The Politics of Custom in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction (review)

“At last!” declares one of the blurbs on the back cover of Ms. Bowen’s study of the novel, “a book on eighteenth-century fiction that acknowledges and investigates what the novel borrowed from the chap-books and broadside ballads of customary culture.” This overstatement should not diminish the value of The Politics of Custom. Ms. Bowen’s central thesis is that recent emphasis on the novel as a reflection or product of the rising bourgeoisie ignores its debt to the interaction of plebeian forces and elite values. In exploring this interplay, she draws attention to the novel’s premodernity, its roots in custom, the social relations and shared culture of peasant and patrician. She does so not to exclude the middle classes or to impose Tory politics of nostalgia, but to show how premodern values are deployed in the novel to mitigate the perceived newness of the eighteenth century. Popular culture is but one of the many influences that have not received their due.

The existing influence of popular culture on the eighteenth-century novel, notably delineated by Pat Rogers, Ronald Paulson, John Richetti, and Michael Preston may explain the relative absence of references to actual ballads, last dying speeches, and two-penny broadsides in her book—only nine ballads are given by name in the index and no dying speeches. But she presents material originally and persuades about the ways in which the novels use popular ballad culture and mass-market print to make sense of a changing world.

The chapter on Defoe is the least convincing. Although Ms. Bowen details how working-class characters in his fictions offer an “older, two-class model” in order to impose “moral constraints on the anarchic energies of a free-market economy,” the chapter as a whole seems to be more about mercantilism. Is this markedly more reflective of the two-class model than the capitalism of the 1720s? Her readings of Defoe are occasionally reductive, Defoe not being a writer one should take readily at face value. Nor is Defoe “glossing over the imperialist implications” of his apparent preference for the foundation of actual colonies over mere stock-market transactions based on notional colonial projects; it may just be that he does not share Ms. Bowen’s view of colonial ventures as necessarily a bad thing.

She is stronger on Pamela, in part because the material lends itself more readily to her thesis—although the analogy between the letters of Richardson’s heroine and the phenomenon of working-class poets like Duck seems exaggerated. There is also the firmest grounding in this chapter in the actual popular culture of the working poor. Fielding’s satire of the class relations in Pamela is only marginal, and he is notable by his absence. It would have been interesting to see her take on Fielding’s Molly Seagrim, Black George, the gypsies, and their interactions with the patrician class of Paradise Hall. This omission is odd.

In places Ms. Bowen’s class distinctions seem conveniently fluid: two of the female soldiers of her third chapter, characterized by her as plebeians, are the daughters of a brewer and a hosier-dyer respectively, one of them the granddaughter of a captain in the army. Of the “middling sort,” one would have thought?

The author’s prose is not always felicitous (“Richardson in Pamela strategically drew on both the traditional English ballad and the model of patronage for plebeian writers as discursive sites where customary values still held sway in order to espouse his redemptive vision of nonelite writers in the print market, and indeed, in Britain as a whole”).

Smollett’s Expedition of Humphry Clinker also offers good material for Ms. Bowen, perhaps the best. His other fiction, while not lacking in lower-class characters, is not mentioned, and posssibly suggests that the author’s thesis drove her selection. Some discussion of novels which do not fit that mold so easily might have been illuminating. Clinker, at any...