Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: George Campbell in the Eighteenth Century by Jeffrey M. Suderman (review)

400 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 one or both terms. Notable among those on Pamela is Albert J. Rivero=s fascinating consideration of the narrative position of Sally Godfrey, Mr B=s former mistress. Rivero=s essay investigates the ways in which >Sally Godfrey never gets a chance to tell her own story, except through the agency, the projections, and the obfuscations of others.= Essays on Pamela=s textual authority (by John B. Pierce), on Richardson=s complicated politics and the politics of virtue (by John Dussinger), and on the structural, social, and linguistic circle drawn to model social authority in Pamela 2 (by Betty A. Schellenberg) round out the section on Pamela. The Clarissa essays are wide ranging in approach and content, authored by Jocelyn Harris, Rachel K. Carnell, Daniel P. Gunn, Peggy Thompson, Robert A. Erickson, and Margaret Anne Doody. They consider the politics of epistolarity; class, economics, and art; passion and abuse; and other topics. The contribution with which I was most taken is Harris=s >Protean Lovelace,= looking at the character of Lovelace in relation to the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Harris makes these and other comparisons in order to consider >man=s Protean paradoxical capacity to create and to destroy.= Doody=s essay linking Clarissa to Gnostic thought and Erickson=s on the language of the heart in Clarissa are also groundbreaking, each taking Richardson studies in previously unforeseen directions. On the Richardson novel least appreciated throughout the twentienth century, Sir Charles Grandison, four contributors argue for its recuperation and centrality. Essays by Juliet McMaster (on body and character), Lois A. Chaber (on anxiety), Wendy Jones (on love), and George E. Haggerty (on the language of nature) are reprinted. McMaster=s is particularly compelling . She argues that Grandison >was remarkably explicit about the body, while still maintaining its own standards of delicacy.= Her interpretations are brilliant and offer provocative reading for anyone interested in eighteenth-century literature and social history. Though this collection has many merits, its main weakness is that it consists largely of reprinted essays from one journal. Passion and Virtue is by no means univocal, but major debates of the past twenty years in Richardson studies are more often referred to than enacted in its pages. Furthermore, half of the essays were first published prior to 1996. The collection would have been of greater value had contributors been invited to respond to each other=s work or to add prologues or codas to their essays, reflecting on the ways that the study of Richardson (or their own thinking) has changed in recent years. Nevertheless, for libraries that do not subscribe to Eighteenth-Century Fiction, this will be an important addition to their collections. For those readers who do not follow ECF or who desire a onebook selection of critical essays on Richardson=s oeuvre, Blewett=s book has much to offer. (DEVONEY LOOSER) Jeffrey M. Suderman. Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: humanities 401 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 George Campbell in the Eighteenth Century McGill-Queen=s University Press. xiv, 294. $75.00 This useful book presents a restored portrait of George Campbell, best known to moderns as the author of The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1775). With solid workmanship, Jeffrey Suderman has removed grime and varnish so that the colours of Campbell=s age emerge bright and fresh, and Campbell himself takes on fuller dimensions. Suderman=s study begins with a biobibliographical essay which places Campbell in his Scottish contexts, primarily those of the moderate party of the Church of Scotland and the >Wise Club,= or Aberdeen Philosophical Society, where Campbell came in contact with the Common Sense movement. This preliminary essay also introduces Suderman=s broader aims of demonstrating the unity of Campbell =s work and of limning the goals and limitations of the moderate Christian Enlightenment through the portrait of Campbell. George Campbell was best known to his contemporaries, Suderman points out, as the author not of The Philosophy of Rhetoric but rather of A Dissertation on Miracles (1762), which was thought by many to have refuted David Hume=s...