Recent Articles

1 Autumn 2002 and Spring 2003 Vol. XXXV, Nos. 1 and 2 RECENT ARTICLES* ADDISON WALKER, WILLIAM. ‘‘Addison’sMastery of Locke,’’1650–1850: Ideas,Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, 6 (2001), 45–76. In the Spectator, Addison invoked Locke repeatedly as an authority on diverse matters (the proper use oflanguage, the human sense of duration, and how people form their ideas of God); he also recommended Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding as a model for thinking clearly. Modern interpreters often easily assume a loose consonance between the two. Yes, there were specific points of difference—Locke’smistrustof the powers of rhetoric is a good example —but in general Addison was able to inhabit Lockean thought intelligentlyand comfortably. Mr. Walker carefully demonstratesthat there was a much more complex relationship between their thinking, one made up of partial conformity and partial dissent, but mostly a quiet and quite systematic reworking of Locke’s ideas to fit them into Addison’s own system of thought. He usefully points out that Ad- *Unsigned reviews are by the editors. dison sometimes borrowed Lockean thoughts without naming his source, so one needs to know Locke well to judge their relationship. Addison often sounds Lockean until one reads more carefully. Most of Mr. Walker’s attention is devoted to Addison’s series of essays on the pleasures of the imagination (Spectators 411–421). Looking at Lockean and Addisonian ideas of pleasure, heemphasizes their respective epistemologies and their philosophies of language. Addison borrowed from Locke’s assessment of how humans form their ideas. Locke would have empirical reason as the final arbiter of all cognition, while Addison found more room for pleasurable sensations, particularly images, and for imagination as an interpreter of human experiences. In Addison’s view, imagination was an important part of both perception and understanding ; this opened the way to a more tolerant view than Locke’s of the fanciful choice of metaphors, fictions, works of art, pleasurable delusions of all sorts. Where Locke warned repeatedly of the ways in which language, particularly figurative language and rhetoric, might mislead understanding,Addisonbelieved 2 the imaginative and energetic use of language to be one of the most distinctive of human pleasures. Addison, in effect, was defending the pleasures of cultureagainst Locke’s austere commitment to human rationality. In short, Mr. Walker clearly and persuasively writes about creative appropriation . Addison’s ‘‘mastery’’ implies that he knew Lockean thought and often turned it to his own ends. Peter M. Briggs Bryn Mawr College BARBER BUDD, ADAM. ‘‘‘Merit in Distress’: The Troubled Success of Mary Barber,’’RES, 55 (May 2002), 204–227. As a compromise between publicly vending one’s writings and confining them to manuscript circulation, subscription publication is usually assumed to be women’s respectable method of securing profitfor theirwork.ButforMaryBarber, a dazzling subscription list (excelledonly by that for Matthew Prior’s Poems of 1718) brought neither profit nor reputation . Mr. Budd reconstructs the lamentable circumstances of Barber’s failed subscription . Her greatest error was trolling for support in resorts and drawing rooms and through ill-assorted patrons. When her volume appeared in 1735, subscribers had learned each other’s identities, and many were mortified. Walpole, for example , would have found his appearance among the Scriblerians insupportable. So many patrons failed to claim their copies that Barber was in debt to her disappointed printer. Barber’s prepublication woes were compounded by bankruptcy and arrest for sedition, and hervolumeprobably caused more embarrassment than pleasure even to her supporters. Mr. Budd’s admirable article reminds us not to generalize about the benefits of subscription publication. BEHN AUSTIN, MICHAEL. ‘‘Aphra Behn, Mary Pix, and the Sexual Politics of Primogeniture ,’’ RECTR, 16 (Summer 2001), 13–23. It is unsurprising, observes Mr. Austin, that two of the era’s most prominent women playwrights compared younger sons to daughters under primogeniture. Contemporary attacks on the English inheritance system made ‘‘undeserving elder son v. attractive younger son’’ plots popular, while daughters and younger sons acknowledged their mutual lack of legal status. In Behn’s The Younger Brother, as posthumously produced, two women friends achieve happy marriages despite their families’ distasteful planned matches. Each woman has an independent fortune, but more importantly...