Regina Janes

Outward, Visible Propriety: Stoic Philosophy and Eighteenth-Century British Rhetorics (review)

anti-Exclusionist novel, based on the reallife elopement of Henrietta Berkeley with her brother-in-law, Ford, Lord Grey (a supporter of Monmouth), rhetorically depicts the heroine as becoming a courtesan. Ms. Conway observes that the authority Behn invested in Gwyn and Hortense Mancini enabled her to use the novel as a means of uniting her interest in sexual relations and political crises in the 1680s. In The Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zarazians, a Tory political secret history from 1705 (once attributed to Delarivier Manley, but now to Joseph Browne), the Whig Sarah Churchill, duchess of Marlborough (known to be a loyal and loving wife), is rendered as a courtesan. The courtesan did not provide a point of reference any more stable than the term Protestant in popular culture’s continuous reimagining. The courtesan’s regular appearance in novels through the middle of the eighteenth century marked the nation’s unresolved anxieties about religion and politics. Here it would have been useful if Ms. Conway had developed further the connection between the political secret history and the developing novel. She appropriately refutes Robert Mayer’s distinction between histories understood as fact and those as fiction during this period; however, it nevertheless would have been helpful to identify at least a porous border distinguishing the secret history from the novel. For example, although twentiethcentury critics viewed the secret histories of Delarivier Manley as novels, Manley, like Browne, was working in the genre that Lionel Gossman has identified as the ‘‘little history’’ (la petite histoire), a gossipy account that contradicted the dominant histories of the day. Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding clearly incorporate such little histories into their novels, but their texts function in a way that many secret histories of the period do not. In Roxana, Defoe ‘‘evokes Nell Gwyn’s legacy and the Restoration’s struggle to sustain the dream of Protestant community’’ in order to demonstrate that this dream will not be achieved through theological abstraction, but ‘‘the embodied status of the individual.’’ Ms. Conway points to Clarissa’s dealings with the prostitutes and to references to Mme. de Maintenon, mistress to Louis XIV. In Fielding’s Tom Jones, Sophia Western, mistaken for the Jacobite Jenny Cameron, is aligned rhetorically with an apolitical Gwyn. Richardson and Fielding thus both ‘‘realized that the political divisions that haunted England in the wake of the ’45 remained unresolved.’’ Moreover, ‘‘Clarissa and Tom Jones gain their power from an awareness that the answers to the questions raised by the Restoration and its aftermath could only ever be partial and incomplete.’’ Ms. Conway persuasively demonstrates that ‘‘Courtesan narrative opens a window onto a continent of religious controversy and sexual politics that offers no safe harbours for those travelling its coastlines.’’ The achievements of her text are manifold. Rachel Carnell Cleveland State University

Regimes of Description: In the Archive of the Eighteenth Century ed. by John Bender and Michael Merriman (review)

expanding, with the methods of recording, comparison, and analysis that had been developed in the natural sciences beginning to be applied to other fields. But these fields developed at a very uneven rate, and so there was no single, overriding concept that governed collection and display. Thus, the Museum exhibited fossils, plants, and animals to illustrate contemporary notions of the Chain of Being, but it arranged books by the reign in which they were acquired, because, as one of the curators remarked, of ‘‘the pleasing sight which arises from the uniformity of elegant coverings in any considerable sett of books.’’And, because the age believed in the ideal of the polymath, the Museum’s avowed goal was to become an encyclopedia of the whole of human knowledge. The result of such an ambition was inevitable: ‘‘Nothing is in order,’’ remarked a foreign visitor in 1784; ‘‘this assemblage is rather an immense magazine, in which things seem to have been thrown together at random, than a scientific collection, intended to instruct and honour a great nation.’’ The twenty-two essays in Enlightening the British explore the origin, development, and gradual systematization of the British Museum, but also the course of Enlightenment knowledge and discovery itself. The methods and goals determining what objects were to be housed and how they were to be displayed and juxtaposed are carefully scrutinized. Scrutinized, too, are the forerunners of the Museum—the cabinets of curiosities, the repositories of universities and learned societies in England and on the continent, and the private collections of individuals such as Dr. Richard Mead, Daniel Solander, Martin Folkes, and the explorer and naturalist, Joseph Banks. Other essays deal with the ways conceptual and methodological advances were reshaping disciplines—how, for instance, numismatics and antiquarian research came to be put on a more modern footing, how the study of the classical world and British history evolved during the century, how new models of ethnographic thought emerged, and how art and sculpture and their relation to other disciplines were rethought. A few studies have a broad historical and intellectual sweep (particularly ambitious is Joseph Levine’s on the causes of the rise and fall of British neoclassicism), but generally, this is history written close to the ground: most of the essays are narrow in scope, their aims specific and often modest, their findings firmly grounded in evidence patiently garnered from archives, guidebooks, acquisition files, bureaucratic records, and contemporary letters. But in a field that has sometimes provoked grand pronouncements undernourished by facts, such a volume is welcome and salutary. It is also generously illustrated. Dennis Todd Georgetown University

Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times ed. by Philip Ayres (review)

while the defender of Collins gracefully waffles. Of some 600 entries, fifteen women qualify: Mary Wollstonecraft, Priscilla Wakefield, Clara Reeve, Susannah Newcome, Hannah More (who opposed attempts ‘‘to introduce atheistic education in schools’’ though the proponents of ‘‘atheistic education’’ remain obscure), Elizabeth Montagu (wherein Johnson’s flattery is reported, his insults softened), Caroline Herschel, Laetitia Hawkins, Mary Hays, Elizabeth Hamilton, Catherine Macaulay Graham, Damaris Cudworth Masham, Catherine Cockburn, Jane Gosling, and Mary Astell. Elizabeth Carter is oddly absent. The ‘‘philosophical’’ concerns of later women writers tend to be women’s roles and education; earlier in the century women chose more gender-neutral topics. Scriblerians include not only Berkeley, but also Bentley, Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot, Steele, Atterbury, and Addison. The major and minor philosophers derided in dying verses, and dunciads appear in all their natural seriousness. Johnson, dissed as no philosopher, has as many pages as Hume and Locke, and more than Berkeley. Given the number of contributors there is some unevenness. Tom Paine gets less space than Pope, and the account, though accurate, is woolly: ‘‘he turns these traditions [natural law and opposition traditions of political thought] to innovatory use in his discussion of welfare provision and property rights.’’ To know more, read Paine. As expected, the Pope entry condescends mightily, but it also reminds readers that Hume quoted Pope more than any other poet. However weak Pope’s grasp of philosophical issues, philosophers and nonphilosophers read and remembered his versions of the new resolutions to ancient questions. Dryden seems to have slipped from philosophers’ reading lists and should perhaps be restored. Johnson’s citing Dryden frequently on philosophy is called ‘‘surprising,’’ and Jenyns is congratulated on an opinion Dryden had articulated sixty years earlier. But Dryden was born the year before Locke, so Locke’s poetic contemporary does not appear beside him. Philosophers’ rules are rules indeed—no poetic license. The volumes are relatively error free. In a postmodern dissolution of poetry into criticism, Pope affirms that ‘‘Poetry began with Aristotle.’’ His ‘‘not exactly original’’ doctrine of the ruling passion is to be found in the Epistle to Cobham [sic, twice]. The publisher of Carl Cone’s volumes on Burke has moved from Lexington, Kentucky, to Massachusetts. Such spots are few in a collection that amply rewards both browsing and reading through. Regina Janes Skidmore College

The Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century British Philosophers ed. by John W. Yolton, John Valdimir Price, and John Stephens (review)

erature. Coverage of individual authors is therefore limited to those, such as Swift and Yeats, whose activities extended beyond the purely literary, along with a few others, whose observations on their society are frequently turned to by historians. Despite this restriction, the present volume is of great use to teachers and students of eighteenth-century Irish writing in English. The entries, arranged alphabetically, provide basic information concisely and accessibly. The nonspecialist teacher of Swift, for example, can here clarify the difference between first fruits and twentieth parts, or check the dates of Navigation Acts. Beyond this, however, both the inclusion of much social and cultural history, under a range of imaginative headings, and a system of cross-referencing, make it likely that even readers who initially approach the volume as a reference work will stay to browse. Specialists will be stimulated by long views of familiar elements, such as that provided in David Dickson’s admirable entry on Dublin. They will also be alerted, in such entries as Patrick Maume’s incisive ‘‘literature and the historian,’’ to specifically Irish versions of general problems. A welcome aspect of the Companion is its acknowledgment, in, for example, entries on ‘‘India,’’ and ‘‘Italian unification,’’ of the range of relationships that Ireland, even in the colonial period, had with the world.