Aileen Douglas’s careful new study, Work in Hand: Script, Print, and Writing 1690-1840, begins with Daniel Defoe’s observations in An Essay upon Literature (1726) that “since the Art of Printing has been invented, the laborious part of Writing is taken off, and the Copying or Writing of Books is at an end” (1). As Douglas notes, Defoe’s position in the Essay is rather more nuanced than this quotation might suggest, but the opposition of these two modes of textual production is a fruitful starting point for a book that joins a growing body of work that reconsiders the relationship between print and manuscript in the long eighteenth century, including, but certainly not limited to, Margaret Ezell’s Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (1999); Stephen Karian’s Jonathan Swift in Print and Manuscript (2010); and Betty Schellenberg’s Literary Coteries and the Making of Modern Print Culture (2016). Douglas’s contribution to this field “is not a history of writing,” her introduction declares (4); rather, she offers a series of case studies interrogating “the co-existence of script and print” in order to engage with “fundamental, complex, and highly varied questions about the nature of writing, and … the nature of writers” (2). Two very different preoccupations thread throughout the book: the first is a concern with what Douglas terms “the expansion, and the diffusion of manual writing”; the second is an interest in “issues associated with the specialised work of authors” (17).

To take the first of these: in An Essay upon Literature, Defoe argues that learning to write is “one of the most essential parts of Education” (quoted by Douglas, 1). As Douglas explores the ways in which that skill began to proliferate to ever-widening constituencies throughout the eighteenth century, Work in Hand is repeatedly interested in the question of who received that “essential… Education,” how they were taught, why they were taught, and what the consequences of that were—or were feared to be. Copybooks were marketed as invaluable manuals for would-be-writers, and in her second chapter, Douglas considers the role that these publications played in disseminating the two leading styles of the eighteenth century, round hand and the Italian or italic hand; while the former came to connote masculine commercial practicality, Douglas argues that the latter became associated with female writers. Later in the book, Douglas picks up on this gendering of handwriting again, recounting an episode in which Richard Lovell Edgeworth showed an example of his daughter’s writing to an acquaintance who declared, emphatically, that it “could not be the hand of a woman…it was the writing of a manly character” (175).

More than gender, though, Douglas is interested in the connection between class and writing. Chapter one contains (among other things) a brief sketch of the kinds of writing education that might be made available to the lower orders in charity and Sunday schools. In those places where the teaching of writing was encouraged, it was within strict limits: children in charity schools should not be taught “fine Writing” (as Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London argued in 1724) lest it “set them above the meaner and more laborious Stations and Offices of Life” for which they were destined (33). As Douglas frames it, “Proscriptive social theory…held that the script of the labouring poor—if it was to be visible at all—should manifest its class origins” (34).

This question of class is the backdrop to Douglas’s third chapter, which focuses upon the kinds of writing education that took place in colonial settings. Douglas explores how the skill of writing in English was exported by the schools run by the Incorporated Society for Promoting English Protestant Schools in Ireland and through Andrew Bell’s well-publicised work at the Male Asylum in Madras, India. Douglas describes the emerging role that writing played in documenting the shaping of children into productive, English-speaking, Protestant subjects, as key to a “Foucauldian disciplinary model” (77), before proposing that methods employed in a colonial context were considered too risky to deploy in an English setting. Douglas explores Bell’s reluctance to implement the methods, of which he was so proud, in schools that educated the English poor for fear of the socially-disruptive—and even revolutionary—energies this might unleash.

Maria Edgeworth, of course, was one of the many who shared an interest in the educational theories and innovations of the age: the eponymous hero of her story “Lame Jervas” (published in Popular Tales in 1804) even rises from his working-class origins to go and teach in Bell’s Madras Academy (explored by Douglas, 161-163). In the chapter of Work in Hand focused on Edgeworth, Douglas reflects upon the ways in which her various fictional works—including Castle Rackrent and Helen—explore “the fear that working-class writers might challenge rather than support the social order” (158). The threat, as Douglas sketches it, comes not only from the self-actualisation that writing might enable in the writer but also from the power that writing—especially the copying of documents—allows working class writers to assume both over knowledge and over people of a higher-class position. This reaches an apogee, Douglas proposes, with the servant Carlos in Helen; his unauthorised copying of documents that do not belong to him comes to symbolise a “monstrous working-class literacy veering out of control” (168).

Though much of Douglas’s discussion of the impact of the diffusion of the skill of writing focuses on the perspective of the educators and educational theorists of the period, in her final chapter, she turns to the testimony of one of those who learned to write in “the poor child’s school” (186). In 1840, the Yorkshire-based Methodist preacher Joseph Barker intervened in debates about the purpose of Sunday school education with Mercy Triumphant, an autobiographical account of the impact that learning to write had had upon him. “The station of a poor child is changed from the moment he learns to write,” Barker argued; as Douglas figures this, “Barker’s child writer exists beyond his social functions and his visible productivity; he is a subject, an individual” (189). Barker was an example of precisely that which the socially conservative feared: an individual whose understanding of their place within the world was radically transformed by acquiring the skill of writing.

The second thread that Work in Hand traces is very different: it is an exploration of what handwriting and handwritten texts—particularly those that were reproduced in print—reveal about the characters and practices of individual authors. In chapter four, on Samuel Johnson, and chapter six, on Maria Edgeworth, Douglas is concerned with the ways in which authors who had constructed a particular version of their character in print might have that exposed or undone by the publication of their private manuscript letters and journals. In these chapters, Douglas is largely concerned with manuscripts reproduced through the medium of moveable type. In focusing on Pope and Blake in chapter five, by contrast, she moves to consider the reproducibility of “the original written copy of a literary work”—that is, the version of that work in the author’s own hand (124). What impact, Douglas asks, might that reproduction have had “on how literary works, and the writers who undertook them, were understood?”

To explore this question, Douglas focuses first upon Isaac D’Israeli’s inclusion of a facsimile reproduction of lines from Pope’s working manuscript of the Iliad in his Curiosities of Literature (3^rd edition, 1793). (The increasing proliferation of facsimiles in the late eighteenth century is an intriguing current that runs throughout Work in Hand.) The facsimile image of Pope’s poem—showing him crossing out and inserting text, as well as suggesting that he composed upon whatever scraps of paper he had to hand—offered readers, so Douglas contends, the opportunity “to focus on the author at work” by giving new insight into his creative processes (132). In the contrasting example of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, meanwhile, Douglas considers the writer at work in a different way. Reflecting upon Blake’s interlinking creative processes as author, artist, and printer, Douglas focuses upon his methods and arguments in Songs of Innocence and Experience and proposes that, in his work, “the distinction between original and copy collapses and the act of ‘copying’ enters a conceptual space that exceeds the ready discourse” (138).

The variety of this set of case studies is the strength of Work in Hand. It is also a weakness of a sort, since their distribution is uneven and not entirely conducive to developing, in a sustained way, the book’s key contentions. However, while its overarching arguments—and its conclusion, querying the connection between our understanding of writing and our understanding of being human—might be developed with greater clarity, this detailed and interesting book undoubtedly fulfils that promise it made at the outset of exploring, across its breadth, some “fundamental, complex, and highly varied questions about the nature of writing, and … the nature of writers” (2).

Jennifer Batt
University of Bristol

If you can’t beat them, join them.

What can one do to snatch the attention of distracted audiences in an age of too much entertainment, especially when some of it is billed as information? This problem is hardly unique to our age of cell-phone usage and texting in traffic. In his splendidly entertaining new book, Darryl P. Domingo discovers a similar problem in the roiling world of eighteenth-century British print and performance, where literary digressions shake hands with social diversions in a riotous feast of competing amusements. He argues that, as leisure became commercialized and thus profitable, commercial writers of the long eighteenth century, in an attempt to pull readers away from boredom, defied the stern, attention-policing tactics of their high-literary, self-conscious, and neoclassically inclined rivals. Instead of trotting obediently down the path of sequential argument or plot, they cultivated perversity: a willful turning away from the main road to dive instead down the dimly lit, digressive pathways of peripheral significance. They appropriated distraction and made self-conscious, authorial meanderings at the margin of the topic actually the center of the entertainment.

This delightful and delight-filled work of cultural studies ably presents its argument that the various forms of entertainment from the late Restoration to the mid-eighteenth century are interrelated through a rhetoric of visual and literary interruptions and digressions. By juxtaposing in his chapters discursive and cultural diversions, Domingo positions a series of close readings of eighteenth-century texts in the broader context of the period’s cultural history, with particular attention to the shifts in the management of public space and spectacle, work and leisure practices, and anxieties about reading, discipline, and time. His questions—why do eighteenth-century texts contain so many interruptions? why does this coincide with the period that legitimized the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake? how did eighteenth-century readers enjoy these self-conscious digressions?—are highly significant, and by linking these questions to the cultural performances of diversion, he answers them in a way that explicates the flavor of a period of generic and imaginative experimentation. Irony and self-consciousness as concepts, so unique to the period, here receive fresh, close analysis in the context of London performance.

The book’s treatments of major Augustan writers, such as Swift, Pope, and Fielding, complement those of a fascinating host of “minor” writers: John Ralph, John Dunton, Ned Ward, John Rich, Tom Brown, and many others. Hence, the book explores a variety of genres: broadside and newspaper advertisements, pamphlets, periodicals, plays, novels, and treatises, and within these, a number of digressive techniques: textual lacunae, flourishes and ornaments that mirror digressive extrapolations, strangled metaphors, sudden interpolated tales and irrelevant jokes, which interrupt steady discourse to give readers refreshing relief from logical thought. (The illustrations also contribute to the digressive feast.) In the same way, and for the same yield of pleasure, cultural diversions—exhibitions, curiosity displays, street-theater, puppet-shows—provided a welcome alternative to the demands of serious life. In spaces such as the British Museum, Don Saltero’s, and Astley’s Theater, in the harlequinades of professional showmen, and in the pages of Tom Brown’s Amusements Serious and Comical (1700), Ned Ward’s The London Spy, and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, what appears to be “mere amusement” becomes the main event.

The four, densely-researched chapters do not follow a strict, chronological progression, but rather combine it with a historical portrait of the development of “the commercialization of leisure.” Domingo explains the book’s historical range, from the late Restoration to the mid-century, by referring to the argument in Neil McKendrick, J. H. Plumb, and John Brewer’s The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (1982) and Plumb’s The Commercialization of Leisure in Eighteenth-Century England (1973) that conspicuous consumption and sophisticated commercialism became fully realized in Britain only by 1760. The first chapter, perhaps the most splendid in content and argument, traces the parallels between the growth of pleasure-places in London and the rise of literary techniques designed to divert, or relax, attention. By exploring the rise of professional entertainment in the period and the contemporary debates about taste and audience response in the later Restoration and early-eighteenth century, the chapter contextualizes amusement in social and intellectual history. An exploration of James Ralph’s quasi-sincere survey of London’s entertainments in The Touch-Stone: or, Historical, Critical, Political, Philosophical, and Theological Essays on the Reigning Diversions of the Town (1728), written under the pseudonym A. Primcock, launches an enlightening exposition on the ambivalent, tonal waver characteristic of eighteenth-century literature. Hovering between reproof and delight, Ralph’s work serves as an emblem of “diversion itself” (30). Ensuing forays into mechanical displays, tricks, puppet shows, raree-shows, doggerel verse, games, and more explain the “Mental unbending,” or psychological release, enabled by diversion (53).

Diversion had its critics, of course, and not merely for prompting the waste of time, but also for undermining reason and social truth by encouraging the admiration of distortions of nature, such as freaks, curiosities, and pantomime. In the second chapter, Domingo addresses this sour-puss discourse by turning to wit and false wit (catachresis, or usage error) in Augustan theory and street practice in the years from 1720 to 1740. Harlequin receives special attention as a figure of excess but also of soundless communication, and proves a telling example of the ostensible clash, but secret friendship, between high theory and popular response. In drawing connections between physical and verbal diversions, Domingo argues that this pantomime figure reignites the Augustan complaint, voiced by such writers as Joseph Addison and Alexander Pope, against false wit and audience duplicity: “dumb Wit” stands as the “physical equivalent of ‘false wit’” (95). This exposition provides a highly suggestive recontextualization of Augustan aesthetic. Another appealing, if slightly less original, chapter, titled “Popular wonder, print culture, and monstrosity,” examines why looking at (and reading about) monsters became such a popular entertainment by connecting it to the cursory reading of texts as a shallow delight in strange material: the lust of the eyes. Domingo suggests that popular writers, such as D’Urfey and Ward, regard monsters “as a textual corroboration of the breakdown of objective representation”: games of print like ellipses, dashes, and asterisks similarly attract “even the most superficial of gawkers” (175, 177).

The remaining chapter moves into the analysis of more canonical material. It examines Henry Fielding’s plays and, particularly, the interpolated genres that wriggle their way into Tom Jones, which abandons, temporarily, tiresome plot and prudence for other forms of entertainment: songs, stories, sudden and shocking events. Domingo sees this novel as the equivalent, for a later day, of The Touchstone in its survey of contemporary amusements and justification of the practice of leisure time reading. Finally, Tristram Shandy appears in the book’s conclusion as a triumphant resistance to what had become the textual commodification of diversion. The book’s embrace of textual and spectacular performances, and the demonstration of the overlap of “cultural and discursive diversion,” is a most welcome addition to the critical discourse on eighteenth-century popular culture, canonical and commercial literature, and characteristic literary modes, particularly irony (and its use especially by Pope) (21). By linking cultural areas that have previously been segregated, in for example the works of John O’Brien and John Brewer, the book is original and important.

By both declaration and demonstration, Domingo defies high theory in favor of scholarly research, literary analysis, and the recovery of pleasure. Consequently, his style is humorous and full of joyful jokes in a way that reinforces the pleasure of diversion. Indeed, Domingo bluntly resists what he sees as an over-intellectualizing tendency in New Historicist cultural and literary scholars, which subordinates the primary aim of producing pleasure to murky political and subterranean readings of cultural resistance. While I might take issue mildly with the argument that recognizing the contemporary enthusiasm for material and mental oddities—or diversions—necessarily precludes or invalidates a theoretical examination of the historical phenomenon, it is very welcome to read a book that takes play seriously on its own terms (a phenomenon that Freud would easily recognize). This anti-theoretical approach distinguishes Domingo’s analysis from those of other scholars, such as Dennis Todd, Julie Park, and Brian Cowan.  Indeed, there is an intellectual and intellectualized argument here about intellectualizing itself (whatever that exactly means), and one with historical and theoretical resonance.

However, the book speaks to many current theoretical concerns. One of the more interesting contentions in a book full of them is that the prevalence of digressions and diversions in eighteenth-century literature argues for a sophisticated reading public who expected leisure in their literature. In this way, the book contributes to the history of reading by exploring the specific reactions of a particular readership. This enterprise includes attention to other aspects of book history: the format and presentation of the material object in print. Nonetheless, the book invites, but does not answer, some of the more resonant implications of its argument. Play is a serious subject in anthropology, sociology, psychology, and of course, history, but these dimensions are largely unexplored (although philosophy gets a look-in). On the other hand, obviously, the question of attention, or concentration, is at the heart of this argument, and its discussion of boredom as a social phenomenon, not merely an epistemological or mental one, contributes usefully to the field. However, could more be said to differentiate kinds of diversion? Drinking alcohol is both like and unlike reading, or watching a pantomime, or other pastimes, both for historical/cultural and physiological reasons, and I would be very interested in more development of that distinction.

Underpinning this analysis, too, is something of a paradox: whereas “commercial” writers used distraction to get attention, Augustan writers such as Pope parodied popular culture both to reprove and to profit from it. This seems to have it both ways: making a distinction between literary styles and then collapsing the distinction. Still, Domingo does acknowledge ultimately that this distinction is perhaps a latter-day invention of the literary academy (a possibility that has been accepted for some time), and thus the book does contribute to the more complex portrait of the period that critics are now painting.

The Rhetoric of Diversion, 1690-1760 draws on an astonishingly wide number of sources—literary, performative, visual, historical—to present a cogent argument, solidly grounded in history, criticism, and cultural studies, about the crucial role of “di-version” as both a turning away from matters of central importance and as a turning toward them in eighteenth-century British culture more broadly. The book contributes to studies in cognitive theory, cultural history, literary history, and the history of curiosity that are cutting-edge concerns in eighteenth-century studies. Domingo presents a thesis that does not merely engage these issues, but presents a new perspective, one firmly grounded in the dominant discourse of the period and one that vitally destabilizes the relationship of the center of culture to its margins, most particularly by an insistence on the central role of performance as an aspect of eighteenth-century cultural experience. The book is an engaging and sophisticated work of synthesis and originality that promises readers a straightening out of their own minds, an unbending, and thus provides much more than Tom Brown promised: “nothing but amusements” (6). Instead, it shows amusement is everything, and diversion itself the real mental exercise.

Barbara M. Benedict
Trinity College

Burnard’s Planters, Merchants and Slaves offers a masterful synthesis of archival evidence and scholarship on the economics and culture of the Anglo-American slave plantation complex from its beginnings through the emancipation of slaves. The profitability of the plantations, and their brutal methods of labor organization, provide the focus. Always maintaining this focus, Burnard, writing briskly, manages to incorporate everything from literary criticism to cultural histories of early modern European warfare without ever straying far from his organizing concerns. The result is a deeply accomplished—and surprisingly slim—volume offering provocative interventions into the debates about the culture and experience of plantation slavery in the English-speaking Atlantic world.

Throughout, Burnard insists on two uncomfortable truths about the Anglo-American slave plantation system that become only more disturbing when paired. The plantations depended on relentless brutality toward slaves, and, nonetheless, were a spectacular financial success for whites in the plantation communities, for colonial merchants, and for metropolitan investors. While either point is difficult to deny, the combination is hard to reconcile with the recent scholarly emphasis on slave agency and the shaping influence of slaves on their culture and on the politics of slavery and abolition. It is also hard to square with longer-standing debates about the relationship between capitalism and abolition. Burnard frequently recurs to the view that violence was a consistently effective method of extracting labor in the plantation system, especially for the extremely demanding work of monocrop plantations, such as, notoriously, planting, growing, and processing sugarcane. Such brutal management, Burnard points out, made slavery highly profitable, and also made it part of an ongoing revolution in management techniques, the “industrious revolution” fundamental to modern capitalism. While earlier generations of historians have debated the extent to which forced labor can be understood as capitalist, Burnard joins an emerging consensus among the current generation of historians of slavery (particularly visible in major recent works on the American nineteenth century) that it was always a quintessentially capitalistic endeavor. This brutality, of course, was itself dependent on a steady stream of slaves being imported from Africa, because it inevitably resulted in shockingly high rates of slave mortality and therefore in the impossibility of the natural reproduction of the enslaved population. While such imports remained easily available, Burnard insists, the planter class did not spare a thought for the victims who fueled their profits. As he notes, “slaves were there to work and make money for their owners” in those owners’ view. Indeed, “slave owners adopted ameliorative measures only in an effort to improve productivity, not standards of living, let alone to address the moral issues tied up in slavery” (149). Although he acknowledges that some planters in the nineteenth century came to see relatively humane treatment of slaves as more profitable, Burnard generally insists that slave owners (and even more so, the managers they hired) pursued profit relentlessly with no regard for the lives or welfare of slaves.

Burnard is well aware that his two central points—that the plantation system was consistently brutal and consistently profitable—have controversial implications, and frankly acknowledges that he has come to this view of slavery through his career-long immersion in documents of the lives of the planter and overseer class. Seeking to explain the cultural background of the system—but never to excuse those who benefitted from it—Burnard argues that the white men who oversaw slave labor had themselves crucially been “brutalized” by prior experiences, especially in early generations, as soldiers, naval sailors, and slave-trade ship workers. In this sense, he contends, the vicious brutality of the plantation system was “not an incidental byproduct” of that system. Indeed, Burnard suggests, the system itself selected such men for their brutality, given the inherent challenges of managing an enslaved workforce and, indeed, one faced with difficult and even life-threatening labor. Such men were often stranded on the plantation islands by their professions, with little means available to make their way home, but plenty of remunerative opportunities in the violent world of the plantations. Viewed in this light, the brutality of the system was in a sense historically incidental—brought about partly by accidents of history and geography that caused soldiers to be stranded in the plantation colonies. But Burnard’s larger point is that the dedication of the planter class to unstintingly violent labor exploitation, especially given the rich returns they garnered, was not a bug but a feature.

Burnard also sees a long-standing British view of Africans as radically other as another factor that allowed the relentless brutality of the plantations. In this view he (explicitly) follows Winthrop Jordan. Burnard questions the influential view that in the first generations of Anglo-American plantation, little difference was made between British indentured servants and African slaves. However, Burnard also embraces the view of race as a system of cultural privilege, and acknowledges the path-breaking work of Edmund Morgan as another important influence. Ultimately, the history of theories of race never comes to the foreground of the discussion, which always returns to the central focus on the plantation system itself.

Burnard does engage the implications of his work for slave agency directly; he states several times that slaves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not revolt against English colonists often enough to present a palpable threat. This point remains much debated and discussed, and much work remains to be done on the frequency of slave uprisings and the cultural responses to them in the English-speaking Atlantic world. Burnard concedes that Jamaicans feared the Maroons they could never defeat, but recurs to a calculation that successful uprisings were rare and suggests that this was due to the extreme violence of the measures taken against those who did attempt to rise up against their masters. While the success of brutal plantation management techniques is hard to dispute, it seems more of an open question whether terrorizing a population with extreme violence is really an effective method of social control.

While the underlying truth here may be more complicated than Burnard acknowledges, his point that revolts were not always a serious concern of the planter class is well taken. Burnard’s related observation that talk of the “anxiety” of the planter class is a “historiographical trope,” rather than a phenomenon one observes in the available evidence, is particularly convincing to me. This point extends from Burnard’s two central points: the plantation regime was horribly violent, but nonetheless very successful economically. Planters (and the white men working for them) had little incentive, and little desire, to consider seriously the moral implications of what they were doing, and, it seems, easily avoided doing so. In my own view, that they did not feel “anxiety” about a labor regime that we can now see as one of the greatest genocides in human history is profoundly upsetting. But to insist, without concrete evidence, that “anxiety” and “guilt” must have accompanied their genocidal actions is to grant humanity an inherent moral sense that does not seem to be reflected in many key swathes of the historical record. Hence, when Burnard insists, convincingly, from the vantage point of a scholar who knows the records of the planter class better than almost anyone else, that they consistently acted to maximize their profits, and rarely spent much time considering the human costs of the measures they took up in this pursuit, I think it is important to take his point.

Of note to readers of this journal, Burnard offers a chapter organized around Defoe’s representation of the plantations, especially in Colonel Jack. Although Burnard analyzes the complexity of Jack’s unwilling empathy with slaves, and its result in his ultimately ameliorative technique of attempting to manipulate slaves psychologically, in keeping with the overall book, Burnard sees the most important point as Jack’s explicit endorsement of brutal violence as a necessary measure in controlling African slaves on the plantation, and in this regard, Jack becomes a trope he returns to repeatedly.

Burnard insists that decisions of planters, and of specific colonies, to join the American Revolution, had nothing to do with an interest in reforming slavery, despite the historiographical obsession with the paradox of slavery in the age of revolution. Indeed, Burnard points out, southern American colonies were inspired by a fear that British imperial administrators were likely to act against their human property. West Indian planters, on the other hand, made a different calculation, staying loyal to the empire due to their closer economic, political, and cultural integration with the British Isles. The West Indians lost the ability to protect slavery more rapidly, as they became an even more pronounced minority in British politics after the Revolution. But British imperial administrators were distressed, not enthusiastic, when some of their generals early on used the emancipation of their enemy’s slaves as a war measure.

In his conclusion, Burnard opposes his favored “Hobbesian” scholarly view of slavery, emphasizing relentless brutality, with a “Panglossian” opposite emphasizing slaves’ agency in a “Manichean” struggle with masters. While invoking Voltaire’s “Dr. Pangloss” and his mantra of “the best of all possible words” is unfair, Burnard typically offers a judicious assessment of the limits and advantages of each view, while frankly disclosing his own preference. In the end his book is a miraculous work of scholarship, fearlessly offering readers disturbing truths, and a thorough grounding in the culture, economics, and politics of the Anglo-American plantation system in a mere 300 pages of text.

George Boulukos
Southern Illinois University

As Anne M. Thell puts it in the introduction to her fine book on empiricism and eighteenth-century travel writing, Minds in Motion excavates the “prehistory of objectivity that predates the term itself, which does not take on its modern form until the early nineteenth century” (10). While other scholars have described the gradual separation of the realms of the aesthetic and the scientific in the early modern period, Thell pays attention to the ways in which the two were nonetheless hopelessly entangled with each other, perhaps nowhere more so than in the popular genre of travel writing. The period covered by Minds in Motion extends for a little over a century, beginning in the 1660s with the emergence of the Royal Society and the emphasis by writers and thinkers such as Francis Bacon on the centrality of experience to the new philosophy of science. Travelers and travel writing were critical to the subsequent emergence of empiricism and notions of scientific objectivity, for these writers and the genre they produced brought back experience and data from unknown locations around the world for Enlightenment projects of knowledge-building.

But Thell’s analysis of these works foregrounds the difficult role played by imagination in these efforts, for “imagination simultaneously enables and undermines empirical engagements with the world” (20); it is at once entirely crucial to the enterprise of scientific understanding and utterly deceptive. Travel writing was a primary site for the popular practice of scientific method, and it engaged with a variety of empirical concepts, including “impartiality and observational detachment, the mechanics of sense perception, the primacy of first-hand experience” (4). But the genre also raised questions about the reliability of first-hand testimony, especially when the selves reporting this information were understood to have unique access to new material while also working to suppress themselves from the narration of that material. Readers of travel writing were thus often left uncertain whether to be skeptical or believing of what they read.

The story Thell tells—about writers grappling narratively, formally, and conceptually with imagination’s role in the production of scientific objectivity—covers a variety of literary texts about travel published between 1668 and 1775. Her selection of texts asks us to reconsider our assumptions about and definitions of the genre of travel writing, first by expanding the breadth of the genre to include any text about the movement of people into and through “space outside of the habitual” (7). She furthermore insists that we consider those texts not as dry documentary records but as aesthetic and philosophical works that were deeply engaged with contemporary debates about scientific objectivity. For Thell, eighteenth-century travel writing erases any distinction that may have existed (or that still persists) between the literary and the scientific. And because travel literature was so enormously popular, it became a mechanism for circulating these ideas and bringing them into the lives of ordinary people, serving at once as “products” of and “agents in a larger process of epistemological change” (25).

Chapter One reads Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World (1668) as a fictional travel narrative designed to accompany her natural philosophy treatise Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666). For Cavendish, motion serves as the guiding force of all of the natural world; even thinking itself requires for her the active motion of rational matter animating the imagination. In this way, ontology and epistemology fuse in her natural philosophy. Cavendish challenges the notion of impartial witnessing and turns to fiction for what Thell describes as “an epistemological tool that can do more than philosophy because it allows her to speculate about what cannot be known for certain” (59). Cavendish’s alternative to Baconian method therefore relies on an imagination that is nomadic rather than static and multiple rather than individual, for it is only through imagination that one can approach an ever-changing universe.

If Cavendish overtly rejects impartial witnessing, William Dampier (the subject of Chapter Two) embraces it so fully that it all but implodes. Thell demonstrates how his 1697 A New Voyage Round the World takes the position of “modest witnessing” to extremes, aiming to create an act of witnessing so impartial that the witnessing self is absent. As a result, Dampier’s style awkwardly oscillates between “exhaustiveness and selectivity” (82) until the distinction between “the necessary and the superfluous” (83) disintegrates altogether. Overwhelmed by an excess of information, Dampier’s form fragments. Thell reads Dampier alongside narratives by fellow traveler Lionel Wafer and naturalists Hans Sloane and John Ray to show how travel writing served as a readily available resource for new ideas about objectivity during this period. Moreover, the popularity of the pirate Dampier’s account meant that its struggles with objectivity and impartiality circulated widely among the reading public.

Daniel Defoe’s New Voyage Round the World (1724) emerges in Chapter Three as the culmination of its author’s experiments with fiction’s ability to explore imaginative spaces unreachable by other modes of perception. Thell positions Defoe’s New Voyage as a critique of Dampier’s New Voyage; where Dampier strove for an impossible impartiality, Defoe turns to the possibilities of a simulated reality. In an early modern anticipation of contemporary forms of virtual reality, Defoe’s text encourages readers to take on avatars in a process that allows them to explore and imagine more than what may exist or be known at present. The genre of travel writing becomes, for Defoe, a “device to visualize and experience places he cannot access in real life” (124).

Chapter Four turns to John Hawkesworth’s 1773 compilation of Pacific travel narratives, Account of the Voyages, which aimed to translate the overly empirical travel logs of British navigators into entertaining narratives for non-specialist readers. His effort to do so ends up collapsing fiction and natural history in ways that disturbed and distressed contemporary readers. Even as his narrative strives to retain the “empiricist ideal of first-hand experience” (157), it “exposes the imaginative machinery that structures travel relation in even non-fictional accounts” (155). Hawkesworth’s narrative method thus exposes “the uncanny relationship between the particulars of literary realism and those of science” (167).

Thell’s volume concludes in Chapter Five with Samuel Johnson’s 1775 Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, written while Cook’s Pacific voyage narratives were causing a sensation but also when Johnson’s own eyesight was deteriorating. The narrative thus raises questions about the role and reliability of visual perception in understanding. For Johnson, imagination arrives in order to enrich knowledge that might otherwise be distorted by purely sensory means. For him, imagination therefore serves as a tool of epistemology that can actually be more reliable than sense or reason (217).

Thell concedes at the beginning of her study that her focus on epistemology necessarily eclipses the role of commerce and colonialism in her examination of travel literature, and argues that this focus allows her to bring to the fore concerns with science and knowledge-production not always given as much space in scholarship whose primary focus is on empire. Minds in Motion is a well-written book that offers an important intervention in studies of travel writing, the history of science, and the prehistory of fiction. The book has its own capacity to travel and drive knowledge across disciplinary borders: it will be of interest to scholars and students of these subjects working outside as well as within literary studies, outside as well as within British studies, and outside as well as within the eighteenth century.

Michelle Burnham
Santa Clara University

Alchemy of Empire is a unique work of scholarship that engages a number of critical questions within the literary and historical studies of Enlightenment science. Lucidly written, replete with elegant close readings and provocative juxtapositions of archival and imaginative texts, the book focuses on five substances: mud, mortar, ice, smallpox inoculant, and paper. Sudan challenges the assumption that Enlightenment’s Reason belonged uniquely to the West by tracking a series of objects that had non-European origins and uses but which were subsequently appropriated as European technologies via colonialism’s subjugation of native knowledge paradigms. The book’s critical genealogy of these technologies has two primary aims. First, it seeks to show that the Enlightenment’s growing self-confidence about scientific knowledge was often interrupted by the sight of foreign wonders that confounded existing theories about matter. Second, it aims to demonstrate that these technologies often had other origins, which, while acknowledged, were understood through alchemical models, or residual forms of pseudo-science, that served to marginalize alien knowledge while also allowing it to be recoded and made into English techne. Using the transactions of the Royal Society and the East India Company’s records as primary sources, Sudan identifies key phenomena and substances that were investigated and then subsequently appropriated by and through colonial trade and governance, first as the intellectual products of Western science and finally as technologies of Empire.

This book joins a number of recent studies that have sparked a new interest in material culture studies. In its focus on the ontology of objects in early modern philosophical and literary contexts, the book resembles Jonathan Lamb’s The Things Things Say (2011). Sudan’s analysis of the relationship between science, technology, and administrative systems in colonial settings resonates with Kavita Phillip’s earlier book Civilizing Natures (2003), while its attention to the networks of correspondence through which knowledge moved back and forth between Britain and its colonies extends, in new and exciting ways, Miles Ogborn’s Indian Ink (2007). The book’s originality lies primarily in the methodology Sudan uses to trace and transform common objects (mud, mortar, ice, and paper) into rich discursive contact zones by reading their historical and cultural significance as transactional objects. In so doing she reveals the theoretical potential of Bruno Latour’s notion of assemblages as a mode of describing the dynamic nature of the social. In this mode of analysis, substances are not identifiable objects that exist in the outside world, but rather they are observable as substances by virtue of the many historical connections that help constitute a network of connections. Substance, in other words, is a name that “designates the stability of an assemblage” (8). Sudan’s work is the only one I know of that braids together a cultural, scientific, philosophical, political, economic, ecological and literary history for each of the substances she takes up. This is a book that will appeal to scholars in postcolonial studies and British eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies as well as anyone interested in the historical intersections of materialism, science, ecology, and economy.

In chapter one, “The Alchemy of Empire,” Sudan’s reading of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock sets the stage for what she calls a “reversed alchemical trajectory,” or the rendering of foreign commodities back to the base materials of their origin. This trajectory, she argues, is the preferred compensatory narrative that allegorizes early eighteenth-century “British helplessness in the face of Chinese power” as a conflicted relationship to foreign commodities (26). By mid-century, however, the idea that rational thought and technological superiority was solely the province of Europe had taken hold. This view is underscored in texts such as Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas where a non-western informant concedes that Europe is “now in possession of all power and all knowledge” (27). Sudan contrasts this representation of European power with evidence from historical documents of the East India Company that reveal the views of men such as Helenus Scott (officer, gentleman, doctor, author, and adventurer) when writing to the Royal Society about the “discoveries” of wondrous substances that he cannot recognize or render through analytical reason. Here Sudan offers “alchemy” as a mode of representing non-Western techne, as wondrous substances beyond the ken of European know-how. The alchemical process is a “discursive structure” with which Britons imagined and shaped their “material historical engagement with cultural and epistemological difference” (48). These historical reports also show, Sudan argues, that “European Scientific hegemony was not as solidified as it is represented in later histories of European hegemony” (37).

Sudan’s contrapuntal and careful weaving of various kinds of textual sources is most successful in the outstanding second and third chapters of the book on mortar and ice, respectively. In chapter two, “Mortar and the Making of Madras,” Sudan reads some early records of Fort St. George that reveal the difficulties faced by early English settlements in India to secure their boundaries and walls. The spatial division of these settlements into White (English) and Black (native) towns was secured, Sudan shows, discursively rather than materially. Such imagined divisions ironically depended for their visualized difference on the use of techne from the Black town—the lime-based mortar and plasters used in the brilliantly white and durable native buildings. Thus, while there was no real difference architecturally between these two towns, the appropriation of white mortar as a symbolic representation of racial separation was enacted visually in descriptions of settlements by English travellers. In chapter three, “Ice and the Production of British Climate,” we encounter George Orwell’s Burmese Days set in the waning days of the British Raj and in which a material such as ice signifies a “metonymic relation to the metropole,” separating the “jungle life” from the climatic and gastronomic aspects of English life (77). Tracing the fascinating circuits of a precious commodity such as ice in the tropical climate (imported from the United States no less), we are reminded of the various material objects that go into the making of assemblages like a colony. In Sudan’s account of these circuits appear some remarkable textual nodes, such as a set of quotations from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and Journals that reveal the American icon’s interest in Vedic Scriptures and his awareness that the ice of “Walden well” took the “fixed air” of Concord to mingle with that of the Indus and the Ganges as it went to the “parched inhabitants” of India, Cuba, and Southern United States (95).

Chapter four, “Inoculation and the Limits of British Imperialism,” takes up smallpox matter as the material basis of the practice of inoculation, which had been widely noted by early-modern travellers to Turkey and India well before Edward Jenner created a cowpox vaccine at the end of the eighteenth century. Sudan connects these scientific histories to the “colonial disease etiologies” visible in eighteenth-century novels like James Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure as well as nineteenth-century classics like Bram Stoker’s Dracula. When inoculation transforms England into a space free from the plague, the spaces of mass epidemics are then easily displaced to colonial non-European hot zones, where such diseases are seen as organically connected to the environment. Here, Sudan reveals the colonial provenance of the metaphoric equivalence of contamination/contagion caused by a foreign body with xenophobia.

In the fifth and final chapter, “‘Plaisters,’ Paper, and the Labor of Letters,” Sudan draws some remarkable connections between the intellectual labor of literature, the representation of domestic and everyday life, and the material history and political economy of ink and paper. Using examples such as plasters and paper to understand the material effects of objects in the everyday life of a female writer, Sudan reprises for Jane Austen a question about the local and the global that she poses in various iterations throughout the book: “What were the political conditions that both kept Austen bound to the insular community of rural England and connected her to the remote reaches of the British empire?” (134). This seems a great way to end the book, though the alchemical elements that are central to the other chapters operate quite differently here, as Sudan gets into the textual intricacies of Jane Austen’s Emma. Sudan sees an alchemical trajectory in the similarity between the harnessing of female intellectual labor and the appropriation and sublimation of “Indian techne” into a “masculinist imperium” (135). She unearths through a series of elegant and revelatory close readings, how there lie, in proximity to the tropes of intellectual labor and acts of writing (especially correspondence) replete in Austen’s novels, numerous references to the paid labor of governesses, companions, postal clerks and slaves. In this economy of materiality, Sudan sees an enabling “alchemist moment” when the sublimity of intellectual labor is rendered from an abstract conception into the material, thereby allowing the reader to see the embedding, for instance, of commerce and consumption in the slave trade and governess trade alike (142). In some respects, what Austen does in Emma is reflective of Sudan’s efforts in the book as a whole. She transforms Indian and non-European forms of manufacture (and practices of science) from abstract and unreadable scenes to historical visibility. She unearths the sublimated Indian physical and intellectual labor that is extracted, refined, and disseminated in the properties of substances and renders them into forms of techne that are not able to appear as such without this critical effort.

In Sudan’s book “materiality of signification” is another name for a methodology that pays careful attention to the role that objects play in the commercial circuits and labor regimes of human beings (144). In thinking of human agency through the principle of an assemblage that includes both human as well as non-human elements (climate, goods, mud, disease, paper, and so on), Sudan shows us what a description of connections can reveal when a privileged subject—the European, male, propertied Christian individual—is displaced as the sole initiator and central player of the story of European civilization. In this changed topography (and changed notions of agency), what we get are not overarching and intimidating pyramids of power that often appear in discussions of empire, but rather many different sites and conduits from which connections spread out at various scales and forms to form assemblages constituted by human and non-human elements.

Betty Joseph
Rice University

What can eighteenth-century literary studies contribute to animal studies in the humanities? This book offers a gratifyingly canonical answer for eighteenth-centuryists. Beginning with James Thomson’s The Seasons and ending with Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “To a Caterpillar,” the book’s argument hinges most tellingly on the different ideas of species difference represented in those staples of the undergraduate curriculum, Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels. Keenleyside writes clearly and compellingly; she is well-informed, if selective, in her citations of the past decade’s outpouring of early modern and “long” eighteenth-century scholarship on humans and animals; and she is unashamed in her partisanship with regard to eighteenth-century writers as a resource for exploring new, more generous, and less instrumental, creaturely relations.

The book is refreshing in its fronting of what might in some circles be considered unfashionable or problematical. Had the book been entitled People and Other Animals, what have by now become familiarly leaky distinctions between humans and non-humans would doubtless have been to the fore, bringing human exceptionalism and indeed humanism under pressure. If not exactly boring, such an approach would have been predictable. However, by making good on James Thomson’s imagining of humans as one species among many, in the sense that species are populations, and populations “peoples,” Keenleyside makes a break from what amounts to an orthodoxy in recent animal studies.

A book entitled Animals and Other People promises to break some rules, the first of which is that in writing about animals or even thinking about them, one must never engage in anthropomorphism or anthropocentrism. That is to say, from a certain point of view, the terminology of “animal people” could be construed as unrigorously humanist. To erase differences between humans and other species by granting personhood, as it were, and the possibilities of interiority, subjectivity, and complex sociality, transgresses these protocols. And yet the unfolding history for which the Enlightenment has become shorthand has entailed precisely such a process of rolling out to previously disenfranchised groups the entitled status of belonging to liberal legal and political subjecthood: plebeians, women, slaves, colonized and racialized others—and animals. If classism, sexism, racism, and colonialism are to be resisted and eventually overcome, why not speciesism? Isn’t the teeming earth of multispecies diversity precisely evidence of the mutual entanglement of all such populations, or peoples, in a universal system of some sort in which all and not only homo sapiens are entailed or engaged? Tobias Menely’s The Animal Claim, which Keenleyside cites, made a powerful, well-historicized argument regarding the contribution of eighteenth-century discourses of sensibility and sympathy to the status of animals, anticipating animal rights; now Keenleyside suggests that such a favourable treatment of animals was already thinkable, via the concept of the “creaturely.”

Fellow-creaturely-thinking certainly risks anthropomorphism. Non-human animals thereby accede to capacities of feeling and acting, and perhaps thinking, comparable to those of humans. It is not so much that species difference is erased, according to Keenleyside, but rather that acute debates about living together, “in a sweeping and capacious vision of a domestic and multispecies society” (18), transpire within eighteenth-century texts, from which we can all still learn. I find myself in sympathy with this argument, given that in Materialist Feminisms, Landry and MacLean proposed that an ecological turn in materialist and feminist thinking informed by the work of Donna Haraway should make precisely this move, recognizing non-human animal exploitation as injustice and intrinsically valuing life-forms other than human ones, “regardless of their instrumental value to human society”: “In this sense, the critique of anthropocentrism both dethrones ‘man’ and lets other sentient beings accede to the status of ‘animal people’” (217) .

For readers alert to what have become increasingly global approaches to the study of animals, the most striking feature of Keenleyside’s Thomson may well be his seeming consonance with Islamic thinking. Sarra Tlili, in Animals in the Qur’an, has explored the pro-animal and ecologically sophisticated implications of the Qur’anic passage “There is not an animal in the earth, nor a flying creature flying on two wings, but they are peoples like you” (Sura 6/al-An’am: 38). Tlili convincingly expounds this passage as egalitarian and non-anthropocentric and even goes so far as to make a case for Islam’s eco-centric and “green” (in multiple senses) potential. Although many Muslims today, Tlili writes, may hold “ambivalent views about the psychological natures of nonhuman animals and generally share the idea that the latter are inferior to humans” (that is to say, a belief in human superiority if not quite exceptionalism), this attitude of human superiority is not grounded in a close reading of the Quran (3). A reading that is attentive to Qu’ranic textual nuance will not so much “devalue” humans as “place them amidst a natural order that God seems to value greatly” (8, xi). When Keenleyside observes how for Thomson all the universe (or multispecies multiverse) is conjoined by Love, with all creatures/peoples praising the creator in a grand design, she casts Thomson in what could be regarded as a distinctly Sufi Islamic light.

Although Defoe does not join Thomson in “animal-peopling” the globe, he does entertain fellow-creaturely feeling, according to Keenleyside. Treating Robinson Crusoe as a case of creaturely expansionism to which Gulliver’s Travels offers a riposte, Kenleyside reads Defoe together with Locke, concluding that to kill or be killed in Robinson Crusoe determines where a being stands in the hierarchy of species, but this hierarchy is one of species in relation; relations are always power relations. This is not as new a move as Keenleyside implies (e.g., Rajani Sudan’s analysis of Crusoe’s assimilation of/with/and/as the “old goat” in Fair Exotics). For Swift, according to Keenleyside, such relationality, rather than constituting an embrace of shared creatureliness, marks an intolerable instability of species categories—and of human exceptionality. Here I find the argument unconvincing, stumbling into a liberal individualism I would never wish to attribute to Swift, surely a champion of thinking-in-relation, if ever there was one. “In a society in which one’s identity depends on others,” Keenleyside writes, “it does not matter whether one’s master is kind or cruel, whether he makes you a pet or a monster—one lives ‘upon such a foot as ill became the Dignity of Human Kind’” (101). But surely this is the point for Swift, that Gulliver wishes to stand singularly, and foolishly, upon his human (and English) dignity. “Lacking fixed and intrinsic forms of identity, nothing holds one together as the person one is” (102), Keenleyside adds. “In a world in which species distinctions have come unhinged, Gulliver is a fundamentally homeless first-person perspective…He longs for the shelter of species” (102). He may long for it, but it ain’t coming any time soon. That is, surely, the brilliance of Swift’s dizzyingly relational multispecies satire.

By the time we arrive at this third chapter, largely devoted to Swift, it has become clearer why Keenleyside was at such pains in the first chapter to distinguish her approach to Thomson from what she baldly calls John Barrell’s “Marxism” (28). Multispecies capaciousness, for her, can only be achieved at the expense of, and gathers its argumentative force from working explicitly against, an ideology critique that is “fundamentally humanist” in its “alertness to systems that benefit the rich at the expense of the poor” (28-29). There is not a word in Keenleyside’s book about John Clare, Thomson’s opposite number in Barrell’s The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840. Laboring-class alternatives to Thomson’s world-making are not of interest to her. The critique of Thomson’s imperial complicity offered by Kevis Goodman (acknowledged) and others (unacknowledged) is similarly put to one side. While the animal writing of Jacques Derrida is cited here, there is hardly any mention of Donna Haraway’s (feminist, “Marxist,” materialist), and no mention at all of the powerfully multispecies work of Isabelle Stengers or Vinciane Despret. Perhaps their multispecies propositions and nuanced, but undoubtedly political, philosophical interventions would take Keenleyside too far from the domain of literary criticism.

Keenleyside’s theoretical touchstones, then, are works of philosophy and the history of ideas, rather than, say, the critique of capitalism. She eschews such terms as posthumanism, the Anthropocene, and Capitalocene, or to borrow from David Nibert, “domesecration” for domestication (Animal Oppression and Human Violence).  There is no embarrassment in this book regarding humanity’s “georgic” stewardship of the natural world, or that active stewardship’s possible modulation by more highly mediated “pastoral” modes. Her readings of Hobbes, Locke, Descartes, and Derrida notwithstanding, Keenleyside is most enthusiastic about literature’s capacity for envisaging human-animal relations. To this end she explores vitalism in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, as well as the Comte de Buffon’s natural history writing (chapter four), and in chapter five rescues the animal fable, typified by Sarah Trimmer’s writing for children, from traditional charges of serving as a screen for entirely human interests. Something of the animal, that is, of species-specific animals, gets across in the fable, she claims, and this is an interesting and provocative move. The case could have been made more compellingly, I think, had Keenleyside engaged with Laura Brown’s work on the capitalist animal fable (Fables of Modernity, which provides the groundwork for Brown’s later Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes, cited briefly by Keenleyside).

Keenleyside’s clear and readable style renders her philosophical learning lightly-worn, though she does observe at one point that her own translation of a passage in Henri Bergson differs in an important way from the standard English translation cited by most scholars (217, note 52). Does this desire to translate for oneself also account for the differing versions given of the title of Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am, which sometimes appears in Keenleyside’s footnotes as The Animal That I Therefore Am (i.e., 217, note 53)? The book appears carefully copyedited and proofread, as is to be expected from the University of Pennsylvania Press, which raises the question of whether the word reversal is meant to be significant. What does it mean to prefer “one’s own translation” of a well-known text, especially if that retranslation leads to an English version in which an “I” comes before the “therefore”?

The undoubted attractions of this book need to be balanced against its curious relationship to historicist scholarship. I find it especially odd that in her ethically alert reading of Barbauld’s “To a Caterpillar,” which, she suggests, begins to usher in a new kind of literary regard for species not immediately companionable, the question of the poem’s historical context is bracketed. The date of composition of the poem is briefly considered, but there is nary a mention of the battlefield to which the poem explicitly alludes. If indeed Barbauld wrote the poem during the summer of 1815, there was more at stake vis-a-vis the historicity of battlefields at that moment than at any other time during the nineteenth century. Surely the context of the Napoleonic wars, and the possible relevance of the 18^th of June 1815 (the date of the Battle of Waterloo) deserve at least a mention, alongside the relative temperatures experienced in England in the summers of 1815 and 1816, and the resulting presence or absence of large numbers of caterpillars in Barbauld’s garden?

Donna Landry

University of Kent, UK

WORKS CITED

Barrell, John. The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840: An Approach

          to the Poetry of John Clare. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1972.

Brown, Laura. Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2001.

—–. Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the

          Modern Literary Imagination. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2010.

Despret, Vinciane. “The Body We Care for: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-genesis.” Body & Society 10 (2004): 2-3: 111-34.

—–. What Would Animals Say if We Asked the Right Questions? Trans. Brett Buchanan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2016.

Haraway, Donna J. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2003.

—–. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2016.

—–. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008.

Landry, Donna and Gerald MacLean. Materialist Feminisms. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.

Menely, Tobias. The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2015.

Nibert, David A. Animal Oppression and Human Violence: Domesecration, Capitalism, and Global Conflict. New York: Columbia UP, 2013.

Stengers, Isabelle. “The Cosmopolitical Proposal.” (2004) 1-16. Accessed 26/06/2017: http://syntheticzero.net/2014/01/25/stengers-the-cosmopolitcal-proposal-pdf/

—–. Cosmopolitics I. Trans. Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.

Sudan, Rajani. Fair Exotics: Xenophobic Subjects in English Literature, 1720-1850.       Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2002.

Tlili, Sarra. Animals in the Qur’an. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2012.

Colonel Jack occupies an odd spot in Defoe’s canon. It was published in 1722, the same year as Moll Flanders and Journal of the Plague Year, one year before Roxana. But while these other novels have long been considered major works, and have for decades anchored undergraduate syllabi, Colonel Jack has never achieved a similar status. Indeed, those of us writing on the novel have, until now, used Samuel Holt Monk’s 1965 Oxford edition, long out of print. Gabriel Cervantes and Geoffrey Sill’s important new Broadview edition will have a major effect on the place of this particular novel in studies of Defoe’s works. Thanks to this beautiful, accessible new publication, the generation of students now in our classrooms may well be challenged to know Colonel Jack before they know Robinson Crusoe.

This is an especially fine moment for a new edition of Colonel Jack, given a recent surge of critical works that encourage us to think of this still-minor novel as a touchstone for the major cultural issues of the day. Thus, Erin Mackie uses the novel in the introductory chapter of Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates to set up her analysis of the gentleman figure in the eighteenth century. Likewise, George Boulukos, in his book The Grateful Slave, has a chapter entitled “The Origin of the Grateful Slave: Colonel Jack.”

I will admit that when I opened the new Broadview edition, I expected to see an introduction articulating the novel’s importance along these same cultural lines, stressing the work’s centrality to discussions of such topics as convict transportation, the treatment of slaves, and the status of Jacobites in the eighteenth century. These are clearly important contexts the editors have in mind for the text: all are to be found in the supplemental materials following the main text, as is conventional in a Broadview edition. There are incredible teaching materials here: from George Alsop’s pamphlet on emigration to America, to William Fleetwood’s sermon on the humane treatment of slaves, to a part of the “Piracy Act.” Colonel Jack appears in this edition with a total of twenty documents divided into “Historical and Political Contexts” and “Literary Contexts.”

Yet in the introduction, the editors do not put forward the fiction as itself a cultural document. They begin, in terms that might at first sound old-fashioned, by championing the “literary reputation of the novel,” even its “high level of artfulness” (14-15). Indeed, they take as a major project the reorientation of the reader’s thinking about the novel: from a “period piece,” mined for historical phenomena and “snippets,” to a novel of “literary interest” (12-13). In 2016, this is an unusual path for editors to tread, and it is worth considering Cervantes and Sill’s exact intentions for their rather radical reorientation.

In the new Broadview edition, Colonel Jack is marked as a problem novel, as it also has emerged in many major considerations of Defoe’s fictions. G.A. Starr’s response to the novel in his 1971 book on casuistry is telling. In that book, Starr illuminates the way Defoe’s novels stage conflicts between legal and moral codes; casuistry, in fact, is the branch of ethics which comes into play when the meaning of such codes is uncertain: when “their scope or meaning is obscure, or when their obligations conflict” (vii). Enter Colonel Jack. Even within Starr’s analysis, which, mind you, marshals a historical form that is precisely about distinguishing individual threads of ambiguity and, even within the context of Defoe’s body of work, which is hardly known for its precision or consistency in idea or expression, this particular novel offers trouble. Yes, elements of casuistry may serve to explain the various junctures in the novel, but Starr declares his frustration that all still does not hang together. As he notes early in his analysis, “there is a difference between being preoccupied with complexity and attaining full mastery of it, and in this book Defoe’s gift for perceiving incongruity seems to me to have exceeded his ability to control and interpret it” (82). Later critics have continued to grapple with this extraordinary messiness, as Lincoln B. Faller does in Crime & Defoe. Here, one of Defoe’s (and this novel’s) most sensitive readers begins his account of the novel by stressing that it “fits together better as a collection of signifiers than it does as a collection of signifieds.” He cautions the reader of his own analysis: “Much of what follows, necessarily, will involve the tracing out of hints and partial, not whole, often confused and contradictory meanings” (169). We have been warned: Faller does not rest with a description of ambiguity but instead leads us through the text’s confusions, its attempts at unity (Might that happen through its proliferation of analogies? Through the sheer number of professions Jack takes up?), ultimately turning to Pierre Macherey in order to assert that “while ideology seems to add up, it doesn’t” (198).

If Colonel Jack has not exactly baffled Defoe’s best readers, we can at least say with certainty that it has given them a very hard time. In turning away from thematic concerns that have made the text seem more straightforward, and back to formal, literary concerns, the recent editors do nothing to settle our minds; quite the contrary, they begin by stressing the novel’s slipperiness and complexity, be it in “Jack’s Name” (the first section title in their essay) or in the status of plantation labor.

Their argument, in brief, stresses a kind of phenomenological account of the uncertainties that struck both Starr and Faller, asking us to read inconsistency as process, as the mind grappling to put together its own experience. Whether or not one buys their explanation of the “collection of signifiers”—for the record, I do—their introduction takes a surprisingly deep dive, one that should inspire the students of the novel (older and younger, and those more and less proficient in the idiosyncrasies of Defoe) to begin again with it.

So compelled was I by the argument of the introduction that I almost wished to push back at the structure of the edition—not against the historical sources offered in those long appendices (how could one argue with such gifts) but against their headnotes, which often suggest an easy text/context application. I also found myself considering the strangeness of the “Contents” page of the Broadview edition, whose list of twenty supplemental sources with names and dates completely overwhelms the name of the primary text, an especially small-seeming “Colonel Jack.” Given the stakes of the introduction, I cannot but feel that the editors would take at least some pleasure in this confusion. After all, theirs is an account of how Colonel Jack forces us to think about “how things are seen rather than what they actually are” (31).

Ruth Mack
SUNY Buffalo

WORKS CITED

Faller, Lincoln B, Crime & Defoe: A New Kind of Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.

Starr, G.A., Defoe & Casuistry. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971.

Misty G. Anderson’s animated and absorbing book on the representation of Methodism in eighteenth-century texts, Imagining Methodism in Eighteenth-Century Britain, belies its austere cover featuring a dour old Methodist. In her consideration of the subject, Anderson expertly navigates historical, religious, philosophical, sociological, and literary material, providing her reader with even more than she promises: a helpful overview of Methodist culture during a forty-year period; a perceptive analysis of the role played by Methodism in the formation of the modern British subject; and a critical approach that accounts for and gives meaning to the religious aspects of eighteenth-century culture.

Anderson proposes that in Enlightenment Britain, when the modern self was beginning to take shape, Methodism was perceived as both deeply threatening and strangely captivating. She theorizes that Methodism came to function in this period as “modernity’s homegrown, mystic-evangelical other” (3). The porous, unstable, affective self of the Methodist, she believes, challenged the emergent idea of a self that was solid, constant, and rational. Yet, she recognizes that contemporaries also found something appealing about the Methodist belief in an “explosive [spiritual] encounter,” the sudden “warming of the heart” as Christ infused the believer, releasing her or him from “the tyranny of the ‘I’” (68, 2, 3). Anderson suspects that what made Methodism particularly troubling at the time was the inability to differentiate it fully from modern thought: while early Methodists associated themselves with mystical experience and the primitive church, they still relied on Lockean rational conceptions of the mind to gauge their spiritual experience and made use of contemporary “discourses of civic engagement and self-improvement” (2). At once familiar and foreign, Methodism functioned as the “uncanny” in this period of British history.

Anderson confirms that anxieties about Methodism—located on the shadowy borderlands of modernity—often led to satirical representations of the movement and its adherents, mainly in the “first phase” of its development (1736–78) (3). Nervous laughter is, for Anderson, the natural response in those who worried “that Methodism would overwhelm individual consciousness” but who also longed for the relief that a bodily “experimental Christianity” might offer the alienated, isolated, cerebral modern self (5, 28).

In the first chapter of her study, Anderson describes the genesis and early development of Methodism, from its origins with the Wesley brothers and the “Holy Club” at Oxford University (38). The rapid growth of the movement she attributes to “charismatic preaching, a somatic language of transformation,” and a powerful “rhetoric of the spiritual event” (49). She examines Methodist engagements with literature, discussing works that early Methodists believed would spiritually enrich, transport, and transform readers (including texts by Chaucer, Milton, Pope, and Rowe), as well as their own literary efforts, intended to serve the same spiritual functions. This chapter also considers fear of the movement: the association of the Methodist “religious enthusiasts” with the Puritan regicides of the previous century, as well as, paradoxically, the “menacing” Roman Catholics. This, despite the fact that John Wesley expressly instructed Methodists to “‘avoid enthusiasm’” and tempered his “evangelicalism” with “Lockean empiricism” (50, 51). Wesley’s call for the opening of the Lockean self to the Divine was enough to unsettle many of his contemporaries.

Chapters 2 through 6 of Imagining Methodism examine the figure of the Methodist in selected eighteenth-century publications. In chapters 2 and 3, Anderson demonstrates that the “sexualized satire” of earlier centuries became a useful literary instrument to voice uneasy laughter at Methodist doctrines and practices (29). Anderson first takes up Henry Fielding’s fusion of Methodism and “aberrant” sexuality in his factually-based pamphlet The Female Husband, in which the unorthodox sexual identity and behaviour of Mary/George Hamilton is blamed on the ideas and actions of her Methodist friend Anne Johnson. The spiritually erotic discourse of Methodism (expressed, for example, in the sermons of George Whitefield) and its “same-sex intimacy” in and outside of “devotional band-meetings” destabilize Mary’s/George’s gendered and sexual identity (71). For Fielding, Anderson argues, Methodist bodily conversion experiences operate as “a queer technology of desire”: desire, as a result, is “multiplied” rather than controlled (72). However, while Fielding ridicules Methodism, Anderson shows that he believes in the power of the movement to transform the vulnerable (female) self.

Anderson maintains that John Cleland’s pornographic novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, or Fanny Hill, associates prostitution and Methodism (albeit indirectly) with the intent of exposing religious enthusiasm as unnatural and sexual enthusiasm as natural. Anderson reads Mr. Barvile as a Methodist figure in Fanny Hill and the novel’s discourse of desire as typical of the language of Methodist literature. While deriding Methodist discourse, Cleland redeploys its primitive power to ignite “a modern secular account of the material mechanists of sex with a sacred flame,” according to Anderson. Fanny Hill is thus read as “a secular account of sex as the new space of the soul, the locus of the deepest truth of the modern self” (129, 102).

Anderson moves from the page to the stage in chapter 4 of Imagining Methodism, examining the eighteenth-century anxiety about the theatrical dimension of Methodist “performance,” especially oral sermons, which many felt uncomfortably blurred the lines between the fictional and the real, the performer and the “true” self. While Anderson contends that the theatricality of Methodism disturbed some writers and visual artists, such as Samuel Foote and William Hogarth, its “theater of the real, in which something happens” resonated with the desire for a spiritual or mystical experience (131). Although Foote and Hogarth (among others) want to move away from the “false illusion and myth” stirred up by Methodist “theatrical performance,” they are drawn to the “tantalizing promise” of an event that “transcends the limitations of representation” in early modern Britain (133, 169). Turning from theatrical performance to hymnody in chapter 5, Anderson highlights how communal singing of intensely emotional Methodist hymns ruptured the buffered, modern self, allowing singers to collectively “inhabit a range of gendered subject and object positions,” given the diversity of voices in hymns (173). As Anderson notes, the “corporate I/me/my of the Methodist hymn” challenged the “triumphalist individual agency” of “modern consciousness” (199, 189).

In the final chapter of her book, Anderson posits that by the 1770s, when Methodism was no longer a radical wing of the Anglican Church but a distinct, more established denomination, it received a gentler comic treatment by writers. Anderson finds in Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker and Richard Graves’s The Spiritual Quixote a recognition of the social connectedness brought about by Methodism, which functions as “an affective supplement to a more materialist account of mind that isolated individual consciousness, as well as a response to the economic materialism of early capitalism” (202). Although Methodism was still the object of laughter in aesthetic works of the 1770s and 1780s, particularly in 1778 when John Wesley publically preached against slavery, many writers continued to explore its ability to perform “significant cultural and social work” in an increasingly materialist age (231).

Anderson stresses in her afterword that it is imperative to understand that conceptions of modernity and modern selfhood are irrevocably linked with the expression of “religious beliefs” (237). To ignore religion in an analysis of eighteenth-century culture is to fail to understand its pivotal role in early modern British society. Her study encourages students of eighteenth-century literature to be sensitive to the ways in which the secular and the religious intersect in verbal, visual, and musical texts in their period of study.

Misty Anderson’s Imagining Methodism in Eighteenth-Century Britain is a strikingly original and sophisticated work of literary criticism. It makes a critical contribution to the study of Methodism in the eighteenth-century cultural imagination. But more than that, it is a model of “right reading” inasmuch as it refuses to bypass or ignore the religious dimension of cultural artifacts in the Enlightenment, which Anderson observes has been a “blind spot” in “defensively secular account[s] of eighteenth-century [British] culture” (238). Imagining Methodism is a vital resource for anyone working on the history of Methodism, the treatment of Methodism in eighteenth-century literature, the intersection of the secular and the sacred in the eighteenth-century British imagination, and the place of religion in modern identity formation.

Holly Faith Nelson
Trinity Western University

Eugenia Zuroski’s A Taste for China argues that an engagement with Chinese objects was central to shifting conceptions of Englishness over the course of the long eighteenth century.^[1] Zuroski delves into what she terms the prehistory of English Orientalism. The Orientalist view of China and Chineseness (in which China functions as an alien Other against which Englishness comes into focus) was not the only attitude evinced by Britons. In Zuroski’s telling, the Orientalist attitudes of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries displaced—and, interestingly, entailed the disavowal of—an earlier “taste for China.” The positioning of China as a figure for all that was undeveloped, fanciful, and irrational is one that came to seem natural and inevitable to the extent that it dovetailed with a story of English development that the English came to tell themselves about themselves. It is this story of Englishness, and the place of “things Chinese” in it, that Zuroski explicates in this immensely interesting book.

In offering the “prehistory” of Orientalism, Zuroski stresses, her object is not to fill in an earlier chapter of the “post-Enlightenment” Orientalism described by Edward Said, but rather to explore the intellectual and cultural milieu out of which Orientalism did—but did not have to—emerge. Aligning her approach with Srinivas Aravamudan’s pluralization of orientalisms, Zuroski seeks to trace a Foucauldian genealogy of Orientalism, rather than a teleological history of it (9-10). In broad terms, Zuroski traces a shift from a model of Englishness that prized cosmopolitan mixture to one that insisted upon an homogeneous English national identity purged of all “alien” influence. In the Restoration and earlier eighteenth century, amidst a burgeoning market of exotic consumer goods, the acquisition and display of Chinese objects became an exercise in self-fashioning for the well-to-do. The accumulation of China goods served as a marker of the cultivated Englishman’s or -woman’s capacity to make judicious choice of the endless variety of goods that the world afforded and to assimilate them into a coherent, cosmopolitan Englishness crafted “out of things not English” (35). By the second half of the eighteenth century, however, chinoiserie was viewed with greater suspicion, even as the vogue for it expanded. The gradual re-valuation of China and Chinese objects coincided with—and contributed to—the elevation of a specifically middle-class English sensibility that rejected aristocratic privilege and emphasized personal virtue and self-regulation. The disavowal of the taste for China coincided, as well, Zuroski argues, with the growing literary dominance of the realist novel. Both of these trends, in her account, aimed at defining the proper relationship between reason and the imagination, on the one hand, and between people and objects, on the other. Zuroski’s argument is at once sweeping and intricate, making a claim for a broad historic shift impelled complexly by multiple forces, and with diverse ramifications.

(It is worth noting at the outset that words like “China,” “Chinese,” and “chinoiserie” carry somewhat broader meanings in Zuroski’s argument than one might at first assume. She is interested, ultimately, in Britons’ ideas about “China” and “things Chinese,” even when those ideas were not necessarily clear or accurate. “China” in her book—and in this review—can refer to a range of things: from objects actually made in China, to objects made in Europe in imitation (however approximate) of “Chinese” style, to English treatments of “China” that bear little resemblance to anything authentically Chinese. “Chineseness,” she carefully clarifies early on, is treated in this book “as an English literary effect that is ascribed to objects rather than an ethnic quality that inheres in objects” [2].)

The book proceeds by a series of deft readings of a variety of texts and objects. She turns, more than once, to the examination of the material culture of chinoiserie, offering, for instance, an intriguing discussion of pattern books of “Chinese” and “Indian” motifs meant for do-it-yourself interior decorators. The contents of these design books were to be studied, then selected and combined on painted screens or lacquered furniture. They offered their users (mostly women, it would seem) the occasion to balance “humour” (or fancy) with “judgment” in the creation of aesthetic objects expressive of their creator’s taste. In another fascinating section, she teases out the dizzying series of cultural exchanges manifested in a porcelain punchbowl that juxtaposes a scene of a Chinese feast with a reproduction of Hogarth’s A Midnight Modern Conversation (1732), in which a group of drunken Englishman disport themselves around a chinoiserie punchbowl (146-50). This piece of chinaware was manufactured in China, but apparently to the specifications of an English designer (and, of course, expressly for export to England). The bowl is rife with self-conscious ironies. At one level, it seems to lampoon English intemperance by contrasting it to the sedate and sober Chinese scene, suggesting the bad use to which the English might put this exotic import. In another sense, however, Zuroski suggests, it dramatizes the choice that its owner is empowered to make both about “which kind of chinoiserie [the punchbowl] will be” and, by extension, what kind of Englishman the owner will be (149). English consumers were increasingly surrounded by Chinese objects (some imported from China, some of European manufacture in the Chinese mode), and Zuroski seeks to draw out the ways that English subjects could employ those objects to construct and display a sense of self.

Though she offers a number of readings of selected objects, Zuroski focuses her attention primarily on textual sources, and on works of literature more particularly. The question of shifting English attitudes towards “things Chinese,” she suggests provocatively, is “a literary problem” (2). On the one hand, she sees the question of changing English ideas of China as one that sheds light on matters of specifically literary history (the ascendance of the realist novel, in particular). But she also considers it a question that may be pursued profitably through the methods of literary study. Zuroski sees the English revaluation of “Chineseness” and the redefinition of Englishness that accompanied it as things that happened in and through literature.^[2]

A Taste for China offers a series of ingenious readings that reveal an ongoing English preoccupation with Chinese objects. Zuroski doesn’t have to beat the bibliographical bushes to find her examples, either. Her sources are drawn from the most widely-read authors of the period: works by William Wycherley, Aphra Behn, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Daniel Defoe, Charlotte Lennox, and Jane Austen all receive attentive, incisive treatment. In many cases, Zuroski’s readings fit quite comfortably with well-established lines of thought on the texts she examines. Her reading of The Rape of the Lock in chapter four, for instance, enters a conversation that might also include the work of Tita Chico, Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Laura Brown, or Louis Landa, to name just a few. But Zuroski manages consistently to draw to the fore the specifically “Chinese” presences in these works—the objects that it is easy to pass over as props or furniture, or to register as generically “exotic.” The cumulative effect of so many examples drawn together from such a range of sources is quite compelling: Zuroski shows how Chinese objects became a means of thinking about and thinking through Englishness.

It is difficult to select just one example of the kind of skillful readings that Zuroski offers, but her discussion of Austen’s Northanger Abbey is characteristic of her knack for illustrating the shifting ideas she traces with a well-chosen case study. Catherine Morland’s education in the novel entails, in part, coming to a proper understanding of the nature of objects as mere objects—that is, as not enchanted or fraught with sinister meaning. Zuroski turns to account the fact that Catherine is only too ready to mistake a cabinet of “black and yellow Japan of the handsomest kind” for the “old-fashioned cabinet of ebony and gold” that Henry Tilney jokingly suggests she imagines she will find at the abbey. Just as the mysterious “lost manuscript” proves in the light of day to be only a laundry list, so too is the seemingly exotic cabinet, on closer inspection, “only” a piece of furniture of a by-then not-extraordinary kind. As Zuroski argues, this evacuation of the imaginative excess of “things Chinese,” their reduction to mere “things,” corresponds with a rejection of the excesses of Gothic literature and an embrace of realist narrative. And both of these transformations are figured, crucially, as maturation, as a leaving behind of childish things. The plot of Austen’s novel, then, enacts Austen’s literary historical project for the novel as a genre: a rejection of the “wild” enchantments of the Gothic and an embrace of the more sober probabilities of the novel. The story of English development that Northanger Abbey tells is one that registers through the abjection of the kinds of “things Chinese” that had served earlier generations of Britons as imaginative touchstones: the novel “converts the Chinese object into a ‘memento of past folly’ that marks the boundary between fact and fiction. Like the Tilney’s chinaware [described as ‘the prettiest English china’], this ornament of an earlier aesthetic regime has been appropriated to the prosaic world, redefined by its ‘usefulness’ as a point of self-discipline” (209).

The case of the Japan cabinet in Northanger Abbey illustrates, I think, some of the book’s great strengths: Zuroski’s ability to turn very particular textual details to account for much larger questions, and her ability to advance an argument that unfolds on multiple levels simultaneously. It may also highlight, however, one quality that can make the book’s argument a little bit difficult to come to grips with in places. In this account, the specifically “Chinese” object is conflated with the Gothic aesthetic. In fairness, of course, that is what happens in the novel, and I do find Zuroski’s description of the novel’s aesthetic agenda very persuasive. But the definition of “Chinese” can be so elastic as to be somewhat disorienting at times. This is less a critique than a caution: readers need always to keep in mind that Zuroski’s “China” is not literally “China,” but, as she notes at the very outset of her project, “an English literary effect” (2).

Zuroski’s A Taste for China is a remarkable, thought-provoking work that offers shrewdly-observed readings of numerous works that are central to our sense of eighteenth-century literature. And it puts those readings in service of a highly interesting and compelling argument about broad developments in the period.

Benjamin Pauley
Eastern Connecticut State University

WORKS CITED

—. “The Story of an Old Name.” Avidly:A Los Angeles Review of Books Channel, 16 Sept. 2016, avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2016/09/16/the-story-of-an-old-name/.

^[1] The book was published under the name Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins. In a subsequent essay, however, the author has offered an eloquent reflection on her decision to return to using the name she was known by before marriage. I defer to her expressed preference in the text of this review (“The Story of an Old Name”).

^[2] To be sure, there are portions of the book that engage with writing that we might not today consider the domain of literature departments. Both Berkeley and Locke appear in her account, for instance, as key figures in a pre-Orientalist epistemology that was less hostile to the claims of the imagination and more disposed to see the self as something to be assembled or constructed.

Stories about diseases are always popular. The details of bodily trauma can horrify yet rivet an audience while the methods of cure may amuse. Thus, a book such as Jonathan Lamb’s Scurvy: The Disease of Discovery attracts readers with its promise of the weird, horrible, and wonderful. Lamb’s work does not disappoint.

As Lamb explains with scientific detail, scurvy is a deficiency disease, meaning it is caused by the absence of ascorbic acid, or vitamin C, in one’s diet. Those without access to fresh fruits and vegetables were susceptible to scurvy, and historically those with the most documented cases of scurvy included sailors and others on extended sea travels. Indicators of scurvy include extreme weakness and fatigue, loss of teeth and foul breath, difficulty breathing, hemorrhages under the skin that can turn limbs black and blue, and pain in the joints as the collagen is lost. In fact, some eye-witness accounts of cited by Lamb describe the clacking of bones in scurvy patients. Death from scurvy was painful and frightening to observe in oneself and others as the body and even personality of the sufferer altered significantly.

In choosing scurvy as subject matter, Lamb inherited an archive of marvelous stories of exploration, illness, and science. His text is rife with accounts of mariners, poets, and medical men that highlight the unique language of scurvy. As a literary historian, Lamb brings an artful analytical eye to these texts, reading language and images (both textual and pictorial) as artifacts of the disease.

Lamb has the added challenge that anyone working with a wealth of archival materials has: finding the right spot for each source. Lamb steps and sometimes leaps from one rich account to another, creating what can at times be a dizzying reading experience, particularly when he asks the reader to bound from one historical period to a non-adjacent one within one paragraph. Of course, he makes no promise of following a historical trajectory, but such shifts without signals can be jarring for readers.

Undergirding Lamb’s assemblage of scurvy textual curios is his argument that extended oceanic travels to explore and discover the world were also fundamentally endeavors to explore and discover the nature of and possible cures for scurvy. Thus, the effects of exploration—transoceanic trade, scientific knowledge, colonization, and slavery—have traces in scurvy, not just as an effect, but as a cause.

Sailors who were stricken with scurvy experienced a particular form of discovery as the signs of disease in their body were revealed to them. Likewise, in reading accounts of travel, readers can discover the physical and linguistic effects of scurvy. Lamb writes, “There is…always a possibility that a narrative of scurvy might itself exhibit signs of the disease, either being dulled by the bleakness and the pain, or brightened by its hallucinations” (61). The first-hand narratives, therefore, are extensions of the bodily experiences with the disease because of the way it heightens the senses, affects perception, and alters personality—all factors that can influence the content of an account. Therefore, Lamb explores the relationship these pathological intensities have in fiction and coins the term “scorbutic fiction” in his fourth chapter (223).

Drawing upon medical texts, medical philosophy, poetry, novels, accounts of journeys, and literary interpretations of them, Lamb discusses the aesthetics and what he calls the “genius” of scurvy—the word “genius,” referring to the disease’s inscrutable logic (9). Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner figures most prominently as a literary source in Scurvy. Other key literary texts and authors include Homer’s Odyssey, Luis Vaz de Cameons’s The Lusiads, Shakespeare’s Othello, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, accounts of expeditions with Captain Cook by Joseph Banks, Johann Reinhold Forster, and Robert Falcon Scott, as well as various works by Margaret Cavendish, Daniel Defoe, and Herman Melville—and that’s the short list.

Rather than an extended analysis of these and other texts, Lamb’s Scruvy offers new insights on these works by relating them to the discourse of scurvy both medical and popular. For instance, one of the comments on Coleridge begins with a quotation from Rime: “heat and stench arising from diseased bodies rot the very planks.” About this line, Lamb writes, “In the poem which owes so much to Coleridge’s interest in the effects of scurvy, the decayed state of Death and Life-in-Death is answerable to the skeletal and disarticulated state of the spectre-bark on which they sail…In scorbutic voyages, this diseased equivalence between the ship and its company is often noticed” (50). The subsequent discussion includes other examples of ships thought to be “corrupted” by the presence of people sick with scurvy. It is not, therefore, an exhaustive analysis of the Coleridge.

In Scurvy Lamb also seeks to trouble the notion that sailors, doctors, and other scientists readily accepted the use of citrus fruits as a cure for scurvy. While the claim that citrus cured the disease circulated in the eighteenth century, it was still a disputed point (as innovative as medicine is and has been, new ideas can be challenged by tradition). Many believed the disease could be cured by malt wort, and others thought it was caused by corrupted or foul foods.

In fact, Lamb sees the citrus debate as a synecdoche of the intellectual battle in the eighteenth century between empiricists who based medical claims on practice and observation of actual cases and theorists who bandied with the latest concepts about bodily systems such as circulation and consumption. As a result, Lamb writes, “The history of scurvy is especially tormenting…being strewn with red herrings, false starts, and mistaken conjectures that mock all teleological symmetries” (34). While the same could be said for many other disease histories, Lamb is right that most readers will have a preformed notion of the history that hinges on the use of limes or lemons to cure scurvy. However, these same readers will approach the history of another disease, such as leprosy or yellow fever, with no such notions since that knowledge is more specialized.

Despite its historical significance in the age of exploration, scurvy has been the subject of only a few book-length works with varying target audiences. Stephen Bown’s Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail (referred to by Lamb) is less a cultural and literary history of the disease, as Lamb describes his own project, and more a popular history of scurvy in oceanic voyages in the eighteenth century. Kevin Brown’s Poxed and Scurvied focuses more generally on maritime health and medicine. Those interested in looking at archival works on scurvy may want to consult Scurvy: Webster’s Timeline History 1534-2007, edited by Philip M. Parker, a bibliography of works on scurvy as early as the sixteenth century. Many of those referenced in this text and Lamb’s bibliography can be accessed digitally through Early English Books Online, the Wellcome Library, and the United States National Library of Medicine.

Scurvy has not received nearly the same kind of critical attention that diseases such as smallpox and yellow fever have. Because of its more conceptual approach (again, it is not a historical narrative of scurvy), Lamb’s book is different from anything else on scurvy and is, in fact, more akin to scholarship on disease in literature, for example Cristobal Silva’s Miraculous Plagues, Priscilla Wald’s Contagious, and David Shuttleton’s Smallpox and the Literary Imagination. At the same time, it is unclear to what extent Lamb engages with other scholarly disease discourses, for his citations of contemporary scholarship focus more on the history of science (especially Stephen Shapin and Joyce Chapin) than medical or disease history.

Often the observations Lamb makes about scurvy also apply to the histories of other diseases. For instance, in the archives of smallpox, yellow fever, and tuberculosis, one will find similar disputes among medical scientists, the clergy, and laypeople concerning the definition, treatment, and containment of the disease in question. Lamb notes the impossibility of documenting a lived experience with scurvy that is legible and meaningful to readers because of the altered senses and perceptions of a scurvied individual. While this is beautifully argued and detailed in Scurvy, the same disorientation and sensitivities can also be seen with other diseases, such as smallpox and tuberculosis. Therefore, one has to wonder how his analysis might shift with consideration of scholarship on disease more broadly. But Scurvy is already a book crowded with references.

A truly exciting feature of this book is the notion of the aesthetics of scurvy or disease in general. Nonetheless, readers hoping to find a series of narratives about scurvy that trace a historical trajectory and provide an overview of scurvy in literature and culture might find this book challenging. Even specialists in historical diseases and their narratives may struggle with some of Lamb’s analyses, organization, and sometimes competing central claims. Overall, Scurvy is an inventive, thoughtful, complex, robustly researched book—and generous, as it invites other scholars to delve into the primary sources and further the literary history of scurvy.

Sarah Schuetze
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay

WORKS CITED

Bown, Stephen. Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2005.

Brown, Kevin. Poxed and Scurvied: The Story of Sickness and Health at Sea. Annapolis: Naval Institute P, 2011.

Chapin, Joyce E. Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001.

Parker, Philip M., ed. Scurvy: Webster’s Timeline History 1534-2007. Las Vegas: ICON, 2009.

Shapin, Stephen. A Social History of Truth. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.

—. Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2010.

Shuttleton, David. Smallpox and the Literary Imagination 1660-1820. New York: Cambridge UP, 2007.

Silva, Cristobal. Miraculous Plagues: An Epidemiology of Early New England Narrative. New York: Oxford UP, 2011.

Wald, Priscilla. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham: Duke UP, 2008.