Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750-1800

L i t e r at u r e , Com m e rc e , a n d t h e Spec tacl e of Mode r n i t y, 1750 –180 0 Paul Keen explores how a co...

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L i t e r at u r e , Com m e rc e , a n d t h e Spec tacl e of Mode r n i t y, 1750 –180 0

Paul Keen explores how a consumer revolution which reached its peak in the second half of the eighteenth century shaped debates about the role of literature in a polite modern nation, and tells the story of the resourcefulness with which many writers responded to these pressures. From dream reveries which mocked their own entrepreneurial commitments, such as Oliver Goldsmith’s account of selling his work at a “Fashion Fair” on the frozen Thames, to the Microcosm’s mock plan to establish “a licensed warehouse for wit,” writers insistently tied their literary achievements to a sophisticated understanding of the uncertain complexities of a modern transactional society. This book combines a new understanding of late eighteenth-century literature with the materialist and sociological imperatives of book history and theoretically inflected approaches to cultural history. pau l k e e n is Professor of English at Carleton University.

C A M BR I D G E S T U DI E S I N ROM A N T IC I S M Founding editor pr of e s s or m a r i ly n bu t l e r , University of Oxford General editor pr of e s s or j a m e s c h a n dl e r , University of Chicago Editorial Board joh n b a r r e l l , University of York pau l h a m i lt on, University of London m a r y j ac obu s, University of Cambridge c l au di a joh ns on, Princeton University a l a n l i u, University of California, Santa Barbara j e r om e mc g a n n, University of Virginia s u s a n m a n n i ng, University of Edinburgh dav i d s i m p s on, University of California, Davis This series aims to foster the best new work in one of the most challenging fields within English literary studies. From the early 1780s to the early 1830s a formidable array of talented men and women took to literary composition, not just in poetry, which some of them famously transformed, but in many modes of writing. The expansion of publishing created new opportunities for writers, and the political stakes of what they wrote were raised again by what Wordsworth called those “great national events” that were “almost daily taking place”: the French Revolution, the Napoleonic and American wars, urbanization, industrialization, religious revival, an expanded empire abroad and the reform movement at home. This was an enormous ambition, even when it pretended otherwise. The relations between science, philosophy, religion, and literature were reworked in texts such as Frankenstein and Biographia Literaria; gender relations in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Don Juan; journalism by Cobbett and Hazlitt; poetic form, content and style by the Lake School and the Cockney School. Outside Shakespeare studies, probably no body of writing has produced such a wealth of comment or done so much to shape the responses of modern criticism. This indeed is the period that saw the emergence of those notions of “literature” and of literary history, especially national literary history, on which modern scholarship in English has been founded. The categories produced by Romanticism have also been challenged by recent historicist arguments. The task of the series is to engage both with a challenging corpus of Romantic writings and with the changing field of criticism they have helped to shape. As with other literary series published by Cambridge, this one will represent the work of both younger and more established scholars, on either side of the Atlantic and elsewhere. For a complete list of titles published see end of book.

L ITERATURE , COMMERCE , AND THE SPEC TAC L E OF MODERNITY, 1750 –180 0 Pau l K e e n

c a mbr idge u ni v er sit y pr e ss Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge c b 2 8r u, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107016675 © Paul Keen 2012 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2012 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Keen, Paul, 1963– Literature, commerce, and the spectacle of modernity, 1750–1800 / Paul Keen. p. cm. – (Cambridge studies in Romanticism) Includes bibliographical references and index. i s b n 978-1-107-01667-5 (hardback) 1. English literature–18th century–History and criticism. 2. Literature and society–England–History–18th century. 3. Commerce in literature. 4. Materialism in literature. 5. Modernism (Literature)–England. 6. National characteristics, British, in literature. I. Title. p r 448.s64k45 2012 820.9′006 23 2011042610 i s b n 978-1-107-01667-5 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For John Barrell, and for Neve, Abbey, and Morgan, distinguished scholars, the lot of them.

Literary space is not an immutable structure, fixed once and for all in its hierarchies and power relations. But even if the unequal distribution of literary resources assures that such forms of domination will endure, it is also a source of incessant struggle, of challenges to authority and legitimacy, of rebellions, insubordination, and ultimately, revolutions that alter the balance of literary power and rearrange existing hierarchies … From the point of view of the history and the genesis of worldwide space, then, literature is a type of creation that is irreducibly singular and yet at the same time inherently collective, the work of all those who have created, reinvented, or reappropriated the various means at their disposal for changing the order of the literary world and its existing power relations. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters

For the materialist historian, every epoch with which he occupies himself is only prehistory for the epoch he himself must live in. And so, for him, there can be no appearance of repetition in history, since precisely those moments in the course of history which matter most to him, by virtue of their index as “fore-history,” become moments of the present day and change their specific character according to the catastrophic or triumphant nature of that day. Walter Benjamin, The Arcade Project

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements

page ix x

1 The ocean of ink: a long introduction The more things change The last masquerade at the Pantheon This invisible je ne scay quoi The fashion fair

1

1 6 16 30

2 Balloonomania: the pursuit of knowledge and the culture of the spectacle

40

3 Bibliomania: the rage for books and the spectacle of culture

78

Beautiful invention The present rage Adventurous heroes Cautious philosophers The world as it goes

Bedlam Curious libraries The cacoethes scribendi The Helluo Librorum Men of taste

4 Foolish knowledge: the little world of microcosmopolitan literature

Diffusing knowledge far and wide The historian of character and manners The miscellany of life Trifling occurrences and little occupations The politics of politeness

vii

40 44 54 64 68

78 82 91 94 98

102 102 107 111 118 125

viii

Contents

5 Uncommon animals: literary professionalism in the age of authors “The low-life of literature” Houseless wanderers The highways of literature The crowd of life Scattered seeds

133

133 136 146 151 157

6 The Learned Pig: enlightening the reading public

165

7 Afterword: A swinish multitude: the tyranny of fashion in the 1790s

202

Notes Bibliography Index

209 223 242

Illiterate readers Erudite swine Wonderful knowledge Advertising culture Incredulous readers

165 173 182 188 195

Figures

1 Frontispiece, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 3rd edn. 1797. By Permission of Encyclopaedia Britannica. page 48 2 The New Mail Carriers, or Montgolfier and Katterfelto Taking An Airing in Balloons. Engraving. Etching. Anonymous. From Rambler’s Magazine. January 1, 1784. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 58 3 The New Mode of Picking Pockets. Engraving. August 1784. Published in Grand-Careret et Detteil, La Conquête de l’air, 1910. © The British Library Board: 1800.a.26. 59 4 Paul Sandby, The English Balloon, 1784. Etching and aquatint. 1784. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 62 5 The Downfall of Taste and Genius, or, The World As it Goes. Etching. By S. Collings. Published by W. Humphrey, 227 Strand. c. 1784. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 72 6 Love in a Balloon. Etching. Anonymous. From Rambler’s Magazine. November 1, 1784. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 75 7 The Quacks. Etching. Published by W. Humphrey, 227 Strand. 1783. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 186 8 Bubbler’s Medley, or a Sketch of the Times. Etching and engraving. Published by Carington Bowles. 1720. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 200

ix

Acknowledgements

It is entirely appropriate, given the topic of this book, that I have been so lucky in my debts. I have benefited greatly from the suggestions and honest feedback of a number of colleagues, many of whom I have been doubly fortunate to count as friends. John Barrell, Mary Fairborough, Ina Ferris, Kevin Gilmartin, Georgina Green, Thomas Keymer, Jon Klancher, Don LePan, April London, Deidre Lynch, Julie Murray, Daniel O’Quinn, Mark Phillips, Andrew Piper, Mary Poovey, Jonathan Sachs, Betty Schellenberg, and Alex Wetmore all helped enormously, asking the right question at the right time and, in many cases, offering honest criticism of draft versions of many of these chapters. I not only learned a lot from them, but have valued the process all the more for having had the chance to enjoy their spirit of collegiality. I was fortunate to have a chance to work through many of these ideas in a variety of seminars and workshops. I would like to thank the organizers of the Digital Retroaction Conference at University of California, Santa Barbara, a work-in-progress seminar at the 2008 NASSR conference in Toronto, and the EighteenthCentury Studies Group in Ottawa. The opportunity to discuss many of these ideas with the people who attended the Bookish Histories conference I co-organized with Ina Ferris was especially helpful. Parts of three chapters appeared elsewhere, and I am grateful to the publishers for permission to reprint material in a revised form: “Foolish Knowledge: The Commercial Modernity of the Periodical Press” (European Romantic Review 19 [2008]); “The ‘Balloonomania’: Science and Spectacle in 1780s England” (Eighteenth-Century Studies 39 [2006]); and “‘Uncommon Animals’: Making Virtue of Necessity in the Age of Authors,” in Bookish Histories: Books, Literature and Commercial Modernity, 1700–1900, ed. Ina Ferris and Paul Keen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). I have benefited enormously from the thoughtful and constructive responses of the anonymous readers in all three of these cases, and from the extraordinarily nuanced and perceptive suggestions of Reader A for Cambridge x

Acknowledgements

xi

University Press. My thanks as well to Linda Bree and Josephine Lane for the helpfulness and sound judgement with which they guided the manuscript through the publication process. Much of this research was made possible by the generous support of grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, including the provision of a year’s leave from teaching. In an age when the humanities face unprecedented attacks on the financial support that makes so much of our work possible, SSHRC’s generosity is especially appreciated. Finally, this book would definitely not be the same without the “help” of our three daughters, Neve, Abbey, and Morgan, all of whom arrived during the years that I have been working on it, and my wife Cynthia, whose ideas and encouragement were every bit as helpful in this book as they were in my first. I have been lucky in my debts.

Ch apter 1

The ocean of ink: a long introduction

Reflecting the other evening on the influence of Fashion, I insensibly fell asleep, and imagined myself suddenly transported into a magnificent temple, in the centre of which, elevated on a pedestal, stood a female of a very light capricious air, attended by numbers of both sexes, who were burning incense on her altar. But what astonished me most was, that the scene experienced a perpetual change … All who rejected the solicitations of Vanity, were compelled to enter by Ridicule, whose shafts were universally dreaded. Even Literature, Science, and Philosophy, were obliged to comply. Gentleman’s Magazine (1781)

Fashion is never satisfied.

The Literary Fly (1779)

T h e mor e t h i ng s c h a ng e This is not, much as I might have wished, a book about how things changed. But it is an account of how people living in an earlier period coped with change, or at least how they coped with seemingly endless talk of change. Addressing a similar ethos of overwhelming cultural and technological acceleration today, Robert Darnton posed the question of how we are to “orient ourselves” in an age when “information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed” (“Library” 72). Rather than offering an answer, Darnton recommends a turn to history as a means of gaining some kind of critical perspective on these issues. This book is animated by a similar conviction. It explores an age that was rife with debates about information overload, about the destabilizing effects of developments in communicative technologies, about the corrosive influence of that scene of “perpetual change” known as fashion, and about the shifting distance between the written word and the political process. In other words, it is focused on an era which, like our own, was haunted by a sense of its own extraordinary modernity. 1

2


I am interested in the complexity and force of the pressures which Britain’s changing commercial order exerted on cultural debates in this period, but rather than reading texts from these decades as sophisticated but implicitly passive accounts of these dynamics, I have tried to emphasize the resourcefulness, wit, and theoretical self-consciousness with which so many writers engaged with these issues in productive rather than reactionary ways. Rather than simply moralizing about these as problems or waxing nostalgic for some older better time, they embraced these realities as the unavoidable foundation of new ideas about why literature mattered, what kinds of knowledge it should aspire to, what the basis of authors’ distinction should be, and what kind of reading public this ought to entail. Or, more accurately, they did all of these things. The texts which form the core of this book were animated by tensions between these impulses: curmudgeonly grumbling about the degraded state of modern culture; wistful longing for earlier, better times; and more genuinely engaged, often cunning, arguments for the renewed importance of modern literature in an era when, to echo Darnton, information was exploding furiously around them. As Chapter 3, which explores the age’s penchant for cultural pathologization (the bibliomania, the cacoethes scribendi, the Helluo Librorum), suggests, there was never any shortage of grumbling and nostalgia. Nor was there any lack of literary feuds, from the sparring between the Monthly Review and the Critical Review to the Ossian and Rowley controversies. But these were never the whole story. And, too often, the sheer vitriolic splendour of these various complaints and disputes has distracted us from writers’ more compelling accounts of the renewed importance of literature in a modern commercial society (the subject of Chapter 4) and the codes of professionalism which ought to ensure modern authors’ distinction (Chapter 5). Whatever their particular approach to these issues, writers’ broader social focus on their cultural location within what a mid-century periodical named the Microcosm called “the wider Theatre of the world,” which frequently extended towards their publishers and booksellers on the one hand, and to their reception among various reading communities on the other, anticipates the materialist and sociological turn of our own day (1: 6). Like many of these earlier writers, book historians have helped to focus our attention on the much broader and highly mediated landscape which defines the field of cultural production in any historical context. This, in turn, has helped to foreground questions about the ways that texts travelled: the kinds of knowledge which their transmission was engaged

The more things change

3

in producing and the forms of subjectivity and community which these exchanges help to foster, from the polite image of a “well regulated” family enjoying the Spectator over “Tea and Bread and Butter” to the rise, near the end of the century, of a plebeian public sphere (1: 39). If these tropes of circulation anticipate our own more sociological focus today, they also gesture to a renewed interest in the question of what it might mean to speak of cultural materialism as a critical practice. The focus among many book historians on factual details, either about how books were printed and distributed, or who was reading them, has helped to complicate our understanding of cultural production in valuable ways. But this shift has also raised important questions that converge in Michael Warner’s cautionary reminder about the dangers of approaching “the history of print” in ways that “suppose printing to be a nonsymbolic form of material reality.” Printing, in this view, “is mere technology, a medium itself unmediated” (9). If literary criticism tended, for too long, to read past the material realities of books, in terms of both how they were produced and sold, and where and how they circulated, research on the factual specificities of print culture – the details of the print shop and the book trade – risks falling into an inverted form of this problem. Gesturing to the same issue, Roger Chartier warned that “the space between text and object, which is precisely the space in which meaning is constructed, has too often been forgotten” by both types of critics: practitioners of “the traditional sort of literary history that thinks of the work as an abstract text whose typographic forms are without importance,” and those whose concentration on typographic form excludes more abstract questions about literary interpretation (Order 10). Reifying the differences between these material and cultural realms, consciously or otherwise, amounts to a new version of the theoretical dead end which bedevilled reductive Marxist accounts of base and superstructure. Raymond Williams’ reminder, in his discussion of this issue in Marxism and Literature, that “it is ironic to remember that the force of Marx’s original criticism had been mainly directed against the separation of ‘areas’ of thought and activity,” offers an important corrective to approaches to print culture which implicitly ground themselves in a similar model of a materialist (or typographic) base and cultural superstructure (78). Challenging more deterministic models, Williams insisted that “a lived hegemony is always a process … a realized complex of experiences, relationships, and activities, with specific and changing pressures and limits” – a shifting and internally heterogeneous network of forces that

4


amount to what Chartier would describe as the intensely relational nature of any field of cultural production (112). Adequately recognizing the highly charged commercial aspects of these eighteenth-century debates means being more attuned, not only to the often fraught nature of this “space between text and object … in which meaning is constructed,” but more ambitiously, to the changing distance between these poles in different texts and for different audiences. Books’ status as commercial objects means that the question of their history has as much to do with the fetishistic realm of the commodity as with the typographic world of bibliography. Rather than offer a series of unified accounts of representative individuals, I have submerged my analysis of particular writers within a more diffuse, often cacophonous assembly of voices. This focus on debates rather than on individual authors resonates in important ways with these writers’ own arguments, which I trace in the next section of this chapter, about the radically intersubjective nature of commercial modernity, which, as Adam Smith and others insisted, was marked by an unprecedented degree of mutual dependence. This sense of the collaborative nature of a transactional world extended to a self-reflexive awareness of their own shared fate as writers; their common predicament was both a sociological reality and one of their most enduring themes, simultaneously the context and a great deal of the content of their writing. I have, in turn, integrated that historical lesson as a central aspect of my own methodological choices. If this diffused focus, which privileges points of discursive convergence rather than isolated voices, amounts to little more than taking these writers at their word, it does still beg the question of the sorts of generalizations I am making, which surface in the kinds of descriptions that I have already been using: “they embraced,” “their own shared fate,” and so on. The point is not that these claims were equally true of all writers, or that there was any kind of easy unanimity in the period. On the contrary, as my account of the rage for ballooning in Chapter 2 suggests, most responses were marked more by ambivalence than by unswerving support or condemnation; virtually every one of these authors can be found to be alternately generous and censorious in different places in their writing, inclined to embrace the more democratic cultural realities of their day in one place and to bemoan modernity as so much vulgarity and faddish corruption in another. But that heterogeneity should not negate the strength of a consensus which emerged in the second half of the century, which underlay and in many ways organized the more

The more things change

5

specific disputes about literature that preoccupied so many of these writers. By the second half of the century, the debate about the legitimacy of professional authorship (as opposed to the more genteel model of the amateur man of letters) had largely been won, but this consolidation only generated further debates about what literary professionalism meant: what forms of writing for money were acceptable and even laudable as opposed to the widely reviled literary prostitution of the Grub Street hacks who remained objects of ridicule throughout the century.1 My emphasis, in other words, is on shared discursive positions: both the broad underlying areas of agreement which facilitated these more particular debates about literary professionalism, and the shared emphases of the numerous voices that converged in each of the contending positions within these debates. My focus has been on the tensions which animated these debates, but if the enormous range of authors and journals included here seem at times to speak with a single voice, that is in part because my goal has also been to highlight the prominent features of one particular position within these debates about why literature mattered in a modern transactional world, a perspective which was most closely associated with the age’s many periodical and miscellaneous writers, and to which we have not been adequately attentive. And yet, as I began by saying, this is not ultimately a book about how things changed. Its main focus is in many ways a history that got lost. The ideas about modern literature, authors, and readers that preoccupy me in these chapters would be displaced by an aesthetic ideology which embraced the power of the creative imagination in terms of a far more narrow understanding of “the literary.” If that emergent ideology, which we have come to refer to as Romanticism, was distinguished by a levelling spirit of its own, and by a similar respect for ordinary life, it embraced these ideas in the far more conservative disciplinary terms of a perspective which equated literature with aesthetic expression, or a literature of power, as De Quincey would theorize it (54). Martha Woodmansee argues in The Author, Art, and the Market, that it was precisely the interventionist nature of these eighteenth-century periodicals and miscellanies that disqualified them from serious consideration in an era which saw the crystallization of an aesthetic ideology that privileged disinterested contemplation. Periodical writers such as Addison, she argues, were “attempting not so much to explain a pre-existing practice as to produce a new practice” (6). Woodmansee’s argument that these authors’ interventionist commitment ensured their own marginalization applies to literary history as much as it does to a broader history of aesthetics:

6


because they wear their prescriptive intent so boldly, because they aim to intervene and to alter rather than to explain practice, such writings do not appear to be “properly” philosophical. They therefore tend to be overlooked by the philosopher-historians – excluded from the canon of texts relevant to the history of aesthetics. (5)

In the wake of recent critiques of this aesthetic ideal of philosophical detachment, a shift which is epitomized by Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, the interventionist spirit of writers such as Addison has regained its importance, if in strikingly new ways. Knowing more about the residual force of these earlier ideas helps us to recognize more clearly just what was at stake in those aesthetic imperatives which displaced them, and which in turn had such an indelible influence on our own inherited ideas about literature and the disciplinary map which these ideas authorized. T h e l a s t M a s qu e r a de at t h e Pa n t h e on There can be few more appropriate starting points for a study of the cultural effects of debates about Britain’s commercial modernity than a masquerade. The May 1782 edition of the European Magazine’s recurring column, “The m a n-m i l l i n e r , Containing an Account of the Fashions, Fetes, Intrigues, and Scandal of the Month,” depicted a memorable “frolic” in which literature, or at least a fictional character dressed up in the various fields which constituted literature, jumped into the deep end of polite sociability in its most refined and, sceptics would have insisted, dissipated state: a visit “to the last Masquerade at the Pantheon.” I covered my jacket with printed labels, descriptive of the work … There was not an inch of my coat which had not its characteristic label – Science – Biography – Politics – Poetry – History – Anecdotes – Music, and all the various topics which compose your miscellany, furnished me with ornaments; and the tout ensemble of my dress was composed by A Hive placed on my breast, for the reception of the flowing wit and humour of the place. On my entrance I distributed the following hand-bill: “Advertisement. – This is to give notice, that in the next number of the European Magazine, and London Review, there will be inserted a complete account of all the trips and miscarriages, the intrigues and scandal, the faux pas, and the tetes-a-tete, the goings out and the comings in, the leers and the glances, the whispers and the appointments that have taken place, are now taking place, or may yet take place at the Masquerade at the Pantheon.”

Flaunting its own physicality, this version of literature unsettled the tendency of many eighteenth-century thinkers to abstract their focus from

The last Masquerade at the Pantheon

7

the materiality of social practices to the purely contemplative realm of taste and learning by aligning itself with the sensuality of these revellers, “the leers and the glances, the whispers and the appointments.” Literature had not merely entered a world of bodies, but had itself become embodied. The masqueraders and labels reflected each other in their chaotic density. Every inch of the Man-Milliner’s coat was covered with the names of forms of literature, but the seriousness and dignity of these genres (“Science – Biography – Politics – Poetry – History – Anecdotes – Music”) only served as a foil for the “scraps” of gossip which he collected. Such was the novelty of his costume that I had not … been long in the Rooms before I had my box loaded with papers – You will hardly believe what a crowd and variety of contributors there were to your Hive. Beaux who never scribbled before – and ladies who declared themselves to be everlastingly at the cabinet, pulled out their pencils and threw into my hive all the scandal of the night. (1782: 1: 330)

The anecdote achieved its comic effect by turning established codes of polite sociability on their head. For Jürgen Habermas, the Spectator’s invitation to its readers to deposit their letters through the jaws of a lion’s head attached to the west side of Button’s Coffee House was a healthy sign of the purposeful nature of bourgeois publicity (42). The Man-Milliner, on the other hand, decorated himself in a kind of fancy dress in order to be “loaded and pestered with intrigues, rumours, hints, surmises, certainties, doubts, and all the items of which a long account of slanders is composed,” all of it to be recycled in future issues of the magazine (1: 330). Addison may have bragged of following the example of Socrates who “brought Philosophy down from Heaven, to inhabit among Men” by bringing “Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables and in Coffee-Houses”; the Man-Milliner had brought literature to “the last Masquerade at the Pantheon,” a scene shaped by Rabelaisian impulses rather than rational exchange, trading in gossip rather than sharing philosophical ideas, and the revellers who encountered it there loved it (Spectator 1: 38–39).2 The point about this light-hearted account of literature’s immersion in the world of fashionable display (apart from its obvious comfort level with what we might be inclined to think of as more anxious terrain) was in some ways its predictability. Inventive though this particular conceit may have been, it succeeded by inverting a familiar set of assumptions. Acknowledging “the tyranny of fashion” was an almost ritualistic stance. Critics’ frequent observations about the literary dimensions of fashion’s tyranny were informed by assumptions about the close relation between a culture’s manners (a word

8


that was suggestive of the broad texture of everyday life) and its writings, but this proximity offered little comfort. The August 1786 edition of the Monthly Review gravely reminded its readers: “we have frequently observed, that Fashion exerts her influence over the literary, as well as over the gay world” (75: 81). A dream vision in the Gentleman’s Magazine’s depicted the world of Fashion (figured as “a female” standing “on a pedestal”) as a scene of instability and distraction policed by Vanity and Ridicule, with which “even Literature, Science, and Philosophy, were obliged to comply” (1781: 51: 355). In his controversial Letters of Literature (published in 1785 under the pseudonym Robert Heron), John Pinkerton warned that “fashion, after exerting her power upon most other subjects, has at last chosen literary reputation to display the utmost caprices of her sway” (15). The Analytical echoed this sense of frustration: “it is much to be lamented, that fashion should extend its influence even to matters of literature” (1790: 8: 543).3 Vicesimus Knox was prepared to allow fashion to exert “her arbitrary power in matters which tend not to the corruption of morals,” such as “the exact dimension of a buckle or a head-dress,” but, he warned, “the misfortune is, that she will, like other potentates, encroach on provinces where her jurisdiction is usurped” (Essays 2: 321–22, 2: 17, 2: 322). As Herbert Croft put it in his shortlived periodical the Literary Fly, “fashion is never satisfied” (96). Described “exerting her power,” “exert[ing] her influence,” “extending its influence,” “encroach[ing] on provinces,” Fashion (more often than not gendered if not actually personified as a female) in these accounts is depicted in motion: an insidious colonizing force characterized by incessant expansion. What interests me is not the question of what it was that made this denunciatory posture (and the ironic celebrations which traded on it for their effect) popular but the more important issue of the kinds of cultural work that it enabled. In what ways did these descriptions of fashion as an aberration implicitly legitimate alternative models of literature that were deeply engaged with the contingencies of a modern commercial society? What realignments and affirmations did this facilitate? Or to put this another way, in what ways did negative versions of fashion as commercial excess help to legitimate other models of literary professionalism that were nonetheless consistent with the pressures of a polite modern nation? How did identifying the corrosive influence of fashion enable authors to create the grounds for a model of writing that could be argued to engage with these pressures rather than merely turn their back on them in Augustan disdain? And what sorts of knowledge would this imply, circulating among what types of readers, and to what end?


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If these questions are difficult to answer, this is partly because we, like so many readers in the period, already know the script. For Tobias Smollett’s Matthew Bramble, “the public” was an “incongruous monster” addicted to “noise, confusion, glare, and glitter” (88), a predisposition which was itself symptomatic of “the general tide of luxury, which hath overspread the nation, and swept away all, even the very dregs of the people” (36). Rather than either reproducing Matthew Bramble’s account of decline into a commercially driven world of triviality and distraction or, in a recuperative spirit, embracing those authors and texts which were damned for being part of this new literary marketplace, it may be more productive to explore the multiple and often contradictory processes of cultural transmission that underpinned these dynamics.4 This includes understanding more about the ways that debates about fashion enabled critics to come to terms with tensions between two very different accounts of the emergence of modern culture. On the one hand, it is important not to underestimate the buoyant optimism that pervaded what Paul Fritz and David Williams have described as “the triumph of culture” in the eighteenth century, an era when, as J. H. Plumb argues, “the combination of leisure and culture became an important industry” (38).5 “This is the age of inventions!” the Morning Post declared. “How happy are we to live at such a pregnant period, when common mechanics produce contrivances, that a very few centuries ago would have been considered as miraculous, or caused their inventors to be hanged as conjurors” (November 7, 1786). Critics framed their endorsement of these changes in terms of a paradigm shift in the definition of virtue away from civic humanism’s masculinist ideal of heroic self-government towards a liberal emphasis on commerce as a civilizing force, under whose “benignant” influence “Barbarity is polish’d,” and “infant arts” made to “Bloom in the desart,” as Richard Glover exclaimed in his epic poem London: Or The Progress of Commerce (1739: 12). John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, the anonymous authors of Cato’s Letters (1720–23), argued that commerce promoted a spirit of “mutual confidence” as the “only possible way … to maintain publick honour and honesty” (1: 48). This sociological emphasis on commerce’s ability to foster a “mutual confidence” was in many ways its advocates’ strongest point. Samuel Johnson insisted in strikingly similar terms that “the business of life is carried on by a general co-operation; in which the part of any single man can be no more distinguished, than the effect of a particular drop when the meadows are floated by a summer shower: yet every drop increases the inundation, and every hand adds to the happiness or misery of mankind” (3: 137).

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If Johnson’s focus was more general than narrowly economic, it is equally true that critics’ growing tendency to align commerce with the whole range of social interactions – “the business of life” – offered a powerful rationalization for more sympathetic perspectives. Commerce was no longer a discreet realm which individuals might choose to enter into in pursuit of personal gain, or which they might prefer to avoid in order to be sheltered from wily opportunists and hard-nosed tricksters; it had become a byword for the totality of relations which society itself comprised in a modern transactional world in which everyone, if they were perceptive enough, recognized the general value of a shared sense of reciprocity.6 Nor was Johnson alone in grounding this leap from social analysis to moral prescription in a vision of irreducible intersubjectivity: the indistinguishable presence of a single drop amid the flood waters of modernity. An article entitled “On the Commercial Ideas Prevailing in some Parts of Europe” in the European Magazine echoed Johnson in its insistence that “every branch of commerce forms a link in this great chain of universal acquaintance; none, therefore, can be annulled, without loosening the bond of reciprocal union and friendship, and setting men at a greater distance from each other than they stood before … The neglect of commerce would be attended with the most destructive consequences” (1784: 6: 18–19). Standard phrases such as “the commerce of human life” fused literal and more figurative interpretations in a vision of modern life where personal virtue depended on an adequate appreciation of the vast intricacy of the social connections which made individual endeavours possible (Monthly 75: 1786: 425).7 However much nineteenthcentury thinkers such as Thomas Carlyle might rail against the alienating effects of industrial capitalism’s tendency to reduce social relations to a mere “cash nexus,” in the eighteenth century it was easier to align commerce with community by reimagining the Renaissance ideal of a Great Chain of Being in terms that were commercial rather than theological, and appealingly horizontal rather than hierarchical: a “great chain of universal acquaintance.” But this triumph was never uncontroversial. The dark side of this narrative of progress was not so much greed and bad taste as the threat of effeminacy, which for many critics was inexorably linked to personal and civic corruption. Reactions to the perceived excesses of modern fashions were in part a response to the dangers of these more refined and polished virtues, and to a materiality which reflected the perils of a social order committed to arousing rather than regulating desire. It is not difficult to trace a powerful anti-commerce strain of thought throughout the century,


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from John Dennis’ passionate invective against the “Itch of Novelty” (19) in 1711, to John Brown’s mid-century description of “the Character of the Manners of our Times” as a “‘vain, luxurious, and selfish e f f e m i n ac y ’” (1: 29), to Samuel Paterson’s insistence in 1772 that the age was “rife” with “scandal, and stocks, and scheming, and swearing, and lying, and quackery, and profaneness, and prodigality, and paper-credit, and bulls, and bears, and bankruptcies,” all of which were elements of a larger climate of “Licentious Freedom … incompatible with the nature of Civil Society” (2: 19, 23). These sorts of criticisms intensified as the consumer revolution’s growing momentum clashed with the reformist ethos of the 1780s and the nervous polemics of the revolutionary and Napoleonic years. The European Magazine’s enthusiasm for “that whimsical goddess, Fashion” was balanced by more pessimistic warnings about “this age of giddy dissipation, when ignorance is every day becoming more and more the character of the people of fashion” (1783: 3: 13; 1783: 4: 94). It was, it insisted, an “age of luxury and dissipation” in which “the only idol is Appearance, at whose shrine almost all the world pay homage” (1782: 1: 108). Recalling “the fate of the Roman Empire, which fell by luxury,” a 1784 tract entitled London Unmask’ d: Or the New Town Spy warned of “the spirit of pride, luxury, profusion, vanity, and corruption, which prevails throughout the kingdom in general, and the metropolis in particular, the effects of which are too universally felt by all ranks and degrees of the community” (143–44). The same year, a letter to the Gentleman’s denounced “that polite spirit of refined dissipation which characterises the present age; where this prevails, it engrosses the time, and effectually excludes every thing which is manly and great” (55: 766). “The passion of this age is in vain display,” Dr. Fordyce agreed two years later (qtd. European 1787: 11: 111). A 1788 letter to the Lounger’s Miscellany warned that “the torrent of dissipation which has encreased to so alarming a degree, must, if not checked in its progress, overwhelm and destroy the empire” (109). The point is not simply to contrast these positive and negative perspectives, but rather to highlight the productive nature of the tensions between them. The extent to which these two accounts of the age – positive and negative – drew on a shared discursive milieu in order to support their diametrically opposed moral judgements suggests the degree to which they were not just mutually informing but also mutually productive; each account gained its coherence and its urgency through their rhetorical proximity. Most prominent among these points of convergence, perhaps, was the question of luxury. As Adam Ferguson pointed out in An Essay

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on the History of Civil Society (1767), few concepts played as important a role in negotiating tensions between these competing narratives of progress and decline. For those who tended to align the impact of commerce with social progress, luxury was “the parent of arts, the support of commerce, and the minister of national greatness”; for pessimists, it was the great “source of corruption, and the presage of national declension and ruin,” a certain index of the “degenerate manners” of the modern age (231). Ferguson was astute in recognizing the role that ideas about luxury played in mediating tensions between these perspectives, but as he also acknowledged, few critical positions were more popular than denunciations of luxury. “Luxury and corruption are frequently coupled together,” he admitted, “and even pass for synonymous terms” (235).8 Fashion was dangerous, critics warned, because it compounded the morally corrosive effects of luxury with the “restless desire of novelty” (Johnson 5: 212). Love of novelty, Edmund Burke argued in the opening section of A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), because it is “the most superficial of all the affections … changes its object perpetually” (1: 101). The world of fashion, the Gentleman’s agreed, was a scene of “perpetual change,” as superficial as it was inconstant (1781: 51: 355). To put this another way, fashion constituted a temporalized form of luxury: an endlessly exhausted, endlessly self-reproducing scene of excess which by the late eighteenth century reinvented itself with “kaleidoscope speed” (McKendrick 92). “Never was fashion so predominant as at present, and never did novelty enter more into the extreme,” the Morning Post complained (August 8, 1783). “The rage for novelty is now constituted to be the prevailing one, and every man who gives public exhibitions must consult it,” it repeated two years later (October 6, 1785). Privileging novelty over inherent worth, fashion conjured up the dangers of luxury in their most commodified form.9 Plumb’s pioneering account has become familiar to us as we grow more attuned to broader sociological questions about the consumption of culture and the politics of politeness. But his tendency to reproduce the triumphalist rhetoric of many critics from the period elides the extent of the anxieties that were also part of these changes. According to Plumb, resistance to these improvements was limited to an enclave of backward-looking curmudgeons whose insistence that “writing for a mass audience led to coarseness and triviality” missed the more profound benefits associated with the emergence of this historically new category of a popular middle class eager for cultural consumption (47). This positive dimension was all the more important because this middle class eager to


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participate in different forms of cultural consumption was dignified by “a moral earnestness, a belief that a taste for the arts led to improvement and refinement” (47). So they told themselves, again and again. And sometimes this was doubtlessly true. But as John Brewer points out (and this is the version of the story which is even more familiar to us), this consumption of culture was about far more than improvement and refinement. Like the Man-Milliner’s trip to the Pantheon, it was “bound up with the giddy round of social pleasures” and “steeped in hedonism and sexual intrigue” (“Most” 348). Plumb’s historical narrative found its theoretical counterpart in Habermas’ description of the bourgeois public sphere as a participatory middle-class culture: “a forum in which the private people, come together to form a public, readied themselves to compel public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion” (25). Habermas’ account has been challenged, however, not only because of its inattention to the political gap between this forum’s universalist rhetoric and asymmetrical social practices, but also because its “rather stilted” account ignores the sorts of “conflicts and anxieties” which the bourgeois public sphere’s reliance on “the private commercial activities of its participants … would have entailed in the eighteenth century” (Jones 33–34).10 Ironically, the very qualities which made Habermas’ argument rhetorically persuasive have rendered it historically suspect: its “orderly and tidy” account of the past does not square with “the untidy and disorderly world of eighteenthcentury social practice” (Brewer, “Most” 345). If we take Habermas’ and Plumb’s vision of a morally earnest eighteenth century as our starting point, then these “giddy” distractions and anxieties can only be read as aberrations of the true (but apparently widely ignored) spirit of the age, repudiations of the purposefulness that was its supposedly more genuine if less practised characteristic.11 Rather than accepting this either/or scenario of cultural arrival and pristine rational debate or decline into giddy distraction, it may be more productive to approach the question of the commercialization of leisure (of which reading was a central element) and the broader idea of the public sphere in ways that fuse these supposedly incommensurable elements of intellectual curiosity and entrepreneurial zeal, enlightenment and opportunism, politicized resistance and fashionable indulgence. Literature took its place in Britain’s commercial modernity alongside a host of phenomena, from performing animals to the rage for air ballooning to scientific demonstrations which featured healthy doses of conjuring to the popularity of automata, all of which simultaneously endorsed, parodied, and

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complicated the age’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge. As Gillian Russell has argued, the hybridizing effects of commerce opened up “new zones of publicity in which fashionable sociability and the republic of letters intersected,” generating an unprecedented set of relations that Russell describes as “metropolitan sociability … a theatre in which fashion, commerce, philanthropy, science and the arts were constantly interacting” (Women 38, 24). As the essays in Romantic Sociability, edited by Russell and Clara Tuite, have demonstrated, the conflict between different views about the modern commercial world can best be read as a clash between competing models of sociability, a concept which formed “the ideological and material battleground on which this struggle occurred” (Women 9).12 Russell’s focus on “domiciliary sociability,” by which she means “the range of activities – balls, assemblies, masquerades, theatricals, dinners, card-parties and general visiting” – that women used to claim a place for themselves within the public sphere, offers a significant rethinking of standard interpretations about the relation between “the republic of letters and the world of ‘the Town’” in Habermas’ theorization of the bourgeois public sphere by highlighting the crucial formative power of the latter, but it also complicates our understanding of “the Town,” or modern urban life, in equally important ways by unsettling the gendered logic which persists in many of our accounts of it (11). Russell’s model of “metropolitan sociability” emerges out of a related engagement with Peter Clark’s British Clubs and Societies, in which Clark traces the emergence of “a ‘new-style’ sociability created by the commercialization of culture in venues such as the coffee house, the inn, tavern, alehouse, the proliferation of forms of voluntary association, theatres, pleasure gardens, dancing assemblies and so on” (Russell 9–10). For Clark, this new version of sociability was itself marked by a familiar separation between what he calls “fashionable sociability,” which was characterized by “the public presence of women,” and the traditional male homosociality of the club, the coffee house, and the tavern (192). Russell’s focus is on a set of women whose activities were associated with the world of fashionable sociability, but as her account suggests, the hybridizing effects of commerce meant that these alternative realms were frequently marked by their interpenetration rather than their distance.13 David Hume’s 1754 essay “Of Refinement in the Arts” (originally titled “Of Luxury”) offered an account of modern life that is remarkable for precisely this sort of metropolitan worldliness: The more these refined arts advance, the more sociable men become: nor is it possible, that, when enriched with science, and possessed of a fund of conversation,


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they should be contented to remain in solitude, or live with their fellow-citizens in that distant manner, which is peculiar to ignorant and barbarous nations. They flock into cities; love to receive and communicate knowledge; to show their wit or their breeding; their taste in conversation or living, in clothes or furniture. Curiosity allures the wise; vanity the foolish; and pleasure both. Particular clubs and societies are every where formed: Both sexes meet in an easy and sociable manner; and the tempers of men, as well as their behaviour, refine apace. (271)

Turning on its head the assumption that the pursuit of knowledge and a love of display were by nature mutually exclusive, Hume insisted on their inevitable fusion as central elements of the same teleology of social progress leading to the “linked” qualities of “industry, knowledge, and humanity” – a process which attracted the wise and the foolish, and which had room for a wish to show off a correct “taste in conversation or living, in clothes or furniture” as well as a desire “to receive and communicate knowledge.” As Russell’s work vividly demonstrates, this was never merely a philosophical position. Nor was it limited to the largely polite circles which constitute the focus of her study. The occasion for Sophie von La Roche’s exclamation “that the Briton is born for all that is noble” (the sight of the Wedgwood shop’s display of “a thousand lovely forms and images”) might have struck a discordant note in classical republican ears, but La Roche found nothing remarkable in combining an interest in window shopping and liberty, trick-riders at the Royal Circus and Alexander Pope’s house at Twickenham, the Pantheon “where none but bright and robust company attend for balls and concerts in the winter” and Somerset House – “a magnificent palace built in four large wings dedicated to the academies of science and art” (122–23; 240–41; 154). Nor, for La Roche, could the enticing window displays on Oxford Street and the Strand be dismissed as an appeal to idle curiosity: “Many a genius is assuredly awakened in this way; many a labour improved by competition, while many people enjoy the pleasure of seeing something fresh – besides gaining an idea of the scope of human ability and industry” (237). Standing inside Boydell’s print shop “to watch the expressions of those outside,” she was prepared to concede the accuracy of “Voltaire’s statement – that they stare without seeing anything” in some cases; “but I really saw a great many reflective faces, interestedly pointing out this or that object to the rest” (237). Polite taste and popular recreation coexist in La Roche’s journal as they do in Hume’s argument (and in the European’s ironic account of the Man-Milliner’s expedition to the Pantheon), not just as complementary and therefore harmoniously related categories, but without any real sense

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of distinction between them. They were part of a triumphalist cultural ethos which could never quite free itself from the “conflicts and anxieties” that were an inevitable part of the “untidy and disorderly” world of commercial modernity, and which were shaped by a discursive legacy that was rooted in the pressures of the first half of the century when “the English began to absorb the experience of commerce into their political self-understanding” (Klein, “Third” 187). The focus of this book is ultimately on how the English (or more accurately in this case, the British) began to absorb the experience of commerce, not just into their political self-understanding but into their cultural self-understanding in the broadest sense of that phrase. As Brewer and Roy Porter argue in Consumption and the World of Goods, “one of the historical tasks of what we may loosely call the Enlightenment was to forge new sets of moral values, new models of man, to match and make sense of the opportunities and obligations, the delights and dangers, created by the brave new world of goods” (5). That emergent form of cultural self-understanding was rooted in an unprecedented sense of the contingency of knowledge which simultaneously unleashed new anxieties about the social order and created fresh opportunities to conceptualize the role of literature in ways that resonated with these developments by embracing that sense of contingency as its most fundamental characteristic. The debates which collectively facilitated this transformative process in the second half of the century were shaped by the mediating force of the more jagged tensions which dominated these previous decades: “the Mandevillian Moment,” as Liz Bellamy has termed it (9). These tensions were historically prior to the literary interventions that I am interested in here in two senses: they had played themselves out during the previous decades, but they also reflected a deeper or more fundamental set of structural changes than the literary debates which form the core of this book. The debates about literature that I will be exploring here, because they were bound up with this process of ideological accommodation, only make sense in terms of these prior tensions. T h i s i n v i s i bl e j e n e s c a y quoi Hume’s and La Roche’s accounts help to complicate our tendency to resolve the debate over whether commerce was productive of virtue or corruption, harmony or discord, progress or decline, into too easily polarized accounts, but remaining on what is still an essentially moral level of this question risks missing a more fundamental aspect of it. Studies of the

This invisible je ne scay quoi

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relation between literature and commerce in the eighteenth century are confronted with a discursive duplicity that is characteristic of commerce’s transformative power, which opened up ideological fault lines deep enough and broad enough that these discussions frequently could not or would not declare themselves in less metonymic terms. Discussions about moral health – the nation’s or that of its citizens – offered a relatively manageable way of responding to far more radical questions about what it meant to be human in what seemed to many observers to have become a ceaselessly transactional world. When critics were railing against effeminacy or (its mirror opposite) saluting virtue, they were generally talking about something else. Discussions of these concepts mobilized highly influential networks of assumptions about the changing nature of Britain’s social order, though they often expressed themselves in terms of a more straightforward moral vocabulary of personal integrity. If discussions of gender were frequently ways of talking about these broader social issues, the reverse was equally true: it was difficult to engage with questions about commercial modernity in ways that were not gendered. As Emma Clery notes, it was J. G. A. Pocock’s analysis of these changes which first highlighted the central role of gender in mediating tensions between the inherited discourse of civic humanism and the impact of commerce. As Pocock argued: Economic man as masculine conquering hero is a fantasy of nineteenth-century industrialisation (the Communist Manifesto is of course one classic example). His eighteenth-century predecessor was seen as on the whole a feminised, even an effeminate being, still wrestling with his own passions and hysterias and with interior and exterior forces let loose by his fantasies and appetites. (Virtue 114)

If these debates about commerce manifested themselves in anxious descriptions of feminized modern man, then, as Clery suggests, this level of mediation could cut both ways. If a gendered account, of either unstable women or feminized men, offered civic humanists a way of articulating the dangerous impact of commerce, it also provided advocates of commerce with a means of framing their more positive version of these events. For these thinkers, “a discourse of feminization came to challenge the masculinist paradigm that had shaped it” by establishing a more positive sense of feminization which approve[d] or even adovacte[d] the acquisition of certain characteristics gendered “feminine”: sociability, civility, compassion, domesticity and love of family, the dynamic exercise of the passions and, above all, refinement, the mark of modernity. The “feminized” man is a model of politeness, shaped by his contact with

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the female sex, full of respect and admiration for moral women, and ably fitted to undertake his heterosexual duties. (Clery 6, 10)

Advocates of what Clery describes as a transition from a discourse of feminization to a full-blown “enlightenment theory of feminization” countered the ethical force of civic humanism by converting the sense of instability which had been regularly associated with women and feminized men into a positive: privileging a capacity to handle the pressures associated with an exchange economy as the cornerstone of new models of virtue (176). Several recent books have, like Clery’s, focused on both the profoundly gendered nature of eighteenth-century questions about commercial modernity and the impact of these questions on debates about literature.14 Like many of these works, Shawn Lisa Maurer’s Proposing Men turns on the shaping influence of a tension that was rooted in writers’ immersion in the commercial order: “periodical authors inserted themselves into the age’s contentious debates about the proper uses of pleasure, employment of leisure, and consumption of the merchandise increasingly available for purchase” by figuring themselves “as legislators of behaviour and arbiters of taste,” but, Maurer suggests, this judicial posture was undercut by their own implication within these dynamics: “Dependent upon the very systems they professed to adjudicate, these authors produced knowledge as a kind of cultural goods” (9). Maurer’s argument centres on the ways that these tensions were contained by periodical writers’ insistence on sexual difference, “naturalizing separations between public and private, masculine and feminine” (19). My focus here will be on the ways that this solution, which functioned primarily on the level of content, was complemented by the ways that these authors’ characterization of themselves as cultural producers reinforced an “enlightenment theory of feminization” that extended to both men and women. And this was especially the case, I will argue, because of the ways that the fragmented and discontinuous structure of genres such as periodical and miscellaneous writing resonated with broader accounts of the nature of commerce itself. Nor, as Betty Schellenberg has argued, can these debates be isolated from the impact of the age’s many women writers who were often far more professionally ambitious and savvy than their contemporaries publicly acknowledged. In the final section of this chapter, and more especially in Chapters 4 and 5, I will return to the question of the impact of these debates on ideas about literature, but I want to prepare the ground for that discussion by considering these more fundamental questions about the deeper structural


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implications of Britain’s evolving commercial order. The problem that critics identified as a consumer-driven decline into personal and social corruption was, at a certain level, actually one of complexity. For its many advocates, the commercialization of leisure had ushered in a rich variety of cultural venues and opportunities in London and the provinces, from book stores, literary societies, and the many different types of libraries that had sprung up, to theatres, assembly rooms, coffee houses, pleasure grounds, and even the welcome allure of beautifully designed storefront windows. But for its critics, the triumph of commerce had produced a state of semiotic flux which they denounced as “profusion,” a word that translated the dangers of cultural heterogeneity into the depredations of personal taste by conjuring up an almost apocalyptic multiplication and intensification of appetites and imaginings.15 For Dennis, the appealingly familiar world of simple, inherited customs had given way to a society where “Manners are so various, so complicated, so prodigious, that one might compile Volumes of them” (11). London Unmask’ d argued that the present “reign of passions” had reduced modern urban life to a “jargon of men and things, thus promiscuously huddled together” (1784: 84). It was not simply that this dystopia had many fundamental urban qualities; urban life was, for its critics, inherently dystopian. London had become an “over-grown Town,” Dennis warned, whose inhabitants were debauched by “an Infinity of irregular Desires” (11, 15). “There would be no end of enumerating the several Wines which we use to debauch us, or the various Dishes, or their unnatural Mixtures, or their high Aromatick Sauces” (14). In his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, which appeared the same year as Dennis’ Essay Upon Public Spirit (1711), the third Earl of Shaftesbury blamed “the enormous growth of luxury in capital cities” for the inflammation of “impotent and unrestrained desire” (214, 221): “Hardly is there anything tasted which is wholly free from this ill relish of a surfeited sense and ruined appetite, so that, instead of a constant and flowing delight afforded in such a state of life, the very state itself is in reality a sickness and infirmity, a corruption of pleasure and destructive of every natural and agreeable sensation” (220–21).16 This new and debased form of desire, which critics frequently described in the more animalistic terms of an “appetite,” or often a “false appetite,” was marked by a paradox: it was more rapidly pacified than those discriminating forms which displayed a “natural” taste for legitimate objects, but in a far less enduring way.17 The attractions of novelty, Burke insisted, produce “an appetite which is very sharp, but very easily satisfied; and it has always an appearance of giddiness, restlessness, and anxiety” (1: 101).

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Brown warned that “Vanity, Luxury, and Effeminacy, (increased beyond all Belief within these twenty Years)” had produced a new type of longing “of a craving and unsatisfied nature” (1: 117–18).18 As Brewer and Roy Porter have argued, these tensions were embedded in an ambivalence associated with the word “consume,” which suggested “both an enlargement through incorporation and a withering away … both enrichment and impoverishment” (Introduction 4).19 Critics’ wariness of this new and debased form of desire was in many ways a reflection of more urgent fears about the tendency of commerce’s relentlessly intersubjective nature to undermine the possibility of individual self-government. In The Way to be Rich and Respectable. Addressed to Men of Small Fortune (1776), John Trusler counselled that “Nothing gives superiority in life, but independency. Whilst we are at the command of another, we are in a state of subordination: it is being master of one’s self only, that makes a man free; and it is independency that makes him great” (11). Responding to charges of the “weakness and effeminacy of which the polished nations are sometimes accused,” Adam Ferguson agreed that “the fortune of a man is entire while he remains possessed of himself” (217). But the various forms of social and economic commerce associated with polished nations unsettled this dream of self-possession. As J. G. A. Pocock puts it, “the individual could exist, even in his own sight, only at the fluctuating value imposed upon him by his fellows, and these evaluations, though constant and public, were too irrationally performed to be seen as acts of political decision or virtue” (Machiavellian 464). What was under siege was less some form of moral purity than a definition of stable subjectivity which had traditionally been aligned with a now outmoded vision grounded in the idea of “an individual capable of ruling and knowing himself, and a social structure which he could know clearly enough to rule his own part in it” (Pocock 458). And crucially, this was less because of the flawed nature of any particular novelty which might tempt an individual than because, collectively, they fostered a “chaos of appetites” which was “productive of dependence and loss of personal autonomy” (486). For Shaftesbury, the problem with the tendency of self-interest to encourage “a state of impotent and unrestrained desire” was precisely the fact that “by increas[ing] our wants, so it must subject us to a greater dependence on others” (221).20 “In civilized society,” Adam Smith warned, the individual “stands at all times in need of the cooperation and assistance of great multitudes … In almost every other race of animals each individual, when it is grown up to maturity, is entirely independent, and in its natural state has occasion for the assistance of no


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other living creature. But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren” (1: 26). Laments for a lost age of personal autonomy were part of a paradigm shift which manifested itself most jarringly in the death of knowledge as it had been conceived in a society that identified the continuities of landed wealth with epistemological stability. Landed wealth’s exteriority to the commercial economy was traditionally assumed to afford a capacity to recognize individuals and things for what they were and to know their worth because they could be encountered in relationships outside of the distractions of the marketplace. But once people accepted the realities of a modern economy predicated on the contingencies of an endless process of exchanges between strangers, “it must follow that the real property which defined the citizen to himself was itself defined by a blend of fictions, namely fantasy and convention; so that he was doomed to inhabit a world more unstable in its epistemological foundations than Plato’s cave” (Pocock, Machiavellian 450–51). The problem with commerce was not simply that it subordinated a commitment to the public good to self-interest fuelled by acquisitive desire, or that it exposed “authentic” culture to the impersonal laws of supply and demand. The moral and cultural threat that many eighteenthcentury commentators detected in the triumph of commerce was doubled by an even more disturbing threat to society’s epistemological foundations. What sort of knowledge could one have of the world when identity had been reduced to a set of fluctuating negotiations, not merely by the instability of market forces, but by the immersion of the individual in a maze of interdependencies which were frequently animated by a volatile and, for many, threatening brew of passions, desires, and imaginings which subordinated inherent worth to a treacherous play of appearances? The more abstract crisis unleashed by this sense of the contingency of value was compounded by a second, less explicit but equally forceful problem that is also implied by Pocock’s suggestive allusion to Plato’s cave: the tension which circulated in debates about metropolitan sociability between alluring public spectacles and the supposedly more reflective world of print culture. If, for Plato, the shadows’ visual prominence induced a kind of false consciousness – a tendency to be distracted by mere illusions at the expense of higher realities – the proliferation of endless different types of commercially driven and highly advertised spectacles seemed to many modern critics to have encouraged a similar alienation from those more valuable cultural practices which they associated with uncorrupted forms of reading as a site of pure critical reflection.

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As James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin have argued, lavishly decorated and technologically innovative exhibits such as Thomas Girtin’s Eidometropolis or P. J. de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon were a crucial part of urban metropolitan life, but for many critics the ubiquity and allure of these sorts of aggressively promoted shows and their inevitable tendency to engulf the individual within the crush of large audiences only reinforced the equation of modernity with corruption.21 If the fashionable excesses of modern literature had become a spectacle in their own right, these debates about literature were also rooted in a world dominated by a whole range of more straightforward spectacles, from performing animals, jugglers, and horse riders, to displays at the Pantheon and Lyceum and at the theatres, to dubious scientific performers such as Gustavus Katterfelto, whose seemingly endless newspaper ads routinely promised “won de r s, won de r s, won de r s a n d won de r s.” The extent to which these various promoters and performers dignified their acts by describing them in self-aggrandizing terms which drew on an Enlightenment commitment to the diffusion of knowledge meant that it was increasingly difficult to isolate debates about literature from these more controversial examples of modernity as a world animated by a love of spectacle. But then, the popularizing tendency of Enlightenment thinkers’ commitment to the diffusion of knowledge (exemplified by Addison’s famous vow to follow Socrates’ example by bringing “Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables and in Coffee-Houses”) had invited this problem all along. Burke would draw on this ambivalence in his critique of Richard Price’s enthusiasm for the French Revolution – “there must be a great change of scene; there must be a magnificent stage effect; there must be a grand spectacle to rouze the imagination … The preacher found them all in the French revolution” – but the idea of cultural spectacles had been politicized long before the 1790s by the extent to which their prominence, and their promoters’ strategic invocation of an Enlightenment rhetoric, had inflamed tensions between visual and written cultures (3: 317). The notion of “wonderful knowledge,” which a letter to the Morning Chronicle seized on as the essence of commercial modernity and to which I return in my final chapter on debates about the reading public, embraced the idea of wonder, not as a sign of the public’s laudable reverence for learning but as a paradoxical emblem of the radically compromised nature of any commitment to the pursuit of knowledge in modern commercial society (October 15, 1782). If my interest in the “balloonomania” (the subject of Chapter 2) seems, at first glance, to be an odd fit


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with the more literary debates which form the core of the chapters that follow, this is in some ways precisely the point. The range and intensity of responses to the early years of ballooning registers an important reminder of the extent to which debates about literature were necessarily embedded within this cacophonous but thriving urban culture marked by a radical proliferation of visual spectacles, but the vogue for ballooning also symbolized these two more fundamental tensions. On the one hand, as Thomas Carlyle would point out, balloons, fantastically buoyant but at the mercy of the winds, served as the perfect emblem of the instabilities of a transactional world that had come unmoored from any foundational ideas of value; on the other hand, their splendour inevitably enflamed tensions between visual and print culture as uneasily related dimensions of the world of metropolitan sociability within which ideas about literature were being negotiated. My argument in the chapters that follow is that this question about the fate of knowledge in a modern commercial nation, which was never merely rhetorical, was not just a problem but an opportunity. Authors responded to it by forging a vision of modern literature which embodied these changes, not just on the level of content but in the very structure of their work as well. And they did so with a self-reflexive clarity and sophistication that suggests an extraordinary sensitivity both to the magnitude of these changes and to the full range of their implications. In doing so they embraced an ironic mode which simultaneously aligned their efforts with an Enlightenment faith in the reformist power of the diffusion of knowledge and unsettled the availability of this sort of knowledge in any stable or easily consolidated form. The spectre of a world more unstable than Plato’s cave – a threat which was simultaneously epistemological and ontological, bound up with the impossibility of stable knowledge and the evisceration of intrinsic worth – had circulated in its rawest form in debates about the protean nature of credit in the first quarter of the century. For commentators such as Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, and John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, credit was “the most uncertain and most fluctuating thing in the world,” but for these Whiggish champions of the new commercial order (including Defoe by the time of his work on credit) credit’s instability and even its hollowness could be hailed as its primary asset rather than grounds for objection (Cato’s 1720: 1: 56). Spectator No. 3 featured Addison’s memorable dream vision of “a beautiful Virgin” named “Publick Credit” who was subject to “quick Turns and Changes in her Constitution” (1711: 13). “In the twinkling of an Eye she would fall away from the most florid

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Complexion, and the most healthful State of Body, and wither into a Skeleton” (13). The appearance of a group of “hideous” intruders affects not only Publick Credit herself, but the entire scene around her (14). The “prodigious Heap of Bags of Mony” that had been stacked behind her are revealed to have “been blown up with Air,” the “vast Sums of Gold that rose up in Pyramids on either side” turn out to be nothing more than “Heaps of Paper, or little Piles of notched Sticks, bound up together in Bundles” (14–15).22 Publick Credit’s wealth may have been illusory, or at least inconstant, but this exposé of bags full of air and little piles of sticks was not intended to demystify credit as a form of false consciousness. The emerging Whig vision espoused by these writers championed the role of credit, not by trying to close the gap with reality, but by emphasizing its radical potential as fantasy. Figured as a “coy mistress,” credit was simultaneously crucial to the new market economy and strangely insubstantial: “this invisible je ne scay quoi, this non-natural, this emblem of a something, though in itself nothing” was nonetheless “the wheel within the wheel of all our commerce, and all our public transactions” (Defoe 118–19). Even more strangely, it enjoyed this position of unique importance precisely to the extent that it was “in itself nothing.” What credit ultimately signified was the productive power of signification itself. As Terry Mulcaire puts it, “To accept Credit’s reifications as valuable in themselves is not only to compromise one’s epistemological commitments to ‘real’ value; it is also to recognize a new concept of value and a new category of objects of value” (1033). More precisely, it is to recognize value, not as a marker of inherent worth but rather as the product of “an astonishingly full – and socially real – fantasy” whose power lies in people’s recognition that it is a fantasy (1039). The concept of value had, in other words, become part of what John Ralston Saul describes as the “theatrical” nature of commerce’s dependence on all participants’ “willing suspension of disbelief” (7).23 What these examples also suggest, however, is that credit circulated as a reminder of the ontological and epistemological cost of this transition. Those who were uncomfortable with the anti-foundational implications of this “willing suspension of disbelief” experienced this shift, not as a release into the “astonishingly full” potential of an aestheticized order driven by desire, but as a disruption of a more natural state of affairs. Horace Walpole’s comment that “the present world seems composed of a forgery” registers this darker sense, not just that particular values were changing but, as Miranda Burgess suggests, that “value itself [was] shifting” into a new and less reliable paradigm governed by an


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uncompromising recognition that, as Samuel Gale insisted in An Essay on the Nature and Principles of Public Credit (1784), “the value of any article of whatever sort or kind, is (not intrinsic, independent, or absolute, but) extrinsic, dependent, and comparative” (Walpole 28: 288; Burgess 105; Gale 179). The context for Gale’s comment is important. He was countering the charge that “Paper-money is … a mockery and delusion because (they say) it has no intrinsic value,” not by denying the charge but by insisting that money was only the most perfect example of a world in which the very idea of value “is extrinsic, not intrinsic; and it is the demand (and the demand alone) that makes [anything] valuable” (179–80). If worries about credit subsided in the second half of the century, concerns about the similarly revolutionary power of fashion – its ability to “transform deformity to beauty, and beauty to deformity” – circulated as an unnerving reminder of the dangerously protean nature of fantasy as a basis for social order (Knox, Essays 1778: 2: 320). For Whiggish theorists, this new symbolic economy would lead to unprecedented levels of prosperity, but the key to their society’s ability to absorb this prosperity in meaningful ways would depend on people’s ability to adapt themselves to this network of instabilities which ran from anxieties about credit in the first quarter of the century to concerns about fashion in the second half. If fashion, like credit, could transform the relations between beauty and deformity as effortlessly as Knox suggested, then it also followed that unprecedented powers were becoming vested in the eye of the beholder. Possessing the right kind of imagination, an asset which in turn required adequate training, was crucial if people were to be capable of sustaining both the credit economy and the cultural formations that it entailed. New ideas about the role of modern literature would necessarily gain their force from the extent to which they were able to play a meaningful role in this training process.24 Concerns about epistemological instability were exacerbated by what many critics took to be commerce’s hybridizing influence generally: a question of the coherence of the social order which manifested itself most jarringly in anxieties about the erosion of gender difference. Dennis’ Essay Upon Public Spirit offered what may have been the most lurid example of this tendency to depict society’s increasing complexity as moral degeneration in terms which could be most forcefully realized as an inversion of stable gender identities: Thus has our Luxury chang’d our Natures in despight of our Climate, and our Girls are ripe as soon as those of the Indies. Nor has it only chang’d our natures, but transform’d our Sexes: We have Men that are more soft, more languid, and

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more passive than Women; Men, who like Women are come to use Red and White, and part of the Nation are turning Picts again. On the other side we have Women, who as it were in Revenge are Masculine in their Desires, and Masculine in their Practices. (15)

Like Dennis, Brown cited the erosion of differences between “the Sexes” as a key symptom of modern England’s cultural malaise: “Their peculiar and characteristic Manners are confounded and lost: The one sex having advanced into Boldness, as the other have sunk into Effeminacy” (1: 51). The Connoisseur described a set of “lady-like” men whose “delicate make and silky constitution” had reduced them to “equivocal half-men … neuter somethings between male and female” (1755: 2: 232–33). A “letter” in a subsequent number of the Connoisseur complained about the preponderance of “lady-like gentlemen … those ambiguous creatures among the men, who are both male and female” (1756: 4: 50).25 These fears about the hybridizing influence of commerce manifested themselves still more insistently, if less graphically, in concerns about the erosion of outward class distinctions. In “Against Inconsistency in our Expectations” (1773), the same essay where she had hailed “this world as a great mart of commerce,” Barbauld complained that one of the “fault[s] of the present age” was that a “conformity to fashionable manners” had weakened social distinctions: “characters are not marked with sufficient character: the several classes run too much into one another” (2: 185, 193–94). In Hannah Cowley’s The Belle’s Stratagem (1781), Sir George Touchwood warns that society is “a mere chaos, in which all distinction of rank is lost” (26). The translation of value into a product of exchanges between theoretically limitless people, many of them complete strangers, and the related primacy of tropes of circulation (rather than of the rootedness of landed wealth) had eroded the viability of stable differences, between either the sexes or the social orders. An article entitled “Strictures on a Young Lady’s Dress” in the European Magazine warned, concerning the influence of fashion on dress, that “this ancient and easy mode of discrimination is no longer known in society … All sorts of people are consequently confounded or melted down into one glaring mass of absurdity or superfluity. The lower orders are intirely lost in a general propensity to mimic the finery of the higher” (1784: 5: 244). These sorts of complaints, that “the several classes” had been “confounded or melted down,” were hardly new. Critics had long worried that any more dignified sense of social connectivity was in danger of being replaced by the sort of hierarchy of envy and insecurity depicted in Bernard Mandeville’s vivid portrait of a chain of competitive consumption flowing


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upwards from “the poorest laborer’s wife in the parish, who … will halfstarve herself and her husband to purchase a second-hand gown and petticoat, that cannot do her half the service, because, forsooth, it is more genteel” to the “shopkeepers” she imitates to “the merchant’s lady, who cannot bear the assurance of those mechanics [and] flies for refuge to the other end of town” to “the women of quality … at court” who are “frightened to see merchants’ wives and daughters dressed like themselves” and so on up “through the several degrees of quality” to “the prince’s great favorites and those of the first rank of all” (1714: 76–77). The World noted in strikingly similar terms that “every one is flying from his inferiors in pursuit of his superiors, who fly from Him with equal alacrity” (1755: 4: 170). Henry Fielding was equally astute in recognizing the double role played by virtually the whole of the population – simultaneously inferior and superior to others – in the “ladder of dependence” which structured the fashionable world of competitive display (1742: 1: 260).26 But what was most threatening about Mandeville’s lengthy delineation of “this emulation and continual striving to outdo one another” (77) was not so much its frank (and highly gendered) account of petty snobbery or its sense of a minutely stratified and therefore potentially incoherent social order, as its delineation of a world turned upside down: a cultural inversion in which the decisions of “the prince’s great favorites” were ultimately governed by the initiatives of “every mean working fellow,” whose emulative struggles generated a succession of innovations all the way up the social hierarchy. The scramble for distinction locked people “of quality,” precisely because they did command social respect, in a kind of servitude to the vulgar, people “from the other end of town” who existed too far beneath their own privileged circles for the full extent of this causal chain ever to be clearly apprehended, but who implicated their social superiors in an economy of affiliation in which the markers of difference could only ever be temporarily reasserted. From the highest to the lowest ranks, people’s actions were governed by a network of influences too indirect and too highly mediated to be easily or accurately delineated but, strikingly, the most powerful channels of influence worked up rather than down the social hierarchy. If one of the most compelling moral arguments for commerce was that it renewed the theological ideal of a great chain of being in a social vision of reciprocity across “a great chain of universal acquaintance” founded on a spirit of “mutual confidence“ or “a general co-operation,” fashion offered the parodic alternative of a chain of restless emulation or “mimicry.” Social connectivity remained assured; what was in question was the extent to which that sense of connection would

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manifest itself in socially productive or subversive ways, and this, in turn, had more to do with the threat of incoherence than with moral corruption, though it often expressed itself in terms of the latter. Concerns about blurred social distinctions suggest that critics’ endlessly rehearsed accounts of apocalyptic decline must be read – against the grain of their own emphasis on abandoned standards of taste – as protests, not against a new age of mediocrity but against a new sense of contingency. They circulated as poignant expressions of the extent to which Britain’s consumer revolution had become the scene of a kind of haunting: it had intensified the role of possessive individualism based on a model of the acquisitive subject even as it immersed the individual within an extended and unstable network of interdependencies which hollowed out the possibility of autonomous subjectivity and its related narrative of self-presence. Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and Wealth of Nations (1776) were widely hailed as crucial philosophical elements of a developing narrative of progress which seemed to close the gap between outward appearances and genuine worth, fortune and merit, extrinsic and intrinsic value, by arguing that commerce paved the way to the morally superior world of an industrious middle class where “the road to virtue and that to fortune, to such fortune, at least, as men in such stations can reasonably expect to acquire, are, happily in most cases, very nearly the same” (Theory 63). But as Smith himself acknowledged, sounding far more like Mandeville than he would have cared to admit, it remained a world animated by envy. “And thus, place, that great object which divides the wives of aldermen, is the end of half the labours of human life; and is the cause of all the tumult and bustle, all the rapine and injustice, which avarice and ambition have introduced into this world” (57). Not only were members of a commercial society disposed “to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition,” but their labours were motivated by a consequent desire to elevate their own social standing, and therefore to reinforce the relations of inequality which, he acknowledged, impeded the function of sympathy (61). Because of these problems, Smith allowed, the coercive power of “justice” rather than the spontaneous workings of sympathy was ultimately “the main pillar that upholds the whole edifice. If it is removed, the great, the immense fabric of human society … must in a moment crumble into atoms.” If the idea of justice in its most coercive form did not “overawe” people “into a respect for [their fellow-creature’s] innocence, they would, like wild beasts, be at all times ready to fly upon him; and a man would enter an assembly of men as he enters a den of lions” (86).


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As forceful as these sorts of anxieties about the impact of commerce may have been, even in Smith’s writings, it is important not to exaggerate their impact in the second half of the century, which, on the contrary, was marked by an optimistic sense of history as progress. It is more accurate to say that these anxieties constituted the central challenge which that optimism had to confront if it was to produce a credible account of social order grounded in a new and commercially oriented emphasis on politeness. The real story of this period is in many ways the enormous intellectual work involved in vindicating “the structure of modern commercial societies as, precisely, a structure, as something which, despite its arguably chaotic appearance, was available to be known, to be comprehended,” and which, therefore, could be relied on as the basis of a vision of society that was as orderly (even if this was not always clear in the short term) as it was prosperous (Barrell, Birth 89). This was not the Machiavellian (or even Mandevillian) moment but an era of ideological consolidation which followed in its wake. Paradoxical though it might seem, the increasingly shrill tone of critics’ denunciations of fashion may have been symptomatic of this process of consolidation rather than of crisis: a resolution of more fundamental anxieties which was achieved in part by redefining fashion, not as a core symptom of the diseased nature of modernity, but as an unsound but ultimately incidental by-product whose rot did not eclipse the more fundamental health of the new commercial social order, a “chaos of appetites” which did not cast into question the legitimacy of those social and economic processes whose ideal limits it was in excess of (Pocock, Machiavellian 486). If Smith’s “discovery” of the laws of the marketplace naturalized commerce by revealing it to be fundamentally rational (and even surprisingly oriented towards equilibrium), fashion became a way of syphoning off all that was “unnatural” about a consumer society in order to stabilize this picture. It functioned, in other words, as a kind of supplement, still an obsessive target of complaint but now in order to emphasize its exteriority to the truly defining and ultimately healthy characteristics of modernity.27 To put this another way, concerns about fashion heightened as fundamental critiques of commerce itself diminished. This reification of fashion as the epitome of all that was most dangerous about modernity operated on two levels. Criticizing fashion in ways that presented it as an autonomous force simultaneously enabled a supplementary logic which juxtaposed healthy and unhealthy forms of desire and laid the ground for a disciplinary regime committed not just to the regulation of desire but to fostering an ethos of self-regulation. On

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the one hand, the identification of unhealthy, destructive forms of consumer desire reinforced the myth of the sorts of highly rational forms of desire – more a rational calculation than any real form of desire, an identification of genuine needs – which function as the basis of the highly ordered marketplace dynamics envisioned by Adam Smith in which individuals “truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another” to fulfil specific needs (Wealth 1:25). On the other hand, as Mackie argues in her study of the Tatler and Spectator, adopting moralizing stances about fashion filled a void left by the retreat of absolutist regimes by naturalizing a highly disciplinary discursive system in which hegemony replaced coercion, substituting “various modes of style, taste, manners, sentiments, and affections” for formal legislation (21). Fashion, like luxury, may well have served “as a kind of magnet for anxieties about the intensified commercialization … of the world,” but properly handled, it also served as a crucial “way to talk about historical change” (30, xiv). It stood less for particular trends, however outrageous, than for a mode of subjectivity which needed to be policed in the name of self-regulation. The emergence of new ideas about what literature ought to be, about why it should matter, and to whom – the questions with which I began and to which I now want to return – was rooted in the opportunities and pressures unleashed by this broader shift in Britain’s absorption of the impact of commerce. T h e fa s h ion fa i r Diana Donald’s insistence that it is essential to set eighteenth-century satirical prints about fashion in the wider context of a “burgeoning market for consumer goods” where the scramble to inflame consumer demands produced the “fashion industry as we know it today” is as relevant to the study of literature as it is to the study of dress (8). James Raven suggests that by the end of the century literature had become “a major fashion business” marked by various forms of what a letter to the Gentleman’s denounced as the “mechanical embellishments of literature,” all of it carefully produced in order to be visually alluring in a world where the visual was gaining a heightened importance as the marketing of culture became a fully fledged industry in its own right (Raven 63, Gentleman’s 1794: 64: 47). But it is only when we recognize the historical density of the discursive connections between fashion, luxury, and subjective and social instability that we can adequately appreciate the full implications of this assessment. Concerns about the destabilization of foundational conceptions of value – the uncanny sense

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that all that was solid had melted into air – fostered an awareness of the relational nature of the literary field, which, like commercial society, was characterized by a complex and sometimes volatile set of mutual influences and exchanges between the various participants – authors, publishers and other members of the trade, and readers – and across a shifting range of genres. Critics often responded to the cultural implications of this transactional vision by embracing a Manichean discourse that went beyond a polarized rhetoric of good and bad, which remained implicitly relative terms, to the absolute lexicon of “true” and “false” predispositions: “false taste” (Gentleman’s 1778: 48: 37, Goldsmith 1765: 1: 259), “false criticism” (D’Israeli, Curiosities 1793: 2: 293), “false fame” (Pinkerton 1785: 14, 475). The World acknowledged the problems that “the great resemblance which fa l s e ta s t e bears to t ru e” posed for “hasty and inaccurate observers,” but, it insisted, this confusion did not jeopardize the ultimate coherence or authority of these terms (1754: 2: 90). To denounce false taste was to smuggle back in the reassuring spectre of foundational values in a world that seemed dominated by a sense that “the value of everything” was “not intrinsic.” This insistence on the availability of a true/false dichotomy gained part of its force from perceptions of the growing number of literary forgery cases, which conjured up the spectre of an imperilled authenticity. “The present is an age of literary deception,” Knox lamented. “Of this every one acquainted with the present state of literature in England, is sensible” (Essays 1778: 1: 296–97). “Scandalous and detestable … literary frauds” perpetrated by “cheats and knaves” had “disgraced the republic of letters by their spurious publications,” the Critical warned (1778: 46: 115). “Literary forgeries being now become so fashionable, it is somewhat difficult to ascertain what is really original,” the Monthly agreed (1777: 57: 77–78). It was “an age of literary imposition” (Critical 1785: 59: 395), an “age of literary fraud” (Gentleman’s 1780: 50: 287), a “book-making age” devoid of authorial integrity (Monthly 1781: 64: 71), an “age of triflers and trifling” (European 1789: 15: 355), an “age of dissipation and scribbling” (Critical 1759: 8: 292), a “publishing age” in the most mercenary sense, in which endless worthless texts were “obtruded on the town” (Gentleman’s 1776: 46: 227). The notoriety of specific cases of actual forgery, such as Chatterton’s Rowley poems or Macpherson’s Ossian poems, resonated with a broader sense of dishonest pretensions which translated the scandal of imposture into a question of standards: texts that were fraudulent because they were simply not good enough to be counted as “real”

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literature, whatever the claims of the “would-be wits” and “idle scribblers” who wrote them (Gentleman’s 1792: 62: 322; Baretti 207). These issues reflected broader concerns about the extent to which the relative porousness of the new literary marketplace enabled unqualified authors to exploit existing processes of legitimation in ways they ought not to have had any claim to. And once again, these sorts of concerns manifested themselves in a rhetoric of authenticity and – its dark underside – fraud. Tracing the continuities between cultural and more literal forms of capital, Pinkerton denounced the emergence of a new breed of imposters whose existence was, he explained, the result of fashion’s tendency to bestow “her favours … unworthily”: “After being blest with a variety of swindlers in all occupations, we have at last got literary swindlers: people who steal reputation in order to steal money” (1785: 15). Motivated by a desire for fame “as only a road to the temple of wealth,” these swindlers played on an unsuspecting populace by ingratiating themselves “with the printers of newspapers, of magazines, of reviews, and other periodical works” in order to puff their own writings (16). These impositions were dangerous, critics warned, because they jeopardized the “mutual confidence” that made social relations – cultural or economic – possible. Likening bad writing to “that French paste … sold for diamonds, and the counterfeit of Birmingham [which] pass in currency for the coin of the Mint of the Tower,” Knox insisted that “puffers ought therefore to be exposed, to be avoided as nuisances to society, and viewed with as much suspicion, as sharpers, swindlers, gamesters, and the whole fraternity of unprincipled adventurers.” Warning yet again about the dangers of “swindlers of literary reputation,” he insisted that “[c]ounterfeit coin ought to be cried down and stopt in its circulation, lest they who, in the honesty of their hearts, take it as lawful currency, should suffer a loss which they have not merited” (Winter 1785: 2: 120, 1: 221, 3: 248, 3: 252). Adopting the same metaphor, the Monthly declared that “the literary state, like the political, depends much on proper currency,” but this more hybrid model which fused intrinsic and symbolic value (real versus fake bills and coins) assumed rather than explained how the consensus which ought to underpin this currency was to be realized (1777: 56: 133). Questions about the availability of a shared cultural currency were magnified by a broader definitional crisis which threatened the fun damental coherence of the literary field. The Monthly’s comment in its review of Knox’s Essays, Moral and Literary that “the term literary has yet

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acquired no appropriate signification in our language” was an acknowledgement of a sense of disorientation that resonated with broader laments for the obsolescence of inherited models of intrinsic value (1780: 62: 63). The inability to establish an “appropriate signification” for the term echoed the crisis in signification that had emerged in its most pressing form in debates about credit in the first half of the century. Like credit, the idea of “the literary” circulated as a kind of “invisible je ne scay quoi,” not in the sense of literature’s subsequent association with ineffable truths which were more easily evoked than articulated but because its status as the product of a fluctuating set of exchanges between various types of authors, editors, people in the trade, and readers across a growing range of genres militated against any stable sense of inherent meaning. In his opening remarks on literary property in the landmark Donaldson v. Becket case (1774), Edward Thurlow “laughed at” the term “as signifying nothing but what was of too abstruse and chimerical a nature to be defined” (Gentleman’s 1774: 44: 51). Judge Eyre’s insistence in the same trial that he “considered a book precisely upon the same footing with any other mechanical invention,” in both of which “ideas were in a manner embodied so as to render them tangible and visible,” articulated the central theoretical challenge for literary critics: just what was this phenomenon called literature whose property rights were to be protected, and what was so special about it, that it deserved a unique form of legal protection unavailable to all other inventions, which had to rely on patents? (Gentleman’s 1774: 44: 55). As an elusive and yet fundamental concept whose various associations helped to structure the whole field of writing and reading, the idea of the literary was, like credit, a “wheel within the wheel” enabling an increasingly busy form of cultural commerce. All of this, however, belongs to a narrative of commerce as alienation. But it would be misleading, or at the very least radically incomplete, to read this sense of the instability of the literary field in such purely negative terms. For many writers, this indeterminacy was as much an opportunity as a crisis. As with the naturalization of commerce in the second half of the century, it is more accurate to say that these anxieties constituted the central challenge that authors had to confront if they were to produce compelling ideas about the role of the literary in a modern commercial society in ways that escaped a recoil into the simplicities of Manichean absolutes. This book tells the story of the resourcefulness with which many writers responded to that challenge. However focused individual writers may have been on their own shortterm, monetary pursuits, they were engaged (albeit in often unconscious

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ways) in a far broader process of reimagining the evaluative frameworks within which the worth of their efforts might be judged. The impact of this struggle was as lasting as their own focus may have been immediate, and as collective as their personal motivations may have been selfish. Too unintended and multifarious to be called a project, this process helped to establish both the values and the tensions that informed Britain’s modernity by adapting its various forms of cultural production and consumption to “the business of life” in contemporary society. The Microcosm’s plan to establish “a l ic e ns e d wa r e hous e f or w i t ” with a “Patent” for selling “Jokes, Jests, Witticisms, Morceaus, and Bon-Mots of every kind,” as well as a full range of “names and titles” for novels in “the most fashionable and approved patterns” (1787: 1: 92, 2: 73), or the proposal in the Connoisseur, to convert “the now useless theatre in Lincolns Inn Fields” into “a L i t e r a r y R e g i s t e r- O f f ic e … a mart for the staple commodities of the literary commonwealth,” which would be staffed by authors “who will be employed from time to time in supplying the public with the requisite manufactures,” were animated by a tone of ironic celebration rather than satirical denunciation (3: 188). A “letter” to the World responded to the age’s “paper-madness” with an equally entrepreneurial (and equally ironic) plan for “pe r f or m i ng libraries”: a paper-hanging, representing classes of books … in so many pretty designs of book-cases, or pieces of ornamental architecture, accommodated to the size of all rooms, in such a richness of gilding, lettering and colouring, that I doubt whether the C h i n e s e pa pe r so much in fashion in most of our great houses, must not … give place to the l e a r n e d: I think the l i br a r y-pa pe r will look as pretty, may be made as costly, and I am sure will have more meaning … It is to be observed that the lettering should not be put on till the paper is hung up; for every customer ought to have the chusing and the marshalling his own books: by this means he may have those of the newest fashion immediately after their publication; and besides, if he should grow tired of one author or one science, he may be furnished with others at reasonable rates, by the mere alteration of the lettering. (1754: 2: 76–77)

Oliver Goldsmith indulged in a similar brand of jovial self-irony in the preface to his Citizen of the World, which aligned his narrative conceit (a “Chinese philosopher” in London) with the much-lampooned vogue for “the furniture, frippery, and fireworks of China” (1762: 2: 15). If these sorts of mock proposals revelled in modern literature’s immersion in the carnivalesque world of a commercial society attuned to the changing dictates of fashion, dream reveries such as the glimpse of the

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temple of fashion in the Gentleman’s Magazine helped to naturalize the cultural impact of Britain’s consumer revolution by deploying its most unsettling aspects in dreamscapes where the jarring novelty of recent changes could be read as part of a stylized world in which the surreal was reassuringly and even comically conventional. Goldsmith’s preface to his Citizen of the World featured a dream about “the capriciousness of public taste, or the mutability of fortune” in which the reluctant narrator watches several authors heading out over a frozen Thames to sell their wares at a set of booths or “fa s h ion fa i r” which had been erected on the ice (1762: 2:15).28 Emboldened by their success, the narrator determines to try his own “small cargo of Chinese morality” only to have the ice crack under him, “and wheel-barrow and all went to the bottom” (2: 15–16).29 The third number of the Connoisseur employed a similar conceit. Having “doze[d] over some modern performance,” the author found himself “transported in an instant to the shore of an immense sea, covered with innumerable vessels,” which turns out to have been “the o c e a n of i n k ” (1754: 1: 20–21). While he “stood contemplating this amazing scene,” he was introduced to “one of those good-natured g e n i i, who never fail making their appearance to extricate dreamers from their difficulties,” but who, in this case, smacked of the more earthly realities of the book trade. His complexion was of the darkest hue, not unlike that of the Daemons of a printing-house; his jetty beard shone like the bristles of a blacking-brush; on his head he wore a turbant of imperial paper; and There hung a calf-skin on his reverend limbs. which was gilt on the back, and faced with robings of Morocco, lettered (like a rubric-post) with the names of the most eminent authors. In his left hand he bore a printed scroll, which from the marginal corrections I imagined to be a proof-sheet; and in his right he waved the quill of a goose. (1: 21)

The genius, clutching his proofs in one hand and quill in the other, offers a thorough account of the complex but predictable geography of the scene – the distant “i s l e of fa m e” and “c oa s t of g a i n,” towards which “innumerable vessels” were “continually launching forth”; the perilous “e ddi e s of c r i t ic i s m” which destroyed or damaged so many of these vessels; and “the furious c u r r e n t of p ol i t ic s, often fatal to those who venture on it,” where a “poor wretch” who turned out to be “the memorable Defoe” had been “set up … as a land-mark, to prevent future mariners from splitting on the same rock” (1: 22–24). Beyond these perils lay more appealing destinations such as the “calm, regularly flowing r i v u l e t s of r h y m e” (1: 24).

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The dream’s increasingly nuanced vision of the different positions which structured the modern literary field (or ocean) is underscored by a dark awareness of the book trade’s more invidious realities, from the “pirates” who had “infested … the whole ocean” and who were themselves making for the c oa s t of g a i n “by hanging out false colours, or by forging their pass-ports, and pretending to be freighted by the most reputable traders,” to “several gallies … rowed by slaves,” all of them “fitted out by very oppressive owners” who force these “miserable wretches … to tug without the least respite,” and with “little or no share in the profits” (1: 25–26). Having been steered through this complex topography, the dreamer is finally directed towards “a spacious channel” first discovered by “one Bickerstaff, in the good ship called The tat l e r , and who afterwards embarked in The s pe c tat or and gua r di a n. These have been followed since by a number of little sloops, skiffs, hoys, and cockboats, which have been most of them wrecked in the attempt. Thither also must your course be directed.” But proper guidance leads to something more like drowning than a safe arrival. “At this instant the g e n i us suddenly snatched me up in his arms, and plunged me headlong into the inky flood. While I lay gasping and struggling beneath the waves, methought I heard a familiar voice calling me by my name; which awaking me, I with pleasure recollected the features of the g e n i us in those of my publisher, who was standing by my bed-side, and had called upon me for copy” (1: 26). Exploring the uncertain fate of authors in a modern commercial society in terms that acknowledged their own complicity with the problems they complained of, these writers repeatedly staged their ambivalence in ways that tied their literary achievements to a sophisticated understanding of the complexity of these issues. But self-irony or comic surrealism were not enough. This revisionary struggle was complicated by the need to address the sorts of anxieties that frequently surfaced in descriptions of the “tyranny of fashion” in order to be convincing about the worth, not just of the literary marketplace, but of the status of literature generally in a society that was profoundly altered by its increasingly transactional nature. The following chapters offer an account of the ways that authors responded to this challenge by valorizing the place of “that lower kind of literature” which required “vernacular erudition” (as Sir John Hawkins said approvingly of Samuel Johnson) in literary styles whose form actively embodied and, as a result, made a virtue out of the instabilities and discontinuities of a polite commercial society (Hawkins 1787:

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168–69). Doing so enabled writers to refashion codes of authorial distinction in strikingly modern terms, in which an aesthetic of immersion (even drowning) rather than transcendence invested everyday language and practice with compelling forms of symbolic capital long before William Wordsworth’s better remembered but less ambitious efforts in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads at the end of the century. But as the drowning metaphors suggest, these strategies were not without risk, nor did they occur in a vacuum. These writers may well have made their own history but they did not make it just as they pleased. They were forced by the intense moral sway of concerns about fashion and commerce, by highly nuanced assumptions about the relation of virtue to particular forms of knowledge, and by related questions about the changing nature of subjectivity, to do so by accommodating the resources of history to their own ends. If this preoccupation with questions about different elements of the literary field prefigured approaches that have been foregrounded by the rise of book history, the intensity and inventiveness of these earlier critics’ responses underlines the importance of moving beyond the lure of historical empiricism (the challenge of getting the facts about who was writing what and under what contractual terms, how it was being published and circulated, who was reading it) towards a more theoretically nuanced consideration of what was at stake in these questions for people in different times and places. In The Order of Books, Chartier critiques book historians’ tendency to assume a homological relation between social and cultural divisions. Rather than assuming that the various patterns which characterized the circulation of print mirrored existing social formations, Chartier argues, it is more productive (and more historically accurate) to assume that they didn’t: “Cultural divisions are not obligatorily organized in accordance with the one grid of social divisions that supposedly commands the unequal presence of objects or differences of behaviour patterns.” The challenge is to “turn the perspective around and begin by designating the social areas in which each corpus of texts and each genre of printed matter circulates” (7). Having done so, the more important challenge, perhaps, is to explore the kinds of ideological work that went on in order to organize these areas of cultural circulation into coherent patterns of hierarchical order which reflected and therefore reinforced social divisions. As Catherine Ingrassia argues in her account of the discursive relations between the worlds of fiction and commerce, or Grub Street and Exchange Alley, “we must resist

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the effort to stabilize or tidy up our representation of the cultural landscape and instead reclassify it as a field in which dominant, emergent, and residual ideologies interacted, and in which different texts contributed to and recorded that process” (9). Those historical processes which aimed at harmonizing the fit between social and cultural divisions must be understood as a struggle rather than a received historical fact, one that went on with varying degrees of self-consciousness, sometimes in overtly politicized ways and at other times not, and which, like all hegemonic processes, could never be adequately or finally resolved. One of the most striking aspects of today’s critical preoccupation with questions about who was writing and reading what and how texts circulated is the extent to which they echo debates which already existed in earlier periods. But the Janus-faced nature of this interrogation – simultaneously historical and self-reflexive – is all the more difficult because of the extent to which it implicates us in the determining influence of those histories which are our object of study. To describe our inherited (but now eroding) definition of literature as a “mystification” (Darnton The Kiss of Lamourette 1990: 152–53) or a “displacement” (Siskin 227) of other possibilities is to strip it of its inherent authenticity and therefore of its prescriptive authority, relocating it within a field of competing perspectives which echoes Raymond Williams’ argument that “culture is never a form in which people happen to be living, at some isolated moment, but a selection and organization, of past and present” (Culture 184). Doing so creates the possibility of “putting Literature into a history of writing” by joining “literary and social historians, sociologists, and others in the task of denaturalizing those still familiar formations” (Siskin 7). Critics in this earlier period who sought to make sense of the nature of books were forced to do so in the context of broader anxieties about a world that was not material enough (the epistemological uncertainties associated with commerce) and too endlessly material (the increasingly suggestive world of goods). Questions about books – about who ought to be reading them and writing them and why, about how they ought to be produced and disseminated, and on another level, about how these sorts of questions ought to be resolved – were rooted in the tensions between these concerns about distinct but related forms of materialism in ways that profoundly influenced conceptions of literature as it crystallized into the discipline of English Studies. If, today, a new sense of too much and too little materialism (a paradox which many critics have described as the central feature of postmodernity, as well as of the digital revolution) is in part what drives our renewed interest in books themselves in all of

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their physicality, recognizing the full impact of this earlier ambivalence may be our greatest challenge. We can only do so by understanding in more genuinely dialectical terms the relations between these two very different crises in the status of knowledge which lie on the nether ends of what has been our modern definition of literature.

Ch apter 2

Balloonomania: the pursuit of knowledge and the culture of the spectacle

Our passions form airy balloons; we know not how to direct them; and the very inflammable matter that transports them, often makes the bubble burst.

Horace Walpole

Be au t i f u l i n v e n t ion What did it mean to inhabit a world of intellectual curiosity and fashionable indulgence, polite sociability and commercial opportunism, ideological consolidation and seemingly endless consternation? It was, as London Unmask’ d (1784) put it, a “world of wonders” in which “novelty never ceases,” a “wonder-working age, in which invention seems to be on the rack to produce such curiosities as surpass whatever have gone before” (46, 135). A “wonder-working age” but also, as The Wreath of Fashion, or the Art of Sentimental Poetry (1778) declared, a “wond’ring age,” trafficking in astonishment as a favourite form of both cultural production and consumption (9, 12). What, to return to the question that I posed at the outset, did all of this have to do with literature? Or better yet, what did writers do with all of this? How did they inscribe themselves within the tensions but also the triumphalism, the emergent alignments as well as lines of resistance, that were the manifest signs of the transformative power of commerce in order to craft a meaningful role for modern literature?1 What kinds of knowledge ought they to trade in when knowledge itself was widely viewed as a “precious … commodity,” one which was too important to be confined to an elite few but whose “precious” value provided no immunity from the contingencies of a modern transactional world? (Monthly 1787: 77: 447). I will pursue these questions more directly in subsequent chapters, but I want to refine our sense of what was at stake in this challenge by concentrating on a seemingly very different phenomenon: the ballooning 40

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craze in Britain in the 1780s. Ballooning was not only a favourite subject across a range of genres, it also offered a vivid sense of the broader energies and anxieties within which literary debates were inscribed, not least because its reception dramatized a set of categorical confusions which, for many critics, inspired a nervous awareness of the hybridizing influence of commerce. We can gain a more historically nuanced sense of the implications of what critics sometimes described as the bibliomania – the “epidemical madness for letters” or “rage of writing” which I explore in the next chapter – by glancing awry at what may still be too familiar a chapter of literary history from the very different terrain of the “balloonomania,” as Horace Walpole put it (Gentleman’s 1786 55: 758; Johnson 1758: 2: 393; Walpole 25: 596). Pursuing these connections between the bibliomania and balloonomania helps to cast the question of the complexities of the eighteenth-century literary field in fresh ways, but if this sideways glance is deliberately eccentric in its approach to literary history, it is neither historically unwarranted nor, it turns out, unprecedented. Looking back on the late eighteenth century in The French Revolution (1837), Thomas Carlyle hailed ballooning as the ultimate icon of the spirit of the age: “beautiful invention; mounting heavenward, so beautifully – so unguidably! Emblem of much and of our Age of Hope itself” (42). As Carlyle knew full well, the fusion of productivity and waywardness that ballooning symbolized ran far deeper than a particular revolution’s unforeseen turn into political extremism. Ballooning evoked the sense of unprecedented control and unsettling contingency at the heart of Europe’s modern commercial order, a “Paper Age” whose greatness was inseparable from an inherent emptiness that was both monetary and cultural: “Bank-paper, wherewith you can still buy when there is no gold left” and “Book-paper, splendent with Theories, Philosophies, Sensibilities – beautiful art, not only revealing Thought, but also so beautifully hiding us from the want of Thought,” both types “made from the rags of things that did once exist” (24). Balloons, invented by a paper maker and “specifically light, majestically in the same manner … tumbling whither Fate will” (42), conjured up the thrill and the terror of that vertiginous historical moment when, as Marx and Engels memorably put it, “all that is solid melts into air” (Marx 7). Ludmilla Jordanova’s important rejoinder that we pay more attention to the “crucial connections” between eighteenth-century science and literature, which “are united in their shared location within cultural history” (15), might be usefully complicated by extending her argument to a consideration of the degree to which this “shared location” was itself

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immersed in the controversial ground of a thriving consumer culture which had little trouble appropriating more serious endeavours to its love of “paradoxical novelties” (European 1785: 8: 376).2 In The Panorama: The History of a Mass Medium, Stephan Oettermann suggests that “it may have been precisely [their] lack of efficiency that made the balloon such an appropriate symbol of human longings and hopes … Hot-air balloons and the gas balloons that succeeded them soon after belong not so much to the history of aviation as to the still-to-be-written account of middle class dreams” (15). But J. G. A. Pocock’s account of “a world more unstable in its epistemological foundations than Plato’s cave” reminds us that these dreams were not without their attendant anxieties (The Machiavellian Moment 1975: 451).3 Balloons, “at the mercy of the wind,” and as imposing and luxurious in appearance as they were hollow, evoked all too graphically these instabilities of a modern commercial culture, pried free from the foundational certainty of landed wealth and subject to a fluctuating network of exchanges in which appearances frequently counted more than inherent worth (Air 1784: 23). Perhaps, Carlyle mused, this “Age of Hope” had itself been nothing but “a simulacrum,” a beguiling age of unfounded optimism (30). As a register of the broader cultural anxieties that spilled over from Britain’s commercial revolution, balloons circulated as a counterpart to the empty “Bags full of Wind” (supposedly full of money) in Addison’s depiction of Lady Credit in Spectator No. 3 – a figure whose similar blend of beauty and inconstancy had suggested the turbulent nature of modern life, full of so much hope and waywardness, in the early years of the century (1711: 15). As if to underscore this connection, Carlyle titled the subsection on ballooning “Windbags” in a chapter entitled “The Paper Age” (39). Whether they counted themselves among its champions or its detractors, few were immune from the craze. On September 18, 1784, at home in Lichfield and miserable less than three months before his death, Samuel Johnson wrote to his friend, Sir Joshua Reynolds, “I have three letters this day, all about the balloon, I could have been content with one. Do not write about the balloon, whatever else you may think proper to say” (Boswell 1353). But who could not write about “the balloon”? After Vincento Lunardi’s ascent three days earlier – the first human flight in England – it was all that anyone was talking about. Like the “rage of writing,” interest in ballooning had become a kind of mania. “It is fashionable to speak of balloons,” the Morning Post announced two weeks later. “My Lord speaks of balloons – my lady speaks of balloons – Tommy the footman, and Betty the cook speak of balloons – yea, and balloons

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shall be spoke of. The sprightly Miss talks of nothing but inflammable air” (September 30, 1784). The excitement had been building for months. “Balloons occupy senators, philosophers, ladies, everybody,” Walpole had proclaimed the previous December (25: 449). When Anna Barbauld visited London the following month, her priorities were seeing one of the two smaller balloons that had been launched in November 1783 (the second was displayed at the Pantheon) and visiting Frances Burney, in that order. “Next to the balloon, Miss B. is the object of public curiosity.” “Nothing,” she wrote her brother, “(the sight of friends excepted), has given us so much pleasure as the balloon, which is now exhibiting at the Pantheon” (2: 22–23). “All the World gives their shilling to see it,” agreed Betsy Sheridan, who visited the Pantheon to see Lunardi’s balloon during a trip to London in October 1784. There she saw it “suspended to the Top of the Dome,” carrying “Lunardi, and his poor fellow travelers the Dog and Cat,” who had accompanied him and “who still remained in the Gallery to receive the visits of the curious” (24). The enthusiasm for ballooning, which had transformed it into an object of “public curiosity” had extended from science to show business, beyond a fascination with the flights themselves to the extravagant interior world of genteel metropolitan culture. Or more accurately, the “balloonomania” was a cultural phenomenon in which the public’s chief fascination was with its own ability to be fascinated. As Barbara Benedict has argued, no form of scientific endeavour better typified the age’s “public appetite for spectacular performance” or did more to highlight a troubling nexus of related questions about “the purpose, merits, and revelations of mechanical advancements and human ambitions” (Curiosity 217–18). Rather than treating ballooning as a single cultural phenomenon, it is more accurate to describe its early days as a cacophony of overlapping events, activities, debates, literary texts, and endless paraphernalia, from the spectacle of the flights themselves to indoor displays to scientific treatises to real and fictitious travelogues to fashion trends to advertisements to broadsheet ballads to satirical prints to novels, poems, and plays, all circulating in different ways and appealing to an unruly blend of audiences – “senators, philosophers, ladies, everybody” – and all of it tainted with hints of commercial excess. “All the World gives their shilling to see it.” Toy balloons became so popular that artisans began to advertise themselves as part of a new trade: “Balloon Maker” (Hodgson 104). Flights were commemorated in a range of fashion accessories such as bonnets, muffs, fans, jewellery, and garters, and knick-knacks such as snuff-boxes, chinaware, and medals.4 Tensions between these different phenomena

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reflect the often fraught relations between the various forms of intellectual inquiry that were becoming known as science, the expansive range of writings that were still known as literature, and what John Brewer has described as the libidinal energies of middle-class popular culture, all of which were inscribed within the broader moral and epistemological uncertainties that critics such as John Barrell, Brewer, Michael McKeon, and Pocock relate to eighteenth-century Britain’s changing social order. At a time when accounts of the South Sea Bubble remained a powerful cultural memory, descriptions of ballooning as a “wonderful bubble” or worse, an “air-blown bubble,” underscored the darker side of these imaginative associations with the simultaneous power and instability of commerce as a network of exchanges dependent upon a shared fantasy of value (Gentleman’s 1786: 56: 3089; Morning Post July 13, 1784). Ballooning’s ability to circulate through so many different symbolic registers as a kind of “fable of modernity,” to borrow Laura Brown’s evocative description of various other eighteenth-century preoccupations, suggests that however important it may have been in its own right, ballooning enjoyed an even greater significance as a cultural lightning rod for the broader anxieties and aspirations of the day. The intensity of the public’s mixed reactions was in some ways a product of the friction between the two master narratives of the century, both of which hinged on interpretations of the effects of commerce: most basically, things were getting better, or they were getting rapidly worse. Whether they approved of it or not, critics on both sides of the debate could agree that ballooning was both a potent symbol and a popular element of a consumer revolution that was changing the most fundamental aspects of Britain’s social order, and which peaked, Neil McKendrick argues, in the third quarter of the eighteenth century (9). Like “the rage of writing,” the air-ballooning craze highlighted the thoroughly compromised nature of the opposition between the pursuit of knowledge and the love of novelty, public inquiry and popular entertainment, polite taste and modish display. T h e pr e s e n t r ag e The “balloonomania” had begun to build in June 1783 in France when the Montgolfier brothers launched a balloon carrying a sheep, a cock, and a duck at Versailles in the presence of the Royal Family and 60,000 spectators. This quickly led to the first human flight on October 15, 1783, in front of the Royal Family and 100,000 spectators. Public interest rapidly grew. The European Magazine described a flight one month later as “a spectacle,

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the like of which was never shewn since the world began” (1784: 5: 25). “Mr. Blanchard made another experiment in his new balloon and apparatus, and afforded a most brilliant spectacle of the new and wonderful invention of aerostation,” it announced the next year (1785: 7: 384). Count Francesco Zambeccari’s two experimental balloons, launched in London in December 1783 (the second of which was viewed by Barbauld at the Pantheon), had intensified public interest in Britain.5 A celebrated Swiss scientist, Aimé Argand, demonstrated a small hydrogen balloon for the Royal Family at Windsor. Like the modern world of letters, whose excesses inspired so many anecdotes and dream reveries, the popular excitement which ballooning evoked frequently struck commentators as an unprecedented spectacle in its own right. “The rage of air-balloons still continues both here and in France,” Walpole wrote in August 1784 (25: 517). “The Balloon rage has spread itself over Italy,” the Morning Post observed (May 28, 1784). “The rage has now extended very considerably,” the Critical Review announced later that year. “It has affected the most distant countries” (1784: 58: 417). “Infinite seems the present rage,” allowed Anna Seward (11). “There seem[s] to prevail a kind of aerial phrenzy amongst us,” London Unmask’ d (1784) acknowledged. “The term balloon is not only in the mouth of every one, but all our world seems to be in the clouds” (137). The American scientist John Jeffries, who funded Jean-Pierre Blanchard’s work in exchange for the right to accompany him, declared ballooning to be “my ruling passion” (Brame Fortune 121).6 Lunardi’s flight in September 1784 attracted an estimated 150,000 spectators, “the windows and roofs of the surrounding houses; scaffoldings of various forms and contrivances … crouded with well dressed people” (Lunardi, Account 1784: 26–27 [incorrectly numbered 34–35]). A letter to the Morning Post insisted that “Mr. Lunardi’s ascension on Wednesday was certainly the most astonishing spectacle ever seen here. It was perhaps the grandest and most beautiful of the kind ever exhibited” (October 13, 1785).7 An ad in the Morning Herald for The Philosophical Fire (a source of instant light) suggested that “After having seen so many recent discoveries of balloons, parachutes, flying horses, flying devils, &c. people in general were apt to think, that enthusiast madness was alone the burning fever of the present age” (December 3, 1786). Nor was the rage limited to the metropolitan centres. “We are all air balloon mad in this city,” a Bath correspondent informed the Morning Chronicle. “At every whist party and tea table, the conversation turns upon nothing but air balloons” (December 31, 1783). “The balloon madness is not over here,” Sarah Scott wrote to her sister,

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Elizabeth Montagu, from St. Edmunds, Norfolk, in June, 1785. “One went off today with the maker of it; we drove up to the top of the hill within about a quarter of a mile, from whence we had a very good view of it for its whole flight.” Again and again, descriptions of ballooning’s popularity drew on a vocabulary which suggested the unstable and potentially threatening energies of religious enthusiasm: a “rage,” a “passion,” a “phrenzy,” or a form of “madness.” As flights proliferated and popular interest built, the world of print culture dutifully followed. Travelogues offered a range of styles from scientific rigour to melodramatic autobiography to farcical pretence. In what the European Magazine called this “age of travellers and of travelling authors” (1787: 11: 251), balloons carried explorers onto an “untrodden path” (Critical Review 1784: 58: 419) through the “untasted sweets” of “the virgin air,” yielding a predictably rich and varied crop of published accounts (Aerial Voyage 1785: 2). Plays such as Elizabeth Inchbald’s The Mogul’s Tale; or, The Descent of the Balloon and Frederick Pilon’s Aerostation; or The Templar’s Stratagem (both of which played at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden in 1784) and a pantomime entitled Lord Mayor’s Day, or a Flight from Lapland in an Air Balloon (1783) traded on ballooning’s popularity in their titles. Endless other plays, from Hannah Cowley’s More Ways than One (1784) to Richard Cumberland’s The Natural Son (1785) to Thomas Holcroft’s The Choleric Fathers (1785) to John Burgoyne’s The Heiress (1786), relied on it for punch lines. Poems such as Henry James Pye’s “Aerophorion” (1787) and Stephen Dickson’s “The Union of Taste and Science” (1799) hailed it as a triumph of intellectual progress. The most prominent literary journals, the Monthly Review and the Critical Review, contained extensive accounts of many of these publications, often using these reviews as a platform for more wide-ranging reflections on the subject. Literary magazines such as the Gentleman’s and the European reviewed many of the same texts and worked hard to keep their readers abreast of the most recent events. The “Historical Chronicle” section of the Gentleman’s Magazine quickly incorporated a subsection devoted to “Balloon Intelligence.” Ballooning news frequently dominated the European Magazine’s “Remarkable Events” section. The November 1784 editions of the Gentleman’s Magazine and the European Magazine carried a virtually identical catalogue of flights which began with the introductory remark: “Our Readers may wish, in the present rage for Balloons, to have a short and accurate account of the different aerostatic voyages that have been made since Mr. Montgolfier’s discovery.” The Gentleman’s diverged slightly (it substituted “which” for the

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European Magazine’s “that”) but it was also more honest, acknowledging the source of their catalogue to have been the Journal des Sçavons (GM 54: 873–4; EM 6: 383–84). At the other end of the literary spectrum, ballooning figured prominently in any number of satirical novels, poems (including two by Robbie Burns), almanacs, jest books, and penny ballads. The Modern Atlantis; or, The Devil in an Air Balloon (1784), which employed the conceit of the balloon to produce a new version of the familiar narrative of a foreigner in Britain (“the island of Libertusia”), was an explicitly Whig attack on George III and his Tory supporters. The Adventures of an Air Balloon, Wherein Are Delineated Many Distinguished Characters, Male and Female (n.d.), a narrative spoken by the balloon itself, offered titillating accounts of the private lives of a series of stock characters, from an impregnated servant (5–13) to “a tradesman and his children” (14) to “a dramatic author” (24–28). The patently opportunistic nature of some of these publications reflected the book trade’s shrewd awareness that ballooning was a trend worth exploiting. The Balloon Almanac, which appeared annually from 1785, was a standard almanac with nothing whatsoever to do with ballooning apart from its title and a cover illustration of Vincenzo Lunardi’s initial ascent. The Balloon Jester; or Flights of Wit and Humour (1784?) led off with a predictable joke (an incredulous Frenchman robbed of his pocket-watch by a resourceful English lad who makes his escape in a balloon) and an accompanying cartoon which it displayed on its cover but, like the almanac, this constituted its sole reference to ballooning.8 Most impressively of all, for those who were inclined to regard ballooning as an admirable scientific achievement rather than the latest rage, the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, completed in 1797, included an image of an air balloon in its frontispiece, hovering above an august assembly of famous individuals and accomplishments which made ballooning’s presence – both on the frontispiece and as the subject of a multi-page entry – all the more dramatic (figure 1).9 The implication was that ballooning had secured a prominent place among what the third edition’s Preface hailed as the “progress of science” – a topic which was of natural interest to “the contemplative mind of man” (v–vi). It belonged to what the fourth edition (whose frontispiece also included the image of a balloon) lauded as the many “great and interesting subjects” which comprised “the present improved state of science, of literature, and of all those arts which are connected with the progress and improvement of society” (vii). An anonymous pamphlet, The Air Balloon: Or a Treatise on the Aerostatic Globe Lately Invented

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Figure 1: Frontispiece, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 3rd edn. 1797.

by the Celebrated Mons. Mongolfier of Paris (1783), lamented that the age had seen far more impressive developments in Moral Philosophy than Natural Philosophy. But, it continued, “the late invention of the Aerostatic Globe, or Air Balloon has furnished us with an experimental improvement in Natural Philosophy, which fully atones for her late repose, and which, if carried to the various uses which probability will warrant us to expect, may prove one of the most novel and serviceable discoveries that this century has produced” (3–4). It was difficult for those who were disposed to view ballooning in terms of this wider sense of scientific and social progress not to be optimistic. Jeffries’ and Blanchard’s successful journey across the English Channel on January 7, 1785 (less than four months after Lunardi’s initial flight), seemed to prefigure a coming era of aeronautical achievements.

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Balloons constituted a breakthrough in themselves and, as Jeffries’ scientific emphasis highlighted, a new means of facilitating the pursuit of various other types of knowledge. Aeronauts retrieved corked bottles of “pure Air, for the purpose of making experiments when on Earth,” all of which helped to establish the intellectual rigour of their endeavours (Lunardi, Mr. Lunardi’s 1785: 23).10 By their very nature, balloons coincided with well-known experiments on air being conducted by scientists such as Joseph Priestley and Henry Cavendish.11 Montgolfier cited Priestley’s Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air (1774) as an inspiration for his discovery of the balloon; Cavendish, whose discovery of the specific gravity of hydrogen helped to facilitate ballooning, supplied Jeffries with empty beakers to retrieve air samples. Publications such as Thomas Baldwin’s Airopaidia: Containing the Narrative of a Balloon Excursion from Chester, the Eighth of September, 1785 fortified themselves with endless tables of statistics that emphasized their scientific rigour. The October 1785 edition of the Monthly Review insisted that “from the rapid progress this infant art has already made, it may reasonably be hoped that the time is approaching, when aerostatic vehicles will be fitted out on purpose for philosophical discoveries, for ascertaining many of the general laws of nature, and exploring the productions of the unknown regions of the atmosphere” (1785: 73: 264). Whatever his own reservations, Samuel Johnson’s Literary Club featured several prominent ballooning enthusiasts, such as William Windham (who ascended in May 1785), Sir Joseph Banks, George Fordyce, and William Forbes. This optimistic sense of scientific progress was shadowed, however, by a widely perceived need to demonstrate the legitimacy of this new form of knowledge, not just on its own terms but according to the practical benefits that might accrue from it. If its impact was to be hailed as an unquestionable good, ballooning (like books) needed to be shown to be capable of making a difference in the world. Advocates for the importance of ballooning would need to dispel concerns that balloons’ extraordinary appeal was inseparably linked to their fundamentally impractical nature, “tumbling whither Fate will.” However popular ballooning may have been with the public, it was not enough to be the latest innovation. Indeed, precisely because ballooning was so popular it became all the more important to show that it was more than the newest innovation; to fail to do so was not only to risk triviality, but to confirm anxieties about what Erin Mackie has described as the self-reinforcing nature of fashion as a force wholly dedicated to the intensification of

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its own influence. “Perhaps fashion’s most dangerous capacity is [its] tautological ability to function as its own end, the sole justification for its own existence. In this formulation, fashion appears as the tyrant, an arbitrary, absolutist ruler of the kind by this time well discredited in England” (7). Demonstrating ballooning’s utility would disrupt the dangerous circularity of fashion’s self-reinforcing tendency by confirming ballooning’s practical link to the broader world in the positive terms of some kind of demonstrable contribution. For its advocates, this would become a crucial task. Despite the Monthly’s optimism, critics evinced a disturbing preoccupation with what Thomas Martyn called “a question not unfrequently asked, Of what use are balloons?” (1784: 15). The Preface to the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica had insisted that “Utility ought to be the principal intention of every publication. Where this intention does not plainly appear, neither the books nor their authors have the smallest claim to the approbation of mankind” (v). For many commentators this emphasis on utility extended beyond books to the discoveries themselves. But, they agreed, it was difficult to see how balloons, in their present state, could be of any practical use. Even the optimistic anonymous author of The Air Balloon was forced to admit that it was “a discovery, we must confess, hitherto merely curious” rather than “highly serviceable” (1784: 23).12 This admission that balloons were not particularly “serviceable” did not prevent advocates from making the case for their utility. Robert Alves broke off his discussion of “the many important discoveries in natural history and geography” in his Sketches of a History of Literature (1794) to note that “[e]ven the invention and history of air-balloons have their use; as they demonstrate the ingenuity of the age to which they belong; and may hereafter produce some very important and astonishing discoveries” (233). It was an inspired argument: balloons were useful precisely because they reflected “the ingenuity of the age”; besides which, Alves implied, they might actually have a real use in the future. Erasmus Darwin, excited by Joseph Priestley’s experiments with air, suggested, tongue only partly in his cheek, that the principle of ballooning could be extended underwater: Led by the Sage, Lo! Britain’s sons shall guide Huge SE A -B A L L O ONS beneath the tossing tide; The diving castles, roof’d with spherical glass, Ribb’d with strong oak, and barr’d with bolts of brass, Buoy’d with pure air shall endless tracks pursue,

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And PR I E S T L E Y ’S hand the vital flood renew … Deep, in warm waves beneath the Line that roll, Beneath the shadowy ice-isles of the Pole. (Economy of Vegetation 1791: 4: 195–200, 205–6)

The Air Balloon offered a confident list of possible applications, all of which might be realized in the near future. “On the first report of a country being invaded,” it suggested, “an Air Balloon would save the expences of messengers, posts, &c. from the coasts to the main army” (1784: 24–25). “A general likewise in the day of battle would derive singular advantage by going up in one of these machines” (25).13 “Observations at Sea,” which could be made “at a greater distance, and with a greater certainty than at present,” would be “useful in time of war, and preventative of accidents at all times” (25). Balloons would provide a valuable “bird’s eye view” “during sieges” and “in cases of fires in capitals or large towns” (25–26). And in the realm of Natural Philosophy, if “our great philosopher Dr. Franklin, by means of an artificial Kite, has already drawn down lightning from the clouds: Why may not this experiment be improved by means of an Air Balloon?” (27). Martyn’s Hints of Important Uses, To be Derived from Aerostatic Globes (1784) offered a similar set of possibilities, stressing balloons’ potential usefulness in providing night signals, a service that “would be of the most essential utility to the inhabitants of a besieged town” (7); military reconnaissance (10); experiments with lightning (11); and astronomical observation (14). “Observatories are commonly built on hills and high towers, that they may be raised above the gross vapours near the surface of the earth, which frequently impede and confuse the vision,” Martyn noted. “But how much purer would be the medium through which the heavenly bodies might be observed from the gallery of a balloon!” (14).14 Emphasizing the difficulty of convincing potential aeronauts to risk their lives by exposing themselves “to be congealed into a hail-stone; or blasted by a thunder storm,” Martyn suggested that with proper encouragement, British authorities would be “graciously pleased to grant the lives of as many condemned criminals as they might desire, on condition that the men so spared should engage in services of supposed danger for the advancement of philosophy” (11–13).15 The Monthly Review noted a plan by “Mr. Dillier, of the Hague … to apply balloons to the use of buoying up large ships, in order to facilitate their entrance into the harbour of Amsterdam” (1784: 70: 228). Observers were not always impressed. “A very moderate proficient in philosophy must perceive, that few of these experiments can succeed,” the

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Monthly concluded (1784: 70: 228). Dismissing Martyn’s “airy projects,” the December 1784 Critical Review warned, with one eye across the Channel, that if, from a candid examination, this new exhibition shall appear to be recommended rather by its novelty than its utility; if its advantages are remote, uncertain, and even improbable; if the ardour of curiosity shall seem to have been excited, without a distant chance of attaining an adequate compensation, the English philosophers cannot surely be blamed, though they should have looked on it with a cautious silence, and weighed the whole with a steady hand. (1784: 58: 424–25)

“Aerostation continues to be fashionable,” the Critical allowed the next year. But this did not change the fact that “the history of aerostation is not yet of great importance. The several adventurers seem to have ascended and returned full of wonder, and to have raised universal admiration, though no one experiment has been hitherto made, which inclines us to look up with respect to this new science” (1785: 59: 340).16 The central issue, for many observers, was the question of whether balloons could be directed, or, as the anonymous author of Thoughts on the Farther Improvement of Aerostation put it, “the government of these machines in the atmosphere” (1785: 2). “Unless these adventurers can acquire the power of steering their bouyant bark,” Anna Seward warned, “the experience is as idle as it is dangerous” (11). But this was exactly what ballooning’s advocates were proposing. “As it was a paper maker in Paris that first sent this Air Balloon above our atmosphere,” suggested The Air Balloon, “who knows but it might be reserved for an English miller, or wheel-wright, to add wings, or some aerial rudder to guide it through those regions with certainty and precision?” (5–6). “This may appear visionary to some,” it admitted, “but we have authority to assure the Public” that more than one inventor was “busied in this project” (24). Tiberius Cavallo’s The History and Practice of Aerostation (1785) confidently suggested that aerial navigation, “far from being complicated or troublesome, is perhaps as simple as might have been wished by the warmest imagination; and so easy for the aeronaut, that he has absolutely much less trouble with the machine, than a sailor with a ship in the most favourable circumstances” (189). Anticipating the objection that “those machines cannot be guided against the wind, or in every direction at pleasure,” Cavallo offered the parallel of sailing vessels’ ability to steer upwind (191). The Monthly Review, however, having singled out these optimistic claims for quotation in its review, declared itself to be

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“by no means perfectly satisfied. When a small boat is suspended at the bottom of an enormous balloon, we cannot conceive how any power of oars, applied to the boat, can vary, in any considerable degree, either the direction or the velocity of the balloon” (73: 1785: 262).17 The Critical Review’s response struck an equally tentative note, but it nonetheless recommended “proper and judicious trials: it is only to the childish spectacles, and the extravagant and exaggerated relations, that we are enemies” (1785: 59: 342). For many, the challenge lay in designing the correctly shaped vessel. The Air Balloon suggested a “machine … in the form of a bird” with wings “to be made of the purest elastic steel ever wrought in this country, and the whole … to be worked and directed by a person who is to go up in a basket attached to the machine” (24). The anonymous author of Thoughts on the Farther Improvement of Aerostation, or the Art of Travelling in the Atmosphere (1785) suggested that the right approach was to make the machine not “globular,” but “of an oblong form, constructed in such a manner that it may be sharpened at one end, in order to divide the resisting fluid … while the tail steers its course” (12, 15). Central to this plan was the provision to furnish the traveller with instruments of “sufficient capacity and strength, both to take good hold of the aerial fluid, and also to bear the whole exertion of the traveller’s muscular strength” (16). Given his central motif, the author suggested that the oars be analogous, in form and situation, to the fins of fishes (15). The pamphlet’s reviewer in the Monthly duly noted that “from the animal which he has been led to imitate, he wishes it to be called a flying fish” (73: 1785: 265). The Monthly pronounced itself to be more convinced by this proposal than by “any that has yet appeared,” but it nonetheless noted the difficulty of keeping such a machine with the smallest end forwards in the atmosphere, and the danger of its turning sideways: we should apprehend a possibility even of its overturning; for though the fish, at full extent, is so balanced as to lie horizontal, yet accidents may happen, from the escape of part of the included air, from currents in the atmosphere, or other causes, by which the equilibrium may be destroyed, and the traveler brought into an alarming situation. (265)18

The harder that its advocates worked to establish the controlled and purposeful nature of ballooning, the more they seemed to many of their critics to reinforce balloons’ symbolic power as emblems of an unprecedented sense of contingency, “tumbling whither Fate will.”

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Critics’ ambivalence about the entrepreneurial world whose creative energy was widely viewed (positively and negatively) as a hallmark of the activities and attractions that the world of metropolitan sociability comprised was itself intensified by what Clay Shirky has described, in the context of our own communications revolution, as the “shock of inclusion,” an “enormous shock” that was rooted, not just in the unprecedented number and range of participants in the whole spectrum of cultural events on offer, but in their powerful role in shaping those events, a shift that resonates with what Jean-Christophe Agnew has described in broader terms as a “shift from a producer-ethic to a consumer-ethic” (22). Book historians’ recent attention to the formative role of readers found its precedent in late eighteenth-century critics’ ambivalence about the role of the public, whether as buyers, viewers, readers, or collectors, in fostering an endless range of new, aggressively advertised and commercially saturated initiatives. The increasingly active rather than passive nature of their involvement promised (or threatened) to close the circuit between processes of cultural production and consumption by highlighting the degree to which the two had become mutually defining. For many observers, ballooning provided the perfect metaphor for this anti-foundational world driven by consumer desire and prised free from the cultural coordinates that might have helped to stabilize ideas about value. The heterogeneity of its appeal as a unique mass spectacle and the intensity of some critics’ disapproval highlight the importance of framing a study of the impact of commerce, in terms not of the impact of particular fashions but of what Mackie describes as “the discourse of fashion … The broad range of fashion’s significance makes sense when one looks at fashion not so much as a fixed category denoting this or that type of object but as a term whose meanings and applications develop within and against a larger field of cultural discourse” (4). I want to finish this chapter by taking a more particular look at the various commercially driven initiatives which catered to a seemingly endless desire for ballooning-related shows and objects, and the responses which this generated, in order to develop a more nuanced sense of this larger field of cultural discourse that would have such a crucial mediating influence on debates about modern literature. Proponents of ballooning knew that they could count on the fact that, however unimpressed critics might be with the inability to steer balloons,

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even ones shaped like a bird or fish, this setback would do little to dampen the public’s enthusiasm. What balloons seemed to lack as objects of genuine scientific progress, they more than made up for as popular entertainment: a fashionable spectacle whose appeal seemed to be uniquely suited to this “world of wonders.” A fifty-foot version of the flying fish “covered with Persian silk coloured after Nature” was displayed at the Great Room in the King’s Arms tavern in Cornhill in July 1785 (Altick 85). A second and more elaborate version, designed by a Mr. Uncles, was exhibited at the Pantheon the following year. It too was shaped like a fish, with a gondola suspended from it, “triumphal in form and magnificent beyond description of appearance,” as Mr. Uncles’ advertisement proclaimed, but its forward motion was to be supplied by four eagles which “Mr. Uncles has so trained, as in their flight for the purpose of guiding the machine, or return to the car, to be perfectly subservient to his pleasure” (Altick 85). On July 18, 1786, Mr. Uncles “mounted his seat with eagles harnessed, and made an effort to ascend” in front of ten thousand people in Ranelagh, rising eight feet in the air before dropping back to solid ground, eagles still in harness (85).19 The communication of serious aerostatic news – positive and negative – was leavened with a healthy dose of more farcical accounts such as the report of “the adventurous hero,” a hairdresser named Mr. Harper, who took off from the Tennis-Court in Birmingham, only to be forced, “reluctantly, to quit the car, and [be] taken in at a chamber window” when “the car (which was suspended to the balloon) caught against the eaves of an adjoining house”: The balloon, with some difficulty, was hauled down, that it might be repaired; and a boy, who was a by-stander, got into the car, as a kind of ballast, to keep it down, but by some neglect, or there not being ballast sufficient, the balloon rose into the air with the boy, instead of Mr. Harper, when the lad behaved to all appearances with great courage, waving his hat to the populace, who saluted him with loud huzzas. (European 1785: 7:149)

Blanchard was similarly upstaged in a related experiment with a parachute (which he is credited with having invented): “After he had obtained a mile in height, he disengaged his parachute, to which a dog was attached, which descended to the earth very gradually, and alighted in perfect safety” (European 1785: 8: 234). “[I]n the evening, the dog … made his Entree at the theatre, ‘being his first appearance upon any stage, and was received with universal applause’” (European 1785: 8: 476). Blanchard himself, it turned out, was forced to adopt a similar mode of transportation when a valve malfunctioned. Descending dangerously quickly after

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being forced to poke holes in the balloon to prevent it from bursting, “his last resource was to cut away the cords of the car, and to tie himself with them fast to it, the balloon then serving in the nature of a parachute” (European 1785: 8: 476).20 For sceptics, these sorts of caprices and near escapes underlined the sensational rather than philosophical nature of the phenomenon. They suggested a carnivalesque world of parodic inversions and theatrical mock-heroes, dogs on stage and trained eagles, that was wholly out of keeping with the dignity of genuine scientific investigation. As the wily Valet de Chambre in John Burgoyne’s The Heiress (1786) explained: Nothing so easy as to bring every living creature in this town to the window: a tame bear, or a mad ox; two men, or two dogs fighting; a balloon in the air – (or tied up to the ceiling ’tis the same thing) make but noise enough and out they come. (10)

However perceptive Carlyle might have been in recognizing ballooning’s symbolic power in an age when the idea of value had slipped free of its foundational moorings, it was equally true that ballooning exemplified the spirit of its age in this more straightforward and morally dubious sense as well. Ballooning was part of the “noise” of a culture driven by novelty and dedicated to a love of spectacle. An indoor display or an actual flight, it made no difference: it appealed to people’s love of diversion the same way that a tame bear or a mad ox, or men or dogs fighting, might.21 Ballooning may well have been hailed by some as a genuine scientific achievement, but as The Air Balloon, A New Song insisted, it was more accurately associated with “the catch-traps of folly” which “now swarm in this town,” a popular spectacle along the same lines as “the vaulting of monkies” or “the speaking of pigs.” It is not difficult to guess in which category – “proper and judicious trials” or “childish spectacles” – the Critical Review would have placed the report of an aerial experiment conducted “at the enclosure, late Blanchard’s Aerostatic Academy, near Vauxhall … by an Italian Gentleman with a parachute, who was to have let himself down from a prodigious altitude, and to manifest his composure by playing on a violin during his descent”:22 To fulfill these promises, the ingenious operator had provided machinery, by which he might have been raised about 45 feet! When the time arrived, he, with his Cremona, entered the vehicle, and was raised, with infinite precaution, about twenty feet, when he prudently forbade any greater elevation. He then expanded his parachute, and proceeded to divide the cords, his assistants lowering him all

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the time with the utmost celerity. From about the height of ten feet only he fell; – but, wonderful to tell, he sailed not on the bosom of the air – nor was wafted, as the gossamer, by the breeze – he fell with the greatest precipitation to the earth. The parachute was broken in the fall, and the unfortunate Cremona, from which not a note had been heard, lay also in shattered fragments on the ground. The conjurer crawled off with the greatest alacrity, whilst John Bull, after a vacant stare of a few minutes, could only wreak his revenge on the machinery and railing of the enclosure, both of which were in a short time demolished. (European 1785: 8: 76–77)

Lunardi’s description as a “flying conjuror,” as one pamphlet enthusiastically dubbed him, was in this context a less complimentary reminder that his efforts were bound up with the stunts of other, less glorified “conjuror[s],” charlatans and showmen who were adept at attracting a paying audience with outrageous stunts rather than engaging in genuine experiments (Lunardi’s 1784: 10). If, at its most respectable, ballooning constituted a much publicized source of national pride, its more dubious forms summoned up images of conniving foreigners preying on John Bull’s credulity. This xenophobic equation of foreigners with underhanded trickery was reinforced by a series of flamboyant self-promoters from the continent, all of whom were actively exploiting ballooning’s popularity, such as Lunardi (who styled himself Secretary of the Neapolitan Ambassador, though he was more likely a minor clerk); Count Francesco Zambeccari (a sailor of fortune who had fled Italy after falling foul of the Inquisition); Jean-Pierre Blanchard (famous for his vanity); the Chevalier de Moret (generally identified as French though he was actually Swiss), who tried unsuccessfully to beat Lunardi to the distinction of the first human flight in Britain; the Swiss scientist Aimé Argand, who had entertained the King and his family with a balloon at Windsor; the “Italian Gentleman with a parachute, who was to have let himself down from a prodigious altitude” while playing the violin; and Gustavus Katterfelto, the infamous quack doctor, performing scientist, and conjuror, who used a helium balloon as part of his routine. If a print entitled The New Mail Carriers, or Montgolfier and Katterfelto Taking An Airing in Balloons (figure 2) cast ballooning’s equation with trickery in a larger perspective which emphasized their mutual absurdity, another print, The New Mode of Picking Pockets (figure 3), provided a stark reminder of the fraudulent nature of many of the more absurd contemporary spectacles – a critique which was once again underscored by the equation of self-promoting foreigners with duplicity. It depicted a foppish

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Figure 2: The New Mail Carriers, or Montgolfier and Katterfelto Taking An Airing in Balloons. Engraving. Etching. Anonymous. From Rambler’s Magazine. January 1, 1784.

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Figure 3: The New Mode of Picking Pockets. Engraving. August 1784. Published in Grand-Careret et Detteil, La Conquête de l’air, 1910.

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Frenchman in London, gesturing to a balloon and saying to an unsophisticated Englishman, “Monsieur perceive you that one great Vonder ’tis one of the greatest curiosities dat ever de Vorld did see.” An inscription emphasized ballooning’s recurring and negative association with both foreigners and performing animals as the two antitheses of English propriety: French men Dutch men Italians, Swedes and Hungarians if you have any Dancing Bears Monkies Camels Butterflies Beetles Lap Dogs or Baloons or any other Whims – Bring them to England and by Gar you will be loved and well paid for your pains – for de English is one great pack of fools – beside John de Britain is very good temper’d if you can tell him one very good story he will belief you and his pocket is yours.

In its account of a new juggler named Cosmopolitan whose “miraculous exhibition” “proved [to be] the greatest imposition ever offered to the public,” the Morning Post complained that “the credulity of John Bull has long been a favourite subject of ridicule; and it is therefore to be wished our generous-countrymen were convinced of the impropriety of encouraging foreign imposters, who are actuated by the spirit of avarice and rapacity, in opposition to candour and honourable principles” (October 12, 1785). The issue was ultimately about national dignity as much as honesty. London Unmask’ d agreed in its discussion of ballooning, “the importation of exotic fashions, exotic wonders, and exotic manners, has … stigmatized our country as the land of fools and apes, and exposed us to the ridicule of those who have so profitably availed themselves of our foibles” (1784: 135). Whatever others’ claims to ballooning’s contributions to science, it was, for many critics, one more example of English gullibility, which exposed them to the tricks of conniving foreigners. But the exploits of these conniving showmen, whether it was Cosmopolitan the juggler whose “miraculous exhibition” was nothing more than a “contemptible” scam or his legion of air balloon contemporaries, seemed to many critics to underscore a darker truth about their historical moment. The future wasn’t friendly (as one telecommunications corporation assures us today), it was foreign, not a welcoming horizon to which Britain was being carried on a wave of progress driven by the efforts of its most industrious citizens but a commercially driven world galvanized by the spectacle of its own epistemological instabilities. Concerns that ballooning’s popularity reflected the dissipated rather than the enlightened spirit of the age were amplified by the luxurious appearance of the balloons themselves. “Fashion has ascended to a higher element,” Walpole joked. “All our views are directed to the air” (25: 449). The Montgolfier balloon had been elaborately decorated in the image and

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cipher of the French king. Moret’s balloon, which caught fire before it could ascend, was to have been in the shape of a “Chinese Temple” overlaid with decorations representing the constellations (Hodgson 111–12). In May 1785, the European Review described Lunardi’s “new balloon, which, when fully inflated, appeared in form to resemble that of a Seville orange, and … was painted like the Union Flag of England” (7: 385). It didn’t help that the phenomenon was so firmly associated with the French, that “lively nation” in which “the most profound speculations are treated … [with] the freedom of a novel … Their very bagatelles have in them something pleasing, that arrests the judgment, and leaves the reader in suspence whether most to applaud or condemn” (Critical 1759: 7: 270). Elaborately decorated and filled with hot air, balloons were the sort of “pretty Toys” that “Gay Gallia’s Flighty Sons” would be interested in, Paul Sandby’s satirical print, The English Balloon, 1784, suggested (figure 4). “When first Balloons came o’er from France, / Whence we have always learnt to dance,” A Poetical Epistle on Major Money’s Ascent in a Balloon from the City of Norwich (1786), observed: … every Calais packet brought Some prim, important Aeronaute, Proud of their new experiment, Holding our learned in contempt Engrossing every one’s attention, The more, ’twas past our comprehension.

(Townshend 5)

The December 1784 edition of the Critical Review, worried that its silence had become conspicuous in what was quickly becoming an early crossChannel version of the space race, explained that “the first accounts of aerial voyages came to us from France, and with so many suspicious circumstances, that we were unable to decide. That lively nation, which can scarcely praise without the highest panegyric, or admire without enthusiasm, decorated its narratives with so many adventitious ornaments, that the cautious philosopher hesitated in silence” (1784:58 : 417). This negative association with France’s “flighty” sensibility was reinforced by what many English commentators felt to be a typically French extrapolation, from ballooning’s fashionable status generally to its role within the fashion industry itself. “So much had the subject engaged the general attention,” Cavallo noted, that “the epithet of balloon was annexed to articles of dress, of house-furniture, of instruments, &c. Thus one commonly heard of balloon hats, balloon colours, balloon coaches, and such-like empty phrases” (History 1785: 136). The December 1783

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Figure 4: Paul Sandby, The English Balloon, 1784. Etching and aquatint. 1784.

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edition of the European Magazine announced that “it is the fashion in Paris, for the ladies to wear straw hats of a monstrous size, made in imitation of aerostatic globes … It is to be hoped,” it added primly, “that this whimsical mode will not be introduced among the people of England, as it would prove still more inconvenient at the play-houses, than the late high heads” (4: 406). The European’s apparent diffidence notwithstanding, the hats were a popular item. The diary of the Norfolk clergyman James Woodforde recorded that his wife received a “nice genteel and pretty Baloon hat” from her brother in London (2: 142). But predictably, this popularity was tinged with farce. London Unmask’ d noted that “from the waving frippery with which our females adorn or rather disguise their lovely heads, one would imagine they indulge the hopes of being wafted by the aid of what are fashionably termed balloon bonnets or hats, above us male mortals” (137). Burns’ “To a Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church” reached a climax of mock horror at the sight of what, it insinuated, was the height of insolence: “But [atop] Miss’s fine Lunardi, fye! / How daur ye do’t?” (1787: 151). In the July 15, 1786, edition of Henry Mackenzie’s periodical, the Lounger, what was purportedly a letter to the editor complaining that Edinburgh was “miserably in the rear of fashion” offered as certain proof the fact that “people [who have] come to years of discretion scarce know the difference between a plain Hat and a Lunardi.” Not wishing to seem wholly negative, the correspondent (almost certainly Mackenzie or one of his collaborators) offered to “find an assistant who will undertake [to] teach the Ladies … the languish of eye that is to be practised under the curtain of the Lunardi,” as opposed to “the smart toss suitable to the new-fashioned turned-up hat … and the hoydenish roll that becomes the Laitière” (301–2). Keeping pace with scientific breakthroughs, the vogue for balloon hats swiftly gave way to parachute hats, which, many critics lamented, proved even more problematic for theatregoers. “The parachute hat is the ton among the fair,” the Morning Post announced, but, it reported a month later, “the managers of both theatres exclude Cork Rumps and Parachute Hats from their respective houses (September 3, 1785; October 8, 1785). Nor was ballooning’s infiltration of fashion itself limited to hats. The European Magazine listed “the air balloon ribbon, which is much the same as that worn here last summer, (a striped yellow)” as one of “the female ornaments that are the admiration of the French Court” (1783: 4: 406). The next month, the European Magazine reported that the Prince of Wales had appeared at the Queen’s birthday celebration wearing “an air-balloon satin embroidered down the seams with silver. The instant he

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made his appearance the seat of majesty was forgot, and all eyes (particularly the ladies) directed towards him” (1784: 5: 11). Almost a year later, the November 1784 edition of the European’s “dr e s s of t h e mon t h” column announced that “the present fashion at the Court-end of the Town is plain frocks, dark brown, blue, or Lunardi’s maroon” (6: 339). The epilogue of Cumberland’s The Natural Son cited “Figaro feathers and Lunardi lace” as two of the day’s leading fashions. This was not, however, to be taken as a compliment. On the contrary, the epilogue cited the tyranny of fashion as evidence of the corruption of the age, “when all the heart is waste, / and frighted nature flies the realms of Taste” (1785: 83). C au t ious ph i l o s oph e r s The simultaneous diffusion of audiences – “senators, philosophers, ladies, everybody” – and diversification of activities, venues, and products which characterized voguish new attractions reflected a more fundamental shift towards a demand-driven culture in which public curiosity, energized by a love of novelty, shaped cultural production in unprecedented ways. It was not just the tendency of any worthwhile endeavour to spawn more cynically motivated spin-offs, but that the pressures exerted by this “shock of inclusion” seemed to have assumed an unprecedented role in shaping the nature and direction of these initiatives. For many observers, this was a defining tension: for those who believed in some form of the ideal of the progressive force of knowledge (however they might interpret it), it was difficult to see what alternative there could be to the formation of an enlightened public culture. But it was the extended nature of any of these attractions, and the impossibility of regulating the ways that that extended appeal would manifest itself, which seemed to jeopardize the connection of these trends with the advancement of knowledge. Observers’ scepticism about anything that could be so easily and so thoroughly aligned with the world of fashion on the one hand, and with opportunistic foreigners on the other (the two were often treated as related manifestations of the same dubious character), highlighted the vexed nature of the problem. To be received too enthusiastically by too broad a public (even one whose members may have thought they were interested for the right reasons) was to seem to be guilty of triviality and misjudgement. Less than a year after the Critical Review had called for “proper and judicious trials,” its pessimism had hardened. Weary of the endless sensationalist exploits, fashion trends, and public clamour, the Critical

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announced in October 1785 that “each successive experiment adds force to our former sentiments; and we have much reason to suppose, that this childish spectacle will soon be forgotten.” Ironically, it continued, this lapse in popularity was to be welcomed as a development that would rekindle rather than inhibit scientific work in the area. “Philosophers may then not be ashamed to enquire into its real merits, and the methods of removing obstacles to its improvement” (60: 319). This sentiment ran against the grain of many observers’ emphasis that individuals engaged in the pursuit of knowledge ought, “as far as lies in their power, to disseminate the produce of their labours” (Monthly 1784: 70: 199). In his Experiments And Observations on Different Kinds of Air and Other Branches of Natural Philosophy (1790), Joseph Priestley inveighed against the selfishness of researchers who honed their projects in privacy “till they think they can astonish the world with a system as complete as it is new” (xvii). But, critics protested, in the rage over “so favourite a science” this ideal of communicative publicity had tilted over into a counterproductive frenzy of distractions that actually impeded research (European 1785: 8: 233). Few areas of investigation better epitomized the European’s judgement the previous year that “the pursuits of science have for some time given way to the agitations of the passions” (1784: 5: 265). In the rage for balloons and books, this represented the core of the problem: how to cultivate public interest in ways that did not stimulate “the agitations of the passions”? To fail or to resist becoming a focus of public inquiry in an age which prided itself on bringing “Philosophy down from Heaven, to inhabit among men,” as Addison had famously put it in the Spectator, was to risk being condemned as parochial (1711: 1: 38–39). But the alternative implied a vulnerability to the entrepreneurial energies of the sort of promoters that any reasonably popular phenomenon was sure to attract. Ballooning may well have overlapped with the study of air, the Critical Review allowed in its review of the third volume of Priestley’s Experiments and Observations, Relating to Various Branches of Natural Philosophy; with a Continuation of the Observations on Air (1786), but this convergence should not be seen as dignifying ballooning. On the contrary, disenchanted with the intense publicity that surrounded the craze, “some of the fathers of aerial science have deserted the subject which they have so successfully illustrated, and either with a mistrusting diffidence, or philosophical apathy, left the harvest to be reaped by hands different from those which sowed the seed” (1786: 62: 81). The work of real scientists had given way to the exploits of commercial opportunists. Nor, the European Magazine suggested, should this development have been surprising. “The

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sciences of real and permanent utility to mankind are those to which, in general, mankind have paid the least attention,” neglected as they were by the public’s enthusiasm for those other “sciences – the polite ones, as they are styled – that tend merely to the embellishment of life; to an improvement in the refinements of sensual luxury; or to the gratification of a restless spirit of curiosity” (1787: 11: 323). Nor was it even a matter of distinguishing between legitimate and relatively trivial phenomena; even the most impressive scientific breakthroughs could be trivialized by opportunistic showmen catering to an undiscerning audience. “Electricity happens at present to be the puppetshow of the English,” Charles Moritz declared after his 1782 journey. “Who ever at all understands electricity, is sure of being noticed and successful” (88). Historians such as Jan Golinski, Simon Schaffer, and Larry Stewart have demonstrated the considerable emphasis which individuals such as Priestley and Humphry Davy and organizations such as the Royal Society and the various philosophical societies placed on enshrining scientific investigation as an important form of public culture.23 But if these popularizing efforts were sometimes less successful that their advocates had hoped, the fate of ballooning in the 1780s tells a very different story: that what was sometimes most frustrating about efforts to interest people in particular forms of experimental knowledge was the massive extent to which these attempts succeeded. The dream of a public culture depended as much on the adequate regulation of popular interest as on its actual encouragement. Critics who dismissed ballooning as a genuine expression of the potential for science to become an important element of Britain’s public culture reacted as negatively as they did because it had engrossed too much of the attention of too many members of the general public. Few trends attracted more notoriety as a symbol of misplaced energy dressed up as learned inquiry. The idea of “public curiosity” (Barbauld’s phrase for the balloon on exhibit at the Pantheon), which was inevitably linked to efforts to make science a fundamental element of mainstream culture, was haunted by suspicions of its complicity with a trivial thirst for mere novelty.24 D’Alembert’s salute to the century’s “exaltation of ideas” and “general effervescence of minds” in his Éléments de philosophie (1759) was in many ways simply a more favourable way of commenting on the distractions of a “wonder-working age” (D’Alembert, qtd. Clark 7; London Unmask’ d 135). John Pinkerton’s Letters of Literature (1785), which distinguished between “solid science” (398) or “true science … useful to man” and “false science … which is useless to him” (403), accepted that “what pleases a man is

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highly useful to him” (398) and ought, therefore, to be included in the former category even where it lacked any obvious utility, but even so, it added ominously, “to this last kind [false science] many more branches of what is called knowledge may be referred, than is generally imagined” (403). “Certain it is,” the Morning Herald ad for The Philosophical Fire gravely insisted about these wayward inventors, “when discoveries tend only to do mischief to mankind, instead of proving useful to them … one cannot call their thoughts, so directed, otherwise than downright madness” (December 3, 1786). Accounts of overactive and predictably mediocre authors found their counterpart in Knox’s depiction of the investigator “who hastily passes from science to science, with too much volatility to admit thought and recollection” (Essays 1778: 1: 167). For some critics, these contradictory accounts of the age’s “effervescence of minds” were nothing more than the two most fundamental sides of a commercial society, within which the pursuit of knowledge could never be convincingly sheltered from a more reckless and degraded spirit of innovation that was rooted in the twin evils of acquisitive greed and a love of display. William Clark’s, Golinski’s, and Schaffer’s attention to the many “little enlightenments” which underpinned the production and circulation of particular forms of public knowledge suggests the highly mediated nature of science as a nexus of social activities (Clark 27). But this post-positivist emphasis on the contingency of intellectual pursuits must be doubled by a related insistence on the unsettling recognition of the ease with which more serious forms of scientific endeavour shaded into the entrepreneurial world of itinerant lecturers and quacks, many of whom were quick to include recent discoveries as part of their routines. Golinski’s citation of ballooning as the chief example of the sorts of applications that lecturers invoked to bolster their credentials underscores the profound difficulties that faced attempts to popularize science while distinguishing it from more controversial fashions (103). Relations between the worlds of “solid” or “true” science and mere spectacle were characterized more by their discursive and institutional overlap than by any reliable sense of opposition. Whatever the opinions of their detractors, aeronauts such as Lunardi and Blanchard took care to embrace a rhetoric of high seriousness alongside their tone of promotional exuberance, to align themselves with distinguished individuals such as Fordyce and Joseph Banks even as they played the role of flamboyant entertainers, and to remind their critics that ballooning demonstrations were in fact a highly successful form of the sorts of public displays championed by

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unquestioned men of science. Ballooning, even in its most opportunistic forms, staged itself as the successful extreme rather than the parodic Other of efforts to establish science as a form of public culture. T h e wor l d a s i t g oe s The tensions which this proximity between science and spectacle or philosophy and madness (each of which functioned as a kind of shorthand for broader theories of civic progress or decline) generated were exacerbated by fears about the erosion of “the public” as an identifiable social group within which particular forms of knowledge might be validated. The public, to the extent that the concept retained any clear identity, had spilled over far beyond the gentrified limits of polite society but it had also fractured into a network of overlapping and often discrepant social groups – “the several classes” which, Barbauld feared, “run too much into one another” – whose habits and preoccupations could be neither harmonized nor distinguished (1773: 2: 193–94). Ballooning, by straddling the line between science and show business and by appealing to a diverse set of audiences (“senators, philosophers, ladies, everybody”), highlighted the profound difficulties that confronted any attempt to translate the pursuit of knowledge into a form of polite public culture – not because science could not be made to be popular, but because this process could never be quarantined off from the spectre of a more unruly form of popular culture whose various passions had little to do with the ideal of politeness, regardless of the different ways that that ideal was being reimagined to fit the needs of a commercial nation.25 Lunardi may have been careful to emphasize the ubiquity of “well dressed people” among the thousands who crowded to watch his ascent, but others’ more sceptical judgements suggest that Lunardi’s insistence on the respectability of his audience be read as a strategically motivated attempt to contain precisely these sorts of anxieties about the instability of the border between polite public culture and all that was merely popular (1784: Account 27: incorrectly numbered 35). Sophie von La Roche happily repeated her Dover landlord’s lament, about the crowd who had thronged to watch Blanchard and Jeffries’ departure across the Channel, “that so few people of standing or particular intellect were present, only the populace came to see” (1786: 289). For La Roche, who was eager to establish the intellectual seriousness of her visit to London by castigating those other activities which must properly be regarded as mere pretensions to serious inquiry, the landlord’s tale of the sight of “many thousand people with telescopes of all sizes” aimed at the sky was merely “humorous,” not proof

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of the triumph of science but an ironic account of the age’s distractions which “made us smile” (289–90). One of the easiest means of dealing with the effects of these tensions between “true” science and mere spectacle was simply to resist commerce’s hybridizing influence by insisting on categorical distinctions, dismissing ballooning as a form of madness which had little to do with respected practitioners such as Davy and Priestley. To this extent, ballooning offered satirists a recognizable symbol, not just of the prevalence of “childish spectacle[s],” but of plain scientific delusion. Anthony Pasquin’s The Royal Academicians (1789) featured the mad Doctor Nimbus who suffered from “Balloonomania,” which “deprived [him] in an instant of the proper use of his mental faculties” after he had been bitten “by a mad outlandish dog, called Lunardi” (26). Charles Macklin’s The Man of the World (1785) similarly invoked ballooning as a shorthand for false genius. The vacuous Lord Rodol vows to “commence a long voyage of air balloon philosophy” “in order to improve and elevate my intellects” (28). Ballooning’s ability to evoke fears of intellectual delusion was all the more serious because the various forms of inquiry that were crystallizing into the category known as science were frequently hailed as a primary index of a nation’s civic health. “Nothing, perhaps, better shows the rise or decline of a nation than the studies it pursues,” declared the Monthly in its review of Essay on Medals in 1784. While the many useful sciences are the objects of investigation, we may safely pronounce it to be sound and vigorous; but when trifling arts occupy its attention; when solid learning and philosophy are made to give way to fiddling and dancing … it is impossible that such a people can long continue flourishing; the meridian of their glory is past, and their sun of grandeur hastening to set, never more to rise!

However dire this scenario may have seemed, the Monthly hastened to add that it was only speaking theoretically. “Far hence be the æra of such degeneracy, in a country which has produced a Bacon [and] a Locke” (71: 201). But which side of the equation was ballooning on? Evidence of progress or decline? A testimony to the manly achievements or the luxurious effeminacy of the age? The pursuit of knowledge or the thirst for novelty? Were balloons the herald of “a new Æra in the History of Science” (The Balloon 1786: iii) or “philosophical playthings” (Walpole 25: 542)? Or was the response to ballooning all of these at the same time? If so, what did this do to the categories which provided some of eighteenth-century Britain’s most fundamental cultural coordinates? Even as cautious a judge

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of modern culture as the third Earl of Shaftesbury was willing to embrace a role for its more light-hearted elements, as long as the boundaries which separated them off from more serious and improving pursuits were clearly maintained: “The way of wit and humour may be serviceable as well as that of gravity and seriousness … The main matter is to keep these provinces distinct and settle their just boundaries” (1711: 161). For many commentators, however, ballooning reflected the tendency of a modern commercial society to blur or eradicate these “distinct provinces,” unsettling their “just boundaries.” Barbauld’s poem “Washing Day” captured this ambivalence in its closing lines, which linked children’s love of blowing “floating bubbles” to Montgolfier’s “silken ball”: “so near approach / The sports of children and the toils of men” (1797: 35). The problem, of course, was that if “the sports of children” could not be easily or obviously disentangled from “the toils of men,” then it became difficult to determine on what basis particular endeavours could be established as being worthy of respect. How, amid “the chaos and trivia of commercial modernity,” did one separate the adults from the children (Lynch 58)? “What can be more justly called Philosophical, and not mad, than the thought which has contributed to find out such an useful and important discovery as this,” asked a newspaper ad for The Philosophical Fire, but the problem with ballooning was not just the extent to which it troubled these sorts of distinctions but, even more unsettling, the ways that it seemed to evoke their compromised nature generally (Morning Herald December 3, 1786). Barbauld was acute in recognizing the problems involved in maintaining the border between these supposedly different activities, but she was not alone in reacting to the tensions created by these sorts of confusions.26 Few texts performed this ambivalence more insightfully than London Unmask’ d: Or, the New Town Spy (1784), whose subtitle promised “a Ramble through the regions of nov e lt y, w h i m, fa sh ion, and ta s t e … With the various h u mou r s, fol l i e s, foi bl e s, v ic e s, and a bsu r di t i e s generally practised throughout L on d on a n d i ts e n v i rons.” The final chapter, entitled “The Prevalence of Novelty,” invoked the recent “Aerial Voyagers” as the most striking evidence of the age’s slavish devotion to the whims of fashion. Like so many others, the narrator was initially inclined to dismiss ballooning as “a piece of foreign finesse, like the bottle conjuror, or a domestic humbug, like the Cock-lane Ghost,” but also like these others, he was determined not to miss out (136). Accompanied by an equally sceptical “philosophical friend,” he joined a “countless throng” to watch a proposed flight. Caught up in the excitement, they “gaped as wide,


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and stared as wide, as any of the great or small vulgar around us.” When the balloon finally rose above the horizon, “every eye was fixed in rapturous gaze” until “it vanished from their sight, and gave them opportunity of exclaiming, wonderful! surprizing!” Rather than settle for enthusiastic conversion, the passage opted for a more tenuous conclusion, giving the last word to another character, Sir Gravity, who urged them to “dismiss this frothy topic” (138). Still under “this attachment to the charms of novelty,” and “impelled no doubt by an epidemic rage” which made them “determined not to be out of fashion,” the narrator and his “philosophical friend” headed off to see the Learned Horse, “the dancing, or rather acting, dogs” and “the wonderful learned pig” (138–40). Elizabeth Inchbald exploited this “epidemic rage” to get her first play staged in London; The Mogul’s Tale; or, The Descent of the Balloon appeared at the Theatre Royal in July 1784. But the prologue Thomas Holcroft wrote for her 1786 farce The Widow’s Vow situated ballooning’s appeal in more nuanced cultural terms: While Exhibitions, Galas, and Reviews, Lisle Street, Vauxhall, the Abbey, Handel, Hughes, Flutes, fiddles, trombos, double-drums, bassoons, Mara, the Speaking Figure, fish balloons … While these create a round of such delight, Sure we may hope you will not frown tonight! While farces numerous as these go down, Our farce may, in its turn, amuse the town! And smiling, thus, on Folly’s vast career, Sure not on us, alone, you’ll be severe! (1)

Holcroft may have been overly optimistic in implying that Folly’s career was too vast and too delightful for ballooning, which constituted only a small fraction of it, to be singled out for undue severity, but this may have been due to an overly generous sense of the sorts of phenomena that ballooning was perceived to be on a par with. The sorts of attractions that Holcroft denominated as “Folly’s vast career” appeared in a less flattering light in a 1784 print, “The Downfall of Taste and Genius, or, The World As it Goes” (figure 5). It depicted an apocalyptic scene in which painting, sculpture, music, and literature are being trampled by a carnivalesque mob of performing animals including a pig wearing a collar on which is inscribed Learned Pig, a hare beating a tabor, a dog in a legal wig and gown, and riding another dog, General Jacko, a monkey that had been performing at Astley’s that summer. A circus performer rides a horse, poised on one leg. In the background are four statues standing on

Figure 5: The Downfall of Taste and Genius, or, The World As it Goes. Etching. By S. Collings. Published by W. Humphrey, 227 Strand. c. 1784.


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broken columns. Fame (on the left) holds two broken trumpets; Wisdom, holding a shield and spear, is decapitated, and her owl perches on her neck; Justice holds her sword and scales, both broken; Virtue is a beggar with a wooden leg. Nature is a statue of a woman with six breasts; her hair is being sprinkled with powder by a harlequin figure. Prominently labelled copies of Shakespeare’s Plays and Pope’s Works are being trampled underfoot. Presiding over the marauding pack of freaks, animals, and circus performers is a dwarf-sized Lunardi in his balloon waving a flag with three fleurs-de-lis. Not only is he associated with a more debased set of attractions than in Holcroft’s poem, but they are depicted as constituting a serious threat to Britain’s civic and cultural health. This ambivalence was reinforced by Lunardi’s tendency to promote himself in romantic terms that were more closely aligned with the vogue for sensibility than with the world of science. Few figures better epitomized the impact of what John Brewer has described as the “Rabelaisian and commercial” impulses of eighteenth-century cultural life (“Most Polite,” 341). “Pleasure never gratifies me highly unless I receive it from the Fa i rSe x ,” he acknowledged after detailing the warm reception he received from the “L a di e s” of Liverpool, who received him at “the A s se m bly ” (Mr. Lunardi’s 31). It was something of a recurring theme in Lunardi’s publications. Nor was he the only one to associate the glamour of air ballooning with the frisson of sexual attraction. Two poems which appeared in the London Chronicle in the weeks after his initial ascent played on a fashion trend which linked its altitudinal dangers with imperilled feminine virtue. The first, “E pig r a m on some young L a di e s wearing G a r t e r s, inscribed with the name of the aspiring Mr. Lu n a r di,” was typical in linking Lunardi’s aerial adventures to his more earthly attractions: When Lunardi, unpinion’d, first soar’d to the skies, Huzza’d by the foolish, admir’d by the wise, The Ladies all gaz’d with amazement and fear, And from many bright eyes dropt the pitying tear; The pitying tear he had when on high, And from every fair bosom the heart-heaving sigh. Now, clasping the thigh of each beautiful Miss, He has soared within sight of the regions of bliss. Alas! Should he lose his inflammable air, The fears would return of each languishing fair, Who hope he will rise like the Lark or the Dove, His affections still set on the good things above. (56: 358: 9–12, October 1784)

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The second poem, “A C au t ion to those ladies who have ventured to wear Garters inscribed with the name of that rising Genius, Mr. L u n a r di,” echoed the first: Ye bright British fair, Who love bubbles of air, And for fashion your safety will barter; Lunardi the bold At your knees can’t be cold; He’ll rise to the Zone from the Garter. (56: 365: 12–14, October 1784)

Lunardi’s status as an Italian infused these accounts with images of an irrepressible but potentially transgressive sexuality. Love in a Balloon, which appeared in the Rambler’s Magazine on November 1, 1784, depicted Lunardi aloft embracing a female passenger (figure 6). “Ah Madame it rises majestically,” Lunardi exclaims. “I feel it does Signeur,” she answers, while on the ground admiring male spectators exclaim, “Damme he’s no Italian but a man every inch of him.” The juxtaposition of Lunardi’s Italian identity and masculine potency was animated by an ongoing association of Italian men and homosexuality, or, in the case of castratos, impotence. John Dennis, in his Essay Upon Public Spirit (1711), had cautioned English women against the modern popularity of Italian opera by casting male Italian opera singers as potential conquerors of their otherwise heterosexual English men. Lunardi’s gallantry might infuse his exploits with a romantic rather than a scientific edge, the print suggested, but at least it was England’s women to whom he was attracted. He was not, it turned out, quite so Italian after all. These sexual tensions resonated with broader debates about ballooning’s ultimate significance because of the extent to which male sexuality (and in particular the threat of effeminacy) had been depicted as an index of the nation’s moral progress or decline. At any rate, in an age when “fashions changed with kaleidoscope speed” (McKendrick 92) the Critical Review’s hopeful 1785 prediction “that this childish spectacle will soon be forgotten” was vindicated quickly enough. Ballooning remained popular, but it soon lost its status as a novelty, and therefore as a “rage” or a “phrenzy.” “The Balloon-mania is a good deal subsided,” the Morning Post announced with relief, “and now we may expect aerostation to be considered more scientifically, and with more immediate regard to useful projects and discoveries” (January 11, 1785). By January 1786, the European Magazine


Figure 6: Love in a Balloon. Etching. Anonymous. From Rambler’s Magazine. November 1, 1784.

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could already refer to “the then fashionable rage for ballooning” two years earlier (13: 7). “The late rage of Ballooning, which had spread itself beyond even the nations of Europe, begins now to be appeased,” the Gentleman’s Magazine announced months later, a judgement which was confirmed by the rapid decline in publications and news about balloons, and in their virtual absence in the satirical cartoons after 1785 (1786: 56: 309). By December 1790, The Bee, Or Literary Weekly Intelligencer could assume a tone of historical detachment suitable to discussions of the distant past in its comment about discoveries which owed their rise to fields of research concerning “permanently elastic fluids, a i r s or g a s e s”: “The art of aerostation, which made so much noise for some time, was the most conspicuous of these; but as it has not yet been found that any useful purpose can be effected by these aerial voyages, they are now no longer attended to” (1: 37). Lunardi, sensing that the winds of public interest had shifted, had already moved on. The July 1787 European noted Lunardi’s “experiment of his new invention for preserving persons from drowning. He launched himself in at Westminster Bridge, and passed down the river, through Black-friars, and also London bridge, at nearly the time of low-water” (1787: 12: 77). Despite Horace Walpole’s many sarcasms about these “philosophical playthings,” it was a letter to Walpole from George Hardinge that best described the public’s ambivalence towards ballooning, as towards so many other elements of what Holcroft had described as “Folly’s vast career”: “Blanchard and Sheldon have just been visible two miles above our heads,” Hardinge wrote. “It was a beautiful sight, and I do not care a bit for the ridicule of it, though nothing, to be sure, can be sillier” (25: 543; 33: 447; 35: 631). Critics of modern literature would have understood his ambivalence; for many observers, modern literature, like ballooning, was animated by tensions rooted in its simultaneous prominence within contradictory narratives of progress and decline, refinement and effeminacy, enlightenment and modish distraction. Judgements about the state of modern literature echoed Carlyle’s double-edged description of ballooning: “a beautiful invention,” the symbol of “our Age of Hope,” but also, in its fashionable excesses, hopelessly unguidable, buffeted by the unpredictable winds of a commercial economy and “tumbling whither Fate will.” In Chapters 4 and 5, I will focus on the ways that writers embraced modern literature’s wayward nature – tumbling whither Fate will – as the basis of their own unguidable (or, in literary terms, miscellaneous) aesthetic, and as the key to their related vision


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of an emergent code of literary professionalism. But like arguments for the importance of ballooning, these ideas were forged in the face of widespread scepticism about modern literature’s excesses – concerns for which an adequate response would be crucial to the formation of any more positive vision. It is these problems, epitomized by satirical descriptions of the bibliomania, that I want to explore in the next chapter; the entrenched nature of these negative judgements highlights the ingenuity with which authors turned these problems to their own constructive ends by making ambivalence a hallmark of their ideas about the role of literature in a modern commercial nation.

Ch apter 3

Bibliomania: the rage for books and the spectacle of culture

Every thing in England is a mania, or it is nothing.

Morning Chronicle, January 25, 1783

Be dl a m What was true of balloons was equally true of books. If the clamour for all things ballooning was frequently described, positively or negatively or with genuine ambivalence, as a “rage,” an “arial phrenzy,” or a form of “madness,” critics responded to the public’s enthusiasm for literature – writing it, reading it, collecting it, or even organizing it – in still more overtly pathologized terms. But as with condemnations of the tyranny of fashion generally, I am less interested in what made these denunciations popular, and even less in the question of their accuracy, than in the kinds of cultural work that they enabled. In The Enlightenment and the Book, Richard Sher suggests that the familiar chorus of descriptions of the “print explosion,” “print boom,” “print revolution,” and “publishing revolution” which characterized this era “has greatly outpaced our knowledge of what was actually taking place” (2).1 A rapidly growing body of work by book historians such as Sher, John Brewer, James Raven, and William St. Clair has gone a long way towards addressing this gap, but as Pierre Bourdieu has reminded us, the tensions that animated the literary field as a site of intense definitional struggles involved “not only the material production but also the symbolic production of the work, i.e., the production of the value of the work or, which amounts to the same thing, of belief in the value of the work” (Field 37). As Sher’s account of publishers’ decisions about which book format (quarto, octavo, duodecimo, or folio) to use suggests, it was never an either/or situation. The most stubborn materialist realities were shaped by broader interpretive dimensions, in this case a shrewd sense of market imperatives which were themselves based on an understanding of the value judgements which determined the status 78

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of different formats. The impact of “what was actually taking place” was mediated by these sorts of broader considerations, not just about what actually was taking place but about its importance (or its danger), and this, in turn, was never a matter of isolated questions about particular elements of the world of print, but “a manifestation of the field as a whole, in which all the powers of the field, and all the determinisms inherent in its structure and functioning, are concentrated” (Bourdieu 37). As Adrian Johns puts it, “the sources of print culture are … to be sought in civility as much as technology” (Nature 35). The point of rehearsing the endless diagnoses which are the subject of this chapter is not to be drawn into a new diagnostic posture by debating their accuracy (is this how it actually was? were things really this bad?) but rather to pursue the question of the ways in which these narratives helped to regulate the modern literary field as a highly mediated network of producers (authors, editors, translators), consumers (buyers and borrowers, readers and collectors), and people in the trade enabling them to maintain their particular investments in the literary field during a time of widely acknowledged change or, even more ambitiously, to reimagine their various literary commitments in ways that were better suited to the pressures of a market culture. What new cultural narratives of legitimacy and distinction did these diagnoses make possible? What recombinations of inherited languages of public and private virtue did they facilitate? How did they align authors with an emergent ideology of professionalism by helping to reconcile self-interest with the general good? The legal, technological, and commercial factors that dominated what Brewer has described as the “expanding maze or labyrinth” of eighteenthcentury publishing, which “offered the potential author many entrances and numerous routes to eventual publication, each full of hazards, pitfalls, and dead ends,” were themselves mediated by the discursive pressures of an equally treacherous cultural landscape in which there was no shortage of strong opinions about the virtues and vices of modern literature. The struggle to assert particular definitions, not just of what sort of authors mattered and why, but about what should count as literature and for whom, was doubled by a far more fundamental struggle over the nature of the processes of consecration that would determine these answers. Acknowledgements of what Clay Shirky calls “the shock of inclusion” manifested themselves in the rise of commonplace gestures to the ultimate authority of the reading public, but these sorts of deferential gestures produced more questions than answers: about how this judgement was to manifest itself (whether or not it could be equated with

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straightforward market demand), how consumer demand was to be mediated, and what sorts of stances writers ought to adopt in relation to this public. The dynamics which characterized the age’s “print revolution” manifested themselves most profoundly, if not always most explicitly, at this foundational level. Few cultural locations dramatized the unruly nature of the connections between commerce and culture, fashion and knowledge, material realities and ideological investments, more vividly than bookstores. Sophie von La Roche’s account of her trip to London in 1785 is most frequently cited for its vivid tribute to the fetishized grandeur of Britain’s consumer revolution: “behind great glass windows absolutely everything one can think of is neatly, attractively displayed, and in such abundance of choice as almost to make one greedy” (87).2 But this frisson of material abundance also provided the context within which La Roche would stage her most intense encounter with modern literature. Among her many destinations, which included Alexander Pope’s house at Twickenham and (like Anna Barbauld the year before) a visit with Frances Burney, La Roche’s journal recalled a memorable trip to “a book-shop in the Strand.” Her initial comment – “I fancied to myself I was at the chemist’s who supplied the aids and preventatives against those mental diseases I had so lamented at Bedlam that morning” – was a dramatic endorsement of the age’s equation of books with learning and, by extension, with a laudable control over the sorts of disorders one might witness at Bedlam, which she had visited earlier in the day (171). It was a popular refrain. George Crabbe’s poem The Library (1781) hailed books’ power to provide “mental physic [to] the diseas’d in mind” (6). Books, it declared, were “Coolers … that damp the fire of rage” (6). The idea was popular enough that it could be relied on for a joke. Richard Cumberland argued that because of books’ healing qualities, libraries ought to be arranged, not in the usual “compartments of The Historians; the Poets; the Divines,” but rather as types of medicines, such as “The Alternatives; the Stimulatives; The Narcotics” (1791: 2: 221). Adam Fitz-Adam, the pseudonymous editor of The World, modestly suggested of his own efforts as a periodical writer that “nothing need be said of these books, but that they are an easy, pleasant and infallible cure for every disorder of the human mind” (1755: 4: 93). Behind these ironies lay the obvious cliché: not only were the worlds of books and the asylum diametrically opposed, but the former contained resources which might help to ward off the afflictions that one found in the latter. The melodramatic flair of La Roche’s description imbued the process with a particular

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urgency by contrasting books’ pharmaceutical powers with her visit, just hours earlier, to England’s most potent symbol of the dismal struggle “against … mental diseases.” But for La Roche, the stability of the distinctions which secured this narrative could not be sustained. The allure of books turned out to be more inflammatory than curative, a source of rather than an antidote to the kinds of passions that might derange a person’s faculties. And like the effects of the displays which she had viewed behind the “great glass windows,” La Roche’s reaction was animated by the tendency of the sight of so many books, encountered here in their most commodified form, to inspire a kind of greed: “I should soon have caught a fever there too,” she acknowledged of the bookstore, “for I was so seized with the desire to see and read all these fine works, that the thought of the sheer impossibility of such an enterprise made the tears well up and really grieved me” (171). Books and Bedlam emerge, not as opposite worlds joined by the power of one to cure or at least ward off the afflictions of the other, but as two equally contagious elements of the same diseased milieu. Like the age’s more glorious allusions to the healing power of books, this wariness of their feverish side-effects was a frequent complaint. Isaac D’Israeli was willing to accept Cicero’s description of authors as “Heroes of peace” as far as their broader social impact was concerned, but, he insisted, “peace is rarely the ornament of their feverish existence” (Essay 1795: 108). “Every composition of genius is the production of enthusiasm,” he suggested, “a phrenzy of abstraction, and wonderful agitation of the soul” (Essay 84). However strongly authors may have been susceptible to this malady as a hazard of their intellectual vocation, D’Israeli suggested elsewhere, this “wonderful agitation of the soul” was symptomatic of a more general condition that was bound up with what Adam Smith had described as “the hurry of life” in a commercial world (Lectures 1763: 112). “How many persons are there,” D’Israeli asked, “who, if there was a rigid police observed, would be chained in Bedlam! Do we not every where see what excesses men are led into by their inconstancy, their fantastic hope, their perishable ambition, in a word, their madness?” (Curiosities 1793: 2: 507). “The world, in the eye of a philosopher,” was a “large mad house” in which “the greatest part of mankind” were motivated by “delusive ideas” and “incited” by the power of “a heated imagination,” Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) agreed. “The passions of men are temporary madnesses; and sometimes very fatal in their effects” (48–49). What threatened La Roche was not the “wonderful agitation” of creative inspiration but the tendency of the sheer profusion and visual beauty of

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modern literature, witnessed here in its most commercial guise, to simultaneously arouse and thwart desire, and in doing so, to inflame the passions into so many “temporary madnesses.” C u r ious l i br a r i e s The fever which La Roche depicts herself having only narrowly and incompletely escaped was a familiar one, a derangement of critical judgement akin to what D’Israeli described as “the Bibliomania, or the collecting an enormous heap of books” (Curiosities 1791: 1: 19). Recent discussions of the bibliomania have tended to focus on the early nineteenth century, when the term’s reference to an interest in expensive books as collectable objects was sharpened by Thomas Frognall Dibdin’s memorable text The Bibliomania; or, Book-Madness (1809) and the poem which inspired it (John Ferriar’s Bibliomania, also 1809), by the notorious Roxburghe auction of 1812 when competing aristocrats bid record amounts for the fifth Duke of Roxburghe’s prized family library, and, in the same year, by the formation of the Roxburghe Club which was committed to an appreciation of rare and valuable books (Connell “Bibliomania”; Ferris, “Introduction” and “Bibliographic”; and Lynch, “Wedded”). These interventions have helped to clarify the ways that debates about books served as an illuminating expression of broader and more fundamental concerns about the social impact of Britain’s commercial modernity, but I want to pursue the public’s fascination with the bibliomania back into the eighteenth century and down the class hierarchy into the more ubiquitous terrain of everyday life, an extension of what a 1785 correspondent to the Gentleman’s Magazine denounced as “that polite spirit of refined dissipation which characterises the present age” (55: 766).3 This version of the bibliomania had less to do with the elite confines of the Roxburghe Club than with a range of popular phenomena which circulated as hyperbolic expressions of what Anne Janowitz has described as the existential predicament of being “set adrift in the too-muchness of urban traffic” (247), from the dangerously unregulated enthusiasm of the “balloonomania,” to what Vicesimus Knox described as “the musical mania” which “suffused itself from the court to the cottage, from the orchestra of royal theatres, to the rustics in the gallery of a country church,” to “the theatrical mania” or obsession with staging plays in domestic contexts, to what the World described as the “p o s t e rom an i a , or rage of having posterity” (Winter 1785: 1: 136, 3: 36; 1753: 1: 148). As the Morning Chronicle acknowledged in its account of the public clamour

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over Mrs. Siddons, “every thing in England is a mania, or it is nothing” (January 25, 1783). Few cultural trends were immune. The Critical Review expressed bemused astonishment at “that strange Shakespearomania” which “prevailed so lately and so universally amongst all ranks and all ages” (1759: 7: 251). Richard Cumberland noted the susceptibility of the English to “the locomotive mania” or domestic travel “in every corner of the kingdom” (1791: 3: 48). What has in some ways been overlooked in our discussions of the bibliomania is just how mundane it was – one more element of a manic age driven by the “too-muchness” of emulative desire and modish distraction. Like the balloonomania, the bibliomania threatened to unsettle what Shaftesbury had called the “distinct … provinces” of instruction and revelry by confusing an interest in the pursuit of knowledge with a fashionable love of novelty (1711: 161). It highlighted the Janus-faced role of commerce in facilitating both the various institutions and activities, or “little enlightenments,” which the pursuit of knowledge comprised and the dangers which jeopardized it, or what was in some ways the same thing, the extent to which the progress of any field of learning could be undermined by its own popularity (Clark 27). Mania implied a kind of madness, but as Thomas Arnold emphasized in his Observations on the Nature, Kinds, Causes, and Prevention of Insanity, Lunacy, or Madness (1782–86), it was a particular kind, not melancholy – “a form of Madness which is accompanied with fear and dejection” – but a “ph r e ns y, or f u r y … the delirium of a violent fever” (1: 123, 29). As a collective description, it suggested the ease with which a group mentality could instil precisely the sort of suspension of judgement which this account of a delirium implied – a mob psychology, even when it referred to a “mob of persons of quality,” as John Pinkerton wryly suggested in his Letters of Literature (1785: 13). In the case of bibliomania, the problem was an unreflecting or at least an obsessive and therefore too hastily judged love of books that threatened to close the gap between the bookstore and Bedlam. If, as Clement Hawes has argued, following Christopher Hill’s lead, the rhetoric of mania or enthusiasm must in part be read as a displaced expression of a radical millenarial fervour that was thwarted by the triumph of a more conservative revolution of the propertied classes, by the end of the eighteenth century it circulated as an expression of commercialism run wild. Focusing on the ways that these discursive trends converged in changing understandings of the more specific concept of enthusiasm, Jon Mee has traced “the migration of the term away from a strictly religious usage towards an understanding of the way the passions

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could communicate themselves without resort to rational articulation” (11). For many critics, enthusiasm’s increasingly broad association with an absence of “reflection and mediation” manifested itself most disturbingly in the public’s craving for cultural spectacle (11). If, as Hill argued, Milton’s nation of prophets had become a nation of shopkeepers, by the end of the eighteenth century England had become a nation of showmen, within the literary domain as well as in other more self-avowedly sensationalist domains. Or so the anxious rhetoric about fashion and novelty would suggest, at least. Bibliomania was nothing new, D’Israeli explained. It had “long been the rage with some who would fain pass themselves upon us for men of vast erudition.” Rather than appreciating books’ real worth as mediating powers enabling the circulation of knowledge, bibliomaniacs valued them as forms of conspicuous consumption: as potential elements of “an immense and curious library” which would reflect their acquisitive prowess (Curiosities 1791: 1: 19). Fundamentally misguided in their motives for collecting books, these bibliomaniacs were easy prey to the predictable “cheats and impositions” of the sorts of tricksters who exploited the gullible and the deluded: Towards the end of the last century, some ignorant or knavish men sent to Paris a number of Arabic manuscripts, in excellent condition and clear characters. They were received with all imaginable respect by the eager collectors of books; they were rapidly purchased at a high price: but, lo! when they were examined by the connoisseurs, these manuscripts, which were held so inestimable, were discovered to be books of accounts and registers, cleanly transcribed by certain Arabian merchants. (19–20)

Having missed the point about the real worth of books generally, these would-be collectors were equally unable identify the actual nature of particular books. D’Israeli’s insistence that he was providing “coin for general use, rather than … medals for the mere virtuoso” aligned his work with a comprehensive rather than specialized audience, but more fundamentally it reflected his sense that literature, like coins, was useful to the extent that it facilitated a process of circulation; books possessed an exchange value that was linked to their important role in keeping ideas in motion, in opposition to the inertia of medals hoarded by the virtuoso for private gratification (Curiosities 2: i). “Knowledge is only knowledge when it is rendered accessible to the nation,” he declared. “It must be shewn to, and handled by the multitude, and not preserved like an useless piece of antiquity in the collections of the curious” (Essay 216). Nor was it just

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knowledge that needed to be “handled.” Reflecting on the sight of his periodical “strung upon a file, and swelling gradually into a little volume … in the public coffee-houses,” Mr. Town (pseudonymous editor of the Connoisseur) insisted that “I have considered every speck of dirt as a mark of reputation, and have assumed to myself applause from the spilling of coffee, or the print of a greasy thumb. In a word, I look upon each paper, when torn and sullied by frequent handling, as an old soldier battered in the service, and covered with honourable scars” (1754: 1: 228). Prizing collection over circulation and display over handling, bibliomaniacs had aligned themselves with a mistaken notion of value which fetishized singularity at the expense of books’ ability to forge important forms of intellectual community. This book madness ran in several different directions. If bibliomania suggested a misguided obsession with books as an ostentatious site of consumer culture, on another level the “avidity” with which “books printed in the black letter are sought” reflected what the Monthly Review described as the age’s more general “rage for antiquities” (Knox, Essay 1: 290; Monthly 77: 1787: 425).4 When it came to books, this antiquarian zeal only exacerbated a set of existing concerns about the vogue for collecting. In the opening essay of Joineriana: Or, The Book of Scraps (1772), Samuel Paterson distinguished between the genuine worth of “the sober and judicious Antiquary” who “stands in the foremost rank of Critics” and the “foolish, childish, vain and unprofitable” obsessions of “the modern antiquary,” “a lover of oddity – a hunter after nicknacks,” endlessly searching for “scraps and fragments” to add to his “cabinet of never-tobe-described oddities” (1: 11, 12, 13, 15, 29, 17). Paterson was willing to concede that “the mere collector of curiosities hurts no one – and is a virtuous character, in comparison with the collector of letters, and papers, and anecdotes, which he accumulates without choice, arranges without method, and prints without discretion” (1: 19). A “cabinet of never-to-bedescribed oddities” was foolish rather than threatening, but “confusions of papers void of wit or taste, and strung together without judgment – the major part consisting of a chaos of matter neither interesting, nor always fit to be known” threatened the coherence of the world of learning at a time when its stability had already been eroded by the escalation of print (1: 19–20). Herbert Croft’s periodical the Literary Fly, (1779) offered, as equally conclusive proof of the age’s cultural decline, the fact that “the collectors of moths, monsters, weeds, and cockle-shells” had transgressed their accepted terrain and were now “presiding over our public stock of Literature” (47).

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Concerns about the empty grandeur of the would-be connoisseur or the misguided zeal of the “modern antiquary” were shadowed by what was in some ways the opposite impulse, which should rightly have served as an antidote to these sorts of mistakes and excesses but which D’Israeli described as another manifestation of bibliomania: “the taste for classing books, and the judgment shewn in their various editions” (Miscellanies 1796: 138). The spectacle of misguided collection, of a kind of wastefulness by people who, for various reasons, were as obsessed with books as they were blind to their real usefulness, could always be contained, some observers suggested, by a rigorously scientific determination to subject these acquisitive drives to the rational imperatives of a systematic body of critical knowledge. But more was at stake in all of this than just a knowledge about books as an end in themselves. This “taste for classing books” would be capable, not just of establishing the internal order of the world of books by developing a detailed sense of the material aspects of particular editions, but far more ambitiously, of shedding light on the thoroughly abstract question of the organization of all knowledge. Neither goal, it seemed, was fully comprehensible except in terms of the other. The January 1803 Monthly Magazine’s obituary for Paterson hailed him as a pioneer in the emergent science of bibliography, a “knowledge of authors and books” which “bear[s], perhaps, the most recent date, in the annals of the human mind,” and which was in turn “the immediate consequence of that overgrowing and amazing scientific wealth, from which we have endeavoured to take the most valuable materials” (15: 43). Bibliography was tellingly bifocal in its commitments: it addressed both the particular realm of books as physical artefacts worthy of consideration in their own right and the organization of “the manifold, diverging, and apparently unconnected branches of the tree of knowledge.” The study of books would, in the hands of a bibliographer as ambitious at Paterson, be nothing less than the occasion for a scientific project “capable of representing in one point of view the intellectual pursuits of several nations, and of an infinite number of individuals in every age.” The intellectual demands of this enterprise would be as extraordinary as the resulting “point of view” would be extensive. It would require the bibliographer “to connect the scientific annals of each generation with their proper links; to notice in their due times, place and gradation, all the names who have gradually contributed to the improvement of the human mind, and to describe every publication, with the circumstances by which it was attended” (15: 43).5 This encyclopaedic dream of a new metascience – the fantasy of a totalizing knowledge of the different branches of all knowledge across

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generations and national boundaries – took many forms, though all of them presumed an inherent relationship between this search for a knowledge of all knowledges and the world of books, which were routinely figured as both the most important resource for this synthesizing enterprise, and the most natural means of consolidating the insights it produced: the perfect structure and the ideal metaphor for the age’s boundless will to knowledge. In its review of The Modern Part of an Universal History, from the Earliest Account of Time, the Critical expressed its “wonder” at the magnitude of this task: “the history of so many nations … the variety of languages under which it is concealed, the infinite number of books from which this work is compiled, the pains and attention necessary to collect and collate these materials” (1759: 7: 1). Whatever its reservations about individual volumes of the Annual Register (“a single volume is scarce worth the perusal”), the Critical insisted in a similar spirit that “a series of such volumes” amounted to something far greater than the sum of these parts: a “faithful repository,” not just of “the manners of the age,” but more ambitiously, of “the difference of ages, the succession of fashion, the progression of science, the fluctuation of public virtue, and the gradual elevation or decline of human nature. In a word, the Annual Register will present to the eye of a philosopher a natural picture of the manners of several ages, represented according to their just distances, by the exact rules of perspective” (1762: 12: 145–46). The ultimate aim of these synthesizing accounts was not just to develop an aggregate knowledge of all knowledges, as audacious as even this would have been, but more fundamentally, to divine in this whole a sense of the flow of all human history, whether this was articulated in progressivist terms such as the Monthly’s reference to the “gradual … improvement of the human mind” or in terms that owed more to a narrative of the rise and fall of nations, such as the Critical’s emphasis on “the fluctuation of public virtue, and the gradual elevation or decline of human nature.” Either way, these projects embraced books as both a central agent of historical change and the most important source of the kinds of knowledge that would help to chronicle these changes. All of these examples underscore the extent to which these two imperatives – a specialized knowledge of books and of the organization of knowledge itself – had become inexorably related. But if the Paterson obituary and the two Critical reviews shared a tendency to ground this search for a knowledge of all knowledges – a perspective that would extend across nations, languages, and generations – in the world of books, the first volume of The Bee, or Literary Weekly Intelligencer (1790) contained a

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proposal that went far beyond the scope of any of these initiatives to a plan “to have a complete collection of all the papers that ever were printed, so arranged, as that they could be easily consulted” (126). This collection would include all published books as a matter of course, but it would also need to make room for even the most “private trifling papers, hand bills, advertisements, &c.,” the kinds of things “which many persons will think ought to be excluded, as mere useless lumber” but which ought to be insisted on nonetheless since, however insignificant these scraps might be in their own right, they might help to “authenticate facts” and so would need to be preserved (130). Nothing ought to be overlooked or rejected. “But were they even altogether useless, it would still be right to make no exceptions, because a door might be thus opened to abuses, the nature and extent of which no one can at present divine. No exceptions, therefore, should be made to any class of papers” (130–31).6 What mattered was the certainty that all writing be included. Where possible, two copies of each text would need to be sent “by separate conveyance, to prevent its being wholly lost in case of accident” (128). Laws would need to be passed disciplining those printers who failed to deliver copies of the texts they produced, or the guardians of the collection, should they neglect to enter texts into the “register” upon their arrival (127). Nothing could be left to chance or to mere good intentions. And having included so much, this collection would need to be perfectly organized. “These papers, as they arrive at the proper office, shall be regularly arranged into volumes; the detached papers to be bound up with others of a similar kind, and of the same size and form. All the volumes of the same size &c. to be arranged in regular order, on shelfs of a proper form, each class to be regularly numbered from the beginning, in chronological order.” These texts would “be regularly entered into a catalogue duly arranged, (the particulars of which need not be here specified), which catalogue should be published at regular periods” (128). The collection would need to be put “under the care of some reputable person duly qualified, with a reasonable number of assistants, who shall receive suitable salaries for their trouble” (128). In doing so, the proposal (like the Paterson obituary and the Critical reviews) sought to assemble nothing less than an archive of enlightenment, a perfect record of “the progress of the human mind” where “the philosopher” could study any period’s “attainments in science, in arts, commerce, manufactures, manners,” and by comparing different ages “trace the various changes in opinion, fashion, knowledge” (130–31). It would be an archive without limits: a seamless reservoir of written traces

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including even the most “trifling papers,” equivalent (through the force of its totality) but at the same time necessarily exterior to the web of lived experiences to which it would bear a factual or faithful record. It would even, in this age of encyclopaedias, become one more glorious element of the story of “the progress of the human mind” whose history this archive of traces was intended to enshrine. To be genuinely useful, this archive would need to be as public as its contents were universal, available to all, or at least to “every person in a decent dress, and unsuspicious appearance, (otherwise bringing a written recommendation, from some known person of a reputable character).” It would need “to be kept properly heated, having also benches, and convenient reading desks, where such persons may consult the catalogues; and, on calling for any volume in that catalogue, shall have it brought to him, and shall be permitted, in the presence of the librarians, to read on it, if he shall so incline, or to make extracts from it, while the doors continue open” (128). The problem was that the proposal’s unspoken equation between knowledge and writing simultaneously facilitated and jeopardized its goal of endless (or virtually endless) public access. “Perhaps it might be found necessary to lay some greater restrictions on reading than is mentioned here,” it allowed, “to prevent books from being too much used. – Perhaps no books should be lent for reading to any person, but in consequence of an order from some particular person, which should never, however, be refused, on a proper application, with reasons assigned for the demand” (129). The materiality of these written traces, which existed in a kind of slow time, guaranteed both their permanence and their mutability; to be too useful, or at least too frequently used, would be to run the risk of destroying their own viability. The two fields of expertise which structured Paterson’s own contribution to bibliography converged in his fascination with “the art and the taste of constructing libraries” as a powerful metaphor and possible model for the perfect organization of knowledge, and, therefore, as the respectable inverse of the “immense and curious library” cobbled together by a vain and unknowing bibliomaniac (Monthly Magazine 1803: 15: 44). But the irony that haunted these ambitions was that their magnitude made them vulnerable to the same charges of excess and delusion that were associated with those other more obviously flawed forms of bibliomania whose errors they were intended to negate. If the Bee correspondent’s dream of collecting “detached papers of any kind” echoed Paterson’s diatribe against the modern antiquary’s obsession with “letters and papers and anecdotes,” Paterson recognized that his own goal of devising

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a single “system of universal bibliography and literary history” reflecting the inherent unity of “the intellectual pursuits of several nations … would be utterly impossible for any man to execute – impossible, even if the writer should possess all the mental powers in the highest degree of perfection. The learning of Selden, and the genius of Bacon, combined together, would prove unequal to the task” (15: 44). The Monthly may have applauded Paterson’s unwavering determination to pursue this vision, even in the face of its impossibility, but for others this commitment to what could never be achieved marked the point where bibliography, the very science that was intended to set itself against so much wastefulness, collapsed into a folly of its own, a “rational madness” as the title of John Major’s satirical poem on the bibliomania put it. D’Israeli was prepared to tolerate these scientific aspirations as an “innocent indulgence,” but, he warned, when carried on to the obsessive extremes to which its practitioners were inclined, “they render a man ridiculous” (Miscellanies 1796: 138).7 These tensions would intensify in the passing decades. Acknowledging the dangers of the increasing numbers of books, which “must strike the heart of the student that enters [modern libraries] with despair, should he aim at attaining universal knowledge through the medium of books,” the Retrospective Review noted the emergence of a new “science” devoted to a “knowledge of [books’] external qualities, and the adventitious circumstances attending their formation or history … professors devote their lives to it, with an enthusiasm not unworthy of a higher calling – they have earned the name of bibliomaniacs” (1820: 1: vii–viii). Bibliographers’ determination to subject the rage for books to the disciplinary rigour of a science folded back into the irrationality which it figured itself against, both in its tendency to fetishize the specific qualities of particular texts and, at the other extreme, in its presumption to regulate the whole of the tree of knowledge. It collapsed into a calling for “bibliomaniacs,” a “rational madness” which anticipates more recent accounts of archive fever, whether as an instance of the “repetition compulsion” which in Freud is “indissociable from the death drive,” a force which inspires a desire for the archive but whose “silent vocation” is to “always have been archive-destroying” (Derrida 10–12), or as the physiological consequence of old books’ disintegrating leather as a source of anthrax meningitis, a condition much like “the brain fever described nearly two centuries ago, as attendant on the sedentary, airless and fevered scholarly life, spent in close proximity to leather bound books and documents” (Steedman 26–28).

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Both of these approaches – archive fever as the death drive or anthrax – find their precursor in these earlier accounts of bibliomania as a proliferation of feverish and infectious maladies which haunted people’s relation to books, whether as purchasers (the fever of the bookstore), collectors, or bibliographers, and which circulated as so many forms of wastefulness: the empty pose of the pretentious collector, the random acquisitiveness of the modern antiquary, or the scientific hubris of the bibliographer. To the extent that the library was to be conceptualized in terms of a dream of a totalizing intellectual order based on a correct appreciation of books’ real worth, it had become the site, not of “coolers … that damp the fire of rage,” but of a kind of madness, or of several forms of madness, as a central condition of its very existence. The

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Concerns about the vogue for collecting “enormous heaps of books” (D’Israeli, Curiosities 1791: 1: 19) and “confusions of papers void of wit or taste” (Paterson 1772: 1: 19–20) or about the grandiose delusions of bibliographers were intensified by critics’ endless diagnoses of what the Trifler (a periodical which appeared over several months in the Gentleman’s Magazine) called the “epidemical madness for letters” which had gripped the nation (1786 55: 758). In the first number of the Idler, Samuel Johnson pondered the consequences of “the rage of writing [which] has seized the old and the young” (1758: 2: 393). Knox worried in almost identical terms about the impact of “an age like the present, when all orders are, in some degree, addicted to letters” (Essays 1778: 3: 109). “The rage of publication” had seduced many would-be authors into making a spectacle of themselves, the Critical Review warned (1761: 12: 358). The Speculator (another periodical which appeared regularly in the Gentleman’s) contained a purported letter from a young gentleman suffering from his uncle’s literary delusions: – My uncle’s house is now become intolerable. – The success his “Travels through –” met with from the kindness of his friends, has almost turned his head. – His whole time is taken up in writing, reading his own works, and pulling to pieces those of others. – The evenings he used to enjoy over his bottle, are now spent in versifying, satirizing, and commentating: in short, the whole man is altered. – At breakfast, before I am suffered to eat a piece of toast, or drink a dish of tea, I must get myself an appetite, by laughing at the follies of mankind, which he has severely exposed in a satire. Every line contains a stroke, as he terms it, which no one but himself can perceive. (1781: 51: 20)

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The Speculator responded to the letter with a blend of commiseration and alarm: “this young gentleman’s situation is truly pitiable. The cacoethes scribendi is certainly one of the most troublesome diseases of the mind; and when it thus totally possesses a man, I scarce know any madness equal to it” (51: 20). The cacoethes scribendi, which as An Impartial and Candid Disquisition into the Case of Sporus, by A Lover of Truth and Impartiality (1755) explained, “is a hard Word for a Disease called in plain English, the Itch of Writing,” was a staple of literary satire (24). Nor was this “itch” confined to writing. Reflecting on the endless compilations that had flooded the market, London Unmask’ d (1784) extended this diagnosis to include “the prevalence of the Cacoethes edendi, on the one hand, and the Cacoethes scribendi on the other; fresh adventures start up every day, and the press teems with a more redundant and complicated farrago of productions than ever” (ii). A letter in the World complained of “a malady, which at present is not only epidemical, but of the foulest and most inveterate kind … the c ac oe t h e s c a r pe n di,” or the itch of “Criticism” (1753: 1: 199). Like the vogue for collecting, there was nothing new about this “rage of writing” (or its various offshoots). It was actually Addison in Spectator No. 582 (though unacknowledged by the Lover of Truth and Impartiality) who first glossed the cacoethes scribendi as “a hard Word for a Disease called in plain English, the Itch of Writing” (4: 93). “The British Nation is very much afflicted with this Malady” which was “as Epidemical as the Small-Pox,” the Spectator explained, but unlike the latter, which offered some hope of a cure, the cacoethes, “when it is once got into the Blood, seldom comes out of it … If you have a Patient of this kind under your Care, you may assure your self there is no other way of recovering him effectually, but by forbidding him the use of Pen, Ink, and Paper” (1714: 4: 93–94). In his Curiosities of Literature, D’Israeli cited a “little Tract, printed in 1681, [which] informs us of various voluminous writers; of some, so infected with the cacoethes scribendi, that they have composed from six to seven thousand volumes!” (1791: 1: 233). Nor could all of this be blamed on the impact of the printing press. As many of these authors (including Addison) also noted, the term first appeared in Juvenal’s seventh Satire which pilloried the cultural depravity of Roman intellectuals. But, critics repeatedly warned, this “epidemical madness” now raged with an unprecedented intensity. In its review of A Letter from Betty to Sally, with the Answer (1781), the Critical Review warned that “the cacoethes scribendi is as epidemical a disease as any other kind of itch can possibly be; and never was, perhaps, more rife than in the present age; when every

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scribbler, however ignorant, illiterate, and totally incapable, takes up the pen, and boldly ventures into the press, without dread or shame” (1781: 51: 76). Accounts of the cacoethes scribendi were, on one level, pathologized reflections of what virtually every observer denounced as a state of sheer excess. “Solomon has said, that of making many books there is no end; but … what would Solomon say now were he to visit our libraries?” asked the authors of Sylva: or, the Wood (1786). “Look into all the departments of authorship, and you will find them crowded; into all our collections of books, and you will find them overloaded. And, where is the matter of wonder? it having long been the fashion to write down all we think, and to print and publish all we write” (v). Nor did this apply solely to “the fungous production[s] of the modern scribbler” – those lamentable efforts which might be found in any circulating library (Knox, Essays 1778: 1: 364). “The art of printing has multiplied books to such a degree, that it is a vain attempt either to collect or to read all that is excellent, much more all that has been published” (Knox, Winter 1785: 2: 224). Evoking a kind of bibliographic sublime, D’Israeli admitted that [w]hen I reflect that every literary journal consists of 50 or 60 publications, and that of these, 5 or 6 at least are capital performances, and the greater part not contemptible, when I take the pen and attempt to calculate, by these given sums, the number of volumes which the next century must infallibly produce, my feeble faculties wander in a perplexed series, and as I lose myself among billions, trillions, and quartillions, I am obliged to lay down my pen, and stop at infinity. (Essay 1795: xviii–xix)

The two main culprits, critics tended to agree, were “that common herd of Novels (the wretched offspring of circulating libraries)” and the growing stream of compilations – a “lounging species” which “seems to be the favourite reading of the age” (Lounger 1785: 80; Monthly Review 1796: 19: 108). But however ritualistic these denunciations may have been, the Sylva was saying nothing out of the ordinary in insisting that the problem applied to “all the departments of authorship” (1786: v). Spiralling levels of textual inflation – “the fogs of literature” which arose “incessantly from the press” – were doubled by a corresponding proliferation in the number of overextended genres (European 1788: 14: 348). “If the publication of sermons could reform the world, how virtuous a kingdom were Old England?” the European reflected in its review of John Dupre’s Sermons on various Subjects (1782: 1: 201). “Myriads of sermons … almost darken the atmosphere of literature with their numbers,” it repeated a month later (1: 290). “There have been of late years, a greater number of

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books published on the subject of medicine than upon all other arts and sciences,” the Critical Review announced. “The medical library is now swelled into such an enormous mass, as might be sufficient to deter any person of moderate parts and application, from the study of the healing art” (1758: 5: 368–69). “Trips, and Tours, and Excursions, and Sentimental Journeys, are become so much the ton, that every rambler, who can write (tolerably or intolerably), assumes the pen, and gives the Public a journal of the occurrences and remarks to which his pregrinations have given birth,” the Monthly allowed (1779: 60: 191). The 1786 Monthly noted with some relief that “the rage for books” on “the study of agriculture is less in vogue at present than it was some time ago … a fact that we Reviewers have reason to acknowledge with pleasure” (1786: 75: 129). The following year the Monthly noted that “books of education in our own language have lately encreased in an extraordinary degree” (1787: 77: 81). Poetry was as vulnerable to the charge as any other genre. “The press has, from year to year, time out of mind, groaned beneath such loads of poetical trash, that the very name of verse is become loathsome to the generality of readers,” the Critical acknowledged (1761: 11: 301). Nor was the problem even limited to new productions or compilations. “The rage of translating foreign books, when they are first published, has been so violent for some years,” the Critical suggested, “that we wonder the High Dutch translation of Clarissa has never been retranslated into English” (1758: 5: 386). Accounts of critics as arbitrary despots were balanced by more pitiable self-portraits of reviewers as beleaguered travellers, “faint with toil and parched with thirst,” forced to wander “over dreary heaths, and disagreeable bogs of dulness and impertinence” (Critical 1759: 7: 378), along the “bad roads” and “barren and inhospitable countries” of “modern literature” (Critical 1756: 2: 490). “‘Oh! (says the patient Job, who, by the way, seems to have been admirably qualified for the office of a Reviewer) that my enemy had written a book!’” (Monthly 1780: 62: 321). The

h e l luo l i br oru m

Part of the problem, of course, was that this epidemic of writers infected with the cacoethes scribendi seemed to many critics to find its reflection in a corresponding set of equally undiscerning readers, the most stereotypically flawed of whom were the lady readers who flocked to the circulating libraries in search of new romantic novels. The Sylva reprinted William Bowyer’s warning that “the world has got such an appetite for reading … that it swallows every thing which is offered to it. Careless readers have

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made careless writers; and, amidst a multiplicity of books, I every day see barbarity creeping in” (1785: Bowyer 281, qtd. Sylva 1786: 13). A periodical essay in Knox’s Winter Evenings which was styled as a letter written from inside a circulating library by a correspondent “more conversant in a college library than in a circulating one,” but “forbidden by my physician to read any thing but what is called summer reading,” expressed astonishment “at the number of volumes which the students would devour” (1785: 1: 129–30). “The Helluo Librorum, or Glutton of Books, was a character well known at the university, and mentioned by the ancients; but I believe their idea of him is far exceeded by many a fair subscriber at the circulating library” (1: 131). Most of these complaints were standard elements of the age’s derisive sense of Grub Street and circulating libraries as shorthand for the evils of modern literature, but they were shadowed by another set of concerns whose disruptive power lay in an uncanny resemblance which unsettled their more obvious social and cultural differences. Knox’s juxtaposition of the college and circulating libraries implicitly worked to contain anxieties about the abuse of modern literature by constructing the latter as the debased but inevitable Other of more studious literary pursuits which remained so blissfully untouched by the corrupting influence of these devourers of novels that his correspondent “could not … but be astonished” (1: 131). But like La Roche’s inability to maintain the distinction between the bookstore and Bedlam as opposed worlds of enlightenment and madness, Knox’s intimation that the Helluo Librorum or Glutton of Books, who was such a familiar figure in college, and his fair counterpart in the circulating library were related figures of excess, who differed primarily in degree, unsettled the opposition which his “letter” seemed to imply. The gendered terms of this dichotomy – the pedant of the college library who converted a misguided rigour into masculine display and the waywardness of these “fair subscribers” who were more interested in novelty than in inherent worth – collapsed into each other in their mutual negation of any recognition of the real value of books. In an essay entitled “The Ill Effects of Reading without Digesting,” Knox repeated his argument that “the Helluo Librorum, the great reader or devourer of books, who is more studious of quantity than quality, and is led on by the love of novelty rather than of excellence, is rarely learned in an eminent degree” (Essays 1778: 1: 165). But in this case the object of Knox’s criticism was not “a fair subscriber at the circulating library” but readers such as “Velox,” whose studious college habits were nothing more than “the concomitant of dulness” (1: 167), the sort of reader who, when

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he turned author, became a manufacturer of works so obtuse that “readers … are obliged to toil with a pick-axe through tonnes of dulness, with as much darkness around them, and labour in their progress, as if they were at work in the lead-mines” (Winter 1785: 2: 278). To be too intellectually self-serious was to be as profligate as the most mindless reader for whom books were nothing more than a fashionable distraction. Both indulged in a kind of wastefulness rooted in their failure to appreciate books’ role in promoting an intellectual commerce throughout an extensive audience. In his Miscellanies; Or Literary Recreations, D’Israeli offered a strikingly similar attack on the misguided instincts of “Men of Erudition,” that “numerous class of students [who] devote their days to researches in almost every species of knowledge … without any profundity or observation, or impulse of genius” (1796: 129). The genuine work ethic of these Erudits was not to be confused with the ostentatious but empty love of display that characterized those bibliomaniacs who were fond of books merely as means of fostering their pose as men of vast erudition, but because their work ethic privileged drudgery over genuine reflection, their misguided attachment to books as an end in themselves was ultimately comparable. “These Erudits are characterised by an enormous passion for collecting books. They were once called Helluones Librorum. But this book gluttony is without digestion or taste” (142–43). Like Knox’s account of Velox, D’Israeli’s description of the spirit of “Erudition” as “a gross lust of the mind [which] seises on every thing indiscriminately, yet produces nothing” echoed the most clichéd denunciations of modern novel readers (145). The Reflector’s description of what “the learned call … a C ac oe t h e s S c r i be n di” as “a crowd of ideas (like so many insects) crawling and buzzing in their brains” might seem, at first glance, to suggest the distracted world of fashionable novel readers, but it too insisted that “this disorder rages,” not among “the lower ranks of people” who might be exposed to “a confused magazine of plays, novels, histories, and I know not what,” but “in great cities and universities … where it is caught by poring over infectious old books” (1788: 1–2). This critique of pedantry and its association with the cloistered world of the college as the great threat to the health of modern literature was almost as insistent a stance as attacks on the circulating library. Whatever his reservations elsewhere about “the frivolous pursuits and pernicious dissipations of the present age,” Oliver Goldsmith’s Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759) offered one of the age’s most sustained examples of this attack on pedantry as the leading reason

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for “the decay of genius” in modern literature (1: 396). In his chapter “Of the Present State of Polite Learning in Italy,” Goldsmith juxtaposed the lively intelligence of earlier poets such as Dante, “who attempted to bring learning from the cloister into the community, and paint human nature in a language adopted to modern manners,” with the sterile insularity of the Filosofi who now dominated the literary community. “Bred up all their lives in colleges, they have there learned to think in track, servilely to follow the leader of their sect, and only to adopt such opinions as their universities, or the inquisition, are pleased to allow” (1: 413). If the memory of Dante made the current state of Italian literature all the more dispiriting, the learned in Germany were worse still: “guilty of a fault, too common to great readers, they write through volumes, while they do not think through a page. Never fatigued themselves, they think the reader can never be weary; so they drone on, saying all that can be said on the subject, not selecting what may be advanced to the purpose” (1: 414). None of this, Goldsmith explained, should be particularly surprising. Having turned their backs on the wider social milieu which might have afforded them valuable lessons in “common sense … [m]en bred up among books, and seeing nature only by reflection, could do little except hunt after perplexity and confusion” (4: 403). “Shut up in Colleges and Cells” away from the important influence of “Conversation and common Life,” Hume agreed, “every Thing of what we call Belles Lettres became totally barbarous, being cultivated by Men without any Taste of Life or Manners” (1742: 534). These concerns about misguided attitudes to books found their complement in complaints about books’ physical excesses. For those who conceived of the ills of modern literature in terms of the age’s misguided love of fashion and novelty, the “mechanical embellishments” and excessive margins of so many modern novels epitomized all that was most worrying (Gentleman’s 1794: 64: 47). But for critics whose main preoccupation was with the intellectual sterility of scholars who lived too thoroughly removed from the scenes of everyday life, and whose works lacked the vitality which that exposure might have gained them, the greatest culprit was what Johnson had derided in the Idler as “useless folios … which will never be read, and which contribute nothing to valuable knowledge” (1761: 2: 677). Having invoked Johnson’s warning that “a big book is a scare-crow to the head and pocket of the author, student, buyer, and seller, as well as a harbour of ignorance” in his own defence of “little books,” D’Israeli praised the achievements of the Spectator, which “introduced literature and morals in the nation; the young, the gay, and the fair, who

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flew from the terrific form of a folio, were attracted by the light graces of a fugitive page” (Curiosities 1793: 2: 63; Essay 1795: 167). For Goldsmith, the image of a folio as a testimony to wasted energy was a kind of running joke. “To be dull and dronish is an encroachment on the prerogative of a folio,” he complained about Britain’s many “Monthly Reviews and Magazines” (Enquiry 1759: 1: 451). Having mocked the pedantry of German scholars, he concluded: “Were angels to write books they never would write folios” (1: 414). A humorous “letter” in the Lounger from an aspiring antiquarian obsessed with “the genealogies, histories, and characters of the several branches of [his] flourishing family,” “an antient race of Loungers,” culminated with the parodic spectacle of his intention to publish a Biographia Loungeriana Scotica, or The Lives of the most eminent Loungers of Scotland, from the reign of Fergus I to the present Times in “two ponderous volumes in folio” (1785: 41). M e n of ta s t e For many critics, the crucial mediating figures in resolving the problems with these different kinds of excess – pedantry, fashion, and the bibliomania in its various guises – were men of taste, “who, without aspiring to the dangerous glory of being Artists, have devoted themselves to a liberal and comprehensive affection for Art” (D’Israeli, Miscellanies 1796: 24). To be motivated by an “affection for Art” without aspiring to have any role in its actual production made it possible to cultivate a position which, as Goldsmith put it, “stands neutral” in “the mutual contempt between the scholar and the man of the world” (1759: 1: 435). In doing so, the man of taste fostered “a middle station, between the world and the cell, between learning and common sense. He teaches the vulgar on what part of a character to lay the emphasis of praise, and the scholar where to point his application so as to deserve it” (1: 435). In his account of his own efforts as an essay writer, Hume figured himself in similar terms as “a Kind of Resident or Ambassador from the Dominions of Learning to those of Conversation” whose task it was “to promote a good Correspondence betwixt these two States, which have so great a Dependence on each other” (1742: 535). Not only did taste provide a crucial “middle station” between the Learned and the Conversible – the worlds of the college and the circulating libraries – but the widely assumed availability of a distinction between “correct” and “false taste” promised all that fashion seemed to lack: “a proper standard, when others fail, to judge a nation’s improvement, or

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degeneracy, in morals” (Goldsmith, Enquiry 1759: 1: 466). In his essay “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757), Hume insisted that “amidst all the variety and caprice of taste, there are certain general principles of approbation or blame, whose influence a careful eye may trace in all operations of the mind” (233). “Among a thousand different opinions which different men may ascertain of the same subject, there is one, and but one, that is just and true” (230). We may “on a superficial view … seem to differ very widely from each other in our reasonings, and no less in our pleasures,” Edmund Burke agreed in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), which appeared the same year, but “it is probable that the standard both of reason and taste is the same in all human creatures” (1: 79). Proper taste was not only reassuringly universal but contained within itself a crucial persuasive force. Even “the bad critic,” when adequately confronted with general principles of good taste, “must conclude, upon the whole, that the fault lies in himself, and that he wants the delicacy, which is requisite to make him sensible of every beauty and every blemish, in any composition or discourse” (Hume 236). The problem for those who advocated the mediating influence of “the man of taste” as a means of fostering “a middle station, between learning and common sense,” or who took refuge in the firm ground of a “standard of taste” as a basis for judgement, was that the precise nature of what actually constituted proper taste was notoriously difficult to settle. “Taste! – And what, it may be again asked, is this ignis fatuus called Taste?” asked the European Magazine. “Volumes, heaven knows! have been written ‘about it, and about it;’ yet, incapable, it would seem, of being reduced to a criterion, taste, we find, remains still as much the child of caprice in literature and the arts, as fashion is in dress” (1785: 8: 417). In its very capriciousness, the European’s account suggested, taste circulated as fashion’s twin, dressed up to fit the pretensions of the literary world. “Taste is at present the darling idol of the polite world, and the world of letters; and, indeed, seems to be considered as the quintessence of almost all the arts and sciences,” the Connoisseur acknowledged. “Yet in this amazing superabundancy of Taste, few can say what it really is, or what the word itself signifies” (1756: 4: 121). “It is surely an unsubstantial form,” D’Israeli agreed, “a shadow, which may be seen, but not grasped” (Curiosities 1791: 1: 38). Paradoxically, it was precisely the extensive influence of this “important monosyllable” throughout “the whole circle of the polite arts” which made the concept of taste so resistant to clear definition (Connoisseur 1756:

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4: 66). The World lamented the fate of “the poor monosyllable Ta s t e” as a prime example of people’s habit of “almost continually using words to which we have no idea at all” (1753: 1: 67). Having set himself the task of proving that “this delicate and aerial faculty, which seems too volatile to endure even the chains of a definition,” was indeed “regulated” by a perceptible “standard,” Burke was forced to acknowledge the extent to which “the pleasures of the taste” had been “complicated, and confused, and altered by unnatural habits and associations” (1: 79, 85). “This does not in the least perplex our reasoning,” he insisted, “because we distinguish to the last the acquired from the natural relish,” though his essay found even these “natural” inclinations difficult to establish except in the most minimal ways (1: 86). Whatever their preferences, Burke explained, no sane person would claim that “tobacco has a taste like sugar” or “that he cannot distinguish between milk and vinegar … We do not call a man of this kind wrong in his notions, but absolutely mad” (1: 84). Nor was it merely a problem of the obscurity of these forms of correct taste among so many “unnatural habits and associations.” Not only was talk of standards wildly out of step with “the variety of dissonant and jarring opinions” which predominated (Critical 1760: 10: 162), but it was equally clear that correct taste, even if it could be defined, lacked the persuasive force that critics such as Hume and Burke had hoped. “Fashion, not taste, rules everything,” the Lounger insisted (304). “Every thing in this world is fashion,” D’Israeli agreed (Literary 162). And as critics endlessly pointed out, few things were more fashionable than books. Reading or writing them, collecting or studying them or just browsing in bookstores, accounts of “the epidemical madness for letters” had less to do with the ideal of good taste, however difficult it may have been to define, than with Arnold’s description of mania as a “ph r e ns y, or f u r y … the delirium of a violent fever.” As for Sophie von La Roche, her own brush with fever inside the bookstore found a curious focus in the intriguing spectacle of a “neat arrangement for collecting all the English poets, charmingly bound and printed, into a case shaped like a large book,” the full possession of which required “perfect eyesight, plenty of time and guineas,” and which she was (apparently for these reasons) unable to purchase (171). If critics worried about the threat that commerce posed to the coherence of the literary field, La Roche’s fascination with this “case shaped like a large book” containing a “neat arrangement” of “all the English poets” suggests one solution which emerged out of the book trade itself: the beginnings of a process of canonization associated with works such as Johnson’s Lives of the Poets

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(commissioned for a ten-volume Works of the English Poets published by a consortium of thirty-six booksellers) structured in the now familiar terms of nation and genre. If it was impossible to acquaint one’s self, however passingly, with the whole of literature, one could nonetheless refer to “all the English poets” (my emphasis), a phrase which suggested a “neat arrangement” or perfect fit between individual texts and the generic category (and the furniture) which contained them.8 This process of consecration was still in an emergent state; it was the sense of profusion rather than the achievement of canonization which preoccupied most critics. As Adrian Johns reminds us, “the print culture of the eighteenth century” was widely “perceived by contemporaries, not as a realization of the rationalizing effects now so often ascribed to the press, but as destabilizing and threatening to civility” (Nature 28), a disruptive force whose alignment with a progressivist historical narrative “had to be made”: to be forged “by virtue of hard work, exercised over generations and across nations” (2). The emergent ideal of a national literary tradition was one of the ways that people involved in print culture found to naturalize the frequently disruptive and often uncivil influence of the press. But there were other, more imaginative responses than a recourse to the disciplinary promise of either taste as a standard of judgement or canonicity as a prescriptive framework. And appropriately, given commentators’ sense of the Janus-faced influence of commerce – simultaneously a catalyst for and a threat to the pursuit of knowledge – many of the texts which dwelt most obsessively on the excesses and abuses of modern writing also embodied the most imaginative responses in their accounts of a miscellaneous literature whose “unconnected” form was uniquely attuned to the contingencies of a transactional world.

Ch apter 4

Foolish knowledge: the little world of microcosmopolitan literature

That the Idler has some scheme, cannot be doubted, for to form schemes is the Idler’s privilege. Samuel Johnson, The Idler

Di f f us i ng k now l e d g e fa r a n d w i de Whether modern literature suffered from authors’ retreat from the healthy influence of daily life or from their immersion in “the gew-gaws of fashion,” whether authors wrote too many books or books that were too long and dense, or whether the consumers of texts (buyers and borrowers, collectors and readers) erred in their ostentation or their pedantry or simply in their addiction to novelty, accounts of the dynamics which structured the modern literary field gained their coherence from a series of pseudomedical and often comic diagnoses which turned on the sorts of distorted judgements that many observers attributed, in one way or another, to the distractions and pressures of “the hurry of life” in a modern commercial world (European 1783: 3: 90; Smith, Lectures 1763: 112). From the bibliomaniac’s “immense and curious library” to the “modern antiquary” with his “cabinet of never-to-be-described oddities” to the impossible science of bibliography to the cacoethes scribendi to the Helluo Librorum or “great devourer of books,” whether in the college or the circulating library, the compulsion to pathologize book collection, authorship and reading had itself become endemic – a kind of “itch” whose compulsive reiteration suggested an ironic echo of the very afflictions these critics set themselves against (D’Israeli, Curiosities 1791: 1: 19, Paterson 1772: 1: 17, Knox, Essays 1778: 1: 165). The challenge in pursuing these issues is not so much to square the tendency of critics such as Elizabeth Eisenstein to accept the stability of print culture with so much apparent anxiety, but rather to ask how these different scenarios might have been part of the same historical 102

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process. How did this rhetoric of disease help to reconcile ideas about literature with “the hurly-burly of the book-trade” and, more broadly still, with “the commercial fray” in ways that critics actually found notably unthreatening? (Eisenstein, “Unacknowledged” 100; Johns, Nature 258) However distinct they may have seemed to be from one another, the four groups who were the main targets of these complaints – pedants who buried themselves in the college library, scribblers who made up in quantity for what they lacked in quality, bibliomaniacs who bought what they needed to satisfy their love of display, and the dissipated patrons of the circulating library – were united by their apparent ignorance of the genuine value of literature. Which is also to say that these denunciations of erroneous ideas functioned as implicit strategies for producing an account of literature’s true nature and worth that was easier to articulate as a series of double negatives than in any more direct manner. Ironically, these critiques of the deformations of print culture were an important element of what Adrian Johns has described as a particular type of cultural “labour” aimed at investing print with “the air of intrinsic reliability on which its cultural and commercial success could be built” (Nature 3). If, as Johns emphasizes, a crucial part of this labour involved “defacing its own traces” – hiding the effort that went into making something seem both spontaneous and inevitable – this has made the challenge of recovering these historical processes all the more difficult. For Johns, piracy formed both a major threat and a crucial context within which this task of establishing the central (and supposedly inherent) characteristics of print could be established (34). My focus here is on a different type of violation – the various pseudo-medical diagnoses of cultural pathologies – though, like Johns, my interest is in the paradoxical way that these accounts of problems helped to naturalize a set of ideas about what print culture ought to be, or “how print culture might emerge from print” (19). In other words, it is worth emphasizing the importance of treating these narratives about the ills of modern writing as narratives, as heavily troped and highly conventionalized versions of the stories that we continue to tell ourselves about books and our modernity. The assumptions which naturalized print’s role within a modern commercial nation “had to be made … by virtue of hard work, over generations and across nations,” but always in ways that ensured the invisibility of these efforts as the guarantee of their success (Johns, Nature 2). Dwelling obsessively on so many forms of unnatural and unhealthy literary production and consumption offered a powerful means of naturalizing new cultural formations in ways that, because they worked more by insinuation than definition, obscured

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their status as interventions doing the “hard work” of reshaping the literary field. Nor were these double negatives the only approach embraced by critics in the period. Critics responded with a number of strategies that ranged between two extremes, each of which was rooted in a fetishistic investment in “the book” as a powerful metaphor for the production of particular forms of knowledge. If the great synthesizing ambitions of the age, from multi-volume collections to the endless encyclopaedic projects to the age’s interest in literary history, gained their appeal through the link they promised between print and the consolidation of knowledge, descriptions of miscellaneous writing positioned themselves as a literary form that trained readers by incorporating a sense of the discontinuities of modern knowledge into their very structure. The force of these contradictory appeals – the revelatory power of systems and fragments – structured the age’s debates about the centrality of books to emergent understandings of modernity. Published separately but intended to be bound as an entire collection in the case of more short-lived weekly or semi-weekly periodicals, or twice a year (or thrice annually as they expanded in size) in the case of the longer and more enduring monthlies, periodicals synthesized these opposed impulses towards dissemination and consolidation. As separate texts, their form was perfectly adapted to the urban milieu of the coffeehouse culture their writings so often evoked; as bound and sequentially numbered volumes, they were designed for the shelf of the well-organized library, in part because they embodied the structure of the library in their very form. They provided a running commentary on their own age, within which they were both a participant and a (supposedly) distanced observer, and a convenient archive of literary history. In their quasijudicial role as “sovereigns of reason,” the monthlies sought to establish a correct standard of taste by censuring the fraudulent efforts of what Thomas Macdonald denounced as the “increasing multitude of literary mercenaries” (Analytical 1788: 1: iv; Macdonald 1795: 10).1 And if the bibliographic dream of a universal literary history had begun to seem impossible, this idea could be recuperated in a serialized form in periodicals’ capacity as “h i s t or i a ns of the Republic of Letters,” providing what the Retrospective Review called “a bird’s-eye view of the rise and progress of our literature” as it unfolded (1820: 1: xii). The literary magazines went further by figuring themselves as not merely the guardians or the historians but as the most perfect embodiment of literature as a public sphere, the venue best suited to the task of facilitating critical discussion between an unlimited number of participants. The

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Preface of the 1777 Gentleman’s proclaimed its importance as a mediating presence enabling the exchange of ideas between its “numerous and very learned Correspondents” in overtly commercial terms whose theatricality reflected a shrewd awareness of the wider social pressures that placed such a premium on this communicative role: For nearly half a century, the G e n t l e m a n ’s M ag a z i n e has been the general repertory, to which, as to a literary bank, the learned and ingenious of all nations have occasionally contributed; and from which in return they have received again their contributions, accompanied with such accumulated stores as enhanced the value of the common stock, and made the gain reciprocal.

“We may,” it continued, “we think, without boasting, be permitted to say, that an impartial and inquisitive reader can no where collect a clearer state of the learning, the policy, the manners, the temper and principles of the times, than from the volumes of this periodical work” (47: n.p.). Periodicals were not merely an important record but also a vital site of intellectual exchange, a virtual space that was defined, even more purely than the coffee houses whose conversational ethos they emulated, by this discursive function. “We shall in general find that the progress of nations in knowledge, but more especially their advancement in literary politeness of manner, will keep pace with the number of periodical publications allowed to circulate, and the freedom of discussion that is tolerated in such publications, when under proper restrictions,” a letter to the Edinburgh periodical, The Bee, insisted (1791: 1: 171). The monthlies were quick to claim a central role in the formation of this ever-widening learned community with all of its attendant benefits. The Preface to the 1788 European Magazine announced that the utility of periodical publications, their general power of entertainment, the knowledge which has been diffused through every part of the known world by means of them, and the improvements in arts, sciences, literature, and civilization, which may be ascribed to them, are so universally known and felt, that it would be a waste of time to attempt to prove what no one will deny, and which requires only the slightest observation to perceive.

Unfazed by “the splenetic sneers of fastidious pride,” the European went on to insist in still more elevated terms that “in the various walks of science and literature more knowledge has been conveyed to the public by this species of publication, than through any other channel whatever. Much of the improvements of the present times may, without arrogance, be claimed by the influence of Literary Journals, and the facility with which they are disseminated” (13: n.p.).

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However extravagant the European’s rhetoric may have been, these claims were familiar ones to late eighteenth-century readers. Periodicals’ extraordinary importance was, in many ways, their own most eloquent subject. A letter to the Monthly Magazine insisted that the Establishment of literary journals has certainly been an event of the greatest consequence in the republic of letters. It has been the means of diffusing knowledge far and wide, and of kindling a love of learning, where the seeds of genius would otherwise, in all likelihood, have perished in wretched torpidity. It has also been of infinite service to the interests of science, and to the useful arts of life, by examining into, and making generally known, the discoveries and improvements of ingenious men. (1798: 6: 101)

The Monthly Review made the same point more succinctly: “Among all the modes which have been devised for the purpose of diffusing knowledge among mankind, none is so effectual as that of periodical publications” (1792: 9: 230). The Analytical Review agreed that the role of “a respectable Journal” was “to diffuse knowledge, and to advance the interests of science, of virtue and morality” (1788: 1: 26). Nor was this triumphalist discourse confined to the end of the century. A correspondent to the World wrote “to congratulate the great world on that diffusion of science and literature, which for some years, has been spreading itself abroad upon the face of it,” in large part due to the influence of the “Monthly magazines, which some years since, were nothing more than collections to amuse and entertain, [but] are now become the magazines of universal knowledge” (1757: 5: 101–5). Their impact, the letter insisted, amounted to nothing less than a “revolution … in the kingdom of learning, which has introduced the levelling principle, with much better success than ever it met with in politics” (5: 101). All of these claims, by emphasizing periodicals’ capacity to “diffuse knowledge,” celebrated them in terms which privileged the age’s assumptions about the connections between the production of literature, the exchange of ideas, and a teleology of social progress. But as important as this authoritative presence may ultimately have been, periodicals’ other role as what the Lounger described as “the Historian of character and manners (in which light a periodical author, to be of any use at all, must be considered)” was in many ways more vital to contemporary assumptions about a polite modern nation (1786: 322). The tendency of commerce to hybridize the realms of private and public experience and the premium which its transactional nature placed on harmonious social relations invested the concept of “manners” (a word that was suggestive of the broad texture of everyday life) with an unprecedented moral force.2 The Edinburgh periodical The Bee insisted that if

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“periodical performances” were “the most proper means that ever yet have been contrived, for raising human nature to its highest degree of exaltation, and for conferring upon man a more conspicuous degree of dignity above all other animals, and a more extended power over the elements, and other objects of nature, than he could otherwise hope to obtain,” this unrivalled power was a direct consequence of their “apparently … humble” status, which helped to facilitate periodicals’ role in promoting the vision of refined sociability (1790: 1: 13–14). Critics’ broadly shared emphasis on the social role of literature (however differently they may have defined that role) ensured that these two tasks – as the historians of manners and of the republic of letters itself – are better viewed in terms of their complementarity rather than their distinction, but the former’s association with the ideal of polite sociability suggested certain connotations about the intricate workings of commercial modernity that are less easily foregrounded by the latter’s more straightforward emphasis on the transformative power of the diffusion of knowledge. T h e h i s t or i a n of c h a r ac t e r a n d m a n n e r s If the monthlies revelled in their panoptic survey of the whole of recent literary production, the single-essay periodicals’ conversational style and multifarious (rather than universalizing) focus defined their importance by embracing what was in many ways the opposite perspective. They comprised what the Lounger called “little records of what I have heard or read, set down without any other arrangement than what the disposition of the time might prompt,” or what Samuel Johnson, writing in the Idler, described as “diminutive history” (Lounger 1785: 4; Johnson 1758: 2: 390). This “diminutive” focus tended to straddle genre distinctions; the weeklies identified themselves as periodicals, but in their content they had more in common with a rich assembly of one-off publications that included miscellanies, lucubrations, and essay collections (some of them organized in ways that were designed to mimic the periodical format) than with the elevated focus of the monthlies. Miscellaneous essayists (periodical and one-off) reinflected the monthlies’ grandiose claims to a central role in promoting the diffusion of knowledge in ways that reflected the stylistic advantages of this “diminutive” focus on “character and manners.” Invoking Bacon’s authority, Sylva: or, the Wood. Being A Collection of Anecdotes, Dissertations, Characters, Apophthegms, Original Letters, Bon Mots, and Other Little Things announced that “knowledge, delivered in this our short and

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miscellaneous way, will strike more forcefully; yea, will make clearer as well as stronger impressions, than a tedious, formal, didactic stile and manner” (1786: viii–ix). Citing another favourite authority of miscellaneous writers, Vicesimus Knox celebrated the social importance of writers who aspired to the role of a “popular philosopher” capable of addressing the general populace, “not like a professor in the dreary schools of an antiquated university, but like Socrates, walking among the people” (Winter 1785: 1: 26–27). Knox aligned his own literary ambitions with “the busy tribe employed in useful and honourable action in the living world” as opposed to the “small number” of people who composed a nation’s “learned and philosophical” elite (Winter 2: 280–81). But if weekly periodicals’ and miscellanies’ articulation of their commitment to conveying knowledge as “forcefully” as possible highlighted the issue of the sociology of reading audiences, it also raised the more radical question of the status of knowledge itself. Their solidarity with “the living world” was reinforced by their resolutely quotidian focus; they were involved in promoting the diffusion of knowledge, but it was a particular kind of knowledge. They did not, D’Israeli argued, aspire to “the sublime sciences, which are reserved for the contemplation of a few” such as “a Newton and a Locke” but to “that happier knowledge which is of daily use, and addressed to those who most want instruction” (Essay 1795: 166–67). Revelling in the “ignoble state of a fugitive sheet and a half” in opposition to that “degree of bulk [which] is absolutely necessary for a certain degree of dignity, either in man or book,” the World disavowed the weightier “moral” topics that would require “at least a quarto” or “thick octavo” in favour of the more prosaic concerns which “alone must be the object of an humble weekly author of a sheet and a half” (1755: 4: 54–55). It may well be “incumbent on an historian, who writes the history of his own times, to take notice of public and remarkable events,” a purported letter to the World allowed, but it was “the business of a writer of essays for entertainment and instruction, to mark the passions as they rise, and to treat of those especially, which appear to influence the manners of the age he lives in” (1755: 4: 259). “We, whose business it is to write loose essays, and who never talk above a quarter of an hour together on any one subject, are not expected to enter into philosophical disquisitions, or engage in abstract speculations,” the Connoisseur agreed (1756: 4: 239). Their true subject matter, it explained, was “the petty distresses and domestic concerns of private families” (4: 244–45). Trading in “a knowledge of the world” rather than in anything more rarefied or abstract, miscellaneous writers aligned their work with “the pieces of Hogarth,”

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whose work offered “faithful delineations” of everyday life without ever stripping “vice and folly” of its “odious and contemptible” character (4: 240–41). This emphasis on a “humble” subject matter that was “of daily use” in a style which suggested their orientation towards “the living world” was doubled by a more fundamental commitment that centred on a selfreflexive interrogation of the nature of knowledge itself. Where other efforts to develop a knowledge about knowledge were animated by an encyclopaedic impulse towards systemization (the cartographic drive to map out the relations between the various intellectual pursuits), the weeklies and miscellanies insisted on the inability of the different forms of knowledge to add up into any unified whole. Rather than attempting to discover (or provide) any kind of underlying unity that would lend some degree of coherence to the age’s rapidly growing body of writing and learned research, they embraced a discursive position that reflected what Ina Ferris has described (borrowing a term from D’Israeli) as a “subterraneous” style that was bound up with their “disconnected form” (“Antiquarian” 533–35). The Microcosm suggested, true to its name, that its strategy of focusing on “a microcosm” reflected its faith in the power of the endlessly particular to resonate more profoundly than supposedly more general lines of inquiry. To be interested in a microcosm was to be oriented towards “a world in miniature, where all the passions which agitate the great original, are faithfully pourtrayed on a smaller scale; in which the endless variety of character, the different lights and shades, which the appetites, or peculiar situations throw us into, begin to discriminate, and expand themselves” (1786: 1: 7–8). Only so narrow a concentration of focus could enable this subsequent amplification of ideas. “I am very much afraid that I may have run into the error … of becoming too local,” it apologized elsewhere before insisting on the ultimately vital nature of this strategy (1: 153). Preoccupied with the resonant power of local truths rather than with broad surveys or theoretical abstractions, miscellaneous writers gravitated towards a style which privileged anecdotes as “registers of the singularity of the contingent” (Greenblatt 3). But this singularity was never the whole story. Ironically, it was precisely the sense of contingency they conveyed which made these anecdotes somehow “representative” of “a larger progress or pattern” (Greenblatt 3). They functioned as microcosms of a larger order which could only ever be delineated metonymically through fragments rather than through any more encompassing structural analysis. As April London suggests in her discussion of D’Israeli’s stylistic

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commitments, “the anecdote makes the intimate, telling detail revelatory of connections between domestic and public spheres” (373). William Cowper’s celebration of rural solitude may, as Julie Ellison suggests, have been widely loved as one means of containing the epistemological discontinuities that characterized modernity – “the cacophony of unmediated London voices all talking at once” – but periodical and miscellaneous writers offered a different strategy by rejecting Cowper’s “safe distance” in favour of absolute proximity (228). If their anecdotal style left them vulnerable to the charge of contributing to the age’s cultural decline by satisfying readers with a stream of brief and highly conversational essays which spared them the task of sustained engagement with serious texts, then as Ina Ferris has argued, they countered this objection by insisting that their “disconnected form” fostered an active process of critical engagement by “offering the reader gaps and spaces to be filled,” and in doing so nurtured an aptitude for “acts of construction and reflection” which was uniquely adapted to the interpretive demands of a polite modern nation (“Antiquarian” 530). What made periodicals like his unique (and uniquely difficult to write), Johnson argued in Rambler No. 184, was their “unconnected” form: an atomized world of solitary wholes, each number as isolated as it was complete (1751: 2: 282). Their most fundamental structural characteristics resonated in powerful ways with what Johns describes as a central literary reality of the age: “those faced with using the press to create and sustain knowledge … found themselves confronting a culture characterized by nothing so much as indeterminacy” (Nature 36). Anti-archival in style (though not in form, which remained thoroughly committed to organizational principles: sequentially numbered, subsequently bound into volumes with tables of contents and indexes), single-essay periodicals specialized in a type of writing which was iterative without adding up into any unified body of knowledge. They not only claimed to lack “the principles of unification and classification” which transform an assembly of “heterogeneous, undifferentiated stuff” into a coherently organized reservoir of sources, or archive, but flaunted this resistance as their greatest strength (Steedman 68). “That the Idler has some scheme, cannot be doubted,” Johnson’s narrator reassured his readers in terms which undermined the promise even as he made it, “for to form schemes is the Idler’s privilege” (1758: 2: 390). If the vogue for multivolume editions of the English poets, the glut of endless encyclopaedias and dictionaries on seemingly every subject, the synthesizing efforts of the monthly reviewers, and, more abstractly, the incipient process of what we recognize today as disciplinarity were, on one level, means of coping

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with the excesses of modern literature across a proliferating number of genres, periodicals’ and miscellanies’ essayistic style constituted a very different response: not a search for closure or organizational containment but a strategic enactment of proliferation which challenged readers to locate their critical strategies in the discontinuities of modern knowledge by “inscrib[ing] différance in the Derridian sense: a dislocation of meaning” in favour of a play of differences and deferrals in their very structure (Benedict, Making 12). By highlighting what Ferris describes as “the unboundedness of writing” as a central characteristic, periodicals and miscellanies insisted on a comparable “ethic of reading,” not merely as an escape from system, but as the basis of a vision of connectivity which mirrored the contingencies of a transactional world (“Antiquarian” 538, 536).3 This “ethic of reading” was valuable, not only because it equipped readers to deal with “the chaos and trivia of commercial modernity,” but more fundamentally because it responded so directly to the mercurial nature of commerce itself (Lynch, Economy 58).4 It highlighted “the systems of semiotic and fiduciary exchange – the machinery of interconnectedness – that made a society go” (6).5 A miscellaneous style of writing, in periodical form or otherwise, with its insistent focus on local knowledge and fragmentary narratives – on the microcosm as the basis of a form of knowledge which resisted taxonomic order – offered a means of training its readers (who were never figured solely or even primarily as readers but as active citizens who made time in their busy days to read) to be knowing participants in what Johnson described as “the general miscellany of life” (1750: 1: 10). T h e m i s c e l l a n y of l i f e But beyond the “chaos and trivia” of modernity, what could it possibly have meant, in any rigorous or fundamental way, to talk of “the general miscellany of life”? Of life itself as a miscellany, with all of the discontinuities, partial truths, and localized knowledge that this genre implied (and to speak of all of this in a self-consciously miscellaneous work like the Rambler)? In his Preface to Richard Rolt’s Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (1756), Johnson warned that by its very nature, which is to say on a structural rather than an incidental level, commerce defied any encyclopaedic will to comprehensive knowledge. “Many branches of commerce are subdivided into smaller and smaller parts, till at last they become so minute as not easily to be noted by observation. Many interests are so woven among each other as not to be disentangled without

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long inquiry; many acts are industriously kept secret, and many practices necessary to be known, are carried on in parts too remote for intelligence” (5: 228). One could not, he explained in the Preface to his own Dictionary, “visit caverns to learn the miner’s language, nor take a voyage to perfect [one’s] skill in the dialect of navigation, nor visit the warehouses of merchants, and shops of artificers, to gain the names of wares, tools, and operations, of which no mention is found in books” (5: 45). Inaccessibility was not, however, the real problem. Commerce’s tendency towards endless atomization and competitive secrecy may have thwarted any impetus towards coherent delineation, but, Johnson argued in his Preface to Rolt’s Dictionary, on a deeper structural level this resistance reflected the profoundly rhizomatic nature of the marketplace generally: the arbitrariness of the alphabetical order imposed by a dictionary was useful because “commerce, considered in its whole extent, seems to refuse any other method of arrangement … A volume intended to contain whatever is requisite to be known by every trader, necessarily becomes so miscellaneous and unconnected as not to be easily reducible to heads” (5: 227–28). Johnson’s commonsense tone should not diminish our awareness of the epistemological lawlessness of this vision of economic relations as “miscellaneous and unconnected”: a moment of archival vertigo in a preface commissioned by a bookseller for a text Johnson never read, and whose compiler he would never meet (5: 227). This “miscellaneous and unconnected” character, which defied systematic analysis, was exacerbated by what many critics took to be commerce’s hybridizing influence on the social order generally. In “Against Inconsistency in our Expectations,” Anna Barbauld complained that one of the “faults of the present age” was that a “general conformity to fashionable manners” had weakened social distinctions: “characters are not marked with sufficient character: the several classes run too much into one another” (1773: 2: 193–94). The social structure of a commercial nation was as resistant to any clear taxonomy as were its strictly economic relations and activities. This social and economic heterogeneity found its literary counterpart in what Knox described as the category of “miscellaneous readers” (not, in Knox’s scheme, readers of miscellaneous texts but non-specialist readers), a group that was as extensive as it was internally diverse (Winter 1785: 1: 25) Readers could best be trained to respond to the pressures and opportunities of this “miscellaneous and unconnected” world of blurred social classes, reading audiences, and market forces, all of which defied systematic or comprehensive understanding, by a form of literature which was


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itself miscellaneous and unconnected, and which as a result was designed to maximize the circulation of ideas even as it insisted on the ultimate instability of knowledge in a modern commercial society. Periodicals and miscellanies, which offered “little records … set down without any other arrangement than what the disposition of time might prompt,” and which were subject only to the sorts of schemes that an idler might dream up, involved readers in an active process of interpretation which forced them to negotiate textual contingencies rather than depend on the reassuring linearity of narrative continuity (Lounger 1785: 4). Playing on its own title, the Microcosm coined the word “m ic ro c o s mop ol i ta n” to suggest a double emphasis on an aesthetic of immersion (rather than transcendence) in the minutiae of daily life (rather than the great events of nations or famous individuals) (1786). If we are more used, today, to thinking of cosmopolitanism in terms of Anthony Appiah’s vision of a globalized accommodation of difference,6 the Microcosm insisted on the absolutely local, not as an evasion but as an intensification of this plurality. However much we may tend to associate irony with textual instability – the capacity to mean two completely different things at once – the self-ironic tone of these accounts worked to stabilize the field by reinforcing their ability to serve as vehicles for the diffusion of knowledge even as they cast into question the status of knowledge in a modern commercial nation; it strengthened their cultural authority by tacitly insisting on their comfort with the major cultural developments of their age, in part by registering their own compromised position within these dynamics. Like the endless letters that go missing, or arrive too late or partly mangled, in Jacques Derrida’s The Postcard, periodicals offered their own mishaps as a metaphor for the contingency of knowledge in a transactional world – an alignment which they articulated on a materialist level by drawing attention to their “miscellaneous and unconnected” form. Tracing the discursive connections between the age’s reaction to the rise of commerce, the advent of a literary modernity typified by the novel, and the status of women, Catherine Gallagher wryly suggests that what linked all three was the fact that they “had – literally – nothing in common” (xv). What they shared, in the eyes of early eighteenth-century commentators such as Alexander Pope, was precisely their status as nothings: their lack of any real character at all. Commerce, fiction, and women circulated as reminders of the demise of foundational knowledge and morality – symptoms of the erosion of the supremacy of landed wealth and its attendant ideal of heroic masculinity. If Gallagher’s insight extended, not just to women but to men who, as Emma Clery has argued, occupied

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a feminized perspective within debates about commerce, and to genres such as periodical and miscellaneous writing whose style resonated with ideas about the hybridizing influence of commerce, then it was equally true that the ethical force of Gallagher’s insight could cut both ways. If, in the more overtly misogynistic and anti-commercial ethos of the first half of the century, all three phenomena – women, commerce, and novels – could be invoked in a mutually reinforcing network of damning judgements about modernity as corruption, similar phenomena – both women and feminized men, commerce, and periodical and miscellaneous writing – could be embraced just as effectively as mutually constitutive elements of a theory of progress in which commerce was productive of refinement rather than corruption. Aligning themselves with these more positive associations, periodical and miscellaneous writers adopted a position of strategic instability, to revise Gayatri Spivak’s formulation. The political implications of this more affirmative network of associations could not be assumed to operate in any unproblematic way. If, on the one hand, it legitimated a set of shifts that we have come to think of as the feminization of culture, the prominence of men within these debates also enshrined men’s role, in their guise as feminized participants in the commercial order, as leading actors in these changes. But whatever the consequences, these associations, and the forms of sociability which they made possible, defined the grounds within which struggles to rethink the connections between commerce and literature would take place.7 Essay writers’ “microcosmopolitan” or “subterraneous” style was distinguished by a master trope of inversion; they aspired to a degree of moral seriousness which was directly linked to their apparent triviality, conveying their ideas “with seeming inattention,” as Goldsmith put it in The Bee (1759: 1: 15). “’Tis all a Patch-work,” the epigraph for the Microcosm No. 32 announced (1787: 2: 134). Paterson’s Joineriana: Or, The Book of Scraps revelled in a similar aura of the fragmentary and haphazard: “Joi n e r i a n a , or the B o ok of S c r a p s ?” – Ay, or C a r pe n t e r i a n a , or the B o ok of C h i p s , if you had rather – or any other A n a you like. Call them S c r a p s , or Fragments; C h i p s or Shavings; waking Reflections, or wandering Imaginations, it matters not – so that some of them profit the reader, which is the principal aim of the writer. (i–ii)

Invoking “the hackneyed culinary simile” favoured by periodical and miscellaneous writers, the authors of Variety: A Collection of Essays proudly declared that theirs was neither “a plain family dinner, nor a splendid city feast, but rather what the French call un petit soupé,


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consisting of a Va r i e t y of dishes, chiefly light and easy of digestion” (1788: vii). In an account of its own miscellaneous project, the Sylva proudly explained that its collection of “the beauties of Knowledge, Wit, and Wisdom” were “selected from all indiscriminately who can furnish them” (1786: viii). The Sylva, whose subtitle offered A Collection of Anecdotes, Dissertations, Characters, Apophthegms, Original Letters, Bon Mots, and Other Little Things, amplified rather than countered this whiff of triviality in its opening chapter, which focused on the once important role of “fools by profession or (as they have sometimes been called) jesters” who functioned as “manufacturer[s] and dealer[s] in apophthegms, proverbs, aphorisms, maxims, and bons mots of every kind” (4). If this parallel between their own literary project and the efforts of fools or jesters was at all unclear, the Sylva emphasized in a footnote to the chapter title that it “may be considered as introductory to the rest; as setting forth the utility of our work, and pleading in some measure for the form and manner of it” (7). Having celebrated the role of “loose papers and pamphlets” in promoting the “diffusion of science and literature,” the World immediately undercut its own elevated rhetoric by likening this process of enlightenment to the importation of pineapples: “At their first introduction amongst us, the manner of raising them was a very great secret, and little less than a mystery … But how common they are grown of late!” (1755: 5: 103). Adam Fitz-Adam, the pseudonymous author of the World, oscillated between comically vain accounts of “the great good which my labours have done to mankind” (earning him, he was sure, “an interment in that honourable place … Westminster abbey”) and admissions that his papers were principally employed to reinforce women’s hairstyles (1756: 6: 309). “It was a particular pleasure to me in all public assemblies, to think that the finest faces there were indebted to the goodness of my paper for setting them off” (1756: 6: 85). This tendency towards self-irony found some of its most eloquent expression in periodicals’ manipulation of their narrative personae. Turning on its head the conventional association of periodical writing and genteel sociability, Francis Grose’s short-lived Grumbler featured a narrator who, having “received various bodily items and hints, that I am not exactly what I was twenty years ago,” had developed a habit of “grumbling on all occasions” until he had “grumbled away all of my acquaintances,” forcing him to “convert this disposition to the public service, by venting my spleen on the vices and follies of the times” (1791: 2–4). Revelling in complaints about the cacoethes scribendi, Peter of Pontefract,

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the purported author of Lucubrations (1786), attributed the publication to “his having unfortunately contracted a Habit of scribbling” (9). Even as he satirized the hyperbolic advertisements of “those eminent practitioners in physick, who make their appearance either in hand-bills, or in the weekly or daily papers,” Adam Fitz-Adam announced his determination to “introduce my own importance to the public, as near as I can, in the manner and words of those gentlemen; not doubting of the same credit, and the same advantages” (World 1753: 1: 7). Having once again hailed “the disinterested spirit of these great persons” (quack doctors) in his fourth volume, Fitz-Adam added that “I take shame to myself, that as an author, and consequently a physician of the mind, I have been less careful in setting forth either the excellency of my labours, or in extending them as I ought to have done to all sorts of people” (1755: 4: 91). Determined to make amends, he explained that he had “directed my good friend Mr. Dodsley to bind up in three neat pocket volumes the aggregate of these my labours for the years one thousand seven hundred fifty three, and one thousand seven hundred fifty four; and to distribute the said volumes among all the booksellers of this great metropolis, to be sold by them tomorrow and forever at so small a price as three shillings a volume. And I have the pleasure of declaring, with equal truth with the proprietor of the Old Iron Pear-tree Water and its Salts, that to relieve the UNHAPPY is the full end of this publication” (4: 92). Sheer incompetence was as fertile a source of humour as opportunism. Figuring himself in terms that were diametrically opposed to Habermas’ purposeful account of the bourgeois public sphere, Samuel Johnson’s Idler described himself as one who “though sluggish, is yet alive,” and who, as a result of this inertia, “habituates himself to be satisfied with what he can most easily obtain” (1758: 2: 389). Not that this sluggishness translated into the sort of goodwill that might have been consistent with the ideal of polite sociability. On the contrary, he confessed that “the Idler is naturally censorious; those who attempt nothing themselves, think every thing easily performed, and consider the unsuccessful always as criminal” (2: 391). Having received a disapproving “letter” from an equally idle reader which concluded “You may publish, burn, or destroy this, just as you are in the humour; it is ten to one but I forget that I wrote it, before it reaches you,” the Idler pronounced himself highly satisfied with its evident marks of comradery. “This correspondent, whoever he be, is not to be dismissed without some tokens of regard. There is no mark more certain of a genuine Idler, than uneasiness without molestation, and complaint without a grievance” (2: 414).


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Hopelessly inflated accounts of their own importance were magnified by mock-tragic narratives of the death of the author. The final three numbers of the Microcosm were dedicated to the saga of their purported author’s untimely demise after an editor’s intervention in the thirty-eighth number announced: The Reader may more easily conceive, than I can express, the extreme sorrow with which I inform the Public, of the indispositions under which Mr. Griffin now labours. It has been, alas! for some time the opinion of the most able Physicians, that he could not outlive forty; – if so, two weeks, “two little weeks, with wings of down” (as the Poet says) will terminate his existence, as the Guardian, the Censor, and the Instructor of the little World.

The declaration finished by prudently reminding readers that “compleat sets of the M ic ro c o s m, or any single number, may be had as usual of Th e E di t or” (1787: 2: 207–8). “Debilitated as [he was] with sickness,” Griffin bravely rallied himself in the next number (the thirty-ninth) in which he began to offer an account of his brief and spectacularly uneventful life before another, still more sombre editorial intervention announced that “Mr. Gr i f f i n could not finish the sentence he was about; this last effort has quite exhausted him, and he has left to me the melancholy office of concluding his life.– Which, by the bye, if printed, with a neat type, in a thin octavo, and adorned with a well looking title page, would cut a very pretty figure in the annuls of literature” (2: 216). The final number (the fortieth) offered a copy of his will, which committed his “body to the press, from whence it came,” and divided the whole of his worldly effects (the contents of the Microcosm) among the four men who had actually written it: John Smith, George Canning, Robert Smith, and Hookham Fere, according to the letter with which they had signed their particular contributions (2: 224–26). If, as Foucault suggests, the eighteenth century was marked by a tightening of the association between books and the authors whose genius was increasingly felt to endow these works with their unique cultural value, periodicals such as the Microcosm pushed this conflation to its logical extreme, revelling in an absolute continuity between text and author (a uniquely embodied text and a fully textualized author) whose ultimate convergence lay in the parodic self-reflexivity of a published will: the body of an pseudonymous author whose age coincided with the precise number of issues, returned “to the press, from whence it came.” The World terminated with a similar conceit. “Before these lines can reach the press, that truly great and amiable gentleman will, in all probability, be no more,” an editor declared, explaining that Adam Fitz-Adam

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had mishandled the one-horse chair he had purchased “in order to make a genteel figure in the world” (1756: 6: 304–5). But such was Fitz-Adam’s fortitude that, as in the case of Gregory Griffin, the news of his death turned out to be slightly premature. “Recovering as it were from a trance,” he implored his “publisher” (identified in the scene as Mary Cooper, the London bookseller who, in real life, was one of the consortium who sponsored the Biographia Britannica) to “set forth my sudden and unhappy end,” and reaffirmed his hopes of being buried in Westminster Abbey (6: 306–7). “The frontispiece to the Wor l d,” he suggested, “if executed at large in virgin marble,” would provide a “suitable monument,” perhaps with a picture in the background of “a one-horse chair in the act of overturning” (6: 309). In fact, though, Mrs. Cooper’s intervention also turned out to be premature. An addendum to the final number announced that Mr. Fitz-Adam, “still alive, though in a dangerous way,” had “ordered a general i n de x to the folio volumes to be printed and given g r at i s in a few days at Mr. Dodsley’s in Pall-Mall, and at M. Cooper’s at the Globe in Pater-Noster-Row” (6: 311). Periodical authors, it turned out, could not even die properly. Their deaths were less a gesture of theoretical annihilation than a failed monument to their heroic dedication, had they managed to die at all. Far from aligning themselves with a celebration of artistic genius that transcended the debased world of the book trade, these ironic accounts reinscribed their authors firmly back within the world of commercial opportunism through the ultimate act of commodification. T r i f l i ng o c c u r r e nc e s a n d l i t t l e o c c u pat ions None of this self-parody and insouciance was to be taken at face value, of course. Goldsmith’s “seeming inattention” was in fact a mask which “concealed choice” (1759: 1: 15). Johnson’s periodical efforts were routinely cited for their seriousness of purpose. The Sylva might have likened itself to the role of a court jester, but it took pains to emphasize the dignity and even the difficulty of this role, not only in its description of the extensive education that was required of a jester, but also in its history of individuals who had performed this role, from Seneca to Plutarch, who “drew up and digested a collection of apophthegms for Trajan, and Erasmus [who] did the same for a German prince” (1786: 3). Like the fools of an older age, miscellaneous and periodical writers were all the more adept at “conveying knowledge,” and, therefore, all the more important to the “living world” which was their audience, precisely because their levity was designed to avoid pedantic self-seriousness.

Trifling occurrences and little occupations

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This stylistic duplicity, which disguised moral seriousness beneath a posture of “seeming inattention” and idleness, resonated with a more profound shift which inverted established ideas about the instructive power of history by eschewing accounts of important individuals and events in favour of an approach which was designed to exemplify “the history of a few particulars in a life of too little consequence to be worthy the attention of the public” (Lounger 1785: 81). As Mark Phillips has argued, the tendency of commerce to foster a new fusion of public and private life meant that the eighteenth century was marked by a turn to “the social: the everyday world of work and custom as well as the inner one of the sentiments” as the central locus of a nation’s character (82). Advocates for the importance of history writing had traditionally argued for its educational power by celebrating the instructive potential of accounts of what Adam Smith described as “the actions of men … [who] have contributed to great revolutions and changes in States and Governments” (Lectures 1763: 90). “The mind naturally seeks after the history of great men,” the 1787 European Magazine agreed (11: 223). But according to the logic of inversion which distinguished periodicals in their role as “the Historian of character and manners,” it was precisely people’s lack of “consequence” which made their lives “worthy [of] the attention of the public.” Regardless of “the importance we are apt to ascribe to the employments and the time, even of the greatest and most illustrious,” the Mirror suggested, it nonetheless remained the case that “life consists, in a great measure, of trifling occurrences and little occupations … It is not, then, surprising, that trifles should form the chief gratification of ordinary men” (1780: 3: 157). “Accounts of manners and follies … though minute in their own nature, serve more fully to characterize [a] people, than histories of their public treatises, courts, ministers, negotiations, and ambassadors,” Goldsmith agreed (1762: 2: 132). In his defence of biography in the Idler, Johnson countered traditional claims for the instructive power of histories of great statesmen and momentous events by insisting that however appealing these narratives might be, “they are oftener employed for show than use, and rather diversify conversation than regulate life” (1759: 2: 629). This was inevitably the case, he suggested, because, ironically, their dramatic impact ensured their broader irrelevance. “Few are engaged in such scenes as give them opportunities of growing wiser by the downfall of statesmen or the defeat of generals. The stratagems of war, and the intrigues of courts, are read by far the greater part of mankind with the same indifference as the adventures of fabled heroes, or the revolutions of a fairy region” (2: 629–30). The complexities

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of human nature, on the other hand, were best discovered in narratives which “are levelled with the general surface of life, which tell not how any man became great, but how he was made happy; not how he lost the favour of his prince, but how he became discontented with himself” (2: 630). The biographer of a famous individual would gain more, Johnson suggested in the Rambler, from “a short conversation with one of his servants, than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree, and ended with his funeral” (1750: 1: 284). But he would do better still by focusing on those “particular lives, that … are not distinguished by any striking or wonderful vicissitudes” because these apparently unremarkable cases would offer far more of the “lessons applicable to private life” in which one might discover the “many invisible circumstances which … are more important than publick occurrences” (1: 283–84). Studies of “great transaction[s]” which “involve a thousand fortunes in the business of a day … afford few lessons applicable to private life, which derives its comforts and its wretchedness from the right or wrong management of things which nothing but their frequency makes considerable.” The risk which this seemed to pose of a descent into triviality was easily outweighed by a more profound sense of universality. “There is such an uniformity in the state of man, considered apart from adventitious and separable decorations and disguises, that there is scarce any possibility of good or ill, but is common to human kind” (1: 284). In his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), Hugh Blair agreed that “bio g r a ph y, or the Writing of Lives,” was both “less formal and stately than History,” and, “for the bulk of Readers,” more instructive because of its orientation towards “minute circumstances, and familiar incidents … It is from private life, from familiar, domestic, and seemingly trivial occurrences that we often receive most light into a real character” (3: 54). A social order which tended to hybridize the realms of public and private experience naturally aligned itself with a literary genre which did precisely the same thing, “giv[ing] the private, as well as the public life of the person [it] explores” (3: 54). But, Blair continued, even formal historiography had evolved in ways that reflected the pressures of commercial society: “It is now understood to be the business of an able Historian to exhibit manners, as well as facts and events” (3: 55). Blair’s discussion of biography remained focused on its ability to convey the most apparently trivial aspects of “eminent men,” but for many critics this emphasis on the “seemingly trivial” aspects of famous lives extended itself to a more fundamental insistence on the importance of focusing on those people whose entire lives might once have been deemed to fall into this category.


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To merit the sort of anonymity which attended “those who are doomed to have no historian,” as D’Israeli put it, was to qualify as a kind of everyman or, sometimes, everywoman in an age when the hybridizing effects of commerce elevated the commonplace to a level of unique significance (Literary 1801: 105). Inverting the usual hierarchy of importance, D’Israeli argued that for modern readers “a parish register might prove more interesting” than “a dull chronicle of the reigns of monarchs” (Literary 6–7). Rather than “attending to battles, which have ceased to alarm; to sieges, which can destroy none of our towns; and to storms, which can never burst upon our shores” (7), observers were more likely to be drawn to a “history of manners” (9), which would have the advantage of illuminating the “minute springs and wheels” of human nature (27), and which, therefore, must be depicted with “minute attention” using “a thousand little brush strokes” (9). “Familiar objects of distress, and familiar characters of merit” were more interesting than “the pompous inflation of history,” whose “powers of seducing eloquence” only served to “disguise the simplicity of truth” (109). Periodical and miscellaneous essayists offered an epistemology of the “lesser world,” not the foothills of Parnassus (a location frequently reserved for the genre) but “the little world out of the library”: “the miniature representation of the passions and affections” (Microcosm 1786: 1: 2; 1787: 2: 103; 2: 150). Many critics explained the paradox that mid-century England, lauded by so many as the home of liberty, was also so lacking in what these commentators took to be liberty’s natural characteristic – sublime oratory in the style of Demosthenes or Longinus – by suggesting that Walpole’s reign of corruption had stifled liberty and, in doing so, had muted what might otherwise have been an age of eloquence. But Adam Potkay’s discussion of tensions between eloquence and politeness suggests a more fundamental explanation which coincides with the accounts that I have been exploring here of a “diminutive history” whose inverted focus privileged “private life” over “publick occurrences.” If British liberty seemed to many observers to lack that sublime eloquence which critics took to be a fundamental characteristic of liberty, it may have been because these accounts were ultimately committed to formulating a very different conception of liberty than the version whose roots lay in a classical republic tradition: one that had more to do with the everyday life of private individuals than the heroic aura of public-minded citizens, and in which, therefore, a spirit of sympathy or accommodation was not only more important than, but ultimately inconsistent with, the performative zeal of sublime eloquence. As Potkay puts it, the vision of social and economic commerce which this

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model of liberty rested on was more aligned with conversation than with oratory (77). Rejecting the aura of heroic fortitude, the Lounger suggested that it was precisely stoicism’s elevated connotations which made it as irrelevant as Johnson’s alignment of the affairs of state with “the adventures of fabled heroes, or the revolutions of a fairy region”: “In such extremes of situation, it is the lot of few to be placed. Of the bulk of mankind the life is passed amidst scenes of no very eventful sort, amidst ordinary engagements and ordinary cares” (1785: 133). This sense of what it called “the littleness of mankind,” which was particularly evident in any “consideration of the circumstances which produce or govern mens different opinions, tastes, sentiments, and conduct,” may have seemed mundane to those who were accustomed to dramatic tales of great events, but true instruction lay closer to home in an insistence on the primary consequence of daily issues (137). These “apparently slight and unimportant” (45) circumstances were not only more relevant and therefore more helpful to most readers, the Lounger insisted, but were ultimately more revealing as well. “The great passions which actuate men in the pursuits of life, present little diversity of features to afford any just discriminations of character … But in the more trifling circumstances of manner and behaviour, and in the more ordinary circumstances of life … we are apt to betray those peculiar features of character, and those often nice shades of distinction, that difference [sic] and discriminate us from one another” (45). Having emphasized the importance of these “trifling circumstances” as sources of historical information, the Lounger embraced the ethical imperative of “domestic morality” or “the science of those relative duties which do not apply only to particular situations, to large fortunes, to exalted rank, to extensive influence, but which constitute that part and character in life which almost every one is called to perform” (105). All of this was especially true, essay writers argued, because as society became more refined, the operations of commerce simultaneously elevated the importance of people’s private relations and thickened the social and psychological complexities within which these relations were inscribed. “If we trace the situation of man from a mere state of nature to the highest state of civilization,” Richard Cumberland suggested, “we shall find these artificial wants and dependencies encrease with every stage and degree of his improvements; so that if we consider each nation apart as one great machine, the several parts and springs, which give it motion, naturally become more and more complicated and multifarious, as the uses to which it is applied are more and more diversified” (1791: 3: 47). “In


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the earlier periods of society, a very simple code of morality and rectitude was all that was necessary,” the Lounger agreed. But, it explained: in a state of society so advanced as ours, (for it is needless to trouble my reader with the intermediate gradations), every one will see the necessity of a nicer and more refined system of morality. The family of the social virtues, like the genealogical tree of an extensive ancestry, spreads with the advancing cultivation of mankind, till it is branched out into a numerous list of collateral duties, many of which it needs an acute discernment to trace up to their source, and some acknowledge their connection without being able to unravel their pedigree. (1785: 5–6)

Returning to the subject in its discussion of modern drama, the Lounger suggested that in more primitive societies virtue and vice were strongly and distinctly marked, [and] wisdom and weakness easily discriminated … But in the modern drama there is an uncertain sort of outline, a blended colouring, by which the distinction of these objects is frequently lost. The refinement of modern audiences calls for shades of character more delicate than those which the stage formerly exhibited; the consequence is, that the bounds of right and wrong are often so uncertainly marked as not to be easily distinguished. (108)

This moral ambivalence or “blended colouring” may have been cause for alarm in plays and novels, but, critics frequently agreed, it was nonetheless a central characteristic of a refined society, part of the “minute springs and wheels” or “invisible circumstances” which regulated personal behaviour (D’Israeli, Literary 1801: 27; Johnson 1750: 1: 284). Periodical writers may have shared many of these traits with miscellaneous writers but, periodical writers argued, they were also distinguished by an important advantage which miscellanies lacked. Not only were they miscellaneous by their very nature, but their serialized format was uniquely adapted to the changing flows of daily life. Defending the extent to which the era of Charles I’s reign might “properly be called ‘The Age of Pamphlets,’” Johnson insisted that “these small productions” were important, not only because they enabled “petty writers” to address questions of widespread concern “while they are yet the subject of conversation,” and therefore “of copying their representations from the life” (1742: 5: 189), but, crucially, because the endless appearance of new pamphlets offered a glimpse of the changing nature of public debates as they evolved. They illuminated the nature of the process, as well as documenting the end results of intellectual exchange. Periodicals’ serialized format offered the same promise of a dynamic glance into the changing texture of social relations, but periodicals

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were, in turn, uniquely valuable because they shared with miscellanies an advantage which pamphlets lacked. Drawing on a familiar argument about the primary significance of supposedly commonplace concerns, periodical writers revelled in the centrality of their status as the ongoing chroniclers of “diminutive history” as opposed to the public issues which tended to preoccupy pamphlet writers. In other words, they were all the more important because the subjects which concerned them were so apparently unimportant – the kinds of things that no pamphlet writer would have bothered with, but which had a greater influence on people’s lives than memorable events or controversies. This was especially the case, the Mirror suggested, because “the Science of Manners” involved a complex terrain whose “subjects are so fleeting, and marked with shades so delicate, that, where-ever a general denomination is ventured, there is the greatest hazard of its being misapplied or misunderstood” (1779: 2: 245). Nor was it simply that manners were of too “delicate” a nature to lend themselves to accurate analysis in any kind of one-off or issue-driven approach. A subject matter which was itself defined by its dynamic rather than static nature required a temporalized literary form that was capable of keeping pace with this sense of process. “The greater virtues are always the same; but many of the lesser duties of social intercourse receive much of their complexion from the daily fluctuating circumstances of custom and of fashion,” the Lounger insisted in terms which echoed the Mirror (1785: 7). The periodical writer “mark[s] the passions as they rise,” the World agreed (1755: 4: 259). It was actually Alexander Pope, in his Essay on Man (1734), who had first insisted on the need to “catch the manners living as they rise,” but where Pope proposed to explore “Human Life and Manners, such as (to use my Lord Bacon’s expression) come home to Men’s Business and Bosoms” by “considering Man in the Abstract,” these later historians of manners insisted on the primacy of the resolutely particular – the fragmentary and the anecdotal – as a crucial antidote to the dangers of abstraction (8, i). Because periodicals’ serialized format enabled them to respond to these “fluctuating circumstances” while they were still in process, it followed that “the author of a periodical performance has indeed a claim to the attention and regard of his readers, more interesting than that of any other writer” (Lounger 1787: 401). It was not simply that periodical writers wrote on topics of general interest for a popular audience: they also helped to make change make sense by articulating “the feelings of the day, in the language which those feelings have prompted” (401).8

The politics of politeness

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T h e p ol i t ic s of p ol i t e n e s s Periodicals’ determination to offer narratives that were “levelled with the general surface of life” (Johnson 1759: 2: 629) by giving a voice to those who were “of too little consequence to be worthy the attention of the public” (Lounger 1785: 81) had an inevitably democratic ring to it, but the question of the politics of this quotidian focus was far from straightforward. The Oxford correspondent’s comment in the World, that the periodical press had helped to achieve a “revolution … in the kingdom of learning, which has introduced the levelling principle, with much better success than ever it met with in politics,” was tellingly ambiguous (1755: 5: 102). Was this “revolution … in the kingdom of learning” with all of its “levelling” effects to be interpreted as a precursor to political change (a scenario which fitted well with standard accounts of the reformist power of the press), or as an alternative which negated or at least diminished these “levelling” pressures on the political front? Wary of these implications, periodicals frequently made a point of maintaining (or at least feigning) a self-conscious distance from politics in favour of what Isaac D’Israeli described as “the provinces, of Manners [and] of Letters.” Richard Steele, D’Israeli explained, had included “Politics” in the Tatler but, recognizing that “violent and sudden reformation is seldom to be used … it remained for the chaster genius of Addison to banish this disagreeable topic from his elegant pages” (Curiosities 1791: 1: 231). Subsequent periodicals distinguished themselves from newspapers, on one side, and pamphlets, on the other, by the distance they kept from this “disagreeable topic.” “I abominate politics,” the World ’s pseudonymous editor, Adam Fitz-Adam, declared, “and when I am writing in defence of politeness, shall certainly not blend so coarse a subject with so civil a theme” (1754: 3: 289). But like the paradoxes that governed the inverted focus of periodicals generally, this resistance was not to be taken at face value. As David Solkin has argued in Painting for Money, periodical writers’ disdain for the “disagreeable topic” of politics is better read as part of an emergent order whose vision of authority reflected the broader domain of middle-class life rather than the formal hierarchies of national government. This focus on manners, or what the Lounger called the unwritten “laws of civility, of gentleness, of taste, and of feeling,” whose “observance forms, amidst the refinement of modern society, an important part of our happiness,” articulated a vision of politeness which provided a crucial form of cultural consensus for the now dominant commercial order (1785: 6). It evoked a sense of the rules of sympathy which made possible the

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forms of mutual dependence required in a transactional world, while at the same time enshrining the idealized self-image of a commercial society as profoundly egalitarian in its individualistic orientation. Having extolled the beneficial effects of “mixing with society, on a footing of equality” as the only way “that man can learn to rub off those rude inattentions to others, which self love so naturally produces in every individual, when confined to solitude; and to acquire that suavity of manner, and attention to others, which constitutes the highest pleasure of social life, that is now denominated urbanity,” a purported letter to The Bee celebrated the role of the periodical press as a simulacrum of this experience: In like manner, it is only when literary men mix with others in a periodical publication, where liberty is permitted to every one to do what he thinks proper, on a footing of perfect equality, that they can properly feel their own weight, and be compelled to relinquish those ungracious self-sufficient tones, which the fancied superiority that every man is disposed to ascribe to himself, before he has experienced the powers of others, so naturally inspires; and to give that becoming modesty in reasoning, which constitutes the highest polish of a literary character. (1791: 1: 171)

The surest proof of this, the “letter” explained, was the case of clergymen who, distorted by their elevated position, “are more apt to assume that dictatorial air, and dogmatic self sufficiency of manner, than other classes of literary men.” So forceful had been the influence of the proliferation of “periodical publications [which] have now become so common in Britain … that gentleness of manner, and liberality of sentiment, in disputed subjects, begin to prevail even among men of this class” (1: 171). Invoking this assumption about the inherently sociable nature of periodical writing, Sir John Hawkins suggested that Johnson had been inspired to write the Rambler by the same motive that had prompted him to form his Literary Club: his “love of conversation” (1787: 259) and the relief he found in “this little society” where, “with a disposition to please and be pleased,” he would pass the “hours in a free and unrestrained interchange of sentiments” (219–20). Periodical writers performed this model of refined sociability in the service of a broader concept of politeness on the levels of both form and content by depicting their engagement with the reader as a kind of genteel conversation (figuring themselves as “an old companion, whose conversation they are pleased with” rather than a cultural “sovereign”) and by emphasizing their own composite form as collectively produced texts (Connoisseur 1756: 4: 269). They were the product of literary communities whose internal harmony and good cheer enabled them to convey a similar spirit to their audience and, in doing so, to effect a


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broader social reformation (even among clergymen). Responding to “the often-repeated question of, Who is Mr. town?” the Connoisseur admitted “Mr. town to consist of two separate individuals … But our accounts are of so intricate a nature, that it would be impossible for us to adjust them in that manner. We have not only joined in the work taken altogether, but almost every single paper is the joint product of both: and, as we have laboured equally in erecting the fabric, we cannot pretend, that any one particular part is the sole workmanship of either” (4: 273–75). The final issue of the Mirror went considerably further, characterizing its origins as “one of those accidental resolutions” that emerged, almost by chance, from “a company of gentlemen, whom particular circumstances of connection brought frequently together,” and whose “discourse often turned upon subjects of manners, of taste, and of literature.” Having “determined to put their thoughts into writing, and to read them for the entertainment of each other,” their efforts naturally progressed to a more public form. “Cultivating letters in the midst of business, composition was to them an amusement only; that amusement was heightened by the audience which this society afforded; the idea of publication suggested itself as productive of still higher entertainment” (1780: 3: 338). Their periodical deserved to be taken all the more seriously because it had never been anything but an unintended by-product of their real desire to share in each other’s company during time away from “business,” a priority which was, after all, their central theme and the most salient characteristic of the kinds of social changes their publication hoped to encourage. The Lounger, which appeared five years after the demise of the Mirror, extended this self-reflexive focus to a new level in a “letter” it printed from a former member of “the Mirror Club” (both journals, based in Edinburgh, were associated with Henry Mackenzie), spilling over beyond the borders of a single periodical in a moment of sociability between the texts themselves, all of it infused with an appropriately refined sense of ironic good humour. “Although long since dead as an author,” the correspondent began: you will readily believe that I am interested in the success of the Lounger. Persons placed in the same situations naturally feel a sympathetic sort of attachment for each other. When the Lounger was first advertised, I could not help recollecting the sensations I experienced when the publication of the Mirror was first announced in the papers; and when your introductory number appeared, I sent for it with an impatience, and a solicitude, which I should not have felt in the same degree had I not once been in a situation similar to yours. (1785: 117)

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Having detailed the Lounger’s relative advantages, building on the momentum created by the achievements of the Mirror only a few years earlier, the correspondent went on to commiserate with the Lounger’s isolation, “conduct[ing] your work single and alone, unconnected with any person whatsoever,” in stark opposition to the conviviality of this earlier group. The increased labour was more than doubled by the greater hardship of that absence of amiable company which had made the earlier periodical so rewarding. Not only, therefore, is your task much more arduous than ours, but, in the way of amusement, we certainly had the advantage of you. I can never forget the pleasure we enjoyed in meeting to read our papers in the Club. There they were criticized with perfect freedom, but with the greatest good humour. When any of us produced a paper which, either from the style or manner of it, or from the nature of the subject, seemed inadmissible, it was condemned without hesitation, and the author putting it in his pocket, drank a bumper to its manes. (118)

The letter finished by inviting the Lounger to “our next anniversary meeting”: for you must know, that our Club still meets once a-year on the day our first number was published. There it would do your heart good, to hear us talk over the little anecdotes which gave us so much pleasure in the Mirror. I shall propose, Sir, that you be received as a guest at our anniversary next year, that you may see what sort of folks your predecessors were. There is one point in which I trust you will agree with us, and that is, in preferring good claret to port wine. Hoping to have the honour of drinking a glass of our favourite liquor with you, I am, &c. (A M e m be r of t h e M i r r or C l u b.)

If polite sociability was both a favoured theme and one of the most important reformist goals of the weekly periodical press, this was in part because they incorporated the ideal as a central aspect of their mode of cultural production: a vision of community that was all the more refined for being carefully egalitarian in its evocation of a world of good-natured gentlemen, “cultivating letters in the midst of business,” and confident of their shared preference of “good claret” to “port wine.” Lawrence Klein suggests, along similar lines to Solkin, that if the third Earl of Shaftesbury embraced the ideal of polite sociability as a means of displacing the power of the Church and King by establishing an “alternative foundation for intellectual and political culture,” this ideal was itself open to appropriation by middle-class writers who reinflected it in ways that affirmed their own professional and commercial interests (Shaftesbury 38). Politeness, as Shaftesbury envisioned it, offered a more worldly “paradigm” capable of adapting existing codes of gentility to a “new urban


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culture” whose “nodal points” were the “coffeehouses, clubs, assemblies, gardens and theatres” that figured so prominently in miscellaneous writing, periodical and otherwise (11). But miscellaneous writers’ emphasis on the “invisible circumstances” which regulated the “miniature” world of “domestic morality” was in many ways an attempt to revolutionize Shaftesbury’s cultural revolution by establishing still another “alternative foundation” that would displace the authority of both the Church-andKing establishment and Shaftesbury’s aristocratic elite, not in the name of radical change but in pursuit of a vision which grafted the cultural authority of the middle class onto these older hierarchies.9 A rhetoric of politeness may have highlighted the prescriptive or didactic nature of these accounts of manners, but the stress on manners, with its emphasis on everyday behaviour, offered a crucial means of distinguishing this middle-class version of politeness from the aristocratic model it was displacing.10 In other words, the periodicals and miscellanies participated in a political project that could be realized all the more effectively to the extent that they disavowed politics in favour of manners. In its study of “the rules established as to the external conduct of men in society, or in what may be called the system of politeness,” the Mirror congratulated its readers that, unlike former ages when “a man used to measure out his complaisance to others according to the degree of rank in which they stood, compared with his own,” it was now the case that “a man of good breeding … considers the same degree of attention to be due to every man in the rank of gentleman, be his fortune or the antiquity of his family what it may; nay, a man of real politeness will feel it rather more incumbent on him to be attentive and complaisant to his inferiors in these respects, than to his equals” (1779: 1: 204–5). Indeed, the Mirror continued, “the idea which in modern times is entertained of politeness … is founded on this, that a man of cultivated mind is taught to feel a greater degree of pleasure in attending to the ease and happiness of people with whom he mixes in society, than in studying his own” (1: 207–8). It regretted that “this system of politeness or of complaisance” had never been extended “to those of a lower station. The rules of good breeding do not extend to them; and he may be esteemed the best-bred man in the world who is a very brute to his servants and dependents” (1: 209–10). This concern for how the polite treated “those who are in stations below them” did not, of course, extend to any sort of enthusiasm for levelling the social hierarchy which established these relative positions of above and “below.” On the contrary, its reformist tone provided a powerful legitimating code which

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reinforced the social distinction of the polite classes by championing decency in people’s private dealings in a way that negated the structural issue of class contradiction. The inherently political nature of “this system of politeness or of complaisance,” even where it could be extended to a greater thoughtfulness in one’s private dealings with those of a lower class, was most clearly exposed in its association with the ideal of gentility. As the European Magazine acknowledged, the concept of gentility, whose entire function as a marker of the polite classes depended upon its “relative existence” (not everyone could lay equal claim to it), was as “indefinable” as it was “generally sought.” It remained “the great aim of much the greater part of the human species” even though it was “altogether incapable of definition” (1784: 5: 180). The “character” of “a gentleman” was, the Monthly Review agreed, a “magical term,” as elusive as it was socially compelling (1781: 64: 90). As the concept of gentility had slipped free of its more narrow connection with landed wealth it had become more frequently associated with the ideal of taste but, as endless critics warned, this only complicated rather than settled the question. Periodicals’ ability to evoke the undeclared “laws of civility, of gentleness, of taste, and of feeling,” was important, not just because the influence of refined manners was crucial to the harmonious transmission of Britain’s social order, but because of its centrality to assumptions about the nature of that “magical term,” the character of “a gentleman” (1781: 64: 90). As the World explained, with unusual frankness: it is not virtue that constitutes the politeness of a nation, but the art of reducing vice to a system that does not shock society. Pol i t e n e s s (as I understand the word) is an universal desire of pleasing others (that are not too much below one) in trifles, for a little time; and of making one’s intercourse with them agreeable to both parties, by civility without ceremony, by ease without brutality, by complaisance without flattery, by acquiescence without sincerity. (1754: 3: 289)

Periodicals’ trope of inversion, which privileged an appreciation of the importance of “trifling circumstances” and “little histories” as the basis of gentility, served as the foundation of a politics of distinction which reflected the significance of manners in a modern commercial society. But as the shockwaves of the French Revolution made themselves felt in Britain, it became increasingly difficult to maintain this trope of inversion in the name of a politics which established itself by disavowing politics altogether. D’Israeli’s argument that “the monarch [must] lose his crown, and the minister his place” before these great men could “come to us with no other claims on our feelings, than that common sensibility, which we


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owe to humanity,” was recognizably Burkean in its sympathy for the vulnerability of “the sublime personages of history” who were exposed “in the nudity of truth” (1796: 103). And, indeed, by the time of the publication of his Miscellanies; Or Literary Recreations in 1796, D’Israeli had already moved considerably away from his earlier support for democratic reform.11 But even so, his larger argument had a dangerously Painite ring to it. “The romantic gilding of the pencil” which embellished accounts of these “sublime” individuals was part of a “pernicious prejudice, which peoples the mind with artificial beings, and enfeebles the sympathies of domestic life,” and which must therefore be resisted (Miscellanies 103). To be “artificial,” and therefore to fuel a “pernicious prejudice” which weakened people’s capacity for sympathy – a charge which was not unlike Paine’s jab that Burke “pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird” – was to be distinguished by an office or title rather than by the sort of unadorned personal merit championed by Jacobin activists, in the same way that the Lounger had downgraded the historical interest of those pursuits that were guided by “the great passions” because they amounted to “acting an artificial part” (Paine 1791: 213; Lounger 1785: 45). This is not to recruit D’Israeli or Henry Mackenzie or, indeed, Samuel Johnson, or the periodical press in general as members of the radical cause despite their wariness or even outright opposition to it, or to fish for radical subtexts which might conscript them in spite of their avowed reservations. April London rightly describes D’Israeli’s stylistic commitments, which resonate in important ways with this more broadly shared commitment to literary microcosmopolitanism, as a form of “conservative iconoclasm” in which a “resistance to hierarchies of knowledge” is informed by an underlying “commitment to the preservation of residual values” (358). But in an age of upheaval, a trope of inversion which elevated the instructive worth of “those who are doomed to have no historian” by offering a series of narratives “levelled with the general surface of life,” unleashing a “levelling principle” which effected a “revolution … in the kingdom of learning,” became dangerously available to appropriation in the name of a politics which openly declared its politics in what were, for many, ominous terms. As the discursive terrain of “manners” became increasingly politicized in an age when, as Burke’s Reflections had rightly pointed out, one of the central struggles ultimately revolved around the question of what constituted a gentleman, the “little histories” celebrated by periodicals shifted towards the safer ground of the sort of modest gentility exemplified by a purported correspondent to the Gentleman’s Magazine who began his letter by informing the Gentleman’s

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of a favourite monthly activity: “the expectation and enjoyment of your valuable Monthly Repository.” It reaches me, in this distant quarter, about the tenth or twelfth day after its publication; and I am free to say, that I return with keenness from my morning’s ride, in expectation that Peter has brought the Gentleman’s Magazine from the neighbouring market-town. He knows my trim, and prepares for me accordingly; and I generally find the fire fresh poked up, the hearth swept clean, and my cushion plumped-up in the easy chair. – The rogue too brings up a bottle of my oldest port, sets it before the fire, and then quits the room, to prepare for the approaching dinner. (1789: 59: 1098)

Pampered and then dutifully left alone by his faithful servant, Peter, the correspondent (and the endless readers for whom he served as an eighteenth-century everyman) could find in periodicals material which reflected back to them their own undefinable gentility, even as they indulged themselves in the literary pleasures of a miscellaneous account of “the littleness of mankind.”

Ch apter 5

Uncommon animals: literary professionalism in the age of authors

There is nothing I hold so cheap as a learned man, except an unlearned one.

Horace Walpole

“T h e l ow-l i f e of l i t e r at u r e” It is one thing to sanctify the commonplace, to insist on the primacy of “that lower kind of literature” which prized “vernacular erudition,” and in doing so to revel in a “diminutive” focus which reflected (however ironically) the “ignoble state of a fugitive sheet and a half” (Hawkins 1787: 168–69; Johnson 1758: 2: 390; World 1755: 4: 54).1 It is another thing to convert these literary priorities into a new basis for the social distinction of the authors themselves. The two processes are obviously bound up with each other; the case for authors’ standing in society, which was always complicated by the question of their relation to other types of writers, clearly depended upon the kinds of work they were seen to do. But these two questions are not quite the same thing. It is entirely possible to valorize particular forms of writing in ways that create problems for the case that one might try to make for the stature of the people who produce them. Flattening established cultural hierarchies in the name of an aesthetic which was “levelled with the general surface of life” and which privileged the dignity of “those who are doomed to have no historian” may have made for compelling literature, but without the benefit of a related emphasis on the agonized genius of the Romantic artist it begged the question of how one might create a basis for the importance of these writers which elevated them above this thriving everyday world within which (they insisted again and again) their efforts were immersed (Johnson 1759: 2: 630; D’Israeli, Literary 1801: 105). These sorts of questions were intensified by authors’ nervous awareness of what Samuel Johnson called the “very uncertain tenure … of literary 133

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fame” in their own day and the cruel reduction of posterity to a “magnificent obscurity” epitomized by “a publick library … crowded on every side by mighty volumes … now scarcely known but by the catalogue” (1750: 1: 103; 1751: 1: 495–96). Lamenting the same double edge of literary obsolescence in “a busy, bustling time,” George Crabbe complained that authors were doomed to obscurity if they aspired to “general themes,” and fleeting popularity if they chose to court public interest by “sing[ing] the subject of the day.” “To-morrow’s wonder puffs our praise away” (NewsPaper 1785: 1–2). It was, at least on one level, a basic problem of supply and demand. “A great quantity of any thing valuable naturally depreciates it. A market overstocked reduces the price,” Vicesimus Knox warned in his account of the declining prestige of “science, wisdom, and taste” (Winter 1785: 3: 121). This imbalance was, for many writers, the defining feature of their historical moment. In an essay in the Adventurer, Johnson dubbed “the present age … The Age of Authours; for, perhaps, there never was a time in which men of all degrees of ability, of every kind of education, of every profession and employment, were posting with ardour so general to the press” (1753: 3: 106–7). Worse still was the self-reinforcing nature of these dynamics. In his own analysis of the reasons why “the L i t e r a r y c h a r ac t e r has, in the present day, singularly degenerated in the public mind,” D’Israeli refined Johnson’s assessment: De Foe called the last age, the age of Projectors, and Johnson has called the present, the age of Authors. But there is this difference between them; the epidemical folly of projecting in time cures itself, for men become weary with ruination; but writing is an interminable pursuit, and the raptures of publication have a great chance of becoming a permanent fashion. (Essay 1795: vii, xviii)

Caught between the instability of current fame and the cruel reduction of an overcrowded posterity to “magnificent obscurity,” writers were forced to confront a series of far-reaching questions about what it meant to be an author in a modern commercial society: questions which, as Pierre Bourdieu has argued, assumed at their core a strategic recognition of “the literary field [as] the site of a struggle over the definition of the writer” (Johnson 1: 496; Bourdieu, Field 42).2 D’Israeli’s fusion of quantitative issues (spiralling levels of print) and categorical problems (the unstable distinction between authors and projectors, or between what he might have been prepared to count as genuine literary ambition and the murky world of showmen and charlatans) highlights the symbolic as well as the statistical nature of the definitional struggles that shaped the literary field. But this does not mean

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that empiricist arguments can simply be stood on their head, dismissing the minute factual aspects of cultural production – “the workaday shufflings and shiftings of meaning brought about by typesetting, translating, proof-correcting, editing, annotating, commentating, reviewing, anthologising, popularising, compiling encyclopaedias, composing textbooks, etc.” – in favour of discursive approaches whose focus on forms of knowledge production trumps these more quotidian aspects of the actual working practices of particular individuals (Jardine 400). Untethered from the materialist force of these “workaday shufflings and shiftings,” discursive approaches risked duplicating the transcendental tendencies of the models they sought to displace. Addressing the theoretical question of the limited and provisional agency implied by writers’ attempts to adapt themselves to the changing nature of their habitus in this age of authors, Nick Jardine proposes the idea of the “un-dead author,” neither about to die another theoretical death nor gloriously resurrected, not quite on life support but still thoroughly divorced from Romantic models of creative autonomy (400). These un-dead writers may well have tried to make their own history but they did not make it just as they pleased. They were forced by the commercial, legal, technological, and discursive pressures of their age to do so by accommodating the resources of history to their own ends. Accommodation should not be too hastily equated with the negation of agency though. Aligning himself with Roger Chartier’s description of the “dependent and constrained” author – “dependent in that he is not the unique master of the meaning of the text, and … constrained in that he undergoes the multiple determinations that organize the social space of literary production” – Jardine sides with Mark Twain ahead of Foucault and Barthes, warning “that the report of the death of the author was an exaggeration” (Jardine 399–400; Chartier, Order 28). This may, however, amount to an extension rather than a refutation of Foucault’s insistence on the necessity of charting “the modes of circulation, valorization, attribution, and appropriation” which helped to define the activity of the author function in different historical contexts (117). Insisting on the constructed nature of modern ideas about the author reinforces the significance of the endless, often minor processes, with all of their unintended or collateral effects, which led to its crystallization into a coherent and widely recognized social phenomenon. If this approach refines rather than eliminates the possibility of agency by conceptualizing it in the double-negative terms of the un-dead world “in which authorship is manifestly constrained, dependent and

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dispersed,” then it may be the failures and marginal successes – the “men [and women] of all degrees of ability, of every kind of education, of every profession and employment” who tried their hand as authors with varying but usually limited degrees of success – rather than the small minority of successful authors who best illuminate the highly mediated nature of the evolving literary field (Jardine 400; Johnson 1753: 3: 106). Or we need both perspectives – those writers who managed to carve out a degree of success in the daunting world of eighteenth-century letters and their far more numerous counterparts, the largely unremembered hordes who belonged to what Robert Darnton called “the low-life of literature … who failed to make it to the top and fell back into Grub Street” (Literary 16). Darnton’s work on illegal and forbidden books written and circulated by obscure figures who lived “on the shady side of the law” in pre-Revolution France has been enriched by a growing body of knowledge about a set of writers in Britain whose marginalization was professional rather than legal, who were sometimes Whig or even Tory but just as often shifting or agnostic in their political allegiances, and who were upwardly mobile rather than revolutionary in their self-image (vi). It was the world of the “adventurer in literature,” as Boswell described Johnson in his earliest days in London, or as Johnson himself had described William Collins who “came to London a literary adventurer, with many projects in his head, and very little money in his pocket,” forging what routes he could to literary success, or if not success, then at least to personal survival (Boswell 1791: 81, Johnson 1781: 4: 321). It is a romantic image, and some (such as Johnson) did establish themselves as writers of extraordinary talent and achievements despite their “low-life” beginnings, but most of them were “adventurers” in the same dubious sense that D’Israeli’s were “projectors.” They made up for intellectual weakness with cunning and enterprise, and where these fell short their failures gave them a sharpened sense of a literary field whose intricacies they had learned so much of by hard experience. Hous e l e s s wa n de r e r s The one thing that no one doubted was the popularity of the idea of the author as a focus of critical debate. Our historical accounts of the status of authors in a modern commercial society are confronted by the palimpsestic nature of the venture: what we find, along with endless carefully narrated examples of authorship as a practice, are instances of authors posing the same questions and engaging in the same genealogical tasks

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as us, and by the late eighteenth century they generally did so in overtly commercial terms. “Sense and genius are as proper commodities to traffick in, as courage,” the Connoisseur insisted, “and an Author is no more to be condemned as an hackney scribbler, though he writes at the rate of so much per sheet, than a Colonel should be despised as a mercenary and a bravo, for exposing himself to be slashed, struck, and shot at for so much per day” (1756: 4: 77). Bristling at the idea “that it should be held reproachful in a man to live by his talent of writing,” the Critical Review took exception to James Grainer’s “heavy charge” that Tobias Smollett “depends on writing by the hour-glass for his daily bread” (1759: 7: 147). The Critical adopted the same position in its objection to the fact “that sir John Hawkins takes every occasion to lessen the merit of those authors who have written for money” in his Life of Samuel Johnson. “He does not surely think it a crime to be rewarded for mental talents? The lawyer, the physician, and the clergyman, will oppose it; and we must look in vain for the distinction” (1787: 63: 417). As the Critical’s points of comparison implied, these analyses tended to situate their discussions of the commercial realities of modern authorship in terms of what Penelope Corfield has described as the emergent discourse of professionalism.3 Having noted the extent to which overcrowding in “the three professions … Law, Physic, or Divinity” had forced many people who would normally aspire to these careers to seek their livelihood in “other employments; which, though distinct from all three, and not usually dignified with the title of Professions, may fairly be considered in the light,” the Connoisseur declared that “the first of these Professions is an Author. The mart of literature is, indeed, one of the chief resorts of unbeneficed Divines, and Lawyers and Physicians without practice” (1756: 4: 91–92). Unlike the three established professions, the idea of literary professionalism was both specific and helpfully (or worryingly) elastic. An anonymous four-part article entitled “On the History of Authors by Profession” in the first volumes of the Edinburgh periodical The Bee began by limiting its focus to those writers who were “an author by profession,” only to expand its gaze to encompass writers from “every state of society,” including “the bard and the genealogist, [who] are the professed authors of simple ages,” and before them, “the ancient philosophers” who appealed directly to the public through their lectures (1790: 1: 63). Having “avowedly and regularly [begun] to receive money for their public lectures … they, like modern authors, depended on the price paid by the public for their productions” (1791: 3: 87). This approach was, the author acknowledged, an unusual and maybe even a controversial one. “The

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bigoted veneration which surrounds these philosophers with such awful splendor, will be shocked at the audacity of him who attempts to dispel the mist, to expose them in commercial plainness, and reduce them to a modern level” (3: 54). But, the article insisted, their real worth could only be appreciated by placing “their condition as authors … in its true light” (3: 13). It was, after all, their public format which made these lectures such “bold and liberal speculations,” entirely unlike “those of modern academical institutions” (3: 87). The force of this account turned on its analysis of the impact of the changing class structure on relations between the two main types of authorship: patronage, which depended on authors “becoming objects of the munificence of individuals,” and those who supported themselves by “ministering to the pleasures of the public” (3: 13). The earliest bards belonged in the latter category, which in this article turned out to be the only one that actually merited the term “authorship” at all. “The bard must owe his subsistence to the grateful hospitality of his whole tribe. He is therefore completely in a state of authorship. He ministers pleasure to that public, from which he derives his reward. He passes from cabin to cabin, purchasing a share in their joys by the recital of his tale and his song.” This “simple and equal state,” with its blissfully unmediated relation between poet and audience, was soon destroyed though, by “the inequality of property, which so early arises in society” (3: 14). Writers quickly abandoned their earlier freedom for “an ease and a luxury, which it requires only flattery to purchase, and obsequiousness to ensure,” but however much they may have deluded themselves into viewing this as an improvement, they had actually been impoverished by their new state of “dependence” and by “the callous ignorance of a public no longer susceptible of [their writing’s] charms” (3: 14). Fortunately, this condition of alienated privilege was itself interrupted by “the dissolution of those great households which [were] the channel for patronage” even as a burgeoning marketplace multiplied the number of writers in search of support (3: 15). Overwhelmed by the expanding number of authors and unable sustain their financial largesse, patrons retreated from their role as benefactors “and the profession of letters [was] once more thrown on the public. Authorship thus closes as it had opened the progress” (3: 15). The article’s history of authors echoed Adam Smith’s insistence on the revolutionary power of commerce, not as an overtly political force, but as a set of spontaneous dynamics which altered relations of supply and demand in ways that ultimately shifted the balance of power away from feudal lords to a multitude of industrious and increasingly autonomous

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producers. But the article displaced Smith’s teleological drama of historical arrival in favour of a more pessimistic vision of ongoing circularity driven by both technological and commercial factors. Where the earliest author had appealed directly to the public, passing “from cabin to cabin” in order to share “his tale and his song,” or through public lectures, modern authors were forced to depend on the booksellers, who in effect became a new class of patrons. “A medium is now interposed between the author and the public. The profits of literature are abridged, while its professors are subjected to a new dependence” (3: 88–89). Where, for Smith, the increasingly complex division of labour was both an index and an engine of social progress, in this account it was just as explicitly the basis for a new form of alienation. But whatever one thought of the booksellers (a favourite eighteenth-century debate), the real point of the article may have been its sheer prominence, and the ambitious scope of its historical argument, over several numbers of a new literary magazine. Isaac D’Israeli’s account of why “the l i t e r a r y c h a r ac t e r has, in the present day, singularly degenerated in the public mind” in An Essay on the Manners and Genius of the Literary Character (1795) lacked the Bee article’s complexity (it tended to fixate on the discovery of “the art of printing” and the consequent “universal deluge” of writers), but it shared the latter’s emphasis on the author as a particular type of writer among the many versions which, it insisted, did not merit that designation (vii, xiv, xix). The second chapter of the Essay, entitled “On Authors,” argued that “it is necessary to distinguish between an Author, and a Writer … I shall consider that no Writer, has a just claim to the title of Author, whose c h i e f e m pl oy m e n t is not that of s t u dy and c om p o s i t ion” (3). But having aligned authorship with the once-dubious concept of paid work, D’Israeli immediately refined his own definition by insisting that this did not imply that the category ought to include “those who disgrace letters and humanity by an abject devotion to their private interests” or “those who intrude on the public notice without adequate talents” (4). All professional authors were paid for their work, but not all paid writers were professionals – or what had become the same thing, they were not really authors at all. Ironically, the theoretical challenge of “putting Literature into a history of writing”, in order to contribute to “the task of denaturalizing those still familiar formations” whose prescriptive authority is rooted in our inherited definition, is confronted by the extent to which critics in this earlier period were themselves intent on achieving precisely the opposite effect: separating out Literature (and authors) from that broader history of writing (Siskin 7). As Raymond Williams has argued,

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these processes of selection and organization have themselves become the principal focus of our investigations (Culture 184). The ideal of professional honour helped to legitimate what might otherwise be a more controversial thirst for individual glory, but critics insisted that professional honour was a collective rather than an individual possibility. Individual success ultimately depended on the respect in which authors as a group were held, and this in turn depended on the good relations which authors cultivated among themselves. In other words, self-interest was most fully apprehended when it emphasized the reciprocity (rather than the tension) between individual and collective ambitions. “Every man ought to endeavour at eminence,” Johnson insisted in a Rambler essay on “passion for the honour of a profession,” “not by pulling others down, but by raising himself, and enjoy the pleasure of his own superiority, whether imaginary or real, without interrupting others in the same felicity” (1750: 1: 42). Nor was Johnson reticent about reminding his readers of the obverse side of this lesson. Had authors not “neglected the common interest” by allowing “envy and competition” to divide “the republick of letters into factions,” he warned in another Rambler, they “might probably have escaped all censure” (1751: 1: 383). But having allowed an unnecessary disdain for others’ work to poison their relations, writers could not reasonably damn the public for having been “seized with the same passion” (1: 384). Writers had only themselves to blame if their “mutual hostilities [had] demolished those outworks which veneration had raised for their security, and exposed themselves to barbarians, by whom every region of science is equally laid waste” (1: 383). This atmosphere of mutual respect was especially important for authors, Johnson explained, because of the very nature of their craft. Other people’s “grudges and heart-burnings … though carried on with equal bitterness, and productive of greater evils,” were nonetheless “suffered to pass off and be forgotten among common and casual transactions,” but authors, by their very nature, tended to expose their mutual hostilities to all who cared to read about them, an indiscretion in which they may have been encouraged “because it gratifies the malevolence or curiosity of readers,” but which ultimately diminished both their own reputation and the distinction of the literary community as a whole (1750: 1: 191). The articulation of a collective form of social distinction entailed a tension between this emphasis on collegiality, on the one hand, and a rhetoric of standards, on the other. Recognizing the importance of cultivating harmonious relations between authors did not preclude an insistence on the need to define which people should be eligible to participate in this

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spirit of professional collegiality by separating the real authors, whose writing was their “chief employment,” from the sorts of hacks “who disgrace letters and humanity by an abject devotion to their private interests” or “who intrude on the public notice without adequate talents” (D’Israeli, Essay 1795: 4). Like many of his contemporaries, Johnson could be found on both sides of the question. But whatever his more dogmatic insistence “that he who has not obtained the proper qualifications of an authour, can have no excuse for the arrogance of writing” (except, he allowed, for those very rare cases where a writer’s literary inadequacies were mitigated by the importance of the news he or she had to convey), his interventions were frequently animated by an equally striking spirit of generosity (3: 109). Those authors who were blessed with a more philosophical understanding of the implications of all of this ought not to “imagine that another is ill employed, because, for want of fuller knowledge of his business, he is not able to comprehend its dignity” (1750: 1: 42). Not everyone could contribute to the republic of letters in similar ways, and the various genres within which they toiled could never be stripped of their hierarchical relations, he acknowledged, but none of this ought to negate authors’ equal right to professional esteem. Nor, Johnson warned his more successful peers, should they console themselves that they were merely acting charitably towards less deserving colleagues: [S]ince no man, however high he may now stand, can be certain that he shall not be soon thrown down from his elevation by criticism or caprice, the common interest of learning requires that her sons should cease from intestine hostilities, and instead of sacrificing each other to malice and contempt, endeavour to avert persecution from the meanest of their fraternity. (1751: 2: 115–16)

Johnson was not alone in emphasizing the strategic importance of this vision of a shared professional esteem, or in warning about the dangers authors faced if they ignored their common interests. “It is difficult to repress our indignation at this envy of writers, who should look for that support from each other, which is sometimes unjustly denied them by the world,” D’Israeli agreed. “In contemplating on this subject, we are struck with the same horror as if, looking into a nest of doves, we beheld vipers hissing at each other” (Literary 1801: 33). Having lamented the fact that the republic of letters was not a distinguished community of “the learned … united into a single body, joining their interests, and concurring in the same design” as its name seemed to imply, Goldsmith took similar exception to the acrimony which divided its members. “They calumniate, they injure, they despise, they ridicule each other … Thus, instead of uniting like the members of a commonwealth, they are divided into almost as many factions as there

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are men; and their jarring constitution, instead of being styled a republic of letters, should be entitled an anarchy of literature” (1762: 2: 84). Crabbe balanced his account of the “hard … fate” of modern authors with a similar plea that they embrace the “common cause” of their shared interests (NewsPaper 1785: 3).4 All of this was especially important because literature’s notoriously unregulated nature stood in growing contrast with other professions’ development of the sorts of formal organizational structures and membership criteria that would ensure their collective dignity. Deprived of the institutional safeguards or “qualifications” (Johnson’s word) that helped to ensure the integrity and therefore the respect of other professions, writers had to make up the difference by emphasizing a spirit of collegiality in the service of their own high standards of professionalism.“Every other body of ingenious men (whether the corporation of useful mechanics, or the society of great artists) are allowed some common association; some domestic seat devoted to the genius of their profession, where they are mutually enlightened and consoled,” D’Israeli complained in his Essay on the Manners and Genius of the Literary Character (1795). “Men of letters,” on the other hand, remained “‘houseless wanderers’ … scattered and solitary, disunited and languid; whose talents are frequently unknown to their companions, and by the inertness of an unhappy situation, often unperceived by themselves.” This degree of alienation made it all the more remarkable that“those men in the nation who are most familiar with each other’s conceptions, and most capable of reciprocal esteem, are those who are often most estranged” (2). None of these concerns about rancour within the community prevented authors from insisting on their unrivalled social importance. “Wherever the liberty of the press is established,” D’Israeli insisted, “authors form as powerful a class in society, as the highest” (Essay 184). “The chief glory of every people arises from its authours,” Johnson declared in the Preface to his Dictionary (1755: 5: 49–50). “The authors of the present age, though perhaps in some respects inferior to those of the past, claim the merit of having employed their talents on subjects of greater importance,” the European Magazine suggested. “Good writing has become the vehicle of instruction, as well as the instrument of pleasure. Philosophy is extended to subjects of general utility; and authors, not satisfied with amusing individuals, have endeavoured to enlighten nations” (1782: 2: 374). A letter to The Bee contrasted “the grand revolution [of] the mind,” which it linked to the invention of “the art of printing,” with the “fluctuating and unstable” nature of “the revolutions that have taken place with regard to

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government in America and France” (1791: 3: 190). Accounts of authors’ influence embraced their role as unacknowledged legislators in terms that ranged from the strikingly prosaic to evocations that bordered on the elevated rhetoric of Percy Shelley’s tribute to the prophetic imagination. Citing Sophocles’ claim that “opinion is the sovereign of man,” D’Israeli insisted that an eloquent author, who writes in the immutable language of truth, will one day be superior to every power in the state. His influence is active, though hidden; every truth is an acorn which is laid in the earth, and which often the longer it takes to rise, the more vigorous and magnificent will be it’s [sic] maturity. What has been long meditated in the silence of the study, will one day resound in the aweful voice of public opinion. The chief magistrate can command; the senator can persuade; the judge can decide; the soldier can conquer. A great author obtains these various purposes at once by his solitary labours. (Essay 1795: 175–76)

What may be most striking about Shelley’s description of poets is its lack of originality. “An author may be considered as a merciful substitute to the legislature,” Goldsmith declared in slightly less poetic terms. “He acts not by punishing crimes, but preventing them” (1759: 1: 444). “I consider you as supplemental to the law of the land,” a letter in the World agreed. “I take your authority to begin, where the power of the law ends” (1753: 1: 106). Idealistic accounts of the importance of authors were reinforced by a more fundamental emphasis on the idea of “the author” as a cherished and knowable social role, and with it, by a tightening of the connections between text and author that Foucault associates with the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (124). “Every reader is possessed with an inclination to become acquainted with, at least, the name of an author, whose production he peruses with approbation,” the Critical insisted. “We are desirous of attaching esteem to the person of an ingenious writer; we love to compare the lineaments of his mind with the features of his face, and thus to make trial of our own sagacity in physiognomy” (1759: 8: 341). “There are few books on which more time is spent by young students, than on treatises which deliver the characters of authors,” Johnson agreed (1: 432). The canonizing effects of texts such as Johnson’s Life of Mr. Richard Savage (1769) and Lives of the Poets (1779–81), and of editions such as Andrew Millar’s The Works of Henry Fielding, Esq; With the Life of the Author (1763) – an “elegant monument erected to his memory” which was “embellished … by a masterly print of that author” by Hogarth – were complemented by more modest but equally reverential accounts of

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particular authors month after month in literary magazines such as the European (Critical 1763: 14: 1). These sorts of publications were reinforced by a series of encyclopaedic works such as William Rider’s relatively modest Historical and Critical Account of the Lives and Writings of the Living Authors of GreatBritain (1762), a Catalogue of Five Hundred Celebrated Authors of Great Britain, Now Living (1788), David Rivers’ two-volume Literary Memoirs of Living Authors of Great Britain (1798), and, the year after, the unfinished A New Catalogue of Living English Authors: with Complete Lists of Their Publications, and Biographical and Critical Memoirs (only the first volume, which ended part way through “C,” ever appeared). The breadth of these encyclopaedic accounts actively resisted the canonizing effects of more exclusively focused works, but they shared the latter’s tendency to encourage readers to value literature primarily as a manifestation of the inventive power of its creator: an outward sign of the inner genius of the author.5 Regardless of the particulars of these various lists and tributes, their sheer force of repetition ensured that readers understood the idea of “the author” in newly intimate and rarefied ways. But ironically, this cult of “the author” as a knowable and revered figure only compounded real authors’ problems. If “the L i t e r a r y c h a rac t e r” had “singularly degenerated in the public mind,” this was as much because of authors’ popularity as of their neglect. In a world dominated by the excesses of fashion, writers had been degraded to the level of a favourite spectacle. “Men of the world are curious to have a glance at a celebrated Author, as they would be at some uncommon animal,” D’Israeli complained. “He is therefore sometimes exhibited, and spectators are invited. A croud of frivolists gaze at a Man of Letters, and catch the sounds of his ideas, as children regard the reflections of a magic lanthorn” (Essay 1795: xvii). “People who are not apt to write themselves, have a strange curiosity to see a l i v e au t hor ,” the World agreed in a favourite set piece in which an author flounders miserably, having been introduced into fashionable society (1754: 3: 182). “There is no character in human life, which is the subject of more frequent speculation among the vulgar, than an Author,” echoed the Connoisseur in its own ironic revision of this scenario, which recalled the editor’s misplaced excitement as a young child, having been introduced to a real author. I could not help whispering to myself the whole evening, “I am in company with an Author,” and waited with the most anxious impatience to hear him deliver something, that might distinguish him from the rest of mankind. The gentleman behaved with great chearfulness and politeness: but he did not at all answer

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the idea, which I had conceived of an Author; and I went away exceedingly disappointed, because I could not find any striking difference between him and the rest of my acquaintance. (1756: 4: 72–73)

Not only did authors suffer from the misguided expectations of “men of the world,” but they were also by their nature superbly unqualified to shine in a culture of display. “Absorbed in his meditations” and inclined to live “in one continued series of reflection,” “the man of genius … appears awkward or ignorant of those petty attentions which form the science of those who have no science” (D’Israeli, Essay 1795: 88). Introduced into polite society, “the man of genius sits like a melancholy eagle whose pinions are clipped, and who is placed to roost among domestic fowls” (Essay 92). “A transition from an author’s books to his conversation, is too often like an entrance into a large city, after a distant prospect,” Johnson agreed. “Remotely, we see nothing but spires of temples, and turrets of palaces, and imagine it the residence of splendour, grandeur, and magnificence; but, when we have passed the gates, we find it perplexed with narrow passages, disgraced with despicable cottages, embarrassed with obstructions, and clouded with smoke” (1750: 1: 69–70). Worse still, if authors, as a kind of occupational hazard, tended to be “diffident and bashful,” having spent “that season of life in which the manners are to be softened into ease, and polished into elegance … in the privacies of study,” it was the charlatans, the unqualified opportunists and superficial thinkers who tended to shine most successfully outside of the literary world (1: 69). “The man of real genius” will inevitably be overshadowed, D’Israeli continued, left sitting “awkwardly and silently on his chair” while attention is lavished on “the intriguing and fashionable author, whose heart is more corrupt than his head, [and who] is admired because he has discovered the art of admiring” (Essay 1795: 88–89). “The frivolist author will be the evening favourite” (92). Handicapped by too much of the wrong kinds of attention and overshadowed by the wrong kinds of writers, authors remained unknown in any way that reflected their real worth, a state of ignorance which they themselves were prone to perpetuate. “The importance of an author in society, is yet so little known, that it is rarely apparent even to authors themselves,” D’Israeli lamented (Essay 5). James Ralph’s The Case of Authors by Profession or Trade, Stated (1758) struck a familiar note in its insistence that “if Heroes and Patriots constitute the first Column of National Glory, Authors of Genius constitute the second,” but, Ralph insisted, this glory only added to the insulting double edge of the stigmas which plagued an author: “he is laugh’d at if poor; if to avoid that Curse, he endeavours to

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turn his Wit to Profit, he is branded as a Mercenary” (3, 58). “All know that an author is a thing only to be laughed at,” Goldsmith agreed. “His person, not his jest, becomes the mirth of the company. At his approach, the most fat unthinking face, brightens into malicious meaning. Even aldermen laugh, and revenge on him, the ridicule which was lavished on their forefathers” (1759: 1: 440). This, then, was the predicament of modern authors: to be mocked for their poverty and derided for their wealth, to sit “awkwardly and silently” while the “fashionable author … is admired,” to be part of “as powerful a class in society, as the highest” but laughed at by aldermen. Any account of modern authorship would need to resolve these tensions if it was going to be both attractive and convincing. T h e h ig h wa y s of l i t e r at u r e The easiest response to so much misunderstanding and mockery was defiance, a recoil into the certainties of Romantic solitude. If readers proved to be annoyingly resistant to the prospect of having their tastes created for them, writers could align themselves with the emergent category that would become known as culture in ways that absolved their work of the taint of its status as a commodity, in part by divorcing themselves from the social world of actual people intent on real forms of gratification in favour of a more abstract notion of “the People, philosophically characterized” (Wordsworth 1815: 662). Archibald Alison hailed the man of taste as someone “who, from the noise and tumult of vulgar joy, often hasten[s] to retire to solitude and silence, where they may yield with security to … illusions of Imagination” (1790: 117).6 But not all writers sought to flee the “vulgar joy” of the crowd into the reassuring abstractions of “the People, philosophically characterized” or the sanctuary of “solitude and silence.” Nor did the alternative need to be an uncritical embrace of commercial cynicism. The problem could be contained more satisfactorily through a rhetoric of commercial humanism which gained its persuasive force by synthesizing the claims of civic humanism and bourgeois liberalism as dominant but competing accounts of virtue.7 Bourgeois liberalism’s stress on personal industry as the only basis for any kind of real usefulness ran directly against the grain of civic humanism’s emphasis on leisure (the sort of leisure that was specifically associated with landed wealth rather than with the mushroom fortunes of upwardly mobile social climbers) as a necessary precondition for the development of a capacity for general knowledge and, therefore, for public virtue. But if these two perspectives,

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marked by their alternative emphases on industry and leisure, could never be reconciled, then as David Solkin has argued, they could be hybridized in the service of an ideology of professionalism by developing a sufficiently complex theory of motivation. People might write for pay, it was true, but also (and perhaps ultimately) out of a love of the work itself, out of a desire to see it done well and because they recognized its potential importance to others. The mistake would be to conceive of these commitments as though they were mutually exclusive. “The Writer who serves himself and the Public together, has as good a Right to the Product in Money of his Abilities, as the Landholder to his Rent, or the MoneyJobber to his Interest,” Ralph suggested. This model had the double benefit of outflanking both of its most obvious alternatives. Not to expect payment was to risk being dismissed as a trifler, one of the “VoluntierWriters” ridiculed by Ralph as mere “Holiday-Writers” from whom no one could expect anything substantial (1758: 8). But to write only for payment was to be oblivious to the reasons why doing good work mattered, to one’s self and to all of those who benefited (even in ways that they themselves did not recognize) when it was done well. The expectation of payment, in other words, was a necessary but not a sufficient criterion for authorship. It affirmed one’s place in a modern commercial world but its secondary importance also measured one’s distance from the excesses of such “a busy, bustling time.” In his essay “On Adorning Life by Some Laudable Exertion,” Vicesimus Knox warned that a refined society diminished the “scope for public spirit” in the older, purely disinterested terms favoured by civic humanists: “Moral and political knight-errantry would appear in scarcely a less ludicrous light than the extravagancies of chivalry” (Essays 1778: 2: 390). But, he argued, this diminution of the opportunity for selfless commitment to the public good ought not to be interpreted as eradicating the possibility of a moral imperative altogether. Quite the contrary, it had produced a paradigm shift that had ultimately renewed rather than undermined the idea of public service but in strikingly new terms by highlighting the need “to do good in an effectual and extensive manner within the limits of professional influence and by performing the business of a station, whatever it may be, not only with regular fidelity, but with warm and active diligence (2: 390–91). Warming to his subject, Knox celebrated this “professional” commitment to virtue as part of “the business of a station” in terms which seemed, by the end of his account, to be little less heroic than the “extravagancies of chivalry” he had rejected as outmoded. Acknowledging the “thousand pleasures and advantages we have

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received from the disinterested efforts of those who have gone before,” Knox insisted that “it is incumbent on us to do something in our generation, both for the benefit of contemporaries and of those who are to follow” (2: 391). Adopting a similar rhetorical stance in his essay “On Literary Industry,” D’Israeli sought to cleanse the idea of industry of the sort of “mean” associations that would be “more appropriate to mechanical labours” by celebrating a more dignified form of industry which amounted to “a continued exercise of the noblest faculties.” Doing so enabled D’Israeli to articulate a model of labour that was clearly distinct from “mechanical assiduity” on the one hand, and from a misguided faith in “genius … as inspiration” on the other. The problem with talk about “genius” was that it tended to overlook the crucial role of hard work in literary productivity. Dismissing the vogue for “original geniuses” as little more than a symptom of his age’s fashionable love of easy distractions, D’Israeli insisted that “inspired geniuses have never survived the transient season of popular wonder” (Literary 1801: 219). “None but mad Bards dream of inspiration,” he argued in an attack on the “romance of original powers” (210–11). Not that D’Israeli was rejecting the idea of “the operations of genius” (225) or of “work[s] of genius” (207) or the excellence of “a real genius” (226) altogether. But real genius, he insisted, must be understood in terms of the value of hard work rather than “original powers”: not a “mean” or “mechanical” form of labour, it was true, but the “slow and gradual renovations of industry” all the same (225). D’Israeli’s highly qualified version of industry enabled him to ground his discussion of creative achievement firmly in the modern world of working life without relinquishing creativity’s hierarchical associations. If the moral authority of civic humanism was predicated on a particular type of leisure (that which was afforded by landed wealth), commercial humanism legitimated itself by privileging a correspondingly narrow version of labour: all successful authors were necessarily industrious, but not all forms of industry were equally dignified. “To write, is mechanical; but to be an Author is no easy matter,” Paterson agreed (Joineriana 1772: 1: 30). This is, of course, a fairly standard version of literary professionalism. The problem with it, however, was the gap that these sorts of accounts exposed between its morally lofty rhetoric of “disinterested” service, even on behalf of future generations, and the workaday realities of “that unprosperous race of men commonly called men of letters,” as Adam Smith described them in Wealth of Nations (1776: 1: 148). Knox’s argument that “[m]oral and knight-errantry” had given way to a more practical

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insistence on the need “to do good … within the limits of professional influence” lapsed into the chivalric language of “disinterested” service to others; D’Israeli’s stress on “industry” may have represented a significant challenge to loftier approaches to cultural production as a purely abstract phenomenon, but as his description gained momentum it began to sound far more like a rarefied account of “genius” than it did the workday efforts of actual writers. The rhetorical strengths which made these accounts attractive also helped to make them irrelevant as descriptions of the working lives of most authors, and therefore useless as a means of establishing a compelling basis for authors’ social distinction. Johnson’s very different account of the “several thousands” of writers currently working in London, who “live unrewarded and die unpitied, and who have long been exposed to insult without a defender, and to censure without an apologist,” was animated by a realism which exposed the full extent of the irrelevance of these elevated portraits of literary labour to most authors (1751: 2: 114). Far from obeying some “impulse of genius,” he insisted, the usual reason these “manufacturers of literature” had chosen writing as a trade was simply “that they have tried some other without success.” Few of them could be said “to produce, or to endeavour to produce, new ideas, to extend any principle of science, or gratify the imagination with any uncommon train of images or contexture of events.” Their “summons to composition” was determined, not by the unpredictable sway of poetic inspiration or by some noble concern for future generations, but “by the sound of the clock.” Nor were they deluded about any of these shortcomings. These “drudges of the pen” made up for their weaknesses as authors with a kind of hard won self-knowledge (2: 114). Far from dreaming of creating a “monument of learning, which neither time nor envy shall be able to destroy … their productions are seldom intended to remain in the world longer than a week” (2: 114, 115). They “have been too long hackneyed in the ways of men to indulge the chimerical ambition of immortality” (2: 114). But this sort of admission was less a disavowal of the rhetoric of professionalism altogether than the starting point of a very different and more engaged version of the ideal. Far from surrendering to these problems, many authors made a virtue out of necessity or, in the language of eighteenth-century discussions of moral authority, made their necessity (in the modern commercial sense) into the cornerstone of a new paradigm of virtue by embracing their “dependent and constrained” state as the true basis of distinction in ways that these loftier accounts of commercial humanism never could. If, as Chartier argued, the author was “dependent in that he is not the unique

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master of the meaning of the text,” this reliance on others’ interpretations was nothing less than a metonym of the ideal of polite sociability itself: a recognition of the paramount importance of cultivating mutually accommodating forms of behaviour in a transactional world which aligned virtue with appropriate forms of commerce (social and intellectual as much as economic) rather than with subjective autonomy. As J. G. A. Pocock has argued about the nature of subjectivity in a commercial society generally, “the individual could exist, even in his own sight, only at the fluctuating value imposed upon him by his fellows” (Machiavellian 464). If the author was “constrained in that he undergoes the multiple determinations that organize the social space of literary production and that, in a more general sense, determine the categories and the experiences that are the very matrices of writing,” this was nothing more than admitting that authors were immersed in the division of labour, with all of its pressures and limitations, the same as almost everyone else. In such a relentlessly transactional world, mediation counted for more than abstraction, or what William Cowper had embraced as the “secure and more than mortal height” from which authors “behold / The tumult” (Task 1785: 142). Authors mattered, not because they were somehow “more than mortal” but because they were relevant; they were able to speak to others’ concerns (and were therefore worth listening to) because they shared those concerns as the very basis of their work. Their virtue resided not in the modified forms of transcendence which sanctified commercial humanism as an exalted basis for professional authorship, but because they were subject to the same kinds of constraints as the vast bulk of their readers, with whom, after all, they were bound up in relations of mutual dependence, both as collaborative interpreters of texts and, far more fundamentally, as participants in a much broader process of collective self-fashioning. Authors, it turned out, were not much different from any other types of entrepreneur selling their wares on the open market: “We sympathise with the merchant when he communicates melancholy to the social circle in consequence of a bankruptcy, or when he feels the elation of prosperity at the success of a vast speculation. The author is not less immersed in cares, or agitated by success, for literature has it’s bankruptcies and it’s speculations” (D’Israeli, Essay 1795: 104). Echoing Adam Smith’s famous account of a pin factory as the ultimate act of economic demystification, D’Israeli insisted that “any particular pursuit, from the manufacturing of pins, to the construction of philosophical systems, appears susceptible of similar pleasures” (Literary 1801: 240). “The art of printing was itself discovered, not by the enlarged views of public utility, but by fortunate

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circumstances concurring with the desire of private and pecuniary advantage,” Knox suggested (Winter 1785: 1: 358). Romanticizing the low-life of literature as picturesque adventure, Herbert Croft’s 1779 periodical entitled the Literary Fly (short-lived, despite the distribution of 10,000 free copies of the first issue) employed a conceit which embraced authors’ immersion in the pressures and opportunities of their day. Playing on the idea of a periodical magazine as a public carriage (no less than “the C a r r i ag e of B r i t i s h L i t e r at u r e ,” he announced on his first page), Croft’s opening number depicted a lively scene of cultural traffic on “the highways of Literature” (4). There was news, the Literary Fly reported, of “an old Elegy” travelling “up from Oxford,” of “a Poem written for Mr. Seaton’s prize, and an Essay on the mathematics” “in a returned hearse … from Cambridge,” and of “two lame irregular Pindaric Odes … trudg[ing] it on foot – from Holyhead.” The scene culminated in word of “a promising train of literary artillery” travelling down from Edinburgh: a tall, slender, emaciated History on horseback, with a bold young dog of an Epic Poem before, and a fretful, whining, dirty-nosed Tragedy clinging behind. This group was attended by a patient jack-ass loaded with natural philosophy and politics, poetry and metaphysics, bread and cheese similies and systems; episodes, problems, metaphors, and cold meat; in short, with all the motley baggage and bastard brood of Literature. (2)

Revelling in the ignominy of this motley baggage and bastard brood, writers such as Croft flaunted their own entrepreneurial instincts in ways that ran directly against the grain of appeals to correct taste as a standard of judgement; they were part of “the noise and tumult of vulgar joy” rather than “the solitude and silence” of a refined imagination. T h e c row d of l i f e Authors embraced this vision of necessity as virtue by insisting on social immersion as the only basis of knowledge appropriate to the kinds of cultural and economic intersubjectivity which characterized a polite commercial society. If the meaning of texts, like the idea of value itself, had become the product of interpretive communities that spilled over beyond the bounds of easy demarcation, then the only sort of knowledge that could possibly be worth communicating – the kind of knowledge that they associated with a microcosmopolitan literature – would need to develop out of a practice of social engagement which reflected this sense of mutuality. “It is universally confessed that learning is an invaluable

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acquisition,” a letter to the Gentleman’s acknowledged, but, it warned, “a continual intercourse with books, without the possession of a distinct knowledge of mankind, is at best but an incomplete endowment. It is not the life of a college makes a wise man, where abstruse researches are made into the depths of philosophy, and where remote reflections and observations on the manners of humanity are so rarely encouraged.” In this sort of sequestered environment: if any knowledge of the world is acquired, it is gained, as Dryden expresses it, through the spectacle of books – it is made through a mist of obscurity … So enchanting is the knowledge of humanity, and so prevailing is its influence, that the wise man, without it, is encumbered and fastidious; without it, he can neither feel nor express the sensations of the heart; he cannot paint them from logic, nor sympathise with them from retirement; they confine his ideas, let him expand them as far as he may; they restrain his faculties, let him exert them to ever so violent a degree.

It was not enough, the correspondent insisted, to be “taught to penetrate … into the bosom of antiquity, or through a profundity of sciences”; the “wise man” must be “humanized by the world” in order to be able “to fathom the hearts of mankind, to distinguish sophistication from truth, and absurdity and weakness from philanthropy and benevolence” (1786: 56: 755). “An extensive communication with the world is as necessary to the truth of reflexions on mankind, as a variety of experiments is to the knowledge of natural philosophy,” the Monthly Review agreed (1784: 70: 199). Goldsmith traced the decline in “ancient polite learning” to scholars’ separation “from common sense … Men bred up among books, and seeing nature only by reflection, could do little except hunt after perplexity and confusion” (1: 403). It was true, Knox admitted, that these arguments did little to ameliorate the sting of authors’ poverty: “no kind of writing in the present age is peculiarly fit for making a fortune. Auctioneers, dancing-masters, quack-doctors, dentists, balloonists, actresses, opera dancers, equestrian performers, perfumers, these are they whom the British nation either honours with fame, or rewards with affluence” (Winter 1785: 1: 33–34). But this insight did not extend itself to an elitist recoil from the business of everyday life. Like Goldsmith and the contributors to the Gentleman’s and the Monthly, Knox rejected “the erudition which is confined to a few libraries, or locked in the bosom of a few scholars” as having “small value to the public at large, and consequently, when viewed with an eye to the general welfare of society, of little estimation” (1: 6). Authors whose knowledge was gained by sheltering themselves from the distractions of

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the world and whose writings appealed to an equally select audience were like “a stagnant pool, large perhaps and deep, but of little utility; while the knowledge which displays itself in popular works may be said to resemble a river, fertilizing, refreshing, and embellishing whole provinces, through which its delightful meanders roll their tide” (1: 7). They may have been overshadowed by the far greater attraction of dancing-masters and perfumers, auctioneers and equestrian performers, but even so, authors had no choice but to embrace the “popular” world if their writing was to have any real value. Where denunciations of commerce tended to fixate on urban life as a corrupt source of “irregular Desires,” these celebrations of the importance of common life embraced the city as a “populous university” in which the complexity of modern life could be fully appreciated, in stark contrast to “the common or combination room. The bursar’s books are the only manuscripts of any value produced in many colleges” (Monthly 1783: 68: 306). “Learning is much more advanced in populous cities, where chance often conspires with industry to promote it,” Goldsmith agreed, “where the members of this large university, if I may so call it, catch manners as they rise, study life, not logic, and have the world for correspondents” (1759: 1: 461). To resist immersion in favour of the cloistered virtue of college life or the specialist authority of a particular profession was to be a pedant rather than a purist: devoid of the companionable habits that would enable a person to enjoy the fellowship of his peers, and preoccupied with a form of knowledge that was too arcane or too narrow to interest more than handful of people anyway. Luckily, “an extensive communication with the world” was the best source not only of knowledge but of personal fulfilment as well. “Men were born to live in society; and from society only can happiness be derived,” the Lounger counselled. “Let not one disappointment, nor even a series of disappointments, induce them to abandon the common road of life” (1785: 30). “Man is not born to continue merely an individual separate from the rest of his species, but should look upon himself as the member of one common body,” a Trifler essay in the Gentleman’s Magazine insisted in almost identical terms (1786: 56: 119). Objecting to scholars’ tendency “to look on the common business of the world” with “disdain,” and to their “unwillingness” to “condescend to learn what is not to be found in any system of philosophy,” Johnson agreed that whatever reverence “abstruse researches and remote discoveries” might excite in some minds pleasure is not given, nor affection conciliated, but by softer accomplishments, and qualities more easily communicable to those about us. He that can only

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converse upon questions, about which only a small part of mankind has knowledge sufficient to make them curious, must lose his days in unsocial silence, and live in the crowd of life without a companion … No degree of knowledge attainable by man is able to set him above the want of hourly assistance. (1751: 2: 75–76)

Not only were there more kinds of knowledge than the “abstruse” sort favoured by philosophers, but knowledge itself could never compensate for the value of companionship in a world where people were more dependent on each other than ever. However intense some critics’ aversion to “the noise and tumult of vulgar joy” may have been, more judicious authors (so this argument went) understood the importance of not turning their back on “the crowd of life” if they wanted to enjoy the blessings of social ties or even to have any kinds of insights worth conveying. Isolation from the world in favour of “academies where nothing but learning confers honours” might facilitate the pursuit of a particular type of knowledge, but only in a very narrow way that was ultimately negated by its tendency to encourage a more general “ignorance of things which are known to all but themselves” (2: 75). Invoking Bacon on the side of his insistence on the need to ground learning in this broader fabric of people’s daily lives, Johnson insisted that “the student must learn by commerce with mankind to reduce his speculations to practice and accommodate his knowledge to the purposes of life” (2: 75). To “hover at a distance round the world” was to “know it only by conjecture and speculation,” and therefore not really to know it at all (2: 36).8 Cowper might well congratulate himself that his “more than mortal height … lib’rates and exempts me from … all the world’s] concerns,” but from another perspective it was also a recipe for ignorance about the most formative aspects of the human condition (Task 1785: 142). Johnson carried this argument to its logical extreme in an Adventurer essay which argued that, paradoxically, it was precisely because fashion was so arbitrary, so devoid of explicable origins, and therefore so prone to change in endless unpredictable ways, that “the studious tribe” needed to embrace “the common intercourses of life” (1754: 3: 131). “The greater part” of fashions “have grown up by chance; been started by caprice, been contrived by affectation, or borrowed without any just motives from other countries.” But ironically, the larger effect of fashion was as salutary as individual fashions themselves were affected or capricious. Collectively, they amounted to the mediating force which made civilized society possible. “By the observation of those trifles it is, that the ranks of mankind are kept in order, that the address of one to another is regulated, and the

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general business of the world carried on with facility and method” (3: 132). Writing which ignored the importance of this irony could have little of value to contribute. But precisely because “the manners of the world are not on a regular system,” an appreciation of the reigning fashions could not be gained “by private meditation” but must be learned through an active social existence. Like the ironic accounts which punctured grandiose notions of literature’s role in promoting the Enlightenment dream of the diffusion of knowledge by recasting this ideal in the less intellectual rhythms of daily life, authors negotiated the gap between rarefied self-descriptions and the degraded conditions of their actual working lives by revelling in self-parodies which exposed their worst complaints as deluded vanity. From the opportunists who made up the Club of Authors in Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World to the “little elderly man, with a very serious countenance, and exceedingly foul linen” who imposed himself on the Microcosm’s pseudonymous editor, Gregory Griffin, explaining “that he was by profession an Author; [and] that he had been for many years a literary projector,” these satirical figures anticipated in advance the worst sneers of the age (Goldsmith 1762: 2: 126–32; Microcosm 1787: 2: 165). Descriptions of these writers’ tendency to blame their failures on the degraded state of current taste simultaneously heightened the absurdity of their vanity and, more importantly, called into question misanthropic accounts of cultural decline by recasting these charges as the pathetic excuse of frustrated entrepreneurs. Having declared his “firm resolution … never to indulge the trivial taste of an ill-judging age, in which it was his misfortune to be born,” the literary projector depicted in the Microcosm “at length concluded by drawing out of a tin box some ‘proposals for publication,’ which he desired might be communicated to the public through the medium of my paper” (2: 165, 168). The “Club of Authors” turned out to be an equally opportunistic assembly of deluded egotists, as indignant at each others’ unwillingness to pay full homage to their own genius as they were unanimous in bewailing the difficulty of making it past the “surly porter or footman” in their quests for patronage (Goldsmith 1762: 2: 129). If Johnson’s Lives of the Poets has rightly been credited with a central role in the canonization, not just of particular authors, but of the more fundamental ideal of “the author” itself, his depictions of authors in his periodical writing often had precisely the opposite effect. Rambler No. 16 featured a letter from a “modest young man” (who signed himself M i s e l l us) bemoaning the “numerous inconveniences which I have … brought upon myself” by following the Rambler’s advice to test his

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fortunes as an author by publishing his work. The problem was not, the young man explained, that he had failed but rather, now that he was “known to be an author,” the far more dire fate of being “condemned, irreversibly condemned, to all the miseries of high reputation” (1750: 1: 77). Having bought a rapidly growing number of flatterers their dinner as recompense for their generous praise, he found himself not just out of pocket, but what was almost worse, deprived of “the pleasure of mixing, upon equal terms, with the rest of the world. As soon as I enter the room, I see part of the company raging with envy, which they endeavour to conceal, sometimes with the appearance of laughter, and sometimes with that of contempt” (1: 78). And his admirers were as bad as his “enemies.” However diligently he had tried, “since the appearance of my work, not to give myself more premeditated airs of superiority, than the most rigid humility might allow,” it was not impossible that I may sometimes have laid down my opinion, in a manner that shewed a consciousness of my ability to maintain it, or interrupted the conversation, when I saw its tendency, without suffering the speaker to waste his time in explaining his sentiments; and, indeed, I did indulge myself for two days in a custom of drumming with my fingers, when the company began to lose themselves in absurdities, or to encroach upon subjects which I knew them unqualified to discuss. (1: 78–79)

The result was a miserable solitude which owed itself entirely to the world’s “dread of uncommon powers.” I have now for some days found myself shunned by all my acquaintance. If I knock at a door, nobody is at home; if I enter a coffee-house, I have the box to myself. I live in the town like a lion in his desert, or an eagle on his rock, too great for friendship or society, and condemned to solitude by unhappy elevation and dreaded ascendancy. (1: 79)

But not even this was the end of his problems. Sounding more and more like the most familiar stereotypes of Johnson himself, the young author explained that his “character” was not “only formidable to others, but burden-some to myself. I naturally love to talk without much thinking … but such is now the importance of my opinion, that I am afraid to offer it, lest, by being established too hastily into a maxim, it should be the occasion of error to half the nation” (1: 79). All too aware of how badly literary celebrities such as Pope and Swift had been exploited, this author explained that he had had to resort to frequent wig changes and wearing a hat over his eyes in order to frustrate the “eleven painters [who] are now dogging me, for they know that he who can get my face first will make his fortune,” and,

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in order to secure his papers from theft, storing them “in an iron chest … fixed [with] a padlock” and changing “my lodging five times a week” (1: 80). This, he explained, “ it is to soar above the rest of mankind” (1: 80). There was, of course, something usefully disarming about these satirical accounts. Irony opened up critical distance, and critical distance could, in turn, rehabilitate the possibility of professional dignity. No alderman could imagine jokes about authors that authors such as Johnson had not already thought of (and published) themselves. And the ability to write so acutely about authors’ delusions suggested precisely that kind of self-knowledge which qualified a person for “the pleasure of mixing, upon equal terms, with the rest of the world.” To be so capable of laughing at one’s self as a member of a profession which was not without its foibles was to locate one’s self at the opposite end of the spectrum of those miserable pedants whose lives were marred by a frigid unsociability or a deluded vanity. S c at t e r e d s e e d s One complication with this appealing respect for “the common business of the world” lay in the widely shared view that authors, as an unavoidable consequence of their particular type of work and often by their very nature, tended to be solitary. “The life of a literary man, employed in cultivating the powers of his taste and his understanding, or of a clergyman instructing his people in the duties of religion and virtue, cannot afford much matter for the historian or biographer,” the European Magazine remarked in its account of Hugh Blair (1783: 4: 201). “In the life of one devoted to literature there is seldom to be recorded either incident or adventure,” it repeated in its comments on Hannah Cowley (1789: 15: 428). An account of Charles Rogers in the 1784 Gentleman’s noted that he had “passed a long and useful life so much confined within the bounds of science and official duty, that no events of importance can be expected in the detail of it” (54: 159). “The life here presented to the public, furnishes, indeed, but few striking incidents; it is the life of a mere scholar, unchequered with variety, and spent in the acquisition of knowledge,” the Critical explained in its review of Select Remains of the Learned John Ray, M.A. and R.F.R.S. With his Life (1761: 11: 92). Nor was this fate always reserved for those of lesser fame. “The life of Sir William Blackstone is, like that of every other scholar, little varied by uncommon events, and seldom relieved by splendid accidents,” the Critical suggested in its review of Baron Glenbervie’s Biographical History of Sir William Blackstone, Late One of the Justices of Both Benches (1784: 57: 95).

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These sorts of observations begged the obvious question: how, if authors had no life worth speaking of, could it make sense to talk of their immersion in the world around them? How could one make a convincing argument for the place of lives that were so bereft of “incident or adventure” within “the crowd of life”? Could such mundane existences really be part of an age that was so obsessively devoted to novelty and display? An answer of one kind lay in the European’s fairly standard observation about the printer William Bowyer that “a life passed with the uniformity of a man of business, seldom affords any remarkable incidents; and Mr. Bowyer’s was as little varied as any person who ever devoted himself to letters, or to a profession” (1782: 2: 433). However flamboyant the excesses of the fashionable classes, professional lives tended to be characterized by the same uneventful routines as those of authors. And in an age when periodical writers insisted that “those who are doomed to have no historian” were the most worthy of attention because their stories, uneventful though they might have been by traditional standards, resonated more profoundly with others, authors’ relative anonymity enhanced rather than undermined their commonality with those around them. Once again it was Johnson, writing in the Rambler, who urged this case most forcefully. Objections that “the scholar who passed his life among his books, the merchant who conducted only his own affairs, the priest, whose sphere of action was not extended beyond that of his duty, are considered as no proper objects of public regard” arose “from false measures of excellence and dignity” (1: 283). Returning to the same question in an Idler essay, Johnson expanded on his argument that the common assumption “that the uniformity of a studious life affords no matter for a narration” missed the crucial point “that of the most studious life a great part passes without study. An authour partakes of the common condition of humanity; he is born and married like another man; he has hopes and fears, expectations and disappointments, griefs and joys, and friends and enemies, like a courtier or a statesman” (1760: 2: 676). Authors’ importance was to be measured, not by the exceptional nature of their work but, on the contrary, by the fact that their lives (professional and personal) were so admirably routine. However precarious their fate may have been, it was precisely this vulnerability – their “hopes and fears, expectations and disappointments, griefs and joys” – that ensured authors’ ultimate significance. Recasting the still too rarefied notion of literature’s central role in promoting the diffusion of knowledge in parodic terms which revised Enlightenment conceptions of diffusion in terms of the less than

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intellectual rhythms of daily life, the editor of the Connoisseur admitted that “my vanity has often prompted me to wish, that I could accompany my papers, wheresoever they are circulated … through all their travels and mutations,” from the company of “the politest men of quality, and … the closets of our finest ladies” to “the shame of seeing many of them prostituted to the vilest purposes. If in one place I might be pleased to find them the entertainment of the tea-table, in another I should be no less vexed to see them degraded to the base office of sticking up candles” (1754: 1: 226). The account’s proliferating list of the usual “vile” uses (at the hands of pastry-cooks and trunk makers) culminated in an account of “an accident, which happened to me the other evening, as I was walking in some fields near the town”: As I went along, my curiosity tempted me to examine the materials, of which several papers Kites were made up; from whence I had sufficient room to moralize on the ill fate of authors. On one I discovered several pages of a sermon expanded over the surface; on another the wings fluttered with love-songs; and a satire on the ministry furnished another with ballast for the tail. I at length happened to cast my eye on one taller than the rest, and beheld several of my own darling productions pasted over it. (1: 228–29)

Having conquered his initial indignation at having “become the plaything of children,” the author manages to convert “what at first seemed a disgrace into a compliment to my vanity” by recasting the possibility of distinction in terms which reflected the realities of modern fame. “As the Kite rose into the air, I drew a flattering parallel between the height of it’s flight, and the soaring of my own reputation: I imagined myself lifted up on the wings of fame, and like Horace’s swan towering above mortality: I fancied myself borne like a blazing star among the clouds, to the admiration of the gazing multitude” (1: 229). But whatever his momentary susceptibility to the lure of transcendence, even in this modified form, the Connoisseur’s account ultimately aligned itself with a version of literature which was firmly “leveled with the surface of daily life” rather than with William Cowper’s vision of the “secure and more than mortal height” from which authors “behold / The tumult.” In his “fantastic contemplation of my own excellence,” he conceded, he had ignored the true lesson afforded by this scene. “I never considered by how slight a thread my chimerical importance was supported. The twine broke; and the Kite, together with my airy dreams of immortality, dropt to the ground” (1: 230). This gravitational pull towards the quotidian world of private affairs and unmemorable routines which distinguished so many of these

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accounts of modern authors’ professional lives manifested itself in a corresponding respect for the radical heterogeneity of the literary field – “the motley baggage and bastard brood of Literature.” In a world dominated by “trifles” knowledge was kaleidoscopic, a shifting set of fragmented perspectives enmeshed in a ceaseless process of dissolution and recombination, but never simply additional in some way that pointed towards a grand perspective of the whole of society akin to the “equal wide survey” accorded to the aristocrat within the discourse of civic humanism (Barrell, English 51–109). If knowledge could never be adequately developed amid the “abstruse researches” and “remote reflections” of academic isolation, literature itself could never retain its own cultural significance as long as it was restricted to those higher genres that interested a correspondingly limited number of readers. The ideal of an individual who was distinguished by a form of knowledge which had itself been won through social interaction with endless other people, each with their own limited perspectives, found its natural corollary in critics’ emphasis on the composite strengths of a community of this type of knowers, each with their own limitations, working in an equally wide variety of genres. In its discussion of Essays on the Trade, Commerce, Manufactures, and Fisheries of Scotland. By David Loch, Merchant, the Monthly Review cited the opinion of those who held it to be “a singular characteristic of a man of great eminence in the literary world, that he was able in all cases to discover the reach of talents of those with whom he conversed, and to adapt the nature of his arguments to their capacity.” This “versatility of genius,” which echoed the panoptic vision and generalized knowledge of the landed aristocrat within the discourse of civic humanism, was doubtlessly valuable, the Monthly agreed, but given its rarity, it was “happy for society, that in every case of great moment, authors of different talents address themselves to the public, each of whom discussing the matter in his own particular manner, adapts his reasoning to the capacities of those who are in the same class with himself” (1780: 63: 172). That extreme versatility which was praiseworthy but almost non-existent in one individual turned out to be a fairly accurate description of modern authors as a community. This emphasis on adapting literature to the various tastes of the public inverted conventional assessments of literary worth by subordinating the idea of inherent excellence to the social imperative of communication. The Monthly continued: as among mankind at large the class of accurate reasoners is very small in comparison with those who are incapable of investigating any subject with a

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philosophical precision, it usually happens that, in those disquisitions especially that are intended to engage the attention of the people at large, the best written book is not the most useful, as an inferior performance will more engage the attention of the multitude.

No work, however outstanding, was exempt from this rule. In fact, the more outstanding the work, the more this rule applied, but relations between these different types of writing were better envisioned in terms of reciprocity than in terms of contradiction. “Newton’s Principia was not in general esteem, even among men of science, till it came to be explained in their own manner by persons of inferior genius,” the Monthly suggested as evidence of this proposition (63: 172). The sheer variety of different types of readers, Johnson agreed in the Adventurer, was in itself enough to put to rest sceptics’ gloomy insistence that “there is no room to hope, that pigmies should conquer where heroes have been defeated, or that the petty copiers of the present time should advance in the great work of reformation, which their predecessors were forced to leave unfinished” (1754: 3: 139). Realistic (rather than hopelessly abstract) assessments of the modern reading public necessarily suggested the worth of a correspondingly broad range of types of authors if celebrations of “the crowd of life” were to be anything more than meaningless phrases. Adopting an ambitious model of ecological balance, the Monthly offered the spectre of a world in which the most seemingly trivial and unintentional events were actually part of a broader process of spontaneous regeneration. “Winds, storms, birds and insects, scatter the seeds of plants upon the surface of this globe, where they spontaneously spring up for the sustenance of those animals which take no care for themselves.” If this biological order was proof of “the infinite wisdom [with which] the affairs of the universe are directed,” the same was equally true of literature: “the knowledge that is produced by the exertions of men of superior genius is, in like manner, happily disseminated among mankind by the more feeble efforts of those whom nature has adapted to that inferior, thought most necessary office” (63: 172). And crucially, this was true because of (rather than despite) the chaotic and overgrown nature of modern literature with its metaphorical “winds [and] storms, birds and insects.” Citing the reviled example of “compilers and plagiaries” in the Idler, Johnson insisted that “not even these writers [were] to be indiscriminately censured and rejected. Truth like beauty varies its fashions, and is best recommended by different dresses to different minds; and he that recalls the attention of mankind to any part of learning which time has

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left behind it, may be truly said to advance the literature of his own age” (1759: 2: 633). Johnson’s description of modern writers as “manufacturers of literature” might, on first glance, seem to participate in derisive accounts of the manufacture of books as a byword for the degrading effects of the literary marketplace (1751: 2: 114). It was true, he acknowledged, that these manufacturers were not to be confused with those “heroes in literature” whose “proper ambition” it was “to enlarge the boundaries of knowledge by discovering and conquering new regions of the intellectual world” and whose writing was the product of “the happy minute in which his natural fire is excited, in which his mind is elevated with nobler sentiments, enlightened with clearer views, and invigorated with stronger comprehension” (1751: 2: 74). None of this was the lot of the vast majority of modern writers who, “like other artificers, have no other care than to deliver their tale of wares at the stated time” (2: 114). But Johnson’s account was actually far closer to the Monthly’s more generous model of ecological balance. Rather than accepting these sorts of apparent limitations at face value, or even making a case for these sorts of writers despite their weaknesses, Johnson’s account of the “manufacturers of literature” inverted this apparent tendency by embracing these limitations as the surest guarantee of relevance and therefore of a particular kind of literary value in a busy, commercial world in which the vast majority of potential readers were similarly preoccupied by their own passing concerns. For these readers, “the humble author of journals and gazettes must be considered as a liberal dispenser of beneficial knowledge” (2: 115). Ironically, these writings’ limitations made them especially important in an age where people’s most pressing cares were often equally immediate. “These papers of the day, the Ephemeræ of learning,” he insisted, “have uses more adequate to the purposes of common life than more pompous and durable volumes” (2: 115). Readers could appreciate these authors better than that illustrious elite who would be remembered by posterity because, immersed in the pressures and opportunities of their own work-a-day world, readers had more in common with them. And this was true, Johnson suggested, not simply because modern readers were too busy to contemplate anything more taxing than the rushed productions of equally frantic authors, but because they had a natural and laudable need for information which spoke to their most immediate concerns, rather than for more arcane forms of knowledge. “It is necessary for every man to be more acquainted with his contemporaries than with past generations, and to

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know rather the events which may immediately affect his fortune or quiet, than the revolutions of ancient kingdoms, in which he has neither possessions nor expectations” (2: 115).9 This celebration of authors’ worldliness, with its acceptance of the rich variety of modern readers and writers, was not without its risks. To be genuinely immersed in the world made one vulnerable to its worst as well as its most laudable influences; it also deprived writers of the critical distance that could sometimes help to give them a clearer perspective on their subject. Proximity did not always translate into insight, any more than it was necessarily conducive to virtue. It begged the question of which parts of their society authors ought to be immersed in, and whether these were all equally valuable (and therefore whether all forms of immersion were equally authentic), and who decided. It made the idea of immersion seem easier and more attractive than it might have been in practice; Johnson was as routinely castigated for his boorish arrogance as he was mocked (most famously by Chesterfield) for his social ineptitude according to the rules of modern politeness. Nor was the prospect of immersing one’s self in “the common intercourses of life” always inviting. But for many writers these tensions were more than overshadowed by the greater evil of “hovering at a distance round the world” in the name of some illusory freedom from dependence and constraint: an escapism which, even were it to succeed, turned out to be little more than the unprofitable fate of an “unsocial silence.” If this spirit of engagement, with its implied determination to situate literature squarely within the broader world of writing, was displaced as notions of literature crystallized into their modern and more narrow emphasis on aesthetic expression (a shift which gave primacy to an equally abstract model of authorship), it is worth remembering the energy with which some writers made a virtue of necessity. However daunting the “maze or labyrinth” of modern publishing may have been, with its “many entrances and numerous routes to eventual publication, each full of hazards, pitfalls, and dead ends,” there was no shortage of adventurers on the highways of literature (Brewer, Pleasures 140). “Were Authors to consider Times as other Manufacturers do, they would act as reasonably – But then they would not be Authors,” Ralph joked in The Case of Authors by Profession or Trade, Stated (1758), likening them to “the desperate Sailor, who, because he had seen others do so before him, jump’d from the Main-yard into the Sea, crying, ‘By G –, I can’t swim – But no Matter! – Some Body or other will save me––’” (71). Contemplating the same problem in slightly more dignified terms in the Rambler, Johnson

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suggested that “the mind of man is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity,” quickly adding “that no class of the human species requires more to be cautioned against this anticipation of happiness, than those that aspire to the name of authors” (1750: 1: 8).

Ch apter 6

The Learned Pig: enlightening the reading public

Man is placed in this world as a spectator; when he is tired with wondering at all the novelties about him, and not till then, does he desire to be made acquainted with the causes that create those wonders. Oliver Goldsmith, “On Education”

I l l i t e r at e r e a de r s In the past couple of chapters I have been exploring the connections between distinct but closely related questions about the type of literature and the sorts of models of authorial distinction which counted most in a modern commercial nation. But what of the reader, or of readers? What role did the period’s endless debates about reading audiences or about the reading public play in all of these discussions? Sociological accounts of book history (whether Robert Darnton’s communications circuit or Pierre Bourdieu’s field of cultural production) have emphasized the constitutive role of readers, not just as consumers, but as crucial mediators in relations of literary production. No longer enshrined at the end of a linear process, to be judged by their correct or vulgar taste when they finally do get books in their hands, readers have been resituated as active participants in the heterogeneous dynamics which “influence the author, both before and after the act of composition” (Darnton, “What” 67). These new appraisals of reading as an active and creative process have been reinforced by a broader theoretical shift towards an anthropological approach which remains sensitive to the power of consumption to facilitate positive as well as negative relations.1 Not that any of this would have come as a surprise to critics in the latter half of the eighteenth century. “All human arts are found to flourish or decay according to the degree of esteem or of contempt in which they are held by the general opinion,” Vicesimus Knox reminded his 165

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readers (Winter 1785: 3: 117). Each of the century’s dominant accounts of commercial modernity – the familiar tales of commerce as an engine of progress (the triumph of culture) or as a source of corruption (the rise of effeminacy) – played themselves out in terms of highly recognizable judgements about the cultural health of modern readers. “What kind of Reading must that be, which can attract or entertain the languid Morning-Spirit of modern Effeminacy?” John Brown asked in his attack on the “vain, luxurious, and selfish E f f e m i n ac y ” of the age (1757: 1: 42, 29). The answer, not surprisingly, was a familiar version of standard narratives of cultural decline. Where “a Knowledge of Books, a Taste in Arts, a Proficiency in Science, was formerly regarded as a proper Qualification in a Man of Fashion,” that “literary Spirit” had been annihilated precisely because it had become too fashionable: “Reading is now sunk at best into a Morning’s Amusement; till the important Hour of Dress comes on. Books are no longer regarded as the Repositories of Taste and Knowledge; but are rather laid hold of, as a gentle Relaxation from the tedious Round of Pleasure” (1: 41–42). Hannah More’s light-hearted depiction of Florio, “spoilt by Cus t om and the Fa s h ion,” lacked the nervous edge generated by Brown’s certainty that Britain was “rolling to the Brink of a Precipice that must destroy us” but it shared his paradoxical sense of modern reading as “a preparatory Whet of Indolence” whose dual function was to “prevent the unsupportable Toil of Thinking” while leaving readers “ever ready for display” (More, Florio 5; Brown 1: 15, 42): He studied while he dress’d, for true ’tis He read Compendiums, Extracts, Beauties, Abregés, Dictionnaires, Recueils, Mercures, Journaux, Extraits, and Feuilles: No work in substance now is follow’d, The Chemic Extract only’s swallow’d. He lik’d those literary cooks Who skim the cream of others’ books, And ruin half an Author’s graces, By plucking bon-mots from their places; He wonders any writing sells, But these spic’d mushrooms and morells. (Florio 1786: 8–9)

More’s culinary references to endless Frenchified forms prepared by “literary cooks / Who skim the cream of others’ books,” like Brown’s account of “the meagre literary Diet” of modern readers “served up in some monthly Mess of Dulness,” reflected a set of problems that were most

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forcefully registered in descriptions of reading as eating: pure consumption devoid of any sort of thoughtful reflection or intellectual nutrition. Critiques of reading as unthinking consumption were reinforced by the emergence of an apparently self-contradictory category: “illiterate readers,” or those people who had mastered the mechanics of reading but were either incapable or unwilling to engage in the more arduous process of critical reflection. They just swallowed writing whole. Vicesimus Knox worried that “illiterate readers” were “easily mislead” by the “air of superiority” affected by “many novels, pamphlets, and newspapers” (Winter 1785: 3: 120). Sylva: or, the Wood declared that it was “not so much intended for the mere illiterate English reader” but “for men who have been liberally trained,” but in doing so it begged the question of the definition of a “liberal” training, which was in some ways the real issue (1786: x). James Beattie’s essay “On the Utility of Classical Learning” took it for granted that “illiterate readers” were simply those who lacked a Classical education, but Beattie’s account also emphasized the degree to which this more factual question (did readers have Greek and Latin?) shaded into the question of taste. Deprived of the steadying influence of “a true taste for Classic learning” which would have enabled them to “relish the original magnificence of Homer and Virgil, Demosthenes and Cicero,” readers became especially vulnerable to cravings for “trash” written by “fashionable moderns,” including “licentious plays, poems, and novels” (1776: 548). To have mastered some degree of Classical learning (as any gentleman presumably would have) involved far more than an ability to read Greek and Latin; on a more fundamental level it implied an ability to know what was worth reading and why, and not just from the Classical period but from modern literature as well. Accounts of the problems with modern readers gained much of their force from the urgency of the broader historical narratives of which they were a part, but not everyone subscribed to this sense of cultural and political decline. Others, who doubted Brown’s sense that Britain was “rolling to the Brink of a Precipice,” hailed the modern reading public both as an index of Britain’s refined state as a polite nation and as an engine of ongoing reform – a mediating force which helped to promote enlightened debate by facilitating what William Godwin called “the collision of mind with mind” (1793: 15). Nor was this more positive assessment necessarily tied to the divisive question of political reform. For its advocates, healthy reading habits were as much a matter of personal enrichment as of national agency. Polite nations were distinguished from earlier social orders, they claimed, by the genuine refinement of their citizens, especially the broad

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stratum of the middle ranks whose virtue and industry formed the backbone of their nation’s moral and commercial pre-eminence. Nor was it just the middle ranks. “All ranks and degrees now r e a d,” the bookseller James Lackington insisted: The poorer sort of farmers, and even the poor country people in general, who before that period spent their winter evenings in relating stories of witches, hobgoblins, &c. now shorten the winter nights by hearing their sons and daughters read tales, romances, &c. and on entering their houses, you may see Tom Jones, Roderic Random, and other entertaining books, stuck up on their bacon-racks, &c. If John goes to town with a load of hay, he is charged to be sure not to forget to bring home “Peregrine Pickle’s Adventures;” and when Dolly is sent to market to sell her eggs, she is commissioned to purchase “The History of Pamela Andrews.” (1791: 257)

As J. H. Plumb has argued, this triumphalist spirit grounded itself in the extraordinary proliferation of cultural venues and activities, including the network of bookstores, libraries of all kinds, and reading societies, that had spread across London and the provinces throughout the century. Knox contrasted the current age, where learning “has now diffused its influence on the mean as well as the great, the gay and the fair as well as the severe and studious, the merchant and manufacturer as well as the contemplative professor,” with “the selfishness of an Alexander, who reprimanded Aristotle for divulging the secrets of science.” Where “Philosophy” was “once preserved among a chosen few,” “pamphlets and manuals on every subject of human enquiry are [now] circulated by the assiduous trader, at a small price, among the lowest ranks of the community” (Essays 1778: 1: 367–68). If it was true, as Hume had claimed, that “the more men refine upon pleasure, the less they will indulge in excesses of any kind,” then the expansion of learning beyond a “chosen few” offered an important means of fostering individual self-government and social cohesion (1752: 271). This more personal emphasis on individual refinement reflected a curious paradox which many critics identified at the core of commercial modernity. On the one hand, the popularity of reading was a testament to the liberal character of a polite modern nation distinguished by unprecedented cultural opportunities; on the other hand, healthy reading habits were often hailed as a necessary antidote to the dehumanizing effects of the very commercial pursuits which made this expansion of opportunities possible. If, Knox argued, it was “difficult to be attached to the common objects of human pursuit, without feeling the sordid or the troublesome passions,” it was equally true that “in the pursuits of

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learning, all is liberal, noble, generous. They require and promote that comprehensive mode of thinking which overlooks the little and mean occupations of the vulgar mind” (Essays 1778: 2: 93). Worldly pursuits tended, by their very nature, to stir up “the troublesome passions,” but an educated imagination offered the most important means of resisting this problem: “the man of philosophical observation … is acquainted with the false glitter that surrounds him; he knows how short and unsubstantial are the good and evil that excite all the ardour of pursuit and abhorrence” (Essays 2: 93).2 Echoing Knox’s insistence on a proper education as the basis of true gentility, the European Magazine claimed that without “a considerable share” of certain branches of learning such as “history and politics, moral and natural philosophy, and polite literature … no man can pass through life with decency, much less with applause” (1784: 5: 421). The European’s double reference to decency and applause suggests the complex immersion of these debates within broader questions of the changing basis of social distinction. If, “without an acquaintance with polite literature, conversation becomes vulgar, and unworthy of a liberal mind,” this was partly because vulgarity referred “not only [to] that species of low breeding which characterises the populace, but [also to] that vacancy of ideas, resulting from ignorance, which obliges people to have recourse to the poorest and dullest subjects of discourse, in common with the meanest and most uninstructed individuals” (1784: 5: 421). Proper reading habits were ennobling in a double sense: they refined people’s sensibility, which was inherently rewarding, and in doing so, enabled them to perceive the true worthlessness of the endless spectacles which captured other people’s attention. In his essay, “On the Advantages of L i t e r at u r e and P h i l o s oph y in general, and especially on the C ons i s t e nc y of L i t e r a r y and P h i l o s oph ic a l , with C om m e rc i a l , P u r s u i t s,” which appeared in the first volume of the Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester (1785), Thomas Henry argued along similar lines that “the pursuit of knowledge, when properly directed, and under due influence, is of the greatest importance to mankind. In proportion as a nation acquires superior degrees of it, her state of civilization advances, and she becomes distinguished from her less enlightened neighbours by a greater refinement in the manners of her inhabitants, and a departure from those ferocious vices, which mark the features of savage countries” (7). So fundamental was this process, that “wherever a love of learning and the arts makes any considerable progress, even crimes themselves lose something

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of their atrociousness” (7). The proudly hierarchical nature of Henry’s distinction between enlightened and savage nations applied just as explicitly to class difference within Britain. “A taste for polite literature, and the works of nature and of art, is essentially necessary to form the Gentleman, and will always distinguish him more completely from the vulgar, than any advantage he can derive from wealth, dress, or titles” (8–9). Polite learning not only made people better than they would have been had they allowed their minds to remain vacant, but also made them better than a lot of other people. And it did so better (that is, more forcefully) than did the traditional markers of distinction. Not only did “external decorations” such as “wealth, dress, or titles” prove less reliable than learned knowledge as a means of policing the divide between the polite and the vulgar, but material advantages acquired without the benefits “which proceed from a proper study of books and men” only reinforced a person’s vulgarity by “render[ing] his ignorance more conspicuous” (9). Learning, which for Henry was perfectly consistent with commercial pursuits, was all the more authoritative as a basis for new codes of social distinction precisely because its rewards were, on one level, so thoroughly intrinsic. One can multiple both of these types of examples: reading as idle distraction or as the basis of social progress and personal refinement. More interestingly, perhaps, one can find many of the same authors on both sides of the debate. Isaac D’Israeli may have embraced the fact that “[w]e have become a reading, and of course a critical nation. A refined writer is now certain of finding readers who can comprehend him,” but this “critical” atmosphere, which implied that people were capable of thinking for themselves, did not prevent him from complaining elsewhere that “[t]he Public are the distributors of glory; but, too often, the distribution is made with blindness, or undiscerning precipitation” (Essay 1795: 167; Curiosities 1791: 1:33). Knox was equally ambivalent. “A tincture of letters, which was once rare and formed a shining character, has pervaded the mass of the people,” he insisted, “and in a free country like our own, where it is not checked in its operation by political restraints, has produced remarkable effects on the general system of morality.” But the spread of “learning … to the vulgar” had “also superinduced a general indolence, refinement, and false delicacy” (Essays 1778: 1: 368). Insisting on the link between a universal taste for reading and the prevalence of bad judgement, he insisted elsewhere that “the depraved taste of readers is another cause of the degeneracy of writers” (1: 37). Whether critics emphasized the “indolence” and “false delicacy” of modern reading habits or their “remarkable effects on the general system

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of morality,” virtually everyone acknowledged the extent to which a taste for books had become inseparable from an increasingly urban and fashionable world that was distinguished (for better or worse) by a proliferation of different forms of cultural consumption and by the erosion of the social boundaries which marked the audiences for these opportunities. More importantly, and far more radically, many also acknowledged the extent to which this new cultural landscape had rendered familiar distinctions between enlightenment and indolence, the pursuit of knowl edge and a love of distraction, rational inquiry and entrepreneurial zeal, difficult if not obsolete. Readers who recognized themselves in Horace Walpole’s description of his own memory as “a chaos of aughts and ends, and fit for nobody’s use but my own” formed a natural complement to arguments that miscellaneous writing’s value lay in the fact that it was so “miscellaneous and unconnected” (32: 374). None of this made traditional distinctions between healthy and depraved reading habits less appealing, but as many critics already recognized, the complexities of a literary field driven by an increasingly sophisticated book trade were fostering new models of reading that could not simply be written off as illiteracy, however little they might have had to do with more traditional criteria. Running through all of these responses was the central fact of the ubiquity of the topic itself in discussions of Britain’s modernity. In a version of the perspectival doubling that was so common to debates about authorship, the fate of the modern reader (who was also frequently identified as “the common reader,” neither a specialist nor a reader by profession) had become a central theme in many of the texts which catered to this extended non-specialist audience. This was especially true because of print’s ability to bind individuals together in what, for many critics, was an unprecedented cultural formation which always seemed to be somehow greater than the sum of its parts. As D’Israeli put it in Curiosities of Literature, “the taste for books, so rare before the fifteenth century, has gradually become general only within these four hundred years: in that small space of time the public mind of Europe has been created” (1837: 1: 1).3 Whatever its actual demographic limitations, the idea of “the public” became invested with almost mystical cultural and political connotations which never pertained to the idea of this or that specific group. To put this another way, the reading public had become one of its own favourite spectacles – an intriguingly unstable element of a “wonderworking age, in which invention seems to be on the rack to produce such curiosities as surpass whatever have gone before” (London Unmask’ d 1784: 135). For Coleridge, writing in the turbulent winter of 1816–17, the reading

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public was “as strange a phrase, methinks, as ever forced a splenetic smile on the staid countenance of Meditation.” However much its advocates might dignify the reading public with a rhetoric of enlightenment, Coleridge insisted (sounding as splenetic as Brown a half-century earlier) that it was better viewed as one more example of the “odd burs and kecksies” of an age characterized by endless different forms of excess, a prominent aspect of “the misgrowth of our luxuriant activity.” It was best viewed, in other words, as a cultural deformation, a contradiction in terms which reflected other more serious underlying problems. Developing his point by playing on the same pun that Herbert Croft built into his 1779 periodical the Literary Fly, which featured a picture of “the C a r r i ag e of Br i t i s h L i t e r at u r e” (1), Coleridge continued that the phrase “reading public” brings to my mind the mistake of a lethargic Dutch traveller, who returning highly gratified from a showman’s caravan, which he had been tempted to enter by the words, THE LEARNED PIG, gilt on the pannels, met another caravan of a similar shape, with THE READING FLY on it, in letters of the same size and splendour. Why, dis is voonders above voonders! exclaims the Dutchman, takes his seat as first comer, and soon fatigued by waiting, and by the very hush and intensity of his expectation, gives way to his constitutional somnulence, from which he is roused by the supposed showman at Hounslow, with a In what name, Sir! was your place taken? Are you booked all the way for Reading? – Now a Reading Public is (to my mind) more marvellous still, and in the third tier of “Voonders above Voonders.” (6: 37–38)

The celebrated life of the Learned Pig may be less familiar today than is Edmund Burke’s notorious reference to a swinish multitude (thanks in large part to the many radical responses that seized on Burke’s phrase as an ironic badge of honour), but as Robert Southey noted in an essay on English credulity, “the learned pig was in his day a far greater object of admiration to the English nation than ever was Sir Isaac Newton” (1808: 340). Each of these two porcine images – the Learned Pig and the swinish multitude – functioned as a kind of shorthand for a set of tensions and ambiguities that haunted what Jürgen Habermas has described as the bourgeois public sphere: on the one hand, the extent to which the public sphere’s rationalist aspirations were undermined by fears of moral corruption associated with commerce; on the other hand, the ways the public sphere fragmented under the weight of political tensions in a revolutionary age. Both of these discourses, about consumerism and revolution, hinged on fears of particular forms of political degeneracy. The first was concerned with the enervating effects of luxury and the politics of

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politeness, and the second with the impact of the French Revolution and the clamour for the rights of man. In the first, the great evil was effeminacy; in the second, it was Jacobinism. The former was structured by an obsessive focus on moral corruption, and the latter by fears of republicanism. Two pig references, two very different problems with the public sphere. But as Coleridge knew as well as anyone, debates about late eighteenth-century reading were shaped indelibly by both. I want to concentrate on the first of these – anxieties about commerce – in this chapter, before turning to the question of the connections between the two problems by way of a conclusion. E ru di t e s w i n e Debuting in London in 1785, the Learned Pig created a sensation with what seemed to be its powers of rational thought. Exhibited near Charing Cross, men and women “of the first fashion waited four hours for their turn” to pay the five shillings admission to see its act (Royster 308).“The wonderful Learned Pig” had become so popular, London Unmask’ d declared, that the proprietor is rapidly amassing a fortune, thro’ the sway of fashion, as it would be quite monstrous and ill-bred not to follow the ton, and go see the wonderful Learned Pig; it being the trite question in all polite circles, Pray, my Lord, my Lady, Sir John, Madam, or Miss, have you seen the Learned Pig? if answer is given in the affirmative, it is a confirmation of taste; if in the negative, it is reprobated as an odious singularity!” (141–42)

A column in The Times denounced the public’s obsession, which had already earned the Pig’s proprietor £3,000 “while honest industry is left to toil through life, too frequently with bare provision for the calls of nature,” as a sign of “the depravi[t]y of this age” (May 2, 1785). When the Pig moved to Sadler’s Wells that summer, it featured as the headline act despite “great objections” from the acrobats and tightrope walkers who had been pushed out of top billing (Royster 308). Contemporary publications such as Sarah Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories (1786) offered detailed accounts of the Pig’s learned feats: Two alphabets of large letters on card paper were placed on the floor; one of the company was then desired to propose a word which he wished the Pig to spell. This his keeper repeated to him, and the Pig picked out every letter successively with his snout, and collected them together till the word was compleated. He was then desired to tell the hour of the day, and one of the company held a watch to him, which he seemed with his little cunning eyes to examine very

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attentively; and having done so, picked out figures for the hour and minutes of the day. He shewed a number of tricks, of the same nature, to the great diversion of the spectators. (72)

Trimmer carefully qualified her account by stressing that the Pig was most likely arranging well-practised words which someone planted in the audience had been instructed to call out rather than actually spelling new words in the spontaneous way that its owners suggested, but even this, she insisted, was an extraordinary feat. Nor was everyone as sceptical. A chapter entitled “Anecdotes of Tame and Wild Swine” in A Present for a Little Boy (1798), having noted that “some pigs have evinced so teachable a disposition, that children might take a useful lesson from their conduct,” offered a similar description of the Learned Pig’s ability “to spell the name of any person or place” as its most compelling proof (n.p.). Like the balloonomania during these same years, which staged a commitment to the pursuit of knowledge as a commercially driven spectacle, the Learned Pig offered viewers two very different levels of appeal: on the one hand, it gave them a chance to see a rare performance of exceptional abilities; on the other hand, its popularity offered the public an opportunity to revel in its own capacity for collective fascination. If the rage for ballooning had blurred the line between the supposedly autonomous realms of science and spectacle – the worlds of the laboratory and the circus – by courting public interest so successfully, the Learned Pig’s routine exposed in more overt ways the fundamental theatricality of this intersection.4 “Any thing in England will do for a show,” Southey complained in his account of the Learned Pig. “Nothing is too absurd to be believed by the people in this country” (1808: 338). Like ballooning, “this erudite swine” was frequently invoked by writers across the ideological spectrum as a symbol of the absurdities and excesses of the age (Southey 340). The Pig’s escape while on exhibition at Cambridge, only to be found eleven hours later in St. John’s College, offered predictable ammunition for satirical accounts of the state of modern learning. “The Cook declared, had it been a Fellow of the College, it could not have been treated with more respect” (Morning Post November 23, 1785). Gesturing to Samuel Johnson’s death only months earlier, a satirical poem entitled “On the Learned Pig” in the April 6, 1785, Morning Post hailed his most fitting successor: Though learned Johnson’s gone Let us no longer mourn our loss, – Another learned Hog is come, And Wisdom grunts at Charing Cross.

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A song entitled “The Prophetic Pig” insisted that the Learned Pig, small in size but “in science very big,” must be “Descended from the great Lord Bacon” (“Prophetic” n.d.: 31–32). The Pig featured prominently along with several other performing animals in the satirical print “The Downfall of Taste and Genius, or, The World As it Goes” (figure 5), trampling prominently labelled copies of Shakespeare’s Plays and Pope’s Works. The Pig was popular with a number of writers – Southey and Coleridge among them – who found in it an ideal satirical image of the problems of the age. “Give pensions to the Learned Pig / Or the Hare playing on a Tabor,” William Blake wrote in a poem in his notebooks (951). In her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft mockingly suggested that Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “ridiculous stories, which tend to prove that girls are naturally attentive to their persons, without laying any stress on daily example” had about as much credibility as “anecdotes of the learned pig” (1792: 5: 111–12). “The horse of knowledge and the Learned Pig” featured more ominously in William Wordsworth’s dystopic portrait of a chaos of jarring impressions which formed that “Parliament of Monsters” known as Bartholomew Fair: a “perpetual whirl / Of trivial objects, melted and reduced / To one identity, by differences / That have no law, no meaning, and no end” (1805: 7: 708, 718, 725–28). “You tell me that I am rivalled by Mrs. Bellamy, and he [Mr. Unwin] that I have a competitor for fame not less formidable than the Learned Pig,” William Cowper remarked in a 1785 letter. “Alas! What is an author’s popularity worth, in a world that can suffer a prostitute on one side, and a pig on the other, to eclipse his brightest glories?” (343). Much of the Learned Pig’s appeal lay in its singularity (a pig which could read or, at the very least, arrange sequences of letters in the correct order), but it also helped that it was part of a larger and much-loved tradition of animal acts, from Astley’s horses, dancing dogs, and General Jacko, the performing monkey, to Thomas Wildman’s trained bees.5 For their critics, performing animals’ status as a leading element and frequent symbol of the public’s most unreflecting qualities was reinforced by the close association, which the Learned Pig’s extraordinary popularity also suggested, between public credulity (the theme of Southey’s article) and the breathless temporality of fashion. As a character announced in the comedy Speculation (1795): Why, as to the fashions, coz, they fly so fast one can’t be quick enough to catch them – nothing lasts above a day. Before I went to India the whole town was running after the Goddess of Health; she died, I’m told, and the learned Pig

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came to life; he went the grand tour, and the balloon came into power; that bubble burst, and boxing bore down all before it. (Reynolds 36)

Nor was the Pig himself immune to these sorts of fashionable attractions. Southey told of an encounter with someone “who had lived next door to [the Learned Pig’s] lodgings … in a house so situated that he could see him at his rehearsals,” who explained that if the pig did not perform its lesson well the keeper would threaten to take away its red waistcoat, “for the pig was proud of his dress. Perhaps even Solomon himself did not conceive that vanity was so universal a passion,” Southey concluded (1808: 340). Brown’s and More’s satirical accounts of the fashionable reader distracting himself with books “till the important Hour of Dress comes on” or “study[ing] while he dress’d” found their parodic reflection in the Learned Pig’s sartorial pride. However exceptional he may have been in some ways, the Learned Pig was all too typical of his age in others. The one thing that no one doubted was the Pig’s extraordinary popularity. “Impelled no doubt by an epidemic rage” and “determined not to be out of the fashion,” the narrator of London Unmask’ d (1784) followed his account of the balloon with an excursion to see the “dancing, or rather acting, dogs” at Sadler’s Wells (the Learned Horse being rumoured to have “long gone abroad”), before moving on to view the Learned Pig, which seemed “infinitely to surpass all that I had ever seen or heard before,” and which, as a result, enjoyed pride of place in the book’s ultimate chapter, entitled “The Prevalence of Novelty” (138–39). Anticipating Coleridge’s tone of mock reverence three decades later, the “sentimental peripatetic” narrator framed his own spectatorial encounter in terms of the shared experience of what Wordsworth had described in more fearful terms as “the press and danger of the crowd” (Prelude 7: 684): As I was walking to Whitehall, I observed a number of people crowding the passage of a house in that neighbourhood, indicating by their looks, that they waited admission to some curious exhibition. Casting my eye to the front of the house, I observed a board inscribed, THE WONDERFUL LEARNED PIG. Well, thought I, it may be truly said, that wonders will never cease. We may now, with propriety, adopt the language of that pretender of all pretenders, Katterfelto, and exclaim, Wonders! Wonders! and more Wonders! Men have traversed the regions of the air; Horses have fetched and carried, laid down and risen up, nodded the affirmative or the negative, and footed it to given numbers at the word of command. Dogs have aped humanity, and represented various scenes which occur amongst us rationals, with astonishing adroitness, and thereby convinced me there is not that remote distance between instinct and reason, which many have imagined and would suggest.

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But here, in this instance, all former efforts must be outdone. What! can it be possible that the most filthy, sluggish, and gross of all animals, should be rendered tractable, alert, and discerning? (140–41)

The hyperbole of the narrator’s reaction epitomized the public’s conflicted response: the account graphically evoked people’s astonishment, but its rhetorical excess also registered darker suspicions about their lack of judgement. Goldsmith had argued in his essay “On Education” that “man is placed in this world as a spectator; when he is tired with wondering at all the novelties about him, and not till then, does he desire to be made acquainted with the causes that create those wonders” (1759: 1: 113). But the uproar caused by the Learned Pig offered little indication that the general public was interested in moving beyond “wondering at … novelties” in favour of a more rigorous concern with “causes.” Quite the contrary: the popular response to the Learned Pig, and to performing animals in general, had become a byword for the mindlessness of what The Wreath of Fashion (1778) called their “wond’ring age” (9). Richard Holmes’ suggestion, in The Age of Wonder, that the ballooning craze epitomized his broader argument that the Romantic period was characterized by an enabling reciprocity rather than antagonism between the realms of literary and scientific thought – a convergence that found its most dramatic manifestation in their shared sense of “wonder” or almost reverential curiosity for the world around them – may be guilty of overoptimism (xvi). The very word “wonder” seemed to many critics to smack of all that was most dubious about the commodification of knowledge. Katterfelto’s publicity campaign was only the most recent instance. At the other end of the century, Jonathan Swift had penned two satirical pamphlets entitled The Wonderful Wonder of Wonders. Being an Accurate Description of the Birth, Education, Manner of Living, Religion, Politicks, learning, &c. of Mine A—se (1722) and The Wonder of all the Wonders, that ever the World Wondered (1722). Another 1722 pamphlet promised All the Wonders of the World Out-Wondered: In the Amazing and Incredible Prophecies of Ferdinando Albumazarides. The opportunistic nature of this sort of rhetoric enlisted a discourse of wonder in a satirical mode that marked the antithesis rather than the culmination of a spirit of rational inquiry. The public’s response to performing animals was animated by a set of spectatorial reversals. The crowds who gathered were there to watch animals that were, on the most straightforward level, far beneath their own rational abilities, but the “wonderful sagacity” (as a puff for Astley’s put it) which drew people to watch these animals and which lifted them above

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their fellow brutes also stood in sharp contrast with their viewers’ idle love of novelty (Kwint 88). It may have been true that these animals were only capable of repeating well-trained routines rather than thinking for themselves, but in some ways this was precisely the problem that critics associated with modern culture. The Aberdeen Magazine’s warning – “So few can emulation’s call withstand / That all would take their neighbour’s trade in hand” – suggested that people were governed by a spirit of imitation which was not unlike the animals’ own achievements (1789: 2: 118). But what may have been laudable in a pig seemed lamentable in humans. The more these performing animals succeeded in appearing human-like, the more starkly their obvious discipline and training contrasted with the misplaced energies of those whose habits they had learned to mimic. In fact, so strong were people’s motives of “curiosity … desire of seeing and being seen, [and] idleness” generally, the Aberdeen suggested, that the popularity of performing animals had become the most telling symbol of the public’s lack of judgement: people “give as much celebrity to a pig as to Mrs Siddons, to dancing dogs as to a Sublime concert” (1788: 1: 195).6 London Unmask’ d ’s “sentimental peripatetic” narrator’s admission that he and his friend had “indulged our passion for novelty in common with the herd of fellow-mortals” begged the question of which of the two – the audience or the animal – behaved more like brutes (143, 142, my emphasis). Nor could the crowd’s herd mentality be conveniently dismissed as the plebeian waywardness of a swinish multitude that could not be expected to know better. On the contrary, the appeal of the Learned Pig highlighted the extent to which popular culture had become the province of a fashionable middle class eager to lavish its disposable income on whatever activities were most in favour. The certainty that “it would be quite monstrous and ill-bred not to follow the ton, and go see the wonderful Learned Pig,” which would amount to nothing less than “a confirmation of taste,” only dramatized the degree to which taste, supposedly the realm of highly developed personal judgement, had been hijacked by a modish spirit of emulation (141–42). The rigorously scientific tone of the London Unmask’ d narrator’s determination “to have ocular demonstration of the wonderful feats of this wonderful Pig” may have provided a dignifying rationale, but by his own admission the “passion for novelty” which drove most of the crowd was bound up with “the spirit of pride, luxury, profusion, vanity, and corruption, which prevails throughout the kingdom in general, and the metropolis in particular.” Jarred by this sense of moral rot, the narrative concluded with the sombre hope that “the fate of the Roman Empire, which fell by luxury, may warn us of these kingdoms to

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shun their example, lest we should be involved in the same ruin and disgrace, which a similar attachment must inevitably entail” (141–43). What often seemed to be most threatening about these sorts of shows was not merely the extent to which their achievements offered up a parodic reflection of the herd instincts of their audience, but the way these sorts of tensions actively inflamed those broader social confusions that were rooted in the hybridizing effects of commerce generally, which had “confounded or melted down” the different social classes “into one glaring mass of absurdity or superfluity” (European 1784: 5: 245). The Times agreed that the real problem was the tendency of these sorts of spectacles to exacerbate already dangerous social confusions. Being “as cunning as his sagacious quadruped,” the proprietor had “left no stone unturned to attract the notice and money of the curious,” including all of the usual “squibs, puffs, and paragraphs,” but most objectionably of all, he had lured the servants of the genteel families, and when the coach is ordered out to air the children, away go the cooks, the ladies’ maids, the nurses, &c. &c. &c. to Charing-cross, where they are introduced as Mrs, Miss, or my Lady, to the levee of the disgusting beast; and for their complaisance, are, besides their admittance gratis, regaled with cake and gin, in a back room. In the meantime, the canaille both without and within, are impressed with a high idea of the consequence of the animal from the assumed rank of his visitors, by which means their curiosity is prodigiously inflamed, and they flock in crowds to the show. But to imagine that any person of figure or even common decency ever put their foot into the nasty stye, is a most absurd reflection on the [t]aste and delicacy of the age. (May 2, 1785)7

These spectatorial instabilities were intensified by the fact that what the people who gathered to watch were frequently viewing were their own fashionable habits, or in other words the most visible aspects of polite society, performed back to them in ways that recast these markers of distinction as parodic elements of a carnivalesque world of people “striving to outdo one another” in their mutual affectation of polite manners. As London Unmask’ d suggested of the dancing dogs, just before its narrator’s ultimate encounter with the Learned Pig himself: never did instinct make a nearer approach to reason, than in the various exertions of this groupe of the canine race; insomuch, that the rational and the animal properties, seemed so jumbled together, that it was difficult even in idea to separate the one from the other. They personated their various characters, in the little drama they sustained, with wonderous aptitude, attended to every gesture with singular nicety, made their bows and their congées with all the precision of a French dancing-master,

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and observed their entrances and their exits as exactly as if they had attended the theatrical academy in Drury Lane for a series of time. In short, they exhibited in full display of character, the gentleman, the beau, the lover, the soldier, the valet, and the chairman of the one sex; and the lady, the flirt, the waiting woman, and the drudge of the other. (140)

“Who would not to London come, / To see such pretty sights?” asked the song The Beggar on Horseback (n.d.), about the performing animals. The animals’ capacity for mimicry rewrote the “drama” of polite manners as mere performance in ways that cast the various “pretty” traits which epitomized social refinement in the uncanny light of this same “jumbled” mix of “the rational and the animal.” And this was true, not just because the animals’ ability to play cards or dance a minuet made them seem almost human, but more disturbingly because in the excess of their refinement people seemed to be in danger of becoming less than fully human: “the languid Morning-Spirit[s] of modern effeminacy” (Brown 1: 42). These anxieties were part of much wider and insistently gendered accounts of a decline that was literary, moral, and even physical, from “the manly exercises of our forefathers” to a taste for “pleasures which are calculated to enervate, rather than strengthen the human frame” (European 1789: 15: 276). Concerns about modern “lady-like” men whose “delicate make and silky constitution” had reduced them to “equivocal half-men … neuter somethings between male and female” may have stood out in sharp contrast with the achievements of these animals but it also narrowed the gap between human and brute from the other side of the divide as well (Connoisseur 1755: 2: 232–33). Asked by the narrator of Sylva: or, The Wood “whether he would not see [a] famous monkey carried … to the masquerade,” “a delicate thing of the ton,” responded with predictable horror: “‘Lah!’ says he mincingly … ‘the brute comes too near us’” (303). In the case of the Learned Pig, the jumble of “rational and the animal properties” converged not in the easily lampooned realm of fashionable manners (cards and minuets) but in the more laudable and therefore more threatening activity of reading itself. As Christian Thorne has argued, one of the most enduring stories which we have learned to tell ourselves is about “the promise of critical reason.” It is a story so familiar that it nearly tells itself: Europe was once full of imbeciles; then came the printing press, and there were imbeciles no more; for with print came mass literacy, and with literacy came learning, and with learning – it is here that the story gets hazy – came democratic self-fulfillment in some guise or other. This is a story, then, of lettered nations and lettered subjects. (531)

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But for many, the Pig’s popularity suggested that the “democratic selffulfillment” which these “lettered subjects” had been emancipated into was little more than the freedom to indulge in a passion for triviality. Europe had been liberated from a feudal state in which all were imbeciles in order that people might revel in their freedom to behave like imbeciles, and not just in the safely foolish realm of matters such as “the exact dimension of a buckle or a head-dress” but, if worries about the fashionable state of modern reading were to be believed, in the very thing which had ensured their liberation in the first place (Knox, Essays 1778: 2: 17). A “letter” in the Western County Magazine told a version of a story almost as familiar as Thorne’s, about a girl befriended by a French Count who, “wonderfully struck with [her] simplicity, beauty, and modest deportment,” had had her taught “to speak French” with a “purity and elegance” that was out of all keeping with her modest Quaker background (1790: 219). “An English gentleman, after having conversed some time with her in the French language, suddenly recollecting (for her accent did not betray it) that she was an English woman,” was shocked “to find the woman, who possessed all the flowers of language in the French, instantly descend to all the vulgarity and barbarism of the lowest order of the English. In short, she was the learned Quaker in French, but she was the Pig-girl in English.” The letter finished by posing the rhetorical question: “Does not this prove that we are all taught creatures, from the Prince to the peasant; and that an untaught man is not much superior to the learned pig?” (220). This conclusion rea ffirmed the traditional status of learning as a genuinely edifying achievement, but the sudden horror of the “English gentleman” at this contrast between “learned Quaker” and “Pig-girl ” also suggested the Learned Pig’s more usual role as an emblem, not of the brutish state which education lifted people out of, but of the vulgarity of education for the wrong reasons, or what Hannah More would denounce as “the phrenzy of accomplishments” which plagued the age – literacy as a kind of fashionable performance, a commodification of the very transformative process that was supposed to rescue people from a mundane preoccupation with more worldly things (Strictures 1799: 1: 62). Brown’s comment that the right sort of fashionable reading left one “ever ready for display” may have been intended as a criticism, but more enthusiastic accounts of modern learning which embraced it as a basis not just of “decency” but of “applause” ultimately implied the same lesson: that learning was most valuable when it was most visible (European 1784: 5: 421). Only this kind of performance, tastefully restrained, could distinguish the

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polite gentleman from the vulgar possessor of “wealth, dress, or titles” (Henry 1785: 9). Won de r f u l k now l e d g e To align the idea of the reading public with the Learned Pig was to reduce it to the level of spectacle, and therefore to a world distorted by the annihilation of individual judgement amid the press and danger of the crowd. Coleridge’s account of the somnolent Dutchman echoed London Unmask’ d ’s evocation of indiscriminate curiosity – “people crowding the passage of a house” eager for “admission to some curious exhibition” – a trait which Southey, writing in 1808 about the credulity of the English, had also associated with the vogue for the Learned Pig two decades earlier. But the full extent of Coleridge’s judgement on the reading public was registered by a more subtle inference suggested by his repeated use of the phrase “voonders above voonders!” For readers in the period, the phrase would have evoked one of the Learned Pig’s leading contenders for public acclaim: Gustavus Katterfelto, a Prussian lecturer and conjuror who had enjoyed brief but intense popularity in the early 1780s, and whose trademark phrase was “won de r s won de r s, wonde r s a n d won de r s.”8 In “The Grand Consultation” (1825), George Canning mocked “That wonderful wonder, the great Katterfelto!” “To see how great must be the rage, / The wonders of this wond’rous age!” John Freeth joked in his poem, “Katterfelto.” “Of knowledge from so vast a stock, / Say what was Ne w t on, what was L o c k e ?” (1794: 37). Nor was Coleridge alone in making this connection between the two acts. The narrator of London Unmask’ d had himself, in 1784, reacted to the notice for the Learned Pig in similar terms: “Well, thought I, it may be truly said, that wonders will never cease. We may now, with propriety, adopt the language of that pretender of all pretenders, Katterfelto, and exclaim, Wonders! Wonders! and more Wonders!” (141). Coleridge would extend this connection to a more damning allusion to the reading public as an outrageous spectacle in its own right: one more example of the dubious wonders of a modern society committed less to the exercise of critical judgement than to satisfying a craving for outrageous entertainment or, what was still worse, ignorant of the difference between the two. Like the Pig, which “was in his day a far greater object of admiration to the English nation than ever was Sir Isaac Newton,” Katterfelto attracted enormous public attention, billing himself as “the greatest philosopher in this kingdom since Sir Isaac Newton” (Southey 1808: 340, qtd. Jameson

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62). Crowds flocked to his lectures, which incorporated a range of scientific phenomena including magnetism, an electrical machine, an air pump, a hydraulic balloon, and most importantly, as his endless newspaper ads proudly declared, his solar microscope, which projected the field of the microscope onto a wall so that it could be viewed by several people at once: won de r s ! won de r s ! won de r s ! and won de r s ! are now to be seen by the help of the SUN and his New Improved s ol a r m ic ro s c ope , and such wonderful and astonishing sights of the Creation, was never seen before in this or any other Kingdom, and may never be seen again. (Morning Post July 23, 1782)

Using his solar microscope Katterfelto claimed that “in a drop of water, the size of a pin head, there will be seen above 50,000 insects, the same in beer, milk, vinegar, blood, flower, cheese, &c. and there will be seen many surprizing insects in different vegetables, and above 200 other dead objects” (Morning Post July 23, 1782).9 Like Humphry Davy two decades later, whose public lectures were equally distinguished by their use of extraordinary visual demonstrations, Katterfelto fused a sense of religious wonder (his ads invited spectators to behold “these wonderful works of Providence”) with Enlightenment promise. He reassured the public that “Mr. k at t e r f e lt o has … by a very long study, discovered at last, such a variety of wonderful Experiments in Natural and Experimental Philosophy and Mathematics, as will surprise all the world” (Morning Post July 23, 1782). Continually updating his advertisements, Katterfelto was soon promising to combine his “Experiments in Natural and Experimental Philosophy and Mathematics” with “his whole regular Course of Philosophical Lectures,” which would be “delivered in twelve Different times, a different Lecture and an Experiment every day, and every evening at 7 o’ clock” (Morning Post November 18, 1782). All hail Philosophy, it’s sovereign aid Each climate owns where Science is display’d, Where Art transcendent o’er dull Error rules, Arts duly drawn from philosophic schools

proclaimed another advertisement in the form of a (syntactically garbled) poem entitled “On Seeing Mr. k at t e r f e lt o’s Grand Exhibition on Saturday night last,” (Morning Chronicle March 20, 1782). Readers and spectators were invited to appreciate Katterfelto’s blend of intellectual preeminence and personal virtue. “Ye curious Britons, who’d instruction draw, / With care attend to truth’s unerring law,” another ad began. “Learn this important serious truth from me, / ’Tis virtue only gives true dignity” (Morning Chronicle July 5, 1782).

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Part of Katterfelto’s appeal lay in the historical coincidence of his own arrival in London with the 1782 influenza epidemic. Exploiting popular anxiety, Katterfelto linked his demonstration with fears of infection in ways that infused his rationalist credentials with an ennobling rhetoric of public service, even as his scaremongering preyed on the insecurities of frightened Londoners. His solar microscope, his ads insisted, would display “those insects which are so numerous in the air, which are the cause of that raging distemper, called the influenza … in the highest perfection, as large as an ox” (Morning Chronicle July 3, 1782). Other ads carried even more explicit promises to “shew those most surprising insects, which have been advertised in the different papers, and which have threatened this kingdom with a plague, if not speedily destroyed.” Raising the stakes still further, he went on to remind his readers that “they are of the same kind, by all accounts, which caused a great plague in Italy in the year 1432. They will be magnified as large as an ox, and a hundred persons may have a view at one time” (Morning Chronicle April 16, 1782). And having exposed the source of the problem, he dutifully offered to cure “any person in London afflicted with the above complaint, by taking one of Dr. b at to’s bottles of medicines, which is now made and sold by Mr. k at t e r f e lto, and at no other place in London. A bottle for 5s. will certainly cure a person in twelve hours, as many thousand persons have experienced since his publication” (Morning Chronicle July 3, 1782). For an additional fee, he also offered advice on how to win at dice, cards, billiards, and at the E.O gambling table. It was this mix of scientific pretensions and opportunism that many critics found objectionable. “Every sensible person considers Katterfelto, as a puppy, an ignoramus, a braggadocio, and an imposter,” Charles Moritz declared in his Travels, Chiefly on Foot, Through Several Parts of England in 1782 (1795: 89). Ridiculing Katterfelto’s “awkward GermanEnglish,” Robert Cheetham dismissed him as “the soul of ignorance, that puffing elf” who dared to violate Philosophy’s “sacred name” (1796: 15). A letter to the Morning Chronicle, which began by noting that “it has long been justly observed that the English are the most credulous people living,” cited as the most damning proof of this credulity the extraordinary success of “the present wonderful, wonder-working Philosopher” whose “pompous, puffing advertisements have induced many thousands to go, hear, and see some of that wonderful knowledge he so lavishly pretends to dispence to the public” (October 15, 1782). The Haymarket Theatre quickly staged a play whose title, “None so Blind as Those Who Won’t See,” repeated one of Katterfelto’s favourite mottos, and which featured a parody of Katterfelto named Dr. Caterpillar, performing a song entitled

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“WON DE R S ! WON DE R S ! WON DE R S ! A N D WON DE R S !” Dr. Caterpillar bragged that he (can) “By my traffic in health can accumulate wealth, / And laugh at a credulous nation” (Morning Chronicle August 12, 1782; Morning Post August 10, 1782). Undaunted by his critics, Katterfelto’s ads swiftly embraced their hostility as envy, incorporating prominent warnings that unlike his experiments, which were the real thing, Caterpillar’s pseudo-scientific stunts were mere fakes designed to fool “the ignorant.” Had they really wanted to imitate Katterfelto, the ads bragged, “they might have caused, perhaps, many crowded houses for several weeks” (Morning Post July 30, 1782). References to negative publicity formed a crucial aspect of his promotional efforts. By September 1783 he was routinely running ads which insisted that, being “a Divine and Moral Philosopher,” he was “very sorry that many 1000 persons in London will have it that he and his famous BLACK CAT [which had become an important element of his show] were nothing else but devils, but that suspicion only arises from his various wonderful performances” (Morning Post September 22, 1783). Katterfelto’s mixture of dramatic flair and entrepreneurial savvy, scientific pretensions and occult mystery, linked him in the public imagination with other showmen such as Philip Breslaw, the German conjuror and mind-reader who had been a hit at the Haymarket Theatre in 1781, and James Graham, proprietor of the Temple of Health (renamed the Temple of Health and Hymen when it moved to less expensive quarters), home of the famous Celestial Bed, which, Graham claimed, had wonderful procreative powers. “The truly divine energy of this celestial and electrical fire, which fills every part of the bed, as well as the magnetical fluid, are both of them calculated to give the necessary degree of strength and exertion to the nerves,” Graham promised couples who were desperate enough to pay £50 to spend a night in the Celestial Bed (reduced to £25 when interest began to wain) (Temple 2). Graham complemented his medical services at the Temple of Health, which was “now embellished to a degree of magnificence, harmonious flowing elegance, and celestial liquid brilliancy, far superior to any theatre, public place, or even perhaps to any royal palace in the world,” with “a curious, free, and very eccentric Lecture on the Propagation of the Human Species … illustrated and enriched with reflections political, moral, and philosophical,” as well as with illegal gambling tables where patrons crowded around to play (Morning Post October 2, 1782). All three ran extensive promotional campaigns, their ads often appearing side by side on the front page of leading newspapers such as the Morning Post and Morning Chronicle alongside ads

Figure 7: The Quacks. Etching. Published by W. Humphrey, 227 Strand. 1783.

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and his black cat” as the surest proof of Lord Chesterfield’s insistence that “mankind are easier deceived than undeceived” (37–38). Edmund Burke agreed in his “Introduction on Taste” that “men are much more naturally inclined to belief than to incredulity,” even in those situations where they ought to have reacted with scepticism (1759: 1: 88). Katterfelto’s popularity lay in his ability to cater to people’s inclination to belief, or in other words to their sense of wonder, not as a form of rational curiosity but in Goldsmith’s more skeptical sense of wonder as the negation of critical inquiry. To be a purveyor of “wonderful knowledge,” as the letter to the Morning Chronicle had put it, was to be situated at the heart of these contradictions: embracing an Enlightenment will to knowledge in ways that cultivated spectators’ credulity rather than their understanding. For the author of the poem in the Aberdeen Magazine that satirized “emulation’s call,” Katterfelto was so perfect an example of the bastardization of learning that his name could become an adjective for a more general state of intellectual corruption: “And Katterfelto-like be ev’rything” (1789: 119). It was this sense of more general cultural fraud – the “Katterfelto-like” state of modern life – that underlay condemnations of the reading public which, as critics from John Brown and Hannah More to Samuel Taylor Coleridge insisted, had become irrevocably rooted in this world of quackery and intellectual delusion. A dv e r t i s i ng c u lt u r e If none of this quite explains why one briefly popular charlatan should have become a lightning rod for such intense negative reactions, the answer may be implicit in satirists’ tendency to fixate on his notorious motto “won de r s ! won de r s ! won de r s ! and won de r s !” Katterfelto’s actual performances, in other words, were less of a problem than was his promotional zeal. As John Brewer has suggested, the extraordinary proliferation of cultural venues, almost all of it marked by “the apparent absence of discrimination between cultural forms that we would consider ‘low,’ popular, or simply ‘entertaining’ and those that we would view as edifying, improving, or highbrow,” was doubled by a second, more radical development: the emergence of an industry centred on “the marketing of culture” as a major trade in its own right, from catalogues to handbills to storefront windows, and most of all to advertising, which by the end of the century had developed into a lucrative and highly sophisticated business.10 Katterfelto’s relentless self-promotion, in other words, exemplified the commercial spirit of his age. “In almost every

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newspaper that appears, there are some verses on the great Katterfelto,” Moritz lamented (1795: 89). “Great Katter-devil fills the morning paper,” John Dent agreed (Candidate 1782: n.p.). William Cowper’s account of the “wilderness of strange / But gay confusion” of newspaper ads in Book Four of The Task famously singled out Katterfelto “with his hair on end / At his own wonders, wondering for his bread” as the epitome of “the stir / Of the great Babel” known as London (1785: 141). These cultural promoters “were agnostic when it came to the question of culture as a means of moral improvement … Their aim was to appeal to the appetite, to cater to changing taste, and to satisfy an audience eager to enjoy novelty and variety” (Brewer, “Most” 346). Except that, as entrepreneurs such as Katterfelto recognized, these appetites could be satisfied all the more effectively if the goods on offer could be dressed up in a grandiose rhetoric of moral improvement and rational inquiry. The real problem with Katterfelto’s ads, “in almost every newspaper that appears,” was not their singularity but, on the contrary, the fact that they were only a more successful instance of a seemingly endless medley of notices publicizing everything from the services of portrait painters (such as Mrs. Harrington’s “improved and expeditious method of taking the most accurate likenesses; time of sitting three minutes only”) to lottery tickets to Mosenau’s Perfume Warehouse on Oxford Street. Ads for c o ope r’s f i r e e s c a pe s recounted in lurid detail the news of recent house fires, adding mournfully that, had they “been provided with one of c o ope r’s f i r e rope s or s ac k s, of Middle Row, Holborn, we should not, at this time moment [sic], have cause to lament the loss of so many of our fellow creatures” (Lysons 2: 188). Numerous doctors advertised their ability to cure an extraordinary range of disorders, from Mrs. Gabriel, Doctress (“just arrived from America”) to Doctor Cerf (“Lately arrived from France”) to Dr. Stopani & Co. (“the Italian Doctors & Ocultists, From the University of Padua”) to Dr. Harrington, who “considers it quite enough to testify in full that it is impossible for him to err, or be at a loss in knowing how to apply the Remedies for Complaints of all kinds,” as one of Harrington’s handbills put it (Lysons 1: 100, 121, 100, 108). “In physic many Candidates we meet, / That bring the dead to life in ev’ry street,” Dent joked in his comic send-up of a world filled with “candidates for Int’rest, Love, or Fame” (1782: n.p.). Medical notices shaded into advertisements for various forms of what practitioners called the occult sciences, from astrology (“Please to walk up One Pair of Stairs, Name on the Side of the Door”) to numerous practitioners of “the wonderful art” of animal magnetism to lectures on galvanism

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and physiognomy (Lysons 1: 181; Morning Post June 3, 1786). These services were complemented by an equally striking range of potions that were not unlike Katterfelto’s own Dr. Bato’s medicine (Katterfelto’s spelling varied), from Dr. Sydenham’s Balsamic Elixir of Health (“Which has been found of the greatest service to Numbers who have many Years laboured under Disorders of the Breast and Lungs, cold catarrhous Defluxions, Coughs, moist Asthmas, Complaints of the Stomach and Bowels, as Cholicks, proceeding from Crudity and Indigestion, Inappetensies, loathing of Food, Vomitings, Gripings and Diarrheas; also for Disorders of the Glands, Flatulencies and Languor of the whole Body; and in all Cases where the Parts are to be strengthened”), to “the Military Drops, a new discovery for curing every degree of the venereal disease,” to Mrs. Gibson’s medicine, which “cannot fail to remove every Cause of Barrenness, and procure immediate Conception” (Lysons 1: 52, 53, 61). Mr. Lattes went still further, proclaiming the “extraordinary” news that “by a long course of experiments he has discovered the wonderful secret of procreating either sex, at the joint option of their parents” (Morning Post June 12, 1771). Newspaper advertisements exploited the full range of rhetorical strategies that critics objected to in Katterfelto’s ads, from notices “humbly submitted to the attention of the Nobility and the Gentry” (and to whatever other readers might be impressed by this) to blatant name-dropping (“G odb ol d’s v e g e ta bl e b a s a l m, a discovery which … is now happily brought to light, and ushered into the world by his majesty’s Royal Authority, and under the immediate patronage of the principal Nobility and Gentry in the kingdom”), to grateful thanks to the public for their overwhelming support, to amazed and appreciative letters from satisfied customers. “I am bound to return you my sincere thanks for the great cure of my Corns, and to publish it for the good of the Public at large,” a letter in The Times to Mrs. Pridmore declared (Lysons 1: 85; The Times August 28, 1790). “Permit me thus publickly to declare to the World, and to thank you, for the miraculous Cure you have, under God, performed on my Wife and Child,” a letter to Dr. Blissard announced (Lysons 1: 91). Few gimmicks went untried. Royal patents were invoked, less to dissuade imitators than to convince the world that a product was worth protecting. Mr. Moore, the inventor of a horseless carriage, announced that he had “sold his Horses … because the price of that noble and useful Animal will be so affected by his new Invention, that their value will not be Onefourth of what it is at present” (St. J. C. April 8, 1769). Katterfelto’s ads’ ubiquity was itself a favourite strategy of newspaper advertisers, who frequently relied on mass publicity campaigns to stand

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out from their competitors. Mr. Patence, “evidently the most skilful and renowned Dentist, &c. in the universe,” placed over one hundred ads in the 1770s and 1780s, each differently worded, proclaiming the triumph of his dental work (“every disease, disorder, and affliction incident to the mouth are infallibly cured”) and the exceptional quality of his “matchless enamelled Teeth (impossible to discolour)” (Morning Post July 1, 1780; MH March 29, 1788). His ads mobilized the whole gambit of rhetorical tricks, from an emphasis on his own selflessness (“a Life of Study and Practice, not so much for his own emolument as to preserve the lives of others”), to his gratitude to the public for their overwhelming support, to lofty professional connections (“to his Supreme Royal Highness, Prince Oginkski, King of Poland, the Empress of Russia, and others in exalted life”) (Lysons 1: 141). As Katterfelto recognized, even bad publicity could be turned to advantage. “Mr. Patence, Surgeon and dentist, not minding envy nor base born paragraphs, needs no falshoods to set forth his abilities, when it is universally known he is not excelled or even equalled by any surgeon, dentist, or physician in the kingdom,” an ad in the Morning Post insisted (November 18, 1775).11 Like many of those who struggled to survive in this often desperate entrepreneurial world, Patence was as adaptable as he was determined. A half decade earlier, describing himself as “Dancing-Master, and Dentist,” he had run a series of notices advertising both his services as a dance instructor, and, like Mr. Moore, describing his own invention of a “curious carriage that goes without horses” (Lysons 1: 33). By the end of the century, Patence had expanded his services to include various medicines such as his Oriental Vegetable Essence (guaranteed to “cure any pains of the stomach and bowels”), Pills of Life (“these eradicate cancerous … and all corrupted matter from the blood, and consequently the flesh and bones must become sound”, and Insanity Drops (“No pains of the head ever withstood their power, and in general no occasion for houses of confinement for that worst of maladies loss of reason”) (Morning Post June 2, 1790). So influential were these sorts of sustained advertising campaigns that they often took on a life of their own, becoming more famous than the person or product they were publicizing. Cowper had gestured to Patence in his reference to “teeth for the toothless” just five lines before his description of Katterfelto “with his hair on end / At his own wonders, wondering for his bread” in his account of newspaper ads in The Task (141). The Times reported that Patence had been in the audience for a play in which one of the characters – Dabble – was recognizably based on Patence’s ads. If Patence’s presence “heightened the pleasure of those who had ever read the great man’s

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advertisements,” Patence himself seemed to enjoy the attention: “no one laughed heartier than himself” (May 6, 1785). Newspaper ads’ sensationalist rhetoric and often dubious products made them a favourite target of criticism, but ironically, it was often the advertisers themselves who registered these complaints most ominously. “The times are full of imposition,” an ad in the Morning Chronicle warned, singling out the “the variety of impositions that had been practised” on people “half-crippled with Corns” by opportunists who “could be deemed no better than mere mercenary Quacks and ignorant Pretenders.” Real scientists having abandoned the field because of so much fraud, “it was very fortunate for mankind, that the Doctor himself, whom we now have in contemplation,” having been “very much afflicted with Corns,” had developed an “excellent remedy … Sold in pots, price 1s. 1½d each, at the Toyshop, No. 12, in Gracechurch Street” (July 13, 1795). “a caution. The Public are particularly Requested to beware of Advertising Quacks, who fill their bills with Cures they never performed only to mislead the ignorant; but such is not my practice,” Dr. Leon, Artist in Herbs, Just Arrived from Dublin, reassured his readers before going on to list his various medical strengths, including “Cancers in the breast or any part of the body cured by internal medicines without plaisters” (Lysons 1: 98). “What between quacks and imposters, ignorance and impudence, practising illiterate pretenders, and understanding silly old women, the noblest of all arts is most vilely prostituted,” Mr. Milner agreed in his ad in the Morning Post, offering to help rectify the situation by “extend[ing] my usefulness as far as possible” at reasonable rates (Lysons 1: 50). Nor were literary pursuits any less implicated in the Katterfelto-like world of advertising, from endless notices of new books and the latest editions of leading monthly reviews and magazines to announcements for libraries to ads for school masters and more specialized instruction in related fields such as elocution and mnemonics, all promising to provide their pupils with crucial ingredients for success in a world where personal refinement had become a major element of social distinction. Notices for new books were generally matter-of-fact, but instructors’ ads often veered towards the same rhetorical extremes as their medical counterparts. “A Gentleman of extraordinary Experience, and consummate Erudition” advertised his plans to open a new “Academy for the Institution of Youth in all of the improved Branches of modern Literature” (Lysons 1: 18). “An eminent professor of Literature, Ancient and Modern, enjoying unaccustomed leisure” felt that he could not “better bestow it, than on the

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improvement of Youth, or the edification of any improveable age” (MH, November 29, 1783). Elevated self-portraits went hand in hand with equally lofty accounts of education (and, by implication, of the educators themselves) which embraced an Enlightenment emphasis on the reformist power of knowledge. In doing so they recast the extraordinary claims that were frequently made for the transformative power of reading in the hyperbolic terms of advertising where these sorts of grandiose assertions were the norm. Mr. Gardiner, having thanked “Friends for their favours and confidence,” emphasized that “the sum of a Nation’s misery, is the sum of its ignorance; what an impressive oracle of the necessity of Instruction!” (Lysons 1: 23). Building into a kind of quasi-Miltonic pedagogical sublime, he continued: “Education, like the creative light that shaped the chaos, regenerates the listless frame of Man, joy sparkles on his awakened mind, his generous passions pant for glory and renown, and he lifts to the smiling skies his lofty brow, in all the majesty of his Maker’s image” (Lysons 1: 23). Proclaiming elsewhere that “Education is the interest of all who value human integrity, human dignity and human blessings,” Gardiner insisted in equally swollen prose that “the praise of Education is the most transcendent exertion of the human talent – her gifts are Virtue, Wisdom, Happiness; Fame, Glory, Immortality – her path abounds with flowers and with fragrance, nor can the evils of life cloud her radiant sunshine” (Lysons 1: 23). The implication was clear enough: if education itself had such God-like powers, what could not be said for the educators, and especially for instructors such as Mr. Gardiner, who were so clearly aware of these larger implications? Like other advertisers, instructors looking for pupils mobilized the full range of rhetorical gimmicks. A letter from a correspondent who had always “entertained a very mean Opinion of the Boarding Schools near London” wrote to convey his praise of Robert Harrow’s new school, curiosity having directed him there for a personal tour (Lysons 1: 17). Potential instructors offered as many warnings about conniving imposters as did their medical counterparts. “As there are Interlopers in most Employments, so perhaps there may be such in the school-way, who deprecate the Profession, and take Youth upon any Terms, to the utter Ruin of their Education,” one ad suggested. “To remedy which,” Mr. A. II, who had “a finish’d Education at proper Schools and University, and who from several Years Trial can be well attested for his ability and good-nature, teaches English, French, Latin, and Greek, with Writing and Accounts, at 12£ a year” (Lysons 1: 17). Conveying his disgust for those school-masters who go “from House

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to House a begging Children,” the Rev’d Mr. R. Britton thanked “the Public for the great Encouragement he has received from them, and desires to inform them that he still continues to teach both Sexes, r e a di ng, w r i t i ng, and every Branch of a r i t h m e t ic; bo ok-k e e pi ng by Single and Double Entry” (Lysons 1: 21). Ironically, the thirst for improvement which these sorts of ads were capitalizing on created a vulnerability in those who were most eager to develop this capacity for critical reason. In an article entitled “Th e S c ho ol s,” the Morning Chronicle commiserated with those parents who were especially at risk because, not having had “the benefit of a decent education themselves,” they were “particularly anxious that their children should not labour under the same disadvantage”: there is no species of imposition on the public which it is of so much importance to expose as imposition in the education of youth. The man who professes to sell ease and elegance in a pair of elastic spring garters, or health and longevity in a pair of breeches made on geometrical principles, imposes only on the ignorant and the credulous of his own time; but the man who imposes upon the public in the education of youth lays up a stock of ignorance and credulity in the rising generation for future quacks and imposters to work on. (January 18, 1791)

Education, with its grand promise of improvement, may have been the most dangerous aspect of print culture to be infiltrated by cunning entrepreneurs but, critics warned, the same problems characterized virtually every aspect of modern letters. As Simon During has argued, literature had been bound up with the world of quacks and charlatans for decades, most dramatically in the case of the publisher John Newbery’s role as the sole distributor of Dr. James’ Fever Powder. Newbury’s promotional efforts extended from testimonials from literary figures such as Lord Chesterfield, Colley Cibber, and Richard Cumberland to the equivalent of product-placement strategies in literary texts associated with Newbury: John Shebbeare’s The Marriage Act (1754) included a chapter-heading attesting to the medicine’s efficacy; Dodsley’s The World inserted a puff in a widely reprinted essay-fiction; and, most famously, the children’s tale, Little Goody Two-Shoes has its heroine’s father deposed from his land, dying because he was “seized with a violent Fever in a place where Dr. James’s Powder was not to be had.” (256)

Far more controversially, however, this association of literature with quackery extended from the implication of bookselling within the world of potions to more figurative but ultimately more damning accounts of the production of literature as a form of quackery in its own right. John Corry’s The Detector of Quackery (1802) expanded its account of the

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schemes “invented by fraudulent Quacks for the purpose of profiting by the credulity of mankind” from its denunciation of “quack Doctors” (Graham’s Temple of Health was one of his prime examples) and “Quack Medicines” to the practices of literary quacks (49). Corry singled out mercenary book-makers’ determination to exploit readers’ naivety by using “puffing advertisment[s]” or passing “those temporary compilations, hastily written, and published for emolument” off as genuine anthologies “in which human knowledge is collected, like a constellation, to illumine the paths of the student” (162–63). Literature, which ought to be a “celestial handmaid of Knowledge, under the guidance of Truth,” uniting “the ingenious, the good, and the virtuous,” had become a favourite realm of quacks and imposters (158). Warnings about educational interlopers were doubled by publishers’ cautions against the art of puffing, including one by the novel publisher and circulating library promoter William Lane, who conceded in an ad in the Morning Post that “in this puffing age, it is hard to advance any thing of the very best productions which has not been said of the very worst; and yet those who have perused the Minor, a novel lately published by Lane, cannot refrain from expressing the satisfaction they received” (May 1, 1788). “This is the age of puffing I know,” a letter “For the Morning Pots” [sic] advertising “‘Lewesdon-Hill,’ by “Mr. or Dr. Crowe, Public Orator at Oxford” acknowledged, including a sample of Crowe’s verse as proof that this letter was an exception (Morning Post January 31, 1788). Running through all these debates was a disturbing irony: reading was not, as idealists might have suggested, associated with the development of critical reason and therefore with the formation of an enlightened public, but with “the credulity of mankind,” and with modern England as “a credulous nation” – perhaps even “the most credulous people living” (Corry 15; Morning Chronicle October 12, 1782). The public’s thirst for the sort of “wonderful knowledge” on offer from entertainers such as Katterfelto unsettled the distinction between learning and ignorance which ought to have guaranteed the social importance of reading. But if advertising constituted the literary genre which most starkly typified these confusions, it also provided an answer to the kinds of reading which could matter. I nc r e du l ous r e a de r s As critics such as John Strachan have recently argued, advertising constituted a thriving and highly sophisticated form of literary culture in its own right. It was not simply that literature, as “a major fashion business,”

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was steeped in this stylized promotional world; ads had become a major form of literature, a highly mediated, rhetorically dense, and richly allusive genre which confronted readers on the front page of almost every major newspaper (Raven 63). But this more positive assessment did little to reassure critics such as the correspondent to the Morning Post who protested that advertisements for so many “wonder-creating experiments,” all of which were designed “to amaze the multitude” (his main example was Mr. Lattes’ discovery of “a wonderful secret of procreating either sex”), offered vivid proof that modern-day London had become nothing more than a “receptacle of fraud” (Morning Post June 12, 1771). Samuel Paterson complained that “quacks seem to be the only adepts and men of genius among us – and quackery, another term for liberal art, profound science and acknowledged sufficiency” (1772: 2: 60). Advertising, far more than the events that were being promoted, struck many critics as the antithesis of traditional ideals of what culture (or polite taste) ought to be. It revelled in a world that was relentlessly acquisitive rather than contemplative, unabashedly materialist and fashion-driven rather than oriented towards a transcendent realm of universal forms, and (when it worked) highly manipulative in ways that flew in the face of republican models of a disinterested commitment to the public good. Nor could those who formed the market for literature and who were the target of these advertising strategies escape this taint. Whatever else they may have been, readers were cultural consumers, aligned with a range of commercially driven activities, services, products, and venues, and inescapably subject to a rapidly growing industry which, for sceptics, embodied the worst aspects of a Katterfelto-like age whose Enlightenment pretensions were belied by a more profound spirit of credulity. Associating these problems with the vogue for acts such as the Learned Pig and Katterfelto, not to mention the quackery of advertising, suggested that people were guided more by a hunger for “wonder-creating” acts than by a desire for genuine insight. The charismatic flair of these satirical denunciations, with their references to performing animals and flashy charlatans, fraudulent ads and outrageous rhetoric, can make it easy to forget the extent to which they were bound up with a more deeply rooted and by now familiar narrative of decline, alienation, and corruption. Corry’s denunciation of modern quackery (and of modernity as quackery) was predictably reinforced by a broader suspicion of people’s “love of novelty” and “its concomitant – profusion,” and of the rise of effeminacy, which had reduced “our young men” to “those idle, lisping, and most insignificant beings, vulgarly yclep’d gentlemen” (1802: 92, 95). This alignment of particular forms of

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for less controversial attractions such as the Covent Garden and Drury Lane theatres, the Royal Circus, Sadler’s Wells, Astley’s Amphitheatre, and, as they came into vogue, for ballooning exhibits and the Learned Pig. A satirical engraving entitled The Quacks depicted Graham, standing on a large E.O. table astride an enormous phallus, and Katterfelto, clutching one of his scientific props, denouncing each other as frauds and proclaiming their own scientific credentials (figure 7). For their critics, these showmen’s intellectual pretensions epitomized the cultural emptiness of the age. “This world is a Fair, where the croud is bent wholly / On gew-gaws and rattles, noise, nonsense and folly,” Thomas Holcroft suggested in his comic opera The Noble Peasant (1784), “With wonders! wonders! and wonders! enough to make a blind man stare! / Oh! Don’t you think it a wonderful Fair?” (15). The predictable answer was no, not everyone did respond quite so enthusiastically to this clamouring for “gew-gaws and rattles,” or at least not when it dressed itself up as science. But unlike venues like Astley’s or Sadler’s Wells, which never seriously claimed to offer anything more than harmless entertainment, these “philosophers” flaunted an Enlightenment rhetoric and exploited the most recent scientific devices in ways that unsettled the distinction between the pursuit of knowledge and “nonsense and folly.” English writers may have liked to speak with Protestant derision about “a country of superstition and credulity like that of Italy [where] all prodigies become more prodigious from report,” but Katterfelto’s appeal smacked of the same atmosphere of “superstition and credulity” in ways that reduced modern science itself to the most outrageous of these prodigies, even as he claimed to convey knowledge to an enlightened public (Morning Post September 10, 1783). However suggestive the Learned Pig may have been as a symbol of the enlightened pretensions of the age, it was, in the end, nothing more than another performing animal act, but Katterfelto offered himself as the genuine embodiment of these aspirations. His pretensions to knowledge, which mixed philosophy and showmanship, suggested that it was the Enlightenment itself which had become the real imposter, deluded by its own grandiose claims about the transformative power of knowledge, and betrayed by its naive faith in the intellectual integrity of an expanded public sphere. Ironically, given his own notoriety as a charlatan, Philip Breslaw’s Last Legacy (1784), whose serious educational purpose he emphasized in his preface and introduction, cited the misplaced enthusiasm with which “the multitude … croud so often to see their wonders! wonders! and wonders! as performed, and puffed away by that great philosopher Katterfelto,

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quackery with more fundamental accounts of social decline was especially vivid in depictions of the reading public, which was always vulnerable to being seized on by sceptics as a sign of the depraved state of the age. However convincing critics’ distrust of particular potions and showmen may have been, it remained equally true that the emphasis on public credulity which often permeated these analyses reflected a more fundamental mistrust of other people’s ability to make sense of these various phenomena for themselves. Coleridge’s anecdotal account implied that the dispassionate world of learning and the “gew-gaws and rattles, noise, nonsense and folly” of commercial modernity, having no natural affinity with one another, could only converge through some comic personal misunderstanding which stood in metonymically for a broader historical process of misgrowth. The “lethargic Dutch traveller” was the victim not of false advertising but of misreading, but if he was a bad reader it was in part, Coleridge’s account suggests, because he was naturally attracted to those cultural venues where spectators were invited to revel in the degradation of modern reading generally. The gap between the world of fashionable spectacles and genuine learning inscribed itself within Coleridge’s text in a tension between two parallel but very different responses. The Dutchman’s exclamation “Why, dis is voonders above voonders” suggested foolish credulity; Coleridge’s use of the phrase a few lines later suggested an altogether different spirit – not naive belief but disapproval. As I said at the outset, there was no shortage of these sorts of anti-commerce perspectives, and no shortage of dubious products and acts which seemed to warrant these negative judgements. But this was never the whole story. It is equally important to emphasize the extent to which they coincided with more positive views that emphasized a logic of cultural progress and personal fulfilment without denying the excesses and absurdities of the age. However colourful Matthew Bramble’s denunciations of “the public” as an “incongruous monster” addicted to “noise, confusion, glare, and glitter” may have been, many onlookers were more inclined to adopt Bramble’s nephew’s perspective (Smollett 1771: 88). Eschewing the two extremes of credulity and outrage, Jeremy Melford embraced a third position of enlightened incredulity: sceptical enjoyment which appreciated various spectacles (including the spectacle of the public itself) without embracing them. “This is what my uncle reprobates, as a monstrous jumble of heterogeneous principles; a vile mob of noise and impertinence. But this chaos is to me a source of infinite amusement” (49). To be a good reader of life’s “follies,” even if they were “truly ridiculous in their own

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nature,” served to “heighten the humour in the farce of life, which I am determined to enjoy as long as I can” (49). However pessimistic Burke’s warning may have been, that people “are much more inclined to belief than to incredulity,” texts such as Smollett’s suggested the opposite possibility: incredulity as an interpretive posture which unsettled the tension between naive credulity (an uncritical desire for “wonderful knowledge”) and misanthropic disavowal. Ironically, the variety of discrepant perspectives which lay jumbled together in Smollett’s novel, unmediated by the structuring influence of a narrative voice, inscribed this “jumble of heterogeneous principles” within its own pages, aligning readers with Jeremy’s determination to revel in “the farce of life” that its own dialogic challenge presented (49). Like the microcosmopolitan style celebrated by endless periodical and miscellaneous writers, it was a recipe for the basis of what it meant to be a modern reader. Periodicals embraced the spectacle of their immersion in this “gay confusion” with a typically Rabelaisian gusto whose ironic force suggested an acceptance which ought not to be equated with naive belief. Explaining that “whoever is acquainted with the writings of those eminent practitioners in physick, who make their appearance either in hand-bills, or in the weekly or daily papers, will see clearly that there is a certain and invariable method of speaking of one’s self to every body’s satisfaction,” the first number of the World announced its own appearance “in the manner and words of those gentlemen; not doubting of the same credit, and the same advantages”: A DV E RT I SE M E N T. TO be spoke with every Thursday at Tully’s head in Pall-mall, A DA M F I T Z ADAM; who after forty years travel through all parts of the known and unknown world; after having investigated all the sciences, acquired all languages, and entered into the deepest recesses of nature and the passions, is, at last, for the emolument and glory of his native country, returned to England; where he undertakes to cure all the diseases of the human mind. He cures lying, cheating, swearing, drinking, gaming, avarice, and ambition in the men; and envy, slander, coquetry, prudery, vanity, wantonness, and inconstancy in the women. He undertakes, by a safe, pleasant, and speedy method, to get husbands for young maids, and good-humour for old ones. He instructs wives, after the easiest and newest fashion, in the art of pleasing, and widows in the art of mourning. He gives common sense to philosophers, candour to disputants, modesty to critics, decency to men of fashion, and frugality to tradesmen. For farther particulars enquire at the place above-mentioned, or of any of the kings and princes in Europe, Asia, Africa, or America. N.B. The doctor performs his operations by lenitives and alternatives; never applying corrosives, but when inveterate ill habits have rendered gentler methods ineffectual. (1753: 1: 8)

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The World framed its literary mission in terms of a mock appeal to readers’ credulity, not, as Coleridge would do, to dismiss modern readers’ capacity as interpreters, but as an ironic gesture which highlighted readers’ ability to negotiate these sorts of contingencies, and as a declaration of their own important role as a cultural means of developing this critical aptitude in the reading public. Cowper’s appreciation of the farce of life was balanced by his insistence that the key to enjoying the “tumult” of modernity was keeping “a safe distance”: ’Tis pleasant through the loopholes of retreat To peep at such a world; to see the stir Of the great Babel and not feel the crowd.

But as the World ’s ironic self-presentation suggests, immersion offered a very different form of critical distance; to be aware of the real worth of so many features of the age was to be able to keep them in perspective. For those who maintained this form of distance, which amounted to a form of cultural literacy, advertising could be comfortably viewed as Cowper had described it: a sophisticated “map of busy life, / Its fluctuations and its vast concerns” (1785: 141). No phenomenon more fully epitomized the contingencies and unbridled energy of a modern transactional world or lived up to Samuel Johnson’s plea for writing that was “levelled with the general surface of life,” even if it did so in ways that Johnson himself might not have embraced (1759: 2: 630). And certainly no other genre came as close to embodying what Johnson had described as the “miscellaneous and unconnected” nature of a commercial society than the crowd of ads which covered the entire front page of major newspapers (1756: 5: 228). The visual density of their endless juxtapositions offered a powerful account of the nature of modern life that recalled the decentred proliferation of cascading images in prints such as the Bubbler’s Medley, or a Sketch of the Times (1721) in the opening decades of the century (figure 8).12 Advertisements for circuses and showmen, circulating libraries and artificial flowers, appeared alongside notices for Frances Burney’s Cecilia and Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. If, in a commercial nation, one important version of literacy had become aligned with the spirit of incredulity espoused by Jeremy Melford’s appreciation of “the farce of life,” the medley of ads which confronted readers on the front page of every major newspaper became a power synecdoche for the world they would need to read: a series of juxtapositions and contrasts whose proximity highlighted the contingencies of value which characterized modern life. Reading became a matter of making distinctions,

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Figure 8: Bubbler’s Medley, or a Sketch of the Times. Etching and engraving. Published by Carington Bowles. 1720.

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of reading across the page, rather than a search for intrinsic value. In this process, ads fostered what Ina Ferris has described, in her account of miscellaneous writing, as an “ethic of reading” which inscribed a critical lesson by “offering the reader gaps and spaces to be filled,” and in doing so nurtured an aptitude for “acts of construction and reflection” which was uniquely adapted to the interpretive demands of a polite modern nation (“Antiquarian,” 536). And modern literacy, to the extent that it had any real meaning in this age, was bound up with an ability to make the appropriate sorts of connections between these different phenomena without succumbing to the equally unproductive extremes of idle credulity and Coleridgean disdain. But like the more socially rooted model of authorship that was suggested by Johnson’s account of the manufacturers of literature, this version of reading as incredulity would give way to the pressures unleashed by the shockwaves of the French Revolution and by a Romantic idealization of reading epitomized by Coleridge’s description of “a willing suspension of disbelief”: a state of self-induced credulity, though one which would only be exercised in relation to those texts whose superior aesthetic worth had been carefully determined.

Ch apter 7

Afterword: A swinish multitude: the tyranny of fashion in the 1790s

If I should happen to trespass a little, which I trust I shall not, let it always be supposed that a confusion of characters may produce mistakes, – that, in the masquerades of the grand carnival of our age, whimsical adventures happen, odd things are said and pass off.

Edmund Burke, Letter To a Noble Lord

Walking in the countryside around Beechen Cliff, outside Bath, the characters in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey lapse into a comic misunderstanding. Eleanor Tilney is shocked by Catherine Morland’s comment that she has “heard that something very shocking indeed will soon come out in London,” something that will be “more horrible than any thing we have met with yet” (1817: 90). Miss Tilney’s more worldly brother, Henry, immediately clarifies things for his sister, but the reasons for the misunderstanding are instructive. Catherine has been referring to rumours of a new Gothic novel that is set to appear “in three duodecimo volumes” in the circulating libraries rather than to the spectre of mass violence that Eleanor imagines – “a mob of three thousand men assembling in St. George’s Fields; the Bank attacked, the Tower threatened, the streets of London flowing with blood” (91). If there is indeed a “dreadful riot,” Eleanor’s brother tells her, it “is only in your own brain. The confusion there is scandalous” (91). The confusion may well be in Eleanor’s brain, but on a more fundamental level the misunderstanding also registers the effects of a confusion between different forms of disorder: the disorder that arises when the excesses of a consumer society begin to dominate literary culture, and the psychic disorder that these problems create on the level of individual affect.1 The gap between Eleanor Tilney’s anxious credulity and her brother’s bemused incredulity recalls and performs the broader tension between similar positions within the debates about modern culture that I have traced in the previous chapter, but Eleanor’s panic also demonstrates just how highly charged these issues had become. 202

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As Jon Mee and Clement Hawes have argued, these confusions were themselves shaped by a much longer history of anxieties about enthusiasm and mania that were rooted in the revolutionary impulses of seventeenth-century millenarianism. As the eighteenth century progressed, these anxieties became identified with the continuities between subjective and social upheaval as they migrated beyond their original context and were “increasingly used to describe kinds of social behaviour that placed one beyond the pale of the emergent bourgeois public sphere” (Mee 10). As Mee argues, concerns about the sorts of “scandalous … confusion” that bordered on psychic “riot” became an important means of regulating the potentially disruptive effects of commercial modernity by distinguishing legitimate forms of affect from those other, more disruptive passions. The task of reinforcing these distinctions by highlighting and disavowing the sorts of “scandalous … confusion” that bedevilled Eleanor Tilney lay at the heart of what John Brewer and Roy Porter have described as “one of the historical tasks of what we may loosely call the Enlightenment … to forge new sets of moral values, new models of man, to match and make sense of the opportunities and obligations, the delights and dangers, created by the brave new world of goods” (Introduction, Consumption 5). But as Jon Mee has argued, and as Jane Austen clearly recognized in 1798–99, these regulatory impulses were animated by a new and highly charged level of discursive complexity as the political upheavals of the 1790s infused fears of commercial excess (the tyranny of fashion) with anxieties about revolution. The result was not so much that anxieties about commerce gave way to more narrowly political concerns (though on one level this did happen), but that anxieties about these two forms of excess and instability became enmeshed in a mutually reinforcing dialectic. And, as Jane Austen recognized with equal clarity, many of the confusions between these various issues found their most pressing intersection in debates about modern literature. In a footnote to The Pursuits of Literature, the fiercely anti-revolutionary satirical poem which appeared in four parts throughout the mid 1790s, T. J. Mathias announced: I condemn the general and needlessly expensive manner of publishing most pamphlets and books at this time. If the present rage of printing on fine, creamy wire-woven, vellum, hot-pressed paper is not stopped, the injury done to the eye from reading, and the shameful expence of the books, will in no very long time annihilate the desire of reading, and the possibility of purchasing. No new work whatsoever should be published in this manner, or Literature will destroy itself. (1797: 223)

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What interests me is the question of what this hyperbolic warning of literature’s imminent self-destruction was doing in the midst of Mathias’ more predictable harangues against a line-up of Jacobin scoundrels such as Thomas Paine and William Godwin, and how this question might help to illuminate the connections between the sorts of issues that I’ve been considering so far and the political controversies which dominated public debate in the 1790s. Why the tone of almost visceral recoil in Mathias’ disgusted reference to “fine, creamy wire-woven, vellum, hot-pressed paper” with its echo of earlier warnings about the “rage of writing,” and the comic excess of his warning of physical “injur[ies] done to the eye”? Was this merely part of the poem’s bitter satirical humour, which was itself typical of the decade’s vogue for melodramatic predictions of apocalyptic demise as news of the violence in France hit home in England? Or was there something more involved? And if there was, what might that tell us about the highly charged relations between these cultural and political fields – the world of the last masquerade at the Pantheon and what Burke would describe as “the masquerades of the grand carnival of our age” (1796: 5: 178)? Warnings about “the folly of submitting to the tyranny of fashion, at the expense of taste, decency and virtue,” in part because “the whirl of dissipation” left people too “giddy to be capable of thinking,” took on far more ominous overtones during the revolutionary age (Analytical 1795: 22: 43). On the most straightforward level, the well-established chorus of warnings that “the torrent of dissipation which has now encreased to so alarming a degree, must, if not checked in its progress, overwhelm and destroy the empire,” and about “the general tide of luxury, which hath overspread the nation, and swept away all, even the very dregs of the people,” meant that, however unprecedented the French Revolution may have seemed to its critics, they already had a well-rehearsed script which simply needed to be reinflected in order to respond to these new threats to Britain’s social order (London Unmask’ d 1784: 144; Smollett 1771: 36). But denunciations of “the tyranny of fashion” also offered critics a highly nuanced way of theorizing the relation between private and public forms of subjugation, or what William Blake, writing from the radical side, would call “the mind-forg’d manacles” (1793). The tyranny of fashion offered the spectre of a form of enslavement that was simultaneously social and deeply personal, inseparable from the broader web of commercial transactions that helped to define the nation but inextricably linked by an economy of desire to the private world of affective interiority. In his Essay on the Study of Literature (1764), Edward Gibbon Jr. had warned that “the influence of

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fashion is founded on the inconstancy of man; the causes of its despotism being as frivolous as the effects of its tyranny are fatal.” In previous eras, Gibbon explained, literature had been venerated as a potential antidote to this despotism, but contemporary “men of letters are nevertheless afraid to cast off its yoke, and, tho’ reflection causes some delay in their submission, it serves to render it but more disgraceful” (2). Denunciations of fashion could be mobilized on both sides of the revolution controversy. For radicals, fashion was synonymous with luxury, and therefore bound up with the sort of corruption that had eroded aristocrats’ civic virtue, even as the expenses it created added to the burden which they imposed on the working poor. As John Barrell has noted, Vicesimus Knox’s The Spirit of Despotism (1795) launched a critique of Britain’s existing government by emphasizing the continuities between political despotism and the sorts of “luxury, corruption, and effeminacy” which marred the age (Barrell, 5). For conservatives, denunciations of fashion were doubly useful. On the one hand, the broader cultural crisis that Knox had aligned with the corruption of the political establishment could be just as effectively recast as a sign of the corrupt nature of revolutionary politics. Hannah More’s account of “the reigning evils” of the day in her Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), ranged freely between straightforward political warnings about the insidious dangers of republican ideas and vitriolic denunciations of the fashionable excesses of modern letters, from “the swarms of Abridgments, Beauties, and Compendiums, which form too considerable a part of a young lady’s library,” to the reigning taste for “frivolous reading,” all of which were symptomatic of the dangers of “an age when inversion is the order of the day” (1: 22, 159–60). Like More, John Corry fused discussions about the dangers of medical and literary quackery with dire accounts of the sorts of political quackery practised by devotees of the “new philosophy” (1802: 72–89). At the same time, the suggestion that radical politics was just the latest and most outrageous trend – the sort of thing that the most superficial followers of fashion would be attracted to – offered anti-Jacobin critics a rich vein of satirical material. Novels such as Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), Jane West’s A Tale of the Times (1799), George Walker’s The Vagabond (1799), and Charles Lucas’ The Infernal Quixote (1801), dismissed radical pretensions as the pathetic delusions of otherwise pitiable simpletons or, worse, as the self-interested lies of manipulative and predatory tricksters. However serious and even stoic reformers’ republican self-images may have been, and however much they

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may have prided themselves on an Enlightenment jargon about critical reason, radical politics turned out to be no more than the latest pose in a modish world whose chief “passion” was “in vain display” (Fordyce, qtd. European 1787: 11: 111). The sorts of anxieties which converged in reactions to the spectre of the Learned Pig and a swinish multitude were not, in the end, so unrelated. (Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers included satirical references to both the Learned Pig and air ballooning.) The intensity of the public’s interest in “the wonderful Spectacle which is now exhibited in a neighbouring and rival Country” meant that the revolution controversy did not so much eclipse questions about the dangers of fashion (and the broader debates about polite sociability and commercial modernity that were bound up with this) as cast their implications in a clearer and more worrying light (Burke, Correspondence 6: 9). These connections between concerns about fashion and the revolution controversy were, of course, largely rhetorical, but my suggestion that anxieties about fashion were themselves a reflection of a deeper crisis of epistemology suggests a more fundamental connection with these political controversies. For critics of commerce, the ultimate problem lay in its tendency to create a transactional world “more unstable in its epistemological foundations than Plato’s cave” (Pocock, Machiavellian 451). For conservatives such as Burke in the 1790s, revolution inflicted a similar uprootedness in the form of the civic amnesia implied by the endless present tense of democratic activism, which privileged the wishes of the living over the imperatives of past generations. Both of these dynamics (economic and political) implied a worrying displacement of any kind of epistemological foundation. The market, in its ceaseless process of commodification, dissolved all possibility of inherent value; revolutionaries, in their arrogant reliance on “their own private stock of reason,” showed no regard for the wisdom or intentions of previous generations (Burke 3: 346). Charles Taylor suggests that this sense of rootlessness was a manifestation of a broader condition which he describes as “the malaise of modernity” – a dissatisfaction that stemmed, on the one hand, from the growing atomization of society as the rights of the individual gained greater sway, and, on the other hand, from the orientation of society towards the promise of the future rather than the guidance of the past, but a future which could never live up to the promise that its horizon of possibilities suggested. If both of these problems found their most dramatic and (for many) jarring expression in the outbreak of the Revolution, they were also, on a more fundamental level, extreme manifestations of the sense of contingency that I have been exploring throughout the whole of this

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book. It was no accident that Carlyle’s discussion of balloons – “mounting heavenward” but “tumbling whither Fate will” – as the most powerful symbol of their age was offered as a prelude to his account of the French Revolution. My argument here is that Mathias’ outburst is rooted in the threatening spectacle of this new sense of contingency that haunted late eighteenth-century discussions of modernity in its commercial, cultural, and political forms. To put this another way, Mathias’ ire is an expression of eighteenth-century Britain’s anxious sense that it had become the site of a kind of haunting – a spectral economy of absences and illusions heightened by a sense of a world which was and was not there: an intensification of “the real” (the process of commodification and the advent of new marketing strategies) and an evisceration of any solid epistemological ground from which to assess it. The world may have been too much with the men and women of eighteenth-century Britain, but that very aura of dazzling immediacy, fuelled by so much getting and spending, fostered an uncanny sense that society had become strangely elusive and even unintelligible. Fashion – including “the present rage of printing on fine, creamy wire-woven, vellum, hot-pressed paper” – epitomized these paradoxes in their most disturbing guise. Its reliance on conspicuous display instantiated a new regime of hypervisibility, but its association with novelty implied a corresponding emptiness – an endlessly new set of emperor’s clothes which enlisted a shared fantasy of plentitude precisely by insisting on a covert awareness of ontological absence. If the anxieties which this new sense of cultural and political rootlessness generated manifested themselves in denunciations of literature’s immersion in the mercurial and excessive world of fashion, these worries could be more satisfactorily resolved through a fetishistic transference of such problems onto a new ideal of literature in which ambiguity and instability of meaning became the hallmark of aesthetic value. Reconfiguring the experience of epistemological failure in the psychologized terms of the sublime, literature (and especially poetry) converted a crisis of subjectivity into a triumph of the imagination, a scene of “Of awful promise” where “the light of sense / Goes out in flashes that have shewn to us / The invisible world” (Wordsworth, Prelude 1805: 6: 34–36). It was an enabling paradox; literature mattered precisely because it offered a form of knowledge which was so unstable. As an expression of “Negative Capability” (the “quality [which] went to form a man of Achievement especially in literature”), poetry affirmed that “man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”

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(Keats 1817: 103–4). In an age when “the passions” seemed to “have all burst the bounds of conscience and reason,” poets offered a reassuring ability to convey the experience of “an overflow of powerful feelings” safely “recollected in tranquillity” (European 1783: 4: 286; Wordsworth, Poetical 1800: 400). In doing so, they enacted a series of idealizing strategies which has an enduring influence on the definition of literature which would, in turn, shape our own disciplinary commitments. Our ability to develop meaningful responses to the erosion of this definition depends in large part on an adequate understanding of the connections between these two moments in the destabilization of knowledge. Doing so, however, means developing a methodology that is at home with the “intrinsically incomplete” nature of this project. “Haunting,” Avery Gordon reminds us, “is a constituent element of modern social life” (7). Romantic writers’ widely noted affinity for literary fragments may well have been, on one level, an expression of their recognition of this “intrinsically incomplete” world, but it is worth bearing in mind the very different ways that an earlier generation of writers incorporated similar lessons into their own arguments for the importance of a “miscellaneous and unconnected” literature whose discontinuities conscripted readers in an interpretive process which adapted them to the pressures of a polite commercial nation.

Notes

1 T h e o c e a n of i n k : a l ong i n t r oduc t ion 1 For critical studies of these earlier eighteenth-century debates about the relation between a more genteel model of the amateur man of letters and professional authors, see Alexandre Beljame, Men of Letters and the English Public in the Eighteenth Century, 1660–1744: Dryden, Addison, Pope (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1948); Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Alvin Kernan, Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson (Princeton University Press, 1987). 2 For discussions of the masquerade as the epitome of the socially hybridized nature of an advanced commercial society, see Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford University Press, 1986) and Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004): 157–79. For a more historically specific and politically nuanced reading of eighteenth-century masquerades, see Gillian Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (Cambridge University Press, 2007): 38–62. 3 As Erin Mackie notes, Leslie Stephen would offer a strikingly similar observation, posed as a rhetorical question, in the first of his lectures on eighteenthcentury English literature: “Are changes in literary fashion enveloped in the same inscrutable mystery as changes in ladies’ dresses?” Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in The Tatler and The Spectator (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997): 203. 4 John Guillory argues, along similar lines, that it is less important to engage in a pluralist critique of the composition of the canon (its inclusions and exclusions) than to interrogate its historical status and function as a construct that is only intelligible in terms of the broader institutional history of the academy. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (University of Chicago Press, 1993). 5 Echoing Plumb’s insistence that the impact of this “commercialization of leisure” has been “almost totally ignored by economic historians” (31), 209

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Ann Bermingham suggests that our appreciation of these changes has been obscured by the tendency of cultural historians to uncritically reproduce Marx’s rejection of consumption as a site of alienating false consciousness. Introduction, The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, ed. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (London: Routledge, 1995): 7–9. 6 Tracing the evolution of the idea of the market from its earliest medieval terms, which emphasized a particular time and place, J.-C. Agnew suggests that “by the end of the eighteenth century, ‘market’ had come to imply, especially in literate circles, a boundless and timeless phenomenon,” Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theatre in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge University Press, 1996): 41. 7 An essay in the World argued, with a certain courageous optimism, that “novelty and fashion … answer excellent purposes to society” in moral terms that go far beyond the usual economic claims for fashion’s role in encouraging trade: “By encreasing the wants, they increase the connections of mankind” (4: 106). 8 For eighteenth-century debates about luxury, see John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) and John Barrell, “The Dangerous Goddess,” The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1992). Terry Eagleton argues, along lines similar to those I pursue here, that “bourgeois culture of a traditionally humanistic kind” is threatened “not so much [by] the political left as the cavortings of the commodity.” Commodities were subversive, not because their supposed autonomy provided a foundation for oppositional politics but, quite the opposite, because the commodity, in its fetishized state, is inherently “transgressive, promiscuous, polymorphous,” The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990): 373–74. 9 For a discussion of fashion in these terms, see Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self 202–7. Wahrman’s entire book is focused on the impact of the various forces that were associated with the word “fashion” on a range of attitudes to the concept of personal identity throughout the eighteenth century, though he only deals with fashion directly as an explicit theme in these pages. 10 For examples of political critiques of Habermas’ account, see the essays collected in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. and intro. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 11 Stallybrass and White’s argument that “the emergence of the public sphere required that its spaces of discourse be de-libidinized in the interests of serious, productive, and rational intercourse” should be read less as a description of an actual historical process (however partially it may have ultimately been realized) than as an account of a particular form of collective self-fashioning and, what was bound up with that, of the requirements of a discursive shift. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986): 17. But as Foucault reminds us in his work on nineteenth-century attitudes towards


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sexuality, this narrative of repression only intensifies the presence of these supposedly disruptive forces. Nor, as I am arguing here, do we need to follow Stallybrass and White’s argument (which is also Habermas’) in assuming that people conceptualized the rational character of the public sphere in such narrow or oppositional terms. See also the essays in Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and the Literary Culture in Britain, 1770–1840 (Cambridge University Press, 2002), ed. Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite. See, for instance, her account of of the sophisticated commercial efforts of Teresa Cornelys, who ran the “Society” in Carlisle House in the 1760s and 1770s, pp. 17–62. See, for instance, Shawn Lisa Maurer, Proposing Men: Dialectics of Gender and Class in the Eighteenth-Century Periodical (Stanford University Press, 1998); Mackie, Market à la Mode; Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England; Liz Bellamy, Commerce, Morality, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Gallagher, Nobody’s Story; and April London, Women and Property in the EighteenthCentury English Novel (Cambridge University Press, 1999). The word “profusion” retained this negative connotation throughout the century. See, for instance, Brown, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times, 7th edn (1757): 1: 40; European 1 (1782): 249; Gentleman’s 53.2 (1783): 759; Lounger 52; Mirror 182; London Unmask’ d 66. For a discussion of these issues in terms of an account of the historical specificity of the modern cultural phenomenon of “insatiability,” see Colin Campbell, “The Puzzle of Modern Consumerism,” in The Consumer Society Reader, ed. Martyn J. Lee (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000): 48–72. See, for instance, Oliver Goldsmith: “The disease is attended with a false appetite, which the natural food of the mind will not satisfy. It will prefer Ovid to Tibullus, and the rant of Lee to the tenderness of Otway. The soul sinks into a kind of sleepy idiotism, and is diverted by toys and baubles, which can only be pleasing to the most superficial curiosity,” The Miscellaneous Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. James Prior, 4 vols. (New York: George P. Putnam, 1850), 1: 266. For links between consumerism as an economic practice and a wasting disease, see Roy Porter, “Consumption: disease of the consumer society?” in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London and New York: Routledge, 1993): 58–81. Building on work by Porter and Brewer, Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace similarly links this debased form of appetite to the double meaning of consumption, a process which means “either to take in what one needs to survive or to waste away in a fit of disease,” Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997): 7. What was most threatening to critics of Britain’s consumer revolution was the extent to which it seemed to imply both at the same time: economic consumption as an activity which emptied out rather than enhanced personal selfhood.

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As Kowaleski-Wallace suggests, ambivalence about consumerism registered itself most sharply when these debates focused on the female body. See Consuming Subjects 6–9. 19 Colin Campbell describes this condition as “modern hedonism,” which, unlike traditional forms of hedonism, focused obsessively on consumer goods as a means cultivating “a state of enjoyable discomfort” typified, Campbell argues, by window shopping. See The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987): 77–95. 20 This existential dilemma resonated on a personal as well as a theoretical level. As Lawrence Klein has argued, Shaftesbury’s “breathtakingly ambitious project of self-organization, a thoroughly centred self, integral and consistent,” was “undertaken in the midst of a social undertow threatening constantly to undermine the project” – a social force which manifested itself in Shaftesbury’s own “experience of personal fragmentation,” Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 1994): 83. 21 See James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin, “Introduction: Engaging the Eidermetropolis,” Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780–1840 (Cambridge University Press, 2005): 1–41. For a similar discussion, see Barbara Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 22 For further analysis of these debates about credit, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton University Press, 1975): 446–61; Laura Brown, Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press): 95–131; and Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). 23 For a suggestive historical analysis of the theoretical links between commerce and theatre, see Agnew, Worlds Apart. 24 Surveying the interpenetration of literature and commerce in this theatrical world dominated by symbolic forms of value, Mary Poovey has argued, directly against the grain of the case that I am making here, that this conjuncture led to an increasingly strong equation of literature with fiction in order to render the links between economics and the world of facts convincing. “During the course of the eighteenth century, practitioners of both writing about financial matters and imaginative writing began to renounce their shared function,” Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (University of Chicago Press, 2008): 7. This apparent distinction between fact and fiction served both sides well, underwriting particular forms of cultural authority within each field. Only through this cleavage could money be fully naturalized as something which “seem[ed] to be rather than simply to represent value” (61). Those works that would come to be known as literature, on the other hand, increasingly aligned their own aesthetic value with a self-conscious awareness of their own fictional character. My argument here will be the opposite: that the


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periodical and miscellaneous press thrived by renouncing this fact/fiction dichotomy in favour of a series of ironic dislocations which forced readers to become skilful interpreters in a textual world characterized by these instabilities. But the point, ultimately, is that both accounts are true; the period was dominated by the tensions between these impulses, rather than by the exclusive validity of either one or the other. 25 For a more specific account of the ways that anxieties about commerce manifested themselves in a preoccupation with the social role of women, see Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects. Kowaleski-Wallace astutely links eighteenth-century Britain’s ambivalence about commerce to the double role that it assigned to women as shoppers and, slightly more figuratively, commodities in their own right, or in other words as desiring subjects and objects of desire (58). In its insistence on this double location – both in and on the market – “British culture projected onto the female subject both its fondest wishes for the transforming power of consumerism and its deepest anxieties about the corrupting influence of goods” (5). 26 See also Knox, Winter Evenings: “Persons in high life, urged by an impulse of that pride which is as strong in low life as in high, will be continually endeavouring to distinguish themselves by external appearance. Those on the next step, quite down to the bottom of the ladder, will always be assuming the appearance of those above them. Fancy and invention are put to the rack to find out new marks unattainable, if possible, by the subordinate classes” (3 vols. 1785; reprinted New York: Garland Publishing, 1972), 1: 66. These descriptions of class emulation echo debates within economic history initiated by Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption as an historically unprecedented phenomenon driven by novel forms of insatiable desire, in The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York: The Modern Library, 1934). Colin Campbell’s corrective response in The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, that we cannot assume that imitative behaviour is necessarily emulative, is an important one, but whatever people’s motives, the depth and persistence of precisely these sorts of characterizations meant that, on a cultural level, these narratives formed the discursive groundwork within which debates about the role of modern literature were situated. For critical debates rooted at the intersection of economic and cultural history that have emerged out of Veblen’s account, see the essays collected in The Consumer Society Reader, ed. Martyn J. Lee (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); The Consumption of Culture, 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, ed. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (London: Routledge, 1995); and Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. Brewer and Porter. 27 As Jon Mee has argued, this drive towards naturalizing those passions which propelled a consumer society was in part achieved through a related devaluing of the millenarial concept of enthusiasm. “If various kinds of affect were increasingly brought into accounts of human identity and knowledge … there was also a constant drive to distinguish authentic affect from mere enthusiasm,” Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the

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Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford University Press, 2003): 7. Adopting a more overtly commercial perspective, this double movement translated into a legitimation of particular forms of desire by demonizing those negative forms that could be dismissed as the corrupt symptoms of fashionable excess. 28 For the history of what were known as frost fairs on the Thames, the most famous of which was held during the winter of 1683–84, see Ian Currie, Frost, Freezes and Fairs: Chronicles of the Frozen Thames and Harsh Winters in Britain from 1000ad (Frosted Earth, 1996); and Nicholas Reed, Frost Fairs on the Frozen Thames (Folkestone: Lilburne Press, 2002). 29 Another of Goldsmith’s reveries, from the fifth number of The Bee, serves as the basis of Frank Donoghue’s well-known study, The Fame Machine: Book Reviewing and Eighteenth-Century Literary Careers (Stanford University Press, 1996). See Goldsmith, Miscellaneous Works 1: 94–100. 2 B a l l o onom a n i a : t h e p u r s u i t of k now l e d g e a n d t h e c u lt u r e of t h e s pe c t ac l e 1 Dror Wahrman’s study of changing conceptions of identity in the eighteenth century turns on “a rapid, swift, far-reaching rupture that spread like wildfire through the thickets of contemporary culture” in the aftermath of the American Revolution, though as Wahrman argues, this rupture is best read as the final outbreak of tensions that had been building for decades, and which were rooted in people’s recognition of the instability of identity (exemplified for many contemporaries by the carnivalesque freedom of the masquerade) in a modern commercial society, a perspective which itself amounted to a fundamental rupture with an earlier age of perceived cultural (if not political) stability (The Making of the Modern Self 47). 2 For related studies of the ballooning craze as a compelling example of these connections between science, literature, and commerce, see Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder (London: HarperPress, 2008): 125–62; and Michael R. Lynn, The Sublime Invention: Ballooning in Europe, 1783–1820 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010). 3 For an account of ballooning as a symbol of the Enlightenment age, see Lynn, The Sublime Invention 7. 4 For entrepreneurs’ efforts to exploit related commercial opportunities, including merchandise which capitalized on the craze, see Lynn, The Sublime Invention 143–61. 5 They also provided a hint of the mix of outrage and entrepreneurial savvy that would characterize the vogue for ballooning in the coming years. Zambeccari’s first balloon was destroyed by terrified peasants after it descended but his second balloon was recovered by a Sussex farmer who exhibited it in his barn for a penny a head. 6 On January 7, 1785, Jeffries accompanied Blanchard on the first ever flight across the English Channel carrying a letter from Benjamin Franklin’s son


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to his father, then living in Paris. For Jeffries’ subsequent attempts to present his findings at the Royal Society, see Brandon Brame Fortune, Franklin and His Friends: Portraying the Man of Science in Eighteenth-Century America (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Association with the University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999): 22–24. 7 For Lunardi’s popularity with the Whig circle associated with the Duchess of Devonshire and the Prince of Wales, see Holmes, The Age of Wonder 139–40. 8 The joke may have been based in part on a pickpocket who created a disturbance in the crowd that had gathered to watch Vincenzo Lunardi’s first flight. 9 This may have been partially as a result of the work of an early aeronaut, James Tytler, as an editor for the second and third editions of the Encyclopaedia. For Tytler’s unsuccessful ballooning attempts, see J. E. Hodgson, The History of Aeronautics in Great Britain, From the Earliest Times to the Latter Half of the Nineteenth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1924): 106–11. My thanks to Jon Klancher for pointing out the presence of the balloon on the frontispiece. 10 See, for example, John Southern, A Treatise upon Aerostatic Machines, 1795. In his Airpopaidia: Containing the Narrative of a Balloon Excursion from Chester, the Eighth of September, 1785, Thomas Baldwin similarly recorded “One of the Pint-Bottles for light Air was prepared … and dropped from the Car” (73). 11 See, for example, Cavendish’s Experiments on Air (1784); and Priestley’s Experiments and Observations on Air (1790). 12 For further analysis of this debate about the utility of balloons, see Lynn, The Sublime Invention 35–57. 13 Montgolfier had proposed balloons as a means of assisting in France’s effort to seize Gibraltar from the English in 1782. For the formation of a French balloon division in April 1794 and the use of a balloon for scouting in the battle of Fleurus in Belgium, see Hodgson, The History of Aeronautics in Great Britain 23. 14 For a similar suggestion, see the Monthly Review’s discussion of a letter from W. T. “on the use that might be made of air balloons for the purpose of practical astronomy” (1784: 70: 326). 15 Wary of disaster, Louis XVI had initially granted the Montgolfier brothers permission to send humans aloft on the condition that the passengers should be two criminals. Pilâtre de Rozier objected to the idea that criminals should enjoy the distinction of becoming the first successful aeronauts and ultimately gained the distinction for himself, ascending in the Montgolfier balloon. 16 An apparently baffled Lunardi remarked that “the Philosophers in England have attended to them with a silence, and an apparent indifference, not easily to be accounted for” (1). 17 In fact, Cavallo adopted this more cautious position himself later in his History, rejecting the parallel with ships, whose navigational powers relied on

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their contact with two different media – air and water – while balloons were immersed wholly in air. The History and Practice of Aerostation (London: C. Dilly, 1785): 297. 18 See also the discussion of the Comte de Galvez’s “Method of Directing Aerostatic Machines” in the European Magazine (1785: 7:176). 19 For the promotional efforts of entrepreneurs, see Lynn, The Sublime Invention 119–41. 20 For a fuller discussion of parachuting as a related innovation, see Lynn, The Sublime Invention 26–32. 21 These negative associations were epitomized by Mercy Warren’s playful confusion of “balloon” with “baboon” in Sans Souci, Alias Free and Easy: or an Evening’s Peep into a Polite Circle (24–25). 22 For Blanchard’s Balloon and Parachute Aerostatic Academy, which he ran in the Stockwell Road, Vauxhall, from some time in 1784 until his departure from England the next summer, see L. T. C. Rolt, The Aeronauts: A Dramatic History of the Great Age of Ballooning (New York: Walker and Company, 1966): 88; and Hodgson, The History of Aeronautics in Great Britain 171. 23 See Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820 (Cambridge University Press, 1992); Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750 (Cambridge University Press, 1992); and William Clark, Jan Golinksi, and Simon Schaffer, eds., The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (University of Chicago Press, 1999). 24 Barbauld had described the exhibition of a balloon as a “public curiosity” in a letter which I have quoted above. For a more nuanced discussion of these issues in late eighteenth-century Britain, see Benedict, Curiosity. 25 As Brewer has argued about the perceived dangers of Britain’s commercial modernity, one of its most novel aspects was the ease with which it had become possible to gain entry to the venues and activities which constituted the nation’s public culture. “ ‘The Most Polite Age and the Most Vicious’: Attitudes Towards Culture as a Commodity, 1660–1800,” in The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800, ed. Bermingham. 26 As J. E. Hodgson and Tom Kymer have noted, Johnson’s response was animated by a tension between fascination and disdain. Hodgson, The History of Aeronautics in Great Britain; Keymer, “ ‘Letters about nothing’: Johnson and Epistolary Writing,” in The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, ed. Greg Clingham (Cambridge University Press, 1997). Like Walpole, Johnson peppered his letters with references to ballooning though he too adopted a sceptical position to the whole phenomenon. Johnson had lampooned the idea of human flight as the epitome of scientific delusion in the Ramber No. 199 (1752) and again in chapter six of Rasselas (1759), and insistently rejected the idea that ballooning had much to offer in the way of science, but this did not prevent him from contributing as a subscriber (Boswell, Life of Johnson, 1791; ed. E. W. Chapman, World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, 1980: 1340) or, too sick to make the trip himself, sending a servant into the garden to witness a flight (1360).


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3 Bi bl iom a n i a : t h e r ag e f or b o ok s a n d t h e s pe c t ac l e of c u lt u r e 1 Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 2 See for instance, Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982): 79–80. 3 For more general explorations of these issues, see Philip Connell, “Bibliomania: Book Collecting, Cultural Politics, and the Rise of Literary Heritage in Romantic Britain,” Representations 71 (Summer 2000): 24–47; Deidre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (University of Chicago Press, 1998); and The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800, ed. Bermingham and Brewer. 4 For discussions of the relations between the culture of the book and antiquarianism, see Ina Ferris, “Printing the Past: Walter Scott’s Bannatyne Club and the Antiquarian Document,” Romanticism 11.2 (2005): 143–60; and Marilyn Butler, “Antiquarianism,” An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776–1832, ed. Iain McCalman (Oxford University Press, 1999). 5 This totalizing drive remains characteristic of bibliographic studies today. See, for instance, D. F. McKenzie’s claim that bibliography “accounts for a history of the book and, indeed, of all printed forms including all textual ephemera as a record of cultural change, whether in mass civilization or minority culture,” “The Book as an Expressive Form,” The Book History Reader, ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (London and New York: Routledge, 2002): 29. Book history’s determination to map out the relations between various elements of the literary field is equally reminiscent of these earlier bibliographic attempts to discover the relations between the various branches of the tree of knowledge. See, for instance, Robert Darnton’s emphasis on the “communications circuit” (with its corresponding diagram) as a means of developing a “holistic view of the book as a means of communication” in order to demonstrate how the “the parts” of this process “are related to the whole,” “What is the History of Books?” Daedalus (Summer 1982): 65–83; or Pierre Bourdieu’s more complex map of the French literary field in the second half of the nineteenth century as part of his sociological account of the field of cultural production, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. and intro. Randal Johnson (Columbia University Press, 1993): 82. 6 The parallel with similar dreams in our own day when corporations scramble to put all writing online highlights the close relation between evolving communicative technologies and the fantasy of the consolidation of knowledge. 7 For a suggestive discussion of the connections between the emergent science of bibliography and early nineteenth-century debates about the bibliomania, see Jon Klancher, “Wild Bibliography: The Rise and Fall of Book History in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Bookish Histories: Books, Literature, and Commercial Modernity, 1700–1900, ed. Ina Ferris and Paul Keen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009): 19–40.

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8 William St. Clair describes this as the formation of an “old canon” in the decades after the landmark 1774 copyright decision (The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge University Press, 2004). 4 F o ol i s h k now l e d g e : t h e l i t t l e w or l d of m ic r o c o s mop ol i t a n l i t e r at u r e 1 For a study of this quasi-judicial account, see Antonio Forster, “Review Journals and the Reading Public,” Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays, ed. Isabel Rivers (New York and London: Leicester University Press, 2001). For studies of the periodical press, see Marilyn Butler, “Culture’s Medium: The Role of the Review,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. Stuart Curran (Cambridge University Press, 1993): 120–47; Donoghue, The Fame Machine; Paul Keen, The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere (Cambridge University Press, 1999): 115–31; Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison, WN: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991); Mark Parker, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Derek Roper, Reviewing Before the Edinburgh, 1788–1802 (London: Methuen, 1978). 2 For the importance of the idea of “manners” in the long eighteenth century, and in a related shift in ideas about history writing, see Mark Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton University Press, 2000), especially 147–52. 3 As Sonia Hofkosh puts it in the context of a related argument about women readers, “to read the magazines this way is to imagine a response to this culture’s dazzling proliferation of wares and words that recognizes the political implications of such abundance and sees in it the possibility for making a material difference.” “Commodities Among Themselves: Reading/Desire in Early Women’s Magazines,” Essays and Studies: Romanticism and Gender, ed. Anne Janowitz (London: D. S. Brewer, 1998): 92. 4 Reinscribing female consumption as a significant form of agency in the context of a burgeoning commercial society, Hofkosh argues that Romantic women’s magazines may “be read as presenting another possible mode of social action and interaction” which might “allow the possibility of alternative self-definitions” (“Commodities Among Themselves” 86–87). 5 Scott Black has emphasized the ways that such texts “register and enable the kind of feedback loops that drive print culture as readers read and respond to other readers. Print culture, indeed, is the name we give to the traces of these activities.” Of Essays and Reading in Modern Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004): 2. 6 See, for instance, Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006). 7 For the efforts of women writers to position themselves as professional authors within this broader cultural landscape, see Betty Schellenberg, The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2005).


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8 I am alluding to Clifford Siskin’s argument that the Romantic poets forged strategies for making change make sense by rewriting historical change as personal growth through a turn to lyrical interiority. Recognizing the extent to which periodical writers had already carved out a similar role (though in terms which did not depend upon a sense of personal change) helps to further our current tendency to develop a more nuanced sense of Romantic aesthetics by locating canonical poets within a complex discursive terrain whose already existing features emerge in these writings in often startling new ways. 9 Jon Klancher argues, in similar terms, that eighteenth-century journals had played a central role in the formation of class consciousness, “organiz[ing] English audiences by forming the ‘reading habit’” (The Making of English Reading Audiences 15). 10 Focusing on the early eighteenth century, Brian Cowan argues that the Spectator and Tatler should be read, not as Habermas reads them, as champions of a greatly expanded bourgeois public sphere, but rather as the advocates of a new hegemonic order characterized by Klein’s account of the politics of politeness. “Mr. Spectator and the Coffeehouse Public Sphere,” EighteenthCentury Studies 37.3 (2004): 345–66. 11 For an account of D’Israeli’s shift to conservative politics over the course of the 1790s, see April London, “Isaac D’Israeli and Literary History: Opinion, Anecdote, and Secret History in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Poetics Today 26:3 (Fall 2005), 351–86. 5 U nc om mon a n i m a l s: l i t e r a r y pr of e s s ion a l i s m i n t h e ag e of au t hor s 1 The heading ‘The low-life of literature’ is borrowed from a passage in Robert Darnton’s The Literary Underground of the Old Regime, which I discuss later in this chapter. 2 See, for a similar argument, John Guillory’s instructive account of how, “in the case of literature, the problematic of cultural capital will always return us to the question of the relations between the means of literary production and the institutions of social reproduction within which speakers succeed or fail to speak for themselves” (Cultural Capital 82). 3 See also Clifford Siskin’s argument that “disciplinarity, professionalism, and Literature [emerged] as historical categories – categories constituted through acts of classification – acts that select hierarchically, and thus empower, particular kinds of knowledge, particular kinds of work, and particular kinds of writing.” The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700– 1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998): 6. 4 Later editions omitted Crabbe’s subsequent plea to “puff my labours as ye puff your own” in favour of a less controversial invitation to “join our forces to subdue / This bold assuming but successful crew.” 5 Mark Rose links this tendency to valorize literature as an expression of the genius of the author to arguments which dominated the copyright trials. See

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Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). It is also worth emphasizing the influence of the turn to biography generally, as it manifested itself in projects such as the Biographia Britannica: Or, the Lives of the Most Eminent Persons Who Have Flourished in Great Britain and Ireland, from the Earliest Ages (1747–66) and John Aikin’s General Biography; or Lives, Critical and Historical, of the Most Eminent Persons of All Ages, Countries, Conditions, and Professions (1799–1815). For the growing emphasis on biography within debates about historical writing, see Phillips, Society and Sentiment. 6 Citing Alison’s remark, John Brewer wryly comments, “[w]e can almost see Alison’s man of taste fleeing from the theater audience and the crowd at the pleasure garden.” The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997): 352. 7 See, for instance, Solkin’s Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) and “ReWrighting Shaftesbury: The Air Pump and the Limits of Commercial Humanism,” in Painting and the Politics of Culture, ed. John Barrell (Oxford University Press, 1992): 73–100. 8 Debates about Johnson’s politics have typically focused on the question of whether his conservatism tilted more towards deference for aristocratic privilege or towards a version of gentility which reflected his own position among those involved in various forms of intellectual (rather than manual) labour. I am less interested in adding one more voice to this debate than in posing the question of the extent to which Johnson’s emphasis on professionalism, with its attendant respect for the importance of social immersion, rejected the mutually exclusive (either/or) nature of this debate in favour of approaches which consistently unsettled these oppositions. 9 It is too limited to argue, as Nicholas Hudson does, that “it is hardly an exaggeration to claim that Johnson’s Rambler essays are dedicated, above all, to the defence of traditional learning and virtues in a society that increasingly finds dignity and merit only in riches. To this extent, Johnson does sound very like an advocate for the values preached in seventeenth-century conduct books, with their disdain of avarice and their glorification of scholarship and military valour.” Samuel Johnson and the Making of Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2003): 26. The miscellaneous nature of periodical writing meant that it was possible to adopt, as Johnson certainly did, very different positions over the course of different issues, but the spirit of the numerous Rambler essays that I have quoted from in this book suggests, not only that Hudson’s claim is an exaggeration, but that the very opposite was true. Many Rambler essays articulated a vision of metropolitan sociability which resisted as needlessly limited the choice between traditional learning and wealth as the basis of new forms of gentility in favour of a genuine appreciation of work-aday realities that was “levelled with the general surface of life,” and which fully recognized the dangers of pedantry (those forms of scholarship that were not adequately nurtured by an intercourse with ordinary social life, and which did not speak to the needs of people in ordinary circumstances) and the irrelevance


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of military valour. I am, however, far more sympathetic to Hudson’s general emphasis on “the importance of understand[ing] Johnson within the cultural developments of his age,” not just by placing Johnson “in his ‘context’ but as part of a process that was changing England from a pre-modern into a modern society” (2). To this extent, I share Hudson’s emphasis on reading Johnson as “simultaneously a product and producer of social realities” (222). 6 T h e L e a r n e d Pig: e n l ig h t e n i ng t h e r e a di ng p u bl ic 1 See, for instance, Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption (London: Allen Lane, 1978). 2 For a broader historical perspective on these debates, see Copley, “The Fine Arts in Eighteenth-Century Polite Culture,” in Painting and the Politics of Culture, ed. Barrell, 13–37. 3 This quotation comes from the 1837 edition of D’Israeli’s Curiosities. It does not appear in any earlier version that I have found. 4 For the efforts of trained-animal presenters such as Phillip Astley to legitimate their shows in the face of anti-theatrical prejudice which often resulted in legal interference, see Marius Kwint, “The Legitimation of the Circus in Late Georgian England,” Past and Present 174 (2002): 72–115. 5 For accounts of Thomas Wildman’s performing bees, see Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1978): 40, 427; and Deidre Coleman’s “Entertaining Entomology: Insects and Insect Performers in the Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-Century Life 30 (Summer 2006): 107–134. Coleman offers an intriguing account of the ways that public interest in insects reflected broader debates about gendered aspects of Britain’s changing social order. As Coleman notes, Wildman’s ability to combine “theatrical performances with natural philosophy” – attracting large paying audiences at the same time that he won respect with the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacturers, and Commerce in Britain – epitomized the tendency of these acts to scramble the distinction between intellectual inquiry and public spectacle (121). 6 Ironically, Siddons’ popularity had itself reached similar proportions, with onlookers flocking to her suburban house and even forcing their way in to catch sight of her. See Charles Royster, The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company: A Story of George Washington’s Times (New York: Knopf, 1999): 308. 7 My thanks to David Fallon for bringing this passage to my attention. 8 For an account of Katterfelto’s career, see Benedict, Curiosity 210–15. Benedict aligns Katterfelto with both performing animals and the rage for air ballooning as instances of the contested state of modern knowledge. See also Altick, The Shows of London 84–85; Fiona Haslem, From Hogarth to Rowlandson: Medicine in Art in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Liverpool University Press, 1997): 202–14; Eric Jameson, The Natural History of Quackery (London: Michael Joseph, 1961); and Henry Sampson, A History of Advertising from the Earliest Times (London: Chatto and Windus, 1875): 403–5.

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9 Katterfelto’s ads usually claimed to reveal 5,000 rather than 50,000 insects, though the number varied. 10 See also McKendrick et al., The Birth of a Consumer Society. 11 For an account of the issues which faced the dental profession in this period, see Mark Blackwell, “‘Extraneous Bodies’: The Contagion of Live-Tooth Transplantation in Late-Eighteenth-Century England,” Eighteenth-Century Life 28 (Winter 2004): 21–68. 12 For an analysis of the Bubbler’s Medley in terms of the impact of early eighteenth-century debates about commerce, see Mark Hallett, The Spectacle of Difference: Graphic Satire in the Age of Hogarth (New Haven and London: The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Yale University Press, 1999). 7 A f t e r w or d: A s w i n i s h m u lt i t u de : t h e t y r a n n y of fa s h ion i n t h e 1 79 0 s 1 My thanks to Cynthia Sugars for pointing this passage out to me.

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Index

Page numbers in italics are illustrations. Aberdeen Magazine, 178, 188 accidents, ballooning, 55–56 Addison, Joseph, 23–24, 42, 65 Cacoethes scribendi, 92 adventurers, authors as, 136 Adventures of an Air Balloon, Wherein Are Delineated Many Distinguished Characters, Male and Female, The, 47 advertising, 188–95 Katterfelto’s, 184–85 as literature, 195–99 “Against Inconsistency in our Expectations” (Barbauld), 26 Age of Wonder, The (Holmes), 177 Agnew, Jean-Christophe, 54 Air Balloon: Or a Treatise on the Aerostatic, Globe Lately Invented by the Celebrated, Mons. Montgolfier of Paris, The, 47 Air Balloon, 50, 51–63 Alembert, Jean le Rond d’, 66 Alison, Archibald, 146 Alves, Robert, 50 An Impartial and Candid Disquisition into, the Case of Sporus (A Lover of Truth and Impartiality), 92 Analytical Review, diffusion of knowledge, 106 on fashion and literature, 8 animal acts, 175, 177–78, 185 appetite, 19–20, 29 Argand, Aimé, 45, 57 Arnold, Thomas, 83 artificiality, 131 Austen, Jane, 202–3 Author, Art, and the Market (Woodmansee), 5–6 authors, 36–37, 40 and Cacoethes scribendi, 91–94, 115–16

and diffusion of knowledge, 151–55, 158 and humanism, 146–51 importance of, 142–45 influence by readers, 165 as professionals, 5, 136–43 relevancy of, 150–51 reputation, 155–57 and social order, 133–36 solitary life of, 157–58 as spectacle, 144–46 supposed death of, 117–18 women, 218n.7 Balloon Almanac, 47 Balloon Jester; or Flights of Wit and Humour, The, 47 ballooning/balloons, 13, 22–23, 40 accidents, 55–56 design, 53–54, 55–56 and fashion, 49–50, 54, 61 history of, 44–46 in literature, 46–47 and science, 47–49, 65–69 and sex, 73 steering, 52–53 uses, 50–52 and xenophobia, 57–60 Barbauld, Anna, 26, 68, 70 on ballooning, 43, 70 on social structure, 112 Barrell, John, 205 Beattie, James, 167 Bee, Or Literary Weekly Intelligencer, 76 on knowledge, 87–89, 105, 106–7 on manners, 126 on professional authors, 137–38, 142–43 Beggar on Horseback, The (song), 180 Bellamy, Liz, 16 Belle’s Stratagem, The (Cowley), 26

242

Index Benedict, Barbara, 43 bibliography, 86–91, 104 Bibliomania; or, Book-Madness (Dibdin), 82 bibliomania, 41, 82–91 biography, 119–21 Blair, Hugh, 120–21, 157 Blake, William, 175, 204 Blanchard, Jean-Pierre, 45, 48–49, 55–56, 57 books, consecration of, 101 Glutton of, 94–98 and mania, 80–82 bookstores, 80–82, 139, 168 Bourdieu, Pierre, 78–79, 134 Bowyer, William, 94–95, 158 Bramble, Matthew, 172–97 Breslaw, Philip, 187–88 Brewer, John, on consumption, 20 on culture, 13, 16, 44, 73, 188 on the Enlightenment, 203 on publishing, 79 British Clubs and Societies (Clark), 14 Brown, John, 11, 20, 176, 181 effeminacy, 166 gender identity, 26 Brown, Laura, 44 Bubbler’s Medley, or a Sketch of the Times (print), 199, 200 Burgess, Miranda, 24–25 Burgoyne, John, 56 Burke, Edmund, 12, 19, 22, 202 on taste, 99, 100, 188 Burns, Robert, 63 Cacoethes scribendi (itch of writing), 91–94, 115–16 Canning, George, 182 Carlyle, Thomas, 23, 42 on ballooning, 41, 42, 207 Case of Authors by Profession or Trade, Stated (Ralph), 145–46, 163 Caterpillar, see Katterfelto Cato’s Letters (Trenchard and Gordon), 9 Cavallo, Tiberius, 52, 61 Cavendish, Henry, 49 Chandler, James, 22 Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (Shaftesbury), 19 Chartier, Roger, 3, 37, 149–50 Cheetham, Robert, 184 circulating libraries, 94–95 Citizen of the World (Goldsmith), 34, 35

Clark, Peter, 14 Clark, William, 67 classes, social, 26–28 Classical education, 167 classification, 109, 110–11 of books, 86 Clery, Emma, 17–18, 113–14 clubs, 14–15 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Dutchman account, 172, 182, 197 on spectacle, 172, 182 commerce, 4, 9–11 advertising, 188–95 and ballooning, 43–44 and corruption, 16–20 and credit, 23–25 and fashion, 29–30 and knowledge, 21, 23, 111–12 and periodicals, 111–14, 118 and spectacle, 23 commercialization of leisure, 13–16, 19 competitive consumption, 26–29 compilations, 93, 94 Connoisseur, on authors, 137, 144–45 diffusion of knowledge, 108–9, 159 dreamscapes, 35–36 on effeminacy, 26 literary register-office, 34 “Mr. Town”, 127 on taste, 99 consciousness, false, 21, 24 consecration, of books, 101 consumerism, 172–73 and bibliomania, 85 and readers, 54 consumption, competitive, 26–29 reading as unthinking, 167 copyright, 219–20n.5 Corfield, Penelope, 137 corruption, 205 and commerce, 16–20 and effeminacy as, 10–11 luxury as, 11–12 moral, 28 and quackery, 196–97 Corry, John, 194–95, 196, 205 Cosmopolitan (juggler), 60 Cowley, Hannah, 26, 157 Cowper, William, 110, 150, 154 on Katterfelto, 189 on the Learned Pig, 175 Crabbe, George, 80, 134, 142 credit, and commerce, 23–25

243

244

Index

credulity/incredulity, 195, 197–98 crime, 169–70 Critical Review, on authors, 137, 143, 157–58 on ballooning, 45, 46, 52, 53, 56, 61, 64–65, 74 on bibliography, 87 bibliomania, 87 Cacoethes scribendi, 9, 91, 92–93, 94 literary fraud, 31 on mania, 83 Croft, Herbert, 8, 85–86, 151, 172 culture, 9–10, 12–13, 21 Cumberland, Richard, 64, 80 on mania, 83 on society, 122 cures, ads for, 189–92 Curiosities of Literature (D’Israeli), 92 Darnton, Robert, 1, 136 Darwin, Erasmus, 50–51 De Quincey, Thomas, 5 death, and authors, 117–18 death drive, 90–91 decline, social order, 196–97, 204–5 Defoe, Daniel, 23 demand, and value, 25 Dennis, John, 11, 19, 25–26 Dent, John, 189 design, of balloons, 53–54, 55–56, 60–61 desires, 19–21, 29–30 see also needs Detector of Quackery, The (Corry), 194–95 Dibdin, Thomas Frognall, 82 diffusion of knowledge, 107–11, 151–55, 158 effect on public, 168 diminutive history, 107, 121, 124 D’Israeli, Isaac, 81 on authors, 134, 139, 141, 142, 143, 145, 148, 149, 150 bibliography, 90 bibliomania, 82, 84, 86, 171 Cacoethes scribendi, 92, 93 diffusion of knowledge, 108 on Helluo Librorum, 96, 97–98 on history writing, 121 on politics, 125, 130–31 on readers, 170 on taste, 99, 100 doctors, advertising, 189–92 domiciliary sociability, 14 Donald, Diana, 30 Donaldson v. Becket case, 33 Downfall of Taste and Genius, or, The World As it Goes (print), 71, 72–75, 175 Dr. James’ Fever Powder, 194 dreamscapes, 34–36

drowning, 36, 37 During, Simon, 194 Dutchman account, 172, 182, 197 earnestness, moral, 13 effeminacy, 10–11, 17–18, 20, 26, 74, 166, 173, 180, 196, 205 Connoisseur on, 26 Ferguson on, 20 Gentleman’s Magazine, 11 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 102–3 Ellison, Julie, 110 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 47, 48–58 Engels, Friedrich, 41 English Balloon, The (print), 61, 62–72 Enlightenment, 22, 187, 203 Enlightenment and the Book (Sher), 78 Enquiry into the Present State of Polite, Learning in Europe (Goldsmith), 96–97 envy, 28 Essay on the Manners and Genius of the, Literary Character (D’Israeli), 139 Essay on the Study of Literature (Gibbon), 204–5 Essay Upon Public Spirit (Dennis), 25–26 European Magazine, on authors, 142, 157 on ballooning, 44–45, 46–47, 65, 74–76 on Bowyer, 158 Cacoethes scribendi, 93 diffusion of knowledge, 105–6, 169 on fashion, 11, 63, 64 on gentility, 130 on history writing, 119 Last Masquerade at the Pantheon, 6–7 “On the Commercial Ideas Prevailing in some Parts of Europe”, 10 on science, 65–66 “Strictures on a Young Lady’s Dress”, 26 on taste, 99 European Review, 61 Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air and Other Branches of Natural Philosophy (Priestley), 65 Fabulous Histories (Trimmer), 173–74 false consciousness, 21, 24 false taste, 31 fantasy, 24–25 fashion, 25 and ballooning, 49–50, 54, 61 and commerce, 29–30 as corruptive, 10–12 and literature, 7–8, 154–55, 207–8 literature as, 30–31 reading as, 171

Index and taste, 100 tyranny of, 7–9, 36, 203–8 feminization, 17–18, 25–26, 114 Ferguson, Adam, 20 Ferris, Ina, 109, 111, 201 feuds, literary, 2 Fielding, Henry, 27 Fitz-Adam, Adam, 80, 115, 116, 117–18, 125 Florio (More), 166–67 Fordyce, Dr., 11 forgery, literary, see fraud, literary Foucault, Michel, 117, 135, 143 France, 63 fraud, literary, 31–32 see also quacks Freeth, John, 182 French Revolution, 22, 173, 201, 204 French Revolution, The (Carlyle), 41, 42 Fritz, Paul, 9 Gale, Samuel, 25 Gallagher, Catherine, 113 Gardiner, Mr., 193 gender, 17–18, 25–26 gentility, 128–29, 130, 169 Gentleman’s Magazine, 1 on ballooning, 46–47, 76 bibliomania, 82 on the diffusion of knowledge, 105, 152, 153 dreamscapes, 35 on effeminacy, 11 on fashion, 8, 12 on gentility, 131 on literary fraud, 31–32 on Rogers, 157 Gibbon, Edward, Jr., 204–5 Gilmartin, Kevin, 22 Glover, Richard, 9 Glutton of Books (Helluo Librorum), 94–98 Godwin, William, 167 Goldsmith, Oliver, on authors, 141–42, 143, 146, 153, 155 Citizen of the World, 34, 35 diffusion of knowledge, 152 on education, 165, 177 Helluo Librorum, 96–97, 98 on history writing, 119 and the microcosmopolitan style, 114, 118 on taste, 98 Golinski, Jan, 67 Gordon, Avery, 208 Gordon, Thomas, 9, 23 gossip, 7 Graham, James, 185 Great Chain of Being, 10

245

Grose, Francis, 115 Grumbler, 115 Habermas, Jürgen, 7, 13, 14, 172 Hardinge, George, 76 Harper, Mr., and ballooning accident, 55 Hawes, Clement, 83, 203 Hawkins, Sir John, 126, 137 Heiress, The (Burgoyne), 56 Helluo Librorum (Glutton of Books), 94–98 Henry, Thomas, 169–70 Heron, Robert, see Pinkerton, John Hints of the Important Uses, to be Derived, from Aerostatic Globes (Martyn), 51 history, 37, 118–22 History and Practice of Aerostation, The (Cavallo), 52 Hofkosh, Sonia, 218n.3 Holcroft, Thomas, 71, 187 Holmes, Richard, 177 homosexuality, 74 honour, of authors, 140–42 humanism, and authors, 146–51 Hume, David, 14–15, 98, 99, 168 ideas, 33 Idler, The (Johnson), 91, 102, 110 importance, of authors, 142–45, 158 imposters, see quacks Inchbald, Elizabeth, 71 incompetence, 116–17 incredulity/credulity, 197–98 indolence, 170–71 information, 1 see also knowledge Ingrassia, Catherine, 37–38 instability, of the period and ballooning, 42 social, 30–31 instructors, itinerant, 188–92 Italians, and sexuality, 74 “Itch of Novelty” (Dennis), 11 itch of writing (Cacoethes scribendi), 91–94 itinerant instructors, 188–92 Jacobinism, 173 Janowitz, Anne, 82 Jardine, Nick, 135 Jeffries, John, 45, 48–49 Johns, Adrian, 79, 101, 103, 110 Johnson, Samuel, 9–10, 118, 154–55 on advertisements, 199 on authors, 133–34, 140–41, 142, 149 and diffusion of knowledge, 153–54, 161–63 solitary life, 158 as spectacle, 145

246

Index

Johnson, Samuel (cont.) on ballooning, 42, 49 on biography, 119–20 Cacoethes scribendi, 91 on commerce and diffusion of knowledge, 111–12 diminutive history, 107 fashion, 154–55 Hawkins on, 126 on pamphlets, 123 on periodicals, 110 on readership, 161 self-irony, 116, 118 Joineriana: or, The Book of Scraps (Paterson), 11, 85, 114–15 Jordanova, Ludmilla, 41 justice, 28–29 Katterfelto, Gustavus, 57, 176–77, 182–88 advertising, 188–91 “Katterfelto” (poem) (Freeth), 182 Klein, Lawrence, 128–29 knowledge, 22, 64 and authors, 151–55 and bibliomania, 83, 84–85 and commerce, 21, 23 consolidation of, 86–91 diffusion of, 107–11, 151–55, 158 and periodicals, 125 pursuit of, 169–71, 174 and virtue, 37 wonderful, 22, 188 see also information; science Knox, Vicesimus, on authors, poverty of, 152–53 Cacoethes scribendi, 91 on corruption, 205 and diffusion of knowledge, 108, 134, 168–69, 170 on fashion, 8 on Helluo Librorum, 95–96 humanism, 147–49 on illiterate readers, 167 on the influence of general opinion on the arts, 165–66 on literary fraud, 31, 32 on mania, 82 miscellaneous readers, 112 on printing, 151 on science, 67 La Roche, Sophie von, 15, 68–69 on bookstores, 80–82, 100 Lackington, James, 168 Lady Credit, 42 Lane, William, 195

Last Legacy (Breslaw), 187–88 Learned Pig, 172–82, 206 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (Blair), 120–21 leisure, 9 commercialization of, 14, 19 Leon, Dr., 192 Letters of Literature (Pinkerton), 8, 66–67, 83 libraries, circulating, 94–95 performing, 34 Library, The (poem), 80 life, business of, 9–10 the literary, 32–33 Literary Fly, 1, 85–86, 151, 172 on fashion, 8 literary magazines, see periodicals literary property, 33, 219–20n.5 literature, 5–6 and advertising, 195–99 ballooning in, 46–47 and commerce, 4, 13–14 and fashion, 7–8, 207–8 as fashion, 30–31 feuds in, 2 fraud, 31–32 history of, 2–4 professional authors, 5 and quackery, 194–95 and spectacle, 22 London: or, The Progress of Commerce (poem) (Glover), 9 London, April, 109–10, 131 London Unmask’ d: Or the New Town Spy, 11, 19, 40 on ballooning, 45, 70–71 on ballooning fashion, 63 and Cacoethes scribendi, 92 on foreign influences, 60 on the Learned Pig, 173, 176–77, 178–80, 182–76 Lounger, 63 on artificiality, 131 diffusion of knowledge, 106, 107, 153 on fashion and taste, 100 Helluo Librorum, 98 history writing, 122 on manners, 125 and the Mirror Club, 127–28 on society, 123 Lounger’s Miscellany, 11 Love in a Balloon, 74, 75 Lunardi, Vincento, 42, 45, 57, 68 Sheridan on, 43 use of sex, 73 luxury, 9, 11–12, 19, 172–73

Index Dennis on, 25–26 and desire, 20 Macdonald, Thomas, 104 McKendrick, Neil, 44 Mackenzie, Henry, 63, 81 Mackie, Erin, 30, 49–50, 54 Macklin, Charles, 69 Man of Feeling, The (Mackenzie), 81 Man of the World, The (Macklin), 69 Man-Milliner, 6–7 Mandeville, Bernard, 26–27 Mandevillian Moment, 16 mania, 78–79 of ballooning, 42–43 and books, 80–82 manners, 7–8, 19, 26, 29, 106, 121 and periodicals, 125 and pursuit of knowledge, 169–70 Martyn, Thomas, 50, 51 Marx, Karl, 41 Marxism and Literature (Williams), 3–4 Masquerade at the Pantheon, 6–7 materialism, 208 Mathias, T. J., 203–4, 207 Maurer, Shawn Lisa, 18 Mee, John, 83–84, 203 Melford, Jeremy, 197, 201 men, feminization of, 17–18 of taste, 98 merchandise, ballooning, 43 metropolitan sociability, 14 and print culture, 21 Microcosm, 2 on authors, 155 death of the author, 117 knowledge diffusion, 109 licensed warehouse for wit, 34 and microcosmopolitan style, 113, 114 microcosmopolitan style, 113, 114–15, 198 Mirror, club, 127–28 on history writing, 119 on manners, 124, 127, 129 Miscellanies; Or Literary Recreations (D’Israeli), 96, 131 miscellanies, see periodicals miscellany of life, 111–18 Modern Atlantis; or, The Devil in an Air Balloon, The, 47 modernity, malaise of, 206 Montgolfier brothers, 44, 49 Monthly Magazine, on bibliography, 87 diffusion of knowledge, 106

247

obituary for Paterson, 86 Monthly Review, on ballooning, 46, 49, 51–53, 69 Cacoethes scribendi, 94 diffusion of knowledge, 106, 152, 160, 161 on fashion, 8 on gentility, 130 on literary fraud, 31 on “the literary,” 32–33 morality, 17 and gender identities, 25–26 More, Hannah, 166–67, 176, 205 Moret, the Chevalier de, 57 Morning Chronicle, on ballooning, 45 on Katterfelto, 184 on mania, 78, 82–83 on quacks, 194 wonderful knowledge, 22 Morning Herald, on ballooning, 45 on science, 67 Morning Post, 9 ads, 191, 192, 196 on ballooning, 42–43, 45, 63, 74 on foreigners, 60 on novelty, 12 Mortiz, Charles, 66 on Katterfelto, 184, 189 Mulcaire, Terry, 24 mutual confidence, 9, 32 needs, 30 see also desires New Mail Carriers, or Montgolfier and Katterfelto Taking An Airing in Balloons, The (print), 57, 58 New Mode of Picking Pockets (print), 57–60, 59 Noble Peasant, The (Holcroft), 187 “None so Blind as Those Who Won’t See” (play), 184–85 Northanger Abbey (Austen), 202–3 novels, 93 novelty, 12, 19–20, 56 Observations on the Nature, Kinds, Causes, and Prevention of Insanity (Arnold), 83 Oettermann, Stephan, 42 old cannon, 218 “On the Commercial Ideas Prevailing, in some Parts of Europe” (European Magazine), 10 “On the Learned Pig” (poem), 174–75 Order of Books, The (Chartier), 37

248 Painting for Money (Solkin), 125 pamphlets, 47, 123–24 and politics, 125 on wonders, 177 Panorama: The History of a Mass Medium, The (Oettermann), 42 Paper Age, 41, 42 parachutes, 55, 56–57 hat, 63 Pasquin, Anthony, 69 Patence, Mr., 191–92 Paterson, Samuel, 11, 85 on authors, 148 bibliography, 89–90 microcosmopolitan style, 114–15 obituary, 86 on quackery, 196 patronage, of authors, 138–39 performing animals, 175, 177–78 periodicals, 18 and advertising, 198–201 and the diffusion of knowledge, 107–11, 125 see also individual periodicals Phillips, Mark, 119 philosophy, 168 pig-girl, 181–82 Pinkerton, John, 8, 32, 66–67, 83 piracy, literary, 103 Plato’s cave, 21, 42, 206 plays, 46, 71, 175, 184–85 Plumb, J. H., 9, 12–13, 168 Pocock, J. G. A., 17, 150 individual self-government, 20 on instability of the period, 42 Poetical Epistle on Major Money’s Ascent, in a Balloon from the City of Norwich (poem), 61 poetry, 94, 207–8 “Katterfelto” (Freeth), 182 Library, The (Crabbe), 80 London: or, The Progress of Commerce (Glover), 9 “On the Learned Pig,” 174–75 Poetical Epistle on Major Money’s Ascent in a Balloon from the City of Norwich, 61 politeness, 29, 121, 167–69, 173 politics, 205–6 and manners, 125, 173 reform, 167 Pontefract, Peter, 115–16 Pope, Alexander, 124 Porter, Roy, 16, 20, 203 Potkay, Adam, 121–22 poverty, of authors, 152–53

Index Priestley, Joseph, 65 print culture, and metropolitan sociability, 21 printing, 3, 151 Professing Men (Maurer), 18 professional authors, 5, 136–43 profusion, 19 property, literary, 33, 219–20n.5 Prophetic Pig, The (song), 175 public, 9, 54, 171, 197 public curiosity, 66 “Publick Credit,” 23–24 publishing, revolution in, 78–80 puffing, 195 pursuit of knowledge, 169–71, 174 quackery/quacks, 67, 152, 192, 205 itinerant instructors, 188–92 Katterfelto, Gustavus, 57, 176–77, 182–88, 188–91 and literature, 194–95, 196 Quacks, The (engraving), 186, 187 Quaker, learned, 181–82 Ralph, James, 145–46, 147, 163 Rambler’s Magazine, 58–59, 75 Misellus letter, 155–57 Raven, James, 30 readers, 112–13, 161 and consumerism, 54 illiterate, 165–73 women, 218n.3 reading, ethic of, 111 reciprocity, 10, 27 Reflector, 96 relevancy, of authors, 150–51 reputation, of authors, 155–57 Retrospective Review, 104 bibliomania, 90 revolution, 172–73, 203, 205–7 consumer, 28, 35, 44 French Revolution, 22, 173, 201, 204 in the kingdom of learning, 125, 131 publishing, 78–80 Rogers, Charles, 157 Romantic Sociability (Russell and Tuite), 14 Romanticism, 5 Rose, Mark, 219–20n.5 Roxburghe auction, 82 Royal Academicians, The (Pasquin), 69 Russell, Gillian, 14 Saul, John Ralston, 24 Schellenberg, Betty, 18 science, 187

Index and ballooning, 47–49, 65–69 and spectacle, 68 see also Katterfelto; knowledge Scott, Sarah, 45–46 self-government, individual, 9, 20–21, 168 self-irony, 115–17 self-understanding, 16 Seward, Anna, 45, 52 sex, 73 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper Third Earl of, 19, 20, 70, 83, 128–29 Sher, Richard, 78 Sheridan, Betsy, 43 Shirky, Clay, 54, 79 Siddons, Mrs., 178 Sketches of a History of Literature (Alves), 50 Smith, Adam, 20–21, 28–29, 30 on authors, 138–39, 148 on history writing, 119 Smollett, Tobias, 9, 198 sociability, domiciliary, 14 metropolitan, 14, 21 social instability, 30–31 social order, 37–38, 68, 112–13, 129 decline, 196–97, 204–5 effect of spectacle on, 179 and literature, 133–36 and the pursuit of knowledge, 169–71 and reading, 167–69 societies, 14–15 solitary life of authors, 157–58 Solkin, David, 125, 147 South Sea Bubble, 44 Southey, Robert, 172, 174, 176 spectacle, 13–14 animal acts, 175 authors as, 144–46 and commerce, 23 Learned Pig, 172–82 reading as, 171–73 and science, 68 and wonders, 176–77, 182–83 Spectator, on ballooning mania, 65 Cacoethes scribendi, 92 D’Israeli on the, 97–98 Lady Credit, 42 “Publick Credit,” 23–24 Speculation (play), 175 Speculator, 91–92 steering of balloons, 52–53 Strachan, John, 195 Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (More), 205

249

“Strictures on a Young Lady’s Dress,” 26 swinish multitude, 172, 206 Sylva: or, the Wood, 93, 107–8 and effeminacy, 180 knowledge diffusion, 118 microcosmopolitan style, 115 readership of, 167 taste, 31, 98 Taylor, Charles, 206 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 28–29 Thorne, Christian, 180 Thoughts on the Farther Improvement of Aerostation, 52, 53 Thurlow, Edward, 33 The Times, 173, 179 Town, 14 Town, Mr., 85 Travels, Chiefly on Foot, Through Several Parts, of England in 1782 (Moritz), 184 Trenchard, John, 9, 23 Trifler, 91 Trimmer, Sarah, 173–74 Trusler, John, 20 Tuite, Clara, 14 tyranny of fashion, 7–9, 36, 203–8 un-dead authors, 135 value, 24–25, 44 Velox, 95–96 Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Wollstonecraft), 175 virtue, and knowledge, 37 Voltaire, 15 Walpole, Horace, 24, 133 on balloons, 40, 41, 43, 45, 60 on miscellaneous writing, 171 Warner, Michael, 3 Way to be Rich and Respectable. Addressed to, Men of Small Fortune (Trusler), 20 Wealth of Nations (Smith), 28–29, 148 Western County Magazine, 181 Williams, David, 9 Williams, Raymond, 3–4, 38, 139–40 window shopping, 15–16 women, authors, 218n.7 and domiciliary sociability, 14 readers, 218n.3 status of, 113–14 “wonderful knowledge,” 22, 188, 195 wonders, 176–77, 182–83, 188, 196, 197

250 Woodmansee, Martha, 5–6 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 175 Wordsworth, William, 175 World, 27 advertisements, 198–99 on authors, 143 Cacoethes scribendi, 92 death of author, 117–18 diffusion of knowledge, 106, 108 false taste, 31 mania, 82

Index on microcosmopolitan style, 115 performing libraries, 34 on politeness, 125, 130 on taste, 100 Wreath of Fashion, or the Art of Sentimental Poetry, 40, 177 writers, see authors xenophobia, and ballooning, 57–60 Zambeccari, Count Francesco, 45, 57

C a m br i d g e S t u di e s i n Rom a n t ic i s m General Editor j a m e s c h a n dl e r , University of Chicago 1. Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters M A R Y A . FAV R E T 2. British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire N IG E L L E A S K 3. Poetry as an Occupation and an Art in Britain, 1760–1830 PE T E R M U R P H Y 4. Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution T OM F U R N I S S 5. In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women J U L I E A . C A R L S ON 6. Keats, Narrative and Audience A N DR E W BE N N E T T 7. Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre DAV I D DU F F 8. Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 A L A N R IC H A R D S ON 9. Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790–1820 E DWA R D C OPE L A N D 10. Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World T I MO T H Y MOR T ON 11. William Cobbett: The Politics of Style L E ONOR A N AT T R A S S 12. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 E . J. C L E R Y 13. Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818 E L I Z A BE T H A . B OH L S 14. Napoleon and English Romanticism S I MON B A I N BR I D G E 15. Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom C E L E S T E L A NG A N

16. Wordsworth and the Geologists JOH N W Y AT T 17. Wordsworth’s Pope: A Study in Literary Historiography R OBE R T J. G R I F F I N 18. The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel M ARK M AN ELLIS 19. Reading Daughters’ Fictions, 1709–1834: Novels and Society from Manley to Edgeworth C A R OL I N E G ON DA 20. Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity, 1774–1830 A N DR E A K . H E N DE R S ON 21. Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early NineteenthCentury England K EVIN GILM ARTIN 22. Reinventing Allegory THER ESA M. K ELLEY 23. British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–1832 G A R Y DY E R 24. The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789–1824 R OBE R T M . R Y A N 25. De Quincey’s Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission M A RG A R E T RU S S E T T 26. Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination J E N N I F E R F OR D 27. Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity S A R E E M A K DI S I 28. Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake N IC HOL A S M . W I L L I A M S 29. Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author S ON I A HOF K O S H 30. Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition A N N E J A NOW I T Z

31. Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle J E F F R E Y N. C OX 32. Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism G R E G OR Y DA R T 33. Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832 J A M E S WAT T 34. Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism DAV I D A R A M K A I S E R 35. Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity A N DR E W BE N N E T T 36. The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere PAU L K E E N 37. Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830 M A R T I N PR I E S T M A N 38. Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies H E L E N T HOM A S 39. Imagination under Pressure, 1789–1832: Aesthetics, Politics, and Utility JOH N W H A L E 40. Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation, 1790–1820 M IC H A E L G A M E R 41. Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species M AU R E E N N. Mc L A N E 42. The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic T I MO T H Y MOR T ON 43. British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740–1830 M I R A N DA J. BU RG E S S 4 4. Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s A NG E L A K E A N E 45. Literary Magazines and British Romanticism M A R K PA R K E R 46. Women, Nationalism and the Romantic Stage: Theatre and Politics in Britain, 1780–1800 BE T S Y B OLT ON

47. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind A L A N R IC H A R D S ON 48. The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution M . O. G R E N B Y 49. Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon CL AR A TUITE 50. Byron and Romanticism J E R OM E MC G A N N A N D J A M E S S ODE R HOL M 51. The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland INA FER R IS 52. Byron, Poetics and History J A N E S T A BL E R 53. Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830 MARK CANUEL 54. Fatal Women of Romanticism A DR I A N A C R AC I U N 55. Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose TIM MILNES 56. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination B A R B A R A T A Y L OR 57. Romanticism, Maternity and the Body Politic J U L I E K I PP 58. Romanticism and Animal Rights DAV I D PE R K I NS 59. Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History K E V I S G O ODM A N 60. Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge T I MO T H Y F U L F OR D, DE BBI E L E E , A N D PE T E R J. K I T S ON 61. Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery DE I R DR E C OL E M A N 62. Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism a n dr e w M . s t au f f e r 63. Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime C I A N DU F F Y

64. Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760–1845 M A RG A R E T RU S S E T T 65. Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent DA N I E L E . W H I T E 66. The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry c h r i s t op h e r r . m i l l e r 67. Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song s i mon j a r v i s 68. Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public A N DR E W F R A N T A 69. Writing against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790–1832 K EVIN GILM ARTIN 70. Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London G I L L I A N RU S S E L L 71. The Lake Poets and Professional Identity BR I A N G OL DBE RG 72. Wordsworth Writing A N DR E W BE N N E T T 73. Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry NOE L J AC K S ON 74. Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period JOH N S T R AC H A N 75. Romanticism and the Painful Pleasures of Modern Life A N DR E A K . H E N DE R S ON 76. Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry M AU R E E N N. Mc L A N E 77. Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750–1850 A NG E L A E S T E R H A M M E R 78. Scotland and the Fictions of Geography: North Britain, 1760–1830 PE N N Y F I E L DI NG 79. Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity DAV I D S I M P S ON 80. Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History, 1790–1890 M I K E G O ODE 81. Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism A L E X A N DE R R E G I E R

82. Romanticism and Music Culture in Britain, 1770–1840: Virtue and Virtuosity G I L L E N D’A RC Y W O OD 83. The Truth about Romanticism: Pragmatism and Idealism in Keats, Shelley, Coleridge TIM MILNES 84. Blake’s Gifts: Poetry and the Politics of Exchange S A R A H H AG G A R T Y 85. Real Money and Romanticism M AT T H E W R OW L I NS ON 86. Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity, 1745–1820 JULIET SHIELDS 87. Romantic Tragedies: The Dark Employments of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley R E E V E PA R K E R 88. Blake, Sexuality and Bourgeois Politeness S U S A N M AT T H E W S 89. Idleness, Contemplation and the Aesthetic R IC H A R D A DE L M A N 90. Shelley’s Visual Imagination N A NC Y MO OR E G O S L E E 91. A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790–1829 C L A R E C ON NOL LY 92. Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750–1800 PAU L K E E N

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