The critique of free thinking from swift to sterne

Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Volumn 15, Issue 3-4, 2002, Pages 341-416

  Battestin, Martin C ^a  

^a NONE

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References (214)

1. The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response, 1660-1750, ed. Roger D. Lund (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 9
2. See George Berkeley, Alicphron: or, The Minute Philosopher (1732).4
3. Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, intro. Crane Brinton, 2 vols (1876; reprint New York and Burlingame: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), 1:72
4. J.GAocock, "Within the Margins: The Definitions of Orthodoxy," Margins of Orthodoxy. 36-37
5. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, the Ballte of the Books, and the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, ed. A.C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 4 (original in italics). References are to this edition
6. The basic studies of the two themes are Miriam Kosh Starkman, Swift's Satire on Learning in "A Tale of a Tub" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950)
7. and Phillip Harth, Swift and Anglican Rationalism: The Religious Background of "A Tale of a Tub" (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961)
8. Starkman (chap. 2) first observed that Hobbes and Descartes were important targets of Swift's satire in the Tale, and many others have since confirmed and developed her insight: e.g., Harth. 81-100, 145-53
9. Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Works and the Age, 3vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962-83), 1:220-21
10. Robert H. Hopkins, "The Personation of Hobbism in Swift's Tale of a Tub and Mechanical Operation of the Spirit" Philological Quarterly 45 (1966), 372-78
11. Lund, "Strange Complicities: Atheism and Conspiracy in A Tale of a Tub," Eighteenth-Century Life 13 (1989), 34-58
12. Though much abridged and somewhat revised, my present discussion of this theme in the Tale draws on my book, The Providence of Wit: Aspects of Form in Augustan Literature and the Arts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). 225-41
13. See Charles Scruggs, "Swift's Use of Lucretius in A Tale of a Tub," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 15 (1973), 40-41
14. For relevant background illuminating Swift's concerns in the Tale, see the following: Margaret C.Jacob, The Newtonians and Ute English Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976)
15. and W.R.Albury, "Halley's Ode on the Principia of Newton and the Epicurean Revival in England," Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1978), 24-43
16. Ignoring Swift's explicit targeting of Hobbes and Epicureanism in the Tale - even to the extent of excising Hobbes from the passage in the Preface discussed above - Kenneth Craven argues that the deists Toland and Shaftesbury are Swift's primary "victims" in the Tale: see Jonathan Swift and the Millennium of Madness: The Information Age in Swift's "Tale of a Tub" (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992), chap. 2, 5
17. The evidence Craven offers, however, is unconvincing: it consists for the most part of alleged parallel passages and flights of speculation. Swift, most scholars agree, had finished the religious satire of the Tale by 1696, the year Toland's Christianity Not Mysterious was published; and the letter Craven cites to prove Shaftesbury knew that Swift had attacked him personally proves nothing of the kind, but merely shows that Shaftesbury, like many others, found the Tale offensive (see p. 101)
18. Swift, Irish Tracts (1720-1723) and Sermons, ed. Herbert Davis, intro. Louis A. Landa (Oxford: Blackwell, 1948), p. 188
19. In the "Ode to the Athenian Society," Swift, attacking atheistical materialism, thus declared, "I believe in much I ne're can hope to see" (line 134)
20. See Swift, "Tale of a Tub" and Other Works, ed. Angus Ross and David Woolley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 223n126
21. Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, 1:240
22. An allusion to Lucretius (IV.30-32): "What we call 'images' of things, a sort of outer skin perpetually peeling off the surface of objects and flying about this way and that through the air" (Ross and Woolley, p. 216n84)
23. Ross and Woolley: "clinanima. Lucretius (II. 292) used clinamen ('inclination') to render Epicurus's parenklisis, the deviation from the straight path which allowed atoms to collide by chance and create the matter of the world" (p. 215n80)
24. Donald Greene, "The Education of Lemuel Gulliver," The Varied Pattern: Studies in the Eighteenth Century, edeter Hughes and David Williams (Toronto: A.M. Hakkert, 1971), p. 17
25. The point is well made by Brian McCrea, "Lemuel Gulliver's 'Treacherous' Religion: Swift's Redaction of Ecclesiastes," Christianity and Literature 49 (2000), 478
26. With these quotations Louis Landa introduced his definitive study, Swift and the Church of Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), commenting that, for all his love of levity, Swift was "a formidable and, in the main, a conscientious clergyman" (p. xiii)
27. See Charles Allen Beaumont, Swift's Use of the Bible: A Documentation and a Study in Allusion (Athens: University of Georgia Press), chap. 6
28. George Sherburn, "Errors Concerning the Houyhnhnms," Modern Philology 56 (1958), 96
29. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 352
30. W.B. Carnochan, Lemuel Gulliver's Minor for Man (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), p. 47
31. Swift to Pope, 29 September 1725, The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, D.D., ed. David Woolley (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001), 2:606
32. See R.S. Crane, "The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the History of Ideas," Reason and the Imagination: Studies in the History of Ideas, 1600-1800, ed. J A. Mazzeo (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962). 231-53
33. Swift, Gulliver's Travels, ed. Albert J. Rivero (New York and London: WAV. Norton, 2002), p. 168
34. References are to this edition. David Renaker sees in Swift's characterization of the Laputians a satire of Cartesian rationalism, "Swift's Laputians as a Caricature of the Cartesians," PMLA 94 (1979), 936-44. While not excluding Descartes from this satire, Everett Zimmerman sees it as aimed chiefly at Newton: "Swift conflated Newtonianism with the Cartesian rationalism that it replaced."
35. Swift's Nanative Satires: Author and Authority (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 165n7
36. See Ehrenpreis, "Four of Swift's Sources," Modern Language Notes 70 (1955), 98-100
37. Swift to Pope, 26 November 1725
38. Correspondence, 2:623
39. See Roland M. Frye, "Swift's Yahoo and the Christian Symbols for Sin "Journal of the History of Ideas 15 (1954), 201-17
40. Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1946), l:xiii
41. The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. F.J. Sheed (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1942), 1:vii. Augustine concludes: "But if I was conceived in iniquity, and in sin my mother nourished me in the womb, then where, my God, where, O Lord, where or when was I, Your servant, innocent?"
42. Swift, Irish Tracts (1720-1723) and Sermons, ed. Herbert Davis and Louis Landa (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963), p. 166
43. quoted by Landa, "Swift, the Mysteries, and Deism," Texas University Studies in English 24 (1944), 248
44. Samuel Holt Monk, "The Pride of Lemuel Gulliver," Sewanee Review 63 (1955), 67
45. In Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. M.C. Battestin (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), the club of "Rule of Right-men" affect to follow "the infallible Guide of Human Reason," pp. 213, 212
46. and in Henry Fielding, The History of Tomjones a Foundling, ed. M.C. Battestin and Fredson Bowers (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1975), the deist Square declares that "an Untruth" is "absolutely repugnant and contrary" to "the unalterable Rule of Right, and the eternal Fitness of Things," p. 128. References are to these editions
47. T.O. Wedel, "On the Philosophical Background of Gulliver's Travels," Studies in Philology 23 (1926), 434-50
48. See Kathleen Williams, Jonathan Swift and the Age of Compromise (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1958)
49. Martin Kallich, The Other End of the Egg: Religious Satire in "Gulliver's Travels" (Bridgeport, CT: Conference on British Studies at the University of Bridgeport, 1970)
50. R.S. Crane, "The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the History of Ideas," pp. 231-53
51. For a judicious survey of critical approaches to Gulliver's Travels from the beginning to 1995, see Gulliver's Travels, ed. Christopher Fox (Boston and New York: Bedford Books of St Martin's Press, 1995)
52. "A Critical History of Gulliver's Travels," pp. 269-301; especially for the present topic. 285-89
53. John J. McManmon, "The Problem of a Religious Interpretation of Gulliver's Fourth Voyage," Journal of the History of Ideas 27 (1966), 59-72
54. Zimmerman, p. 138n24
55. G.A. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965)
56. and Jaul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe's Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe (Baltimorer: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966)
57. See also Martin J. Greif, "The Conversion of Robinson Crusoe," Studies in English Literature 6 (1966), 551-74
58. Pat Rogers, Robinson Crusoe (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1979), p. 51
59. Especially relevant is chap. 3, "Religion and Allegory."
60. In brief, Cherbury's "Common Notions" affirm the existence of God and Providence; the duty of worshipping him by the practice of virtue and the expiation of vice and crime by repentance; and the assurance of rewards and punishments in the afterlife. See Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, De Veritate, trans. Meyrick H. Carré, University of Bristol Studies 6 (1937), 289-307
61. In his comments, Carré observes that the idea of a "special Providence or Grace as well as of universal Providence, or Nature" is part of the "notion" of God (p. 56)
62. Hunter, "Friday as a Convert: Defoe and the Accounts of Indian Missionaries," Review of English Studies n.s. 14 (1963), 243-48
63. Paula Backscheider reads the episode against the background of the Salters' Hall controversy, in which Dissenters were divided over the question of "the authority of the church and the sufficiency of reason and conscience." Daniel Defoe, His Life (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).401-3, 417-18
64. Her reading, however, should not be seen as contradicting Hunter's. In the year Robinson Crusoe was published, Defoe himself traced the dispute among Dissenters over the divinity of Jesus to the influence of the deists: see Mercurius Politicus (February 1718/19), 80-90
65. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. Michael Shinagel (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975), p. 168. References are to this edition
66. In "Friday as a Convert," Hunter cites two works on the subject written contemporaneously with Defoe's novel: the Boyle Lectures of John Leng entitled "Natural Obligations to believe the Principles of Religion and Divine Revelation" (1717-18), A Defence of Natural and Revealed Religion (1737). 107-216
67. Richard Fiddes, Theologica Speculativa: or A Body of Divinity ... Wherein are explain'd the Principles [and Duties] of Natural and Reveal'd Religion (2 parts, 1718-20)
68. Serious Reflections (1720)
69. for the reference to Friday and Benamuckee, see pp. 124-25
70. John Mullan, intro. to Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (London: Everyman's Library, 1992), p. viii
71. Henry Fielding, Shamela, ed. Sheridan W. Baker, Jr (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953), p. 10
72. T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 551
73. For their discussion of Richardson's religious views, see pp. 550-56
74. Richardson is quoted by Eaves and Kimpel, p. 553; see also p. 555
75. See Tom Keymer, Richardson's "Clarissa" and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 163
76. Samuel Richardson, Pamela, ed. George Saintsbury, Everyman's Library, 2 vols (London: J.M. Dent, 1955), 1:55. References are to this edition
77. From the text reprinted in British Novelists, 1660-1800, ed. Martin C. Battestin, Dictionary of Literary Biography 39, 2 parts (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1985), 2:601. References to the Postscript are to this edition
78. For the curious use of "sentimental" in this context see the OED (secondary sense)
79. For the curious use of "sentimental" in this context see the OED (secondary sense): "Arising from or determined by feeling rather than by reason."
80. Richardson, Clarissa or The History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 443. References are to this edition
81. See Keymer, Richardson's "Clarissa," pp. 163-68
82. Eve Tavor, Sceptism, Society and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (London: Macmillan, 1987). 72-77
83. Tavor, p. 54
84. Keymer, p. 167
85. Cf. Henry Fielding in Amelia, ed. M.C. Battestin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983),justifying his depiction of an apparent flaw in Dr Harrison's character: "it is our Business to discharge the Part of a faithful Historian, and to describe Human Nature as it is, not as we would wish it to be" (p. 429). References are to this edition
86. Samuel Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison, ed. Jocelyn Harris, 3 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 3:466. References are to this edition
87. Margare t Anne Doody, A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 273
88. Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela, intro. Alan Dugald McKillop, Augustan Reprint Society 21 (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1950). 11,8-9
89. McKillop notes that the author, as stated in the Monthly Review 10 (1754), 159-60, may be Alexander Campbell (p. i)
90. For a succinct account of Henry Fielding's attitude towards deism, see Battestin, A Henry Fielding Companion (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000). 229-30
91. For a rebuttal of Ronald Paulson's contention that Fielding remained sympathetic to deism until late in life, see Battestin, "Fielding and the Deists," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 13 (2000), 67-76
92. For an account of Henry Fielding's early flirtation with deism and the particular case of Pasquin, see M.C. with R.R. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life (London: Routledge, 1989). 152-57, 199-200
93. See Frederick G. and Anne G. Ribble, Fielding's Library: An Annotated Catalogue (Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1996). xxiv-xxvi
94. See Richardson's letter to Mrs Donellan, 22 February 1752, Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed.J. Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), p. 197
95. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. M.C. Battestin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966). 212-13
96. On Henry Fielding's exposure to the heterodox views of Cooke and Ralph, and their membership in a club of wits, see Battestins, Life. 152-57
97. Fielding, Tom Jones, p. 127
98. See A.R. Humphreys, "The Eternal Fitness of Things': An Aspect of Eighteenth-Century Thought," Modern Language Review 42 (1947), 188-98
99. See Tom Jones, p. 126n2
100. See the excerpts from William Warburton, The Divine Legation of Moses demonstrated (1738)
101. and George Lyttelton, Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of Staul (1747) in Tom Jones, p. 925n2
102. See 1 Corinthians 1:17-23
103. and 2 Peter 2:1-4
104. On the autobiographical dimension of the novel, see Fielding, Amelia. xvi-xxi
105. The discussion of Booth's heterodox views and his final conversion is based on my article, "The Problem of Amelia: Hume, Barrow, and the Conversion of Captain Booth," ELH 41 (1974), 613-48
106. See James Harris, "Essay on the Life and Genius of Henry Fielding Esqr," appendix 3 in Clive Trobyn, The Sociable Humanist: The Life and Works of James Harris, 1709-1780 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 306, 305
107. and A Fielding Companion. 243-45
108. See Peter V. LePage, "The Prison and the Dark Beauty of Amelia," Criticism 9 (1967), 337-54
109. A.R. Towers identified Fielding's allusion in Modern Language Notes 70 (1955), 257-60
110. Aurélien Digeon, Le Texte des romans de Fielding (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1923). 99-101
111. Sarah Fielding, David Simple, edeter Sabor (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), p. 206. References are to this edition
112. See, for example, Hume's Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding (1748), essay 8, "Of Liberty and Necessity," and essay 11, "Of the Practical Consequences of Natural Religion."
113. A copy of this work was in Henry Fielding's library. On the possible importance of Hume to Amelia, see Battestin, "The Problem of Amelia," 613-48
114. Bernard de Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, ed. F.B. Kaye (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), 1:39
115. Barrow, Works, 5th ed. (1741), 2:1, 10. A copy of this edition was in Henry Fielding's library
116. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A Selby-Bigge (1739; reprint Oxford, 1888), 2, iii, 3, "Of the influencing motives of the will," p. 415
117. Sarah Fielding, David Simple, p. 281. Orgueil's obsession with the rule of Reason and Rectitude is emphasized throughout the novel
118. Sarah Fielding, David Simple, ed. Malcolm Kelsall (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p.434n
119. See Hume, "Essay on Miracles," Philosophical Essays (1748)
120. Middleton, Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers of the Christian Church (1749)
121. See Lewis Mansfield Knapp, Tobias Smollett: Doctor of Men and Manners (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), p. 307
122. See also Jerry C. Beasley: "Smollett's personal religious beliefs remain something of a mystery, as he was very private about them, but in all of his fiction he subscribed to an essentially Christian notion of human history and of the trajectory of the individual life directed by faith." Tobias Smollett Novelist (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998). 229-30n17
123. In February 1759, Smollett's candidate for Lecturer at Chelsea Old Church was elected; his mother-in-law and daughter were buried in the church in 1762 and 1763, respectively
124. See Knapp, p. 113
125. Tobias Smollett, Rodeiick Random, edaul-Gabriel Boucé (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 117
126. The Life and Adventures of Sir Lanncelot Greaves, edeter Wagner (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988). 228-29, 252
127. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, ed. Thomas Rreston (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), index, see "Methodism." References are to these editions
128. Smollett, Travels through France and Italy, ed. Frank Felsenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 299
129. Smollett, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, ed. James L. Clifford, revised by Paul-Gabriel Boucé (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). 133-34
130. Clifford plausibly suggests that the allusion may be "a mixture of Leibniz, and Pope's 'Whatever is, is right'" (p. 785n). References are to this edition
131. Smollett, The Adventura'of Ferdinand Count Fathom, ed.Jerry C. Beasley (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), p. 259
132. Beasley (p. 431n3)
133. and, earlier, Knapp (p. 304) are surely right in seeing Shaftesbury as the principal target in this passage
134. Humphry Clinker, p. xxxii
135. Roderick Random had anticipated Lismahago's scorn of "the notion of the real presence" (p. 173)
136. James G. Basker, Tobias Smollett: Critic and Journalist (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988). 252-53, 265
137. Critical Review 7 (June 1759), 550-51
138. Critical Review 12 (August 1761), 138
139. Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote: or The Adventures of Arabella, ed. Margaret Dalziel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 206
140. Frances Brooke, The History of Emily Montague, ed. Mary Jane Edwards (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1985), letter 50. 106-7
141. Eliza Haywood, Epistles for the Ladies, vol. 1, part 2, of Haywood's Selected Works, ed. Alexander Pettit and Christine Blouch (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001), epistle 35, p. 104. References are to'this edition. I am indebted to Margaret Croskery for alerting me to passages relevant to my subject
142. In her note to the passage, Blouch identifies the authors in question: John Toland in Christianity Not Mysterious (1696)
143. and Thomas Woolston in The Moderator between an Infidel and an Apostate (1725)
144. and A Discourse on Our Saviour's Miraculous Power of Healing (1730), works for which Woolston was imprisoned for blasphemy (459n4)
145. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill and L.Fowell, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 2-8
146. Maurice J. Quinlan, Samuel Johnson: A Layman's Religion (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964). 135-36. The Shaw quotation is from the preface to Androcles and the Lion
147. Boswell, 1:342
148. The Poems of Samuel Johnson, ed. David Nichol Smith and Edward L. McAdam (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). 132-33
149. See Gwin J. Kolb, "The Structure of Rasselas" PMLA 66 (1951), 698-717
150. and Robert G. Walker, Eighteenth-Century Arguments for Immortality and Johnson's "Rasselas", English Literary Studies (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, 1977)
151. For a comprehensive survey of Rasselas criticism from 1759 to 1986, see Edward Tomarken, Johnson, "Rasselas, " and the Choice of Criticism (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989)
152. See Johnson's letters to his mother Sarah in Lichfield, 13 to 20 January 1759, The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bruce Redford, 5 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 1:174-78
153. Samuel Johnson, Diaries, Prayers, and Annals, ed. E.L. McAdam, Jr, with Donald and Mary Hyde (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958). 65-67
154. Samuel Johnson, Sermons, ed. Jean Hagstrum and James Gray (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). 261-62
155. Johnson, Rasselas and Other Tales, ed. Gwin J. Kolb (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 70-71. References are to this edition
156. Walker, p. 54
157. Arieh Sachs similarly explains Johnson's motive in the episode: "stoicism represented a declaration of absolute human self-sufficiency, it offended Johnson's deepest convictions, his very Christianity." Passionate Intelligence: Imagination and Reason in the Work of Samuel Johnson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), p. 30
158. See, for example, T.S. Eliot, "The Humanism of Irving Babbitt," Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950). 419-28
159. The Idler and The Adventurer, ed. W.J. Bate, John M. Bullitt, L.Fowell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 131
160. Walker, p. 55
161. On the origins of Johnson's philosopher, see especially Gwin J. Kolb, "Rousseau and the Background of the 'Life Led according to Nature' in Chapter 22 of Rasselas," Modern Philology 73 (1976), S66-73 and the notes to the chapter in Kolb's edition of Rasselas and Other Tales
162. also Richard B. Schwartz, "Johnson's Philosopher of Nature: Rasselas, Chapter 22," Modern Philology 74 (1976), 196-200
163. See John Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Minneapolis: Universtiy of Minnesota Press, 1983)
164. Gwin J. Kolb, "The Intellectual Background of the Discourse on the Soul in Rasselas," Philological Quarterly 54 (1975), 357-69, and the notes to this chapter in his edition of Rasselas and Other Tales
165. Walker, chap. 1, "The Metaphysical Argument," and pp. 60-63
166. Johnson, Sermons. 263-64
167. Johnson, Sermons, p. 270
168. Charles Eierce, Jr, The Religious Life of Samuel Johnson (London: Athlone Press, 1983), p. 129
169. Oliver Goldsmith, Collected Works, ed. Arthur Friedman, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 4:160. References to The Vicar of Wakefield are to this edition
170. See M.C. Battestin, "Goldsmith: The Comedy of Job," chap. 7, Providence of Wit
171. Goldsmith, Collected Works, 3:154-55
172. also Jonathan Lamb, The Rhetoric of Suffering: Heading the Book of Job in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), chap. 6, "The Job Controversy."
173. Babler 2 (1767), p. 56
174. My remarks on Tristram Shandy draw on my discussion of the novel in Providence of Wit. 241-69
175. e siècles 38 (1994), 188-96
176. See Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, ed. James A. Work (NewYork: Odyssey Press, 1940), p. xxiii
177. and Sterne, Tristram Shandy, ed. Melvyn and Joan New, The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, 3 vols (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1978)
178. The Notes, 3:16-17 (references are to the New edition)
179. and Ian Campbell Ross, Laurence Sterne: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 217
180. For Sterne's high opinion of Locke's Essay, see Arthur H. Cash, Laurence Sterne: The Early and Middle Years (London: Methuen, 1975). 205-7
181. In this context it should be noted that as a student at Cambridge Sterne is likely to have undertaken the course of study recommended by Daniel Waterland, Master of Magdalen College and Regius Professor of Divinity. In his Advice to a Young Student, with a Method of Study (1730), Waterland particularly emphasized the importance of Locke's Essay, "which must be read, being a Book so much (and I add so jusdy) rallied" (p. 23)
182. On the importance of Waterland's Advice to Sterne's intellectual development, see William James Owen, "The Evolution of Sterne's A Sentimental Journey," PhD Dissertation, University of Virginia, 1994, chap. 3, "The Ordering of Matten Laurence Steme and Eighteenth-Century Materialist Thought," pp. 133-35
183. Another sign of Sterne's familiarity not only with the Essay but with Locke's writings in general is his instruction to his bookseller to include in a shipment of books to his friend Diderot, an atheist, "All Lock's works," which, together with "Tillotson's Sermons," comprised the only items of a strictly philosophical or religious kind in the shipment: see Sterne's Letters, ed. Lewis Perry Curtis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), p. 166
184. and my remarks in "Sterne among the Philosophes: Body and Soul in A Sentimental Journey," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 7 (1994), 22-23
185. The Clockmahers Oulcry Against the Author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy" (London, 1760). 10-11, 17
186. "Christopher Flagellan," A Funeral Discourse (London, 1761), p. 7
187. Julien Offray de la Mettrie, La Mettrie's "L'Homme Machine": A Study in the Origins of an Idea, ed. Aram Vartanian (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 190
188. John W. Yolton, Locke and French Materialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 38-55
189. Owen, p. 136
190. See Owen on this episode. 146-50
191. "Flagellan," p. 8
192. Ross, Sterne, p. 234
193. Melvyn New, the leading authority on the subject, emphasizes the orthodoxy of Sterne's religious beliefs: see The Sermons of Laurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New, vols 4-5 of the Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne (1996), vol. 5 preface. References are to this edition
194. Ross, Sterne. 276-77
195. Arthur Cash, Laurence Sterne: The Later Years (London and New York: Methuen, 1986). 137, 355
196. See Joel L. Gold, "Tristram Shandy at the Ambassador's Chapel," Philological Quarterly 48 (1969), 421-24
197. Sterne, Letters, p. 218
198. Eve Tavor finds the sermons helpful to her thesis that Sterne in Tristram Shandy meant to attack scepticism by parodying it. Scepticism, Society and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, espp. 205-20 and 258n19
199. In the late summer of 1767 from Scarborough, Richard Griffith wrote his wife that he had met Sterne and read as much of the manuscript of A Sentimental Journey as Sterne had then written: "It is stiled a Sentimental Journey through Europe, by Yoric [sic]. It has all the Humour and Address of the best Pans of Tristram, and is quite free from the Grossness of the worst.... He promises to spin the Idea through several Volumes, in the same chaste Way, and calls it his Work of Redemption; for he has litde Superstition to appropriated Expressions" (quoted in Letters. 398-99n3)
200. The following remarks on the novel are based on my discussion in "A Sentimental Journey. Sterne's "Work of Redemption," pp. 200-4
201. Laurence Sterne, A Senlimental Journey through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick, ed. Gardner D. Stout, Jr (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), p. 278. References are to this edition
202. Examples of the so-called "hard" approach to A Sentimental Journey are Rufus D.Sutney, "The Evolution of A Sentimental Journey," Philological Quarterly 29 (1940), 349-69
203. and "Laurence Sterne: Apostle of Laughter," The Age of Johnson: Essays Presented to Chauncey Brewster Tinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949). 159-70
204. Ernest N. Dilworth, The Unsentimental Journey of Laurence Sterne (New York: King's Crown Press, 1948)
205. Arthur Hill Cash, Sterne's Comedy of Moral Sentiments: The Ethical Dimensions of the "Journey", (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1966). 89-101
206. and Mark Loveridge, Laurence Sterne and the Argument about Design (Totowa, NJ: Barnes, 1982). 167-209
207. The reading of the novel that follows is an abridgment of my essay "Sterne among the Philosophes," pp. 27-36
208. Cash's reading of this important episode ignores the change in these circumstances that removes the erotic implication that undermined the pathos of the otherwise parallel episode in Tristram Shandy, see "Sterne, Hall, Libertinism, and A Sentimental Journey," Age of Johnson 12 (2001), 315-16
209. On Newton's understanding of this term and its currency in the period see Stout's edition, appendix E. 353-54
210. On the importance of the concept in Sterne's novel, see John A. Dussinger, "The Sensorium in the World of A Sentimental Journey," Ariel 13 (1982), 3-16
211. Sterne died less than a month after the first two volumes of A Sentimental Journey were published, leaving Yorick stranded in the mountains on his passage to Italy, which was to have been the scene of vols 3 and 4. The novel stops with "The Case of Delicacy," the last chapter of vol. 2, but it does not end there as Cash would have it ("Sterne, Hall, Libertinism, and A Sentimental Journey," p. 318)
212. M.C. Battestin, "A Sentimental Journey and the Syntax of Things," Augustan Worlds: New Essays in Eighteenth-Century Literature in Honour of A.R. Humphreys, ed. J.C. Hilson, M.M.B. Jones, and J.R. Watson (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1978). 223-39
213. Stout cites the following biblical texts: Matthew 10:29-31, Luke 12:7, 1 Samuel 14:11, and 1 Kings 1:52
214. Also Sterne's Sermons: "Without [God's] knowledge and permission we know that not a hair of our heads can fall to the ground" (p. 278n)