Abstract
Eighteenth-century sensibility is linked inescapably to the econ-omic. The classic sentimental tableau, such as this set piece in Bedlam from Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), in which the spectator weeps at another’s distress, is based not simply on feeling, but on feeling and money: money which the spectator generally has, and which the object of his or her gaze does not. The centrality of feeling in fiction labelled ‘sentimental’ has long been a commonplace of criticism, but the link with the economic has been largely neglected. Yet sensibility manifests itself again and again economically and in situations of financial delicacy and exigency. Mary Collyer, popular sentimental novelist of the 1740s, wrote (with a telling lack of either finesse or irony) of ‘drying up the tears of the distressed with money’.2 Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison quite consciously uses the response to financial generosity as a barometer of moral worth. The possibility of reformation in his ward’s wayward mother is confirmed by her new husband’s speechlessness and tears on being presented with a large banknote: ‘He hurried out, and when he was in the hall, wiped his eyes, and sobbed like a child. ’3
She stretched out her hand to Harley; he pressed it between both of his, and bathed it with his tears. — ‘Nay, that is Billy’s ring,’ said she, ‘you cannot have it, indeed; but here is another, look here, which I plaited to-day of some gold-thread from this bit of stuff; will you keep it for my sake? I am a strange girl; — but my heart is harmless: my poor heart! it will burst some day; feel how it beats.’ — She press’d his hand to her bosom, then holding her head in the attitude of listening — ‘Hark! one, two, three! be quiet, thou little trembler; my Billy’s is cold! — but I had forgotten the ring.’ — She put it on his finger. — ‘Farewel! I must leave you now.’ — She would have withdrawn her hand; Harley held it to his lips. — ‘I dare not stay longer; my head throbs sadly: farewel!’ — She walked with a hurried step to a little apartment at some distance. Harley stood fixed in astonishment and pity! his friend gave money to the keeper. — Harley looked on his ring. — He put a couple of guineas into the man’s hand: ‘Be kind to that un-fortunate’ — He burst into tears, and left them.1
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Notes
Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (1771; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 34–5.
Mary Collyer, Letters from Felicia to Charlotte (1744–9; rpt 2 vols, London: R. Baldwin, 1755), vol. I, pp. 5–6.
Samuuel Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), vol. IV, Letter ix, p. 311.
As James Thompson points out in Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 4.
Examples of earlier treatment of economic aspects of eighteenth-century literature include the now classic work of Maximillian E. Novak, Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962)
and more recent studies such as Mona Scheuermann, Her Bread to Earn: Women, Money and Society from Defoe to Austen (Lexington, KY: Kentucky University Press, 1993),
Colin Nicholson, Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
and Edward Copeland, Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England 1790–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
As Mary Poovey has commented, in the course of the eighteenth century, ‘sentimental virtues were increasingly identified as feminine virtues’ (‘Ideology and The Mysteries of Udolpho’, Criticism, 21 [1979], pp. 308–9), while in The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984) she points out that ‘even critics of excessive sentimentalism … agreed that women were “naturally” suited to this species of composition’ (p. 38) In Feminist Literary History: A Defence (Oxford: Polity Press, 1988), Janet Todd underlines the crucial connections between eighteenth-century women writers and male writers such as Richardson, commenting that the ‘gender polarities of that century cut across sex lines to label his prose “feminine”’ (p. 42). See also Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford and New York: Blackwell,1986; rpt 1987), pp. 77–8.
See Nancy Armstrong, ‘The Rise of the Domestic Woman’, in N. Armstrong and L. Tennenhouse (eds), The Ideology of Conduct (London: Methuen. 1987) and Spencer pp. xi and 77–8.
The political dimensions of sentimental fiction have, of course, been more widely recognised and discussed with regard to the 1790s than the earlier decades of the eighteenth century, particularly in the last few years. See especially Chris Jones’s Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London: Routledge, 1993).
Compare Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) pp. 9–10, where she argues that ‘We are taught to divide the political world in two and detach the practices that belong to a female domain from those that govern the marketplace. In this way, we compulsively replicate the symbolic behavior that constituted a private domain of the individual outside and apart from social history … political events cannot be understood apart from women’s history, from the history of women’s literature, or from changing representations of the house-hold.’ Her stance, of course, is part of the longstanding questioning of the public/private divide in feminist (particularly socialist feminist) criticism.
John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: the Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 198.
Robert Markley, ‘Sentimentality as Performance: Sterne, Shaftesbury and the Theatrics of Virtue’ in Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (eds), The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), p. 211.
Erik Erämetsä, ‘A Study of the Word “Sentimental” and of Other Characteristics of Eighteenth-Century Sentimentalism in England’, Annales Academiae Scientarum Fennicae, B, 74 (Helsinki, 1951), p. 8.
Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language: in which the Words are Deduced from their Originals, and Illustrated in their Different Significations by Examples from the Best Writers (2 vols, London: J. and P. Knapton et al., 1755).
George Berkeley, An Essay towards preventing the Ruin of Great Britain (1721), in Stephen Copley (ed.), Literature and the Social Order in Eighteenth-Century England (London, Sydney and Dover, New Hampshire: Croom Helm, 1984), pp. 90–1.
Wetenhall Wilkes, A Letter of Genteel and Moral Advice to a Young Lady (1740; 8th edn, London: L. Hawes et al., 1766), p. 201.
Sainuel Richardson, Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady (1747–8; London: Penmuin Books, 1985), pp. 1468, 1471.
Sarah Fielding, The Adventures of David Simple (1744 and 1753; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), Book H, Chapter x, p. 139.
For discussion of the roots of civic humanism and the values it espouses, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 1975), especially Chapters 3 and 14, and Stephen Copley’s Introduction to Literature and the Social Order.
Bernard Mandeville, ‘Remark L’, The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, ed. F. B. Kaye (1714–28; 2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), vol. I, p. 107.
John Barrell, English Literature in History 1730–1780: An Equal Wide Survey (London: Hutchinson, 1983), p. 24.
J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 9.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (1976; Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books, 1984), p. 100.
See, for example, Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977).
John Brown, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (London: L. Davis and C. Reymers, 1757), p. 29.
Harriet Guest, ‘A Double Lustre: Femininity and Sociable Commerce, 1730–60’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 23 (Summer, 1990), pp. 479–501.
For contemporary response to Mandeville’s work, see Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1984; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1984; Toronto: Random House, 1984), pp. 30–1 and Elizabeth Bellamy, Private Virtues, Public Vices: Commercial Morality and the Novel, 1740–1800 (unpublished PhD thesis; Cambridge, 1988), Chapters 1 and 2.
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776; 2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), vol. I, p. 25, and see Hirschman, p. 107.
Since beginning this project nine years ago, valuable and innovative work has been produced on the sentimental novel in the eighteenth century, much of which I have profited by and I hope fully acknowledged. I am sorry that Markman Ellis’s The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) came to my attention too late to enable me to include it in my discussions, but I am also delighted that the very title of his study confirms my conviction that the broader significances of the sentimental novel deserve much greater attention.
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© 1999 Gillian Skinner
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Skinner, G. (1999). Introduction. In: Sensibility and Economics in the Novel, 1740–1800. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230372566_1
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