Pope to Burney, 1714–1779: Scriblerians to Bluestockings by Moyra Haslett (review)

124 Mr. Rogers’s envelopment of the poem in sources, so that the interpretation itself of a source may approach a property of the poem, reminds me of E. R. Wasserman , whose chapter in the Subtler Language (1959) enjoys repeated endorsement , although Mr. Rogers never endorses its reduction of the poem (and most everything else Pope wrote) to concordia discors. If Pope is a ‘‘Renaissance poet,’’ on the other hand, he does not always seem to know what a symbolism is to do. It is odd that the ‘‘heraldic language ’’ that Mr. Rogers ‘‘translates’’ out of the poem operates as a symbolism if it is ‘‘not so much another level of meaning as an alternative system of signification ’’ redundant of what Pope says ‘‘in the poem by other means.’’ The politics of the poem are still not much beyond Wasserman’s own elaboration of J. R. Moore. ‘‘The whole dialectic of WindsorForest ,’’ as Mr. Rogers has it, ‘‘is organized around the notion of an evil Williamite interregnum jeopardizing true British virtues, as embodied by the Stuart family, and reviving some of the horrors of the interregnum.’’ Mr. Rogers’s emphasis on the artistic tests tolerances between old Turks and young fogies among Scriblerians. No exquisite contradictions in ideology are turned up; no theory intervenes; the word ‘‘Foucault’’does not appear. There is also little attention to genre, the one issue that divides through all critical persuasions. He is suggestive about the artistic, as in accounting for some of the color imagery through locutions of heraldry, and can be no lesssuggestiveinwhatmightleadonly to a resemblance. For instance, he says of the poem ‘‘most of its main descriptive terms can be found on any small-scale map of this district.’’Perhaps not just any map. One of the activities of the retired man is that he ‘‘O’er figur’d Worlds now travels with his Eye,’’ and traveling in a map, regarding theimageastheareaitself depicted there, is a topos since Ariosto. So what could be the implications of such a resemblance of appellativesfromafamily of early maps, of a use of a map space in the sequence of description or narration in the poem (as occurs with the maps of Poly-Olbion)? There is much to go on from with Mr. Rogers’s positioning of the poeminanimperialsensibilitythatwould ironically set aside the policy of another aging queen. Richard Eversole University of Kansas MOYRA HASLETT. Pope to Burney,1714– 1779: Scriblerians to Bluestockings. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Pp. xviii ⫹ 240. $75; $24.95 (paper). To unify the 65 years covered in Pope to Burney, Ms. Haslett invokes the‘‘dominant idea’’ of conversation, which she earnestly asserts is ‘‘not in any sense a single label.’’ With Jürgen Habermas as both hero and villain of the piece, Ms. Haslett treads the familiar ground of public and private spheres. She treads surefootedly , however, and she does venture forth to emphasize the role of women writers. She considers literal conversations —beginning with a history of literary clubs and coteries—and figurative dialogues—including real and fictional epistolary exchanges, as well as ‘‘print conversations’’ surrounding Grub Street practices—which bring a wide array of texts into her purview. Ranging through periodicals, poetry, correspondence, and the appropriation of these by the novel, she conveys the dynamic evolution of eighteenth-century literature and a sense of conversation between and among writ- 125 ers and readers. Her main targets are Habermas and Ian Watt, and she iterates, with minor elaboration, the feminist and Marxist cases against both. She argues that privacy is publicly performed, and thus complicates the division of spheres and the traditional placement of women. Ms. Haslett’s attention to women writers is valuable. By examining how women shaped public discourse by both their absence and their presence, she conveys a more vibrant picture of eighteenthcentury life, literary and otherwise, than conventional representations have sometimes done. In addition toherinterpolated readings of Sarah Fielding’s David Simple (1744), Leapor’s poetry, and others, an entire chapter is devoted to ‘‘Female Communities.’’In this, she discusses Sarah Fielding’s The Governess (1749), Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762), and Jane Barker’s A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723), as examples of...