Traveling the world with a real friend: the eighteenth-century novel reconsidered.

Paula Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia, eds. A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 550 + xiii pp. $199.95.

 
   [David] spent whole Days ... wishing he could meet with a Friend 
   that he could live with, who could throw off all separate 
   Interests; for where Selfishness reigns in any of the Community, 
   there can be no Happiness. After he had resolved these things 
   several times in his Mind, he took the oddest, most unaccountable 
   Resolution that ever was heard of, viz. To travel through the whole 
   World, rather than not meet with a real Friend. 
 
   From the time he lived with his Brother, he had led so recluse a 
   Life, that he in a manner had shut himself up from the World; but 
   yet when he reflected that what is called the Customs and Manners 
   of Nations, relate chiefly to Ceremonies, and had nothing to do 
   with the Hearts of Men; he concluded, he could sooner enter into 
   the Characters of Men in the great Metropolis where he lived, than 
   if he went into foreign Countries; where, not understanding the 
   Languages so readily, it would be more difficult to find out the 
   Sentiments of others, which was all he wanted to know. He resolved 
   therefore to take a Journey through London; not as some Travellers 
   do, to see the Buildings, the Streets, to know the Distances from 
   one Place to another, with many more Sights of equal Use and 
   Improvement; but his design was to seek out one capable of being a 
   real Friend, and to assist all those, who had been thrown into 
   Misfortunes by the ill Usage of others. 
 
   He had good Sense enough to know, that Mankind in their Natures are 
   much the same every where; and that if he could go through one 
   great Town, and not meet with a generous Mind, it would be in vain 
   to seek farther. 
 
   --Sarah Fielding, The Adventures of David Simple (1744) 

Sarah Fielding's The Adventures of David Simple is not even mentioned in Paula Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia's A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture, and yet I was reminded of it often as I read this latest offering in the Blackwell Companion series. David Simple announces his intention to take in the whole world and then circumscribes that world to his own city; he walks the streets of a great metropolis yet peers into hearts. Fielding's hero thus invokes both a venerable tradition of travel accounts and a growing fascination with the burgeoning city of London, both a universalizing discourse of sentiment and a parochial discomfort with foreign customs and languages. As his quest proceeds, he encounters the new credit economy and invokes tired gender stereotypes (with the help of Henry Fielding's revision to Sarah's novel). He listens to one tale of scandalous romance set in France and several "novelistic" accounts of vulnerable Englishwomen resisting seduction, while passing through his own series of Spectator-like encounters with satiric character types. He observes and, in Volume the Last (1753), is finally entrapped by a growing web of consumerism, a lack of wage-earning opportunities, and an inability to pay the rent, finding in the process that happiness can no longer be defined in communal rather than economic terms. In short, David Simple is capacious and multifaceted enough to be illuminated by virtually all of the studies gathered into the Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture--not least in that its author calls it, not a novel, but a "moral romance."

Thus David Simple, a popular and respected work in its time, demonstrates the value of this collection of twenty-three essays that sets out, according to Ingrassia's introduction, to "upend some of the traditionally held 'truths' about the novel" (1). One of these mistaken "truths" is that of the prominence of the novel in eighteenth-century Britain: as the relatively recent digital accessibility of catalogs and printed materials of the period has made abundantly clear, the novel was far from being the most popular print form of the period, and, in Ingrassia's words, "was not even a recognized or codified genre until well after mid-century (and, arguably, later)" (1). Working against this effort to put the novel in its place, however, is our institutional investment in it, manifested in everything from textbook editions to the most sophisticated academic discourse. The publication of this 550-page volume, containing the work of many of the most authoritative and original scholars in eighteenth-century studies, can only reinforce the disproportion.

But importance can be measured in terms other than quantitative, and the contributors to this collection make a cumulative case for the engagement of prose narrative and its writers in a very wide range of cultural discourses and concerns; a model of the form as inchoate and protean in fact lends itself to the sense that it is everywhere. And indeed, contributors to this book find "the novel" in places where we have not often looked: in spy narratives, a plague journal, the Tales from Arabian Nights, or educational conversations on political economy. This is not to say that the novel as it is portrayed in this collection serves as a mere sociological document, although it is inevitably and importantly that for us as twenty-first-century readers. If in one or two of the essays the genre does not seem much more than a window onto the times, the majority contribute something new to our understanding of how imaginative prose identified, made meaning of, and even attempted to intervene in matters that preoccupied contemporaries. The best contributions here also reflect on the import of such new understandings for our models of the novel genre, our literary histories, and our awareness of our own critical and political preoccupations.

At this point, the "our" I have been using needs some qualification. While I would prefer that it signify a global community of twenty-first-century literary scholars, new and expert, of eighteenth-century Britain, the contributors are, in fact, overwhelmingly (twenty-two of twenty-four) affiliated with American institutions. This fact has surely determined to some extent what questions will be asked about the eighteenth-century novel, and what current issues--nationalism or minority rights, for example, rather than cultural imperialism or provincial culture or sociolinguistic conflicts--it will be seen to address. As Ruth Perry notes in the thoughtful conclusion to her essay on homelessness in the eighteenth century, "We study what our world sensitizes us to" (455). If warmth of assertion is any indicator of sensitivity, the days of "Ian Watt and the Anglo-monoglot school" of the realist novel (Turner 214) are over, exposed as a "voluntary parochialization of the vast fictional and nonfictional archive ... into the artificial unity of a so-called eighteenth-century English or British novel" that is "a nationalist and xenophobic project" (Aravamudan 50), "a project that has as its single-minded objective the consolidation of citizen-subjects in full narcissistic contemplation of their own idealized images (and those of others)" (54). Ingrassia's introduction and several of the essays adopt Homer Brown's position in "Why the Story of the Origin of the (English) Novel Is an American Romance ...