Mark Blackwell (ed.). The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England.(Book review)

Mark Blackwell (ed.). The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2007. $62.50 365 pp ISBN 10:0-8387-5666-2

"I am sure that Jane Austen purists the world over are steaming," a former student wrote to me. She was referring to Becoming Jane--the latest film release on Jane Austen. Austen phenomena, similar to it-narratives of the eighteenth century, has taken on a life of its own. Very little in the film had to do with Austen's actual letters and biographical data. Most of the plot seemed based on a loose interpretation of her books, with Austen as Elizabeth Bennett and Tom Le Froy as a more cavalier Fitzwilliam D'Arcy from Pride and Prejudice; yet, people flocked to the movie theater nonetheless, anxious to be entertained and romanced. Austen has become an icon of the public sphere--known and even owned by many. Some argue that what people have come to think of Austen has become more influential than who she actually was.

Though Mark Blackwell's edited collection of essays covers a panoply of topics, one thread that seems to run through a number of them is the idea that it-narratives of the eighteenth century--stories told by coins, coats, dogs, goose quills, watches, slippers, shoes, pincushions, and host of other objects and animals--somehow take on a life of their own. In this way, they parallel the eighteenth century texts themselves, which pass "from author to printer to reader" and in the process, essentially go through a type of transformation. The reader, in purchasing the book monetarily, "owns" it--even somehow possessing the lives of the characters beyond the pages of the book. In The Golden Spy, for instance, its author Gildon realizes "how easily his words spiral out of control once introduced into the public sphere; before the story even begins, the book has assumed an autonomous role as an object of trade" (164).

Many of the objects and animals in it-narratives tell of how they are passed from place to place--having different owners, adventures, and even identities. One person may treat a coin as an object of trade--another, as a keepsake. In Helenus Scott's Adventures of a Rupee from 1782, when the rupee is dislocated from its origins in India, it ceases to be a "'current coin' and essentially becomes something different. Its value is not intrinsic; rather, it is based exclusively on the caprice of the owner" (78). So it is with the very books that house the it-narratives. Books circulating in the public sphere became the property of the owner to be interpreted, molded, and even re-invented--perhaps many times over by many owners.

The implications of this phenomenon were vast, including what Deidre Lynch calls the "democratization of consumption" where "the boundaries of wealth and class appeared increasingly permeable, as luxuries that were once confined to an elite few came to seem as if they might potentially be every person's property." "Things" went from being individualized keepsakes to becoming "mass produced commodities"--much like books (85). This socio-political undercurrent connected to it-narratives is pervasive throughout The Secret Life of Things--and the irony in this title is that what was once ...