Suspicious Minds: Spies and Surveillance in Charlotte Smith’s Novels of the 1790s

Abstract

In his influential essay of 1992 on ‘Visualising the Division of Labour’, John Barrell argued that the ‘totalising discourse’ of the division of labour articulates a ‘subject which defines its own partiality even as it denies it’. The subject must claim for itself a viewpoint from which it can grasp the coherence of the social whole; a coherence invisible to all those pursuing their different occupations within society by virtue of the specialization their occupations demand. But the subject must also acknowledge its own view as partial, as the interested view made available by its peculiar occupation within the division of labour. It must therefore always admit the validity or authority of the competing discourses articulated from other subject positions, other occupational viewpoints. The discourse of the division of labour must define itself as both more than, and just one of, the ‘hubbub of voices, which together produce the representation of a society irretrievably atomised and dispersed.’¹

This essay was first written for a conference on ‘Spies and Surveillance’ organized by Ian McCalman and John Barrell at the Humanities Research Centre, ANU, Canberra, and has benefited from the comments of audiences there and at the University of Chicago, as well as at the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York. I am particularly grateful to my colleague, James Watt, for his acute and helpful comments.