Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates: The Making of the Modern Gentleman in the Eighteenth Century (review)

Erin Mackie is to be congratulated on the range, scholarship, and critical perception in her study of some disquieting resemblances between deviant masculine types and perfect gentlemen. John Dryden and Lord Rochester, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, George Etherege and John Gay, and Daniel Defoe’s Colonel Jack (1722) as well as his Compleat English Gentleman (1728–29) are all used to support her views on “the stubbornly tenacious imbrication of the criminal and the gentleman conventional within early eighteenth-century culture” (13). She argues that the criminality of rakes has often passed unnoticed, or at least unreproved. One cause is the tolerant acceptance that “boys will be boys” (37), stemming from “the modern emphasis on sexuality as a confirmation of masculinity” (9). Another is the tendency of crime historians to concentrate on the poor, with the ironic consequence that upper-class offenders who paid no court penalty for their crimes now evade condemnation at the bar of history. Drawing on criminal biographies and Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–48), Mackie likens the rakish Lovelace, rooted in “the matrix of seventeenth-century issues of authority, absolutism, and masculinity” (61), to James Hind, Claude Duval, and Philip Stafford, “those few highwaymen who are figured as ‘gentlemanly’ or ‘gallant’” (77), and who enacted either the “martial and political imperatives” or the “excesses” of the Stuart court (83). She finds a parallel in seventeenth-century politics for the “doubled quality and consequent potential for reversals of authority ” in criminal biography (76). This stage of her argument ends in a critical tour de force, when she discusses the presence of Mr Spectator and Captain Macheath among the role models mentioned in James Boswell’s London journals (1762–63). She argues that these examples are not incompatible extremes of a violently swinging pendulum, but “mutually constitutive positions more or less simultaneously available in Boswell’s psyche” (85). The riddle’s solution lies in the journal’s status as a “work of imaginative description” (89).

Mackie realizes that her rake/highwayman template does not fit pirates: like Stephen Gregg and Hans Turley, she is “intrigued and sometimes perplexed by the juxtaposition of the pirate’s hypermasculinity with the absence of piratical sexuality” (120). Defoe’s enigmatic Captain Singleton (1720) does not entirely resolve these quandaries. Colonial history is a much more productive approach. She performs original and enlightening investigations into “sociocultural features that plantation slave and ship societies, and Maroon and pirate societies as well, share in common” (141). Making frequent connections with the present day, she notes that “early modern piracy has an analogue in late modern West Indian youth gangs” (125), while the Rastafarians have much in common with “the separatist Maroon communities with their focus on spiritual righteousness” (127). She even finds evidence in Alexander Esquemelin’s Bucaniers of America (1684) for the origin of the zombie, who, “like the comatose indentured servant, is a being whose identity and will are slaughtered in service to the exactions of unfree labour” (135).

Finally, Mackie’s readings of Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778) and William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) emphasize “their continuity with earlier novelistic ‘precursor’ forms such as the criminal biography” (150). She examines Burney’s “variations on the ‘gentleman highwayman’ theme” (164), while making it clear that the true gentleman is Lord Orville, “more purely perfect” even than Samuel Richardson’s exemplary Sir Charles Grandison (172). Godwin, however, depicts a nightmare world where members of the upper classes are unwilling or unable to bring about reform. Mackie invokes Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) to reveal Falkland, a failed would-be Grandison, as “the gothic specter of Burke’s definition of chivalry” (183). She brings her argument to a triumphant conclusion by showing how Godwin utilizes criminal biography as a crucially important element in the development of his hero’s character: “it is...