Common Ground: Eighteenth-Century English Satiric Fiction and the Poor (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 361 many women writers of the past have been forgotten. As in his earlier book, Siskin 's "relentlessly combinatory" (p. 15) weaving ofgenres and periods represents a wholly serious methodological answer to the problem of how to historicize a subject that has fundamentally shaped the way in which we think about literary history. Yet, as he is also concerned in this book with tracing the disciplinary turn within the broader history of writing, he has modified his earlier episodic approach by repeatedly emphasizing the connections between the changes he describes , connections which were not causal in any simple linear way but which none the less resulted in a modern world where knowledge grows because it is differentiated . And once again, Siskin has pulled it offbrilliantly. I do not know how complicated the historicist's task will be ten years from now, but I am sure that Siskin will be taking it on, breaking new ground well ahead ofthe rest of us. Trevor Ross Dalhousie University Judith Frank. Common Ground: Eighteenth-Century English Satiric Fiction and the Poor. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. ix + 230pp. US$39.50. ISBN 0-8047-2908-5. Judith Frank's book reminds us that the famous and much-disputed rise of the middle class in the eighteenth century, with its attendant developments in the art of narrative, leaves out the equally vexed question of the disenfranchisement of the poor. Because agricultural labourers, servants, and vagabonds did not write their own novels, their presence in the works of Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, and Burney says more about the new professional writing class than about the poor per se. Nevertheless, this often-forgotten presence is usefully brought before us here to fill out the picture of the ideology of eighteenth-century narrative. Frank concerns herself with conservative satiric narratives. Although all four writers knew poverty at first hand, she sees them as speaking for a gentility that felt besieged by the growing market economy. Since this same force also robbed the poor of their cows and their self-sufficiency and turned them into wandering wage-slaves, the gentle classes shared with the lower class a sense of loss and an attendant anxiety and trauma. Frank tries to connect ambivalence about the poor to ambivalences about strong emotion and about the increasingly subjective narrativetechniques ofsentimental fiction: "this book centers upon the conjunction of economic change, novelistic technique, and the constitution of affects" (p. 8). This conjunction necessitates the forging of many unexpected links into long, sometimes fragile chains; yet the juxtaposition of ideas here is provocative and ingenious even when not entirely convincing. The book devotes a chapter to each of four satiric novels: Joseph Andrews, A SentimentalJourney, Humphry Clinker, and Cecilia, with aconclusion on Burney's last novel, The Wanderer. The chronological arrangement gives the rather disparate sections some forward thrust. The first chapter argues that Fielding equates moral 362 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 11:3 purity among servants with contented illiteracy in an effort to assuage genteel anxiety that the poor might rise socially through education. The second uses Sterne's Yorick to describe the middle-class writer's construction ofa new gentility based on sensibility rather than birth or wealth, accomplished by identifying with the poor and subjecting themto adistancing scrutiny. The especially solid Smollett chapter discusses the landed gentry's ambivalence towards the enclosure acts in terms of a denial of loss and mourning over the consequent dislocation of the rural poor. The chapter on Burney connects the sentimental heroine's double bind familiar from feminist criticism—her strong feeling and equally strong selfcontrol —with sociological awareness of the role the poor play in this paradox as objects of the sensitive heroine's heartfelt, dangerous charity. In the conclusion, Frank shows Burney after the French Revolution having accepted as inevitable what the previous novels were trying to fend off: the encroachment ofpoverty and demeaning labour on gentility. Readers may not always be willing to go all the way with Frank to her conclusions . Her use of psychoanalytic theory, which she ably defends (p. 27), may seem either brilliant or forced, depending, as this type of analysis does, on the reader's intuitive sense of its...