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

How do we connect the present with the past? The community of eighteenth-century teachers and scholars is continually asking this question, if my own experience and The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England are any indication. This imperative is not so much defensive—though our presentist culture may sometimes make us feel that way—as it is an impulse towards understanding the power relations that shape the ways we live and think in the present world. Zionkowski and Klekar, the editors of this volume, enter the subject of gifts and the relationships formed around them with this imperative to explain the present in light of the past. Why is Bill Clinton's Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World a 2007 best-seller? What are the motives and fascinations behind the popularity of television shows such as Oprah Winfrey's Big Give? Instead of approaching gift-giving as an alternative to or as deeply complicit in advanced capitalist economies, Zionkowski and Klekar position their subject as having a complicated and often ambiguous relationship to the historical emergence of capitalism.

The essays are divided into four sections: "Theories of Benevolence," "Conduct and the Gift," "The Erotics of the Gift," and "The Gift and Commerce." The first essay, "Rights and Reciprocity in the Political and Philosophical Discourse of Eighteenth-Century England," identifies and historicizes an apparent contradiction in Locke's theory of natural rights as it pertains to the poor. While he endorses the natural rights of man across lines of status and wealth, the rights of the poor boil down to the right to subsistence rather than self-determination. The social relations that mask this contradiction are those of gift-giving: the adult poor give their labour in workhouses in exchange for food and shelter, and poor children give their future labour in exchange for an education that prepares them to labour within the economic and social constraints of the adult poor. The authors, Motlchanova and Ottaway, show the deeply embedded nature of a gift exchange that is predicated on relations of dominance and subordination.

Jad Smith's contribution on the charity school movement of the early eighteenth century also follows from Locke's theories of education. Smith shows us how Anglican clergy used Lockean association theory to define education as a "gift that keeps on giving," by redefining its problematic features as "sin" while retaining its facility for ethical training. The poor are educated into the clean, well-behaved subordinates that were flaunted in the exhibition of neatly dressed, polite charity school children at public events. John Dussinger concludes this section on a literary note by linking Samuel Richardson's fictional identification with repentant prostitutes with his experience as a "feminized" victim of one of the many financial "bubbles" to break in the decade between 1721 and 1731, the failure of the ironically named Charitable Corporation. I am not sure what Richardson's "theory" ultimately is, but Dussinger traces the novelist's compassion for ruined women (as well as his distrust of courts of law) from Pamela through Sir Charles Grandison and continues the arguments of Motlchanova, Ottaway, and Smith: eighteenth-century social theory is relentlessly classed and gendered.

Marilyn Francus begins the section "Conduct and the Gift" with a close examination of three conduct texts written by parents for their daughters. While certainly not new to the eyes of eighteenth-century scholars, the works of Halifax, Gregory, and Pennington emerge with a new clarity and even pathos through Francus's focus on what these texts can reveal about gift exchange and relations between parents and children. As Francus wisely observes, the gift probably tells more about the donor than the recipient and is embedded in uncertain and unequal family relations. Dorice Williams Elliott's essay on Sarah Trimmer's Sunday School projects puts gift exchange in political context. "The Gift of an Education" is...