Wicked Traders, Deserving Peddlers, and Virtuous Smugglers: The Counter-Economy of Jane Barker's Jacobite Novel

A manuscript-circulated coterie poetess, then a (long-forgotten) pioneer in the rise of the English novel, Jacobite author Jane Barker witnessed with distrust and distaste the rise of businessmen and tradespeople in early eighteenth-century British society. Standing at the crossroads between the two worlds and world-pictures of the Jacobite court at Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Hanoverian Britain, deeply concerned with, and personally affected by, the material difficulties of the daily survival of Jacobite partisans, she simultaneously expressed and fostered the uneasiness of the men and women of the landed gentry faced with the change from a status- to a class-based society in her later novels. To this end, she created a variety of sharply delineated, often contradictory "trading" figures vested with symbolic and political significance. Halfway between observation and allegorization, novelistic characterization provided Barker with a way to negotiate a difficult adaptation to the unsparing historical necessity—the dual political and economic revolution—which had upset both her status as a poet of the elite and the political and religious order to which she still adhered.