Illegitimacy and social observation: The bastard in the eighteenth-century novel

ELH - English Literary History

Volumn 69, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 133-166

  Schmidgen, Wolfram ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 60950053748     PISSN: 00138304     EISSN: 10806547     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/elh.2002.0010     Document Type: Article

References (90)

1. Michael MeKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1991), 158-59.
2. Alison Findlay, Illegitimate Power: Bastards in Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1994), 5.
3. Findlay, 47.
4. This structural function is also absent from one of the very few essays we have on the question of bastardy and eighteenth-century narrative, Homer Obed Brown's wonderfully suggestive "Tom Jones: The Bastard of History," Boundary 2 7 (1979): 201-33.
5. Peter Earle has found evidence that Defoe actually participated, and not just claimed to have participated, in the rebellion. See Montmouth's Rebels: The Road to Sedgemore (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), 180, 223.
6. On the same issue, see also Paula Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1989), 35-40.
7. Robin Clifton points out that Montmouth himself was painfully aware that he couldn't win the crown by fighting the royal forces but had to gain massive support from the landed classes, something that could only be achieved by a staged, public display of the rebellion. See Clifton's The Last Popular Rebellion: The Western Rising of 1685 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984), 149-73.
8. John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, lines 690 and 717 in The Oxford Authors: John Dryden, ed. Keith Walker (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), 177-204.
9. Defoe alludes more than once to Absalom and Achitophel (lines 556-57, 679, 681, and 990-91)
10. (I quote from the reprint of The True-Born Englishman in Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660-1704, vol. 6, ed. Frank H. Ellis [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970], 259-310).
11. The strongest and most interesting moment of differentiation from Dryden comes in lines 919-24, when Defoe is about
12. Defoe, The True-Born Englishman, 334-47.
13. Compare to the emphasis on "Mixture" and "Medley" in Castamore's account of illegitimacy: Conjugium Languens: or, The Natural, Civil and Religious Mischiefs Arising from Conjugal Infidelity and Impunity (London, 1700), 15.
14. Clifton, 273.
15. Defoe associates the two rebellions in the following passage: "The inhabitants have been noted for the number of Dissenters. . . . They suffered deeply in the Duke of Montmouth's rebellion, but paid King James home for the cruelty exercised by Jeffries among them; for when the Prince of Orange arrived, the whole town ran in to him, with so universal a joy, that, 'twas thought, if he had wanted it, he might have raised a little army there'" (A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, ed. Pat Rogers [London: Penguin, 1986], 252).
16. John Sharp to Lord Nottingham, 31 March 1702
17. quoted in H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-century Britain (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1977), 48.
18. In the parliamentary debates over the Bill of Rights, common law and the term "entailment" feature prominently. See Cobbett's Parliamentary History of England, vol. 5 (London, 1809), 39, 47, 103, 249-52.
19. For an account of how the common law and its focus on property comes to dominate constitutional politics in the late seventeenth century, see Howard Nenner, By Colour of Law: Legal and Constitutional Politics in England,. 1660-1689 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1977)
20. and his essay "Liberty, Law, and Property: The Constitution in Retrospect from 1689," in Liberty Secured? Britain Before and After 1688, ed. J. R. Jones (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992), 88-122.
21. For related arguments, see also Michael Landon, The Triumph of the Lawyers: Their Role in English Politics, 1678-1689 (Tuscaloosa, Ala.: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1970);
22. and Dickinson, Liberty and Property.
23. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Holquist (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1992), 31.
24. Wilkie Collins, No Name, ed. Mark Ford (London: Penguin, 1994), 110.
25. Collins, Dickens, and Eliot returned repeatedly to the bastard. On the bastard in Victorian culture and literature, see, for example, Jenny Bourne Taylor, "Representing Illegitimacy in Victorian Culture," in Victorian identities: Social and Cultural Formations in Nineteenth-century Literature, ed. Ruth Bobbins and Julian Wolfreys (London: MacMillan Press, 1996), 119-42;
26. and John Reed, "George Eliot's Illegitimate Children," Nineteenth-century Literature 40 (1985): 175-86.
27. Richard Adair, Courtship. Illegitimacy, and Marriage in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1996), 227.
28. See also Peter Laslett's comments along similar lines in Bastardy and its Comparative History: Studies in the History of Illegitimacy and Marital Nonconformism in Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, North America, Jamaica, and Japan, ed. Peter Laslett, Karla Oosterveen, and Richard M. Smith (London: Edward Arnold, 1980), 1-4.
29. John Brydall, Lex Spuriorum: or, The Law Relating to Bastardy (London, 1703), 18.
30. Brydall 3, 2.
31. Richard Savage, preface to Miscellaneous Poems (1726), reprinted in Samuel Johnson, Life of Savage, ed. Clarence Tracy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 27.
32. Smollett also emphasizes the in-between status of the bastard. In The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), the eponymous protagonist is, for example, "literally a native of two different countries" because he is half-born in one country and half-born in another and holds, in the family he grows up in, "a middle place between the rank of a relation, and favoured domestic" (The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, ed. Paul-Gabriel Boueé [London: Penguin, 1990], 46-47, 59).
33. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995), 95.
34. Turner, 96.
35. Harold Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1986), 49.
36. R. S. Neale, Class in English History, 1680-1850 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), 81-84.
37. Penelope Corfield, "Class by Name and Number in Eighteenth-century Britain," in Language, History and Class, ed. Corfield (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 116.
38. As David Cannadine notes, the forces of social diversification surface in the intensifying effort in eighteenth-century Britain to offer an accurate description of social structure (Class in Britain [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1998], 28).
39. Lawrence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540-1880 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), esp. 276-81.
40. John Barrell, English Literature in History, 1730-1780: An Equal, Wide Survey (London: Hutchinson, 1983), 17-51.
41. I'd like to record my indebtedness to Barrell's book. Its thoughtful argument on social observation and literature has consistently stimulated my own thinking on the concerns of this essay. Deidre Lynch has recently expanded Barrell's account by showing how the "flat", de-individualized character is utilized in eighteenth-century narratives of social circulation (The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998], 80-123). Lynch's work breaks new ground in several respects, but it lacks a specific account of eighteenth-century social structure that would allow it to differentiate between, and assign more distinct functions to, the social circulation acted out in various narratives. My own account of a specifically defined subspecies of the flat character - the bastard - attempts to recover the dynamic interaction between character and social structure in eighteenth-century narratives.
42. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, ed. Fredson Bowers (Middletown: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1975), 42, 43-44.
43. Fielding, Tom Jones, 495-97. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page numbers.
44. Barrell, English Literature in History, 72.
45. Fielding refers to Savage in the Covent-Garden Journal, 27 June 1752 (Fielding, The Covent-Garden Journal and a Plan of the Universal Register-Office, ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988], 283).
46. He also owned an account of Savage's murder trial (Select Trials at the Old Bailey, 4 vols. [London, 1742]).
47. Perhaps more intriguingly, he believed and supported James Annesley's claim for legitimacy in 1750. Anneslev was a reputed bastard whose story is strikingly similar to Savage's (see Martin Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life [London: Routledge, 1993], 503).
48. Richard Savage, The Wanderer: A Vision, 107-8 ("On this bleak"), 113-14 ("turbid"; "devious"), 122 ("dreadful Lake"), 116 ("Assemblage"), 136 ("Eye")
49. I quote these lines from The Poetical Works of Richard Savage, ed. Clarence Tracy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1962), 94-159.
50. The references here are to William Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty, ed. Ronald Paulson (1753; reprint, New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1997), 33
51. and Joseph Addison's papers on the pleasures of the imagination (1712). fn the second of these papers, Addison states that "a spacious Horison is an Image of Liberty, where the Eye has Room to range abroad, to expatiate at large on the Immensity of its Views, and to lose itself amidst the variety of Objects that offer themselves to its Observation" (The Spectator, vol. 3, ed. Donald F. Bond [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965], 541).
52. The possibility that Savage's illegitimacy may have been a lie dexterously employed in Savage's aggressive self-promotion is now generally entertained. Yet the question of whether Savage was a real or "artificial" bastard is secondary to my concerns here. Even if Savage wasn't illegitimate, his life and his claims fueled the cultural construction ol bastardy. Johnson's Life, at any rate, is acutely aware of illegitimacy's role in shaping Savage's life. For a recent assessment of the evidence for and against Savage's illegitimacy, see Richard Holmes's Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 233-35. After carefully weighing the evidence, Holmes states that "I cannot believe that Savage was a conscious impostor" (235).
53. Savage, The Wanderer, 13-20.
54. See Johnson's use of the term wanderer in Life of Savage, 97, 104, 119.
55. In emphasizing Savage's mobility, Johnson reinforces the sense of the bastard's placelessness and draws on an established cultural assumption about bastards: see Findlay's comments on the "physical mobility of the type" (38-39).
56. Johnson, 70-71, 45, 63-64.
57. Savage, preface to Miscellaneous Poems (1726)
58. quoted in Johnson, 27.
59. The reference to Savage's "Enquiry" can be found in Johnson, 64.
60. Smollett, 50;
61. Defoe, Roxana, ed. David Blewett (London: Penguin, 1987), 117.
62. Lord Chesterfield, Letters, ed. David Roberts (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), 129.
63. Brydall, 32.
64. The point about virility is made by Castamore, who deems passionate conception to communicate to "the Issue generally very wild and extravagant Passions" (8). The association ol the male bastard with virility cuts against the bastard's identification as a mother's son, an effeminate figure who lacks a father. This last tradition and its manifestation in Shakespeare is explored in Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (London: Routledge, 1992).
65. Johnson, 70-71.
66. Johnson, 136.
67. In Alan McKenzie's "History, Genre, and Insight in the 'Characters' of Lord Chesterfield," Chesterfield's own talents for observation elide the particular inflection that illegitimacy gives to the letters (Studies in Eighteenth-century Culture 21 [1991]: 167).
68. Conduct literature provides the context for Charles Pullen's consideration of the Chesterfield letters, "Lord Chesterfield and Eighteenth-Century Appearance and Reality" (Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 8 [1968]: 501-15).
69. As Pullen's focus on appearance and reality indicates, his generalizing approach excludes considerations of rank and illegitimacy. This is misleading in general and it is misleading in more specific ways, for example when Pullen fails to distinguish between Chesterfield's letters to his Godson and the letters to his illegitimate son (513-14). As Claude Rawson points out, these two sets of letters reveal differences of tone and content that may very well be linked to the question of illegitimacy (see his "Gentlemen and Dancing-Masters: Thoughts on Fielding, Chesterfield, and the 'Genteel,'" Eighteenth-century Studies 1 [1967-1968]: 138). My argument on the cultural construction of bastardv shows, more clearly than previous accounts, the basic importance of illegitimacy for an understanding of the letters; it should, in the long run, also enable a more detailed account of how exactly illegitimacy inflects Chesterfield's correspondence.
70. Chesterfield, 89, 73.
71. Smollett, 69, 139.
72. Chesterfield, 221. See 106 for a statement on the moral precariousness of the "cameleon."
73. The argument that Tom outgrows his early follies and acquires "prudence" is well established in the criticism of Fielding's novel. See, for example, Battestin, The Providence of Wit: Aspects of Form in Augustan Literature and the Arts (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1989);
74. and Paul Hunter, Occasional Form: Henry Fielding and the Chains of Circumstance (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1975). I'm not arguing that Tom Jones doesn't tell us that its hero is acquiring prudence. What I am suggesting is that Fielding's novel does not show us that Tom acquires prudence.
75. One of the few critics to acknowledge the continuity between sexuality, bastardy, and virtue in Tom Jones is Rawson, 132-33.
76. For reading of Fielding's novel that stress its political symbolism, see, for example, Hunter, 184-85;
77. and Brown, "Tom Jones: The Bastard of History," 209-11.
78. The more extended perspective on literary uses of the bastard offered in this essay should go some way towards problematizing John Allen Stevenson's linkage between Tom and the pretender Bonnie Prince Charlie, which he constructs, among other things, by capitalizing on the seeming disjunction between the bastard motif and the Whig succession ("Tom Jones and the Stuarts," ELH 61 [1994]: esp. 579-84). 59
79. Frances Burney, Evelina: or, The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World, ed. Margaret Doody (London: Penguin, 1994), 369, 347. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number
80. Findlay, 3. See also Shakespeare's King John, 1.1.170-71, where the bastard playfully refers to his origins: "Something about, a little from the right, / In at the window, or else o'er the hatch" (William Shakespeare, King John, ed. R. L. Smallwood [London: Penguin, 1974]).
81. Susan Greenfield's '"Oh Dear Resemblance of Thy Murdered Mother': Female Authorship in Evelina," is one of the few essays to emphasize properly that Evelina's namclessness enables her survey of social mores (Eighteenth-Century Fiction 3 [1991]: 306).
82. But compare Susan Staves, "Evelina;
83. or, Female Difficulties," Modern Philology 73 (1976): 376;
84. and Irene Tucker, "Writing Home: Evelina, the Epistolary Novel and the Paradox of Property," ELH 60 (1993): 428, 431, both of whom mention this aspect.
85. Burney, Evelina, 8.
86. My reading of Evelina as a social palimpsest argues against interpretations that foreground her "blankness," her "lack of defined being in the world," as Catherine Gallagher puts it in Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995), 214.
87. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992)", 53.
88. Hermsprong's masculinity is obvious in references to his "most manly character" (Robert Bage, Hennsprong, or Man as He Is Not, ed. Stuart Tave [University Park: The Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1982], 3:57) and his muscularity (3:106). The bastard is associated with femininity when the narrator informs us that both his first and his last name derive from female figures (his mother and his godmother), a statement that contradicts the earlier assertion that his first name stems from his biological lather (1:101,6). The bastard's dependence on circumstance is most obvious in his habit of falling in love with even' iemale he encounters, in the suicide attempt, apparently modeled on sentimental novels (1:18-2.1), and his immediate friendship with Hennsprong, which significantly coincides with his abandoning of the first person narrative (1:101).
89. Bage, 2:58, 54.
90. I join Lynch here, who discusses Jane Austen's novels as contributing to the discursive production of society as a phenomenon sui generis (250).