The Captive of the Castle of Sennaar: An African Tale (review)

REVIEWS 193 creativity. By responding to the challenge of the work, the reader "will develop capacities of understanding by which, thereafter, to light his way through the actual twilit, probationary state of which the novel is only a vast image" (p. 244). But Richardson's readers like Milton's are free to fall, and his obstinate absenting of himself makes the task even harder. When he let evil speak for itself, for instance when Lovelace rewrites Clarissa's story of oppression and rape as an amoral, rakish annal of erotic quest, Keymer argues that he had allowed perilous intimacy, even complicity with the libertine point of view, to subvert his own stabilizing and reforming design (p. 157). The general clamour for a happy ending especially "marked a Lovelacean response to the text, a nave acquiescence in the logic and standards of Lovelace's position that far exceeded Richardson's own readiness to tolerate (and at times embrace) interpretative variation" (p. 204). It was Richardson's readers who attempted to wrench the book towards determinate meaning and banal harmony; he himself asserted the destructiveness of evil, the absence of providential care, the skull beneath the skin, the coffin in the bedchamber (p. 210). This older, bleaker vision, which reminds one of Job and the Jacobeans, is at odds with notions of Richardson the sentimentalist, but here after all was a man strong enough to prefer Shakespeare's Lear to Tate's, a man who stared unblinking into the abyss. It is perfectly understandable that he should reply to inadequate readings as best he could in later instalments, in footnotes, and in other material added to new editions. But having denied clarity and coherence within his text, he could hardly impose meaning on it now. Tom Keymer's knowledge of the archives and contexts of Richardsonian scholarship is impeccable, and he moves easily among modern critical ideas. His book is subtle, precise, well written, and wry, revealing a Richardson who is not just a formal realist, but realistic about the sombre world he knew. Keymer proves that the author is not dead, and that in the shifting relationship between author and reader plays the marvellous experience of reading Clarissa. Jocelyn Harris University of Otago George Cumberland. The Captive of the Castle of Sennaar: An African Tale. Ed. G.E. Bentley, Jr. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991. liii + 361pp. $55.00. ISBN 0-7735-0742-6. Part 1 of The Captive ofthe Castle ofSennaar was printed in 1798 but not published; a revised version appeared in 1810. Part 2 is printed in this edition for the first time: G.E. Bentley, Jr, a professor at University College, Toronto, has the good fortune to own the manuscript. The Captive ofthe Castle ofSennaar is a moderately interesting late-eighteenth-century Utopian novel. Bentley devotes nine pages of his Introduction to an account of Simon Berington's Adventures ofSignor Gaudentio di Lucca and a discussion of its parallels with Cumberland's novel, but does not seem to give sufficient emphasis to Berington's predecessors and successors in the tradition of Utopian fiction. It may be that he also overlooks the extent to which Cumberland's and Berington's shared interest in the marriage customs and sexual morality of imaginary societies belongs to a common eighteenth-century preoccupation with the humane regulation of sexuality in society. 194 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 5:2 On this subject Cumberland may have been as confused as the best of them. His Sophian spokesman complains of European brides appearing tiie day after their wedding night, "without blushes, though ruffled with tiie inordinate first rites of impetuous love: and, still more strangely indelicate, instead of fanning the mysterious flame, by soft denials, and secret conjunctions, they occupy the same pallet openly, and nightly" (p. 68). The narrator finds it quite otherwise with his Sophian lover: "The transporting hours we enjoyed were greatly enhanced by the imagined secrecy of our appointments; and, although there is no doubt that the good family in which we resided, saw, and rejoiced at our union, they had the generosity to conceal from us the discovery" (p. 72). One suspects that Cumberland's preference for...