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Carlyle liked the word tenebrific (causing or producing darkness, obscuring), using it at least eight times during his career, but two uses, Whiteley definitely demonstrates, can be traced specifically to Addison (Spectator 582, August 18, 1714). Similar contexts—stars or constellations ironically producing darkness—establish this, even though Addison’s word is the older variant tenebrificous. The establishment of the source of Carlyle’s usage in Addison is enlightening, but Whiteley enters into the shade when he suggests that rather than simply misremembering slightly the Spectator quote Carlyle intended “to combine Addison with Burns,” who, according to the OED first used the newer term tenebrific. Whiteley quite correctly does not insist on this extension of his discovery.In the eighteenth century “about eight pages of sermons were published for every one page of fiction,” outselling all other genres, though often disguised under such titles as “‘discourse,’ ‘appeal,’ or ‘address.’” But as Donald Davie pointed out long ago, teachers of eighteenth-century and even Renaissance literature (when sermons included much of each era’s best prose) are reticent today about teaching or even writing about speeches delivered in church. The form lent itself especially to political polemic: it was Richard Price’s sermon “Discourse on the Love of our Country” (1789) that led Burke to write his Reflections on the Revolution in France. This wonderfully energetic and informative essay examines the role of sermons in English political debates of the early 1790s—whether to castigate the godless French, support the war against them, protest Parliament’s failure to end slavery, or repeal the Corporation and Test Acts—to explain why Anna Barbauld ended nine years of literary silence to write her Civic Sermons to the People (1792) and equally sermonic Sins of the Government, Sins of the Nation (1793), and address not “gentlemen” but her “brethren in Christ,” often skillfully turning the patriotic days of fasting and prayer proclaimed by George III to her own dissenting and pacifist purposes.Behn and her contemporary dramatists were skilled at adapting old plays—from Shakespeare to Marston, Middleton, and Molière. Sometimes Behn refused to admit her borrowings: “a very bare hint” from Moliere’s Malade Imaginaire or “the Sign of Angellica, (the only stoln Object)” from Killigrew’s Thomaso. Gerald Langbaine’s extensive search for sources—“Plagiaries of the English Stage,” as one of his subtitles has it—found many sources for Behn’s works. However, when it came to The Revenge, Langbaine listed it among “Unknown Authours” and identified it as “Ascrib’d to Mrs. Behn, but Borrowed all from Marston’s Dutch Courtezan.”Aughterson seeks to place The Revenge in Behn’s canon and show how her adaptations can identify her “unique dramaturgical skills.” Starting with a study of The City Heiress, the title page of which bears Behn’s name, Aughterson juxtaposes the play with two of its four sources, Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters and A Trick to Catch an Old One. Aughterson examines “staging and theatrical setting,” something called “a key scenic idea,” and properties to define “a distinctive dramaturgical signature,” which are then applied to Marston’s Dutch Courtezan and its reworking as The Revenge.These categories prove slippery, as the discussion ranges from “sexualized metaphor,” inversion of male prerogative, City comedy, and stage directions, with special attention directed toward moveable shutters to achieve inside and outside settings. Each scene, aided by the shutters, leads to the discovery of a bed chamber at the back of the stage, with its metonymic sexual signals. The dramaturgically powerful properties are the ring, the dagger, and the gun, and the discussion of these props extends past the source plays into a wide range of contemporary dramas. Finally, Aughterson argues that the adaptation of Middleton’s plays reflects what she marks as “signature-Behn.”Several tables compare scene locations in the two Middleton plays, scene locations in The City Heiress, settings and scenes in Marston’s Dutch Curtezan and The Revenge, and word-counts and exchanges in selected parts of The Dutch Curtezan and The Revenge. A final appendix seems to illustrate how passages from The Dutch Curtezan were adapted in The Revenge. One is not certain what these tabulations mean, individually or together.There are interesting insights in this essay, but they are not linked. Whatever “signature-Behn” markers might suggest concerning the adaptation of several older plays, the connections are not made.Behn’s life and career present a giant jigsaw puzzle with great chunks missing. Thus, any piece is important even if we do not yet know where it fits. Britland supplies several tantalizing, well-researched pieces that should help track the elusive Mrs. Behn. Starting with the discovery in the records of St. Botolph, Aldgate, of marriage banns announced three times in August 1657 between Aphra Johnson, daughter of Bartholomew, and John Halse, Britland follows a trail through the Halse family, which had broad connections with the slave-trading colonies of the Caribbean. In addition, the trail leads to Behn’s probable involvement with Thomas Scot, son of a regicide, to her spying mission in Flanders, to the money borrowed from Edward Butler, and finally to her connections to the theater.Since no proof that the marriage took place has yet been found, Britland exercises care in examining the newly identified banns. Even if there was no marriage, we still have some new directions in which to take biographical research. Again, the virtue of the information gathered is that it is presented as possible evidence of a marriage, but never as definitive. For example, the article starts with the May 1657 death of Edward Johnson, son of Bartholomew and Elizabeth, possibly Behn’s brother. If so, this places Behn’s family in St. Botolph, Aldgate. Yet, we have Bartholomew appointed in 1654 Overseer of the Poor in St. Margaret’s, Canterbury, and the burial of one of Bartholomew’s sons, George, in St. Margaret’s in 1656. This puts a narrow time frame on the move of the Johnson family from sometime in 1656 to May 1657. Possible? Certainly. If Aphra Johnson of the banns is Aphra Behn and if Behn was born in 1640 as most assume, she was not yet seventeen, and would have needed special permission for the marriage. Can that permission be found? The Halse family had many connections to the English colonies and trade in the Caribbean, but was there any connection to Surinam? If she did travel to Surinam as the wife of John Halse, where do Thomas Scot and Mr. Behn (Joachim?) fit into her return to London and her new name, as signed variously in her 1666 spying reports, ABehne, A Behne, A Behn or AB?Even as there can be quibbles, this is an important document for Behn scholars and for anyone interested in the broad connections possible in London in the 1660s.When a critic seeks to establish a certain philosophical outlook for a given author, it is incumbent on that critic to provide facts and opinions and to quote accurately. Unfortunately, this article fails these simple requirements and is marred with so many misreadings and misquotations that the premise is lost in the morass of error.For example, to establish Behn’s interest in Epicurean and Lucretian skepticism in Oroonoko, Lesley first establishes Behn’s connection to Lucretius through Thomas Creech. Behn wrote the commendatory poem “To the Unknown Daphnis” for the second edition (1683) of Creech’s translation of De Rerum Natura, although she seems not to have known Creech at that time. She soon after made his acquaintance as is clear from her intimate doggerel “A Letter to Mr. Creech at Oxford, Written in the last great Frost,” probably dating to the harsh winter of 1683–84 and published in her Miscellany in 1685. In “A Letter to Mr. Creech,” which she does not acknowledge as hers in Miscellany, Behn writes about a billet-doux, a “scrap of nonsense,” to Creech that seems not to have been left at Tonson’s because of a carriage accident in which she was injured on her way to deliver her love note.In Lesley’s interpretation, this poem is about Creech’s “betrayal,” presuming that the “scrap” was Behn’s dedicatory poem for Creech’s De Rerum and that the “betrayal” was the radical revision of two sections. Behn’s own 1684 version of her commendatory poem is harsh about “Faith,” while the 1683 version in De Rerum supports it. Who is responsible for these changes? Lesley would indict Creech “or his publisher Jacob Tonson” for trying to prevent Behn or Creech from appearing libertine. But Tonson did not publish Creech’s translation. In addition, Lesley has Behn complaining that Creech changed these lines with “Scribling Fist all out of joynt,” yet these words describe not Creech’s fist but Behn’s own sore hand and overall pain after she was ejected from her wrecked carriage and ended up looking “like Brawn in sowsing drink,” pickled pig. There is no hint of betrayal in this poem.To establish Behn as a freethinker, Lesley cites Anthony Collins’s placement of Behn as “the Right Modest and Orthodox Matron Mrs. A Behn” among “eminent and high Divines” in his 1713 Discourse of Free-Thinking. This is not a list of seventeenth-century Epicureans; the mention of Dr. Bernard, Dr. Duke, and Dr. Adams simply identifies clergy who prefixed commendations to Creech’s translation.Finally, to prove that Oroonoko is a religious skeptic, Lesley presents his claim that “they [the Christians] wanted only but to be whipped into the knowledge of the Christian gods to be the vilest of all creeping things.” Alas, when Oroonoko makes this speech, the “they” to whom he refers are the slaves who first have fled with him and then crawled back to their captors—not the Christians.At the end of the article, a note alleges that Behn read Lucretius in the French before Creech translated it. The proof? Behn in 1680 referred to the dead Rochester as “a young Lucretius.” And finally, if one is to use Creech and Lucretius as a basis for a study, would it not make sense to quote from Creech’s Lucretius, the one Behn read and praised? Why use a 1995 edition?Jane Spencer provides two valuable directions for approaching Oroonoko. First, she connects animal imagery in Behn’s short novel to verses that Behn provided for the revised edition of Francis Barlow’s Æsop’s Fables (1687). Three of these fables in particular deal with the lion, and connect to the character Oroonoko, as does the odd parallel between Aesop, the black slave who speaks truth to his masters, and Oroonoko, who mocks the venality of his captors.In Spencer’s reading, Aesop’s (and Behn’s) lion informs the character of Oroonoko, and Behn extends fabular readings to three animals of Surinam, the tiger, the numb eel, and the cousherie. Behn connects the Royal Slave to the natural wonders of this new world, including the cousherie, a lion-like animal “in Miniature.” Using an extensive survey of contemporary natural histories and a mastery of the most important critical studies of Oroonoko, Spencer not only presents a candidate for the cousherie but manages to explore the symbolic meaning of the tigers, the eel, and, finally, the little cousherie, an animal traded with the colonists, not unlike the slaves, who in Oroonoko’s words are “Bought and Sold like Apes, or Monkeys.” Behn’s animals are part of the natural life of the colony; they are also symbols that reflect classical use of animals; they are tropes for royalty; they are creatures of fable that would have been comfortable in Æsop’s stories had he encountered them.This is only part of this packed essay, which yields new insights with each reading.The “Noble Savage” is not a new approach to Oroonoko, nor is it particularly useful in this article. Uściński positions Behn’s royal prince as a Noble Savage yet ignores the nobility of the indigenes in Surinam although both Oroonoko and the indigenes turn violent in the end. Uściński’s abstract promises a discussion of Derrida’s “iterability” (without mentioning Derrida) and Bhabha’s “Third Space.” However, after several pages of plot summary and discussion of Dryden’s Religio Laici and Swift’s Tale of a Tub, when the two theoretical concepts are finally discussed, they occupy only three paragraphs just short of the conclusion. The text could use a second proofreading, and the sources are rather outdated.Students of literature may get a slightly different view of Boswell than they are used to from Brown’s essay, an account of the breakfast held in a Glasgow tavern on April 10, 1784, in honor of Edmund Burke. Brown explicates Boswell’s record of the gathering, which he cites in full from Boswell’s journal in an appendix. He categorizes those present as “four noted Scottish literati: the political economist Adam Smith; Dugald Stewart, advocate of a ‘common sense’ theory of knowledge; Andrew Dalzel, professor of Greek at Edinburgh University; and the jurist and historian, John Millar,... two Scottish peers, Lords Maitland and Daer, and, newly arrived, Samuel Johnson’s recorder, James Boswell.” But those expecting a Boswell-bashing are to be disappointed. Although apparently not considered a member of the Scottish literati, at least not by the literati and Brown, Boswell has provided, in some 400 words, an insight into the political situation in Britain at the time from which Brown extrapolates, often astutely.The breakfast was to celebrate the Irishman Burke’s election as Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow, an honorific position with its primary duty being “to petition the government on the university’s behalf.” Unfortunately, the fall of Fox’s government soon after Burke’s selection rendered the move untimely. Boswell “gate-crashed the party” after recently publishing a pamphlet opposing the East India Bill that included a veiled reference to Burke. (“[C]haracteristically, Boswell, prompted by a misguided sense of etiquette, sent Burke a copy of the barb.”) Moving outward to a larger context, Brown analyzes the attendees’ views on religion and national identity: “what is striking about the group gathered at the tavern that morning is the array of their political colours.” In less than a decade that diversity would find the men assuming greatly different attitudes toward the French Revolution. “Boswell’s politically acute antennae in 1784 identified a rift within the Scottish Enlightenment that would ultimately result in its collapse.... The death of the Scottish Enlightenment was due to political not natural causes.”To mention only one of Brown’s other fine points: “In the breakfast at the Saracen’s Head we have a meal, held by Scots, in honour of an Irishman, who had gained his fame in English politics, by debating the best way to treat of imperial holdings.” I think Brown is correct when he states, “in many ways, the language of British identity was a Scottish and Irish invention.... Englishness, as Boswell was wholly aware, remained typically reactive, in that it was often defined in relation to this influx of outsiders.”Robert G. WalkerWashington & Jefferson CollegeThe bluestocking Elizabeth Carter’s lifelong chronic headaches have tended in recent decades to be diagnosed as psychosomatic (often taken to be the result of sexual frustration), or as migraines. Arguing that such diagnoses are unproveable and suspiciously dependent on current fashion (and that the diagnosis of migraines fails to fit the symptoms so fully reported in Carter’s voluminous correspondence), Hansen prefers to understand them as did Carter herself. Contemporary medical theory appealed to “nervous disease,” though Carter was quick to reject any hint of moral fault: the fault, she thought, lay with her bodily “mechanism.” She considered her own “beyond the reach of medicine” (other than occasional doses of tar water), and instead sought relief from rising early, taking long walks in all weathers, and visiting spas such as Tunbridge Wells (where, she thought, the waters did no good, but the sociability sometimes did). She came also to understand what in one poem she called the “kind Alternative of pain” as an incentive to Christian fortitude and even to the love of God (especially when pain abated). Curiously, Hansen draws no conclusions from all this, but leaves us simply with Elizabeth Carter’s own self-understanding.This stylishly entertaining study in the history of pornography treats not the selling of John Cleland but, in the wake of the publication of new editions of Cleland’s classic, the passing off of some racy, supposedly long “suppressed” (but in fact merely forgotten), eighteenth-century fictions as “By the author of Fanny Hill.” Putnam’s brought out the first American edition of Fanny Hill in 1963, in the wake of the New York Supreme Court’s 1963 decision that the book had literary merit. Soon after, Swan Publishing (Toronto) issued what it called “the sizzling sequel to Fanny Hill” in its “original complete uncensored edition,” Memoirs of a Male Prostitute (1965)—in fact simply a retitled printing of Cleland’s never censored (and anything but “sizzling”) Memoirs of a Coxcomb. The floodgates were open.In 1968 Zebra Books (affiliated with Grove Press) brought out a paperback edition of Memoirs of an Oxford Scholar (1756), billing it as the first American appearance of “a bawdy chronicle by John Cleland/author of Fanny Hill.” In fact no evidence external or internal suggests Cleland wrote the novel (though the Beinecke owns a copy, on the spine of which some nameless librarian, reader, or bookdealer wrote Cleland’s name, a fact Zebra’s editors may or may not have known). Nor is the scholar’s story salacious, so Zebra silently expanded eight fairly innocuous passages to make them pornographic.Then in 1978 Ralph Ginzburg’s Erotic Art Book Society brought out The Illustrated Fanny Hill, with an introduction by Erica Jong. In its wake, St. Martin’s reissued the 1766 Genuine Memoirs of the Celebrated Miss Maria Brown as, according to its jacket, “By the Author of Fanny Hill.” Here the publishers had at least one leg to stand on, since the first (and only previous) edition of the novel announced on its title page “Published by the author of a Woman of Pleasure.” The editors at St. Martin’s silently passed over the obstacle that in his 1974 biographical and textual study of Cleland, William Epstein convincingly argued that the novel was not his.Perhaps no linguistic task is as thankless as explaining a joke: “Irony is a particularly effective device for the dramatic satirist since, when hearers choose ironic meaning over literal, they do not lose sight of the literal. On the contrary: the literal meaning, although no doubt overshadowed by the ironic meaning, remains under consideration in the mind of the hearer and serves as a marker by which the gap between the two meanings can be measured.” The distance between such explanations and Congreve’s brilliant comedies is the irony that comes to mind when reading this essay.Mandon offers no reading that has not been overtly available to both readers and auditors for 300 years: “Ben might be ugly but he is clear-sighted... and the audience quickly find themselves laughing with rather than at him”; “the ridiculously effusive Lady Froth, whose discourse... is overflowing with frothy enthusiasm”; “In Congreve’s comedies, banter, like irony, serves to strengthen a divide between the younger and the older generation and to show how younger, skilled speakers get the upper hand.” Her attempt to distinguish between “banter” and “irony” is unconvincing, as are her various efforts to find significant new meaning in separating literal from non-literal statements. Anyone who has ever enjoyed a Congreve comedy does so because the play constantly (and successfully) signals the need for such separation; indeed, all comedy does so. We are thus no wiser than we were when Mandon concludes that banter and irony rely “on a discrepancy between what is apparent and what is intended.”Congreve is quoted from the 1967 Davis edition rather than Donald McKenzie’s 2011 Oxford scholarly edition; Davis is not quoted carefully enough, especially in omitting too many capitalizations and italicizations. Almost all the scholarship cited is structuralism from the 1970s and 1980s; no work on Congreve is mentioned. As for quoting Johnson’s Dictionary “published in 1785” the less said the better.Cole takes the transcontinental crossing of Africa in Defoe’s Captain Singleton (1722) as the focus of her illuminating essay on the quest for elephant ivory in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Pragmatic and opportunistic, Singleton regards the interior of Africa as a largely untapped source of boundless wealth: human, animal, and mineral. He is mightily impressed by the “Number of Elephants hereabouts” and fantasizes that their ivory tusks, or teeth, could easily fill “a thousand Sail of the biggest Ships in the World.” For Defoe, valuable ivory is there for the gathering—in the vast graveyards where elephants leave their skeletal remains. Contemporary accounts and modern historians tell a much more complex story of rapidly diminishing herds and vanishing ecosystems, even by the early 1700s. Cole also shows that Europeans were weaponizing Africans with firearms to help them slaughter elephants in a more efficient manner than they could using spears, ropes, and traps. In all of these narratives, there is a clear and disturbing disconnect between the status of elephants as “potential delivery systems for ivory” on the one hand and as “living, sentient beings” on the other. Cole argues that ivory, when it is transformed into such things as combs, piano keys, billiard balls, and the like, becomes a kind of “fetishized commodity” for Europeans. It is also a fitting emblem of the larger exploitation of human and non-human resources that has been going on for eons.Taylor CorseArizona State UniversityScholars have long recognized that Defoe’s novels do not fit neatly into a schema of progressive Enlightenment modernization and secularization, given his emphasis on providential logic and post-facto explanations. Donnelly argues both that Defoe’s providentialism is more complicated than it may appear—balancing as it does providential with more everyday explanations—and that it was not anomalous but typical of the period. Finding a similar approach in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, Donnelly posits that both authors display what she calls “‘skeptical providentialism,’ in which necessity and chance, spirituality and secularity, determinism and free will all converge simultaneously within the common experiences of everyday life.” Both authors assert that God is the ultimate cause of earthly events at the same time as they present a number of other causal factors. Both stress human agency alongside divine direction.The article convinces that Defoe’s religious thinking is not unusual and that therefore linear accounts of the “development” (the scare quotes are Donnelly’s) of secular modernity are inadequate—a point generally accepted in scholarship but still in need of repetition. The essay could use more explication of Hobbes’s thinking on divine intervention for the comparison to be useful. Here, Leviathan receives only a few paragraphs of analysis, but Donnelly’s readings of A Journal of the Plague Year, Robinson Crusoe, and Moll Flanders add to our understanding of Defoe’s works as exemplary in their combination of human and divine explanations for life’s “surprising adventures.”Johnson examines the discourse of nationalism and patriarchy in works by Henry Neville and Defoe to argue that “The Isle of Pines anticipates Defoe’s thesis in The True-Born Englishman (1701) that the principle of legitimate descent—central to Stuart royalism, ethnocentric nationalism, and white supremacy in the colonies—was a noxious fiction that would divide England against itself and render it vulnerable to foreign conquest.” She looks at how race and gender are depicted in Neville’s novella to show that it is in fact a “patriarchal dystopia” rather than a utopia, despite the abundance of food on the island, and that the society created by the castaways works to suppress the rights of the women and the descendants of Philippa, the one enslaved African woman among them. Defoe’s poem, by extension, works “as an affirmation of Neville’s concerns about nativism, racism, and patriarchalism in post-Restoration England.” In Johnson’s reading, Defoe’s support for King William in the face of potential Jacobite or Catholic invasion reflected his relief at a period of peace and stability after the Glorious Revolution. As she points out, “Defoe’s poem does ultimately critique ethnocentrism and promote pluralism, even as it ridicules the undignified origins to England’s heterogeneity.” Like Neville, Defoe supports the mixture of different types of people as good for society, but he differs from Neville in that he does not see illegitimate birth as a sign of degeneracy. In different ways, both works show that the enforced “stratifications of society under royal absolutism” are harmful and serve only to tear apart society and the nation.This article will be of interest to those working at the intersection of politics, social history, and literature, demonstrating, as it does, that both Defoe’s and Neville’s works are part of a similar tradition of social critique. It is also a welcome reminder of the relevance and significance of Defoe’s poetry as serious political writing, and helps to lay the ideological groundwork for the fictions of social outcasts like Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders for which he became better known.Lipski briefly examines the descriptions of art in the travel narratives of Defoe and Smollett in order to argue “that one of the reasons behind the travellers’ repetitious attempts to fashion themselves as connoisseurs was the need to reaffirm their national identity.” Defoe’s A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–1726) is overtly nationalistic, but Lipski’s focus on the discussions of painting and collections rather than British art and architecture highlights the ways Defoe sees collecting as a British “responsibility” for preserving the past as well as “indicative of the country’s prosperity.” Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy (1766) offers a more aesthetic approach, criticizing the overly sentimental and praising the natural over the artificial. This article makes some interesting but not altogether surprising points; it is short and rather thin both in terms of its eighteenth-century contextual material and its secondary sources, so it is more an introduction to the topic than a decisive intervention into the field.Rogers begins with an overview of the extent to which Defoe’s Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain has been and remains a key source for political, social, economic, infrastructural, agricultural, urban, and literary history (among other fields), demonstrating the “sheer range” of ways in which “historians have raided the Tour.” Across a variety of schools, and from the late nineteenth century until today, the work has proved an apparently indispensable primary source for evidence of Georgian life. However, Rogers points out, many earlier scholars worked from later eighteenth-century editions that excluded the Scottish sections of the Tour, an abridgement replicated in the widely cited Everyman’s Library edition (although not, of course, in John McVeagh’s Pickering and Chatto edition). In accounting for the work’s influence, Rogers cites its range of coverage and posture of eyewitness accounting, even though some sections relied on other secondary sources, especially Camden’s Britannia. Defoe was “the right author in the right place at the right time”—for example, his observations on the emergence of the turnpike system, a topic that had sparked his interest since his earliest book-length work, the Essay on Projects, have been cited again and again. While the article is a bit boosterish at times, its encyclopedic survey of scholarship on early eighteenth-century Britain proves that “the Tour is a truly central work for our understanding of Britain at a crucial stage of its transition into modernity” and provides the “comprehensive survey of the writer’s achievement” that Rogers finds lacking elsewhere in the historiography.Rogers traces six previously unexplicated allusions in Defoe’s Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain as examples of how his works make “a variety of sly, indirect, or mystificatory gestures which have puzzled critics as well as the general body of readers.” Some of the allusions, such as the reference to a politician Rogers identifies as Sir Basil Dixwell, invoke figures unknown to contemporary readers, while others employ outdated slang, such as the term “Yorkshire” for sharp or cunning. Rogers traces several snippets of poetry to their sources, which are often Defoe quoting Camden’s Britannia. In tracing such allusions, Rogers shows the variety of sources (including Defoe’s own previous work) the author drew from for the Tour. The article shows the many uses to which Defoe put such references, from personal attack to gentle satire to political signaling.This article fills in many of the references to places and people in the sixth “letter” of Defoe’s Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, which takes the tour through Wales. As Rogers points out, Defoe had “little or no firsthand knowledge of wilder Wales,” meaning that many of his descriptions and place names are difficult to follow. Rogers explains references not glossed by John McVeagh or other previous editors, providing geographical and historical details on many places named in the Tour. Defoe misspelled many Welsh place names, such