Reading London: Urban Speculation and Imaginative Government in Eighteenth-Century Literature by Erik Bond (review)

257 tions of this sort. Mr. Emmett’s collection offers a strong contrary argument. Its well introduced and annotated primary texts and its secondary readings encompass cultural history, economic theory, the history of the interrelations of market and legislature, the uses of literary forms in the battle against speculation , and the gendered nature of commercial society. This stimulating oneplace resource could serve as a foundation for a graduate seminar in eighteenth -century culture and economics. Great Bubbles is also an excellent introduction to the negative effects on individuals and society of financial scheming. Kevin Joel Berland Pennsylvania State University ERIK BOND. Reading London: Urban Speculation and Imaginative Government in Eighteenth-Century Literature. Columbus: Ohio State, 2007. Pp. 276. $44.95. Mr. Bond’s Reading London offers a suggestive account of how literary writing in the eighteenth century depicted urban experience and, in a special sense, contributed to urban planning and administration . Each chapter is devoted to a major author: Chapter One considers Gay’s Trivia (1716), Chapter Two compares the techniques that Fielding uses in Tom Jones (1749) with his writings as a Bow Street magistrate (1749–1751), and Chapter Three turns back to Pope’s Epistle to Burlington (1731); later chapters (not discussed in this review as they treat works written after the midcentury mark) examine the urban writing of Boswell and Burney. In the Preface, Introduction, Interchapter, and Conclusion , Mr. Bond articulates the argument, kept well in view throughout, that writers ’ portrayals of eighteenth-century London sought ‘‘to participate in the larger eighteenth-century project of civil rule and the model of liberal governmentality following the fall of absolutism in 1688.’’ More specifically, the peculiar administrative structure of eighteenth-century greater London, consisting of Westminster , the City of London, and the intermediate zone in between (including administrative units such as ‘‘liberties’’) provoked an especially intense imaginative effort by writers to conceive of London as a whole: ‘‘by the middle of the eighteenth century, London’s problematic administrative geography had encouraged writers to generate imaginative solutions, and these solutions participated in a new, textual art of government known as governmentality.’’ Alongside these abstractions, Mr. Bond employs others such as ‘‘conduct’’ (as when he considers, in discussing Fielding , how ‘‘a novel can assign new conducts to unregulated spaces’’), to describe the ways imaginative writing not only depicts London but also shapes experience in it. His approach often produces keen insights . For instance, he notes that the description in Gay’s Trivia of the London streetscape does not follow a consecutive journey but jumps: ‘‘Gay’s text immediately compares streets separated by incredible distances—a method that is impossible for a walker to recreate. . . . This creates the surface effect of a unified ‘London’ and effaces Court, Town, and City.’’ Hence, the poet gains a unique authority to constitute imaginatively a whole London in a way that is unavailable to ordinary walkers at street level. Some readers may find that the abstractive tendencies of Mr. Bond’s approach and its lack of historical detail 258 blunt his analysis. Many scholars of London culture in the Restoration period , such as Cynthia Wall in The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London (1998), rightly stress the physically and psychologically transformative effect of the Great Fire of 1666. Acknowledging and citing such arguments, Mr. Bond nevertheless claims that attitudes toward London radically changed after the deposition of James II in 1688, which presented Londoners, used to ‘‘absolutism,’’ with a perplexing new lack of authority in their city, an assertion that may provoke skepticism. James aspired, perhaps, to a kind of absolutism (modeled on that of his well-wisher Louis XIV), but his rocky, brief reign arguably failed to achieve anything so secure, and before that his brother Charles, called to the throne with the memory of his father’s beheading fresh, found himself uneasily sharing power with Parliament (‘‘a king’s at least a part of government,’’ Dryden has him say in Absalom and Achitophel). Mr. Bond does not provide much direct evidence from Londoners to show they found the loss of some putative absolutism disorienting after 1688. His ground is more solid as he moves from the seventeenth-century origins of his argument to...