In 1759, Adam Smith wrote in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that although the “various motions” of a watch “conspire in the nicest manner” to tell the time, “Yet we never ascribe any such desire or intention to them, but to the watch-maker, and we know that they are put into motion by a spring, which intends the effect it produces as little as they do” (Smith 1979, 2.2.3.5). Materiality, in this view, is a passive receptacle for the designs which a superior human understanding inscribes upon it. Smith makes this human–nonhuman relationship a metaphor for the relation between Providence and human nature, suggesting his overall hierarchical view of divine, human, and nonhuman activity. Nonetheless, Smith’s choice of example demonstrates the irrelevance of his concern with the object’s “intention,” as it acknowledges that, in the eighteenth century, humans are relying upon these mechanical devices to direct their daily activities. An it-narrative from 1788 makes this point further explicit by noting how the watch “instructs the man of taste when to dine; the belle when to dress; the beau when to take his drops; the cit when to go on a change; and the man of understanding how to number and make a proper use of those few hours Fate hath allotted” (Anon. 2012d, 4:133). Regardless of intention, the watch was bound up quite integrally in human affairs and activities in the late eighteenth century and would only become more folded into social assemblages as the new century wore on, as attested by didactic Victorian poems like Thomas Hood’s “The Workhouse Clock: An Allegory” (1844).
While the eighteenth-century it-narrator bears witness to the ubiquity of the inanimate object in everyday life, toward the end of the century, several it-narrators unequivocally assert their active role in human activities: a mirror from 1791 thus informs its readers that “my family have existed for many hundred years, have been known all over Europe, and have had a very large share in the refining and polishing of mankind to their present state of civilization” (Anon. 2012a, 4:165). Unlike most earlier it-narrators, this mirror moves beyond simple prosopopoeia as it extensively narrates how it directly affects and influences human actors. Written at a time when it-narrators had become largely generically exhausted, “Adventures of a Mirror” more directly questions the hierarchy of human and nonhuman by characterizing its physical reflective work as “advice” that is then promptly and scrupulously followed by its human viewers. In its constructive depiction of the relationship between the human user and the nonhuman object, the text functions not just as a modern satirical commentary on human vanity, but also as an explication of the role of the tool in enabling human activity.
Other late eighteenth-century popular texts register their anxiety about agential objects through recourse to the occult. In a series of newspaper reports that eventually culminated in a small publication (Anon. 1772a), a gentlewoman’s belongings all begin to dash themselves to the floor, actively disintegrating before their mistress’s eyes. Some of the newspaper extracts include a passage that rises to the level of farce:
Accounts similar to this one appeared throughout the eighteenth century, amounting to a small sub-genre of “factual” articles that reported on domestic occult or pseudo-occult activity (Benedict 2007). Yet, at least part of this particular account is probably true, considering at the same time that the disturbance is presumed to have begun (the morning of January 6, 1772), three powder mills in nearby Hounslow exploded, with shocks reportedly felt as far as Gloucestershire (Anon. 1772d, 724). Connecting the two events, one correspondent observes, “it is nothing marvelous that an explosion of gunpowder at Hounslow should produce an explosion of lyes so near as Stockwell” (Anon. 1772b). The Stockwell incident provides examples of a real instance of the material behaving in an unexpected and potentially deadly manner as well as a more imaginative attempt to make meaning out of that traumatic event. The Stockwell reports are further significant for how it is largely domestic objects—china, pottery, pewterware, lanterns, candles, tables, clocks, jars, and tea pots—that are affected and not just in passive terms. While these objects are sometimes “thrown,” they just as often seem to “jump,” “turn upside down,” or “fly off” of their own accord (Anon. 1772a, 10–14). While such lexical variation may arise from rhetorical style, the words themselves attribute agency to the inanimate and suggest a fear of the potential of objects to behave contrarily to their designed functions.in short, about four o’clock in the morning of Tuesday, almost everything in the parlour and kitchen were animated, and made such a racket, that Mr. Payne’s maid servant ran up stairs, and took a child out of bed, and carried it into the stable naked, thinking it was not safe longer to stay in the house. (Anon. 1772c)
These examples provide a sampling of the extreme ways that objects—and specifically domestic objects—are represented in popular literature in England as the eighteenth century was coming to a close. Each features a very different view of object agency: the watch is described as directing human activity, the mirror portrays itself as a productive partner to mankind, and the Stockwell accounts represent objects as a threat, rather than an asset, to human well-being. The watch and the mirror, for the most part, fulfill their designed functions; the crockery and furniture of the Stockwell reports produce chaotic and even deadly living conditions.
While the present study does not investigate occult objects as such, it does explore domestic objects that have somehow “gotten out of hand”—here the mirror text is also significant for including a passage in which objects seem to have copulated, filling up whole rooms and leaving no space for human inhabitants, discussed further in Chap. 2. The text thus finds a synthesis between the spatially aware and clinical descriptions of objects Cynthia Wall (2006) identifies in eighteenth-century scientific and literary texts and the self-reflexive book-narrators of the mid eighteenth century that Christina Lupton (2011) has argued disavow the interconnectedness of the human–nonhuman by positing completely autonomous material objects. In attributing total agency to the textual medium and erasing the status of the author—as in it-narratives such as Adventures of a Quire of Paper (1779)— Lupton writes that such texts “seem to make paper cleverer than people” (Lupton 2011, 10; Anon. 2012b). The texts explored here less often treat objects as though they are sentient creatures—we learn that the increase of furniture in the mirror text has nothing to do with copulation and everything to do with their mistress’s inability to resist a bargain—but rather blend the two extremes of circumscribing through description, what Bruno Latour calls the “myth of the Neutral Tool under complete human control,” and pretending that objects hold authorial power (“the myth of the Autonomous Destiny”) (Latour 1999, 178).
These texts are made up of humans and nonhumans, as nonhuman actants are critical both to the action and plot and to the aesthetics of the text. The human narrators, implied authors, and characters of these texts demonstrate awareness of the role of the object in human activities, but this awareness proves to be precarious, as the mirror from earlier bears witness, that although its abilities are central to the “polishing of mankind to their present state of civilization—yet I seldom hear that we are mentioned with respect” (Anon 2012a, 4:165). While these texts draw attention to the activity of the material, such explicit references to object agency also highlight the surprise and anxiety that attends the human acknowledgment of that agency, anxiety that is present both within plots, as characters relate to objects, as well as on the formal level, as writers consider the physical embeddedness of their work. This research demonstrates that the further one moves into the nineteenth century, the more concern narrators and authors betray over the power objects within the text wield over human subjectivity as well as over the creation of the text itself.
To some degree, these texts share this fear with their eighteenth-century forebears: in addition to a fascination with the material object, eighteenth-century texts are often concerned with the object’s agency and its role within “human” affairs. Turn-of-the-century texts continue to preoccupy themselves with how, as Jonathan Lamb writes, accidents or “sudden emergencies” tend to “capsize the hierarchy of things and people” both in literature and in society (Lamb 2011, 4). Lamb argues that this fascination with objects arises from the alternate temporality of the material world, its thereness, what Lamb calls “an existential simplicity” that the human may in turn identify with or envy (Lamb 2011, xxi). What distinguishes late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century texts is the degree to which the human–nonhuman assemblage is identified and, even, accepted. These later objects are often well integrated into the narratives in which they form a part, as they prove essential to the message, the aesthetics, and the success of the text—an integration demonstrated especially well in the writings of Jane Austen and openly discussed in the autobiographical writings of Thomas De Quincey.
The present study engages with texts at the turn of the nineteenth century that demonstrate a reorientation to the thing, not just as something helpful or enabling, but also...