Commerce, Morality, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel by Liz Bellamy, and: The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning by Deirdre Shauna Lynch (review)

64 erley; in short, Dryden gave his contemporaries the kind of classic which ‘‘the age demanded.’’ No one has produced a more comprehensive and balanced assessment of Dryden’s Virgil than Ms. Caldwell. Taylor Corse Arizona State University RICHARD MORTON. John Dryden’s Aeneas : A Hero in Enlightenment Mode. Victoria: Victoria, 2000. Pp. 136. $15.50. In selective meticulous detail, this monograph demonstrates the important truth that Dryden’sAeneidembodies‘‘the different social assumptions and moral values of a different time and place.’’Virgil (Mr. Morton spells his name Vergil) ‘‘becomes a contemporary of the translator . Not only does he seem to allude to the Glorious Revolution and the key political squabbles of the time; more centrally and viscerally he is an Englishman, his habits of mind formed by Christianity, Toryism, Lockean philosophy, and Restoration sentimentality.’’ Mr. Morton comments shrewdly and judiciously on the many ways, large and small, in which Dryden manipulates the text of Virgil to presentanAeneas‘‘whoisarecognizably post-RenaissanceEuropeanhero—aman continuing his education, through occasional backslidings and embarrassments, to an ultimate epic status which is itself ambiguous.’’ In chapters on memory and identity (the wanderings of Aeneas), on social status (Aeneas and hisfellowTrojans),on romantic love (Aeneas and Dido), on the underworld (Aeneas and Anchises), on epic combat (Aeneas and Turnus), Mr. Morton shows how Dryden produces a robust and vigorous translation, which loses much of Virgil’s pathos, ambiguity, and subtlety: ‘‘If Vergil is suggestive, he will make the English explicit; if Vergil leaves readersfreeto respondintheirown way to charactersandincidents,Dryden’s English will plainly directtheappropriate response.’’ Although none of these ideas is new, Mr. Morton develops his thesis with intelligence and sensitivity both to the nuances of Dryden’s English and Virgil’s Latin. He makes good use of other seventeenth -century translators (Lauderdale and Ogilby), as well as contemporary commentaries by Segrais, Rapin, and Dacier . (He does not mention Dauphin’s Vergil, Dryden’s principal scholarly guide to Virgil’s meaning.) I found especially illuminating the section on Book 3 of Aeneid, in which Dryden presents a strikingly inward and subjective Aeneas engaged with problems of memory, experience , and identity. Throughout, Mr. Morton writes concisely and cleverly. (I detected only two typos: ‘‘Ninus’’ for ‘‘Nisus’’ on pp. 62 and 64.) However, a few shortcomings.First,he appears unaware of (or unconcerned with) other scholarship on Dryden’s translations, a burgeoning field inDryden studies for the past twenty years. Secondly ,heneverexplainsordefineshiskey term ‘‘Enlightenment,’’ as if that notion were utterly transparent. Thirdly, he fails to account for the fact that Dryden’s Aeneid, for all its flaws and limitations, still ‘‘remains’’ (in Mr. Morton’s own words) ‘‘arguably the national epic in English .’’ Mr. Morton’s valuable study, nevertheless, should hold the interest of anyone who enjoys and appreciates Dryden ’s Virgil. Taylor Corse Arizona State University LIZ BELLAMY. Commerce, Morality, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Cambridge : Cambridge, 1998. Pp. vii ⫹ 223. $70. 65 DEIRDRE SHAUNA LYNCH. The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning. Chicago : Chicago, 1998. Pp. xiii ⫹ 317. $45; $18 (paper). Two books published in the same year, on roughly the same topic: the intersections of the novel as a ‘‘new’’ form with eighteenth-century British economic thought and consumer practices.Ms.Bellamy ’s emphasis falls on the discourse of economic tracts; Ms. Lynch’s on the cultural significance of new behaviors like shopping, window-shopping, and marketing . Both want, however, to embed the eighteenth-century novel in contexts that have been ignored or dismissed until recently ; both want to reshape our understanding of the supposed ‘‘riseof thenovel .’’ Though both books are revisions of earlier dissertations, Ms. Bellamy’s feels decidedly old-fashioned, even dusty: her Commerce, Morality, andtheEighteenthCentury Novel draws principally on scholarship before 1985. She posits two parallel ‘‘discursive splits’’: one between the languages of civic humanism and of economics, the other between the continuing discussions of the theory of the epic and the new discourses of the novel. She uses them primarily to show a prevailing confusion about public and privatevirtue; and, like many eighteenth-century writers , she assesses the fiction she treats ‘‘as a locus for moral debate.’’ Her readings of the novels rarely go beyond...