Reading 1759: Literary Culture in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and France edited by Shaun Regan (review)

Reading 1759 calls attention to an interesting and pivotal moment in British and French history and reading culture by bringing together eleven essays on different aspects of the literature of that year. As Shaun Regan explains in his introduction to the volume, the year 1759 is particularly suited for this kind of cross-disciplinary study because it was the midpoint of the Seven Years’ War and was marked by cultural events such as the public opening of the British Museum, as well as the publication of major literary works by Voltaire, Samuel Johnson, Laurence Sterne, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke (1–2). By encompassing the literature of both Britain and France, Reading 1759 invites a more transnational approach to literature that better approximates what readers at the time could have experienced. Regan explains that “the purpose of the new essays collected together in Reading 1759 is to investigate the literary culture of Britain and France during this remarkable year” (2). Taken as a whole, the volume does this quite well.

The standout essays in this collection are those that draw on at least two of the three main connecting topics (literature, culture, and the particular historical contexts of 1759). Nigel Wood’s essay on Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments is a good example of how the focus on a single year can change how we understand a canonical author. Wood points out that “Smith would not have been associated with economic theory in the year 1759,” and argues that “the first edition of the Theory was, in fact, a significant intervention in a persistent debate, during the 1750s, about one’s social obligations” (57, 58). Similarly, Adam Rounce’s essay on “Young, Goldsmith, Johnson, and the Idea of the Author in 1759” calls attention to the print culture of 1759 in order to conclude that “the authorial temper of the moment ... was one of contradictory veneration of the past and acknowledgement of the shifting present” (110). While these essays examine the direct literary contexts of particular works, the opposite approach is taken by Kate Rumbold, who looks at Shakespeare alongside Sarah Fielding’s The History of the Countess of Dellwyn to argue that “Sarah Fielding epitomizes the way that mid-century novelists at once construct an impression of authority for Shakespeare, and exploit it for their own ends” (190). By focusing on the specific literary moment of 1759, these essays illuminate some of the broader cultural changes in the eighteenth century.

Many of the other essays focus on individual works published in 1759. Simon Davies’s piece on Candide and Moyra Haslett’s on Tristram Shandy help to fill out the coverage of the volume to include the major literary works from the year. Rosalind Powell’s essay on Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno and Burke’s theory of aesthetics does a good job of contextualizing a work that is a notorious outlier. The two essays on Rasselas—James Watt’s piece on the topicality of Rasselas and James Ward’s on the connection of that work with Hume’s philosophy—balance each other and provide complementary ways of reading the novel. Mary Peace’s essay on “1759 and the Lives of Prostitutes” reveals an interesting and often overlooked corner of printed matter, but as the only essay on popular literature it seems out of place in this collection. Rebecca Ford, in her piece on the Encyclopédie, takes the reverse perspective of most of the essays in the volume by arguing persuasively that “although the events of 1759 may have made the Encyclopedists rather more wary than they had been previously, the project’s philosophical focus remained essentially the same” (135). These pieces will primarily be of interest to those scholars working on the relevant texts or authors, as they are fairly specific.

My main criticism of...