The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England

Transcription

1 The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England

2 The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England Edited by Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar

3 THE CULTURE OF THE GIFT IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND Copyright Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar, Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the United States a division of St. Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number , of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The culture of the gift in eighteenth-century England / edited by Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. 1. English literature 18th century History and criticism. 2. Generosity in literature. 3. Politics and literature Great Britain History 18th century. 4. Great Britain Intellectual life 18th century. 5. Locke, John, Influence. 6. Social classes England History 18th century. 7. English language 18th century Social aspects. I. Zionkowski, Linda. II. Klekar, Cynthia. PR448.G46C dc A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: January

4 Contents Acknowledgments List of Contributors vii ix Introduction 1 Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar I Theories of Benevolence 1 Rights and Reciprocity in the Political and Philosophical Discourse of Eighteenth-Century England 15 Anna Moltchanova and Susannah Ottaway 2 Charity Education and the Spectacle of Christian Entertainment 37 Jad Smith 3 Debt without Redemption in a World of Impossible Exchange : Samuel Richardson and Philanthropy 55 John A. Dussinger II Conduct and the Gift 4 Tis Better to Give: The Conduct Manual as Gift 79 Marilyn Francus 5 The Gift of an Education: Sarah Trimmer s Oeconomy of Charity and the Sunday School Movement 107 Dorice Williams Elliott III The Erotics of the Gift 6 Obligation, Coercion, and Economy: The Deed of Trust in Congreve s The Way of the World 125 Cynthia Klekar

5 vi Contents 7 The Erotics of the Gift: Gender and Exchange in the Eighteenth-Century Novel 143 Charles Haskell Hinnant 8 Fictions of the Gift in Sarah Scott s Millenium Hall 159 Jennie Batchelor 9 The Nation, the Gift, and the Market in The Wanderer 177 Linda Zionkowski IV The Gift and Commerce 10 Josiah Wedgwood s Goodwill Marketing 197 Susan B. Egenolf 11 Anson at Canton, 1743: Obligation, Exchange, and Ritual in Edward Page s Secret History 215 Robert Markley Bibliography 235 Index 253

6 Acknowledgments It seems altogether appropriate that a collection of essays on the topic of gift relations should begin with a note of thanks. For the time and energy that they devoted to helping this book take shape, our contributors deserve our deepest gratitude; working with them has been a pleasure from beginning to end. Institutional support for our research and editorial labor has been generous as well. Joseph McLaughlin, chair of the English Department of Ohio University; Ohio University s College of Arts and Sciences; and Western Michigan University s College of Arts and Sciences have provided us with timely assistance in bringing our manuscript into print. Behind the scenes, our reader at Palgrave offered encouragement and insightful advice on individual essays and on the collection as a whole. We are especially grateful to our copyeditor, John Knapp, who brought to this project an admirable degree of expertise, professionalism, and patience. Thanks are also due to Rick Huard, who composed our index with precision and insight in record time. Our most profound debts, of course, are to our families and friends, whose innumerable gifts can never be returned.

7 Contributors Jennie Batchelor is Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Kent. She has published various essays on gender and material culture, and is the author of Dress, Distress and Desire: Clothing and the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Literature (2005), and coeditor of and contributor to British Women s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship, History, Politics (2005) and Women and Material Culture, (2007). She is currently completing a monograph on literary representations of manual and intellectual labor in women s writing between 1750 and John A. Dussinger is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Author of The Discourse of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (1974) and In the Pride of the Moment: Encounters in Jane Austen s World (1990), and numerous articles and reviews on eighteenth-century subjects, he is currently editing the letters of Thomas Edwards, Sarah Wescomb, Laetitia Pilkington, and Frances Grainger for The Cambridge Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Samuel Richardson. His recent work includes articles in Studies in Bibliography, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and Papers for the Bibliographical Society of America on Richardson s anonymous writings; a critical biography of Thomas Edwards (1699? 1757) is also in progress. Susan B. Egenolf is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University, where she teaches courses in eighteenth- and early-nineteenthcentury British and Irish literature and culture and Women s Studies. Her publications, such as her forthcoming study The Art of Political Fiction in Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson (2008), have focused primarily upon women writers and the intersections of literature and the visual arts. Her current book-length project is an exploration of Josiah Wedgwood and his influence upon Romantic aesthetics. Dorice Williams Elliott is Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department at the University of Kansas. Her book, The Angel out of the

8 x Contributors House: Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England (2002), was published by the University Press of Virginia. She has published articles on Elizabeth Gaskell, Hannah More, Sarah Scott, and Jane Austen, and on servants, class, and Australian convicts. She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled Transporting Class: Reinventing Social Relations in Australian Convict Fiction. Marilyn Francus is Associate Professor of English at West Virginia University. She is editor of The Burney Journal and author of The Converting Imagination: Linguistic Theory and Swift s Satiric Prose (1994), as well as multiple articles on eighteenth-century literature and culture. She is currently writing a book on monstrous motherhood in the eighteenth century. Charles Haskell Hinnant served as the Catherine Paine Middlebush Chair from 1996 to 1999 before retiring from the University of Missouri English Department in He is the author of seven books, most recently The Anne Finch Wellesley Manuscript Edition (1998), which he coedited with Barbara McGovern, and a number of articles, the latest of them on Defoe, Austen, Shaftesbury, Burke, and Wollstonecraft. His edition of the anonymous picaresque novel, The London Jilt (1683), was published by Broadview Press in A companion to his essay on The Erotics of the Gift, entitled Gifts and Wages: The Structures of Exchange in Eighteenth-Century Fiction and Drama, is forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Studies. Cynthia Klekar is Assistant Professor of English and Associate Editor of Comparative Drama at Western Michigan University. Her work has appeared in Eighteenth-Century Fiction and The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and is forthcoming in Philological Quarterly and Eighteenth-Century Studies. She is currently completing a book entitled Fictions of the Gift: Generosity, Obligation, and Economy in Eighteenth-Century England. Robert Markley is Professor of English and Romano Professorial Scholar at the University of Illinois, and editor of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. His books include Two-Edg d Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve (1998); Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, (1993); Virtual Realities and Their Discontents (an edited collection of essays); Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination (2005); and The Far East and the English Imagination, (2006). He is currently working on two books one on climate and culture before and after the age of fossil fuels, the other a study of European Asian relations between 1740 and 1850.

9 Contributors xi Anna Moltchanova is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Carleton College. She received her Ph.D. from McGill University in Her present research deals with issues in international law and global justice and with theories of group agency and group intentionality as they relate to social moral epistemology. Her article Stateless National Groups, International Justice and Asymmetrical Warfare appeared in The Journal of Political Philosophy (2005), and Nationhood and Political Culture appeared in Journal of Social Philosophy (2007). Susannah Ottaway is Associate Professor of History at Carleton College. She is the author of The Decline of Life: Old Age in Eighteenth-Century England (2004), and the coeditor of The History of Old Age in England, (2008), an eight-volume set of primary sources on old age in early modern England, and Power and Poverty: Old Age in the Preindustrial Past (2002). She is currently working on a project on workhouses and poor relief reform movements in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Jad Smith is Assistant Professor of British Literature and Cultural Studies at Eastern Illinois University. His work Custom, Association, and the Mixed Mode: Locke s Early Theory of Cultural Reproduction appeared in ELH (2006), and How Fanny Comes to Know: Sensation, Sexuality, and the Epistemology of the Closet in Cleland s Memoirs appeared in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation (2002). His book manuscript, Childhood and Moral Reform in the Age of Locke, explores the relationship of childhood and culture in early eighteenth-century knowledge economies linked to projects of social reform. Linda Zionkowski is Professor of English at Ohio University and author of Men s Work: Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Poetry, (2001), as well as numerous articles on authorship and print culture. She served as editor for Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, volumes 37 38, and is currently finishing a book on women and gift economies in novels by Richardson, Burney, and Austen.