Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 by Mark Salber Phillips

Abstract

ESC 28, 2002 famous disagreement with Tonson over the portrayal of Aeneas as William in the engravings (to which Morton refers in an in­ troductory aside). Morton’s commitment to the traditional gen­ eralizations about Restoration values obscures the political and religious particularity of some of Dryden’s references, especially in the shadings of the Turnus narrative; for example, in com­ menting on the potent line “A Crown usurp’d, which with their Blood is bought” (xi: 335), he touches, without elaborating, on the possible political implications of these rather obvious, even dangerous, reflections on William (113). Morton’s study and his conclusion are valuable in reasserting the significance of Dryden’s Aeneid in English literary history, but they raise historical, theoretical, and textual questions that his critical discussion does not address. KATHERINE M. QUINSEY / University of Windsor Mark Salber Phillips. Society and Sentiment: Genres of Histor­ ical Writing in Britain, 1740-1820. Princeton: Princeton Uni­ versity Press, 2000. 369. $24.95 (U.S.) paper. Phillips presents himself in this study as a scholar who can think outside the box, who sees history as a fluid genre that spills over into various kinds of texts. Society and Sentiment, he tells the reader, “explore[s] the ways in which historians, bi­ ographers, antiquarians, memorialists, literary historians, and others sought to represent the social world of everyday life as well as the inward world of the sentiments” (xii). While he may exaggerate the extent to which others have remained in the box and seen Enlightenment historiography through the lens of nineteenth-century commentary, there is an important les­ son in how Phillips reminds us of the danger of “unexamined assumptions about historical distance” (349). One of the engag­ ing ideas of Society and Sentiment is the descriptive model of our fascination with the past as being the product of two shift­ ing impulses: the near or “approximative” — what we identify with — and the far or “distanciating'" — what we are detached from (26). The theory seems accurate enough — we may be drawn into an eighteenth-century personal memoir, like Hes524 REVIEWS tor Thrale’s first-hand account of her husband’s neglect during a miscarriage (the rough carriage ride of the distant past), in a way that speaks directly to our feelings about contemporary spousal insensitivity. Phillips, however, does not include Thrale; rather we get Boswell, and, because of the largeness of the sub­ ject, readers will no doubt suffer like disappointments about omission. Particularly significant are events “on the horizon of living memory” (33): the Glorious Revolution for Hume, Culloden for Scott. While Phillips treats a fair number of lesser known figures, the first section of Society and Sentiment examines Hume and what Phillips maintains is a growing tendency among eighteenthcentury historians to step back from the narrative detail and exercise the “philosophical eye” or draw some general truth from the particular; specifically, we trace Hume’s “philosoph­ ical outlook as it helps shape the History of England” (51) and then the reactions against Hume’s method on the part of Adam Smith and Hugh Blair. Hume’s irony and sentimentalism (re Charles i ’s execution) are also noted as modes of engaging reader sympathy for those who fall victim to events. The second section is entitled “Narratives and Readers” and focusses on the range of forms in the historical representations of the period: the classical tradition as discussed in Adam Smith’s lectures on rhetoric, Dugald Stewart and William Robertson on the ex­ panded subject, Helen Maria Williams and Samuel Ancell on the epistolary form, Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs (of her hus­ band and the Civil War) published in 1806, Adam Ferguson and Lord Kames on sympathetic reading, and, finally, a very sketchy and selective look at the novel and prose romance (the latter is made primarily through an unpublished essay fragment by the parliamentarian James Mackintosh). Phillips warns his reader at the outset that his study is not “a survey of British historiography” and that it focusses largely on a Scottish line of tradition (xv). Fair enough, but the induc­ tive reasoning and extrapolated conclusions have a much greater sweep about them as evidenced by statements like the following: “As...