Sarah Fielding Research Articles

La littérature enfantine en Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle

Although children's books were available at the beginning of the eighteenth century, they developed from 1744 onwards and became very popular in the 1790s. Sarah Fielding, Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Maria Edgeworth wrote for children in order to teach them moral principles. The first outstanding book was Sarah Fielding's The Governess; or, Little Female Academy, Being the History of Mrs Teachum and Her Nine Girls (1749), which stressed obedience and righteousness. Anna Laetitia Barbauld took after the fable genre whereas Maria Edgeworth wrote a treatise on education and several tales collected in The Parent's assistant; or, Stories for Children (1796). Those books were often illustrated to stimulate children's imagination and appetite for reading.

Commerce, Morality and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (review)

REVIEWS 109 the chronology of Fielding's life and the annotated bibliography of primary and secondary sources. As an added bonus, the edition includes four reproductions of Thomas Stothard's illustrations to the 1782 Novelist's Magazine edition, one engraved by the young William Blake. Readers of eighteenth-century fiction will be delighted that Sarah Fielding's edition has been restored in a volume that is accessible, responsibly edited, and handsomely produced. Christopher D. Johnson Francis Marion University Liz Bellamy. Commerce, Morality and the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. vii + 233pp. US$59.95. ISBN 0-521-62224-7. In Commerce, Morality and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, Liz Bellamy argues that civic humanism, bourgeois economics, and moral philosophy constitute an unsettled ideological mix that novels continually try to sort out as the eighteenth century proceeds. The difficulty with Bellamy's text is that its thesis develops at so high a level ofgeneralization that terms such as "economics" continually confront the reader without adequate intellectual underpinning. Sometimes economics is seen as feminizing when compared to the brute masculinity ofepic; at other times as suppressing the feminine with overbearing patriarchalism. Moreover, while the thesis is illustrated through a series of novels, one is never quite sure whether such novels constitute a coherent discourse or are merely scattered, coincidental shots aimed at a moving target. Even if ideology were unsettled along the lines suggested by Bellamy, she has not proved that novels really try to sort out or even register this unsettlement in a systematic, deliberate way, or even in unconscious ways that can be convincingly demonstrated. Of course novels are about struggle and tension—when have they not been? Bellamy makes claims that are often facile, as if her generalizations did not require adequate analysis of subject texts. Speaking of Tom Jones, for example, she asserts that "by repeatedly suggesting the absence of a consensus in the interpretation of the novel, despite the presence of the narrator, it creates an impression of the absence ofa unifying ideology within society" (p. 94). Does it? Anyone familiar with Fielding criticism could offer several reasons for the cognitive tug-of-war between narrator and reader. Speaking of Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, Bellamy notes that while the hero is respectable, he fails to merit the praise he receives, and she ascribes this disjunction to a "cultural uncertainty over the definition of male virtue" that is over-simplified and radically inaccurate: "the epic concept of heroism and public endeavour was being undermined by the emergence of economic analysis, with its denial of the importance of any kind of civic humanist notion of the public, and its elevation not only of private and domestic virtue, but also of mercenary acquisitiveness" (p. 108). Who among eighteenthcentury economists counselled "mercenary acquisitiveness"? Certainly not Adam 110 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 12:1 Smith, whom Bellamy examines as a pivotal figure. Moreover, the type of "civic humanism" that we have come to understand through the writings ofJ.G.A. Pocock stood in opposition to certain forms of mobile wealth attained through speculation and enterprises unassociated with traditional landed concerns. As Pocock has shown, it did not necessarily oppose the market economy in all its forms. BeIlany 's argument here is another instance of the unstable, insufficiently explained categories that drive the reader to say "Now wait a minute...!" There are so many such instances that they continually detract from the case that Bellamy is attempting to make, since they signal to the specialist that Bellamy's analysis is superficial. Speaking ofa visit to the Royal Exchange in Sarah Fielding's David Simple, Bellamy observes that it provides the occasion for a set-piece, "a satirical portrayal of the debased and corrupted values of the contemporary financial system, in a style which was familiar from periodicals such as Daniel Defoe's Review or the Spectator" (p. 133). If anything is characteristic of the Review, it is that Defoe said as many wonderful things about "credit" and the necessity for well-run markets as he said adverse things about jobbery and AirMoney . Lady Credit epitomizes Defoe's love-hate relationship with the financial system, which persisted throughout his...

The Adventures of David Simple and Volume the Last (review)

REVIEWS 107 the Italian to uncover a political and religious allegory about Catholicism being expelled from England, calling this "new" understanding of nationalism "rigidly discriminating and cruel in principle" (p. 128). The allegorical reading is convincing, but Richardson's own politics and class loyalties were far more problematic than Chung suggests. It is Grandison and not Richardson who is said to be a strong supporter of the Union and the Hanoverian kings—for all the author's prudence in later life, he played with the High Flyers as a young printer. The sheer glamour of the Restoration leads to Richardson 's combining bourgeois rectitude with Caroline allure when he names his hero Sir Charles and his sister Charlotte, or when he proposes for Sir Charles and Clementina the same agreement as that between Charles I and Henrietta Maria: the sons to be raised as Protestant and the daughters Roman Catholic. Similar ambivalences occur when he models his attractive villain-hero on Rochester, Hobbes, and the Caroline poet Lovelace, or has him quote Herrick, Dryden, and Waller. Chung dismisses gender and class conflicts as irrelevant, and yet Richardson's concern with "contaminated" aristocrats seducing moral middle-class women surely makes it imperative to consider both. And although she talks of the analogy between nations and families, she does not mention Sir Robert Filmer's highly influential Patriarcha, which, if Virginia Woolf spoke true, established hierarchies for the imperialism Chung rightly loathes. Richardson was hardly the only eighteenth-century writer to be nationalistic and exclusive—the French in particular were fair game. But whatever one's sympathies , it is a fact that the Stuarts threatened the political and spiritual hegemony of Britain, while the ultramontane Roman Catholics always had the potential to undermine national autonomies, as Locke pointed out in his Letter Concerning Toleration . Chung's study implicitly raises the question about how hard we should be on those who fail to transcend their historical moment, and fail to think like us. Are we perhaps intolerant if we attack writers of the past for not being as modern , as enlightened as we are? More contextualization would help us assess the problem so carefully laid out by Ewha Chung. Jocelyn Harris University of Otago Sarah Fielding. The Adventures ofDavid Simple and Volume the Last. Ed. Peter Sabor. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998. xli + 399pp. US$45.00 (cloth); US$16.95 (paper). Peter Sabor's edition of The Adventures ofDavid Simple and Volume the Last is a welcome addition to eighteenth-century studies. Essentially two critical editions in one volume, Sabor's work makes available Sarah Fielding's most popular novel and its sequel. The Adventures ofDavid Simple (1744) recounts the story of the titular hero, who, having been cheated out of his inheritance by his brother and servants, 108 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 12:1 searches for a "Real Friend." Travelling through London and Westminster, David initially encounters yet more deception and hypocrisy at the hands of Mr Orgueil, Mr Spatter, and Mr Varnish. David's search ends when he discovers Cynthia, Camilla, and Valentine, benevolent characters, all alienated from their families. Towards the end of the novel, David marries Camilla, Camilla's brother marries Cynthia, and all the characters, now living happily and peaceably together, are reconciled with their families. David Simple is engaging for its depictions of eighteenth-century family life, gender, and psychology. Volume the Last (1753) was written after Fielding experienced financial hardship and the loss of three siblings and a nephew. Sombre in tone and advocating a severe Christian fortitude, Volume the Last stands a precursor to Samuel Johnson's Rasselas. Sabor's edition is significant not only because it provides the first fully annotated text of David Simple, but also because it has been prepared from copies of Sarah Fielding's first edition. The only other modern production of the work, by Malcolm Kelsall in 1968, is based on the second edition, which was substantially altered by Henry Fielding. In his introduction, Sabor demonstrates the degree to which Henry Fielding was "motivated less by a desire to expunge errors than to shape his sister's novel into one reflecting his own concept of fiction" (p. xxx...

Gender, Empire, and Nation in Sarah Fielding's Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia

Gender, Empire, and Nation in Sarah Fielding’s Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia Sara Gadeken (bio) The novels of Sarah Fielding (1710–65) offer freshly conceived notions of masculinity and redefinitions of femininity, as well as the possibility of new relationships between men and women based on nonhierarchical structures of mutual benevolence and caring. Fielding’s fifth novel, The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia (1757), was published by subscription early in the Seven Years’ War, the outcome of which would make the British Empire possible. It explores the uneasy tensions of an emerging commercial culture, as gender and class relations are renegotiated in a nascent mercantile economy. Classic Rome represents a constant reminder of the evils of luxury and overconsumption, and, as England’s commercial enterprise and empire begin to develop, comparisons with the Roman Empire become increasingly uneasy. Against this background, Cleopatra and Octavia exploits cultural fears of effeminacy, luxury, and moral corruption in an effort to claim a place for strong and active women in the republic of virtue. In this, her only historical novel, Fielding uses the simple format of two personal narratives told from beyond the grave by historical rather than fictional characters, her title being an ironic reference to Plutarch’s Lives. She contends in her introduction that historical figures “are better suited to inform, and give us juster Notions of Ourselves, as they are Originals, and present the Eye with the prospect of Human Nature, taken from Life, and not extended beyond the Limits of Credibility and Truth.” 1 Yet she retells a story that has been retold many times before, and, like each teller, she revises and reinterprets her “Originals” to fit her own allegiances. [End Page 523] She rejects the image of the virtuous but misunderstood Cleopatra that John Dryden uses in All for Love: Or, the World Well Lost (1678). Instead, Fielding’s Cleopatra represents a luxurious orientalism and theatricality that threatens republican manhood. The choice was a careful one. The bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu, in a letter to her sister Sarah Scott, disapproves of Fielding’s decision to portray Cleopatra as evil queen rather than virtuous victim, but she understands the reason for it: “Octavia and Cleopatra are to come forth in a few days. As [Fielding] is a virtuous maiden she will make Octavia the more agreeable of the two which will give history the lye and make Anthony appear a greater fool than ever he appear’d.” 2 Anxious indeed to appear a virtuous maiden, Fielding assures her readers that her novel will “impress the fatal Consequences of a mad intoxicated Lover and a false insinuating Woman” and that “the Distresses of a virtuous Octavia will excite a more lasting Sensibility of Pity or Relentment [sic]” (p. 55). Yet more than three-quarters of the volume concerns Cleopatra, and Fielding is clearly fascinated with this powerful woman. Well-known anecdotes are given a new look and meaning when they are narrated from Cleopatra’s ironic point of view: One Evening, when Anthony had provided a very expensive Supper, I told him in a vein of Pleasantry, that his whole Entertainment was trifling in Comparison of what I could do, for I would provide him a Supper in which we might each of us consume more than the Value of Six Million Sesterces . . . I provided a Supper in which there was nothing extraordinary . . . then taking one of the Pearls out of my Ears, which was equal in value to the sum above-mentioned, I dissolved it in Vinegar and drank it off . . . Anthony looked first a little confounded at my Device; on which I smiling said, “these Pearls, that came into my Possession from a long Race of royal Ancestors, I would consume , as I would indeed the World itself, to give Anthony a Moment’s Diversion” . . . This turned him into the greatest Rapture imaginable; he esteemed this Contrivance a Mark of my Ingenuity, and the consuming my Pearl as a Sign of my Love. (p. 107) When the exotic Egyptian queen takes into her body the pearl worth “Six Million Sesterces,” she becomes herself a part of the luxurious treasure of empire. This treasure, so frivolous and yet so...

Gender, Empire, and Nation in Sarah Fielding's "Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia"

Gender, Empire, and Nation in Sarah Fielding's "Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia"

The adventures of David Simple: containing an account of his travels through the cities of London and Westminster, in the search of a real friend; and, The adventures of David Simple, volume the last: in which his history is concluded

Sarah Fielding (1710-1768), the author of five novels, a children's story, an imaginative historical biography, a critical treatise on Clarissa, and a translation from the Greek of Xenophon, is among the most versatile and interesting eighteenth-century women writers.The Adventures of David Simple (1744), Fielding's first and most celebrated novel, went through many English editions -- including a second edition heavily revised by her brother Henry -- and was translated into German and French. The guileless hero, having been cheated by his hypocritical younger brother, sets out to find a real friend. In recounting David's search, the novel depicts the derision with which almost everyone treats his sentimental attitudes to human nature. An important secondary character acts as a mouthpiece for some provocative feminist ideas. This edition makes the original text of the novel available for the first time since 1744. It also reproduces Fielding's much darker sequel, Volume the Last (1753), in which a string of disasters befalls David and his family.

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

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...

The Conversational Circle: Rereading the English Novel, 1740-1775

The Conversational Circle offers a model for exploring a range of novels that experiment with narrative patterns. It makes a compelling case that teleological approaches to novel history that privilege the conflict between the individual and society are, quite simply, ahistorical. Twentieth-century historians of the early novel, most prominently Ian Watt, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Terry Castle, have canonized fictions that portray the individual in sustained tension with the social environment. Such fictions privilege a strongly linear structure. Recent reexaminations of the canon, however, have revealed a number of early novels that do not fit this mold. Betty Schellenberg identifies another kind of plot, one that focuses on the social group-the conversational circle-as a model that can affirm traditional values but just as often promotes an alternative sense of community. Schellenberg selects a group of mid-eighteenth-century novels that experiment with this alternative plot structure, embodied by the social circle. Both satirical and sentimental, canonical and non-canonical, these novels demonstrate a concern that individualistic desire threatened to destabilize society. Writing that reflects a circular structure emphasizes conversation and consensus over individualism and conquest. As a discourse that highlights negotiation and harmony, conversation privileges the social group over the individual. These fictions of the conversation circle include lesser-known works by canonical authors (Henry Fielding's Amelia and Richards's Sir Charles Grandison as well as his sequel to Pamela ), long-neglected novels by women (Sarah Fielding's David Simple and its sequel Volume the Last, and Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall ), and Tobias Smollet's last novel, Humphrey Clinker . Because they do not fit the linear model, such works have long been dismissed as idealogicall flawed and ideologically irrelevant.

Henry and Sarah Fielding on Romance and Sensibility

One of the remarkable things about the eighteenth-century is the manner in which it gradually became less overtly political without ever giving up politics. Such works of the early decades of the century, such as Manley's New Atalantis and Swift's Gulliver's Travels often had a free-standing political content, a political content seated upon a generic platform, to be sure, but detachable nonetheless. This way of interfacing form and content, which indicates not less sophistication but a different range of cultural needs, all but disappeared in the second half of the century, as the pivoted toward its watershed novel of form. It was in that liminal period between, say, Gulliver's Travels (1726) on the one hand and The Man of Feeling (1771) or Evelina (1778) on the other, that the stakes of writing were perhaps highest. The Augustan form of the genre, with its characteristic way of interfacing form and political content, was no longer on the pulse of the times, and the sensibility form, with its more integrated approach to form and content, had not yet arrived. Everything was negotiable. The genre itself seemed to be east of Milton's Eden, as it were, with all its possibilities spread out before it. The of the 1740s, at the center of that liminal period, is in fact marked by its own characteristic political and formal questions, questions that not only indicate the particular zeitgeist of the decade but also determine, in part, the possible futures of the genre itself. Politically, the conflict between bourgeois and landed ideologies reaches peak visibility in the novels of the 1740s. Before that decade, as Ros Ballaster points out, political conflicts were more often framed by party interests than by ideological convictions per se (11). After the 1740s, the landed/bourgeois dyad gradually lost its claim on the public imagination. It was certainly passe by the time of Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling, wherein it takes all the filial respect Harley can muster just to pay attention to his elder aunt's insistent discourse upon the relative authority of money and birth (108). One might indeed turn closer to home and suggest that Henry Fielding's Amelia (1751) marks the beginning of the end of the dyad's currency value. Whereas Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749) had playfully lingered over the landed versus bourgeois cultural wars, Amelia attempts to face more directly the dynamics of an increasingly urban and capitalist world of social relations. In short, although the issue certainly pans out in both historical directions, the conflict between bourgeois and landed allegiances has a peculiar dominance in driving the political content of the 1740s novel, underpinning works by such authors as Richardson and Cleland as well as the Fieldings. In terms of form, the interfacing of a separable political content and a chosen narrative form was perhaps less viable in the 1740s than it had been in the heyday of Augustan satire. It was certainly becoming less common practice for

The 'Words I in Fancy say for you': Sarah Fielding's Letters and Epistolary Method

As letter writing became increasingly fashionable, an awareness of literary values in letters cultivated suspicion about sincerity in epistolary discourse in the eighteenth century.1 Samuel Johnson ( 709-84), while emphasizing that 'in a Man's Letters [ . .] his soul lies naked', cast doubt on the sincerity of other people's letters.2 He shrewdly detects the manipulative powers of published 'genuine' letters which take advantage of the reader's supposition that private letters reveal 'true' aspects of the self otherwise unknown. He maintains that 'there is, indeed, no transaction which offers stronger temptations to fallacy and sophistication than epistolary intercourse' and reads Pope's letters cautiously: it must be remembered that he had the power of favouring himself: he might have originally had publication in his mind, and have written with care, or have afterwards selected those which he had most happily conceived, or most diligently laboured.3

Eighteenth-Century Fiction: A Full-Text Database of English Prose Fiction from 1700 to 1780 (review)

Reviews Eighteenth-Century Fiction: A Full-Text Database ofEnglish Prose Fiction from 1700 to 1780. Alexandria, Va.: Chadwyck-Healey, 1996. CDROM . US$4,400.00. ISBN 0-85964-323-9. Will wonders never cease! This single CD-ROM (with two diskettes to install the software to run it) enables the lucky user to view just about the entire range of significant British eighteenth-century novels by thirty different authors, moving (alphabetically) from Thomas Amory's The Life ofJohn Bunde to Horace Walpole's The Castle ofOtranto. The editorial board for this project, Judith Hawley , Tom Keymer, and John Mullan, have advised Chadwyck-Healey wisely, and their choice of texts and editions is everything that a student of the period and the genre could desire. The range of narratives available at the click of a mouse on this disk is complete and wonderfully comprehensive, including the fictional output of writers such as Defoe, Aubin, Richardson (the first and third editions of Clarissa), Mackenzie, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, as well as substantially complete reproductions of the primary (mostly first) eighteenthcentury editions of the works of Manley, Barker, Davys, Lennox, Haywood, Sarah Fielding, and Frances Sheridan. In addition, the CD contains important works by the Brookes, Frances and Henry, two versions of Gulliver's Travels , Johnson's Rasselas as well as Hawkesworth's Almoran and Hamet, the first edition of Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, the second edition of Reeve's The Old English Baron, the first edition of Evelina, and much more. A student would have to go to a first-rate research library simply to read all the titles gathered by modern technological wizardry on this CD-ROM, and some of them—Robert Paltock's weirdly interesting fantasy, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1751), for example—would be hard to find even there. In addition to this comprehensive collection of fiction, the CD features excellent bibliographical information for all the texts, along with reproductions of EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 10, Number 1, October 1997 108 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 10:1 some illustrations, of title pages and tables of contents for all the works. Original page numbering is noted in the text, so that even though your monitor generally holds less than a book page of text, you know where you are and can cite eighteenth-century volume numbers (given running heads at the top of the screen) and pages. Chadwyck-Healey's keyboarding, I can report, seems flawless , and I found not a single typo as I browsed extensively in most of the titles. If you have a good, bright, and sharp monitor to go with your computer , the texts themselves are eminently readable, far more so than they are in book form, since the distracting (if lovable) particulars of eighteenth-century typography such as italics and capitalization (to say nothing of paper grown brown and worm-eaten with age) have been removed. Whether it is really possible to read a novel on a computer screen is, of course, quite another question, and I for one cannot imagine actually reading all the way through a novel by spending hours staring at my computer screen. But some of my colleagues swear that they have done it, and I believe it can be done at the cost of some eyestrain and discomfort. I can report that installing the software and running the CD-ROM with it are child's play. The software comes with the usual idiot-proof on-screen directions, allowing the user to click happily to enter the manifold riches of the CD. Even the manual that accompanies this CD is clear and readable, although just about superfluous in light of the menu-driven on-screen features of the software. To be sure, you will need two things to run this package. First, a great deal of money, since the price at the head of this review is not a misprint, and one assumes that only a millionaire enthusiast of eighteenth-century fiction or a well-funded library could afford this particular scholarly toy. It is possible to purchase an annual subscription to this Chadwyck-Healey database (and others), and if a library or a department...

The Fame Machine: Book Reviewing and Literary Careers (review)

Reviewed by: The Fame Machine: Book Reviewing and Literary Careers Maureen Harkin Frank Donoghue. The Fame Machine: Book Reviewing and Literary Careers. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Pp. 213. $37.50. The familiar modern routine of checking the reviews for responses to new books first established itself in Britain in the mid-eighteenth century. The rapidity with which this practice became routine within the two decades following the founding of the Monthly Review (1749) and the Critical Review (1756) is remarkable; by the time of Burney’s shrewd dedication of Evelina to the reviewers of the Monthly and the Critical in 1788, the reviewers’ power in the literary hierarchy was well entrenched. The Fame Machine: Book Reviewing and Literary Careers takes for its subject the importance of these two periodicals in mid-century England, specifically as the crucial means for making possible and defining literary careers. Donoghue’s work allies itself with the work of scholars like Michael Warner and Kathryn Shevelow on eighteenth-century print culture and the role of journals in regulating the expanding audience for books. The book’s primary ambition, however, is to force a reconsideration of the careers of the writers under study—principally Goldsmith, Sterne, and Smollett—in terms of their various responses to, and incarnations as, reviewers. In focusing on these writers’ careers rather than on thematic analysis of their texts, Donoghue attempts to bridge the gap between serious criticism and literary biography, two modes of writing about literature that maintain a very uneasy coexistence at present. Noting the subdued response to the major biographies of eighteenth-century authors published in the 1980s, Donoghue probes the current limbo between biography and criticism, and describes his own work as an attempt to forge a “possible path for a new biography” (14). This is an important project, and the focus on the reviews’ role in constructing literary careers produces striking and original claims about the work of Sterne, Smollett, and Goldsmith. However, the terms of the investigation undertaken here generate one difficulty, that of providing a framework for discussing the work of female writers, for the reviews’ definition of a literary career, which Donoghue adopts, claim it as an “exclusively male form of social practice” (161). Hence the brevity of the concluding chapter on a range of female writers from Sarah Fielding to Frances Burney. Caught in the familiar dilemma of the lady-writer, Donoghue identifies [End Page 139] their counterstrategies (having texts endorsed by male “sponsors” or claiming to aim at an exclusively female audience) as ultimately rather self-defeating attempts to forestall reviewers’ criticisms of their professional ambitions. (162–67). It is, then, Donoghue’s assessment of the forces shaping the male literary career that is the central achievement here. Donoghue argues that the rapidity with which the Monthly and Critical Reviews established themselves as indispensable sources of information on recent publications cannot simply be explained as part of a natural expansion or “democratization” of reading in the century (22–23). He demonstrates, through a comparison of the different initial strategies of the Monthly and the Critical, that there was nothing natural or inevitable about the tendency, by the later 1750s, of reviewers and philosophical critics alike to hierarchize various reading preferences and tastes. The Monthly’s original conception of its mission—to provide a comprehensive but not terribly opinionated survey of new publications (23)—changed only in response to the Critical’s successful formula: the aggressive exercise of critical judgment as a means of distinguishing the “curious and critical” from the socially marginalized and endlessly disparaged “hasty reader” (28). Donoghue’s account of the formation of literary careers in this exacting climate stresses not only the power of the reviews to confer or withhold legitimacy on various productions after the fact, but also the prescriptive effect of their opinions on matters of style. The distinctiveness of his contribution to the study of the reviews lies in his account of the reviewers as often influencing and even dictating authorial choices and initiating what were in effect collaborative relationships between authors and critics, the most extreme case being that of Sterne. In accounting for Sterne’s abandonment of Shandyism for the pose of the...

Women playwrights in England, Ireland, and Scotland, 1660-1823

David D. Mann and Susan Garland Mann, with Camile Gamier. Women Playwrights in England, Ireland, and Scotland 1660-1823. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996. Pp. xiv + 417.This dictionary of and their plays from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries is valuable and muchneeded resource that should, as the authors hope, help to stimulate research in this area. It is an accessible compendium of information, much of it hard to find and even obscure, that will be of use both to experts and those new to the field.The authors rely on earlier scholarship, which ranges from The London Stage to An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers, edited by Paul and June Schlueter and The Feminist Companion to Literature in English, compiled by Virginia Blain, Isobel Grundy, and Patricia Clements. Drawing on these and many other sources they have produced over seven hundred entries, organized primarily by playwright and play. They have attempted to be comprehensive, within the limits imposed by working in sparsely explored field of early dramatists (ix). They therefore interpret their mandate broadly. The terminal date of 1 823 is stretched to include later plays written by such authors as Joanna Bailie, whose collection Plays on the Passions was published in 1798 and two of those late plays were staged in 1836. In dealing with individual they choose to be as inclusive as possible: for example, their list of Behn's plays (379-80) contains all those attributed to her, including The Woman Turn 'd Bully (1875), which their entry makes clear is very doubtful ascription (365-68).The designation women playwrights is also interpreted flexibly. The authors include not only major figures of the professional theatre, such as Behn, Centlivre, Cowley, and Inchbald, but any woman to whom play can be attributed, even anonymously, and any play to which female authorship can be ascribed, whether or not it is extant, whether or not it was performed or even intended for performance. Alongside staples of the repertoire such as Cenlivre's The Wonder or Inchbald's A Mogul Tale, there are entries for The Cry, Sarah Fielding's and Jane Collier's 'novel done in dramatic form' (97) and The Disguise, 'dramatic novel' by a woman unknown (112).This breadth indicates that the authors are not solely concerned with drama as an aspect of the theatre, although this component is not neglected; for example, number of their entries concern actresses, such as Susanna Cibber and Catherine Clive, who wrote or adapted plays for their benefits. Their comprehensiveness increases their potential audience, which they describe in their preface as being made up of students of the Restoration, the Eighteenth Century, and the Romantic Era; theatre historians; feminist scholars; researchers of drama; theatre directors; analyzers of popular culture; as well as general readers (ix).Their entries provide this wide audience (ix) with an accessible and reliable collection of up-to-date information about and their plays. …

Sarah Fielding

Sarah Fielding

Is Sex Necessary? Criminal Conversation and Complicity in Sarah Fielding's Ophelia

Is Sex Necessary? Criminal Conversation and Complicity in Sarah Fielding's Ophelia

The Poems of William Cowper. Vol. III: 1785–1800 ed. by John D. Baird, Charles Ryskamp

Indeed, one finds so much to admire in “Princess Docile” (even as one also sees that it had not reached final, fully matured form when Lady Mary put it aside with her other unpublished work) that there is a regretfulness in the experience. The regretfulness, of course, is that, in the end, a writer with such talents did not do more with them, perhaps because she was a woman (in a man’s world and an inherently vulnerable position) writing outside “the dominant tradition of fiction-writing,” and an aristocrat who never really resolved her “internal conflict between class pride and literary ambition, both of which she found necessary to her sense of self” (ix). Lady Mary did not have to write to eat and did not have to perfect and publish much to be a “somebody,” indeed a literary celebrity, and if these were great advantages to the lady, they were great disadvantages to the writer. Grundy’s balanced and empathetic introduction puts the matter in a nutshell: Lady Mary pitied her cousin Sarah Fielding for the financial need which drove her to publish; modern readers may be inclined to regret the material comfort which preserved Montagu from any such need. Perhaps nothing but the pressure of imminent publication would have made her mould an extended work into final form, (xxv) Be that as it may, two things are clear. The first is that the narratives she did produce are fascinating artifacts of the literary side of her life. The second is that this meticulously informed and critically intelligent edition of those narratives is a most impressive contribution to the process of restoring Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to her appropriate place and stature in the literary history of England in the eighteenth century. t h o m a s r . c l e a r y / University o f Victoria John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, eds., The Poems of William Cowper. Vol. Ill: 1785-1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). lii, 413. $148.50 cloth. With this third volume of Cowper’s poems, Messrs. Baird and Ryskamp complete two decades of scholarly labour. Volume I (1980) gave us Cowper’s verse to 1782, Volume II (also 1995), to 1785. Volume ill maintains both the high standard of scholarship set by the earlier volumes, and Clarendon’s reputation for high-quality editions, with real bottom-of-the-page footnotes: now an almost old-world grace. I came across no errors, and rarely wished for an explanatory note that was not supplied. Like any good edition, this one can serve the purposes of bio-criticism, in which the commentary and notes enlarge the poems. We have often heard of Cowper’s depressions and religious mania, for example, but it is clear from the biographical introduction and patterns in the poetry that 246 he would now be diagnosed with Seasonal Affective Disorder (xviii-xix). Gloomy poems cluster in winter (he often wrote one for the local Bill of Mortality in December), while spring and summer produced most of the light and hopeful verse. A long “Textual Introduction” addresses scholarly concerns: sources, de­ velopment of the canon, arrangement and editorial method. The principal source for the shorter poems is Cowper’s “Entry Book.” The amount of bibliographical detail provided may be gauged from the editors’ account of Cowper’s alterations in this source (xxiv), or their description of the Nor­ folk MSS: “Sheet no. 7 begins with the first translation from the Greek Anthology, dated 12 May; the others follow to the thirty-eighth, ‘On Envy’ at the foot of the verso of the first leaf of sheet no. 9, with the last four lines written in the right-hand margin, suggesting that it was not possible to continue on to the second leaf” (xxxi). The poet did not oversee an authoritative edition of his poems, and the “difficulty of determining what Cowper wrote” forced the editors “to unravel” the “complexly interwoven relationship between his personal history and the activities of members of his family, his publisher, and his first editors” (xxxii). Like Bailey’s edition (1905), this one follows a “general chronological framework in which the published collections retain their identities” (xlviii...

Vingt études sur Prévost d'Exilés (review)

REVIEWS 109 women can be traced to their undertaking all the primary care of infants—a social fact, not a biological one. The question is not whether parents "loved" their children in earlier periods, but how parental concern was manifested. Eighteenth-century depictions of children are centrally concerned with managing children's moral training: the schoolgirls in Sarah Fielding's The Governess (1749) have to learn to share their apples. And who is to say whether the child-centred fixation of the late twentieth century is better or worse for children than the stricter discipline of earlier times? But it is inappropriate to judge attitudes towards children on die basis of strictness or laxity without taking into account the prevailing philosophy of the time and its historical rationale. Jane Austen, who was adored by her nieces and nephews for her affectionate playfulness and for her serious attention to their problems, often depicts children who are disruptive, difficult, and insufficiently disciplined. Austen satirizes the inability of selfindulgent parents to teach children to curb their appetites and anti-social behaviour. It is not that children are disliked: what is disliked is parents who abdicate their responsibility for the serious and difficult task of raising children well. Children reflect the moral intelligence and self-knowledge of their parents and as such are sign and symbol of responsibility to a larger social world. Fondness without discipline is not a good thing in Austen. It results in two-year-old Walter's climbing on the back of his aunt Anne in Persuasion, and in the misbehaviour of the children of Lady Middleton in Sense and Sensibility, "who saw with maternal complacency all the impertinent encroachments and mischievous tricks to which her cousins submitted. She saw their sashes untied, their hair pulled about their ears, their work-bags searched, and their knives and scissors stolen away, and felt no doubt of its being a reciprocal enjoyment." These scenes of bratty children were left out of the recent movies of Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility because there was no way to make twentieth-century audiences understand indiscipline as a sign of failure of care. It is a convention in late twentiethcentury Anglo-America to represent children either as sentimental icons of innocence and unerring natural morality or as eerily haunted—preternaturally evil (the bad seed)— but not as moral agents capable of improvement. The film-makers apparently despaired of superimposing one conception on the other and so left those scenes out altogether. This sense of historical difference is what I miss in Nelson's book—how the logic about parents and children might have a different feel to it in the eighteenth century. However, my own concern with historicizing diese phenomena aside, Nelson has tackled an important subject and engaged a number of canonical texts with a new agenda in a lively manner. I found much of interest in the book—and so will others familiar with these eighteenth-century texts. Ruth Perry Massachusetts Institute of Technology Jean Sgard. Vingt études sur Prévost d'Exilés. Grenoble: ELLUG, 1995. 316pp. FFr125. ISBN 2-902709-92-7. Ce demier-né des livres de Jean Sgard, publié à l'occasion de son départ à la retraite , rassemble une longue série d'articles sur l'abbé Prévost parus dans des revues diverses depuis une vingtaine d'années—à peu près la moitié, d'ailleurs, dans les Cahiers 110 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 9:1 Prévost d'Exilés (1984-94) fondés par Sgard lui-même pour promouvoir les recherches sur Prévost. On y trouve, cependant, trois nouvelles études, rédigées pour le volume présent. Comment parler de vingt articles hétéroclites? Sgard nous facilite la tâche en bouleversant la chronologie de ses articles pour les regrouper en quatre grandes rubriques: La Vie [de Prévost], Le Siècle, L'Image de Manon, Le Temps. Dans la première partie, il motive , de manière convaincante, sa tentative d'imposer le nom de «Prévost d'Exilés», nom de plume choisi par Prévost lui-même, avant de nous offrir, dans l'article suivant, une collation de dix-neuf...

Sarah Fielding's Dashing Style and Eighteenth-Century Print Culture

Sarah Fielding’s Dashing Style and Eighteenth-Century Print Culture Janine Barchas Several eighteenth-century women authors have benefitted from the recent expansion of the literary canon along gender lines, among them Sarah Fielding. Precisely in light of recent scholarly attempts to “recover” original texts by women authors, however, it is time that one of the most significant texts in Sarah Fielding’s oeuvre, The Adventures ofDavid Simple (1744), was restored to the version we know to be much closer to the author’s original intentions. 1 When we rescued her novel from historical obscurity, we resurrected not Sarah Fielding’s first edition of David Simple, but the second edition—a text heavily edited by her brother, Henry Fielding. 2 In fact, every edition of Sarah Fielding’s novel since 1744 has been based on Henry Fielding’s text. When Henry Fielding “corrected” what he termed his sister’s “Grammatical and other Errors in Style” he did great violence to her original text, in effect re-authoring her novel according to his own design. 3 This essay focusses on the most common of Sarah Fielding’s alleged errors, namely her characteristic punctuation and unconventional use of the dash. I will argue that what might, at first glance, appear an eccentric or sloppy application of dashes, actually serves a vital interpretive function in Sarah Fielding’s text—indicating the depth of her control over the details of her writing and its visual production. Her original punctuation, I argue, conveys information through graphic rather than verbal means. Specifically, Sarah Fielding’s use of printallows her to echo the non-verbal world which the women of her novel increasingly come to inhabit. Moreover, her punctuation deliberately aligns her novel with a Richardsonian literary tradition resisted by her brother. Understood in this narrative and historical context, Henry Fielding’s “corrections,” though seemingly minor, reveal the so-called “accidentals” of David Simple to be of critical importance in a reading of the novel. Only by returning to the first edition text of David Simple can we recover these vital clues to interpretation. I. Henry Fielding’s Editorial Revisions Soon after the initial publication of Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple, her brother, Henry, assumed editorial control [End Page 633] over a second edition, making hundreds of corrections to the original text. The title page of the new edition of David Simple flaunts Henry Fielding’s involvement: “The Second Edition, Revised and Corrected. With a Preface By Henry Fielding, Esq.” Sarah had published the first edition anonymously as by “A Lady,” and, as a result, Henry is the only Fielding whose name appears on the title page of the second edition. A casual reader might easily suspect that Henry Fielding himself had authored the novel, that his assumption of the identity of a reviser and corrector was analogous to Richardson’s “editing” of Pamela. Indeed, given Henry Fielding’s fame and his sister’s relative obscurity, such mistakes almost certainly improved the sales of the novel. Yet if Henry Fielding’s advertised involvement in David Simple was born of such generosity, it seems suspiciously like the kind of magnanimity that is actually the expression of ego, as though Henry Fielding’s goal is to displace his anonymous sister as the controlling force behind the novel’s production. If modern studies of the relationship between “Henry’s” and “Sarah’s” editions of David Simple are any guide, Henry Fielding succeeded in eclipsing his sister’s authorship. Previous critics have compared the two editions of David Simple not to recover Sarah Fielding’s original project but rather to identify Henry Fielding’s contributions. 4 This essay does the opposite. It examines Henry Fielding’s corrections in order to better understand Sarah Fielding’s original intentions. In his Preface to the second edition, Henry Fielding justifies his many revisions: There were some Grammatical and other Errors in Style in the first Impression, which my Absence from Town prevented my correcting, as I have endeavoured, tho’ in great Haste, in this Edition: By comparing the one with the other, the Reader may see, if he thinks it worth his while, the Share I have in this Book, as...

Reviews

Romantic Voices: Identity and Ideology in British Poetry. By Paul Michael Privateer. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press. 1991. xvii+257 pp. Price: $40.00. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition. By Jonathan Bate. London: Routledge. 1991. 131 pp. Price: £8.99 pb. Books with Manuscript: a Short Title Catalogue of Books with Manuscript Notes in the British Library. By R.C. Alston. London: The British Library. 1994. 663 pp. Price: £60.00. The English Language: a historical introduction. By Charles Barber. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1993. xii + 299 pp. Price: £30.00 hb/£8.95 pb. Introduction to English Language. By N.F. Blake and Jean Moorhead. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan. 1993. xii + 178 pp. Price: £35.00 hb/£9.99 pb. Who Climbs the Grammar‐Tree. Edited by R. Tracy. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. 1992. xv + 521 pp. Price: DM 226.00 The Correspondence of Henry and Sarah Fielding. Edited by Martin C. Battestin and Clive T. Probyn. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1993. liv + 207 pp. Price: £35.00. Mary Leapor: A Study in Eighteenth‐Century Women's Poetry. By Richard Greene. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1993. ix + 243 pp. Price: £30.00. The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Volume I. Edited by E.B. Murray. Oxford: Clarendon Press. lii + 592 pp. Price: £65.00. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume VII: 1853–1855 (Pilgrim Edition). Edited by Graham Storey et al. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1993. xix + 975 pp. Price: £85.00. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Edited and introduced by Margaret Cardwell. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1993. lvxvii + 516 pp. Price: £60.00. From Puritanism to Postmodernism. A History of American Literature. By Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury. London and New York: Routledge. 1991. 381 pp. Price: £35.00.

Companions without Vows: Relationships among Eighteenth-Century British Women (review)

REVIEWS 319 play of voices in the letters, the pleasure in the other's—and one's own—divided self) can be found in Poulet, Seylaz, Wohlfarth, Thody, or any number of more recent critics. Remarkably, however, only one source is cited, aside from Versini's edition: Michel Delon's study of italics in the characters' correspondence. That Bayard reformulates the ironic reversals of submission and mastery in Laclos's story rather elegantly in terms of prise and emprise (both words mean "hold," and allow for a play between active and passive connotations) will do little to lessen the annoyance of any reader even slightly familiar with earlier scholarship. It is hard to believe Bayard is unaware of this work, and even if he arrived at his own insights independently, he should at least have made some attempt to situate himself within the ongoing critical conversation about Les Liaisons. It is certainly odd that a study that focuses so much on the illusion of exteriority that blinds Laclos's heroes should reproduce that illusion so blatantly. It might be objected that Bayard is not a literary critic but a clinician exploring his response as an analytic experiment. (Some of his remarks suggest this, although no information is provided on his affiliation. Is this by any chance the same Pierre Bayard who some years ago wrote suggestive monographs on Armance and La Peau de chagrin!) But this is hardly an excuse. Le Paradoxe du menteur is a well-written, clearly organized, and intelligent book. Had the author been willing to compromise the "integrity" of his response by engaging with other commentators, it would have been a more welcome one. Patrick Coleman University of California, Los Angeles Betty Rizzo. Companions without Vows: Relationships among EighteenthCentury British Women. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. ? + 439pp. US$55.00. ISBN 0-8203-1541-9. Betty Rizzo's new book not only explores an idea that needed to be written about: it does so in a comprehensive and thoroughly readable fashion. Her conception of "companionate relationships" moves well past recent scholarly exploration of female friendship and provides an opportunity to re-examine the ideology of tyranny that Mary Wollstonecraft analysed so capably at the end of the century. Rizzo locates the roots of that late eighteenth-century political debate as she examines the socioeconomics behind women's relationships and contextualizes them in terms of both tyranny and benevolvence . She develops her thesis by way of both biographical studies and the fiction of such writers as Sarah Fielding, Frances Burney, and Sarah Scott This is really a study about the abuse of power, and the author helps us see that women were quite as capable of such abuses as men: that the term "toadeater"—first used to demonstrate political spinelessness—was soon appropriated to describe the humble companion provides some evidence in the popular mind of the link between political and domestic tyranny. Rizzo theorizes that the companionate relationship followed the same paradigm as marriage. Like marriage, companionate relationships demonstrated a great range of human behaviour, from the tyranny Frances Burney experienced at the hands of Elizabeth Juliana Schwellenburg at the court of Queen Charlotte to the deep friendship between Sarah Scott and Lady Bab Montagu that resulted in the establishment of a Utopian community in Batheaston. Because, as Rizzo notes, "the power to define tyranny for a culture rests with the empowered" (p. 12), we can expect to have to search carefully to find the ways women 320 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 7:3 exerted the power they in fact possessed. Again, here was a fact not lost on Mary Wollstonecraft when she labelled pernicious the ways that women, denied political power and education, use sexuality to manipulate men; she pleads for women to gain power over themselves, not over others, a plea difficult to fulfil when the harsh economic facts of life intruded upon any woman, single or married. In fact, the cost to a woman of being on her own was very high: a ten-thousand-pound dowry might yield a good fortune, but even that would not amount to the five-hundreda -year that Virginia Woolf later described as the minimum for freedom...