In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Afterword
  • Thomas Keymer (bio)

If Northanger Abbey is among much else an argument for the novel as a serious genre, it is an argument to which the example of Samuel Richardson is central. He does not feature, of course, in Jane Austen’s explicit defence of the novel genre as one “in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.”1 In this celebrated passage, added or at least adjusted some years after Austen’s first draft of 1798–89, the emphasis falls on Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth as lead exponents of a female tradition that also, by implication, includes Northanger Abbey. Yet Austen always achieves her best effects through indirection, and in the chapter that follows a deft gag about Sir Charles Grandison, which turns on the ambiguity of “horrid” (thrilling, boring) in her characters’ argot, is no less telling. As Bonnie Latimer observes in her article, the joke highlights Richardson’s influence on this female tradition, and gives the palm to Grandison “as paradigmatic of the sentimental-realist novel, an antitype to Isabella’s favourite tales” (“Popular Fiction [End Page 317] after Richardson”). Fashionable Miss Andrews could not get through the first volume, Isabella says. She herself thinks it “an amazing horrid book”—but not in a good way (35). Grandison resembles not the six new gothic shockers that she plans to binge-read soon with Catherine (“are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?”); instead, it prefigures the meticulous domestic realism of Burney’s Camilla, “the horridest nonsense you can imagine ... nothing in the world in it but an old man’s playing at see-saw and learning Latin” (33, 43).

It is now well understood that Northanger Abbey is not an attack on gothic fiction as such, and that its satire falls more specifically on formulaic imitations of Radcliffe—Horrid Mysteries (1796) is one target—and the naive, absorptive reading they seem able to elicit. That said, Northanger Abbey certainly promotes alternative narrative priorities (blended by Austen with true Radcliffean conflicts), patient and nuanced in their attention to the fabric of life. Yet nothing is ever without a twist in Austen’s fiction, and every move has its counter-move. The pleasure of the “amazing horrid” joke flows partly from the collateral damage it inflicts on Grandison, with its plotless interludes and discursive longueurs, when considered alongside the spare efficiency of Austen’s own practice. It may be true, as family memory reports, that Austen cherished “every circumstance related in Sir Charles Grandison, all that was ever said or done in the cedar parlour.”2 But this was not how she saw the future of the novel. Her brother Henry gets it about right in the biographical notice he wrote to accompany Northanger Abbey in 1817, which notes Austen’s admiration for Richardson’s achievements in Grandison “whilst her taste secured her from the errors of his prolix style and tedious narrative” (141).

One way to understand the formidable, yet by now also vulnerable, reputation of Sir Charles Grandison in the era of Northanger Abbey is through the optic of mediation, a term used with enabling flexibility by the contributors to this special issue. Collectively, these essays pick up a recent call in eighteenth-century and Romantic-period studies to embrace within the term not only communications media as conventionally understood but also the tools, protocols, infrastructures, and institutions within [End Page 318] which these media forms developed. As Paula McDowell puts it, “Thinking about media and mediation in the eighteenth century means thinking not only about print, manuscripts, performance, and voice, but also about a wide range of objects, interactions, practices, actions and technologies that differentiate this new history of mediation from ‘media history’ as it has thus far been practised and understood.”3 Crucially, contributors pursue the recognition of scholars such as John Guillory, Christina Lupton, and McDowell herself that far from being a concept imposed in retrospect on practitioners unable to get outside it or see it themselves, mediation is something that eighteenth-century writers actively...

pdf

Share