The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (review)

When, in his introduction to the 1946 edition of Henry James’s American Scene, W.H. Auden claimed that, “outside of fairy tales, I know of no book in which things so often and so naturally become persons,” he marked the oddity of the fact that James grants the power of speech to churches and train cars, among other things (xi). Within the novelist’s impressions of the U.S., the secret life of things looms large, as it does for other writers at other times in other genres—and not just the genre of the fairy tale or fable. In England, more than thirty editions of Aesop’s fables were published between 1708 and 1798, but by the close of the eighteenth century animals were considerably more voluble in, say, The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse (1785), “related by a mouse,” or The Memoirs of Dick (1800), a pony: “I trust the following Memoirs of my checquered life will prove that I am not uncultivated, or have been an inattentive observer of human manners.” Moreover, inanimate objects considerably outdid animals in their capacity to wax autobiographical; the object autobiography became a much discussed convention and pretty standard reading fare. This is why it is not (so) surprising that George Eliot’s brilliant young doctor, Lydgate, an obsessive reader of Rasselas and Gulliver, also read (by the age of ten) the novel by Charles Johnstone entitled “Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea, which was neither milk for babes, nor any chalky mixture meant to pass for milk” (Eliot, Middlemarch [1871–72; New York: Penguin, 1994], 143.) In Gulliver’s own adventures, after all, conditions for vocability are buoyantly breached. And just as Swift’s non-humans have strong reactions to their human others, so Chrysal does not mince his words: unwilling to argue strongly within the nature/nurture debate, the guinea remains eager, after recounting the despicable schemes of a gentleman, to share the observation that while humans are careful to track the pedigrees of their dogs and horses, they seem to “show no regard to the dispositions of those, on whom they propagate their own species” ( Johnstone, Chrysal [1764], 13). Johnstone’s novel, reprinted three times before being expanded into a four-volume edition, was once deemed worthy of collection in Ballantyne’s Novelists’ Library (1822), but it belongs to a subgenre (in which things become persons) that remained generally unread in the twentieth century, even by such a voracious reader as Auden.

This is the subgenre now widely designated as the “it-narrative,” with protagonists—shoes, quills, coats, cats, dogs, cork-screws, coaches, kites, canes, pins, and any number of coins, most famously the gold guinea Chrysal—that often serve as homodiegetic narrators. As Mark Blackwell explains in the introduction to this impressive collection of essays, despite Joseph Addison’s “Adventures of a Shilling” (1710) and Tobias Smollett’s The History and Adventures of an Atom (1769) belonging to this genre, scholars have widely ignored it, disdaining it as formula fiction, and it has thus “languished in critical purgatory” (11). The Secret Life of Things provides instead a critical paradise. For some readers, this collection could no doubt be captioned “everything you wanted to know about it-narratives and chose not to ask”; for many more readers, though, it will certainly serve as the critical foundation for formulating new questions about a form of narrative prose fiction that proves to be far more than a curiosity, newly legible here as an integral part of literary and cultural history, appearing to allegorize (and at times to ameliorate) anxieties about authorship, property, ethnicity, female sexuality, point of view, and the eighteenth century’s burgeoning consumer culture. This is one of literature’s more idiosyncratic contributions to what John Brewer and Roy Porter have called the Enlightenment’s task of “making sense of the opportunities...