What if the early eighteenth century were the “Age of Finch”? For reasons that are fairly easily justified, it’s not. In her own time and immediately after, Finch was a modest poet with a minor reputation. She received praise from Delarivier Manley, Nicholas Rowe, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope – for the last hundred years or so of eighteenth-century literary history, the latter two names could have followed the words “Age of” on a monograph. To wit, Pope’s poems occupy seventy-four pages of the most recent tenth edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, while Swift’s prose and poems take up 206. Preceding both is Finch’s “A Nocturnal Reverie”; in volume nine, one could also find her caustic “The Introduction,” which has since been removed. Her biographical caption begins in the middle of page 252, after a similarly concise excerpt from Mary Astell, and “A Nocturnal Reverie” ends halfway through page 254, where Swift’s work, long enough to be its own book, begins. By contrast, I could scissor out the Finch entry and probably find a way to glue it to the front of a piece of loose-leaf notebook paper.

To some degree, the Norton realistically registers the lack of a footprint that Finch had in the later eighteenth century. Often Finch’s lack of presence is suggested as a product of that aforementioned modesty: perhaps a fear of criticism kept her poems “in the shade” (as per Volume C of the Norton [253]) and “might have made her shrink from exposing herself to the jeers that still, at the turn of the century, greeted any effort by a ‘scribbling lady.’” This and similar descriptions of Finch have become the reigning speculation that one finds when first confronting her work. This “shrink[ing]” feeling, the argument goes, led her to publish only one collection, the 1713 Miscellany Poems, on Several Occasions “in spite of her skepticism about readers’ abilities to appreciate the quality of her (or her contemporaries’) compositions” (I:lviii). She was fifty-two at the time, and would die seven years later and leave behind manuscript volumes that were preserved, if not meant for publication.

Yet a fuller survey of Finch’s rich corpus reveals the tensions that are elided in that fairly convenient modesty narrative. In the 1680s, Finch and her husband Heneage were aspirants in the vexed Stuart court of James II, with Anne serving as maid to Mary of Modena. Following James’s “bloodless” ouster after the Glorious Revolution, the Finches lived out a tumultuous 1690s in Kent. The poems that emerge from this period, only a few of them published later in the Miscellany Poems, reflect her grief and uncertainty. In “Ardelia to Melancholy,” she tells the titular foe: “Thou, through my life, wilt with me goe, / And make the passage, sad and slow” (I:54.37-38). She also remained deeply attuned to, and cynical about, public affairs that became “discreet but persistent” topics (I: xlviii). The Finches would return to public life in 1702 with the ascension of the more tolerant Queen Anne, and Finch’s work would occasionally appear anonymously in miscellanies. The first printing of Miscellany Poems were attributed to “a Lady.”

That Finch has posterity at all may because of the surprising endurance of “A Nocturnal Reverie.” In the “Essay Supplementary to the Preface” of the 1815 Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth celebrated “the nocturnal Reverie of Lady Winchelsea” alongside “a passage or two in the Windsor Forest of Pope” as the rare exceptions of an Augustan poetic canon between Milton and Thomson that “does not contain a single new image of external nature” (73). It’s likely that Wordsworth’s endorsement of “Lady Winchelsea” led to her inclusion in the 1825 Specimens of British Poetesses, edited by literary historian Alexander Dyce. Wordsworth would send him a letter of praise, offering to suggest more poems by this female writer to whom he was “especially partial.” Five years later, he would write to Dyce:

Her style in rhyme is often admirable: chaste, tender, and vigorous, and entirely free from sparkle, antithesis, and that overculture which reminds one, by its broad glare, its stiffness and heaviness, of the double daisies of the garden, compared with their modest and sensitive kindred of the fields. (qtd. in Lonsdale 6)

Thus the canonization of Wordsworth as a major poet who never went out of print led to the republishing of these tantalizing notices of a talented woman whose work had not been reprinted in full since the 1713 publication of her Miscellany Poems. Reading Wordsworth’s insistent praise of Finch is charming, sort of like your friend who keeps demanding you listen to some band you’ve never heard of. Yet there’s also something confoundingly frustrating about this dynamic in which Finch needed the assistance of a cultural heavyweight like Wordsworth to avoid her complete disappearance as a “specimen.”

How and why Finch resurfaces across the nineteenth century is difficult to track, but Wordsworth’s praise is almost always involved. In an essay from an 1847 collection, Leigh Hunt refers to her as “one of the numerous loves we possess among our grandmothers of old, or rather not numerous, but select and such as keep fresh with us forever” (107). He follows this up by mentioning Wordsworth’s praise, before excerpting “The Spleen,” one of the poems included in Dyce’s collection. It’s a brief summary, and Finch receives more praise than Aphra Behn (possessed of a “thoughtless good humor” [107]) or Anne Killegrew (who “reminds the reader of her great friend” John Dryden [103]). Finch is invoked in a work by the fiery Welsh poet Lady Jane Williams, who went by the wonderful bardic name of “Ysgafell.” Ysgafell registers her anger at the minimal place for women in the literary tradition, but she gives Finch a mixed review: “Nocturnal Reverie” is “wonderfully true to nature” but “The Spleen” is “very poor, and ill deserve[s] the praise lavished . . . by contemporary flatterers” (qtd. in Reynolds lxxxi). By the late nineteenth century, Finch found another male admirer who argued for her inclusion in a broader anthology. That man, the magnanimous literary historian Edmund Gosse, was convincing enough that Finch got six poems (along with Gosse’s critical introduction) placed in Thomas Humphrey Ward’s 1880 four-volume anthology The English Poets. In that introduction, Gosse longed for “those unpublished poems, to which reference has been made . . . still in the possession of her family,” adding, “it is highly desirable that they should be given to the world” (27). Gosse was able to hunt down from a catalog of obscure books Finch manuscript, or what he called “a vast collection of the poems of my beloved Anne Finch” (lxxxvii). This opened the door for Myra Reynolds.

Myra Reynolds isn’t a name you find much referred to in contemporary scholarship outside of a footnote, but she’s an intriguing, prolific figure for the turn-of-the-century study of letters. She was one of the first four fellows at the (then-new) University of Chicago in 1892, where she earned her Ph.D., rose through the ranks, and even became an administrator. She wrote a critical work on Pope and Swift, as well as the insightful and progressive overview The Learned Lady in England, 1650-1760. But it’s Reynolds’ editing of The Poems of Anne, Countess of Winchilsea, published in 1903, that is perhaps still the reason we know Finch today as well as we do. The work includes a lengthy introduction that, more than any preceding work, clarifies Finch’s biography, contextualizes her in the period, and offers incisive close readings of her poems. Reynolds is not exactly a defiant feminist: like the speaker of “Ysgafell,” she’s often critical of Finch and the women she surveys in The Learned Lady in England. The availability of the Poems as a digital edition once it entered public domain has likely made the growing field of Finch studies possible. Yet Reynolds relied on print sources alone, and “because her edition lacks a textual apparatus, it necessarily effaces Finch’s different use of manuscript and print” (liv).

There were three editions between 1928 and 1987, all relying on Reynolds’ fading original. The 1990s saw important and illuminating monographs on Finch by two scholars, Charles Hinnant and Barbara McGovern, who jointly published a volume of poems from the so-called Wellesley Manuscript, containing occasional and religious poetry as well as verse epistles that did not appear in Reynolds’ edition. The edition is a valuable contribution, and was to that point the most exhaustive critical edition of Finch’s work. In a 1995 review of Charles Hinnant’s The Poetry of Anne Finch: An Essay of Interpretation, Kathleen Kincade appropriately notes that the book is hard to process because of the “unavailability of her works” that “most scholars have not had the opportunity to see” (428). This was a fair assessment of the difficulty of reading Finch’s work before digitization made Reynolds’ edition available.

* * *

The two-volume Cambridge Edition of the Works of Anne Finch: Countess of Winchelsea allows us to imagine an alternative Age of Finch. The editors, Claudia Kairoff and Jennifer Keith, have completed with astonishing thoroughness, sensitivity, and seriousness one of the landmark pieces of eighteenth-century scholarship of this century. Given their prior work on her poems, they are not exactly looking through Finch with fresh eyes, but allow us to. They have consumed, synthesized, and responded to the scholarship that led up this moment, and the availability of this work will allow for more. Their critical framing has enhanced and complicated Finch’s modesty. Finch is a poet who “repeatedly explores the powers and limits of language” (xlix). She is a “critic of patriarchy” and “an innovator of poetic kinds and modes . . . along with the themes and value systems that accompany them” (xlviii). While her political views where clearly aligned with the deposed Stuart monarchy, she explored and even interrogated these through devotional poetry, fables, occasional verse, and of course the nature poems that Wordsworth publicized.

Volume I contains her earliest, unpublished manuscripts, mostly poems prior to 1704. This was a period when the Finches were mostly in exile from public life, and the work consists of devotional and love poetry, odes, songs, satires, fables, and occasional verse. Throughout, Finch “experimented with formal hybrids and complicated the associations of certain themes with particular kinds and forms” (lxxvii). Volume I also contains Finch’s two never-staged plays, The Triumph of Love and Innocence and Aristomenes or the Royal Shepherd, which both of the editors have insistently kept alive through earlier scholarship. As the editors explain, these works “pose special, intriguing problems in text and authorship” (cxiii). By necessity, the editors provide ranges of dates for composition, while offering possibilities that go far beyond speculation. These manuscripts, primarily transcribed by her husband Heneage, are “authorized” rather than “authorial,” and represent the work completed before 1702, much of which would be published in the 1713 Miscellany Poems (cxiii-cxv).[1] The editors’ description of the two manuscripts that make up this volume illuminates and brings to life early modern manuscript practices in ekphrastic detail regarding binding, gatherings, stamps, and ornamentation.

Tellingly, the title page of the later Miscellany Poems with Two Plays by Ardelia includes an epigraph from Finch from Edmund Spenser: “I play to please myself, albeit ill” (I: 21). The poems of the first volume indeed attest to a deeply personal poetics, one that resists what Finch calls in a preface (never published) the “daring manifestation” and “confident producing” of publication. While some poems are certainly wracked with a despair that accompanied exile, others allow her wit to shine, particularly in the caustic political tone of fables that “amuse while exposing . . . Whig innovations such as the Bank of England, the Stock Exchange, mercantile ventures, and a generally commercialized culture” (I:xcvi-xcvii). These works now have the generous attention they deserve.

Volume II presents the later collections, and particularly the remaining poems in the 1713 Miscellany Poems and what is known as the “Wellesley Manuscript,” which were unavailable to Myra Reynolds and difficult to find digitally. In their introduction, the editors explain the tensions that Finch felt in publishing her work, as well as the possibilities. Challenging Finch as a writer who hid behind modesty tropes, the authors point to the ailing health of Queen Anne and the succession crisis that she anticipated. The timing of the volume allowed it to “participat[e] in a vigorous campaign to persuade English readers of the respective merits of Stuart and Hanoverian rule” (lxii-lxiii). Finch is a “woman censuring – without apology – the moral and political ills of the past and present” (lxiii).

The editors’ critical attention clearly makes the argument for the vitality of Finch’s poems. For instance, one of her most frequently anthologized poems is “A Petition for an Absolute Retreat, Inscribed to the Right Honorable Catherine Countess of Thanet; Mention’d in the Poem, under the Name of Arminda,” usually with an abbreviated title. Noting that the edenic setting recalls Milton, the editors then turn our attention to the tradition of the Horatian “happy man” tradition and the politically potent “retreat poems of Katherine Philips, Andrew Marvell, and Abraham Cowley (I: 650). However, Finch avoids “Marvell’s misogyny and Cowley’s preference only for a spouse,” while sharing Philips “intimation that her garden provides a retreat . . . in a specific time of political danger” (I: 651). The poem becomes a complex engagement not only with a century of Royalist verse, but also with a tradition of nature writing that associates the feminine with sport or frailty. In the editors’ glosses to the poem itself, a “lonely, stubborn Oak” is connected to Stuart iconography (I:653). The sobriquet for the Countess of Thanet, “Armida,” is linked to Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (I:652). A “Cordial drop” is linked to a matching phrase in Rochester (I:653). Clarified here are references to Romans Silla and Sertorius, and the editors explain which competing translation of Plutarch Finch might have encountered. And, as with every poem, the editors carefully lay out variants, marks, and emendations.

In other glosses, we find exhaustive and exciting references that make legible the previously elusive nature of Finch’s encounters with literary tradition. In addition to linking her to poetic superstars like Marvell and Milton, the editors clarify the sweeping intertextuality of these poems, their references to minor, forgotten writers like Christopher Clobery. You find yourself nodding along as the editors explain that Finch’s image of “melting words . . . to catch the Soul, when drawn into the eye” recalls Philip Sidney’s Astrophil longing for Stella to receive his poems so that “reading might make her know” (I:464). To place Finch in a constellation with Sidney, even in a concise footnote, is to acknowledge her participation in a poetic tradition that she felt was denied to her.

In a playful but problematic poem called “Apollo Outwitted,” Jonathan Swift pestered Finch to be more public. The demure Ardelia consistently refuses the coercive sun god who has descended to “pick up sublunary ladies,” and must face the following curse:

Of modest poets be thou first

To silent shades repeat thy verse

Till Fame and Echo almost burst,

Yet hardly dare one line rehearse. (57-60)

Swift shifts Finch’s modesty from self-imposed to divinely enforced. There’s a critical insight here that Swift might not have intended: that the overseers of the same print marketplace that allowed him to thrive had different expectations and outcomes for a woman. Finch could not expect readers to have sensitivity and generosity, and worried about the adverse effects of fame. As she writes in “The Introduction,”

Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,

Such an intruder on the rights of men,

Such a presumptuous creature, is esteemed,

The fault can by no virtue be redeemed. (I:33.9-13)

Against centuries of incomplete attention to Finch, Keith and Kairoff have “redeemed” her in a triumphant act of feminist intervention and recovery. Future generations of Finch readers, and there will be more, will no longer have to scour digitized sources to piece together her archive. The Cambridge Finch can join such noteworthy appellations as the Cambridge Swift, the Twickenham Pope, the Yale Johnson, and that level of prestige is overdue. The next necessary step is obviously an inexpensive teaching edition that draws upon this luminous edition.

Andrew Black
Murray State University

NOTES

1. One exception is intriguing: the later poem “Reflections . . . upon the Late Hurricane” was transcribed and added by Heneage in 1704.

WORKS CITED

Gosse, Edmund. “Lady Winchelsea” in The English Poets, edited by Thomas Humphrey Ward, vol. 3, 4 vols. Macmillan and Co., 1884, pp. 27-28.

Hunt, Leigh. Men, Women, and Books: A Selection of Sketches, Essays, and Critical Memoirs. Harper & Brothers, 1847.

Kincade, Kathleen. Review of The Poetry of Anne Finch: An Essay in Interpretation by Charles H. Hinnant. The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography. vol. 20-21 (1994/1995), pp. 428-429.

Lonsdale, Roger. Eighteenth Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology. Oxford University Press, 1990.

Reynolds, Myra. “Introduction” in The Poems of Anne Countess of Winchelsea. Chicago UP, 1903, pp. xvii – cxxxiv.

Swift, Jonathan. “Apollo Outwitted: To the Honourable Mrs. Finch,” in The Poems of Jonathan Swift, edited by Harold Williams, vol. 1, 3 vols. Clarendon Press, 1958, pp. 119–21.

Wordsworth, William. “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface,” in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, edited by W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, vol. 3, 3 vols. Oxford UP, 1974, pp. 62-107.

The Age of Silver is an important, timely, and potentially paradigm-shifting study that deserves widespread attention especially (but not only) from those with research interests in the novel and its modern history both before and after 1800. Indeed, although focusing essentially on the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Ning Ma makes a compelling case for why modernists need to return to the early modern period in order to rethink their understanding of the past on which their notions of the history of the present are grounded. Ambitious in conception and boldly articulated, the five-chapter monograph should also earn a high-ranking place on university reading lists, both introductory and advanced, not least, it might be added, on account of the rich and “professionally-aware” bibliographical apparatus and the comprehensive digest that constitutes much of the opening chapter in which the author situates her thesis in relation to a series of salient concepts drawn from some of the most influential twentieth-century theories of the novel. To convey a sense of the theoretical self-awareness that shapes this project, suffice it to say that this opening survey ranges from Georg Lukács (“transcendental homelessness” and “reification”), Mikhail Bakhtin (“heteroglossia”), Benedict Anderson (“imagined communities”) and Fredric Jameson (“national allegories”), without, of course, omitting Ian Watt and Franco Moretti inter alia. In order to align her own project with what she sees as a “new ethics for world literature,” the author sets about “reinventing” and “reconfiguring” these major novelistic theories. She does so by drawing (a trifle less digestibly) on a yet wider set of more recent (largely postcolonial) theoretical concepts including Gayatri Spivak’s “planetarity,” Edouard Glissant’s “creolity,” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “rhizomes,” Bruno Latour’s “actor-network theory,” Homi Bhaba’s “vernacular cosmopolitanism” and Wai Chee Dimock’s discussion of world literature as a “lexical” form of “global civil society.”

At the theoretical core of nearly all the major theories of the novel that have shaped discussion over the past century, Ma identifies three common presuppositions. The first is that the genre of the novel is the quintessential embodiment of literary modernity; second, the modern novel is distinct from earlier heroic modes of narrative fiction by virtue of variously defined notions of “realism” or a tendency towards materiality; third, it is a Eurocentric genre. She concurs – perhaps a little too readily – with the first and second of these presuppositions. The transcultural category of the modern realist novel on which she builds her own argument does not, however, aim (or need) to depart from these perhaps overly narrow conventions for her particular purposes. The force and originality of her Ma’s thesis lies in her outright rejection of the third presupposition. The arresting and ultimately convincing primary argument of The Age of Silver is that the modern realist novel, as identifiable by conventional features, did not ‘rise’ uniquely in Western Europe, either in eighteenth-century England (as is the contention of Watt in his Rise of the Novel) or (as Hispanists have long insisted) in Golden Age Spain. The emergent realist narrative forms of the early modern era are also to be found in late Ming Chinese society and that of Japan of the same period without any apparent or necessary ties of direct European literary influence.

To sustain her proposition, she devotes the second chapter to a historically-contextualised reading of a Chinese literary landmark, circulating towards the end of the sixteenth century, the anonymous Jin Ping Mei, or The Plum in the Golden Vase, hailed by Patrick Hanan as “the first true Chinese novel.” In chapter four, the focus is on the “floating world” narratives of the seventeenth-century Japanese writer Ihara Saikaku, who, we are told, became known at the end of the nineteenth century as “Japan’s realist.” Through these case studies – fascinating in themselves – Ma opens up a novelistic landscape that, she argues, is essentially continuous with the worlds of Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe which are, respectively, the subject matter of chapters 3 and 5. The study concludes with a more speculative epigraph which develops further parallels between novels in both East and West during this period in their representation of the virtuous female heroine, building from an observation made by Goethe who had sensed a strong resemblance between Chinese novels and the works of Samuel Richardson.

Capturing a “forgotten” period where European readers had a greater awareness of Chinese fiction and felt a sense of kinship with its protagonists, Goethe’s comment (made to his young assistant, Johann Peter Eckermann, in January 1827) also serves as a clever and colourful benchmark in Ma’s overarching historiography. Over the eighteenth and early nineteenth century – the final tipping point being the First Opium War – the dynamics of the early modern global economy gave way to a new world system from which emerged a new world view that placed Europe at its centre. A quotation from The Communist Manifesto of 1848 is neatly invoked to capture this seismic shift and to spell out its consequences for the understanding of world literature, the European historical imagination and its “ideology” of modernity. Whereas Goethe, but twenty years previously had proclaimed the epoch of world literature to be at hand, anticipating “a great discourse” on an international scale between Europe, China, the East Indies and the United States (167), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels could only conceive of the imminent birth of a Weltliteratur that would arise as a result of a world market created by the European bourgeoisie who are henceforth cast as the revolutionizing “subject” of history (16). Theorists of the novel, Ma argues, have for generations been straightjacketed and blinkered by this subsequent “diffusionist” model of “Euromodernity,” and this, she argues diplomatically, continues to inform more recent critical projects, including those (she hints) that are undertaken in a political spirit of decolonisation. The Age of Silver is thus conceived as a project in re-excavating the dynamics of an earlier world system the memory of which has subsequently been repressed by the “hegemonic constituents of nineteenth-century Euromodernity” (6). Through this excavation it aims to disrupt “routinized Eurocentric narratives of linear development” and clear the way for the reconstruction of a different genealogy of novelistic modernity and, by extension, modernity itself.

Hence a second compelling and perhaps even more important argument advanced by The Age of Silver: a corollary of the main thesis is that the modernity of which the realist novel is understood to be an expression is not inherently tied to the forces of industrialisation, capitalism, colonialism or indeed to notions of Enlightenment science and subjectivities. With reference to the transcultural category of the realist novel, and foregrounding social mobility and critical consciousness as the quintessential hallmarks of modernity, Ma is able to illustrate that just as the modern novel did not arise alone or even first in Europe, so too the social and political transformations of modernity were not unique to the West. The chapters on The Plum and on Saikaku’s “floating world” fictions expound on these changes with reference to China and Japan, both through the analysis of the novels themselves and through contextualising discussion. They provide ample evidence to back up her assertion that: “The emergent realist narrative forms of the early modern era – whose Eastern development has been theoretically ignored – can be broadly correlated with the social and political significances money and material objects rapidly assumed during the period” (7).

Such a statement may appear to be a self-evident truism and it would be if simply applied to the European novel. The traction of her thesis lies in her conceptualisation of the novelistic response to “cultural displacement” at local level to “transregional conditions” which she frames in terms of the global dynamics structuring Eurasian relations through the circulation of silver.  The “borderless and transmuting motions” of this white metal “connected nations, peoples, and individuals in covert yet profound ways” (23) creating what the author describes as a new planetary environment or “anthropocene” to which she gives the label “Age of Silver,” hence her memorable book title. Drawing insights from Andre Gunder Frank, author of Re-Orient (University of California Press, 1998) and other East-West world-system analysts such as Kenneth Pomeranz, this focus on the global dynamics opens up the history of the novel to the insights of recent comparative history undertaken by historians and economists who have been working against the Orientalist foundations of Western social and historical thought.  Within this undertheorized world-system, it is to China’s massive attraction of foreign silver via her exports of consumer goods that we need to look in order to understand the “crucial substructural conditions of coeval European and global developments” (52). The less informed reader is reminded of Japan’s historical role as a major silver exporter, responsible for perhaps one third of the global total output of silver during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of which as much as 75% was traded with China. As regards the Spanish colonies in South America, which were, of course, the largest producer of mined silver in the period, the reader is again reminded that a substantial quantity of this also found its way to China, either directly via the Mania galleons, or indirectly, via Europe, through subsequent trade with the East.  The point being stressed here is that during the early modern period, it was China’s massive attraction of foreign silver via her exports of consumer goods that created the “crucial substructural conditions of coeval European and global developments” (52).  There is therefore no need at this point of the story to explain the rise of the modern novel with reference to European ideas or European industrialisation; furthermore, The Age of Silver displaces the centrality of European colonialism to the genealogy of the modern novel, or at least relocates it within less familiar global dynamics, the author gently noting: “In comparison to the more established transatlantic approach to early modernity and its focus on European colonial operations, the question of coeval Eurasian relations harbors a much less noted world-historical dynamic.”

Against a background in which differing methodologies and ideologies have, on occasion, brought the fields of world literature and postcolonial studies into conflict, we might glimpse here the potentially thorny nature of the path that Ma navigates so thoughtfully and at times cautiously in The Age of Silver and we might understand why, perhaps, she builds up such a tremendous theoretical armoury in the first chapter. On the subject of disciplinary “turf wars,” she maintains a dignified silence. This is a book which maintains the hope and ambition that it is not only possible but also ethically imperative to attend simultaneously to distinct yet interlocking systems of power relations and tease out their entanglements in and through the critical consciousness cultivated by modern fiction.

So, to conclude, what new perspectives does Ma bring for the study of Defoe and the later eighteenth-century English novel? In this context, Defoe is no longer positioned at the origins of the modern novel’s “rise” but construed as a belated response to the global dynamics of the “Age of Silver.” There are, of course, much earlier English examples of novelistic realism – Robert Greene’s cony-catching tales from the late sixteenth century might, for example, be said to present analogous features to those of The Plum in the Golden Vase.  The point that is emphasized in this study, however, is that Defoe, at any rate, engages with this global order at a critical juncture and plays an instrumental role in the construction of later nineteenth-century Anglocentric narratives of homo economicus. Drawing especially on the work of Lydia Liu and Robert Markley, The Age of Silver reframes twentieth-century readings of Robinson Crusoe as allegories of British colonial conquest within the wider context of Eurasian trading relations. From this perspective, Defoe’s novel emerges as fantasy or “science fiction” written with the objective of disavowing the pre-eminence of China and the unfavourable state of the British economy about which he writes critically in The Complete English Tradesman and A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain.

In order to read Robinson’s island sojourn in terms of repressed English-Chinese trading relations, Ma insists on the importance of the two sequels, above all the Farther Adventures, pointing out that these were typically included in eighteenth-century editions and only became divorced from Robinson Crusoe well into the nineteenth century. Connections between the texts are cleverly focused with reference to the hard “glazed” earthenware pot that Robinson successfully fires after numerous attempts – the subject of Virginia Woolf’s famous essay.  Whereas Woolf is drawn to the the symbolic and secular materiality of this pot, Ning Ma connects it to the fashion for Chinese porcelain that was flowing into Britain at the expense of national manufacturing. Thus understood, Robinson can be seen as achieving not only a form of colonial mastery over the island (as according to familiar readings); he also technically masters the manufacturing process of “China ware,” expressing a fantasy of an Anglo-centric global economy – a reading that Ma helpfully aligns with the trading strategies proposed in A New Voyage whereby silver would flow back to Britain.  By refusing to name the pot anything other than “earthenware,” the author suggests that Defoe is refusing to give any place at all to China in his economic fantasy.

This is, however, an ambition that Defoe knows is at odds with contemporary reality and Ma suggests that what is repressed in Robinson Crusoe re-emerges in the sequel where the protagonist abandons his New World territory that has become unprofitable in favour of trade with the East Indies. The return of the repressed is illustrated with reference to two passages in particular.  The first is the description of the “China house” that the protagonist stops to consider, putting him a good two hours behind schedule. The other is that of a statue of a Chinese idol which the protagonist finds incomprehensible from every angle, presenting a perplexing hybridity, conjoining a diversity of beings as interrelated equals with indistinguishable bonds. Seeing in both a monstrous reappearance of the earthenware pot, both passages are invoked as evidence of the sustained theme of Chinese negativity across the two sequels “reveal[ing] that one of their primary purposes is to de-Sinicize the early-eighteenth century global order, or, in other words, to attack a powerful civilizational Other that conflicts with Defoe’s ideology of an Anglocentric world system” (157).  The sequels, she argues, reveal Defoe’s recognition that China was an unrivalled mercantile centre during this period beneath strategies of disavowal. Defoe’s objective, from her perspective, was to undo the threatening hybridity represented by the indistinguishable parts of the idol and by the infinite connectivity and self-similarity of the artificial porcelain tiles on the excessively extravagant “China house.” Robinson Crusoe, read in tandem with the sequels, thus emerges as a fantasy born from fear in the context of the “Age of Silver.”  Once the fantasy became fact, the sequels became redundant and economic theorists referred simply to the founding myth of the island.

The Age of Silver thus offers a very clever reading of Defoe which sharpens colonial criticism. Defoe stands accused, so to speak, of not only colonising ambition but also Sinophobia. This is a larger story than the one with which many readers are familiar. But is it the whole story? Rhetorically speaking, the texts invite pause for further thought. It is not only the protagonist who stops for a long time to contemplate the China house. The ekphrastic description also invites the reader – past and present – to ponder the many entanglements of trade and travel during this period. The Age of Silver is an important and timely contribution to scholarship not least because it poses these questions anew.

Jenny Mander
Cambridge University

There is no shortage of books on British piracy, but David Wilson’s evidence-driven examination of the final phase of the Golden Age phenomenon is, if the reader will forgive me, a welcome piece of new scholarship in which there is much to be treasured. Focusing on the period 1716-1726, which witnessed a shocking resurgence and proportional diminution of maritime piracy in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, Wilson’s book, which “contains pirates” but is “not a book primarily about pirates” (xi), engages a vast and complicated maritime network of imperial merchants, colonial settlers, and naval forces touched by and touching piracy. Well-paced and clearly written, Suppressing Piracy mounts a persuasive challenge to the broadly accepted narrative of the late Golden Age “War on Piracy,” arguing instead that the isolation and eventual collapse of large-scale European-captained Atlantic piracy was the result of trade pressures and colonial allegiances, and not the straightforward result of a decision that the British navy should at last get tough with respect to the plague of the hostis humani generis.

Wilson’s book opens by painting an image, to which it will periodically return, of the just-hanged bodies of Bartholomew Roberts’ crew, in one of the most famous anti-pirate victories of the eighteenth century. In Wilson’s framing, though, Ogle’s triumph over Roberts is the exception that proves the rule: this was a famous victory in part because it had little company. Historians have conceded that the British lacked the naval capacity simply to suppress pirates in the 1670s through early eighteenth century. They did not miraculously develop this capacity in 1722 (the date of Roberts’ defeat).

Instead, posits Wilson, effective anti-piracy efforts were localized, which meant allying with various colonial and mercantile stakeholders to bolster Parliamentary and Admiralty campaigns. Even so, Wilson is not precisely arguing that the British presence was weaker than we have been led to believe; the overall direction of the piracy suppression efforts amount to a solidifying of British imperial reach and ambitions. Wilson’s interest is in the understudied mechanisms of how that solidification happened, which he attains by turning to the accounts of merchants and captains trying to effect local change in the service of imperial stability. There is something faintly reminiscent of Tolstoy in the way Wilson lays out his careful analyses, always cautious of assigning too much agency, blame, or achievement to single actors – though he might not appreciate the comparison I’m making here, for there was, Wilson insists, no war against the pirates (nor was there really much of a pirate peace). There were only sporadic reactive measures to soothe the ruffled feathers of aggrieved mercantile interest groups.

The tides of piratical fortunes in peacetime ebbed and flowed largely at the behest of “legitimate” imperial and transatlantic trade. Wilson makes the crucial distinction that, hostis discourse aside, the English government saw pirates less “as a threat to imperial authority” than as an irritant to important mercantile interests who could be appeased (it was hoped) by measures well short of an expensive and difficult project like eradication (74). Whether a colony or trade route received meaningful protection from the Royal Navy was a function of whether the area was already a well-established trade hub with lobbyists in England. Private colonies, like the Carolinas or the Bahamas, were considerably under resourced compared to Crown colonies like New York and Virginia. The governments of private colonies only organized effective resistance to piracy when their own local people and merchants found it more profitable to do so than to tolerate the pirates.

Essentially, no concerted effort would be made against pirates until enough of the Atlantic was profitable enough to European investors to make it worthwhile, which meant that through much of the end of the Golden Age, the Navy was instructed to, for example, protect Massachusetts but not Rhode Island. While the Navigation Acts attempted to draw a bright line between piracy and legal action, actual suppression of piracy was not consistently attempted until colonial-domestic trading ties made it desirable; only once the London merchants had reason to advocate for the interest of colonial ones – and specifically, the tobacco, sugar, and, pulling all together, the enslaving trades – did suppression efforts begin to grow teeth.

Wilson gives more attention than most to the important question of what becomes of pirate spoils: if a pirate accepts a pardon, what becomes of his booty? What redress was possible for merchants who claimed their belongings had been stolen? Most pirate treasure was not metal specie but rather fungible goods, and often, as Wilson often highlights, this included human prisoners, for whom the capture of a pirate usually meant only further captivity as they were enslaved or re-enslaved “legally.” Wilson traces, for example, as far as he is able, the fate of the skilled diver named Ned Grant, hired out by a white enslaver named Catherine Tookerman, captured by pirates twice – and then sold by a vengeful Tookerman who needed to pay a share of his price to the pirate hunter who’d declared him salvage.

The Venn diagram of enslavers and pirates shows much overlap. It is generally understood that it was their damage to the post-Asiento transatlantic trade in African prisoners that finally made pirates too annoying to European authority to be tolerated; still, for far too long, popular histories, wanting to celebrate pirates as anticapitalist freedom fighters, have nonetheless tended to give piracy credit for antislavery impulses that were never manifested on any significant level. While enslaved people appear throughout Wilson’s text, Chapter 5 specifically addresses the interactions of piracy and the slave trading lobby, and brings Wilson’s characteristic nuance to the fore. The pro-slavery lobby was not unified, but comprised of different factions: the so-called anti-monopoly separate traders (such as those encountered by Defoe’s Captain Singleton), and the Royal African Company, who regarded the separate traders as akin to the pirates (they not infrequently had been, but they also not infrequently were attacked by current pirates). Indeed, for a period the depredations of pirates elsewhere near the West African coastline were advantageous to the RAC traders who stuck to the Gold Coast, argues Wilson. It was innovative collaborations between the Royal Navy and the enslavers that eventually deterred pirates from the worst of their West African predations.

Meanwhile, as Chapter 6 details, the far more powerful East India Company lobby was able to secure a significant naval patrol for the Indian Ocean despite far less evidence of pirate problems than those faced by those in West African waters – setting aside their self-serving contention that Kanhoji Angria, leader of the Marathon navy, was piratical. Pirates and separate traders based in Madagascar were, however, a real impediment to the BEIC’s fledgling efforts to establish their own transatlantic Malagasy trading and enslavement faction.

After 1722, piracy within the bounds of the expanding British Empire became less profitable and more difficult, leading to a marked decline in piratical reports. The trading functions that had enabled pirates to recruit and find safe harbor had been superseded by determined imperial and colonial networks of sugar and enslaving merchants. The pirates were pushed out, one among many casualties – albeit perhaps among the least sympathetic ones – of imperial mercantilist or nascent capitalist development. This is less evidence of the omnipresence of British naval power than of its limitations in the face of a far more complex cultural shift, and of the importance of colonial maritime forces. Moreover, concludes Wilson, “It was legitimized maritime predation, rather than outright piracy, that proved the more prevalent threat to British commercial interests in the western Atlantic after 1722” (233).

In other words, belief in the decline in piracy depends a great deal upon how one defines piracy. Thus it ever has been. But Wilson’s corrective contribution to this old tale amasses evidence form under-used sources, adding voices and challenging pirate historians to revisit received wisdoms in the face of his evidence that piratical matters were overwhelmingly local and transient. This should be required reading in Pirate Studies.

Manushag N. Powell
Purdue University