Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property by Wolfram Schmidgen (review)

73 Eighteenth-Century English LabouringClass Poets: 1700–1800, 3 volumes, ed. John Goodridge. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003. Pp. xl ⫹ xxxvi ⫹ xl ⫹ 1288. $420. The need for a comprehensive anthology of laboring poets has been clearsince 1973, when Raymond Williams incorporated a number of them into the argument of The Country and the City. Roger Lonsdale brought forward a fascinating representation of them in his New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse (1984) and Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (1989). However, the subsequent study of poets outside the canon has generally concentrated on women. Mr. Goodridge’s Introduction reminds us that, in the past, poets of the laboring class, when mentioned,haveusuallybeen absorbed into various agendas as ‘‘peasant poets,’’ ‘‘natural geniuses,’’ and ‘‘uneducated poets’’: ‘‘They have been repeatedly invoked in cultural and political debate, whether as pawns in the game of patronly power-broking, literary noveltyacts , or as ‘natural’ homegrown versions of the ‘noble savage.’For some, theyhave been exemplars of the virtues of hard work and self-reliance; for others, they offer evidence of proletarian resistance and cultural vitality.’’ These writers, Mr. Goodridge commonsensically notes, have rarely been considered in their own right as poets. A few of these poets are outstanding— Stephen Duck, Mary Leapor, James Woodhouse, and Robert Burns (granted a cameo). Many are merely good, and their work, at best, distinctive. Some, such as Edward Ward, Edward Chicken, Robert Tatersal, Mary Collier, and Elizabeth Hands, produced truly remarkable poems. For readers who actually care about eighteenth-centurypoetry,andwho resent the vulgarreductionofitsliterature to just a half-dozen major figures, these volumes should be read carefully. The anthology is sensitive to the aesthetics of eighteenth-century poetry, but Mr. Goodridge and his colleagues see their work not merely as a late gleaning of solitary talents: ‘‘The fifty or so poets whose work is brought together here represent not only individual voices and histories , but a tradition of writing that was an integral part of the eighteenth-century literary scene.’’In the Introductions to the volumes, the editors consider the origins, achievements, functions,andreceptionof this kind of verse. They recover a vast number of largely neglected works and their contexts. Poets could disagreewidely on almost any topic. The tradition is one of poetic practice, but not of creed or outlook. There are a few odd choices. Chatterton , who was not truly of the laboring class, appears as an influence upon the tradition; Crabbe, who was brought up in desperate poverty, is excluded. However, the value in this anthology is not the reprinting of poems easily obtainable elsewhere , but the recuperation of unknown poems by the likes of Brimble, Shaw, Aram, Elliott, and Freeth. Mr. Goodridge and his colleagues haveperformedagreat labor; we are all in their debt. Richard Greene University of Toronto WOLFRAM SCHMIDGEN. Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2002. Pp. vii ⫹ 266. £45. This book will interest readers concerned with the novel or with Marxisttheory . Mr. Schmidgen usefully redirects attention to description in the novel, description having been relatively neglected by modern criticsmorefascinated 74 with narration. He considers novelistic description of places, especially estates, and of things. Thus, he offers a chapter on Robinson Crusoe’s island, one on Paradise Hall in Tom Jones, then a more miscellaneous one on the objects Crusoe retrieves from the ship wreck and ‘‘itnarratives ’’ including The History and Adventures of a Lady’s Slippers and Shoes and objects in sentimental narratives . The book concludes with chapters on landscape and houses in Radcliffe and on the Bradwardine estate in Scott’sWaverley . Landed property was still the major source of political, social, and economic power in the eighteenth century. In contrast to others who have recently emphasized the capitalist commodity as the most significant force shaping identity in the period, Mr. Schmidgen arguesthatthe eighteenth century was a transitional period between feudalism and capitalism and that communal forms, especially the manor, in which identity was embedded in land and its attendant social relations, continued to shape novelistic constructions of identity. Allworthy’s Paradise Hall is such a place. Allworthy’s combining the roles of land owner and magistrate effaces the Lockean distinctionbetween public and private. Mr. Schmidgen reads the narrator’s studied refusal...