Commerce, Morality and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (review)

REVIEWS 109 the chronology of Fielding's life and the annotated bibliography of primary and secondary sources. As an added bonus, the edition includes four reproductions of Thomas Stothard's illustrations to the 1782 Novelist's Magazine edition, one engraved by the young William Blake. Readers of eighteenth-century fiction will be delighted that Sarah Fielding's edition has been restored in a volume that is accessible, responsibly edited, and handsomely produced. Christopher D. Johnson Francis Marion University Liz Bellamy. Commerce, Morality and the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. vii + 233pp. US$59.95. ISBN 0-521-62224-7. In Commerce, Morality and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, Liz Bellamy argues that civic humanism, bourgeois economics, and moral philosophy constitute an unsettled ideological mix that novels continually try to sort out as the eighteenth century proceeds. The difficulty with Bellamy's text is that its thesis develops at so high a level ofgeneralization that terms such as "economics" continually confront the reader without adequate intellectual underpinning. Sometimes economics is seen as feminizing when compared to the brute masculinity ofepic; at other times as suppressing the feminine with overbearing patriarchalism. Moreover, while the thesis is illustrated through a series of novels, one is never quite sure whether such novels constitute a coherent discourse or are merely scattered, coincidental shots aimed at a moving target. Even if ideology were unsettled along the lines suggested by Bellamy, she has not proved that novels really try to sort out or even register this unsettlement in a systematic, deliberate way, or even in unconscious ways that can be convincingly demonstrated. Of course novels are about struggle and tension—when have they not been? Bellamy makes claims that are often facile, as if her generalizations did not require adequate analysis of subject texts. Speaking of Tom Jones, for example, she asserts that "by repeatedly suggesting the absence of a consensus in the interpretation of the novel, despite the presence of the narrator, it creates an impression of the absence ofa unifying ideology within society" (p. 94). Does it? Anyone familiar with Fielding criticism could offer several reasons for the cognitive tug-of-war between narrator and reader. Speaking of Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, Bellamy notes that while the hero is respectable, he fails to merit the praise he receives, and she ascribes this disjunction to a "cultural uncertainty over the definition of male virtue" that is over-simplified and radically inaccurate: "the epic concept of heroism and public endeavour was being undermined by the emergence of economic analysis, with its denial of the importance of any kind of civic humanist notion of the public, and its elevation not only of private and domestic virtue, but also of mercenary acquisitiveness" (p. 108). Who among eighteenthcentury economists counselled "mercenary acquisitiveness"? Certainly not Adam 110 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 12:1 Smith, whom Bellamy examines as a pivotal figure. Moreover, the type of "civic humanism" that we have come to understand through the writings ofJ.G.A. Pocock stood in opposition to certain forms of mobile wealth attained through speculation and enterprises unassociated with traditional landed concerns. As Pocock has shown, it did not necessarily oppose the market economy in all its forms. BeIlany 's argument here is another instance of the unstable, insufficiently explained categories that drive the reader to say "Now wait a minute...!" There are so many such instances that they continually detract from the case that Bellamy is attempting to make, since they signal to the specialist that Bellamy's analysis is superficial. Speaking ofa visit to the Royal Exchange in Sarah Fielding's David Simple, Bellamy observes that it provides the occasion for a set-piece, "a satirical portrayal of the debased and corrupted values of the contemporary financial system, in a style which was familiar from periodicals such as Daniel Defoe's Review or the Spectator" (p. 133). If anything is characteristic of the Review, it is that Defoe said as many wonderful things about "credit" and the necessity for well-run markets as he said adverse things about jobbery and AirMoney . Lady Credit epitomizes Defoe's love-hate relationship with the financial system, which persisted throughout his...