The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England (review)

This book exemplifies how the study of British literature in the last several decades has absorbed other disciplinary influences and expanded its interpretive frameworks. The title relies most heavily and explicitly on Marcel Mauss's famous work The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, though the writings of Derrida, Bourdieu, and several other authors are also frequently invoked. This creates both new insights and new problems—new ways of considering older texts and nagging discomfort about cross-time and cross-place comparisons, as well as the neglect of the rhetorical purposes of the texts examined.

The eleven essays in this volume are divided into four separate subheadings: Theories of Benevolence, Conduct and the Gift, The Erotics of the Gift, and The Gift and Commerce. An overview essay by the book's editors precedes these sections. Jad Smith's "Charity Education and the Spectacle of 'Christian Entertainment'" offers a fine example of how to "read" the illustrations of works in support of charity schools. "Debt without Redemption in a World of 'Impossible Exchange'" by John A. Dussinger suggestively gives us a new insight into the life and writings of Samuel Richardson, while Susan B. Egenolf shows us another facet of the promotional activities of Josiah Wedgwood. Many of the other essays were similarly innovative, informative, and provocative.

I am, however, left with several quandaries. First is the notion of "the gift" as a historical tool. In their introductory essay the editors claim that they wish to recover the way in which "the gift" had (and has) a "central role in distributing and aggrandizing power and creating and dismantling relationships in all aspects of social life" (2). Here I think that, while their endeavor is daring, its execution can lead to difficulties. I am unconvinced by Moltchanova and Ottaway's argument (in the "Rights and Reciprocity in the Political and Philosophical Discourse of Eighteenth-Century England") that "not only charity but also statutory relief was allocated according to the principles of gift giving and reciprocal exchanges" (16). Even those incapable of labor, the very old or young, or the mentally handicapped, were considered proper objects of state relief. Furthermore, can we consider conduct manuals as gifts to their ostensible recipients, as Francus contends, even though the examples she uses were all published and sold? Or is the "self-protecting deed" discussed by Klekar in "Obligation, Coercion and Economy" (133) really a "gift"? Or more largely, and to return to the editors' introduction, is any gift really a gift, or is it always some sort of "power-play"? It seems to me that there are many sorts of gifts whose only similarity is that they involve donors and recipients. Some, like the gift I give my granddaughter, are entirely silly gifts of love. Others, like praise to students, are sometimes gifts of encouragement, whereas still other compliments, of which I am sometimes the recipient, are students' attempts to raise their grade by flattering their instructor. Surely all these are gifts, but of very different sorts. They share the word, but little else.

Second, how useful can the work of anthropologists and theorists be to those who study places that are culturally, temporally, and geographically far removed from the societies that these seminal writings were originally discussing? It seems that only in arguing that human nature and human societies share in a variety of practices, of which "the gift" is an important example, can this position be strongly supported. Otherwise, like has to be compared with like; I am not implying, however, that comparisons are impossible or not useful. We might fruitfully consider gift-giving in France, Germany, and Britain in this period to discover just how much difference time, place, politics, religion, etc., play in the process or processes.

Third, we must consider the question of the original purpose of the work analyzed to understand the sorts of gifts we are really dealing with. I have spent many...