Mourning, Melancholia, and Modernity: Sentimental Irony and Downward Mobility in David Simple

This essay identifies Sarah Fielding as an early practitioner of a rhetoric that I call “sentimental irony.” Reading her first novel in the context of the eighteenth-century value crisis postulated by the new economic criticism, I argue that Sarah Fielding uses sentimental irony to produce a melancholy interpretation of early modern social and cultural change. Ultimately, this essay endeavours to take a step towards imagining what might be called “negative history,” an anti-teleological mode of historiography that strives to tell the story of what did not happen.