Histories 'if Mrs Mure be not sorry for poor King Charles': History, the novel, and the sentimental reader

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 43, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 109-131

  Phillips, Mark Salber ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 53249105597     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (48)

1. The case for seeing reading in the early modern period as essentially active is made by Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton in '"Studied for Action"; How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy', Past and Present 129, 1990, pp. 30-78.
2. My own argument would suggest that genre is also a factor in the way Harvey read Livy. More broadly, see Roger Chartier, The Order of Books; Readers Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between The Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, tr. L. Cochrane, Stanford, 1994.
3. Whear's Reflectiones hyemales, de ratione et methodo legendi utrasque historias, civiles et ecclesiasticas, Oxford, 1637,
4. was translated by Edmund Bohun as Method and Order of Reading Both Civil and Ecclesiastical Histories [1685].
5. have used the third edition of 1710, which includes Dodwell's 'Invitation to Gentlemen to acquaint themselves with Antient History'. On Whear and Bohun, see Daniel Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England, Toronto, 1990, pp. 186-90;
6. and Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books, Ithaca, 1991, pp. 278-80.
7. Whear, Method, pp. 19-29.
8. Whear, Method, pp. 307-08, 315.
9. It is worth noting Godwin's recollection of his own childhood passion for reading: 'it was scarcely possible for any preceptor to have a pupil more penetrated with curiosity and a thirst after knowledge than I was when I came under the roof of this man. All my pleasures were sedentary; I had scarcely any pleasure but in reading; by my own consent, I should sometimes not so much as have gone into the streets for weeks together. It may well be supposed that my vocation to literature was decisive, when not even the treatment I now received could alter it.' Quoted in Maurice Hindle (ed.) Caleb Williams, Harmondsworth, 1988, p. xxix.
10. 'We must watch their minutest actions, we must dwell upon their every word. We must gain admission among their confidents, and penetrate into their secret souls.' The Enquirer, London, 1797 (reprint NY, 1965) p. 41.
11. Kames, Henry Home, Lord, Elements of Criticism, Edinburgh, 1762 [repr. Hildesheim, 1970], v. 1, p. 112.
12. Kames, Elements, v. 3, p. 174.
13. Kames, Elements, 1, 115.
14. In the theodicy that underpins all of Kames' writings, the broad application of this principle confirms the design of the moral world: 'It therefore shows great wisdom, to form us in such a manner as to be susceptible of the same improvement from fable that we receive from genuine history. By that contrivance, examples to improve us in virtue may be multiplied without end.' Elements, p. 40.
15. In his Lectures on Oratory and Criticism, 1777,
16. Joseph Priestley talks at some length about the same kinds of 'reality-effects' that interest Kames, but in his Lectures on History and Political Oratory, 1788, he explicitly subordinates sentimental reading to higher and more rigorous ways of learning from history.
17. See also George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1776.
18. 'If indeed you consider history in its proper light, not as a mere detail of names, facts, epochs, and events, but as a picture of human nature, and of the wonderful administration of Providence, apportioning rewards and punishments to nations, and frequently to individuals . . . it will become not only an entertaining study, but a source of the sublimes!, moral improvement.' Bennett, Letters to a Young Lady, London, 1789, p. 173.
19. Bennett, Letters, p. 184.
20. [Mary Astell] The Christian Religion, as Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church of England, London, 1705, pp. 292-93.
21. On Astell, see Gianna Pomata,'History, Particular and Universal', Feminist Studies, 19, 1993, p. 9.
22. Hester Chapone, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, Addressed to a Young Lady, 3rd ed., London, 1774, pp. 170-71.
23. Chapone, Letters, p. 186: 'By repeating to your friend what you can recollect, you will fix it in your memory; and, if you should omit any striking particular, which ought to be retained, that friend will remind you of it, and will direct your attention to it on a second perusal. It is a good rule, to cast your eye each day over what you read the day before, and to look over the contents of every book when you have finished it.'
24. In a cautious discussion of the way in which English historiography has suffered from political partisanship, she offers the advice that, 'as you will not read with a critical view, nor enter deeply into politics, I think you may be allow'd to choose that which is most entertaining; and, in this view, I believe the general voice will direct you to Hume'. Chapone, Letters, p.212.
25. Chapone, Letters, pp. 201-08.
26. On this point, I owe much to discussions with my former student, Mary Catherine Moran.
27. Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Harmondsworth, 1985, p. 306.
28. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 261.
29. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 309.
30. I have used the third edition of the Letters, published in London in 1803. See also her Memoirs of Agrippina, the Wife of Germanicus, Bath, 1804,
31. and A Series of Popular Essays, illustrative of principles essentially connected with the improvement of the understanding, the imagination, and the heart, Edinburgh, 1813.
32. Elizabeth Benger, Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton. With a selection from her correspondence, and other unpublished writings, London, 1818, pp. 142-43.
33. Hamilton, Letters, p. 225.
34. 'The historian who does not catch a portion of his hero's spirit, and enter with warmth into his interests, will be cold and inanimate. He who does, will be apt to throw false colours over actions that are in their natures base and vile.' Hamilton, Letters, p. 223.
35. Godwin, 'Of History and Romance', in Caleb Williams, ed. Hindle, pp. 359-73. See p. 364.
36. Godwin,'Romance', 368.
37. Godwin, 'Romance', 371-72.
38. Godwin, 'Romance', p. 372.
39. Hamilton, Agrippina, pp. x-xi.
40. The passage begins: 'Hence arises the advantage which the biographer possesses over the novelist. Amusement is expected by the reader from both; but in sitting down to peruse the memoirs of a fellow being, in whose past existence we have assurance, in whose eternal existence we have hope . . .'. Agrippina, pp. x-xii.
41. Hamilton, Agrippina, p. xvi. 'Every individual, however high his intellectual endowments is impelled by passions, and influenced by affections, which essentially affect his character and conduct. Without a complete display of these, the delineation will remain imperfect; and yet completely to delineate them, is not in human power: for however possible it may be to trace the progress of talents, and to take the measure of the understanding, He who made the heart can alone appreciate its frailties and its virtues'.
42. See Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790-1827, Oxford, 1993, 269. Hamilton's insistence on the factualness of her biography, in face of her desire to penetrate more deeply into her subject's mind, needs to be respected. Part of the problem here, though, is that Kelly seems to take novel to be a term of value: by calling the biography a quasi-novel he confers a higher imaginative standing on Hamilton's work, a prejudice in which he is far from alone among historians of literature.
43. Mackintosh's 'essay' on the moral powers of fiction is found in his manuscript journal for August and September of 1811, written on his return from India. See British Library, Add. mss. 52438B 128r-156v. His son, Robert Mackintosh, reproduced a judiciously edited version of this material in his Memoirs of the Life of Sir James Mackintosh, London, 1836, v. 2, pp. 127-36.
44. Mackintosh, BL Add, mss. 52438B, 133r.
45. BL Add. mss. 52438B, pp. 133v-134r. This excursus, too, the younger Mackintosh suppressed, embarrassed perhaps that his father could indulge himself in thinking that fiction, not Property and the Division of Labour, had been responsible for the progress of mankind. See Memoirs v. 2, p. 129.
46. BL Add. mss. 52438B, f. 153v.
47. BL Add. mss. 52438B, f. 154v. One more expansion remains, which carries his thoughts away from history, but adds further interest to his analysis of literary response. Replying to an Edinburgh reviewer who had denied the affective power of drama on the ground that any theatre performance is necessarily brief and transitory, Mackintosh counters with some acute remarks on the factors that make the experience correspondingly intense. He draws attention especially to the ritual and public character of dramatic presentation, a setting in which spectators are 'kindled into enthusiasm by the action and reaction of each others passions'. Mackintosh offers nothing comparable on the special conditions surrounding the reading of history. Yet surely, as Hamilton points out, history gains a special impact by the force of its compact never to invent. Hume might be as much of a 'pathetic painter' as Richardson, but the strength of Hume's portrait consciously builds on the reader's acceptance of the reality of the Scottish queen's life and death. In this sense, the affective power of Hume's history depends in good part on precisely those features by which it could assert and maintain its difference from fiction.
48. For a valuable discussion of the philosophical context of inwardness, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge, 1989.