Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (review)

Since the publication of Ian Watt's seminal The Rise of the Novel in 1957, scholarship on the novel's emergence as a distinct literary form in eigh-teenth-century Britain seems to have expanded exponentially decade by decade. With it, so too has our understanding of the novel's complex subjects and subjectivities, changing modes of address, mutable and mutating constituent parts, and contingent technical concerns. Janine Barchas adds to this body of scholarship by focusing on the ways in which a range of formal features evolved during the novel's early development. She takes a historical materialist approach of the best kind, treating novels as artifacts with far more complex associations and meanings than simply their written content.

From the opening pages on Swift's "Description of a City Shower," Barchas reinserts the novel into the plethoric materiality of an age of "fine silks and Mercenary Goods," "flint Drinking Glasses," and "Mr Fary's 16s. Bohee-tea" (4), and in doing so highlights the fact that many of the formal features of these early publications have been lost in modern editions. She argues convincingly for their importance, however, not only for an understanding of the works as material objects delimited by contemporary printing processes, but also for the ways in which particular formal choices represented quite canny manoeuvres by authors and publishers in relation to both markets and meanings. Here, we get a sense of how writers and publishers grappled with and tried to resolve (not always successfully) the different possibilities inherent in this emerging form, and this makes Barchas's careful attention to the changing fortunes of the double rule or the temporal intercessions of the fleuron particularly absorbing. She demonstrates that such formal choices were of considerable significance in a literary form concerned with the moral force of sentiment and sensibility. Her analysis of Sarah Fielding's use of dashes in the first edition of David Simple (1744), for example, is especially revealing in this respect. She suggests that the dashes articulate a gendered, nonverbal world inhabited by the novel's female characters. When her brother Henry Fielding took them out in a later edition, "he under-mine[d] the privileged position of silence" in the novel (164). A fascinating rereading of the music score from Richardson's Clarissa (1748) also folds out into a much wider contemporary audience than is usual in analyses of this work, which more often focus on the potentially embarrassing appropriation of its lyrics from a contemporary Bluestocking, Elizabeth Carter.

As an analysis of some of the main formal features of the eighteenthcentury novel, the work attends to engraved images primarily in relation to how they fit within the novel's wider formal schema rather than for their content. Although Barchas is consequently clear why she does not address the subjects of these illustrations in any depth, instances such as her subtle readings of the semiology and deployment of frontispiece imagery make this a niggling absence. It would have been fascinating to have her insight brought to bear on engravings featured in the various editions of Gulliver's Travels or Robinson Crusoe. While she acknowledges that much scholarship already exists on these, such as David Blewitt's detailed study in Defoe's Art of Fiction (1979), some attention to their changing deployment and framing would have enriched her analysis.

The work also would have benefited from situating the eighteenth-cen-tury novel within a wider range of contemporary print culture. For example, what distinguishes the novel from other literary products of the age, such as travel literature, biography and autobiography, as well as translated prose and history writing? The last example is particularly pertinent in a period characterized by John Brewer, Linda Colley, and J. E. Cookson as one in which a distinctly British identity began to take shape. Earlier works, like Michael McKeon's The Origin of the English Novel (1987), are perhaps stronger in this respect, and Barchas might have...