The Anxieties of Idleness: Idleness in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture by Sarah Jordan (review)

Abstract

MLR, 100.2, 2005 487 profession. Where science led, the arts followed, and one of the virtues of this book is the readiness to see fiction within the spectrum of other artistic practices, not least the visual arts and performance. The science might have been rudimentary, patients might still have been dying of what they had always died from, but in the novel and its kindred forms bodies were visible, legible, and understandable: 'As the trained physician observes the body and interprets its symptoms in order to procure health forthe patient, so the informed reader of a novel observes characters in their speech and bod? ily actions in order to arrive at sympathy,understanding, and moral judgement' (p. 23). Sterne, Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, Burney, and Austen are the main novelists to be discussed, though with useful glances too at Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, and Elizabeth Inchbald, as well as forward readings of Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot. Contemporary texts influential in their time in terms of reading the body in its various aspects come from Charles Le Brun, who 'built his theory of the visual representation of the passions around Descartes' model of the body' (p. 2), Johann Lavater, whose name was 'a household word' (p. 52) after his Essays on Physiognomy were published in England in the 1780s, and, on a more de? tailed scale but particularly significant forthe gestural method of acting made famous by Garrick, the Englishman John Bulwer, whose illustrated treatises, Chirologia and Cironomia, published in 1644, addressed 'the Natural Language of the Hand' and the 'Art of Manual Rhetoric' (p. 70). With such knowledge, a Garrick, a Lovelace, or a Henry Crawford were able to perform their parts with conviction, but with such understanding, too, audiences and readers were able to read the dissembler as readily as a Tom Jones, an Uncle Toby, or a Charles Grandison. McMaster might not be breaking new ground here, but she has certainly brought together an impressive range of reference in a highly readable account to enrich our appreciation of the early novelists in a context that remains significantly unexplored. University of Northumbria Allan Ingram The Anxieties of Idleness: Idleness in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Cul? ture. By Sarah Jordan. Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2003. 298 pp. ?42. ISBN 0-8387-5523-2. There have been a number of thematic studies of aspects of eighteenth-century cul? ture recently: fame, luxury,politeness, enthusiasm. Sarah Jordan's contribution to this topic-led bibliography argues that the development of a British identity of industriousness during the period was complicated by the retention ofan ideal of leisure as the marker of social class; one result was an increase in anxiety about the idleness of nonpowerful social groups. The main text begins with chapters on the 'industrious poor' and on images of labour whereby the body ofthe worker was imagined as 'grotesque' if it was perceived to be idle. By contrast, women (ofa certain class, forJordan has little to say ofworking-class women) were, according to the textual evidence presented here, expected to confine useful labour to supervisory roles in the domestic sphere. Writ? ings on Africans and Indians regularly characterized them as indolent, thus implying their readiness for colonization, though also giving rise to fears of the corrupting effects of the tropical climate on Westerners. More internalized senses of industry and idleness are found in the private and public writings of Samuel Johnson, in an individual, psychological case study. The religious sense of the sin of idleness, and the attendant issue of madness, recur more intensely still in the fine chapter on Cowper, which offersa convincing reading of The Task and other poems in terms of conflicting pressures: his sense of being a leisured gentleman beyond work, his religious duty to be useful, his profound belief that no effortcould save him from damnation. 488 Reviews The book is very handsomely produced and well illustrated (Hogarth's series 'In? dustry and Idleness' is reproduced) but the copy-editing could have been tighter. Several points are repeated in virtually identical terms: we are twice told, within nine pages, that British characterizations of Dutch indolence intensified during...