The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (review)

REVIEWS 191 GJ. Barker-Benfield. The Culture ofSensibility: Sex and Society in EighteenthCentury Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. xxxiv + 520pp. US$49.95. ISBN 0-226-03713-4. Under its huge title, this big book addresses a wide field. It sets out to relate the vogue (or cult, or religion) of sensibility to developments in physiological theory and in global power politics. Along the way it addresses ideas about the mechanistic workings of the nerves, the hierarchical ranking of individuals according to their greater or lesser capacity for feeling, and the allocation of reason and emotion to each sex as a respective special sphere. This involves it with gender construction (male as well as female), with social change through human moral agency (reformation of manners, humanitarian reforms, Methodism), with literary history, and with economic processes (print culture, capitalism, consumerism: all those aspects ofthe period which speak urgently to our own concerns)— in short, with almost every psychological, social, and economic aspect of its period. It is a "history of the eighteenth century and of everything," from Locke and (more unusually) the physician George Cheyne, to Mary Wollstonecraft and her Jacobin associates. The account of Dr Cheyne is particularly interesting. A witty and satirical but sensitive Scot, he was a bulimic who veered several times from obesity to slenderness and back again; this personal experience lay behind his pondering on the relation of self and body. He developed his ideas in an influential book, The English Malady (1733), which probably drew a broader if less intellectual audience than Locke's. G.J. Barker-Benfield acknowledges Locke as source of Cheyne's concept of the nerves (as strings making up an instrument on which the soul or spirit plays), and Mandeville as a probable source for some of his ideas about nervous diseases (p. 25). He suggests, however, that Cheyne, friend and doctor to Samuel Richardson, was the conduit by which the concept of the nerve as musical string entered the novel of sensibility. Despite this "emblematic" (p. 101) use of Cheyne and his book, Barker-Benfield's favourite territory is that of secondary texts: works about literary works. This is a dangerous method for several reasons. Notes which cite "X" quoted in "Y" must mean that whatever in "X" was not germane to the different purpose of "Y" has remained unscanned . Irrelevant errors creep in as the original author communicates by intermediary. Bits of inaccurate information—like the statement that Anne Elliot in Persuasion is interrupted by Captain Harville while writing a letter—ought, perhaps, to be ignored by a reader intent on taking in a broad sweep of argument. But such intentness is hard or impossible for the irritable scholarly mind to attain. This book is brim-full of such inaccuracies. Many stem from sheer inadvertence. The misprints suggest that no proofreading was done at any stage. James Thomson is spelt with a "p," with a note citing Margaret Drabble's Oxford Companion to English Literature. Among the plethora of misspelt names, Keith Walker, editor of Rochester, becomes Keith Wilmot; Penelope Aubin's heroine Lucinda becomes Luanda; Hannah Glasse becomes Gasse; Mary Davys becomes Davis; Captain Mirvan becomes Mirwan. The Gunning mother and daughter and the two Lee sisters coalesce under the single name of "Gunning Lee" (p. 168). Quotations have their sense mangled with "tim'd" for "tun'd" (p. 8), "Thou" for "Than" (p. 438), "might" for "mighty" (p. 191), "case" for "care" (p. 456), and so on ad infinitum. Many confusions are fairly minor: a character in Henry Mackenzie is said to be "named Emilia after Richardson's maddened heroine" (p. 144); Burney is said to have first published at age thirty-six; her The Wanderer becomes Juliet. Steele's Christian Hero is mentioned as a play; Pope is mentioned as a dramatist. Others are more regrettable. An outrageous joke is lost when a novel by William Beckford, published as "Jacquetta Agneta Mariana Jenks" and attacking his half-sister Elizabeth Hervey, is mentioned as a 192 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 6:2 novel by Hervey, published as Beckford's. Any critical or ideological reading of Inchbald 's Simple Story, part 2, is lost with the assertion...