Mentoring in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture (review)

In this collection, Mr. Lee advances an ongoing project: to apply current literary and cultural perspectives to the largely unexamined topic of mentoring relationships. The twelve essays take us from Rochester's contradictory sequences of sacred and profane mentors to Mary Wollstonecraft's influence on Mary Hays. They treat translation, satire and humor, the development of the novel, the contributions of newspapers and their readers to the public sphere, and manifestations of feminism.

Three essays are devoted to Johnson: they offer complicated views of him as a self-made authority figure and bestower of monological statements. Foregrounded are his early growth and development, his influence on and interpretation by women, and his suppression of an unstable "shadow-self" in the form of Christopher Smart. Swift and Pope emerge as flawed or misunderstood mentors: the former, fixated on the contradictory model offered in his own youth by Sir William Temple, is described by Brean Hammond and Nicholas Seager as unable to sustain the Augustan ideals of containment, order, and disinterest in his advisory and tutorial relationships (or in his didactic writings).

In Shef Rogers's essay, Pope is described as a beneficiary of mentoring but not of patronage; conversely, he was often perceived as an instrument of patronage rather than as the insightful mentor he could have been to many, not just the few who profited from his poetic advice. Brief allusions in two other essays (by Anne Cotterill and Mr. Lee) position Pope as an antagonist to budding writers: he "viciously slander[s]" Elizabeth Thomas in The Dunciad, and he represents a literary sovereign to be deposed, from the perspective of the youthful Johnson. Among the central figures, Dryden (in Ms. Cotterill's essay) comes to light as the most resonantly valued mentor, less by virtue of his considerable active support of younger writers, than by virtue of the fluid and transformative models of gender in his writings, and the view that his embattled authorial stance is a prototype for the situations of women writers. The hermaphrodites, ghosts, magicians, and other nonstable images of tutoring subjects in these essays reveal that the phenomenon takes distinctly different forms in the eighteenth century from those in our era. Augustanism itself is revealed to be multiple and fluid: its mentorships are capable of dissolving key binary distinctions such as reason and passion, disinterest and interest, seriousness and humor.

The Introduction sketches a broad paradigm of eighteenth-century mentoring; the key relations, authority and influence, harbor Freudian/Bloomian elements of agonistic anxiety and symbolic murder beneath the era's typical "foreground(ing of) indebtedness." Mr. Lee defines the model as equally applicable to interpersonal and intertextual mentorship. Many of the essays provide straightforward and distinct examples of mentoring both interpersonal (such as Gilbert Burnet's of Rochester, or Swift's of Hester Vanhomrigh) and intertextual (such as the influence of La Place's translation of Fielding's Tom Jones on the characters and structure of Voltaire's Candide). In the interest of creating a broad and varied field of study, Mr. Lee emphasizes points of correspondence between the two mentoring structures, enveloping them within his paradigm of authority and influence. What becomes truly compelling, however, is the tendency of some of the essays to refine these encompassing categories—to reinscribe the tensions and the interplay between personal and textual influence—in ways that reveal central strains of eighteenth-century thought. For instance, the early novel inherited from didactic guidebooks the truism that "examples work more forcibly on the mind than precepts" (Joseph Andrews); moral characters influence readers more than rules and advice. Although characters in novels are fabricated, they assume the visibility of real persons; Fielding's Dedication in Tom Jones reminds us that "[a]n example is a kind of picture, in which virtue becomes . . . an object of sight." Thus the novel distinguishes the exemplary figure from the verbiage of advice. That essential distinction shapes the readings of mentorship as well.

While the Introduction explicitly links mentors...