Revolutions in Taste 17731818

Revolutions in

T aste, 1773–1818

To my parents

Revolutions in T aste, 1773–1818 Women Writers and the A esthetics of Romanticism

Fiona Price University of Chichester, UK

© Fiona Price 2009 A ll rights reserved. N o part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Fiona Price has asserted her moral right under the C opyright, Designs and Patents A ct, 1988, to be identi.ed as the author of this work. Published by A shgate Publishing L imited A shgate Publishing C ompany Wey C ourt E ast S uite 420 U nion Road 101 C herry S treet Farnham Burlington S urrey, GU 9 7PT VT 05401-4405 E ngland USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Price, Fiona L . Revolutions in taste, 1773–1818: women writers and the aesthetics of Romanticism. 1. E nglish literature – 18th century – History and criticism. 2. E nglish literature – 19th century – History and criticism. 3. E nglish literature – Women authors – History and criticism. 4. Women and literature – Great Britain – History – 18th century. 5. Women and literature – Great Britain – History – 19th century. 6. Politics and literature – Great Britain – History – 18th century. 7. Politics and literature – Great Britain – History – 19th century. 8. Romanticism – Great Britain. I. T itle 820.9’9287’09033-dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Price, Fiona L . Revolutions in taste, 1773–1818: women writers and the aesthetics of Romanticism / by Fiona Price. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 9780754660262 (hbk) ISBN 9780754693895 (ebk) 1. English fiction—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. English fiction—18th century—History and criticism. 3. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 4. Women and literature—Great Britain—History—18th century. 5. Women and literature—Great Britain—History—19th century. 6. Aesthetics in literature. 7. Women authors, English—Aesthetics. 8. Aesthetics, British—18th century. 9. Aesthetics, British— 19th century. 10. Romanticism—Great Britain. I. Title. PR113.P76 2009 823’.009’9287—dc22 ISBN 9780754660262 (hbk) ISBN 9780754693895 (ebk.V)

2008052515

C ontents Acknowledgements  

vi

Introduction  

1

1 ‘Real Solemn History’:Rethinking Tradition  

13

2 ‘Fashion’s Brightest A rts Decoy’:Fashion and O riginality  

45

3 Disinterest, E conomics, and the T asteful S pectator  

75

4 S elf-control:Romantic Psychologies of T aste  

103

5 Rustic T astes:T he Romantic T ale  

135

C onclusion  

167

Works Cited   Index  

173 193

Acknowledgements I am grateful to the U niversity of Durham and U niversity of C hichester for intellectual and financial assistance. While colleagues and friends at both institutions and elsewhere were extremely helpful, I would specifically like to thank Pamela Clemit, Simon J. James, Beth Lau, Benjamin Noys, Robert Miles, N icholas Roe, and Fiona Robertson. I owe a special debt of gratitude to the late Robin Dix, who played a part in inspiring this project. He will be much missed. I also thank Chawton House Library for awarding me a visiting fellowship and providing me with the ideal surroundings in which to complete the book. A version of some material from Chapters 3 and 4 first appeared in ‘“Myself Creating What I Saw”: The Morality of the Spectator in Eighteenth-century Gothic’, Gothic Studies 8.2 (November 2006):1–17, and ‘Democratising Taste: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and E lizabeth Hamilton’, Romanticism 8.2 (February 2003): 179–96.

Introduction In A nn Radcliffe’s The Italian (1796), the hero and heroine, struggling to escape the evil monk, Schedoni, pause to admire the scenery. From the summit on which they stand ‘the whole lake of Celano’ bursts ‘upon their view’ and gives rise to typically gendered aesthetic responses. T he feminine E llena reacts to the beautiful, while the hero Vivaldi reacts to what is sublime and magnificent. The response of their loyal but rather simple-minded servant, Paulo, is more anomalous: “Ay, Signora!” exclaimed Paulo, “and have the goodness to observe how like are the fishing boats, that sail towards the hamlet below, to those one sees upon the bay of N aples. T hey are worth all the rest of the prospect, except indeed this fine sheet of water, which is almost as good as the bay, and that mountain, with its sharp head, which is almost as good as V esuvius – if it would but throw out fire!” (The Italian 159)

A lthough Paulo appreciates the ‘prospect’, his view is comically inappropriate, disorderly, and ill-considered. Lacking Vivialdi’s perspective, he is incapable of generalising, which is, according to the neoclassical standards of taste Radcliffe is influenced by, a flaw. Similarly, while he clearly appreciates the sublime, he seems to have only a limited understanding of it. His suggestion that the mountain is ‘almost as good as Vesuvius – if it would but throw out fire’ shows, to say the least, equivocal judgement. Paulo’s apparent inability to make developed judgements of taste seems to confirm the social order: his partial perspective makes him unfit for social responsibility as surely as Vivaldi’s sublime vision confirms his suitability to rule. This set-piece suggests that while ordinary people like Paulo are capable of appreciating spectacle, they are still not fully functioning subjects as regards either politics or taste. T easingly, however, Radcliffe elsewhere complicates this, suggesting that, even if Vivaldi and Ellena have confident responses, confusion in relation to the aesthetic is not confined to the lower ranks. If Schedoni’s guide, for example, does not know whether ‘to laugh or cry’ when confronted with theatrical representation, neither, frequently, does Radcliffe’s audience (318). T en years later, S ydney O wenson’s use of the language of taste is equally emphatic. In The Wild Irish Girl (1806), her dilettante aristocratic hero finds his sensibility and taste corrupted by the vices of fashionable life to such an extent that

A nn Radcliffe, The Italian, ed. and intro. Frederick Garber (London: Oxford UP, 1968), vol. 2, p. 159. For an insightful discussion of the visual politics of The Italian, see Diego Saglia, ‘Looking at the Other: Cultural Difference and the Traveller’s Gaze in The Italian’, Studies in the Novel 28 (1996): 12–37. 



Revolutions in Taste, 1773–1818

he can no longer enjoy high cosmopolitanism. However, on a visit to Ireland he gradually becomes involved in the study of Irish history, language, and oral culture, hence recovering from his ennui. O wenson’s strategy is to dignify the Irish present by promoting a culturally prestigious past, endorsing the taste and orality of the Irish peasantry. For O wenson the emphasis is on the revivifying effects of local culture and its lower class embodiment. Her hero, Horatio, reflects: ‘in the first circles of all great cities (as in courts), the native features of national character are softened into general uniformity, and the genuine feelings of nature are suppressed or exchanged for a political compliance with the reigning modes and customs’ (16). Here his remarks retain vestigal traces of the neoclassical association of the universalising perspective with the ability to govern. However, the connection is degraded; it is no longer that courtiers experience a variety of cultures in order to form a taste superior to local prejudice. Rather, their cosmopolitanism represents the erosion of nervous sensibility. O wenson’s argument in favour of particular local taste is offered as a corrective to sophisticated, standard responses to the aesthetic. T he divergence between the two writers is indicative of more than the difference between O wenson’s Irish nationalism and Radcliffe’s alleged conservatism. T aste had always had a political dimension but, as the overdetermined and all but ubiquitous use of its language in these works reflects, the fierceness of political debate after the A merican and French Revolutions brought the concept under greater pressure. Suitably adapted by writers like Radcliffe, elements of neoclassical taste could be used (albeit sometimes playfully) to protect a view of the social order predetermined by class and gender. However, I would argue, there was an alternative approach that did not position taste as a secret of the upper classes. Instead, the discourse of taste could be used to ensure that the ‘right’ kind of aesthetic experience was no longer formulated as accessible only to the social elite. T his study argues that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century witnessed a revolution in taste; from an aristocratic conception of taste linked to the power to rule, disinterestedness, and universality to a more democratic model. T his radicalisation of taste occurred in part as a result of the impact of the debates following the A merican and French revolutions. During this period, disputes over taste frequently took place in marginalised forms themselves regarded as being in bad taste: the Gothic, the sentimental novel, the romance, and the tale. O ften considered feminised, these genres positioned the apparently exclusive quality of taste as something which might be possessed by a greater number of people. T his, in turn, allowed the middle classes to begin to reimagine the role of the lower ranks in the political life of the nation.  Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale (1806), ed. Kathryn Kirkpatrick (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), p. 11.  S ee Daniel C ottom, The Civilized Imagination: A Study of Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, and Sir Walter Scott (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985).

Introduction



Not only has commentary on taste in these genres been insufficiently examined, but the contribution of women writers to this debate has been marginalized. In terms of Romantic aesthetics, women’s writing is invariably positioned in relation to the sublime and the beautiful. O f course, this topic forms an important starting point, but female commentary on taste had a more complex influence on Romantic aesthetics and dealt with a far wider range of concerns than modern scholarship acknowledges. It insisted on connections between taste, utility, sentiment, and morality. T his ethical discourse on taste is explored here in relation both to better known literary figures – Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Austen, Smith, and Edgeworth – and to a range of more minor writers, whose significant contributions to the debate have been largely overlooked: Clara Reeve, Sophia and Harriet Lee, Eliza Fenwick, Mary Brunton, Joanna Baillie, Elizabeth Hamilton, and Priscilla Wakefield. Exploration of this topic is overdue for a number of reasons. Most histories of taste concentrate on the early to mid eighteenth century, when the civic humanist account of taste as a signifier of political fitness was most influential. The neoclassical ideas that supported this were gradually eroded in the latter half of the century, challenged in particular by Gothic and sentimental fiction. Histories of taste present this as a period of decline for the notion, in a number of ways. A fter all, while the word aesthetic was not in common usage in Britain till the 1830s, this was nonetheless a time when the notion of a commonly available aesthetic experience was gaining ground amidst anxiety that taste was purely subjective. Further, while Kant’s notion of a subjective but universal judgement of taste is an exception, it did not prove influential in England in the period. Hence the scholarly assumption is that the growing emphasis on subjectivity and on the association of ideas weakens the possibility of agreement on artistic manners and all but finishes taste as a central concept. T he role of ‘taste’ as a hierarchizing mechanism (that is, as a way of determining the cultural capital of the art work) seemed threatened. However, it is possible to argue that, rather than the importance of taste in the period decreasing, a shift took place in its meaning which generated anxiety. Hester L ynch Piozzi, for example, suggests in 1794 that taste is a ‘word profaned by so many coxcombs’ who ‘profess a TASTE for what they do not even understand’; similarly, Wordsworth remarks irritably in his 1815 Essay, Supplementary to the Preface that ‘TASTE ’ is ‘a word which has been forced to extend its services far beyond the point to which philosophy would have confined them’. Remembering  George Dickie, The Century of Taste: The Philosophical Odyssey of Taste in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996), p. 4.  Hester L ynch Piozzi, British Synonymy; Or, an Attempt at regulating the Choice of Words in Familiar Conversation. Inscribed, With Sentiments of Gratitude and Respect, to such of her Foreign Friends as have made English Literature their Peculiar Study, 2 vols (London: G.G. and J Robinson, Paternoster-Row, 1794), p. 305; William Wordsworth, E ssay, S upplementary to the Preface’, in William Wordsworth, Selected Prose, ed. John O. Hayden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), p. 409.



Revolutions in Taste, 1773–1818

that Wordsworth is attacking the ‘factitious influence’ of a select group, ‘the PU BLIC ’, in this essay, it seems both Piozzi and Wordsworth are suggesting that the wrong people are assumed to have cultural capital (Wordsworth, Selected Prose 411). They are not denying the role of taste, merely redirecting it. Wordsworth, for example, is concerned that the reader may not remember that ‘TASTE ’ ‘is a metaphor, taken from a passive sense of the human body, and transferred to things which are in their essence not passive – to intellectual acts and operations’ (409). Wordsworth is keen to ensure that ‘taste’ is not positioned, as Shaftesburian sensibility had been, as a purely instinctive response to sensory stimuli: taste is not collapsible into a simple formulation of aesthetic experience as immediate, unreflective. Instead, ‘taste’ is something requiring mental effort, and as such subject to control and direction. ‘Taste’, it seems, no longer involves choosing between one art object and another; rather, it is a question of judging between different treatments of aesthetic experience. A s the opening of Piozzi’s piece shows, the viewer, whether ‘poet’, ‘painter’, or ‘coxcomb’, is as much on trial as the piece of art or the prospect. Given the growing sense of a common access to aesthetic experience, it was no longer enough to claim the status of gentleman to be considered tasteful. As this book indicates, the matter was far more fiercely contested. But if taste was still an important concept, not only for philosophers and poets but also more generally in this period, key areas of the discourse of taste have nonetheless been neglected. T his has arisen partly as a result of the historical difficulty in defining taste itself. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault, distinguishing the episteme of the C lassical A ge from that of the modern, remarks: N ot that reason made any progress: it was simply that the mode of being of things, and of the order that divided them up before presenting them to the understanding, was profoundly altered.

In these terms, eighteenth-century discussions of taste can be seen to form part of a meta-enquiry during this period into the ‘order that divided [things] up’. E ven in its less philosophical manifestation, as a jargon on which ‘every tongue rang changes’, as I suggest above, discussions of taste frequently signalled an attempt to redefine on what authority judgements about sensory information on the world should best be made. While this interest in epistemological authority ties aesthetics to debates concerning the more direct exercise of power, it also ensures that taste occupies a particularly unstable discursive space. T his space has usually been recognisable by the presence of familiar key motifs (the sublime, the beautiful, the picturesque) or through key debates (of which that on the standard of taste has been examined  Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 1970), p. xxii.  Mary Wollstonecraft, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, eds Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 7 vols (London: Pickering, 1989) 7:7; subsequently Works.

Introduction



most exhaustively). In particular, within scholarly writing, this instability has led to concentration on those texts (often philosophical in nature) apparently most securely concerned with aesthetics. My book acknowledges taste as a discourse with a strong philosophical strand that attempted and ultimately failed to define its central notion. However, it does not aim to assess the philosophical (in)coherence of such accounts. Instead, it directs attention to the pervasive and popular use of the language of taste, often ignored in the history of aesthetics. T racing the relationship of taste and its opposite, A gamben notes that ironically the ‘novel … born to satisfy the exigencies of bad taste, ended up occupying centre stage in literary production’. A glance at the late eighteenth-century novel shows the actual extent of this incongruity. E ven given the fluctuating status of the genres, by the end of the century the romance, the sentimental and Gothic novel, children’s literature, and the tale were among the most important forums for the discussion of taste. T his is not as paradoxical as it might appear. As a comparatively vulgar genre, the novel was frequently subject to attack, criticised for its allegedly seditious content or poor style. Given the novel’s dubious status, writers were anxious to distinguish their own works from more ‘frivolous’ attempts. T hey promoted their own cultural capital in the Preface, in choices of epigraph, or in the plot itself, but they also reflected seriously on the nature of taste. In addition, because gender often played a role in the criticism of the novel, women writers found themselves particularly implicated in this process. A nd some, most notably Wollstonecraft, were eager to emphasise that the problem of taste did not only affect young women but had far broader implications. Yet the contribution of women writers to taste within these previously devalourized genres has received little critical attention. In the cases where criticism, often feminist in perspective, has approached the topic, the account remains fragmentary, touching on unusual attitudes to the aesthetic in the work of individual women writers but failing to provide a large-scale narrative. S cholarly discussions of women’s position in relation to aesthetics have often reinscribed the handicap represented by the gender bias in the discourse of taste. It is still, for example, a critical commonplace to stress the devalorizing nature of women’s association with ornamental rather than the critical or creative, and with the beautiful rather than the sublime. E ven sophisticated studies focusing on the relationship between gender and taste often concentrate on these areas of well-trodden ground. Robert W. Jones, in Gender and the Formation of Taste in Eighteenth-Century  Giorgio Agamben, ‘The Man of Taste and the Dialectic of the Split’, The Man of Content (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994) pp. 13–27, 21.  The association of masculinity and sublimity has been reflected in a critical concentration on the latter: see Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976); Peter de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), and Neil Hertz’s The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York, Columbia UP, 1985).

Revolutions in Taste, 1773–1818



Britain (1998), for example, considers the frequently remarked association of the feminine with the beautiful.10 A lternatively, for some critics, the association of Romantic women’s writing with the particular and the beautiful is replaced by a tendency to represent it in relation to the sublime as a transgressive appropriation of a more ‘masculine’ aesthetic.11 Although complicated, questioned, and sometimes weakened, such gendered formulations of the dichotomy between the sublime and the beautiful still underpin present-day criticism. Indeed, the textbook commonplace that renewed scholarly interest in women’s writing led to a destabilising of the notion of Romanticism rests firmly on such assumptions. Writing by women is perceived as different (more modest, more interested in sentiment and the quotidian), a situation that arises because, in the past, feminist criticism often focused on the unique nature of such work. Yet while this was an important move in terms of gaining acceptance for such writers, it also led to their ghettoization. In some instances, for example, women writers of the late eighteenth century are positioned as quite separate from Romanticism, seen as continuing earlier eighteenth-century aesthetic values. T his is a dangerous tactic because it is possible to see such writers as outdated, less farsighted than their bold male Romantic counterparts. A nother strategy has been to place such writers in terms of an essentially divided Romanticism. For example, in Romanticism and Gender, A nne K. Mellor suggests there are two Romanticisms, masculine and feminine (and when feminine Romanticism is linked with women writers, of course the danger is that it is seen as inadequate). Alternately, in The Contours of Masculine Desire, Marlon B. Ross suggests that Romantic ideology emerges as a defence against the increasing numbers of women poets in this period; here feminine qualities are hijacked, becoming acceptable when appropriated and transformed by emotional (but not inappropriately feminine) men.12 T his study recognises that the issue of marginalisation remains a thorny one in relation to women writers of the period. T he values seen by critics as representing the tasteful in the early to mid eighteenth century (for example, the neoclassical emphasis on generalisation, disinterestedness, and rationality) or in the Romantic period (originality, exploration of feeling, emphasis on the primitive rather than the

Robert W. Jones, Gender and the Formation of Taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998). 11 One example here, though sensitive to the difficulties also present for the lower classes, is Jacqueline Labbe, Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender and Romanticism (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s P, 1998). Also pertinent is Patricia Yaeger’s essay, ‘T oward a Female S ublime’, in L inda Kauffman ed., Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) pp. 191–212. 12 Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993); Marlon B. Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire; Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989). 10

Introduction



civilised) 13 are all, when most powerful, seen as masculine. A cynic might assume that the dominant aesthetic values, whatever they might be, always are positioned in this way – and that there is then a slippage between ‘masculine’ and ‘male’ that ensures the canonization of male rather than female writers. N onetheless, this study does not seek to correct this imbalance by an extensive or point-bypoint comparison of male and female writers (although patterns of influence and unexpected similarities of thought are revealed). Instead, this study (following Marlon B. Ross) recognises that more time needs to be devoted to examining the work of women writers in order for a more integrated and accurate understanding of the period to emerge. In particular, examining the work of such writers in relation to taste will, it is hoped, aid in the development of this more accurate understanding by revealing that taste itself is something malleable, under debate: that cultural prestige (whether for poet, writer or ordinary citizen) is something fiercely contested. What emerges is that the narrative of taste is not merely one of exclusion (as C ottom hints in The Civilized Imagination), but also of inclusion. Further, examination of debates around taste in women’s writing highlights this period as a time when apparently neoclassical values and those usually considered Romantic were both present. S uch values were adapted, combined, and assessed, their role in shaping an ethical society considered evaluated. Indeed, this debate or testing is, if anything is, the quintessential feature of the discourse of taste in this period. T his study proposes, through re-examining debates around taste, to examine such complexities. Hence it traces the discussion of taste from the illuminating remarks made by Clara Reeve and Barbauld on the value of tradition to S ydney O wenson’s critique of Romantic aesthetics in Florence Macarthy (1818). T his study does not suggest, then, that women’s commentary on taste is bound by any necessary because essential similarity, but it does suggest that the complication of gender discourse in the late eighteenth century gave women writers a common and particular point of entry into discussions on taste. Building on the work of Ross, Mellor, Johnson, Labbe and others, the comlexity of the relation of the discourses of gender and taste in the period can be appreciated. T hus, while it is possible to represent the hackneyed association of women and the beautiful as purely restrictive, not only did middle-ranking women have considerable access to the tasteful and the culturally prestigious, but this access was facilitated by their perceived connection to ornament and the beautiful. T hat women’s access to the belles lettres had at any rate grown during the eighteenth-century is confirmed by the efforts of periodicals such as The Spectator.14 In addition, the association of ornament and femininity meant that female involvement in the aesthetic sphere 13

For such classifications of the aesthetic qualities of the period, see Walter J. Bate, From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (C ambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1946). 14 Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, 7 vols (London: Buckley and Tonson, 1712); subsequently Spectator. S ee Spectator no. 10 (1: 53–8, 57).



Revolutions in Taste, 1773–1818

could be defended in unimpeachably hegemonic terms. Women were allowed authority over the ornamental because this was how they themselves were expected to appear. This is stated in its bluntest form by Jean-Jacques Rousseau: in Emile (1762) he connects female taste and artistic activity with vanity: ‘This voluntary progress [in embroidery] is easily extended to drawing, for this art is not without its importance for the art of dressing oneself up tastefully’; women should not, however, draw figures or landscapes, but: ‘Leaves, fruits, flowers, draperies, everything which is useful for giving an elegant turn to clothing’.15 Women are allowed to be producers of the aesthetic only as long as the primary aesthetic object they create is themselves. Representative of this attitude to ornament, Rousseau’s heroines, Sophie and Julie, stimulated a lengthy novelistic debate in which politics and taste intersected.16 Rousseau’s account confirmed women’s access to the sphere of the tasteful. Further, it granted them a metamorphic potential that was a source of both authority and difficulty to conservative and radical women writers alike. T his, along with the already existing tendency to criticise young female novel readers, in turn gave a growing urgency and authority to women’s commentary on taste, and a new significance to the aesthetic choices of their heroines. In particular, following Rousseau, such writing saw the increasing politicisation of the female figure. The connection of the female body with nation and the symbolic relation of female chastity to national pride is an enduring one.17 However, in the last three decades of the eighteenth century, it is increasingly the case that much of the political significance of the female figure is expressed through women’s manipulation of the codes of taste: not only their dress, their accomplishments, or their reading but the way their taste as a whole affects the community has the greatest political significance. In the novels of the 1780s and 90s the potential for political disaster is ultimately indicated by the sexual fall of a female protagonist, but (since such a disaster can only occur once for each heroine) during the course of such narratives it is necessarily signalled by her lapses from good taste. Warnings of aesthetic, sexual, and political disaster, articulated through the female figure, were accompanied by a critique of taste’s role in a healthy society. Here I re-examine these areas of debate, often considered by modern commentators to have been less persuasive or marginal. For example, in discussions surrounding the function of art, utility is often portrayed by modern criticism as representing a threat to the integrity of the aesthetic, particularly in terms of Romanticism; in 15 Jean‑Jacques Rousseau, Emile: Or on Education (1762), trans. and intro. Allan Bloom, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 367, 368. See also Jacqueline L abbe, Romantic Visualities pp. 149–86. 16 Sophie and Julie are Rousseau’s heroines in Emile and La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) respectively; see Eloisa, or a Series of Original Letters, trans. William Kendrick (1803), 2 vols, Revolution and Romanticism, 1789–1834, A Series of Facsimile Reprints (O xford: Woodstock, 1989). 17 S ee L inda C olley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (N ew Haven, CT : Yale UP, 1992).

Introduction



fact, as my study will show, the case was considerably more complex.18 S imilarly the status of detail, often portrayed as devalorized within the discourse, is open to reinterpretation,19 as is that of sentiment.20 In their more vulnerable moments, all these are seen by contemporary scholarship to be inadequate or dangerous facets of flawed, feminised accounts of taste. In contrast, this study considers them as important elements in a complex debate concerning taste and citizenship. T heir inclusion marks an attempt to change ‘the order of things’ in both philosophical and political terms. As I discuss in the first chapter, for eighteenth-century commentators on taste, one of the most obvious ways of determining this order was by considering the opinions of the past. Both politically and aesthetically, tradition could provide reassurance that the right choices were being made. Yet towards the end of the century and during the Romantic period, both competing (and sometimes partially invented) indigenous literary traditions and the American and French Revolutions meant that the value of tradition was under interrogation. The work of Clara Reeve (with her Old Whiggish education) and of the dissenter Anna Letitia Barbauld reveals more about the political and religious basis of this interrogation of tradition. For Reeve the Glorious Revolution of 1688 had meant a break with tradition for British society, a break distorting standards of taste and critical judgement. In Barbauld’s analysis, a sublime of tradition had been constructed to support the 18 See John Whale’s Imagination Under Pressure: 1789–1832 (C ambridge: C ambridge UP, 2000), where Whale suggests that a reshaped form of imagination and taste is set up by thinkers including Wollstonecraft and Hazlitt in opposition to utility (97). See also Flint S chier, ‘Hume and the A esthetics of A gency’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 87 (1986–87): 121–35, and Virtue and Taste; Essays on Politics, Ethics and Aesthetics, Philosophical Quarterly Supplementary Series vol. 2, eds Dudley Knowles and John Skorupski (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). Particularly relevant is ‘Taste, Virtue and Class’, David Brooke, 65–82. 19 Reluctance to concentrate on detail was incorporated into even the methodology of commentary on aesthetics. However, in the 1960s the direction began to change. S ee A rthur C . Danto, ‘T he A rtworld’, Journal of Philosophy 61 (1964): 571–84, and Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (London: Oxford UP, 1969). For a discussion of the development of the criticism of aesthetics as it relates to representation of gender difference, see the introduction to Peggy Zeglin Brand and C arolyn Korsmeyer, eds, Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State UP, 1995) pp. 1–22. 20 T he low aesthetic status of sentiment is evident in the low status of the sentimental novel through the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. Edith Birkhead gave an interesting discussion of the term sentiment in her article ‘S entiment and S ensibility in the E ighteenth‑century N ovel’, in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, vol. 11, comp. Oliver Elton (Oxford, Clarendon P, 1925). See also R.F. Brissenden, V irtue in Distress: S tudies in the N ovel of S entiment from Richardson to S ade (L ondon: Macmillan, 1974); Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London, Methuen, 1986); and G.J. Barker‑Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth‑Century Britain (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1992).

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Established Church (and by implication the state). Importantly, then, both writers are emphatic concerning the link between narratives of politics and narratives of taste (although Reeve is more concerned with the effects of art, specifically fiction, and Barbauld extends this to see the aesthetic operating more broadly). Further, both offer alternatives to what they see as the current positioning of tradition: Reeve suggests that an accurate mode of vision, true taste, is held by subjects usually disempowered and feminised; Barbauld proposes a ‘devotional taste’, an internalised sublime that would influence Romantic writers as diverse as Wollstonecraft and C oleridge. C rucially, they are both aware of the power of the discourse of taste to reshape the country, to allow the devalued and disempowered to speak, to expose what has been hidden. Both Reeve and Barbauld struggled, however, against a sense of the forcefulness of established modes of interpretation, and, as I explore in C hapter 2, the same difficulty haunted Wollstonecraft. It is often assumed that women writers have little to say about the Romantic notion of original genius: Wollstonecraft’s work belies this claim. E xtending Barbauld’s critique of the operation of the sublime, Wollstonecraft suggests that social corruption is supported by a false, Burkean notion of the sublime and the beautiful. T he alternative is an independent mode of thought drawing on the individual’s original powers of perception: taste and the artistic activities connected with it here aid such freshness of vision. Wollstonecraft’s sometimes awkward self-positioning in respect to such original thought has much to reveal about the problematics of Romantic authorship more generally. She provides an insightful analysis of the difficulties facing the original thinker: in this account, language, the senses, and, perhaps most importantly, feeling are easily distorted (even always-already contaminated) by society. As Wollstoncraft’s work suggests, the dangerous force of the aesthetic experience and the vividness of the imagination produce emotional excess that needs to be controlled. T he next two chapters hence examine ways of directing aesthetic experience, exploring two major (but by no means mutually exclusive) approaches. C hapter 3 examines the treatment of emotional detachment through Gothic, children’s fiction, and educational literature, an investigation that involves a rewriting of our notions of women writers’ use of detail. Works by Radcliffe, Fenwick, Smith, and Wakefield imply that without knowledge both of the quotidian, and of the circumstances and systems that connect the features of the landscape, the spectator cannot achieve sufficient detachment to make a tasteful or an ethical judgement. Yet such writers suggest that while a variety of perspectives might grant disinterested detachment and a heightened ethical sense to the tasteful spectator, the structure of the recipient’s mind was equally important. Chapter 4 picks up on this theme by examining a range of more psychologically orientated accounts of taste. While Romantic interest in the law of association is well established, little attention has been paid to women’s contribution in this area. Maria Edgeworth and Joanna Baillie used a more psychological approach to taste in order to construct a spectator who could possess all the sensibility of taste without becoming dangerously vulnerable to feeling. However, perhaps the most democratic account of aesthetic

Introduction

11

judgement is offered by Elizabeth Hamilton, who argues for a shared taste, vital for all ranks, which would guarantee the health of the community. A s I examine in C hapter 5, both the notion of common aesthetic experience and the idea that such experience still needed an (albeit difficult to define) direction can be traced in the Romantic tale. In his 1800 Preface to The Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth made what came to be seen as a quintessentially Romantic move when he avowedly turned to the lower ranks of the Lake District to examine ‘the real language of men’.21 However, an examination of the contribution of women writers to the tale and short story enables a fuller account of the emerging emphasis on variation in terms of both class and nation in the aesthetics of the Romantic period. In particular, it can be argued that the growth in the ballad and folk tale seen from the mid-eighteenth century onwards gained extra impetus as a result of an increasing suspicion of fashionable and cosmopolitan life. In addition, however, collections of radical short stories by women writers compared the effects of various national and regional political systems on the lower as well as upper classes. In the process, the ability of lower class subjects to make judgements of taste was acknowledged. This can be demonstrated through examination of an unacknowledged source for the national tale, the collection of tales or short stories (such as, for example, C harlotte S mith’s Letters of a Solitary Wanderer [1800], Harriet and S ophia L ee’s The Canterbury Tales [1797–1805], and E lizabeth Gooch’s Wanderings of Imagination [1796]). In relation to the national tales of E dgeworth and O wenson (and particularly when seen in the context of O wenson’s 1818 Florence Macarthy: An Irish Tale), these works were important in establishing the importance of belonging in relation to taste. A ttachment was as important for the tasteful spectator as the detachment of disinterestedness. As the social position of these writers (in the middle and lower upper ranks) suggests, this study in part examines how the ‘genteel’ re-imagined the role of the lower ranks within the nation, creating a more democratic aesthetic that aided the avoidance of revolution.22 In Distinction (1979), Pierre Bourdieu suggests that such pronouncements by the culturally authoritative are a way of continuing to deny others the right to speak. He refers to Marx and Engels’ notion of a society in which ‘there are no painters but at most people who engage in painting among other things’.23 He finds that, despite such ‘apparent generosity’: the indulgent populism which credits the common people with innate knowledge of politics equally helps to disguise and so consecrate the ‘concentration in a few individuals’ of the capacity to produce discourse about the social world, and through this the capacity for consciously changing that world. (397) William Wordsworth and S amuel T aylor C oleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. by R.L. Brett and A.R. Jones, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 241. 22 For ‘genteel’ see Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter (L ondon: Yale U P, 1998), p. 13. 23 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction; A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (L ondon: Routledge, 1984), p. 397. 21

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While acknowledging this tendency, this study’s examination of largely middle class commentary is not an unconscious perpetuation of this ‘concentration’ of the right to comment ‘in a few individuals’ nor a denial of the importance of working class voices. Instead, it acknowledges that middle class intellectual ideations both of the broader potential of humanity and of particular social groups are enablers of political change. In Bourdieu’s terms, the power to speak that these ‘few individuals’ claimed makes the examination of this aspect of their work all the more vital. By positioning the lower ranks as potentially tasteful, such commentary enabled another reading of working people. Instead of being objects of ridicule or fear, they could now potentially be seen as politically responsible. A s such, this aesthetic commentary by women writers in often-devalued genres represents an important intervention in the post-Revolution debate. V ia the language of taste, these writers participated in what A lfred C obban called ‘perhaps the last real discussion of the fundamentals of politics in this country’. 24

24 A lfred C obban, ed. The Debate on the French Revolution 1789–1800 (1950), 2nd ed, The British Political Tradition 2 (London : Black, 1960), p. 1.

C hapter 1

‘Real S olemn History’: Rethinking Tradition In his essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, David Hume admits the difficulty of finding agreement in matters of taste but nonetheless suggests that, although the amount of requisite ‘delicacy’ differs between one person and another, ‘practice in a particular art’ improves the judgement: ‘One accustomed to seem and examine, and weigh the several performances acquired in different ages and nations, can alone rate the merits of a work exhibited to his view’. Sir Joshua Reynolds, first President of the Royal A cademy of A rt, held a similar view, as William Wordsworth notes in both the 1798 A dvertisement and the 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads: ‘An accurate taste in poetry, and in all the other arts, Sir Joshua Reynolds has observed, is an acquired talent, which can only be produced by severe thought, and a long continued intercourse with the best models of composition’. T he best way of improving taste is to look at those models which have been ‘universally found to please’, which are, in other words, already lauded or canonised (Hume, Essays 236). Yet William Wordsworth finds this notion of taste being constructed through the canon problematic. In his 1815 Essay, Supplementary to the Preface, Wordsworth provides ‘a hasty retrospect of the poetical literature of this country’. However, he establishes a tradition of writing often constructed through difference: the great writers share only originality and, significantly, Britishness. He argues such that great and original poets often experience ‘partial notice only, or neglect’ because their originality presents a challenge. S uch originality represents an obstacle to the reader who has developed his or her taste by reading what has been ‘universally found to please’ – if a new work is strikingly different, his experience will not necessarily help him to judge it. As might be predicted, then, Wordsworth appears anxious about the taste of his audience. Since the ‘number of judges who can be confidently relied upon’ is ‘small’, the position of great writers within the tradition seems precarious (393).  Jane Austen, The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R.W. C hapman, 3rd ed., 5 vols (L ondon: Oxford UP, 1932–1934), 5: 108.  David Hume, ‘O f the S tandard of T aste’ in Essays Moral, Political and Literary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 231–55, 242, 244.  William Wordsworth and S amuel T aylor C oleridge, Lyrical Ballads, eds R.L . Brett and A.R. Jones, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 8; this quotation is repeated in the Preface, with minor modifications (271).  Essay, Supplementary to the Preface in William Wordsworth, Selected Prose, ed. John O. Hayden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), p. 408.

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14

While the concept of tradition is thus in some ways a problematic one, eighteenth-century commentators nonetheless often suggested that the taste of an artist or audience could be improved by looking back at the works of the past, works which formed a prestigious cultural or artistic tradition. Of course, it is a critical commonplace that during the eighteenth century the notion of what might constitute a prestigious tradition altered: the emphasis shifted from the classical to the indigenous literary heritage. T he reason for this shift, criticism suggests, can, at least in part, be found in the discourse of civic humanism. In this discourse, taste was seen as a quality intimately linked with the ability to be a good citizen: to possess taste was to possess independence, the ability to generalize, and the ability to be detached. However, by the 1750s, there was a significant unease with the suitability of classical culture to develop a citizenry appropriate to eighteenthcentury Britain. Indeed, as Michael Meehan suggests in Liberty and Poetics in Eighteenth Century England (1986), ‘By the 1760s, most had accepted the fact that British liberty was neither particularly Roman nor Grecian in character’: [T his] assertion of national singularity, and the attempts to read in the nation’s political fortunes the outlines of a new aesthetic, did promote a national confidence among writers, and offered a powerful theoretical urgency to a growing ideal of independence, of taking aesthetic character and artistic ideals from within the culture, from the directions offered in the national history, from the demands of local government and from the demonstrated strengths of local achievement. (Meehan ii)

Writers turned to indigenous literature (fake or actual) to foreground particular regional values or to gain prestige for particular cultural groups. As Jonathan Brody Kramnick suggests in Making the English Canon, such constructions of tradition involved fierce negotiation over cultural authority: ‘tasteful’ was a socially desirable label for which individuals struggled. Kramnick’s study concentrates on the first 70 years of the eighteenth century. However, when the Romantic period is considered, scholarship tells us a rather different story. The interest in vernacular literature is still acknowledged. Indeed, it would be hard to ignore. As Joep Leerssen notes, ‘Between 1780 and 1840 a huge rediscovery of the early medieval vernacular roots and rootedness of the various European languages and literatures took place’ across ‘the fields of philology, antiquarianism, and imaginative literature’. However, L eerssen hints, criticism has frequently treated this tendency in the context of ‘literary poetics’ (222). More specifically still, it is possible to say that critical attention has been Michael Meehan, Liberty and Poetics in Eighteenth-Century England (L ondon: Croom, 1986).  Jonathan Brody Kramnick, Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998).  Joep Leerssen, ‘Literary Historicism: Romanticism, Philologists, and the Presence of the Past’, Modern Language Quarterly 65:2 (June 2004): 221–43, 221. 

‘Real Solemn History’

15

focused largely on the male poet’s attitude to the ‘burden of the past’. Interest centres on the creativity of a few privileged individuals rather than on the taste of the public more generally. For W. Jackson Bate, for instance, looking at the history of the arts generates a question for ‘the poet or artist: What is there left to do?’ ‘Anxiety’ (such as that displayed by Wordsworth above) is the response to this burden – along with a questioning of or even breakage with tradition. Harold Bloom suggests that ‘In the beginning, modern poetry abandoned most of what had served as the subject matter of European literary tradition from Homer to Pope. Wordsworth was the inventor of modern poetry, and he found no subject but himself’. Yet, quite clearly in this period, the concept of tradition was not only interpreted as a source of anxiety for the artist in relation to his work. Commentators were also conscious that (invented or otherwise) traditions could alter the perceived tastefulness, the cultural authority, of particular groups. A s such, the use of tradition in relation to taste had a potential significance far beyond any myth of the creative psyche of the artist. Indeed, hints of the broader significance of the anxiety over tradition occur even in those critics (then and now) who concentrate on the mind-set of the male Romantic poets. For Hazlitt, when the Lake Poets rejected tradition and emphasized the importance of the new, they were influenced by the ‘sentiments and opinions which produced [the French] revolution’.10 A nd for Bloom, writing more than 140 years later, although Wordsworth’s poetry represents a break with the literary heritage, his choice of the unconventional subject matter of self is influenced by Protestant or dissenting thought (Visionary Company xviii). To examine such suggestions and to contextualize the problem of tradition more accurately, a different approach (one that does not foreground the creative anxieties of the male Romantic poet) is necessary. Looking at the work of the period’s women writers (often, because of their own position, acutely aware of the politics of marginality) exposes the complex role of tradition as a mechanism for developing or (more often) shoring up the authority, not only of poets but of more culturally disadvantaged social groups. Further, such writings can be used to demonstrate that this struggle over tradition and taste was seen as socially extremely significant: the construction of tradition was seen to have profound political and spiritual consequences for the health of the nation. In this area, the works of Clara Reeve and Anna Letitia Barbauld form a particularly important resource, illuminating contemporary anxieties concerning state and church. Both recognise that cultural tradition (with its suggestion of sublimity) can

W. Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1970), p. 3.  Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), p. 461. 10 William Hazlitt, ‘L ectures on the E nglish Poets’ in The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. Duncan Wu, 9 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998) 2: 163–323, 314. 

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be manipulated by those in power – and both suggest alternatives which redirect critical authority away from the establishment. A lthough both Reeve and Barbauld foreground the problem of cultural (and political) tradition by embarking on canon-making enterprises (Reeve with her 1785 Progress of Romance, Barbauld with her 50-volume edition of British Novelists [1810]), at times their approach to taste is rather different.11 A lthough there are some suggestions of the impact of the senses on the imagination in Reeve’s work (most notably in metaphors around travel and in fears concerning luxury),she is overwhelmingly concerned with the written text, recalling Addison’s definition of taste in The Spectator no. 409: ‘MOST Languages make use of this Metaphor, to express that Faculty of the Mind, which distinguishes all the most concealed Faults and nicest Perfections in Writing’ (6: 72–78, 72). However, Addison’s papers on The Pleasures of the Imagination also acknowledge the role that sight in particular has to play in stimulating the imaginative faculty: sensory information, it may be posited, stimulating the imagination either directly or indirectly through memory, is highly significant when making judgements of taste. This approach, which acknowledges the impact of what would today be called the aesthetic, is the one taken by Barbauld. Nonetheless, both Clara Reeve and Anna Letitia Barbauld share an awareness of the malleability of tradition; as a basis for aesthetic or critical judgement, it is contingent. In the case of Clara Reeve, this acknowledgement of the mutability of tradition is rather ironic. Reeve, who received an O ld Whiggish education, wished to use romance and its criticism to combat what she saw as the political corruption that resulted from the Revolution of 1688.12 Reeve wanted to revert to the earlier political traditions of balanced constitutional powers, which she arguably saw S ir Robert Walpole as having corrupted. T o combat the luxury she connected with such corruption, Reeve posited an alternative, suggesting the re-evaluation of romance and its readers as a way of connecting with a more politically ethical past. However, in the process, she implies the malleability of tradition as a source of authority. For the dissenter A nna L etitia Barbauld, on the other hand, it was the C hurch’s use of tradition to shore up its power that formed the initial point of concern. In her contributions to Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (1773), Barbauld gave a sophisticated analysis of the way the notion and structures of tradition have an aesthetic and emotional impact, producing the awe connected with the sublime.13 But in her 1775 essay ‘T houghts on the Devotional T aste, on S ects 11 A nna L etitia Barbauld, The British Novelists; With an Essay; and Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, 50 vols (London: Rivington et al; Edinburgh: Creech; York: Wilson, 1810). 12 C lara Reeve, The Progress of Romance, through Times, Countries and Manners; With Remarks on the Good and Bad Effects of It, on Them Respectively; In a Course of Evening Conversations, 2 vols (Colchester: Keymer; [London]: Robinson, 1785). 13 J. Aikin and A.L. Aikin, Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose (1773), 2nd ed. (London: Johnson, 1775).

‘Real Solemn History’

17

and E stablishments’, Barbauld also suggested there might be alternatives to this sublime of tradition – alternatives outside established state institutions. A nd this realisation was to have considerable impact on Romantic aesthetics. Rewriting British literary tradition to include prose fiction, Barbauld and Reeve consider that prose fiction and its reading public are crucial to a socially beneficial cultivation of taste. Positioning the novel as hegemonic, their work sheds light on the development of the form as an essential vehicle for aesthetic and political discussion in the 1790s. * Politically, C lara Reeve may be regarded as an ‘O ld Whig’, as S ir Walter S cott’s remarks on her reading material suggest – the young Reeve apparently reported having read Rapin’s ‘History of E ngland’ and C ato’s L etters, by T renchard and Gordon, as well as Greek and Roman histories.14 L ess evident, however, is the effect that such political leanings had on her use of fiction. Both her translation of Barclay’s Argenis, The Phoenix (1772), and her novel The Champion of Virtue (1777) are attempts to revive (or to create fictional) memories of supposed past political liberties.15 T he term Old Whig (used by Reeve to describe her father) was originally used to denote those Whigs who became disenchanted with the means Walpole took to maintain political power. Such Whigs objected in particular to Walpole’s closeness to the court, which was perceived to weaken an English liberty that originated in the dim past with the Goths, A nglo-S axons, or N ormans. It is no coincidence, then, that Reeve’s novel, The Champion, reissued as The Old English Baron, and described as a ‘Gothic S tory’,16 was written in response to the defects S ir Walter S cott, Lives of Eminent Novelists and Dramatists, rev. ed., ‘C handos’ Classics (London: Warne; New York: Scribner, Welford and Armstrong, n.d.), pp. 545–50, 549–50; subsequently Lives; see also Elizabeth R. Napier, ‘Clara Reeve (23 January 1729–3 December 1807)’, British Novelists, 1660–1800, part 2, ed. Martin C. Battestin, Dictionary of Literary Biography vol. 39 (Detroit, MI: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1985), pp. 372–77; Gary Kelly, ‘Clara Reeve. Provincial Bluestocking: From the Old Whigs to the Modern L iberal S tate’, Huntington Library Quarterly: Studies in English and American History and Literature 65 (2002): 105–25. Rapin’s history was assumed by Hume to be Whiggish in sympathy: Paul Rapin de T hoyras, The History of England. Written in French by Mr Rapin de Thoyras. Translated into English with Additional Notes by N. Tindal, trans. N . T indal, 2nd ed., 2 vols (London: Knapton, 1732–33); Bridget Hill, The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1992), pp. 26–7. For a discussion of ‘C ato’s L etters’, see C olin Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), p. 266. 15  C lara Reeve, trans. The Phoenix; Or, the History of Polyarchis and Argenis. Trans. from the Latin by a Lady, 4 vols (London: Bell; York: Etherington, 1772). 16 C lara Reeve, The Champion of Virtue. A Gothic Story (C olchester: Keymer; London: Robinson, 1777); The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story (1778), ed. James Trainer (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977), p. 3; subsequently O.E.B. 14

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of Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764). Reeve indeed described the novel as one in which ‘the machinery is so violent, that it destroys the effect it is intended to excite’.17 In contrast to the work of Sir Robert Walpole’s son, Reeve’s narrative is anything but playful in its support of political and land-owning traditions, upheld with integrity. In her early fictions Reeve had used romance and the Gothic to allegorise, represent, and promote a political approach informed by the O ld Whigs’ fear of corruption; in both The Phoenix and The Old English Baron, she appeals to the past as a time when balanced liberties and moral strength are successfully placed in opposition to political corruption – an imagined tradition of political liberty is constructed. Perhaps because of Reeve’s very forcefulness, her politicised romances were far from being an unmixed critical success.18 N onetheless, The Progress of Romance (most often considered by critics in relation to its gender politics) reveals the same Old Whiggish agenda as Reeve’s fictional works.19 Responding to attempts by Richard Hurd and James Beattie to form alternative (aesthetic and political) romance traditions, in this work Reeve establishes her own prose genealogy, from classical romance to modern novel.20 Like Hurd and Beattie, she draws upon the connection between romance and Gothic liberty. For Reeve, however, this ‘progress’ of prose romance, if properly managed (as in The Old English Baron), would allow the liberties of an (imagined) Gothic past to be transferred to the present. Furthermore, past narratives of liberty, Reeve suggests, have specific relevance to modern ‘Britons’, whose state is in decline since the Revolution of 1688. Reeve sees moral, and by implication political, benefit both to constructing a canon of romance fiction and to valuing certain supposedly traditional feminised modes of reading.

17 O.E.B. pp. 4–5; Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764), ed. W.S. Lewis, notes Joseph W. Reed, Jr (1964: Oxford: World’s Classics-Oxford UP, 1982). 18 S ee, for example, Horace Walpole, Walpole’s Correspondence 41: 410; S cott similarly found attempts to ensure the story’s probability led to tedium (Lives 545–50). A nna L etitia Barbauld, too, described The Old English Baron as a novel of a ‘moderate degree of merit’, in which the ‘chief fault … is, that we foresee the conclusion before we have read twenty pages’ (British Novelists 22: i–ii). 19 Both Runge and Ballaster, for example, have emphasised the skill with which Reeve promotes female critical authority and feminised genres. S ee L aura L . Runge 155–63; Ros Ballaster, ‘Romancing the N ovel: Gender and Genre in E arly T heories of N arrative’, Living by the Pen: Early British Women Writers, ed. Dale Spender (New York: Teachers College P, 1992), pp. 188–200. 20 Clara Reeve’s contribution to novel criticism is often only acknowledged in passing. S ee, for example, Ioan Williams, ed. Novel and Romance 1700–1800: A Documentary Record (London: Routledge, 1970), pp. 298; James P. Carson, ‘Enlightenment, Popular C ulture, and Gothic Fiction’, The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), pp. 255–76, particularly 258–9.

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C lara Reeve’s tradition-building enterprise has its basis in the late eighteenthcentury interest in cataloguing various art forms.21 Johnson’s Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets appeared between 1779 and 1781 and were first collected together in 1781.22 Warton’s History of English Poetry (1779–81) had recently been published. Reynolds’s Discourses on Art (1769–90) was a review and classification of the different genres of art and artists, and, though international in its scope, promoted British culture. The context of Reeve’s work is the construction of a national canon. This is indicated by the remarks of the critic in The Monthly Review: If Hurd, Beattie, Warton, and Percy (whose names reflect the highest lustre on modern literature), did not regard the subject of these little volumes as unworthy of their research, no one need blush at devoting some portion of time in pursuit of the same enquiry: nor can that be deemed undeserving the notice and protection of the Public, to which the practice of a S ydney hath given sanction, and which hath received the approbation of a Milton.23

T he writers and the critics of romance mentioned by the reviewer were associated with the promotion of a national tradition of literature. In line with this is the reviewer’s failure to mention Pierre Daniel Huet, who, in A Treatise of Romances and Their Original (1672), had stated the superior quality of the French romance.24 Huet’s assertion of superiority was challenged by Richard Hurd and James Beattie, and their work, like that of Warton and Percy, reflected a growing interest in native trends in literature. However, the reviewer’s use of the conditional gives his remarks a tentative quality, and this indicates the precarious nature of this tradition at this point. Hurd, Beattie, and Percy had some critical authority, but the status of the subject on which they wrote was still fluctuating. Furthermore, though they had each shown a particular interest in forms related to metrical and prose romances, there was some disagreement as to the nature of romance and its most prestigious forms. C lara Reeve had chosen her moment well. T he potential canon she was discussing had enough prestige to be taken seriously and yet was still flexible enough to be manipulated. One of the key manoeuvres Reeve makes is to focus on prose; other writers had said a great deal about ‘metrical Romances’, but in their treatment of prose romances, ‘their informations have been scanty and imperfect’ (Reeve, Progress 1: v). Yet Reeve’s choice of novel and romance is not merely a scholarly attempt to redress an omission. Rather, she builds on the political content of Hurd’s and Beattie’s accounts of romance to argue for the present-day relevance of prose fiction to the state. 21 See Lawrence Lipking, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970). 22 Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets (1781), 2 vols, Everyman (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, n.d.). 23 ‘A rt. II . ‘Progress of Romance’ by C .R.’, rev. of ‘T he Progress of Romance’. The Monthly Review; or Literary Journal, Enlarged 73 (1785): 414–18, in particular 414. 24 [Pierre Daniel] Huet, A Treatise of Romances and Their Original: Translated out of French (London: Heyrick, 1672).

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The work of Hurd and Beattie had a political potential that Reeve was able to build upon for her Old Whiggish narrative. Both were interested in the kind of speculative history that traced British liberty back to a remote Gothic past. C onsidering ‘Whose ancient constitution? E thnicity and the E nglish Past’, C olin Kidd defines seven main ways in which the ancient English past was reshaped according to various ideological imperatives.25 Hurd’s position best corresponds to the fourth which Kidd outlines as follows: S ome antiquarians conceded that the irruption of Romans, S axons, Danes and N ormans had inevitably wrought changes in E ngland’s institutions and laws; however, these alterations were superficial. Underlying a surface history of arrival, settlement and change was a deeper-laid pattern of common institutional forms, whether through limitations on monarchy, or through legal continuity within a shared framework of custom and precedent. That blending of peoples did not disturb the basic principles of English government. (80)

Importantly, it is Richard Hurd’s Moral and Political Dialogues (1759) that Kidd gives as an example. However, while Hurd viewed the principles of E nglish government as essentially unchanged, in ‘On Fable and Romance’, James Beattie uses elements of this approach alongside a more Gothicist perspective on British history. In part, he suggests a common Gothic heritage for E urope. A ccording to Beattie, the actions of the N orthern peoples in invading E urope had ultimately ensured certain constitutional liberties.26 He writes: ‘Another thing remarkable in the Gothick nations, was an invincible spirit of liberty’ (2: 527). He continues: ‘To them [gothic institutions] there is reason to believe that we are indebted for those two great establishments, which form the basis of British freedom, a parliament for making laws, and juries for trying criminals, and deciding differences’ (2: 527). However, despite these ‘political ideas on the natural equality of mind’, the feudal system became corrupted as the people ‘settled in the secure enjoyment of riches and honour’ (2: 533–4). Luxury introduces inequality, and at the same time, dignities become not earned, but hereditary. E ventually, the deterioration of the feudal system across E urope leads to a ‘change in the form of government’ in which the king becomes more powerful (2: 552). While praising the Gothic constitution, then, Beattie seems conflicted on the matter of feudalism. He no doubt wishes to distance himself from S cotland’s recent past, often positioned as feudal – hence the emphasis on feudal decline. Yet he finds the remote British political past praiseworthy. T his narrative of the British political system is one of decline and breakage from original liberty. Both Hurd and Beattie subject romance to what might be termed anthropological criticism, where the imagined political organisation of a society is used to justify particular generic features. A t the same time, however, this mode of criticism 25 C olin Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999). 26 James Beattie, The Philosophical and Critical Works of James Beattie, 2 vols (Hildesheim: Olms, 1974).

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allows construction of British political pasts; romance and its analysis are both politicised. Reeve capitalises on this politicisation. As has been suggested, like Hurd and Beattie, she was fascinated by the notion of a purer political past. Yet Reeve’s approach is also innovatory: Beattie notably drops the political element of his analysis as soon as he approaches C ervantes; Reeve, in contrast, is quite explicit about the significance of her work to contemporary politics. In the book’s last conversation, the critic Euphrasia and romance reader Sophronia are walking outside because, according to S ophronia, extensive study has damaged her friend’s health. Hortensius commends such exercise, remarking: N o people are born too tender to endure their own climate, – it is indulgence and luxury that effeminates us, and then we complain of our country, and fly to others to recover what we have lost by our own fault. (2: 75–6)

Hortensius then notes that the Britons have altered since Julius Caesar, to which E uphrasia replies: ‘T he Britons are not more altered in this, than in all other respects – their manners, – their customs, – their amusements’ (2: 76). The remarks of both E uphrasia and Hortensius promote a notion of native hardiness which should be preserved but is gradually being eroded. More than this, however, Euphrasia remarks that this change has been particularly noticeable over the previous hundred years. S he dates the beginning of commercial corruption in E ngland to the time of the Glorious Revolution. Hortensius’s and Euphrasia’s remarks invoke nostalgia for a hardier Gothic past and locate this past before the Glorious Revolution in a way compatible with O ld Whiggish beliefs. In line with this, Reeve’s main political move in the Progress is an insistence on the importance of morality to government. T his becomes explicit a few pages later when a much reformed Hortensius comments that showing scenes of corrupt life to young people is detrimental and hopes that amendment will occur in the future: O h E ngland, model to thy inward greatness Like a little body with a mighty heart; What might’st thou do, that wou’d thee honour do Were all thy children kind and natural?27

This quotation from Henry V (II. I. 16–20), ascribed by Reeve simply to ‘S HA KES PEA RE ’, comes from a point in the play when three E nglish supporters are found to be in conspiracy with France. It thus emphasises the importance of the political morality which Reeve insists can be promoted through good reading habits. Progress of Romance 2: 91; William Shakespeare, Henry V, ed. S tanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett, and William Montgomery, intro. Stanley Wells, The Complete Oxford Shakespeare, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987), vol. 1: II. I. 16–20; this edition reads as follows: ‘O England!–model to thy inward greatness, / Like little body with a mighty heart, / What mightst thou do, that honour would thee do, / Were all thy children kind and natural?’ 27

22

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In Reeve’s narrative, the (often female) readers of romance preserve such a tradition of morality by discovering literature for themselves and by forming their own taste through discussion of what they have read. A nd here Reeve’s communities of female readers make an important contribution to the discourse of luxury. As E.J. Clery suggests, the rise of luxury was connected with the perceived ‘feminisation’ of society, a trend that could be exploited by women writers of the early to mid-eighteenth century.28 However, by the end of the century, I would suggest, the situation had become less positive for women readers, writers, and critics. T he gender politics of Reeve’s Progress of Romance have been extensively discussed, yet little attention has been given to how Reeve’s manoeuvres are designed to work within the context of the debate on luxury. Confronted with what she sees as political corruption, in The Progress of Romance, Reeve uses a complicated rhetoric of gender to attack the association of women with such consumerist decadence. For Reeve, such an association is itself a false tradition, a sign of Britain’s political decay after 1688. Instead, she imagines an alternative heritage, in which customary reading communities work against luxury to preserve intellectual independence and critical health. I would argue, then, that Reeve’s vignettes of reading communities work to support not only a feminist agenda but a broader political one. Groups of women readers offer an alternative both to French luxury and to corrupt aspects of classical culture. In the first volume, for example, Sophronia refers to her mother’s and aunt’s habits of gathering to read fiction aloud (Reeve, Progress 1: 69). Ballaster comments: ‘T his picture of communal reading activity on the part of women is somewhat nostalgic; consumption of the emergent novel appears to have been a solitary and intimate reading experience carried out in the boudoir’, and, as Wollstonecraft’s portrait of Mary’s mother indicates, such novel reading was sexualised and connected with French influence (Ballaster 191; Wollstonecraft, Works 1: 8). Reeve’s public reading, on the other hand, replaces the erotic novel reading that was associated with the French with the portrait of a rational community. Reeve’s ‘nostalgic’ picture of communal reading is consistent with her O ld Whiggish position; it involves a deliberate rejection of the modern reading habits that, for Reeve, reflect the corruption of eighteenth-century politics. Reeve also gives this way of reading further authority by indicating its persistence. E uphrasia later describes the observations of M. de Guys in his Sentimental Journey through Greece, saying: ‘When a party of women met together they frequently entertained each other with telling a story in turn, which amusement is called Paramythia’.29 By filling Greece not with heroic males, but with reading women, Reeve overtly criticises a system that associates classical learning with political power. Reeve strengthens her argument by contrasting these communal reading habits with the pursuits that gave eighteenth-century upper class men cultural capital. 28 E.J. Clery, The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England; Literature, Commerce and Luxury (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 1–12. 29 Reeve, Progress 2: 64; published originally as Voyage littéraire de la Grèce in 1771, Pierre Augustin Guys’s work was translated into English the next year as A Sentimental Journey through Greece, 3 vols (London: Cadell, 1772).

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Initially scornful of romance, an eventually convinced Hortensius provides the necessary narrative. In his anecdote, a traveller in search of antiquities who had embarked on the enterprise against the advice of his friends was having difficulties: His patron rallied him upon his want of resolution, and asked him if he had not yet learned the Turkish method of calming his mind? – The traveller thought he meant the use of opium or some drug of that kind, but he soon after called for a young man his servant, and ordered him to take up a book and read where he left off the night before. (Reeve, Progress 2: 61)

Hortensius explains that a ‘pleasant story’ was read: to which the traveller was attentive, and found his mind relieved and comforted. – When the lad had done reading, his master raised many questions, and made remarks upon the story, and then spoke to his guest as follows: – “You see my friend, that we are not such Barbarians as many of the Franks believe us’ … [this activity] is as natural and as innocent as gaming, or drinking great quantities of wine, which are your common diversions.” (Reeve, Progress 2: 62–3)

This anecdote is particularly significant because the Turks were more frequently treated as aesthetic objects than subjects, as Elizabeth Bohls suggests in her book Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics (1995). Discussing Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters, Bohls comments that ‘late seventeenth‑ and early eighteenth‑century British and French accounts of travel to the O ttoman Empire are consistent with later representations of the Middle East. The Orient is discursively feminized and eroticized; West stands to E ast in a relation of proto‑colonial domination that takes on a seemingly inevitable sexual character’.30 Bohls’s remarks are verified by an examination of treatments of the East in the work of other romance critics. Beattie, for example, writes: When an E astern prince happens to be idle, as he commonly is, and at a loss for expedients to kill the time, he commands his Grand Visir, or his favourite, to tell him stories. Being ignorant, and consequently credulous; having no passion for moral improvement, and little knowledge of nature; he does not desire, that they should be probable, or of an instructive tendency: it is enough if they be astonishing. (Philosophical and Critical Works 2: 509)

Further feminised, his prince is also impressed with ‘rich robes, gaudy furniture, sumptuous entertainments, and palaces shining in gold, or sparkling with diamonds’ (2: 509). In other words, Beattie’s prince has the kind of indiscriminating attachment to the material and bodily which was often associated with women. T hat Reeve introduces, then subverts such common perceptions is in line with her broader programme. S he wishes to suggest that readers (whether women or Turks) who are typically positioned as feminised consumers nonetheless have a 30 E lizabeth A . Bohls, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics 1716– 1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), pp. 27–8.

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potential moral and intellectual purity that makes them worth listening to in the context of the nation’s political health. Her traveller’s assumption that the Turk will use ‘opium’ is drawn from stereotypical portraits of the E ast and suggests that the prevailing image of the O rient here is one of a place of languor. A dditionally, the presence of the young man might be a sly reference to notions of homoeroticism or effeminacy. However, the boy and the older man have the relationship of pupil to teacher. This, like the relationship between Charoba and her nurse later in the work, is another example of Reeve connecting an apparently feminized relationship with the inheritance of knowledge. In contrast, the taste of the solitary traveller is questionable. He has acted against advice in going to Turkey; his complete, unruly, and unprofitable independence is contrasted with the independence of thought, the reasoned discussion which the Turk carries out when considering the written words of others. The traveller’s attempt to gather antiquities suggests a colonial and acquisitive attitude, and his attitude to the Turks is coloured by lazy assumption. For Reeve, the grand tour, symbol of masculine cultural prestige and fitness to rule, does not after all equip the subject with the requisite disinterestedness for political life. Instead, it is potentially connected with corruption and acquisitiveness and with the deliberately unthinking pursuits of gambling and drinking to excess. In contrast, the newly educated Hortensius, now trained in the interpretative methods of the romance reader, is able to understand the importance of critical reading. In The Progress of Romance, then, Reeve constructs a tradition of prose romance which is connected with narratives of inherited constitutional freedoms and supported by customary ways of group reading. S uggesting that such an approach is a way of reversing present political and cultural corruption, Reeve makes the modern relevance of the romance tradition much clearer than does Beattie. However, at the same time, Reeve’s manipulation of the history of romance points to the ease with which tradition can be distorted for a particular political purpose. A nd, although Reeve can hardly be described in general as a playful author, she is clearly amusedly self-conscious about the suitable pliability the romance offers. Her manipulation of the two key roles offered a female critic or reader by the romance is a case in point: shifts in E uphrasia’s tone and approach (noted by Runge, Ballaster, and Ellis) can be profitably placed in relation to models of female behaviour offered in the work of Hurd and Beattie. In his Letters on Chivalry and Romance, Hurd had depicted a ‘military fanaticism’ so strong that women too were involved, although he assures the reader that ‘in this representation they did but copy the manners of the times’.31 In line with this, Reeve draws on the martial imagery of romance to place Hortensius in the position of challenger (Progress 1: 1). Remarking on the dangers of ‘Violations of chastity’, however, Hurd had also portrayed female virtue as ‘the fairest and strongest claim of the sex itself to such protection’ (Letters 18). Euphrasia’s confessions of weakness, and her 31 Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), ed. Hoyt Trowbridge, Augustan Reprint Society 101/102 (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1963), pp. 11, 12.

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emphasis on her femininity, cater to this more chivalric approach. In constructing her tradition, then, the female critic is aware that strategy is necessary. Significantly, Euphrasia’s manipulation of the roles offered by romance scholarship has correlatives in another politically dynamic romance, The Faerie Queene (1590–96) (a poem highly praised by Hurd). Euphrasia combines the modest femininity of Florimell and the combative aspects of Britomart, patriotic, valiant, and disguised as a man. T he two characters are S penser’s solution to the problem of presenting the Queen as both ruler and woman. Reeve’s tactics suggest that such doubling is necessary not just to present queens in romance but also for women who wish to gain cultural and political authority. A nd this manipulation is justified, Reeve suggests, because Euphrasia is also a moral guide. As Una led the Red Crosse Knight in the first canto of The Faerie Queene, E uphrasia leads Hortensius through the landscape of romance. Her name, ‘E uphrasia’, is close to ‘euphrasy’, a substance used to brighten the eyes and also once thought good for vision; if ‘Una’ possessed the holy singleness that could correct her knight’s course, E uphrasia has vision, a quality perhaps more appropriate for a guide in an empiricist age. Her metaphors are not of territorial conquest or acquisitive imperialism. Rather, in figuring her judgement of literature as a journey through the ‘land of romance’, she allies the acts of criticism and a scenic tourism that requires only imaginative travel. Romance and the criticism written on it allow women readers and critics a flexibility of roles. However, Reeve is aware that there is an element of trickery in adopting them. Moreover, she also seems to acknowledge that the female guide in romance tradition potentially has a darker side, of which Spenser’s Duessa serves as an example. ‘Like a faire Lady, but did fowle Duessa hyde’, the female may be an enchantress, leading the knight astray.32 It is this which Hurd presents as his third role for women in romance: ‘T he oppressions, which it was the glory of the Knight to avenge, were frequently carried on, as we are told, by the charms and enchantments of women’ (Letters 33). It is also, incidentally, this use of stratagem, rather than violence, which N orthrop Frye associates with romance in The Secular Scripture (1976).33 Reeve herself refers to this role in a story appended to The Progress, ‘T he History of C haroba, Queen of Ægypt’. Initially, C haroba uses trickery to compel Abraham and Sarah to accept riches from her. Later, when Gebirus threatens to invade Ægypt unless she marries him, C haroba again uses deceit to defend herself. And her trickery is successful: profiting by the advice of her nurse, C haroba establishes a female dynasty. Reeve’s narrative indicates that a woman can maintain a position of authority by well-informed cunning. S uch deception results in a greater control over property, both physical and intellectual. Indeed, Reeve invites the reader to draw a parallel between C haroba and herself. 32 E dmund S penser, Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. De Selincourt, intro. E. De Selincourt (1912; Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970), pp. 3, 1. 2. 35. 33 N orthrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (L ondon: Harvard UP, 1976).

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Like Charoba, she defeats an apparently powerful male authority; and, like Charoba, she leaves an inheritance, in this case – a reading list of ‘Books for Children’ and ‘Books for Young Ladies’ and a potential canon including women writers (2: 102–103). In valorising romance, positioning it and the reading practices associated with it as central, Reeve, it seems, is using a certain amount of cunning. Both romance and its criticism have been manipulated to support her agenda. Instead of the corrupt and luxurious cultural practices associated with the decayed politics of eighteenth-century Britain, she wishes to give her readers another form of inheritance. T he established reading communities and traditions of critical thought that Reeve connects with female novel readers are, she argues, a potential defence against luxury. U sing all the guile associated with the romance form, Reeve has reversed critical and generic expectations. N onetheless, Reeve is extremely careful – even if ‘C haroba’ partly reveals her strategy, Reeve remains safe behind numerous disclaimers: the message about inheritance is presented in a fictional form, separate from the main text and given as an ancient example of romance. While using the narrative of tradition to extend the number of subjects with cultural credibility, then, Reeve nonetheless indicates that tradition is a powerful source of authority vulnerable to manipulation. In her work the crisis (and reinforcement) of tradition is a result of political breakage, most markedly after 1688, and longstanding decline from Gothic liberty. A s Hazlitt suggests, then, politics plays a significant part in this narrative, but the difficulty with tradition does not stem solely from the events of the French Revolution but has deeper roots in the British past. Moreover, this crisis is not only significant to the writers of poetry, but to any consumer of culture – and its solution is to be found in the taste of some of society’s least prestigious readers. * Clara Reeve’s attempts to organise both the romance and modern fiction were followed by other similar canon-making projects, most significantly for our purposes A nna L etitia Barbauld’s 50-volume The British Novelists, including her important introductory essay ‘O n the O rigin and Progress of N ovel-Writing’. According to Claudia L. Johnson, within the project’s constraints, Barbauld constructed ‘a diverse, politically self-conscious, and progressive canon always laying bare the work of social dissent and the political associations and interests of authors’.34 T he importance attached by Barbauld to novel-writing and to canonmaking is recorded in her Preface’s final and often-quoted remark: It was said by Fletcher of Saltoun, ‘Let me make the ballads of a nation, and I care not who makes the laws’. Might it not be said with as much propriety, Let me make the novels of a country, and let who will make the systems? (1: 62) 34 Claudia L. Johnson, ‘“Let me make the novels of a country”: Barbauld’s The British Novelists (1810/1820)’, Novel 34 (spring 2001): 163–79, 170.

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Barbauld was as aware as Reeve of the canon’s potential to challenge political mores. And, like Reeve, she imagined her readers as ‘alert proto-narratologists’ (Claudia L. Johnson 171), not easily imposed upon by such prestigious cultural products. However, Barbauld acknowledged and (unlike Reeve) was fascinated by the powerful emotions stirred by fiction, emotions she suggested were forceful enough to register strongly on the body. Fiction, like other artistic forms, has, in this sensibility-inspired narrative, something close to an aesthetic power – it impacts upon the mind with as much force as do the senses. Despite this fascination with the force of emotion, Barbauld, educational writer, essayist, poet, polemicist and critic, is frequently positioned in relation to a rationalist Enlightenment background. Growing up at the dissenting Academy in Warrington, Barbauld was exposed to the ideas of leading E nlightenment figures, including Joseph Priestley and William Enfield.35 Yet, as Penny Bradshaw has emphasized, Barbauld’s approach contained ambiguities, particularly to E nlightenment narratives of progress.36 Significantly, in the area of religion, Barbauld was to disagree in emphasis with Priestley, arguing that the progressive rationalist dissenting approach was in some ways less appropriate than an emotional spirituality informed by devotion. However, first in the area of fiction and then more widely, Barbauld was aware that emotion could be manipulated by use of artistic effect, employed to support invented traditions. A s a poet of sensibility acutely aware of the impact of cultural products on body and mind, Barbauld comes to analyse the power the aesthetic offers to established institutions.37 U sing the E nlightenment genres of speculative history and philosophical anthropology, Barbauld indicates that the (religious) Establishment uses a sublime of tradition to ensure its perpetuation. Barbauld’s insights into the aesthetics of tradition are expressed in her essay ‘T houghts on the Devotional T aste on S ects and E stablishments’, added to the third edition of Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose in 1792. Overlooked by scholars of the period, this essay develops alternative models of the sublime that are of great significance in understanding 35

For the kind of community Barbauld experienced and its effect on her thoughts, see Anne Janowitz, ‘Amiable and radical sociability: Anna Barbauld’s “Free Familiar C onversation”’, in Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain 1770–1840, ed. Gillian Russell and C lara T uite (C ambridge: C ambridge U niversity Press, 2002) pp. 62–81, and Deirdre Coleman, ‘Firebrands, Letters and Flowers: Mrs Barbauld and the Priestleys’, Romantic Sociability pp. 82–103. 36 Penny Bradshaw, ‘Gendering the Enlightenment: Conflicting Images of Progress in the Poetry of A nna L ætitia Barbauld’, Women’s Writing 5 (1998): 353–71. 37 For a brief history of Barbauld’s treatment as a poet of sensibility, see Robert Jones, ‘What then should Britons feel? A nna L aetitia Barbauld and the Plight of the C orsicans’, Women’s Writing 9 (2002): 285–303, 285–7. Barbauld’s suspicion of established institutions did not just extend to the Church of England but also to the law. Alice G. Den Otter, for example, notes Barbauld’s concern with the legal system which ‘protects the rich while perpetuating hegemony over the poor’, in ‘Pests, Parasites, and Positionality: A nna L etitia Barbauld and “The caterpillar”’, Studies in Romanticism 43 (2004): 209–30, 210.

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Romantic aesthetics.38 Within the essay, Barbauld alters the E nlightenment model in which stages of social organisation are separated chronologically. Instead, in an analysis that would be applicable to the aesthetic and political battles of the post-French Revolution debate, she indicates that the present moment itself contains competing aesthetic modes, tied to competing social structures. A nd, in her account, the struggle between these stages is continuous and intense. Given this ferocity, for Barbauld, as for Reeve, the individual who wishes to preserve his way of life needs well-developed critical and aesthetic judgement. Although somewhat diffidently entitled, the Aikins’s 1773 work, Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, is indicative of Barbauld’s interest in the varying psychological effects of fiction, at times controlling, at other times generating emotion. The title suggests that the collection is fragmentary, without larger coherence, philosophical or otherwise. However, the modesty of this claim allows the Aikins considerable latitude for experimentation with fictional form, as Lucy Aikin, Barbauld’s niece, suggests. In her ‘Memoir’, Aikin notes that ‘the early volume of Miscellaneous Pieces contained specimens in various kinds’; the ‘allegory of the Hill of Science’ is reminiscent of A ddison, while ‘T he E ssay on Romances is a professed imitation of the style of Dr. Johnson’.39 A nd the essay ‘A gainst Inconsistency in our E xpectations’ (of which ‘the editor feels it superfluous to speak’) uses a passage from Elizabeth C arter’s translation of All the Works of Epicetus (1758) as its epigraph, drawing upon S toicism. Yet, while Barbauld is fascinated by ‘imitation’, this collection is more than an exercise in elegant and controlled literary ventriloquism. ‘A gainst Inconsistency’ also reveals Barbauld’s sense of the power of ‘the philosophy of the human mind’ – ‘the man who has mastered it’ will be able to use ‘the passions and inclinations of others’ as ‘his tools’ (Works 2: 194). In Miscellaneous Pieces both she and her brother are particularly interested in understanding how generic forms direct the reader’s emotions to persuade or influence. Barbauld’s particular emphasis on the force of emotion in fiction leads to an interesting departure from the more neoclassical views of Dr. Samuel Johnson. While she uses the authority of the Johnsonian voice in ‘On Romances: An Imitation’, her perspective differs from his significantly. The power of modern fiction alarms Johnson. In The Rambler no. 4, he suggests that the examples provided by such works ‘take possession of the memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the will’.40 Clara Reeve, too, while acknowledging the 38 William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft emphasise that ‘as a poet, Barbauld can claim to be considered a founder of British Romanticism’; however, her work on aesthetics remains little discussed. S ee A nna L etitia Barbauld, Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002), p. 11. 39 A nna L etitia Barbauld, The Works of Anna Lætitia Barbauld. With a Memoir by Lucy Aikin, 2 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1825), pp. 1: lxv; subsequently Works. 40 Samuel Johnson, Rambler 4 (Saturday, March 31st, 1750), 4 vols (London: Parsons, 1793), pp. 27–32, 29.

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importance of the idealism of romance to young readers, also notes the dangerous passions it may excite; her reading communities presumably operate to moderate such excitement. In contrast, Barbauld’s opening remarks celebrate the extensive influence of fiction, which (as in Johnson’s account) powerfully impacts on mind and body, producing indicators of sensibility: ‘curiosity sparkles in every eye, and every bosom is throbbing with concern’ (Works 2: 172). Given its immediate effect on the body, reading is more closely related to the sensory impact of the aesthetic than might at first be supposed. And, as such, fiction is also a vehicle for persuasion, operating as an antidote to the capitalist specialisation of activity increasingly connected with civilised society. Barbauld’s observation, ‘few can reason, but all can feel’, not only establishes fiction’s ability to persuade otherwise isolated social groups; it also implicitly suggests that fiction has a power to guide those unreachable by other means – it has a hegemonic force (2: 172). However, it is not only that Barbauld differs from Johnson in her approach to the psychological power offered by fiction. Unlike him, she also acknowledges that a persuasive emotional force can be generated even by spurious cultural traditions: here, the two writers’ contrasting treatment of Ossian is particularly significant.41 In A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), Johnson insists: ‘If we know little of the ancient highlanders, let us not fill the vacuity with Ossian’.42 In contrast, Barbauld’s inclusion of ‘S eláma: A n Imitation of O ssian’ in Miscellaneous Pieces signals her willingness to experiment with the emotional power that accrues to such a text; for her, tradition can clearly be evoked to support (and naturalise) various, even contradictory, ideological positions – it is highly malleable. A nd Ossian in particular has a curious position in relation to tradition. As Susan Manning puts it in Fragments of Union (2002), this kind of writing ‘attempted to compose (and re-compose) a current national identity from the fragments of the past’.43 A fter the 1707 Union of England and Scotland, Macpherson’s elegiac treatment of a remote, idealised past at once marked the difference between past and present and increased S cottish cultural prestige by suggesting the richness of the country’s heritage: the ‘work of their bards’, Macpherson insists, were ‘handed down with great purity’ in a show of national strength.44 T he authority of Ossian, its importance as a project of literary nation building, rests on the notions of antiquity and tradition, even as the poetry itself is supposed to evoke the prestigious imaginative freedom of a Macpherson arguably began the tradition with his publication of Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland and Translated from the Galic or Erse Language (1760). However, he claimed the poems had survived from ‘the latter end of the third, and beginning of the fourth century’. See James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, ed. Howard Gaskill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1996), p. 51. 42   Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, ed. Peter L evi (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 119. 43 Susan Manning, Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 148. 44 James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian, p. 50. 41

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primitive society. Barbauld, however, subverts both this age-based authority and the narrative of cultural primitivism by participating in a Romantic tradition of O ssian pastiche or reference. In choosing to imitate a literary form that relies on its antiquity for authority, Barbauld (like other imitators) at once benefits from and weakens its cultural prestige. Macpherson had claimed that Ossian had been passed down from the third or fourth century and Barbauld immediately evokes and manipulates the bardic oral tradition so central to his aesthetic: ‘what soft voice of sorrow is in the breeze?’ (Works 2: 176). This initially unspecified vocalisation recalls Ted Underwood’s observation that ‘Romantic-era representations of history often depend on a special sense that sees or hears historical depth in the inanimate world’.45 E ven though such utterances are in fact not (or no longer) oral but (perhaps) newly written and printed, they are naturalised, in typically O ssianic gesture given authority by their apparent projection onto the landscape. However, what emerges in Barbauld’s narrative is a sense of the opposing ideologies such voices from an invented past may be made to support. T he heroine, S eláma, has a romantic choice between alternative oral traditions: T onthormo, ‘meteor of death in war’ who withers nations, is associated with the ‘torrent’s roar’; Hidallen, in contrast, is ‘a breeze that sighs over the fallen foe’ (Works 2: 177–8). The division is between a destructive imperialist sublime and a more conciliatory (and Ossianic) melancholic model: ‘pleasant are thy words of peace, and thy songs at the mossy brook Thy voice is the gale of summer that whispers among the reeds of the lake’ (Works 2: 178). Blair notes that O ssian ‘appears to have been endowed by nature with an exquisite sensibility of heart’; here, Barbauld emphasises that this melancholic masculinity is the one her heroine finds attractive.46 It is also worth noting the problematic position of the heroine, S eláma, in relation to these semi-naturalised voices. Her interlocutor suggests S eláma herself should take the bardic role, a role usually reserved in Macpherson’s work for male warriors. However, the position remains unavailable to her. A llen W. Grove suggests that the Gothic fragment ‘S ir Bertrand’ (included in Miscellaneous Pieces, perhaps written by John Aikin) concerns female silencing.47 Working in a similar way, this imitation draws attention to women’s position in relation to the cultural authority of utterance: the suggestion in this piece is that the bardic organisation of ideology can be positioned as particularly the concern of men. N onetheless, S eláma chooses between oralities and forcefully directs her own fate. Barbauld has manipulated tradition by emphasising female agency. E qually, she has suggested that voices may be given spurious historical prestige, even if they T ed U nderwood, ‘Romantic Historicism and the A fterlife’, PMLA 117 (2002): 237–51, 237. 46 Hugh Blair, ‘A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian,’ in James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian, p. 352. 47 Allen W. Grove, ‘To make a Long Story Short: Gothic Fragments and the Gender Politics of Incompleteness’, Studies in Short Fiction 34 (1997): 1–10, 5–6. 45

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support opposing ideologies; antiquity can be evoked and exploited, whatever the political objective. Barbauld’s imitation of Ossian shows her interest in the strategies by which cultural authority is gained: here the projection of voices onto the landscape gives ideological positions (even pacifism) a perceived permanence or longevity; equally, the piece suggests awareness of the glamour given by the notion of antiquity, of belonging to an apparent (oral) tradition. And finally the work shows that the qualities that are supposed to constitute to imaginative freshness of the past can be recreated in the present. T hese insights are not, however, Barbauld elsewhere makes clear, relevant only to literature. They may also be applied to an analysis of social institutions more generally – and in this area her thoughts present an interesting (and aesthetically significant) development on Enlightenment accounts of social development. In 1735 Thomas Blackwell had noted in An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer that ‘the manners of a People seldom stand still, but are either polishing or spoiling’: the state of literature and the poetic imagination is symptomatic of the state of the whole of society.48 S imilarly, in his more detailed Essay on the History of Civil Society (1769), Adam Ferguson presented a largely linear account of social development, followed by luxury and decay. However, like Macpherson, he also had anxiety about the merit of apparent social progress. Both looked to the (imagined) past as a space in part of wish fulfillment or somewhere, at least, as Dafydd Moore points out, where some of the tensions of the civilised present might be played out.49 Ferguson himself did not write directly on aesthetics. However, in both Macpherson’s criticism of Ossian and in A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of O ssian by Hugh Blair, Professor of Rhetoric and Belles L ettres at E dinburgh, particular qualities of the imagination were ascribed to the early stage of social development: T he progress of the world in this respect resembles the progress of age in man. T he powers of the imagination are most vigorous and predominant in youth; those of understanding ripen more slowly… . Hence poetry, which is the child of imagination, is frequently most glowing and animated in the first ages of society.50

T his parallel between social and psychological development evidently foreshadows the dual Romantic interest in childhood and primitivism. Significantly, however, it also suggests that other stages of social development might have their own

Thomas Blackwell, An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735) (Menston: Scolar Press, 1972), p. 14. 49 Dafydd Moore, ‘Adam Ferguson, The Poems of Ossian and the Imaginative L ife of the S cottish E nlightenment’, History of European Ideas 31 (2005): 277–88, 280. 50 Hugh Blair, A Critical Dissertation on T he Poems of O ssian, the S on of Fingal, Eighteenth-Century Critical Essays, ed. Scott Elledge, 2 vols (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1961), 2: 850. 48

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characteristic aesthetic qualities.51 In Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose Barbauld, familiar with E nlightenment thought, and writing from a position of dissent, envisaged these different stages in terms of rival religious organisations. In her essay ‘On Monastic Institutions’ and in more detail in the later ‘Thoughts on the Devotional T aste, on S ects and E stablishments’, Barbauld developed a theory of competing aesthetic and political models, potentially present at the same moment, and each favouring a different form of taste. Notably, though Barbauld, like Macpherson, Ferguson, and Blair, is drawn to the aesthetic qualities of an imagined ‘primitive’ society, she is also interested in the aesthetic appeal and utility of later social stages, with supposedly more complex ideological and social structures. T his is evident even in the title of ‘O n Monastic Institutions’: the last word refers not only to a set of physical structures but to an organisation designed to survive through time. T he C atholic church was frequently positioned in E nlightenment discourse as an obstacle to progress, a position Barbauld deliberately ventriloquizes in the opening paragraphs of her essay, by using flamboyant (but ultimately ambiguous) gothic imagery. The ‘venerable ruins of an old abbey’, designed to let in little light, similarly operates as striking metaphor for the Church’s promotion of ignorance and superstition (Works 2: 195). But besides this slightly mocking recreation of a typical prejudice, what this opening description indicates is Barbauld’s sense of the power of the institution, a power most forcefully suggested through its buildings’ endurance through time. The ‘gloomy mansions of mistaken zeal’ are associated with that key quality of the gothic sublime, the ‘obscure’, as detailed by Edmund Burke in his 1757 Philosophical Enquiry.52 In the Enquiry, Burke had suggested the importance of undertaking a diligent examination of the passions when considering matters of taste. And, significantly, his psychological approach to aesthetics includes an indirect acknowledgement of the awe inspired by tradition. For Burke the ‘artificial infinite’ is produced by ‘succession and uniformity of parts’: these ‘parts’ ‘impress the imagination with an idea of their progress beyond their actual limits’ (Enquiry 68). Similarly, for Barbauld’s speaker, the obscurity is not only meant to express the Church’s role as impediment to progress. The gloom also makes the borders of the structure itself uncertain, with the ‘cells’, ‘aisles’, ‘arches’, and ‘secret caverns’ operating as a metaphor for the institution’s history (Works 2: 196). Barbauld’s syntax leaves it unclear whether it is the monasteries or the monks that are ‘obscure in their origin’, but, again as in Burke’s Enquiry, the C hurch’s structures and 51

This is not an uncommon idea among those influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment: in A Series of Popular Essays (1815), Elizabeth Hamilton notes that ‘In the songs, or ballads, or other species of poetic composition, which are known to have been popular at any particular period, or in any particular country’, we can judge the way in which the mind has been cultivated (1: 161); Elizabeth Hamilton, A Series of Popular Essays, Illustrative of the Principles Essentially Connected with the Improvement of the Understanding, the Imagination, and the Heart, 2nd ed, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Manners and Miller, 1815). 52 Barbauld Works 2: 195; Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), 2nd ed. (1759), ed. James T. Boulton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p. 54.

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antiquity give the sense of the sublime, felt even in the moment of pastiche (Works 2: 195). As the constructed literary tradition of Ossian potentially functions to create awe, so do the mighty buildings (even perhaps the ruins) of the Catholic church. Both call on the sublime, using it as a metaphor for their authority. However, Barbauld’s attitude to such awesome institutions differs from Burke’s. In Re.ections on the Revolution of France Burke would implicitly use the awe generated by obscurity and antiquity in support of his argument for the continuity of the constitution.53 Barbauld, on the other hand, acknowledges the power of antiquity to generate awe, but her speaker, unswayed by Gothic rhetoric, has a far cooler approach to tradition. The opening passage of the essay evokes the sublime stereotype only to interrogate it. T he ‘good protestant’ feels a ‘secret triumph’ over Catholicism that signals the extent of his prejudice and suggests that his view may be suspect (Works 2: 195). Consequently, his opinion of Catholicism and the Gothic formulas that work in place of argument to condemn it are similarly open to re-evaluation. Following this, a more rational distance is established in the rest of the essay, where Barbauld unexpectedly emphasises the potential usefulness of this institution: the Church preserves knowledge, albeit in Gothic confinement. This evaluation of the utility of social structures is a core part of Barbauld’s attitude to tradition. The essay also contains an Enlightenment-influenced speculative history of the development of the C hurch: early C hristians, driven by ‘persecution’ into ‘the solitary deserts of Thebais’, find that isolation offers the possibility of preserving faith and morality; nonetheless, such freedom of belief within existing social structures is constantly under threat, and the very desire for isolation leads, almost paradoxically, to the foundation of the monastery.54 Barbauld’s paragraph-long account of C hurch history is significantly expanded and given an important aesthetic dimension in her 1775 essay, somewhat unpromisingly entitled ‘T houghts on the Devotional T aste, and on S ects and E stablishments’. Initially issued in an unsuccessful volume entitled Devotional Pieces Compiled From the Psalms of David, and subsequently added to the third edition of Miscellaneous Pieces, it did not, as Lucy Aikin, notes, ‘escape animadversion’.55 However, this neglected work contains interesting contributions both to E nlightenment accounts of social progress and to the discussion of the sublime. The first sections of the essay suggest (following John Gregory) that there 53 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event (1790), ed. C onor C ruise O ’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). 54 Barbauld, Works 2: 206–7; Barbauld’s ‘eremites’, ‘choosing the wildest solitudes, living in caves and hollows’ and ‘subsisting on such roots and herbs as the ground afforded them’ are a forerunner of familiar Romantic hermits and outcasts – reminiscent of ‘some Hermit’s cave, where by his fire / The Hermit sits alone’. William Wordsworth, ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, in William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor C oleridge, Lyrical Ballads, pp. 113–18, l. 20–21. 55 (Works 1: xxviii, lxvi). Priestley did not approve of the essay’s emphasis on the seat of religion being ‘in the imagination and the passions’ – this devotional account of religion for him contained ‘too much of the language of poetry and romance’, Betsy Rodgers, Georgian Chronicle: Mrs Barbauld and her Family (London: Methuen, 1958), p. 65.

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are three ways of viewing religion: as a matter of devotion, of reason, and of habit. Further, the second half of the essay implies that each of ‘three different views’ is connected with a particular stage in the development of a sect. A nd each view has its own characteristics – characteristics that evoke different forms of the sublime. Instead of presenting us with a model of distinct social stages, in which creative and imaginative strength belongs to the primitive past, Barbauld here develops a model of combined and uneven development. T he devotional taste of the individual C hristian, the expansive sublime of the rational dissenter, and the awe of tradition inspired by the habitual religion of the E stablishment can, Barbauld suggests, coexist, fighting it out side by side. Moreover, as will be seen, it is this sense of possible aesthetic and religious struggle that comes to inform both her poetry and that of S amuel T aylor C oleridge. In the essay, Barbauld is perhaps least enthusiastic about the final stage of religion, where the sect is gradually reabsorbed into the E stablishment, and habit has the strongest impact. This phase, which links most closely to the suggestions made about the Catholic Church in ‘On Monastic Institutions’, is characterised by Barbauld in terms of a material corruption which she implicitly suggests the E stablishment caters to, affecting ‘the mind by splendid buildings, music, the mysterious pomp of ancient ceremonies’ (Works 2: 251–2). In turn, these connect religion with ‘ideas of order, dignity, and antiquity’ (Works 2: 252). What Barbauld is suggesting, even more directly than in ‘On Monastic Institutions’, is a sublime of tradition. And the essay also makes Barbauld’s conflicted stance regarding this mode of the sublime much clearer. O n the one hand, she notes that ‘A fabric which has weathered many successive ages, though the architecture be rude … strikes us with a sort of admiration’; however faulty such institutions are, their age and selfrespect generate unreasoning admiration in the onlooker through the association of ideas (Works 2: 253). Yet, on the other hand, she acknowledges that the sublime of tradition serves a definite purpose. In contrast to the ‘strictness of a sect’, which is ‘calculated for a few finer spirits’, an Establishment provides religion for ‘all those who have not strength of mind to think for themselves’ (Works 2: 255). For the dissenter Barbauld, both the monasteries and the established C hurch of E ngland have a role to play: in the absence of genuine devotion or enthusiasm, they provide a substitute, the habitual sublime. In contrast, Barbauld herself places a much more positive emphasis on devotion, which she sees as lacking in modern life, and which she allies to aesthetic pleasure: ‘Its seat is in the imagination and the passions, and it has its source in that relish for the sublime, the vast and the beautiful, by which we taste the charms of poetry’; it is, however, made intimate by ‘a sense of gratitude for personal benefits’ (Works 2: 232). Later in the essay, Barbauld’s language makes it plain that this devotional taste, so closely linked with appreciation of the aesthetic, is associated for her with the early stages of a sect: In an infant sect, which is always in some degree a persecuted one, the strong union and entire affection of its followers, the sacrifices they make to principle, the force of novelty, and the amazing power of sympathy, all contribute to cherish devotion. (Works 2: 247)

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E ven more explicitly than when Barbauld describes the C hristian fathers and ‘eremites’ in her essay ‘On Monastic Institutions’, persecution is the catalyst for the sublime of devotion, which, her language here suggests, involves not only admiring the ‘vast’ but to some degree embodying it: ‘eloquence … works like leaven in the heart of the people … the living spirit of devotion is amongst them, the world sinks away to nothing’ (Works 2: 247–8). While persecution encourages asceticism, the accompanying exclusion promotes a form of internalisation where the sect becomes the world. In promoting this form of devotion, Barbauld was somewhat out of step with the rational and scientific bent of the dissenting thinkers by whom she was surrounded. In a letter (following one dated S eptember 9th, 1775, but itself undated) to her brother, John Aikin, thanking him for defending her, Barbauld records the accusation the essay brought on her: ‘An admirer of Popery! Heaven help their wise heads! when it was one of my earliest aversions’ (Works 2: 8). With her emphasis on simplicity and the internal, unmediated sublime, Barbauld bears little resemblance to the British stereotype of an eighteenth-century C atholic. N onetheless, Barbauld may have been labelled ‘an admirer of Popery’ because of her equivocal attitude to the role of rationalism within religion.56 In ‘T houghts’ Barbauld suggests that stage of devotion ‘cannot last long’: the heat of persecution ‘abates’ and the result is a more reasoning phase which may produce the danger of ‘disputat[ion]’ but also produces what might be called a philosophical sublime (Works 2: 248, 249). Philosophy ‘gives us the sublimest ideas of [the Deity’s] power and extent of dominion’; however, these enlarged ideas (which are not only a consequence of disputation, but also are also linked to the natural sciences, including astronomy) generate a more impersonal form of the sublime (Works 2: 237). Although the philosophical mind-set is worthy of praise, then, Barbauld suggests that sublime speculation has too abstract a tendency – the sense of gratitude for personal benefit that she connects with devotion is lacking. Barbauld’s ideas on the sublime and its social and spiritual implications proved of considerable interest during the post-French Revolution debate in Britain. Her work was drawn upon by commentators as apparently diverse as Mary Wollstonecraft (discussed in the next chapter) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge’s later dislike for Barbauld (displayed through puerile puns on her name) is well-known, but the extent of her influence on his work is only just beginning to be appreciated.57 In 1794 C oleridge had adopted U nitarianism, and See J.T. Rutt, The Theological and Miscellaneous Works & c. of Joseph Priestley (1831), 25 vols (New York: Kraus, 1972), 1: 1. 57 See, for example, Felicity James, ‘Coleridge and the Unitarian ladies’, Coleridge Bulletin: The Journal of the Friends of Coleridge 28 (2006): 46–53; and Jane Stabler, ‘“Kindred Powers in Nature”: Anna Barbauld and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’, Coleridge Bulletin NS 12 (1998): 1–26, and her chapter ‘Space for Speculation: Coleridge, Barbauld, and the Poetics of Priestley’, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life, ed. Nicholas Roe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) pp. 175–204. At one point in her article, Stabler compares ‘A Summer Evening’s Meditation’ with ‘The Eolian Harp’ in 56

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his poem ‘Religious Musings’ of the same year pays tribute to Barbauld’s friend and mentor, Joseph Priestley. But Coleridge also greatly admired Barbauld’s poetry, giving her a presentation copy of his first published collection, Poems on Various Subjects (1796) and travelling on foot from Nether Stowey to Bristol to meet her.58 Further, his enthusiasm was of a productive kind: Coleridge seems to have found Barbauld’s views on competing modes of sublimity of particular relevance to his own poetic vision. T he structural similarity of Barbauld’s poem ‘T he First Fire: O ctober 1st 1815’ to ‘Greater Romantic Lyric’ was noted by John M. Anderson.59 T o this similarity of form, one of content can be added: the contest between two forms of faith explored in ‘A Summer Evening’s Meditation’ is also acted out in Coleridge’s ‘The E olian Harp’. In both poems, a moment of contemplation gives way to a sense of expansive intellectual excitement. In the process, the speaker has a moment of spiritual revelation. However, as in Barbauld’s ‘T houghts on the Devotional T aste’, the intellectual or philosophic sublime, however poetically inspirational, proves ultimately alienating. The rationalist search for (spiritual) meaning in the world is potentially frustrating, leading to error – hence both poets return to something closer to the devotional. In Barbauld’s poem, the speaker is initially contemplative, a mood which generates a search for meaning. In this process of this search, obviously literary (and non-Christian) imaginative interpretations of the universe are displaced by the scientific enquiry characteristic of Enlightenment dissent (l. 18). Hence, when the speaker looks at the night sky, her first descriptions evoke the myths and personifications of classical culture (a form of poetic reference Wordsworth famously warns against in the 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads). Rather than being content to apostrophize the gods associated with the stars, however, the speaker instead goes on an intellectual journey, through the planets of the known solar system (and their moons), then our galaxy, the Milky Way, and finally the infinite reaches of space beyond. The planets are no longer seen primarily in terms of the arbitrary associations of classical mythology: instead, they are potentially evidence of the L ogos, the living language of God’s creation. T he attempt to interpret this language through scientific enquiry (astronomy was earlier taught at the Warrington Academy by Joseph Priestley) produces a sense of sublime expansion that clearly relates to Barbauld’s comments on ‘Philosophy’ in her essay ‘T houghts order to note that ‘a peculiar sense of movement … is vital to the speculative writing of both C oleridge and Barbauld’, but I would argue that the comparison can be pushed still further, particularly if we take into account Barbauld’s thought on the sublime (16). In her chapter she also notes the relevance of Barbauld’s ‘T he Hill of S cience’ to ‘T he E olian Harp’ and C oleridge’s thought on creativity, but the essay’s precise parallels with C oleridge’s position in the poem are only slightly touched on (198) . 58 Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (1989; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990) p. 112; McCarthy and Kraft xxi. 59 John M. Anderson, ‘“The First Fire”: Barbauld rewrites the Greater Romantic L yric’, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 34 (1994): 719–38.

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on the Devotional T aste’: as mentioned, philosophy ‘gives us the sublimest ideas of [the Deity’s] power and extent of dominion; but it raises him too high for our imagination to take hold of’ – astronomy makes us ‘grow giddy with the prospect; the mind is astonished, confounded at its own insignificance’ (2: 237–8). In line with this, neither the act of contemplation nor the resultant experience of the sublime is portrayed wholly positively. C ontemplation issues from ‘the cool damp grotto, or the lonely depth / Of unpierced woods’ (l. 19–20) (a location rather like the tangled wood of ‘Error’ in Barbauld’s allegorical essay ‘The Hill of Science’) (Works 2: 165). And this contemplative error ultimately generates a sense of alienation: successive stages in the repeated process of imaginative failure and further expansion that Barbauld traces are marked by epithets increasingly indicative of isolation. Thus, we leave the ‘green borders’ (l. 73) of the earth for the ‘pale’ moon (l 74), ‘solitary’ Mars (l. 75) and ‘cheerless’ Saturn (l. 79) to come ‘To the dread confines of eternal night / To solitudes of vast unpeopled space’ (l. 93–4). Having experienced this sense of alienation, then, the speaker returns with relief to the more comforting position of devotion which characterises the close of the poem. Here the sense of personal relationship with God that Barbauld connected with the state of devotion is invoked through gratitude. Admittedly such devotion seems rather less sublime than the fearful emotions earlier provoked by philosophical expansiveness. Yet Barbauld suggests that this ‘accustomed spot’, this ‘mansion fair, and spacious’ (whether the earth or the body) is still ‘full replete with wonders’ (l. 114–16). This is a calmer sublime. The expansive intellectual impulse is balanced and contained. However, while the close of the poem endorses the view of religion based on devotion, the contrasting excitement and energy of the body of the work is provided by a sense of the philosophical sublime – imaginatively at least, both moods are necessary. T he two models of faith powerfully presented in ‘A S ummer E vening’s Meditation’ are also present in Coleridge’s 1795 poem ‘The Eolian Harp’. Like ‘A Summer Evening’s Meditation’, ‘The Eolian Harp’ attempts to probe the relationship between C reator and created universe: both poems try in some sense to locate God. Beginning at the same contemplative moment of dusk, Coleridge’s speaker makes a similar opening manoeuvre to Barbauld’s. Where she refers to the personifications of classical myth as a way of making imaginative sense of the world, Coleridge uses simile to suggest mankind’s attempts to give meaning to his environment through a pattern of arbitrary or coincidental correspondences (a tendency he also explores in ‘Frost at Midnight’ and ‘The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’). These become more elaborate (paralleling in some degree the process of expansion in Barbauld’s poem). Then, as astronomy replaces classical myth in Barbauld’s meditation, in the 1795 version of C oleridge’s poem the initially literary comparisons give way to a philosophical interpretation of man’s relationship to God and his environment. However, C oleridge seems, if anything, rather more troubled about his noontide philosophical musings than Barbauld about her intellectual journey. Here the dream, in which the speaker imagines man as passive, only moved by the influence of ‘the S oul of each, and God of A ll’ is connected to C oleridge’s interest in Hartley’s

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doctrine (his Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations [1749] had been edited by Joseph Priestly as the Theory of the Human Mind [1775] and greatly influenced the early Coleridge). 60 T he daydream that results from this Hartleian approach is far less energetic than the intellectual journey undertaken by Barbauld’s speaker, perhaps indicating Coleridge’s doubts about Hartley even in this early phase of the poet’s career. Hartley’s theory of association, outlined in the Observations, had certain materialist implications which C oleridge famously reacted against, most notably in the Biographia Literaria (1817), where he connects Hartley’s thought with a vision of a mechanized, deterministic universe, in which there is ultimately no room for God – the passivity of the mind of man in the dream to some extent pre-empts this criticism. Coleridge’s abrupt awakening from his day-dream confirms this impression of doubt; here, like Barbauld, he is at once drawn to, then forced away from, the rational, philosophic aspects of dissent. C oleridge’s choice of imagery reinforces this intellectual similarity with Barbauld. T he precise implications of his position become evident when seen in relation to Barbauld’s essay ‘T he Hill of S cience’, included in Miscellaneous Pieces. In this short allegory, Barbauld had located ‘the wood of E rror’ ‘half way up the hill’ – and Coleridge finds himself ‘on the midway slope’ (l. 34) (Works 2: 165). Further, Barbauld suggests that in this wood, ‘the light which beamed from the countenance of truth’ is partially blocked; Coleridge’s speaker experiences a similarly obstructed vision, viewing the light through his ‘half-closed eyelids’ (Barbauld Works 2: 166; l. 36). Barbauld also notes that near the wood of error the Muses ‘cheer the spirits of the travellers … with songs from their divine harps’, but in certain circumstances, such tunes lead the climbers astray (Barbauld, Works 2: 166). In this context, Coleridge’s own eolian harp becomes more dubious – after all, its music has proved the starting point for his metaphysical journey. According to Barbauld, too, allegory lies in this area of the Muses (and it should be born in mind that Coleridge has instituted some elaborate comparisons), a place so dark ‘that the light at noonday was never stronger than that of a bright moonshine’ (Works 2: 166) And to complete the comparison, Barbauld suggests that Indolence (and Coleridge’s speaker is both ‘indolent and passive’ [l. 41]), although at first attractive, is one of the most formidable seducers of those hoping to gain the ‘T emple of T ruth’ (Works 2: 168). The echoes of Barbauld’s ‘The Hill of Science’, in other words, reinforce the suggestion of the dangers of philosophy. However, Coleridge’s speaker manages to reject temptation, thanks to the figure Sara, whose role of female restrainer hence parallels Barbauld’s. T he devotional is asserted, but with a hint of resentment that perhaps foreshadows C oleridge’s hostility not only to his wife but later to Barbauld. Yet, arguably, even when C oleridge had moved to defaming Barbauld, her influence still made itself felt on alternations to the poem. William H. Scheuerle 60 S amuel T aylor C oleridge, The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2 vols, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), rept. 1968, 1: 100–102, l. 48.

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asks why lines 26–33, added in 1817 and describing the ‘One life’ philosophy that Coleridge explored, were not added after the section rejecting the ‘aye-babbling spring’ of speculative thought.61 T o S cheuerle it initially seemed that C oleridge should have chosen to end with a philosophic position he could endorse. Instead, by placing these lines before the section dismissed as a fantasy, C oleridge, S cheuerle suggests, potentially weakened their impact. Yet here again, ‘The Eolian Harp’ mirrors the structure of Barbauld’s ‘A Summer Evening’s Meditation’. Early in her ‘contemplation’ Barbauld’s speaker had imagined that the ‘self-collected soul’ ‘turns inward’ (l. 53–4) to find ‘a spark of fire divine’ (l. 56), a position closer to the internalised sublime Barbauld connects with the devotion of the early stages of the sect in ‘Thoughts’. But the speaker is unable to stop with this (perhaps less reprehensible) speculation – instead, ‘Contemplation’ ‘seize[s]’ her as she sails ‘On Fancy’s wild and roving wing’ to greater extremes (l. 71–2). When Coleridge, in 1817, placed the lines describing the ‘one life’ before his more extreme philosophical musings, he suggested that he held a similar position. Philosophy may be necessary, but unrestrained and fanciful, it can also become dangerous. If philosophical speculation is potentially abstruse and alienating, for Barbauld and, thus, for C oleridge, the devotional sublime forms a call to spiritual and political action. In ‘Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement’ (another poem with echoes of ‘The Hill of Science’), Coleridge experiences the gratitude and content associated in Barbauld’s allegorical essay with the vale, but when he manages to ascend to the summit of the nearby mountain, what he sees is no longer speculative error, but a ‘temple’, the world built by God (l. 39). And this vision, still based largely on devotion, stimulates the speaker to compare a selfish and pampered sensibility with the active virtue of ‘some Howard’s eye’ (l. 49) (a reference to the prison-reformer John Howard (1726–90) whose memoirs were written by John Aikin, Barbauld’s brother).62 Mindful of this dissenting culture of social engagement, Coleridge’s speaker feels a similar call to ‘honourable toil’ but it is worth noting that his fight is still one ‘Of science’ as well as ‘freedom, and the truth in Christ’ (l. 63, ll. 61–2). Later, in her poem ‘To Mr C[oleri]dge’, Barbauld repeats the emphasis on engagement, echoing the imagery of her earlier essay and poem and advising the poet that ‘A ctive scenes / S hall soon with healthful spirit brace thy mind’ (ll. 39–41). For Lisa Vargo, the poem, which circulated in manuscript for eighteenth months before coming into print,63 can be interpreted as a response to Coleridge’s ‘Religious Musings’.64 However, it can also be seen as 61

William H. Scheuerle, ‘A Reexamination of Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp”’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 15 (1975): 591–9, 598. 62   John Aikin, View of the Character and Public Services of the late John Howard (London: Johnson, 1792). 63 McCarthy and Kraft 296n. 64 Lisa Vargo, ‘The Case of Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “To Mr C[olerid]ge”’, The Charles Lamb Bulletin N.S. 102 (April 1998): 55–63, . 12 December 2007.

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part of a longer ongoing discussion between the two writers. If ‘Religious Musings’ shows C oleridge’s understanding, in line with Barbauld’s thought, of the need for devotional activity, the ‘E olian Harp’ demonstrates his appreciation (despite his later trajectory) of the dangers of metaphysical enquiry. Barbauld’s own celebration of devotional action was longstanding, but her focus was frequently on the battle between the internalised sublime and the habitual (used to support state institutions and the status quo). Poems (1773) begins with ‘Corsica’, written before June 1769 as a response to Boswell’s account of the struggle of the islanders for independence against the French. T he poem is, Robert Jones remarks, ‘a powerful piece of patriot writing wholly committed to the cause of liberty’, where Boswell is praised for having shifted subject: From the grey reliques of imperial Rome, From her long galleries of laurel’d stone, Her chisel’d heroes, and her marble gods, Whose dumb majestic pomp yet awes the world, T o animated forms of patriot zeal, Warm in the living majesty of virtue.65

Roman imperial might lends prestige to the tradition of classical art, but Barbauld proposes an alternative subject, the continued fight for freedom. Moreover, the aesthetic choice between the habitual sublime and more independent political action becomes a recurrent theme in Barbauld’s own political writings, including ‘A n A ddress to the Proposers of the Repeal of the C orporation and T est A cts’ (1790), ‘Letter of John Bull’ (1792) (outlining difficult relations between state, subject, and constitution considering developments in France), and ‘Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation’ (1793) in which she suggests the importance and interrelation of political and religious principles. With a more positive view of modern fiction than Johnson, then, Barbauld’s interest in ‘the philosophy of the human mind’ generates significant insight into the persuasive power of tradition. In her early pastiche of Ossian, she explores the notion that an (imagined) oral tradition (and by inference prose fiction) can be used to promote particular social and political values. By offering alternative constructions of bardic speech, Barbauld’s narrative emphasises that such invented traditions are open to manipulation. Along with Macpherson, Barbauld sees the fictions of the past as a place where present tensions are worked through – from the Enlightenment viewpoint, the supposed voices of history, projected onto the landscape, may either generate ruthless imperialism or a more conciliatory humanism. A nd when Barbauld turns to the E nlightenment mode of speculative history in ‘On Monastic Institutions’ and ‘Thoughts’, she sees that the persuasive evocation of tradition is particularly useful to the E stablishment. In these essays, the trappings of tradition produce a similar effect to Burke’s ‘sublime of 65 Robert Jones, ‘What then should Britons feel?’, 285; Anna Letitia Barbauld, Selected Poetry 60.

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succession’ – through a process of association they generate awe. While in his 1757 Enquiry Burke remained unspecific about the social application of this, in his introduction to the second edition in 1759, he connects the sublime to the worship of God.66 With her position outside the religious E stablishment, however, Barbauld sees that society poses this question of worship in more material and structural terms. A nd in addition she shares the E nlightenment concern over the way organisations perpetuate themselves in a supposedly advanced state of society. Consequently, for her, the sublime of tradition is much more closely linked to contemporary earthly institutions. Yet Barbauld also offers an alternative. While Blair and Macpherson positioned the past as a more imaginative space than the advanced present, Barbauld thought enthusiasm and originality could equally be found in other (smaller, independent) social structures, particularly the sect. In this account, the devotional sublime and the sublime of institutionalised tradition, no longer separated chronologically, are competing aesthetics, representing different modes of social organisation. Whereas Reeve offers us an alternative tradition, then, Barbauld gives an aesthetic, spiritual, and political alternative to tradition itself. A s I mentioned earlier, Bloom hinted that the strain in British thought was responsible for Wordsworth’s rejection of traditional poetic material in favour of a concentration on the self. E xamining Barbauld’s thought gives concrete and precise evidence of the way in which dissent both shaped the early Romantic approach to tradition and supplied an influential narrative of competing forms of the sublime. In Barbauld’s account, the spiritual self-determination of devotion struggles against isolated rationalism and the sublime of tradition, and, once adopted, ensures (and is aided by) taste. * The period under consideration in this book saw the construction of various national literary traditions, but it also witnessed a growing suspicion of tradition in terms of judgements on both taste and politics – looking at the great works of the past was not sufficient to guarantee the public’s taste; well-worn precedent was questioned as an adequate basis on which to make political and religious decisions. Of course, it was Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France that gave an added urgency to this re-evaluation of tradition, but Burke himself can be seen as responding to established patterns of criticism already present in other treatments of political and literary tradition. Specifically, it is useful to position in his remarks in relation to the approaches taken by Reeve and Barbauld. In Reflections Burke politicised the sublime in the service of the British constitution: though Burke is as aware as Reeve of the discontinuity represented by the Revolution of 1688, in his account, the tradition and antiquity of the constitution make revolution all but impossible. A s Barbauld had predicted, the aesthetic in the form of the sublime of tradition 66 Edmund Burke, Enquiry 62. T his is discussed in more detail in relation to Wollstonecraft in C hapter 2.

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aids the Establishment in maintaining stability. And in a related manoeuvre, Burke also famously uses the language of chivalry and romance to support this sublime of succession and to discredit events in France (169–70). For Reeve (along with Hurd and Beattie), romance’s growing status within the developing British literary tradition had been linked with the British heritage of constitutional freedoms. Burke, however, indirectly uses romance to support a more reactionary argument: that the basis of the British constitution is now settled forever. Reeve had suggested that tradition, even the romance tradition, was capable of manipulation – and sure enough, Burke manipulates it. In the debate that followed, Burke’s attempts to shore up a supposedly immutable constitution with both the sublime and an (invented) tradition of romance were seen as highly dubious – as Reeve and Barbauld had hinted, the invocation of tradition as a strategy for authority had its drawbacks. Liberal Whigs like James Mackintosh associated Burke’s apparent adherence to medieval chivalric values with support for the ‘fortuitous Governments’ that developed in the past.67 A nd for the radical Mary Wollstonecraft (like Barbauld, influenced by dissenting thought and suspicious of the sublime of succession), Burke’s adherence to historical precedent was no more than ‘prejudice’ (Vindication of the Rights of Men 11). Burke was guilty of ‘reverenc[ing] the rust of antiquity’ and possessing ‘gothic notions of beauty’.68 In turn, however, more conservative thinkers attacked the radicals for their perceived abandonment of tradition and misuse of the rhetorical of romance – if the old romance was too traditional, from a conservative point of view the new romance, with its use of chivalric language alongside the rejection of precedent, was even more dangerous. Modern romances, particularly Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, were criticised for spreading immorality and revolutionary philosophy, particularly to a female readership. Reeve, and later Barbauld, had, however, suggested that prose fiction could be used to educate readers politically – and that, by implication, the resultant interpretative skills might generate a more independently minded citizen. This potential can be clearly seen in the domestic novel of the period. In Belinda (1801), for example, Maria Edgeworth warns that both the sublime and the language of romance can be employed not only by those supporting historical precedent, but by corrupt and unnatural politicians. Female politician and cross-dresser Harriot Freke explains to Belinda that she has ‘swor[n] to set the distressed damsel free, in spite of all the dragons in C hristendom’.69 But her dubious knight-errantry also leads her to assert that, while she ‘never mind[s] young ladies’ looks – always 67

James Mackintosh, ‘Vindiciae Gallicae. Defence of the French Revolution and its English Admirers, against the Accusations of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke’ (1791), in Marilyn Butler, Burke, Paine, Godwin (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984), pp. 90–95, 91. 68 Edmund Burke, Reflections 98; Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Men, Political Writings, ed. Janet Todd (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994), p. 8. 69 Maria Edgeworth, Belinda (1801), ed. Eiléan Ni Chuilleanain, Everyman (London: Dent; Vermont: Tuttle, 1993).

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give the lie to their thoughts’, Belinda is ‘as handsome as an angel!’ (212). For this user of the rhetoric of romance, women are deceitful and vain, capable of being manipulated into political radicalism by the language of chivalry. A nd the invocation of the sublime can be as dangerous as the rhetoric of romance: Harriot Freke forces her female acolyte into a series of dangerous situations in a desire to show her bravery. For Edgeworth, however, rational women like Belinda Portman do not need rescuing by their more Amazonian (or Wollstonecraftian) counterparts. T hey are quite capable of managing by themselves. While suggesting that, after Burke’s Reflections (and to some extent contra Reeve and Barbauld), women readers needed to approach both the motifs of romance and the sublime with greater caution in order to maintain their freedom, the episode indicates that the ability to make judgements on genre has aesthetic, moral, and political consequences of particular significance to women. If female readers make the wrong choice, they are in danger of being seen as aesthetic objects rather than thinking subjects. In this derogatory position, their morality and their political judgement will suffer. It is significant that Belinda shows herself to be a critical reader of others’ speeches, more than capable of identifying the generic tactics they employ against her. She resists both Freke’s narrative and some aspects of the more modern rational romance supported by Mrs Percival; instead, she exercises her own judgement. Reeve had imagined reading as a critical act, taking place within a community. However, the dialogic novel of the 1790s (examples of which are included by Barbauld in her canon-making enterprise) to some extent internalises this critical function. Heroines like Belinda Portman pick their way between differing political and moral positions, each associated with different aesthetic choices. Further, the actions of such heroines are seen to have social consequences – as do, by implication, the choices of the novel’s readers. In 2001, Claudia L. Johnson noted that novels written in the late eighteenth century, after the form’s initial ‘rise’, experienced critical neglect. Perhaps it might be argued that such critical discomfort was the result of the very flamboyance, the self-conscious generic artifice and deliberate political allusiveness of many of the novels of this time. T his was a period in which novelists were acutely sensitive about the political dimension of aesthetics, a period in which, as in Reeve’s and Barbauld’s work (elsewhere often castigated female), readers were being trained to become ‘proto-narratologists’. A nd such readers were encouraged to reach aesthetic and political judgements by a process far more complex than merely looking, as Sir Joshua Reynolds had advised, at the most favoured works of the past. Indeed, one of the key issues in the Romantic novel was the degree and manner of mental independence the (often female) readership should aspire to. A nd this matter of mental independence (promoted in different ways by both Reeve and Barbauld) is linked, through Mary Wollstonecraft and those who responded to her, with the Romantic narrative of originality – a narrative with which it is often assumed women writers had little to do.

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C hapter 2

‘Fashion’s Brightest A rts Decoy’: Fashion and O riginality Although Edmund Burke works hard to create a sense of the sublime of succession in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, his political realism ultimately undermines the attempt. T he Reflections contains the worrying suggestion that tradition may be merely a more persistent form of fashion. While, in his famous remarks on Marie Antoinette, Burke emphasises our ‘subordination of the heart’ to aristocratic rule ‘through a long succession of generations’ (170), he also includes another interpretation, that of his opponents: But now all is to be changed … A ll the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. A ll the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion. (171)

Burke argues that such ‘pleasing illusions’ are necessary. N onetheless, the subordination of the heart here seems to be only one way of being reconciled to the operation of power. As a political approach, Burke’s metaphors suggest, such subordination is chosen from a wardrobe perhaps containing other ideological garments. His remarks capture the rhetorical significance that fashion held for his opponents. For Wollstonecraft in particular, tradition, along with opinion, custom, and prejudice, are closely related to fashion, lacking a basis in rational thought. S uch concern over the apparently arbitrary values of fashion is, I would argue, extremely important when the period’s fascination with originality is considered – and this anxiety comes particularly sharply into focus when we examine the work of women writers on the subject. Yet Romantic originality is usually positioned in a rather different way. In his 1818 Lectures on the English Poets, William Hazlitt remarks on the importance of the ‘new’ to the Lake school of poets: ‘Nothing’, he hyperbolically states, ‘that was established was to be tolerated’. While Hazlitt’s comments carry a delicate hint of distancing irony (indicating that this emphasis O liver Goldsmith, ‘T he Deserted V illage’, Roger L onsdale ed., The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith (London: Longmans, 1969), l. 263.  For another account of the undressing of Marie Antoinette, see Tom Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), p. 165.  William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets in The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. Duncan Wu, 9 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998), 2:163–323, 314. 

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on the new might not be unproblematic), his accuracy is undeniable: the particular importance of originality to the male Romantic poets has long been a critical commonplace. T he centrality of the concept of originality in the period is usually seen as a reflection of the Romantic artist’s growing anxiety about his ‘relation to his own art’. In such a reading, the concern with ‘original poetic genius’  is a symptom of the tendency, described by M.H. Abrams, ‘to pose and answer aesthetic questions in terms of the relation of art to the artist, rather than to external nature, or to the audience’. In contrast to this, the assumption (perhaps encouraged by Hazlitt’s neglect of his female contemporaries) has been that the women writers of the period were far more awkwardly placed in relation to originality – more inclined to feel modest ‘inhibitions’, less willing to ascribe to the male Romantics’ model of creativity. In her 1995 essay ‘A Criticism of Their Own’, Anne K. Mellor, for instance, claimed that, in contrast to the six Romantic poets most commonly considered canonical: ‘For the most part Romantic women writers forswore their male peers’ concern with the capacities and value of the creative imagination … celebrated not the achievements of genius …’. I want to offer an alternative interpretation of the period’s emphasis on intellectual and artistic independence, one that takes the contribution of women writers into account. What becomes evident is that the discourse of original poetic genius was only one part of the period’s wider concern with the possibility of independent or original thought. Burke’s combination of forcefulness and rhetorical subtlety in the Reflections relates to wider eighteenth-century anxiety concerning the lack of a stable basis from which to make judgements, an anxiety exacerbated by contemporary concerns over the excessive consumerism represented by luxury; if tradition is revealed as only contingent, it is little better than fashion as a way of informing the individual’s moral, political, or aesthetic choices. T he question seems to be whether there is another method of making sound choices, not based merely on convention (whether those conventions appear to be long-term traditions or short-term consumerist fashions). In terms of the artist’s creativity, eighteenthcentury critical theorists such as Duff and Young had seen originality as a site

W. Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, MA: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1970), p. 95.  S amuel T aylor C oleridge, Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1983), 1:77; subsequently BL.  M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London: Oxford UP, 1953), p. 3.  Anne K. Mellor, ‘A Criticism of their Own: Romantic Women Literary Critics’, Questioning Romanticism, ed. John Beer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995), pp. 29–48, 31.  A ccording to C ottom, this was a period which was ‘being nudged toward relativistic postulates by the doctrine of association in psychology … .’ (1). 

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of resistance to the marketplace. T hey wished to position it as a quality that, by fighting convention, placed work apart from the luxurious riot of consumerism. However, it is also worth remembering that, somewhat problematically, the ‘new[ness]’ of a work can also be what sells it. Artistic originality is, then, situated rather oddly in relation to consumption, perhaps not always sufficiently distinguished from fashion. But this older eighteenth-century discourse of original poetic genius was reinforced and broadened to become more widely socially applicable by two key strands of thought: first, that of Rousseauian primitivism and, second, the dissenting emphasis on intellectual and spiritual autonomy. T hese two strands facilitated a stress on the ‘original’ not necessarily as the ‘new’ but as a return to the qualities of the socially unadulterated self, or to the pure and correct values ultimately provided by God. Could ordinary individuals be trained to think, even to see and feel, in a way that would protect them from convention, ensuring mental accuracy and leading to a better society? Here original thought (particularly as outlined by Wollstonecraft) provides a mode of resistance both to convention generally and, more specifically, to fashion. As will be seen, however, the very eagerness with which Wollstonecraft and others sought to distinguish original thought from fashion and the marketplace generated a problem of artistic isolation (visible too in Wordsworth’s 1815 Essay, Supplementary to the Preface). Given that women were frequently positioned as excessive consumers, women writers, far from being separated from such concerns, had a particular point of entry to this debate concerning original thought and its relation to taste. S ome degree of resistance or at least thought about fashion was necessary for women in their everyday lives; some degree of independence from overwhelming luxury was seen as desirable aesthetically, as a signifier, in fact of taste. But this ability to think with some degree of originality was not seen by women writers only in relation to dress, but also as a matter of wider social significance. In her article ‘War Correspondence’ (1998), Mitzi Myers asks whether ‘women do politics’ and suggests that one of the important ways in which they might is through fashion. Restless and mobile, fashion is ‘an ideal vehicle for philosophically emblematizing the innovative and the outmoded. Both contemporary and twentieth-century commentators on French Revolutionary garb note that the period’s styles demonstrate “incredible caprice” 

Trying to mark the separation, eighteenth-century commentators on aesthetics, including Shaftesbury, Dennis, Duff, and Young, in the main rejected the tradition which associated genius with the bustle, competition, and excess of consumerism. William Duff, for example, described genius as regular, harmonious and virtuous’; significantly, he suggests it might also be marked by originality, in Duff’s account a potential drawback but equally, in its awkwardness, something that separates such creativity from the demands of the marketplace. William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius (1767), intro. John Valdimir Price (London: Routledge/Thoemmes P, 1994), p. 291. Similarly, Edward Young writes that ‘an O riginal author is born of himself, is his own progenitor, and will probably propagate a numerous off-spring of imitators, to eternize his glory; while mule-like imitators die without issue’. E dward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), ed. Edith J. Morley (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1918), p. 30.

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and cross-channel circulation’.10 Yet the practice of fashion was only one aspect of its political significance in the period: its use as a trope signifying the corruptness of political system was equally important. A nna L etitia Barbauld’s ‘letter sent to a young lady’, published in The Monthly Magazine 3 (April 1797), captures this dual significance.11 An (at times darkly) humorous piece, ‘Fashion’ points to the ‘despotic authority’ of fashionable consumption: combating its influence, the speaker hints, is a crucial element of any struggle for liberty. Barbauld’s overuse of the language of radical rhetoric in the essay’s first paragraphs opens space for a more directly political reinterpretation: given the ‘deformity and monstrous swelling’ caused by fashion, ‘drapery’ selected centuries ago from the ‘wardrobe of a moral imagination’ seems likely to distort the political as well as the human form (283). As Barbauld’s essay shows, women had a particular stake in discussions of consumerism and political corruption: the question of what they wore and how they appeared was intimately linked with the health of their society. And no one was more aware of the greater implications of this than Mary Wollstonecraft. To some extent, Wollstonecraft is unusual in that her emphasis on her own (creative) originality has been noted by critics (potentially placing her nearer to the model of Romantic creativity as usually perceived). Both her emphasis on her singular professional status12 and her carefully constructed narrative of female intellectual singularity have been remarked upon.13 N onetheless, Wollstonecraft’s treatment of originality remains relatively unexamined. And this neglect is significant since Wollstonecraft’s complex formulations of the significance of original thought have important implications for our understanding of Romantic originality more generally. T he problematic nature of original thought, evident in Wollstonecraft’s work, was a matter of concern not only to the major Romantic poets, but to those women who responded to her work. Such women were equally concerned with mental independence, ‘imagination’, and ‘genius’; however, whereas Wollstonecraft seems sometimes to suggest that isolation is the only way of generating originality, other women writers interrogated whether artistic solitude was the best way either to promote independence or to benefit society. 10 Mitzi Myers, ‘War Correspondence: Maria Edgeworth and the En-gendering of Revolution, Rebellion, and U nion’, Eighteenth-Century Life 22 (1998): 74–91, 74, 81. 11 A nna L etitia Barbuld, ‘Fashion, A V ision’, Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2002) 282–9. 12 Note the critical interest shown in Wollstonecraft’s determination to be ‘first of a new genus’. Mary Wollstonecraft, letter to Everina Wollstonecraft, 7 November 1787, in Ralph Wardle, ed., Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (L ondon: C ornell U niversity Press, 1979), p. 165. See Mary A. Waters, ‘The First of a New Genus: Mary Wollstonecraft as a Literary Critic and Mentor to Mary Hays’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 37 (2004): 415–34, and ‘“The First of a New Genus”: Proud to be a Female Journalist’, in Caroline Franklin, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Literary Life (London: Palgrave, 2006), pp. 56–82. 13 S ee, for example, C atherine Gallagher, ‘A History of the Precedent: Rhetorics of L egitimation in Women’s Writing,’ Critical Inquiry 26 (2000): 309–27, 311.

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* Although Wollstonecraft played an important role in making fashion a political counter in the 1790s debate, ironically she is also responsible for the relationship between originality and fashion remaining relatively neglected in recent scholarship. C ritical reluctance to discuss formulations of originality in women’s writing arises as a result of Wollstonecraft’s own determination to distinguish herself from contemporary trends. A s C atherine Gallagher notes in ‘A History of the Precedent: Rhetorics of L egitimation in Women’s Writing’, Wollstonecraft emphasised that her insistence on independent thought was singular. A s a result, even the most sophisticated feminist criticism frequently overlooks the complexity of the discussion. T his is the case with Gallagher, who argues that: A skeptical reading of Wollstonecraft’s preface [to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman] demonstrates that when the prevailing notion of authorship requires writers to declare their allegiance to some entity – such as reason, nature, or virtue – considered more compelling than custom, they will tend to stress their hard-won freedom from the shackles of tradition imprisoning the minds of other authors. (311)

However, Wollstonecraft’s emphasis on originality was more than a selfaggrandizing narrative of authorial brilliance. Instead, it points to a debate about the nature not only of authorship but of aesthetic judgment more generally. For Wollstonecraft and other radical writers, the ‘shackles of tradition’ were conceived in political as well as aesthetic terms (a distinction that Gallagher does not unpack). Such ‘shackles’ were forged from prejudice, closely related to the arbitrary force of fashion. A s an alternative, Wollstonecraft promoted a form of original thought that involved not a complete rejection of influence, but an engagement with and critique of both firsthand experience and cultural artefacts. Yet this original thought was problematic. T he necessary intellectual and artistic education for mental independence required retreat from society. Wollstonecraft became increasingly aware that, given the polluting effect of society on both language and the senses, original thought was all but impossible, even in isolation. A dditionally, although Wollstonecraft frequently emphasizes her ‘hard-won freedom’, she does not see her singularity as desirable. Much of her work attempts to produce an audience capable of similar aesthetic and political originality. Yet this desired audience seems elusive: Wollstonecraft, like William Wordsworth, struggles to ‘creat[e] the taste’ by which she is to be ‘enjoyed’ (Wordsworth, Selected Prose 408). While Wollstonecraft’s educational writings (particularly The Female Reader [1789]) are often examined only cursorily by commentators on her political theory, they were a particularly important forum for the development of such ideas. A s I examine here, in these works, Wollstonecraft opposed a Rousseauian emphasis on display, and what she saw as a related interest in fashion, to a more independent sense of taste. Her female audience is encouraged to analyse the relationship between a wide range of cultural texts, including writings on aesthetics (by Hugh Blair and

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John Ussher) and history (by David Hume and William Robertson) as well as conduct book literature (Lord Chesterfield) and pre-Romantic or Romantic poetry (Cowper and Barbauld). What emerges is a critique of the corrupt power politics underpinning the sublime and the beautiful, a critique which puts Wollstonecraft in a strong position to engage with the aesthetic drapery of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. A nd Wollstonecraft’s alternative form of taste, placing emphasis on original thought, has surprising similarity with Wordsworth’s in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Both writers attempt to construct an original way of seeing in opposition to the passive acceptance of convention. Yet in the increasingly reactionary climate of the 1790s, the difficulty was to find a place from which such a perspective was possible. And, as Maria Edgeworth and others building on Wollstonecraft’s work made clear, this difficulty was further complicated when the original thinker in question was a woman. Wollstonecraft’s rejection of fashionable spectacle has its roots in the intellectual autonomy emphasised by the dissenting tradition. From 1783 to 1786, she taught in Newington Green, where Richard Price was principal preacher (1758–1783). In his Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution and the Means of making it a Benefit to the World (1785), Price had promoted the notion of the equality of souls, asserting that ‘Jesus Christ has established a perfect equality among his followers. His command is, that they shall assume no jurisdiction over one another’.14 A nd both when dealing with British and French post-revolutionary society in ‘A Discourse on the Love of our Country’ (1789), and when advising the A merican government, Price suggested that ‘luxury’ caused such inequality. Hence, in ‘A Discourse on the Love of Our Country’, he remarks that ‘the state of [Britain] is such as renders it an object of concern and anxiety’: ‘It wants … the grand security of public liberty. Increasing luxury has multiplied abuses in it. A monstrous weight of debt is crippling it’ (10–11). Similarly, in his Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution (1785), he suggests the dangers of foreign trade. ‘Foreign frippery’ has the potential to undermine not only ‘simplicity of character’ but also: that manliness of spirit, that disdain of tinsel in which true dignity consists will disappear. E ffeminacy, servility, and venality will enter, and liberty and virtue be swallowed up in the gulph of corruption. (148)

If the noun manliness places women in a marginal position in relation to civic feeling, effeminacy indicates something still more telling. A lthough women remain relatively out of sight in this passage, feminine qualities are implicitly those which undermine the state, particularly in the context of consumerism. For Mary Wollstonecraft, this makes the cultivation of independent thought in women all the more vital. Yet she is also mindful that for Price luxury is a malaise that directly affects politicians and the state apparatus. 14 Richard Price, Political Writings, ed. D.O . T homas (C ambridge: C ambridge U P, 1991), p. 130.

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If Price emphasises the general economic effects of luxury, the ultimate effect of Rousseau’s political and educational writing on the subject is to place women even more emphatically as the enemy within. While Wollstonecraft sympathised with Rousseau’s conception of existing society as essentially flawed, her disagreement with his ideas on the tuition of women, expressed in Emile: Or On Education (1762), is well-known. According to Rousseau, current educational methods and social organisation pervert the male child, when, instead, he should be ‘secur[ed] from the impact of human opinions’, to develop in a supposedly natural way; in this account education should ostensibly be based on the child’s direct knowledge (Emile 38). However, his female pupil, Sophie, is to be taught differently because ‘O pinion is the grave of virtue among men and its throne among women’ (Emile 361). C loser examination reveals that, in some respects, this distinction has troubling consequences for Rousseau’s political thought. In his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men (1755), Rousseau argued that, as opposed to isolated natural man, in society men become enervated and debased: ‘As he becomes sociable and a slave, he becomes weak, timid, and servile; his soft and effeminate manner of living completely exhausts both his strength and his courage’.15 Furthermore, this process is connected with ‘luxury’, which is figured not only as excessive consumerism but as the endless pursuit of desire: For man in society, there are very different concerns; there is, in the first place, the matter of providing for the necessities and then for the superfluities; next come the luxuries, then immense riches, and then subjects and slaves … . My hero will end by slaughtering everything until he is the sole master of the universe. (Political Writings 17)

Pursuit of excess material goods leads to the longing for power, yet social man, Rousseau tells us, is frequently a slave. Moreover, in Emile he suggests that in the current poorly organised state of society men find themselves divided: they are ‘double men, always appearing to relate everything to others and never relating anything except to themselves alone’ (41). They have neither the single-minded pursuit of their own survival that characterises natural man nor the freedom and civic feeling they might possess under a properly constituted social contract. Hence, by removing his pupil from ‘prejudices, authority, necessity, example’ and ‘all the social institutions in which we find ourselves submerged’, Rousseau hopes to improve E mile’s ‘happiness’; equally, he is offering a potential solution to social corruption (37). Yet S ophie in many respects seems to represent an obstacle to such reformation, a block to the unconventional thought of which Emile is to be capable. Subject to opinion, women must conform absolutely to the contradictory demands of the 15 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rousseau’s Political Writings: Discourse on Inequality, Discourse on Political Economy, On Social Contract, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella, ed. Alan Ritter and Julia Conaway Bondanella (London: Norton, 1988), p. 14.

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male viewer. O n the one hand, they should cultivate the appearance of chastity: ‘It is important that she be modest, attentive, reserved, and that she give evidence of her virtue to the eyes of others as well as to her own conscience’ (Emile 358). Yet, simultaneously, because women’s main duty is ‘to please men’ they need to use their ‘charms’: ‘Little girls love adornment almost from birth. Not satisfied with being pretty, they want people to think that they are pretty’ (Emile 365). Their persistent lack of equality means that aesthetic status is the foundation of their identity. For Barbara Taylor, this sacrifice of individuality to ‘le bien publique’ makes women ‘civilised selfhood incarnate’.16 L ed by ‘appearances’ and ‘opinion’, Rousseau’s women are politically problematic, not least because they themselves have a ‘double’ object (Emile 41). While they appear to wish only to please men, Rousseau himself has little doubt (or concern) that their real agenda is personal power, or ‘enslav[ing] the strong’, largely through their appearance (Emile 358). Here, then, social corruption and the pursuit of luxury are figured in terms of the aesthetic. Rousseau’s narrative is concerned with the reactions of the imagined (male) spectator, who evaluates not only Sophie’s dress and physical appearance, but also her drawing and musical performances. However, a closer reading reveals a more complex specular politics. It is not only that S ophie (or any socialised subject) wishes to be observed in order to gain power; it is also that, to be sure of that power, she has to watch others watching her. C onnecting Rousseau’s educational and political thought, then, women’s attention to appearance is a sign of general social corruption, a link made by Wollstonecraft herself in Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). ‘[Fondness for dress]’, she writes, ‘is not natural; but arises, like false ambition in men, from a love of power’ (5: 97). In search of an alternative, Wollstonecraft draws on a technique mentioned by Richard Price. While Price has little to say in his Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution (1785) on how an accurate aesthetic sense might be developed once luxury has been introduced, elsewhere he points to the need for independent thought: ‘By attacking with great ability, every principle of truth and reason, [David Hume] put me upon examining the ground upon which I stood and taught me not hastily to take anything for granted’ (Political Writings 142). Individuals, Price suggests, cannot afford unthinkingly to follow convention; they must be educated enough to take responsibility for their own spiritual well-being. Price’s model of thorough analysis provided Wollstonecraft with the key to retaining an ‘original disposition’ in luxurious society (Emile 39). Instead of watching others watch them, women (and, eventually, other subjects) would develop a more probing gaze, avoiding passive dependence on the senses. T o put it another way, an emphasis on personal beauty is replaced by an emphasis on original thought. In this respect, Wollstonecraft’s Thoughts on the Education of Daughters is an important text, although it is often seen as fairly conventional. A lan Richardson 16 Barbara T aylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (C ambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), p. 91.

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remarks that ‘if Wollstonecraft had not gone on to write the two Vindications, it is doubtful that anyone now would find Thoughts a ‘radical’ text’, while for Janet Todd sections of it express the ‘current mode of exhortation and repressive religiosity’.17 In contrast, Mary, A Fiction (1788), while perhaps viewed as less interesting than the more political Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman. A Fragment (1798), nonetheless receives attention for its portrayal of a female genius; in the advertisement, Wollstonecraft aligns her own work with the ‘originals of great masters’, while Mary’s mind has a ‘grandeur … derived from the operations of its own faculties, not subjugated to opinion; but drawn by the individual from the source’; drawn from Rousseau’s Lettres de deux Amants (1761), the novel’s epigraph suggests Mary’s genius – ‘L’exercice des plus sublimes vertus éleve et nourrit le genie’.18 Crucially, however, the education followed by Mary is in many respects identical to that recommended in Thoughts. T his implies that in her educational writings Wollstonecraft is already working to place a more active variety of original genius at her pupils’ disposal. T his is not to deny that Thoughts contains conservative elements. C onduct and educational literature (including Emile) aimed to construct the female as pleasing aesthetic object, suitable for marriage, and Wollstonecraft is conventional enough to aestheticise her results in language reminiscent of both Rousseau and E dmund Burke. Her suggestion that she is ‘quite charmed when [she] see[s] a sweet young creature, shrinking as it were from observation’, for example, provides a more prurient, Rousseauian version of Gregory’s advice in his influential conduct manual, A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1774): modest girls should desire to be ‘rather silent in company’.19 Yet, even at this most Rousseauian point, the standard specular politics are disrupted. Wollstonecraft, like Rousseau, emphasises the pleasure such feminine softness gives. However, she does not suggest that young women should aim for such an effect, that the young woman, in other words, should watch to see whether others are watching her. (Both Rousseau and Gregory, in contrast, seem unable not to imagine some degree of reciprocity in the gaze, even in their construction of hypermodest women). Thoughts in fact persistently undermines Rousseau’s visual politics, suggesting instead the moral purpose of taste. C hapters on ‘E xterior A ccomplishments’, ‘Artificial Manners’, ‘Dress’, ‘The Fine Arts’, and ‘Reading’ subtly concentrate on correcting Rousseau’s tendency to make women in society be a ‘double’ object, one, that is, which apparently pleases others, but really pleases itself (Works 4: 17   Alan Richardson, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft on Education’, The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Claudia L. Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002) pp. 24–41, 26; Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Columbia UP, 2000), p. 76. 18 Works 1: 5, 1: 4. See also Andrew Elfenbein, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and the Sexuality of Genius’, in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Claudia L. Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), pp. 228–45. 19 Wollstonecraft, Works 4: 11; Vivien Jones, ed. Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 46.

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12–19; Emile 41). True, the text loudly acknowledges women’s position as items of display in the marriage market. However, in the dissenting tradition, it also emphasises the importance of inner life – and here it repeatedly links internal moral activity with aesthetic endeavour. Wollstonecraft suggests that instead of using ‘art’ to attract men, siting themselves as constructed cultural objects, women should position themselves as aesthetic judges. Hence she disapproves of an education in artistic display. In her account, ‘exterior accomplishments’ (‘a few tunes’, ‘a drawing or two’) produce ‘foolish, indiscriminate praises’ of ‘no importance’, but these activities become ‘of the utmost’ importance, ‘when a girl has a fondness for the art and a desire for excellence’ (Works 4: 14, 12). Why? Because although aesthetic appreciation makes use of the senses, for Wollstonecraft, it also ‘makes a person independent’ of them: Amusing employments must first occupy the mind; and an attention to moral duties leads to piety, so whoever weighs one subject will turn to others, and new ideas will rush into the mind. T he faculties will be exercised … . (Works 4: 12)

This analogy reveals Wollstonecraft’s particular take on dissenting thought. Religion and reason are, the comparison implies, closely associated for Wollstonecraft, something perhaps unsurprising given dissenting emphasis on individual moral responsibility: everyone needs sufficient reason to act correctly. But Wollstonecraft adds an extra dimension. Whether considering religion or reason, external activity trains the mind. And significantly, in the area of reason, it is artistic practice (whether in the area of the fine arts or in the context of writing) that encourages this crucial independence. Wollstonecraft’s first novel, Mary, continues this emphasis on inner creativity as the foundation of original thought. A s advised in Thoughts, Mary spends time ‘in retirement’ on music and drawing; as a result, her ‘taste and judgement were both improved by contracting a habit of observation, and permitting the simple beauties of N ature to occupy her thoughts’ (1: 21). The process teaches Mary to think – and hence the development of taste is closely linked to the growth of reason and religion. Taste and judgment are also developed in a specifically cultural context. Both Mary and Thoughts show the Rousseauian suspicion of educators: Mary is largely self-educated in isolation. N onetheless, both volumes emphasise the importance of reading (Mary ‘perused with avidity every book that came her way’) as well as, less conventionally, the need to write: in communicating with A nn, ‘a little practice made [Mary] write with tolerable correctness’ (1: 10, 13). Given her ‘genius’, Mary may be supposed an exceptional case, yet Wollstonecraft also asserts in Thoughts that ‘A relish for reading, or any of the fine arts, should be cultivated very early in life’ to avoid being ‘dependant on the senses for employment and amusement’ (4: 20). This advice is extended in The Female Reader, which includes ‘A L etter on Letter-Writing’, excerpted from the first volume of Francis Atterbury’s The Epistolary Correspondence (1783) (Works 4: 155–6). Here Wollstonecraft has selected texts which repeatedly stress the clearer arrangement of thought and the development of simplicity of expression connected with writing (perhaps in the

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process shedding light on the significance of Fanny Price’s letter-writing habits in Mansfield Park [1814]). To have an ‘original’ mind, then, does not necessarily involve establishing complete intellectual precedence. Instead, the original thinker moves beyond the power politics connected to beauty. Having examined both nature and art, and improved through practice, such a thinker has a habit of observation and comparison that enables her to challenge convention. Indeed, a comparison of Mary and Thoughts suggests that Wollstonecraft’s ideas about original genius return us by a curious route to A nna L etitia Barbauld’s essay ‘T houghts on Devotional T aste’. In The Female Reader Wollstonecraft shows her familiarity with both Barbauld’s prose and poetry, in particular including the opening to ‘Thoughts’ at the start of Book VI and a lengthy extract from the essay in the work’s introduction (4: 323, 4: 57–8). Mary’s religious thoughts connect her closely with Barbauld’s model of devotional taste – reflecting in isolation, ‘she thought that only an infinite being could fill the human soul’; her desire, like that of the C hurch fathers in the desert, is for an internalised sublime (Works 1: 16). Moreover, in Mary as in Barbauld’s essay, this internalised sublime is opposed to an aesthetic based on ritual. Barbauld had connected the desire for outward display of riches with the pomp and ceremony of the E stablished C hurch and with the C hurch of Rome – ritual gives, she suggests, a form of habitual sublime. Wollstonecraft suggests that such taste extends beyond the C hurch. A mong the Portuguese, ‘the gross ritual of Romish ceremonies’ is followed: ‘T aste is unknown; Gothic finery, and unnatural decorations, which they term ornaments, are conspicuous in their churches and dress’ (1: 36). For Wollstonecraft, however, this tastelessness affects not only religious institutions but also social ones. Her ‘fashionable women’, for instance, are equally implicated: ‘though of an ancient family, the title had descended to a very remote branch – a branch they took care to be intimate with; and servilely copied the Countess’s airs’ (1: 30). The traditions surrounding nobility are here linked with living ‘in the fashionable world’ (1: 31). Further, not only the Church but the aristocracy use luxurious ‘ceremony’ to generate awe – and, Wollstonecraft suggests, this has a deleterious effect on the spectators: ‘Riches, and their consequent state, are the sublime of weak minds’ (1: 30–31). Wollstonecraft has extended Barbauld’s critique of the sublime of tradition; deconstructing the awe generated by ‘ancient family’, she instead connects rank with the less impressive force of fashion. Mary thus demonstrates that taste (or a lack of it) has significant social impact. In The Female Reader Wollstonecraft constructs this case for the importance of original taste to public spirit more robustly. T he anthology remains relatively unexamined by modern scholars: perhaps because it is a compilation, an apparently derivative format unlikely to foster any independence of taste; perhaps because it is positioned as ‘hack-work’, a purely financial exercise unlikely to show Wollstonecraft’s original thought.20 However, I will show how Wollstonecraft’s selection of excerpts constructs a particular discourse of taste in relation to a critique 20 Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: the Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), p. 74.

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of fashionable femininity. The first indication that Wollstonecraft is pursuing a particular agenda occurs in the Preface, where she praises Dr William Enfield’s The Speaker (1774). The Speaker had been designed to give elocution practice to young gentlemen at the dissenting academies, whose education, while often containing pragmatic components, also placed an unprecedented stress on the belles lettres. As Wollstonecraft’s title suggests, she was more wary than Enfield had been about her audience’s speech (‘females are not educated to become public speakers or players’) (4: 55). In particular, she speculates that perhaps only financial need makes it acceptable for ‘a woman to obtrude her person or talents on the public’ (4: 56). Yet, while this position might be taken as a conservative attempt to limit the female role, it is clearly consistent with her views on ‘display’ – again her work offers a corrective to Rousseau, who remarked that: ‘Talent at speaking holds first place in the art of pleasing … . It is for all these reasons, I believe, that young girls learn to chatter so attractively’ (Emile 375). Wollstonecraft similarly believes that ‘to be able to read with propriety’ is ‘desirable’, but the emphasis (in the Preface at least) is not on male desire; rather, stress is laid on the need for reason (4: 56). Similarly, in her choice of extracts, while Wollstonecraft includes pieces that suggest the importance of sexual display for women, the overall emphasis lies on the development of mental autonomy. This is evident in the Preface. Enfield’s anthology had given his dissenting gentlemen the chance to develop their taste as well as their elocution; Wollstonecraft intends to encourage a similarly independent taste in women: ‘T aste should very gradually be formed … the ignorant never read with propriety; and they must ever be accounted ignorant who are suddenly made wise by the experience of others, never brought to a test by their own feeble unexercised reason’ (4: 56). In other words, the educator may stimulate the pupil by judicious selection of pieces that will interest her, but it is personal interest that eventually leads to the development of taste. In this process, the order of the pieces included is vital. Wollstonecraft praises the ‘methodical order’ of the pieces included in The Speaker, ‘as whatever tends to impress habits of order on the expanding mind may be reckoned the most beneficial part of education’; it is not the ideological content of the pieces that holds the greatest importance, but a principle, ‘impress[ed]’ on the mind that will later enable independent, rational thought (4: 55). By this means, in contrast to Rousseau’s theories, the student may be exposed to the writings of others without losing her independence. From the opening section, which provides a thematic overview, the order of the pieces emphasises this need for mental autonomy. The first section, ‘Select Desultory T houghts A ddressed to Females’, initially appears fairly conventional, stressing family and domestic duties – for instance, Wollstonecraft includes extracts from the standard conduct manual Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters. Yet Gregory’s advice is moderated by her own. Gregory, for example, stresses the importance of being seen to be ‘amiable in society’ (Works 4: 68). Wollstonecraft follows this advice with an extract from Thoughts. Here she remarks on the importance of ‘a constant attention to the management of temper’ but indicates this is not done ‘to be seen of men’, not, in other words, for display (Works 4: 68).

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N otably, also, warnings against luxury and display are counterbalanced in this early section by sophisticated remarks on taste: selected from the suitably aimed U sher’s Clio; Or, A Discourse on Taste. Addressed to a Young Lady (1769), which nonetheless assumes an intelligent and sophisticated audience (Works 4: 70, 74); and from Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and the Belles Lettres (1784), a work central to Wollstonecraft’s subject but originally addressed to gentlemen students at the U niversity of E dinburgh (Works 4: 80). Further, a judicious selection of texts positions weaknesses usually associated with women as common to socialised human nature. Later in the work, observations concerning triviality, for instance, are taken from Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son (1774) (4: 128). Frequently overlooked, however, is the fact that the Female Reader poses political as well as intellectual challenges. In Vocational Philanthropy Patricia C omitini, noting the dialectic reading strategies promoted in Vindication of the Rights of Woman, argues that a similar practice of reading is visible in The Female Reader; nonetheless, for C omitini, Wollstonecraft here only ‘presents material that [she] felt would inculcate the proper moral sentiments’.21 Yet, particularly in the fifth volume, the order of the pieces strongly indicates Wollstonecraft’s increasing interest in the public function of taste. S he opens with a situation in which women’s characters had (or were perceived to have) direct political effect – the execution of Mary Queen of Scots by Elizabeth I. In David Hume’s History of England, he notes E lizabeth T udor’s ‘force of … mind’ by which ‘she controlled all her more active and strong qualities, and prevented them from running into excess’ (4: 279). Resisting the extremes that characterise fashion, the result is a successful reign. Yet: When we contemplate her as a woman we are apt to be struck with the highest admiration of her qualities and extensive capacity; but we are also apt to require some more softness of disposition, some greater lenity of temper, some of those amiable weaknesses by which her sex is distinguished. But the true method of eliminating her merit is to lay aside all these considerations, and to consider her merely as a rational being placed in authority, and intrusted with the government of mankind. (Wollstonecraft, Works 4: 279–80)

While Hume’s praise of ‘amiable weakness’ momentarily suggests Rousseau’s version of femininity, his advice on considering E lizabeth as a ‘rational being’ sounds very much like Wollstonecraft; in this (albeit apparently exceptional) case, rationality is the favoured quality. William Robertson’s description of Mary Queen of Scots ultimately works to support this: ‘To all the charms of beauty, and the utmost elegance of external form, Mary added those external accomplishments which render their impression irresistible’ (Wollstonecraft, Works 4: 280). The word ‘external’ is crucial because Mary is a Rousseauian female, in Robertson’s formulation, ‘Not insensible to flattery, or unconscious of that pleasure with 21 Patricia C omitini, Vocational Philanthropy and British Women’s Writing, 1790– 1781: Wollstonecraft, More, Edgeworth, Wordsworth (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 48.

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which almost every woman beholds the influence of her beauty’ (Wollstonecraft, Works 4: 281). Unlike Elizabeth, Mary’s own body is marked with excess; she is ‘irresistible’, displaying ‘the utmost elegance’. Her interest in pleasing the male viewer brings about her downfall, not just as a queen but also as a woman. Wollstonecraft indicates that even if E lizabeth may not gain Hume’s approval as ‘a wife or a mistress’, Mary, according to Robertson’s portrait all too feminine, is a more complete failure (Wollstonecraft, Works 4: 280). The ‘order’ of the pieces is designed to encourage the reader to the conclusion that fashionable, sexualised femininity is politically and personally dangerous. Having begun the fifth volume by challenging conventional accounts of the beautiful, Wollstonecraft then critiques the Burkean sublime. As suggested by Rousseau’s account of social man, both the position of weakness (roughly corresponding to the beautiful) and the position of apparent power (in Burke’s terms, the sublime) are a product of corrupt socialisation – however much power one possesses, one always desires more. S ocialised luxury hence produces an erroneous aesthetic which mystifies power. Notably, Burke remarks that in the first edition of A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), he ‘purposely avoided … to introduce the idea of that great and tremendous Being’ when considering the ‘awe’ and ‘terror’ produced by power. However, by the second edition, he had overcome his diffidence and makes explicit mention of God as the ultimate source of sublimity. T he power of the A lmighty and the sublime evoked by the ‘dread majesty’ of ‘S overeigns’ are, this suggests, in some sense analogous.22 Wollstonecraft’s next extracts challenge this implicit continuity, which, for her, facilitates an inaccurate worship of earthly power. A piece from The Spectator, ‘T he Planetary and T errestrial Worlds C omparatively C onsidered’ argues: ‘If then not our globe only, but this whole system, be so very diminutive, what is a kingdom or a country? What are a few lordships, or the somuch admired patrimonies of those who are styled wealthy?’ (4: 284). And this perspective is reinforced in an extract from C owper, entitled here ‘T he E mpress of Russia’s Palace of Ice’ – a palace that, melting, ‘glanc’d’ ‘O n human grandeur and the courts of kings’ (4: 294). In each case, the trappings of social power are seen, not as sublime, but as transient and limited. Wollstonecraft’s educational work is an attempt to create an audience capable of original thought. Precisely speaking, she wishes to direct her readers away from the power politics evident in both Rousseau’s and Burke’s aesthetics. It could be argued that, in this account, original thought involves the ability to see power clearly, stripped of the glamour given by a false aesthetic. Wollstonecraft’s wellknown attack on Burke in A Vindications of the Rights of Men shows the potential of this strategy. Burke had characterised metaphysical speculation as something which tears off ‘all the decent drapery of life’ (Reflections 171). In response, commentators have noted, Wollstonecraft targets his ‘linguistic femininity’, 22 Edmund Burke, Enquiry 62. For the complicated relationship between Burke’s aesthetic and political thought, see Luke Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland (C ambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003) and Tom Furniss.

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positioning him, it is argued, as the epitome of weak womanhood – or as the opposite of the model presented in Wollstonecraft’s educational writing (T aylor, Mary Wollstonecraft 65). However, Burke is not merely positioned as a woman – but as a fashion victim, an adherent to the culture of luxurious inequality. Wollstonecraft places him in the position of a ‘celebrated beauty’, concerned only with appearance, interested in display and ‘instantaneous applause’ (Works 5: 8). While he has the (feminine) quality of a ‘lively imagination’, his productions are ‘desultory’ (Works 5: 8). Further, his supposedly fashionable behaviours are used by Wollstonecraft to reinforce her argument concerning the arbitrary nature of the sublime of succession. Wollstonecraft’s rhetoric insists that society at large is stained by the arbitrary force of fashion, and in this situation, it is no longer women who provide the warning figure of synecdoche: it is the statesman himself. For Wollstonecraft, the traditions Burke dresses as venerable actually generate a superficial irrationality. The ‘desire of perpetuating a name’ does not only cause ‘vice’ in ‘women of fashion’; it arguably drives fashion itself: ‘It would be an arduous task’, she suggests, ‘to trace all the vice and misery that arise in society from the middle class of people aping the manners of the great’ (5: 22–3). Further, Wollstonecraft suggests that the sublime of succession Burke attempts to establish does not only generate fashion, but has a metonymic link with it. Succession is ‘arbitrary’, rests on ‘unnatural customs’, and is associated with ‘effeminacy’ (5: 8, 13). Noting that ‘the British House of Commons is filled with every thing illustrious in rank, in descent, in hereditary’, Wollstonecraft adds that ‘talents, knowledge, and virtue, must be a part of the man’ unlike ‘robes of state’ (5: 42–3). The implication is that hereditary honours are as external as fashionable opinions; like Burke’s own ‘gorgeous drapery’, they are matter of appearance (Works 5: 37). For Wollstonecraft, traditions which relate to property lack sublimity, and those, like Burke, who cannot see this, are poor readers and writers, failing the standards set out in Wollstonecraft’s educational work (Works 5: 10, 29). With such individuals, ‘Works of genius are read with a prepossession in their favour, and sentiments imitated, because they were fashionable and pretty, and not because they were forcibly felt’ (5: 29). In contrast, this implies, the truly tasteful react with genuine feeling (tempered by reason); they recognise ‘the simplicity; which, in works of taste, is but a synonymous word for truth’ (5: 29). While Burke’s arguments (and therefore presumably his system) rest on ‘no fixed first principle’, Wollstonecraft’s more able readers will see past the ‘gorgeous drapery’ of luxurious propaganda (5: 10; Reflections 37). They will distinguish that liberty (not property), is built on ‘an everlasting foundation – the attributes of God’ (Wollstonecraft, Works 5: 9). Indeed, it is in this spiritual context that Wollstonecraft uses the word original. T he clearest example of this religious usage occurs in Original Stories (1788), an educational work republished the year after her response to Burke’s Reflections, and again in 1796. Here, when Mrs Mason suggests the dangers of family pride, A nna replies: We ought to be proud of our original, but we should trace it to our Heavenly Father, who breathed into us the breath of life. – We are his children [when] we try to resemble Him. (Works 4: 431)

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In other words, the independent mode of taste Wollstonecraft valorises in both her educational and political writings is justified (and sustained) by spiritual appeal.23 This original taste rejects the worship of arbitrary power implicit in Burke’s sublime and beautiful – hence hereditary pride in family is dismissed. Instead, it rests on the correct worship of God: ‘It is not [God’s] power that I fear – it is not to an arbitrary will, but to unerring reason I submit’ (Works 5: 34). Having appealed to this first principle, the Wollstonecraftian reader will be able to mount a radical critique of the power structures operating in her society and will propose an alternative, an aesthetic based on morality rather than power, in which ‘truth’ will be ‘sublime’ and ‘simplicity’ beautiful (5: 29). Wollstonecraft’s use of the concepts of fashion and taste makes it evident that her insistence on originality is more than, as Gallagher puts it, an attempt to ‘stress [her] hard-won freedom from the shackles of tradition imprisoning the minds of other authors’ (311). This is not merely a self-aggrandizing strategy, but one that directly relates to the dissenting belief that individuals should be able, through independent reason, to take responsibility for their own souls. Consequently, as a comparison between Mary and Wollstonecraft’s educational works demonstrates, Wollstonecraft desired to extend the number of people capable of original thought. And this original thought specifically involved rejecting the dominant aesthetics of her society, to radical political effect. Yet, equally clearly, even in her educational works, the assumption is that most people lack ‘true’ taste. Wollstonecraft shows Rousseau’s suspicion of educators, explaining in Thoughts that ‘it does not always happen that both parents are rational’ (Works 4: 9), just as Rousseau had commented in Emile that to find a suitable educator, ‘it would be necessary to go from education to education back to I know not where. How is it possible that a child be well raised by one who was not well raised himself?’ (50). In this account, education, like hereditary position, has no fixed basis. Wollstonecraft attempts to provide some solution to this problem; as Anna’s remarks imply, the foundation for the correct education comes from God. Yet, for Wollstonecraft, this correct education is most likely to be provided if the child is left isolated, rather like Mary. A nd such an experience seems more suitable for individuals than for the mass of society. In Wollstonecraft’s educational works, the correct form of individual development is possible but difficult to achieve. In her fiction and polemics, however, the doubt about the possibility of widespread change is more evident: as the scale of the fashionable corruption caused by primogeniture becomes clear, the possibility of widespread social improvement appears more remote. Critics rarely note Wollstonecraft’s growing sense of intellectual difficulty as the aesthetic and the political become increasingly enmeshed in her writing. The more inter-related Wollstonecraft sees these as being, the harder she finds it to imagine a space outside the existing political system where the individual 23 In Mary Wollstonecaft and the Feminist Imagination, Barbara T aylor argues: ‘It was thanks to God, in other words, that Mary Wollstonecraft became a feminist’ (94).

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might receive the untainted aesthetic education that would, in turn, lead her to become a wise citizen. T his is nowhere more evident than in her 1797 essay ‘O n Poetry, and O ur Relish for the Beauties of N ature’, described by Barbara T aylor as ‘a conventional celebration of the ‘native wildness and simplicity’ of poetic genius’ (140). Elsewhere, as has been seen, Wollstonecraft had suggested that the interrogation of first-hand sensory information and of cultural artefacts is key to developing mental independence. Yet here Wollstonecraft opens the possibility that the vehicles necessary for such interrogation – the senses and language – are already tainted by the social process. At the beginning of the essay, Wollstonecraft positions herself, rather like Rousseau’s narrator in Reveries (1782). In contrast to the fashionable sleepers, who will later use conventional language to declaim of the beauties of nature, she is prepared to see for herself; her vision is unmediated by cultural products, as ‘printless’ – one might say as ‘untrodden’ – as the grass she walks upon (Works 7: 7). As Judith Thompson points out, ‘the characteristic Romantic turn (later practised so skilfully by Wordsworth and Coleridge)’ involved ‘separating the purely literary or aesthetic elements of texts from their ideologically charged contexts’.24 Wollstonecraft’s aesthetic and political thought provides perhaps the clearest explanation among British writers of this motif of separation. Her insistently polemic approach makes it perfectly evident that, despite the landscape’s emptiness, such an apparently isolationist aesthetic is strongly politically charged. The wanderer’s independence ‘break[s] the ignoble chain’ of implicit submission to authority (Works 5: 14). Here, as in Mary and her educational work, this independence is best promoted by observation (significantly and more extremely here the observation of nature rather than art). Without the obscuring effects of culture, she implicitly has the clear vision of genius. In contrast, her community of late sleepers consists of fashionable society members who, like Edmund Burke, are part of that ‘chain’. V itiated in body and mind, mentally vacant and morally lax, these people are members of the country-house society Wollstonecraft had experienced when she was a governess in the family of L ady Kingsborough; their fashionable exhaustion is indicative of corruption. Given this, Wollstonecraft’s isolation in the landscape is not only (as Gallagher might suggest) a manoeuvre to suggest her originality, but a worrying sign of the political times. T he apparent separation between the political and the aesthetic is generated, at least in part, by the writer’s notion of the ‘supine’ nature of his or her audience. As a solitary walker, Wollstonecraft attempts to provide an analysis of this common lack of independence. In the process, she provides, more clearly than in her educational works, an explanation of the importance of the aesthetic. She 24

Judith Thompson, ‘“A Voice in the Representation”: John Thelwall and the E nfranchisement of L iterature’, in Romanticism, History and the Possibilities of Genre, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998) pp. 122–48, 125; see also Harriet Devine Jump’s study Mary Wollstonecraft: Writer (L ondon: Harvester– Wheatsheaf, 1994).

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begins obliquely. Despite initially claiming to ‘endeavour to trace the cause’ of current social inertia, she immediately shifts to the (apparently unconnected) subject of ancient poetry: Having frequently had occasion to make the same observation, I was led to endeavour, in one of my solitary rambles to trace the cause, and likewise to enquire why the poetry written in the infancy of society, is most natural: which, strictly speaking (for natural is a very indefinite expression) is merely to say, that it is the transcript of immediate sensations. (Works 7: 7)

Wollstonecraft is reluctant to address the difficulty of firsthand vision in modern society directly because to her it seems all but impossible. However, her elliptical remarks are revealing. I would suggest that, although the connection between the absence of spectators and great poetry is not immediately self-evident, it is closely linked to her rejection of Rousseau’s visual politics. For her, the presence of other spectators generates inequality and hence impure vision. In society, recording firsthand interpretation of sense data (as she puts it the ‘transcript of immediate sensations’) becomes impossible for two reasons. First, in the state of ‘civilization, or rather luxury’ the danger is that the nervous system becomes ‘destroyed by the strong exercises of passion’, unable to attend to the ‘calm sensations’ produced by observing nature (Works 7: 11). Second, Wollstonecraft identifies a problem inherent in language. She suggests a parallel between modern poets, whose works are constructed from books, and ‘Boys who have received a classical education’ and ‘load their memory with words’, whilst ‘the correspondent ideas are perhaps never distinctly comprehended’ (Works 7: 9). The danger is that language itself becomes inseparable from passive conventionality. S ocial constructions inherent within language distort the ability to see ‘ideas’ – the poets and school boys use their understandings but only to choose between words already in common currency. N onetheless, confused readers still turn to the poet to concentrate the force of their impressions by ‘selecting the most picturesque part in his camera’ (7: 9–10). The image of the ‘camera’ is significant here: not only the audience, but also the modern poet is unable to view nature directly. T his derivative tendency is particularly dangerous because, as Wollstonecraft clearly suggests elsewhere, it corrupts feeling. In a 1791 review of A ugustus Wendeborn’s A View of England, Wollstonecraft had referred to S haftesbury’s notion of prayer as egotism. S haftesbury preferred a sense of virtue based on immediate sensation and although in doing so he was responsible for the eighteenth-century fascination with feeling, Wollstonecraft disapproved of his account: However noble and true the sentiments may be, which represent virtue as desirable for its own sake, those sentiments appear in rather a suspicious garb in his affected inflated periods; and this parade of words, has ever led the writer of this article to suspect, that his heart was unmoved whilst his head fabricated the lifeless rhapsody … . (7: 347)

Shaftesburian sensibility is rejected in a similar manner to Burke’s feelings for the Queen of France. The key word is ‘parade’; both Shaftesbury and Burke favour

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an elaborate use of language that mimics the display employed by the power structures of society. Wollstonecraft’s own emphasis on plain speaking does more than ally her with T homas Paine and other radicals; it suggests the possibility of an aesthetic that is outside the current political order. In ‘O n Poetry’ Wollstonecraft tentatively offers an alternative to the corrupting aesthetic influence of modern society, but this alternative is highly problematic. Poetry written in smaller or less sophisticated social groups, she argues, shows none of this tendency to imitation. S uch natural poetry arises spontaneously in a way reminiscent of the early Wordsworth; as she puts it, ‘it is not necessary to ransack the understanding or memory, till the laborious efforts of judgement exclude present sensations, and damp the fire of enthusiasm’ (Works 7: 7). ‘Natural’ poetry is a response to sense data which is as unpolluted by cultural baggage as possible. In isolation, it might be presumed, the individual has increased nervous sensitivity (rather than the languor produced in society), and this allows him to structure and categorise the world in a way unique to him or herself. While Wollstonecraft asserts that ‘genius [is] only another word for exquisite sensibility’, she also posits a crucial role for the understanding (Works 7: 9). As she puts it, ‘the first observers of nature … exercised [their understanding] to discriminate things, whilst their followers were busy to borrow sentiments and arrange words’ (Works 7: 9). Her account momentarily offers the possibility of a private language, a division of mental notions about the world which would take place without, or before being modified by, a community. Capable of attending to their sensations, powerful new associations would result in the poets’ mind: When nature seems to present obstacles to [the ancient poet’s] progress at almost every step, when the tangled forest and steep mountain stand as barriers, to pass over which the mind longs for supernatural aid; an interposing deity, who walks on the waves, and rules the storm, severely felt in the first attempts to cultivate a country, will receive from the impassioned fancy “local habitation and a name”. (Works 7: 10)

In contrast to Edmund Burke’s political thought, in this account neither the mob nor the monarch produces the sensation of the sublime; social inequalities are not responsible for aesthetic pleasure. Instead, the sense of struggle is with an unpeopled landscape without property divisions. T he process of exploration in an unpopulated countryside allows the artist to form his own associations and both to name the landscape and assign it spiritual and emotional significance. In this respect, Wollstonecraft’s artist is similar to those ‘persons resident in the country and attached to rural objects’ found in Wordsworth’s ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’.25 However, while Wordsworth finds isolation in the marginal spaces of society, Wollstonecraft at times comes close to suggesting that originality requires a complete absence of the economic and political hierarchy – or a time machine. 25 William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E . DeSelincourt, 2nd ed., 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1944), 2: 109.

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With its roots in the gendered discourse of display and the political struggles of the 1790s, Wollstonecraft’s account of the social impact of taste can be classed as key to the Romantic conception of creativity. In A Short Residence in Sweden (1796), for instance, she suggests the environment, when observed directly, literally impresses upon the mind, forming new, poetic associations. However, this process has some uncomfortable results: N ature is the nurse of sentiment, the true source of taste; – yet what misery, as well as rapture, is produced by a quick perception of the beautiful and sublime, when it is exercised in observing animated nature, when every beauteous feeling and emotion excites responsive sympathy, and the harmonized soul sinks into melancholy, or rises to extasy, just as the chords are touched, like the aeolian harp agitated by the changing wind. But how dangerous is it to foster these sentiments in such an imperfect state of existence and how difficult to eradicate them when an affection for mankind, a passion for an individual, is but the unfolding of that love which embraces all that is great and beautiful. (Works 6: 271)

Although the syntax makes causal links unclear here, it seems that nature encourages a ‘quick perception’, which in turn produces ‘responsive sympathy’ and generates an ‘enlarged humanity which extends to the whole human race’. T his mode of taste is similar to that explored by Wollstonecraft in Mary and Maria or the Wrongs of Woman (1798). In each case, this taste is a guarantee of public conscience in the individual. However, in Wollstonecraft’s novels, it also leads the heroine to fall in love and run the danger of becoming sentimentalised. S entiment may be necessary for genius, but, in the current state of society, it is also a danger to it. Despite the public and spiritual function of taste and genius, then, both are paradoxically best sustained in isolation. S econd, Wollstonecraft’s account of original thought is also troubled by her pessimism about contemporary social organisation. In her educational writings at least, her ideas about taste had a democratic element: taste could be developed (in Thoughts among young women, but perhaps also by implication amongst other groups). In Wollstonecraft’s work the political roots of the impetus to write in the ‘the very language of men’ are clear; it is related to the radical rejection of the aristocratic and fashionable sensibility of ‘parade’ (Lyrical Ballads 7). Yet in her essay ‘O n Poetry’, both the upper classes and the labour trudging to work seem incapable of the necessary mental activity. Wollstonecraft’s line of thought here can be usefully compared with that of John Usher’s in his work Clio: Or, a Discourse on Taste: Addressed to a Young Lady, several extracts from which occur in The Female Reader.26 For Usher, while the ‘generality of mankind’ is capable of taste, the ‘common people’ do not generally exhibit it (180, 39). T his, he suggests, is because they are involved in ‘necessity and labour’, while ‘relaxation’ is needed for aesthetic appreciation (39). Yet he also suggests this is merely ‘accidental’; if circumstances change, working people can and do possess taste (40). He repeatedly notes: 26 John Usher, Clio: Or, A Discourse on Taste. Addressed to a Young Lady, 2nd ed. (London: Davies, 1769).

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When once the common people are rent asunder wholly from the great and opulent, and made subservient to the luxury of the latter, then the taste of nature infallibly takes her flight from both parties … . It may seem a paradox, and yet I am firmly persuaded, that it would be easier at this day to give a good taste to the young savages of America, than to the noble youth of Europe. (181)

Luxury (and the resultant alienated labour and strained class relations) produce false associations. In a society marked by inequality, such false associations are particularly destructive to taste in all classes. Wollstonecraft’s sense of social inequality, sharpened in the Vindications, produces a similar pessimism about the possibility of taste in the current social situation. Wollstonecraft’s ideas about labour in some senses refine Usher’s. Given the dissenting influence on her thought, Wollstonecraft is far from unsympathetic to kind of endeavour a working man might face; indeed, in certain circumstances (allied perhaps to those experienced by Rousseau’s natural man), she feels such effort constitutes a spiritual journey. Under the right conditions, she suggests, necessity is not, after all, such an obstacle to taste. When considering the ‘baneful effects of the despotic practice of pressing’ in A Vindication of the Rights of Men, for example, Wollstonecraft suggests that ‘self-preservation’ inspires ‘a manly spirit of independence; the effort, the restless pursuit it requires, leads to a ‘habit of thinking’ (5: 16). Yet, when Wollstonecraft imagines the current social system, labour ‘to support the body’ does not have the same effect: T he vulgar, and by this epithet I mean not only to describe a class of people, who, working to support the body, have not had time to cultivate their minds; but likewise those who, born in the lap of affluence, have never had their invention sharpened by a necessity, are, nine out of ten, the creatures of habit and impulse. (5: 16)

Given this emphasis on the body, neither rich nor poor have properly developed minds, while the use of ‘arbitrary authority’ by the upper ranks makes this impact particularly badly on the lower classes. Both the ‘mechanic’ in danger of being pressed, and the ‘peasantry’ oppressed by the game laws are here the victims of the ‘unfeeling luxury’ linked to capital. For Wollstonecraft, alienated labour presents a serious obstacle to the taste that would bring spiritual enlightenment. Wollstonecraft does not, then, give a straightforward account of the lower ranks as either congenitally incapable of taste or insufficiently educated. Instead, Wollstonecraft suggests that under current economic conditions, both the upper classes and those lower down the scale are likely to lack the mental organisation necessary for taste or for independent thinking. When Wollstonecraft imagines the landscape of the Essay as empty, this is not merely a device to emphasise her originality; it is, for her, an inevitability given the economic structures of contemporary Britain. An anxiety concerning luxury strongly marked political discourse throughout the eighteenth century, and the writings of Richard Price and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who influenced Wollstonecraft, reveal that women had a strange position in relation

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to this anxiety. When luxury was considered in terms of its broad political effects on the state, the feminization of society was a key concern. In Emile, Rousseau’s construction of womanhood takes this association further. Yet Rousseau’s political writings suggest that in (inevitably luxurious) society, everyone is feminized; and in the context of his educational work, the aesthetic consequences of this feminisation become clear. Appearing attractively weak (that is, beautiful), the socialised subject in fact desires power, yearns to be sublime. Reacting to Rousseau’s fascination with the aesthetics of femininity, Wollstonecraft suggested an alternative to such fashionable display. T rue taste develops through observation of nature and participation in the fine arts. Such activities have the potential to develop both feeling and the ability to arrange thoughts rationally. In short, the individual who concentrates on the world around her, rather than making herself the object of display, is able to develop a sense of what is truly sublime. Reflecting on God as the original foundation of knowledge, such a person is able to think independently. A nd this capacity for original thought has an important political application. In A Vindication of the Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft’s strategy is not merely to place Burke in the role of fashionable female. She also draws attention to the corrupt power politics she sees underpinning the Burkean account of the sublime and the beautiful. T he danger is that man in so-called civilised society will, in his search for power, construct a false aesthetic: this aesthetic glamorises and gives authority to both fashion and tradition. In contrast, the original thinker can see beyond such parade, mounting a challenge to the status quo. Formulated as an alternative to luxury, Wollstonecraft’s account of true taste clearly has ameliorative possibilities both for the individual and for society. A nd her treatment of it in her educational writings suggests her belief that this taste can and should be encouraged in greater numbers of people. Yet, paradoxically, because of its political dimension, her account of taste has a strong isolationist element. A lthough original thought generates independence and ultimately a less luxurious society, the necessary taste cannot be developed within the corrupt community. T his element of withdrawal is evident even in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, where the development of ‘taste’ involves a retreat from audience, and in Mary Wollstonecraft adds to this narrative, by suggesting that to develop the full intensity of ‘genius’, this retreat must be even more extreme. Further, given the extent of social corruption, Wollstonecraft at times doubts the viability of her alternative aesthetic. S he is sceptical about the possibility of taste, when labour is alienated, and both rich and poor are unable to think. * Wollstonecraft’s account of original thought sheds light on both the aesthetics of the major Romantic male writers and on the work of her female contemporaries. In particular, Wollstonecraft’s doubts concerning the possibility of original thought generate three significant (and interrelated) anxieties. First, Wollstonecraft is concerned with the difficulty original genius represents to an artist communicating

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with an audience – it may be impossible to find or even create an audience capable of appreciating original thought. S econd, therefore, the idea of creative retreat is problematic – it may mean that the artist remains stranded in glorious isolation. Third, the retreat from society represents particular difficulties for the female genius. T he longing for sympathy and the willingness to behave unconventionally leaves women like Wollstonecraft’s heroines Mary and Maria vulnerable. Generated by the problematic nature of original thought, these anxieties are constantly replayed during the Romantic period not only, I would argue, by male Romantic poets but equally by women writers whose concern with genius is typically felt to be limited. True, women writers were typically more anxious about the specific difficulties independent thought and isolation represented for women. However, given its acuteness over issues of gender, Wollstonecraft’s work can be used as a starting point to demonstrate that both the male Romantic poets and the women writers of the period were responding to the same difficulty: both faced the difficulty of finding a (mental) space outside stale convention and idle luxury where creativity and original thought would be possible. A comparison of Wollstonecraft’s ‘O n Poetry’ with Wordsworth’s Preface, for instance, allows the interrogation of Mellor’s suggestion that women writers rarely positioned themselves as ‘solitary genius[es], divinely inspired’ in the way that male Romantics did.27 While Wollstonecraft at times emphasised her talented singularity, she desired not only to be ‘first’ but to create a new ‘genus’.28 Her position is consonant to that Wordsworth, for example, takes in the advertisement and Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Despite Wordsworth’s worry concerning ‘pre-established codes of decision’, his preferred reader (like Wollstonecraft’s) is one who is experienced, having benefited from familiarity with ‘our elder writers’ (Lyrical Ballads 7–8). Wordsworth, like Wollstonecraft, desires that his work will encourage (further) improvement in the reader’s ‘taste’, ‘affections’ and understanding (Lyrical Ballads 247). Consequently, the poems themselves encourage an active and challenging engagement in the audience; as Heather Glen notes, in the Lyrical Ballads, simplicity often gives way to complexity, in a way that confounds the expectations the reader has garnered from contemporary magazine poetry.29 I suggest that such a process of complication creates a similarly challenging effect to the sometimes unexpectedly subtle ordering of the pieces in The Female Reader. For both writers, instituting a process of comparison is a way of challenging ‘certain known habits of association’ (Lyrical Ballads 243). A s might be expected, then, the sublime and the beautiful require rewriting for Wordsworth, as they do for Wollstonecraft. In the advertisement to the Anne K. Mellor, ‘Were Women Writers “Romantics”?’ Modern Language Quarterly 62 (2001): 393–405, 404. 28 Mary Wollstonecraft, letter to Everina Wollstonecraft, 7 November 1787, in Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Ralph Wardle (London: Cornell UP, 1979), p. 165. 29 Heather Glen, Vision and Disenchantment: Blake’s Songs and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983), pp. 33–56, 42. 27

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1798 edition, for instance, Wordsworth announces that the poems included are ‘experimental’, and one possible direction of this experimentation is suggested by the format of the book itself.30 A lan Boehm notes the tendency at the time towards finely printed, elaborately produced, expensive editions, a trend which, in the simplicity of its presentation, the Lyrical Ballads undercut.31 This rejection of fashionable convention is in line with Wollstonecraft’s dislike of luxury; the format of the Lyrical Ballads promotes the ‘simplicity’ that Wollstonecraft had seen as the ‘only criterion of the beautiful’ (Works 5: 7) Similarly, as Wollstonecraft had done, Wordsworth requires a natural sublime to replace the artificial stimulants produced by an (increasingly agitated) urban society. Rather than allowing his reader to be stimulated by temporary and local events, by the quick changes of human society, he wishes to direct us to ‘certain powers in the great and permanent objects that act upon [the mind]’, to an unchanging sublime stimulated by the natural world (Lyrical Ballads 249). The Preface indicates that for Wordsworth, as for Wollstonecraft, the best way to avoid conventional language, stale aesthetics, and arbitrary emotion is to look directly at the environment – hence Wordsworth’s belief that the language of rustic life is the best because ‘such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived’ (Lyrical Ballads 245). Like Wollstonecraft’s Mary, whose art stems from observation of the environment, Wordsworth’s subjects would ideally learn language largely from nature (and firstrate art, such as his own). Both Wordsworth and Wollstonecraft, then, suggest that to produce an original thinker, a degree of retreat from the social group is necessary, a position which sheds light on that ‘characteristic Romantic turn’ away from the politically explicit (Thompson 125). However, a reading of Wollstonecraft’s work alongside Wordsworth’s Preface reveals the same difficulties with original thought that arise for both of them. In ‘On Poetry’ Wollstonecraft’s solitary walker, like her heroine, Mary, or Rousseau’s narrator in Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1782), is not only alone but isolated. And while such isolation is necessary for the original thinker, it also generates a difficulty: the writer may never be able to communicate with his audience. In the essay, society’s inevitable corruption of language and sensory information suggests that change is almost impossible, the very vehicles of progress compromised. To recall Wordsworth’s remarks in Book Eleventh of The Prelude, Wollstonecraft’s ideal audience would consist of the ‘man to come parted as by a gulph / From him who had been’, an audience necessarily but mysteriously,

Lyrical Ballads 246. For debate concerning the experimental nature of the Lyrical Ballads, see Robert Mayo, ‘The Contemporaneity of the Lyrical Ballads’, PMLA 69 (1954): 486–522 and John Danby, The Simple Wordsworth: Studies in the Poems 1797–1807 (London: Routledge, 1960). 31 A lan D. Boehm, ‘T he 1798 Lyrical Ballads and the Poetics of L ate E ighteenthCentury Book Production’, ELH 63.2 (1996): 453–87. 30

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even impossibly, separated from the aristocratic sleepers of current society.32 Wordsworth’s addition of the 1800 and 1802 Prefaces to The Lyrical Ballads suggests that he finds himself combating a similar position of isolation. Despite the simple presentation of the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth’s explanations indicate his suspicion that his audience has little experience of ‘low and rustic life’; equally, they suggest his fear that his readers have a conventional and unquestioning familiarity with a set of arbitrary generic conventions (Lyrical Ballads 245–7). In other words, his audience potentially shares two significant characteristics with Wollstonecraft’s dozing aristocrats: they are separated from nature and inured to conventionality. T he explanation necessary for such readers might, indeed, ‘require a space wholly disproportionate to the nature of a preface’ (Lyrical Ballads 243). The unconventional language proposed will be too original to be effectively understood. And such a communicative gap is likely to appear greater at a moment of political reaction. The second difficulty that confronts the original author is, if anything, more intractable. Both Wordsworth and Wollstonecraft devote considerable energy to producing an audience capable of understanding them. Yet for both writers, such an audience presents a potential threat; once original writers can be understood by an audience, their originality, the basis of their artistic identity, becomes threatened. In ‘On Poetry’, this difficulty is suggested by Wollstonecraft’s trenchant tone. Her forcefulness indicates her sense of the precariousness of critical authority, an authority which a critically active audience might challenge. Wordsworth struggles with this issue when discussing his conception of audience in his 1815 Essay, Supplementary to the Preface. Here Wordsworth, unsatisfied with his contemporary reception, rejects the ‘public’ in favour of a more ideal readership. The public is that ‘small though loud portion of the community, ever governed by factitious influence’: they seem caught in the patterns of convention and stimulation that Wordsworth abhors in the Preface (Selected Prose 413; Lyrical Ballads 248). In contrast, the ‘People’ form a far broader yet far less determinate group: they are the ‘Vox populi which the Deity inspires’ and have knowledge of past, present and future (Selected Prose 413). Here, then, the same notion of a wide and able readership underpins Wordsworth’s work as had underpinned Wollstonecraft’s. Yet while the People provide a sympathetic readership, they have an indefinite, even ghostly presence, offering no immediate challenge to Wordsworth’s sense of himself as original author. Both Wollstonecraft and Wordsworth, then, desire an audience capable of appreciating them. Both see retreat from mainstream society as an important way of generating the original thought to create such an audience, but equally as a potential barrier to communication. Isolation is both desired and abhorred. Reading a woman writer such as Maria Edgeworth in this context reveals similar anxieties concerning the ultimate efficacy of isolation, but in this account the issue 32   William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, eds. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979) Book Eleventh, ll. 59–60.

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of gender is to the fore. For Edgeworth it seemed unlikely that retreat from society would work to produce an original thinker, attractive wife, or good citizen. Born nine years after Mary Wollstonecraft, Edgeworth is seldom seen as quite such a radical figure. In her novels, she shows suspicion of the female radical philosopher – in Belinda (1801), for example, represented by the ultimately unfortunate Harriot Freke, whose shapely legs are spoilt when she is caught in a man-trap. However, she certainly possessed Wollstonecraft’s suspicion of fashion and convention. Like Wollstonecraft, she considered how such intellectual slavishness might be avoided and emphasised the importance of independent thought. As an educational writer, Maria Edgeworth shared with Wollstonecraft and Rousseau awareness of the tension between the role of the pedagogue and the need for the child to develop mental autonomy. S he was, however, very sceptical of the notion that the child might develop autonomous reason in isolation. When, in her novel Belinda, she gives an account of the lonely education of V irginia, she is, as is widely recognised, directly attacking educational theories such as Rousseau’s. After all, she had seen the effects of such theories at firsthand. Her father’s friend, Thomas Day (writer of the educational work Sandford and Merton [1783–89]) had tried a version of Rousseau’s educational experiment for himself, bringing up two sisters with a view to making one of them his wife. The experiment failed when Day became emotionally entangled with another woman. In Edgeworth’s work, her hero, Clarence Hervey, mockingly referred to by Dr. X as ‘a man of universal genius’, is equally unsuccessful in his attempt to create a wife (Belinda 85). C larence’s interest in Rousseau’s S ophie (stimulated by his disgust with pre-Revolutionary Paris) leads him to a course of impractical radical pedagogy. Discovered by C larence in the N ew Forest, his substitute S ophie, Rachel, is renamed ‘V irginia S t. Pierre’, recalling both the heroine in S t. Pierre’s novel Paul and Virginia and the island of Saint Pierre, mentioned by Rousseau during his fifth walk in Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1778) (348). But Virginia (an unspoilt empty land ready for practices of colonization and slavery) remains, perhaps unsurprisingly, naïve in terms of taste. O ffered a choice between diamond earrings and a moss rose, V irginia chooses the latter, showing to Hervey ‘her indifference to objects of show and ornament’: ‘What a difference, thought he, between this child of nature and the frivolous sophisticated slaves of art’ (351). Edgeworth offers a more sceptical commentary: ‘V irginia’s absolute ignorance of the world frequently gave an air of originality to her most trivial observations’ (352). This pleases C larence, as ‘N othing is so tiresome to a man of any taste or abilities, as what everybody knows’ (353). However, Edgeworth points out that the ‘air of originality’ is misleading, drawing a parallel with the book Rousseau recommends for E mile, Robinson Crusoe (1719): Isolated in the world, [Virginia] had no excitements to the love of finery, no competition, no means of comparison, or opportunities of display; diamonds were consequently as useless to her, as guineas were to Robinson C rusoe, on his desert island. It would not justly be said, that he was free from avarice, because he set no value on the gold; or that she was free from vanity, because she rejected the diamonds. (352)

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T he moral and aesthetic economy which operates in isolation is very different from that which pertains in the world. When Wollstonecraft pictures the formation of a female ‘genius’ in Mary, she imagines that the necessary isolation occurs accidentally; further, she consistently directs her pupils to independent thought through reading for themselves. E dgeworth, on the other hand, though suspicious of educators, sees isolation from convention as something far more likely to be linked (perhaps paradoxically) to display: a young woman’s retreat is designed to make her more attractive to the Rousseauian male. Wollstonecraft had imagined that the isolated female genius would have access both to books and to scenery, which would in turn inspire her own artistic endeavours. In contrast, E dgeworth suggests that the isolated female is likely to be brought up by her philosophic male educator in ignorance and without wide-ranging imaginative liberty: Rachel can initially neither read nor write, and both in the glade in the N ew Forest and in the house where C larence places her, her space has strictly defined boundaries. Wollstonecraft thought that in such a situation her heroine would progress spiritually, be indeed, a ‘solitary genius, divinely inspired’; E dgeworth has V irginia experience a fantastic attachment to the first picture of a man she sees. The sexualised sensibility Wollstonecraft had feared comes to dominate V irginia’s imagination and disorder her mind. T here will be no private language, no imaginative renaming of the landscape for the isolated woman. Rather, such a woman runs the risk of being renamed by the ‘impassioned fancy’, of being the colonised instead of the coloniser. E dgeworth’s Belinda, with its extensive exploration of mental autonomy, exhibits a number of preoccupations typical of fiction of the period (and closely linked with Romantic anxieties concerning original thought). First, and perhaps most obviously, in E dgeworth’s narrative, the ‘air of originality’ is connected with anxiety concerning female chastity (S ir Philip Badley spreads the rumour that Virginia is Clarence’s mistress). Like Edgeworth, and indeed like Wollstonecraft herself in Mary, novel writers of this period often explored (female) mental independence in relation to sexual choice (inside or outside marriage). Ann Close, for example, notes a group of novels ‘published in the 1790s that attempted to emancipate their heroines from the destruction of gender ideology that equated chastity with narrative worthiness’; these include Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy (1796), C harlotte S mith’s Desmond (1792), Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman (1798), and E lizabeth Hay’s Victim of Prejudice (1799).33 While radical writers supported the mental independence necessary to make (sometimes unconventional) sexual choices, those who were more doubtful equated such autonomy with dangerous revolutionary philosophy. T his is to some extent the case in A melia O pie’s Adeline Mowbray (1805) as well as in the work of conservative writer and moralist Hannah More. When More comments on the ‘liberty’ depicted in the novels that follow Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), for example, she finds that ‘the virtues 33 Anne Close, ‘Into the Public: The Sexual Heroine in Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy and Mary Robinson’s The Natural Daughter’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 17 (2004): 35–52, 39.

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they exhibit are almost more dangerous than the vices’; 34 much of her concern about such ‘vice’ is hung upon the peg of chastity. In her narrative, there is little difference between libertarian and libertine, between independent thought and loose living. S econd, for E dgeworth as for Wollstonecraft and Wordsworth, spatial metaphors and positioning are important when considering mental independence. In Belinda neither the New Forest nor Virginia’s sheltered home with Mrs Ormond can compete with the advantages of the Delacours’ position in the heart of L ondon society. Indeed (arguably in response to the narratives of femininity proposed by Wollstonecraft and Rousseau), the argument that retreat from the world does not provide any protection from fashionable convention frequently reoccurs in novels of this period. In Desmond (1792) Charlotte Smith, for example, is careful to suggest that women who live a sheltered existence do not escape the dangers of the fashionable economy.35 Desmond’s adviser, Mr Bethel, insists ‘that ignorance and simplicity’ are no safeguard of domestic life, a sentiment learnt as a result of bitter experience (60). Having been brought up in an ‘obscure village’ in Wales, on her entry into London life, Louisa is ‘dazzled and intoxicated’, becoming ‘fine lady eager for admiration’ before leaving her husband ‘under the protection’ of another man (62, 64–5). Yet again, isolated sensibility and simplicity are seen to fail as a guard against fashion. T he rural retreat, the precivilised language gained by looking at the mighty forms of nature, are, for Smith as well as for the secularly orientated E dgeworth, inadequate. T hey are discussed and ultimately found lacking; instead, as will be seen in Chapters 3 and 4, the words of men in society, along with an understanding of economic systems, are important when it comes to developing accurate taste. Edgeworth in particular rejects such isolated retreat from society as a fantasy. In this insight she is echoed by Jane Austen (who also provides some of the period’s most sophisticated spatial metaphors when considering ‘solitary female walking’) (A usten, Novels 4: 18). The issue of women’s mental independence was clearly an enduring one for A usten, as the sexual choices faced by A nne in the 1818 novel Persuasion suggest. Significantly, the novel’s only use of the word original comes when Captain Wentworth, walking with Louisa, suggests the need for women to be independently minded, unswayed by advice in matters of sexual choice. His rather outré example (suggesting perhaps the associative disturbance in his mind) is of a hazelnut, ‘a beautiful glossy nut, which blessed with original strength, has outlived all the storms of autumn’ (A usten, Novels 5: 88). Although the word is not connected in any way with creativity here, the suggestion is still of retaining integrity in the face of convention and prejudice.   Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern Female System of Education (1799), Women Critics 1660–1880: An Anthology, ed. Folger C ollective on Women C ritics (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995), pp. 204–206. 35 C harlotte S mith, Desmond, ed. Antje Blank and Janet Todd (Peterborough, ON: Broadview P, 2001). 34

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In Persuasion Anne’s initial decision to reject Captain Wentworth, on Lady Russell’s advice, is shown to have been largely mistaken: the suggestion seems to be, where marriage is concerned, women should think carefully about outside pressures placed on them. But it is in Mansfield Park (1814), the most theatrical of A usten’s novels, that she explores the inescapability of such pressures, the unavoidability of audience. In a visit to S otherton, A usten suggests the sense of claustrophobia felt by Maria at her lot. Here while Mr. Rushworth ‘scarcely risked’ an original thought’, the more dominant Maria wishes to go through an ‘iron gate’ into the park so that ‘their views and their plans might be more comprehensive’ (Novels 3: 97). While Mr Rushworth’s lack of original thought is unappealing, Maria’s desire for freedom is dangerous. But it is also understandable given the constrictions on female walking, experienced particularly by the novel’s heroine, Fanny. In this context, the full unconventionality of Wollstonecraft’s solitary morning strolls and bold aesthetic judgements becomes evident. Fanny’s walk is in the protective environment of the park, in daytime and on gravel at the advice of S ir T homas, who recommends it ‘as the dryest place’ (Novels 3: 323). Furthermore, it is a walk taken for health and refreshment rather than for any more esoteric purpose – and the result of such startling independence? Mrs Norris finds leisure to comment: Fanny likes to go her own way to work, she does not like to be dictated to; she takes her own independent walk whenever she can; she certainly has a little spirit of secrecy, and independence, and nonsense, about her, which I would advise her to get the better of … . (Novels 3: 323)

One of the key points here is the difficulty of escaping an audience, an ongoing theme throughout the novel. In Belinda E dgeworth had emphasised the theatricality of the final scene by having Lady Delacour arrange the ‘actors’ in a tableau; the novel reader is made aware of both of the artificial nature of the product and of his own voyeuristic relationship to it. T he play in Mansfield Park, however, more plainly suggests how careful a woman must be in relation to her handling of such spectators. Maria’s desire to play a central role foreshadows her eventual sexual downfall. If A nne’s and Fanny’s experiences suggest that women should not be too far swayed by the social audience, Maria’s experience heavily underlines this message, making the (actually Wollstonecraftian) point that display is dangerous. N onetheless, A usten is careful to underline that some awareness of audience is necessary for a woman: unlike Wollstonecraft in her solitary rambles, in this novel there is no desirable place of complete isolation. Maria and Henry, tempted to indiscretion in the very relative seclusion of Richmond, find themselves threatened by the maidservant of Mrs Rushworth. And the eventual result, for Maria, is a far from pleasant kind of virtual isolation, the isolation of ostracism, shared only with Mrs Norris. In short, there is no idyllic space without audience, and the independent woman thinker must take its presence carefully into account. Having explored Wollstonecraft’s thought on aesthetics, it becomes much more evident that the debate about women’s independence (sexual or otherwise)

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in the novels of this period is closely linked to the Romantic interest in originality. Women, Wollstonecraft’s analysis suggests, are not marginal to a discourse of original thought; rather, their position in Rousseau’s narrative of corruption as ‘civilised selfhood incarnate’ makes their conversion to a different mode of thought all the more pressing. S tatesmen, clergy, and soldiers are, in her account, all liable to the same mental flaws, but it is in her educational work for women that Wollstonecraft proposes we could counter the blanket feminisation of social corruption by developing original thought. Stimulated by firsthand observation of nature and cultural products, original thought is developed through artistic practice. For Wollstonecraft, then, a truly healthy society requires its citizens to have creative independence. However, this narrative produces a number of tensions, for creative artists in general and for the autonomous female in particular. In Table-Talk (1822) Hazlitt writes: ‘Genius or originality is, for the most part, some strong quality in the mind, answering to and bringing out some new and striking quality in nature’.36 Hazlitt’s context of serious artistic creativity seems at some distance from E dgeworth’s remarks on Virginia’s dubious ‘air of originality’. Yet both writers desire some distance from convention, some mental independence that would allow the individual to see and interpret in a creative yet accurate way. A s Wordsworth and Wollstonecraft experience, and Hazlitt suggests, such independence generates a peculiar difficulty for both artists and autonomous female thinkers. Both groups must be able to communicate in an accurate and understandable way with their audience or (as E dgeworth and those who respond to Wollstonecraft are only too well aware) face ostracism. The early eighteenth century had positioned the imagination as akin to madness, and while the Romantic period is often seen as a time when the faculty is reclaimed, suspicions evidently linger. E dgeworth’s V irginia, with her naïve imaginative and emotional attachment to a picture; Austen’s Maria, carried away by her role in Lovers’ Vows (1798); the (sexualized) sentiment experienced by Wollstonecraft’s original heroines and narrators; even (with slightly different emphasis) Wordsworth’s worries about the excessive stimulation experienced by his contemporaries: all suggest unease over the power of the imaginative experience. When the excitement of the aesthetic is experienced, it seems that detachment is necessary but elusive.

William Hazlitt, Table-Talk: Or, Original Essays, 2 vols (London: Warren, 1821), 1: 93.

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C hapter 3

Disinterest, E conomics, and the T asteful S pectator Late eighteenth-century Britain was marked by a particularly acute fear about the excessive power of feeling. Worry about the overstimulation of sensibility, an overstimulation linked both with a wandering imagination and with ultimate enervation, was felt across the political spectrum. A s Immanuel Kant put it, while praising the ‘disinterested sympathy’ felt on behalf of the French Revolutionaries, ‘this revolution has aroused in the hearts and desires of all spectators who are not themselves caught up in it a sympathy which borders almost on enthusiasm, although the very utterance of this sympathy was fraught with danger.’ In other words, there was potentially considerable slippage between spectator and participant; Kant suggested that even when men embrace ‘the cause of goodness’, they may do so out of ‘blameworthy’ ‘passion’ (183). Radical sympathy was not, however, the only problem. A less honourable form of emotional slippage was particularly remarked in environments where fashion and luxury predominated. Mary Brunton’s heroine, Ellen Percy, for example, leads a fashionable existence, in which she is frequently put on display. In line with Wollstonecraft’s thought, this distorts the individual’s powers of observation. A t an auction, E llen, the central character of Discipline (1815), has sufficient detachment to sketch the event but is quickly converted ‘from an amused spectator of the scene’ into ‘a keen actor’. Her defective education has left her unable to maintain her independence, either morally or financially. Therefore, although she does not have enough money, she bids for: a tortoiseshell dressing-box, magnificently inlaid with gold. Art had exhausted it self in the elegance of the pattern and the delicacy of the workmanship. It was every way calculated to arrest the regards of fine ladies; for, like them, it was useless and expensive in proportion to its finery. (75)

Competition causes Ellen to pay far more than this ‘useless’ object is worth, and in borrowing the money to honour her debt, she compromises her reputation. In this narrative, fashion generates excessive emotion that proves sexually dangerous. A s well as including the familiar tropes of enervation and effeminacy, Brunton Immanuel Kant, ‘T he C ontest of Faculties in Immanuel Kant’, in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991), pp. 176–90, 182.  Mary Brunton, Discipline (1815), intro. Fay Weldon, Mothers of the Novel (L ondon: Pandora P, 1986), p. 75. 

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indicates the danger the falsely inflated values of fashion represent to the country’s economy at large. T he auction Brunton’s heroine attends parallels her father’s business collapse. Mr Percy ultimately invests as unwisely as his daughter, and, because his emotions fluctuate with his profits, he commits suicide. Even his plebeian homeliness is not enough to protect him from the dangerous narratives of excess generated by the variables of the supply and demand economy. Brunton also gestures to the substantial economic pain of those at the other end of the process. Fashionable E llen is too frivolous to care about the wrongs of the slave trade that her worthy suitor, Mr Maitland, campaigns against. As a result, he rejects her. Ellen, raised as an object for display, cannot maintain a detached, disinterested gaze but is continually drawn in to the scenes before her. Fashionable life is particularly dangerous to those who cannot see clearly. T he discourse of taste seemed to offer some hope of controlling such emotional and imaginative excess. E ighteenth-century Britain had seen a growing interest in what would come to be called aesthetic disinterestedness, a notion that might seem to offer the tasteful sympathetic spectator some insulation against the fashionable economy. Yet the early British formulations of disinterestedness in S haftesbury, A ddison, and Hume, subsequently adapted in the discourse of art criticism, did not sufficiently distance the spectator from material (and sexual) concerns; his sympathy remained inflected by self. This chapter argues that these problems with the notion of the emotionally engaged spectator led not only to the Romantic suspicion of getting and spending, but ultimately to the promotion of art as way of enhancing economic knowledge. Particularly in the last 25 years, sympathy and the novel of sentiment have received a significant amount of attention, and, partly as a result, there has been increased interest in the formulation of the gaze. However, little attention has been paid to the way in which tensions between sympathy and disinterestedness inherent in the discourses of philosophy and art criticism were interrogated in the fiction of the 1790s. T hese discourses suggested that instinctive sensibility was inadequate as a safeguard of the tasteful and morally accurate gaze; a greater sense of perspective was needed to ensure that the spectator’s emotional response was correct. A lthough often seen as emotionally and visually excessive, Gothic  For discussions of sensibility, see Birkhead, R.F. Brissenden, and Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction. For an overview, see my chapter, ‘“Inconsistent rhapsodies”: S amuel Richardson and the Politics of Romance’, A Companion to Romance, ed. C orinne Saunders (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 269–86.  S ee, for example, L aura Hinton, The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy: Sadomasochistic Sentiments from Clarissa to Rescue 911 (Albany: State of New York P, 1999), for a construction of sympathy in relation to scopophilic practices; and Gillen D’A rcy Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture 1760–1860 (New York: Palgrave, 2001).  Pertinent work in this area includes Stephen Bruhm’s Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction (Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania P, 1994); and Robert Miles, ‘T he E ye of Power: Ideal Presence and Gothic Romance’, Gothic Studies 1 (1999): 10–30.

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fiction explored this tension between sympathy and visuality. For Ann Radcliffe, perspective was encouraged by examination of the landscape: sensitivity to nature developed knowledge of the world. Other writers influenced by the Gothic, such as Eliza Fenwick and Charlotte Smith, extended this emphasis of knowledge of the world to include awareness of economic suffering. In their writing, Gothic fiction is moderated – the emphasis is on a ‘real’ Gothic at home. With this shift comes the demand for another type of perspective. For economically aware writers like Smith and Priscilla Wakefield, the prospect view is not enough. The more detailed knowledge of nature as ‘oeconomist’, given by botany and the examination of microscopic detail, is also necessary. In the writing of Smith and Wakefield, the tasteful or accurate spectator has his sensibility properly directed by awareness of a number of perspectives. A nd while an emphasis on disinterestedness in the discourses of philosophy and art criticism is often coupled with a tendency to ignore economic suffering, the disinterested observer imagined by S mith and Wakefield is able to see and understand it quite clearly. What inevitably comes out of this insistence on economics, however, is the knowledge that the work of art itself is implicated in this system of supply and demand. Eliza Fenwick, Charlotte Smith, and Priscilla Wakefield all wrote for financial gain and suggested to others that they might use their talents in the same way; indeed, it is common knowledge that Charlotte Smith used her financial need as a strategy to legitimise her publications. Yet this strategy can be seen as dangerous because, since the Renaissance, artists had been trying to gain prestige by denying the commercial and craft associations of their products. A nd, A ndrew Bennett suggests, this is particularly the case for the major Romantic poets: ‘Romanticism develops a theory of writing and reception which stresses the importance … of the work of art as an expression of self uncontaminated by market forces, undiluted by appeals to the corrupt prejudices and desires of (bourgeois, contaminating, fallible, feminine, temporal, mortal) readers’. Positioned this way, art is a protection from the commercial realm, and the artist an original thinker whose unique subjectivity appeals to the future. Further, Kant’s later formulation of a more extreme form of aesthetic disinterestedness also militated against a consumerist approach to art. For Kant, the very existence of the aesthetic object had to be matter of indifference to the spectator: ‘the judgement of taste is simply contemplative, i.e. it is a judgement which is indifferent as to the existence of an object’. N ot only was Priscilla Wakefield, An Introduction to Botany in a Series of Familiar Letters, with Illustrative Engravings (Dublin: Burnside, 1796), p. 4.  A ndrew Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (C ambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), p. 3.  Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), pp. 48, 1. 1. 5. Note Coleridge’s remark in Chapter 22 of the Biographia Literaria concerning ‘the negative faith, which simply permits the images presented to work by their own force, without either denial or affirmation of their real existence by the judgement’. See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. H.J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1952), p. 396. 

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this account of disinterestedness highly influential on subsequent developments in aesthetics, but also Bourdieu suggests that, from Kant on, disinterestedness becomes a device to separate supposedly more prestigious cultural products from popular entertainment. Given this, the Gothic and revolutionary novels and the educational work of the 1790s that focus on the importance of material relations in the production and consumption of art are likely to be interpreted as of low status: their position on taste is insufficiently near to Kant’s formulation; and their insistence on the economic motivation driving artistic production in one sense appears to ally them with less prestigious cultural products. Yet this refusal to erase the economic narrative can be repositioned as an essentially humane reply to weaknesses in the eighteenth-century discourse of disinterestedness. Furthermore, in its insistence on economic knowledge, this stance also has a close relation to the realism that would come to dominate the nineteenth-century novel. * T he roots of the eighteenth-century interest in both sensibility and disinterestedness can be traced to S haftesbury’s Characteristics (1711). Shaftesbury responded to the notion of prayer as egotism by positing that disinterestedness was necessary for true virtue If a man only prays because of fear of divine punishment or hope of reward, he is not truly virtuous. However, as Jerome Stolnitz notes, Shaftesbury ‘does not identify moral rightness with benevolence. E thics is not a question of consequences’.10 In S tolnitz’s interpretation, moral existence is ‘far less a matter of choosing and executing one’s decision, than of “liking” or “loving” the “view or contemplation” … of virtue’ (133). In short, the disinterested spectator is one who enjoys looking at the beauty of virtue rather than one who necessarily does good deeds. Similarly linked to the gaze, Shaftesbury’s concept of sympathy is equally problematic. He compares sympathy to a sense, something felt automatically, remaining uncoloured by one’s personal situation. O nce we have gained the ability to generalise: THE MIND, which is Spectator or Auditor of other Minds, cannot be without its Eye and Ear; so as to discern Proportion, distinguish S ound, and scan each S entiment or T hought … N or can it with-hold its Admiration and Extasy, its Aversion and Scorn, any more in what relates to one than to the other of these Subjects.11 

The difficulty of policing this boundary between high and low culture is suggested by Giorgio A gamben 13–27. 10 See Jerome G. Stolnitz, ‘On the Origins of Aesthetic Disinterestedness’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20 (1961/62): 131–43, in particular 133. 11 A nthony A shley C ooper, 3rd E arl of S haftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), ed. Philip Ayres, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1999) 1: 203; I. iii. 6–9, 13–15.

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S ympathy, then, ensures an involuntary moral reaction that exists independently of personal interest. In particular, the spectator can read passion as a sign of moral status. However, this description of the way in which we make moral judgements contains a weakness. In writing that the ‘Spectator’ of ‘other Minds, cannot be without its Eye and Ear’, S haftesbury was disingenuous. A ctions can be directly observed, but internal motivation cannot. T he possession of disinterested sensibility might prove hard to gauge and, from the start, these difficulties are connected with the problematic act of ‘S pectator[ship]’. Although David Hume at first adopted an even more radical reliance on sympathy, he became uneasy with the degree of engagement required from the viewer. Increasingly, he believed that such engagement should be moderated by removing painful scenes of economic suffering. C ommenting on the ‘nature and force of sympathy’ in the Treatise (1739) he initially seems comfortable in suggesting that an object’s utility or beauty is important in so far as it produces sympathy: the object, which is denominated beautiful, pleases only by its tendency to produce a certain effect. T hat effect is the pleasure or advantage of some other person. N ow the pleasure of a stranger, for whom we have no friendship, pleases us only by sympathy. T o this principle, therefore, is owing the beauty, which we find in everything that is useful.12

Hume is confident enough here to let his argument rest on the concept of disinterested sympathy; our reactions to a stranger show that an object’s direct utility to ourselves is not what makes it attractive. To this extent, the judgement of beauty implies some moral integrity on the part of the viewers, and Hume’s use of this first person plural implicates us in this. However, given this ethical dimension, the viewer’s passivity in this account is disturbing. Placing the audience in a position of inevitable approval, Hume omits a more active alternative in which, by contrast, seeing an object’s lack of utility, the spectators aid the stranger. Finally, Hume connects the process with ownership: Wherever an object has a tendency to produce pleasure in the possessor, or in other words, is the proper cause of pleasure, it is sure to please the spectator, by a delicate sympathy with the possessor. (Treatise 577; III . III. I)

Here, disinterested sensibility is strongly linked to material wealth and thus lacks moral robustness. In subsequent works, Hume’s doubts about the social effectiveness of disinterested sensibility, latent in the Treatise, became more obvious. T his is evident in An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) where Hume opens by arguing that morals are judged in terms of both sentiment (an 12 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), ed. with an analytical index by L A. Selby-Bigge (1888) (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1968), p. 576; III. III. I.

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instinctive reaction rather like that outlined by Shaftesbury) and reason. The role of sympathy, however, is reduced in favour of justice, a virtue apparently only produced by social contingency.13 Instead, in this work, as John Mullan has pointed out, Hume saves his comments on disinterested sympathy for the theatre and pastoral poetry.14 In this context, the audience shares the emotion produced by the spectacle, but the call for any socially ameliorative action is absent. Further removing the possibility of response to economic distress, Hume argues that, in the case of pastoral poetry, ‘images of a gentle and tender tranquillity’ should be communicated to the reader and to replace these with the ‘idea of toil, labour, and danger suffered by a fisherman’ is an error (Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability 40). Hume’s judgment here is consistent with the suggestion in his work that reason is achieved only momentarily and through struggle. Frequently, the mind is passively subject to sense impressions, and this passage implies that for Hume this is the preferable state with regard to the contemplation of art. In this naïve (but extremely influential) account of art as straightforwardly representational, Hume rejects images of suffering because they prevent the relaxed flow of sense impressions through the mind. In literature, images of suffering evoke a pain that is in danger of becoming too unpleasant. Present from the first attempts to connect disinterestedness to art, this problem with the act of viewing is also evident in the discourse of the liberal arts. Here practitioners often had a vested social interest in separating themselves from artisans and craftsmen. In order to claim a more secure social status, they frequently drew on neoclassical aesthetics, particularly in terms of the notion of disinterestedness. This often led to them eliding the economic consequences of their art. Sir Joshua Reynolds provides a telling example in his Discourses on Art, delivered from 1769 to 1790, of how disinterestedness could be exploited to facilitate the middle orders’ access to taste. As a portrait painter, he might be perceived to be of lower rank than his subjects, with whom he comes into intimate contact. To protect himself from the charge of being a tradesman, Reynolds emphasises the role disinterested spectatorship plays for the artist:15 when society is divided into different ranks, and some are appointed to labour for the support of others, those whom their superiority sets free from labour, begin to look for intellectual entertainments. Thus, whilst the shepherds were attending their flocks, their masters made the first astronomical observations; so musick is said to have had its origin from a man at leisure listening to the strokes of a hammer.16 David Hume, An Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. T om L . Beauchamp (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1998), p. 14. 14 John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability; The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (1988; Oxford: Clarendon P, 1990), p. 36. 15 See John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting 1–68. His second chapter deals with Reynolds (69–162). For a counterargument, see Ronald Paulson, The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange: Aesthetics and Heterodoxy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996). 16 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art (1797), ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1997), p. 70. 13

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Reynolds’s two examples are cunningly arranged to suggest that artist and audience are from the same social rank. In the first example, his star-gazing masters participate in an activity which requires them to observe and calculate at the same time; they are both audience and originators. In his second example, which has an explicitly aesthetic context, Reynolds is careful to establish, albeit obliquely, the same relationship. T he audience, ‘the man at leisure’ is, on close examination, also the creator of the music. When the labourer makes the blows of the hammer, they are merely sounds; it is the listener’s perceptions that transform them. T he artist and audience must come from the same class, that which is leisured, powerful, or, at the very least, expensively educated. O thers are excluded from it, fated to produce the blows of the hammer without having the ability or opportunity to generalise from them. A t this point, the struggle to achieve a disinterested and universalising perspective leads Reynolds and his spectator to ignore the potential discomfort or distress of the labourer. A similar distortion of the economics involved in the production of art is present in the highly conventional Dissertation on the Progress of the Fine Arts (1800).17 John Robert Scott argues that the artist himself is drawn to the activity because ‘there always were some to whom labour had no charms’ (Dissertation 131). E conomic suffering, whether of artist or society, is omitted, and with it vanishes the moral role of spectatorship. Indeed, in another piece which he published with the Dissertation, ‘An Essay on the Influence of Taste on Morals’, Scott denies any connection between art and morality.18 There is, then, a significant slippage between the disinterested sympathy of S haftesbury (an instinctive reaction enabling moral judgment) and the strategic manipulation of the notion of disinterestedness in this discourse. Here it is used to disguise the economic function of art to establish the practitioner’s universalising perspective. Scott and Reynolds take to a high point some of the difficulties with disinterested sympathy latent in Hume. In each case, there is a danger of inactivity in the face of distress; in each case, suffering is in danger either of becoming the sport of voyeurs or of simply being ignored, too painful to contemplate. If Shaftesbury’s work on disinterest places emphasis on the moral individual as spectator rather than benefactor, for Hume and A ddison the ethical roots of disinterest are further elided. T rue, both writers suggest that the spectator should not be interested in a way that would benefit him – specifically, that he should not desire possession of the beauty he sees before him. However, poverty and 17 John Robert Scott, Dissertation on the Progress of the Fine Arts (1800), ed. Roy Harvey Pearce, Augustan Reprint Society 45 (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1954), p. 130. 18 In his Introduction to S cott’s Dissertation Pearce notes that a similar stance was taken 14 years later by William Hazlitt in his ‘Why the Arts are not Progressive’, which for Scott suggests a weakening of the link between art and morality in romantic aesthetics due to this strand in the discourse of civic humanism; I would suggest the issue is rather more unsettled (v).

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a lack of utility have vanished from the experience. Specifically, these accounts do not suggest what might happen when the disinterested spectator views more distressing scenes. Indeed, Hume makes the suggestion that such scenes should not be included. T he call for moral action is minimized; the spectator remains always just that. And in the discourse of art criticism, the artist’s lack of personal interest serves to maintain his distance from both his employers and the labouring poor. T he notion of disinterestedness, then, becomes connected with unease about the viewer’s emotional and moral involvement. A nd similar anxieties were developing in relation to sympathy. S haftesbury’s belief that sympathy would provide the spectator with a reliable mode of interpretation seemed hard to accept, while the moral effects of such emotion also seemed problematic. In one of the most famous critiques of sensibility, The Man of Feeling (1771), for example, the Scottish novelist Henry Mackenzie depicted a hero who is stirred by sensibility but who is nonetheless unable to take further effective moral action. A nd the mixed effects of sympathy were even more evident in L aurence S terne’s Sentimental Journey (1768), where the narrator’s sensibility is as likely to produce a libidinous response as a moral one. Significantly, however, in his later novel, Julia de Roubigné (1774), Mackenzie suggests that sensibility alone might not be enough to facilitate change. Working for his uncle on Martinique, Mackenzie’s hero Savillon is shocked by the hardships of the African slaves but is fortunate enough to find a way of both assuaging his sensibility and improving profit. Having ameliorated the conditions of a particular group of slaves, he reflects: ‘In the list of slaves belonging to a wealthy planter, it would astonish you to see the number unfit for service, pining under disease, a burden on their master. – I am talking only as a merchant: but as a man – Good heavens! when I think of the many thousands of my fellow-creatures groaning under servitude and misery!’19 As Susan Manning notes, Mackenzie’s abolitionist views were ‘far ahead of general opinion’ (Mackenzie, Julia 97). Yet, crucially, in this early antislavery discourse, Mackenzie suggests that the sympathetic spectator may have to understand other dominant discourses, other perspectives (particularly in relation to economics) in order to act effectively. As Mackenzie’s anti-abolitionist narrative suggests, it was sometimes inadequate for the artist or observer to avoid the spectacle of suffering. A nd not only the sentimental novel, but also the Gothic was predicated on an engagement with extreme emotion. Indeed, in her criticism of Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764), Reeve captures what would become two of the Gothic’s most significant features: its insistence on emotional excess and its preoccupation with the visual. For Reeve, these features led, at least in Walpole’s narrative, to what Reeve, in painterly metaphor, called a lack of ‘keeping’ (OEB 5). The emotions aroused by the Gothic, Reeve suggested, could lead to a lack of perspective (a fault 19 Henry Mackenzie, Julia de Roubigné, ed. Susan Manning (East Linton: Tuckwell P, 1999), p. 101.

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she was confident she could correct). As a genre that evoked emotional excess, the Gothic, then, was in fact an ideal place for an exploration of the tensions between visuality and sympathy. Rebuilding the ethical role of aesthetic judgement ultimately elided by manipulation of the civic humanist discourse in art criticism and philosophy, many writers’ explorations of sentiment were accompanied by an insistence on the economic and social consequences of the gaze. A nn Radcliffe’s initial speculations on the possibility of maintaining distance in the face of experience, for example, quickly gain an economic dimension: the desire for wealth and power associated with urban or fashionable life is seen to undermine visual disinterestedness. The alternative, a gaze cultivated in rural seclusion, was to become a significant Romantic trope. Yet, for this Gothic writer, the need for a proper perspective on landscape is accompanied by an insistence on knowledge of the world. Ann Radcliffe’s first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), for example, outlines three stages in the development of the spectator. O pening with the slaying of the ‘noble E arl of A thlin’, Radcliffe abruptly shifts from a description of clan warfare to aesthetic apostrophe: When we first enter on the theatre of the world, and begin to notice that objects that surround us, young imagination heightens at every scene … We are fixed with indignation at the recital of an act of injustice, and at the unfeeling vices of which we are told. At a tale of distress our tears flow a full tribute to pity … As we advance in life, imagination is compelled to relinquish a part of her sweet delirium … . 20

In this account both the new E arl and her ideal, if youthful, reader should be moved by distress yet distanced from it: drawing attention to the way information is received (as ‘theatre’, a ‘tale’ or ‘recital’), Radcliffe positions Osbert as an admittedly naïve spectator, but one who displays signs of the neoclassical detachment that she associates with power. He reacts to suffering as he would to a piece of art, and the result is a disinterested sympathy that compels moral action. In some ways, O sbert is reminiscent of a S haftesburian observer, the descendent of Hartley in MacKenzie’s Man of Feeling. He possesses the ability to respond immediately and instinctively to scenes of distress; he has an innate moral sense that reacts without the need for reflection. In the culture of sensibility, this would mark Osbert as an aristocrat with a finely organised nervous constitution. For Radcliffe, however, it is also a sign of his youth and inexperience. C ertain forms of disinterested sensibility are too liable to produce unwise enthusiasm. At the end of the passage Radcliffe strikes a different note: violent reaction to tales of oppression seems appropriate to youth, but mature observers react more cautiously because their moral view is more complicated:

20 A nn Radcliffe, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1798) (S troud: S utton, 1994), p. 2.

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Revolutions in Taste, 1773–1818 We are led reluctantly to truth through the paths of experience; and objects of our fond attention are viewed with a severer eye. Here an altered scene appears; – frowns where late were smiles; deep shades where late was sunshine … . We turn indignant from a prospect so miserable, and court again the sweet illusions of our early days; but, ah! they are fled forever! (2)

‘T ruth’, ‘experience’, ‘severer eye’ – this is the language of observation. Radcliffe’s mature spectator is an empiricist. As the travel metaphor (‘path’) indicates, experience gives him a new ability to judge. Journeying through a landscape of scenes and prospects, he gains knowledge of the world and scrutinises it critically. Aesthetic and moral experience are closely linked. This well-travelled spectator still has the desire to detect moral purity but is doubtful that he will find it. The growth to maturity is inevitable and melancholy, but perhaps this wiser form of spectatorship is the best we can hope for. T here is, however, a third, less attractive mode of vision. T he mature spectator’s sense of moral chiaroscuro may tip him into cynicism: ‘The fine touch of moral susceptibility, by frequent irritation, becomes callous; and too frequently we mingle with the world, till we are added to the number of its votaries’ (Radcliffe, Castles 2). This, it becomes clear later in her work, is the contamination of fashion and convention. T hese erode our nervous capacity to respond to distress and disinterestedness. Like Ellen in Discipline, abnormal stimulation unfits us for domestic life, and no longer detached but seeking unnatural excitement, we become part of the picture we formerly observed. Radcliffe develops this argument further in later writings, including The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). There she also offers three modes of viewing. In the early stages of the narrative, Emily and Valancourt, like Osbert, are innocent spectators, partially protected by S t. A ubert, who has encountered, then retreated from, Parisian life. In this stage, like Osbert, Emily and Valancourt are impulsively moved by sentiment. T hey display the instinctive moral sensibility praised by S haftesbury. However, despite its attractiveness, this automatic response to visual stimuli can lead to imprudence. Journeying with Emily and her father, for example, V alancourt encounters a family who have lost their ‘little all’. ‘T he innocent countenance of the woman, and the simplicity of her manner in relating her grievance’ form the visual and aesthetic stimuli that prompt V alancourt’s generosity: ‘This sum then,’ said he to himself, ‘would make this poor family completely happy – it is in my power to give it – to make them completely happy! But what is to become of me? – how shall I contrive to reach home with the little money that will remain?’ (52)

N evertheless, V alancourt ‘threw down all the money he had, except a very few louis’ and is then more able than ever to appreciate the ‘enchanting scenery around him’ (52–3). Valancourt’s action is, St. Aubert notes, benevolent. However, it is also impetuous and to some degree imprudent, flaws that will put him in grave danger when he comes to Paris. A s S t. A ubert, warning E mily against the danger of

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indulging in too much sensibility, remarks, happiness ‘can no more exist in a heart, that is continually alive to minute circumstances, than in one that is dead to feeling’ (80). The spectator should refrain from too much emotion, from enthusiasm. T he next mode of spectatorship Radcliffe explores is found in the display of Paris life and corresponds to the overly cynical ‘votary’ of the world described in The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne. Particularly corrupting is an emphasis on ‘splendour’, seen at the house of the bourgeois Madame Cheron.21 T here, E mily notes that the appearance of good humour and knowledge in society in fact consists of ‘display’, ‘imposture’ and, in the worst cases, ‘over-acting’: the immoderate and feverish animation, usually exhibited in large parties, results partly from an insensibility to the cares, which benevolence must sometimes derive from the sufferings of others, and partly from a desire to display the appearance of that prosperity, which they know will command submission and attention to themselves. (122–3)

T hese spectators watch each other only in order to gain some advantage. A bad audience, the Parisians are constantly trying to attract attention to themselves. T he emotional cost of this preoccupation with display is made painfully evident to Emily through the capricious behaviour of Madame Cheron. Attracted by the ‘splendour’ of Madame Clairval’s ‘festivities’ and wishing to become her friend, Madame Cheron agrees that Emily may marry her nephew, Valancourt, only to change her mind on equally selfish grounds (130). This is a Mandevillian visuality based primarily on the desire for power, in which the participant is only restrained by appearance. In such preoccupations, these individuals lose the opportunity to feel genuine sympathy. N ervous sensibility to genuine suffering is worn away. T he resultant languor means such individuals need ever greater emotional stimulation. T his, in turn, leads the ‘indulgence of the passions’, and, according to A gnes, ‘their force is uncontrollable – they lead us we know not whither – they lead us perhaps to the commission of crimes, for which, whole years of prayer and penitence cannot atone’ (646). Instead, Radcliffe proposes an alternative kind of gaze, approximating to the chiaroscuro seen by her mature observer in The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne. For E mily, the mature gaze is established through the examination of nature, which frequently exalts the spectator and calms her, providing a sense of ‘perspective’ or detachment from her own troubles (191). When Montoni is trying to force Emily to marry Count Morano, for instance: The charming scenery soon withdrew Emily’s thoughts from painful subjects … . E mily often lingered behind the party, to contemplate the distant landscape, that closed a vista, or that gleamed beneath the dark foliage of the foreground; – the spiral summits of the mountains, touched with a purple tint, broken and 21 A nn Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), intro. Bonamy Dobrée (1966) (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970), p. 118.

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As when, looking over the Adriatic she feels ‘that pensive luxury which is felt on viewing the scenes of ancient story’, the ruins included in the landscape provide a temporal perspective on E mily’s position; similarly, the sublime nature of the mountains gives a sense of spatial perspective (206). Elsewhere, natural scenery frequently compels Emily to think of more personal memories, ‘the sweet illusions of our early days’ mentioned by Radcliffe as part of the process by which the spectator matures. However, the nostalgia and perspective of a more general kind found in this episode support E mily’s ‘mild dignity’ and encourage ‘the strength of fortitude’ (213). Viewing landscape is connected both with sympathy and with self-control. Further, these developing facets of E mily’s character, encouraged and articulated through surrounding scenery, are linked to her increasingly complex experiences of mankind. Emily’s knowledge of different varieties of landscape, of perspective, of light and shade, implies her increasing knowledge of human nature. In gazing upon a variety of landscapes, she is being ‘led reluctantly to truth through the paths of experience.’ Although Radcliffe takes every opportunity to reinforce this morality of the gaze, there is very little character development in her novel. N onetheless, Radcliffe is clear about the benefits of the behaviour she has recommended. When V alancourt returns, unharmed from Paris, for example, the C ount de V illefort ‘was confirmed in his belief of all he had hoped … while he perceived so many noble virtues in V alancourt, and that experience had taught him to detest the follies, which before he had only not admired’ (669). Valancourt’s youthful sensibility has been enhanced by knowledge of the world. He has gained experience and been able to use it wisely. His moral responses will now stem not only from innate, unreflecting emotion but from rational consideration. As a result of acting in the manner Radcliffe considers virtuous, both hero and heroine are rewarded: O! how joyful it is to tell of happiness, such as that of Valancourt and Emily; to relate, that … they were, at length, restored to each other to the beloved landscapes of their native country, to the securest felicity of this life, that of aspiring to moral and labouring for intellectual improvement to the pleasures of enlightened society, and to the exercise of the benevolence, which had always animated their hearts; while the bowers of L a V allee became, once more, the retreat of goodness, wisdom and domestic blessedness! (672)

The benefit of cultivating a more self-controlled sensibility, an improved moral gaze, is to be allowed to continue to cultivate it: virtue is, in this sense, its own reward. In addition, though, it is clear that the struggle for rational self-control, enhanced through nature, brings wider social advantages. V alancourt and E mily have learnt how to use their position and, crucially, their money wisely for the good of others.

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Radcliffe offers a more complicated account of the gaze than, for example, A ddison. For A ddison in the Spectator no. 411, the way the spectator views nature, without requiring actual possession, is merely evidence of the innocent pleasures of taste (6: 86). For Radcliffe, viewing nature itself cultivates the tasteful and unselfish spectator. In Radcliffe’s work, the act of viewing landscape, with its patterns of light and darkness, form a metaphor for understanding the moral shades of the human character. Moreover, in a sensitive human being, examining the scenery cultivates self-control. L andscape gives E mily perspective on emotional excess: the sublime of the Alps dwarves the distress caused by Montoni’s villainy; memories associated with landscape soften current pain by giving temporal perspective. Landscape in Radcliffe is often intimately linked with psychological distress but ultimately has a cathartic influence that encourages disinterestedness. As such, the spectator will develop a moral gaze that is not merely the instinctive sensibility associated with S haftesbury, but more rational. Disinterested observation grants the ability to gauge the feelings of others and respond appropriately. The demand for perspective takes a more firmly economic form in work of Eliza Fenwick, a member of the publisher Joseph Johnson’s circle and associate of Mary Hays and Mary Wollstonecraft. Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy: Or, the Ruin on the Rock (1795) was a radical novel described (possibly by Mary Hays) in the Monthly Magazine as ‘bespeak[ing] a more philosophic attention to the man mind than is generally sought for, or discovered, in this lighter species of composition’.22 For the more conservative British Critic, on the other hand, the epistolary novel was ‘worthy enough of modern France’.23 T he political interpretations that troubled contemporary reviewers were replaced by concern over genre in the writings of modern critics – for T erry C astle, in the London Review of Books, the characters in the novel ‘inhabit polarised fiction universes’ which indicate the work’s ‘imaginative incoherence.’24 Yet it is possible to interpret the novel’s use of generic rhetoric as part of its political agenda; for Julia M. Wright, for example, the work displays ‘an insistent extradiagetic concern with genre as an articulation of and rubric for social relations’.25 In fact, the novel is not only a ‘clash’ of genres or of ‘cultures’ as Wright argues, but of post-French Revolution rhetorics. Affiliations between political positions and genres include some that have already been touched upon – the Burkean traditionalist Valmont is associated with the Gothic; the philosophic Mr Murden is connected with the Quixotic romance and castle-building (motifs often used by conservative thinkers to attack the ‘New Philosophy’); and the heroine Rev. of Secresy, by Eliza Fenwick, Monthly Magazine 18 (Sept 1795) 351. Rev. of Secresy, by Eliza Fenwick, British Critic 6 (Nov. 1795) 545. 24 T erry C astle, ‘Review of Secresy; Or, the Ruin on the Rock, by Eliza Fenwick, ed. Isobel Grundy’, London Review of Books (Feb 23 1995): 18–19. 25 Julia M. Wright, ‘“I am ill fitted”: Conflicts of Genre in Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy’, Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge UP), pp. 149–75, 149. 22 23

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S ibella might be associated with Wollstonecraft’s Mary and Rousseau’s political thought. Here, then, generic allegiances of the characters, signalling individual perspective, play some of the role that landscape does in Radcliffe. Yet in this novel there is no prospect view, no correct vantage point: all generic positions are flawed. The explicitly political clash of genres ends in disaster. Wright notes that each of the characters plots unsuccessfully within his or her genre, unable to appreciate the plots or control the actions of others. Significantly for our purposes, however, these generic misunderstandings are also accompanied by an exploration of paradigms of sensibility. A s with Radcliffe’s Madam Cheron, those involved in fashionable life display little capacity for genuine or unselfish feeling. For such individuals, even taste itself is subject to misrecognition. Confronted by the sad spectacle of Clement’s rejection of the pregnant Sibella, Caroline’s mother, Mrs Ashburn, certainly misappropriates the word: ‘Nay, now Miss Valmont, you are childish,’ said Mrs Ashburn coldly. (Montgomery’s bride, I mean.) ‘What man of taste marries a woman after an affair with her?’26 In Mrs Ashburne’s definition, taste is no more than a passive adherence to convention, even when such convention is facile and immoral; here the man of taste, having enjoyed both spectacle and substance, owes nothing to the female object of his gaze. Mrs Ashburne insists on constructing taste as separate to, and more important than, morality. Yet Mrs Ashburne’s marriage to the heartless Clement seems likely to prove ultimately unbeneficial: she is clearly an unreliable reader. T he spectacle of sophisticated life corrupts both taste and morality, creating a smug indifference to the sufferings of others. However, if adherence to ‘general customs and general experience’ leads to selfish consumerism and misconception of taste, to reject such customs in favour of radical sensibility is even more dangerous. A s Radcliffe suggested in the case of Valancourt, lack of experience breeds naivety. Disgusted by the fashionable world, the arch traditionalist V almont decides to educate his niece, S ibella, in isolation. A s a result, S ibella is closely related to the female genius imagined by Wollstonecraft in Mary. A lthough her guardian desires to ‘thwart the development of her reason’, he does not succeed.27 E ducated in part by C lement’s tutor (an education similar to Mary’s perhaps only in its accidental quality), Sibella is, as Julia M. Wright points out, in some respects a rationalist; yet, like Mary, she also has the requisite sensibility for female genius (162). Furthermore, her speech shows qualities that recall advice in both The Female Reader and Thoughts. C aroline A shburne, describing their first meeting, comments, ‘There was something wild in your air; your language was simple and concise, yet delivered with an impressive eloquence’ (16). Along with this simplicity and arrangement of thought, Sibella’s departure from convention is initially visible in her willingness to wander the castle grounds, even at night. However, Wollstonecraft’s Mary had initially turned her thoughts 26 Eliza Fenwick, Secresy or The Ruin on the Rock (1795), intro. Janet Todd, Mothers of the Novel (London: Pandora, 1989), p. 122. 27 A nn C lose 44; C lose offers another opinion.

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towards the divine; on the other hand, Sibella, although a tasteful original thinker, does not. Instead, when C aroline sees S ibella’s ‘imagination soaring as it were beyond the bounds prescribed to [her] person, in search of a remoter object’ (18), Sibella is thinking of Clement. Considering Sibella’s sexual activity with him, C aroline notes: With such an education as [Mr. Valmont] has given you unless you had been a mere block without ideas, it was impossible that you should not become a romantic enthusiast in whatever species of passion first engaged your feelings: and Mr Valmont took care to make that first passion Love’. (45)

T he danger here is that a male philosopher will direct the education of the isolated female so that, instead of turning towards God, she will find her sexuality awakened. In Fenwick’s account, the suspicion of the corrupting influence of society (present in the educational theories of Rousseau and Thomas Day) has unfortunate consequences for the tuition of women. E ducating them in ‘Gothic’ isolation and ignorance of the world is actually more dangerous than giving them a broader experience. When sketching Mary, Wollstonecraft herself had foreseen the difficulties that sensibility and sexuality would cause her heroine. Rather, as E dgeworth had done in the ‘V irginia’ episode in Belinda, but at greater length, Fenwick suggests that in ‘this imperfect state of existence’ the isolated education necessary for genius may be unfortunate, particularly if the subject is a woman. Specifically, while Sibella’s sexual union outside marriage with Clement is rational, it has terrible consequences in an irrational world. S ibella’s sexualised emotions prove even more dangerous than V almont’s spontaneous charity in The Mysteries of Udolpho. E ncouraged in isolation, sensibility distorts perspective. On the other hand, greater knowledge of the world leads to a more emotionally robust taste. For C aroline A shburne, who has learnt by observing and experiencing the world, fashion and convention are connected with selfishness and corruption. C aroline is aware that her wealth comes from colonial exploitation. Having watched S ir T homas Barlow, whose ‘riches have become his punishment’, she comments: And my mother can look on this existing fact with indifference, while I shudder. T hose enormous sums of wealth she lavishes away, that cluster of pearls she triumphantly places in her hair, those diamonds heaped up into different ornaments, how were they obtained? Thousands perhaps – (27)

Fashionable display, the attempt to gain social influence, is accompanied by moral guilt and callousness. Caroline’s rejection of ‘ornament’ indicates that taste cannot exist without an awareness of the cost of art in human terms. Unthinking acceptance of convention (whether in terms of taste or morality) is inadequate. N onetheless, as Wright points out, C aroline remains trapped within her own generic paradigm, and her attempts to control events ultimately fail. C onsequently, perhaps, in her children’s books, Fenwick becomes increasingly interested in the mechanics of correct reading, particularly in relation to economic impact. Fenwick’s

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emphasis on the value of literacy in these works is of course to some extent generically appropriate. A s the title Infantine Stories; in Words of one, two, and three Syllables suggests, the implied reader is struggling to acquire a skill; hence it is obviously suitable that the content persuades him of the benefits of his labour.28 Yet the powers ascribed to the activity are still greater than one might expect. In Lessons for Children: Or, Rudiments of Good Manners, Morals, and Humanity (1810), for example, the narrative drive is to replace selfish sensibility with industrious self-control, a literally profitable behaviour, made possible, Fenwick suggests, by reading.29 Hence, in a typically punitive narrative, a character like foolish C lara Hammond displays her sensibility through fear of insects, screaming so loudly that her carer falls, is ‘covered with a stream of blood, and …taken up for dead’ (4). On the other hand, in ‘Joseph’s School Room at the Foot of the Oak Tree’, the ‘diligent’ Joseph, specimen of the impoverished middle ranks, is able to teach the poor children working at the mill – ‘They did not think about their ignorance till they knew Joseph; and when they saw what an advantage his learning was to him … they began to wish for knowledge’ (37). In this narrative of the shared economic benefits of universal education, learning opens the potential for children (and mill owner) to profit. Their desire for education (they arrive at the oak tree at four in the morning before going to work at six) may seem rather improbable to the modern reader – yet this use of working class fringe-time is an early instance of the promotion of values explored by Jacques Rancière in The Nights of Labor: The Workers Dream in Nineteenth-Century France (1989). The alternative to such industry is unpleasant. In Infantine Stories Fenwick takes a moment to tell us about the over-indulged Kate, who makes the mistake of wearing the cook maid’s gown, ‘with red and blue flowers on it’, to a ball (95). Emotionally undisciplined, Kate is subsequently blinded in one eye by a piece of smashed mirror. Eliza Fenwick’s educational writings may be read as providing a solution to the generic complexities of Secresy. In these narratives, excessive (often illconditioned) sensibility should give way to a more economically (and perhaps more politically) beneficial approach, based on the discipline of accurate reading. Without such discipline, Fenwick suggests, our sense of perspective, like Kate’s, may be permanently damaged. Yet, while Fenwick’s children’s stories criticise the superficial aesthetics of fashion and attack the selfish insensibility elsewhere associated with poor aesthetic judgment, the broader category of taste remains relatively invisible. For Wollstonecraft, training in the fine arts and belle lettres played an important role in the development of the tasteful, independent citizen; in Fenwick, the requirements for independence are simplified to the self-disciplined acquisition of knowledge. It is this self-discipline which will produce ‘good manners, morals and humanity’. 28 Eliza Fenwick, Infantine Stories; In Words of One, Two, and Three Syllables (London: John Souter, n.d.). 29 Eliza Fenwick, Lessons for Children: Or, Rudiments of Good Manners, Morals, and Humanity, rev. ed. (London: Godwin, 1811).

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In Eliza Fenwick’s account, then, accurate reading (which might be related to Addison’s definition of taste) gives the perspective to steer between radical sensibility (such as Sibella’s) and the selfish passions of consumerism. For Charlotte Smith, another writer who moved from Gothic to children’s fiction, taste and the related accomplishments had a greater role to play in ensuring perspective. S mith is aware of the Gothic spectacle of aristocratic pride (as in The Old Manor House [1793]) and the potential selfishness of out-of-control revolution (as in the third volume of Desmond). She is also equally conscious of the perils of consumerism – showing in Desmond (as Mary Brunton had done in Discipline) that hysteria and selfishness are produced as individuals ‘are taught to idolize the next in Power above ’em’ (S haftesbury, Characteristicks 2: 117; i. 29–30). For Smith such sycophancy as this produces a mistaken aesthetics. She instead proposes an alternative model of taste in which economic knowledge and awareness of financial suffering are essential. Charlotte Smith’s concerns with the signifiers of taste in society are clearest when she responds most directly to the French Revolution. Described by N icola J. Watson as a ‘political romance’, for Eleanor Wikborg, Desmond demonstrates that ‘the political and the romantic are fundamentally incompatible’. In this reading, the romance plot weakens the novel’s radical politics.30 Indeed, while two of the volumes take place in revolutionary France, critics have been troubled by the novel’s more cautious elements, which often concern the domestic space.31 However, despite the limitation of revolutionary action and sexual freedom to France in this novel, S mith constantly draws attention to the need for reform at home, and here one of her key strategies is to echo Wollstonecraft in suggesting the tyranny of fashion. For S mith, as for Wollstonecraft, fashion and the spectre of hereditary power are closely linked. Yet while Wollstonecraft sees the aristocracy as a mechanism to preserve inequality, S mith nuances the institution slightly differently. L ord N ewminster is the son of a newly created peer; his father has worked in trade. Rather like Mrs. Rayland’s painful reluctance to accept, in The Old Manor House (1793), that her family blood has been tainted by commerce, this suggests S mith’s view of the fallen nature of ‘aristocratic’ status in the late eighteenth century. Pride in heritage is replaced by pride in (equally superficial) display: Lord Newminster himself, for example, ‘filled the part of a man of real fashion’, a part connected by Smith to brutality towards the poor and lack of courtesy to those nearer him in social rank (74–5). Nonetheless, his position (and, 30 Nicola J. Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel 1790–1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1994), p. 36; Eleanor Wikborg, ‘Political Discourse versus Sentimental Romance: Ideology and Genre in C harlotte S mith’s Desmond (1792)’, English Studies 6 (1997): 522–531, 531. 31 For particular points of tension ,see Diana Bowstead, ‘C harlotte S mith’s Desmond: T he E pistolary N ovel as Ideological A rgument’, in Fetter’d or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670–1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Ohio: Ohio UP, 1986), pp. 237–63, 252.

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one suspects, his rudeness) serve only to generate yet more fashionable behaviour, seen in the family of Mrs. Fairfax. E xpressing sentiments which recall Wollstonecraft’s strictures on the effects of hereditary property in A Vindication of the Rights of Men, Desmond remarks on the Fairfax family’s ‘vanity’ and ‘affectation’: which carries them into the superior ranks of life, to applaud and flatter there, that they may acquire in their turn, greater superiority over that class where fortune has place them, and be looked up to as the standards of elegance and fashion … . (68)

T his two-way process (adulation to those above with the hope of gaining power over those below) is nicely captured by Mrs Fairfax’s first remarks. An inveterate name-dropper, Mrs Fairfax boasts to her neighbours about the effects of her daughters’ accomplishments: – Oh! my dear Mrs Fairfax, said Lady Susan, you have no notion now, how excessively happy we shall all be, to have you so near us – and your sweet girls! – their society is a delightful acquisition – Miss Fairfax’s singing is charming, and I so doat upon A nastatia’s manner of reading poetry, that I hope we shall see a great deal of both of them. (55)

In this social hall of mirrors, even the young ladies’ display of their accomplishments happens offstage; what is more important is the display of the resultant (alleged) compliment. T his is an auction in which the discourse of taste is only seen in relation to the young women’s accomplishments, accomplishments puffed to make them more valuable. For Smith (again, similarly to Wollstonecraft) this preoccupation with display is connected with a sexualised form of taste, in which women are the aesthetic (and erotic) objects ; hence, Colonel Scardale, when he attempts to seduce Geraldine, criticises her husband’s neglect, by remarking, ‘I believe he is the only man in England who has so little taste’ (220). N onetheless, C harlotte S mith does not, as discussed in C hapter 2, favour retreat into rural simplicity. Such a retreat (with its radical connotations) strikes Smith as too dangerous, likely to leave the female a victim of sexualised sensibility (even Geraldine’s reputation suffers as a result of her stay in a country hideaway). Instead, Smith emphasises the importance of intellectual independence. Like Mary, both the submissive Geraldine and her ‘wild’ sister, Fanny, received little parental instruction, explicitly because of the system of primogeniture (their mother only cares for her son, Waverley). And this vital independence (again as in Wollstonecraft) extends particularly to the area of reading. When Fanny reports to Geraldine that ‘more than half’ the novels she proposes reading are now forbidden, her sister replies: How long, my dear Fanny, has your reading been under proscription? We used to read what we would, when we were girls together, and I never found it prejudicial to either of us. (222)

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While Geraldine’s mother emphasises the sexuality immorality of novels in an apparent attempt to deny her daughters’ sexual independence, the vocabulary here (‘proscription’, ‘prejudicial’) suggests the political and intellectual consequences of such assumed prudishness. Geraldine, on the contrary, points to the morality available in novels, while ‘in reading the world, a girl must see a thousand very ugly blots, which frequently pass without any censure at all’ (223). In other words, good novels can provide a framework of interpretation in contrast to that supplied in a society governed by fashion and hereditary wealth. When considering such matters of taste, Geraldine finds the confidence to touch on politics. The fiction Geraldine recommends clearly engages with the world; she particularly praises ‘those [novels] which represent human life nearly as it is’: For, as to others, those wild and absurd writings … they can (if any young woman has so much patience and so little taste as to read them) no more contribute to the character of her mind, than the grotesque figures of shepherdesses on French fans and Bergamot boxes, can form her taste in dress. (223)

T he way the word ‘taste’ is used here is in opposition to C olonel S carsdale’s usage, earlier in the same letter. This is not a taste based on voyeuristic enjoyment of the female form. A nd in the same way that this form of taste is distinct from the sexualised gaze, it also refuses the pastoral idealisation of lower class rural life. Geraldine rejects the fantasy provided by the ‘china figures’ and in this she is much like Mrs Woodfield in Smith’s second children’s book, Rambles Farther (1796): I had supposed a shepherd to be a person elegantly attired, in a pea-green jacket … instead of which I saw a stout rough-looking clown … followed by an ugly shag-ear’d dog, whose continual and hoarse barking constituted all the music of this rude and solitary pair.32

Mrs Woodfield refuses the option offered by Reynolds’ account of the man at leisure listening to the strokes of the hammer; the dog’s barking is not music in any accepted sense, and the middle ranks should reject the urge to reinterpret it as such. Despite the brutality of this picture, S mith shows considerable sympathy and respect for rural labourers – it is the urge to disguise their economic suffering that annoys her. A nd this disguise is associated with pre-revolutionary France, as the mention of the fan and ‘bergamot box’ suggests. In relation to the latter, eighteenth-century France had seen rapid developments in the sophistication of the perfume industry. In particular, a dislike for strong perfumes and odours led to an emphasis on rural natural scents, as capitalism reincorporated Rousseauian primitivism in a way which hardly fits with Smith’s emphasis on simplicity. Often painted with scenes of gallantry, both boxes and fans operate here to suggest the 32 C harlotte S mith, Rambles Farther: A Continuation of Rural Walks in Dialogues. Intended for the Use of Young Persons, 2 vols (London: Cadell and Davies, 1796), 1: 122.

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luxury that leads to political downfall. Hence, while Geraldine suggests that such articles will have little effect on the minds of (presumably British) young ladies, she also makes a persuasive argument for ‘those [novels] which represent human life nearly as it is’. In this account, economic realism represents a much politically safer aesthetic. Charlotte Smith’s pedagogic works largely (though not completely) avoid explicit reference to revolution. N onetheless, she uses them to explore the relationship between taste, economic knowledge, and sympathy already acknowledged in Desmond more extensively. In the Preface to her first children’s book, Rural Walks (1795), she emphasises that she desires to give ‘a taste for the pure pleasures of retirement, and the sublime beauties of N ature’, goals later important to the major Romantic poets.33 T he apparently innocuous cultivation of this taste is clearly an important part of her programme ‘to repress discontent, to inculcate the necessity of submitting cheerfully to such situations as fortune may throw [her readers] into’, an aim that carries the biographical weight of S mith’s own experience (1: iii). But while this sense of pleasure in nature is supposed to ‘repress discontent’, in the Preface, S mith is not quite honest about how this will come about. In fact, even while promoting domestic and rural pleasures, this collection of dialogues repeatedly exposes the hardship of rural life. A nd S mith’s use of generic variety in the work suggests that the growth of sensitivity to such hardships necessarily goes hand in hand with the development of taste: good art (like Rural Walks itself) exposes the reader to such realities, while simultaneously improving her emotional and mental responsiveness. The consequences of failing to link taste, sensibility, and knowledge of suffering are clearly explored during the first dialogues, where Smith uses the flexibility of the peripatetic mode to introduce poetry and to allude to painting, landscape appreciation, and music. O n arrival, the fashionably educated C aroline, who has greeted the journey over dark, ‘rough’ roads with Gothic ‘fear’, reacts unfavourably to the scene before her: ‘To be buried alive in such a place as this! A wide wide common, with nothing in sight but those miserable cottages yonder, or a few clumps of mournful fir trees! (1: 10). Not only does Caroline lack the ability to appreciate nature, but she is equally unable to engage imaginatively or sympathetically with those who live in the ‘miserable cottages’. And this lack of sympathy is equally evident in her attitude to music. When Henrietta mentions that Mrs Woodfield has tuned the pianoforte, Caroline’s response is less than enthusiastic: Caroline (coldly). I cannot play worth any one’s hearing. Henrietta. I am so fond of music! – Dear cousin, I hope you will play to us. Caroline (still more coldly). I am only sorry I cannot play well enough to amuse you. (1: 12)

33 C harlotte S mith, Rural Walks in Dialogues. Intended for the use of Young Persons, 2 vols (London: Cadell and Davies, 1795), 1: iii.

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As Caroline’s later eagerness to exhibit her dancing at a country ball makes clear, her reluctance to please Henrietta is a result of her education in the art of display (1: 20). While she has considerable self-will and her language reflects emotional extremes, her sensibility does not direct her to please the sympathetic community she finds around her. C harlotte S mith suggests that C aroline’s condition can be amended by exposure to new genres and spectacles. Mrs Woodfield’s first move in her corrective strategy is to take Caroline on a visit to a family of poor cottagers, whom Mrs Woodfield has aided: Mrs Woodfield: Well, Caroline, what do you think of the scene we have just witnessed? Are not sickness and poverty real evils? And do not such spectacles teach us the wickedness and folly of that discontent we are so apt to indulge, if we are not exactly in the place which we prefer, or wit the people who amuse us? (1: 17)

E ven while the realism of this combination of dialogue and the ‘interest of the novel’ encourages S mith’s readers to analyse their own experience of ‘real evils’, S mith reminds us of the distance between us and the cottagers; this is a ‘scene’, a ‘spectacle’ over which the viewers must exercise their sense of perspective (1: iv). Thus while Caroline dislikes ‘visiting the miserable mansions of a parcel of beggars’ and hearing ‘of nothing but such dismal stories’, Mrs Woodfield reminds her that the cottagers, who live in these places all the time, are ‘creatures whose feelings and necessities were the same as her own’ (1: 23–4). These ‘dismal stories’ are presented with a realism that suggests their truth; the perspective that we gain thus unusually encourages us to close the gap between fiction and reality, to narrow the distance between us and our fellows. S uch realisation of shared humanity, S mith suggests, does not necessarily come through ‘innate ideas’ but ‘often, perhaps arise from an early habit of reflection’ (1: 24–5). And artistic practice and poetry such as James Thomson’s are, Smith implies, ways to promote such reflection. A s the dialogues progress, it becomes even more evident that such ‘scenes’ represent more than a message about the ‘folly’ of discontent. T hey are a call to understanding and action. In the second dialogue, C aroline fails to appreciate the rural beauties Mrs Woodfield points out, perversely arguing that there is no spring in the country; in L ondon, however, there are the ‘delightful roses, lilies, and I know not how many charming flowers, for I always forget their names, which one used to have from that delightful man in Bond Street’ (1: 30). Caroline’s lack of landscape appreciation is connected with both luxury and ignorance, while Mrs Woodfield’s enjoyment of the scenery and knowledge of botany foreshadow S mith’s Conversations Introducing Poetry (1804).34 U nderstanding the detail of the natural world (for example, the ‘provision of insensibility’ nature gives the hibernating dormouse) is connected to a sense of humanity: Mrs Woodfield is able 34 C harlotte S mith, Conversations Introducing Poetry Chiefly on Subjects of Natural History. For the Use of Children and Young Persons, 2 vols (London: Johnson, 1804).

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to appreciate that nature protects the hibernating dormouse, as she herself had made ‘provision’ for the formerly ill labourer Master Anderson (1: 47). Notably, however, appreciation of suffering leads her to give money even when she is not certain of the economic conditions and morality of the recipient. Mrs Woodfield comments: “I have not, for my part, sagacity enough to distinguish what are called common beggars, from poor men disabled by illness from working, or accidentally distressed in a strange country, where they have no claim to parochial relief. I only know, that in giving a few halfpence, it is possible I may encourage an idle vagabond, but it is also possible I may relieve an unfortunate fellow creature”. (1: 52)

While in Discipline Mary Brunton’s wise Christian Mrs Mortimer insists that enquiry is necessary, S mith’s sensibility gives her a sense of common humanity that overcomes such considerations. E xamination of the detail of nature, then, curiously gives an enlarged perspective. But in the third dialogue S mith suggests that both the prospect view and landscape painting have a similar effect. S he and her charges sit on a bench, outside a shepherd’s hut, from where they enjoy a prospect view that shows them the contrasting behaviours of two local landowners. Later, while sketching that Romantic staple, a ruined abbey, the children meet an émigré French priest, enabling an implicit parallel between the upheaval of the Reformation and the French Revolution. Understanding the detailed workings of (beneficent) nature promotes a sensibility that grasps the need for shared ‘provision’ for our common humanity; on the other hand, occupying the prospect view or working as an artist provides historical and economic perspective. N onetheless, it might be noted that in this dialogue while prospect view lies outside the shepherd’s hut, the shepherd’s children are not shown interpreting it. T he rural poor are frequent characters in Smith’s educational work, but their fellow humanity is emphasised, rather than their taste. Instead, the fine arts and belle lettres are here shown to have several functions for the middle and upper ranks. They encourage humanity to others; they provide a way to avoid the folly of chasing unnecessary status symbols – and furthermore, Smith suggests from her own experience, such skills are financially advantageous. What emerges in both Rural Walks and its sequel, Rambles Farther (1796), is that natural objects are more beautiful than those produced by art and that their aesthetic value is most uncomplicatedly certain when found in their native setting. S ince our view of what is beautiful is often a matter of caprice or based on the desire for the novel or the rare, Smith suggests, we should have a keen eye to the consequences of our aesthetic choices: in particular, the consumer should be aware of the impoverished or enslaved individuals who supply such desires.35 See the first dialogue of Rambles Farther, particularly comments on the slave trade (1: 15–19) and the third dialogue, ‘Wonders’, which contains a warning against ‘that sort of caprice which gives an imaginary value to so many other things, even less pleasing than these beautiful productions of nature [shells]’ (1: 54). 35

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Furthermore, the danger is that objects gain value through the false associations promoted by the fantasies of literature; as Mrs Woodfield puts it, ‘The ideas we gather, while we are very young, from poetry or romance, which like all other ideas acquired at an early period, we seldom think of investigating afterwards, make us take it for granted, that myrtle bowers and orange groves are extremely delightful’ (Rambles Farther 1: 19). Hence Smith’s later educational works (Minor Morals, interspersed with Sketches of Natural History, Historical Anecdotes, and Original Stories [1798], Conversations introducing Poetry and The Natural History of Birds, intended Chiefly for Young People [1807]) promote a detailed knowledge of British nature. And this knowledge is encouraged through poetry and inset narratives which use sensibility to support a broadly radical political agenda. N oting S mith’s use of botanical, historical, and literary footnotes in The Emigrants (1791), Jacqueline Labbe remarks that the history which underlies the poem ‘combines with the footnoted voice … to produce a speaking Self capable of challenging the social construction of women’s marginalised position’.36 Having observed the continuity of strategy in Smith’s educational works, it is possible to extend this comment. S mith is not only interested in challenging women’s marginalised position – she is also concerned to associate taste and realism. For Smith, the inclusion of such different spheres of knowledge works to increase sensibility and to tackle wider problems of social difference. C harlotte S mith insists that the suffering caused by poverty is included in art. Her young readers should be made aware, through poetry and narrative, of the perils of inflation and the monetary problems caused by poor health and ill management. Yet while art can expose financial inequity, Smith is also aware that it itself is implicated in the consumerism that causes social corruption. Hence, while she sees art as a potential financial aid to the middle class, she is also wary. Indeed, her suspicion about the effect most poetry has on young people leads her to emphasise natural beauty rather than cultural products. A more thoroughgoing investigation of the relationship of both art and nature to the consumer economy is, however, given by Priscilla Wakefield. Daughter of well-established Quaker family (her grandfather was Robert Barclay, author of Theologiæ Vere Christianæ Apologia [1676]), Wakefield is perhaps best known today for Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex (1798).37 Yet the interest in economics shown in this, her single work for adults, is also obvious in her 16 children’s books. While Wakefield is less concerned with the perils of revolutionary sensibility than Fenwick or Charlotte Smith, she is concerned with ill-directed emotion, particularly in relation to consumerism. T his anxiety concerning feeling can be 36 Jacqueline M. Labbe, Charlotte Smith: Romanticism and the Culture of Gender (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003), p. 53. Labbe also extensively explores Smith’s clever use of her own commoditification as a woman writer in the marketplace; see, for example, pp. 17–18. I argue that S mith is concerned not only with her own production as artefact but with the politics of consumption more generally. 37 For an introductory overview of Wakefield’s work see Bridget Hill, ‘Priscilla Wakefield as a Writer of Children’s Educational Books’, Women’s Writing 4 (1997): 3–14.

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traced in both An Introduction to Botany in a Series of Familiar Letters, with Illustrative Engravings (1796) and in Mental Improvement (1794–97). The Introduction to Botany positions the science rather as Barbauld had positioned astronomy in ‘A Summer Evening’s Meditation’, albeit in a less emotive manner. Of all the ‘judicious objects’, she remarks in the Preface: none can be better adapted to instruct, and at the same time amuse, than the beauties of nature, by which they are continually surrounded. T he structure of a feather or a flower is more likely to impress their minds with a just notion of Infinite Power and Wisdom, than the most profound discourses on such abstract subjects, as are beyond the limits of their capacity to comprehend. (An Introduction to Botany n. pag.)

Despite Wakefield’s rather prosaic tone, botany clearly has a function as emotional and spiritual channel. In line with this, although the work is often dryly technical, it also sustains a motif of alternative sensibility. The first of the series of letters that form the work is written from ‘T he S hrubbery’ to compensate Felicia for her sister’s absence: ‘A s it is an unusual thing for us to be separated, I do not doubt, but we equally feel the pain of being at a distance from each other; … . Every place here looks solitary, especially our own apartment, and our favourite haunts in the garden’ (1–2). In the Preface, Wakefield had hoped that botany would act as an antidote to ‘levity and idleness’ common among ‘young ladies of fashionable manners’ (n. pag.). In the text, however, it functions as a cure for the ‘depression of spirits’ caused by feelings of isolation (2). Yet these feelings are not caused by the separation of lovers but have a more domestic origin in the love between sisters. Letters, filled not with gossip, but with detailed information about the natural world, enable the rational direction of Felicia’s feelings and presumably sustain the bond between the two girls. In short, Felicia is a sentimental heroine whose researches are extremely atypical; like any other impassioned young woman, she can ‘readily steal an hour from those allotted to sleep or diversion’ but her aim is not solely the indulgence of feeling; it is botany (87). In this context, botany provides knowledge of a caring framework of thrift and efficiency. The natural world is both ‘parent’ and ‘oeconomist’ (4). Mental Improvement similarly locates the narrative of sensibility firmly within the family. Whereas children’s books of this era often (like Charlotte Smith’s) emphasise the role of the female educator, Wakefield insists on the importance of the whole family unit participating in instruction. By communicating knowledge, these model parents inspire both further affection and the desire for information. As the suitably named eldest daughter, Sophia, remarks to her sister, Cecilia, ‘with what tenderness do they listen to our conversation, and improve every subject that arises to our advantage!’38 In these opening pages, the faults associated 38 Priscilla Wakefield, Mental Improvement: Or the Beauties and Wonders of Nature and Art, conveyed in a Series of Instructive Conversations (1794), 1st American ed. from 3rd ed. (New-Bedford, MA Printed by Abraham Shearman for Greene and Son, 1799), 1: 7.

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with fashionable sensibility are hinted at, but they remain relatively unexplored, mentioned primarily as the product of the untrained mind. Hence C ecilia, who presumably has never experienced such fashionable living, finds it hard to retain concentration because ‘the habit of attention is difficult to form’, while Augusta, their friend, has a governess who ‘takes but little pains with her’; consequently she asserts she requires ‘amusement’ (1: 8). Frequently in eighteenth-century discourse, the extremes of fashionable sensibility are connected with the abandonment of family responsibility; here (rather like Brunton’s Ellen Percy) Augusta has ‘no mamma’ and ‘her papa is engaged in business’ (1: 8). Opposed to frivolity and vapid emotion, judicious instruction within the family unit produces both correct feeling and a desire for knowledge. Even more precisely, for Wakefield this instruction should involve an understanding of manufacturing processes; such knowledge will presumably allow her pupils to avoid idle display. In Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex, Wakefield refers to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776). In Mental Improvement she is determined to explain the relationship between art, nature, and consumerism in a similarly economically informed way. Wakefield believed that understanding this relationship was vital in allowing the individual to work ethically within a capitalist social structure. The full title of her 1794 work Mental Improvement: Or the Beauties and Wonders of Nature and Art is significant. While she acknowledges the aesthetic appeal of untouched nature, her parataxis ultimately suggests continuity as much as dichotomy. Her character Sophia remarks on examining seashells: “What beautiful tints! what colours can equal these? Shells, flowers, and insects are the finishings of nature, and for elegance of form, variety, and beauty of colour, as well as delicacy of texture, excel the finest works of art”. (1: 49)

When C harlotte S mith (whose Rambles Farther shares subject matter with Mental Improvement) had mentioned the perfection of shells, it was to suggest the superiority of nature (1: 54). Wakefield’s position is more equivocal. Her initial humility before God’s creation quickly gives way to a celebration of industry. Even at this moment, where nature’s perfection and primacy is acknowledged, the language of manufacture intrudes; like a chest of drawers or well-made house, nature has ‘finishings’ (98). Wakefield proceeds to note that many parts of nature are ‘concealed by a coarse outer coat, which the hand of a skilful polisher may remove’: ‘How many fine strokes of nature’s pencil in this part of creation would be entirely concealed from our view, were it not for the assistance of an art that unveils and displays them in full lustre?’ (1: 53–4). Here there is a crucial ambiguity in her use of the word ‘art’. It comprises not only a creative work, but the process behind it. Art and industry improve nature, displaying to best advantage the work God has begun. Wakefield construes ‘art’ as an essential part of the economic progress. Fundamentally implicated in social exchange, this version of art cannot exist in the pre-industrial isolation sketched by Wollstonecraft. According to Wakefield,

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it is most advanced in the ‘civilised’ (and increasingly industrialised) societies of Western Europe. Further, it is fuelled by fashion: Wakefield proposes that the desires of ‘people of fashion’ lead to ‘scope for the exercise of taste in the artist’, who then treats natural materials to make his products. However, Wakefield’s attitude contains contradictions: while she acknowledges that fashion is vital for economic growth, she also sees it as also potentially dangerous to both individual and society. Wakefield’s solution is that we be careful consumers, watchful and knowledgeable about economic processes. Even so, she remains concerned about the moral corrosiveness of supply and demand. For her, fashion is linked with social instability. T his fear is evident in Reflections, for example, where she remarks that the daughters of ‘tradesmen and mechanics’ should ‘not only be prohibited from learning the ornamental arts, such as music, dancing, drawing, foreign languages, and costly works of taste, (unless they are brought up for teachers) but they should never be placed at a school where those arts are taught’.39 T here is no suggestion that the daughters of tradesmen and mechanics would not be able to become proficient at such studies; Wakefield clearly indicates elsewhere that such activity is not the secret of the elite but may be stimulated by economic need (Reflections 124–30). However, it seems clear that the ‘ornamental arts’ themselves are here an attractive and dangerous gateway to consumer desires. E xamination of nature, it might be argued, is altogether safer. Indeed, Wakefield’s economic awareness, coupled with a deep-seated dislike of luxury, sometimes makes her seem extreme in her rejection of activities connected with cultural prestige. The final story in the collection Leisure Hours (1794–96) concerns the anti-slave trade reformer and prison philanthropist John Howard (1726–90), who visits Europe not to see ‘ancient grandeur’ or ‘modern art’ but to examine dungeons, hospitals, and madhouses.40 In this narrative, Howard praises his wife when she refuses to spend surplus income on pearls, a trip to the lakes, or ‘plate’: ‘A miable woman, neither dress, pleasure, nor splendour are able to seduce you from those superior views of softening the calamities, and increasing the comforts of all around you’ (176). The issue of perspective is still there (this is a particular ‘view’), but the spectator is now concerned with improving the ‘dwellings of the poor’ (176). Charlotte Smith had frequently remarked on the financial advantages of the fine arts; however, this recognition of art as part of the consumer process is clearly extended further in Wakefield’s work. Here the emotions and sensations commonly Priscilla Wakefield, Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex; With Suggestions for its Improvement (London: Johnson, Darton and Harvey, 1798), p. 58. 40 Priscilla Wakefield, Leisure Hours; Or, Entertaining Dialogues, between Persons Eminent for Virtue and Magnanimity. The Characters Drawn from Ancient and Modern History. Designed as Lessons of Morality for Youth, 4th ed., 2 vols (L ondon: Darton and Harvey, 1805), p. 171. Wakefield refers here to Edmund Burke’s 1781 tribute to Howard. The subject of prison reform was of interest to Wakefield’s family. Priscilla Wakefield’s niece Elizabeth Fry (1780–1845) was an English Quaker who famously worked on behalf of woman prisoners in N ewgate. 39

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connected with taste (the awareness of the sublime and the attraction to the novel and the beautiful) are beneficially attached to an understanding of those economic and manufacturing processes directed by Providence. A t the same time, however, given her fear of luxury, Wakefield sees art as always on the verge of descending into luxurious consumerism; she suspects the social effects of ‘costly works of taste’ (Reflections 58). Wakefield’s fear can be related to the Romantic tendency to separate art from consumerism. T his position is summarized by William Hazlitt, who, in an article published in 1817, asserts that ‘T he spirit of art is not the spirit of trade: it is not a question between the grower or consumer of some perishable and personal commodity: but it is a question between human genius and human taste, and how much the one can produce for the benefit of mankind, and how much the other can enjoy.’41 Here, art itself, representing a different form of exchange, provides resistance to rampant commercialism. For the economically well-informed Wakefield, however, it seemed that this distinction between different modes of exchange did not exist. Consequently, her work provides a good explanation of several Romantic period tendencies. It is better, her work tells us, to concentrate on nature rather than art because botany is simply safer than the study of fine accomplishments. It is advisable to describe the activities of the lower orders because production and producers are fitter subjects for contemplation than consumerism and consumers. While S haftesbury’s notions of sympathy and disinterestedness were highly influential in the eighteenth century, they were also extremely problematic. As an instinctive response, sympathy was shown to be a potentially unreliable moral guide; meanwhile, disinterestedness (coupled with neoclassical aesthetics) led, in art theory, to an eliding of the suffering of the poor. Increased awareness of such difficulties were promoted by the humanitarian movements of the eighteenth century and subsequently by the French Revolution. It is perhaps no coincidence that Kant both suggested the connection between the sympathetic viewer and the ‘enthusiast’ and produced a more rigorous definition of disinterestedness. Often dismissed as artistically inferior because of its emotional excess, Gothic writing of the 1790s can be reinterpreted as another exploration of the tension between sympathy and disinterestedness. O n the one hand, the naïve yet vulnerable spectator may be converted to a dangerous enthusiasm; on the other, the fashionable man or woman of the world has blunted emotions. Yet there is a third model, of the sympathetic spectator, whose emotions are given correct perspective; knowledge of the world, here couched in aesthetic terms, provides the promise of a humanitarian economics. T he consequence of such suspicions of sensibility in this period is a move away from the displacements of fantastic Gothic towards an emphasis on an alternative ‘real’ Gothic of social suffering. T his is seen not only in the punitive 41 William Hazlitt, ‘On the Catalogue Raisonné of the British Institution’, The Round Table (1817), The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P.P. Howe after the edition of A.R. Waller and Arnold Glover, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1930–34), 4: 144.

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nature of Fenwick’s children’s stories or in the works of Charlotte Smith, but also in mainstream Romanticism. However, for C harlotte S mith the tasteful and sympathetic spectator should not only master the prospect view. Like Priscilla Wakefield, Smith emphasises the need to understand both the minutiae and the relationships involved in the natural world. In neoclassical aesthetics, such detail would have had little prestige in the culture of taste, being associated with the limited vision commonly ascribed to women and labourers. Yet for S mith and Wakefield, this valorisation of detail is not only, or even primarily, a way of reclaiming authority for a ‘feminized’ perspective. In their work, at least, such intricate knowledge provides a site of resistance to the constantly shifting values and dangerous emotions caused by consumerism. T he combination of prospect view and microscopic examination encourages a recognition of common humanity, where rich and poor are potentially separated only by conditions of chance within an economic system. The tasteful (or, in the case of Wakefield, the accurate) spectator must explore the financial minutiae of social relations. In short, as the aesthetics of this period have it, it is necessary to understand ‘interest’ to become disinterested.

C hapter 4

S elf-control: Romantic Psychologies of T aste In Mansfield Park, S ir T homas, confronted by his family’s private theatricals, gives the scene painter his dismissal, long enough to justify the pleasing belief of his being then at least as far off as Northampton. The scene painter was gone, having spoilt only the floor of one room, ruined all the coachman’s sponges, and made five of the underservants idle and dissatisfied (Austen, Novels 3: 190–91).

A usten’s swift summary of the damage caused by the scene painter proves her command of litotes; her brevity and S ir T homas’s dispatch contrast amusingly with the more lengthy and grim prognostications of other commentators on fashion. N evertheless, it is clear that, for A usten, the commerce attached to the pursuit of taste threatens the social order by promoting travel, an accompanying lack of social stability or cohesion, and inflated ambitions among the lower classes. A mistaken economy of taste is dangerous for all ranks. At the root of Austen’s alarm lurks a fear of excess. The randomness of the scene painter’s destructiveness (ruining ‘one room,’ ‘all the coachman’s sponges’ and ‘five’ of the underservants) mirrors the erratic, illogical, excessive thought processes A usten suggests are encouraged by the play. For the upper-class players, this time of dangerous intimacy produces poor associations, both in terms of mental processes and in terms of the company kept. The eventual effects of this intimacy on Maria are an implicit reminder of the warnings of anti-revolutionary novels of the 1790s, where sexual immorality was inevitably connected with atheism, revolution, and social destruction. If too many people are affected by the poor associations connected with extravagant artistic output, a threat is posed to the fabric of society. A more stable alternative (for A usten, the craftsmanship and family loyalty of the carpenter Christopher Jackson) is necessary. T he interest shown by canonical Romantic writers in the law of association is well established. However, modern aestheticians, for example, Martin Kallich in The Association of Ideas, have persistently underestimated the subtlety of the contribution of women writers in this area. Romantic poets use the associative process in what Paul Hamilton calls their ‘characteristic concentration on the artistic process, the growth of a poet’s mind’; for him, this is part of a struggle  Martin Kallich, The Association of Ideas and Critical Theory in Eighteenth-Century England: A History of the Psychological Method in English Criticism (The Hague: Mouton, 1970). See also Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Thought in XVIIICentury England; With a New Preface by the Author, 2nd ed. (Michigan: Ann Arbor-U of Michigan P, 1960).

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against the materialism that seems to be a consequence of the British empiricist tradition. In this account, poetry provides a language that can enrich philosophy. However, when women writers explore the association of ideas, they frequently do so with close attention to the phenomenon’s widespread practical effects on society. Such accounts position idle habits formed by prejudice as insufficient; instead, a rigorous mental training was necessary for correct taste and accurate judgement. However, the difficulty was to decide just how this training would operate, particularly in relation to community: for the women writers examined here, properly disciplined habits of association were the key. T he notion of the association of ideas had a troubled philosophical history – and awkward consequences for eighteenth-century narratives of social and aesthetic agreement. Exploration of associationism dates back to Aristotle but was continued by British empiricists. While Hobbes provided a potentially positive account, Locke connected association with irrationality. T hese perspectives are both present in Addison’s influential account of taste and association, his ‘Essays on the Pleasure of the Imagination’ in The Spectator nos. 411–21 (The Spectator 6: 83–140). Here Addison suggests that association (where a ‘single Circumstance’ can raise ‘up a whole Scene of Imagery, a ‘Sett of Ideas’ in the brain) is one of ‘the several S ources’ of pleasure. This suggestion makes taste potentially democratic; all that was needed to possess it was a collection of associations rather than a classical education. However, there is a difficulty: if personal associations were the basis of taste, it might lead to the extinction of any notion of a standard. Indeed, in the Spectator no. 416, A ddison had used the notion of the association of ideas to account for difference in taste – variation in reaction to poetry ‘must proceed either from the Perfection of Imagination in one more than another, or from the different Ideas that several Readers affix to the same words’ (6: 110–15, 114). And with such differing ideas, agreement on matters of taste might become impossible, even irrelevant. A ddison’s essays had suggested the importance of association to aesthetics, but the position was further complicated by Hume’s treatment of the imagination. Although Locke had connected association with irrationality, in the Treatise of Human Nature (1739) and his Enquiry (1748), David Hume placed it as an essential principal of cognition, carried out through the imagination. For Hume, the associative imagination worked along certain habitual lines. Associations or connections between ideas were produced in several ways: through ‘RESEMBLANCE’ (ideas that are similar are linked); through nearness or Paul Hamilton, Coleridge’s Poetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p. 32. See Martin Kallich, ‘The Association of Ideas and Critical Theory: Hobbes, Locke and A ddison’, English Literary History 12 (1945): 290–315. The fourth edition of John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding has a chapter on the association of ideas; see John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1975), pp. 394–401; 2. 33.  A ddison and S teele, Spectator 417; 6: 116–21, 116; Spectator 411; 6 83–7, 87.  David Hume, Treatise 8–9; I. I. III , 8–9, 10; I. I. IV .  

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‘CONTIGUITY in time or place’; or finally as a result of imagining a relationship consisting of ‘CAUSE AN D E FFECT ’. T racing these patterns, the imagination forms our experiences and generates our belief in an external world, a world that we cannot know directly. Yet, contrasting memory and imagination, Hume asserts ‘the liberty of the imagination to transpose and change its ideas’ (Hume, Treatise 10; I. I. III). Hume’s account suggested the centrality of imagination; however, it also generated considerable anxiety. A ccording to the S cottish common sense philosopher T homas Reid, for insistence, Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739) ‘built a system of scepticism, which leaves no ground to believe any one thing rather than its contrary’. And, quite apart from the irreligiousness Reid finds in Hume’s account, the structures of social power are also made vulnerable. Hume tells us that it is not only that ‘two objects are connected by cause and effect, when one produces a motion of any action in the other, but also when it has a power of producing it. A nd this we may observe to be the source of all the relations and duty, by which men influence each other in society, and are plac’d in the ties of government and subordination’ (Hume, Treatise, I. I. IV, 12). In suggesting the link between the imagination and social organisation, Hume arguably opens a space of anxiety. Hume emphasises the importance of the ‘impression[s]’ made on us by the external world, but it is the philosopher and physician David Hartley who further problematises the account by suggesting the materiality of this process. Hartley does not mention Hume directly in his Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (1749), but he does explain that his analysis of the doctrine of association of ideas is taken from ‘what Mr. Locke, and other ingenious Persons since his T ime’ had written. In Observations Hartley attempted to connect the way the brain worked, the associative patterns of the mind, morality, and ultimately spirituality. He thought we received information about the external world via a series of vibrations. A longside these physical phenomena was the mental activity of association. Hartley nonetheless desired to avoid materialism; he did not believe that the impact of the physical world determined mental activity. Yet his objections to such materialism are not as obvious in his Observations as in his earlier work. And, as Barbara Bowen Oberg put it: ‘His theory of vibrations opened the way to several dangerous possibilities: matter endowed with the power of sensations; animals endowed with the same physical, and potentially mental and spiritual, possibilities as man; man’s reduction to the categorical level of rock David Hume, Treatise 11; I. I. IV. See also 130–142; I. III. XII, ‘Of the Probability of C auses’.  S ee T homas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense (1764) ed. Timothy J. Duggan (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970), ‘Dedication’, p. v.  David Hartley, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (1749), intro. Theodore L. Huguelet (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles, 1966), 5; I. I. 

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or beast’. Hence, when Joseph Priestley adapted the work, he removed the theory of vibrations (along with the religious superstructure). This reissued version of the work, Theory of the Human Mind (1775), became an important text for Priestleian Unitarianism and influenced Coleridge when he was exposed to it at Cambridge. But despite C oleridge’s early enthusiasm (he had his portrait painted holding a copy of the book and named his son after Hartley), by 1817 he came to see Hartley as ‘a spokesperson of the mechanical philosophy’ that he had rejected (Bowen Oberg 441). For Coleridge, the consequence of such mechanism is a model of the mind as essentially passive; free will is replaced by determinism, a position C oleridge connects with the French Revolution.10 A s C oleridge’s eventual critique of Hartley suggests, this issue of association was particularly important because of eighteenth-century concern over the apparent epistemological implications of Newtonian science. As Stephen Prickett notes, ‘It seemed at first sight that the epistemological implications of Newtonian science served to confirm Locke’s model of the mind as a tabula rasa’; in other words, it suggested that the mind is essentially passive, formed by sense data acting on it.11 N ewtonian science was also read as presenting an essentially dead external world, consisting of form and extension. C learly, in this dilemma concerning the relationship of mind and world, the aesthetic, closely connected to the experience and interpretation of sense data, was a point of crux. For C oleridge, interrogation of British empiricism led to a compensatory emphasis on creative (and particularly the poetic) imagination. After all, the poetic imagination had had little function in Hume’s account. A s Paul Hamilton puts it: ‘[Hume] has no conception that poetry and the poetic imagination might have a purpose different from that of the understanding which produces beliefs in matters of fact. Hume’s description leaves poetry either as make-believe or “a counterfeit belief”’ (Coleridge’s Poetics 46). For Coleridge and Wordsworth, in contrast, the associative processes of the poet’s mind were key; the imagination of the poet drew on resources unavailable to philosopher or scientist. T he interrogation of empiricism also led to an eagerness to distinguish poetry from other areas of human endeavour. T he Romantic celebration of the creative realm and of original poetic genius in one sense serves to separate art from the material realm and its immediate purposes. However, there was also a marked reaction against the anti-empiricist (Humean) trend in British empiricism, a reaction found in a hostility to ‘building castles in

 Barbara Bowen O berg, ‘David Hartley and the A ssociation of Ideas’, Journal of the History of Ideas 37 (1976): 441–54, 443. 10 S amuel T aylor C oleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols (London: Routledge, 1983), 1: 121­–3; for mental passivity see 1: 111. 11 Stephen Prickett, Coleridge and Wordsworth: The Poetry of Growth (C ambridge: Cambridge UP, 1970), p. 7.

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air’ (as Maria Edgeworth put it), whether philosophical, political, or romantic.12 Mary Wollstonecraft had attacked Burke’s attempts to build an ‘airy edifice’ without ‘foundation’; equally, the more conservative E lizabeth Hamilton accused philosophers like Godwin of ‘bold’ ‘flight[s]’ of fancy.13 The difficulty was to find a firm, mutually agreeable basis on which to establish values. And here art had an important educative role to play. In discussions around the possibility of a standard of taste, commentators had suggested that agreement was difficult because of the inadequacy of most people’s mental equipment. Individuals, caught in their own solipsistic mental space, could not agree and the failure of community might be the ultimate result. T he writers considered here examine a potential solution to this difficulty, proposing a reorganisation of the way the mind channels and processes sensory information. Stephen Prickett suggests that Wordsworth and Coleridge conceived ‘mental growth … as the product of a continual modification of perception’ (20). A similar belief is present in the works of Maria Edgeworth, Joanna Baillie, and Elizabeth Hamilton. For these writers, attention to the external world produces good associations and beneficial habits. Then the properly trained mind is able, independently, to make accurate decisions with which others can agree. Instead of being trapped by subjective associations, selfish and solipsistic, individuals with such an education can form part of a healthy and cooperative community. C hallenging the empiricist emphasis on sight, these writers suggest that mental improvement comes about through attention to all sensory information – particularly, for E dgeworth and Bailie, the ability to listen. E ncouraging us to re-evaluate the information we receive from our environment, all three writers promote what might be called a redistribution of the sensible, a redistribution which had consequences for the way the lower ranks are imagined. And in these accounts the aesthetic is not seen as a separate sphere of activity, divorced from other, more practical concerns. Rather, both art and nature are seen as important insofar as attention to them can aid our mental re-education. * Writing to A dam S mith about the reception of Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), David Hume reveals the extent of his anxiety with audience.14 A dopting the language of sensibility, he nonetheless suggests that, far from being bound together in a sympathetic community, readers are likely to have such personal 12 Maria Edgeworth, Helen (1834), intro. Maggie Gee, Mothers of the Novel (L ondon: Pandora, 1987), p. 72. For a discussion of conservative disapproval of the supposed radical appropriations of romance see April London, ‘Novel and History in Anti-Jacobin Satire’, Yearbook of English Studies 30 (2000): 71–81. 13 Wollstonecraft, Works 5: 24; Eliza[beth] Hamilton, letter to Mary Hays, 13 March 1797, Microfilm RP677, Department of Manuscripts, British Library, London. 14 A dam S mith, The Correspondence of Adam Smith, eds Ernest Campbell Mossner and Ian S impson Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 33–5.

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imaginative associations and such strong self-interest that an approving audience becomes a virtual impossibility. Hume’s unease about both the integrity of individual judgement is similarly evident in his essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’. He initially signaled the importance of sympathy to taste by publishing the essay in Four Dissertations (1757), which began with ‘On the Passions’.15 However, in the latter half of ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, sympathy becomes far from sufficient. There Hume sets up a series of tests for the individual judgement, requiring in his critic not only ‘practice in a particular art’ and the ability to make ‘comparisons’ but a knowledge of others’ ‘peculiar views and prejudices’ (Hume, Essays 237– 9). Elsewhere, Hume even suggests that suspicion and antagonism are desirable in encouraging good taste since they will prevent the ‘contagion of popular opinion’.16 T he personal nature of associations eventually comes to threaten that larger association, the sympathetic community. E ven for Hume, then, particular associations or personal interests led to difficulties in making either aesthetic or ethical judgements, and the result was a threat to the sympathetic community. Maria Edgeworth’s work, particularly on education, can be seen as an attempt to overcome this difficulty – that is, to show that association, properly managed, could be the bedrock of an ethical (and tasteful) community rather than a threat to it. Her educational writings are frequently seen as influenced by Locke,17 while Marilyn Butler notes the use of ‘the simple Baconian model of the learning subject within an environment’ and the idea of the ‘self as spectator of the world and self-examiner’ inherited from S mith and Hume.18 However, Edgeworth combines these influences in quite a precise way. Arguably, her work can be interpreted as an attempt to reconcile the materialist tendencies in David Hartley’s work with Adam Smith’s theory of sympathy.19 A ssociation is used to promote a secular morality that, crucially, is supported by scientific observation. Further, having examined E dgeworth’s emphasis on observation in her more directly educational work, it becomes possible to see that, for her, art is not a separate realm, but implicated in general economic and emotional exchange. Like Harry and Lucy’s scientific experimentation, its role is to provide an accurate source of information about both objects and human sympathies.

15 Hume, ‘O f the S tandard of T aste’, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (1777), ed. Eugene F. Miller, revised ed. (Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1985) pp. 226–49. 16 David Hume, ‘O f the Rise and Progress of the A rts and S ciences ’, Essays 120. 17 See Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (L ondon: Routledge, 1993), p. 117. 18 Maria Edgeworth, The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth, ed. Marilyn Butler, 12 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999–2003), 1: xxii. 19 In 1778 or 1779, Richard E dgeworth read Priestley’s abridgement of Hartley’s Observations on Man (1749), where, as Marilyn Butler notes, ‘Priestley drew attention to the importance of Hartley’s doctrine of the association of ideas’ (Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth; A Literary Biography [C larendon: O xford U niversity Press, 1972], p. 60).

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Drawing on the work of Smith and Hartley, Maria Edgeworth’s Early Lessons (1801) is one such attempt to position scientific materialism and human emotional experience so that they no longer appear at odds. While the ethical dimension of the work, based on Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, grows in complexity during its 10 parts, a scientific orientation is immediately evident.20 Early Lessons suggests that scientific observation and the ability clearly to express such observations in language have a vital part to play in forming proper associations in the child’s mind. Indeed, the growth of the child’s mind is intimately linked with, even stimulated by, his ability to both appreciate and make gradually more complex deductions about the external world. As has been noted, Stephen Prickett suggests that Wordsworth and C oleridge conceived ‘mental growth … as the product of a continual modification of perception’.21 C ertainly E dgeworth similarly suggests that the mind develops in response to sense impressions from the external world; active rather than passive, the more information the mind gathers the richer the interpretation and the more perceptive the gaze. Wordsworth’s attitude to science was, however, equivocal; the stress was on mental and human development through poetry. For the Edgeworths, in contrast, scientific observation played a far more central role in the development of the mind. Edgeworth linked Early Lessons with her father’s interest in ‘the art of teaching to invent – I dare not say – but of awakening and assisting the inventive power by daily exercise and excitement, and by the application of philosophic principles to trivial occurrences’.22 More significantly, however, an attentive reading of the initial sections concerning Harry and Lucy suggests that observation of the external world cultivates habits which in turn also facilitate moral growth. Empirical knowledge is hence tied both to mental activity and to ethics. The first part of Early Lessons (adapted slightly from a story written in 1779 by Richard Lovell Edgeworth and his second wife Honora) suggests the force with which sensory information impacts on the brain but, nonetheless, establishes a space for mental activity and free will (Novels 12: xiii–xiv). The appended glossary clearly indicates the Hartleian tendency of the work: IMPRESSION. When anything hard is pressed upon something which is not elastic; or springy, but which is much softer than itself, it sinks into it, and leaves marks upon it, as a seal does upon bees wax, or upon sealing-wax softened by heat. The marks thus made are / called impressions, because they are impressed upon what receives them. Whatever makes us attend leaves a remembrance in the mind, which is called an impression, because this remembrance is something like the effect made by one body upon another. (Edgeworth, Novels 12: 86)

20 T his is unsurprising since Richard L ovell E dgeworth was a member of the L unar Group of S cottish intellectuals and scientists (E dgeworth, Works 1: xix). 21 Stephen Prickett, Coleridge and Wordsworth 20. 22 Maria Edgeworth, Harry and Lucy Concluded; Being the Last Part of E arly Lessons, 4 vols (London: Hunter et al, 1825), 1: xvii–xviii.

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Despite the cautious hedge ‘something like’, which suggests an element of metaphor is at work, the parallel here between the mind and wax is suggestive of Hartleian materialism, such as that attacked by Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria. Notably, this outlook is subtly reinforced by the inclusion of entries such as ‘PRINT’ and ‘STAMPS’, relating to the nonmetaphorical meaning of impression (E dgeworth, Novels 12: 87–8, 90). However, when the glossary, in line with Hume and Hartley, mentions habit, there does seem to be potential for mental activity. T he suggestion that ‘there are some things, which, from habit, become so easy to be done, that we do not seem to think of them, when we are doing them’ (E dgeworth, Novels 12: 86) recalls Hartley’s suggestion that things that become ‘secondarily automatic’ like walking can still show our power for voluntary action (we can choose whether to do them or not).23 A nd habits, which may be ‘good’ or ‘bad’, occur ‘when we have done a thing a great many times’ (E dgeworth, Novels 12: 86). Repetition allows certain actions to occur without thought; however, there does seem some possibility that we have control over the formation of such patterns of habitual behavior: this is not the passive determinism C oleridge fears. For the Edgeworths, the key to such control is association. In Early Lessons, association, operating by contiguity, is seen as an educational trick, an aid to memory (Novels 12: 83). But what becomes more important for Maria Edgeworth are the emotional lessons it provides. Harry and Lucy’s parents are keen to establish the association between learning and pleasure in their children’s minds (Novels 12: 104). Further, this association between learning and pleasure, facilitated by the parents, equally generates another, connected feeling: gratitude (Novels 12: 105). And gratitude, the stories as a whole make plain, encourages a reciprocal desire to please in the children. Hence Lucy, for instance, collects honeysuckle blossoms because she ‘thought her Mother would like them’: the beautiful sight and scent of the flowers are only as important as the bond of sympathy the gift represents (Novels 12: 72). Attention to empirical data is, then, linked to appreciation of other people’s emotions. T he aesthetic is important mainly in terms of its pleasurable and practical associations, associations which allow the individual to please himself or others. A s Early Lessons progresses, the family unit gradually becomes the setting for more sophisticated moral lessons, still building, however, on the child’s initial empirical training. Whether choosing between a new pair of shoes or a purple vase, or between fake wooden plums and a huswife to hold her needles, Rosamond must learn the patience to evaluate her desires. A s in Harry and L ucy’s experiments, a vital aspect of this is sensory investigation. A voiding the concentration solely on sight (the empiricist emphasis on this sense was often criticised), Rosamond should examine ‘more attentively’ (Novels 12: 171). In the case of the purple vase, she must learn to discriminate: the colour is given, not by the glass itself, but by an unpleasantly odorous purple liquid within. Similarly, the wooden plums look attractive, but touch and (should one be unwary enough to try the teeth-breaking Hartley, Observations 258; I II . VII . 77.

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experiment) taste establish that they are not what they appear. This process complete, Rosamond must weigh up the benefits, considering the temporary pleasure of tricking her cousins, against the utility of being always able to find her needles. The sensory, even when at its most appealing, should be subject to evaluation – and the major criterion by which it is to be judged is utility. T he lesson here is clearly one of self-command, considered by A dam S mith to be a key aspect of moral development. Self-command, according to Smith, ‘is not only itself a great virtue, but from it all the other virtues seem to derive their principal lustre’.24 What is remarkable is that self-command is tied so closely for E dgeworth to investigation of sensory material: this process is at the heart of establishing S mithian sympathy. Rosamond’s self-command and her ‘gratitude’ work to benefit others, as in the fifth part of Early Lessons, where, despite temptation, she gives the impoverished A nne a box of hyacinths in repayment for good treatment. A ttention to the material world also improves understanding of such reciprocity. In the third part of Theory of Moral Sentiments S mith asserts: The man of the most perfect virtue … is he who joins, to the most perfect command of his own original and selfish feelings, the most exquisite sensibility both to the original and sympathetic feelings of others. (152; III. 3. 35)

Schooled in empirical observation, Edgeworth’s Frank makes a conscious choice to control his ‘original and selfish feelings’. When he thinks of picking the gardener’s flowers, his mother appeals to his own experiences: ‘But should you like that any- body should take flowers out of the little garden you have at home?’ ‘N o, mamma, I should not’ he replies (Novels 12: 174). Understanding his own selfish feelings enables him to appreciate the gardener’s position and hence leads to greater morality. Further, this eventually allows a more advanced form of moral exchange, implicit in the story of Frank’s interaction with a boy of his own age. Frank returns a bag of nuts the boy has lost; when Frank loses a bunch of cherries, the boy reciprocates. Both Frank and the reader are led to conclude that the boy possesses similar sympathies; having felt pleasure at Frank’s earlier gratification of his desires, this ordinary boy is now able to understand Frank’s own feelings. Sympathetic feelings are built on appreciation of original selfishness in others and rely on the ability to observe and reflect. The suggestion is that if only we are attentive enough to realise it, economic and sympathetic reciprocity proceed in parallel. Maria Edgeworth’s approach combines aspects of the thought of Hartley and S mith in order to create healthy patterns of associations which would eventually lead to an economically and morally beneficial community. Further, her work suggests a relationship between matter and mind, between the empirical observation of the environment and the moral and intellectual development of the individual; and (despite Coleridge’s later objections), in this account, the relationship does 24 A dam S mith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, eds D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 241; VI. III. 11.

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not sacrifice free will. The growth of the mind was, then, as for Wordsworth and Coleridge, Maria Edgeworth’s key concern. But while Edgeworth’s interest in the mind and in fiction’s role in exploring it bears some similarity to that of the male Romantic poets, the details of her system mean that her approach to the audience, artist, and the art object itself differs considerably. The desire, common in the Romantic period, to separate art and artist from the marketplace has been linked to anxiety concerning audience. Lucy Newlyn remarks: ‘More potential readers of literature existed than ever before, but fewer and fewer, it was feared, were genuinely qualified to understand what they were reading’.25 A s has been suggested, this leads to a desire to control, educate, or guide the audience that is peculiarly emphatic, a desire that perhaps as the period progresses seems increasingly unlikely to be fulfilled. This in turn generates Wordsworth’s suggestion in his 1815 Essay, Supplementary to the Preface that the poet ‘create the taste by which he is to be enjoyed’ and Coleridge’s reduction of his effective audience to a well-informed ‘clerisy’.26 E dgeworth also places demands on her audience but she stands in a rather different position in relation to the market. While Edgeworth fears luxury, she also believes that the market can operate along socially beneficial lines. The key is that the purchasers (properly educated themselves) understand the mechanisms of self-control and sympathy outlined in A dam S mith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. T he prestige of connoisseurship and the ethical and cultural knowledge of the ‘clerisy’ have little value in this account. Hence, in Maria Edgeworth’s last novel, Helen (1834), we learn that the heroine’s late guardian, Dean Stanley, was ‘cursed with too fine a taste, and with too soft a heart – a heart too well knowing how to yield – never could he deny himself, much less any other human being, any gratification which money could command’ (Helen 2). The Dean has feeling but is insufficiently disciplined by Smith’s brand of Christian stoicism. Unlike the good children of Early Lessons, he lacks self-command and the prudence that accompanies it. Consequently, while Frank appreciates original selfish desires and is hence aware of the property of others, the Dean’s soft-heartedness leads him to damage his creditors and, to a certain extent, his niece. T he Dean’s ‘extravagances’ ‘in Italy’ place him as an antiquarian and connoisseur, but for E dgeworth this is inadequate (Helen 2). The behaviour of the elitist connoisseur is seen to have grave consequences for women and the lower ranks. Edgeworth is aware of the difficulties represented by the market but refuses to shirk them. Art, in this account, is something sold for money and bought ideally on principles of both prudence and sympathy. E qually uncomfortably, E dgeworth also insists on foregrounding the economic implications of art for the artist. Given E dgeworth’s sense of the interrelation of L ucy N ewlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), p. 4. 26 William Wordsworth, Selected Prose 408. S amuel T aylor C oleridge, ‘O n the C onstitution of the C hurch and S tate, according to the Idea of E ach’, Samuel Taylor Coleridge 686–96, 694. 25

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sympathy and economics, in her work the motif of neglected genius meets with little sympathy: such an individual has, perhaps, merely failed to produce the benefit that would induce payment. For Edgeworth, this situation was one better avoided, and her emphasis was on the dangers of poverty and dependence. In Popular Tales (1804), for example, ‘Lame Jervas’ is the narrative of a former tinminer turned successful entrepreneur. In his youth, the newly literate Jervas has been elated by his ‘writing-master’s calling me a genius’, but his poem in praise of the thistle, while perhaps a promising first attempt, is not in actuality a true artistic success (Novels 12: 17). The writing master presumably flatters Jervas’s attempts because of his disbelief that a C ornish tin-mining boy could rise to such intellectual heights. Nonetheless, neither Edgeworth nor Jervas’s fictional mentor, Mr. Y –, find the tin-miner’s initial display of taste and talent surprising. Rather, Mr Y–’s objection to Jervas’s work is based on other grounds. He easily shows Jervas the ‘difference between good and bad poetry’ and praises his pupil’s ability to discriminate (Novels 12: 17). But he warns Jervas: ‘it was not likely, if I turned my industry to writing verses, that I should ever either earn my bread or equal those who had enjoyed greater advantages of leisure and education’ (Novels 12: 17). In the third book of The Pleasures of Imagination (1744), Mark Akenside had imagined a tasteful peasant, a ‘swain’ enjoying the sunset, experiencing the ‘form of beauty smiling at his heart’ since ‘heaven / In every breast hath sown these early seeds’.27 However, he also indicates that ‘Without fair Culture’s kind parental aid’ these ‘early seeds’ come to nothing (1. 538). Edgeworth gives this account of the tasteful but culturally ignorant peasant a new dimension. Not only would Jervas take a long time to gain the necessary education, but there is some doubt as to whether the ultimate product would be socially useful. For Edgeworth, the fine arts are like any other branch of industry (except that it is perhaps harder to make them utile). Effort, determination (that is, self-control and prudence), craftsmanship, and an eye for utility are the necessary qualities to become a success, whether in the field of poetry or in any other. Aware of the uncertainty of success, the would-be artist, Edgeworth suggests, should work hard to retain his financial independence – and this is true not only of the lower classes, but equally for the middle and upper ranks. Hence in Patronage (1814) a ‘genius’ painter feels thwarted by his patron.28 Equally, Mr Temple gives up his profession of lawyer to become the secretary of a politician. However, E dgeworth indicates that although his ‘celebrated political pamphlets, and two volumes of moral and philosophical disquisitions’ are a great literary achievement, the independence given by professional work would have been beneficial (587–9). Although Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination. To which is prefixed a Critical Essay on the Poem, by Mrs Barbauld (London: Cadell and Davies, 1794), pp. 114, 1. 526, l. 534, l. 536. 28 Maria Edgeworth, Patronage (1814), intro. Eva Figes, Mothers of the Novel (London: Pandora P, 1986), pp. 173–4. 27

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Edgeworth is well aware of the dangerous impact of fashion on judgements of taste, Mr Percy, head of the novel’s central family, argues that ‘as far as the public good is concerned, free competition is more advantageous to the arts and to artists, than any private patronage can be’ (255). ‘Productions’ with ‘real merit’ will make their way (255). A nd Rosamond’s experiences in Early Lessons suggest what such ‘merit’ might consist of. There Edgeworth emphasises the range of senses: judgements, including those relative to taste, are, it seems, not merely a question of individual perspective but of accurate knowledge. And the most important way in which art can have utility is through providing accurate knowledge of human nature. Hence, in Belinda, Virginia, educated like Rousseau’s Sophie, in isolation and largely in ignorance, falls in love with the (apparently fantastic) portrait of an unknown man. In contrast, the more experienced heroine, Belinda decides to copy ‘Westal’s sketch of lady Anne Percival and her family’, a portrait ‘more interesting … than all the pictures of shepherds and shepherdesses … that were ever drawn’. Significantly, Belinda notes ‘how much more interesting this picture is to us, from our knowing that it is not a fancy-piece; that the happiness is real, not imaginary’ (Belinda 223). If it is inevitably an exercise of taste, and to some extent imagination, for us to picture an ideal society, she advises that we keep the image as close to reality as possible. In short, her emphasis on verisimilitude in art is similar to that found in C harlotte S mith’s Desmond (even the scornful mention of the idealistic picture of the shepherd is the same). Edgeworth holds consistently to this belief in verisimilitude: in Patronage, for example, the stained glass window depicting the novel’s heroine, C aroline, rescuing an old woman servant from the fire engulfing her home is particularly admired by the hero when he discovers it depicts an actual event. E dgeworth is not, however, concerned only that art should represent what is positive about human nature, as Helen makes clear. There, Lady Davenaunt praises Dumont’s Mémoires de Mirabeau, which gives her ‘infinitely increased pleasure, from [her] certain knowledge, [her] perfect conviction, of the truth of the author’.29 This sincerity makes ‘the characters’ contained in the work: valuable as records of individual varieties that have positively so existed, while the most brilliant writer could, by fiction, have produced an effect, valuable only as representing the general average of human nature, but adding nothing to our positive knowledge, to the data from which we can reason in future (Helen 171).

A rt and literature, written with an eye for accuracy, serve to add to our ‘data’, rather as observation of the environment gives E dgeworth’s children the further capacity to reason accurately. T his may be art as mimesis, but it is mimesis with a particular purpose. For E dgeworth, art which facilitates S mithian spectatorship is Maria Edgeworth, Helen 170. E dgeworth is slightly inexact here, however: E tienne Dumont’s Souvenirs sur Mirabeau was published in 1832 (E tienne Dumont, Souvenirs sur Mirabeau [London: Bull, 1832]). See also, however, Lucas De Montigny Riquetti, Honoré Gabriel, Mémoires biographiques, littéraires et politiques de Mirabeau (1834–35). 29

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that to which a tasteful person should be attracted. Art improves our judgement of the ‘original and sympathetic feelings’ of others. In encouraging sympathy, it has a moral and economic function. Yet, as in Early Lessons, personal observation is as important as knowledge gained from books or portraits; for Lady Davenaunt, ‘if women would avail themselves of their daily, hourly, opportunities of judging people by their words, they would get at the natural characters, or, what is of just as much consequence, they would penetrate through the acquired habits’ (Helen 140). A rt merely adds to the information individuals should gather for themselves. T he mediation of the poet or author should not, strictly, be necessary at all. Despite E dgeworth’s emphasis on the importance of processing the sensory (an emphasis that seems to relate closely to the aesthetic), her work has a utilitarian drive that is difficult to equate with the influential Kantian position on taste. After all, Kant remarks when analysing the beautiful that ‘One must not be in the least prepossessed in favour of the real existence of the thing, but must preserve complete indifference in this respect, in order to play the part of judge in matters of taste’ (Critique of Judgement 43; 1. 1. 2). For Edgeworth, the existence of the object is of primary importance because practical social utility is important. E qually challengingly, E dgeworth does not seem interested in art or, more generally, the aesthetic experience as something separate or distinct from the rest of our experience. Rather, faced, like Kant in his response to Hume, with the prospect of endlessly differing subjective judgement, Edgeworth comes up with an alternative solution to relativism. In this account, attention to the external world (whether to art, to attractive objects, or to people) can facilitate mental development. In particular, the spectator will understand his own desires and sympathies and those of others. He will have a moment, in other words, when he is above the pressure of either his own or other people’s passions. T his is E dgeworth’s form of disinterestedness, and it offers an escape from solipsism. Moreover, for Edgeworth, there is no area of life, no decision, which is unaffected by the imperative to balance the needs of self and other. Consequently, art, like other facets of human existence, is important only insofar as it serves this imperative. C orrect social behaviour is generated by trained attention to sensory information, which art can develop. N otable here is E dgeworth’s insistence on the accurate use of language as the vehicle that depicts such development. The glossary attached to the first part of Early Lessons suggests the importance of clarity in language for scientific purposes (a notable divergence from the search for a natural or philosophical language in Wollstonecraft and Wordsworth), and this same point was extended by Edgeworth to the moral realm. Like infantile Augusta Eltons, Edgeworth’s poorly educated children, such as Hal in Waste Not, Want Not are apt to be misled by inaccurate slang (Parent’s Assistant [1800] in Novels 10: 25–45). Attention to the ‘words’ of others is key, in both life and art (an aesthetic imperative found at its strongest in Austen, where the auditory plays as large a part as the visual). Further, E dgeworth herself connects this concentration on voice with the theatre. S he had initially thought to include plays as part of the contents of Moral Tales (1801) but apparently abandoned the plan after her play Whim for Whim (1798) was rejected

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by Sheridan (Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth 165). Yet her interest in drama remains. Informed, for example, of the importance of ‘words’, Helen listens to remarks as ‘she would have done to observations about two characters in a novel or on the stage’ (140). What Edgeworth’s imagined Romantic drama might look like can be seen to some extent in the work of Joanna Baillie. An influence on Wordsworth and C oleridge during the Lyrical Ballads period, Baillie shares E dgeworth’s interest in the work of Adam Smith and similarly emphasises the importance of art in depicting the developing mind. In her Introductory Discourse to plays on the Passions (1798), Baillie applies Smith’s ideas to the dramatic arena. Recent years have seen a reawakening of interest in Baillie, and particularly in her use of sympathy.30 However, her work has not been examined in the context of the debate concerning the disinterested yet sympathetic gaze so important in late eighteenth-century Britain. For Baillie as for E dgeworth, the challenge was to prevent sensibility being directed towards only ‘original and selfish feeling’. Well aware of the Gothic’s exploration of extreme emotional pain (discussed in the last chapter), Baillie saw that an aesthetic based on Adam Smith’s work might justify and control our responses to extreme emotion in both art and life. Baillie proposes a particular process of observation and reflection that, forming beneficial associations, prevents the drift to self-interested desire. T he fascination with pain and persecution so typical of the Gothic was in part legitimised, no longer the interest of the callous voyeur but of the self-controlled, sympathetic observer of human nature. For Adam Smith, the key to the smooth operation of disinterested sympathy and self-control in society is sympathetic curiosity. A s spectators, we feel sympathy with the ‘grief or joy’ of others, but this sympathy ‘before we are informed of the cause of either, is always extremely imperfect’ (S mith, Theory of Moral Sentiments 11; I. i. I. 9). Hence we feel curiosity to find out more about the particular situation. Having done so, we feel that an action has merit or demerit depending on our degree of sympathy. In other words, our sympathetic curiosity draws us into a process of judgement. Moreover, in this process, Smith posits, a spectator feels the greatest sympathy when the individual he is watching displays self-control; this is because the spectator does not feel the current desires of the individual 30 See, for example, Aileen Forbes, ‘“Sympathetic Curiosity” in Joanna Baillie’s T heater of the Passions’, European Romantic Review 14 (2003): 31–48, which offers an account in terms of the theatricality of sympathy. Placing Baillie in relation to the closet drama and A dam S mith’s thought on spectacle, Forbes does not, however, examine Baillie’s work in the context of the richly nuanced debate over sympathy carried out in the Gothic and philosophical novels and in the educational literature of the late eighteenth century. For other accounts of sympathy in Baillie’s work, see also Thomas C. Crochum, ed. Joanna Baillie: Romantic Dramatist: Critical Essays (London: Routledge, 2004); and Michael Gamer, ‘National supernaturalism: Joanna Baillie, Germany, and the Gothic drama’, in Romanticism and the Gothic (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), which places Baillie primarily in terms of Gothic drama abroad.

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in question and therefore thinks that the more moderate response is appropriate. What he requires is a sense of ‘propriety’, of both the justness and proportion of the response (S mith, Theory of Moral Sentiments 19– 23; I. i. 4). In Smith’s account, this balance between self-control and sympathy has an important effect: U pon these two different efforts, upon that of the spectator to enter into the sentiments of the person principally concerned, and upon that of the person principally concerned, to bring down his emotions to what the spectator can go along with, are founded two different sets of virtues. (23; I. i. 5. 1)

O n the one hand, our sympathy generates ‘the amiable virtues’ of humanity. O n the other hand, our detachment and bias in favour of self-control produce ‘the great, the awful and respectable, the virtues of self-denial’ (S mith, Theory of Moral Sentiments 23; I. i. 5. 1). A dam S mith’s theory of the ‘amiable’ and the ‘awful’ virtues represented a reply to Hobbes’s suggestion that society was based on self-interest. S mith suggests that Hobbes’s misreading is possible because in civilised society, these two sets of virtues have become unbalanced. In more civilised, feminised societies, the danger is that the amiable virtues will predominate. T he virtues of self-denial will be less evident, making society appear to conform more closely to Hobbes’ model. A nd if a civilised society is left bereft of such self-control, a deleterious interest in fashion, custom, and awe of rank will occur. While these have a certain economic utility, ‘this disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful … though necessary … is at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments’ (S mith, Theory of Moral Sentiments 61; I. iii. 3. 1). Hence, Smith, in replying to Hobbes, emphasises the more painful aspects of social intercourse – the emotions felt when watching an execution, and the Indians’ willingness to torture capture enemies. In their essay on terror in Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, the Aikins had mentioned the importance of spectacles of distress as a way of eliciting sympathy but had also suggested the conflict felt by the observer. Smith provides an argument for the moral necessity of facing such pain; removing the more vivid spectacles of distress will weaken the character. T o counteract such tendencies, particularly evident in civilised societies, portrayals of pain, passion, suffering, and self-control are beneficial. Adapting Smith’s account of the social benefits of sympathy, Baillie argued in her ‘Introductory Discourse to Plays on the Passions’ that curiosity about others is a leading human characteristic. A lthough she mentions the older aesthetic categories of the grand, the beautiful, and the novel, she does so only in order to dismiss them; it is not these, but the portrayal of natural human emotions, which stirs real emotion within spectators. O ur aesthetic impulses are essentially social. As such, Baillie insists that the desire to watch tragedy or read books does not stem from a morbid curiosity, but from a desire to know ourselves. Implanted by God, this desire is morally beneficial, provided our knowledge is culled from the correct source – not fashion, but high quality literature and, in particular, the drama. S uch genuine examinations of human nature cultivate both taste and ethical judgement.

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In contradistinction to Mary Wollstonecraft, Joanna Baillie explicitly states that fashion, custom, and the resultant social corruption are the result of misdirected curiosity. In her account, the need to discover more, which S mith detects in the spectator, easily degenerates. A ccording to Baillie, not only children but ‘every person, who is not deficient in intellect’ is impelled by sympathetic curiosity to examine the motivations and characters of others’; however, with those ‘whose penetration is but lightly esteemed’: that conversation which degenerates with them into trivial and mischievous tattling, takes its rise not unfrequently from the same source that supplies the rich vein of the satirist and the wit.31

Hence, in idle minds curiosity causes an interest in ‘how a man wears his wig and cane, what kind of house he inhabits, and what kind of table he keeps’ (68). The act of gauging material status (closely related to fashion) replaces the harder task of explaining ‘from what slight traits in his words and actions we have been led to conceive certain impressions of his character’ (68). Since reasoning is harder than making ‘observations’ on the ‘dress and the manners of men’, for Baillie there is a constant danger that ‘sympathetick curiosity’ will degenerate into trifling gossip and small-mindedness (Plays on the Passions, 68–9). Even the spectacle of fashion, its ‘endless changes’, ridiculed on the stage, is capable of misleading spectators (95). Concentrating on what is material and external, viewers are in danger of developing a detrimental admiration for the rich and powerful. In this, Baillie follows the Gothic condemnation of excessive visual preoccupation with display. As it was for Adam Smith, Joanna Baillie’s wariness of such luxury was accompanied by a suspicion of civilisation. This is evident when she rejects sentimental literature as too ‘artificial’, concerned with the fake or adapted behaviour deemed appropriate in society: For though great pains have been taken in our higher sentimental novels to interest us in the delicacies, embarrassments, and artificial distresses of the more refined part of society, they have never been able to cope in the publick opinion with these [works which most strongly characterize human nature in the middling and lower classes of society, where it is to be discovered by stronger and more unequivocal marks]. The one is a dressed and beautiful pleasure-ground, in which we are enchanted for a while, amongst the delicate and unknown plants of artful cultivation; the other is a rough forest of our native land; the oak, the elm, the hazel, and the bramble are there; and amidst the endless varieties of its paths we can wander for ever. (Baillie, Plays on the Passions 79)

Baillie’s choice of words, including pleasure, delicate, and artful, establishes a link between sentimental literature, relaxation, luxury, and a loss of concentration. 31 Joanna Baillie, Plays on the Passions (1798), ed. Peter Duthie (Peterborough, ON: Broadview P, 2001), p. 68.

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Baillie connects these phenomena with the upper ranks and implicitly to the foreign travel and privileged exposure to art that they experienced. A s a counterbalance, fashionable, civilised society requires a greater emphasis on self-control. C orrespondingly, the literature Baillie approves of is referred to metaphorically as part of an uncultivated landscape. T he ‘rough forest of our native land’ suggests a harshness that stands in opposition to the luxury of sentimental literature. By adopting this motif, Baillie suggests, that in contrast to the pleasure ground, it is commonly available; its constituents are visible in the middle and lower ranks, where deprivation and self-control are presumably more frequent. Baillie’s landscape reproduces the stoicism that was important to S mith’s thought, yet at the same time evokes the sublime and wild scenery so important to constructing a morality of vision in the Gothic. Further, in connecting self-control with the British landscape, Baillie implies its importance to national character. As Joanna Baillie’s praise for the harsh environment of the ‘rough forest’ might suggest, she is interested in the ameliorative effects of self-restraint. Illustrating the drive to observe man’s struggle with his passions, Baillie supplies a macabre choice of examples similar to Adam Smith’s. Her first case in point is the attraction of a public execution which, she argues, does not arise out of cruelty, but out of curiosity: T o see a human being bearing himself up under such circumstances, or struggling with the terrible apprehensions which such a situation impresses, must be the powerful incentive, which makes us press forward to behold what we shrink from and wait with trembling expectation of what we dread. (Plays on the Passions 69)

A s Baillie’s carefully constructed antitheses imply, the observer is brought into a state of equilibrium that is at once reminiscent of self-control but also of the paralysis of horror. This sinister (if ultimately beneficial) compulsion towards surveillance involves a balance between restraint and desire, withdrawal and watchfulness, that is reminiscent of S mith’s two classes of virtue, the ‘the amiable’ and ‘the awful’ (Theory of Moral Sentiments 23; I. i. 5. 1). Accordingly, the knowledge gleaned from watching others either ‘under the pressure of great and uncommon calamity’ or struggling against their own passions and flaws, in general produces social benefit: ‘Unless when accompanied with passions of the dark and malevolent kind, we cannot well exercise this disposition without becoming more just, more merciful, more compassionate … .’ (Plays on the Passions 74). Although Baillie appears to reject the Gothic, she has gone some way to providing a rationale for its emphasis on suffering. T he Gothic novel had been concerned with the social corruption produced by the fashionable gaze and uneasy with the institutional surveillance and ‘secresy’ that accompanied this self-serving form of observation. Baillie suggests, however, that if the individual practises such surveillance and internalises its moral implications, the ultimate social effect will be beneficial. T hat Baillie’s theory of ‘sympathetic curiosity’ relied on associationism is evident. In her 1826 Preface to ‘The Martyr’, Baillie made it plain that she was

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familiar with the thought of Dugald S tewart, a ‘great philosophical writer of our days’.32 Her interest in association is also explicitly indicated in her Preface to the third volume of Plays on the Passions, where she comments that she had ‘attempted to trace a natural connection from association of ideas, by which one thing produces another, or is insinuated to have done so from beginning to end’ (104). Indeed, the whole theory of Baillie’s drama of the development of the passion depends, effectively, on a form of association: In plays of this nature the passions must be depicted not only with their bold and prominent features, but also with those minute and delicate traits which distinguish them in an infant, growing, and repressed state; which are the most difficult of all to counterfeit, and one of which falsely imagined, will destroy the effect of a whole scene. (Baillie, Plays on the Passions 104)

Whatever the difficulty in execution, inherent here is the notion that the causes of mental development, the way ‘by which one thing produces another … from being to end’, can be traced; Baillie is offering an adaptation of the tragic convention of the fatal flaw along psychological lines. In fact, unlike Lord Kames and Alexander Gerard, who applied associationism to justify neoclassical dramatic rules, Baillie emphasised the potentially pernicious effects of following such precedents rather than observing associations at firsthand. In this scepticism with regard to classical models and in emphasising the importance of local or personal experience, Baillie followed Wollstonecraft. However, Baillie, like Edgeworth, had a more thorough-going interest in association than Wollstonecraft, and this enabled her to advance a more confident theory about the way all minds might be cultivated by art. Baillie thought that similar processes of association went on in every mind not completely detached from reality and that, therefore, anyone might benefit from the accurate portraits provided by art. ‘I have said’, she commented: that tragedy in representing to us great characters struggling with difficulties, and placed in situations of eminence and danger, in which few of us have any chance of being called upon to act, conveys its moral efficacy to our minds by the enlarged views which it gives to us of human nature, by the admiration of virtue, and execration of vice which it excites, and not by the examples it holds up for our immediate application. But in opening to us the heart of man under the influence of those passions to which all are liable, this is not the case. Those strong passions that, with small assistance from outward circumstances, work their way in the heart, till they become the tyrannical masters of it, carry on a similar operation in the breast of the Monarch, and the man of low degree. (Baillie, Plays on the Passions 93–4)

All are subject to the operations of association; all can hence be restrained by examining the processes by which this takes place. Unlike Wollstonecraft in her 32 Joanna Baillie, The Dramatic and Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie, 2nd ed. (London: Longman et al, 1851), p. 509.

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darker moments, Baillie does not have to propose that the individual has to step completely outside society to escape its distorting values. Rather, Baillie suggests that when accurate observation takes place within society, it is enough to create a tasteful and ethical individual. C omplete retreat from society becomes unnecessary. T o put it another way, the beautiful and sublime found in Wollstonecraft’s account in the landscape are now instead located in the amiable and awful virtues of the human character. O bserving such virtues presumably allows the artist to come closer to the universal language Wollstonecraft imagines will be produced by examining the natural world. Like Edgeworth, Baillie thought the key to this was speech. Dialogue and soliloquy allows us to trace the associations by which an emotion develops. For Baillie, however, dialogue was most integral to the theatre; hence it was by watching that the most satisfying reflection of human nature and the most edifying associations could be gained. Baillie argued that for the ‘poet, the novelist, the historian, and the philosopher’ human nature is ‘a powerful auxiliary’, but they can also supply ‘richness of invention, harmony of language,’ and ‘grandeur of sentiment’: If [the poet and the novelist] are to move us with any scene of distress, every circumstance regarding the parties concerned in it, how they looked, how they moved, how they sighed … is carefully described, and the few things that are given them to say along with all this assistance, must be every unnatural indeed if we refuse to sympathize with them. But the characters of the drama must speak directly for themselves. (81– 2)

T his emphasis on dialogue as a medium for the realistic expression of emotion had already been commented on in the work of the actress and author Elizabeth Inchbald. T he Monthly Review wrote about her novel A Simple Story (1791) that: The secret charm, that gives a grace to the whole is the art with which Mrs Inchbald has made her work completely dramatic. The business is, in a great degree, carried on in dialogue. In dialogue the characters unfold themselves. Their motions, their looks, their attitudes, discover the inward temper.33

T he process the reviewer describes – the ‘unfolding’, the ‘discover[y] of the inward temper’– is markedly similar to the association of ideas described by Baillie.34 Perhaps the best-known instance of this Romantic interest in speech, however, occurs in the 1802 A dvertisement to the Lyrical Ballads. A fter having access 33 Rev. of A Simple Story, by E lizabeth Inchbald, Monthly Review N .S . 4 (A pril 1791) 437. 34 Maria Edgeworth, for example, had commented that while she was reading A Simple Story (1791) she ‘never said or thought, that’s a fine sentiment’. Maria Edgeworth to Elizabeth Inchbald, 14 January 1810, quoted in James Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs Inchbald: Including her Familiar Correspondence with the Most Distinguished Persons of her Time, 2 vols (London: Bentley, 1833), 2: 152.

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to a copy of Baillie’s plays during the height of his association with C oleridge over the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth’s thought and examples in the Preface bear some striking similarities to Joanna Baillie’s. Like Baillie, Wordsworth opposed the fashionable, ‘fickle tastes and fickle appetites’ to the more tasteful ‘natural’ – defined by Baillie in her remarks on the ‘rough forest’ of her native land as the indigenous and the common. Rejecting the ‘Poetic diction’ that made no ‘regular or natural part of [the very language of men]’, he stated that the poems in the volume ‘were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society’ was suitable for poetry. For Wordsworth, then, as for Baillie, the ‘very language of men’ could illustrate ‘the manner in which our feelings and ideas are associated in a state of excitement’.35 In part four of Women and Playwriting in Nineteenth-century Britain (1999), ‘Genre T rouble’, S usan Bennett, examining the genres rules bent by women playwrights, argues that Joanna Baillie, along with Elizabeth Polack, troubled the genre of tragedy by including the local rather than the individual, the particular rather than the general.36 However, Baillie’s work can also be seen as crucial to a growing tendency to value careful recording and analysis, particularly of language. * If Baillie emphasised the importance of the language of the common man, for Elizabeth Hamilton, influenced by the common sense philosophy of Thomas Reid, the ordinary individual himself took on a new role as aesthetic judge. Critical commentary on Elizabeth Hamilton’s work usually concentrates on her participation in the post-French Revolution debate. However, Hamilton’s later work employs both common sense philosophy and the association of ideas in an attempt to find workable answers to questions about (self-) government raised by the political arguments of the 1790s. Hamilton’s common sense criticisms of radical philosophers implied the overly imaginative nature of their work and connected their ‘metaphysics’ with the emptiness of fashion. In contrast, Hamilton adopted herself the common sense position that it was possible to make meaningful assumptions about the external world. Important to an understanding of Romantic aesthetics, Elizabeth Hamilton’s work shows a clear progression from the common sense suspicion of scepticism, revolution, and fashion to the development of an Wordsworth and C oleridge, Lyrical Ballads 7. T he similarities may have been more than coincidental. In his Introduction to the facsimile edition of Baillie’s plays, Jonathan Wordsworth cites evidence that C oleridge and ‘Wordsworth had access to a copy of Baillie at Alfoxden at the height of the Lyrical Ballads period’ (n. pag). Joanna Baillie, A Series of Plays (1798), Revolution and Romanticism, 1789–34, A Series of Facsimile Reprints, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Oxford: Woodstock, 1990). 36 Susan Bennett, ‘Genre Trouble: Joanna Baillie, Elizabeth Polack – Tragic Subjects, Melodramatic Subjects’, Women And Playwriting In Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. T racy C. Davis and Ellen Donkin (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), pp. 215–32. 35

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associationist account of taste. Its sophistication, it might be added, calls for a critical re-evaluation of the notion that S cottish common sense responses to radicalism were ‘simple’ rejections of theory unimportant to the development of Romantic aesthetics. The sophistication of Elizabeth Hamilton’s account has been overlooked for several reasons. Since Marilyn Butler’s study Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975), a great deal of critical attention has been given to the ‘quixote-like’ hero of conservative novels, who is said to be ‘deluded by [the] revolutionary ideas’ of the 1790s.37 However, when examining attacks on the ‘New Philosophy’, critical commentators often accepted at face value the conservative writers’ propagandist rejections of theory.38 Conservative novels, it seemed, attacked radical ‘theory’ without having either any sophisticated philosophical underpinnings of their own or any relevance to Romantic aesthetics.39 A challenge to this trend was offered by David S impson’s Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory (1993), which historicized the conservative rejection of theory. Simpson’s work provides a vantage point from which to reassess Hamilton’s contribution to aesthetic theory. It demonstrates that, in many cases, the S cottish common sense tradition founded by Thomas Reid formed the intellectual background to conservative criticisms of the ‘New Philosophy’ and was an important influence on Romanticism. N onetheless, the range and sophistication of its uses remained in doubt, partly because of confusion surrounding the term common sense.40 Both radicals and conservatives used the expression, but the philosophical strategies of radicals such as Wollstonecraft differed from those of the conservative writers. Radicals frequently appealed to a ‘common’ reason. However, for the more conservative Hamilton, the common sense insistence on a knowable external world formed a useful counterargument to the perceived solipsism of those polemicists who wished to break with tradition. In addition, for those uncomfortable with Edmund Burke’s 37   Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975), pref. Marilyn Butler (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1987), p. 6. For a discussion of the use of ‘quixote’, see David Duff, Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre (C ambridge: C ambridge UP, 1993). For a discussion of the importance of common sense philosophy, see David S impson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory (C hicago, IL : U of Chicago P, 1993); Marilyn Butler, ‘Irish Culture and Scottish Enlightenment: Maria E dgeworth’s Histories of the Future’, in Economy, Polity, and Society: British Intellectual History 1750–1950, eds S tefan C ollini, Richard Whatmore, and Brian Young (C ambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), pp. 158–80. 38   Gary Kelly, ‘Jane Austen and the 1790s’, Fetter’d or Free? British Women Novelists 1670–1815, eds Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1986), pp. 285–306, 289. 39 This reluctance to examine the philosophical background of conservatism is the case even in a study as ambitious as Gary Kelly’s Women, Writing, and Revolution (O xford: Clarendon P, 1993). 40 See Julie Choi, ‘Feminine authority? Common Sense and the Question of Voice in the N ovel’, New Literary History 27 (1996): pp. 641–62, in particular 643–45.

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account of tradition as a basis for government, it provided an intellectually credible alternative. A substitute for following precedent, the common sense insistence on shared knowledge of the external world could underpin the Romantic conception of nature as both aesthetic standard and ethical guide. O ne of the greatest differences between Hume and the common sense philosophers, and the most significant for Hamilton, was the treatment of the association of ideas. A s previously suggested, Hume had argued that the imaginative power of association leads us to suppose that we see cause and effect in the external world, while all we can really perceive is contiguity and succession. In making this claim, Hume used association to question several principles which Reid insisted were self-evident. O verall, the implication was that conclusions about the external world relied on the imagination and might not be particularly accurate. In response, common sense philosophers tried to make the association of ideas fit their own picture of the human mind: they resisted the notion that their beliefs were based solely on imagination and consequently vulnerable to fashion. A nxious about mental development, George C ampbell, for example, argued that our assumptions about the external world were not based solely on imagination. O n the contrary, memory and association were reliable sources of information both when making judgements about the external world and when reasoning about morals. Campbell’s work hints, too, at the possibility of a kind of education through association. In the common sense account, correct education would produce the necessary memories and associations to ensure truly correct judgement on which everyone might agree.41 Common sense arguments against David Hume influenced conservative satirists in the post-French revolution debate who applied them to the ‘N ew Philosophy’. Following Reid’s criticisms of Hume, they associated the ‘N ew Philosophy’ with atheism, revolutionary principles, and the rhetoric of romance, portraying both sceptics and radicals as overly imaginative. In addition, however, their common sense anxiety about how evidence from the external world could be verified and interpreted gave added impetus to a growing interest in education. Hamilton exemplifies both reactions, moving from satire to develop an associationist theory of taste in her Series of Popular Essays (1813) and The Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808).42 A lthough E lizabeth Hamilton recalled read reading L ord Kames’s associationist work, Elements of Criticism (1762), as a young girl, her interest in philosophical controversy can be traced to the publication of her first novel, Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796).43 T his satiric critique of E astern and Western George C ampbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 2 vols (L ondon: S trahan and C adell; Edinburgh: Creech, 1776); see in particular I. V. II. I, 43 and I. V. II. I, 47. 42 E lizabeth Hamilton, The Cottagers of Glenburnie; A Tale for the Farmer’s IngleNook (Edinburgh: Ballantyne for Manners and Miller, and Cheyne; London: Cadell and Davies, and Miller, 1808); subsequently Cottagers. 43 E lizabeth Hamilton, Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), eds Pamela Perkins and Shannon Russell (Peterborough,ON: Broadview Press, 1999). 41

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values contained a lengthy parody of ‘Philosophers[s]’, who, instead of being men ‘“deep in knowledge either moral or natural”’, were ignorant individuals, ‘entertain[ing] a high idea of their own superiority, from having the temerity to reject whatever has the sanction of experience, and common sense’ (Hamilton, Translation 257). In the novel’s most grotesque episode, a young ‘Sceptic’ decides to prove ‘that sparrows may be changed into honey-bees’ by altering the ‘external circumstances’, thereby killing hundreds of ‘nestlings’ (Hamilton, Translation 266). In a letter to Mary Hays, who was annoyed at the novel’s attack on Godwin, Hamilton claimed that such instances of philosophical ‘absurdity’ were extremely common: In my opinion it is a strange sort of a compliment you pay your friend Mr Godwin, in taking it for granted that he has made a Monopoly of all the absurdity, and extravagance in the world; and that it is impossible to laugh at any thing ridiculous without pointing at him. Ignorant as I am, and ignorant as to the world you have declared me to be, I could point out to your perusal volume upon volume where you might see in the regions of Metaphysicks fancy has taken as bold a flight and that in the rage for systemizing are those of at least as distinguished eminence have laid themselves open to ridicule. (Letter to Mary Hays, 13 March 1797)

Her remark about the ‘systemizing’ tendencies of her opponents reflects the typical common sense suspicion that sceptical philosophers constructed elaborate theories not supported by empirical evidence: it was because they were overly imaginative and ignored the evidence of common sense that they came to inaccurate conclusions about the external world. T o this common sense observation Hamilton adds an attack on fashion. She suggests that metaphysicians, following a ‘rage’ in current philosophy as others might in dress, are ‘extravag[ant]’; fashions of both sorts lead individuals to put an incorrect or distorted value on what they see. In radical accounts, such as Wollstonecraft’s, the weakness of blindly following fashion belongs to those entrenched in the existing order. Hamilton moderates this rhetoric by suggesting that radical philosophers who have ‘no ground to believe any one thing rather than its contrary’ are equally vulnerable to the unruly associations that characterize fashion. E lizabeth Hamilton states this at greater length in Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), where the seducer and false philosopher Vallaton not only changes his opinion according to his convenience but previously had ‘the task of adorning the heads of his fair country-women’; fashion and philosophy are again intimately connected.44 Throwing away the prejudices of tradition, Hamilton argues, the sceptics come to rely not on the independent reason they champion, but on idle and changing trends which make them look at worst vicious or at best foolish. Brigetina, for example, who is interested in ‘cowsation and perfebility’, 44  E lizabeth Hamilton, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, ed. C laire Grogan (Peterborough, ON: Broadview P, 2000), p. 57.

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as her mother puts it, wears a ‘blue gown and yellow slippers’, a wig and ‘stiff turban and gaudy ribbons’ in a mistaken attempt to look attractive (Hamilton, Memoirs 38–40). Arbitrary associations fill her mind, and her appearance connects intellectual with aesthetic weakness. Parodying Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), his Memoirs of the Author of ‘A V indication of the Rights of Woman’ (1798), and Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), the book was Hamilton’s greatest success.45 However, Hamilton was not content with merely attacking those philosophers she associated with Hume’s scepticism; she wished to counter their influence by with the ‘modern philosophers’. S he therefore developed a theory of education which relied upon the association of ideas. In this account, commonly held associations, based on accurate observation of the environment, could form a basis for a more moral and, supposedly, more accurate taste. From Hamilton’s common sense perspective, this taste would not merely be a matter of individual preference but would be widely agreed upon because of its basis in accurate assumptions about the external world. Her interest in the uses of association was visible in her next work, Letters on Education. T here Hamilton echoed Reid by insisting that ‘rules are less necessary than principles’.46 In his Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764), Reid had written that while mechanics, astronomy, and optics had rules which could ‘universally obtain’, rules for the mind would not work. Instead, Reid maintained a belief in ‘certain principles’ of ‘common sense’ (9–10, 32). By defending these principles, he attempted to provide a philosophical alternative to scepticism; in contrast, Hamilton’s alternative was educational. Having made the case for the harmful effects of a sceptical or ‘systematizing’ education in her novels, in her pedagogic writings Hamilton argued that the flexibility of principles rather than rules was necessary if the developing mind was to be trained successfully. T o exemplify this, she gave the example of an agricultural improver who, instead of indiscriminately employing on the Grampian Hills the system of rules put down by the Devonshire farmer, adopted a more practical, flexible approach to theory, using general principles (Hamilton, L. on E. vi–vii). With this reference to farming, Hamilton signalled that her position was as down to earth – as unextravagant – as the soil itself. In contrast, she implicitly compares the sceptical philosophers to ‘improvers’ such as Repton and Brown, whose fashionable theories of landscape management neglected the local and particular in favour of generalisation. Like the overzealous agriculturist, Hamilton implied, the so-called systematic N ew Philosopher does not inquire into particular circumstances but places an incorrect 45 William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness (1793), ed. F.E.L. Priestley, 3 vols (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1946); Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), ed. Eleanor Ty (Oxford: Oxford World ClassicsOxford UP, 1996). 46 E lizabeth Hamilton, Letters on Education (Bath: Crutwell for Robinson, 1801); also published as Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education, 2nd ed., 2 vols (Bath: Crutwell for Robinson, 1801), p. v.

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value on what he sees; his systems are inflexible, failing to respond to empirical stimuli. S he, on the other hand, wishes to use the principles of associationist psychology, drawing upon what people commonly observe and experience to stabilise the social group. In A Series of Popular Essays and her last novel, The Cottagers of Glenburnie, Hamilton argued that associationism could be used to avoid the folly and violent stimulation of fashion and generate a correct taste, which would ultimately transform the whole community. Like William Wordsworth’s remarks on the ‘real language of men’, the titles of both E lizabeth Hamilton’s last novel, Glenburnie, and her Popular Essays signal a rejection of fashion in favour of something apparently more generally accessible.47 E lizabeth Hamilton’s narrative of aesthetic improvement was, however, explicitly aimed at the aesthetic life of both the middle and lower class. Hamilton’s biographer, Elizabeth Benger, suggests the project’s success by giving the anecdote of an old woman making a profit by hiring out her copy of Glenburnie to fellow villagers at 1d. a time.48 Hamilton’s account of taste in the novel connected it, as will be shown, not with the incorrect associations of fashion but, as she saw it, with a more genuine attention to the comfort and emotions of others, which is applicable not only to the working class, but across the whole of society. To this discussion of taste Hamilton’s Popular Essays lends a philosophical dimension rather more explicit than that provided by Wordsworth’s description of ‘philosophical language’ in the Preface (Lyrical Ballads 241). Hamilton’s common sense approach and reaction to Hume allowed her to use the association of ideas to argue for a shared taste which would guarantee the health of the whole community. Hamilton’s novel The Cottagers of Glenburnie provides a fictional model of this inclusive process.49 The work begins with a description of the visit of its unconventional heroine, spinster and former servant, Mrs Mason, to Glenburnie. Mrs Mason, who shares her name with the instructress in Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories (1788), visits the middle-ranking Stewarts before travelling to Mrs MacClarty’s cottage. Mrs MacClarty (the name means ‘dirty’) lives in a house which is both unattractive and disregarded, exhibiting a lack of taste and personal responsibility also evident even in the actions of the youngest children. Jean and her brother throw mud at the windows after Mrs Mason has cleaned them, reflecting the MacClarty family’s strange mixture of fashionable aspirations and inattentiveness. Mrs MacClarty prevents her children learning household chores, arguing that ‘they have not been used to [wark]’. She is more concerned that her William Wordsworth and S amuel T aylor C oleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 241.  S ee E lizabeth Benger, Memoirs of the late Mrs Elizabeth Hamilton, 2 vols (L ondon: Longman, 1818), 1: 50. 49  Ian C ampbell discusses the educational emphasis in The Cottagers but does not touch on the complicated associationist thought that characterises Hamilton’s work. See Ian C ampbell, ‘Glenburnie revisited’, in Literatur Im Kontext / Literature in Context, eds Joachim Schwend, Susanne Hagemann and Hermann Völkel (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1992), pp. 305–27. 47 48

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children have the leisure enjoyed by the upper ranks than with the immediate comfort of the household (Hamilton, Cottagers 140). Most significantly of all, this lack of consideration is connected with a form of mistaken ‘taste’ that places prestige above utility, an error demonstrated in the most trivial of domestic incidents – supplying refreshments to weary visitors: Miss Mary Stewart took upon herself the trouble of making tea, and began the operation by rincing all the cups and saucers through warm water; at which Mrs MacClarty was so far from being offended, that the moment she perceived her intention, she stepped to a huge Dutch press, and having, with some difficulty, opened the leaves, took from a store of nice linen, which it presented to their view, a fine damask napkin, of which she begged her to make use. “You have a noble stock of linen, cousin,” said Mrs Mason. “Few farmers houses in England could produce the like; but I think this is rather too fine for common use,” “For common use!” cried Mrs MacClarty; “na, na, we’re no sic fools as put our napery to use! I have a dizen table-claiths in that press thirty years old, that were never laid upon a table. (Hamilton, Cottagers 145)

Mrs MacClarty presumably thinks this linen improves her status, but it does nothing to make her life easier, more comfortable, or more enjoyable. In order to wipe the crockery tea, drinkers use ‘a long blackened rag’, aesthetically unpleasant and unhygienic (Hamilton, Cottagers 146). Hamilton implies that it is foolish to think good taste means owning objects which are prestigious but neither useful nor ornamental; the fact that the dresser holding the napkins opened ‘with some difficulty’ underlines their impracticality. In contrast to Mrs MacClarty, those who have good taste have an accurate view of the value of objects in their environment. This is emphasised in the second half of Mrs Mason’s stay in Glenburnie, when her attempts at teaching the MacClarty children are contrasted with her fruitful endeavours with the Morisons. An unsuccessful tradesman, Mr Morison lost his money by ‘extravagan[ce]’, going into debt for fashionable objects of no direct use to his family. Educated by Mrs Mason, however, he learns to improve his situation by valuing objects in proportion to the genuine comfort they provide. A s a schoolteacher he subsequently disseminates these values, and the result is an improvement in the comfort and beauty of the whole village. After Morison’s efforts, the ‘bright and clear glass of the [schoolhouse] windows, was seen to advantage peeping through the foliage of the rose-trees and other flowering shrubs that were trimly laid against the walls’ (Hamilton, Cottagers 397–8). This newly found cleanliness and taste, presumably the result of the school children’s labours, contrasts with the dirty windowpanes earlier in the novel. T he children’s early act suggests an inability to perceive the external world reminiscent of Hamilton’s criticisms of the ‘N ew Philosophers’. In contrast, the newly cleaned glass promoted by the now rational associations of the schoolmaster suggests the common sense position that it is possible to

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make accurate judgements about the environment. Reid had argued that ‘the natural faculties, by which we distinguish truth from error, are not fallacious’; Hamilton’s account moderates this, positing that the correct operations of these ‘natural faculties’ are best ensured by sensitivity to the emotions of others and to the environment. S uch sensitivity promotes correct vision by forming associations built upon the genuine comfort of others. Reflecting Elizabeth Hamilton’s emphasis on the importance of taste to the whole community, Glenburnie presents this emotionally responsive taste as equally important to the lower and middle classes. A s Hamilton’s discussion of dress indicates, each class is vulnerable to the associations of fashion and requires protection to ensure social harmony. Indicating that they value prestige more than comfort, the village girls of Glenburnie veer between the extremes of weekday squalor and Sunday finery. However, in the middle-class environment of the rectory, Miss Stewart, the eldest daughter, also aspires to gentility. Aspirational but displaying a sad lack of financial acumen, she describes young ladies being fashionable: ‘I don’t mean those who have fortunes, for there is nothing in that; but those who have not a shilling to depend on. Yet they are all so fine … .’ (Hamilton, Cottagers 18). Miss Stewart’s admiration is reserved for girls who go into debt for their finery; fashion, it would seem, inspires financial mismanagement. However, Hamilton argues that the circle of fashion and debt can be broken. With a tractability more often displayed by fictional than actual adolescents, Hamilton’s village girls are re-educated in Glenburnie’s new school and no longer subscribe to extremes of weekday grime and Sunday best. Rather than pursuing fashion, they become perpetually neat. This benefits the community’s appearance, its morality, and, most important, its stability: the school girls’ ‘improvement in personal neatness and good-breeding’ guaranteed ‘the attention they were likely to pay to the instruction of their teacher in points still more essential’ (Hamilton, Cottagers 392). In policing the boundary between the random associations of material and intellectual fashion and the supposed emotional order of her own taste, Hamilton comes to a radical conclusion. Her emphasis on emotional education leads her to reject the position, popular throughout most of the eighteenth-century, that taste depends on a connoisseurship characteristically possessed by the upper ranks. Instead, in The Cottagers of Glenburnie, Mrs Mason, retreating from the village into the Scottish countryside, values nature above art, the ‘works of God’ above those of man: What are all the works of man, what all the pomp and splendour of monarchs, compared with the grandeur of such a scene? But the sights that are designed by man, as proofs of his creative skill, are only to be seen by the rich and great; while the glorious works of God are exhibited to all. Pursuing this thought a little farther, it occurred to Mrs Mason, that all that is rare, is in general useless; and that all that is most truly valuable is given in common, and placed within the reach of the poor and lowly. (Hamilton, Cottagers 194)

Mrs Mason’s values here build on those set up elsewhere in Glenburnie. Having established that emotional sensitivity and the ability to make the right associations

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rely on the assessment of an object’s direct utility, she dismisses the ‘rare’ art objects. Although these are possessed by the upper ranks and consequently fashionable, they remain, like Mrs MacClarty’s linen, ultimately useless, serving only to inspire pointless emulation in the lower ranks. The natural objects which gave Mrs Mason so much pleasure, on the other hand, are ‘truly valuable’, that is, both useful and, by extension, representing a genuine grandeur or sublimity. Hamilton’s insistence that the aesthetic appreciation of nature is connected with moral and spiritual health is typically Romantic. Her criticisms of high art are similar to, though perhaps more extensive than, Wordsworth’s rejection of ‘sickly and stupid German T ragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse’ (Lyrical Ballads 249). However, Hamilton does not want aesthetic education to be limited by acquaintance with relatively rare cultural objects of any sort. Instead, she extends the opportunity for correct aesthetic judgement by basing taste on common emotional associations. In her Series of Popular Essays, Elizabeth Hamilton explains her need to make taste inclusive; she also explains, in a way reflective of common sense philosophy, how such a widely available sense of taste is not merely a matter of personal opinion, but is based on shared associations. T he Essays were dedicated to A rchibald A lison, whose Essays on the Nature and the Principles of Taste (1790) was one of the most completely associationist accounts given of the faculty.50 While A lexander Gerard and L ord Kames employed associationism to support neoclassical standards, A lison argued that personal associations triggered the emotion of taste. Hamilton uses similar terminology first to personalise taste and then to exploit it for her moral agenda. Hamilton refers to the ‘emotions’ of the sublime and the beautiful and emphasises the importance of the individual’s associations in facilitating such experiences: ‘In order to excite that emotion [of beauty], the object must recall to our recollection some pleasurable feelings or sensations formerly experienced’ (Hamilton, Popular Essays 1: 186). Her interest in making taste more personal and thereby more widely available quickly becomes evident. Taste is, she says, ‘seen as connected with the moral principle, and appears, not indeed as an additional faculty bestowed on a few fortunate individuals, but as an operation of the mind, to which all the faculties … and all the affections and sympathies … are alike essential’.51 Having connected taste with morality, she is anxious to imagine that it is something that can be possessed by as many people as possible. However, A rchibald A lison’s account potentially allowed for a descent into the sort of relativism Reid and the common sense philosophers disliked; based on the random associations made by the individual, taste might become merely a matter of personal opinion. In contrast, E lizabeth Hamilton’s common sense background led her to insist that, in taste, as well as in other matters, there were 50  A rchibald A lison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790), 5th ed., 2 vols (E dinburgh: Willison for C onstable; L ondon: L ongman, Hurst, Rees, O rme and Brown, 1817). 51   Hamilton, Popular Essays 1: 184–5; see also Letters on Education 3, 10.

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correct conclusions to be reached. Hamilton, like Campbell, insists on the common environmental influences that form our associations in childhood and which affect everyone’s tastes. Discussing the ‘recollection’ which triggers the emotions of taste, she selects an association, light, which almost everyone must share, and which promotes ‘cheerful’ ideas (Hamilton, Popular Essays, 1: 187). She argues that light produces cheerfulness because it is associated with the first consciousness of existence; she recalls the infant’s ‘delight’ in seeing ‘luminous objects’ and so first learning ‘the art of seeing’.52 With this account of childhood, Hamilton, as David Hartley had done, indicates how general environmental influences educate our taste, and, importantly, she lays the foundations of a taste which, although working on personal emotional associations, is similar in all human beings.53 E lizabeth Hamilton also suggests how this pattern of environmental associations produces a moral effect. When an external object reminds an observer of a noble quality or tender feeling, he or she feels the emotions of taste. A s A lison put it: N ot only the smell of the Rose, or the V iolet, is expressed to us by their C olours and Forms; but the utility of a Machine, the elegance of a Design, the proportion of a C olumn, the S peed of the Horse, the ferocity of the L ion, even all the qualities of the human mind, are naturally expressed to us by certain visible appearances; because our experience has taught us, that such qualities are connected with such appearances … . S uch visible qualities, therefore, are gradually considered as the S igns of other qualities, and are productive to us of the same E motions with the qualities they signify. (Alison 1: 291–2)

Unlike Alison, Hamilton is interested in qualities of the human heart than those of the mind. Like Wordsworth’s ‘feeling’, her anthropomorphizing taste fills the observer with ‘the same affections as are inspired by the proper objects of his love’ and ensures that he will have an enhanced moral sense towards his family. In turn, his developed responsibility leads to his only buying those objects which are tasteful because genuinely useful. A s Hamilton expresses it, ‘ideas of utility, or of propriety, fitness, symmetry, and congruity’ are connected to taste; the tasteful person (who is, in her account, necessarily considerate) reflects on the actual benefits an object will confer (Hamilton, Popular Essays 1 : 232). Avoiding the mental dependence caused by following the latest trend, he will become a responsible member of the community, which should have similar values. A s this focus on shared values suggests, Hamilton’s attempt to overcome the problems of a more inclusive account of taste rewrites Hume. Hume’s emphasis on the role of the imagination, mentioned earlier, led him to worry about the possible erosion of individual opinion. Hamilton’s common sense confidence in being   Popular Essays 1: 187; a similar point is made by Dugald S tewart in Philosophical Essays, ed. S ir William Hamilton (E dinburgh: C onstable; L ondon: Hamilton, A dams, 1855), vol. 5 of The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, esq., F.R.SS. 11 vols. S ee part 2 (Philosophical Essays 204; 2. 2. 1. 2). 53 S ee David Hartley, Observations on Man 418–42: 1. iv. 1. 52

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able to arrive at truths concerning the external world, on the other hand, meant that, unlike Hume in his more pessimistic moments, she saw an alternative to the continual attrition of personal belief and opinion. While aware that sympathy may produce prejudice, she had confidence in an educational system which exercises ‘the attention’ ‘in acquiring clear and distinct ideas’; such an education would allow the individual to develop his own opinions, which would then in most cases coincide with those of other people (Hamilton, Letters on Education 346). Less worried by the erosion of self by other, Hamilton is able to select affective criteria as the correct ones by which to make judgements of taste, in the process rejecting elitist learning as a basis for the standard (Hamilton Popular Essays 1: 235). Unlike Hume’s critic in ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, her critic makes comparisons, not between different artworks but between feelings. A potentially more inclusive basis for taste is established, relying on the rejection of high status – and therefore fashionable – objet d’art in favour of a more precise set of emotional and ethical associations gained through the environment. U sing the common sense proposal that it is possible to arrive at accurate judgements which have reference to an external ‘true’ state of affairs, Hamilton posits a mode of taste which is available to anyone willing to give proper attention to their actual environment. When Marianne and Sir John discuss Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility, such attention is absent: she ‘could no more satisfy him as to the colour of Mr Willoughby’s pointer, than he to describe to her the shades of his mind’ (A usten 1: 44). The selective viewpoint of each is incomplete, inadequate: the one, in his passion for hunting, making purely external observations; the other, with her burgeoning feelings, too directed to internal passions. T he moment is reminiscent of Hume’s remarks in his letter to Adam Smith, suggestive of a failed community that in fact consists only of a mass of self-interested, solipsistic individuals. What, it seems, is necessary for Marianne, with her overpowering adolescent sensibility (and for that other notable Austenian ‘imaginist’, Emma) is a reliable link between the mind and the world (Austen 4: 335). Like Wordsworth and Coleridge in Stephen Prickett’s account, each of the writers considered in this chapter believe that the mind is developed by directing attention to sensory information. For each of them, too, such attention allows the development of a system of values, not affected by relativism but strongly based in physical and moral reality. E dgeworth suggests that the use of all the senses, encouraged by parental love, stimulates gratitude and allows the interpretation of both original selfish feelings and more sympathetic ones. Here art has a utilitarian function, to direct attention in a way likely to promote such understanding. Baillie provides a more precise focus for attention, advising us to examine the behaviour of human beings in order to develop the requisite intellectual and moral growth. A rt facilitates this process. Reacting to the Gothic depiction of pain, Baillie suggests that art, in a civilised society, provides balance, allowing exposure to the ‘awful’ virtue of self-control. Finally, for Hamilton the common sense position that it is possible to reach accurate judgements about the external world opens correct aesthetic judgement to everyone. Indeed, in her narrative it is imperative that individuals strive for

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accurate observation and judgement; if they do not, society might be led en masse into the mistaken associations characteristic of scepticism, atheism, and revolution. Hamilton’s new aesthetic regime is based on the belief that for society to remain safe, it is not enough for only the few to be capable of judgement. T his emphasis on the processing of the sensory has consequences for the discourse of taste. Taste is no longer a matter of judging certain art objects or evaluating the use of particular consumer goods, no longer a question of examining how a man ‘wears his wig and cane’ (Baillie 68). Rather, taste is developed by, and involves, giving attention to a variety of external objects (not only those traditionally considered beautiful) in a way that facilitates both detachment and ethical engagement. The quality of the spectator’s attention is judged in terms of social utility (or lack of it). While Wollstonecraft suggests that painstaking attention to both nature and culture is a way of resisting social prejudice, she also at times saw literal retreat as the only way of avoiding prevalent corruption. For E dgeworth, Baillie, and Hamilton, the retreat need no longer be so literal. Instead, detachment is ensured by a balance between mind and world, a balance that would allow selfish and sympathetic feelings to be properly understood. As observation and reflection combine, a moment of detachment from desire becomes possible, and a greater knowledge of the behaviour of others is gained. Here, the tasteful spectator seems to present a solution both to Humean solipsism and to the luxurious corruption of civilised society.

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C hapter 5

Rustic T astes: T he Romantic T ale In his 1800 Preface to The Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth made what came to be seen as a quintessentially Romantic move when he avowedly turned to the lower ranks of the Lake District to examine ‘the real language of men’. For Hazlitt, the poets of the ‘Lake School’ tried ‘to reduce all things to an absolute level’ (Lectures 318, 319). Southey and the ‘two authors of the Lyrical Ballads’ produced poetry that contained a ‘mixed rabble’ of character and claimed ‘kindred only with the commonest of the people’ (320, 321). This politically motivated willingness to challenge literary convention was found not only in poetic forms such as the ballad, however. It was also present in another genre associated with folk culture, the tale. During the 1790s, the tale gained popularity, partly as a result of the tendency of sentimental literature to concentrate on the individual narrative. S entimental and Gothic fiction often used short inset narratives to make a direct appeal to the emotions in a bid at bypassing political prejudice (although the skill with which such narratives were grafted onto the main story sometimes remained in doubt). In addition to these interpolated tales and intertwined multiple narratives, there were also collections of separate, shorter but thematically linked tales, most notably for us S ophia and Harriet L ee’s The Canterbury Tales (1797–1805) and Charlotte S mith’s Letters of a Solitary Wanderer (1800–1802). Building on the civic humanist position that artistic output and the health of the nation are connected, the L ees and S mith explore the relationship between taste, the individual, and the political. T heir use of the collection form allows implicit comparison of nations, of historical periods, and of social ranks. Harriet Lee identifies this in the Preface to the 1837 Bentley’s Standard Novels edition of The Canterbury Tales, when she remarks that such stories were ‘professedly adapted to different counties’ and ‘adapted in the same manner to all classes’. Distinguishing their endeavours from other forms of connoisseurship, S mith and the Lees collected the narratives of individual subjects, no longer presenting the lower classes in a stock or Shakespearian way as Radcliffe, for example, had come close to doing. The tale, in short, had a flexibility that made it an important democratising influence on the language of taste. Such works had what John Wilson Croker, reviewing Waverley in 1814, then saw as the distinguishing characteristic

 Harriet and S ophia L ee, The Canterbury Tales (1797–1805), 2 vols, Standard Novels 12–13 (London: Bentley; Edinburgh: Bell and Bradfute: Dublin; Cumming, 1837), pp. 1: viii.

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of modern fiction: an interest in ‘men of a particular nation, profession, or temper, or, to go a step further – of individuals’. S hedding light on the growing emphasis on regional and class variation in Romantic aesthetics, promoting the broader availability of aesthetic judgement, the collection of tales also instituted the process of comparison that would prove crucial to the national tale. In particular, it is possible to trace a narrative of alternative connoisseurship (collecting individuals rather than art objects) from the work of the Lees and Smith to the national tales of Maria Edgeworth and Sydney O wenson. A nd what increasingly but perhaps paradoxically emerges in relation to this is the importance of a sense of belonging. For E dgeworth, for example, tastefully made craft items, used locally, provide a bond between classes. For O wenson, the narrative of taste supports the Gaelic Irish in the form of imaginative ownership. In each case, the tale insists that for the tasteful inhabitant (of whatever class), knowledge of the habits and the history of the nation is necessary. And both the collection and the tale offer a warning: as this sense of belonging should not be denied, neither should the discourse of taste and the ethical imperative of sentiment be separated. A discourse of taste which removes the impulse for local understanding and moral action is, these works suggest, disastrous both for class relations and for nationhood. The background to the tale’s use as a vehicle for the representation of political oppression, regionalism, and the lower classes lies in the well-documented move, in the mid to late eighteenth century, away from neoclassical literary models toward native cultural models. T he associations of political liberty possessed, however problematically, by A ncient Greece and Rome were increasingly transferred onto the British literary past. While a vogue for E astern tales also played a part in promoting the tale, the resultant increase of interest in indigenous culture created a context in which such short narratives could flourish. Poetic references to tales identified them as a feature of folk culture, existing alongside the ballad. Perhaps because of their perceived connection to these native traditions, tales were often identified with a particular locality and, when this locality was in Britain, linked (tenuously) with narratives of political liberty and tradition. In addition, they were portrayed as accessible and, despite their connections with superstition, were often shown to provide instruction to children and adults. Most significantly of all, however, the tale was perceived as particularly connected with women. A ddison, for example, when discussing the ‘Fairy way of Writing’ in no. 419 of The Spectator, advises that the poet ‘ought to be very well versed in L egends and Fables, antiquated Romances, and the T raditions of N urses and old Women, that he may fall in with our natural Prejudices, and humour those Notions which we have imbibed in our Infancy’ (6: 127–31, 127). This reference is taken up with more aesthetic and social purpose by Akenside in the first book of The Pleasures of Imagination (1744) (itself influenced by Addison’s essays):





John Wilson Croker, rev. of Waverley, Quarterly Review 11 (1814): 355.

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… finally, by night T he village-matron, round the blazing hearth, S uspends the infant-audience with her tales, Breathing astonishment! Of witching rhymes, A nd evil spirits; of the death-bed call O f him who robb’d the widow, and devour’d T he orphan’s portion; of unquiet souls Risen from the grave to ease the heavy guilt Of deeds in life conceal’d; of shapes that walk At dead of night, and clank their chains, and wave The torch of hell around the murderer’s bed. (24–5, 1. 255–65)

Akenside’s portrait of the matron occurs as part of a broader disquisition into the effects of the ‘wonderous’. Her stories are included by Akenside as an example of his wider argument that the imagination mediates between the aesthetic and the moral faculties. Akenside indicates this by giving a clear moral content to the matron’s tales, in which acts of social oppression result in spiritual torment. Purposely, he does not specifically point up their didactic content, an omission indicative of the notion that the leap from aesthetics to morality should be an imaginative (or an associative) act. Instead, the implication is that the connection is made through curiosity. T he matron’s tales form part of our imaginative development. Her inclusion implicitly places such local storytelling on the same spectrum of activity as the ‘Genius of ancient Greece’, which Akenside hopes to follow; both potentially promote liberty and artistic achievement (40, 1. 567). A similar argument is made in Beattie’s The Minstrel (1771), where the youthful Edwin, sheltering against the ‘driving snow’ gains his first instruction from the Beldam’s ‘tale[s] admired’. T hroughout the poem the spontaneous productions of nature are contrasted with the songs of those who ‘with artificial note, / To please a tyrant, strain’ (28–9). The old woman’s tales fall into the former category: N or let it faith exceed, T hat N ature forms a rustic taste so nice. Ah! Had they [the audience] been of court or city breed, Such delicacy were right marvellous indeed. (44)

T he Beldam’s rustic listeners have an integrity and rural independence indicative of both liberty and taste; by implication, the supposedly tasteful members of the beau monde do less to achieve aesthetic judgment and moral sensitivity. Suspicion of luxury and court culture here begin to lead to a re-evaluation of peasant culture. However, despite Beattie’s juxtaposition of rural domestic tastefulness and court corruption, in both The Minstrel and Akenside’s Pleasures of Imagination, the connection between the fireside tale and the narrative of national liberty remains implicit. T his is because the eighteenth-century’s association between  James Beattie, The Minstrel; Or, The Progress of Genius. And Other Poems (N ew York: Bartow, Bartow and Richmond, 1821), p. 41.

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artistic achievement and poetic liberty was more vulnerable when applied to the less prestigious tale form than when taken in the context of canonical literature or the ballad. Nonetheless, this lack of prestige made the tale an ideal vehicle for writers (and particularly for women, its traditional narrators) to question the connection between liberty, national glory, and politics. Akenside’s village matron had described oppression; clearly, the tale was a suitable vehicle for more overtly politicised narratives on the subject. T he tale’s ability to critique stories of national liberty and poetic glory is clearly visible in the quatrains of S ophia L ee’s historical poem A Hermit’s Tale. By the reference to ‘tale’ in her title and by her use of the quatrain suggestive of the ballad format, Lee invoked traditional folk culture, an oral tradition associated through the work of Gray, Macpherson, and others with a lament for or call to national independence. N onetheless, L ee’s tale, set in the reign of Richard the L ionheart, suggests the need for the moderation of narratives of national glory. Its protagonist abandons his role of shepherd to fight for the English against the S cots; and while he is absent, his mother and homestead are destroyed. L ee’s tale insists on the primacy of domestic responsibilities in a way which places it apart from the tradition connecting British liberty and traditional culture in which it has its roots. In T homas Gray’s ‘T he Bard’, for example, the emphasis is on national heritage, and, more specifically, on a correspondence between liberty and poetic achievement. In A Hermit’s Tale, however, poetic stories of Palestine and the ‘Brave C oeur de L ion’ only serve to inculcate an inappropriate militarism. T he tale itself becomes a site of resistance to such narratives. In short, the folk tradition which Lee invokes in A Hermit’s Tale challenges glorified narratives of national strife. When S ophia L ee wrote the introduction to what had initially been her sister’s project, The Canterbury Tales, the potential of the prose collection of narratives to further the exploration of the relationship between the individual and nation must have seemed evident. In the admittedly interested judgement of Harriet L ee The Canterbury Tales began a vogue. ‘When these volumes first appeared, a work bearing distinctly the title of ‘Tales’, … was a novelty in the fictions of the day’ (C.T.S.N 1: viii). However, she continued, ‘Innumerable “Tales” of the same stamp … have since appeared’ (C.T.S.N 1: viii). Similar concerns with regional aesthetics and class were also visible in other collections, which were not labelled as ‘tales’, but which contained (more or less) short, self-sufficient yet thematically consistent narratives. T he title of E lizabeth S arah Gooch’s The Wanderings of the Imagination (1796), for example, is designed to indicate the supposed spontaneity, the randomness of its contents, yet its narratives consistently invoke the dynamics of power. T he collection has a similar insistence to The Canterbury Tales on actual  S ophia L ee, A Hermit’s Tale: Recorded by His Own Hand, and Found in His Cell, by the Author of The Recess (London: Cadell, 1787).  S ee Roger L onsdale, ed. The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith (London: Longmans, 1969), especially pp. 177–200.

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observation and experience and on location; travel, the Preface states, ‘prove[s] interesting to people less accustomed to diversity of situation’. References to despotism and English national prejudice are accompanied by an emphasis on cultural diversity, typified by the narrative of a Welsh harper, entitled ‘The History of L lewyllin’. Here the tale is an ideal vehicle for the exploration of the narratives of those elided by the sometimes masculinist romance, that is, the lower ranks and women. However, while the tale concentrated on the individual, the obscured, and the particular, the collection format allowed a broader statement and in the 1790s was used to reinforce more general points concerning patterns of social oppression. What is particularly noticeable about both The Canterbury Tales and C harlotte S mith’s Letters of a Solitary Wanderer is the importance both works immediately and self-consciously assign to the discourse of taste. In the Preface to the first volume of the tales, S ophia L ee’s narrator argues that while his activities can be compared with those of international collectors, ‘Fellow[s] of the Royal S ociety’, and ‘virtuosi’, they differ in several key respects. For one, the collection is portable, ‘Compact in its nature’ because it involves ‘mark[ing] a new character, or develop[ing] a singular incident’ rather than gathering (expensive) physical objects (C.T. 1: iii). Another significant difference is that his ‘specimens’ are from ‘animate’ rather than ‘inanimate nature’ (C.T. 1: iii). These suggestions form a light-hearted acknowledgement of a shift from an exclusive mode of taste based on connoisseurship to a potentially more democratic approach, grounded in empirical observation. C harlotte S mith’s Letters of a Solitary Wanderer adopts a similar approach. Although the work’s title places its narratives within another sentimental (and often revolutionary) genre, the epistolary novel, the length of the stories told and the fact that the wanderer is the sole correspondent (we never see any replies) makes this work essentially a collection of tales. Further, Smith was aware of The Canterbury Tales and (given she acknowledges in the Preface to the first three volumes of the Letters that she had begun the work two years earlier), the wanderer’s opening letter suggests the influence of the Lees’ work. In the wanderer’s narratives, taste plays a significant part both in revealing the machinations of power and in providing an (albeit) precarious alternative to corrupt social existence. Like Sophia Lee’s Preface, the opening of S mith’s Letters recalls that particular narrative of connoisseurship, the grand tour, but constructs the process of international comparison in a particular way. Hence the narrator places himself as a gentleman of taste when he promises his ‘hills will boldly swell’; but while the sublime, beautiful, and picturesque concern him, these are often seen in relation to power and its effects on individuals (1: 3). Although he insists ‘there is but little originality of character any where to be met with’, he, like Lee’s narrator, ultimately promises a narrative  [E lizabeth S arah] Gooch, The Wanderings of the Imagination, 2 vols (L ondon: Crosby, 1796), 1: viii, vi.  Harriet and S ophia L ee, The Canterbury Tales (1797–1805), 2nd ed., 5 vols (London: Robinson, 1799–1805), 1: iii–iv; subsequently C.T.

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of ‘who’ as much as ‘what’ (1: 3–4). The tasteful activities of a gentleman on a grand tour are transformed to the activities of wanderer and exile. A nd what this tasteful spectator collects are narratives of oppression. Further, his relationship to such stories gradually changes. Fleeing misery at home, a displaced, dispossessed traveller, the wanderer initially positions himself as misanthropic, uninterested in tales of ‘sentiment’ (1: 3) However, slowly he moves from the role of passive spectator to active participant. As Wollstonecraft had done in both educational and polemical works, Smith attempts to deconstruct the Burkean sublime and beautiful, examining the ‘drapery’ Burke had suggested was necessary to disguise the operation of power. Smith’s exploration suggests that danger to society lies not in an invasion of radical values stimulated by the French Revolution, but from a resurrection of the reactionary sublime. In the first narrative, this reactionary sublime appears when the priests of C atholic Italy are imported into Protestant E ngland, exercising arbitrary authority over a family whose legitimate head is mad. T heir rule contributes to an atmosphere of Gothic gloom on the estate. Partly as a result, the legal owners have so little ‘taste for improvement’ that their parkland resembles a ‘forest’ (1: 39). Reactionary Catholicism is connected with ‘superstition’ and ‘the tales with which idleness and ignorance occupy the otherwise listless hours of existence’ (1: 102). On the other hand, Smith’s tale (like Radcliffe’s novels) benefits from the fictional interest of the supernatural while actually working to expose an aesthetic in which tradition and the sublime are conflated. Here it might be useful to recall Barbauld’s essays ‘On Monastic Institutions’ and ‘Thoughts on the Devotional T aste on S ects and E stablishments’: for Barbauld, the C atholic church – and in the latter essay, the E stablished C hurch of E ngland and by implication other state institutions – benefit from what might be termed a sublime of tradition. S mith’s tale exposes the mechanism by which such power operates. In the novel’s historical third tale, when the heroine Corisande meets Margaret of Navarre, she trusts to her integrity: Whoever has read the various histories in which mention is made of this extraordinary woman, will not hesitate to say, that none of the evils C orisande was likely to encounter, was, in its probable consequences, more to be dreaded than this strange meeting. But C orisande herself, to whom the real character of the Queen was not known, and who had never comtemplated [sic] her but by such mediums are the Great in every age are seen through, felt herself at once relieved from all her apprehensions. (3: 86)

The ‘mediums’ that obscure the great are dangerous to their subjects, Smith suggests. For her, it seems, one of the functions of history (and presumably of historical tales of this type) is to tear away the Burkean drapery that obscures the mechanisms of power. A nd when such sublime ‘mediums’ are removed, what is visible, S mith suggests, are the paltry specular power politics of the Burkean beautiful. In this system the supplicant (whether a young woman or a statesman) adopts a particular beautiful or ornamental appearance, affecting weakness, but only in order to gain

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power over others. Consequently, in the court of the King of France, the Marquis de C hampignac is someone more than usually capable of adapting to political exigency. Described as a ‘handsome coxcomb’: His person and face were uncommonly beautiful: they gave indeed rather the idea of the beauty of very early youth, more that of a woman, than of a man of five-and twenty. His dress, consisting of coloured satin, was studied with the greatest nicety, his laces the finest that could be procured, and his hair most delicately brocaded. (3: 172)

T his celebrated politician is, in other words, infantilised by his struggle to gain power within the system; there is also a suggestion (in the comparison of his beauty to a ‘woman’s) of the effeminacy, which sometimes is a covert reference to homosexuality, but equally, for both Richard Price and Rousseau inevitably follows from the luxuries of society. A nd for S mith, too, it is the system rather than merely the man she wishes to criticise. Ten pages later, she recalls Burke’s infamous statement: ‘But this was an age when vice lost half its deformity by losing its grossness’ (3: 182). But if royalty itself is marked, in this narrative, by beautiful corruption, S mith is also insistent that the new aristocracy of trade similarly bears these features. Henrietta, the slave owner’s daughter, herself too easily led by the opinion of the world, makes some comments on her sisters ‘of colour’ that sit uneasily with the modern reader; she highlights, for example, their love of ornament: Their odd manners, their love of finery, and curiosity about my clothes and ornaments, together with their total insensibility to their own situation, is, I own, very distressing to me. (2: 57–8)

Her narrative is the most racist of those who observe the West Indian slaves in Smith’s tale, but, arguably, she is one who, like them, has been greatly damaged by the system of exchange. A nd the reader who follows S mith’s views on beauty might extrapolate that this attraction to ornament is supposed to be generated by the degradation of oppression. Oppression breeds ‘beautiful’ behaviour in all ranks – and the term beautiful here is far from complimentary. Burke had feared that the ‘age of chivalry’ would be replaced by an age of ‘sophisters, oeconomists and calculators’ (Reflections 170). Smith suggests that in terms of its deployment of the sublime and the beautiful, this new age might not differ that much from the last. In the first letter of the third book, Smith attempts to present us with a (temporary) alternative to this corrupted aesthetic in the pastoral existence of the De V ezelais, an existence immediately connected with the tasteful activity of sketching, and contrasted with life at the political centre: I have witnessed the delicious supper that followed a day of patriarchal toil, and have compared it with the sumptuous repasts to which I was sometimes a witness in the younger part of my life, when, after the fatigue of a late debate, I have remarked the trembling hands and hollow eyes of a cabal of statesmen – countenances marked evidently at work each for his own advantage … . (3: 23)

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In other words, this rural labouring system, with its plain food, contrasts with the unnatural luxury and gluttony of those who try to govern others. E lsewhere in the Letters S mith has commented on the natural fertility, the E denic quality of the landscape (in which food is available without labour). However, where this quality appears, it is neutralized or destroyed by oppression; in Jamaica, particularly, the natural produce of the landscape is rendered dangerous by the tensions generated by capitalism; in the E urope of the last two volumes, the landscape seems too littered with troops, banditti, rebels, and refugees to be productive. Here, however, in contrast, the remaining Eden-like qualities of France are here momentarily supplemented by the unalienated labour of the family. T aste resides in what is near to an agrarian socialist model, recalling Mary Wollstonecraft’s wish, in A Vindication of the Rights of Men that estates should be covered by ‘decent farms’: ‘A garden more inviting than Eden would then meet the eye, and springs of joy murmur on every side’ (Works 4: 56). Such a plot of land offers not the capitalist dream of acquisition disproportionate to one’s own labour but provides another model of the beautiful landscape in which an individual is able to cultivate sufficient for his needs. T he De V ezelais’ existence presents an alternative to the increasingly chaotic landscapes of war-torn Europe, where court culture, imperialism, and politics first create huge estates, symbols of sublime power, and then make ownership (and the future of those who live upon such land) extremely precarious. For Smith (as in her children’s fiction), the taste that might exist in such a situation is connected both with knowledge of history – De Vezelai is teaching his boy to sketch ancient ruins – and with the rational classification of the natural world that is botany. Further, as in Wollstonecraft’s educational works (particularly The Female Reader and Thoughts on the Education of Daughters), emphasis is placed on the importance of reading. De Vezelai’s children are ‘governed, by reason’ unlike other children ‘who are to be bribed or terrified into knowledge and obedience’ (3: 19). In terms of politics, he has made his sons read, ‘and I hope I have taught them to reflect on what they have read’ (3: 20). Reading, in other words, is an aid to mental independence, and since the next story is an historical one, the imputation is that one of things it allows is reflection on the past. ‘The Story of Corisande’ operates as a warning about the terrors of unrestrained monarchy. A nd, in the case of the wanderer, listening to tales of ‘sentiment’ in which the structures and aesthetics of different forms of power are exposed ultimately generates ethical intervention. Following Wollstonecraft, then, in Letters of a Solitary Wanderer, S mith shows the use of the sublime and the beautiful to support existing power structures, and she suggests an alternative – a different power relation that gives a different value to the landscape. However, what is perhaps most notable is the vulnerability, even the impossibility of this alternative given existing political conditions. In contrast, The Canterbury Tales initially seems to present a more stable environment. T his is not the revolutionary narrative of an isolated wanderer, but one connected (at least initially) to a gathering. In Sophia Lee’s Preface, the audience in the inn rapidly become part of a shared narrative endeavour, one that crosses a range of genres,  C harlotte S mith, Letters of a Solitary Wanderer (L ondon: L ongman and Rees, 1802).

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classes, and countries. Further, for the reader of this (albeit more cosmopolitan) collection, Chaucer’s work remains a point of reassuring comparison. However, while the authors of the Tales are more cautious in their approach to the French revolution, they also display a certain scepticism about the workings of power. In Vision and Disenchantment, Heather Glen suggests that Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads was an attempt to complicate the assumptions of the magazine poetry of his day, a magazine poetry that for Glen is linked to a growing attempt at social discipline, where ‘the speaker assumes control of his readers and implicitly claims to be speaking for all reasonable men’ (56). Placing his work within British literary tradition, Wordsworth challenges this attempt to civilise popular culture. A similar observation might be made about the L ees. Paralleling Wordsworth’s efforts in his contributions to the Lyrical Ballads, the L ees attempt to enrich and alter the associations of the tale. T he poet-narrator of the Preface, a man of imagination and taste, shows interest in the stories of the disempowered, while the tales themselves question the relationship between liberty, literature, and national glory. Further, the L ees challenge generic assumptions in a complication of the relationship of tale and teller. T he L ees’ use of C haucer (rather than, for example, those ‘elder writers’ Shakespeare or Milton) positions their collection interestingly from the start. Despite Harriet L ee’s claim in the Preface to the 1837 edition that The Canterbury Tales were not named in order to recall ‘our great E nglish classic’, the title draws attention to the act of writing in a once low-status language, E nglish, and gives a reminder of long-elided, forgotten narratives (C.T.S.N. 1: viii). Dryden had said in his Preface to the Fables (1700) that ‘from Chaucer the purity of the English tongue began’, but the obscurity of the language of The Canterbury Tales was a frequent matter of comment, for Dryden himself as well as for Pope and A ddison. Addison, for example, remarked on the poet’s part in the development of the language in ‘A n A ccount of the Greatest E nglish Poets’: Till Chaucer first, the merry bard, arose, A nd many a story told in rhyme and prose. But age has rusted what the poet writ, Worn out his language, and obscured his wit; In vain he jests in his unpolished strain, And tries to make his readers laugh in vain. (1: 23)  See [Morell], ed. The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer, in the Original, from the Most Authentic Manuscripts; And as They are Turn’d into Modern Language by Mr Dryden, Mr. Pope, and Other Eminent Hands. With References to Authors, Ancient and Modern; Various Readings, and Explanatory Note (London: printed for the editors [Morell], sold by Walthoe, Bickerton, and Payne, 1737), p. 16; Addison, The Works of Joseph Addison: With Notes by Richard Hurd, D.D, 6 vols (London: Bohn, 1854–1856), 1: 22–7; for a further discussion, see Eric Miner, ‘Chaucer in Dryden’s fables’, in Studies In Criticism and Aesthetics 1660– 1800; Essays in Honour of Samuel Holt Monk, eds Howard Anderson and John S. Shea (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1967), pp. 58–72; and William L. Alderton and Arnold C . Henderson, eds. Chaucer and Augustan Scholarship (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1970), esp. pp. 53–68 and 141–61.

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C haucer’s dual status, as a promoter of E nglish language and literature and as an obscure, even crude writer, is exploited by the L ees, whose reference to his work immediately associates the pair with both a native literary tradition and the ‘unpolished’, the powerless and the uncultured. The Lees’ allusion reaffirms the fitness of the English language (accessible to eighteenth-century women and the lower classes in a way in which Latin and Greek were not). In addition, however, the L ees’ tales also set the E nglish language and native literary tradition in a much wider, international context. Reflecting the romance criticism that found such tales to be ‘of universal growth’, the L ees have several of their stories told by or about foreigners.10 In comparison with C haucer’s, their tales insist on their cosmopolitan nature, firmly shifting attention away from the eighteenth-century fascination with classical civilisation and literature to examine recurring patterns of oppression in eighteenth-century E urope. In particular, The Canterbury Tales uses its E nglish literary heritage as an excuse for narrating tales of both the lower ranks and women, allowing them a voice within the cultural discourse while also connecting their tales to the state of the nation. This is suggested by the Shakespearean epigraph to the first volume: A woman’s story at a winter’s fire, A uthoris’d by her grandame. (C.T. 1: i)

T he epigraph functions as a modest disclaimer, but it also deliberately highlights female authorship. It provides a reminder of the importance of the uncelebrated folk tale by indicating that popular culture both allows a transfer of knowledge and reinforces group identity. It also indicates that folk culture has a relationship to higher status literature close enough to cause unease. Most significantly, however, the epigraph suggests an uncanny connection between the folk tale and national tradition. Taken from the scene where Macbeth sees the ghost of the murdered Banquo, the lines were originally part of Lady Macbeth’s denunciation of supernatural portents: T his is the very painting of your fear; T his is the air-drawn dagger which, you said Led you to Duncan. O, these flaws and starts, Impostors to true fear, would well become A woman’s story at a winter’s fire 11

T he epigraph thus sets The Tales in the context of Macbeth’s murderous usurpation of Duncan, a political act which, as Macbeth is well aware, also represents the betrayal of domestic responsibility. T he epigraph is hence more than a modest disclaimer. It indicates that The Canterbury Tales are not merely insignificant folk stories but instead relate to treachery and rebellion. More than that, it also 10

Arthur Johnston cites James Beattie and Clara Reeve, who ‘summarized existing opinions and concluded sensibly that “Romances are of universal growth” ’ (Johnston 57–8). 11 William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth, The Complete Oxford Shakespeare, vol. 3: III . iv. 60–64.

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establishes the unassuming tale, with its background of shelter and companionship, as a potential antidote to the domestic and political treachery of court culture. T he political dimension of The Canterbury Tales is made clear by S ophia L ee in her Introduction. T here her narrator, immediately placing himself ‘among the eccentric part of mankind … yclept poets’, demonstrates his ‘genius’ and ‘taste’ by his willingness to see the tomb where ‘C hurchill, the champion of liberty is interred’ – striking a note of caution, however, his guide is a barber – that Churchill’s career has shown a degree of political and moral decline.12 Associated with John Wilkes (whose claim to patriotism was attacked by Dr Johnson), this episode suggests a suspicion of cynical popularism and political corruption.13 N onetheless, the tomb sends the poet on a historical flight of fancy which centres on signs of political oppression, the ‘sneers’ of mitred abbots, and the suffering of the ‘bare-headed, the mean, the prostrate king’.14 While L ee emphasises the humorous impracticality of her narrator – who fails to listen to the details given by his guide and ultimately outpaces him altogether – she also, albeit light-heartedly, stresses the connection between poetry and national narratives of oppression. Significantly, her narrator lulls himself to sleep while composing ‘a brief poetical history of E ngland, to help short memories’ (C.T. 1: xi). The theme of political oppression is reinforced at the inn, where the crowd includes an ‘abbé’ who gave ‘the impression of some danger escaped’ on ‘every feature’: “Thou hast comprised,” thought [the poet], “the knowledge of a whole life in perhaps the last month: and then perhaps didst thou first study the art of thinking, or learn the misery of feeling!” (C.T. 1: xvi)

T his S ternian apostrophe, which highlights the corruption and dangers of preand post-revolutionary France, respectively, is followed by the Introduction’s final reference to international upheaval, given by the narrator. He determines (as Chaucer’s host had done) that lots should be cast to decide the order in which the stories will be told; however, he proposes this only after making ‘a philosophical and elegant exordium upon the levelling principle’ (C.T 1: xxii). Whereas Chaucer’s audience are relieved when the first story fortuitously falls to the person of highest rank, the knight, Lee’s narrator, despite his satirical tone, shows no anxiety that the correct social order be followed. Instead, the distinguishing characteristic of the first storyteller is not rank but nationality – he is an English traveller. Placing the examination of E nglish society within a context of international comparison, the L ees use individual stories, not to record static, inherited social structures, but to emphasise political choice. 12

1: iii–ix; buried at Dover, C harles C hurchill wrote political and social satires and is well-known for The Rosciad (1761) but later became involved with member of the hellfire club John Wilkes. 13 John Sainsbury, ‘John Wilkes, Debt and Patriotism’, Journal of British Studies 34 (1995): 165–95, 174–5. 14 C.T. 1: ix. In 1213 King John made his submission to Rome on the western heights of the Dover downs.

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T his initial establishment of these tales as at once international and political is followed by a sustained interest in the relationship between liberty, poetic achievement, and national glory, which S ophia had indirectly questioned in A Hermit’s Tale. T he topic is initially touched upon in the opening story, Harriet L ee’s ‘T he T raveller’s T ale’, which displays the typical eighteenth-century British prejudice against Spain and its religion. The traveller’s father warns him, in a piece of anti-C atholic rhetoric, that in visiting France and Italy: You will behold the theatre of arts and arms: but S uperstition has twined her ivy amidst their laurels, and they daily wither beneath its pernicious influence. (C.T. 1: 3)

He does not mention S pain, yet the traveller’s later discoveries imply its more advanced state of decay. N ot only is it the location of private tyranny, but, correspondingly, there, in the house of his hosts: Montford vainly looked round for the Muses and the Graces: of the former no trace remained but an old guitar with three strings, which hung against the wall, and the latter seemed totally to have foresworn the threshold. (C.T. 1: 6–7)

T hese details replay the E nglish belief in the connection between artistic achievement and freedom, particularly, in this case, in intellectual liberty as opposed to religious superstition. Hence, despite the poet’s initial discovery that the E nglishman numbered ‘credulity, and a love of the marvellous’ among his characteristics, the tale establishes at least an interest in the relation between liberty, the political conditions of the state and artistic achievement (1: xvi). This fascination develops in Sophia Lee’s first major contribution to the collection, ‘T he Poet’s T ale. A rundel’. A fter promoting the moral power of sensibility, ‘The Poet’s Tale’ undercuts the revolutionary potential of subjectivity by attacking the French Revolution itself. Lee maintains, however, a cautious approach, describing the earlier government of France in decidedly equivocal terms as one which: at least allowed its inhabitants to carry their heads upon their shoulders in preference to a pike – that occasionally plundered them of their money, but made it no crime that they had some to be plundered of – that often stripped the beautiful plant of genius of its leaves, but never buried it beneath that coarse and rugged soil which blasts its very root. (C.T. 1: 63)

Drawing on the same implicit connection between liberty and art, L ee condemns a revolution that by implication damages genius. Despite this rejection, however, throughout the tale her central point is that a self-indulgent, vicious aristocracy is equally damaging to national merit, and, in particular, to taste, talent, and virtue. While the young hero of the tale is capable of appreciating both the financial hardship of the lower orders (in this case the French peasantry) and the allure of liberty, his aristocratic relation, brought up in habits of self-indulgence, sees others only in

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relation to his own pleasure. He replies to A rundel’s exclamation of ‘L iberty’: ‘is a goddess, I grant. But pr’ythee, dear Henry, lift thine eyes to one of the prettiest mortal rustics that ever yet greeted them’ (C.T. 1: 65). His suspect sexual politics (he eventually seduces and abandons the once-innocent peasant girl in London) underline the unwholesome social influence of a corrupt aristocracy. Lee also singles out for particular criticism the damaging effects of the aristocratic system of patronage on the arts and sciences. T he corrupt L indsey lures a talented botanist to L ondon with promises of patronage and then whimsically decides that, as this Italian has supposedly shown a ‘extraordinary genius for music’, he should become a fiddler; Lindsey similarly reduces a learned German philosopher to the status of cheap entertainer (C.T. 1: 136, 1: 166). This attack on corrupt aristocracy is given further political direction in Harriet L ee’s ‘T he Frenchman’s T ale. C onstance’. There, Constance, the heroine ‘briefly recited the story of her country’: That, green in youth, she should have seen the gaudiest and gayest flowers of creation thus blighted; the vast consolidated mass of prejudice and principle whole ages had accumulated, crumbled at once to dust; systems annihilated that seemed to be incorporate with thought itself; a whole nation changing, with one convulsive crisis, its character, its manners, and its laws: reason more steady than V almont’s would have grown dizzy with the prospect; and humanity shuddered at her own errors, whether she calculated the enormous pile of evil she had destroyed, or that she was perhaps assisting to raise. (C.T. 1: 277)

Balancing radical rhetoric – the denunciation of ‘prejudice’ and ‘past evil’ – with conservative caution, the L ees’ tales of sensibility use the individual narrative to map out a moral route between political extremes. The significance of the narratives of the peasantry or lower classes, stories usually considered without prestige, is also clear in the course of the tales. In particular, Harriet L ee is concerned with the effects of corrupt government lower down the social scale. In ‘The Frenchman’s Tale’, she makes the almost Wollstonecraftian manoeuvre of showing the corruption of the master encouraged in the servant: the vice and envy generated by primogeniture spreads down the social system. T he more painful effects of a corrupt ruling or military class on the lower ranks, and, in particular, upon their domestic existence, are then sympathetically highlighted in the fifth volume. There, the title ‘Canterbury Tales’ is discussed in a conversation between the landlady and her refined authorial lodger. The landlady is telling her guest the story of Mary, a poor servant girl who had a child by her employer, a captain. A fter the child dies, she steals her former lover’s legitimate son, bringing him up as her own. By a cruel irony, the captain accuses the boy, his son, of a crime and condemns him to transportation. As a result, Mary becomes insane. Despite an emphasis on social justice that makes the tale compare interestingly to Inchbald’s Nature and Art (1796), the landlady is not convinced of the story’s value, describing it as a C anterbury T ale:15 15 E lizabeth Inchbald, Nature and Art (1796), ed. Shawn L. Maurer (London: Pickering, 1997).

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T he writer’s reply does not immediately grant the landlady’s tale much artistic merit, nor does it directly award tales about the poor cultural importance. However, although the description of the tale as a ‘prosing old stor[y]’ might be taken as a manifestation of the kind of feminine authorial modesty discussed by Katharine Rogers in her article ‘Inhibitions O n E ighteenth C entury Women N ovelists’, the depreciating tone seems false.16 T he moment when the tale is called ‘prosing’ is also the moment when Harriet Lee allies the work most closely with Chaucer’s own. At that instant the speaker continues: ‘I shall not attempt to decorate the one in question, Mrs Dixon: it shall remain your own story told, as nearly as I can recollect, in your own words’ (C.T. 5: 35). He thus firmly affiliates his story to C haucer’s narrative approach in The Tales. By implication granting a new prestige to previously unheard tales, the L ees’ narratives demonstrate how a collection of stories facilitates a healthy process of comparison. Repeatedly depicting oppression, whether caused by political systems or their openness to abuse, The Canterbury Tales denaturalises the notion of a national political system and offers the possibility of a rational consideration of such structures. In the process, it suggests that the relationship between national liberty and artistic achievement is most fruitful when a plurality of narratives is considered. The tale’s flexibility enables it to offer this range of perspectives, while, simultaneously, its lack of prestige ensures that its content remains unthreatening, even innocuous. In her commentary on the national tale, Ina Ferris identified the effectiveness of ‘writing outside the official and dignified genres’ in the context of Maria Edgeworth’s Preface to Castle Rackrent (1806). There she notes that: Valorization of the unofficial genres reaches its height not, as might be expected, with the defence of the use of the dialect but with the notion that gossip represents the model for biography.17

T he L ees’ use of the tale may be seen as an early indication of this ‘valorization’ of the unofficial, as they exploited the tale’s status as ‘a woman’s story at a winter’s fire’ to gain social and political space.

16 Katharine Rogers, ‘Inhibitions on E ighteenth-century Women N ovelists: E lizabeth Inchbald and C harlotte S mith,’ Eighteenth Century Studies 11 (1977): 63–78. 17 Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1991), p. 144.

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Drawing upon a non-valourized form might, however, involve use of its less prestigious techniques and, while C haucer distinguished his tales and narrators admirably, Akenside’s and Beattie’s accounts hint at the formulaic nature of the tale. T he L ees’ use of repetitive titles, broad enough to refer to whole nationalities, suggests, despite their similarities to C haucer, a comforting use of formula. While they remarked that Harriet Lee’s ‘pictures, if not taken from life, are such as life might possibly have presented’,18 the apparent use of literary stereotype came in for comment from The Critical Review: T here is so much spirit in this Introduction, that we cannot wish it had been omitted; and yet we think miss [sic] Lee would have acted more prudently in publishing the tales unconnectedly, than in adopting the title and imitating the plan of Chaucer’s admirable work. Her stories want the characteristic excellence of those of C haucer. We meet with the T raveller’s T ale, the Poet’s T ale, the Frenchman’s T ale, and the O ld Woman’s T ale; but each of these might, with equal propriety, have been related by any other individual of the company … the sentiments are alike in all.19

C orrect in supposing that the L ees’ interest was not in the creation of distinctive narrators, the reviewer came close to acknowledging their interest in stereotyping, mentioning Harriet L ee’s use of the traveller who ‘recounts adventures which occurred in S pain’, ‘the Frenchman’ who ‘lays the scene of his story in France’, ‘the old woman’ who ‘introduces a spectre’ and the use of proverbial S panish jealousy in the first tale (170–73). Similarly, drawing upon the traditional prolixity of young women, the British Critic remarks of Sophia Lee’s the ‘Young Lady’s Tale’ that it ‘is so much longer than the rest, (natural enough) as to occupy the whole of the second volume’.20 T he reviewers did not, however, grasp the L ees’ experimental use of such stereotypes. T he L ees’ tales in fact refer not only to C haucer’s interest in social division, but in the appropriateness of tale to teller. They invoked such stereotypes to re-examine and subvert them. In the process, they questioned the allocation of cultural and literary authority, giving credibility to figures usually denied it – as the tales of the landlady, the old woman, and the young woman demonstrate.

‘A rt. VIII – Canterbury Tales. Vol. 5. By Harriet L ee. 8 vols Rev. of Canterbury Tales, by Harriet and S ophia L ee’, Annual Review/JAS 4 (1805): 605, Sheffield Hallam Corvey, 25 Feb 2000 http://www.shu.ac.uk/corvey/CW3/ContribPage.cfm?Contrib=109. 19 ‘Canterbury Tales for the Year 1797. By Harriet L ee. 8 vols 6s. Boards. Robinsons. 1797. [*Vol. I only]’, Rev. of Canterbury Tales: for the Year 1797, by Harriet and S ophia L ee, Critical Review/JAS n.s. 22 (1798): 170–73, Sheffield Hallam Corvey, 25 February 2000 http://www.shu.ac.uk/corvey/CW3/ContribPage.cfm?Contrib=109. 20 ‘Canterbury Tales: for the Year 1797’. Rev. of Canterbury Tales: for the Year 1797, by Harriet and S ophia L ee, British Critic /JAS 12 (1798): 306, Sheffield Hallam Corvey, 25 Feb 2000, http://www.shu.ac.uk/corvey/CW3/ContribPage.cfm?Contrib=92. 18

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In the 1805 ‘L andlady’s T ale’, for instance, the landlady is a far cry from her grasping equivalent in Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers. Hamilton’s narrow-minded landlady cannot understand the anti-sceptical writings of her penniless dead lodger and sells them after complaining bitterly about their worthlessness. L ee’s landlady, in contrast, is herself the compassionate and understanding narrator (though within a frame narrative) of her lodger’s moving story. In contrast to Hamilton’s novel, this story uses the plight of the individual to examine the problematic nature of authority. Significantly, it also culturally enfranchises the landlady, who is both able to tell the tale and aware of social injustice. In short, the story indeed provides ‘More last Words’, (as the volume’s epigraph has it) in the lengthy post-revolutionary debate about the construction of society (C.T. 5: n. pag.). The ‘Old Woman’s Tale’ also makes problematic the very stereotype it draws upon. Like the epigraph to the first volume, it complicates the connection between the feminised folk tale and superstition. The old woman is not mentioned at the beginning of the tale, which instead opens with the visit of a Baron to a priory. There, surrounded by darkness and obscurity, he first hears about the legend of L othaire, ‘in consequence of [whose] donation’, the abbey was founded (C.T. 1: 339). The Baron expresses his curiosity, and the prior associates such enthusiasm with ‘the age of the Troubadours and Jongleurs’, adding to the peculiarity by shifting the genre from folk tale to romance (C.T. 1: 340). Furthermore, not only is the romance extremely obscure, but its status as the tale of an old woman is made problematic. T he prior shows the baron ‘several small rolls of vellum’, ‘wholly unintelligible’ since each has been modernised, ‘in every succeeding century, down to the present’ (1: 340). The story read by the Baron has passed through the hands of numerous translators; ultimately, it is more the C hurch’s story than the old woman’s. T his is underlined by the ending: The Baron, who had with difficulty kept awake so long over the extravagant story he had been reading, … now found his curiosity yield to the lateness of the hour … . his eyes insensibly closed; he relaxed his hold – the manuscript dropped from his hand – and he fell into a profound sleep, from which he was roused – not by a ghost – but by a plump friar of the convent. (C.T. 1: 395–6)

T he romance of feudalism is discredited by the tale’s close, which exposes the Baron as a character of comically dubious taste and the abbey as the home of materialism. However, the story also connects the dubious romance and the material wealth of the abbey; the romance is presumably preserved by the abbey as the narrative of the origin of its wealth. Rather than being a straightforward account of superstition, pleasing the reader while trivialising the old woman, the tale’s inclusion of romance values is decidedly uneasy.21 21 See also Allen W. Grove, who briefly considers ‘The Old Woman’s Tale’ when arguing that the gothic fragment’s unfinished nature ‘invests the form with the potential to effect social commentary and change’ (9); see particularly 7– 9.

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S imilarly, S ophia L ee’s ‘Young L ady’s T ale’, which the reviewer assumed invoked stereotypes of femininity, begins by exploiting a conventional and titillating motif of female beauty, particularly in romance, that is, metamorphosis. However, it ultimately offers a sophisticated critique of such transformations.22 T he heroine, E mily A rden, daughter of S ir E dward, initially undergoes various alterations in appearance to attract the Marquis of Lennox, the hero. Since the Marquis has determined not to follow his guardian’s wish that he marry Emily, her increasingly elaborate disguises are necessary to ensure his interest. Remaining ignorant of her identity, he thus falls in love, seeing her first disguised as an Italian peasant and later as a S cottish crofter. A s a result, he eventually becomes E mily’s husband, but not before he is tricked into apparently marrying another woman, an impostor. In this context, E mily’s transformations indicate that female identity is at risk both from the dishonourable actions of male relations and the pride of rank. T he consequent association between metamorphosis and vulnerability is made explicitly during the wedding scene: T he performers were all stopt in the hall, and the lover only admitted to the garden; where, as by magic, had arisen a straw-roofed cottage, in which appeared, in the simple garb of Scotland, the affianced bride … . but to the masquers was added the fair-haired Italian peasant, whose light fingers once more swept the mandoline with inimitable grace: that pleasure past, E mily again vanished, but soon to return in the chaste elegance of her bridal dress. (C.T. 2: 188–9)

T he bride is placed in a series of tableaux and, even when she performs on the mandolin, her person is part of the overall aesthetic effect. Her figure is associated with folk culture; it is the simplicity of the disempowered peasant that makes her seem attractive, not the E nlightenment traditions of S cottish thought or the writings of all classical Italy. S ophia L ee does not directly criticise the metamorphoses that E mily has to undergo to attract E dward. However, E mily catches smallpox and suffers a loss of aesthetic status, which emphasises her intrinsic worth (C.T. 2: 421). Lee also makes the Marquis of Lennox undergo a spectacular transformation from sculpture to life. Having transgressed social boundaries by contracting two marriages, Edward Lennox regains his wife by becoming an aesthetic object. First, he appears to Emily, rather idiosyncratically, as the statue of a flute-playing faun. Then, as 22 T he relation between female beauty and metamorphosis gained a new impetus in the eighteenth century from theories of sensibility. S uch theories of sensibility owed a lot to materialist psychology and the ‘significance of the nervous system’, which Locke and Shaftesbury ‘could easily be read to have elevated and popularised’ (Barker-Benfield 106). In S haftesbury nerve theory was combined with a belief in ‘moral instinct’ – ‘N o sooner are actions viewed … than straight an inward eye distinguishes, and sees the fair and shapely … apart from the deformed or foul’ (Barker-Benfield 105). For Hume, sensibility involved the ‘incapacitating’ of the mind for ‘rougher and more boisterous emotions’ (Barker-Benfield 133). The upper ranks of women, supposed to have particularly delicate nervous systems, would be closely linked with acute sensibility.

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Emily had done on her wedding day, he takes the role of musician and enacts a tableau for her benefit. Demoted to a baroque form expressive of movement and transformation, Edward’s error forces him to forfeit the role of aesthetic subject. T hus S ophia L ee’s exploration of the metamorphic beautiful indicates that it is a strategy employed either by those who have to surrender power and pride or by those, particularly women, who have little authority to begin with. T his examination of changeable beauty suggests that it is the counterpart of the sublime of terror L ee had depicted in The Recess (1783–85). There Lee indicated that outside forces, acting to suppress or control the individual narrative, could produce a terrible fear. In ‘T he Young L ady’s T ale’, the interrogation of the literary convention leads L ee to the conclusion that the beautiful is also a response to such external pressures, and, in particular, to patriarchal pride. In questioning the accuracy of literary stereotypes, and the impartiality and selectivity of narrative, the Lees were probing the notion of accurate fictional representation, famously formulated by Johnson in The Rambler 4 (31March 1750) as a sign of good taste: The works of fiction, with which the present generation seems more particularly delighted, are such as exhibit life in its true state, diversified only by accidents that daily happen … . Its province is to bring about natural events by easy means, and to keep up curiosity without the help of wonder: it is therefore precluded from the machines and expedients of the heroic romance … . (1: 27)

Johnson’s category of life exhibited ‘in its true state’ is called into question by the L ees’ self-conscious use of literary stereotype. T he titles of their tales draw attention to literary convention, only to subvert it. T he L ees use the repetition allowed by the collection of tales to encourage a process of comparison that queries not only the makeup of political systems, but the representations of social types. In addition, The Canterbury Tales’ subversion of literary stereotypes may be seen as the counterpart to its examination of political oppression. Having considered the cultural effects of incorrect government, by including the narratives of the disempowered, it exposes the limitations of conventional narrative and opens the possibility of alternative readings. A s such, The Canterbury Tales forms an impressive example of the use of the collection to examine social injustice and broaden the perspective of the tasteful. In Bardic Nationalism, Katie T rumpener argues for ‘the emergence of the national tale out of the novels of the 1790s’, locating its development with ‘the work of E dgeworth and O wenson’ and describing it as ‘a genre developed initially by female authors, who from the outset address questions of cultural distinctiveness, national policy and political separatism’.23 T hese features, which T rumpener notes in the novels of the 1790s, are to a large extent present in the collections of ‘tales’ present in the same period. S mith and the L ees begin to examine cultural distinctiveness 23 Katie T rumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1997), pp. 131–2.

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in relation to notions of national character and government, suggesting patterns of comparison between different countries and different historical periods. In doing so, they themselves built on popular conceptions of the tale’s role in folk culture (as articulated, for example, in the work of Akenside and Beattie). However, the pan-E uropean approach adopted by the L ees and S mith gives way with the national tale to an examination of national relationships in smaller groups of countries with close colonial ties to E ngland. In the case of E dgeworth’s Tales of Fashionable Life (1809–12), for example, the focus is on England, Ireland, and France (France, admittedly, arguably operates, as in many novels of this period, primarily as both warning and example to the inhabitants of the British Isles). Given the image of war-torn E urope that emerges at the end of Letters of a Solitary Wanderer, this shift in focus can be seen as a retreat from or caution about E uropean relationships during the N apoleonic Wars. Fears of a French invasion of Britain, along with anxiety concerning the American Revolutionary War (1775–83) and the Irish rebellion of 1798, precipitated a British reassessment of colonial relations. However, while the grand tour became more physically difficult to take, the interest in the figure of the cosmopolitan traveller and in the political and national significance of the discourse of taste remained. A nd for writers of the national tale as politically different as Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson, the discourse of taste offers a solution to social and national division. While Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, a Hibernian Tale (1800) is usually recognised as the first regional novel, her Tales of Fashionable Life show greater correspondence to the L ees’ and S mith’s examination of national tastes. It is worth noting, however, that the Preface to Castle Rackrent suggests, albeit in a tonguein-cheek way, the turn to a ‘rustic taste’ noted in this chapter’s title: Thady’s ‘plain unvarnished tale’ of three generations of the Rackrent family prior to the Union is preferable to ‘the most highly ornamented tale’, not because his lower rank places him nearer the permanent truths of nature (as Wordsworth has it), but because we ‘never bow to the authority of him who has no great name to sanction his absurdities’ (Novels 1: 5–6). Edgeworth’s project, it seems, is not to romanticise either rich or poor. Rather, although she suggests the manners described are a thing of the past, it seems her aim is to expose and prevent such national peculiarities. More unequivocally than in her later Tales, she promotes the notion that ‘N ations, as well as individuals, gradually lose attachment to their identity’ and imagines ‘Ireland los[ing] her identity by an union with Great Britain’ (Novels 1: 7). While Edgeworth’s rationalist project here apparently involves exposing and civilising Irish (and English) ‘taste’, her Tales of Fashionable Life present a more complex view of the relationship between taste and nation; a greater emphasis is placed on personally made craft items as a mechanism to allow cross-class sympathy, while the purchased art products associated with fashionable cosmopolitanism are viewed with suspicion. While S mith’s Letters of a Solitary Wanderer in particular was an exploration of human suffering in relation to taste, E dgeworth here uses the comparisons allowed by the tale format to bring the social classes to a position of greater mutual understanding. Instead of exploring the ethical effect of sentiment, E dgeworth concentrates on exploring the relationship of gratitude and respect

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expounded in her educational works. This continued educational mission (and the wide appeal of the tales) is suggested by Edgeworth’s father when he comments that her ‘former works consist of tales for children … of tales suited to that great mass which does not move in the circles of fashion’, while ‘T he present volumes are intended to point out some of those errors to which the higher classes are exposed’.24 But (and she is like Elizabeth Hamilton in this respect) Edgeworth wishes to educate both the lower and upper orders; one of her concerns is to point out the dangers that luxury and its pursuit represent to all ranks. Consequently, as R.L . E dgeworth notes (in phrasing similar to Harriet L ee’s comment that The Canterbury Tales appeals to ‘different counties’ and classes), ‘the parts of this series of moral fictions bear upon the faults and excellencies of different ages and classes’ (Tales of Fashionable Life 1: iv). Edgeworth had in fact considered several titles for the work (moral stories, fashionable tales, unfashionable tales, and, as suggested by Sophy Ruxton, ‘Modern Sketches’.25 In finally choosing Tales of Fashionable Life, she was concerned to stress the non-elitist nature of the title; she remarked in a letter dated 20 April 1809 to Charles Sneyd Edgeworth that the work consisted of tales ‘of, not for’ the fashionable (5: xi). Indeed, the Scottish writer Susan Ferrier found the work rather too transgressive in terms of its depiction of the sensitivity and ethical behaviour of the lower ranks: ‘as for sentimental weavers and moralising glovers, I recommend them as penny ware for the pedlar’, she wrote dismissively to C harlotte C lavering.26 Ferrier’s comments suggest these are not, as she desires, didactic tales aimed at a lower class in need of instruction. Instead, the tales provide a lesson in interclass appreciation. Indeed, the title, Tales of Fashionable Life, enacts a certain removal of division. E dgeworth’s choice of the term tale for the title of the series is significant, given the term’s association, not just with the lower ranks, but with the notion of accessibility (as the title and purpose of E dgeworth’s own educative Popular Tales suggests). E dgeworth’s title therefore contrasts accessibility with the supposed exclusivity of fashion. Hence, while the title hints at a cultural split (for example, that between tenant and landlord, between popular culture and aristocratic luxury, enacted in several of the tales), it also indicates the general applicability of the story’s didactic content. Divided into two three-volume series, the collection traces a series of national contrasts and similarities in E ngland, France, and Ireland. T wo of the E nglish tales in particular (Manoeuvring and Vivian) trace the character faults occasioned by fashionable life, taking, respectively, those familiar (even 24 Maria Edgeworth, Tales of Fashionable Life, 3 vols (London: Johnson, 1809), 1: iii–iv. 25 Novels 5: viii–ix; the title Moral Stories is suggested in a letter to Margaret Ruston on 13 March 1809; ‘Unfashionable tales’ in a letter to Sophy Ruxton 30 June 1802; ‘Modern sketches’ and ‘Fashionable or unfashionable tales’ were mentioned in a letter to Sophy Ruxton dated 3 N ovember 1803. 26 John A. Doyle, ed. Memoir and Correspondence of Susan Ferrier. 1782–1854. Collected by her Grand-Nephew John Ferrier (London: Murray, 1898; repr. London: Eveleigh, 1929), p. 66.

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Rousseauian) tropes of the desire for power and the feminising weakness caused by corrupt social existence: here the manipulation and distortion of character Wollstonecraft had associated with the Burkean beautiful is much in evidence. In contrast, the French and Irish tales, particularly those from the second series, Emilie de Coulanges and The Absentee, suggest an alternative to the corrupting force of luxury, an alternative designed to bond society together rather than to atomise it. Despite E dgeworth’s suggestions concerning the limits of national character in Castle Rackrent, Tales of Fashionable Life make it clear that Edgeworth does not favour a bland or culturally arbitrary cosmopolitanism. T he worst example of this cultural mystification is provided in The Absentee by the imaginative fervour of Lady Clonbrony’s upholsterer, whose eye ‘in fine frenzy rolling’ through ‘imagination’ gives ‘to airy nothing / A local habitation and a NAME’ (5: 13). T he confusion of ‘local habitations’, languages, and cultures drawn upon by the furnisher proves disadvantageous, not just to Lady Clonbrony’s purse but to her country. Moreover, those cultures most distinguished in the upholsterer’s scheme of decoration are those associated with a feminised orient and with slavery itself. Hence, although he proposes using ‘A pollo’s head with gold rays’ and the chimeras of Greek mythology, he intends to mix these with the fittings of a seraglio and hangings mimicking Alhambra (the palace of the Moorish kings at Granada), with a Chinese pagoda and Egyptian hieroglyphic paper (5: 13–14). Further, this extravagant jumble is shown to generate slavery among both the novel’s aristocrats and its working poor. Lady Clonbrony abases herself before worthless English aristocrats who ultimately ridicule her taste, while the lower ranks suffer near indigence on the Irish estates of L ord C lonbrony to pay for such display. A nd the fault, Edgeworth suggests, is not confined to the Irish upper classes but is equally found amongst the E nglish and the bourgeois. Yet, if the associative mishmash of fashionable cosmopolitanism displeases Edgeworth, she also suggests the difficulty of achieving a more finely attuned sense of national cultural identity. Hence, while, on the level of character it is possible, like Lord Colombray, to combine ‘English good sense’ with ‘Irish vivacity’, it is also possible to become confused, like his mother, Lady Clonbrony, and cover a ‘naturally free, familiar’ Irish manner with ‘a sober, cold, still, stiff deportment, which she mistook for English’ (5: 8–9). The solution, it seems, ultimately lies in being properly informed, achieving a balanced knowledge of other cultures, alongside the ability to generalise properly. Hence, for example, the sensible Mr Salisbury ‘was full of anecdote’ and, ultimately like Thady’s, these are not ‘mere gossiping anecdotes that lead to nothing, but [are] characteristic of national manners’ (5: 38). In a tacit retreat from the wider European explorations of The Canterbury Tales and Letters of a Solitary Wanderer, in the colonial context, Edgeworth outlines the time, effort, and intellectual sensitivity necessary to make an accurate assessment of national character. Edgeworth in fact desires to replace both ill-thought-through national prejudice and fake fashionable cosmopolitanism with a different kind of tasteful economy. T his becomes evident in Emilie de Coulanges, where constant battles over the relative merits of French and E nglish literature, music, and art disrupt the domestic

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peace of Mrs. Somers’s house. Edgeworth remarks: ‘Those who will not make allowances for national prejudice, and who do not consider how much all our tastes are influenced by early education, example, and the accidental associations of ideas, may dispute for ever without coming to any conclusion’, especially ‘if each of the combatants set up a standard of his own, as the universal standard of taste’ (5: 282). Using the language of associationist psychology, Edgeworth tantalizingly hints that it may be possible to subtract national prejudice and other influences in order to come to a rational valuation of art. However, this hint is not followed through. Edgeworth is certainly worried about the likely inaccuracies generated by national stereotyping, but she is far more interested in proving a personalised kind of aesthetic appreciation that will bypass such international disputes. The main theme of the narrative is the difficult relationship of benefactor to recipient. To allow Emilie and her mother to live comfortably as émigrés, Mrs Somers gives them the money she has secretly destined to purchase ‘two fine pictures, a Guido and a Corregio’ (5: 270). Irrationally annoyed by the pair’s ignorance of this intended sacrifice, and goaded by continual disputes concerning taste, Mrs Somers eventually becomes impossible to live with. When the Coulanges leave the household, Masham, Mrs Somers’s servant, assumes that they have not left the customary ‘vails’ or gifts for the household, gifts that function as a sign of respect. Emilie, Masham implies, is both insensitive and frivolous, painting a ‘butterfly’s wing on some of her Frenchifications! Her eyes were red, to do her justice; but whether with painting or crying, I can’t pretend to be certain’ (5: 313). However, after their departure, Masham discovers the missing gifts: ‘There are her little paintings and embroideries, and pretty things, that she did when she was confined with her sprain, all laid out in order … and the very butterfly that I was so angry with her for staying to finish, is on something for you, ma’am … .’ (5: 314). Masham’s earlier complaints against the ‘climate and natural character’ of the ungrateful French prove to be an inaccurate generalisation; instead, E milie is as sensitive as the flowers she painted on her ‘dial of Flora’, flowers that open and close at various times of day, as described by Linnaeus (5: 298–9). In this economy, the sublime paintings of Guido and C orregio are replaced with artistic products that have personal affective value because they are manufactured as a result of gratitude combined with love. A similar rewriting of the economy of taste can be traced in both The Absentee and Madam de Fleury, in each case with direct relevance to interclass relationships. There is no doubt that for Edgeworth those born into the lower ranks are capable of developing significant taste and artistic talent, or even of being fine ladies and gentlemen; after all, in Ennui the cosmopolitan L ord Glenthorn is actually the child of his Irish peasant nurse. In contrast to Reeve’s innately genteel E dmund, the actual heir to the estate, brought up as a peasant’s son in The Old English Baron, for L ord Glenthorn, nurture rather than nature and the fact of his economic power have made him what he is. A nd in Madame de Fleury Victoire, daughter of a working Parisian woman, shows poetic ability which could be cultivated had she sufficient ‘leisure’; however, even with ‘positive excellence’

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‘the taste of the public may suddenly vary’, throwing her ‘out of employment’ (5: 225). Edgeworth’s point, as with the middle-ranking character Mr Temple in Patronage, is that literature is a very economically uncertain profession. Instead, educated in the school sponsored by Madame de Fleury, Victoire goes to work for a ‘brodeuse’ (5: 241). Loving and feeling grateful to Madame de Fleury, Victoire rescues her from captivity during the French Revolution. L ater, when the upperranking woman finds herself a penniless émigré in England, Victoire is able to send her money, raised through such embroidery. Against the background of the ‘public disturbances’ of the Revolution, E dgeworth suggests that, when the upper ranks behave in a responsible and thoughtful way, a healthy relationship can be maintained between the classes (5: 230). Those from the lower ranks, such as V ictoire, should not be encouraged by the patronage of idle aristocrats to use their skills in the uncertain markets of high art or fashion. Led to apply their (creative) talents in more practical and financially stable arenas, the working people will no longer be servile and disaffected but able to participate within an economy of gratitude and mutual support. Correspondingly, the upper ranks should replace (or at least supplement) their fashionable, cosmopolitan purchases with the benefits accrued from emotional engagement with their workforce. This is nicely illustrated in the Irish context of The Absentee where L ady C lonbrony’s elaborate interior decorations are far less genuinely tasteful than the ‘very small but neat room’ with its ‘comfortable-looking bed’ that Lord Colombre finds in the cottage of a poor Irish woman on his father’s estate. In response to his praise, the old woman comments: ‘Ah, these red check curtains … these have lasted well: they were give me by a good friend, now far away, over the seas – my lady C lonbrony; and made by the prettiest hands ever you see, her niece’s, miss Grace N ugent’s, and she a little child at that time; sweet love! all gone!’ (5: 117). Ensuring loyalty despite the financial hardship experienced by peasants on the estate, these attractive red curtains prove much more socially valuable than the ‘A lhambra’ hangings in L ady C lonbrony’s L ondon drawing room. While E dgeworth saw creative endeavour as a way of preventing alienated labour relations, S ydney O wenson pressed the aesthetic trends of her day into rather more complicated service for Ireland. E dgeworth emphasised the importance of local knowledge, but her suggestion about the exchange of craft objects is broadly applicable, creating a social bond that does not depend on nation. For Owenson, local knowledge, taste, and belonging were more closely linked. Kathryn Kirkpatrick notes that given the 1800 Act of Union ‘which formalised Ireland’s status as a colony, politically and economically controlled by E ngland’, the subtitle of O wenson’s novel The Wild Irish Girl, A National Tale ‘made a particularly defiant rhetorical gesture’.27 However, O wenson’s use of the particular descriptor ‘tale’ draws attention to the connection between popular culture and politics explored in the earlier part of this chapter. A nd her ‘Irish’ and national tales can also be seen in the context of the motif of cosmopolitan travel present in The 27 Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, The Wild Irish Girl; A National Tale (1806), ed. Kathryn Kirkpatrick (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), p. vii.

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Canterbury Tales and Letters of a Solitary Wanderer. In his article ‘Fiction, Poetics and Cultural Stereotype’, J. Th. Leerssen suggests that Owenson’s Irish tales are an uneasy hybrid of the realistic novel form (suitable for describing the Anglo-Irish) and the more fantastic romance (appropriate to the Gaelic inhabitants).28 However, understanding the work as a ‘tale’, a form which at once evokes popular culture and relates to the discourse of taste, allows us to see past this apparent generic split. T he national tale has of course been extensively discussed, with O wenson’s The Wild Irish Girl receiving particular attention (much more than the rest of her oeuvre). And the particular worry emerging out of such discussion is often that Owenson’s work, celebrating Irish culture to support nationalism, allows such culture to be co-opted for a British imperialist project.29 Ireland, Glorvina, and Lady Morgan are offered as ‘exotic curio[s]’ for English audiences and the country remains a primitive if attractive other in need of guidance; or, on the other hand, the Irish are lured by O wenson’s writing into an ancestral myth of origin that traps them politically.30 But if we take into account the tale’s longer-term associations with the discourse of taste, a different narrative emerges. Instead of O wenson exhibiting the ‘false consciousness’ of a ‘minor artist’ in an ‘attempted conversion of aesthetics into politics’, it is possible to see that O wenson (self-consciously and with increasing complexity) explores the contradictory politics of Romantic aesthetics (Andrews 7, 8). Just as Edgeworth with her different political bias had seen popular art as a cohesive force, O wenson offers taste as a mechanism to build respect and understanding in an otherwise divided culture. A nd her programme arguably becomes progressively more ambitious. In The Wild Irish Girl (1806), the (by now familiar) figure of the cosmopolitan traveller receives an education in Irish culture that makes the country a prime location for Romantic redevelopment. In O’Donnel (1814), Owenson’s depiction of well-informed local taste is a way of showing the Irish people’s (metaphoric) ownership of the land. And Florence Macarthy (1818) demonstrates that a link between such a sense of belonging and taste is essential to ensure ethical action and the health of the nation.

28

J. Th. Leerssen, ‘Fiction, Poetics and Cultural Stereotype; Local Colour in Scott, Morgan, and Maturin’, Modern Language Review 86 (1991): 273–84. 29 For discussions of the dangers of the national tale being co-opted into a British imperialist project, see Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution, 184–6 and N icola Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, chapter 3. Other important work on the national tale includes that by Katie Trumpener, Ina Ferris, and Mary Jane Corbett. 30 For an interesting account of O wenson’s ‘orientalizing mode of writing Ireland’ as ‘exotic curio’, see N atasha T essone, ‘Displaying Ireland: S ydney O wenson and the Politics of S pectacular A ntiquarianism’, Eire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies 3/4 (2002): 169–86, 171 – writing about O wenson’s ‘heightened museological imagination’, T essone acknowledges that the writer ‘appears to ironize, even undermine, her main vheicle for explaining Ireland’ (184); for distorations on Irish political consciousness, for example, see Elmer Andrews, ‘Aesthetics, Politics and Identity: Lady Morgan’s The Wild Irish Girl’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 12 (1987): 7–19.

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In The Wild Irish Girl, although the figure of the cosmopolitan traveller is familiar, his re-education is rather more dramatic than in Letters of a Solitary Wanderer. While the hero’s correspondent is on his ‘way to France’, Horatio repines that he ‘cannot recollect that in its fabulous or veracious history, Ireland was ever the mart of voluntary exile to the man of pleasure’ (8, 7). However, on arrival in the bay of Dublin, ‘a foreigner on board the packet, compared the view to that which the bay of N aples affords’ (a comparison also pursued in O wenson’s O’Donnel. A National Tale [1814]) (14). The challenge is to re-evaluate Ireland’s place in relation to such narratives. And Horatio possesses the necessary qualifications. He shows the aesthetic whimsicality (he is a ‘genius’ whose mind has ‘the bright colouring of romantic eccentricity’ [3]) possessed by both the initial narrator of The Canterbury Tales and the wanderer. And just as Sophia Lee’s narrator shows his ‘genius’ and poetic inclinations by wishing to see the tomb where ‘C hurchill, the champion of liberty is interred’, Horatio similarly suggests his awareness of the interrelation between politics and taste, when, in a way that recalls Hugh Blair’s dissertation on O ssian, he comments that ‘to be sensibly alive to kindness or to unkindness, is, in my opinion, a noble trait in the national character of an unsophisticated people’ (15). Further, Horatio shares a certain listlessness with the narrator of Letters of a Solitary Wanderer. But Horatio’s listlessness (like Lord Glenthorn’s after him) is caused by the ‘destructive atmosphere of pleasure’ enjoyed by the fashionable elite at the expense of their responsibilities. A nd this, as in E dgeworth’s Ennui, is linked with anti-Irish ‘prejudice’ (10). Owenson, however, suggests that a removal of prejudice based on love will produce a more accurate observer, and later, in Florence Macarthy, she suggests that such an spectator, instead of seeing ‘images’ would improve his judgement by ‘observations’ of ‘men’ (1: 78). In this sense, too, her work relates back to the suggestions made by Sophia Lee’s narrator, an international collector who will ‘mark anew character’, choosing ‘specimens’ from ‘animate’ rather than inanimate’ nature (C.T. 1: xi). The travels of Owenson’s hero, then, seem likely to offer something more profound than the typical aristocratic sojourn of the period. In the book’s introductory letters, Horatio mentions ‘chemistry’ as a subject his father has forbidden while the hero stays in Ireland. But chemistry (like botany in the narratives of Smith and Wakefield) is connected with an orderly mind, one that the speaker does not have. Here it is Ireland that will remove Horatio’s fashionable sickness of mind, allowing him to ‘look minutely into the intimate structure of things, and resolve them into their simple and elementary structure’ (11). Ireland, in other words, will give him perspective. Whereas E dgeworth was part of the A nglo-Irish A scendancy, O wenson had Irish C atholic sympathies inherited from her father. C onsequently, O wenson differs from her when considering what a sympathetic observer might see in Ireland. Both authors of course share common ground in suggesting that corrupt management, absentee landlords, and resultant poverty will be notable features. However, it is a critical commonplace that Owenson also (to a far greater extent than Edgeworth) emphasises that a spectator will be struck by the ‘original’ qualities of the Irish – by Glorvina’s ‘genius’ and the ‘curiously expressive and original’ language of the Irish boatmen, for example (79, 65, 14). As suggested above, Owenson’s tactic

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is in one way potentially dangerous: as national representative, Glorvina, ‘uniting in her character, the extremes of intelligence and simplicity’ is nonetheless ‘a mere child’, like her country in need of instruction (82). But equally, the manoeuvre can be positioned in relation to the pre-Romantic and Romantic aesthetics of T homas Blackwell, Macpherson, Hugh Blair, and Wollstonecraft, all of whom situate genius in the opening stages of society. Furthermore, Wollstonecraft (and to some extent Coleridge, with his dreams of a new society on the banks of the Susquehanna River) genuinely see this imaginative quality as something worth striving for in the present, as something that will enable a break with some of the corrupted (often fashionable) values of contemporary society. In The Wild Irish Girl, O wenson positions Ireland as the space where such an imaginative life is possible. Particularly notable in this process is her depiction not just of the aristocracy but of the Irish poor and peasantry. T hese are shown to have a rich creative or artistic life, through the ‘song of the ploughman or labourer’, a ‘voluntary recitative’ of a ‘singular’ nature (27), and the ‘choral strains’ of the spinners. In true tale tradition, these proceed ‘according to the old woman’s fancy’ and show ‘that Ireland, like Italy, has its improvisatorés, and that those who are gifted with the impromptu talent are highly estimated by their rustic compatriots’ (22). Although the Irish peasantry, then, are degraded and impoverished by current political circumstance, they are also the preservers and enactors of cultural tradition. S uch tradition preserves intact originary imaginative freshness, even under trying political circumstances. A nd such authenticity in turn means that they are always already prepared for a political future that will match their imaginative freshness. Wollstonecraft had consistently attempted to imagine and facilitate the construction of a better future society. Yet, despite this will to refashion civilisation, in her more pessimistic moments, she failed to see how corrupt contemporary society could be given the requisite imaginative freshness to reform – hence in her essay ‘O n Poetry’ she returns to the imaginative power of the ancients. O wenson provides an interesting take on this typically Romantic politico-aesthetic dilemma. By suggesting that the Irish have retained this imaginative power to the present, she implicitly positions Ireland as a prime candidate (more suitable perhaps than England) for progressive political rule. The country has enough creativity to enable the break with fashionable convention that the Romantics saw as so problematic. O wenson offers Ireland as the space the Romantics have been searching for. N onetheless, the legal and physical dispossession of the C atholic Gaelic Irish is a problem for O wenson when she attempts to bolster the inhabitants’ prestige. S ara L. Maurer notes when Edmund Burke suggests that ‘“to love the little platoon we belong to in society … is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country,” his rhetoric orients that love not toward other people, but toward the physical objects collectively owned by the ‘‘little platoon’’ of the family’.31 In other words, Burke’s rhetoric suggests that property (and it might be added) the related factor of hereditary position generates national feeling. But, 31 Sara L. Maurer, ‘Disowning to Own: Maria Edgeworth and the Illegitimacy of N ational O wnership’, Criticism, 44.4 (Fall 2002), 363–88, 365.

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as O wenson explores, the position of the C atholic Gaelic Irish both to property and hereditary glory is deeply problematic. T he hero of O’Donnel, for instance, is dispossessed by an unfair anti-C atholic statute, which is castigated throughout the novel. N onetheless, the novel’s ending suggests the virtual impossibility of full restitution. A nd the notion of hereditary honour in post-U nion Ireland is similarly awkward. At times Owenson’s ideas concerning nobility seem almost Burkean (as when O’Donnel indicates how much he values the ring given him by Queen Marie-Antoinette). Yet, on the other hand, in The Wild Irish Girl, Glorvina mentions ‘the celebrated Bishop of Cloyne’, who ‘relates an anecdote of a kitchen maid, who refused to carry out cinders because she was of Milesian descent’ (117). Both formerly owned property and past glories are compromised, no longer seen as unproblematic symbols of prestige. Given this, in order to strengthen her case for Ireland as a country truly owned by the honourable Irish, O wenson draws upon a number of taste-related narratives. A s has been seen in relation to the Wild Irish Girl, one of these is the narrative of cultural inheritance. Here, the notion of cultural tradition, which Reeve and Barbauld had explored and found open to distortion and appropriation, operates in favour of Gaelic C atholic credibility. S econd, O wenson uses the discourse of scenic tourism to shore up our sense of the legitimacy of Irish nationalism; and here the narrative structures of O’Donnel are particularly effective. In The Spectator no. 411, Addison had suggested that spectatorship operates as a kind of substitute for actual possession, and the first volume of Owenson’s novel contrasts positive and negative forms of imaginative possession, represented, respectively, by O ’Donnel and the fashionable English (6: 86). Rather like Horatio at the beginning of The Wild Irish Girl, the E nglish doubt the attractions of Ireland to the tourist. Hence, while Miss O’Halloran (Irish governess, later the Duchess of Belmont and the daughter of a ‘genius’ Irish artist) thinks that ‘the peninsula of Curran resembled the S icilian Dripanon’, L ady S ingleton pronounces ‘a decided dissent’ (O’Donnel 1: 66; 1: 87). This is ‘followed up by’ by her acolyte Mr Dexter: “Undoubtedly, Ma’am. It is totally impossible that an Irish scene could resemble any thing in Italy: the comparison is really quite comical.” “Were you ever in Italy, Sir?” drawled out Miss O’Halloran. “No, Miss Halloran, not absolutely in Italy, though I have been abroad; but I think I know it as well from her Ladyship’s description as if I had lived there all my life.” (O’Donnel 1: 87)

Self-seeking ignorance prevents Mr Dexter even attempting to think for himself (in a way that, given Mr Dexter’s interest in using Lady Singleton to find a ‘place’, would not have surprised Wollstonecraft) (O’Donnel 1: 83). His well-matched patron, L ady S ingleton, displays a constant spirit of contradiction, peddling illinformed theories with no attention to the local environment. S uch travellers are incapable of seeing beyond their prejudices. Hence, when Miss O’Halloran glimpses a figure suspended on the sublime cliffs near the Heights of Sliabh-Barragh, for her ‘it realises the idea one has of the statue of Peter the Great placed on a solid rock’, while for L ady S ingleton, bathetically, the man only appears to be ‘some foolish

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person looking for samphire’ (1: 131–2). However, although initially presented as part of the picturesque spectacle, O ’Donnel is able to interpret it, understanding the geology, history, language, and political and economic circumstances that contribute to the Irish condition (O’Donnel 1: 150–53). Ireland is as sublime as Italy; the Irish are capable not only of forming a part of such a spectacle but of judging and analysing it. And, although (like the wanderer) previously forced into exile, when he travels through his own country, O ’Donnel’s taste is enhanced by local knowledge. What O wenson does is to develop a contrast between the genuinely wellinformed native taste of O’Donnel and the luxurious (ill-informed) cosmopolitanism of the English. J. Th. Leerssen complains that Owenson ‘make[s] little distinction between fashionable scenes in Britain or in Ascendancy Ireland’ (277). In fact, O wenson’s purpose seems to be to suggest that the E nglish are as ‘drowsy’ as Wollstonecraft’s aristocratic sleepers in ‘O n Poetry’ (O’Donnel 1: 162). Whether at home or abroad, they require constant stimulus. In the second volume, when O ’Donnel is lured to E ngland, what emerges is the social set’s preoccupation with an impoverished version of A ddison’s third aesthetic category, the novel. A lthough A ddison was perhaps more concerned with the variety offered by a single spectacle, the category was mocked in the Romantic period, most notably by Thomas Love Peacock in Headlong Hall (1816). Whereas Peacock’s objection is to its philosophical weakness, Owenson connects the desire for novelty with luxury. In L ady L lanberis’s home, the pursuit of the latest sensation (whether it be a performance in a new theatre or the poetry of a disposable protégé) leads to the callous exploitation of vulnerable individuals.32 In this respect L ady L lanberis is rather like Lord Lindsey in ‘The Poet’s Tale’. Arundel transplants the Italian botanist and German philosopher to an environment in which they cannot thrive. Having discredited the taste of the E nglish fashionable world with all its assumed cultural authority and contrasted it with O ’Donnel’s more informed local vision, then, in the third volume O wenson is able to turn to the complicated and embroiled matter of Irish landownership. Her careful preparatory use of the aesthetic now allows her to explore the unfortunate position of the C atholic Irish in relation to property, without weakening her implicit argument that this group is nonetheless in some sense the authentic owners of their country. In her 1818 Florence Macarthy: An Irish Tale O wenson’s thoughts about the landscape, nationhood, and belonging are expressed still more emphatically. The work begins with the arrival in Ireland by boat of two travellers journeying under assumed names. The first, ‘De Vere’ is recognisable as ‘an Englishman of rank and fashion’, who also possesses ‘genius’: ‘An ideologist in the fullest sense of the word, in his philosophy he talked as one who believed that “nothing is, but thinking makes it so”’.33 But while De V ere ‘mused, dreamed, and was 32

For Owenson’s treatment by Lady Cork (similar to that experienced by O’Donnel), see L ionel S tevenson, The Wild Irish Girl: The Life of Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan (1776–1859) (London: Chapman and Hall, 1936), pp. 104–105. 33 S ydney O wenson, Florence Macarthy: An Irish Tale, 4 vols (L ondon: C olburn, 1818) 1: 8; subsequently F.M.

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passive’, his companion, the C ommodore, ‘a brilliant illustration of physical and intellectual energy’, ‘thought, sympathized and acted’ (F.M. 1: 75–6). Both travel, De V ere from ‘choice’, the C ommodore from ‘necessity’, the former interested in ‘images’, the latter in ‘observations’, particularly of ‘men’; both are connected with creativity (F.M. 1: 78). However, their reactions to the spectacle of poverty in Dublin vary sharply. De Vere has ‘no positive objection’ to suburban squalor, connecting it with ‘poetical misery’ and picturesque wretchedness’ (F.M. 1: 44). When he speaks of ‘misery well chiselled’, he indicates that the scene, viewed by him with perfect detachment, is largely of interest as the subject for art (F.M. 1: 44). Additionally, this is a type of art that seems to be admired more for its elegance and accuracy than for the emotions it engenders. De V ere’s attitude, in short, forms a kind of accidental parody or extreme version of Kant’s suggestion that the viewer should be indifferent as to the existence of the art object. De Vere (having moved on from Hume’s view that suffering be excluded from art) is indifferent to the real-life misery that art might depict. T he C ommodore, on the other hand, is nearer to the alternative Romantic position on suffering in art, seen in the work, for instance, of Charlotte Smith and Joanna Baillie: “But who,” asked the Commodore with emphasis, “can see such wretchedness as this with man’s eye and not feel it with man’s heart. T he mind starts beyond he mere impulse of sympathy here; it rushes at once form the effect to the cause. Indignation usurps the seat of pity, and the spirit rests upon those who have afflicted, not on those who suffer.” (F.M. 1: 44)

O bservation here is not passive, but active, leading to both sympathy and the desire for understanding, an interest in the system that produces such results. O wenson, then, has staged a debate between two approaches to the act of viewing: De V ere’s where the aesthetic is ultimately detached from other areas of interest, an attitude that later evolves into art for art’s sake, and the Commodore’s position, which insists on the connection of aesthetic experience with other emotional and social concerns. A nd while De V ere’s attitude has often been most valourized by aestheticians and Romantic scholars alike, for Owenson the Commodore has all the best arguments. De V ere’s detachment also places him in a strange relation to the discourse of nation. O bserving the approaching coast of Ireland, the C ommodore’s appreciation of the scene is enhanced by personal attachment, but De Vere asks him if he can imagine a ‘creature’ ‘placed by nature or circumstances beyond the ordinary pale of humanity’: scarcely looking upon that spot, called earth, with human eyes, nor herding with his species in human sympathy – one so organized, so worked on by events and thwarted in feelings, so blasted in his bud of life, as to stand alone in creation, matchless, or at least unmatched. (F.M. 1: 11)

For the C ommodore, with his closer active attachment to Ireland, however, such a being ‘could not be man’:

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He, who wants the appetites and passions common to all men, with the sympathies and affections that spring from them, is something better or worse, angel or demon, but he is not man’. (1: 11–12)

The Commodore, who is later revealed to be Walter de Montenay Fitzadelm, a member of the A nglo-Irish ‘master cast’ but dispossessed due to poor moral and political conditions in Ireland, believes in the vital role of affection, of sympathy in making the aesthetic meaningful, and in turn in reinforcing national feeling (3: 119). Significantly, too, this liberator of indigenous peoples marries Florence Macarthy, the Lady Clanclare, writer of ‘tales, stories who possesses ‘the charm of endless variety’ (and thus is a true representative of the Addisonian novel) (3: 109; 3: 263). The marriage ensures, as Terence O’Leary suggests, the ‘ENGLISH BY BLOOD’ are ‘leagued with the IRISH MERE’ (3: 198). De Vere is later revealed to be L ord A delm Fitzadelm, son of the usurper Gerald Fitzadelm, in whose family on the mother’s side, madness runs. L ord A delm is disinterested enough to help the C ommodore reclaim his true position, and the differing viewpoints of the two provide each with intellectual stimulation. N onetheless, O wenson suggests that his approach is inadequate on its own (perhaps even an attitude of sophisticated indifference generated by colonialism); the Commodore’s viewpoint is necessary to complement it, while being more satisfactory when occurring on its own. O wenson’s connection between the aesthetic and belonging presents an interesting parallel with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), also, among other things, a narrative of cosmopolitan travel. T he S helleys were familiar with Owenson’s work.34 Perhaps consequently, when Frankenstein sees the creature in the Alps, the creature is silhouetted against a sublime background in a way reminiscent of the English tourists’ first sighting of O’Donnel. Owenson’s hero is one who, for much of the novel, struggles to come to terms with his marginal and dispossessed status in Ireland. A nd the creature, too, is one who has had his desire for belonging disrupted. Presented with a Romantic education (Milton, Goethe, Volney), the creature is nonetheless denied his position in the theological, emotional, and political ideologies that, for S helley, shape the period. T he result, as O wenson suggests in Florence Macarthy, is a being with potential to become either an ‘angel’ or a ‘demon’ (recalling Shelley’s Miltonic references in Frankenstein). Like the dispossessed Irish, denied belonging, the creature becomes infinitely closer to the ‘demon’ the Commodore proposes as his second alternative, and the landscape he and Frankenstein eventually destructively journey through is completely barren. For Mary Shelley, whose work might be said to be a significant last contemporary word both on the phase of Romantic aesthetics that came out of the French Revolution debate and on the work of Wollstonecraft and Godwin, the denial of the feeling of belonging is disastrous, aesthetically, personally, and

Mary Shelley records in her journal reading O’Donnel on 20 O ctober 1816 and The Wild Irish Girl on 19 August 1817. Mary Shelley, The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814– 1844, eds Paula R. Feldman and Diana S cott-Kilvert, 2 vols (O xford: C larendon Press, 1987), 1: 41, 1: 179–80. 34

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politically. This same sense is found in Owenson, to whose work the Shelleys were drawn, and whose nationalist project still had some way to run. T rumpener’s crucial realisation in Bardic Nationalism that ‘N ational tales were widely influential in their own right and of formative importance for nineteenthcentury realism’ needs to be extended to recognise the prior significance of the collection (131). Of particular significance is the way in which its use of cultural comparison, interest in location, and class contributed both to this process and to the formation of the national tale itself (131). In its use of topographical shifts, the tale mirrored the conventional narrative of taste, the tour. However, its emphasis on observation, not of the productions of art, but of inhabitants, made it a flexible vehicle for the examination both of individual narratives and of political system. In their speculation about the relationship between taste, politics, and liberty, the tales of C harlotte S mith and Harriet and S ophia L ee show one aspect of the ‘levelling’ tendency Hazlitt connects with Romantic poetry (Lectures 321). However light-heartedly, in these works the narratives of the dispossessed or those without cultural prestige are given new value by the travelling connoisseur. T he pattern is repeated with the national tale, where an interest in the culture of the politically marginalized represents a way of overcoming division. For E dgeworth, the exchange of cultural and craft objects produces mutual understanding across classes and cultures. For O wenson, the discourse of taste, along with an emphasis on native tales, antiquarianism, and histories, have a key function. They can be used to construct an understanding between the E nglish, A nglo-Irish, and the Gaelic Irish themselves. A ccording to O wenson, too, in this process ‘the testimony of the lowly, and proofs in possession of the illiterate and prejudiced’ have an important part to play (F.M. 3: 97). And literary fiction, Owenson suggests, is crucial in recording such testimony. Like Barbauld in her Preface to The British Novelists, she assigns it a central role, remarking in the Preface to O’Donnel that literary fiction perhaps ‘forms the best history of nations’ because ‘the novelist … is, par etat, the servant of the many, not the minister of the FEW’ (unlike, Owenson hints, the elitist poet): such a writer takes ‘nature and manners for the grounds and groupings of works, which are professedly addressed to popular feelings and ideas’ (viii–ix). Here the emphasis on observation present in the Lees’ tales gains extra impetus through O wenson’s agenda of promoting cross-cultural appreciation. Her work demonstrates how the national tale retained and in some cases increased the democratising potential of the work of Smith and the Lee sisters. T he early chapters of this study suggested that a sublime of tradition could be used to support C hurch and S tate but that such a use was problematic. Having critiqued Romantic aesthetics and established the centrality of the novel, O wenson suggests that this sublime of tradition can be reinvented as cultural continuity. Recognition of shared culture (including oral narratives, craft items, novels, and tales) here allows resistance to relativism and to the selfish atomisation of society often connected with luxury. A nd, these tales suggest, without such a willingness to broaden the definition of culture, without the recognition of culture as a mass form of belonging, social improvement seems unlikely.

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C onclusion Repositioning the work of the period’s women poets in The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry, Marlon B. Ross suggests that we should ‘re-examine romanticism itself’ (316). ‘Enriched with the knowledge garnered from … recovered sources’ we ‘must transform our critical practices to enable us to be more conscious of our blindness’ (316). To adjust our understanding and arrive at a more coherent position is not only a matter of recovering forgotten sources, however. N or, although it may be important, is it sufficient to trace patterns of influence (as has been done here with Barbauld and Coleridge) or to reveal unexpected similarities of thought (such as those between Wollstonecraft and Wordsworth). Rather, what is necessary is a re-evaluation of the debates concerning taste and the aesthetic in the period. In this book, such re-evaluation enables the dismissal of the idea that use of the quotidian, caution regarding genius and attention to the economic are merely the apparently out-ofstep or non-Romantic decisions of women writers. Instead, such manoeuvres can be seen as part of a general response to the period’s widespread fears of relativism, social disintegration, and luxury. T he discourse of taste had an ambivalent relation to these fears: the aesthetic had potential either to aggravate or ameliorate them. T o consider for a moment the elaborate title of The Mirror of the Graces; Or, the English Lady’s Costume: Combining and Harmonizing Taste and Judgment, Elegance and Grace, Modesty, Simplicity, and Economy with Fashion in Dress (1811), here, it seems, taste is clearly connected with consumerism. T he discourse of taste had been dogged by fears about subjectivity and the failure of a standard of judgment; and now, in this guide to female dress, the faculty is connected with the arbitrary values of fashion. T he very existence of this guide suggests anxiety concerning choice: the fear is one of relativism, of a failure of a fixed foundation for values. And such pursuit of individual desire, such rampant competition (the book is designed to teach ‘the art of captivation’) might lead to a social breakdown – a situation where each individual pursues his or her own good at the expense of others (iii–iv). Further, although this manual is aimed at women (demonstrating how they are particularly interpolated into this discourse), the problem impacts on everyone. At the same time (and enhancing its own longevity), however, the work also presents taste as a potential solution, a fixed value connected to ‘VIRTUE’ that will provide guidance to the confused English (iv). At least with taste, there is the possibility, however elusive, of a standard. A s a way of evaluating  The Mirror of the Graces; Or, the English Lady’s Costume: Combining and Harmonizing Taste and Judgment, Elegance and Grace, Modesty, Simplicity, and Economy, with Fashion in Dress; By a Lady of Distinction (London: Crosby, 1811).

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the environment, it might provide a basis for shared rational agreement. If taste makes agreement possible, we could imagine a world where we might exercise independent judgment yet still (since some decisions would be right, others wrong) be able to operate as a community. Writers considered here (from across the political spectrum) search for a mode or a formulation of taste that will provide such a fixed basis for judgment, and in this search positions not usually considered Romantic are repeatedly canvassed. Here Wollstonecraft’s emphasis on original thought is revealing. C losely related to the Romantic interest in originality and genius, her explorations not only praise originality, but reveal its weaknesses as a quality ultimately threatened by the strength of feeling and imagination, vulnerable in relation to audience. Probing the strength, weaknesses, and very nature of original thought, other writers also tried to formulate ways in which separation from corrupt values was possible, whether outside or (often in the case of less radical writers) within the community. The difficulty was to decide what kind of individual mind might be able to sustain tasteful independence, and debate over this issue leads in part to the period’s interest in associationism – whether that takes the form of those explorations of the working of the mind (like Coleridge’s) most typically considered Romantic or those which, like Edgeworth’s, seem the most remorselessly practical. S imilarly, in the search for tasteful autonomy, the period is as likely to see emphasis on an awareness of the detailed or system as on the prospect view most usually seen as characteristic of Romanticism; indeed, possession of both kinds of gaze is frequently seen as the best guarantee of independent, ethical taste. In short, as Charlotte Smith and Priscilla Wakefield clearly realised, by changing our perspective we are able to see the scenery anew. The writers examined in this study use the aesthetic (not defined as passive sense reception but as an active form of vision) to change what can be seen: following their discussions may also have a liberating effect on us. C ommenting on S chiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, the French philosopher Jacques Rancière suggests that ‘there exists a specific sensory experience – the aesthetic – that holds the promise of both a new world of A rt and a new life for individuals and the community’. T his movement towards what Rancière emphasises as a notion of a common aesthetic experience emerges in the eighteenth century and becomes more pervasive in the Romantic period: it is present earlier in the century in Akenside’s sketch of the tasteful swain, later in Hamilton’s portrait of The Cottagers of Glenburnie and in Wordsworth’s and Baillie’s insistence on the value of the experience of the lower ranks. For Rancière, this commonly available aesthetic experience can be used to alter what can be said and seen. In other words, it has a potentially emancipative effect. T his is not to deny that there are ways of interpreting both taste and the aesthetic as far less liberating. In Distinctions, for example, Bourdieu, focussing on the cultural object, represents a rather static model of taste in which those lower down the social scale  Jacques Rancière, ‘The aesthetic revolution and its outcomes’, New Left Review 14 (2002) 09/10/2007.

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are more likely to appreciate paintings of sunsets and animals, while those higher up are capable of appreciating the avant-garde. Bourdieu argues that taste or cultural capital work to confirm the social order. In terms of the Romantic period, however, writers are frequently more ambivalent about this possibility. T he very fervency of Edmund Burke’s call for aesthetic ‘drapery’ to reinforce monarchy suggests a knowledge that there are other uses of the aesthetic – and Barbauld of course suggests the coexistence of several models of the sublime with different political implications, either unsupportive of the E stablishment or involving the hijacking of some of its features. Given this awareness of the political flexibility of the aesthetic, attempts to separate taste from consumerism might seem like a necessarily conservative move designed to prevent the middle and lower ranks in particular from gaining status. But in the context of the eighteenth-century fear of luxury and its connection to social collapse, this is not necessarily the case. Rather, attempting to use taste to provide a basis of fixed values on which agreement was possible, the writers considered here were consistently searching for a balance between individual and community. In this balanced community, the individual might be what could be characterised as free enough, escaping the more aggressive manifestations of social power. Given the familiar gendered status of the sublime and the beautiful, critics often examine the difficulty faced by women writers (and those of the lower classes) in attempting to gain authority when dealing with a power-based aesthetic that always associates them with the weaker term. However, thinking in terms of an attempt to struggle against the ‘feminisation’ of society, against the potential weakness associated with civilised life, an attempt at a more fundamental rewriting can be posited. For Barbauld (in relation to religion), for Wollstonecraft, and for Charlotte Smith (particularly in relation to aristocratic power and consumerism), the danger is that the sublime and the beautiful can be associated with, and used to support, all earthly structures of oppression. Instead of accepting such formulations, their aim, central to Romantic aesthetics, is to demonstrate that there are imaginative choices to be made by the active mind; that the aesthetic experience can and should be relocated and readjusted to provide an alternative basis for society. Yet the notion of the aesthetic as a realm where a common shift in perception might take place was problematic, challenging not only the relation between artist and audience, but between art and life. When Romantic writers like Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, or C oleridge attempt to construct an original way of seeing in opposition to the passive acceptance of convention, they place themselves in a difficult position. The original author may find that unconventionality poses considerable obstacle to his or her audience; second, if the desired audience, capable of independent thought, is created, it threatens the singularity and the prestige of the artist. E qually, the conception that a particular type of experience is not confined to viewing art but may be had in relation to nature challenges the status of the art object. Here there are two possible but (perhaps in British Romanticism) inseparable effects. First, there is an exploration of the separation

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of art or the aesthetic experience from the rest of life. T his tendency can be traced in Wollstonecraft’s essay ‘O n Poetry’, where she seems to withdraw the possibility of creativity in contemporary society virtually completely; it may also be noted in what Judith Thompson calls the ‘characteristic Romantic turn,’ in the past so critically celebrated, away from the ideological (125). Yet this position is in truth only held temporarily and with unease. O ften simultaneously, art becomes a way of teaching about (the correct use of) the aesthetic experience in life: this is the impulse behind Wordsworth’s psychological exploration of the poet’s mind in The Prelude and the influence on attempts by Maria Edgeworth, Joanna Baillie, and E lizabeth Hamilton to retrain the minds of their readers. T he tasteful Romantic viewer, it might be argued, would carry not only a C laude glass, but also a telescope and microscope. T o ensure an appropriately sympathetic and ethical reaction, the spectator must see N ature as a system with interrelated parts to be understood, and here art has an educative function. We have, then, two seemingly conflicting tendencies arising from the notion of common aesthetic experience: the tendency to separate the aesthetic from the ideological and the insistence on art as a way of exposing such operations. In truth, however, these apparently contradictory manoeuvres are inseparably linked. The retreat from ideology is necessary so that ideology may be reshaped; disinterestedness or detachment is necessary because it allows the correct form of engagement. Hence, in E lizabeth Hamilton’s Cottagers of Glenburnie, Mrs Mason enjoys her time of retreat into the aesthetic experience inspired by nature, yet it is the kind of perspective she gains there which enables her to see the hairs in the butter at the MacClartys’ cottage. The vision granted in isolation (think of the young Wordsworth’s sense of isolation from the audience in turn separated by a ‘gulph’ from the men who are to come) eventually stimulates a form of pedagogic engagement (Prelude 11. ll. 59–60). In sum, both the retreat and the engagement, the imaginative sublime, and the quotidian practical are inseparable and necessary parts of the duality of Romantic aesthetics. T o praise one and devalorise the other, to characterise one as masculine and the other as feminine, seems to be to miss the point. However, it can be noted that because this dual movement included an educational impulse, some applications of the gaze and some forms of attention were supposed by individual writers to be more valuable than others; in other words, taste continued to operate as a hierarchizing mechanism but in a rather different way from earlier in the century. T aste was not now merely a matter of being able to distinguish accurately between more and less prestigious art objects. Rather, it was more a question of being able to distinguish between different kinds 

Jacques Rancière makes a similar point in relation to the avant-garde in ‘Jacques Rancière in Conversation with Chto Delat’, Debates of the Avant-Guarde, Newspaper of the Platform “What is to be done?” 17 (August 2007): ‘Avant-gardism may be defined as the transformation of the forms of art into forms of life. And it may be defined as the preservation of the autonomy of aesthetic experience from that transformation’ (n.p.).

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of aesthetic experience; after all, this was now socially vital: when the individual could accurately make judgments of taste, it would be possible both to agree and to form a community based on that agreement. T his shift in emphasis allowed a change in the social role of taste. As long as particular art objects are the signifiers of taste (the situation Bourdieu imagines in Distinctions), it certainly might seem as if the upper ranks had a particular ‘secret’, underpinned by (inherited) wealth. However, the psychological emphasis in the discourse of taste offers a new possibility. It ensures the importance of the individual (be they artist or shepherd) to whom the correct form of aesthetic experience is available. Since knowledge of the correct aesthetic experience is what is prestigious, such individuals are more valuable than fine paintings or poems (hence the Romantic cult of the artist): in some sense, they stand in for the art object. Further, given the anxiety concerning the luxurious feminisation of society, those capable of such judgment and vision are often assumed to be subjects marginal to discourses of authority (women, but also dispossessed colonial subjects and the working classes). Indeed, it is the odd relation of taste to luxury that is the underlying cause of what Hazlitt refers to as the ‘levelling’ potential of the Romantic imagination. Seen by Richard Price as a generator of excess and debt, linked by Johnson to a riot in the brain, luxury (whether aristocratic or mercantile) is positioned as damaging to the whole of society. In order to provide an effective antidote to the pandemic of consumerism, taste had to be figured as both distinct from luxury and as something capable of being possessed by anyone. It also had to be figured as ameliorative. T here is not only interest in the effect of fashion on the taste of the upper classes, but equally in its economic and mental effects on those lower down the social scale. A nalysis of the way luxury may produce debt, inequality, slavery, and poverty encourages a more inclusive vision, in which such poverty is seen as part of a system, a system that can be adjusted and improved. The poor and lower orders are no longer innately different but are those who find themselves in a different position within the system. Further, as the notion of common aesthetic experience is explored, there is more interrogation of the particular type of damage done across the classes by the consumer economy. Both Wollstonecraft and Hamilton, otherwise quite politically different, for example, suggest that luxury introduces repetitive habits among not only consumers but also producers; labour is no longer the obstacle to possessing taste. Rather, the question is how an accurate, thinking relationship to the environment can be sustained as modern conditions of production are introduced. A nd while there is a tendency to imagine a space outside such damaging conditions (often in rural environments), equally there is a need to suggest that labour (or at least the suffering that accompanies it) has something to teach us about taste. Hence Baillie, following Adam Smith, suggests that luxurious civilised society, with its emphasis on ‘amiable’ virtues, needs the counterbalance of the ‘awful virtues’, which can be found lower down the social scale. S imilarly, for both E dgeworth and Hamilton, taste is generated by industry, whether that involves making craft objects or cleaning windows. In other words, since common aesthetic experience is applicable not only to art but

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to life, there is a willingness to talk about taste in relation to the humble and quotidian objects and arrangements of everyday life. Given this extension of the aesthetic, the responses of the lower orders and (more importantly, given fears of luxury) of the upper and middle ranks can be guided to improve quality of life and enhance social stability. Craft objects and popular art forms provide an affective link between the classes (a substitute aesthetic inheritance distinct from the Burkean sublime and the beautiful and the inheritance of the upper ranks). C orrectly or, to put it another way, tastefully applied, the aesthetic itself provides the basis for a sense of mutual sympathy and collective belonging. It offers a route to rebuild a national community in which the previously disenfranchised may hold the aesthetic key to mutual respect. And as Frankenstein warns us, those who concentrate on more superficial ways of viewing, who try to deny sympathy and withhold such a sense of belonging, may find themselves travelling through a very bleak landscape indeed.

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Watson, Nicola J. ‘The Faerie Queene and the Afterlives of Elizabeth I.’ Paper presented to the S taff/S tudent Research S eminar. Department of E nglish Studies. Durham University. 4 March 1998. ———. Revolution and the Form of the British Novel 1790–1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions. O xford: C larendon P, 1994. Weinbrot, Howard D. Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian. C ambridge: C ambridge U P, 1993. Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. Whale, John. Imagination Under Pressure: 1789–1832. C ambridge: C ambridge U P, 2000. Wikborg, Eleanor. ‘Political Discourse versus Sentimental Romance: Ideology and Genre in C harlotte S mith’s Desmond (1792)’. English Studies 6 (1997): 522–31. Wood, Gillen D’A rcy. The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture 1760–1860. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Wright, Julia M. ‘“I am ill fitted”: Conflicts of Genre in Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy’. Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre. Eds Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright. Cambridge: Cambridge UP., pp. 149–75. Yaeger, Patricia. ‘T oward a Female S ublime’. Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism. Ed. Linda Kauffman. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989, pp. 191–212.

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Index accomplishments 8, 53–4, 57, 91–2, 101 Addison, Joseph and Richard S teele The Spectator 7, 16, 28, 76, 81, 91, 104, 136, 143, 161–2, 164 aesthetic(s) disinterestedness 75–102; see also disinterestedness education 61, 130, 168 experience 2, 4, 10–11, 115, 163, 168–71 judgment 28, 49, 73, 83, 90, 130–37 object 8, 23, 43, 53, 77, 151 Romantic 3, 7, 17, 28, 81n18, 122–3, 136, 158, 160, 164–5, 169–70 A gamben, Giorgio 5, 78n9 Aikin, J. 30, 35, 39 and Aikin, A.L. 16, 28, 117; see also Barbauld Aikin, Lucy 28, 33 Akenside, Mark 113, 136–8, 149, 153, 168 A lison, A rchibald 130–31 A merican Revolution 2, 9, 50, 52, 153 Anderson, John M. 36 A ndrews, E lmer 158n30 art 8, 10, 13, 19, 40, 45–83, 86, 89–90, 94–101, 103, 106–9, 112–16, 119–20, 129–36, 146–7, 155–8, 161–3, 167–72 artist 14–15, 19, 46, 66–3, 66–7, 74, 77, 80–82, 96, 100, 112–14, 121, 158, 161, 169, 171–2 association of ideas 3, 34, 103–33 A tterbury, Francis 54 Austen, Jane 3, 11, 72, 115, 123 Emma 132 Mansfield Park 55, 73, 103 Persuasion 72–3 Sense and Sensibility 132 Baillie, Joanna 3, 10, 107, 133, 163, 168, 170–71 ‘The Martyr’ 119–20 Plays on the Passions 116–22, 132–3

ballad 11, 26, 32n51, 135–8 Ballaster, Ros 18, 22, 24 Barbauld, A nna L etitia 7, 9–10, 15–17, 26–43, 50, 55, 113, 161, 167, 169 British Novelists 16, 18, 26–7, 165 ‘Fashion’ 48 ‘Hill of S cience’ 28, 36–9 Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose 16, 27–41, 117 ‘On Monastic Institutions’ 32–5, 40, 140 Poems 40 ‘A Summer Evening’s Meditation’ 35–9, 98 ‘T houghts on the Devotional T aste’ 10, 16, 27, 32–7, 55, 140 Barclay 17 Barker-Benfield, G.J. 9n20, 151n22 Barrel, John 80n15 Bate, Walter Jackson 7n13, 15, 46 Beattie, James 18, 20, 137, 144n10 ‘O n Fable and Romance’ 20, 23 beautiful, the 1–7, 57–8, 68, 72, 79, 96, 99, 101, 110, 115, 118, 133, 140–42, 152, 155; see also sublime and beautiful belle lettres 90, 96 Benger, E lizabeth 127 Bennett, A ndrew 77 Bennett, S usan 122 Birkhead, Edith 9n20, 76n3 Blackwell, Thomas 31, 160 Blair, Hugh 30–31, 50, 57, 159–60 Bloom, Harold 15 Boehm, A lan D. 68 Bohls, E lizabeth 23 Bolla, Peter de 5n9 Bourdieu, Pierre 11–12, 78, 168–9, 171 Bowstead, Diana 91n31 Bradshaw, Penny 27 Brand, Peggy Zeglin 9n19 Brissenden, R.F. 9n20, 76n3 British C ritic 87, 149 Brunton, Mary 3 Discipline 75–6, 91, 96

194

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Burke, Edmund 10, 41, 53, 58, 60–63, 66, 87, 100n40, 107, 123, 140, 155, 160–61, 169, 172 A Philosophical Enquiry 32, 58 Reflections on the Revolution in France 33, 41–3, 45–6, 50, 58–9, 141 Butler, Marilyn 108, 123, 226 C ampbell, George 124 C ampbell, Ian 127n49 Carson, James P. 18n20 C astle, T erry 87 C atholicism 33, 140 C haucer, Geoffrey 143–5, 148–9 childhood 31, 51–2, 60, 70 children’s literature 5, 10, 26 and education 36, 52–60, 66, 90, 93–100, 109–15, 126–132 chivalry 24–5, 42–3 Choi, Julie 123n40 C hurchill, C harles 145, 159 civic humanism 3, 14, 81n18, 83, 135 Clery, E.J. 22 C lose, A nne 71n33 C obban, A lfred 12 C oleman, Deirdre 27n35 C oleridge, S amuel T aylor 10, 34–6, 61, 104, 106–7, 109, 111–12, 132, 160, 167–9 Biographia Literaria 46, 77n8, 110 ‘T he E olian Harp’ 36–40 Poems on Various Subjects 36 (with William Wordsworth), Lyrical Ballads 11, 33, 116, 122n35, 127 C olley, L inda 8n17 C omitini, Patricia 57 common sense, S cottish philosophy of 105, 122–33 connoisseurship 112, 129, 135–9, 165 convention 46–74, 84, 88–9, 120, 151, 160, 165, 169 literary 120, 135, 152 Corbett, Mary Jane 158n29 cosmopolitanism 2, 11, 143–4, 153–62, 164 C ottom, Daniel 2, 7, 46n8 C owper, William 50, 58 craft 77, 136, 153, 157, 165, 171–72 craftsmanship 80, 103, 113 Critical Review, The 149

C rochum, T homas C . 116n30 Croker, John Wilson 135–6 Danby, John 68n30 Danto, A rthur C . 9n19 detail 9–10, 77, 95–102, 168 Dickie, George 3n4 disinterestedness 75–102 display 49–66, 70–73, 75–6, 85–92, 99, 113, 118, 155 dissent 9, 15–16, 26–7, 32–42, 47, 50, 54–6, 60, 65 drawing 8, 52, 54, 100 Duff, David 123n37 Duff, William 46–7 Edgeworth, Maria The Absentee 155, 157, 159 Belinda 42–3, 70–73, 89, 114 Castle Rackrent 148, 153, 155 Early Lessons 109–15 Emilie de Coulanges 155–6 Ennui 156, 159 Harry and Lucy Concluded 109 Helen 107, 112–16 Madame de Fleury 156–7 Parent’s Assistant 115 Patronage 113–14, 157 Popular Tales 113, 154 Tales of Fashionable Life 153–7, 159 education 10, 16, 27, 36, 49, 51–62, 64, 66, 70, 72, 74, 75, 78, 88–100, 103–33, 142, 154, 158–9, 164, 170 associative 103–33 classical 22, 62, 104 E lfenbein, A ndrew 53n18 E lizabeth I 57–8 Enfield, William 27, 56 ethics 3, 7, 10, 75–102, 103–33, 136, 142, 153, 154, 158, 168, 170 fashion 1, 11, 45–76, 83–4, 88–94, 98–103, 114, 117, 119, 122, 124–32, 153–5, 157, 159–62, 167, 171 feeling 2, 6, 10, 50–51, 59, 62–6, 75–99, 110–16, 122, 130–33, 145, 160, 163–5, 168; see also sensibility Fenwick, Eliza Infantine S tories 90

Index Lessons for Children 90 Secresy 71, 87–90 Ferguson, A dam 31–2 Ferrier, S usan 154 Ferris, Ina 148, 158n29 folk culture 135–8, 144, 151–3 Forbes, A ileen 116n30 Foucault, Michel 4 Franklin, Caroline 48n12 French Revolution 47, 75, 87, 91, 96, 101, 106, 143, 146, 157 French Revolution debate in Britain 122, 124, 140, 164 Frye, N orthrop 25 Furniss, T om 45n2, 58n22 Gallagher, C atherine 48–9, 60–61 Gamer, Michael 116n30 gender 1–2, 5–7, 9n19, 18, 22, 64, 67, 70, 71 generalisation 1, 2, 6, 14, 78–9, 81, 88, 122, 126–32, 155–6 genius 10, 45–75, 88–9, 101, 106, 113, 145–7, 159–62, 167–8 Gerard, A lexander 120, 130 Gibbons, Luke 58n22 Glorious Revolution 9, 16, 18, 21, 41 Godwin, William 90n29, 107, 125–6, 164 Gooch, E lizabeth S arah 138–9 Goodman, N elson 9n19 Goldsmith, O liver 45n1 Gothic 2, 3, 5, 10, 17–18, 20–21, 26, 30–33, 42, 55, 76–8, 82, 83–7, 89, 91, 94, 101, 116, 118–19, 132, 135, 140, 150n21 Glen, Heather 67, 143 Gregory, John 33, 53, 56 Grove, A llen W. 30, 150n21 Guys, Pierre A ugustin 22 habit 34, 55, 65, 95, 99, 103–33, 136, 146, 171 reading 21–22 and religion 34, 40 Hamilton, E lizabeth 122–33 The Cottagers of Glenburnie 127–30, 168, 170 Letters on Education 126–7, 130, 132 Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education 126n46 Memoirs of Modern Philosophers 125–6, 150

195

A Series of Popular Essays 32n51, 127, 130–32 Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah 124–5 Hamilton, Paul 104, 106 Hartley, David 37–8, 105–6, 108–11, 131 Observations on Man 37, 105–6, 108–11, 131 Hays, Mary 87, 107n13, 125–6 Hazlitt, William 9n18, 15, 26, 45–6, 74, 81, 101 135, 165, 171 Hertz, N eil 5n9 Hill, Bridget 17n14, 97n37 Hobbes, T homas 104, 117 Holmes, Richard 36n58 Huet, Pierre Daniel 19 Hume, David 13, 17n14, 50, 52,76, 81–2, 106–10, 115, 124, 126–7, 131–3, 152n22, 163 History of England 57–8 Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals 79–80 ‘O f the S tandard of T aste’ 108, 132, 151n22 Treatise of Human Nature 104–5 Hurd, Richard 18–21, 24, 42 Letters on Chivalry and Romance 24–5 Moral and Political Dialogues 20 imagination 9n18, 10, 16, 32–7, 145–75, 83, 89, 104, 114, 124,131, 137, 143, 155, 158n30, 168, 171 associative 104–106; see also association of ideas Pleasures of (Akenside) 113, 136–7 poetic 31, 106 Wanderings of (Gooch) 138–9 Inchbald, E lizabeth 121 Nature and Art 147 independence 10 14, 22, 24, 40–43, 45–75, 79, 90–93, 107, 113, 137, 138, 142, 168–9 Ireland 1–2, 153–65 James, Felicity 35n57 Janowitz, Anne 27n35 Johnson, Claudia L. 7, 26–7, 43 Johnson, Samuel 28–9, 40, 145 and James Boswell A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland 29

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Lives of the English Poets 19 Rambler 28, 152, 171 Works of the English Poets 19 Johnston, Arthur 144n10 Jones, Chris 108n17 Jones, Robert 27n37, 40 Jones, Robert W. 5 Jump, Harriet Devine 61n24 Kallich, Martin 103, 104n3 Kames, L ord Henry Home 120, 124,130 Kant, Immanuel 3, 75, 77–8, 101, 115, 163 Kelly, Gary 17n14, 85n20, 123n38–9, 158n29 Kidd, C olin 17 Kirkpatrick, Kathryn 157 Korsmeyer, C arolyn 9n19 Kraft, E lizabeth 28n38 Kramnick, Jonathan Brody 14 Labbe, Jacqueline 6fn11, 7, 8n15, 97 language 10, 14 16, 36, 42–3, 48–9, 53, 61–9, 71–2, 88, 95, 99–100, 104, 107, 109, 115, 121–2, 143–4, 155–6, 159, 162 of men 11, 64, 122, 127, 135 of taste 1–5, 12, 135 L ee, Harriet The Canterbury Tales 11, 142–65, 159, 165 and S ophia L ee L ee, S ophia; see also L ee, Harriet ‘A Hermit’s T ale’ 138 The Recess 152 Leerssen, Joep 14, 158, 162 levelling principle 145, 165, 171 liberty 18, 20, 40, 48–50, 59, 136–7, 143, 145–8, 159, 165 British 14, 17, 20, 138 Gothic 18, 26 imaginative 71, 105 national 138 Lipking, Lawrence 19n21 Locke, John 104–6, 108, 11n22 luxury 31, 45–73, 75–103, 118–19, 137, 142, 154–5, 162, 165, 167–72 McCarthy William 28n38 Mackenzie, Henry 82–3 Mackintosh, James 42 Macpherson, James 29–32, 40–41, 138, 160

Manning, Susan 29, 82 Mary, Queen of Scots 57–58 Maurer, Sara L. 160–61 Mayo, Robert 68n30 Meehan, Michael 14 Mellor, Anne K. 6, 46 Miner, Eric 143n9 Mirror of the Graces, The Monk, Samuel H. 103n1 Monthly Magazine 48, 87 Monthly Review, The 19, 121 Moore, Dafydd 31 More, Hannah 71–2 Mullan, John 80 music 34, 38, 52–4, 80–81, 93–4, 100, 147, 152, 155–6 Myers, Mitzi 47–8 N apier, E lizabeth R. 17n14 N ewyln, L ucy 112 novelty 95–6, 101, 117, 162 O berg, Barbara Bowen 105–6 O ’Donnel. A N ational T ale 158–9, 161–2, 164–5 O ld Whigs 9, 16–22 O pie, A melia 71 orality 2, 30–31, 40, 138, 165 originality 6, 1, 13, 17, 41, 43–73, 77, 89, 95, 106, 111–12, 115–16, 127, 139, 159, 168–9 ornament 5, 7, 8, 55, 70, 89, 100, 128, 140–41, 153 Ossian 29–33, 40, 159 O tter, A lice G. Den 27 Owenson, Sydney, Lady Morgan 50, 136, 152–3, 157 Florence Macarthy 7–11, 158–9, 162–5 The Wild Irish Girl 1–2, 158–60 painting 11–12, 80, 81, 94, 96, 156, 169, 171 Paulson, Ronald 80n15 Peacock, Thomas Love 162 perception 10, 23, 64, 81, 107–9, 169 picturesque 4, 139, 162–3 Piozzi, Hester L ynch British Synonymy 3–4 Price, Richard 50–52, 65, 141, 171

Index Prickett, Stephen 106–7, 109, 132 Priestley, Joseph 27, 33n55, 35–6, 106, 108n19 primitivism 6, 30–34, 47, 61–3, 93, 158 Radcliffe, A nn 1–3, 10, 77, 83–9, 135, 140 T he C astles of A thlin and Dunbayne 83–5 The Mysteries of Udolpho 84–9 Rancière, Jacques 90, 168, 170n3 Rapin, Paul de T hoyras 17 Reeve, C lara 3, 7, 9–10, 15–28, 41–3, 161 The Old English Baron 17–18, 82, 144n10, 156 The Progress of Romance 18–26 regionalism 11, 14, 135–65 Reid, T homas 105, 122–6, 129–30 relativism 115, 130, 132, 165, 167 religion 27, 32–40, 54, 146, 169; see also dissent Reynolds, Sir Joshua 13, 19, 43, 80–81, 93 Richardson, A lan 52–3 Robertson, William 50, 57–8 Rodgers, Betsy 33n55 Rogers, Katharine 148 romance 2, 5, 16, 17–26, 28–9, 33n55, 42–3, 87, 91, 97, 107n12, 124, 136, 144, 150–52, 158 Ross, Marlon B. 6–7, 167 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 47, 49, 65–6, 70–71, 74, 88–9, 93, 114, 141, 155 Discourse on the Origins of Inequality 51 Emile 8, 51–7, 60, 66, 114 La Nouvelle Héloïse 42, 71–2 Lettres de deux Amants 53 Reveries of a Solitary Walker 61, 68 Runge, L aura L . 18n19, 24 S aglia, Diego 1n1 S cheuerle, William H. 38–9 S chier, Flint 9n18 Scott, John Robert 81 S cott, Walter Lives 17–18 Waverley 135–6 sensibility 2, 4, 9n20, 10, 27–30, 39, 62–4, 71–2, 75–102, 107, 111, 116, 132, 141, 146–7, 151n22 sentiment 3, 5, 6, 9, 15, 59, 62–4, 72, 74–102, 107–9, 111–12, 116–21, 135–6, 139–42, 149, 153–4

197

sentimental novel 2, 9n20, 76, 82, 118 S haftesbury, A nthony A shley C ooper 47n9, 62, 76–84, 87, 91, 101, 151n22 Shakespeare, William 21, 143–4 Shelley, Mary 164–5,172 S impson, David 123 S mith, A dam 99, 107–8, 111–12, 114, 116–19, 132, 171 S mith, C harlotte 11, 71–2, 77, 91–8, 100–102, 114 Conversations Introducing Poetry 95, 97 Desmond 71–2, 91–4, 114 Letters of a Solitary Wanderer 135, 139–42, 148 Old Manor House, The 91 Rambles Farther 93–4, 97 Rural Walks 94–7 solipsism 103–33 spectator 10–11, 52, 55, 62, 73, 75–102, 108, 114–18, 133, 136, 140, 159, 161, 170; see also A ddison, The Spectator S penser, E dmund The Faerie Queene 25 Stabler, Jane 35n57 S tewart, Dugald 120, 131n52 Stolnitz, Jerome 78 sublime 1–6, 9–10, 16, 30–45, 50, 53, 55, 58–68, 86–7, 94, 101, 119, 121, 130, 139, 140–42, 152, 156, 161–5, 169–72 and beautiful 1–6, 10, 34, 50, 60, 64–8, 101, 117, 121, 130, 139–40, 169, 172 devotional sublime 32–7 habitual 34, 40, 55; see also of succession rational sublime 32–7 of succession/ tradition 9, 17, 27, 32–7, 42, 45, 55, 59, 140, 165 sympathy 34, 64, 67, 75–102, 108, 110–17, 132, 153, 163–4, 172 tale 2, 5, 11, 83, 113–15, 127–30, 135–65 taste associationist 103–33 civic humanism 3, 14, 81n18, 83, 135 definitions of 3–4, 16, 88, 91 devotional 10, 16, 27, 32–7, 55, 140 democratic model of 2, 10–11, 64, 104, 139

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and disinterestedness 75–102 and ethics 3, 7, 10, 75–102, 103–33, 136, 142, 153, 154, 158, 168, 170 language of 1, 5, 12, 135; see also language neoclassical 1–3, 6–7, 28, 80, 83, 101–2, 120, 130, 136 and originality 45–74 psychology of 103–33 rustic 135–65 standard of 4, 13, 107–8, 132, 156 and suffering 75–102 and tradition 13–43 T aylor, Barbara 52, 59–61 T essone, N atasha 158n30 Thompson, Judith 61, 68, 170 Todd, Janet 9n20, 53, 76n3 tradition 9, 13–43, 45–55, 59, 60, 66, 87–8, 104, 123–5, 136, 138, 140, 151, 165 cultural 15, 29, 160–61 invented 27, 40–42 literary 9, 15, 17, 33, 41–2, 143–4 sublime of 9, 17, 27, 32–7, 41–2, 55, 140, 165 T rumpener, Katie 152, 158n29, 165 U nderwood, T ed 30 universality 2,3, 13, 70, 81 Usher, John 50, 57, 64–5 utility 3, 8, 9n18, 32, 33, 79, 82, 111–17, 128–33 V argo, L isa 39 Vickery, Amanda 11n22 Wakefield, Priscilla 3, 10, 77, 97–102, 259, 168 An Introduction to Botany 77, 98 Leisure Hours 100 Mental Improvement 98–100 Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex 97, 99–101 Walpole, Horace Castle of Otranto 18, 82

Correspondence 18n18 Walpole, Rovert 16, 18 Waters, Mary A. 48n12 Watson, Nicola J. 91, 158n29 Weiskel, Thomas 5n9 Whale, John 9n18 Wikborg, Eleanor 91 Wilkes, John 145 Williams, Ioan 18n20 Wollstonecraft, Mary 3, 5, 9n18, 10, 22, 35, 41n66, 42–3, 45–75, 87–92, 99, 107, 115, 118, 120–23, 125, 127, 133, 140, 142, 147, 155, 160–62, 164, 167–71 Female Reader, The 54–8, 67, 142 Letters 67n28 Letters written during a Short Residence 64 Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman 53, 64, 67, 71 Mary, A Fiction 53–5, 60–61, 64, 67–8, 71, 88–9 ‘On Poetry, and our Relish for the Beauties of Nature’ 61–9, 162 Original Stories 59–60, 127 Thoughts on the Education of Daughters 52–5, 60, 66, 142 Vindication of the Rights of Men 42, 53, 58–9, 65–6, 107, 142 Vindication of the Rights of Woman 52–3, 65 Wordsworth, William 11, 41, 61, 72, 74, 106–9, 115, 130–32, 153, 167–70 Essay, Supplementary to the Preface 3–4, 13, 15, 47, 49, 69, 112 Lyrical Ballads 11, 13, 33n54, 36, 50, 67–9, 116, 122, 127, 130, 135, 143 Poems on the Naming of Places 63 Prelude, The 68, 170 Wright, Julia M. 87–8 Yaeger, Patricia 6n11 Young, E dward 47–8