Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit (review)

REVIEWS 595 his novels of education. Perhaps wisely, Barney eschews a causal model which would require him to show how Locke directly influenced early novelists, and chooses instead an analogical model, by which the shape, language, and behaviour ofdifferent texts might prove to be similar. In citing Pocock, Barney refers more to Pocock's history ofpolitical theory than to his equally important essays on method in intellectual and cultural history. Pocock is sympathetic to the view that what are to us different genres or discourses might reveal similar historical commitments, but he makes it clear (I believe rightly) that those analogies must explicitly appear in the languages of those texts through what he calls a "migration" of terms. It is all too tempting for the modern scholar and critic to project analogies onto the material when no explicit language warrants them, and, unfortunately, this is largely Barney's tack, when defensible analogies between Locke and (say) Defoe are frequently collapsed into more hopeful and imaginary analogies suppliedby the scholar. Hence the ubiquity of the verb "suggest," where the suggestions are more those offered by Barney to his reader than those invoked by suggestive parallels between Locke's actual rhetoric and that of any given novel. (This practice occurs with particular vividness, for example, at pp. 109-10 and 162-63.) The weakest case occurs, I believe, when Barney emphasizes Locke's rendering educational theory into a loosely narrative mode, a view he conscripts both to prove Locke's originality as an educational theorist (see p. 34 on the "emerging fictionalization of educational discourse"), and to show that Locke influenced the narrative structure of the novel (see variously pp. 38, 74, 81, 88, 92). The problem here is that, since language is linear, virtually any piece of writing can be thought of as having a narrative, so that the idea of narrative dissolves rather than cements the supposed connections between Locke and the novel. I am of course convinced of Locke's spectacular importance to the eighteenth century, but, despite his intelligence and learning, about the more specific connections Barney wants us to see I remain unpersuaded. Richard Kroll University of California, Irvine Catherine Ingrassia. Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth -Century England: A Culture ofPaper Credit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xi + 230pp. US$59.95. ISBN 0-521-63063-0. Under an older critical dispensation, scholars identified the country house as the moral centre of and microcosm for eighteenth-century British culture. Work over the last decade, however, has made London's Change Alley the place to be. Scholarhip in the 1990s relocated the hope for happiness—the Utopian longing— that had found its home in the Palladian mansion and resituated it at the site where, in the eighteenth century, people learned to speculate on the possibility 596 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:4 that the right investment, made at the right moment, might transform their lives and selves. While it assists in this relocation, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England 'iom^ forces with recent books such as Colin Nicholson's Writing and the Rise of Finance and Sandra Sherman's Finance and Fictionality. And, while Catherine Ingrassia asserts the cultural centrality of Change Alley, she simultaneously exemplifies a shift of focus that has been increasingly evident in novel studies. Like William Beatty Warner and Catherine Gallagher, Ingrassia downplays realism and makes fictionality—the negation of things as they are, the capacity to arouse fantasy—the aspect of novels that requires explaining. Novels, Ingrassia observes, ask readers investing in them to believe in a future return on their investment. In an analogous manner, instruments of paper credit—the stocks and bonds of a speculative economy—are negotiable only so long as investors are willing to dispense with immediate, material gratification and instead give preference to a "fiction about the future" (p. ix): to the happy endings which they identify with some future moment of cashing in. Formerly, the emergence of the novel seemed to scholars testimony to a new priority given to referential language. By contrast, Ingrassia aligns the commodities that are novels with immaterial, imaginary property. Here novels function much like promissory notes or like...