Illusory Consensus: Bolingbroke and the Polemical Response to Walpole, 1730-1737

This book belongs to the growing number of revisionist studies challenging traditional perceptions of party politics during the eighteenth century. Alexander Pettit, concentrating on a seven-year period during the second decade of Robert Walpole’s administration, persuasively challenges the picture presented in works such as Isaac Kramnick’s Bolingbroke and His Circle (1968) of a unified and monolithic “Country” opposition to Walpole shaped and defined by Lord Bolingbroke’s political philosophy. The oppositional “consensus” promoted in the pages of Bolingbroke and Pulteney’s Craftsman was, Pettit argues, “illusory”: the opposition was what he pithily dubs a “disparate bunch that resisted, as it continues to resist, easy definitions” (30). Pettit sets out here to investigate some of the heterogeneous, cross-grained modes of opposition thought which owed little to Bolingbroke and were sometimes downright hostile to his ideas. The polemical literature generated by the likes of the non-juror, Matthias Earbery, defined by its High Church stance and its nostalgia for the close alliance between church and monarchy under Charles I, bears little resemblance to Bolingbroke’s deliberately bland platform of secular civic humanism. Far from “leading” the opposition, Bolingbroke, the former Jacobite turned Revolution Principle Whig, was viewed with profound suspicion by both Tories such as Earbery and (one might add) by opposition Whigs.

Although this book is shaped by a strong argument it does not set out to offer a full or comprehensive reappraisal of the composition and nature of Walpole’s opposition. Those unfamiliar with the period will find little to guide them through the main events and contours of the political scene: this is not a book for an uninitiated or even an undergraduate readership. Indeed, its focus is highly selective: it reads almost as a series of discrete, closely argued essays on various aspects of opposition polemic, including two chapters on Bolingbroke, one on the role of the 1688 Revolution in opposition debate, two on what Pettit has christened “Carolinism” (nostalgia for the reign of Charles I), and a rather detached last chapter interrogating conventional readings of opposition drama of the mid-1730s.

Although Bolingbroke features prominently in the book’s subtitle and in its first two chapters, Pettit knocks him from the pedestal on which Kramnick and others have placed him by immersing his writings in the context from which they emerged–the cut-and-thrust of daily ministerial and opposition journalism and propaganda, “a version of the political debate that would have been familiar to a coffee-house politician in the 1730s, but that several centuries’ emphasis on ‘high politics’ and ‘high literature’ have taught us to disregard” (29). Much excellent and detailed scholarship has gone into recreating these contexts. Particularly impressive is chapter one’s sustained reading of the –Remarks on the History of England and chapter two’s account of the historiographical debate over the use of analogy in a decade when writers on both sides ransacked the English past to praise or berate modern ministers and monarchs. The Remarks, enshrined as a “classic” of political thought by Kramnick’s 1972 edition, was, in fact, a series of ad hoc essays whose most vital characteristic was their intertextuality and contemporaneity. Unfortunately Pettit’s admirable reconstruction of the proper contexts for the Remarks is accompanied by a fair amount of dirt-dishing at Kramnick’s expense: “Surprisingly, Kramnick ignores the folios in his research” (51), “Kramnick consistently ignores the topical content of the Remarks” (52), “Mindful of Kramnick’s others [sic] deletions” (55). This verbal tic extends to his treatment of the inadequacies of other scholars: “Burtt does not say so, but they are the bases of Walpolite theories of government. . . . Nor does Burtt consider” (88).

Chapter three contains some shrewd analysis of the significance of 1688 in opposition debate. Pettit cleverly argues that the Revolution was the one point at which Bolingbroke’s cyclical theory of history intersected with the linear theory advanced by Walpole’s apologists. Bolingbroke saw 1688 as the most recent incident of the “ancient spirit of liberty” which returned through British history during periods such as Elizabeth I’s reign, whereas Walpole’s defenders, unabashed modernists, saw 1688 as a novel source of a modern liberty formalized by the Bill of Rights and safeguarded by the Hanoverian succession. One side claimed it as inheritance, the other as invention. Yet far from sharing this glorification of 1688, other opposition polemicists, such as the Tory authors of the Grub Street Journal, derided William III’s innovations. Pettit treads a very careful path around the recently controversial issue of Jacobitism, which he dismisses as an “imprecise term” for the 1730s. In so doing he seems to be defining a third kind of opposition position: Tory “Carolinism,” nostalgia for the close alliance between High Church and monarchy epitomized by the relationship between Laud and Charles I. Pettit is surely right to reinstate religious controversy into the political framework of the 1730s, notably in his discussion of the political row over dissent and the Quaker Tithe bill in the early 1730s. I am slightly uncomfortable about his invention of the term “Carolinism” for this phenomenon, if only because it inevitably calls to mind the reigning Hanoverian “Caroline,” consort of George II, who was heavily involved in ecclesiastical policy. It may be true, as Pettit argues, that the “Carolinists” criticized Walpole for severing the monarchical and ecclesiastical estates and thus reviving the republicanism of England under Oliver Cromwell. However, it might be added that a more substantial sector of the opposition–notably dissident Whigs–attacked Walpole’s ecclesiastical advisor, the High-Church Bishop Gibson, during the early 1730s for his odious similarity to Laud. Here I refer to Gibson’s intolerance of religious heterodoxy, tight control of ecclesiastical patronage, and desire to extend into civil life the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts.

The final chapter on historical drama, if something of a coda to the book, offers a valuable corrective to the critical tendency to oversimplify political propaganda on the stage. Focusing on what Robert D. Hume dubbed “application plays”–historical dramas designed to comment on current politics–Pettit shows that their Bolingbrokean rhetoric is often presented ironically or inconclusively. The failure of closure in which the Patriot king figure abdicates or remains unmarried and hence heirless points to an interrogation of, rather than an affirmation of, Patriot ideals.

One final caveat. Although Pettit has perhaps sensibly confined himself to the period 1730-37, the rationale for his terminal date seems disingenuous. He argues that if there was a “Bolingbrokean moment” it was over by 1737, since by this stage the Craftsman was on its last legs and Bolingbroke had returned to France. Well, Bolingbroke returned to England in March 1738 and spent many months that year with his friend Pope orchestrating the renewed Patriot campaign behind the scenes, editing opposition drama, and writing The Idea of a Patriot King. In 1738 the Prince of Wales looked in a strong position as a “center of union” for the opposition: this was the year that witnessed a flood of opposition writing, including Johnson’s London and Dialogues One and Two of Pope’s Epilogue to the Satires. If there was ever a “Bolingbrokean moment” I would locate it in 1738.

Hegel: A Biography

A series of impressive works over more than a decade has established Terry Pinkard as one of the leading exponents of a “new” non-metaphysical Hegel. First in Hegel’s Dia-lectic: The Explanation of Possibility (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988) and then in Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1994), Pinkard has proposed a distinctly modernist Hegel. The concept of Geist, so central to Hegel’s philosophy, should, Pinkard has argued, be understood not as the abstract entity “Spirit” but as the concrete collective “mindedness” of the human community. Likewise, for Pinkard, the language of the “end of history” should be under-stood not as a conservative foreclosure of the future but rather as a liberal affirmation, in the wake of an age of democratic revolution, of an ongoing, open-ended ended process of critical reflection on the common good. Out of these reinterpretations has come a Hegel of immediate contemporary relevance. Hegel’s dialectical method offers a way to navi-gate the modern/postmodern divide between identity and difference, universal explana-tion and local knowledge. Hegel’s social and political philosophy offers – as Pinkard has made clear in works such as Democratic Liberalism and Social Union (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987) – a way to allow liberalism to combine the language of the autonomy of the individual with the language of a community of value.

One of the purposes of Pinkard’s intellectual biography of Hegel is to summarize the ear-lier commentaries for a wider audience. Thus Pinkard interpolates a number of chapters devoted to the interpretation of Hegel’s major philosophical works — the Phenomenology of Spirit (chapter 5), the Science of Logic (chapter 8), and the Philosophy of Right (chap-ter 11) — amidst “more biographical” chapters. Like the earlier commentaries, these “philosophical chapters” combine a command of Hegel scholarship that is extensive and up-to-date with a lucid style that is entirely accessible to the non-philosopher and non-specialist.

Pinkard’s disciplined approach to philosophical exegesis is well suited to the book’s pri-mary purpose, which is to tell “the story of Hegel’s life.” The range and richness of his-torical reference in the earlier commentaries suggested that Pinkard was well qualified to tell this story. And Pinkard’s biography does not disappoint. The book provides a vivid portrait of Old Württemberg and the Protestant Seminary at Tübingen (chapters 1 and 2), of what it was like to live in early nineteenth-century Nuremberg (chapter 7), and of a Berlin poised between reform and reaction in the years 1818-1821 (chapter 10). Pink-ard’s Hegel is no ghostly specter lamenting on his deathbed that “nobody has ever under-stood me” — a report that Pinkard demonstrates is myth. Instead we have a Hegel who is very much flesh and blood. The Hegel inhabiting Pinkard’s pages is the student whose fondness for pub-crawling in Tübingen prompted a Seminary porter to an exasperated outburst: “Oh Hegel, you’re for sure going to drink away what little intellect you have!” He is the Privatdozent at the rapidly declining University of Jena with few prospects of a permanent position and with an illegitimate son by his landlady. He is the older man, now more established, who was enamoured of the countryside around the University of Heidelberg, who preferred Rossini’s Barber of Seville to Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, and who spent long hours playing the card game Whist with a variety of decidedly non-academic companions. In short, Pinkard renders Hegel a profoundly sympathetic, even poignant, figure to a contemporary audience: philosophical questions regarding the im-plications of social and political modernity acquire a quite “down-to-earth” address in Hegel’s own difficulties be they in establishing a career and supporting a family amid the upheavals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries or be they in maintaining integrity and defending students and friends from charges of subversion in the aftermath of the Karlsbad Decrees.

The third and most ambitious purpose of Pinkard’s intellectual biography is to explore how Hegel’s life and Hegel’s work intersect. Here, however, Pinkard is less successful. In part, these difficulties arise from the fact that Pinkard, in a laudable desire to accom-modate “selective readers,” has “separated … off” the more philosophical chapters from the more biographical chapters. Such a strategy may well increase the value of Pinkard’s intellectual biography as a work of historical reference. But at the same time it tends to inhibit a creative dialogue between the narrative of the life and the exposition of the phi-losophy. The result is to reduce the value of Pinkard’s biography as a work of intellectual historical analysis.

Pinkard’s decision to separate the more philosophical chapters from the more biographi-cal chapters is also a response — again laudable in itself — to Hegel’s own strictures about reducing the philosophical to the personal. Yet, as Pinkard’s own interpretation of Hegel’s Geist should have suggested, such a separation is not the only response to the reduction-ism that Hegel rightly condemned. Indeed, for the intellectual historian, a network of traditions of discourse mediates the personal and the philosophical. To be sure, Pinkard locates Hegel at a crossroads between the “Good Old Law” traditions of the German hometowns and the respective rational reform programs of the Napoleonic and Prussian “revolutions from above.” Likewise, Pinkard follows the traditional trajectory of the de-velopment of Hegel’s idealism through a succession of encounters with the writings of Kant and Fichte and with the more immediately personal influence of Schelling and Hölderlin, who had been Hegel’s fellow students and most intimate friends at the Tübin-gen Seminary.

Nevertheless Pinkard neglects some of the more specific sources of Hegel’s engagement with modernity. Pinkard has, for example, little to say of Hegel’s reading in Scottish moral philosophy and political economy. There are just three passing references to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, one reference to Adam Ferguson and none to Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments or to Sir James Steuart. Pinkard also struggles with Hegel’s Protes-tant commitments. Indeed so attenuated do these commitments become that Pinkard has difficulty answering the charges of pantheism and atheism that Hegel’s critics leveled against him with increasing frequency during the 1820s.

Such questions regarding Hegel’s sources are not mere quibbles. They point to an im-portant problem of historical understanding. To the extent that Hegel’s idealism drew more on a French program of rational reform than on Scottish moral philosophy and po-litical economy, to the extent that Hegel’s Protestant commitments were more anthropo-logical than theological, we have a Hegel who to use John Toews categories is a virtual left Hegelian. Yet it was precisely one of Hegel’s purposes during the later stages of his career to resist such a reading of his philosophy and to construct out of a reform-minded Christianity a response both to the extremes of the Prussian reaction and to the extremes of the French revolution.

These difficulties in historical understanding contribute to a problem in thinking about Hegel’s continuing relevance. During the decade after Hegel’s death in 1831, and for much of the next century and a half, his philosophy was largely eclipsed by left Hegelianism. Today, however, Feuerbach’s and Marx’s “philosophy of the future” has lost its youthful self-confidence and its sense of historical inevitability. It is perhaps not surprising therefore that, given the way that Pinkard constructs the context, the epilogue has nothing to say about the “possibility of a contemporary Hegel.” This silence is un-fortunate, for Pinkard is correct in believing that the study of Hegel has something to contribute to a more nuanced liberalism but only, I would argue, if the Hegel we are reading is not a modernized contemporary but the eighteenth and early nineteenth century philosopher whose understanding of the problems and promise of modernity derived from an engagement with Scottish political economy and Protestant civil piety.

A Dictionary of Members of the Dublin Book Trade 1550-1800

In 1977 the Bibliographical Society in London produced a compact, integrated edition of the several volumes of H. R. Plomer et al.’s Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers Who Were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland during the period 1641-1775, originally published between 1909 and 1932. A quarter of a century later, it seems unlikely that Plomer’s pioneering dictionary will ever again be reprinted, because so much of it has been superseded. The Scottish book trade, for example, has been well served by John Morris’s “Scottish Book Trade Index” (SBTI), which became widely available on the National Library of Scotland’s website in 1998 and now exists in a new, greatly expanded PDF version that can be downloaded directly on to one’s home computer at no charge (www.nls.uk/catalogue/resources/sbti/SBTI.pdf), rendering obsolete G. H. Bushnell’s sections on the Scottish trade in Plomer’s dictionary. A similar result has occurred in regard to the early modern Irish book trade, using more traditional publishing methods. Robert Munter’s A Dictionary of the Print Trade in Ireland 1550-1775 began the process in 1988. Now Mary Pollard has swept away both Munter and Plomer (or more precisely, E. R. McC. Dix, who contributed the sections on Irish bibliography to Plomer’s dictionary), at least insofar as the Dublin trade is concerned.

Pollard’s work is a monumental achievement. Using the manuscript records of the Dublin stationers’ guild, St. Luke the Evangelist, as well as other manuscripts, contemporary newspapers and pamphlets, and secondary sources of every description, Pollard has amassed a formidable amount of data, crammed into nearly seven hundred densely packed pages. Her dictionary ranges so widely in regard to occupations (twenty of them within the trade, including papermakers and engravers) and chronology (from the beginning of the Dublin trade c. 1500 until 1800, including those twenty-five crucial years at the end of the eighteenth century that Plomer/Dix and Munter both omitted), and does the job so thoroughly, that it sets a new standard of comprehensiveness, documentation, and accuracy for dictionaries of the early modern book trade. The book includes three maps of Dublin that are useful for recreating the geography of the trade at particular times during the course of the eighteenth century. It also contains an introductory essay on the evolution of the stationers’ guild from 1670 to 1800, a readers’ guide, a checklist of members of the trade arranged by occupational subgroup, a map of paper mills in the vicinity of Dublin, bibliographies of manuscripts and secondary sources, and a thorough listing of newspapers and periodicals.

I tested the dictionary by examining closely a database of more than one hundred mid- and late eighteenth-century Dublin booksellers whose names appear in the imprints of Dublin publications that I am currently studying. In the great majority of cases, especially among the figures who were most active and important, the dictionary provided a vast amount of new information about such topics as apprenticeships, marriages, birth and/or death dates, kinship ties, lines of succession, bankruptcies, wills, even politics and ideology. Among other things, I gained a new appreciation for the role of family, including women, and began to realize various kinds of connections that could lead to a richer understanding of the workings of the trade. To cite but one example, the names Leathley, Hallhead, and McKenzie were all known to me from Dublin imprints, but I had only a superficial knowledge of the nature of their inter-relationships until I encountered Pollard’s dictionary. There I learned that Joseph Leathly’s name began appearing in Dublin reprints in 1719; that Anne Leathly succeeded her husband upon his death in 1757, and was in turn succeeded after her death in 1775 by her nephew, William Hallhead, who had probably been her foreman; that in 1779 Hallhead married Sarah Casson, who succeeded him after his death in 1781, trading as S[arah] Hallhead; that two years later she married William McKenzie, who had worked for the Hallheads since about 1781; and that McKenzie then took over the business and ran it until his death in 1817. That’s a pretty good story, spanning an entire century, and featuring two women who kept the firm alive at critical periods.

The work’s most troublesome shortcoming is the lack of an index. Although a biographical dictionary does not usually have an index, one is required here because of the unusual density of the material and the obscurity of most of the subjects. Readers wishing to learn about the connections of the Dublin book trade with, say, the United Irishmen or Roman Catholicism, or with the book trades in London, Philadelphia, Belfast, or Glasgow, or with particular institutions and streets in Dublin itself, are going to be frustrated, not because the work lacks information on such topics (quite the contrary), but because there is no easy way to get at it. The contrast in accessibility with the searchable PDF version of SBTI is great, especially when one considers that Pollard’s dictionary is too expensive for purchase by most individuals. Perhaps a time will come when, like Ian Maxted’s The London Trades 1775-1800 – which originally appeared in book form in 1977 but is now freely accessible on the web (www.devon.gov.uk/library/locstudy/bookhist/) – Pollard’s dictionary will be made available in this format. In the meantime, the Bibliographical Society would do a great service by making a thorough index available online, to which purchasers and users of the dictionary might be directed by means of a notice pasted inside the book and circulated on appropriate internet lists and websites.

The dictionary may also be a little disappointing to readers seeking insight into patterns of printing and publication that marked individual careers in the Dublin book trade, or to readers attempting to discover how individuals in the trade contributed to the printing and publication of works in particular genres, or by particular authors. Entries for members of the trade who were involved in book publishing typically cite several of their imprints, without indicating why those titles were chosen over others and without generalizing about the contributions of the subjects under whom they appear. In fact, the imprint selection process is avowedly “random” (xlv), and for that reason it is not consistently useful. Only occasionally do the entries contain generalizations that summarize or assess the contributions of particular individuals. We are told that the output of George Ewing (d. 1774) was “large and relatively adventurous” (187), and that his grandson Thomas (d. 1776) had “an extensive and solid list of pub[licatio]ns” (189). Vague as they are, such pronouncements are welcome because they provide points of guidance drawn from Pollard’s vast knowledge of eighteenth-century Dublin printing and publishing. One wishes there were more.

Another problem arises from an occasional lack of bibliographical consistency and efficiency. In regard to secondary sources, for example, the bibliography of “Printed Books, Pamphlets, & Unpublished Theses” (657-67) actually includes some published articles as well, while omitting many other articles (and some books) that are cited in the text. As I learned the hard way, a reader who casually notices in one of the biographical entries a citation to an article of interest that turns out to be excluded from the bibliography may have a difficult time finding it again. Items cited repeatedly in the text contain full bibliographical information every time they are mentioned, even when they also appear in the bibliography; in such cases, some congestion could have been avoided by means of a parenthetical reference to the author’s name alone in the text, augmented by a word or two from the title when more than one entry by that author appears in the bibliography.

These limitations suggest that Pollard’s dictionary may be improved, but it will not be superseded. It constitutes a landmark in Irish book history, and early modern book history generally, which will remain indispensable for a long time to come.

The Private Correspondence of Catherine the Great and G.A. Potemkin, 1769-1791

One of Dostoyevsky’s characters used to pray for the Comtesse du Barry, executed in Paris during the Reign of Terror, because “no one ever crossed himself for her sake”. In this respect, Catherine the Great is highly similar; nobody has ever prayed for the “Semiramis du Nord,” as Voltaire called her. Horace Walpole (as Anthony Cross recently reminded me) wished she had been beheaded instead of Marie-Antoinette, let alone du Barry. Catherine did have her devotees as well as her enemies, to be fair, though the line separating the two was a thin or rather an arbitrary one: where as her devotees spoke flatteringly of her wit, her social adaptability, her clever diplomacy, her enemies anathematized the same qualities with the same conviction. Nowadays, arguably, we lack that conviction; personal and public virtues and shortcomings that were once proverbial are now seen, darkly, through the glass of two centuries and an intervening host of psychopathic tyrants.

Yet if time and political extremism have robbed Catherine the Great’s image of much of its vividness, historical novelists and popular historians have been kept busy enough. Time, moreover, has also brought its usual clarifications, even some revelations. We know more about the drama of her early years in Russia and about her ill-fated marriage, for example, as of the once shadowed relations between Catherine and her son. And central to this restored and to some extent revalued portrait has been Catherine’s correspondence, a vital source of information not just about the empress herself, of course, but also about global politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Catherine knew enough of the curiosity of the future to have attempted to forestall its disrespectful clarifications and revelations by burning some of the intimate letters written to her by Prince Potemkin, her “special lover,” if in Catherine’s case that does not sound too precious. In the interests of historical accuracy, on the other hand, and no doubt for other reasons closer to home, Potemkin kept all the notes and letters he received from the Royal patron and paramour who in a secret ceremony became his wife–at least according to Viacheslav Lopatin, whose Lichnaja perepiska, first published in Moscow earlier this year, is the first complete edition of their surviving correspondence. Many of the 1162 letters and notes contained in this volume first appeared in what are now rare Russian editions published between 1859 and 1917, some in emigré Parisian editions of 1934. Of particular interest, however, are the 320 as yet unpublished letters–250 of Potemkin’s and 70 of Catherine’s–which were supposed to have been destroyed a century ago but, thanks to the perseverance of Moscow historian and film-director Viacheslav Lopatin, have been salvaged from archives in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Indeed, the book represents twenty years of Lopatin’s scrupulous and courageous archival work, 1978 to 1998, “courageous” insofar as the search for royal private papers in the Soviet era was a dangerous enterprise. According to the account he wrote for this edition, Lopatin owes part of his success to his status as a film-director. His status as “an entertainer” made his research appear harmless in the eyes of Soviet authorities distrustful of the potentially subversive investigations of writers and scholars. This bizarre political axiom, it seems, opened doors that had been locked to most of Russia’s historians. Certainly, we can believe and sympathize when Lopatin writes of the discovery of Potemkin’s private letters in the Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as one of the more rewarding moments of his life.

The body of the book is divided into three main sections: first, the correspondence (pp. 5-470); second, Lopatin’s account of his editorial adventures “Pis’ma bez kotoryh istorija stanovits’a mifom” (pp. 473-540); finally, twenty pages comprising notes to the letters and an index to people mentioned (pp. 965-986). The paradoxicality of this editorial strategy of Lopatin’s might fruitfully be compared with the narrative (un)method of Laurence Sterne, who perversely placed the preface of his Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, “Gentleman” in the middle of the book, provoking his readers to an almost immediate active independence. Similarly, Lopatin’s edition launches into the correspondence without any pre-emptive explanation, introduction, or orientation.

Because their correspondence is framed by Potemkin’s letters to Catherine, moreover, one gets an impression of the Prince playing first fiddle in what Lopatin rightly calls “a political duet unique in World History”–a duet that, with major and minor variations, lasted from a first letter of Potemkin’s signed “your obedient slave” and posted to “Your Highness” from Field-marshal Prosorovskii’s military camp in 1769 until a last message of Potemkin’s written in a trembling hand from his death bed at Yassy in 1791. Lopatin puts particular emphasis on the private nature of the correspondence: “although it is sometimes impossible strictly to distinguish private from official correspondence (for personal and state matters are interwoven), it should be stressed that the present publication is based on private letters. Because of the importance of their contents, few official documents (not more than twenty to twenty-five) have been enclosed.” It is on Catherine’s and Potemkin’s intimacy, therefore, that their editor has lavished all his industry and concern, assiduously tracing in and through different archives every familiar letter and note that passed between them. He has also painstakingly organized the material into chronological order, having identified and dated all the notes written during those periods when the correspondents lived close enough to each other in Petersburg or in Tsarskoje Selo to dispense with the formality of place and date.

Lopatin, currently the sole expert in Potemkin’s handwriting, has returned to decipher the original for each and every letter, even when a published version was extant. Only with the few exceptions where originals could not be located did he rely on earlier publications. And the conviction of dealing throughout with material transcribed directly from autograph manuscripts in private and public archives in turn underwrites the authenticity of Lopatin’s enterprise for the reader.

From reading physically to reading critically, Lopatin also takes time out from his discussion of the cultural significance of the correspondence to reflect upon the literary merits of Catherine’s and Potemkin’s respective styles, and to confront the historical cliché of the Empress’s poor ability in Russian grammar: We should remember that Catherine only came to Russia at the age of fifteen, when she was obliged to learn Russian. On the evidence of her letters she has indeed mastered the language, expressing her thoughts and feelings in Russian with facility. The orthography and syntax of her letters are, admittedly, far from perfect, but still the structure of her language is clear and easy to understand. Catherine’s and Potemkin’s letters, written as a rule without any drafts and crossings out, convey their vivid, spoken Russian. Potemkin’s speech . . . is clear, refined and fluent. . . His style is at once energetic and precise. From these stylistic observations, Lopatin characteristically moves to the almost Platonic idea of Catherine and Potemkin as complementing one another in essential and occult ways: “the methodical, intensely focussed Empress on the one hand and, on the other, the Russian nobleman speculating and imagining on a grand scale.”

This complementarity of Lopatin’s two lovers and the intimacy between them that he assumes are to some extent contingent upon the revolutionary piece of ‘evidence’ he has to offer of Catherine’s and Potemkin’s marriage. In a hypothetical reconstruction based on Catherine’s addressing Potemkin as “Mon mari”, “Mon cher et bien aime Epoux”, and “Cher Epoux” (letters 430, 434) and on her mention of “the sacred bonds” that linked them forever (letter 434), Lopatin envisages this secret marriage between the two having taken place on the 8 July 1774, in the Church of St. Samsonii. There are also other revisionary gestures: Lopatin reconstructs a dramatic story of solitude and betrayal darkening Catherine’s younger days, for example, one sketched in a confessional letter to Potemkin, where Lopatin concludes that while her first child, the future Paul I, was undoubtedly fathered by by Count Saltykov, her last child, Elizabeth Kalageorgi née Temkina (1775), was born into wedlock with Potemkin.

The revision of Catherine’s and Potemkin’s epistolary heritage that together with a comprehensive critical apparatus plays the part of an epilogue, for example, reflects a depth and extent of historical, literary, and genealogical resources. His command of the detail of Catherine’s life and milieu is impressive and his knowledge of–not to say devotion to–eighteenth-century history and art, and of and to Russian genealogy in particular, shines out of his writing.

This knowledge and devotion were no doubt encouraged by his companion for many years, the Moscow art collector and genealogist Jurii Borisovich Shmarov (1898-1990), whom Lopatin figured in his documentary film on Suvorov with a copy of Novikov’s Barhatnaja kniga (the massive study of eighteenth-century Russian genealogy) in his hand. Shmarov was one of the illuminati of the “keepers of antiquity”, a small circle of enthusiastic archivists in Moscow to which the two belonged, and an expert in rare, pre-revolutionary editions on Russian history and genealogy–editions like Russkaja Portretnaja Galereja (A Gallery of Russian Portraits), 1887, and Russkii Portrety (Russian Portraits), published in 1905-1909 by Grand Duke Nickolay Mikhailovich in collaboration with the leading Russian genealogist Chulkov, to mention only two–all of which could be found in his library.

Not surprisingly, then, the illustrations Lopatin has used in this book are also impressive, including portraits of the young Catherine, her children, and members of the Empress’s and Potemkin’s inner circle; of her courtiers and fellow European monarchs and politicians. Some of the images of this vast collection of Catherineana are well enough known, admittedly, but some are genuine rarities, like the portrait of the Princess Dashkov as Director of St. Petersburg Academy of Arts painted by Levitskii in 1784 from a private collection in Moscow.

Lopatin claims that he is not trying to solve dynastic riddles or encourage historical scandal; however, his supposition on Catherine’s marriage to Potemkin gives a new perspective, not only on Catherine herself, but also on her persona as sole Empress of Russia and on her reign as a political phenomenon. More than on any other issue of serious Russian and European scholarship, it is on the question of whether or not Potemkin was Catherine’s effective co-regent that Lopatin’s study has the potential to effect a radical reinterpretation. For whatever interested or disinterested reasons, his own money is on the Empress’s “Cher Epoux”: “These letters provide evidence that Potemkin’s ‘friend and mentor’ deferred to his authority when she sought her husband’s and co-ruler’s advice in situations that were difficult for Russia.” Not a fashionable or “politically correct” conclusion when scholars are busy rewriting women back into history, perhaps, but even if we refuse to accept any radical attenuation of her power, Lopatin’s romantic, humanizing revision of Catherine the Great should give us pause.

Women’s Reading in Britain 1750-1835: A Dangerous Recreation

Jacqueline Pearson’s book is a valuable work. It is brimming with quotation after quotation about the experience of reading in the eighteenth century. It concentrates on women reading, though not exclusively so, for she presents a broad picture of people reading—children, men, women, families, the rich, and the poor. As Pearson states in her conclusion, she was herself astounded by the many literary references to women reading that were to be found: “The woman reader is a key icon for this period” (219-220). Her book proves her assertion to be true, and she makes abundantly clear how reading began to be woven into the fabric of women’s lives.

Pearson has searched high and low, in the canon of great works and outside of it, to come up with a treasure trove of eighteenth-century texts that present women reading. Canonical authors such as Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen are discussed with considerable expertise, as are lesser- known writers. The book also gives special attention to women writers like Mary Robinson and Charlotte Smith, and Pearson notes that many female readers gravitated to books written by other women. The Lady’s Magazine is a major source for this book, and it provides a good way to gauge public opinion about different views on women’s reading. It would have been helpful if Pearson had written about the publication history of this periodical and about its readership, since it is a resource that she calls about so frequently. The same is true for some of the lesser known books that she cites. For instance, the novel Emily by Henry Kept (63) is referred to on several occasions, so Pearson could have provided a plot summary and biographical sketch of its author.

Although her focus is on fiction, she examines different categories of reading material, such as the Bible, scientific works, classical texts, foreign languages, and philosophy. Pearson collects examples of the many ways that the act of reading has been viewed, ranging from a sign of idleness to a sign of the “proper performance of religious duties” (7). The strongest sections of the book tend to be those dealing at some length with the work of a particular author. Her sections on Ann Radcliffe (100-05), Elizabeth Carter (137-142), and Charlotte Lennox (201-06) are especially strong. Through her wide-ranging examples, Pearson shows that this was a time when “the learned lady” was sometimes praised and sometimes stigmatized (15); a time when “fondness for reading” (101) did not always qualify one to be a heroine (87).

In some places, there are so many examples from different books joined together that the effect is rather dizzying, with not enough attention paid to chronology or to the differences between the texts. Often several sources might be used over the course of a few sentences, but there will only be one endnote for them all, which means that one has to count through the citations and guess which source applies to which quotation. For instance, note number 24 on page 228 cites five different items: an edition of Samuel Richardson’s letters, a book about Richardson, an article about another writer, an edition of Claris, and an edition of Richardson’s letters. Sometimes critics who are quoted are not named in the text, but only in the endnote, with phrases from a few different critics being joined together to make up one sentence.

Nonetheless, Pearson’s subject matter is fascinating, and she looks at the “pleasures and perils of reading” (87, 122) from many different perspectives. Even the physical perils are dealt with—she identifies several literary references to fires started when someone was reading by candlelight (107, 217). Reading also created a minefield of moral issues, particularly in relationship to the novel. There was good reading material and there was bad reading material, but opinion varied on some books (Fielding’s Tom Jones is cited as an example). Elizabeth Carter, who enjoyed Fielding’s novels, was known for her own extensive reading, but she refused to read “Voltaire, Rousseau, or other French sceptics: “ ‘I should as soon think of playing with a toad or a viper, as of reading such blasphemy and impiety’” (139). Carter’s friend Elizabeth Montagu disagreed with her on the subject, but, even so, one is impressed by Carter’s firm stance.

Pearson’s book functions something like a reference work, with its collection of quotations. A little known story about Samuel Johnson is an especially good find. He is quoted as saying “Turn your daughter loose into your library.” If only this encouraging quotation were as well known as Boswell’s pejorative anecdote about a woman preaching. On this front, Pearson joins other scholars (such as James Basker, Norma Clarke, Isobel Grundy, Kathleen Nulton Kemmerer, and Alvaro Ribeiro) who have been modifying critical perceptions of Johnson’s views of women and literature. The anecdote that Pearson uses comes from the memoirs of Frances Sheridan, who was worried that Johnson would think she let her daughter read anything. Frances Sheridan said she kept

‘from her all such books as are not calculated, by their moral tendency, for the perusal of youth. ‘” Johnson disagreed: “ ‘Then you are a fool, madam! . . . Turn your daughter loose into your library; if she is well inclined, she will choose only nutritious food; if otherwise, all your precautions will avail nothing to prevent her following the natural bent of her inclinations.’ (42)

This is a wonderful story to discuss in light of Johnson’s Rambler No. 4. It is one of the many memorable anecdotes to be found in Jacqueline Pearson’s book, and no doubt her own readers will be going to the library to find out more about the intriguing sources she has discussed in this useful study.

Mighty Lewd Books: The Development of Pornography in Eighteenth-Century England

Julie Peakman’s Mighty Lewd Books is the first attempt to give a comprehensive overview over erotic material in eighteenth-century England since Peter Wagner’s magisterial Eros Revived in 1988, and as such it is welcome. Furthermore, Peakman’s book is impressive in the depth and breadth of her research—the bibliography of primary sources lists over 200 works for a book of about 200 pages of text. The author’s contention that British pornography was different from its French counterpart in its focus on the transgression of family values is probably true, and her fascination with flagellation is interesting. At the same time, Peakman’s argument could have been stronger if she had presented less taxonomy and more analysis.

At the beginning of Mighty Lewd Books, Peakman defines her topic, analyzes the literary scene (with respect to pornography), and explores some themes. In the vexing discussion over terms, she defines ‘erotica’ as material that describes sexual desire by insinuation and ‘pornography’ as literature that intends to excite the reader sexually—a pragmatic, if theoretically untenable, distinction. Describing the literary marketplace, Peakman shows that erotica would have been available in all parts of England, to members of all classes, and to both genders—she even documents that some women were involved in the production of pornographic literature. However, her suggestion that all classes and both genders did actually read erotica is not necessarily supported by these facts. In terms of themes, Peakman is most interested in bodily fluids, which men were supposedly in charge of, while women lacked control. More specifically, erotic and pseudo-medical texts reveled in menstrual blood and blushes as well as genital fluids—but not breast milk.

In the rest of Mighty Lewd Books, Peakman offers a detailed taxonomy of erotic literature, distinguishing between ‘scientific’ erotica, sexual utopias, anti-Catholic erotica, and flagellation pornography. For example, erotica responded to developments in three separate fields of science in the 1730s, 1750s, and 1770s, respectively, to produce botanical, reproductive, and electrical erotica. In the first instance, works like Thomas Stretser’s Arbor Vitae (1732) and Frutex Vulvaria (1732) used botanical metaphors to portray sexualized bodies—men as trees, women as shrubs. Erotica dealt with second area by engaging in the discussions over the importance of the two genders in reproduction and over the necessity of female orgasm for reproduction. At opposite extreme of most ‘scientific’ findings, Lucina Since Concubita (1750) affirmed the importance of female pleasure and even suggested that men might be unnecessary for conception. Finally, such works as The Torpedo (1774) and The Electrical Eel (1777) raised questions about conception and pleasure. Similarly, sexual utopias responded to three major changes in the British landscape in the eighteenth century—enclosures, designer gardens, and the exploration of the world—by developing into agricultural, topographical, and nautical erotica. Anti-Catholic erotica came in four main forms: polemics against priests and the church, reports of priests’ trials, convent narratives, and French anti-clerical pornographic novels.

As these examples show, Peakman has an astounding command of her material and classifies it in a way that helps the reader get a handle on the otherwise overwhelming amount of publications. However, Peakman’s focus on taxonomy does not always contribute to a better understanding of the texts. For instance, it might have been more helpful to organize the chapter on scientific developments around the scientific controversies: As it is, the topics of conception and female pleasure come up in all three sections in almost identical form, but are not assessed or discussed critically in a central argument. Also, interesting ideas such as challenges to gender hierarchy in pornography get lost because they are spread over a variety of material. Rhetorically, the book similarly over-organized, each chapter ending in a section titled “Conclusion.” Transitions like, “Having looked at… the next section will explore…,” could have been more elegant.

These criticisms apply least to the last section, where Peakman investigates what is clearly her main interest, erotica on flagellation. Various forms of such sexual violence were visible in eighteenth-century English society as wife- or maid-beating, as birching in schools, and as a cure for impotence suggested in pseudo-medical literature. In addition, there was at least one instance of a legal case involving flagellation. In the last quarter of the century, these facts spilled into the fictional mode to form the subgenre of flagellation pornography, which was prominent until about the 1830s. Major aspects of flagellation pornography included blood as an essential ingredient; plot location in schools and parlors; governesses, mothers, and stepmothers as conservative major characters making the works more disciplinarian and almost incestuous; and dress such as purple gloves and nosegays advertising the sexual predilection. In this material, two developments come into focus that constitute the most important findings of Might Lewd Books. First, erotica on flagellation expose such parts of the body as thighs, buttocks, and forearms, so pleasure no longer resided exclusively in the genitals and in coitus—a development that points straight to sexual fetishes analyzed in later centuries. Secondly, this material shows the interesting ideological negotiation of much eighteenth-century pornography: On the one hand, it was mostly conservative, representing sexuality as a threat, but on the other, it displayed a transgression of moral values, particularly the ideal of the family, making it radical. It is not always easy to find these kinds of critical insights in Mighty Lewd Books, but their occasional presence—as well as Peakman’s encyclopedic knowledge—makes the book worthwhile overall.

“There are no Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime

Through an anecdote that forms the first and last words in “There Are No Slaves in France,” Sue Peabody relates that, even in contemporary France, the mere suggestion that slavery once existed in the hexagon, evokes indignant outrage. In their effort to project a commitment to “liberty,” the judicial and legislative institutions of the ancien régime endeavored to confine slavery to France’s colonies across the Atlantic. As Peabody reminds us, though, these same institutions very consciously and calculatedly introduced a more enduring and pernicious legacy, racism.

Just how sensitivities over slavery morphed into a spate of racist laws in the eighteenth-century is at the crux of Peabody’s work. Though it was published eight years ago, “There Are No Slaves in France” remains the only English-language text to synthesize an examination of slavery and race in ancien régime France. If this were the work’s only value, it would fill a rather large lacuna in the literature on the period. However, “There Are No Slaves in France” situates the subject within the philosophical currents of the time and the conflict between the Parlement of Paris and the monarchy that gnawed at the fabric of the ancien régime until it unraveled in the French Revolution.

In 1685, the same year that he revoked the Edict of Nantes, Louis XIV spread Catholicism to slaves in French colonies through his issuance of the Code Noir. Comprised of sixty articles, the Code also restricted whatever freedoms slaves had and regulated the behavior of their masters. Slavery, however, did not exist in France; according to the “Freedom Principle,” a colonial slave became a free individual once s/he touched French soil. It was not until 1716 that a royal edict, produced by the regency government, addressed the status of slaves on French soil. According to the terms of the Edict of 1716, slave masters could bring their slaves to France without fear of the latter claiming their freedom provided the slave owner fulfilled certain procedural requirements. In addition, they had to affirm that they brought their slaves to France either for religious instruction or occupational training. The edict, however, remained in an ambiguous state, as the Parlement of Paris (whose jurisdiction covered nearly one-third of the kingdom). If unregistered, enforceability of an edict was, at best, a dubious proposition, especially since the Admiralty Court of France (which maintained appellate jurisdiction from provincial admiralty courts, the juridical authority over colonial affairs) did not recognize a royal order that was not registered by the Parlement of Paris.

As discussed by Peabody, the reticence of the Parlement of Paris to register the Edict of 1716 and the royal Declaration of 1738 (which provided that slaves whose masters did not follow procedure were no longer to be granted their freedom in France, but to be confiscated au profit du roi and deported to the West Indies where they would either labor at public works or be sold into slavery) were, in all likelihood, manifestations of a larger conflict over spheres of authority between Parlement and the monarchy. Parlement’s response to the royal orders on the status of slaves in France was the residuum from its dispute with the monarchy over the latter’s enforcement of the Papal Bull Unigenitus that condemned the Jansenists, and Parlement’s defense of the dissident sect. In its consideration of both Jansenism and slavery, the Parlement of Paris positioned itself as the defender of France’s historic liberties.

In the cases examined by Peabody, lawyers for the slaves persuasively advanced France’s historical antipathy towards slavery as underpinning their clients’ claims to freedom. However, as Peabody explains, their arguments were based on a “national myth of liberty,” that had no basis in reality. Whether the judges who granted freedom to the petitioning slaves were swayed by this argument, or premised their rulings on either the slave owners’ non-compliance with procedures or the ambiguous legal state of the unregistered Edict or Declaration, is impossible to determine. On the other hand, in at least one case arising in a jurisdiction where the regional parlement (at Rennes) registered the Declaration of 1738, the Admiralty Court at Nantes (within Rennes’s jurisdiction) enforced it in ordering a petitioner-slave deported au profit du roi to the West Indies.

The vast majority of cases that came within the jurisdiction of the Parlement of Paris resulted in the petitioning slaves being granted their freedom; but because ancien régime magistrates rarely coupled their decisions with legal findings, lawyers navigated the juridical wilderness with creative arguments. In Francisque v. Brignon, a 1759 case before the Parlement of Paris, counsel for an enslaved native of India raised the race card in arguing that qualitative differences based on physical characteristics, history, and geography between natives of Africa and the Indian subcontinent justified the enslavement of the former and the freedom of the latter.

The foregoing case coincided with a shift in the emphasis in discourse on slavery from freedom to race. Though the number of enslaved and freed nonwhites in France was extraordinarily small (estimated by Peabody to be between 4,000 and 5,000 for the entire century), in 1762, the procureur du roi, Poncat de la Grave, warned of rising numbers of nonwhites and the perils posed by multiracialism, referring to it as disfiguring the French nation. However, not all nonwhites were disdained equally. On one level, Poncat de la Grave’s concerns were rooted in a foucauldian model of sexualized discourse. On another level, though, his statement that “every bourgeois and worker has his slave,” could be interpreted as trepidation over the obliteration of ancien régime signifiers of social distinctions. Regardless, though, after 1762, previous outrage over efforts to transport the institution of slavery to France transmogrified into fear of repercussions over the presence of nonwhites in France.

As the focus shifted from the status of slaves to the identity of nonwhites, Louis XVI produced, in 1777, the final piece of legislation covered by Peabody, the Déclaration pour la police des Noirs. This law prohibited the entry of all nonwhites into France, and affirmed that slaves brought to France by their masters before the law’s promulgation could not initiate proceedings for freedom. In contrast to the laws of 1716 and 1738, the Parlement of Paris registered the Declaration of 1777; yet, as Peabody states, while even the most determined supporters of freedom wanted to rid France of the nonwhite population that served as a constant reminder of slavery, the Admiralty court judges continued to free slaves who brought suit for their freedom. Within a decade and half, however, royal decrees on slavery and race, as well as the court system of the ancien régime, were amongst the casualties of the new sensibilities and institutions ushered in by the French Revolution.

In the final analysis, “’There Are No Slaves in France’” is a study in the tensions that simmered beneath the surface of eighteenth-century France; institutional tension reflected by Parlement’s claim to represent the last rampart in defense of liberty and the philosophical tension that pit liberty against equality. In Peabody’s view, the Parlement of Paris’s position on slavery was, an extension of its stance against royal despotism, enlightened or otherwise, in other matters. After René Maupeou instituted his infamous judicial reforms of 1771-1774 at Parlement’s expense, lawyers who represented slaves seeking freedom, whether their motivatation was financial, reputational, or ideological considerations, refused to practice law. Parlement and its defenders believed the conflict could be confined within the parameters of the ancien régime, but they failed to realize the enormity of the subtext. In the end, the forces they unleashed were inevitably bound to yield results, during the century’s closing decade, more profound than they imagined or desired.

However, there is a more subtle point, one implied, but not directly stated in Peabody’s study. Throughout the eighteenth century, liberty was the watchword of the enlightened community, and opposition to slavery, regardless of the identity of the slave, was something of a litmus test. When the slavery morphed into race, and elimination of the root (the presence of nonwhites in France) meant elimination of the branch (the prospect for slavery in France), advocates of freedom did not transform into defenders of racial equality. If we project the base of this argument onto the French Revolution, we are afforded a portal into the thought processes that influenced the revolutionaries to privilege liberty over equality as the revolutionary project’s most identifiable and pervasive principle.bedeviled

In conclusion none of this is to say what is unstated is the strongest point of the book. On the contrary; while Peabody’s study is a lucid presentation of the struggle over slavery in eighteenth century France through its legislative history, cultural antecedents, and court cases, it is also an invaluable examination into the processes that so thoroughly enveloped slavery and race in the larger context of the contentious political and judicial culture of the last decades of the ancien régime.

Making a Prince’s Museum: Drawings for the Late-Eighteenth-Century Redecoration of the Villa Borghese

The Galleria Borghese, located in the casino of the Villa Borghese on the Pincian Hill in Rome, is one of the world’s foremost museums today. Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew of Pope Paul V (r. 1605-21), commissioned the casino and grounds of the villa and formed a collection of Old Master paintings and sculpture (including works by Raphael, Titian, Caravaggio, and Bernini) that remains on view to this day. The present appearance of the casino is, however, the product of a late-eighteenth-century renovation commissioned by Prince Marcantonio IV Borghese and executed by the architect Antonio Asprucci. As Carole Paul demonstrates in her recent study, Asprucci integrated a decorative program with the exhibition of statuary, both ancient and modern, creating a design that was strikingly innovative; at the same time, the aims of the patron, Prince Marcantonio, closely resembled those of his seicento ancestors. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Borghese used their villa to assert and display their family’s preeminent position in Rome’s cultural and political life.

In the era of Paul V the Borghese family was relatively new to Rome, having arrived from Siena in the second quarter of the sixteenth century. With the papal election of 1605, the Borghese climbed to the highest rank in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The papacy brought this modest, foreign clan wealth and power, but it remained the task of the cardinal-nephew, Scipione, to use these newfound riches to secure for the Borghese a permanent position among the Roman aristocracy, one that would outlast the temporary glories of St. Peter’s throne. The acquisition of land and titles, the arrangement of marriage alliances, and the conspicuous display of artistic patronage were essential to social ascent. Forming collections of fine works of art was central to the projection of aristocratic identity. By emulating ancient Roman rituals of villeggiatura and the collecting practices often associated with villa life, as they did at their Pincian estate, the Borghese demonstrated not only their wealth but also their sophistication, taste, and erudition. A collection of antiquities that featured classical gods, heroes, and rulers reinforced Borghese claims to ancient Roman, rather than Sienese, ancestry.

More generally Marcantonio IV came of age at a time when the position of the Borghese family, and that of the Roman aristocracy, was uneasy. After two centuries of prosperity, sustained by their extensive rural landholdings, the Borghese faced a series of setbacks as financial crises swept the Italian peninsula. By renovating the Villa Borghese, Marcantonio hoped to bolster the family image, to reaffirm its nobility and romanitas. Asprucci’s project included the redecoration of the walls, floors, and ceilings of the casino, as well as the reinstallation of a large group of antiquities on the ground floor. This collection, mainly formed by Cardinal Scipione in the early decades of the seventeenth century, remained in place very briefly. In 1807 Marcantonio’s heir, Camillo, sold the majority of the antiquities to Napoleon for the Louvre. Despite Camillo’s attempts to retrieve his collection after the fall of Napoleon, many jewels, such as the Borghese Gladiator, remain in Paris today.

Beautifully illustrated with fifty-eight halftones and twelve color plates, Paul’s book, published by the Getty Research Institute to accompany an exhibition mounted in the summer of 2000, reconstructs Asprucci’s important, but little studied, renovation of the Borghese casino. The exhibition featured a group of preparatory drawings held by the Getty, which Paul used to analyze Asprucci’s decorative scheme and to reconstruct the placement of the antiquities prior to their removal to the Louvre. Paul’s long essay is accompanied by a catalog of drawings (a selection from a larger cache pertaining to the renovation) and by a short essay by Alberta Campitelli that describes Marcantonio’s commission for a second museum, the Museo di Gabii, which was designed to house antiquities discovered during excavations at a nearby Borghese property in the countryside.

Paul demonstrates that Asprucci devised a decorative ensemble for the ground floor rooms of the casino that was exceptionally cohesive in both form and content. Asprucci unified walls embellished with architectural motifs, stucco bas-reliefs, gilded decorations, painted panels, heraldic devices, and niches for statuary with rich marble pavements and ceilings decorated with narrative frescoes, and he tied the decorations thematically to the statuary that he selected for each room. The result was a visual panegyric that glorified the Borghese as descendants of the ancient Romans, in particular the great founders of the city, while offering lessons to future progeny, such as the young Camillo, in princely virtues. Although the practice of collecting and the creation of statuary programs that made genealogical claims were deeply rooted in Renaissance villa life, as Paul shows in the first section of her essay, Asprucci’s ensemble had no direct precedents and played a significant role in the rise of the modern public museum, in particular the Louvre. Paul notes that coordinated decorative programs were relatively common in baroque Italy prior to Asprucci’s design for the Borghese casino, especially fresco cycles designed to unify suites of rooms. However permanent decorations and moveable objects meant for display had never been fully integrated. Those models that did exist for Asprucci’s design, such as the Casino Albani in Rome, lacked both the tight formal unity and the thematic complexity achieved at the Villa Borghese.

The Louvre was the first public art museum in France. Napoleon not only acquired the lion’s share of the Borghese collection of antiquities, but he also employed the former Borghese antiquarian, Ennio Quirinio Visconti, to supervise the installation of antiquities there. In Paris, as in the Borghese casino in Rome, the decoration of museum spaces was integrated with the exhibition of precious objects; specifically, ceiling decorations and groupings of statuary were connected thematically. A formally unified scheme also served a didactic purpose. But, rather than serving the political and social aspirations of a princely dynasty, it was redeployed, writes Paul, “for the education of the ideal citizen, and the glory that the prince’s museum had accrued to the noble patron instead redounded to the state” (p. 88). Paris was portrayed as the new Rome, the center of Western art and civilization in the modern world.

In concluding her essay, Paul highlights the broader museological significance of the scheme Asprucci devised for the Borghese. In the late eighteenth century, an enlightened patron and his architect succeeded, for the first time, in creating a princely display of antiquities that anticipated many of the guiding principles of modern museums, including the necessity of providing ample lighting, of arranging well organized installations, and of designing coordinated programs meant both to please and to instruct. Paul’s book is essential reading for all those interested in this important transition from the princely collection to the public museum.

The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood: Essays on Her Life and Work

At last, this long-awaited volume of essays has arrived. Saxton and Bocchicchio’s edition is the first critical book-length study devoted entirely to Eliza Haywood, and hopefully it is the forerunner of many to come. Thirteen thought-provoking essays, plus an introduction, illustrations and bibliography make this a valuable volume. Most of the essays are historicized studies or concerned with Haywood’s engagement with or reworking of popular novelistic forms and writers. Studies of politics, parody, imitation, fiction-making, and exoticism among other themes successfully demonstrate that Haywood merits, withstands, and rewards close critical examination. Saxton and Bocchicchio’s excitement about the possibilities for Haywood criticism is infectious and most of the scholars in this collection match the editors’ enthusiasm in their critical offerings. The collection considers Eliza Haywood’s “passionate fictions” chronologically, ranging from one essay on her first novel, Love in Excess, through her often studied Fantomina and The British Recluse, her lesser known scandal novels, exotic tales, and histories, to three critical considerations of her 1751 domestic novel, The History of Betsy Thoughtless. Rounding out this excellent reconfiguring of Eliza Haywood and her works are two essays on what contemporary perceptions of Haywood and her imagined readers represented in the fashioning of the literary canon.

The first essay establishes the direction of the volume. In “The Story of Eliza Haywood’s Novels: Caveats and Questions,” Paula R. Backscheider states that it is time to rewrite Haywood’s “story.” It is no longer acceptable simply to assess Haywood’s long career as “mercenary and bipolar” (43). We must ask how we can connect Haywood’s texts of the 1720s and the 1750s in meaningful ways; and we need to give her work more primacy in the history of the novel rather than seeing it as derivative or reactive. In a broad summary of Haywood’s texts, Backscheider shows how Haywood was innovative in her style and themes and continued to develop concerns, motifs and forms throughout her career. As the essays in this collection prove, Backscheider’s questions are being addressed: Haywood is taken seriously as an original writer and she has been discovered as a skillful author with specific social, political and literary interests.

Many of the articles in this collection demonstrate how Haywood was concerned with the fictionality of social and cultural institutions and how she used her own fictions to expose those artificial constructions. Margaret Case Croskery’s “Masquing Desire: The Politics of Passion in Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina,” is a rewarding new perspective on a tale that has long been the focus of feminist criticism. Croskery looks not only at the “politics of seduction [but also] the shared contingencies of social and narrative fictions” (70), contending that Haywood destabilizes the gendered dichotomy of the victor/vanquished paradigm to unmask its inadequacies. As the heroine dons her many masks to keep the interest of her lover, she manipulates her role as “other” to create and celebrate alternative social fictions for herself. Dealing with another popular text, Rebecca P. Bocchicchio’s “’Blushing, Trembling, and Incapable of Defense’: The Hysterics of The British Recluse” rewrites Spacks’s and Ballaster’s earlier interpretations of Haywood’s hysterical heroines. Using eighteenth-century formulations of hysteria, Bocchicchio exposes the destructive power for women of the conflict between social constructions of “female” (insatiably desiring) and “feminine” (the complete absence of desire). Haywood uses the “hysterical overpresence” of her heroines to show that it is not a “naturally feminine” condition (102). Cleomira’s and Belinda’s stories of their hysteria enable them to articulate their histories, using the debilitating condition productively. However, their ending is not optimistic: they remove themselves entirely from the conflict between the female and the feminine. This is “an evasion rather than a solution, and this text can offer no answers for the desiring woman” (112). Also concerned with fictional depictions of women and how they attempt to negotiate their reactions to a hostile world is Kirsten T. Saxton’s stimulating “Telling Tales: Eliza Haywood and the Crimes of Seduction in The City Jilt, or, the Alderman turn’d Beau.” Saxton demonstrates how Haywood, through satire, her reworking of the romance and the Southern European revenge novel, and her destabilization of narrative cohesion “unsettles patriarchal fictions of law, heterosexual romance, and textual authority” (117).

Particularly welcome in this volume are the studies of four of some lesser-studied works by Haywood. In “’A Race of Angels’: Castration and Exoticism in Three Exotic Tales by Eliza Haywood,” Jennifer Thorn tracks Haywood’s representation and development of these compelling motifs in a tale from Letters from the Palace of Fame, “The History of Montrano and Iseria” from The Fruitless Enquiry, and Philidore and Placentia. Thorn presents Haywood’s “dream of non-gendered, because non-reproductive, individual autonomy” as well as the idea of the patriarchal European “race” played against “the Orient as liberating” (191; 190). Felicity Nussbaum’s study of Haywood’s foray into the cultural phenomenon that was Duncan Campbell, “a deaf-mute secular prophet who flourished from 1710 to 1730” (194) is a fascinating piece on the little known A Spy upon the Conjuror and The Dumb Projector. “Speechless: Haywood’s Deaf and Dumb Projector” examines eighteenth-century literature on Campbell for its images of disability and otherness. It compares Haywood’s use of his condition as “an emblem of women writers’ struggles to be heard and their difficulty in articulating that condition” (209). Both essays reveal that Haywood’s works and interests were wide-ranging and that much more study remains to be done before we can truly appreciate the scope of her oeuvre.

Two essays consider the significance of party politics in Haywood’s writing with varying results. “Collusive Resistance: Sexual Agency and Partisan Politics in Love in Excess” by Toni Bowers begins with the controversial and unsubstantiated claim that Haywood’s first novel “functioned in its day as a powerful work of Tory partisan polemic” (48). Concentrating on the virtuous Melliora’s resistance and capitulation throughout the novel, Bowers offers that these actions are “consistent with Tory strategies for constructing ideological integrity and partisan resistance at a difficult time” (49). The reading of Melliora’s relationship with D’Elmont as one of “collusive resistance” or “ideological purity within unavoidable complicity” (63) is an attractive one as far as sexual politics go (though Bowers does not consider the fact that Melliora does love D’Elmont), but it is definitely strained when she adds the dimension of national politics. Without textual or contextual proof to back up her theory, Bowers merely reinterprets Melliora through the now popular move of labeling Haywood (with absolute confidence) a Tory. The essay has some valuable insights about the novel, but the forcibly applied Tory template is unconvincing.

A much more rewarding work is Ros Ballaster’s “A Gender of Opposition: Eliza Haywood’s Scandal Fiction.” Changing her 1992 opinion that Haywood retreated from Behn’s and Manley’s style of figuring “(female) party political agency through sexual political narrative” (143), Ballaster now finds that Haywood effectively used satire, irony, and intertextuality to make her political statements in the 1720s and 1730s. Careful readings of Memoirs of …Utopia, The Secret History of … the Court of Caramania, and Adventures of Eovaai, demonstrate how Haywood used “both imitation and critique” of Alexander Pope’s “Rape of the Lock” and Dunciad to satirize Walpole (151). Ballaster concludes her essay by stating how Haywood cleverly stands the Scriblerians on their heads in her writing: “If the mock-epic identifies a feminized “romance” as undercutting the heroic potential of masculine agency associated with the epic, Haywood’s “mock-romance” [Eovaai] identifies a masculine force of “rigid” interpretation as restricting, perverting, and containing the wayward libidinal affections of female romance” (164). In an essay that creatively dialogizes with Ballaster’s, David Brewer’s “’Haywood,’ Secret History, and the Politics of Attribution” shows what the construction of “Eliza Haywood” meant to writers like Pope and Swift. What Brewer discovers is that the Scriblerians were anxious to distinguish their satires—like Gulliver’s Travels which satirizes political figures like Walpole—from secret histories like Haywood’s. “Prior to the Travels, fictionalized partisan narrative, as a genre, was inextricably bound up with amatory fiction” (231). Brewer makes the case that any popular woman writer—Centlivre or Thomas, for instance—could have stood in for Haywood in the Dunciad. Pope simply needed a signifying “Authoress,” “something of a scapegoat, a figure pilloried in an attempt to distinguish categorically the kind of writing “she” embodies from that engaged in by the Scriblerians” (230).

The next three articles, each examining Betsy Thoughtless in different ways, are complementary as well as contestatory in their juxtaposition. Andrea Austin’s “Shooting Blanks: Potency, Parody, and Eliza Haywood’s The History of Betsy Thoughtless” and David Oakleaf’s “’Shady bowers! and purling streams!—Heavens, how insipid!’: Eliza Haywood’s Artful Pastoral” each examine how Haywood cleverly plays with established literary forms to create her own ironic visions of women and literature. Austin historicizes parody as a masculine form in the eighteenth century, “a type of literary ambition, … and so an act particularly publicly inappropriate for the woman writer” (262). Austin convincingly argues for Haywood’s “flexible use of intertextuality” as the “vehicle for pointed, critical comment, giving the work the effect or purpose of a parody” (264). Her study of Haywood’s techniques of characterization, repetition, imitation and quotation, depict Haywood as an artist thoroughly in control of her material. Like Austin, Oakleaf contends that Haywood artfully uses form for parody. Oakleaf’s essay is scholarly with a light tone as he examines Haywood’s employment of pastoral oppositions in Betsy Thoughtless. Trueworth is proven a dangerous seducer who entices in the role of the pastoral swain; while Betsy’s nymph recognizes the ploy and refuses his offer of pastoral retreat. Haywood’s deconstruction of seductive language proves that women must be careful readers, and readers must be attuned to Haywood’s self-parody. John Richetti’s “Histories by Eliza Haywood and Henry Fielding: Imitation and Adaptation” pits itself against all of the other essays here. Presenting Fielding’s criteria from Tom Jones on how to write a history, Richetti reminds us that by “invention” Fielding meant “a quick and sagacious Penetration into the true Essence of all the Objects of our Contemplation” (241). According to Richetti, Eliza Haywood could not meet Fielding’s criteria. By focusing mainly upon The History of Betsy Thoughtless but with a brief glance at The Fortunate Foundlings and a few others, Richetti suggests that Haywood was “literal-minded and vulgar, lacking true inventiveness” (258).

Christine Blouch’s concluding essay, “’What Ann Lang Read’: Eliza Haywood and her Readers” can be productively juxtaposed with Backscheider’s and Brewer’s presentations of Haywood as author. Blouch examines the political act of gendering and classifying Haywood’s readers that resulted in her exclusion for so long from the literary canon.

Saxton and Bocchicchio have successively compiled an informative and exciting collection of essays on some of the fictions by, and about, Eliza Haywood. In her introduction, Saxton states that Haywood’s works demand “rereadings on multiple fronts” (17) as “Haywood’s experiments with form and theme, her engagement in current socio-political debates, and her breadth of literary accomplishment across the genres combine to make her a crucial figure in eighteenth-century letters” (10-11). The essays in this volume certainly demonstrate that Haywood is a skilful and evocative author who can amply repay close critical readings.

Passion and Virtue: Essays on the Novels of Samuel Richardson

Passion and Virtue: Essays on the Novels of Samuel Richardson is a collection of fourteen essays that first appeared in Eighteenth Century Fiction from 1989-1999. In spanning this decade of ECF’s publication, the scope of the compilation is at once wide-ranging-as it provides a variety of perspectives on each of Richardson’s novels and a sense of some of the major arguments in recent Richardson criticism-and narrow in that the essays contained in the book are primarily contextual or historicized interpretations, with less literary theory informing the readings than one might hope to find. However, this quality does not diminish the significance of the collection to the rapidly growing field of Richardson studies as much as it broadens the scope of its accessibility and usefulness; the complex and often fascinating essays not only offer students a better sense of the eighteenth-century context in which Richardson produced his novels, but also provide students and scholars with complicated, engaging arguments by several influential recent Richardson scholars. While there is a greater concentration on Clarissa scholarship in the volume, the collection includes intriguing essays on Pamela, one study of Pamela II, and several essays on Sir Charles Grandison. Beyond the collection’s other merits, the latter section on Grandison offers a much-needed critical revival of Richardson’s final novel that significantly complicates Richardson scholarship.

The collection considers Samuel Richardson’s novels chronologically, the first section accordingly focused on Pamela. Two essays in this section examine Pamela’s relationship to the politics of print culture. Through an analysis of Pamela’s remarkable literacy and her “textual authority” -specifically the text’s empirical claim to historicity, its emotional veracity and the moral authenticity created by frequent allusion to the Christian bible and to Aesop’s Fables-John Pierce explores the power Pamela gains as both reader and writer in emergent print culture. In “‘Ciceronian Eloquence’: The Politics of Virtue in Richardson’s Pamela,” John Dussinger examines Richardson’s career as a London printer, particularly the years during which Richardson printed “the chief organ of propaganda for the Walpole government-the Daily Gazetteer” – hypothesizing a distinct connection between the political “power of the written word” in Richardson’s career and Pamela’s story (35, 51). Through an analysis of the dynamics of desire and resistance in the novel and in Richardson’s life, Dussinger shows how virtue becomes profitable for both Richardson and Pamela. In a fascinating and highly convincing argument, Albert Rivero examines the placement of the ‘poor Sally Godfrey’ episode in Pamela, reading the novel’s conclusion against the grain Richardson “auspiciously” offers us-the crystalline lessons of Sally’s errors in judgment and a smooth resolution of the plot through her quiet, appropriate disposal-preferring instead to be “suspicious” of the ideological underpinnings inherent in its providential closure and the eleventh-hour revelation of the affair. Finally, Betty Schellenberg’s “Enclosing the Immovable: Structuring Social Authority in Pamela 2” attempts to recover Richardson’s sequel to Pamela from critical disfavor, arguing that what may appear as a lack of vitality in the sequel is in fact Richardson’s formal attempt to “[stabilize] Pamela’s comic plot” and “resolve tensions its author has most often been seen to avoid or mismanage” (75). Schellenberg’s compelling analysis argues that “[t]his purportedly plot-less, directionless” novel functions conservatively to reinvest authority in the figure of Pamela and thus to “[control] the forces of individualistic desire by drawing the other characters into an admiring and imitative orbit around her” where “[p]otentially disruptive social energies . . . are either concentrated according to the terms of Pamela’s discourse or deflected and excluded from her circle” (75-6).

The first three of six articles in the collection’s Clarissa section are primarily concerned with overt political and economic issues of passion and virtue, while the latter three examine the more implicitly ideological religious themes in the novel. In “Protean Lovelace,” Jocelyn Harris sees Clarissa as Richardson’s portrait of two competing philosophies, “Hobbism and Christian Platonism,” drawn between the mutability that characterizes Lovelace and the stability of Clarissa. Harris’s intriguing study analyzes Lovelace’s character through both the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes and the libertine life of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and connects Clarissa with ideologies present in the work of Mary Astell and Edmund Spenser. For Rachel Carnell, it is the political debate between social contract theorist John Locke and divine right apologist Robert Filmer that aptly characterizes Clarissa’s struggle over the tyranny of Lovelace and the Harlowes. In Carnell’s reading, Clarissa’s public, epistolary revelation of both her rape and her family’s hypocrisy allows her to “[redefine] the public sphere not merely as a means of criticizing tyranny in the state but as a means of protesting against abuses of power in the household as well” (133). Ultimately, Carnell argues that Richardson’s novel questions the exclusion of women from the public sphere at the same time that it obscures the fundamentally political nature of “both domestic fiction and the literary public sphere” (134). In a groundbreaking article titled “Is Clarissa Bourgeois Art?,” Daniel Gunn complicates the longstanding critical perception of the novel as an ideological struggle between middle-class and aristocratic values, most prominently asserted by Christopher Hill and Terry Eagleton. Rather, Gunn contends that Clarissa’s morality is best understood in terms of her station as a member of the ruling-class elite and that “Richardson’s achievement, as an ideologue, was to equivocate between two repressive moral ideologies” through which he “helped the eighteenth-century ruling class to reimagine itself, during a period of economic change, without breaking sharply with its most valued traditions” (149-50). Gunn’s engaging argument clearly represents the dynamic nature of Clarissa studies in recent years.

The latter three essays in the Clarissasection pay close attention to religious themes, considering broadly the ways that religion operates ideologically in specific gender and class-related modes. Peggy Thompson explores the ways in which the novel engages several contemporary theories of Christian atonement, concluding that Clarissa’s development as a Christ figure reflects an anti-feminist reinscription of female identity Ellen Pollak calls the “myth of passive womanhood.” In a less innovative essay titled “‘Written in the Heart’: Clarissa and Scripture,” Robert Erickson examines Richardson’s literary and religious influences, finding that the unique posture of a suffering Christian hero who is at once a woman and a writer and the novel’s deployment of the ‘heart’ as a trope rework conventional Old Testament doctrines. Margaret Anne Doody loosens the long-standing traditional reading of the novel as flatly morally didactic and a wholesale endorsement of status quo Christianity. In “The Gnostic Clarissa,” Doody locates a radical Gnostic strand in the novel. Exploring an extensive array of Gnostic source elements within Clarissa, Doody compellingly argues that, “Only by incorporating such a powerful choke-pear as the Gnostic symbolic system could Richardson’s work resist the pressure of what convention and custom had made of Christianity as a set of rules making the poor and women know their place. . . . [T]his cosmic counter-story . . . fights against translating spiritual light into repressions defined as ‘duty'” (224). Doody’s inventive argument considerably revises the conventional assumption that the novel is an unambiguous type of Christian conduct manual.

Critics have long contended that “passion” is a far less prominent theme in Richardson’s final novel Sir Charles Grandison than it is in Pamela and Clarissa, finding in Grandison a “lower emotional pitch” (Blewett 6) than Richardson’s earlier works, due especially to the paradigmatically virtuous male protagonist and the novel’s overt moralizing. The final section of this collection significantly complicates such criticism of the novel, making a case instead for Grandison’s complex engagement with human passions. The titles of the final four essays collectively echo their original contributions to Richardson scholarship-phrases such as “body and character,” “anxiety,” “dialectic of love,” and “language of nature” signal the way in which these essays challenge former critical estimations of Sir Charles Grandison. In “Sir Charles Grandison: Richardson on Body and Character” Juliet McMaster makes a case for Grandison’s popularity among nineteenth century authors such as Jane Austen and George Eliot. McMaster gives detailed textual evidence from the novel to convincingly argue that not only is there an explicitness about the body and desire in Grandison, but that the emphasis is on the desire of female characters such as Harriet and Charlotte. Likewise, Lois Chaber attempts to revise formerly held critical assumptions about the novel, estimations that found Grandison to contain little psychological depth, simple optimism, and flat moral didacticism. Chaber stresses the presence of a sharp anxiety toward “the precariousness of human fate” (279) in Grandison, an anxiety she likens to the Anglican homiletic literature of Richardson’s day, and through her reading effectively refutes traditional criticism of the novel.

In “The Dialectic of Love in Sir Charles Grandison,” Wendy Jones finds that Grandison maps various types of love-romantic, erotic, companionate, sentimental-ultimately representing these categories as a dialectic resolved in the “rational passion” of sentimental love. Jones suggests that the novel is ideologically subversive because Richardson does notendorse emergent companionate marriage wholesale-rather, Richardson shows that the “completely ‘voluntary passion'” of class-based companionate marriage “could never alter the social order” (308). Through the various types of love he portrays in the novel, Richardson sanctions the “erotics of virtue” intrinsic to sentimental love as a kind of marital love that contains the power to subvert rigid social structures. While erotic passion works integrally with personal merit in Jones’ reading of Grandison, George E. Haggerty insists that passion is a virtue only when characters recognize and verbalize such private emotion. Haggerty argues that in learning “the language of nature,” Grandison’s characters are able to “redirect” the private pain or anxiety of their imaginations outward to a public realm, through which act deception is erased and community enhanced (331).

If there is anything lacking from this sweeping examination of contemporary Richardson criticism, it is perhaps less engagement with contemporary literary theory than characterizes much of the other recent work in the field. This does not, however, diminish the quality and significance of its contribution to Richardson scholarship, and in fact enhances its audience significantly-making the text a complex but accessible tool for undergraduate as well as graduate students. Thus, this unique and valuable collection offers a multifaceted, engaging picture of recent Richardson studies and will be an indispensable resource for scholars, teachers and students.