Accidental Migrations: An Archaeology of Gothic Discourse by Edward H. Jacobs (review)

Abstract

970 Reviews of what inevitably looks like generalization or partiality. I guarantee that practically every reader will want to adduce some exception or call in question some statement. Fortunately, however, the author's very evident knowledge and enthusiasm diminish this objection: in the event he does not become so imprisoned by his thesis as his firstchapter seems to predict; his accounts of these complex relationships are lively and readable (I think particularly of his account of Henry Jones, the bricklayer poet patronized by Lord Chesterfield), and one doesn't have to be convinced by his often tortuous arguments to enjoy and profitfrom the book. However, one important criticism remains. In his very careful construct of the 'plebeian' poets of his title, in which he seeks to clear away anachronistic assumptions based on later models (see especially pp. 41-45), Christmas tends to pass over the status and attitudes of the patrons, which were just as variable and resistant to defini? tion. They were by no means all 'patrician'?sometimes quite the opposite. In fact, it might be argued that it was often the agenda of the patron which determined the reaction of the protege, as itcertainly was in the case of Ann Yearsley. Hannah More's dubious gentility (she was the daughter of a steward-turned-schoolmaster and herself began as a provincial schoolteacher) made her insecure in the literary Establishment (Christmas refers to her vaguely as 'well-connected')?hence her crude and tactless determination to prevent Yearsley from living by her pen, which precipitated the famous quarrel. Yearsley got on perfectly well with her really patrician patron, Lord Bristol, who was airily indifferentto the breaching of social barriers, and with Wilmer Gossip, landed proprietor of Yorkshire, who treated her throughout their acquaintance as his intellectual superior and was genuinely anxious to freeher fromexhausting and time-consuming physical labour. The contrast in attitude of these three contem? porary patrons demonstrates how difficultit is reliably to define a 'hegemony'; what looks monolithic at a distance tends to disintegrate on closer examination. These things aside, the book has much to recommend it; it contains enough new material and provocative comment to keep the discussion going for many a long day. University of Essex Mary Waldron Accidental Migrations: An Archaeology of Gothic Discourse. By Edward H. Jacobs. (Bucknell Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture) Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2000. 295PP. ?37-50- ISBN 0-83875-429-5. Edward Jacobs's intention in this densely written monograph is to judge the impact of seventeenth-century Gothicist historiography on the Gothic aesthetic ofthe midto later eighteenth century. Establishing the credibility of this position forms the firsthalf of the book; the second half is taken up with a reading of Walpole's Castle of Otranto, Eliza Parsons's The Mysterious Warning (ij 98), and Ann Radcliffe's The Ita? lian (1797). The methodological/theoretical structure of the argument is, as Jacobs's title suggests, underpinned by Foucault's The Archaeology ofKnowledge. To this end Jacobs's introduction aims to relate the relevance of Foucault's theories of power and archaeology to the literary-historical argument he posits about the transmission of Gothicist historical writing into the eighteenth century. Foucault's ideas have a long history of not always favourable usage by scholars of eighteenth-century culture, and Jacobs is rightto point to their current unfashionable status. This, of course, is no good reason not to proceed with what seems to be a very good idea. Jacobs, however, does his Foucauldian analysis of Gothic no favours in his introduction, which is often obscure, over-technical, and in places badly written. Sometimes his sentences simply do not make sense. The following is by no means MLR, 98.4, 2003 971 untypical: 'However, a summary of my argument in chapter 1 that Jordanes' Getica (as his editors have dubbed De origine actibusque Getarum) exercises the repeatable materiality of a "rhapsody" can illustrate how the activity of rediscovery with which I identify Gothic repeatable materialities defines such a complex yet variable "set of material institutions'" (p. 20). Jacobs's argument about Gothicist historiography in the seventeenth century draws considerably upon the work of Glenn...