The Conversational Circle: Rereading the English Novel, 1740–1775 by Betty A. Schellenberg

Abstract

mainly expository, and he does not give his work context by drawing on theorists of visual meaning — no Gombrich, no Panofsky, no semiotics or cultural critique. This book could have been longer, deeper, and fuller. It reports a great deal that is useful, but it has no sustained argument. Its structure is based on chronological sequence. Blewett gives us ready (though less than full) access to fascinating material, and he opens a path to the further work that Defoe and his illustrators deserve. This is certainly an accomplishment that merits our thanks, and it may be mean-spirited of me to suggest, nevertheless, that greater sophistication would have been desirable. j a n is s v il p is / University of Calgary Betty A. Schellenberg, The Conversational Circle: Rereading the English Novel, 1740-1775 (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996). $US 34.95 cloth. In an ingenious attempt to rescue a group of mid eighteenth-century novels usually dismissed as “aesthetic failures,” Betty Schellenberg has identified and named a new sub-genre, the “conversational” novels, which share certain characteristics, notably sociability and consensus, that set them apart from their more successful rivals. The dominant or mainstream novels, which employ a “strongly linear, teleological narrative structure” (2)— a journey, or at the very least a struggle, involving adventure and hardship, and ending in reconciliation or death — have obscured a “handful” (3) of fictions built according to different principles. The straight line is replaced by the circle, specifically the social or domestic circle, often walled about and cut off, exclusive, communal, and harmonious. More than twenty years ago Ronald Paulson pointed out a change in prose fiction in the 1740s, from “a single hero on a pilgrimage to the unit of a family” (Emblem and Expression 130). This book carries Paulson’s observation a step further by distinguishing among the domestic fictions, separating out those whose “centripetal and static narrative structures” (17) leave “the impression of semi-ritualized tableaux or ceremonies” (20) — like the portrait group, or conversation piece, from which Schellenberg borrows her name. Or as the Oxford Companion to Art warns, in the group portrait “the sitters are engaged in conversation or social activity of a not very vigorous character.” Appropriately, Schellenberg begins her analysis with Sarah Fielding’s David Simple (1744), “virtually a model for the intimate circle portrayed in the contemporary fictions to be discussed in this study” (29). The closeknit family formed by the two couples, linked by kinship, is an ideal of 200 “an egalitarian, transparent, unindividualistic [sic], non-conflictual [sic], and self-sufficient means of attaining social stability” (33) and as such sets “a standard that the subsequent texts do not approach” (29). But it also car­ ries the seeds of its own ultimate destruction, as its continuation, Volume the Last, separately treated by Schellenberg in the final chapter, attests. All too typically, its social stability is “fulfilled in terms of traditional hierarchy, polite deception, a denial of desire, an exclusion of sources of conflict, and a dependence on the material supports of leisured sensibility” (33). In addition to the two works by Sarah Fielding, five other novels are treated by Schellenberg. The greatest challenges the advocate of the con­ versational novel faces must be Richardson’s Pamela n and Sir Charles Grandison. Her defence of Pamela II is more ingenious than persuasive. Richardson has to be seen as deliberately setting out “to frustrate reader desire” by making his “novel of marriage and social relations” conform to “the same kinds of limits as must its female protagonist” (30), but there is no reason why this should be so, as Trollope’s wonderful Palliser novels demonstrate. Grandison is extolled as the ultimate “model of the conversa­ tional circle.” In its frictionless transit, “dramatic momentum is reduced to a bare minimum” (60); ironically, in this “the most fully developed and the most optimistic” (52) novel of the conversational circle, conversation itself will finally cease: “between Harriet and Sir Charles there appears to be little need for conversation at all” (65). Although the greater egalitarianism of Amelia — following upon Richard­ son’s relentless class-consciousness — makes its social circle the “most truly inclusive” (76), it is a...