Eighteenth Century English Literature

Charlotte Sussman

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780745625157
  9780745625140
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745637204
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This engaging book introduces new readers of eighteenth-century texts to some of the major works, authors, and debates of a key period of literary history. Rather than simply providing a chronological survey of the era, this book analyzes the impact of significant cultural developments on literary themes and forms - including urbanization, colonial, and mercantile expansion, the emergence of the "public sphere," and changes in sex and gender roles.

In eighteenth-century Britain, many of the things we take for granted about modern life were shockingly new: women appeared for the first time on stage; the novel began to dominate the literary marketplace; people entertained the possibility that all human beings were created equal, and tentatively proposed that reason could triumph over superstition; ministers became more powerful than kings, and the consumer emerged as a political force. Eighteenth-Century English Literature: 1660-1789 explores these issues in relation to well-known works by such authors as Defoe, Swift, Pope, Richardson, Gray, and Sterne, while also bringing attention to less familiar figures, such as Charlotte Smith, Mary Leapor, and Olaudah Equiano. It offers both an ideal introduction for students and a fresh approach for those with research interests in the period.

1

National Identity and a National Literature

Introduction

[S]hould it ever be the case of the English, in the progress of their refinements to arrive at the same polish that distinguishes the French, if we did not lose the politesse de coeur, which inclines men more to humane actions than courteous ones – we should at least lose that distinct variety and originality of character which distinguishes them, not only from each other, but from all the world besides … The English, like ancient medals, kept more apart, and passing but few people’s hands, preserve the first sharpnesses that the fine hand of nature has given them – they are not so pleasant to feel – but in return, the legend is so visible, that at first look you see whose image and superscription they bear.

Laurence Sterne, 1768¹

Just who were the British? Did they even exist?²

Speaking to a French acquaintance, Yorick, the protagonist of Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, encapsulates some of the characteristics of English national identity during the eighteenth century. The English are unpolished but humane, sincere, and straightforward, if not always polite. Some of their qualities are paradoxical; the English are all original and various, distinguished not just from other nations, but from each other. Their very lack of a uniform character constitutes their collective identity.³ How difficult then to summarize a national identity that includes not just the English, but also the inhabitants of an ever-expanding Britain. (Indeed, Sterne himself was Irish, although Yorick is English.) If we look across the wide spectrum of the British population, can we find a uniform national identity? Or, conversely, can we say that there were no self-identified characteristics that unified the inhabitants of Great Britain and its settler colonies? These were questions that animated British writers during the eighteenth century, when the manifestations of national identity were a favorite subject of literature and the other arts.

National identity is a relatively new invention, a concept that may not have existed at all in Britain before the eighteenth century, or even during it. As Benedict Anderson has shown, national identity is an abstract idea. Men and women from diverse social backgrounds, who live in very different physical conditions, and who may even speak different languages, see themselves as belonging to an aggregate of others, most of whom they have never met. There is no necessary physical or linguistic marker of national identity; it is an identification based on internal self-conviction. Of course, national characteristics were assigned to the British by outside observers. But, to the British themselves, the definitions that mattered were self-conceived. In order to have national identity, they needed to image themselves as belonging to a nation, a culturally unified territory of long standing, rather than viewing themselves as simply the subject of monarchy or government.

Nationalism is often distinguished from patriotism, although the two are closely connected. Gerald Newman, for example, defines patriotism as “a mere primitive feeling of loyalty”: “in some way connected with military matters, the patriotic sentiment should be regarded as primarily an attachment to the country’s prestige in a context of foreign relations; to its arms, flags and power in the international sphere.” Patriotism thus involves a fervent, often aggressive belief in the superiority of one’s country to all others. Nationalism, as Newman writes, must function “in peace as well as war.”⁴ The emotions of national identity are often organized around symbols – a flag, a song, or a particular national hero – although the meanings of those symbols may differ over time, or from person to person. The fact that both the British national anthem “God Save the King [or Queen]” and the great nationalist hymn “Rule Britannia” were composed during the eighteenth century is an index of how important the codification of national identity was during the period.

National identity presumes not simply the achievements of the nation in the present, but the persistence of the nation through time. National identity is thus always concerned with history. Yet, that history is perpetually under construction, both by the recovery of appropriate ancestors and exemplary moments for the nation, and by the forgetting of divisive or embarrassing people and events. As Ernest Renan argues, the nation exists by “the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories,” while at the same time, “forgetting, … even … historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation.”⁵ As Homi Bhabha points out about this formulation, “being obliged to forget becomes the basis of remembering the nation, peopling it anew, imagining the possibility of contending and liberating forms of cultural identification.”⁶ Literature, as it offers compelling and coherent narratives of national endeavor, has a vital role in this continual, imaginative reconstruction of the nation’s past and present.

During the eighteenth century, however, many obstacles stood in the way of Britons imagining themselves to be a coherent nation. For one thing, the countries that made up Great Britain had either only recently been joined together politically or were in the slow process of political assimilation during the eighteenth century. England was formally joined to Wales in 1536, but union with Scotland took place only in 1707, and Scotland retained its own legal system and parliament throughout the period. Ireland’s status was even more volatile and difficult to understand. A virtual colony through most of the century, only the Anglo-Irish had any political representation in the British parliament (most inhabitants of Ireland could not vote because they were Catholic). Ireland was granted its own parliament in 1785 (“Grattan’s Parliament”), but this was dissolved at the Union of Ireland with the rest of Britain in 1801. During the period, many of the inhabitants of these regions still spoke their own languages: Welsh, Gaelic, or Scots Gaelic (Erse). Within England itself, other divides presented themselves, such as those between country and city, or between north and south. When Defoe wrote The True-Born Englishman, he emphasized these internal differences, as manifestations of Britain’s history of conquest by foreign powers.

In eager rapes, and furious lust begot,

Betwixt a painted Briton and a Scot:

Whose gend’ring offspring quickly learnt to bow,

And yoke their heifers to the Roman plough:

From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came,

With neither name nor nation, speech nor fame

In whose hot veins now mixtures quickly ran,

Infus’d betwixt a Saxon and a Dane.

While their rank daughters, to their parents just,

Receiv’d all nations with promiscuous lust.

This nauseous brood directly did contain

The well-extracted blood of Englishmen … (ll. 281–92)

Culturally heterogeneous, the inhabitants of Great Britain had fewer reasons than one might expect to imagine themselves as part of the same nation.

In the face of all these divisions, however, members of these disparate groups still often thought of themselves as a unified whole, and viewed their country with pride and self-satisfaction. They celebrated their accomplishments, both man-made and geographical. Oliver Goldsmith declared, for example, in “The Comparative View of Races and Nations” (1760): “Hail Britain, happiest of countries! Happy in thy climate, fertility, situation and commerce; but still happier in the peculiar nature of thy laws and government.”⁷ Religion also played a significant role in British national identity, particularly after the Act of Settlement of 1701. This act excluded the heirs of the last Catholic king, James II, and stipulated that all future monarchs would be members of the Church of England. Thus Protestantism, particularly Anglicanism, became part of British national identity, both legally and culturally. Catholics and members of other religions, including Jews and dissenters from the Church of England, were denied most of the rights of other citizens throughout the period.⁸ Both anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism played a significant role in defining Britishness.

National identity also manifested itself in a variety of physical practices, including food consumption. A character in Frances Burney’s novel The Wanderer (1814), for instance, describes what he believes to be a gracious invitation to some new French acquaintances thus:

You won’t think me wanting to my country, if for the honour of old England, I give these poor half-starved souls a hearty meal of good roast beef, with a bumper of Dorchester ale and Devonshire cyder? Things which I conclude they have never yet tasted from their birth to this hour; their own washy diet of soup meager and salad, with which I would not fatten a sparrow, being what they are more naturally born to.⁹

The idea of roast beef as the national food had already been enshrined by Hogarth’s engraving, “The Roast Beef of Old England.” As both these examples make clear, national characteristics stood in the sharpest relief when juxtaposed to the shortcomings of other nations, especially France. In her influential study of national identity, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837, Linda Colley argues strongly that the British “came to define themselves as a single people not because of any political or cultural consensus at home, but rather in reaction to the Other beyond their shores.”¹⁰ The many wars between France and England during the century helped cement a sense of national unity.

And yet we should not assume that there was a single formation of national identity to which all Britons subscribed during the period. Indeed, the period was marked by conflict between different ideas of where national identity came from, and who deserved to belong to the nation. These conflicts played out around religion, as both the press and the government debated whether to extend the rights of British citizens to Catholics, Jews, and dissenters. Conflict also arose around the question of colonial expansion and the rights of the inhabitants of the British colonies. For most of the century, the growth of the British Empire was a source of national pride. At the end of the century, however, both the American War of Independence and the debates over slavery challenged belief in national coherence. As Kathleen Wilson argues:

Within Britain itself, from the perspective of the metropole, the Welsh, and, more gradually, the Scots become naturalized as British, the Irish, Jews and Africans perhaps never do; beyond the British isles, the claims of people of different races and cultures to British rights and liberties were even more remote and contingent, and Britishness was conferred or denied not only in relation to the numbers of white British settlers in residence, but also to the degree of acceptance by colonial peoples of English hegemony and the legitimacy of British rule.¹¹

Often, then, national identity can be viewed as more of a desire to belong to a national whole, a willful dismissing of the material, economic, and cultural divisions that separate the inhabitants of a nation, than as a natural, or organic formation.

This section is a survey of some of the literary projects that helped build national identity by offering visions of Britain that attempted to smooth over these divisions, or subsume them into representations of the nation with which Britons could identify with pride. Towards this end, literature worked to find a “common” language that all literate inhabitants might share.¹² The section also traces the changes in the sources writers sought for that identity – from classical analogies to indigenous roots. While writers of the neoclassical, or Augustan, era of the early eighteenth century looked for a definition of English greatness in comparison to the glories of the Roman Empire, later writers searched for a national identity that would be geographically rooted in British soil.

In this transposition of terms, an important event in literary culture occurred. Critics established English antiquity as the moment of literary achievement against which all subsequent writing would be measured. A national canon formed on the precedent example of the classical canon took shape. This canon was necessarily old and carried with it much of the aura of antiquity: difficulty, rarity, sublimity, masculinity.¹³

Thus, as the century ended, the project of formulating a national canon gave rise to a number of collections and evaluations of English writers of the preceding hundred years, including Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets (1781) and Anna Barbauld’s fifty-volume set of The British Novelists (1810).

The works discussed in this segment emphasize that even as British culture, and its literary forms, experienced extensive change and innovation during the period, the search for national identity in eighteenth-century Britain was concerned centrally with the uses of history. From Dryden to the author of the Ossian poems, writers give a variety of answers to the question of which past Britain would choose, and what use would be made of that past. Finally, we might speculate that, as more traditional forms of community dissolved during the period, the n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Cultural History of Literature
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 National Identity and a National Literature
• 2 Print Culture and the Public Sphere
• 3 The City
• 4 The Countryside
• 5 Individuality and Imagination
• 6 Religious Experience
• 7 Female Sexuality and Domesticity
• 8 Wit and Sensibility
• 9 Trade and Travel
• 10 Colonialism and Slavery
• Index