The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (review)

Cynthia Sundberg Wall’s The Prose of Things introduces its subject by juxtaposing two well-known literary settings: the Slough of Despond in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), and the infamous “red room” of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). “How vividly do we see it?” Wall asks of Bunyan’s slough. “Do we see a particular swamp, a darkening of the green plain, perhaps treeless, the red sun slanting through dreary clouds, the men’s arms thrashing, their bodies sinking by inches, panic on their faces? Probably not” (8). By contrast, the site of young Jane’s suffering “is a room made unforgettably familiar to us all, as images pile up for the eye, and for the tactile sense, and for the tongue and the ear, and for the sense of temperature and the sense of pressure, so to speak” (9). The two passages neatly bracket the trajectory of literary development with which The Prose of Things is concerned: the book considers the evolution of descriptive writing in British literature during the long eighteenth century, from the spare, emblematic style of late seventeenth-century prose to the lush detail of the Victorian novel.

It is the legacy of the latter, Wall argues, that has shaped critical understanding of description in eighteenth-century fiction. “Instead of presenting us with settings, with fully visualized spaces, the early novel describes things. . . . To the post-nineteenth-century reader, these ‘things’ seem disconcerting, contextless, isolated in otherwise empty space, not part of properly furnished homes with Dickensian detail and Jamesian significance” (1). In response to this difference, “[m]ost twentieth-century critics pass along the generalization that the eighteenth- century writers ‘lacked eye’” (8), but their judgment, Wall argues, fails to consider early descriptive methods in their proper context. Eighteenth-century authors indeed saw, but they saw differently; their evolving use of description reflects, and in turn helps to shape, English culture’s changing relation to spaces, objects, and their verbal representation. To place description in context, Wall revisits some well-known chapters of eighteenth-century history, including the rise of empiricism and its surrounding practices of observation and documentation, as well as the emergence of consumer culture. She seeks to plumb this admittedly familiar terrain for insights regarding the development of fictional description — and the results are striking: unexpected analogies reveal the complex interrelation of literary technique and its cultural environment.

After offering a broad view of the topic in Chapter One, which considers key changes in the discourse on description from antiquity to the nineteenth century, The Prose of Things examines the development of descriptive practice in a largely chronological argument that might be roughly divided into three parts. Chapters Two through Five look at the early novel in relation to prior descriptive traditions. Chapters Six and Seven consider the elaboration of description at mid-century vis-à-vis the economic and social developments that cause material objects, and especially those of the domestic interior, to proliferate and become increasingly vivid and visible to the eighteenth-century eye. The final chapter focuses on the more secure place of description in the writing of the late 1700s and early 1800s, paying special attention to Gothic fiction and the historical novel.

The author turns in Chapters Two and Three to what she terms “descriptive workhorses” (70), late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century non-fiction genres whose popularity both reflected and catered to a growing popular taste for description. Nourished by the manifold upheavals of the 1600s, these forms of writing sought to capture in language the objects and images of material reality: “The world was looming visible in some new ways, prompting new or newly adapted forms of observation and representation. Improvements in trade and travel, discoveries and methodologies of empirical science, Puritan habits of self-examination, the passion for collecting and classifying, all found wideopen spaces for description in topographies and maps, micrographies and meditations, lists and catalogues, diaries and satires...