Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates: The Making of the Modern Gentleman in the Eighteenth Century by Erin Mackie (review)

245 Price, and Tess. The final chapter analyzes the female literary characters who emerged in late nineteenth-century realist fiction. Ms. Lacey argues that while the female criminal had disappeared, active, vivacious female agents lived on, embodied by Thackeray’s Becky Sharp and Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke. Ms. Lacey provocatively and originally discusses sensibility as a means by which women responded to the gender norms that proscribed emotional expression . The characters who people nineteenth-century novels do not share their feelings and strategies with their readers the way that Moll, Roxana, and even Pamela do. Instead, as Ms. Lacey argues, the early nineteenth century produced protagonists such as Fanny Price whose seeming passivity Ms. Lacey reads as a testament to emotional discipline and self-control. By redefining self-denial and self-containment as positive values, what has been read as female powerlessness actually developed into a means of empowerment. The book’s perspective focuses on the middling sorts and displaced aristocrats and their values. Given how much crime was imagined and perpetrated by people in the lower orders, their absence is profound . Rising literacy rates and the tradition of reading out loud exposed those from all classes to the novels of this period . This was especially true of servants who peopled them with literary characters and who in real life traded books and were often seen as dangerously threatening to the virtue of their mistresses. The author attributes many of the cultural changes she charts to increasing urbanization, in particular London ’s unique dimensions. This explanatory apparatus must bear a heavy load and perhaps other factors, including imperial expansion, might be implicated, examined, and analyzed. Finally, the reliance on the culture of sensibility shaped gender roles acutely. The absence of an analysis of its impact on men, expectations of them and their lived experiences, presents opportunities for future scholars. Strong on historiographical summation and synthetic analysis, Ms. Lacey writes straightforwardly, and her synopses of the most recent literature are precise and efficient. At times her argument is obscured by its explanatory scaffolding. In an age of cultural history, the necessity for making a case for the legibility of novels and their place as purveyors of cultural phenomena is a reflection on the state of some legal history ; it is so empirically based that it sometimes gives the impression that the law was hermetically sealed from those who peopled its courtrooms and often seems to deny how law and society are coproduced and mutually constituted. Ms. Lacey’s book convincingly attends to both changes in criminal culpability and literary representation. Dana Rabin University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign ERIN MACKIE. Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates: The Making of the Modern Gentleman in the Eighteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2009. Pp. xi ⫹ 231. $55. An adventure story, Ms. Mackie’s impressive work offers a fascinating study of criminal and moral masculinity, both real-life accounts and fictional representations . ‘‘The modern polite English gentleman shares a history with those other celebrated but less respectable eighteenth-century masculine types: the rake, the highwayman, and the pirate.’’ 246 Notorious highwaymen such as Jack Sheppard (1702–1724) and Dick Turpin (1705–1739) and Jonathan Wild (1683– 1725), about whom sensational biographies , enthralling novels, and thrilling plays were written, while not instrumental in shaping the modern gentleman, were celebrated as representatives of nonconformity. Most famously, William Harrison Ainsworth’s Rookwood (1834) turned Turpin into ‘‘a boys’ adventure hero.’’ But alongside these real-life criminals whose masculine behavior is appropriated, and in some ways commended , in popular print culture, Ms. Mackie draws usefully on eighteenthcentury fictional sources of the rake, including Clarissa and The Mohocks (1712). She devotes a large part of her discussion of the rake to Clarissa’s Lovelace, at once attractive and charming but also ‘‘a pathetic and destructive psychosexual basket case.’’ Ms. Mackie compares the rake to a glamorized demon defined by his ‘‘sexual prowess.’’ Conversely, the pirate, whose masculinity lies outside his sexuality, is defined by his behavior and performance. Lastly , her study focuses on the criminal characters found in the famous novels, Caleb Williams, Evelina, and Sir Charles Grandison, all of which bring together the criminal and the gentleman, in order to ‘‘articulate their...