Poetical cash: Joseph Addison, antiquarianism, and aesthetic value

Eighteenth-Century Studies

Volumn 38, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 509-531

  Alvarez, David ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 61249183626     PISSN: 00132586     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (65)

1. Joseph Addison, Dialogues Upon the Usefulness of Ancient Medals, (London, 1726; reprinted New York: Garland, 1976). The Dialogues were published posthumously in 1721 but written in the late 1690s and early 1700s. Jacob Tonson paid for the rights to the Dialogues in 1713.
2. Joseph Addison, The Tatler, ed. Donald Bond (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), III: 133.
3. For a useful historical overview of the discourses surrounding the scholar's exclusion from polite society see Steven Shapin, "'A Scholar and a Gentleman': The Problematic Identity of the Scientific Practitioner in Early Modern England," History of Science 3:29 (1991): 279-327.
4. See also Lee Andrew Elioseff's The Cultural Milieu of Addison's Literary Criticism (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1963), 21-48.
5. For more on satires of antiquarians see Shapin; Joseph Levine, Dr. Woodward's Shield: History, Science, and Satire in Augustan England, (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1977), 114-129;
6. Barbara Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001);
7. and the introduction to Producing the Past: Aspects of Antiquarian Culture and Practice, 1700-1850, ed. Lucy Pelts and Martin Myrone, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999): 1-13.
8. Two useful recent essay collections on antiquarianism are in Eighteenth-Century Studies 34.2 (2001)
9. "Antiquarians, Connoisseurs, and Collectors," and Art History 25.4 (2002), "Tracing Architecture: The Aesthetics of Antiquarianism."
10. John Evelyn's Numismata (1697) offers a similar encomium to coins, describing them as "small pieces of Metal, which seem to have broken and worn out the very Teeth of Time, that devours and tears in pieces all things else" (2). Evelyn's work takes a more traditional form in its methodology, as does Louise Jobert's The Knowledge of Medals: or, Instructions for those who apply themselves to the study of Medals both Ancient and Modern (1697). These guides, along with Obadiah Walker's The Greek and Roman History Illustrated by Coins and Medals (1692), are the primary English numismatic texts for medallists in the early eighteenth century. For a comprehensive introduction to Roman coinage see R. A. G. Carson, Coins of the Roman Empire (London: Routledge, 1990).
11. Joseph Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age, (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991). Subsequent references cited in text.
12. qtd. Levine, Battle 285). More important than this distinction between narrative and image, however, is that in both instances the truth of the representation matters less for Addison than the capacity of the work to "break . . . upon us insensibly" and effortlessly construct a homogenous reading or viewing public.
13. On the chaos of print culture and the normalizing function of polite discourse see Lawrence Klein's Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994): "These Whig writers [Shaftesbury, Addison, and Steele] foregrounded the volubility of their society as a problem. Within that polyphony, politeness as a norm and also goal of discourse promised order and direction in a way that inherited cultural institutions might have once sought to do"(12).
14. See also Jody Greene's forthcoming Risky Business: The Trouble with Ownership in the First Era of Copyright.
15. On the epistemological foundation for ut pictura poesis see David Marshall, "Literature and the Other Arts: (i) Ut Pictura Poesis." The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism-: The Eighteenth Century, ed. H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997): 681-99.
16. See Austin Wright, Joseph Spence, 90ff.
17. For this history of the Dialogues' influence I rely on Mark Jay Levin, "Literature and Numismatics in England, 1650-1750," (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1974).
18. Lessing objects to the use of ut pictura poesis because it subordinates the imagination of the poet to pre-existing cultural images; see chapters 7-8 of Laocoon: An Essay Upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962). It is precisely the programming of the public imagination that interests Addison in the force of visual images.
19. Michael McKeon, "Cultural Crisis and Dialectical Method," The Profession of Eighteenth-Century Literature: Reflections on an Institution, ed. Leo Damrosch (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 44.
20. I follow Blanford Parker's The Triumph of Augustan Poetics: English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998) in his use of the term "baroque" to designate the seventeenth-century poetics that Addison and other neoclassical writers opposed. Parker's emphasis upon the religious tradition in this poetic and the secularizing Augustan response to this "feared residue of the Civil War culture" as "a mode of public control - of narrowing the public taste for a dangerous past" has usefully framed my essay's approach (3, 8).
21. For an overview of how the Anglican church used the discourse of politeness to control sectarianism and how this discourse after 1688 was used by writers such as Addison, Steele, and Shaftesbury "to imagine a new culture of gentlemen, with an elitist politics, an Erastian Church, and a public culture of civil discourse," see Lawrence Klein, "Sociability, Solitude, and Enthusiasm," Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650-1850, eds. Lawrence Klein and Anthony J. La Vopa (San Marino, California: Henry E. Huntington Library, 1998), 153-77.
22. J. G. A. Pocock, "Enthusiasm: The Antiself of the Enlightenment," Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650-1850, 7-28.
23. Since modern epistemology justifies knowledge in relation to the subject, whether Descartes' "clear and distinct" ideas or empiricism's emphasis upon the immediacy of sense perception, the difficulty of separating enthusiastic claims to knowledge based upon an "inner light" from Enlightenment conceptions of knowledge is particularly acute, often calling forth considerable rhetorical effort in the form of a rhetoric against rhetoric. On enthusiasm, see Clement Hawes, Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996);
24. Michael Heyd, "Be Sober and Reasonable": The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1995);
25. Shaun Irlam, Elations: The Poetics of Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999); Klein and La Vopa; and Parker. Subsequent references in text.
26. Alexander Pope, "To Mr. Addison, Occasioned by his Dialogues on Medals" (1720), in Minor Poems, ed. Norman Ault and John Butt (London: Methuen, 1954), 204.
27. On this commonplace see Neil Saccamano, "Knowledge, Power, Allegory: Swift's Tale and Neoclassical Literary Criticism," Enlightening Allegory: Theory, Practice and Contexts of Allegory in the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Kevin Cope, (New York: AMS Press, 1993): 299-322;
28. Irlam, 40-54.
29. In his A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie, Samuel Parker, Bishop of Oxford, asks for an "Act of Parliament to abridge Preachers the use of fulsom and luscious Metaphor" because it causes sectarianism and civil strife (London: J. Martyn, 1670), 76.
30. Blanford Parker similarly notes that "quieting the cannon's mouth, was for Bishop Sancroft in 1669, attended by "a like calming of those conceitful bigotries and ferocious fancies of the last age" (Parker, 3).
31. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1978), 117.
32. Cf. John Locke's definition of enthusiasm, which "takes away both Reason and Revelation, and substitutes in the room of it, the ungrounded Fancies of a Man's own Brain, and assumes for them a Foundation both of Opinion and Conduct" in An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), 698.
33. In addition to Benedict's Curiosity, see Peltz and Myrone's Inventing the Past for more on "the antiquarians' apparent willingness to transgress normative boundaries (of social behavior, of the body, of intellectual disciplines)" (8).
34. Jonathan Kramnick points to the pedant as the dialectical cause of the formation of the public sphere: "the specter of the pedant. . . resides at the origin of the public sphere, as nothing less than its negation . . . [and] anti-intellectual charges of pedantry, obscurantism, bookishness, and the like served to outline a contrasting domain of rational and general conversation . . . scholarly reading blocks the communicative rationality of the coffee-house" Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700-1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998): 89-91. The Dialogues' critique of pedantic obscurantism, however, implies no commitment to "communicative rationality." The communicability that Addison advances does not endorse rational/critical debate but instead depends upon the aestheticization of classical knowledge. Thus he does not juxtapose Tom Folio's materialist approach to classical texts with interpretations of their contents but instead notes their aesthetic qualities: their "fineness of style," "justness of thought," and "the brightness of . . . particular passages."
35. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989);
36. Scott Black offers more detailed support for such a position in "Social and Literary Form in the Spectator," Eighteenth-Century Studies 33 (1999): 21-42.
37. Neil Saccamano, "The Sublime Force of Words in Addison's 'Pleasures.'" EEH 58 (1991): 85.
38. See Barbara Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment, Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994). Focusing on the educational value of images in the Enlightenment, Stafford downplays their ideological work. The Dialogues and other texts by Addison, however, are keenly interested in the ideological force of images to produce and manage the social.
39. On the centrality of immediacy to neoclassical literary theory see Ronald Paulson, Emblem and Expression (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975). In this period, "the direction in which literature was being pushed was toward the visual arts, and the central doctrine was that of aesthetic immediacy,. . . a more immediate intuitional mode of communication" (86).
40. See also Wallace Jackson, Immediacy: The Development of a Critical Concept from Addison to Coleridge (Amsterdam: Rodopi NV, 1973).
41. Luis Rene Gámez sees a similar "aesthetics of numismatics" at work in Addison's play Cato. In a bid to explain away the play's notorious lack of dramatic energy, Gámez argues that it borrows from the Dialogues passages of poetry used to explain ancient coins and applies these descriptions to the main characters, especially Cato. The aim of the play was to represent his '"lofty and sublime image," which Addison hoped "would 'strike dumb' the howls of party rage" and "cure the broader malady of civil discord" ("'And Art reflected Images to Art': Addison's Use of Numismatics in Cato," Modern Philology 85.3 (1988): 263). Gámez leaves unexplored, however, the implications of Addison's aesthetic for our understanding of the public sphere and its reciprocal relationship to monetary value.
42. John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: "The Body of the Public" (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986), 19-20. Subsequent references in text.
43. Cynthio asks why these "Virtues are generally shown in petticoats" (36), and this anxiety about the gender of ancient coins reveals how the Dialogues rewrite the gendering of "economic man," who as J. G. A. Pocock observes, "is feminised, even an effeminate being, still wrestling with his own passions and hysterias and with interior and exterior forces let loose by his fantasies and appetites, and symbolised by such archetypally female goddesses of disorder as Fortune, Luxury, and most recently Credit herself" (Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press), 118).
44. Along with his representation of Lady Credit in the Spectator, Addison's numismatic feminine figures of virtue undercut the masculine, republican tradition of political virtue, revaluing feminine passion and sociability as appropriate virtues for a market society. On the gendering of the economic and literary marketplace see Catherine Ingrassia's, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998);
45. and Terry Mulcaire, "Public Credit; or The Feminization of Virtue in the Marketplace," PMLA 114 (1999): 1029-42.
46. See P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688-1756 (London: Macmillan, New York: St. Martins, 1967).
47. See J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), 423-505.
48. Joseph Addison, The Guardian, ed. John Calhoun Stephens (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1982), 345.
49. Joseph Addison, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 44.
50. According to John Craig's The Mint: A History of the London Mint from A. D. 287 to 1948 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1953), halfpence and farthings were copper coins whose intrinsic value was acknowledged not to equal their face value. No copper coins were minted between 1701-1718.
51. An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1968), 196.
52. James Thompson provides a useful overview of the debates surrounding The Recoinage Act in Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1996), 15-17; 47-67.
53. Patrick Brantlinger, Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694-1994 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996), 35.
54. On the aesthetic as the ground of monetary value see Marc Shell's Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1982), 7: "Credit, or belief, involves the ground of aesthetic experience, and the same medium that confers belief in fiduciary money (bank notes) and in scriptural money (accounting records and money of account, created by the process of bookkeeping) also seems to confer it in art."
55. Reprinted as "The Issue of Representation" in The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics, ed. Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen (New York: Routledge, 1999), 53-74.
56. Laura Brown, Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century, (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2001), 85.
57. In addition to Bran dinger's Fictions of State and Catherine Ingrassia's, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England, see Colin Nicholson's Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994),
58. and Sandra Sherman's Finance and Fictionality in Early Modern England: Accounting for Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996).
59. See Poovey's "Aesthetics and Political Economy in the Eighteenth Century: The Place of Gender in the Social Constitution of Knowledge" in Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. George Levine (Camden: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1994), 80.
60. See Luc Ferry, Homo Aestheticus: The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age, trans. Robert de Loaiza (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993),
61. and Terry Eagleton's The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990).
62. Eagleton argues that the aesthetic "figures as a genuinely emancipatory force - as a community of subjects now linked by sensuous impulse and fellow-feeling rather than by heteronomous law, each safeguarded in its unique particularity while bound at the same time into social harmony . . . On the other hand, the aesthetic signifies . . . a kind of 'internalized repression', inserting social power more deeply into the very bodies of those it subjugates, and so operating as a supremely effective mode of political hegemony" (28). As he notes, Eagleton's analysis of eighteenth-century aesthetics owes much to Howard Caygill's Art of Judgement (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).
63. Timothy Dykstal, The Luxury of Skepticism: Politics, Philosophy, and Dialogue in the English Public Sphere, 1660-1740 (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 2001), 12, 11.
64. Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1998), 42.
65. Building upon Richard Kroll's analysis of "somatic culture" in The Material Word: Literate Culture in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1991),