Be It Ever So Humble

Poverty, Fiction, and the Invention of the Middle-Class Home

Scott R. MacKenzie

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780813933429
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Before the rise of private homes as we now understand them, the realm of personal, private, and local relations in England was the parish, which was also the sphere of poverty management. Between the 1740s and the 1790s, legislators, political economists, reformers, and novelists transferred the parish system's functions to another institution that promised self-sufficient prosperity: the laborer's cottage. Expanding its scope beyond the parameters of literary history and previous studies of domesticity, Be It Ever So Humble posits that the modern middle-class home was conceived during the eighteenth century in England, and that its first inhabitants were the poor.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, many participants in discussions about poverty management came to believe that private family dwellings could turn England's indigent, unemployed, and discontent into a self-sufficient, productive, and patriotic labor force. Writers and thinkers involved in these debates produced copious descriptions of what a private home was and how it related to the collective national home. In this body of texts, Scott MacKenzie pursues the origins of the modern middle-class home through an extensive set of discourses—including philosophy, law, religion, economics, and aesthetics—all of which brush up against and often spill over into literary representations.

Through close readings, the author substantiates his claim that the private home was first invented for the poor and that only later did the middle class appropriate it to themselves. Thus, the late eighteenth century proves to be a watershed moment in home's conceptual life, one that produced a remarkably rich and complex set of cultural ideas and images.

A 2014 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

1

“Stock the Parish with Beauties”

Henry Fielding’s Parochial Vision

A parish where the minister and the parochial officers did their duties with activity and zeal, might be almost as well ordered as a private family.

—Robert Southey, Quarterly Review, 1820

While no British Parliament of the eighteenth century ever met to outlaw chivalric romance, the nation’s unacknowledged legislators certainly did. Poets and reviewers subjected the motifs and themes of romance to derision and made its characteristic sensibilities vehicles for satire. In The Rape of the Lock, the Baron “to Love an altar built, / Of twelve vast French Romances, neatly gilt” (161, lines 37–38) and set the whole lot on fire. Classicism, Cervantes, and the trading interest combined to declare chivalric romance childish, foolish, deluded, and Frenchified. Charles Gildon, a regular object of scorn for Pope and Swift, finds common ground with them in sneering at the “Heroes in French Romance, who do nothing but love and fight and never eat” (303). Many English examples of romance from the early part of the century, such as Delarivier Manley’s The New Atalantis and Eliza Haywood’s The Adventures of Eovaai, are complicated by their status as satire, but Haywood’s more conventional romances of the 1720s (such as Love in Excess) made her subject to attacks from Pope and others for hackery and undisciplined femininity. The decline of courtly virtues in literature, we tend to say, accompanied the decay of aristocratic paternalism, the end of feudalism, and, of course, the rise of the novel.

Had Parliament written its bill against romance, it might well have sounded, in part, like this:

All common players of interludes; . . . all minstrels; jugglers; persons pretending to be gypsies, or wandering in the habit or form of Egyptians, or pretending to have skill in physiognomy, palmestry, or like crafty science, or pretending to tell fortunes, or using any subtil craft to deceive and impose on any of His Majesty’s subjects, or playing or betting at any unlawful games; . . . all persons wandering abroad, and lodging in alehouses, barns, outhouses, or in the open air, not giving a good account of themselves; all persons wandering abroad . . . pretending to be soldiers, mariners, seafaring men, or pretending to go to work in harvest; and all other persons wandering abroad and begging shall be deemed rogues and vagabonds. (Statutes at Large 101)

The passage actually comes from the vagrancy law of the thirteenth session of the reign of George II (1741). This law, one of a series passed in the early to midcentury, all saying essentially the same thing, belongs to the body of legislation and administrative practices that would eventually be known as the old poor law. The main effects of vagrancy laws were their maintenance of the parish as the primary administrative unit of poverty management and their restriction of movement (both geographical and social) for the laboring classes. The Settlement Act of 1662 had codified the principle that entitlement to poor relief was founded on the pauper’s settlement in a parish, a qualification established at birth by the settlement of one’s parents and difficult to change thereafter if one could not afford a ten-pound tenancy.¹ One who had no employer and no particular employment was not permitted to move about the countryside in search of either.² In effect, the English poor laws outlaw the knight errant of romance and his quest, not to mention the wandering minstrel and his song.

A state of unwilled errantry is the predicament that Joseph Andrews faces when he finds himself in London, far from his parish of settlement, cast out of employment, and stripped of his livery. I will suggest in this chapter that vagrancy law helps define the “hitherto unattempted” species of writing that Fielding proclaims in his preface to Joseph Andrews (8): he subjects the conventions of romance to the conditions of poor law and poverty management.³ Fielding was an eager participant in the poor-law debates of midcentury. His “Social Pamphlets”—An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, and A Proposal for Making Effectual Provision for the Poor—published in the 1750s, are important contributions to the literature of the debates. In them he argues that social aspiration and its attendant emulation are the root cause of the sufferings of, and dangers posed by, the poor:

Thus while the nobleman will emulate the grandeur of a prince, and the gentleman will aspire to the proper state of the nobleman, the tradesman steps from behind his counter into the vacant place of the gentleman. Nor doth the confusion end here; it reaches the very dregs of the people, who aspiring still to a degree beyond that which belongs to them, and not being able by the fruits of honest labour to support the state which they affect . . . the more simple and poor-spirited betake themselves to a state of starving and beggary, while those of more art and courage become thieves, sharpers and robbers. (Enquiry 3 [1751 ed.])

Fielding’s social polemics and his fiction share with the vagrancy laws a policy of figuring patriarchal hierarchies of status and condition in topographic and geographic terms: the tradesman steps “into the vacant place of the gentleman.”⁴ Restraint of social movement means restraint of physical movement, and so the knight errant must put aside his lance and be content with his laborer’s implements.⁵

Aspiring “beyond” one’s station, we will see, tends to manifest in quite literal departures from one’s proper place within a geography whose foundational unit is the parish and whose constitutive administrative practice is the confinement and supervision of the parish poor. The register of high and low is clearly not abandoned altogether—as the term “dregs” attests—but its mystification is implied, for instance, in Fielding’s satirically skeptical “Dissertation concerning high People and low People” midway through volume 2 of Joseph Andrews. By high people, the narrator informs us, he means “no other than people of fashion”; low people are “those of no fashion” (136), and their segregation is geographic: “Whilst the people of fashion seized several places to their own use, such as courts, assemblies, operas, balls &c. the people of no fashion . . . have been in constant possession of all hops, fairs, revels, &c.” (136–37). In the Enquiry, Fielding reasserts these territorial divisions without structural irony: “let them [the ‘great’] have their plays, operas, and oratorios, their masquerades and ridottos; their assemblies, drums, routs, riots, and hurricanes, their Ranelagh and Vauxhall; their Bath, Tunbridge, Bristol, Scarborough, and Cheltenham” (8–9). While Fielding may affect a distaste for vertical hierarchies of social rank, his geographic partitioning of national space maintains their fundamental distinctions.

The social pamphlets were authorized by Fielding’s prominence as a lawyer and magistrate, and were taken seriously by his fellow pamphleteers. His contemporary Charles Gray, M.P. for Colchester, praised the “excellent piece” in which Fielding “has shown himself a most worthy labourer in the vineyards of the public” (6); the legal scholar Richard Burn includes a summation of Fielding’s pamphlet in his 1764 compendium The History of the Poor Laws (196ff.); and the polemicist clergyman Joseph Townsend quotes from the proposal in his 1786 Dissertation on the Poor Laws (63). The pamphlets were also written nine and eleven years respectively after Joseph Andrews. Hence I will not be able to take an uncomplicated stance toward the literary example; Joseph Andrews is not a simple redaction of Fielding’s thinking about poverty management to a satiric fiction. That novel’s engagement with the poor laws and the poor is at a remove from actual social practice, though not such a great one: Fielding’s pre-1742 essays in the Champion and elsewhere abound with social and political admonition.⁶ Notably also, the legal career that led Fielding to his social pamphlets began before he read Pamela for the first time: by July 1740, he had completed his legal studies at the Middle Temple, had been called to the bar, and was riding the Western Circuit “looking for cases to plead” (Paulson, Life 98–118). I will not take a strong position in the scholarly debate over the extent to which Fielding’s politics and moral principles changed between the end of the Walpole administration in 1742 and his entering the magistracy in 1749, although I will cite Bertrand Goldgar’s suggestion that, while Fielding may have been willing to sell his pen to the highest bidder, there is little reason to see a radical break between the Fielding of the Champion and Joseph Andrews and the Fielding of the Covent Garden Journal and Amelia (“Fielding, Politics, and ‘Men of Genius’ ” 258–59).

Fielding’s social project aims to revive the patriarchal social bonds embodied by the parish in the face of a general decline in landed paternalism.⁷ The parish was, in eighteenth-century England, the primary unit of social administration. For Fielding it is also the defining instance of the local and of the convergence of intimate, personal relations with relations of governance and civic management. To a considerable extent that is true of the parish’s role in English life and social imagination generally. K. D. M. Snell goes so far as to argue that “the old poor law provides the key to a social understanding of the eighteenth century. Parochial organization ensured a face to face connection of administrators and the poor; while generous terms of relief and often humble officers facilitated agreement and mutual respect between the ranks and orders of parish society” (104). Over the course of the century, however, the hierarchical, consanguineal, and obligational social ties that organized Filmerian patriarchy and paternalistic community gave way to conjugal and affinal bonds whose primary sphere of manifestation was domesticity.⁸

I will argue here that the middle-class home rises from the ruins of the parish more than it does from those of the great house. The crises that condition the decline of parochial orders are in many cases the same crises from which private domesticity emerges. The parish is, in other words, one of the private home’s most significant antecedent institutions. Hence, my account will resist a plain analogy between the transformations of familial structures and those of the domestic setting. I do not imagine the aristocratic household metamorphosing into the middle-class family while the manorial hall dissolves around them into the bourgeois parlor. Nor do I want to imply that such a conflation is a significant feature of historical or literary scholarship. Scholars have long recognized the parallel, mutually influential, but distinct developments of family and domesticity. Thomas Sokoll reports that “by the mid 1970s, research into the social history of household and family had made it clear that the traditional notion of the large and complex households of preindustrial time was a romantic myth and that . . . in England . . . the nuclear family had been the predominant household form since the sixteenth century” (xix). Without question the hegemonic imagery of the modern domestic sphere overwhelms that of the great house, and indeed an effect of the modern home’s rise is the thorough naturalization and commingling of family, household, house, and home in popular representation. But the structures, bonds, functions, and jurisdictions that belong to the parish are absorbed by and translated to the features of familial, social, and national life for which the private home acquires responsibility by the early nineteenth century, while the structures characteristic of manorial households become functions of public ritual, museum exhibits, and nostalgic pastiche.⁹

Among my objectives in this chapter is an examination of the prominence in Joseph Andrews of the parish and the social systems it sustains, both as a contribution to analyses of Fielding’s fiction and social theory and as a provocation for broader consideration of the parish as topos in eighteenth-century fiction generally. I will argue that Fielding’s parochial vision, formulated across the range of his literary, critical, and juridical writings, constitutes an intricate scheme of surveillance, discipline, and care that Fielding hoped to see applied homogeneously and universally throughout the nation. What I am calling his parochial vision combines a plan for reforming oversight of the poor (from the intimate confines of parish management through the supervisory offices of the county and the magistracy) with a heuristics of judgment and discrimination, based on the visible authenticity of poverty and verified by the ridiculousness of affectation, which he exemplifies in Joseph Andrews. But Joseph Andrews does not simply provide literary examples of, or thematic figurations for, this improved parochial system. The reformation of romance is a central component of Fielding’s social polemics, providing, it seems to me, much of the initial formulation as well as the governing logics of his projects.

Romance, in Fielding’s schematic, is visibly inauthentic. His use of the term denominates forms of representation (both literary representation and self-presentation) that have no authorizing connection to substance or precedent, no verifiable truth value. It is important to note that his condemnation falls most emphatically on the “voluminous works commonly called Romances, namely, Clelia, Cleopatra, Astraea, Cassandra, The Grand Cyrus, and innumerable others which contain, as I apprehend, very little instruction or entertainment” (3)—French seventeenth- and eighteenth-century chivalric/nostalgic narrative and its English imitations.¹⁰ As will become clear, the romantic mode typifies, for Fielding, more than a group of exemplary works; it originates in and defines an epistemology of delusion, distortion, and insolent pretension—the quixotism that Fielding associates with “modern” ways of defining property relations, social ambition, and personal merit.¹¹ Romance is empty, depicting what is not to be found in nature, or it is a fraudulent affectation of what is not in one’s own nature. It is, in other words, the vulgar masquerade produced by transgressive emulation, a kind of imitation that abjures “the just imitation of nature” for a burlesque “exhibition of what is monstrous and unnatural” (JA 4). The romantic/quixotic subject abandons his natural place in favor of emulative ambition just as the authors of romances discard Nature in favor of “the confused heap of matter in their own brains” (JA 163). The generic characteristics of literary romance are of a piece with the corrupting influences spreading decay through the manor-parish system. Each has lost its grounding in “natural” traditional orders.

The imitation of nothing—or nothing natural—that constitutes romance makes it subject to ridicule, an elaboration of Cervantean travesty that Fielding develops into a mechanism of judgment for readers of Joseph Andrews. In his “Author’s Preface,” he explains the function of the ridiculous, with which “life everywhere furnishes an accurate observer” (4): its recognition, “which always strikes the reader with surprize and pleasure,” enables us to detect affectation: “The only source of the true ridiculous is affectation” (6), and affectation, like romance, is a product of improper social emulation. “Now affectation,” Fielding continues, “proceeds from one of these two causes, vanity, or hypocrisy” (6), a definition that he revisits, and modifies, ten years later in his account of the emulation responsible for “the late increase of robbers”: “Now the two great motives to luxury, in the mind of men, are vanity and voluptuousness” (Enquiry 23). Here and elsewhere, the resonances between Fielding’s literary work and his social analytics are striking enough to justify the parallel investigation that I propose and that other critics have also employed.¹²

The structuring logics shared by Fielding’s fiction and his social pamphlets are these: first, the neoclassicist edict that legitimate form must mediate proper substance and/or authorizing precedent; second, an ethics of judgment that applies the first edict to examination of person/character; and third, an attempt to bring the mechanisms of private and intimate relations into congruous and homogeneous communication with those of collectivity and the state. All three edicts devolve from a demand for congruity between signifier and signified (between word and idea or thing) and for modes of policing that congruity, and all three are worked out on exemplary cases involving poverty. Fielding’s governing assumptions are: that the pauper has no capacity (no means) to assume any outward form distinct from the poverty that is his effective substance; that a capable judge can easily tell when anyone affects what he is not; and that adequate provision for and discipline of the poor is key to personal virtue and harmonious civic order—for the poor as well as for those doing the providing and disciplining. The test by which one judges affectation is based on a heuristic (in this case a rule of judgment that asses...