Sarah Fielding Research Articles

Clarissa ’s Readers

Reading Samuel Richardson's Clarissa can be, at one and the same time, an in- tensely intimate and off-putting affair. In one way, the novel's letters position the reader as a privileged confidant, privy to the most delicate details of the heroine's tragedy, as well as a powerless spectator to Lovelace's maniacal plans. The novel, in many ways, encourages its readers to feel as if they were there; Sarah Fielding aptly conveys this model of reading when she describes her reactions to the novel: am all sensation; my heart glows; I am over- whelmed; my only vent is tears; and unless tears could mark my thoughts as legibly as ink, I cannot speak half I feel. I become like the Harlowes' servant, when he spoke not; he could not speak; he looked, he bowed, and with- drew. 1 But reading Clarissa can just as easily produce a sense of disjunction and skepticism. Familiar letters, as we know, were considered textual per- formances in the eighteenth century—and even if a reader believes everything that Clarissa writes, there is no guarantee of identification. How could any reader be like Richardson's virtuous heroine? Martha J. Koehler's Models of Reading: Paragons and Parasites in Richardson, Burney, and Laclos (Bucknell, 2005) offers a suggestive paradigm to under- stand these conflicting responses—shared over the course of the novel's re- ception history—to Richardson's enormously influential model of the didac- tic novel. In a study that utilizes narrative and communication studies theory, along with an expansive definition of the Clarissa text, Koehler's work asks us to question the critical assumption that Richardson offers a straightforward didactic text sympathetic to the plights of eighteenth-century women. In this way, Koehler forcefully challenges the inherited truism that Richardson's moralism is, ultimately, a celebration of female virtue. Positing a double-bar- reled argument, Koehler contends that the female paragon is produced specifically through the female readership's agreement that they are inferior to her. Enabling this reifying and ultimately denigrating structure is

Life after Death: Widows and the English Novel, Defoe to Austen (review)

Reviewed by: Life after Death: Widows and the English Novel, Defoe to Austen Peter Walmsley Karen Bloom Gevirtz . Life after Death: Widows and the English Novel, Defoe to Austen. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005. 218pp. US$46. ISBN 978-0-87413-923-5. Karen Bloom Gevirtz sees the eighteenth century, as have many others, as a time of economic transformation that had a profound impact on all aspects of British life. She argues convincingly, and with admirable clarity, that in the eighteenth-century novel the widow became a locus for articulating the anxieties present in the wider culture about the moral and social consequences of burgeoning mercantile capitalism. Compared to a wife, who had little economic authority, a widow was an independent economic agent, often inheriting a considerable estate or business upon the death of her husband. This power made her a threat to patriarchy, and a frequent scapegoat. Gevirtz supports this claim with research in social history, showing a parallel process in the real world of growing restrictions on women's participation in business, of declining wages for women, and of the waning of many traditionally feminine cottage industries. Novelists provided images of widows as fictional evidence for this exclusion of women from the economic sphere. In particular, Gevirtz makes the case that the flourishing of sensibility within the novel privileged women's affective role. Home and family were women's only proper concerns: "Women could generate wealth, but only by producing Englishmen" (20). Widows, who were sexually experienced but husbandless and typically past childbearing, could not participate in this alternative, subordinate economy of heart and home. The great strength of Life after Death is its impressive synthesis of a vast range of novels, many under-read (for example, Sarah Scott's The History of Cornelia and Clara Reeve's School for Widows receive serious attention). This catholic approach is helpful in substantiating Gevirtz's claim for the concerted conservatism of novelists of both genders and all political stripes in portraying the widow. She organizes her subject according to economic status and activity, with chapters on affluent, working, poor, and criminal widows. The good affluent widows of eighteenth-century fiction use their wealth charitably, for strengthening communities, families, and friendships. A prime example is the maternal community run by the widows of Scott's Millenium Hall, who eschew luxury and their own gain for the good of others. And there are, predictably, numerous bad rich widows who seek their own sexual and material gratification, often at the expense of young heroines; among the better-known examples that Gevirtz discusses are Henry Fielding's Lady Bellaston and Ann Radcliffe's Madame Cheron. Here Gevirtz charts an increasing discomfort with second marriages [End Page 179] (Charlotte Smith's Emmeline and Margaret Lee's Clara Lennox provide examples of shunned and abortive remarriage), which she argues is in part an expression of concerns about the appropriate transfer of property: a rich widow must remain single in order to pass on her dead husband's wealth to his children intact. The chapter devoted to depictions of working widows shows how novelists "carefully distance the working woman from the actuality of commerce" (70). Virtuous working widows are always seen to be dependent on male protection, and their economic impulses are cast as maternal rather than competitive—witness Mrs Miller's reliance on Allworthy and her motherly care of Tom. These widows only work from necessity, and their ultimate reward, as earned by Mrs Darnford in Reeve's School for Widows, is an escape from the world of work into leisure. Destitute widows, such as the Bath widow in Humphry Clinker to whom Matthew Bramble gives twenty pounds, enter fiction only to serve as sites for the exercise of the sympathy and the benevolence of their social superiors. Repaying charity with gratitude and submission, they reinforce social hierarchies. Their antithesis is found in such criminal widows as Moll Flanders, or the Marchioness of Trente from Sarah Fielding's The History of Ophelia, women who in their ambition "exemplify attributes of unregulated, emergent capitalism" (136). Life after Death ends with a chapter devoted to Austen, whose fiction is densely populated with widows rich and poor...

Traveling the World with a Real Friend: The Eighteenth-Century Novel Reconsidered

Traveling the World with a Real Friend: The Eighteenth-Century Novel Reconsidered BETTY A. SCHELLENBERG Paula Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia, eds. A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 550 + xiii pp. $199.95.[David] spent whole Days . . . wishing he could meet with a Friend that he could live with, who could throw off all separate Interests; for where Selfishness reigns in any of the Community, there can be no Happiness. After he had resolved these things several times in his Mind, he took the oddest, most unaccountable Resolution that ever heard of, viz. To travel through the whole World, rather than not meet with a real Friend.From the time he lived with his Brother, he had led so recluse a Life, that he in a manner had shut himself up from the World; but yet when he reflected that what is called the Customs and Manners of Nations, relate chiefly to Ceremonies, and had nothing to do with the Hearts of Men; he concluded, he could sooner enter into the Characters of Men in the great Metropolis where he lived, than if he went into foreign Countries; where, not understanding the Languages so readily, it would be more difficult to find out the Sentiments of others, which all he wanted to know. He resolved therefore to take a Journey through London; not as some Travellers do, to see the Buildings, the Streets, to know the Distances from one Place to another, with many more Sights of equal Use and Improvement; but his design to seek out one capable of being a real Friend, and to assist all those, who had been thrown into Misfortunes by the ill Usage of others.He had good Sense enough to know, that Mankind in their Natures are much the same every where; and that if he could go through one great Town, and not meet with a generous Mind, it would be in vain to seek farther.- Sarah Fielding, The Adventures of David Simple (1744)Sarah Fielding's The Adventures of David Simple is not even mentioned in Paula Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia's A Companion to the Eighteenth- Century English Novel and Culture, and yet I reminded of it often as I read this latest offering in the Blackwell Companion series. David Simple announces his intention to take in the whole world and then circumscribes that world to his own city; he walks the streets of a great metropolis yet peers into hearts. Fielding's hero thus invokes both a venerable tradition of travel accounts and a growing fascination with the burgeoning city of London, both a universalizing discourse of sentiment and a parochial discomfort with foreign customs and languages. As his quest proceeds, he encounters the new credit economy and invokes tired gender stereotypes (with the help of Henry Fielding's revision to Sarah's novel). He listens to one tale of scandalous romance set in France and several novelistic accounts of vulnerable Englishwomen resisting seduction, while passing through his own series of Spectator-like encounters with satiric character types. He observes and, in Volume the Last (1753), is finally entrapped by a growing web of consumerism, a lack of wage-earning opportunities, and an inability to pay the rent, finding in the process that happiness can no longer be defined in communal rather than economic terms. In short, David Simple is capacious and multifaceted enough to be illuminated by virtually all of the studies gathered into the Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture-not least in that its author calls it, not a novel, but a moral romance.Thus David Simple, a popular and respected work in its time, demonstrates the value of this collection of twenty-three essays that sets out, according to Ingrassia's introduction, to upend some of the traditionally held 'truths' about the (1). One of these mistaken truths is that of the prominence of the novel in eighteenth-century Britain: as the relatively recent digital accessibility of catalogs and printed materials of the period has made abundantly clear, the novel far from being the most popular print form of the period, and, in Ingrassia's words, was not even a recognized or codified genre until well after mid-century (and, arguably, later) (1). …

Cassandra Brydges (1670–1735), First Duchess of Chandos, Life and Letters by Rosemary O’Day

58 losopher who maintained a consistent and outspoken commitment to ‘‘feminist Country ideology.’’ Sarah Scott assumed the title ‘‘author’’ as ‘‘a merely occasional label’’ and dreamed of transcending ‘‘barriers of gender, geography, genre and status.’’ Ms. Schellenberg’s comparison of the different modes of selffashioning (Sarah Fielding as a ‘‘person of letters’’ and Charlotte Lennox as a ‘‘professional writer’’) provides us with an understanding of ‘‘the interdependent double faces of the modern author.’’ A chapter that compares eighteenthcentury evaluations of less well-known, but also prolific, novel writers—the Minifie sisters and Edward Kimber— argues that the period’s standards of aesthetic value were applied universally , without regard to the author’s gender. The book’s final chapters use Frances Burney as their starting point for a study of the ‘‘strategic naming and forgetting’’ undertaken by women writing literary history in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Ms. Schellenberg’s excellent overview of the mid-century print marketplace questions any simple notion of gender as the primary determinant in a woman author’s career. Like all books that seek to shift a critical paradigm, this one sometimes overstates its case. ‘‘If I have succeeded at all,’’ writes Ms. Schellenberg, ‘‘we may find new ways to talk about mid-eighteenth-century women writers—as variously ambitious, variously professionalized, variously influential—even, as interesting.’’ The book implies, at times, that critics who study sexism reify women as passive victims, whereas those who focus their attention on other concerns restore purposeful agency to them, an opposition that depreciates the complex assessments of power and powerlessness provided by an earlier generation of critics. In attending to the gap between ‘‘the eighteenth-century evidence and the late twentieth-century perspective,’’ Ms. Schellenberg perhaps underestimates the extent to which all historical narratives are shaped by contemporary concerns; it behooves us to reflect on our critical investments in relation to the present, as well as the past—especially in a book as polemical as this. Ms. Schellenberg has thrown down the gauntlet, and it will be interesting to see how critics writing on eighteenth-century women authors in the years ahead respond to her challenge . Alison Conway University of Western Ontario ROSEMARY O’DAY. Cassandra Brydges (1670–1735), First Duchess of Chandos , Life and Letters. Woodbridge: Boydell , 2007. Pp. viii ⫹ 442. $145; £75. In eighteenth-century history, politics and patronage, James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos (1674–1744), protégé of the powerful general, John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, is an interesting case study. (I was so intrigued that I wrote his biography Portrait of a Patron. The Patronage and Collecting of James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos (1674–1744), Ashgate, 2007.) At his right hand, and clearly a figure worthy of study in her own right, is his second wife, his cousin, Lady Cassandra Willoughby (1670–1735). In 1713, Cassandra gave up her single life of housekeeping for her brother to marry at forty-three, and her dowry provided the money—£23,000—for her new husband to expand his country house at Cannons, now the site of North London Collegiate Girls’ School. Cassandra’s 59 experience, good taste, economic independence , and her importance to the political and artistic activities of her husband , are Ms. O’Day subjects. Although Joan Johnson’s short biography Excellent Cassandra (Stroud, 1981) is out of print, Ms. O’Day’s is not a new biography of the Duchess, but an annotated volume of ‘‘all known extant letters’’ taken from three principal archives : Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Record Office, Stratford-upon-Avon; North London Collegiate School; and the Huntington Library. The letters are compelling documents of an early eighteenth-century, well-connected, family -oriented noblewoman, and Ms. O’Day contextualizes them well in her excellent Introduction. She evaluates the recent scholarship relating to the role of women in areas assumed to be traditional male preoccupations, for instance patronage networks and financial investments . Duchess Cassandra stated that the purpose of her marriage was to be useful to her family and to further their interests . To this end, she sought from her husband political and other posts for her relatives, mediating between them and the Duke. She also applied herself to matchmaking...

Italy

Italy Elena Kilian Francesca Orestano (Ed) Tempi moderni nella children's literature. Storie, personaggi, strumenti critici [Modern times in 'children's literature'. Stories, characters, literary-critical tools) (Series: LIMC 5) Milan: CUEM 2007 225pp ISBN 9788860011206€14 Click for larger view View full resolution A continuation of Le guide del mattino. Alle origini della 'children's literature' [The morning guides. On the origins of 'children's literature'], this volume of collected essays is devoted to the study of modern British children's literature. The editor, professor of English at Milan State University and since 2007 host of an English-language website on the study of children's books in Italy (http://users.unimi.it/childlit/), brings together eight contributions by Italian Anglicists. The period of the Enlightenment is represented by the essay 'Puer oeconomicus', which looks at work, wealth, and social rise in 18th-century narrative children's literature, and by Giulia Margon's article on Sarah Fielding's The Governess, or The Little Female Academy (1749), the first British novel to be published specifically for girls. Matteo Crivelli's contribution on scientific phenomena and issues in Lewis Carroll's Alice novels is followed by four essays on famous protagonists of children's books from the Victorian era to the present: Winnie-the-Pooh, Mary Poppins, Harry Potter and, in Orestano's essay, child protagonists in 19th-century urban novels. An annotated bibliography of British children's literature from the beginnings to the postmodern present completes the volume, which, thanks to its broad thematic and historic scope, succeeds in uncovering the intellectual and cultural roots of British children's literature. [End Page 56] Copyright © 2007 Bookbird, Inc. Reproduction of articles in Bookbird requires permission in writing from the editor. Items from Focus IBBY may be reprinted freely to disseminate the work of IBBY.

The Practice of Quixotism: Postmodern Theory and Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing by Scott Paul Gordon

41 SCOTT PAUL GORDON. The Practice of Quixotism: Postmodern Theory and Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006. Pp. xviii ⫹ 240. $65. In early modern England, when reason contemplating Nature had virtually supplanted faith contemplating Revelation as the touchstone of truth, it was hoped that, finally, certainty of knowledge was within reach. Yet as Mr. Gordon explains, the prerequisite for direct experience of Nature was that the mind purge itself of what Bacon called idols, internalized forms drawn from tradition, and free itself from what Locke called fetters, ‘‘other mens Opinions’’ and the ‘‘Pastor.’’ Only then might reason apprehend reality passively and truly, as in a mirror. Eighteenth-century writers, however, raised serious doubts about this epistemological project. Those who perceived reality through internal filters were depicted at the time as quixotes. In ‘‘orthodox’’ quixote stories they would end by finally opening their eyes and seeing reality directly. But in ‘‘unorthodox’’ stories, which Mr. Gordon emphasizes here, readers would be trapped in quixotic visions and persuaded that preconceptions were well nigh inevitable. Recent critics are mistaken, he thinks, when they present Arabella, the heroine of Lennox’s Female Quixote (1752), as a feminist whose quixotism is a strategy to resist her father’s authority. Comparing Lennox’s work to quixote narratives written fifty years later by Edgeworth, Hamilton, Tenney, and Barrett—stories that replicate the Female Quixote’s formula —Mr. Gordon shows Arabella as an ‘‘orthodox’’ quixote who finally opens her eyes. Critics take the wrong tack when they stress ‘‘the content of Arabella’s quixotism,’’ the romance tradition where women had power, and ignore the ‘‘structure’’ of the novel, in which Lennox undercuts Arabella repeatedly to reveal her perceptions as aberrant. What seems to clinch Mr. Gordon’s argument is that Edgeworth and Barrett read the story just as he does. In Sarah Fielding’s David Simple (1744), the virtuous hero is incapable of discerning hypocrisy. Although Fielding shows discomfort with ‘‘suspicion,’’ she licenses it when ‘‘accurate observation’’ of another’s behavior has shown that something is wrong. Yet Simple never opens his eyes, even when ‘‘almost infallible proof’’ is offered him, for no evidence is ever sufficient for him to judge another harshly. Fielding thus undercuts the usefulness of direct experience for anyone choosing to view others through an internal lens. Mr. Gordon contends that when critics read Mary Wortley Montagu’s response to Swift’s ‘‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’’ (1730) as an ‘‘orthodox’’ quixote story, they fail to notice its form. Whereas Swift occupies ‘‘a privileged epistemological position ’’ above Strephon in the satire and creates a ‘‘reality effect’’ by his quasi-scientific anatomy of Celia’s room, Montagu responds by trapping Swift inside a Restoration genre. She tells the story of how he visited a prostitute, found himself impotent, and then lashed out at the woman in angry satire. She thereby explodes the ‘‘reality effect ’’ of his satire by giving it the form of a libertine lament on sexual dysfunction: ‘‘No critic has before enrolled Montagu’s poem in the genre of the Restoration ‘imperfect enjoyment’ or ‘disappointment’ poem as developed by Etherege, Behn, Wycherley and Rochester.’’ 42 Mr. Gordon discusses two works beyond the Scriblerian’s purview, Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783–1785) and Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). In both, the general epistemological ‘‘difficulty of knowing others and even myself’’ (quoting William Godwin) is highlighted; in the latter, the practice of quixotism is seen as salutary and spiritualizing. By the end of the century, Mr. Gordon concludes, we have arrived at the opposite pole of Bacon’s project to achieve a passive, mirror-like experience of reality. Replying to recent critical theory, according to which all human beings are quixotes incapable of seeing the surrounding world except through ‘‘cultural lenses of which we are largely and necessarily unaware,’’ Mr. Gordon in the final chapter defends agency and argues that we need not be blindly gripped by our beliefs. We can surely be self-conscious quixotes who take responsibility for preconceptions and ‘‘actively’’ shape the world we ‘‘ostensibly find.’’ He sets his analysis of these quixote stories against an impressive panorama of eighteenth-century works. From his reflections—a...

The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Betty A. Schellenberg

57 fidence of a Davies or Trapnel, transcending class divides? What can the shift from mother of a daughter (Davies) to daughter of a mother (Trapnel) to mother of a sect (Fell) show us? Certainly anachronistic discourses illuminate ; we are made of them. Yet that the women themselves might have had a point of view never crosses Ms. Feroli ’s mind. There is also a curious animus to real female power: ‘‘Of course, Anne’s monarchical power was far less than that of James.’’ Fell’s claim that women first witnessed the resurrection is ‘‘overstated and extravagant.’’ Instead of recognizing an insurgent and undeniable claim, regularly erased by a patriarchal tradition, Ms. Feroli disputes the necessity of female witness to the progress of Christianity. After all, ‘‘according to all four gospel writers, Christ appears before all of his apostles shortly after his resurrection.’’ Ms. Feroli seems unaware that the earliest gospel, Mark, indeed ends with the women, afraid. The resurrection appearance in Mark was added later by the tradition that Davies , Trapnel, and Fell were successfully resisting and adapting. It is all rather strange; would it were more interesting. Regina Janes Skidmore College BETTY A. SCHELLENBERG. The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2005. Pp. x ⫹ 250. $85. In the 1970s and 1980s, feminist literary critics and cultural historians advanced the thesis that the eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of a separate-spheres gender system. This thesis, argued by Nancy Armstrong, Janet Todd, Jane Spencer, and others, stresses the predominance in the eighteenth century of a new model of sexual difference, one that identified women with the virtues of the home and granted them the dubious honor of representing, collectively, society’s moral barometer. Revisiting the grounds on which the domestic thesis was built, critics recently have constructed very different historical edifices. In The Gentleman’s Daughter (1997), Amanda Vickery argued that ‘‘the increased harping on the proper female sphere might just as easily demonstrate a concern that more women were seen to be active outside the home rather than proof that they were so confined .’’ New modes of urban life afforded women greater, rather than less, freedom in the public sphere, Vickery suggests , and stringent codes of propriety served as the means by which men and women alike proved their gentility and social authority. Ms. Schellenberg, like Vickery, challenges an earlier generation of feminist orthodoxy in her study of mideighteenth -century British women writers whose authorship was shaped as much by geographical location, modes of publication, professional connections, and patronage networks as it was by gender. Claiming that previous histories of women writers—particularly those of mid-eighteenth century authors—have simplified a complex narrative, Ms. Schellenberg’s rigorous analysis of each author’s works displaces gender as ‘‘the prior explanatory cause overriding all other causal factors.’’ She reads Frances Sheridan’s The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biddulph alongside John Home’s Douglas to stress their mutual investment in the ideals of disinterested virtue and heroism, an investment connected to the political ideologies associated with Lord Bute and the court of George III. Frances Brooke appears as a political phi- 58 losopher who maintained a consistent and outspoken commitment to ‘‘feminist Country ideology.’’ Sarah Scott assumed the title ‘‘author’’ as ‘‘a merely occasional label’’ and dreamed of transcending ‘‘barriers of gender, geography, genre and status.’’ Ms. Schellenberg’s comparison of the different modes of selffashioning (Sarah Fielding as a ‘‘person of letters’’ and Charlotte Lennox as a ‘‘professional writer’’) provides us with an understanding of ‘‘the interdependent double faces of the modern author.’’ A chapter that compares eighteenthcentury evaluations of less well-known, but also prolific, novel writers—the Minifie sisters and Edward Kimber— argues that the period’s standards of aesthetic value were applied universally , without regard to the author’s gender. The book’s final chapters use Frances Burney as their starting point for a study of the ‘‘strategic naming and forgetting’’ undertaken by women writing literary history in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Ms. Schellenberg’s excellent overview of the mid-century print marketplace questions any simple notion of gender as the primary determinant in a woman author’s career...

The practice of Quixotism: postmodern theory and eighteenth-century women's writing

Introduction: The Quixote Trope Historicizing Quixote and the Scandal of Quixotism Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote and Orthodox Quixotism Suspicion and Experience in Sarah Fielding's David Simple Mary Wortley Montagu and the Quixotic Dream of Objectivity Quixotic Perception in Sophia Lee's The Recess Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and the Practice of Quixotism Epilogue: Beyond Quixotism?: Quixotism and Contemporary Theory

‘So Common-Hackneyed in the Eyes of Men’: Banal Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Novel

This essay was runner-up in the 2006 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Eighteenth Century Section. Scholars of Shakespeare's reception still conclude that he was elevated in the eighteenth century from provincial playwright to ‘secular scripture’, his words reverently spoken ‘everywhere’. This article proposes that there was a negative side to this omnipresence. Through the lens of the eighteenth-century novel, it examines the hitherto unstudied phenomenon of ‘banal Shakespeare’: a Shakespeare whose phrases are overused by polite society. It focuses on those instances in the fiction of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sarah Fielding and Laurence Sterne when the novelists deliberately have their characters quote Shakespeare in ways that are trite, cliched or compelled by society. Asking whether ‘banal Shakespeare’ is a threat, or an aid, to the ‘rise of bardolatry’, this article contributes a new sense of the multiple, ambiguous meanings of ‘Shakespeare’ in the eighteenth century, and develops the study of novelistic quotation.

JANE SPENCER, Literary Relations: Kinship and the Canon 1660-1830.

JANE SPENCER's book blends myth with biography as she seeks to trace the interplay between familial relations and the creation of a national literary tradition in the long eighteenth century. As such an approach implies, the result is a critical study that manages to be simultaneously wide-ranging and specific, integrating individual familiar stories into the larger historical picture of the emergence of a canon. She rightly points out that while individual kinship relations did not change in the same ways or at the same rates as literary uses of kinship metaphors, there is much value in synthesizing the two in her study, especially given the numerous examples of actual literary kin, like Henry and Sarah Fielding. As we expect from Spencer, her personal interests lie in addressing where women writers fit into a familiar/literary structure that was historically patriarchal, and considering the extent to which such patriarchal structuring metaphors inform our own understanding of canonicity today. She argues on page 17 that despite the emergence of a literally and symbolically masculine canon, ‘women always had a marginal, shifting, and sometimes unsettling place’.

An Addition to the Sarah Fielding Canon: A Comparison between the Horace of Corneille and the Roman Father Of Mr Whitehead (1750)

An Addition to the Sarah Fielding Canon: A Comparison between the Horace of Corneille and the Roman Father Of Mr Whitehead (1750)

The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture by Paul Goring

162 gernon Sidney, and John Locke, we will observe the emergence of distinctively liberal and republican modes of thought and discourse.’’ For the most part, it succeeds wonderfully. Mr. Ward’s simple but profound contribution to the debate shows that the liberal and republican interpretations present a false dichotomy—they both can be true. The intellectual forces that shaped the Exclusion Crisis and Glorious Revolution drew strength from the principles of natural liberty and individual rights as well as from the principles of civic virtue and political participation . The Whig political discourse of the period emphasized the value of liberty as well as the importance of virtue, which means that it is overly simplistic and schematic to reduce the whole conversation to a single paradigm. Mr. Ward does an excellent job of recreating the intellectual milieu of the Exclusion Crisis by revivifying the major alternative political philosophies, many of which are virtually unknown today, that formed the horizon of the early modern debate over sovereignty. The only pervasive problem in the work is that in trying to recreate this intellectual world, Mr. Ward sometimes finds his material slipping away from him. He shows that the liberal and republican traditions in Anglo-American thought were originally part of a single discourse of opposition against divine right absolutism, yet the differences between these traditions are often as glaring as their shared rejection of absolutism . Mr. Ward himself seems to feel the problem. He says that he has tried to ‘‘reconcile the different strands of this early modern philosophy into the complex heterogeneous whole it originally was.’’ But in what sense are the parts ‘‘reconciled’’ when the whole remains complexly ‘‘heterogeneous.’’ Matthew Simpson PAUL GORING. The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2005. Pp. 222. $50; $22.50 (paper). Aaron Hill’s The Art of Acting argues that actors summon up bodily signs in performance; a grammar of gestures manifests specific, identifiable ‘‘passions .’’ For Mr. Goring, power sharing and capitalism created a need in the middle class for the means of gentility, and orators revealed a model of politeness through physical movement and eloquence in public and in conduct books. British culture saw the human body as objectively performing ‘‘eloquent’’ movement and gestures in public; thus the body responds to cultural developments . The body in place and in motion is the site on which permutations of British ‘‘polite society’’ were displayed, recognized, and valued. While stage speech in the eighteenth century has been studied extensively, the body as a medium for public oratory and its attendant gestures has not. Mr. Goring distinguishes between polite bodily discourse and that of enthusiastic bodies, such as those ‘‘associated with Methodism,’’ especially the exuberant preaching of John Henley, who challenged religious propriety. Thomas Sheridan believed systematically ‘‘fixing ’’ British oratory and bodily performance would make English speech more natural than the ornamented French oratory , and these improvements would lend cultural coherence to the English nation. Bodily eloquence also appears in the sentimental novel and language of feeling. Readers ‘‘stage’’ politeness by 163 learning and sharing with others. Works by Richardson—particularly Pamela— Sarah Fielding, Frances Sheridan, and Henry Mackenzie constitute a genre of sentimental fiction featuring performance . Mr. Goring’s Epilogue examines Sterne’s oratory and bodily expression in sermons and literature. In sermonizing , Sterne’s indecorous wit and bawdiness did not exhibit appropriate gravitas, but in Tristram Shandy and Sentimental Journey he gently mocks scholars who produced technical formulae for public oration and somatic delivery: Corporal Trim’s now-famous reading of Sterne’s own sermon. Rebecca Shapiro Westminster College LYNN FESTA. Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2006. Pp. 312. $55. Recently, I overheard a renowned eighteenth-century scholar opine, ‘‘Aren’t we through with sensibility yet?’’ For some, it has been a long twenty years in which studies of sentiment have come of age and matured. By refusing to accept sentimentality on its own terms, however, Ms. Festa discovers some new dimensions to explore. She stakes the originality of this book on her insights into the concept of the person, but I find that the project is most memorable for unearthing the volatile politics of...

The Cambridge Companion to Henry Fielding, ed. by C. J. Rawson

127 prime attraction of Mr. Ross’s edition is that it gathers the correspondence, including Arbuthnot’s letters to and from Swift and Pope, in one place for the first time. While these can of course be found in Sherburn’s and Williams’s and Woolley’s editions of Pope’s and Swift’s Correspondence, respectively, a different perspective on these letters opens up when they are read in the context of Arbuthnot ’s other correspondence. Readers of the Scriblerian will also want to read what Mr. Ross has to say in the sections on ‘‘The Arbuthnot-Swift Letters’’ and ‘‘The Arbuthnot-Pope Letters’’ in Part III, a ‘‘Dissertation’’ in which, in six chapters, he not only explains the rationale behind his edition, but considers the letters as ‘‘Literary Documents’’ and discusses the ideas expressed in them in detail. J. A. Downie Goldsmiths College, London The Cambridge Companion to Henry Fielding, ed. C. J. Rawson. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2007. Pp. xv ⫹ 202. $85; $29.99 (paper). This Companion includes an Introduction and Mr. Rawson’s essay, ‘‘Fielding’s Style,’’ plus eleven ‘‘specially -commissioned’’ pieces on Fielding ’s life, his theatrical career, his individual prose fictions, his periodical journalism, his relations with female authority , his social pamphlets, and his critical reputation. The Companion is satisfyingly complete and remarkably uniform. None of the essays strays very far from the template proposed over thirty years ago by Mr. Rawson in his Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal Under Stress. The individual authors regularly cite (fourteen times) a Rawson precedent and repeatedly portray Fielding as struggling, typically unsuccessfully, to reconcile literary precedents with social change. Thus, in ‘‘Fielding’s Theatrical Career,’’ Thomas Keymer rightly places Fielding’s plays between ballad operas in the mode of Gay and sentimental comedies in the mode of Cibber, a characterization that has been around since the early 1980s, but then, making the Rawson-move, sees Fielding looking toward ‘‘theatre of the absurd’’ rather than a new genre (‘‘true history’’). Paul Baines in ‘‘Joseph Andrews’’ rightly describes Fielding’s ‘‘overwriting’’ rather than parodying of Pamela, but then, in a complicated version of the Rawsonmove , mischaracterizes Fielding’s narrator as an ‘‘authority figure,’’ as a ‘‘Patrician narrator,’’ as ‘‘every inch the gentleman.’’ Of course, Fielding’s narrator is much more flexible, always ready to admit to what he does not know and does not remember; indeed, he actually is a first-person narrator. But a Rawsonite needs an authority to put under stress. After the obligatory Rawson citation, Nicholas Hudson in ‘‘Tom Jones’’ focuses on ‘‘antiquated modes of social authority’’ in asserting that Fielding’s ‘‘irony’’ pervades the novel as part of its bespeaking ‘‘the upheaval of perceived values.’’ This, of course, is why Tom Jones inherits and unifies the estates of Allworthy and Western and provides an heir to them, much to the delight (and praise) of all in the neighborhood. In Amelia, Peter Sabor, after citing Mr. Rawson, argues that Amelia falls between, as it were, the two stools of classicism (its Virgilian precedent) and domestic detail (Ms. Atkinson’s cherry brandy). The first edition of the novel, with Amelia’s problematic and embar- 128 rassing shattered nose, is better than the second, which Fielding carefully revised , because it is more provoking, more challenging. Bertrand Goldgar’s ‘‘Fielding’s Periodical Journalism’’ celebrates The Covent Garden Journal, which Mr. Goldgar has edited authoritatively and insightfully , and dismisses the political periodicals that preceded it. The True Patriot , rather than building Whig consensus during the ‘45, was ‘‘ineffective’’; The Jacobite’s Journal only brought Fielding ‘‘distress.’’ Jane Spencer’s ‘‘Fielding and Female Authority’’ places Fielding during a time when, as Samuel Johnson convincingly argued, ‘‘female cultural power was visible, highly contested, and especially associated with both the theatre and the novel.’’ She perceptively describes Fielding’s ‘‘mixture of responses to female authority,’’ Kitty Clive, Sarah Fielding, and Charlotte Lennox won authority through their talents; theirs were achievements Fielding acknowledged and honored. He wrote for Clive, even as he deferred to his first patron, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. In Ms. Spencer ’s innovative account, the Augustan Ideal is not under stress so much as any easy dismissal of Fielding as a misogynist . Mr...

The Governess; or, The Little Female Academy by Sarah Fielding

197 difficulties posed by Mr. Prince’s dense argument. What does the evidence of this hypothetical model suggest about Mr. Prince’s analysis of the genre, about the way he has constructed his narrative, and about the limitations of his overall approach? To begin with, the book appears to be more narrowly focused than its title suggests, for it concentrates on religious dialogues, more specifically, on the clash between ‘‘Christian Neoplatonism ’’ and philosophical skepticism . It thus overlooks dialogues (Hobbes’s A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England, 1681), that are devoted to other topics. Similar constraints may have compelled Mr. Prince to omit consideration of the Cambridge Platonists from his discussion of Neoplatonism in the opening chapter, their obvious influence on Shaftesbury and perhaps even Berkeley notwithstanding . He might have cited Henry More’s Divine Dialogues (1674) as a rudimentary prototype of the eighteenth-century dialogue on religion and noted that Shaftesbury appropriated the term ‘‘plastic Nature’’ in his unpublished essay on the Judgment of Hercules from Ralph Cudworth. Mr. Prince later reports in a footnote to an intriguing chapter on the Platonic revival that he located more than thirty separately issued translations, imitations, or discussions of Plato, Xenophon, and Plotinus between 1730 and 1755, but they are not listed in an Appendix. In his truncated history of the dialogue , Mr. Prince traces a pattern of rise and fall, in which rational theology ultimately fails to overcome the skepticism that continually menaces it. The quest for universal norms is thereby displaced onto the new discourse of aesthetics , in which beauty rather than truth becomes the object of inquiry, and onto an emergent genre of prose fiction, the novel, that deals in probabilities rather than certainties. While the digital reprint makes this elegantly constructed argument available to students, what led me through the text were Prince’s incisive and penetrating analyses of Berkeley, Hume, and Ramsay. At the same time, I wish Mr. Prince had been allowed a brief preface to the second edition. In it, he might have taken account of works published on the philosophical dialogue since 1996, especially Timothy Dykstal ’s important The Luxury of Skepticism : Politics, Philosophy and Dialogue in the English Public Sphere, 1660– 1740 (Virginia, 2001). Charles H. Hinnant The University of Missouri-Columbia SARAH FIELDING. The Governess; or, The Little Female Academy, ed. Candace Ward. Peterborough, Ont. Broadview , 2005. Pp. 242. $14.95. Frequently characterized as one of the first children’s books, The Governess has important implications for adults. It offers a model for childhood education with sources in Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education and a subdued call for reforms in the education of young women with affinities to those proposed by the two great Marys— Astell and Wollstonecraft. It went through four editions between 1749 and 1758, and extracts from it appeared in anthologies of children’s stories through the 1920s. The story is about nine students of Miss Teachum who, in the course of a ‘‘communal bildungsroman,’’ grow beyond their initial moral failings in- 198 to a ‘‘harmonious society.’’ Education, in this narrative, is a means to reform. Perhaps most postmodern about their change is that it happens through narrative , through the stories they share. Ms. Ward’s Introduction is both frustrating and enlightening. She tries to include too much: a short biography of Sarah Fielding (and all the complicated and painful family conflicts that her mercurial father initiated), a précis of Fielding’s publications, an interpretation of The Governess, a commentary on eighteenth-century educational reform. The edition’s appendices are equally wide-ranging: excerpts from reviews of The Governess, from Fielding’s correspondence , from her defense of Clarissa , and from Locke and other writers on education. Lost in all this is any sense of how or why Fielding could be such an experimental and eclectic writer. Early on, Ms. Ward refers to Michael McKeon’s account of the English novel as an amalgam, as a genre that originates in the dialectic between Fielding’s brother Henry and her friend Richardson. She does not pursue that insight and thus fails to establish an illuminating context for The Governess. This story about...

Novel beginnings: experiments in eighteenth-century English fiction

In this study intended for general readers, eminent critic Patricia Meyer Spacks provides a fresh, engaging account of the early history of the English novel. Novel Beginnings departs from the traditional, narrow focus on the development of the realistic novel to emphasize the many kinds of experimentation that marked the genre in the eighteenth century before its conventions were firmly established in the nineteenth. Treating well-known works like Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy in conjunction with less familiar texts such as Sarah Fielding's The Cry (a kind of hybrid novel and play) and Jane Barker's A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (a novel of adventure replete with sentimental verse and numerous subnarratives), the book evokes the excitement of a multifaceted and unpredictable process of growth and change. Investigating fiction throughout the 1700s, Spacks delineates the individuality of specific texts while suggesting connections among novels. She sketches a wide range of forms and themes, including Providential narratives, psychological thrillers, romans a clef, sentimental parables, political allegories, Gothic romances, and many others. These multiple narrative experiments show the impossibility of thinking of eighteenth-century fiction simply as a precursor to the nineteenth-century novel, Spacks shows. Instead, the vast variety of engagements with the problems of creating fiction demonstrates that literary history--by no means inexorable--might have taken quite a different course.

The secret history of emotion: from Aristotle's Rhetoric to modern brain science

Princess Diana's death was a tragedy that provoked mourning across the globe; the death of a homeless person, more often than not, is met with apathy. How can we account for this uneven distribution of emotion? Can it simply be explained by the prevailing scientific understanding? Uncovering a rich tradition beginning with Aristotle, Daniel M. Gross' Secret History of Emotion offers a counterpoint to the way we generally understand emotions today. Through a radical rereading of Aristotle, Seneca, Thomas Hobbes, Sarah Fielding, and Judith Butler, among others, Gross reveals a persistent intellectual current that considers emotions as psychosocial phenomena. The Roman Stoics, for instance, offer insight into the reasons political passions are distributed to some people but not to others. Contemporary theorists like Judith Butler, meanwhile, explain to us how psyches are shaped by power. To supplement his argument, Gross also provides a history and critique of the dominant modern view of emotions, expressed in Darwinism and neurobiology, in which they are considered organic, personal feelings independent of social circumstances. The result is a convincing work that rescues the study of the passions from science and returns it to the humanities and the art of rhetoric.

The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain (review)

Reviewed by: The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain Patricia Meyer Spacks (bio) Betty A. Schellenberg. The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. x+250pp. US$80. ISBN 0–521–65060–6. This enlightening study further undermines the already tottering doctrine of "separate spheres" in eighteenth-century Britain. By examining careers rather than only individual works of female writers, Schellenberg makes a powerful case for eighteenth-century women's participation in public life. She exposes the inadequacy of literary criticism or historiography that assumes female subordination as the fact of paramount importance, and she raises far-reaching critical and historical questions. Schellenberg does not argue that female literary careers duplicated male ones. On the contrary, a conspicuous virtue of her book is its careful distinctions. Thus Sarah Fielding, a "woman of letters," can preserve an identity and imagine a career not fully professionalized, in contrast to the comparably prolific Charlotte Lennox, who saw herself and was widely seen as a professional writer. Sarah Scott deliberately obscured the extent of her literary production, in effect denying connection between her private and public life, through anonymity, pseudonymity, and disjunctive publication by various booksellers. [End Page 521] She burned her own letters and virtually disappeared from literary view: Clara Reeve in The Progress of Romance (1785) mentions Millenium Hall and The History of Sir George Ellison, but neither links them nor names their author. Frances Sheridan positioned herself to comment on public issues; Frances Brooke consciously supported a specific political agenda. The young Frances Burney fashioned an artful persona as "author," purposefully separating herself from more amateurish female writers. Possibilities for female career-shaping, Schellenberg amply demonstrates, were multifarious. Surveying women's careers, Schellenberg reminds us of the varied literary production that characterized them. Fielding not only wrote novels and that remarkable experimental fiction, The Cry; her contemporaries considered her especially distinguished for her translation of Xenophon. Lennox published a periodical, poetry, plays, and several translations, including a version of Shakespeare's sources, complete with critical commentary. Scott wrote history, as did Brooke, who also experimented with poetry, plays, and a periodical. Like their male counterparts, then, these women, writing for money, responded to market realities. Reaction to their work in reviews, Schellenberg shows, often ignored their gender. Contrary to much recent critical assumption, women writers were not universally patronized or ignored. Reviewers sought in their work, as in men's, human insight, moral sensitivity, wit, and imaginative development. When a reviewer found such qualities, he praised them. Schellenberg does not, however, claim that women's literary careers proved easy. Female authors shared men's difficulties, and they might find them—well, more difficult. Lennox, with two children and an irresponsible husband, faced urgent economic problems, which she confronted on occasion by soliciting subscriptions without producing a volume to justify them. Sarah Fielding, an unmarried gentlewoman, also financially needy, relied on the kindness of friends. Burney used The Witlings to express her annoyance about the pressures of female amateurism. Schellenberg not only describes women's literary careers, but also delineates and speculates about their cultural context. Her investigations include inquiry about the literary standards applied by eighteenth-century reviewers and about what she calls (borrowing the term from Clifford Siskin) "the Great Forgetting": the process by which female writers disappeared from the canon in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The standards of the eighteenth century, she argues, might provide useful suggestions for our own evaluations of early women writers, and "the Great Forgetting" offers a cautionary tale. Previous accounts of how women became "forgotten" literary figures have stressed male efforts to regularize the canon. Schellenberg emphasizes the contributions women themselves made to the elimination of their predecessors. The famous Bluestocking correspondence of Catherine Talbot and Elizabeth Carter (published in 1809) systematically denigrates Lennox, on moral grounds, and elevates Sarah Fielding. Burney claims male but not female precursors. Frances Brooke, purportedly complaining about the devaluation of women novelists, names not a single one. Even Reeve, who mentions [End Page 522] numerous women in her genealogy of the novel, illustrates principles by which women might be "forgotten." Such instances do not add up to...

The History of Ophelia (review)

Reviewed by: The History of Ophelia Betty A. Schellenberg (bio) Sarah Fielding . The History of Ophelia. Edited by Peter Sabor Broadview. 320. $18.95 Peter Sabor concludes his critical introduction to Sarah Fielding's The History of Ophelia (1760) with the observation that 'In the mid-eighteenth century, Sarah Fielding was the second most popular English woman novelist, behind only Eliza Haywood. And just as Haywood, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, has become a canonical author, more intensively studied than almost all of her contemporaries, male or female, Sarah Fielding's writings seem set to become widely read and vigorously debated once again.' That Sabor's prediction, supported by the very recent scholarship informing his introduction, convinces is in large part due to his [End Page 272] own leading role in bringing the work of this very accomplished Fielding out from the shadow of her brother Henry's reputation. Having previously edited two of Sarah Fielding's most important works - The Adventures of David Simple, her debut novel, together with its 1753 sequel Volume the Last (Kentucky 1998), and Remarks on Clarissa, Addressed to the Author, the first critical analysis of Richardson's novel to appear in print (Augustan Reprint Society 1985) - Sabor here continues to broaden the range of Fielding's publications accessible for wide reading and vigorous debate. Fielding's final novel, Ophelia is the engaging first-person account of a female noble savage, raised in Welsh isolation, who is kidnapped and introduced to an insincere and dissipated London society by Lord Dorchester, a rakish nobleman who has fallen in love with her after stumbling upon the rural cottage she shares with her aunt. Dorchester is no Lovelace, however (a deliberate rewriting of Richardson, Sabor argues), treating Ophelia with generosity and affection while, it ultimately appears, awaiting a propitious moment to assault her virtue. And so the reader is at leisure to enjoy not only the exposure of high-society follies, but also two further abductions within the principal narrative, the first farcical in the manner of Henry Fielding, and the second a kind of early Gothic rewriting of Pamela's Lincolnshire captivity. Ophelia was in the long term one of Fielding's most popular novels; in the established pattern of Broadview editions, Sabor demonstrates the novel's reception through appendices of material added to the second Dublin edition, illustrations from the 1785 Novelist's Magazine reprinting, and, most intriguingly, an 1888 appraisal by the critic Clementina Black. Sabor also presents considerable evidence for the novel's being woven into a complex tissue of influences or at least shared plot patterns, ranging from tales of the innocent traveller as social critic, to the use of Wales as primitive hinterland to England, to scenes of an ingénue's social faux pas and their comic, yet potentially tragic, repercussions (like those of Burney's Evelina). Such material, presented in a learned, but highly readable, introduction as well as through the appendices, should prove very useful to undergraduate readers in situating this novel in the landscape of eighteenth-century prose fiction. Notes identifying quotations and explaining eighteenth-century English places and manners are judicious and succinct. I am left with one question: why Ophelia rather than the 1759 The Countess of Dellwyn, a novel which traces with considerable sympathy the descent of a not-unworthy heroine through an unfortunate marriage, adultery, and divorce? Like so much of Fielding's writing, this earlier work seems courageously experimental and probing in its anatomy of human foibles and their potentially disastrous consequences. This may be simply a matter of individual taste, but the novel's first reviewers imply a similar [End Page 273] assessment in their rather cursory dismissals of Ophelia as genre work, unlike their relatively respectful response to the Countess's story. Perhaps my either-or formulation is a false one: certainly, in these post-recovery times, theoretically sophisticated arguments can be marshalled for attending to the formerly popular just as effectively as for privileging the original or innovative. Sabor's detailed account of Ophelia editions and translations implies such an argument. Ideally, both of these novels - indeed, all of Fielding's accomplished and widely varied fiction...

The Making of the Modern Child: Children's Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century (review)

Reviewed by: The Making of the Modern Child: Children's Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century Patricia Demers (bio) Andrew O'Malley . The Making of the Modern Child:Children's Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth CenturyRoutledge2003. x, 192. US $90.95 Our notions of the child as educable and influenced by mentors and surroundings predate the theories of Jean Piaget or Maria Montessori or Jerome Bruner. Andrew O'Malley's richly detailed study assembles convincing evidence to argue that contemporary concepts of childhood have been shaped by and have responded to the middle-class ideology of the late eighteenth century. The most impressive feature of The Making of the Modern Child is its wealth of textual examples and the dexterity with which O'Malley interprets and interlaces them. Not only is he familiar with the treasures of the Osborne Collection of the Toronto Public Library, the Fisher Library at the University of Toronto, and the Opie and Johnson Collections at the Bodleian, but he also distinguishes this ideologically precise account of [End Page 281] class relations, medical management, pedagogical discipline, and gender roles from the earlier descriptive narratives and Whig histories of F.J. Harvey Darton, Percy Muir, Geoffrey Summerfield, and Mary Jackson. More interested in tracing the rhizomes of ideological groundwork than sniffing approvingly a few spectacular plants, O'Malley declares his intellectual allegiances to Raymond Williams and Alan Richardson. Because of this subterranean investigation his study offers several illuminating insights. John Newbery's success as a pioneering publisher of books for children is largely due to the adroit way he appropriated and muted potentially subversive plebeian elements from chapbooks for his publications. Less scrupulous and more entrepreneurial was John Marshall, who, in addition to marketing the acceptable pedagogy of Mary Ann Kilner's Memoirs of a Peg-Top (1785) and Lady Eleanor Fenn's The Art of Teaching in Sport (1785), managed to hoodwink some middle-class buyers by collecting chapbook and fairy-tale stories under the title Nurse Dandlem's Little Repository of Great Instruction for all who Would be Good and Noble (1784). Along with such easily recognized 'conservative' reformers as Sarah Trimmer and Hannah More, more 'radical' writers and theorists (Mary Wollstonecraft, Catherine Macaulay, Maria Edgeworth, and Anna Barbauld, among them) warned against the pernicious and demoralizing effects of children's close contact with domestic servants. Formulaic, didactic, and controlled by a middle-class authorship, eighteenth-century literature for children sought to regulate and control its readership, inculcating the values and social returns of hard, honest work as opposed to chance windfalls, characterizing animals as more appropriate recipients of middle-class bounty than the destitute, and indicating that upward mobility for servants was exceptional and unlikely. The sobering factuality of this study means that, while we might detect some residual features of eighteenth-century precepts in contemporary practice, we can also be grateful for huge differences. For all of its frustrations and competing theories of learning, today's classroom is far removed from the experiments in mass, industrial, monitorial education undertaken by Andrew Bell in Madras and Joseph Lancaster in Southwark. Although, in The Governess, Sarah Fielding's peacemaker Jenny Peace is clearly being trained for the female duties of mother and pacifier, and in Richard Johnson's Juvenile Trials, for Robbing Orchards, Telling Fibs, and Other Heinous Offences, Master Meanwell, who hands down judgments, is being schooled in the masculine discourse of decision making, we can realize that those gendered roles and categories are much more interchangeable and osmotic in most contemporary cultures. O'Malley's focus on the emergence of the child as a subject, albeit one defined within a state of deficiency and described by a surplus of negatives, and his alert reading of political, scientific, medical, and literary texts combines to produce a nuanced, complex exploration. The breadth of [End Page 282] textual sources is certainly impressive and valuable. However, despite his antipathy towards Hannah More and his agreement with Alan Richardson's criticism of Mitzi Myers's argument about the unacknowledged allegiances linking More and Wollstonecraft, O'Malley might have considered More's strong-minded Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education as, among...

Honoring Our Mothers: The Legacy and Life of Mitzi Myers

Culturing the Child 1690–1914: Essays in Memory of Mitzi Myers. Ed. Donelle Ruwe. Lanham, MD: Children's Literature Association and Scarecrow P, 2005. Mitzi Myers was unquestionably the founding mother of eighteenth-century children's literature criticism, and her untimely death was a great loss to the scholarship of that important period. Myers's readings challenged and routed the ad feminam attacks on women writers for children by Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Charles Dickens, attacks that influenced children's literature criticism and history for many generations afterward. Because of Myers we admire rather than vilify the accomplishments of those redoubtable women who challenged their periods' assumptions about women and children. At the same time she disputed and revised past assessments, Myers inspired contemporary feminist critics to evaluate women writers not only as feminists but also as writers and thinkers, placing them in context and not succumbing to what C. S. Lewis called "chronological snobbery," the "presentist" assumption that we always know better than persons in the past. Myers's work taught us that we should not uncritically repeat past truisms without considering their source; as well, she showed us that no critical theory, however vast its claims, can replace careful reading and consideration of the cultural and historical contexts in which a text was produced. The essays in Culturing the Child 1690–1914 provide a fitting tribute to Mitzi Myers in their variety, their range, and their methodology. Culturing the Child is divided into four parts, each of which highlights a different aspect of Myers's legacy. The first, "Creating the Contexts of Children's Literature," focuses upon the eighteenth-century writers and publishers of children's books who laid the groundwork for later developments in children's literature. Chapter one, an essay by Ruth Bottigheimer on the usually yawn-inducing topic of bibliography, ought to be required reading in any graduate class in children's literature for the valuable overview she gives of what is and is not known about early children's books, publishers, and popularity. [End Page 218] Bottigheimer not only convinces readers of the rewards of more systematic study of books as objects rather than as simple containers of text (retrievable through microfilms and reproductions), she also provides the conceptual tools needed to perform such study. Next, Karen E. Rowe's article relates a useful history of the discourse and debates surrounding the eighteenth-century fairy tale, its production, and its suitability for children. Contemporary histories of children's literature are well versed in the debates between realism and romance; however, discussions about the role of the imagination, morality, and narrative within the fantasy tradition are not so widely known. Rowe's article provides important background on that debate, beginning with Charles Perrault and culminating in Mrs. Trimmer's repudiation of the form. Last in this section, Julia Briggs's enjoyable and illuminating essay on women, children, and reading in the eighteenth century demonstrates the extent to which the educational theories of John Locke and others were being debated in children's and adult literature of the time, from Samuel Richardson's Pamela to John Newbery's Goody Two Shoes and Sarah Fielding's Little Female Academy. This essay, too, will be valuable reading for any student of the eighteenth century interested in adult-child cross-writing, another important thematic strand in Mitzi Myers's critical oeuvre. Part two of Culturing the Child focuses on the "Rational Dames" so central to Myers's criticism. These chapters build upon her foundation and develop new avenues for further study. William McCarthy's fascinating study of the pedagogy behind Anna Barbauld's Lessons for Children helps us to appreciate the loving sensitivity she had for children's educational needs and does a great deal to recuperate her work for further study. Marjean Purinton's essay on Hannah More is informative and historically situated, albeit too prone to finding More's work insufficiently feminist and therefore wanting. M...