal (1729), the Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), and A Discourse of the Contests and Dissentions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome (1701). This section gets its title from Swift’s marginal note in response to Jean Bodin’s argument for absolute and indivisible sovereignty in Six Books on the Commonwealth (1576): detestable doctrine, yes, but maybe also necessary. As Loar argues, “although Swift damns absolutism and tyrants, his writing cannot seem to leave behind the problems to which tyranny appears as a partial solution” (145). We therefore find uncomfortably unironic ideas in A Modest Proposal and ambivalently imperialistic beliefs in Gulliver’s Travels, a text that also has much to say about gunpowder and technological violence. Especially compelling here is a discussion of the flying island that pairs well thematically with Defoe’s treatment of forts in Captain Singleton. As with the tree trunk in Madagascar, Laputa maintains its sovereignty by defensive violence that ultimately renders it defenseless. Looking at the famous canceled passage on the flying city’s destruction, Loar concludes that sovereignty becomes “a quasi-colonial and violent form of intimidation” that finally results in “the death of the political order and civility itself” (178).

“Savage Vision: Violence, Reason, and Surveillance in Eliza Haywood,” chapter five, transitions to the middle of the eighteenth century, when, as conventional wisdom has it, sovereign violence gave way to more distributed forms of authority. Loar pushes against this view, concentrating on two Haywood novels that have received relatively little critical attention, at least until recently: The Adventures of Eovaai (1736) and The Invisible Spy (1755). A version of this discussion of Eovaai appeared recently in article form. Both novels “attend to questions of self-monitoring, autonomy, and sovereign violence,” as well as “the ways that law and civility are, or are not, guaranteed by various forms of surveillance and violence” (182). The discussion of politically cathected objects now expands to include magical devices designed to reform behavior, especially women’s behavior: the sacred telescope in Eovaai and the invisibility belt in Invisible Spy. Ultimately, however, these narratives reveal the insufficiency of surveillance alone, betraying “a fundamental pessimism that leavens their efforts to imagine a self-monitoring society and a rational citizenship for men and women alike” (184). Both texts “allow us to observe a more highly developed model for how sovereignty might leave its violence behind—but cannot” (183).

The conclusion, entitled “Coda: Enemies,” confronts Schmitt’s argument in The Concept of the Political (1927) that political community entails a fundamental distinction between friends and enemies, friends coexisting in a sphere where violence is prohibited, enemies always potentially challenging one another in extreme and even deadly conflicts. As Loar writes, “We might rather imagine a utopian politics that understands peace and political community as perpetually and constitutively threatened, not by enemies but by the very impossibility of any absolute security” (228). It is a welcome note of encouragement in this book of bracing ideas, a book that at times brings to mind the incisive skepticism of Jonathan Lamb and Sandra Macpherson.

Of course, all good work leaves readers wanting more, leaves them eager to pursue lines of inquiry beyond the grasp of any book-length study maintaining its focus on a coherent range of issues. I, myself, wondered if the literature of piracy and fantastic voyages might offer alternatives to the deceitful and violent forms of sovereignty to which the texts Loar examines seem either committed or resigned. Granted, his primary concern is with fictions that reimagine contact between colonists and savages. Moreover, although Loar demarcates his timeline clearly, setting off the literature he discusses from the later Enlightenment, I found myself curious how the relationship between savagery and sovereignty changed when savagery was ennobled, romanticized. How, specifically, did the history of British fiction and its figurations of sovereignty reflect this development?

All in all, Political Magic is an important book that should interest specialists in literature, history, political philosophy, and postcolonial studies. The research is meticulous, the readings careful and confident, the prose lucid and elegant. On page after page, I was struck by the subtlety and sophistication of Loar’s ideas. Perhaps the most significant achievement of Political Magic is the way it shows us a number of familiar texts and makes us look at them—all together—in brand new ways. I had read most of these novels before without fully noticing their preoccupation with guns and gunpowder, let alone the linkage of guns and politics. Thanks to Loar’s book, I will never think about this literature, or teach or write about it, in quite the same way.

Jason Pearl
Florida International University

WORKS CITED

Benton, Lauren. A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. Print.

Doyle, Laura. Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. Print.

Kahn, Victoria. Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–1674. Princeton: Princeton UP. 2004. Print.

Leon-Portilla, Miguel. The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of the Mexico. Trans. Lysander Kemp. Boston: Beacon Press, 1962. Print.

Loar, Christopher F. “The Exceptional Eliza Haywood: Women and Extralegality in Eovaai.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 45.4 (2012): 565–84. Print.

—. “How to Say Things with Guns: Military Technology and the Politics of Robinson Crusoe.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 19.1–2 (2006): 1–20. Print.

Todorov, Tzvetan. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. Print.

Visconsi, Elliott. Lines of Equity: Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2008. Print.

Karen Lipsedge’s book examines the relationship between real domestic spaces and their fictional counterparts in novels by Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, Eliza Haywood, and Frances Sheridan. “By recreating the structure, design, function and social significance of specific rooms and garden buildings, and the ways of life they facilitated,” Lipsedge hopes to shed light on the ways such rooms functioned in novels, recapturing the ways eighteenth-century readers would have understood literary heroines’ characters, relationships to privacy, and senses of freedom or confinement through the descriptions of their rooms (3–4). She sees her approach as bringing together studies of domestic architecture and literary studies, focusing not just on literature’s symbolic treatment of spaces, but also on the relationship of rooms in novels to real eighteenth-century rooms and cultural understandings of those rooms’ meaning and function.

Lipsedge’s introduction provides an overview of eighteenth-century architecture and the polite elite’s embrace of the Palladian ideal to order their domestic spaces—both indoors and outdoors. Building on other scholars’ work, she shows the ways “the Palladian house was perceived to be the ideal visual symbol of the owner’s politeness” and its “hierarchal organization of the interior, in which the function of each room was signalled by its location [and] was believed to reflect the order and harmony of the inhabitants” (8). But it is not only order and harmony or ideas about the homeowner’s identity that are revealed through architecture. Lipsedge is also interested in how over the course of the eighteenth century a growing concern with privacy and individuality gets expressed through architecture. Specifically, she concentrates on two kinds of rooms in her introduction—dressing-rooms and closets—in order to show this change, tracking the “decreasing social significance of the private closet and the concurrent increase in value of the dressing-room, in the second half of the century” (11). Closets were places of individual study and reflection, especially for prayer. Alternatively, dressing-rooms, originally both for men and women, became more and more associated with women over the course of the century and reflected changing conceptions, not just of privacy, but also of virtue. Tracking the decrease in closets and increase in dressing-rooms—as both rooms also shifted in meaning—helps us to understand quite a bit about eighteenth-century lives. More importantly for Lipsedge’s purposes, it also helps us to understand the nuances of these spaces in novels not as fixed but as culturally dependent and continually questioned, by both those who wrote and those who read novels.

Lipsedge’s first chapter is mostly an overview of real houses, exploring how eighteenth-century architects and inhabitants of those spaces thought of their homes and rooms. She uses letters, architecture histories, and illustrations to reveal what houses looked like and how they were laid out. Interestingly, as the century progresses, rooms became more and more about sociability at the same time that the occupants were becoming more concerned with privacy. From the mid-century on, there was “a change in the balance between social and private rooms, for while social rooms began to dominate the domestic interior, the composition, size and significance of private rooms began to decrease” (36). Social rooms took over the ground floor and private rooms moved upstairs, all as part of the Palladian ideal moving away from the idea of apartments into a different use of space. Rooms became more and more specialized and sometimes even gendered, as when dining rooms developed as spaces solely for eating and (with)drawing-rooms became a female sanctuary where women could “withdraw” from the men after dinner. Lipsedge makes interesting use of architect Isaac Ware’s 1756 Complete Body of Architecture to trace specific examples of the locations, functions, and meanings of important domestic spaces.

Lipsedge’s next three chapters turn to the novels themselves and are named after different kinds of rooms: social rooms, private rooms, and garden rooms. “Social Rooms” concentrates on parlours and drawing-rooms. Her close reading of the three parlours in Clarissa is thoughtful and nuanced, emphasizing the ways in which the Harlowes assert their authority over Clarissa by manipulating and controlling her parlour, staging Solmes courtsthip scene there, for example, and attempting to limit how she uses a space once in her control and once a site for her personal intellectual pursuits and privacy. At its best, Lipsedge’s work brings to life for the modern reader the function and meaning of spaces that an eighteenth-century reader would have intuitively grasped. For example, she notes that the Harlowe’s three parlours—one family parlour, one for Bella, and one for Clarissa—was unusual and this fact “articulate[s] the recurrent themes of the novel: divided families and the violation of space” (59). Rooms in the Harlowe household are “commodities and assets for which the family bargain,” just as they will attempt to do with Clarissa herself (59). Lipsedge also traces the function of social rooms in Pamela, Evelina, and, briefly, Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph. The “Private Rooms” chapter contends that the shift from Richardson’s emphasis on private rooms to Burney’s emphasis on social rooms reflects “changes in interior design and the cultural perception and use of domestic space in the eighteenth century” (98). Closets and dressing-rooms were seen as “liberating spaces in which the individual could escape, if only metaphorically, from the physical boundaries of the surrounding walls” (91). Lipsedge traces the evolution of the dressing-room from its satirical origins early in the century to its association with virtue and privacy later by looking closely at two works of art, Hogarth’s Marriage-à-la-Mode in 1745 and a portrait of Queen Charlotte by Johann Zoffany in 1765. Hogarth’s dressing-room is certainly a satirical site of illicit female sexuality and consumerism whereas Queen Charlotte is portrayed in her dressing room with her two sons in a scene of “maternity, harmony, order and femininity” (114). She notes that the Queen is positioned next to her mirror but looking at her sons, not focusing on vanity. Queen Charlotte’s dressing-room is a place of family intimacy and privacy. Lipsedge nicely integrates this visual history into a reading of several novels, moving from Pamela in her lady’s dressing-room in danger of seduction to Harriet (in Sir Charles Grandison) in her dressing room’s “private female space in which the heart, rather than the body, is unveiled and displayed” (120).

Chapter Four, “Garden Rooms,” follows the pattern of earlier chapters in giving a history of “real” garden buildings to shed light on their function in novels. Garden buildings were often whimsical and idiosyncratic, not as formal as house architecture, but functioned much as interior parlours did. Much of this chapter looks at famous garden seduction scenes, a common trope at least since the amatory novels of the late seventeenth century. In the four novels Lipsedge examines, the “ambiguities of isolation” make summer houses seemingly safe retreats, but it is dangerous for the heroines to treat them as they would parlours—their seclusion makes them unsafe (148). Lipsedge uses J. D. Macey’s argument that the garden buildings are “transitional spaces” in these novels and applies it in slightly different ways (132). Many scholars look at the ways male intruders trap the heroines in garden buildings, but Lipsedge sees them as sites for potential autonomy. For example, in her reading of the changing function of the arbour at Mrs. Beaumont’s house in Evelina, Lipsedge notes that at first Sir Clement Willoughby tries to seduce Evelina there, but eventually it becomes a spot for Evelina and Lord Orville to meet: “The arbour now functions as a symbol of pastoral innocence and of burgeoning platonic love, rather than as an emblem of threatening passion” (165).

The book’s conclusion is mostly a repetitive summary of earlier material, but it does begin to speculate on male characters’ relationship to domestic space. Overall, Lipsedge is successful in her main goal, bringing to life the function and meaning of eighteenth-century rooms in several novels and their “intersect[ion] with contemporary ideas about the function and use of domestic space, the concept of privacy, and the connection between living space and the individual” (1–2).

Amy Wolf
Canisius College

WORKS CITED

Macey, Jr., J. D. “‘Where the World May Ne’er Invade’? Green Retreats and Garden Theatre in La Princess de Clèves, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, and Cecilia.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 12.1 (1999): 75–100. Print.

Howard D. Weinbrot’s Literature, Religion, and the Evolution of Culture has a very impressive chronological and intellectual range and sweep. Adapting Darwinian evolutionary theory to the cultural history of the long eighteenth century is a significant and formidable undertaking. It is Professor Weinbrot’s contention that “gradual improvements from generation to generation are passed on to successive generations.” These are then “solidified and in turn improved … and incorporated into national and international social, political, literary, and other cultural gene pools” (8). Portraits of Defoe and Sacheverell appear on the dust jacket along with a list of eighteenth-century notables such as Gilbert Burnet, Tobias Smollett, John Wesley, and George Gordon, who themselves loom large in Weinbrot’s text. This appears a generous cross-section of individuals displaying diverse religious and political affiliation in the long(ish) eighteenth century. In his concentration on their works and their activities Weinbrot demonstrates the extent to which cultural, religious, and political life in eighteenth-century Britain was in a constant state of flux.

Sacheverell’s name is forever associated with the most celebrated trial of the early eighteenth century. He was charged with sedition for vilifying the powerful Whig minister Sidney Godolphin and denigrating the Glorious Revolution. His impeachment and trial generated a considerable “storm of pamphlets” (Holmes 32). A narrowly high-Tory Anglican who hated moderate Tories, Latitudinarians, and Dissenters alike, Sacheverell’s guilt at trial led to riots on the streets of London. George Gordon, at the other end of Weinbrot’s gallery of portraits, shares with Sacheverell the distinction of lending his name to significant violent acts of riot in defense of religious intolerance, this time against Catholics. Violence against Dissenters in 1710, and against Catholics in 1780, seem to suggest that little in the way of enlightened evolution took place in eighteenth-century England.

The history of early modern English Protestantism is a history of conflict, famously embodied in regicide, revolution, and republicanism in the mid-seventeenth century. After the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660, revolution was carried on by other means across the remainder of the seventeenth century when republicanism ceased to be a practical alternative to monarchy and instead was translated into a language of opposition. Defoe himself of course was a notable Dissenter and supporter of the Glorious Revolution: his character was formed in the persecutory decades before and after the Glorious Revolution and the passing of the Toleration Act, when a war of religion raged through the literary mediums of pamphlet polemic in many different forms. Weinbrot is alert to the tangled threads of orthodoxy and Dissent in all of its murky difference, and he opens chapter 2 of Literature, Religion, and Culture with the recognition that “[e]ven one’s own coreligionists could be apostates, antichrists, or false brethren” (55).

Weinbrot’s reading of work by Defoe and Sacheverell takes place in the context of other pamphlets, treatises, and tracts that consider the relationship between church and state and the danger presented to the Church of England by Dissent. It was a world in which little quarter was given and less asked. Despite the powers of the state that were almost permanently arrayed against them in the decades after 1660, in the ongoing struggle between the established church and nonconformists, “Lower churchmen and Dissenters gave as good as they got” (30). In chapter two, Weinbrot zeroes in on the reign of William III, placing Defoe’s Shortest-Way and Sacheverell’s The Political Union (1702) at the center of the discussion. Weinbrot’s analysis throughout this chapter is deft and vigorous. He nicely sets up the terms of the debate between High Anglican Tories, Low Church Whigs, and Dissenters, and the manner in which it was fought out in the pamphlet literature of the 1690s and the opening years of the eighteenth century.

In an age of satire, The Shortest-Way famously proved too cunning for its earliest readers to be properly understood. In terms of initial reception the work seems to have satisfied no-one. To Dissenters it appeared to treat flippantly serious questions of toleration and invited in their view the wrong kind of attention to their cause; to Anglican Tories in Sacheverell’s ultra-conservative mode, the text was received as a mockery of their values. On the whole, outrage by all interested parties was the norm (80-84). The death of William III on March 8, 1702 re-opened debates about the efficacy of the Toleration Act passed in 1689 and led to the intensification of what was already a heated discussion regarding the legalization of Protestant Dissent. Between the passing of the Act and 1702 “worries over popular religious behaviour” and “intellectual challenges to orthodoxy” were “presented with particular force,” says Julian Hoppit. This led in turn to debates about the Protestant religion in England that were “hardly less intense than those which had raged so fiercely in the mid sixteenth century and during the Interregnum” (Hoppit 208). Quoting Jonathan Swift’s Some Free Thoughts on the Present State of Affairs (1714) —“that the church’s ‘secret Adversaries were Whigs, Low Church, Republicans, Moderation-Men, and the like’” —Weinbrot makes it plain that Sacheverell was not the only intolerant High Churchman willing to nail his colors to the mast. Anything less than “absolute belief” in the supremacy of the Episcopal Church of England, many agreed, was madness (55; 89–90, notes 1–2).

Here we see a familiar association made by supporters of Episcopal Church government: Dissent is equated with republicanism, with the implied charges of regicide and revolution—of a world turned upside down. Such rhetoric was the staple of anti-toleration debates throughout the period of Weinbrot’s coverage. Accusations of this kind were revived, reiterated, and enhanced at moments when political crisis was generated by issues of religion. The most spectacular example of this in the later seventeenth century is the massively disruptive political upheaval of the Exclusion Crisis, and of course the Glorious Revolution itself. Gilbert Burnet writes eloquently on it in History of his Own Time. For the Exclusion Crisis he blames the press which “became very licentious against the court and the clergy”. Accordingly the bishops of the time, in fear of a rebellion, “set themselves to write against the late times and to draw a parallel between the present times and them” (Burnett 210–11). Pro-episcopal writers were quick to blame the current liberal fashion for philosophical skepticism, of which the leading practitioners were Hobbes and Spinoza (Ibid). From this point onwards there were existed irreconcilable positions regarding enthusiasm and reason: for Dissenters an exclusive reliance on inspiration by the Holy Spirit was essential. “From the High Church point of view,” says Weinbrot, “the Dissenters had usurped the divine voice.” They took active steps to reclaim it “with their own language of annihilation” (60). It is a short step from this position to one that sees Dissenters tarred by Sacheverell and others with the brush of satanic influence and a fall into chaos. Charles Leslie, for instance, sees chaos as “a synonym for enthusiast-Whig-Dissenter minds” (56). This brief look at the opening section is a prelude to a chapter rich in its analysis of early eighteenth-century writers that were familiar with—and in some cases were contributing to the history of religious violence from the Counter Reformation of Mary I to the late seventeenth century. For some Tory writers in the period there was no separation of church and state needed: “Denial of divine right was a denial of God” (56). Works by Sacheverell (Nature and Mischief of Prejudice and Partiality) and Leslie (Principles of the Dissenters) called for Old Testament retribution upon Dissenters. Quoting liberally from both of these texts Weinbrot points out that both writers called out for action including “Condign Vengeance” and the infliction of “wrath” upon “Insatiable, Mercenary, Blood-Hounds.” Recourse to the “Hebrew Law of Retaliation,” the argument went, is the only appropriate solution to the current malaise. Sacheverell and Leslie believed wholeheartedly, Weinbrot writes, that “the state’s martial arm” was [also] its religious arm’ (61). In The Perils of False Brethren, both in Church and State (1709), Sacheverell sets out his stall. Quoting liberally from this text and others Weinbrot draws upon some very interesting material suggesting that fear of persecution and extirpation was something that was feared by Church of England loyalists every bit as much as Dissenters. Commentators such as Charles Leslie “were sadly confident that the Whigs and Dissenters planned utterly to destroy the true church” (59). His New Association makes this all too clear with its repeated references to the “Destroying of Episcopacy Root and Branch” (qtd. in Weinbrot 60).

It is the satirical rendering of these views that form the target of Defoe’s Shortest-Way. In her encyclopedic taxonomy of satire from 1658-1770, Ashley Marshall describes The Shortest-Way as a “less straightforward type of religiopolitical satire,” intended by Defoe “not to ridicule the High Church position but to school his fellow dissenters about the dangers concealed in that position,” while Paula Backscheider believes that The Shortest-Way “was a dramatic impersonation, a defense of liberty [that] included all of the ideas Defoe found most offensive” (Marshall 151; Backscheider 94, 95). The clearest danger, and one that Defoe is alert to from the outset of the Shortest-Way, is the relatively recent parliamentary act guaranteeing religious toleration, albeit to a limited number of Dissenters. The outcome of this act, writes Defoe, is that “these last fourteen years” have enabled a “viperous brood” to flourish, who have “butchered one King, deposed another King, and made a mock King of a third.” William III is no more than the Dissenters’ puppet, a “King of Clouts” (Defoe 132–33). Defoe picks up too on the position outlined by Sacheverell and Leslie: suppression of Dissent is to be lauded and not decried. Intolerance, says Defoe, is preferred to coddling. He cites the clearing of Huguenots from France by Louis XIV in the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 as a good example. Insofar as the Dissenters are concerned, “Heaven has made way for their destruction,” by eliminating their “Monmouths, and Shaftesburys and Argylls,” and “if we do not close with the divine occasion” and extirpate them, he goes on, then we have no-one to “blame [but] ourselves” (Defoe 137, 138). As the section in chapter two heads towards its conclusion Weinbrot charts a convincing path through the jungle of visceral religious polemic. In the end, there seems little to distinguish between the two sides. In his view Defoe “could so well mimic Sacheverell’s version of ethnic cleansing: [because] he was keen on practising it himself towards Catholics” (78).

Literature, Religion, and the Evolution of Culture is a formidable work of scholarship written by one of the period’s sharpest critics. Its erudition is pronounced, its analysis acute, and there is little doubt in my view of its quality as a work of literary and cultural history. Each chapter is a case study; most have as their centerpiece a reading of something by a well-known writer: Defoe, as we have seen in chapter two; Equiano (chapter four); Dickens (chapter eight). If I were to quibble I would ask for more close reading of the period’s literature, more poetry, and more fiction. More, as another reviewer has remarked, on the debate concerned with toleration (Conway).

David Walker
Northumbria University

WORKS CITED

Backscheider, Paula R. Daniel Defoe: His Life. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. Print.

Burnet, Gilbert. History of his own Time. 1724–34. 6 vols. Ed. M. J. Routh. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1883. Print.

Conway, Alison. Rev. of Literature, Religion and the Evolution of Culture, 1660–1780, by Howard D. Weinbrot. Review of English Studies 65:271 (2014): 745–47. Print.

Defoe, Daniel. The Shortest Way with the Dissenters: or, Proposals for the Establishment of the Church. 1702. The True-Born Englishman and Other Writings. Ed. P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens. London: Penguin, 1997. Print.

Holmes, Geoffrey. British Politics in the Age of Anne. 2nd ed. London: Hambledon Press, 1987. Print.

Hoppit, Julian. A Land of Liberty? England 1689-1727. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Print.

Marshall, Ashley. The Practice of Satire in England, 1658-1770. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2013. Print.

G.A. Starr has produced an excellent edition of a work that he demonstrates, without the shadow of a doubt, to be by Defoe. It is a reply to Matthew Tindal’s Christianity as Old as the Creation, which appeared in April 1730. Defoe’s response was published in May 1730 by Thomas Warner, who, as Starr points out, was one of Defoe’s regular publishers at the time. Defoe’s text runs to only sixty-one pages, but with notes, Professor Starr’s introduction runs almost as long, and he provides over twenty pages of detailed notes to the text itself. Although I will discuss the nature of this work and Professor Starr’s contribution later in this review, I feel that I have to remark on some oddities in the publication. Defoe’s name does not appear on the spine of the work, and its inclusion in the subtitle, “The Last of Defoe’s Performances,” seems somewhat tendentious. The work is certainly by Defoe, but it is not at all certain that it was his last piece of writing. Of course, it was not included in P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens’s Critical Bibliography (1998). Since Professor Starr expresses his gratitude to those authors, did it have to assume a doubtful status, more doubtful than, say, The Commentator (1720), another of Defoe’s works without external evidence? Is this why, even after Professor Starr establishes Defoe’s authorship with brilliant analysis of parallel passages from works we know to be by Defoe, he continues to refer to “the author” of this work rather than to Daniel Defoe?

As Professor Starr remarks, Defoe refers to Tindal’s work just a few times. Tindal glorifies human reason and argues that whatever fails to pass the test of reason—including the Bible—has to be dismissed as unworthy of humankind who needs to be considered “moral Agents.” Defoe’s opposition to such arguments—his defense of Revelation—was longstanding. In fact, he presented similar arguments against William Wollaston’s Religion of Nature Delineated (1722) in works such as Mere Nature Delineated (1726), The Political History of the Devil (1726), and A New Family Instructor (1727). As Professor Starr points out, Christianity Not Old as Creation has its few slightly amusing passages involving Defoe’s mockery of Adam’s behavior after the Fall, but the essential argument about human folly is handled far more wittily in Mere Nature Delineated and that involving sin and punishment in The Political History of the Devil. Professor Starr presents a thorough picture of the battle between the deists and those, such as Defoe, who believed in Revelation, and he remarks on Defoe’s adherence to a Calvinistic view of sin, faith, and repentance, with the notable absence of any mention of pre-destination. He also comments learnedly on Defoe’s equivalent of Pascal’s Wager, seeing Defoe’s attitude as connected to Defoe’s interest in insurance. In appealing to the youth of his times, Defoe argues the immense risk in disbelief, compared to the relatively small commitment to faith. Defoe, indeed, had argued much the same in his “Vision of the Angelic World” attached to Serious Reflections… of Robinson Crusoe (1720).

One point on which I have a mild disagreement involves how Defoe responded to science. In a work such as The Storm (1704), he certainly appealed to God’s power and our ignorance of how wind comes about, but he was always ready to adjust his beliefs when confronted with genuine scientific knowledge. Surely had he a modern knowledge of meteorology, he would have included that in his account of events such as the storm of 1703 which he viewed as a sign of God’s presence in the world. The same would apply to his Journal of the Plague Year (1722), in which he actually raises the possibility that the plague might have been caused by the equivalent of germs. Having more certainty on such matters would hardly have changed his overall view of the hand of God in such events, but the author of An Essay upon Projects (1697) and A General History of Discoveries and Improvements, in Useful Arts (1725–26) would not have rejected what he would have considered genuine discoveries.

If, then, there is little new in Christianity Not as Old as the Creation, we still have the pleasure of seeing a Defoe in his seventieth year capable of mustering his arguments with great skill. Does it throw much light on Defoe’s novels? Professor Starr offers the interesting suggestion that the persistent appeal to fear and anxiety in this work is reflected in a similar way in the novels. But some of his connections to the novels are at best doubtful. Fictional characters are not the same as polemicists. They have to be judged according to their situations and individual traits.

In the final paragraph of his introduction, Professor Starr suggests that the rigid test of authorship present in his discussion of this work should be followed by anyone attempting to offer a correction or addition to the Bibliography of Furbank and Owens. That seems slightly self-serving. Furbank and Owens offered corrections to J. R. Moore’s Checklist (1960, 1971). So far as I know, they never attempted to treat any of the many attributions offered after Moore’s final edition. And while Professor Starr is excellent in tracing parallel passages and quoted materials, he is less effective in offering stylistic elements typical of Defoe. Certainly he might have alluded to the short paragraphs, vocabulary, and paragraph beginnings. And despite the air of finality that Furbank and Owens attempted to impart to their Bibliography does not Professor Starr’s discovery suggest that there are more writings of Defoe yet to be found?

Maximillian E. Novak
University of California, Los Angeles

WORKS CITED

Furbank, P. N. and W. R. Owens. A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe. London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998. Print.

Moore, John Robert. A Checklist of the Writings of Daniel Defoe. 1960. 2nd ed. Hamden: Archon Books, 1971. Print.

As a metaphor for relationships of political obligation, friendship is at once more contingent and more applicable to the interactions of eighteenth-century politics than the filial bond commonly used to define the relationship between monarch and subject. In Emrys Jones’s Friendship and Allegiance in Eighteenth-Century Literature, it is these two qualities that allow friendship to play an important role in bridging the public and private spheres. A semantically and conceptually labile term, friendship, in the eighteenth century, could encompass the exchanges of debt and credit that became an insistently problematic feature of both public and private life following the burst of the South Sea Bubble. The humanistic ideal of friendship set in the minds of writers across political factions a standard, albeit an ambivalent one, with which to judge the rise of Walpole’s party from opposition to oligarchy. Walpole’s implication in the financial crisis was never neatly resolved. And so Court Whigs, not least their leader, were subject to a matrix of judgement wherein the reciprocal loyalties of interpersonal exchange were as much a marker of corruption as they were an asset for what we now call public image.

Jones’s monograph is deeply attuned to the complexities and ambiguities of polemical culture and to how writers in this period rendered the concept of friendship indeterminate. The anxieties that arose when writers questioned the significance of “disinterested” private friendships to politics are shown by Jones to be the product of a difficult negotiation between public and private modes of judgement. The effects of public politics on friendship were rendered ambiguous by an uneasy correlation between private virtue and the “abstract standards” of allegiance required by those in public life (8). The effects of friendship on public politics were, in turn, complicated by the fact that these supposedly “abstract standards”—“reason, principle, sincerity” (8)—were themselves underwritten by the imperatives of private friendship.

This line of argument requires a case by case analysis, upon which Jones stakes his two principal contributions. He broadens the already capacious lexis of friendship established by Naomi Tadmor, uncovering the grounds for contention beneath each of Tadmor’s terms and euphemisms (2); and he expands upon the Habermasian public sphere by identifying a new origin of subjectivity: associations between individuals outside the family unit that sit in uneasy relationship to the wider structures of rational-critical discourse—friendships (6).

In pursuit of these tasks, Friendship and Allegiance is divided into two parts. The first, “Friendship in Crisis” (21–108), attends to the historically specific operations of intimate relations in the wake of the South Sea Crisis and Excise Crisis, convincingly linked by Jones (22). The second, “Friendship by Trope” (109–72), focuses on how the difficulties associated with finding a secure idea of intimacy, exacerbated by these crises, surface in the “dehumanising tropes” of beast fables and criminal narratives (166). Re-reading the figures of beast and criminal, commonplaces of eighteenth-century literature, Jones uncovers how these figurations were, in fact, attempts to reconcile the political and the personal. Indeed, it is the inevitably irresolute end of such a task which preoccupies the first part of his book.

Jones’s close reading of political communication, propaganda, and literature ensures a convincing transition between the two sections. The sources he marshals reflect the wide purchase friendship gained on political and literary culture during Walpole’s dominance; and his easy movement between the various discursive genres demonstrates the aptness of his methods of elucidating it.

The first chapter focuses on two actors—Walpole and Pope—in order to situate Scriblerian accounts of friendship in the climate of public hysteria brought on by financial collapse. Walpole’s retreat from blame finds a parallel in Pope’s distancing himself from the polluted exchanges of the public arena. Yet both are inescapably implicated. And Pope, who was discomfited by the extent to which “the public drive for speculation” (35) affected him, assumes a focal point within the network of communication between Swift and Gay; their corpus of letters speaks not only to the financial networks of the coterie, but also to the destabilizing effects of these networks on friendship—as an ideal and in practice.

Perhaps of greatest interest to Defoe specialists will be chapter two, “Daniel Defoe and South Sea Friendship.” With Defoe, whose ambitions (despite his acumen) made him receptive to the values of the market, Jones is able to show that the influence of public speculation on sociability was of bipartisan concern. The hypocritical disdain for the market displayed by the Scriblerians was but one product of a public engaged in mass speculation; the crisis of conscience and opportunism within Whiggism was another. To this end, Jones homes in on the friendships between Walters and Singleton in Captain Singleton (1720) and between H.F. and Dr. Heath in A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). The first he treats masterfully, carefully reading the implications for individual identity, conscience and confessional affiliation drawn out by the vicissitudes of this friendship in the novel. The Journal, however, seems like an afterthought. Heath is an unusual example and does not quite bear out the suggestive links Jones makes between mass hysteria and infection, both of which intimate the dangers of widespread public exchange. One need look no further than the tales of entrepreneurial sociability of Robert the Waterman and the Three Men of Wapping (Defoe 103–11, 117–45) for more nuanced examples of the careful negotiations involved in the sociable exchanges of business, the demands of virtuous friendship, and the health of the body politic.

Jones’s third chapter deals with Lord Hervey and the often unsuccessful attempts of Court Whigs to integrate ideas of virtuous friendship into a “pro-ministerial discourse” (53). The fourth chapter looks back to Pope, considering his Epistle to Bathurst (1733) as an interrogation of Walpole’s behavior in the wake of the South Sea Crisis. (69). The poet who emerges from Jones’s extended and detailed analysis is unmistakeably aware that those opposed to Walpole, himself included, faced just as difficult a task in assimilating private conceptions of virtue to the public identity of the Opposition.

In the final chapter of the first section, Jones turns to the figure of the Patriot Prince (Frederick Prince of Wales), continuing to trace the fraught involvement of a relationship that is at once domestic and the basic constituent of a public sphere. In this chapter, the discourse which works to ameliorate friendship is the mythos of the Patriot Opposition, which Jones furnishes with interesting new readings of little-discussed plays, including Henry Brooke’s Gustavus Vasa (1739), David Mallet’s Mustapha (1739), and James Thomson’s Alfred (1740). The friendships of the Patriot Prince are the subject of scrutiny and yet, as he is rendered, the Prince embodies the private virtues of male companionship. The prospect of Frederick assuming the throne thus throws private virtue and public life into stark relief.

In the second part of the book, Jones brings the complexity and overdetermined nature of friendship established in the first section to bear on fabulistic tropes (mostly Aesopian) and narratives of crime. In doing so, he finds interesting new angles for mostly Scriblerian texts: Pope’s epigrams, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) and Polly (1729), and Fielding’s Jonathan Wild (1743), among others. While Jones’s reading of each work yields new insight, the sum total seems to be that these works struggle to make public what were once, and still, to an extent remained, private concerns. In these texts, intersubjective associations and the virtues they profess or violate are accommodated to the substantive deliberations of the rational public sphere. The potential for public figures to retreat to the privacy of friendship, now an avenue fraught with paradox, is touched on in the book’s all too brief epilogue.

For a work so engaged with the divisions of public and private, and the slippages between them, it must be seen as an oversight that Friendship and Allegiance makes no mention of Michael McKeon’s Secret History of Domesticity. Jones’s stated preference for contemporary polemic (3) over humanistic inheritance in understanding eighteenth-century friendship means that while references to Aristotelian, Ciceronian, and Senecan conceptions anchor his monograph, large gaps are left between the philosophy of friendship and how it is put into practice. But this is perhaps to judge the work against criteria which are not its own.

All in all, Jones resists teleology, probably wisely, and yet still fashions a coherent account of the complexities of friendship, as concept and trope, that will have widespread interest. With Jones’s principal analytic claim that friendship is more complex than previously assumed, the rigor of his analysis is, in places, too easily substantiated by the ambiguities of the texts themselves. Readers of Friendship and Allegiance will find, with Jones, that friendship hopelessly complicates all the hermeneutic possibilities it advances.

Marc Mierowsky
Queens’ College, University of Cambridge

WORKS CITED

Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year. 1722. Ed. Cynthia Wall. London: Penguin, 2003. Print.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. 1962. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge: Polity P, 1989. Print.

McKeon, Michael. The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private and the Division of Knowledge. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005. Print.

Tadmor, Naomi. Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Print.

This lucid, subtle, and stylishly written scholarly monograph belongs to a line of works which includes Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957), Michael McKeon’s The Origins of the English Novel (1987), and, more recently, Michael Schmidt’s The Novel: A Biography (2014). It is informed by recent work in reception studies and book history—work which has complicated our understanding of the history of the European novel, returning us to archival sources, reminding us of the materiality of culture, and challenging teleological conceptions of change.

Since the publication of Philippe Ariès’s Centuries of Childhood (1960) we have been familiar with the idea that childhood is an “invented,” or historically specific, concept. Studies of children’s literature have burgeoned, but until now less has been said about the other side of the coin: the “invention” of “adulthood” and of a specifically “adult” literature. A literature aimed at younger audiences began to appear in the seventeenth century and had become increasingly prominent by the middle of the eighteenth century. But it was not, in Michals’s view, until the latter part of the nineteenth century that strong claims were made for the existence of a distinctively adult audience for the novel and, more importantly, for the superior value of this literature. Robinson Crusoe (1719) was written for a “mixed” rather than an “age-leveled” audience and it was only in 1761, when it became the first work of fiction to be read by Rousseau’s Émile, that Defoe’s work began to be seen as the foundational children’s classic. Richardson’s Pamela (1740) presents the converse case: it was initially (albeit somewhat ambiguously) directed at a youthful readership and it was only in the nineteenth century that Richardson’s story, in which a twenty-six year old man repeatedly attempts to rape a fifteen year old girl, no longer seemed suitable reading for children.

Michals’s book traces the emergence of a “developmental model” in which the child was seen, not simply as “a person of any numerical age whatsoever in a dependent social status” (66), but as an individual who lacked the criteria which defined adulthood—criteria variously set out in terms of social autonomy, sexual maturity, and economic and/or Lockean rationality. In the work of such writers as Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Maria Edgeworth, and Walter Scott maturity was a matter of manners and property. Gradually, however, the notion of a “psychologically complex” adult—and, therefore, of an adult reader—began to emerge (95). It was not there in the work of Dickens, one of the last novelists in English to address his work to a mixed-age audience. David Copperfield the boy does not develop into David Copperfield the man like the heroes of Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir (1830) or Balzac’s Illusions perdues (1837–1843). In Michals’s view, David Copperfield is always David Copperfield: his experiences do not change him in any essential respect. It is, as Michals argues, equally difficult to fit the Pip of Great Expectations (1860–1861) into a stadialist model of development: he simply loses the insights of his childhood and finally regains them. And this is not just the case for Dickens’s male protagonists: Michals argues that Dickens’s “Little Mothers” are also exceptions to the stadialist model, precisely because they are “mothers” whatever age they happen to be.

The ways in which novelists were received by future generations were affected by their awareness (or lack of awareness) of differences between the child and the adult, their sense of what activities and experiences defined the life course. Scott’s work later came to be seen as suitable reading for children exclusively—particularly boys. In 1919 Virginia Woolf suggested that George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872) was “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people” (192). For Michals this judgment offers a telling example of the “cult of adulthood” associated with literary modernism. Notions of complexity and seriousness became key values because they were “adult.” Meanwhile fiction for a mixed-age audience or writing specifically addressed to younger readers was seen as artistically inferior. A narrative of human development became a narrative of literary history: in its earlier stages the novel had been a child; now had it come of age.

The final chapter of Michals’s study argues that modernists like Woolf were anticipated by Henry James, who rejected the idea that the novel should minister to a younger audience and set out to create an adult novel which was non-didactic, intelligent, and, most importantly, had sexual relationships as its main field of interest. Such works as What Maisie Knew (1897), “The Turn of the Screw” (1898), “In the Cage” (1898), and The Awkward Age (1898–1899) have children or young adults at their centre, but Michals argues that James’s vision was self-consciously an adult one. He was concerned in these works to think about what adults are—or rather to think about what adults do (in other words to have sexual relationships and to think about these relationships, often in ways which Fielding or Richardson might have found curiously indirect). The focus on James is most welcome, though Michals might perhaps have broadened the perspective to include George Moore, Thomas Hardy, and the “New Woman” novelists of the 1890s, not all of whom would have been happy to identify adulthood with masculinity.

Michals observes in conclusion that nineteenth-century conceptions of adulthood remain “consonant with important assumptions that economics, politics, law, education, medicine, and psychology make about the self” (208). This closing point is quietly made, but for that reason it is all the more thought-provoking. One of the achievements of this book is to make the world of the modern adult as strange as an earlier world in which those whom we would think of as children stood on burning decks, married, were hanged, elected Members of Parliament, and sent to work in factories—all with no sense that anything untoward had taken place.

T. J. Lustig
Keele University

WORKS CITED

Ariès, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. 1960. Trans. Robert Baldick. London: Jonathan Cape, 1962. Print.

McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987. Print.

Schmidt, Michael. The Novel: A Biography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2014. Print.

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. London: Chatto and Windus, 1957. Print.

Melanie Bigold’s new book sets out to fill a significant—and, at first sight, surprising—lacuna in scholarship on eighteenth-century literature. While the past 25 years have witnessed a dramatic growth of interest in women’s writing in the long eighteenth century, this interest has typically presupposed the overriding importance of print and professionalism, focusing on the rise of the professional woman writer. Meanwhile, manuscript circulation, so important in recent scholarship on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women’s writing, has only rarely been addressed in research on eighteenth-century women writers (the pioneering work of Margaret Ezell is, as so often, a crucial exception). Yet as Bigold points out, manuscript transmission of literary materials did not suddenly cease in 1700, but continued to offer women in particular a vital means of engaging with the wider world of letters. Following Ezell, Bigold argues that the privileging of print within literary scholarship, combined with the frequent critical tendency to favor transgressive or radical voices, has distorted perceptions of eighteenth-century women’s writing, obscuring the achievements of many women whose writings do not answer to twentieth- and twenty-first-century critical priorities.

Among these unjustly neglected writers are the three women at the center of Bigold’s study: Elizabeth Rowe (1674-1737), Catharine Cockburn (c.1674-1749), and Elizabeth Carter (1717-1806). All three have traditionally been categorized—Bigold might say, dismissed—as pious or learned writers whose works largely fall within genres deemed suitable for women and who are thus thought not to have advanced opportunities for women’s writing. Against this orthodoxy, Bigold argues that Rowe, Cockburn, and Carter all made selective and strategic use of both manuscript and print in order to bring their works to an appropriate readership. Women of Letters traces their writings across the long eighteenth century, from the inclusion of Rowe’s early poetry in the Athenian Mercury in the 1690s to the posthumous publication of Carter’s letters in 1817. Based on extensive research of original manuscript sources, Bigold’s study focuses in particular on women’s use of letters—both “real” and fictional—as a means of consolidating coterie relationships, taking part in contemporary intellectual debates, and shaping their own posthumous reputations. It also considers all three women’s relationships with male writers, whether as sources, correspondents, mentors, or editors.

Elizabeth Rowe, the subject of Bigold’s first two chapters, has perhaps suffered more than either Cockburn or Carter from the critical priorities of modern literary scholarship. Yet against the conventional picture of Rowe as dully and obsessively pious, Bigold presents instead a canny and well-informed writer who controlled the circulation of her own literary works and actively contributed to the construction of her own textual afterlife. Through careful comparison of Rowe’s published work—especially the Letters Moral and Entertaining—with manuscript sources such as Alnwick MS 110, Bigold is able to show the extent to which Rowe edited her own writings for publication: omitting names, selecting from and conflating letters, and altering her quotations from literary and philosophical sources—in so doing, substantially modifying the effects produced in the printed text. She also shows that the “pietistic repetitiveness” (32) that characterizes the published Letters does not represent a lapse in artistic control but rather a conscious literary choice on Rowe’s part.

Bigold is at her most interesting and persuasive when discussing Rowe’s remarkable publication record between the mid eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As she points out, “between the years 1737 and 1820, something by or about Rowe was published almost every year” (62); Friendship in Death went through at least 27 posthumous editions, while both her letters and her Devout Exercises remained in print for around 90 years (88). But Rowe’s publications were not solely a posthumous phenomenon: many of her works were published in her own lifetime, albeit at well-spaced intervals and often anonymously. Bigold argues that Rowe, unlike some women of her period, did not avoid print-publication but rather sought to take advantage of the facilities it offered for spiritual edification amid what she perceived as a worrying deterioration in contemporary manners and morals. Rowe’s efforts to edify her readers persisted even after her death: her Miscellaneous Works, published posthumously in 1739, included many original moral letters, each carefully fitted to the known character and interests of her addressee. Yet the Miscellaneous Works—edited by Rowe’s brother-in-law, Theophilus, and evidently intended both to collect and pay tribute to her writings—also helped prepare the way for the sudden decline in Rowe’s reputation after the early nineteenth century. Not only Theophilus, but also the other men who wrote commendations of Rowe after her death (Isaac Watts and Henry Grove), felt obliged to acknowledge and explain away the “enthusiasm” of her religious language, while also constructing her as a pious, exemplary feminine figure. Over time, both Rowe’s enthusiasm and her pious image would lose their appeal; the popularity of her works has never recovered.

Catharine Cockburn, the second subject in Women of Letters, represents a different kind of literary challenge for Bigold. Active as a writer from the 1690s until the 1740s, Cockburn now enjoys a solid, though modest, literary reputation as one of a wave of female dramatists (also including Delarivier Manley, Mary Pix, and Susanna Centlivre) that followed Aphra Behn in the late seventeenth century. Her later contributions to post-Lockean philosophical controversy, especially her Defence of the Essay of Human Understanding (1702), are similarly well regarded. As a result of these twin scholarly emphases, however, Cockburn is often perceived as having had a rather disjointed writing career, with a long gap between 1708 and 1726 when she published nothing. Literary critics have, in some cases, regretted her apparent move away from imaginative genres in her later writings, while historians of ideas have tended to regard her contributions to eighteenth-century philosophical debate—most of which are structured as responses to other writers—as derivative. The clarity of her philosophical writings has also sometimes been held against her: much praised in her own time, it has been viewed in some recent scholarship as unimaginative.

Bigold’s archivally-based approach should do much to change scholarly perceptions of Cockburn’s career and achievements. As she shows, careful reading of Cockburn’s manuscript remains—some of which have still never been published—reveals a writer who remained closely involved in philosophical correspondence networks throughout her years of print silence. Manuscript evidence also conclusively demonstrates Cockburn’s own close involvement in helping to plan a collected edition of her own works in the 1740s. That these Works were not published until 1751, after their author’s death, should be attributed neither to Cockburn herself nor to her editor, Thomas Birch, who emerges from Bigold’s account as a significant and relatively respectful advocate for her writings, but rather to the dilatory William Warburton, from whom Cockburn’s manuscripts eventually had to be reclaimed by Birch and Henry Etough. Bigold also defends Birch from the charge, levelled by Anne Kelley among others, that his decision to favor Cockburn’s philosophical over her literary works in his edition resulted in a narrowing of her posthumous reputation. The second volume of Birch’s edition, as Bigold points out, included a larger selection of Cockburn’s poetry than had previously been available in print, while Birch’s decision to omit many of her plays seems to have been due in part to the expenses of publication and in part to the difficulty of obtaining correct texts. The undoubted bias of the Works toward Cockburn’s philosophical and religious writings can also be explained by the practicalities of subscription publication: it reflects the preferences of her subscribers, many of whom were academics or clergymen.

Bigold’s sensitivity to the role of readers in shaping a writer’s reputation is not confined to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her discussion of Cockburn’s afterlife also considers how the priorities of twenty-first-century scholarship may have limited the ways in which her works are read: thus those of her texts which do not readily lend themselves to a proto-feminist reading are often ignored or disparaged, while the intellectual distinction between the English and the Scottish Enlightenment may, Bigold argues, have disadvantaged a writer whose origins and biography fall between these two nationalities. With Elizabeth Carter, Bigold’s third subject, such concerns are less in evidence, since Carter—more than either Rowe or Cockburn—actively controlled her own ventures into print publication and assumed a strikingly modern attitude toward the ownership of her own works. Supported by her father, Carter wrote with clear intellectual aims but with an unabashed ambition for fame and money; she also took care to ensure that her texts, when included in print collections, were associated only with high-quality writings. As a result, Carter succeeded to a remarkable degree in determining her own posthumous reputation, which has remained consistently high from the eighteenth century to the present day, especially in the area of classical scholarship. Yet even she suffered to an extent from the well-meant attentions of a posthumous editor. Her nephew, Montagu Pennington, who edited her letters after her death, had scant respect for the integrity of individual texts and also had what Bigold nicely describes as “a frankly odd sense of … effective epistolary narrative” (210). His edition thus created a somewhat chaotic and achronological picture of his aunt’s letters, and has been much criticized in recent Carter scholarship. With characteristic generosity, however, Bigold recognizes the role of Pennington’s edition in sustaining interest in Carter’s work, as well as providing important evidence for how her life and writings were regarded at the outset of the nineteenth century.

Women of Letters, Manuscript Circulation, and Print Afterlives in the Eighteenth Century is a valuable addition to the fast-expanding scholarly literature on eighteenth-century women writers. No single book can aspire to do everything, and all reviewers have their biases. For my part, I would have liked to see Bigold pay more attention to the materiality of her archival sources and to more directly consider the issue of gender: Did any eighteenth-century men, for instance, have writing lives at all like Rowe’s, Cockburn’s, or Carter’s? Or did Elizabeth Carter’s status as a non-professional woman enable her to defend anti-Athanasian theology with a forthrightness impossible for her clergyman father? Such quibbles aside, Women of Letters is a well-documented and engagingly argued study which should do much to further future scholarship on these three under-rated women.

Gillian Wright
University of Birmingham