Literature and Crime in Augustan England (review)

REVIEWS 167 Ian A. Bell. Literature and Crime in Augustan England. London and New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1991. vii + 250pp. US$49.95. ISBN 0-41502231 -2. It is not common diese days to find the word "Augustan" used to describe a large slice of British history. The reason it has a place in die title of Ian Bell's book is to emphasize his distinction between die instruments of a ruling class and popular forms of resistance to them. His aim is to detect die moments of mismatching, interrogation, and critique that occur when the "assured and triumphant" rhetoric of eighteenth-century law (typically in the summaries of Blackstone) comes up against intractable social and economic realities. He takes literature (in its broadest sense of prints, journalism, conduct books, and pornography, as well as novels, plays, and poems) to be exemplary of these slippages between ideology and practice. It may sound like the increasingly familiar New Historicist patrol of die cultural margins of the eighteendi century, but Bell's investigation has more in common with the Marxist and socialist precursors of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, such as Benjamin, Gramsci, Williams, Richetti, and most of all the historians of E.P. Thompson's school, such as Douglas Hay and Peter Linebaugh. Akhough Foucault is introduced in the postscript to make a point about tile contested readings of "Last Dying Words," Bell is not concerned to analyse power in its textual or discursive formations, so much as to consider written words as representational counterparts or satirical exposés of the hegemonic structures of law and penology. He frequently points to them as evidence. Of Amelia for example: "We see the appointed officer of die law committing injustices ... . Thrasher is clearly meant to represent. ..." This is not what one expects from a book with sections entitled "The Grammar of Punishment," where me promise implicitly is made to tackle the issues raised by Foucault in Discipline and Punish—the prison as an expressive form of power, and modes of punishment as a language system of classification, translation, and counter-reading. Instead, Bell turns to "official penal policy and practice" in Britain, assigning it "a very important place in die legitimising ideology of the state" (p. 147); although later he is less certain, referring to the causes of change in penal practice as "long-term shifts in material and economic circumstances" and "drastic underlying economic changes," which are merely "dramatised by particular legislative moments" (pp. 159—60). In fact it is hard to tell what teleology is in use from chapter to chapter, which may be owing to a confusion between his analysis of tile operation of power and his concept of ideology. If "the state was stealthily reinforcing its own powers" as part of a process which culminates in Benüiamite reformism and the Benthamite maxim "all punishment is mischief," men ideology is a subtler manifold of intentions and effects than Bell sometimes gives it credit for. Therefore it might have been wise to exchange the moralizing tone of die long and rather digressive third chapter on the topic of women under the law (where tile pathos of the plight of prostitutes and the outrageousness of James Boswell the whoremaster are radier too salient) for a more rigorous analysis of the social and economic factors diat produced the inhumanity. As it is, Defoe's and Mandeville's versions of the economics of marriage and prostitution are cited but not pursued. When Bell puts aside tendentious rhetoric and concentrates on penology tout court, the results are excellent and bibliographically very useful. The review of theories of punishment from Hobbes to Price, via Butler and Hutcheson, is authoritative and informative. 168 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 4:2 I wish Fielding could have been incorporated into this discussion before being introduced as the rather muddle-headed convener of "the disciplinary tribunal of die novel" (p. 222). Bell has a good local grip on the antinomies of Fielding's "not entirely straightforward " blends of law and poetics, but little conceptual grasp of die urgent issues of verisimulitude and exemplarity which overwhelm law-makers and novelists alike in die 175Os. How do you make a satisfactory...