Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 by Mark Salber Phillips (review)

234 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 The past is a >foreign country,= so historian David Lowenthal has intriguingly observed, a time and place >based on ways of being and believing incommensurable with our own.= Grundy has accepted this order of challenge and responsibility to approximate contemporary readers to Montagu=s era. She accomplishes this translation in substantively engaging ways B by, for example, describing the feeling of riding in a carriage, detailing the stages and manner of treatment of smallpox, and characterizing the unbridgeable gap between eighteenth-century views of the Mississippi and South Sea schemes (a combination of philanthropy and good investing principles) and our equally self-assured latter-day reading (exploitative imperialism and faulty economics). Thus the author both enlightens and retains something of the mystery of the past and her subject, entertaining, educating, and humbling us in the presence of Montagu=s compelling life force and achievement. This book will be of interest to students of eighteenth-century history, culture, literature, and issues of gender and sex examined in a variety of contexts (domestic, political, legal, and medical, among others), and to all who enjoy a finely written, beautifully researched biography and a fascinating real life story. (CATHERINE N. PARKE) Mark Salber Phillips. Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740B1820 Princeton University Press. xvii, 370. US $57.50, US $25.95 There is a passage near the conclusion of Mansfield Park which depicts the efforts of Jane Austen=s heroine, Fanny Price, to tutor her younger sister Susan, with mixed results, in history and biography. Despite some success in impressing upon Susan Fanny=s own love of the past, >Their conversations ... were not always on subjects so high as history or morals= but turned frequently to domestic matters, including Fanny=s own recollections of private life with the Bertrams. Jane Austen=s ambivalent attitude to history is well known, and the reactions of other women to the aridity of much >high= historical writing in the eighteenth century have been much studied in recent years. Mark Phillips=s Society and Sentiment deals with the question of women=s relationship to historical writing (and, elsewhere, to the different question of historical writing about women), among a variety of other issues. The book is a close study of representatives of several different historical genres during a critical eight Georgian decades which are usually associated with the >rise= (to use the late Ian Watt=s terminology) of the novel, the fictional upstart that so threatened the audience of historians, which itself had only recently expanded to include the literate middle classes. Phillips is well qualified to undertake this study as both an expert and an outsider: after half a career spent specializing in the classic humanist historical writing of HUMANITIES 235 fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Florence, he has made the leap to eighteenth-century England where not only the language but the social context of historical writing was vastly different. Three overarching themes connect the twelve chapters of this work, in which major figures like David Hume, Edmund Burke, and William Godwin (though not Edward Gibbon, who nevertheless flits in and out) rub shoulders with less well known authors such as James Mackintosh and William Gilpin. The connecting themes, well summarized in the conclusion, are, in order, the >late arrival= of a >classical moment= in British historiography B of a group of national historians of sufficient reputation to balance against their great continental and still-revered ancient counterparts; the importance of paying attention to genre (as, ironically, the earlier humanist and seventeenth-century commentators such as Bacon did) and not thinking of history as a >single= genre in opposition to the novel; and, third, the arrival in this period of >new norms of distance= that eventually hardened into dogma (not least in the idealist historiography that connects, rather peculiarly, such disparate twentieth-century commentators as R.G. Collingwood and Hayden White). The three themes are not always handled simultaneously (the first seems to me not especially contentious), and the book as a whole is not only a comment on eighteenthcentury historical writing but also a meta-historiographical analysis of how historians since the early nineteenth century have reacted, often...