Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France

Finance, Fiction, and Loss

Reviewed by: Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Touching Fiction by Alex Wetmore Amelia Dale Alex Wetmore, Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Touching Fiction (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2013). Pp. 207. $95.00. Eighteenth-century printed texts are notoriously self-aware about the circumstances of their production and dissemination. The relationship between self-reflexivity and literary form has been explored by such figures as Christina Lupton, Deidre Lynch, Christopher Flint, and Tom Keymer, among others. Alex Wetmore argues for the congruity between the printed bodies of sentimental books and the mechanized men of feeling presented within their pages. Sentimentalism’s stress on embodied emotive expression is crucially related to the eighteenth century’s [End Page 547] preoccupation with the physicality of the book; print’s palpability becomes crucial to its capacity to elicit emotion. The subtitle, Touching Fiction, refers to how sentimental fictions deploy tactility in order to become emotionally and allegorically “touching.” The cover illustration, an anonymous etching with engraving titled “High life at noon” (1769), portrays a man touching a woman’s breast amidst a scene of literary and appetitive consumption. It suggests another, more sexual connotation of “touching fiction.” Yet Wetmore’s interest is not so much in the sexual practices of the men of feeling, but in the way feeling is inscribed on sensible bodies, and what it means to touch, and be touched by, sentimental fiction. What I found especially interesting was the study of sentimentalism’s “touching” of bodies via book-like bodies and bodies in books. This speaks to one of the most fascinating aspects of eighteenth-century writing: its playful coalescence of signifying flesh and printed paper. Sentimental novels by Henry Brooke, Laurence Sterne, Tobias Smollett, and Henry Mackenzie are the focus of Men of Feeling. Wetmore introduces a useful term, “corporeal defamiliarization,” to denote how sentimental novels denaturalize their status as touchable book-objects. The phrase also encompasses sentimentalism’s preoccupation with bodies of texts, and bodies in texts. Wetmore compellingly argues that sentimental self-consciousness can be understood to have the matter of the book and the body at its fraught center. Sentimental self-reflexivity, therefore, is not the metafictional, proto-postmodern irony that our moment in history might tempt us to identify it as being. The book is structured around three lengthy chapters, each with a title composed of two competing, interrelating terms. In the first of these sections, “Body/Language,” Wetmore explores the relationship between sentimental self-reflexivity and eighteenth-century theories of language. Though sentimental fiction, as is often noted, draws attention to the limitations of writing and speech in favor of an embodied articulation of emotion, it is far from naïve in its treatment of bodily expression. It remains alert to the way bodily signs mirror lexical and linguistic structures. Wetmore’s argument is convincing, particularly when considering how in Tristram Shandy the language of the body is as fraught, and as susceptible to failure and miscommunication, as the words that the characters speak and write. Arguing from a different perspective in “Tristram Shandy and the Wound of Language” (1995), Ross King contends that the impotent, ailing male bodies in the novel are constitutive to the failure of language that pervades the book. In a narrative that entangles literary expression with sexual prowess, linguistic failure and sexual impotence become inextricable. Sentimental fiction might privilege embodied expression, but it is as skeptical about interpreting the body as it is about reading the page. In the subsequent section, “Feeling/Machines,” Wetmore argues that the automaton is central to sentimental fiction’s self-awareness. The feeling body of the sentimental man, marked by print and experience, becomes analogous to the mechanically reproduced book. Wetmore notes how ideal, sentimental, masculine virtue is repeatedly characterized as involving mechanized, automatic affective responses. The following section, “Public/Health,” investigates relationships between sentimental novels’ preoccupation with their own physicality, and books of “physick.” Wetmore suggests that sentimental fiction’s corporeal defamiliarization works in tandem with the genre’s palliative goal of expanding and extending nervous sensibilities. Following Henry Fielding in The Author’s Farce (1730), Wetmore [End Page 548] plays on the suggestive congruities between hacks and quacks. Sentimentalism’s fraught...

Reviewed by: Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century by Christina Lupton Alexander Creighton (bio) Christina Lupton. Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Pp. ix+199. $49.95. That Christina Lupton’s Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century is best read slowly and carefully testifies to its achievement as both a rigorously researched history and a philosophy of reading for the present. Investigating the reading practices of a variety of eighteenth-century individuals—“actors, clergy, professional novelists, translators, housekeepers, and politicians” (3)—Lupton asks whether, in the modern history of the book, we have ever really had more time to read. Although the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed a proliferation of printed materials, the era also saw the rise of longer and more regular work days with less free time, what E. P. Thompson famously calls “time-discipline.” When, under these conditions, did people find time to read books? In what ways did book reading challenge the growing predominance of work schedules and clock time? Lupton suggests that there is no one answer to these questions, and her book unfolds as an analysis of the relation between reading and “making time” in two senses: 1) how these readers made time for books; 2) how the act of reading fashioned alternative relations to time. “In the stories I tell,” Lupton writes, “people pick up books, reread them, and postpone reading them in ways that are often out of kilter with the idea of modernity’s commitment to regularity and speed” (8). Lupton’s central argument is that over the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, reading books was seen as a means of negotiating with, rather than capitulating to, an emerging cultural time-consciousness centered around efficiency and speed. “Book reading develops its own character as an activity valued because it can offset newer and faster kinds of reading,” such as the reading of “newspapers, periodicals, almanacs, and sermons” (6). From a bustling early life in the theater that admitted little leisure, novelist Elizabeth Inchbald, in the 1790s, began a calmer life with more time for leisure reading—a progression dramatized in her most famous novel, A Simple Story. The notebooks of William Wyndham Grenville, Prime Minister of the U.K. after William Pitt the Younger, reveal a careful reader who scheduled his readings and rereadings of Demosthenes and Aristotle. In letters to her friend and fellow Bluestockings member [End Page 265] Elizabeth Carter, Catherine Talbot laments her lack of time to read, always interrupted “with a thousand little errands and employments” (40). Talbot’s 1770 Reflections, which takes the form of short homilies to be read on each day of the week, preserves Sundays as a time of leisure—a time for slower reading. Lupton’s readers include fictional characters as well as real people; they range from the mid-1700s through the Romantic period; and all, in their own ways, make time for reading and through reading. The richness of ideas in Lupton’s book comes from her drawing into seamless dialogue several different but related fields, including a variety of kinds of reading and writing, such as epistolary exchange, translation, the study of classics, and the promise of future reading; specific, high-stakes questions about the structure and use of time; and an impressive range of modern theorists and literary scholars, from book historians to philosophers of time to social theorists such as Bruno Latour and Niklas Luhmann. The result is that each of the book’s four chapters unfolds as a lucid progression of ideas. Meanwhile, brief autobiographical asides, interspersed throughout the whole, not only formally underscore the argument that books need not accord with any one tempo, but in content, they address the problem of finding time to read in the age of the internet. At a time when reading is increasingly instrumentalized as a means toward some professional end (or else deemed unworthy of our time), Lupton argues that a reevaluation of reading profits from understanding the history of reading and the temporal politics involved. Rather than capitulate to speed-reading or skipping pages, “I want to promote...

108 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:1 To construct a picture of "Georgian libertinism" almost entirely out of Fielding's works and twentieth-century criticism of them seems to me profoundly misguided methodology. Robert D. Hume Pennsylvania State University Brian McCrea. Impotent Fathers: Patriarchy and Demographic Crisis in the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1998. 242pp. US$39.50. ISBN 0-87413-656-3. Brian McCrea's readings of a set of now-canonical eighteenth-century novels constitute part of a useful collégial dialogue with recent feminist critics. After opening with consideration of Don Quixote and Paradise Lost, McCrea looks at Moll Flanders, Roxana, The Female Quixote, Tom Jones, Roderick Random, Clarissa, Evelina, and A Simple Story, frequently disagreeing, politely, with Patricia Meyer Spacks, Margaret Anne Doody, Terry Castle, and Eleanor Ty, among others. He is concerned that feminist readings have unduly totalized "patriarchy" and he seeks to present a more historicized understanding of the vagaries of patriarchy in the eighteenth century, particularly as they affected the novel. He is struck by the fact that many of the characters who seem to represent patriarchal power in novels have troubles and worries of their own that make them weak and incapable of exerting power or unwilling to do so. Having read recent social history about the "demographic crisis" in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries , he is also struck by the many novelistic plots featuring families in which there is no son to inherit father's estate. In contrast to feminist critics who have stressed patriarchal power as oppressive to daughters (and wives), McCrea finds the impetus of the eighteenth-century novel in "the absence rather than the presence of patriarchal authority" (p. 18). Patriarchs lacking biological sons are tempted to experiment with fictive filiations, as in Burney's Cecilia, where Cecilia Beverley 's uncle famously writes a will making her his heiress, but requiring any future husband who wishes to enjoy her inheritance to take the Beverley name. McCrea has a thorough familiarity with the canonical novels and offers more detailed close reading than many recent critics; his attention to male characters he thinks feminist critics have tended to overlook is valuable, especially his attention to Lord M. in Clarissa, Sir John Belmont in Evelina, and Dorriforth in A Simple Story. For instance, he points out that despite Evelina's obeisance to Sir John in the recognition scene, Sir John is not able to derivejoy from the discovery of his child or even to endure her presence, being "wounded rather than healed by events" (p. 150) and anxious to secure the marriage and acceptance of his "fictive daughter," Polly Green. Evelina McCrea reads as recognizing both biological and fictive kinship, as Evelina honours both her foster-father, Mr Villars, and her biological REVIEWS 109 father, Sir John, and recognizes her fictive sister, Polly. A Simple Story, in contrast, McCrea sees as dedicated to revealing "the cost ofthose 'pious fictions' ofkinship practiced by the eighteenth-century elite" (p. 17 1), as Dorriforth becomes a victim when he has to give up his priestly vocation and his name in order to become Lord Elmwood. Similarly, in The Female Quixote, McCrea looks closely at Glanville to argue that in his "peculiar status ... Lennox complicates any attempt to place a patriarch at the novel's center" (p. 155). He rightly emphasizes Glanville's willingness to enter (partially) into Arabella's "sign system" and Glanville's reservations about older patriarchal duelling codes, generally finding the marriage of Arabella and Glanville more euphoric than recent feminist critics have. Although generally interested in the instability of signs, McCrea here I think misses the richness and subtlety of Lennox's comedy, which poignantly shows us moment after moment when Glanville's language of realistic "common sense" misses truths for which Arabella's romance language has words. For example, when Arabella speaks to the "prostitute" at Vauxhall, a young girl who is being sadistically terrorizedby a naval officer and scoffed at by the crowd, only Arabella can see her fear, her "Woe," and that she is, indeed, an "Unfortunate." That in her marriage to Glanville Arabella will be able to "'use...

Personal Effects and Sentimental Fictions Deidre Lynch Sentimental novels are cluttered with things. The emotional attachments that people form with possessions in these mid-eighteenth-century fictions can seem as freighted with consequence as the emotional attachments that people form with each other. Indeed, modem readers of Henry Brooke's The Fool ofQuality or Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey might be pardoned for finding it hard to distinguish one sort of relationship from the other—even if normal notions of the folly of fetishism predispose us to believe that the difference between, say, ownership and friendship is a difference worth preserving. The keepsakes that clutter sentimental fiction (the lockets that protagonists wear next to their hearts; the sleeve buttons or snuffboxes that pairs of characters exchange to memorialize their first meeting or last, teary-eyed parting) work instead to collapse that difference. While they instructed their readers in emotional responsiveness, sentimentalists were more than ready to make objects of this variety—objects particularly valued because they are the surrogates for particular persons—their props. This practice marks the novelists' fashion-consciousness. On the testimony of the OED, which dates the word keepsake to 1790, it was only in the eighteenth century that keepsakes came to be identified as a distinct kind of material good. The fact that by 1790 members ofthe propertied classes had learned to want to give and to receive keepsakes from one another bespeaks the reciprocal influence EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000 346 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION between eighteenth-century people's love affair with feelings, and their fascination with the new opportunities for acquisitiveness that they discovered in shops. And that new readiness to countenance superfluous expenditure that historians of this century's "consumer revolution" have recognized— people's new willingness to disregard the traditional association between luxury and vice and instead value the luxury good as a vehicle for the finer feelings—also lies behind the marketability throughout the era of a literature designed to procure for its readers the "luxury of tears."1 Writers such as Henry Brooke, Laurence Steme, Henry Mackenzie, and Sarah Scott vindicated the psychology of refinement suitable to the new consumer culture not only by finding increasingly nuanced ways of discriminating human emotions, but also by exemplifying the diversity of the portable properties that humans might feel emotional with or about. Hence the clutter. Sensibility is both the capacity to feel as others do and, as one eighteenth-century definition maintains, that "peculiar ... habitude of mind, which disposes a man to be easily moved, and powerfully affected by surrounding objects."2 The (only semi-) satiric imitator of Sterne who takes a "Sentimental Journey from Islington to Waterloo Bridge" knows he should let nothing (no thing) "escape" him: "The traveller ... should extract reflections out of a cabbage stump." Satirists were quick to note that sentimentalism invited people to be (in the standard phrase) "tremblingly alive" to dead matter.3 Such satires of sentimental animism had a point. A carriage for hire that sits alone and "unpitied" in an inn yard in Calais is able to arouse in Sterne's Parson Yorick the sense ofobligation he had been unable to muster in his earlier encounter with the Franciscan friar. "Much indeed was not to be said for it—but something might—and when a few words will rescue misery out of her distress, I hate the man who can be a churl of them."4 It seems apt that Yorick's piteous words acknowledge his obligation to a désobligeant—that they personify a carriage that seats one person only. It is as if the communicative and emotive powers that sentimentalism 1 On sensibility and consumer culture see G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture ofSensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 2 "Question: Ought Sensibility to be Cherished or Repressed?" Monthly Magazine 2 (October 1796), quoted in Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 5. 3 Thomas Hood, "A Sentimental Journey from Islington to Waterloo Bridge," first published in the London Magazine, 1821; reprinted in Sterne...

<i>The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England</i>. Edited by Mark Blackwell . Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007. Pp. 365.

This essay explores the visualization of culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by examining the spectacle surrounding the death of a beautiful woman in sentimental texts. Focusing on Rousseau’sJulie, ouLa Nouvelle Héloïse, I argue that this novel highlights the relationship between interpretation and identity formation by outlining a style of reading that concentrates on the visual aspects of interpretation. Central to my study is the idea that Rousseau considered the imagination as the primary medium through which interpretation occurred. This is an unstable medium in that the passions were believed to influence the imagination and limit one’s ability to read properly. Rousseau thus sought to repress passion and contain the imagination through an image presented in the form of a spectacle – the image of the feminine ideal. This image, stabilized in death, needed to be internalized in the reader’s heart and mind. Readers would then interpret bodies/texts/objects – and their own identity – through an imagination that is controlled by this enduring symbol, allowing them to have access to “truth,” and to regain a sense of unity and happiness that is often lost in modern society.

Unhousing the Archives Around the<i>Zong</i>, Again

Self-construal influences the way people ascribe blame to victims, but it is not clear whether the same applies to harm doers, especially those in a position of authority. We examined (N = 122, men n = 60) participants' ascriptions of both blame and intentionality to harm doers (authority figure versus peer) while priming self-construal (relational versus individual self). Using eye-tracking, we explored whether priming relational self, compared to individual self, affects the allocation of attention to faces versus objects. Although no effects of priming were found, the type of harm doer influenced the way people interpreted harmful social encounters. Participants attributed both greater intentionality and blame to peer than authority perpetrators. Also, in the case of peer perpetrators, blame ascription was higher than judgements of intentionality, which was the opposite pattern for authority perpetrators, where judgements of intentionality were greater than ascribed blame. In regard to encoding, participants independently of the type of harm doer looked significantly longer at faces than at objects in violent scenes. Our results suggest the status of perpetrator influences judgements of harm independently of intrapersonal factors, such as primed self-construal. Moreover, people perceived as authority figures are not blamed for the hurtful action, despite attributed intentionality.

<i>The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Thought</i> , ed. Frans De Bruyn

Reviewed by: Religion, Reason, and Culture in the Age of Goetheed. by Elisabeth Krimmer and Patricia Anne Simpson Christopher R. Clason Elisabeth Krimmer and Patricia Anne Simpson, eds., Religion, Reason, and Culture in the Age of Goethe. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013. 269 pp. Krimmer and Simpson’s editorial collaboration brings together an eclectic group of scholars, who focus on the significant theme of religion in German writing from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and represent numerous perspectives on this vast topic. The editors identify their chronological field, the “long eighteenth century,” as the period extending from Wieland through Goethe and Hegel, or from Sentimentality through Romanticism (7). However, as one might expect with such a historically weighty subject, the boundaries set by the title are elastic. If we take into account Frederick Amrine’s compelling discussion of Spinoza and Fichte and their reception in Deleuze, one acquires a sense of the great temporal expanse that the discussion of religion necessarily takes on: few subjects depend upon such an enormous tradition for their underpinnings. The volume is composed of an introduction and ten essays, subdivided into four main sections: “I: Wieland and Herder,” including contributions by Claire Baldwin on the former and Tom Spencer on the latter; “II: Schiller and Goethe,” comprising three essays on the Weimar classicists, one each by Jeffrey High, Elisabeth Krimmer, and Jane K. Brown; “III: Kleist and Hölderlin,” with essays by Helmut Schneider, Lisa Beesley, and Patricia Anne Simpson; and “IV: Leibniz, Spinoza and Their Legacy,” which includes chapters by John H. Smith and Frederick Amrine. It is unclear why these divisions are necessary, since the essays generally address interdisciplinary topics, especially philosophy and literature; corralling them into such categories does little to elucidate their connections to one another or even to the overarching headings the sectional labels imply. The essays range in quality from good to excellent, although the span of the subjects they treat may not be as comprehensive as the title suggests. The topics tend to be linked to specific authors, necessarily limiting the ground covered, but the articles themselves compensate for this by delving deeply into often-neglected writers such as Wieland and Stolberg. Clear writing characterizes the entire volume, and since some of the essays treat the same works or authors from different perspectives (e.g., Schneider and Beesley on Kleist’s Die heilige Cäcilie, Spencer and Smith on Herder, and several who address, at least in passing, aspects [End Page 291]of Goethe’s Faust), the volume achieves an evenness and cohesion that contribute strongly to its overall unity. The editors’ introduction to the volume, situating religion in the context of the social secularization that flourished in the eighteenth century, emphasizes the central role played by religious discourse throughout the period, despite copious efforts to minimize or reject it consciously. While authors such as Goethe have become iconographic for their irreligiosity, having been ascribed unorthodox, even “pagan” beliefs, they nevertheless deal copiously with religion in many of their works. As the essays clearly reveal, religion is not synonymous with orthodoxy but obtains a great variety of nuanced and dynamic significations over time, whether through historical treatments of biblical figures or outright attempts to define the psychology of spirituality. Following the introduction, the essay by Claire Baldwin, “‘Über Glaubenssachen filosofieren’: Wieland on Reason and Religion,” addresses Wieland’s acceptance of religion’s importance in contemporary intellectual life and his insistence that it not be dismissed as superstition and thereby relegated to an irrational extreme. Instead, he brings up religious questions in essays and novels and treats religion as a powerful emotional force and a matter worthy of “filosofieren.” Next, in “Personal Impersonalism in Herder’s Conception of the Afterlife,” Tom Spencer outlines how Herder’s view of life after death evolved, as revealed in his letters to Mendelssohn and Lavater and in later philosophical writings. According to Spencer, Herder’s philosophical statements suggest a “progressive-yet-impersonal continuance of substance beyond death” (69) even while his poetic writings imply, apparently incongruously, that one may embrace death with hope and even joy. Underlying Herder’s discourse is the attempt...

Este trabalho, fruto de pesquisa pós-doutoral em curso, contempla a passagem de Flora Tristan por Cabo Verde em 1833, o contexto histórico local e apresenta uma análise dos relatos memoriais da escritora, de cunho jornalístico e literário, do capítulo La Praya de sua obra autobiográfica Peregrinações de uma pária. Durante a travessia marítima que a levaria ao Peru, o navio em que viajava faz uma escala forçada na cidade da Praia, então sob o domínio colonial e escravocrata português. As cenas de violência e miséria que nunca dantes presenciara despertam a sensibilidade de Flora, que expressa sua revolta contra a exploração humana, sobretudo de mulheres, em seu livro. O tema será recorrente nos relatos de viagens que escreveria tempos depois.

It is among the paradoxes of the lachrymose fiction that bedewed the eyes of novel readers in the later eighteenth century that the foremost exponents of the sentimental mode were also its most cogent detractors. The prime example is Henry Mackenzie, whose much-reprinted The Man of Feeling (1771), with its successors The Man of the World (1773) and Julia de Roubigne (1777), made him the most fashionable novelist of his day. With its trembling alertness to the minutiae of suffering and sympathy, and the plaintive silences of its fractured narrative form, The Man of Feeling is the exemplary sentimental text. Yet Mackenzie was to retire from novel writing in his early thirties, and in an essay of 1785 he gave systematic development to anxieties about sentimental fiction and its ethical basis that had already quietly haunted his three novels. Surveying the emergent subgenres of fiction, he detects in ‘that species called the Sentimental ’ a dangerous subversion of its central claim: that by engaging readers' sympathies with misfortune, it could activate, as well as merely represent, ‘the most exalted benevolence’. Feeling had become an end in itself, narcissistically attentive to nothing more than its own exquisiteness. Deploring the inertia of ‘refined sentimentalists … who open their minds to impressions which never have any effect upon their conduct’, Mackenzie attributes to sentimental fiction a ‘separation of conscience from feeling’ which is, he adds, ‘a depravity of the most pernicious sort’. Even in its foremost examples, it cultivates nothing better than self-admiration, and disengages the will from forms of practical action that only less modish virtues – duty, principle – have the power to impel.

The Political Novel and the Seduction Plot: Thomas Holcroft's Anna St. Ives Katherine Binhammer Spurred by the July 1989 bicentenary of the French Revolution, critics of English literature have turned in large numbers to the study of fiction from the 1790s.1 The genealogy of the recent critical attention to 1790s fiction can be traced, in part, to our current 1990s interest in the way political meaning functions in the literary text. The impact of new historicism and cultural studies on literary criticism has led scholars to reconsider the interconnection between literature and politics, and the 1790s provide fertile ground for this work. The explicitly feminist novels ofMary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and Charlotte Smith, for example, seem pregnant with material for those of us engaged in studying the dissemination of political and gender ideologies through literature.2 Why is it, then, that 1 Recent essay collections dedicated to issues of representation in the 1790s include Reflections on Revolution: Images ofRomanticism, ed. Alison Yarrington and Kelvin Everest (London: Routledge, 1993); Revolution in Writing: British Literary Responses to the French Revolution, ed. Kelvin Everest (Milton Keynes and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1991); Revolution and English Romanticism, ed. Keith Hanley and Raman Seiden (New York: StMartin's Press, 1990); The French Revolution andBritish Culture, ed. Ceri Crossley and Ian Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); and The Novels ofthe 1790s, ed. Linda Lang-Peralta (forthcoming). 2 For a sampling of this recent feminist criticism see Mary Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women , Politics and the Fiction ofLetters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1995); Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, Revolution: 1790-1827 (Oxford: ClarenEIGHTEENTH -CENTURY FICTION, Volume 11, Number 2, January 1999 206 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Thomas Holcroft's feminist novel, Anna St. Ives (1792), has been marginalized by some and wholly ignored by other critics participating in the revisioning of 1790s fiction?3 Is it because the women writers from this period, in their combination of the textual and the personal, are too seductive to resist? Is it the problematic issue of men in feminism that keeps critics away? Or is the overtdidacticism ofHolcroft's novel responsible for its lack of popularity? In this essay, I will advance the case for the importance ofAnna St. Ives to a feminist literary history of the novel at the end of the eighteenth century. My argument is not grounded in a qualitativejudgment ofthe text's canonical greatness; rather, I am suggesting thatAnna St. Ives, as arguably the first Jacobin novel, can teach us a lot about how politics and the novel became inextricably linked through the seduction plot in the revolutionary decade.4 In herexcellentbookEquivocalBeings: Politics, Gender, andSentimentality in the 1 790s (1995), Claudia Johnson analyses the profound interplay between sentimental fiction and political debates in the decade. She argues that sentimental discourse merged with the language of politics—for example, in Burke's Reflections—such that the language of the heart and the narratives of sentimental fiction were invested with either a revolutionary or counter-revolutionary meaning. The frequent analogies appearing both in the fiction and the political tracts which linked the state of the nation to the state of the family explicitly underscore the imbrication of politics and sentimental affective relations.5 As Johnson succinctly points out, "During the 1790s ... sentimentality is politics made intimate."6 Sentimental fiction played out the revolutionary debates in the arena of the don Press, 1993); Eleanor Ty, The Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); and Nicola Watson, Revolution and the Form ofthe British Novel, 1790-1825 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 3 Anna St. Ives is included in the major early studies of the 1790s political novel—for example, Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War ofIdeas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) and Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel: 1780-1805 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). But few contemporary critics, particularly feminist critics, show any interest in, or familiarity with, the text. 4 In her classic study, The Popular Novel in England (London: Constable, 1932), J.M.S. Tompkins designates Anna St. Ives "the first full-blown...

Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) is best known today as a novelist, whereas in the eighteenth century he was primarily regarded as a historian and critic. In Tobias Smollett in the Enlightenment, Richard J. Jones explores the diversity of Smollett's journalistic and literary writings and establishes connections between Smollett's work and writers of the Scottish Enlightenment. Taking as his focal point Smollett's visit to Nice between 1763 and 1765, and the account he wrote of it in Travels through France and Italy (1766), Jones argues that Smollett's account should be read as a 'pocket encyclopedia' in the tradition of Voltaire, rather than as a conventional 'travel narrative'. Discussing Smollett's engagement with medicine, fine art, the theatre, and history, Jones offers a productive juxtaposition of authors, texts, and contexts, presenting Smollett as a writer whose Scottish (and particularly Glaswegian) identity informed his involvement in a wider European Enlightenment.