Defoe, Sentiment, and the Novel

Mention the name "George Starr" and most eighteenth-century scholars will think of Defoe. Starr's seminal publications, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (1965) and Defoe and Casuistry (1971), along with those of J. Paul Hunter and Maximillian E. Novak, were fundamental in moving Defoe, often considered an eccentric outsider and "embryonic" precursor to Richardson, into the center of the canon.¹ Martin C. Battestin, writing in 1972, called Defoe and Casuistry "one of the best accounts yet written of the way Defoe's fiction works."² Whether or not one agrees with Starr's interpretations, his books were undeniably important in helping to restart the conversation about Defoe. In the fifty years since his first book, Starr has repeatedly returned to Defoe, editing a widely used and reprinted Oxford World's Classics edition of Moll Flanders and four volumes of the recent Pickering and Chatto edition of Defoe's works. In addition to these volumes, Starr's shorter publications cover an array of subjects, from sentimental novels to the architecture of the Hungarian reformed church.

In Reflections on Sentiment, Alessa Johns and her contributors both pay homage to Starr's wide-ranging influence in eighteenth-century studies and also offer new arguments that move forward different scholarly conversations related to his work. The essays are arranged in three sections: "Sympathetic Identification and Narrative Sociality," "Sentimental Family Politics and the Novel," and "Professing Literature in a Changing Marketplace." There is much overlap here, as the titles imply, and the main commonality amongst the essays is their relation to Starr's work, especially on the sentimental novel and on Defoe. As Johns explains in the introduction, "The essays in this volume similarly employ new modes of inquiry to approach the kinds of questions Starr has asked or to treat authors he has interpreted" (4). Given Starr's range of scholarly interests, the contents of this volume are quite varied.

Three essays deal directly with Defoe, primarily his fiction. Alison Conway's "'Unequally Yoked': Defoe and the Challenge of Mixed Marriage" examines Defoe's The Family Instructor (1715) and Religious Courtship (1722) to argue that they "use narrative to negotiate the possibilities of social transformation through the investigation of intimate relations as a microcosm of the world at large," and that Defoe presents "an alternative vision of religious sociability, even as he insists on the conformity of family worship" (11). Conway's close reading of these two texts concentrates on the second aspect of the argument, and she makes a convincing case that Defoe endorses several radical views, including that conscience is personal, that spouses cannot control each other's religious beliefs, and that communication about religion is essential among family members. The argument that religious sociability in the family serves as a model for religious toleration in the wider world is not exactly revelatory, but it certainly makes sense with Defoe's narrative practice more generally. Joanna Picciotto continues the investigation into narrative and religion by looking at mundane details and particularities in Defoe's novels. Building on Starr's argument about Crusoe's earthenware pot in Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography, Picciotto analyzes the ways that particular details add to or detract from abstract ideas, especially Providence, in the fiction. She calls attention to Defoe's uniqueness in attributing credibility to particularities rather than generalities. In Defoe's work, "It was only when the hand of God singled out an individual that its messages could be trusted," whereas more common signs "were more likely to be explained as instances of fraud or mass delusion" (46). This presents a new way of thinking about the old question of Crusoe's individualism and his relationship with God. Rather than emphasizing Crusoe's debt to the spiritual autobiography tradition as the reason for his individuality, Picciotto suggests it is a way to make his interpretation of signs more believable.

Barbara M. Benedict takes a somewhat different approach from much of the volume in "The Sentimental Servant: The Dangers of Dependence in Defoe's Roxana...