Literary Patronage in England, 1650-1800 (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 381 explosions of readings dedicated precisely to Austen's engagement with issues of feeling, the philosophy of emotion and aesthetic response, and historical or social change, despite the preoccupations of many essayists, and some essays , included in the volume. Rather, the framework places Austen within a longer-established critical tradition, referred to in Gary Kelly's essay as that of the "popular classic," rather than within academic criticism more narrowly defined (p. 167). McMaster and Stovel's volume title and section headings gesture towards the tone of the volume, which serves as a defence or celebration of Austen within the relatively "secular," which is to say non-academic or paraacademic , context of the 1993 Conference of the Jane Austen Society of North America. These contexts contribute much to readability by a general or undergraduate audience—footnotes are very limited, for example, and theoretical concepts such as panopticism, intersubjectivity, and cultural capital are explained in a good deal of detail—as well as to the diversity of perspectives brought to the essays themselves. At the same time, by claiming and literalizing Bronte's "business" metaphor to argue that Austen manufactures cultural capital and uses the commercial viability of her novels to advance their own classic status and the status of the English novel itself, Kelly's essay in the volume explicitly addresses the possibly more troubling effects of this "popular" context , echoed by McMaster and Stovel's introductory comment that Austen "not only has business; nowadays she is business" (p. xix). As adaptations of conference papers, the essays in the present volume are lucid and often suggestive, if not especially detailed. A useful resource for teaching Persuasion or for gaining an overview of the popular reception of Austen's novel, these essays will market an engagingly faceted Austen to a general or academic non-specialist audience. Miranda J. Burgess University of British Columbia Dustin Griffin. Literary Patronage in England, 1650-1800. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ? + 317pp. ISBN 0-521-56085-3. Dustin Griffin's admirable and exemplary study conveys good news to the scholarly community: there is still plenty to discover even on the beaten track, which, it appears, may not have been so thoroughly beaten after all. The down side may be that Griffin's kind of scholarship requires close and accurate reading, a lot of knowledge of context, and the ability to rethink. The rethinking is from a new-Tory historical stance that postulates the persistence of an aristocratic century as opposed to new-Whiggism that postulates a steady progress towards modernity. Closely studying the nuances in the voices 382 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 10:3 of (particularly) Dryden, Swift, Pope, and Johnson in "the language of dedications , prefaces, letters, novels, and poems, in which authors ... engage the topics of obligation, debt, gratitude, benefit, dependence, and independence" (p. 11), Griffin is able to contest the received narrative reciting the blow to patronage of Pope's vaunted independence, its death with Johnson's famous 1755 letter to Chesterfield, and its replacement in the latter part of the century by the marketplace. Instead, he concludes, and I think demonstrates, that the patronage system was active and coexistent with the new print culture until past the end of the century. Literary patronage, Griffin points out, was ultimately a political and economic system for control of the definition of culture, a system providing political and economic rewards for patron as well as for client, but as yet we have neither an adequate history nor a comprehensive theory of it. His own narrative is of an ongoing contest between authors and patrons, later joined by booksellers and reviewers , for authority. The patron could provide a far wider range of benefits than could the bookseller—dinners and introductions, social countenance, recommendations , places. In Dryden's time, patrons had it very much their own way, were conceived of as owning, even authoring, both patronized poet and literary work; they were repaid in praise which contributed to fame and political power. Within this climate Dryden functioned as both profuse dedicator and proud laureate, acknowledging the noble patron's right to judge, even his proprietorship of work and poet, but also suggesting that the...