Daniel Cook

The afterlives of eighteenth-century fiction

Introduction 1. On authorship, appropriation, and eighteenth-century fiction Daniel Cook 2. The afterlife of family romance Michael McKeon 3. From Picaro to Pirate: afterlives of the Picaresque in early eighteenth-century fiction Leah Orr 4. Ghosts of the guardian in Sir Charles Grandison and Bleak House Sarah Raff 5. The novels afterlife in the newspaper, 1712-1750 Nicholas Seager 6. Wit and humour for the heart of sensibility: the beauties of Fielding and Sterne M.-C. Newbould 7. The spectral iamb: the poetic afterlife of the late eighteenth-century novel Dahlia Porter 8. Rethinking fictionality in the eighteenth-century puppet theatre David A. Brewer 9. The novel in musical theatre: Pamela, Caleb Williams, Frankenstein and Ivanhoe Michael Burden 10. Gillrays Gulliver and the 1803 invasion scare David Francis Taylor 11. Defoes cultural afterlife, mainly on screen Robert Mayer 12. Happiness in Austens Sense and Sensibility and its afterlife in film Jill Heydt-Stevenson 13. Refashioning The History of England: Jane Austen and 1066 and All That Peter Sabor Select bibliography.

Introduction: Gender, Genre and Authorship

Literary scholars now recognize, as Clare Brant expresses it, that ‘many women writers in eighteenth-century Britain were not novelists, poets, or dramatists. They were writers of letters, diaries, memoirs, essays — genres of sometimes uncertain status then and certainly liminal status now’.1 This collection of new essays argues for the importance of women’s life writing, both within women’s literary history and as an integral part of the culture and practice of eighteenth-century and Romantic auto/biography. As these essays show, research in this area has broader implications for our understanding of literary genres, constructions of gender, the relationship between manuscript and print culture, the mechanisms of publicity and celebrity, and models of authorship in the period.

‘Neglected Genius’: The Romantic Canon

‘I weep’, writes Coleridge in his monody for Chatterton, ‘that heaven-born Genius so should fall’.3 The phrasing is slippery. Does Coleridge mean to suggest that the fall of genius is, even over a differing period of time, inevitable? Or does he wish to imply that Chatterton’s case entailed the most emphatic collapse of all? Is genius salvageable, redeemable, or is it by nature doomed to fail? Clearly Coleridge’s categorization of ‘heaven-born Genius’ recalls Edward Young’s assertion that virtue must attend ingenium. Was that the biggest sin of hubristic genius: a rejection of its own divinity?

The Rowley Controversy

Notwithstanding the appearance in 1778 of the rashly printed edition of modern works, the Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, attention largely turned to the Rowley papers for the next half-decade, between 1777 and 1783, as the so-called ‘Rowley controversy’ dominated large sectors of the periodical press. In addition to weekly, even daily, notes in the journals and newspapers, many lengthy books and pamphlets ostensibly arguing for or against the authenticity of the relics — by Rowleians and anti-Rowleians respectively — appeared quickly, and a greatly expanded edition of the works came with reams of superfluous scholia in late 1781. Sub-controversies about the value and methods of literary history and criticism took shape, and gentlemen renewed old disagreements. For many participants, as George Steevens informed Thomas Warton, the notional controversy proved to be a convenient vehicle for puffing other research often only tangentially related to the newly recovered works or even to neglected early English literature at large.1

Miscellanies and the Moderns

Independently of Tyrwhitt’s collection, the Oxford don and poet Thomas Warton made his own enquiries into the Rowley papers as he wished to include them — authentic or not — in the medieval chapters of his grand History of English Poetry (1774–81). More so than in the case of Tyrwhitt, Warton’s authority for and methods used in judging the Rowleyana would incur heated discussion within the Rowley controversy over the next half-decade. But, at the same time, his defence of Chatterton’s genius in 1778 directly influenced John Broughton’s edition of the modern works, the Miscellanies in Prose and Verse; by Thomas Chatterton, the supposed author of the poems published under the names of Rowley Canning, &c, which was rushed through the press that July on the back of the success of Tyrwhitt’s Rowley.2 Brought on sought to substantiate Warton’s claim that Chatterton had been ‘a prodigy of genius: and would have proved the first of English poets, had he reached a maturer age’.3

‘Too proud for pity’: The Sentimental Reader

In many of the early treatments of Chatterton a strong source of contention concerned authorship. Even though leading scholars, principally Tyrwhitt the philologist and Warton the literary historian, had quickly realized that the texts were modern concoctions, a small band of antiquaries had stubbornly refused to relinquish the fictitious fifteenth-century priest Rowley. More than anything else, authorial decorum was at stake: the works exhibited marks of ‘classical’ genius and so demanded an appropriate figurehead. Such commentators could not bear to see them attributed to an unreliable and dissolute charity-schoolboy. Paradoxically, then, the pro-Rowleians devoted reams of print to Chatterton’s life and character in the very act of excising him from the corpus. They belittled his mock-scholarship, corrected his own glosses and brought forth his private correspondence as proof of his inadequacies of character. To put it another way: far from ignoring Chatterton the antiquaries savaged him. Yet, as we have seen, they belonged to a minority. Warton, Malone, Steevens and a whole host of critics and literary pasticheurs praised the boy-poet as a unique genius, a doyen of modern antiques and a master of a new brand of Rowleyese Englishness.

Genius and Scholarship

During a brief aside to his lecture series on the major British poets, Hazlitt dashed Chatterton’s claim to literary fame. ‘It is his name, his youth, and what he might have lived to have done’, he suggests, ‘that excite our wonder and admiration’.2 For more than forty years, by this point, Chatterton had in fact been conducive to a number of highly divisive critical debates. And over a number of decades many noteworthy literary figures collected piles of Chattertoniana with relish, including Thomas Percy, William Mason, Michael Lort, Robert Glynn, William and Jane Cole, as well as the leading Shakespeare experts of the age, such as Edmond Malone, George Steevens and Richard Farmer, along with dozens of notable gentlemen, aristocrats, physicians and amateur historians. In the public realm the principal vernacular scholars of the late eighteenth century gave detailed axiological attention to Chatterton’s texts, particularly so by Thomas Warton, Malone, Steevens, and the nation’s pre-eminent Chaucerian, Thomas Tyrwhitt, as well as Southey and Cottle, Walter Scott, and Percival Stockdale in the early nineteenth century. In particular, the boy-poet proved flexible enough to conform to, and embolden, familiar if conflicting theorizations of genius, from Joseph Addison’s well-known essay in The Spectator (no. 160) on natural and learned genius through to Edward Young’s forceful rejection of the Augustan ‘rules of art’ in the second half of the eighteenth century, as well as the models of intertwined genius, taste and judgement established by the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers William Duff and Alexander Gerard.

Tyrwhitt’s Rowley, or ‘what the author wrote’

As named authors fronted definitive collections of their own literary works on an increasingly frequent basis, scholars waged an anxious war over the right way to edit an English classic.2 Each question raised a further battle. Are vernacular authors different from classical and scriptural ones? Which were the more reliable copy-texts: manuscripts, which often survived in a heavily degraded state, or the somewhat slapdash print editions? Is textual scholarship a necessary tool in the recovery of authorial intentions or a pedantic encumbrance? Who is more qualified for the duty of bringing a work back to life: a dull critic or an empathetic poet? The best known of these skirmishes involved Richard Bentley and Lewis Theobald on one side and Alexander Pope on the other. The fame of Pope’s merciless lampoon of Theobald as the King of the Dunces in The Dunciad, as well as the vociferous backlash against Bentley’s heavy-handed emendation in his edition of Milton, might well indicate that the scholars lost; in the popular imagination, they certainly did. Textual critics were widely depicted as duncical, vainglorious parasites who usurped the role of the author. Within the nascent field of professional editing, however, the battles between learning and taste engendered a dualistic adaptation of classical humanism, a compromise between a cluttered and a clean page.