Abstract
Proprietorship shaped identity in premodern Britain. Land ownership determined rights, duties, wealth, and status; consequently, it signified who one was or could be. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, however, property and identity lost their grounding—literally. Along with the eclipse of land ownership as the main arbiter of status, political transformations and commercialization expanded the opportunities for wealth creation and upward mobility, thereby broadening the range of identities a person could conceivably inhabit and bringing into existence such impalpable possessions as copyright, patents, stocks, debt shares, and commercial agreements. The consumer revolution contributed by supplying markers of status to those not to the manor born, even as the enormously expanded but unstable system of debt and credit put such achievements at constant risk, as the South Sea Bubble disaster attested.1 The emergence of “much more variegated, intangible, and peculiar forms” of property, unattached to the web of obligations associated with land, also disrupted the constitutive link between proprietorship and subjectivity, as John Brewer and Susan Staves argue. We associate “different entitlements to property or the ownership of different kinds of property” with different sorts of people, they note, providing examples that could supply the (male) character list for many early British novels: “the confident, perhaps presuming heir of primogeniture in contrast to the worried, perhaps envious, younger brother; or the independent-minded, public-spirited landowner in contrast to the servile, self-interested city lawyer or stockbroker.”2
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Notes
See Margot C. Finn], The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 20
Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982)
John Brewer and Roy Porter, Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993)
James Cruise, Governing Consumption: Needs and Wants, Suspended Characters, and the “Origins” of Eighteenth-Century English Novels (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1999)
Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997)
Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behavior and Material Culture in Britain, 1660–1760 (London: Routledge, 1988).
John Brewer and Susan Staves, “Introduction,” Early Modern Conceptions of Property, eds Brewer and Staves (New York, London: Routledge, 1995), 1–18
Frances Ferguson, “Reading Morals: Locke and Rousseau on Education and Inequality,” Representations 6 (1984), 66–84
Michael McKeon, drawing upon Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 5–6
Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Helen Thompson, Ingenuous Subjection: Compliance and Power in the Eighteenth-CenturyDomesticNovel(Philadelphia: UniversityofPennsylvania Press, 2005), 2–3.
Ruth Perry, Novel Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 46.
Anny Sadrin, Parentage and Inheritance in the Novels of Charles Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 7
April London, Women and Property in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3.
Donna Dickenson, Property, Women, and Politics: Subjects or Objects? (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 21.
George Levine, Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 2.
See H. J. Habakkuk, Marriage, Debt, and the Estates System: English Landownership 1650–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 6–14
Eileen Spring, Law, Land, and Family: Aristocratic Inheritance in England, 1330 to 1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 14–16.
Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 5.
J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 389.
See Sean Gaston, Derrida and Disinterest (London, New York: Continuum, 2005), vii
Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 89.
Amelia Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 6.
Mary Hays, The Victim ofPrejudice, ed. Eleanor Ty (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1998), 6.
Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobree (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 282.
Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 346.
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© 2009 Virginia H. Cope
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Cope, V.H. (2009). Introduction. In: Property, Education, and Identity in Late Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230239548_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230239548_1
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