The Prose of Things

Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century

Cynthia Sundberg Wall

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780226215273, 9780226871585
• eBook ISBN: 9780226225029
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Virginia Woolf once commented that the central image in Robinson Crusoe is an object—a large earthenware pot. Woolf and other critics pointed out that early modern prose is full of things but bare of setting and description. Explaining how the empty, unvisualized spaces of such writings were transformed into the elaborate landscapes and richly upholstered interiors of the Victorian novel, Cynthia Sundberg Wall argues that the shift involved not just literary representation but an evolution in cultural perception.

In The Prose of Things, Wall analyzes literary works in the contexts of natural science, consumer culture, and philosophical change to show how and why the perception and representation of space in the eighteenth-century novel and other prose narratives became so textually visible. Wall examines maps, scientific publications, country house guides, and auction catalogs to highlight the thickening descriptions of domestic interiors. Considering the prose works of John Bunyan, Samuel Pepys, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, David Hume, Ann Radcliffe, and Sir Walter Scott, The Prose of Things is the first full account of the historic shift in the art of describing.

CHAPTER ONE

A History of Description, a Foundling

ETC., tel pourrait être l’emblème de la description.

—Philippe Hamon

But should “ETC.” really be the emblem of description?¹ From the sixteenth century through the late eighteenth, and then again across the middle of the twentieth, the status of description in literary theory and linguistic discourse was generally considered an afterthought at best, an obstacle or weakness or danger at worst. And worst tended to win out over best. But, in the later eighteenth century, and throughout the nineteenth, description underwent a sort of rhetorical amplificatio, or “enlargement,” of its own, along with its stable of figurative means—its own culturally updated versions of accumulation and paralepsis, division and hyperbole, . . . etc. Description, long treated as a static object within prose or poetic narratives, began to find itself absorbed within narrative lines, at home and in place—only to lose visibility and credibility once again in twentieth-century criticism.

The traditional literary assumption is that description presents something, that its primary function is to make us see. The OED defines it as “the action of writing down; inscription. Obs. rare”; “the action of setting forth in words by mentioning recognizable features or characteristic marks; verbal representation or portraiture”; “a statement which describes, sets forth, or portrays; a graphic or detailed account of a person, thing, scene, etc.” But some examples of description—from Bunyan in the seventeenth century and Macaulay and Brontë in the nineteenth—will illustrate just how differently things can be seen. The following passage from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) is typical of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century prose place setting in its emblematic quadrants, its fixed coordinates in a fictional geography. What does it make us see? “Just as [Christian and Pliant] had ended this talk, they drew near to a very Miry Slow that was in the midst of the Plain, and they being heedless, did both fall suddenly into the bogg. The name of the Slow was Dispond. Here therefore they wallowed for a time, being grievously bedaubed with the dirt; And Christian, because of the burden that was on his back, began to sink in the Mire.”² We read the emblems, of course: the Slough of Despond sucks us all in at times, bedaubing us grievously. How vividly do we see it? How are we trained or accustomed to see it? Do we see a particular swamp, a darkening of the green plain, perhaps treeless, the red sun slanting through dreary clouds, the men’s arms thrashing, their bodies sinking by inches, panic on their faces? Probably not. Most twentieth-century critics pass along the generalization that the eighteenth-century writers lacked “eye” and, like Dorothy Van Ghent, see a large list of things sans context, things that “are not at all vivid in texture . . . [not] a world rich in physical, sensuous textures—in images for the eye or for the tactile sense or for the tongue or the ear or for the sense of temperature or the sense of pressure. It is extraordinarily barren of such images” (34–35).³ We have a miry slough that bedaubs and starts to sink two figures: we have the fact of essential details, but not the details.

But that is us. Thomas Babington Macaulay, on the other hand, reviewing Robert Southey’s 1830 edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress, finds a text rich in evocative, detailed description:

This is the highest miracle of genius,—that things which are not should be as though they were,—that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another. And this miracle the tinker has wrought. There is no ascent, no declivity, no resting place, no turnstile, with which we are not perfectly acquainted. The wicket-gate and the desolate swamp which separates it from the City of Destruction, the long line of road, as straight as a rule can make it, the Interpreter’s house and all its fair shows, the prisoner in the iron cage, the palace, at the doors of which armed men kept guard, and on the battlements of which walked persons clothed all in gold, the cross and the sepulchre, the steep hill and the pleasant arbour, the stately front of the House Beautiful by the wayside, the low green valley of Humiliation, rich with grass and covered with flocks, all are as well known to us as the sights of our own street.⁴

But this is largely Macaulay’s knitting together of a whole visual scene, from his own very English (as well as biblical) “memory storehouse” (to use the phrase of Philippe Hamon, to which I will return). As a twenty-first-century reader, I am not all that clear on wicket gates and turnstiles myself. It is Macaulay who layers on for himself the details of the spiritual allegory and its visual emblems, connecting them into a fully realized, fully familiar English landscape; it is Macaulay who fills in the empty spaces between visual tags and finds them full and complete representations of his own landscape. Macaulay in the early nineteenth century sees differently from us; he sees early English prose narrative in much the way, I will argue, that early eighteenth-century readers were able to see—to fill out, expand on, rehydrate—the local, immediate signs of a shared culture, a shared visual landscape of meaningful, referential detail.

Macaulay lived in a time when one expected to see a novel describe an interior setting in intimate, well-upholstered detail, as in Jane Eyre:

The red-room was a spare chamber, very seldom slept in . . . yet it was one of the largest and stateliest chambers in the mansion. A bed supported on massive pillars of mahogany, hung with curtains of deep red damask, stood out like a tabernacle in the centre; the two large windows, with their blinds always drawn down, were half shrouded in festoons and falls of similar drapery; the carpet was red; the table at the foot of the bed was covered with a crimson cloth; the walls were a soft fawn colour, with a blush of pink in it; the wardrobe, the toilet-table, the chairs were of darkly-polished old mahogany. Out of these deep surrounding shades rose high, and glared white, the piled-up mattresses and pillows of the bed, spread with a snowy Marseilles counterpane. Scarcely less prominent was an ample, cushioned easy-chair near the head of the bed, also white, with a foot-stool before it; and looking, as I thought, like a pale throne.⁵

This is a room made unforgettably familiar to us all, as images pile up for the eye, and for the tactile sense, and for the tongue and the ear, and for the sense of temperature and the sense of pressure, so to speak. There are two points to make here. First, we should compare Jane’s description of the red room to an earlier interior, say, Bunyan’s House of the Interpreter, for the impact of comparative presences and absences: “Then [the Interpreter] took [Christian] by the hand, and led him into a very large Parlour that was full of dust, because never swept; the which, after he had reviewed a little while, the Interpreter called for a man to sweep: Now when he began to sweep, the dust began so abundantly to fly about, that Christian had almost therewith been choaked: Then said the Interpreter to a Damsel that stood by, Bring hither Water, and sprinkle the Room; which when she had done, was swept and cleansed with pleasure” (24–25). The room is large; it is a parlor; it is dusty and uncomfortable until the damsel wets it down and sweeps it out to the pleasure of all. Does it have a sofa? No, because sofas came later.⁶ Do we know how many windows it has, or whether it has curtains, or whether its floor is stone or earth? If we lived in 1678, we might. If we live in the twenty-first century, especially if we live in suburban America, we have no idea. There’s certainly nothing about snowy counterpanes or walls of soft fawn color with a blush of pink. We know that we’re in an interior, and we know the essential things about it: it’s dusty and needs cleaning. (And, if we’re spiritually attuned, we know that that’s an emblem that we can easily amplify, especially when the Interpreter adds helpfully: “This Parlor, is the heart of a Man that was never sanctified by the sweet Grace of the Gospel” [25].) Like the Miry Slow, it is an overdetermined place, with certain visual properties as well as its spiritual and ethical meanings. So the first point is that it is our job, according to Bunyan, to fill out those spaces with particular meaning; it is our act, for Macaulay, that we fill them out with instant familiarity; it is the hope of this chapter to fill out the spaces of different historical perceptions of what visual familiarity might mean.

The second point, coming out of that last clause, is that interior domestic space itself acquires an almost wholly new status in the larger history of description in the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth. Pictorial description has had a long history, but it has mostly devoted itself to landscape or to architectural exteriors, and then largely in terms of the symbolic connections to the landowners and the visual representation of their virtues or vices. Domestic interiors—the furniture and fabric and object details of particularized rooms as part of ordinary life and action—rarely appear in the high-level hierarchies of poetry or prose until later in the eighteenth century, but then dominate nineteenth-century novels and poetry.

This book will try to account for the historical and cultural change in the status and use of description; this chapter will review the history of description from classical rhetoric to nineteenth-century practice. It will show that and how the rhetoric about and the status of description changed, without trying to reargue the long history of critical work on ekphrasis or word and image. (The subsequent chapters will argue why that change appears most prominent in the eighteenth century.) I will first look at some contrasting definitions of description to set up some of the dimensions of its historical space. I will then examine the historical rhetoric about description, noting particularly that that rhetoric shifts markedly: from talking about description as itself a sort of object, generally getting in the way of (or providing relief from) narrative (a sort of res non grata), to talking about description as achieving a primacy of perception, an essential of particularity, as the culture shifts from an emphasis on the universal to a celebration of the particular. The change in description’s status involves a change in the culture’s awareness of and accessibility to a rather sudden large intake of new things, from the expanding English trade markets and the development of a credit economy, to the wider market of readers of English texts and the corresponding evaporation of a shared “cultural storehouse.” Description as object was a traditional cultural construct that, over two or three centuries, found itself transformed from something obstructing narrative and refrigerating thought to something absorbed into narrative as the need to see differently expanded.

This project obviously marks and, therefore, believes in historical and cultural change. As John Bender and Michael Marrinan point out, one condition governing description is the “historical variability produced when the technology used to register descriptive features changes so dramatically that things previously invisible become newly visible.”⁷ But such a change is not intended to seem teleological. What interests me is what a particular culture does with its particular inheritance of technological and epistemological revelations, how the culture moves either habitually or inventively both within and beyond its temporal, geographic, and ideological givens. I necessarily cover areas with which I am less familiar than I am with the eighteenth century, but my forays into medieval and Renaissance rhetoric have shown me similar studies of the relation between formal practice in relation to cultural practice, formal innovation underneath traditional decorum. I see the expanding and increasingly intrusive functions of spatial description—most especially the mapping out of domestic interiors—as a late eighteenth-century project, but, along with charting and contextualizing a trajectory, I hope equally to demonstrate the particular agility and richness of early description, an agility and richness that have become more or less invisible to a post-nineteenth-century eye.

Some Definitions of Description

Consider the following dialogic answer from a seventeenth-century distillation of Aristotle and Peter Ramus:

Q. What is Description?

A. Description is a definition defining the thing from other arguments also.

Q. Give an example.

A. This is the description of a man; A man is a living creature, mortall, capable of discipline.

Q. Are not proper circumstances also mingled with common causes sometime?

A. Yes.

Q. Then it seemeth succinct brevity is not always in this kinde.⁸

Although straightforward, to the point, with succinct brevity, and carefully broken down into easily digestible bits, it is not, perhaps, in the end the most helpful way to begin, but it does suggest the difficulty of the task. The history of the definition of description is at least as convoluted and contrary as that of the practice and importance of description. The Compendium’s definition is actually addressing logic, in which description is definition of a kind. “[A] description is a sentence which setteth out a thing, even by other arguments,” says Thomas Spencer in The Art of Logick (1628).⁹ Samuel Johnson considers descriptions “definitions of a more lax and fanciful kind” (Rambler, no. 143, as quoted in the OED), although a 1962 Dictionary of Philosophy definition of logical description is neither lax nor fanciful: “Where a formula A containing a free variable—say, for example, x—means a true proposition (is true) for one and only one value of x, the notation (ix)A is used to mean that value of X.”¹⁰

The traditional literary expectation, as noted above, is that description presents something, that its primary function is to make us see. John Bender has distinguished description from pictorialism by defining description as “formally neutral,” with a tendency to “reduce and simplify experience” as its “detail accumulates without compelling the reader to a fresh visualization and reevaluation of successive images in a developing context.” His focus is on Spenser and the kind of cumulative imagery that creates “intensity and vividness” by its “form an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Frontispiece
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. A History of Description, a Foundling
• 2. Traveling Spaces
• 3. Seeing Things
• 4. Writing Things
• 5. Implied Spaces
• 6. Worlds of Goods
• 7. Arranging Things
• 8. The Foundling as Heir
• Afterword: Humphry Repton
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index