The Savage and Modern Self: North American Indians in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture by Robbie Richardson (review)

The year 1710 was a watershed moment in British culture, as the Statute of Anne ushered in a new form of copyright that would radically transform legal and social notions of authorship, creativity, ownership, and even individuality. Countless studies trace the critical effects that this and subsequent copyright laws have had on the establishment of modern notions of British authorship, particularly among Romantic-period poets. That same year, an equally important, but significantly less appreciated, event occurred that would also help reshape notions of British identity: three Mohawk chiefs and one Mahican chief, widely known as the Four Indian Kings, visited Queen Anne in London. In his capacious and well-researched book, Robbie Richardson carefully details the contemporary fervour and lasting effects that "one of the first media events of the century" had on British culture and notions of the "modern" British self (26). Practically speaking, the North American Indians visited London "to achieve an immediate political effect, which was the renewal of the campaign against the French in North America" (31). Yet their visit had the unintended consequence of spawning dozens of British literary creations that employed North American Indians, not to better understand Indigenous cultures, but rather to use the chiefs as figures through which Britons could come to better understand their own sense of identity during a period of radical change. The Four Kings are emblematic of eighteenth-century Britons' fascination with North American Indians and their cultures, and Richardson's book painstakingly describes the ways in which British literature employed these figures for the sake of imagining a developing but nascent sense of the modern British subject.

The Savage and the Modern Self tracks, primarily chronologically, British views and depictions of North American Indians from the 1707 Acts of Union to the end of the century, though Richardson often notes that "Indians became much more abstract than real to most Britons" after the American Revolution (82). Over the course of six chapters, Richardson (re)covers dozens of important cultural and literary figures. Moore Carew, a "notorious rogue" and "pretender in his own right to the title 'King of the Beggars'" (43), is among the book's most interesting figures. An Apology for the Life of Bampfylde-Moore Carew (1749) illustrates, in some ways, how similar British "gypsies" (Roma) were to North American Indians in the British imagination: "Like the gypsies to whom [Carew] turns in England, the Indians allow for a freedom outside of unjust legal structures" (45). No figure better represents this outsider status than King George Lillycraft, who, according to Carew, claims to be the son of one of the Four Indian Kings who visited Queen Anne. Lillycraft is important because he removes a "pot hook" ailing Carew, "indicating [Lillycraft's] own investment in individual freedom" (46). Although Carew eventually returns home and abandons his life as perhaps the most successful "full and accepted hybrid Indian" (82), his time with Lillycraft and others illustrates how cultural outsiders such as Indigenous peoples and Roma "present an alternative to the uneasy British self caught between social graces or transculturation" (48). Carew might eventually leave Lillycraft and North American Indians behind, but the lessons he learned about his own identity and the changes he experienced living outside the strictures of British culture helped shape a burgeoning modern identity.

Carew might come closest to becoming a "hybrid Indian," but he is far from the only one; all of chapter 5 looks carefully at literary representations of cultural hybridity and the effects that such imaginative moments of cultural miscegenation have on the construction—and defence—of modern British identity. As Richardson articulates it, cultural hybridity refers to moments in which white British figures assume aspects of North American Indian identity and culture. British subjects developed their "growing notion of the modern subject that could negotiate the difficulties of the transient world" through a...