Satire and Sentiment 1660-1830, and: Radical Satire and Print Culture 1790-1822 (review)

An advantage of looking at the long eighteenth century is the perception it offers of change and of interacting forces within particular works, especially when those forces become pronounced in later years. (Claude Rawson’s example is Swift’s attack on a modern consciousness later articulated in Sterne, so that A Tale of a Tub becomes an anachronistic parody of Tristram Shandy.) The organization of separate chapters in Satire and Sentiment 1660–1830 moves roughly by chronology. Rawson’s discussion of Rochester and Oldham prefaces a substantial two-chapter discussion of the military mock-heroic from Swift and Pope to Byron and Shelley. A central chapter on metaphors of dress as expressions of class-bound cultures and politics and of ideas of the self provides a large transition to shorter essays on Steele, Richardson, Boswell (and Johnson), and Thomas Moore. These in turn lead to a concluding essay on Jane Austen’s Persuasion. What unites these essays, many published before, is the movement of basic ideas underlying the apparently disparate subjects. The ultimate subject of Satire and Sentiment is not satire or sentiment or the relations between them. Satire and sentiment become trace elements that allow Rawson to perceive shifts in the energies of language and sensibility (in its modern sense).

For Rawson the persistence of aristocratic values and status, a sense of hierarchical order in society and of one’s own position in that order, gave writers a confident frankness and precision in exploring sexuality (as with Rochester and, less securely, with Oldham), in speaking of or to women, and in attacking “modern” behavior that fails or undermines traditional standards. But stresses in the traditional order appear in the language and devices of satire, especially in the mock-heroic, which may (in Pope) both satirize modern behavior and parody the past, which may (in Swift) seek to insulate the past from attacks on the present, or which may (in Shelley and Byron) abandon the epic and the heroic except as satiric gestures. Discomfort with the artifices of social order generates the dangerous myth of the authentic self and the moral demand for sincerity. But efforts to describe the self and society from a “sincere” point of view reveal the inadequacies and hypocrisies of sincerity—in Steele, in Richardson, and in Boswell. The ensuing embarrassment also creates a false condescension toward women. But Jane Austen negotiates an inclusive position, despite her partial rejection of both satire (the harsh mockery of others) and sentiment (the selfish absorption in personal feelings). For Austen this negotiation takes place in the language of social description, but the social implications of language have been Rawson’s concern throughout.

That Rawson’s position is both less sweeping and more subtle than my description of it can be inferred from the ways he approaches his material. In his longer chapters he identifies loci classici—Gulliver’s descriptions of the art of war, Burke’s reaction to the abduction of Marie Antoinette, and Austen’s comic description of Mrs. Musgrove’s grief for her dead son. His intensely perceptive reading of key terms is set in the context of previous (and often later) treatments of the same terms, so that he achieves a multilayered interpretation that allows immediate meanings to reveal their significance over a broad range of historical comparisons. In the shorter essays the method is similar but less satisfying. His general descriptions usually narrow to particular elements—the Spectator’s anthologizing of daily life or Richardson’s condescension toward women—that then become defining characteristics. The negative elements that Rawson identifies are recognizable enough, but the Spectator has both charms and serious (or almost serious) intellectual purposes that Rawson neglects, and he seeks not to plumb the depths of Clarissa but archly to criticize Marxist and feminist critics who do. The shorter chapters do not thrive after their transplantation from their original journals to Rawson’s book, where they suffer...