Eighteenth-Century Writers in Their World: A Mighty Maze

Abstract

Eighteenth-Century Writers in Their World: A Mighty Maze. By Andrew Varney. Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's Press. 1999. ix + 238 pp. 40 [pounds sterling] (paperbound 12.99 [pounds sterling]). In this study, which is aimed principally at the student market, Andrew Varney sets a range of canonical and non-canonical writings from the period 1700-1750 in their social, political, and cultural contexts. Among the many texts surveyed, in varying degrees of detail, are The Way of the World, The Spectator, Robinson Crusoe, Roxana, Gulliver's Travels, The Beggar's Opera, The Seasons, Clarissa, Tom Jones, and Roderick Random, along with a selection of works by Pope, Manley, Johnson, and early-century women poets. Over the course of eight chapters, Varney situates these writings in relation to such contemporary concerns and modern interests as the rise of commerce and paper credit; travel narratives and imperialism; love, marriage, and property. In a study which seeks to move between the `grandiose' and the `picayune', and which indirectly problematizes the cleaving of a cultural continuum into `texts' and `contexts', there are also walk-on parts for Hogarth, Mandeville, Newton, and Young, along with curious digressions on topics such as contemporary chronometry, and what might be described as early modern `ways of seeing' pineapples. The relative strengths and weaknesses of the study are immediately revealed in its opening chapters. Despite some useful insights into the resonances of `accounting' in Defoe, the first chapter is patchily constructed, covers mostly well-trodden ground, and incorporates a redundant attempt to align Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels with The Rape of the Lock (all texts which, Varney bathetically reveals, `find their identities in difference, difference from other narratives that exist or could exist'). Far better is the succeeding discussion of The Way of the World and Clarissa, which manages to evoke wider changes in cultural temperament through close textual readings. As Varney suggestively argues, while Congreve's play displayed the influence of new notions of decorum and moral virtue, Richardson's imagination was itself `marked' by the `manners of the Restoration world'. Identifying Lovelace with a discredited `culture of wit', Richardson nevertheless imbued Clarissa herself with many of that culture's characteristics. In Varney's nuanced reading of Clarissa's `battle of wits', Richardson's heroine is thus usefully positioned as a figure in whom `an attempt is made to reconcile wit and virtue'. Where the opening discussion of Swift and Defoe might add little to the understanding of the averagely careful student reader, this juxtaposition of Congreve and Clarissa would provide a good starting point for the study of Richardson in particular, and the culture of sensibility more generally. Indeed, for both students and academics the most welcome sections of Varney's study are likely to be those which address less frequently discussed material. …