The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century by Cynthia Sundberg Wall (review)

124 Roberts, the publisher of his Apprentice’s Vade Mecum in 1733, and a man for whom he printed more frequently than for any other after the Rivington and Osborn partnerships , Andrew Millar, and James Leake.’’ But printing for someone did not give you control over the rest of his output, and, unlike these others, Roberts was a trade publisher. If you wanted your book distributed by pamphlet or booksellers other than those with whom you exchanged copies, you had to have a publisher like Roberts or the Coopers, and Roberts was the most popular publisher, with an enormous volume of business. I suspect you just took your books along to his shop in Warwick Lane, got a receipt, and left them there on a sale or return basis. There was no personal relationship or collaboration: Roberts resembled Amazon.com more than he did Harold Monro. Richardson’s being endowed with implausible agency relates to a more general problem haunting literary scholarship, even when it is as distinguished as this: the presumption that authors are up to no good. If Richardson, for example, really was contriving Slocock’s sermon for publicity, why didn’t he print it or get someone else to do so? I suspect more of Richardson’s genius went into his writings than into his publicity, and that we would all be better off if suspicion were more suspicious of itself. James McLaverty Keele University CYNTHIA SUNDBERG WALL. The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century. Chicago: Chicago, 2006. Pp. xiii ⫹ 316. $35. Mr. Pope might counsel that numbers are better lisped than counted: the quantity of streaks on a tulip may be easily found, but the computation hardly edifies. This points to the dilemma surrounding eighteenth-century description. Ms. Wall argues that for a ‘‘classically trained gentleman’’ like Fielding or Pope, ‘‘the vocabulary of . . . detail is prescriptively and . . . consciously limited.’’ While the values of Puritan introspection, mercantile capitalism, and empiricist philosophy make descriptive detail necessary and precious, the values of classical rhetoric make ‘‘literary description . . . a foundling.’’ The Prose of Things traces a significant shift in the rhetoric of description in the eighteenth century, carefully showing readers how the novel exchanges a suspicion of description for a happy partnership with it. Ms. Wall argues that critics have had difficulty understanding the kind of detail that matters to early eighteenth-century prose writers because they have misunderstood key issues. First, narration and description are not fully divisible. This is true of classical ekphrasis, which is ‘‘a fairly comfortable companion’’ of narrative, but it is also true in that descriptions often involve temporal unfolding. She performs beautiful close readings to demonstrate this; her analysis of Hooke’s Micrographia reveals the flea as an object in motion, and the ‘‘classical combination of description and narration operates . . . to render an unseen world visible and alive with motion, plot, characters, space.’’ The temporality of description links description to action, and ekphrasis is revealed to contain narrative within it. A second problem involves the relation of the particular to the general. The general , as Aristotelian or Platonic category, still matters in religion and natural philos- 125 ophy. Looking at Robert Boyle’s Occasional Reflections, Ms. Wall notes that the details of a particular object inform the possibilities for understanding generalities: ‘‘This apple comes to stand for All Apples, but . . . any particular apple that I pick up is capable of generating a transcendence by my . . . describing it.’’ This peculiarity of late seventeenth-century descriptive praxis means that scholars should take care how they read allegory, as Ms. Wall shows by an illuminating reading of Pilgrim’s Progress. The details of landscape, especially in the second part of the Progress, do not all support allegorical closure. Whereas normally in allegory every detail carries symbolic weight, these details seem to proliferate beyond the symbolic, making reading occasionally vertiginous. Readers encounter, for example, ‘‘a groaning as of dead men’’ in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. In classical allegory or ‘‘the usual poetic simile,’’ the details would ‘‘stand in for familiar things to concretize the unfamiliar, . . . and try to neutralize its terror through a grasp at familiarity’’; in part two of the...