Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Beyond the Law by Hal Gladfelder (review)

84 reason in landscape and the natural world are humanist ideals with a long pedigree in English thought—the Beauforts were not trend setters, but emblems of an ancient culture. The biographies by Mr. Gregg and the late Ms. Hatton, originally published in 1980, and 1978, respectively, grapple more confidently with a vast range of evidence , context, and contemporarythemes. Reading the three side by side reveals that religion and political disorder would remain at the center of political life until the age of Reform. These editions, reissued as they were published, remain useful. Charles W. A. Prior Cambridge University HAL GLADFELDER. Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Beyond the Law. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins, 2001. Pp. 281. $52. Mr. Gladfelder opens with a passage from Caleb Williams in which Caleb, trying to lose himself in London, hears a hawker advertising ‘‘the most wonderful and surprising history, and miraculous adventures’’ of Caleb himself. Mr. Gladfelder compares this incident to a similar one in Daniel Defoe’s 1724 narrative of Jack Sheppard’s life: ‘‘There’s no getting away, for either of them, from these fictions that hunt them down.’’ Mr. Gladfelder does see important differences between the narratives of Defoe and Godwin. Sheppard can hide inalarge,unruly crowd, and the prisons in which he finds himself ‘‘are relatively unmonitored .’’ ‘‘But in the world Godwin describes , in which the mechanisms of repression have been articulatedthroughall the domains of private and public life, no real escape is possible.’’ We apparently are in for another Foucault-driven account in which both the Enlightenment and the novel are brought to the bar of political and social bad faith for their roles in closing what was once free and open space, installing all manner of pernicious surveillance, and founding the industrial-capitalist state. Mr. Gladfelder, however, is supple and undogmatic. Acknowledging Bender’s and Miller’s books that describethenovel as an agent of ‘‘policing power,’’ he nevertheless directs his inquiry to the ‘‘experience of the outlaw.’’ In his readings, novels actually ‘‘tend to legitimate . . . the very disruptive potentialities they set out to contain.’’ Even Fielding, who in most recent accounts of his work as a magistrate is characterized as a proto-fascist, comes off fairly well. Mr.Gladfelderconvincingly argues that Fielding’s ‘‘exercise of authority . . . depended less on impersonal surveillance than on a highly physical formofintervention.’’Fielding’s rewards for his work as a magistrate included a broken body and an early death. In the first of his three parts, Mr. Gladfelder reviews the various genresofcrime writing in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: crime reports and gallows writing, trial accounts, criminal biographies. He moves on to Defoe’s work in the 1720s, considering Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders, and Roxana along with Defoe’s writing in the various crime genres. His final section discusses Fielding ’s work as a magistrate, particularly in the famous cases of Bosavern Penlez and Elizabeth Canning, as it relatestoAmelia. In his Inroduction, he establishes his basic interpretive move: Insofar as Defoe and Fielding encourage ‘‘identification between criminal and audience,’’ they find themselves ‘‘destabilizing the narrative ’s predetermined outcome.’’ In this account, readers remain free not to prac- 85 tice the reification that Bender and Miller would impose upon them. Mr. Gladfelder finely sees that Defoe’s ‘‘writing’s profusion and discord both stem from the intensity of his identification with the voices he invokes at the outset of each narrative.’’ In Defoe’s ‘‘edgy’’ presentation of Moll Flanders, ‘‘persistent Newgate immodesty threatens the value of her memoirs as an allegory of penitence.’’ Over forty years ago, Booth used Moll Flanders as an example of a first-person participant narrator who inevitablybuilds sympathy for herself, no matter her crimes. Starr in his Defoe and Casuistry and James Sutherland in his Critical Study anticipate Mr. Gladfelder. The figure standing between Mr. Gladfelder and these earlier critics is Bender, whom Mr. Gladfelder thanks warmly in his Preface. Imagining the Penitentiary has successfully inscribed its reductive and cynical reading of eighteenth-century fiction into the literary sensibilities of two generations of critics. Mr. Gladfelder forcefully pursues his version of the novel as a liberating , even subversive genre. Hebriefly and convincingly describes as...