Recent studies in the Restoration and eighteenth century.

Publication: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900

Publication Date: 22-JUN-04

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It may seem ungrateful, but I want to begin this review by asking if there were any such age as "The Restoration and Eighteenth Century." That awkward compound has given way to "The Long Eighteenth Century," but is this a period at all? A cultural, political, or social moment? What was the Restoration outside the fantasy of those cavaliers who rushed back in 1660 to reclaim what had been lost in the civil wars? And what sort of intimacy might it have had with the next century, which began by repudiating the Restoration as a sink of moral corruption, spiritual regression, and political tyranny? Are there other and better ways of constituting this literary period? Should it really be called "The Long Eighteenth Century," or might we divide the period differently, thinking perhaps of a long seventeenth century stretching from the accession of James I in 1603 to the death of Queen Anne in 1714, followed by a short eighteenth century that opens with the accession of George I and closes at the brink of the first generation of Romantics? Or might this period--whatever we call it--stretch rather from the stirrings of the Scottish troubles in the late 1630s to the demise of Jacobitism in 1745, markers that identify the beginning and the end of civil violence internal to the three kingdoms?

By opening the long eighteenth century with that fabrication known as the Restoration--a fabrication made as much by contemporaries as by historians such as David Hume and Thomas Babington Macaulay--we have insistently obscured the ways in which the civil wars and the republican experiment haunted all of those for whom the wars and republicanism remained a living memory and an inheritance and not only in the later years of the seventeenth century but throughout the eighteenth century as fears and filaments of radical and dissenting thought were woven through the institutions and writings of Jacobitism, Whiggery, Enlightenment, and the late-eighteenth-century apprehension of reform and revolution. To sever the Restoration from the civil wars denatures those years in the very ways that the returning monarch and his court desired--selectively erasing memories of the recent past, even while retaining a shadowy if uncomfortable awareness that the fault lines of civil violence and constitutional crisis ran deeply, and might on occasion be discerned, under all the busy settlements of the 1660s and under its continuous sense of conspiracy and crisis. The turbulence of midcentury can still be felt in the revolution that aimed to sweep away the dangers of popery and tyranny in 1688, in the continuing threat of Jacobite invasions and uprisings at least until 1745, under an emergent story of eighteenth-century "liberalism" whose most eloquent spokesmen turned out to be the herose of seventeenth-century republicanism and religious toleration--John Milton and Andrew Marvell--and even under the reemergence of political radicalism in the last decades of the eighteenth century.

And another kind of deformation takes place when we elide or obscure Romanticism under the cover of a long eighteenth century. Georg Lukacs long ago and brilliantly reminded us of the Enlightenment roots of Romanticism, but the current assimilation of Romanticism to a long eighteenth century runs the risk of obscuring the dialectic between Romanticism and the Enlightenment, and hence the contradictory spirit of Romanticism itself embracing both Enlightenment ideals of rationally bounded individual freedom and the unbounded autonomy of the infinite self. Perhaps we should reconfigure these ages as, first, the long moment of humanism that opens with the importation of classical texts from the Continent and closes with Richard Bentley editing Horace and Manilius, or perhaps with Dr. Johnson at work on his Dictionary, followed by an age of modernity that begins in the last decades of the eighteenth century--the years of the gothic novel, the Lyrical Ballads, and the events and reverberations of the French Revolution--and closes in the twentieth century as modernism gives way to the theories and performance of postmodernity.

We might even wonder about the extent to which the age we call the eighteenth century was invented in the 1650s--in that decade's enthusiasm for social improvement and the regulation of manners, its deep suspicion of popery and tyranny, its dissenting and evangelical spirituality, its regard for constitutional reform and the redistribution of political authority. And then, of course, a sense not merely of plasticity and exchange but of infinite regress begins to set in, and with it the worry that the refiguring of periods and ages runs the risk of becoming a mere parlor trick. But the questions that we ought to pose grow out of a sense not simply of the ease or arbitrariness with which regnal dates and political crises can be reshuffled to designate differing moments of cultural and social study, but more deeply out of a skepticism about the constitution of periods and ages altogether, and the conviction that to understand cultural habits and expressive modes is always to read the past deeply into whatever present we may be examining. And yet that lesson needs to be balanced against the certain knowledge that cultures constantly renew and reinvent themselves, that they do so adventitiously and opportunistically, and that relations with the past are uneven and invariably difficult to calibrate. So it is with both skepticism and diffidence about "The Restoration and Eighteenth Century" that I began to look at this year's work. Questions about the problems and conveniences of literary periodization will return at various points within this review. But what needs first to be remarked is the energy, intelligence, and variety of this collection of books, journals, editions, catalogs, miscellanies, and special numbers.

Comparisons are inevitable, so I begin with books that gave the greatest pleasure--pleasures of historical understanding, of cultural representation, of critical responsiveness. And these are Frances Harris's Transformations of Love, a biography of the friendship of John Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin; Thomas Keymer's deft and wide ranging Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel; and volume 3 of J. G. A. Pocock's masterful study of Edward Gibbon, Barbarism and Religion: "The First Decline and Fall." Not only are these books models of scholarship; together they open a number of the themes that will be explored in the course of this review: the nature and variety of sociability, the relationship between the text and the book and between the production and consumption of literature, the complex convergences of religion and politics, and the enduring presence of what we might call the long seventeenth century within any configuration of the next age.

Frances Harris's book is a deeply considered and nuanced portrait of the psychology of friendship and spirituality in an age often thought to have precious little of either. We have been so often (and so rightly) tutored in the politics and postures of Restoration cynicism, turbulence, and pornography that it takes a special effort of imagination to conjure the delicacy and passion with which not simply friendship but male and female friendship might have been negotiated in this age, and especially under the sign of intense Anglican spirituality. But this is exactly what Frances Harris has done in her study of John Evelyn and Margaret Blagge (as she was known until a few months before her death when she finally married the courtier Sidney Goldophin). Transformations of Love is not conventional biography--it covers the shared years of friendship between Evelyn and Blagge, maid of honor at Charles II's court, and not everything about those years--though it is surely life narrative, and the perspective and convergence of its twinned subjectivity gives a superb window onto the nature of marriage and friendship, of platonic love and erotic desire, of piety and display in the Restoration.

Evelyn was a polymath, virtuoso, collector, translator, founding member of the Royal Society, and for us, above all, the diarist whose Kalendarium provides a record of nearly the whole of his age; and Evelyn's diary forms one of the bases of Harris's study. But in narrating the friendship of Evelyn and Blagge, Harris ranges widely over a number of manuscript sources that have never been read before in this way. What emerges from her work is not only an intimate portrait of the relationship between Evelyn and Blagge, but also a wonderful rendering of their voices, internal and in conversation, an achievement made possible by the depth of Harris's scholarship and by the exact sense of quotation with which she constructs this story. Nor is it only the hothouse of spiritual friendship with its "rather faded adolescent paraphernalia [of] ... emblems and symbols, suns, stars, flaming hearts, and Greek mottoes" (p. 151) that is here illuminated. Harris also gives a superb account of the complex maneuvering at Charles II's court for place and favor and of that court's magnetic attraction, its "glitter, potency, and cultivation" (p. 40); of the contradictory strains in private and social life in the Restoration with its "combination of devout piety and worldly display" (p. 8); and of the nature and intensity of Anglican spirituality in the Restoration, the latter an especially powerful lesson for those who would understand the literature and history of these years.

Thomas Keymer's Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel is a wholly different enterprise: a study of literary intertextuality--of the multiple relationships that Laurence Sterne negotiated in Tristram Shandy with utterly contemporary voices and events, with competing examples of its genre, with the technologies of serial publication and typographical experiment, and with earlier meditations on what Sterne called the "devastation, blood-shed, and the expence" of war (p. 11). Among the most interesting of these intertextualities is the relation between Tristram Shandy and Marvell's Upon Appleton House--a text which Keymer wonderfully describes as a "ghostly and ambient presence" lurking pervasively beneath the underplot of Tristram Shandy (p. 202). This reading is eloquent testimony to the ways in which mid-seventeenth-century disturbances continued to stir mid-eighteenth-century texts. Elsewhere Keymer illuminates the manner in which Sterne parodied mid-eighteenth-century practices of serialization and developed strategies of narrative deferral in order to capitalize on "the faddish, unstable literary culture of the 1760s" (p. 149). Sterne cultivated modes of writing that enabled him to navigate contemporary tastes and trends; he always steered with an eye to holding his position at the "cutting edge" of novelistic expression and experiment.

What Keymer shares with Frances Harris is a gift for beautiful and sharply observant prose, and more than that, a quickness of intelligence that illuminates everything he touches on. Keymer's critical aim is to navigate between competing traditions of Sterne criticism: the modernist/postmodern version of the writer as ludic and skeptical, provisional and parodic; and an older version of Sterne as humanist and Scriblerian, self-consciously positioned within the satiric traditions of Francois Rabelais, Michel de Montaigne, and Miguel de Cervantes. Keymer resolves the apparent contradiction by reading the novel deeply within its own textual and technological context, inserting Tristram Shandy "into its rich and heterogeneous cultural moment, and [doing so] in ways that, by adjusting rather than denying the critical traditions ... open up a telling area of potential convergence between them" (p. 7). Keymer deepens our understanding both of the ways in which Sterne's experiments with novelistic resources are grounded in mid-eighteenth-century conventions and tropes and of how Sterne appeals far beyond the eighteenth century to our own absorption in the problems of representation and indeterminacy. In its breadth, elegance, and economy this is exemplary work.

The depth of Pocock's encounter with Gibbon cannot be conveyed within the compass of this review, but what needs to be remarked are the immense sophistication, assurance, and learning of the third volume of Pocock's Barbarism and Religion. This book is essential reading for students of the British Enlightenments, their rhetorical arts, their relations to antiquity and to French historical writing, and their complex religious and civic politics. Central to Pocock's rendering of Gibbon's History is the darkly luminous figure of Tacitus: he was the Roman historian whom Gibbon most deeply admired, and Pocock's work unfolds the Tacitean shape and tone of the History and the important traditions of Tacitism that Gibbon inherited--the prominent strain of Tacitism in the literature of European humanism from the decline of the Florentine republic to the eighteenth-century polemicist and translator, Thomas Gordon. Gordon was a Whig in his dependencies, associations, and inclinations, and he aimed to claim Tacitus for Whiggery, but the Annals and Histories were not captive of party or faction. A few years before Gordon published his translation, a group of Tories and Jacobites fashioned a Tacitus that transformed his Roman history with its emphasis on deceit, indirection, and suspicion, and its warnings against arbitrary power and arraignment of courtly hypocrisy, into an attack on the Glorious Revolution and the regime of William III. As Pocock observes, the moral precepts of Tacitism were multivalent and ambivalent, and Pocock is especially instructive on Gibbon's debts to this complexity and to the psychology of Tacitus's reading of political corruption, his study of political behavior after the fall of the Roman republic: "its deviousness, perversity, brutality and recurrently suicidal folly, which have made him renowned in the historiography of the human heart as we wish it were not but know that it is" (p. 20). The authority and comprehensiveness of Pocock's understanding of this episode of classical and Enlightenment historiography and the reach of his prose, intuitive and resonant, are evident throughout this study which at once situates Gibbon in relation to his Enlightenment contexts, to the traditions of Renaissance humanism and seventeenth-century historiography, and to the deep reverberations of civil war and republicanism throughout his age. To enter Gibbon's world, under Pocock's guidance, is to understand that the crises of the mid-seventeenth century--the military intervention in English politics which led to regicide and republic, commonwealth and Protectorate--were productive not only of the contemporary responses of Thomas Hobbes, James Harrington, Milton, and the Earl of Clarendon but continuously implicated in the eighteenth-century creation of an image of the decline and fall of the Roman republic.

These three very different books make an eloquent case for the continuity of interests and passions across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and for the vitality of familiar scholarly genres: biography, single-author study, and historiographical essay. But this year's work comes arrayed in other costumes, and it addresses a variety of more and less conventional problems and themes: the politics of the British diet; the meaning of privacy and solitude; the wild and the monstrous; economies and empire; dissenting spiritualities; satiric inheritance; the passions and practices of reading; and a topic that looks to remain at the center of eighteenth-century studies for some time to come, the public sphere.

UNDER THE SIGN OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE

However much Jurgen Habermas's compelling idiom has been corrected, redated, revised, liberalized, qualified, and amplified, the public sphere continues to hover above and within much of the writing about an age that for Habermas began in the late seventeenth century with its burgeoning culture of coffee houses, and unfolded into the clubs, networks, circles, letters, and conversations of eighteenth-century Britain. Yes, the public sphere began to emerge earlier than Habermas conjectured, and yes, it might be discovered in any number of locales and discursive spaces that he may not have had in mind--in theaters, fairs, marketplaces, and neighborhoods--and yes, it was more heterogeneous, polemical, and instrumental than Habermas urged, and less responsive to the regulation of reason in that tumult of gossip, slander, and news that stirred the conversation and writing of the age. But it remains the case that Habermas's insight into the character of eighteenth-century exchange in the discursive space that lay between the household and the state remains enormously productive for students of literature and social relations throughout that age, and crucial to the Enlightenment sense that the life of the mind was a life of conversation and correspondence.

One of the many attractive features of Moyra Haslett's Pope to Burney, 1714-1779 is the skill with which such notions of public life are related to eighteenth-century literary culture--to its clubs and coteries, its habits of collaborative reading, and its modes of publishing, circulating, and consuming literature. Here generic innovations are related to social formations, the novel imagined in terms of literary sociability, and the emergence of women writers explored in relation to female community and sociality. Pope to Burney invigorates eighteenth-century studies with insights and approaches that might well bring the age closer to its newest readers; and the emphasis on conversation and exchange works not only between them and us, but illuminatingly between them and them. Haslett provides attractive, crisp narrative elements, good questions, sympathetic responses, and ventriloquisms. Perhaps it did not really take cultural studies to reveal the "embeddedness of texts within their own cultures" (p. 178)--the notes to the Twickenham edition of Alexander Pope's poems might be thought to have done that work fifty years ago--but this book does an excellent job of bringing out the sense of interplay between text and society that may remain latent within the formidable learning of standard editions. Such concepts as coterie writing and literary conversation are then returned to imaginative texts and made central to the understanding of eighteenth-century literature. In the book's closing chapters, Haslett proposes readings of Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Richardson that situate these writers within the communities of eighteenth-century literary sociability.

And how well a number of new studies of eighteenth-century writers and editions of their texts and letters confirm our sense of the importance of correspondence, coteries, and clubs to eighteenth-century culture. Reconsidering the Bluestockings, a special number of the Huntington Library Quarterly edited by Nicole Pohl and Betty A. Schellenberg, underscores the sociable nature of female intellectual pursuit in the latter half of the eighteenth century. A decade ago Dena Goodman demonstrated the importance of female intellectual...

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