The Search for “It”

The title for this review of two recently published books on objects in eighteenth-century England evokes another recent book, Joseph Roach’s It (Univ. of Michigan, 2007). While the “It” of Roach’s book concerns not so much things as people themselves—“abnormally interesting” people in particular—and the “nameless charm” that makes them so interesting, the properties of its “It” can easily apply towards the “things without life” that feature in Blackwell’s and Wall’s books. Much as Roach searches for the ineffable qualities and conditions that allow certain individuals to possess the “it-factor” in Restoration England and Hollywood alike, Blackwell and Wall bring a similar level of inquiry to the question of things and their own qualities of not only “it-ness,” but also, of having “It.” Indeed, Blackwell’s and Wall’s works, promising to reveal something about the nature of “things” in their titles, convey the notion that material objects themselves rather than the human subjects who own, desire, or describe them, emanate the nameless charisma that seduced consumers throughout eighteenth-century England.

Yet both Mark Blackwell’s The Secret Life of Things and Cynthia Wall’s The Prose of Things are not so much concerned with studying the properties of things as with the diverse bodies of literature produced to register and accommodate cultural fascination with them. Blackwell’s collection of essays concentrates on the eighteenth-century genre of literature known now as the “it-narrative,” those rambling adventures of coins, garments, furniture, vehicles, or domestic pets that feature as main “characters” and narrators. In devoting itself to a genre that has escaped serious critical notice, The Secret Life of Things serves as a useful source for scholars and students. Including essays or versions of essays published earlier as journal articles—such as those by Deidre Lynch, Christopher Flint, and Aileen Forbes, which comprise the most resonant and representative of the essays—the collection functions partly as a reader. At the same time, it continues a direction in the field that gained prominence during the 1980s and 1990s with the series of volumes devoted to consumer culture published by John Brewer and other historians. Works of literary history that joined this movement include, most notably, Erin Mackie’s Market à la Mode (1997), Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace’s Consuming Subjects (1997), and Deidre Lynch’s Economy of Character (1998).

The Secret Life of Things proceeds similarly to these earlier works as it links consumption and representations of consumption with emerging genres of literature, the periodical essay, and the novel. Blackwell’s collection raises the question about how an apparently minor genre can illuminate the nature of narrative, as well as “the nature of things,” as Lucretius might have it. Indeed, the it-narrative constitutes a pivotal development in ideas about things and narrative in eighteenth-century England: things, rendered mutable by mercantile logic, were viewed as conducive rather than resistant to the mobile nature of narrative. The very notion that from the first decade of the eighteenth century onwards, a long fictional narrative could have as its central agent a goose quill, watch, or a desk, reveals a prevailing attitude that not only do things have lives, but also, “things happen” through and around purportedly inanimate objects. Things, in other words, as much through the faculty of printed narrative as through the fantastic effects of marketplace forces, like humans, tell and make their own stories. By bringing our attention to a genre that realizes the apparently impossible condition of material objects behaving as narrative protagonists, Blackwell’s collection destabilizes our received impressions of eighteenth-century narrative as an evolving institution of realism. The experience of reading the it-narrative, after all, demands accepting such unrealistic scenarios as that of a pincushion or coin relating to a reader its worldly “adventures” as they pass from the hands of one owner...