New Contexts for Eighteenth-Century British Fiction: "Hearts Resolved and Hands Prepared": Essays in Honor of Jerry C. Beasley (review)

Christopher D. Johnson collects thirteen essays written with "hearts resolved and hands prepared" to celebrate the scholarly accomplishments of Jerry C. Beasley. In the introduction, Johnson portrays Beasley, retired from the University of Delaware, as the consummate intellectual—rigorous yet humane, enthusiastic yet professional. Beasley has had an undeniable impact on his area of study and, as this collection shows, on students he mentored and colleagues who read and admired his work as an editor and literary critic. Johnson's anecdotes about his former supervisor give us a sense of Beasley as a personality: someone invested (without incongruity) in both rock and roll—as a musician playing with The Elderly Brothers—and eighteenth-century literature. Charles E. Robinson contributes a touching personal essay on his friend's contributions to academia, his energetic involvement with the life of the university, and with eighteenth-century studies as both a field and a community.

Following Robinson's short homage to Beasley, the collection moves into three essays concerning bibliography and life-writing. O.M. Brack Jr. contributes a carefully considered essay about the need for an updated biography of Tobias Smollett. Brack acknowledges the value of information collected by past scholars, weighing the strengths and weaknesses of older biographies, such as Lewis M. Knapp's Tobias Smollett: Doctor of Men and Manners (1949), pointing to problems like the minimal attention paid to "the enormous canon of Smollett's miscellaneous writings" (17). The existing works' scholarly gaps appear to be, more often than not, the product of changing methodologies and interests, the evolution of bibliographical studies, and the additional primary materials available to today's critics. Brack not only lays out the challenges of this yet unrealized project, but also clearly identifies its requisite parts. He would like to see a biographer take into account the eighteenth-century book trade and meticulously construct an historically accurate portrait of Smollett within the complex literary marketplace in which he participated—investigating, for example, his relationships with various members of the world of commercial letters, including booksellers and other writers.

Beasley's work on Tobias Smollett has inspired several other pieces in this collection, many of which acknowledge their debt to Tobias Smollett, Novelist (among other works by Beasley) and his scholarly editions of Smollett's novels. Johnson includes two essays on Smollett's Roderick Random. His own contemplates this work in relation to the eighteenth-century public imagination, which, as he notes at the beginning of his essay, was stirred by Mary Toft's monstrous "birth" of seventeen rabbits. Robinson ends his piece with an inspired discussion of the imaginative powers of Roderick's beloved Narcissa, a figure both illusive and redemptive. Rivka Swenson then interprets Roderick Random, a "narrative of dislocation," as a fundamentally political, historically inflected text, one which fictionally reverses the flight of the Scottish diaspora (187).

Major contributions to Smollett studies aside, Beasley led the way in many subfields of eighteenth-century studies and encouraged the study of several previously marginalized writers. Beasley exercised his critical powers on Eliza Haywood, whose recent popularity as a subject of critical scrutiny is evinced in two essays: Melissa Mowry reads the romance-laden Love in Excess against the grain as a political text, while Mary Anne Schofield charts the progress of scholarship to date on this prolific author. Referencing multiple secondary sources, including her own, Schofield acknowledges the movement beyond a "two-Haywoods theory" or the artificial divide between an early (scandalous) Haywood and a late (reformed) Haywood who writes about rehabilitated coquettes rather than erotic adventuresses (166).

Alexander Pettit's intriguingly titled "The Headwaters of Ooziness (Richardson the Polemicist)" is also interested in more sharply defining the character of a prominent literary figure, contributing an evaluative essay on Samuel Richardson's morally questionable or "oozy" tactics as an...