Imperial Characters: Home and Periphery in Eighteenth-Century Literature (review)

Ms. Wallace’s Imperial Characters is the latest entry in a lineage of scholarship that examines how Britain forged its identity by defining and opposing itself to an “Other.” Colonialism, of course, provided Britain with a wealth of such “Others”; indeed, Linda Colley’s Britons suggests that it has only recently run out of them and that this loss has shaken British identity to its core. Like Colley, Ms. Wallace is interested in how Scotland and England forged a new British identity after the Acts of Union by contrasting themselves with a “foreign” threat. But she chooses none of the usual suspects: for her, England’s “other” is neither the French nor even principally the colonized. It is the colonial project itself. According to Ms. Wallace, writers of the period, both English and Scottish, depict the dangers that colonialism posed to the mother country by draining its natural resources and population and diluting its character with foreign goods and customs. In doing so, these authors repeatedly emphasize the homogeneous “British nature” of the domestic identity that the colonial project threatened. Ms. Wallace traces this cultural project from Behn to Walter Scott, pairing an English and a Scottish writer in most chapters to show how representations of colonialism on both sides of the border reinforced a collective sense of Britishness. Given the focus of the Scriblerian, this review will concentrate on her interpretations of Pope’s Windsor-Forest and Smollett’s Humphry Clinker.

Ms. Wallace moves deftly back and forth between brief but informative sections of historical context and careful close readings. In the opening chapter, for example, she examines Pope’s descriptions of Windsor Forest in the context of English concerns about the deforestation that resulted from expanding the imperial fleet. For her, the poem speaks back to this “depletion of native woodlands” through its frequent allusions to the Navy and its descriptions of “thin trees” that she finds “cautionary rather than celebratory.” Particularly convincing is her reading of the hunting scenes as a critique of conscription, which Pope deplores for depleting the moral resources of Britain by initiating the country swain into the imperial culture of violence. The conscripted swain then returns home “wily, coldhearted and destructive,” to persecute the very natural world that he used to protect.

However, the most entertaining of these dialogues between literature and culture takes place in the section on Humphry Clinker, which the author argues is Smollett’s attempt to combat the recent wave of Scottish emigration by undermining the image of the colonies as an alternative to economic and political problems at home. She links Lismahago’s life among the Indians to several real-life cases of a similar kind that made the English public intensely aware that colonization seemed to be working in the wrong direction. For Ms. Wallace, this anxiety is at the heart of the sexual tortures that the Indians inflict on Lismahago, through which the “European body” is symbolically penetrated and mastered, just as colonial “products and practices . . . penetrate and pervert British life” at home. While this scene raises concerns about reverse colonization, Imperial Characters shows that it also reiterates a common justification for why the attempt to assimilate the Indians has failed: their “drunken pleasure in torturing” suggests a nature impervious to the finer feelings of British culture. Of course, such dehumanization is virtually cliché in the colonial literature of the time and in recent criticism about it. However, Ms. Wallace gives it a new turn by examining it in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment’s use of the “noble savage” to critique the effects of the commercial revolution at home. By combining images of Indian violence with scenes of rabid consumerism, Smollett makes indigenous America home to the ills of savagery and civilization alike, thereby removing any ground for idealizing it as an alternative to commercial Britain.

Impressive as these readings are, Ms. Wallace’s emphasis on authorial intention and on the polemical nature of these texts perhaps leads...