Eighteenth-Century Characters: A Guide to the Literature of the Age (review)

McGirr’s study considers the eighteenth-century fascination with character writing. She provides a useful summary of selected “characters” that “help to illustrate the themes and paradoxes central to eighteenth-century literature, culture and political debate” (20). Her book is a useful resource for those teaching literature from the period as it contains excellent, accessible summaries of character types that are mostly drawn from drama and novels. Following an introduction, her study is divided into three clearly marked sections. In each, McGirr provides general and pertinent information as she maps the trajectory of character types over the long eighteenth century. The most interesting aspect lies in following the shifts in fortune of characters in light of general political, economic, and social changes.

The introduction establishes how, during the eighteenth century, the meaning of the term “character” expanded from including just the “external marks or signs by which something could be recognized” to incorporate the newer meaning of “the estimate formed of a person’s moral qualities.” McGirr argues that this shift in meaning “capture[s] the most important elements of eighteenth-century literature” and is marked by a shift from “characters that typify to those that specify—what literary critics and historians have identified as the rise of the individual and subjective interiority” (1). The slippage between the two meanings also exposes one of the central concerns of that century: the gap between seeming and being, appearances and reality. McGirr notes that the eighteenth-century “character,” with its insistence that external description could delineate the inner man, was used to bridge the two meanings of “character” and to try to blur the boundaries between physical and moral qualities (3). Thus “the ‘character’ is not just an index to a particular social or moral type, it is also an index to the period and its literature” (4). In this way “characters were presented as indexes to social types and gender behavior: in claiming to describe, they legitimized and naturalized—even helped to create—gender roles and sexual identities” (16).

The first section covers four male types (the Rake, the Fop, the Country Gentleman, the Cit), investigating how the constant and overlapping debate surrounding these four characters reveals “a clear picture of the masculine ideals and anxieties of the 18th century” (20). We learn that the rake moves from a position of eminence to one of contempt, while the Cit emerges as the new man: “as the rake’s stock plummets, the cit’s credit improves” (64). In the second section, entitled “Women: ‘Most Women Have No Character At All,’” McGirr presents four pairings of types (Heroine and Wife, Coquette and the Prude, Country Maid and Town Lady, Learned Ladies and Female Wits). These pairs represent extremes of female sexuality, of nature and artifice, and of native wit and acquired intelligence. McGirr suggests that “female characters are intended to shape, not to reflect, reality,” and thus all the characters examined in this section demonstrate “how female self-presentation came under increased scrutiny and attack” because “self-presentation was ... on the rise” (21–22). She argues that these types of women are presented as “binary opposites defined against each other” and operating through “negative didacticism” (77). McGirr maps the “un-writing of the witty, independent desiring heroines of Restoration stage and their silencing and reformation as the innocent victims or chaste wives of the eighteenth-century novel” (78). The third and final section deals with an eclectic selection of “Others” (The Catholic Other, The Protestant Other, The British Other). McGirr suggests that following the 1707 Act of Union with Scotland notions of “Englishness” were replaced by notions of “Britishness” such that “radical otherness came not from the Celtic fringe but from the Continent” (135).

Overall, this study provides a broad-reaching analysis of character in the period; but the wide range of character types discussed presents some problems. This selection presumes a familiarity on the reader...