Reviewed by: British Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century: Challenging the Anglo-French Connection ed. by Valérie Capdeville and Alain Kerhervé James Harriman-Smith Valérie Capdeville and Alain Kerhervé, eds., British Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century: Challenging the Anglo-French Connection ( Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2019). Pp. 320; 10 b/w illus. $115.00 cloth. In Marie-Madeleine Martinet's reading of The Exact Surveigh of the Streets Lanes and Churches Contained within the Ruin of the City of London (1666), what appear as voids—courtyards, quadrangles, and so on—"were the significant meeting points," and thus a negative expression of the "marks of sociability" (36). In Elisabeth Martichou's study of French and English painting academies, we learn that "the grotesque representation of artistic sociability was more pronounced in England than in France" (105). Through Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire's investigations of masonic archives, we discover the extraordinary efforts that the freemasons of Brest took to place their lodge under the jurisdiction of both the Grand Orient de France and the Grand Lodge of England. Annick Cossic-Péricarpin argues that Thomas Smollett's championing of cold-water baths "redefined British sociability" in less foppish terms (142). And Norbert Col relays Mary Shackleton's portrait of Edmund Burke, "this inimitable man … mixing with his own hands pills for the sick poor" (243). The variety of these vignettes and arguments demonstrates the welcome range of work that appears in Valérie Capdeville and Alain Kerhervé's edited collection. The contributors themselves are regrettably a little less varied: they are all in permanent positions at universities in the UK, North America, or France, and none appear to be early career academics. This is partly, I suspect, a result of the book's genesis in a series of conferences held in 2014–15 on British sociability, and the sociable and academic network the editors describe as forming there. From this network come fourteen essays, whose aim is presented to us as follows: to investigate the origins and evolutions of sociability in Britain in the long eighteenth century by challenging the hegemony of the French model of sociability and establishing the ways and means by which a form of national sociability evolved in the British Isles in the long eighteenth century. (4) The relationship between this statement and the concept of "British sociability" is complex. As Michèle Cohen observes in her foreword, this collection's aim of "challenging the hegemony of the French model of sociability" aligns with Roy Porter's argument, in his Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (2000), that Britain was the true home of modernity. At the same time, though, there is a limit here on what "Britain" means. While this statement does not deny that "British sociability" might also have evolved outside of the British Isles (a passage in the volume's conclusion takes up this possibility by mentioning British colonies), it does inform us that the bulk of this volume's investigation into the "origins and evolutions of sociability in Britain" will be focused on the British Isles. The final sentence of the introduction adds another layer of complexity to the claim that "a form of national sociability" evolved in this geographical area between (roughly) 1660 and 1830. A British model of sociability progressively took shape from the Restoration period and developed throughout the eighteenth century, defining [End Page 509] itself thanks to exchanges and tensions with France and expressing itself through paradoxes that both reflected and constructed the national character. (4) Perhaps inevitably, there is something apparently circular about this statement. "A British model of sociability" expresses itself in a way that "both reflected and constructed the national character," and thus, presumably reflected and constructed something that might very well define the Britishness of British sociability. Of course, a strict definition of "British sociability" as that sociability which evolved in the British Isles would prevent this, by setting the relative solidity of "British Isles" against the more nebulous (and politically fraught) terms of Britain and British. To do so, though, would deny much of the interest of the topic of this collection. It is a good thing, therefore, that, throughout...
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Jun 12, 2021
Valeria Varea + 2
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