Odds and Endings

When the Tate Gallery staged a major Hogarth retrospective in 2007, the image chosen for its poster campaign and catalogue cover was one of the artist's most familiar works, the second 'scene' from his 1743-5 sequence Marriage à-la-mode. In The Tête à Tête Viscount Squanderfield and his new wife, the alderman's daughter, sit either side of their family hearth. He has come home at noon after a night on the tiles, looking pale and not especially interested in matters connubial. His wife, on the other hand, who has been up all night herself, is full of languorous life. I had never quite understood the expression on her face - a sly smile of post-coital satisfaction cast, mid-yawn, at her evidently unsatisfactory husband. Now that I have read Jesse Molesworth's book, I think I do. The crucial clue is the copy of Edmond Hoyle's A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist (1742) that lies open at her feet. As Molesworth explains, Hoyle's immensely popular book transformed the polite card table from a scene of chance, deception, and above all honour (as ritualised in the prompt settling of personal debts) into one of information, strategy, and intelligently controlled risk. The young countess has tossed away Hoyle, and her cards lie scattered behind her, but the sly expression on her face is one of uninterrupted calculation. After a night working out odds at whist, the countess is confident that she can manage the hazard of deceiving her husband. At the very centre of the canvas is her pocket mirror, which she holds above her head so that some concealed lover can see what we do. At one level, it is the trick of a card-sharper - she is giving her accomplice a glimpse of the booby's cards, as it were. But at another it is that of a long-game plotter. We see nothing in the mirror ourselves but the blank reflection of narrative potential. Hogarth has pitched the calculating countess out of the realm of opportunistic indiscretion, and into the realm of the novel.

The basic question that interests Jesse Molesworth in his book Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel is what this sort of fall into narrative has to do with Enlightenment. One well-established broad-brush account of the Enlightenment describes how the early modern idea of a universe controlled by a prevenient providence gave way, at the end of the seventeenth century, to the idea of a universe in which events are governed by statistical laws and calculable odds. Hogarth's middle-class countess moves easily between the conning of Hoyle's strategic arithmetic and the plotting of an affair. She is no philosophe, and yet she belongs quite clearly to the modern side of this divide, in a way that her aristocratic husband perhaps does not. Post-Foucauldian literary historians tend to think of the emerging novel as a form of fiction best described as the product of this materialistic, secular, probable world-view - so Michael McKeon, John Richetti, Nancy Armstrong, John Bender, and company bring into focus the social realism that Ian Watt valued in the novels of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, and redescribe it as cultural system and material trace. But they all agree that the novel is, for better or for worse, a machine of Enlightenment. Molesworth is not so sure. His point is that this basically sociological vision of the genre has blinded materialist critics to the most dynamic and characteristic aspect of eighteenth-century novels. These critics are no good at understanding plot, or at appreciating its absolute power over character and setting. A literary text that is experienced by its readers primarily as narrative can never enlighten, because narrative necessarily involves its audience in the irrational, the digressive, and the counter-probable.

The triumph of Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel is that this argument is made as deftly at the level of historical scholarship as it is at that...