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  • Historical Style, Fashion and the New Mode of History, 1740–1830 by Timothy Campbell
  • Paula Radisich
Historical Style, Fashion and the New Mode of History, 1740–1830. By Timothy Campbell (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) 440pp. $65.00

The jacket of Campbell’s book displays two versions of the same man wearing a different set of clothes. The figure labeled “a beau 1700” is bedecked in a towering wig and high heels. He reappears on the reader’s right as “a beau 1791,” attired in his own cropped hair and flat shoes.1 The juxtaposed figures capture the narrative arc of the book, which examines how British conceptions of historical representation between 1740 and 1830 were shaped by pictures staging fashionable figures from one era confronting equally fashionable figures from another era. Clearly, ideas about “datedness,” periodicity, and novelty affecting human behavior are posed and incarnated in such printed images. Conceptualizing fashion’s “serial alterations” as history’s “building blocks” (27), Campbell claims that “after the eighteenth century, an unprecedentedly influential and conceptually sophisticated historiography was an effect (author’s emphasis) of commercial culture and of the audiences and outlooks that commerce shaped” (27). More and more attuned to the vagaries of fashion, Britons increasingly saw themselves as capricious social products changing over time, subject to the imperatives of material culture. [End Page 89]

As a literary historian, Campbell grounds his claim on an analysis of historical writing, especially novels. Chapter 1 examines Anna Letitia Barbauld’s poem “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven” (London, 1812); her essay “A Comparison of Manners, Athenaeum, II (1807), 512–513 (1806); and Walter Scott’s Waverley novels (London, 1814–1832), in which “conflation of dress with the ‘spirit of the age,’ of surface with essence, becomes a central problematic” (55). Chapter 2 explores the problem of clothing in fine-art portraits, such as those by Anthony Van Dyke and Joshua Reynolds. David Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste,” in Four Disserations (London, 1757), and the portrait-auction scene in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play The School for Scandal (1777) are contrasted with the aesthetic theories espoused by Reynolds in his Discourses on Art (Chicago, 1891). In Chapter 3, Campbell focuses upon other writings by Hume, in particular History of England (1754–1761), A Treatise of Human Nature (1738–1740), and “Of the Study of History,” in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1741), highlighting their “commercialist qualities” and positing them as a context for Hume’s exchanges with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an exemplar of anti-commerciality (131).

In Chapters 4, 5, and 6, Campbell analyzes the place of dress in a range of literary works, such as Sophia Lee’s novel The Recess: or, a Tale of Other Times (London, 1783–1785); Barbauld’s essay “On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing,” in The British Novelists (London, 1820); William Cowper’s poem The Task (London, 1785); Maria Edgeworth’s Tales of Fashionable Life (London, 1809London, 1812); Scott’s Kenilworth (1821), Old Mortality (1816), and The Heart of Midlothian (1818); and William Godwin’s novel Mandeville: A Tale of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1817). Campbell also cites substantial secondary sources, and he provides an extensive bibliography.

A weakness of Campbell’s book is that it presupposes a deep familiarity with obscure English novels. Its strength lies in the way that it points to the influence of the fashionable figure in print culture as a means of measuring and apprehending time past. Campbell’s use of visual texts is discriminating. For example, he reproduces a composition from Thomas Jefferys’ A Collection of the Dresses of Different Nations, Antient and Modern (London, 1757), labeled “Habits of English Gentlemen in the Years 1735 (a) 1745 (b) 1755 (c).” But instead of lining up the figures in the chronological order of the inscription, the eighteenth-century artist twisted “history” by picturing the gentleman of 1755 gazing curiously at the back of the man from 1735, who is unexpectedly placed in the center of the triad and engaged in a face-to-face encounter with his counterpart from 1745. Commercial modernity is thereby figured as a jumbled, unpredictable sequence of past and present material objects—objects that...

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