Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel

Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print

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Fielding to Austen Roger Maioli University of Florida Gainesville, FL, USA

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland To my parents, | Dedico este livro aos meus pais, Eliseu dos Santos & Lurdes Maioli dos Santos PREFACE

Between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, the philosophy and the prose fiction of Great Britain came to evince an unprecedented interest in the particulars of experience. Classical empiricism from Francis Bacon to David Hume redirected the attention of philosophers from the stratosphere of rationalism to the discrete data of the senses. At the same time, fictionists from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen turned their gaze from the high plains of romance towards the minute details of everyday life.1 Modern historians of the novel have come to see these two developments as aspects of a single tendency in European culture. In his highly influential TheRiseoftheNovel, Ian Watt described the shift towards particularity in British philosophy and literature as the common expression of a new world picture that had been taking shape since the Renaissance, “one which presents us, essentially, with a developing but unplanned aggregate of particular individuals having particular experiences at particular times and at particular places.”2 For Watt, philosophers and novelists were common inheritors of this worldview, which they promoted by means of analogous methods. The procedures developed by the empiricists to investigate the world of experience and document their findings were equally recognizable in the “formal realism” that came to characterize prose fiction. “The novel’s imitation of human life,” says Watt, “follows the procedures adopted by philosophical realism in its attempt to ascertain and report the truth” (31). Like the new philosophy, the rising novel endeavored to portray the circumstantiality of observable life with faithfulness, and it did so in order to “report the truth” and thus enlighten its readers about the world. From Watt’s perspective, the realist novel was more than romance descended from the clouds to please a lowlier taste. It was an agent of the

vii viii PREFACE

Enlightenment. Through its subject matter and its methods, the novel participated in the contemporary campaign to popularize knowledge of the observable world by means of accessible, unadorned reports. Modern scholars have come to be suspicious of Watt’s progressive narrative, especially for its strict separation between romance and the novel. Still, Watt’s belief that the rises of empiricism and the novel were somehow connected has retained its appeal, and the main tendency of later scholarship has been to reafﬁrm and reﬁne rather than contest it. The original thesis was given extensive elaboration in Michael McKeon’s The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740, and subsequently taken in new directions in a number of studies by J. Paul Hunter, John Bender, Jonathan Lamb, Jonathan Kramnick, Cynthia Wall, and others.3 For all their variety, these studies broadly conform to Watt’s “collaborative” model; they offer a picture of a mutually reinforcing relationship between empiricism and the novel, showing how the latter either mirrored or appropriated the methodological procedures and pedagogic goals of the former. The picture is essentially this: like empiricism, the novel sought to collect, organize, and make sense of the data of sensory experience, giving pride of place to the here-and-now of English life and inspecting with clinical thoroughness the inner workings of human subjectivity, always in a stylistic register in which denotation trumps adornment. The ultimate goal, again, was to convey knowledge. Defoe and Richardson, no less than Locke or Hume, based their writings on the particulars of experience in order to help readers understand and navigate the real world. The empirical genesis of Moll Flanders or Clarissa allegedly enhanced the power of these novels as vehicles for instruction, making them imaginative counterparts of the political treatise or the moral essay. The empiricist program had only to gain from these developments, as it found in the novel a powerful ally for the popularization of socio-ethical knowledge. As far as the attitude of eighteenth-century novelists go, this collaborative picture has much to recommend it. Fictionists in the period consistently capitalized on the purported connection between the protocols of empiricism and the novel’s pedagogic value. Stressing the moral accompanying the fable was a routine gesture in the addresses to the reader that prefaced most narratives at the time, and the moral was usually characterized as a type of empirical inference – a set of conclusions to be drawn from the dizzying array of particular facts documented by the novel. Thus, Defoe characterizes Moll Flanders as “a Work from every part of which something may be learned, and some just and religious Inference is drawn, by which the PREFACE ix

Reader will have something of Instruction”; by the same token, the story of Colonel Jack, according to Defoe’s preface, is so rich in lessons “that it would employ a Volume, large as itself, to particularize the Instructions that may be drawn from it.”4 Richardson went Defoe one better and actually produced the volume, listing the lessons yielded by his novels in A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflexions, Contained in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison (1755). Since it was a matter of no slight importance that the facts yielding the inferences be authentic, novelists often buttressed their teachings by denying (or, in Richardson’s case, de-emphasizing) the novel’s fictionality. Through this well-known maneuver, they were able to validate their lessons by alleging their historical (and hence empirical) grounded- ness. Now, while the false claim to historicity is the most well known, it was not the only way of enlisting the epistemic prestige of empiricism in support of the novel. The genre’s pedagogic program retained its association with empiricism even after the 1740s, when the old authenticating devices entered their slow descent into obsolescence. Midcentury novelists like Fielding, who made no attempt to sell their fictions as fact, nonetheless staked the cognitive value of their novels on a professed faithfulness to observation and experience. Whether in the early or the late eighteenth century, therefore, fictionists with a pedagogical agenda invoked the principles of empiricism as an epistemic warranty stamp. Naturally, not everyone agreed that they were entitled to do so. The claim to historicity proved highly controversial, and McKeon has documented with unprecedented thoroughness the reaction it elicited in more skeptical quarters. But the revamped commitment to empiricism that characterized the explicit fictions of the midcentury was equally contested, and faced a type of critique that studies of the novel have mostly tended to gloss over. The assumption that empiricism can underwrite the lessons of undis- guised fictions had no currency in more philosophical quarters, where Watt’s collaborative picture would have seemed very alien. Empiricist philosophers for the most part saw no compatibility between their quest for knowledge and what they regarded as the misleading tendencies of imaginative literature. Bacon, Locke, Hume, George Campbell, Adam Smith – all drew a functional distinction between philosophy or history, both of which seek to instruct, and “poetry,” whose purpose, they thought, is merely to please. Bacon spoke for generations of empiricists when he declared that those who seek “to dissect the nature of the real world” should seek “everything ...from the things themselves,” rather than “fabricate apish x PREFACE mockeries of worlds [simiolas & fabulas Mundorum].”5 Nature, rather than reason or the imagination, is for Bacon the proper court of appeal in empirical matters. Narratives, he acknowledges, can be suitable replace- ments for the observation of nature, as long as they are “unsullied and undefiled by fables and vanity” (41) – as long, in other words, as they are strictly factual. While the realist novel was less guilty of wild inventions than the forms of fiction Bacon was acquainted with, the empiricists who wit- nessed the novel’s emergence made no exception of it; in fact, they found that the genre’s realism only heightened the risk of delusion. As Hume complained, young readers are blinded by the “false representations of mankind” offered by novels.6 James Beattie, who dissented from Hume in almost everything, nonetheless concurred that novel reading “breeds a dislike to history, and all the substantial parts of knowledge,” and “with- draws the attention from nature, and truth.”7 Rather than an outpost of empiricism bringing enlightenment to a broader audience, the novel struck the empiricists as a vulgar peddler of misconceptions. Unlike the response to the early claim to historicity, the proscription of explicit fictions by eighteenth-century empiricists has played no substantial role in discussions of the alignment between empiricism and the novel. To some extent the omission is understandable. After all, studies of the topic undertaken from the perspective of literary studies are interested in what empiricism means for the novel, not vice-versa.8 Conversely, philosophical studies of empiricist aesthetics have prioritized broad theoretical questions over the empiricists’ applied criticism. As a result, we still lack an appropriate account of what the novel meant for those thinkers whose philosophical principles it ostensibly shared. While understandable, however, this omission is by no means inconsequential. There are two reasons why it should concern us. The first is that the perspective of the empiricists has direct implications for our picture of the parallel rises of empiricism and the novel. As I show in my introduction, extant accounts of empiricism’s relation to the novel have tended either to suggest that empiricism lost its purchase on prose fiction as the claim to historicity waned, or that the explicit fictions following the 1740s fostered the empiricist enter- prise in ways that were envisioned and even endorsed by the classical empiricists. Neither view satisfactorily accounts for the ongoing con- flict between the demands of empirical epistemology and the procedures of literary representation in that period. Taking account of the empiricist standpoint thus serves a corrective function. The second PREFACE xi reason why that standpoint deserves attention is of a more constructive nature. As will be seen, the concerns emanating from the empiricist camp were expressed not only by those philosophers conventionally labeled “empiricists”; they were shared, often in veiled ways, by a range of authors whose outlook on life and letters was informed by the empirical worldview. Like Hume or Beattie, novelists including Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Laurence Sterne, William Godwin, and Jane Austen admitted that prose fiction’s appeal to experience posed a theoretical problem: that of explaining how it is that characters and events that never existed can in any sense represent the empirical world or support inferences about it. Unlike empiricist philosophers, however, these novelists did not find that the problem was insurmountable, and proceeded to address it in their theories of the novel. Recovering the empiricist suspicion of fictions accordingly highlights a crucial set of concerns for eighteenth-century novel theory, concerns that clarify why such theories took the shape they did, but which scholarship on empiricism and the novel still needs to come to terms with. The aims driving the present project are accordingly two. The first is to reconstitute the empiricist case against the novel and then trace its influence on the theories of fiction that evolved in the decades following the 1740s. The reason for conjoining these two lines of enquiry is that most novelists addressed the empiricist critique of fictions in an ad-hoc, unsystematic fashion, so that the common purpose of their dispersed reflections only becomes recognizable once the critique itself is brought into full view. Taken together, the empiricist perspective and the responses it elicited bring into relief an untold part of the story of the two rises, one marked by a spirit not of collaboration, but of negotiated antagonism. In this revised picture, empiricism presents novelists not only with a set of methodological and thematic opportu- nities, but also with a pressing theoretical challenge: to prove fiction’s empirical standing or exit the philosophical arena. My account of these developments aspires to depth rather than extensiveness. Both the philosophical challenge and the attempted solutions allowed for much individual variation, and I decided that paying close attention to a selection of complex cases would be more illuminating than briefly outlining a greater number of examples. My hope is that the approach I take here will seem cogent enough to be tested more broadly, as I believe it can be fruitfully applied to figures I discuss only in passing or notatall– such as George Campbell and John Stuart Mill in the xii PREFACE empiricist camp, or Frances Burney, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Maria Edgeworth among the novelists. That said, I also discuss the broader developments my case studies instantiate, both in my critical introduc- tionandinmyclosingremarks. My second goal is to situate the rise of the novel within a broader movement in intellectual history, as a transitional moment in the age-old debate about literature and knowledge. Empiricism, I claim, changed the rules for epistemic defenses of literature, and its eventual consolidation as the epistemology of modern science means that the new rules have come to stay. Modern philosophers of literature are still grappling with a charge first leveled by Bacon four hundred years ago – that literature and the empirical sciences have different functions, and that knowledge should be the exclusive province of the latter. By simultaneously endorsing the empirical conception of knowledge and denying Bacon’s division of intellectual labor, contemporary thinkers such as Mitchell Green and Martha Nussbaum are running again into theoretical quandaries that eighteenth- century novelists were among the first to encounter. As a result, the modern solutions, as I point out throughout the book and argue in greater depth in my Conclusion, bear substantial resemblance to the arguments developed by Fielding, Lennox, and their peers. These two iterations of the same effort, I argue, are in fact two phases in a continuing quest for an empiricist defense of imaginative literature. The main achievement of early novel theory, on the view I propose, was not to dispel the empiricist challenge. It was, instead, to inaugurate a longstanding tradition in Western aesthetics, one that seeks to realign literature with the cause of instruction after the dissolution of their bond by classical empiricism. The narrative arc sketched above comprises three broad but distinct developments: the impact of empiricism on the debate about literature and knowledge; the relevance of the empirical shift for the rise of the novel and our current picture of it; and the continuity between the new picture I propose and modern debates on the epistemic value of literature. Bringing these several threads together will be the task of my critical introduction. For now, I would like to zoom out for a moment from the concerns of eighteenth-century scholarship and say something regarding the more immediate motivations behind this study. For many modern readers – certainly for some of the colleagues with whom I discussed this book – the view that novels afford knowledge of the world is either a category mistake or a turn toward some naïve hermeneutics. It either disregards literature’s aesthetic value or deviates critical attention PREFACE xiii from the text’s latent meanings to comparatively uninteresting didactic messages. There is, of course, a degree of truth to both charges, and it is not my intention to advocate for a mode of criticism that emphasizes a quest for messages to the exclusion of other concerns. It is nonetheless significant that a renewed interest in the cognitive value of literary genres is on the rise, in ways that cut across disciplinary boundaries; witness the calls for surface reading among literary scholars, the rise of cognitive defenses of fiction among philosophers of literature, and the recent surge in neuroscientific studies on the benefits of reading fiction. These trends all present themselves as responding to the modern crisis in the humanities, as uncoordinated attempts to justify the reading and teaching of novels to publics unpersuaded of the other values of literary study. In this sense, our historical moment is recycling concerns that, if seemingly misguided from an aestheticist or critical-theoretical standpoint, are all too familiar to scholars of the eighteenth century. Prose fiction in the 1700s had not yet gained its modern credentials as an art form, and novel theory had no access to anything resembling late twentieth-century critical approaches. Authors and critics had to defend the novel on pedagogic grounds instead, even as imaginary genres were falling into discredit as heuristic devices. As a result, the arguments envisioned by eighteenth-century supporters of the novel bear more than superficial resemblance to modern arguments for the literary humanities; both seek to defend fiction as a source of knowledge to constituencies that associate knowledge with the standards of the empirical sciences. Bringing out that resemblance, however, requires some major adjust- ments to our extant story about empiricism and the eighteenth-century novel. This is what I have tried to provide in this book. On the most basic level, what I offer is a revisionist study of the relationship between classical empiricism and the rise of the British novel. My ultimate goal, nonetheless, is to align the rise of the novel with our present predicaments as stages in a single cultural crisis, one that assumed its present shape around the time of the Scientific Revolution. My interest in these issues ultimately dates back to my experience growing up in Brazil, where we lack a liberal arts curriculum and the cultural gulf between literature and STEM fields is consequently wider than in the United States. A technician by training, working with colleagues in whose intellectual formation the humanities had played no essen- tial role, I was immersed in cultural presuppositions common to a technocratic space with no windows into an Arnoldian conception of culture – including the reservations about literature that now loom large xiv PREFACE as the discipline is called upon to justify itself. Transitioning into academia after years in the industry allowed me to view things from the other end of the spectrum, in ways that were closer to my own unarticulated sense of literature’s possibilities. The tension between these two perspectives – a scientistic and a humanistic one – lies at the very heart of this book. I have tried not to portray either view as simply right or wrong. In fact, in tracing the debate about literature and knowledge as it evolved in the eighteenth century and after, I have been less invested in taking sides than in showing that others have thought seriously about our present concerns, from opposite perspectives, long before our historical moment. I was guided by the conviction that we only stand to gain by taking both sides as seriously as they have taken themselves.

Roger Maioli

NOTES 1. A recent discussion of literary attitudes towards particularity in the period is Jenny Davidson, “The ‘Minute Particular’ in Life-Writing and the Novel,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 48, No. 3 (2015), 263–281. See also Leo Damrosch, Generality and Particularity,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Vol. IV: The Eighteenth Century, ed. H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 381–393, and above all Scott Elledge’s seminal essay “The Background and Development in English Criticism of the Theories of Generality and Particularity,” PMLA, 62, No. 1 (1947), 147–182. 2. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 31. 3. Hunter sees a link between the novel’s exploration of subjectivity and the tradition of “meletetics” (or occasional meditations on apparently trivial things) practiced by writers such as Robert Boyle; Hunter, “Robert Boyle and the Epistemology of the Novel,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 2, No. 4 (July 1990): 1–17. Bender discusses the novel as part of broader systems of inquiry that include scientiﬁc hypotheses and the Enlightenment culture of experimentation; Bender, “Enlightenment Fiction and the Scientiﬁc Hypothesis,” Representations 61, Special Issue (Winter 1998), 6–28; “Novel Knowledge. Judgment, Experience, Experiment,” in This is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin and William Warner (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 284–300; and Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of PREFACE xv

Chicago Press, 1987). Lamb links the empiricist distinction between wild and governed uses of the fancy to different genres in prose ﬁction, arguing that the realist novel is epistemologically akin to Locke’s notion of personhood; Lamb, “Locke’s Wild Fancies: Empiricism, Personhood, and Fictionality,” The Eighteenth Century, 48, No. 3 (Fall 2007), 187–204. Kramnick analogously suggests that the novel’s representation of thinking processes corresponds to empiricism’s imagistic theory of mind, in “Empiricism, Cognitive Science, and the Novel,” The Eighteenth Century, 48, No. 3 (Fall 2007), 263–285. Cynthia Wall, in The Prose of Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), relates the changes in eighteenth-century styles of description to the emerging scientiﬁc practices and the epistemological attitudes of empiricism. 4. Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders, ed. David Blewett (London: Penguin, 1989), 40; and The History and Remarkable Life of the Truly Honorable Col. Jacque, ed. Samuel Holt Monk (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 1. 5. Francis Bacon, The Instauratio Magna Part II: Novum Organum and Associated Texts, ed. Graham Rees and Maria Wakely. Vol. 11 of The Oxford Francis Bacon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 37. Further refer- ences will be to this edition unless otherwise noted. 6. Hume, “Of the Study of History,” in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller, rev. edn. (1985; rprt. Indianapolis IN: Liberty Classics, 1987), 564. 7. James Beattie, Dissertations Moral and Critical (Dublin: Exshaw, Walter et al., 1783), Vol. 1, 320. 8. An exception is the pioneering work of Rebecca Tierney-Hynes, who studies the importance of romance and romance reading for empiricist accounts of the self. See her Novel Minds: Philosophers and Romance Readers, 1680–1740 (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012). ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Needless to say, my thinking on empiricism and the novel was inﬂuenced by the many scholars and colleagues I had the privilege of working with. Foremost among them is Frances Ferguson, who directed my doctoral research at Johns Hopkins with unwavering support and wisdom. I also beneﬁtted from direct feedback by Amanda Anderson, Simon During, Jonathan Kramnick, Patrick Fessenbecker, John Hoffmann, and William Cook Miller, as well as from exchanges with Jared Hickman, Jesse Rosenthal, Katarina O’Briain, Nan Zhang, Saroja Ganapathy, Stephanie Hershinow, Elena Russo, Hent de Vries, Leonardo Lisi, and Scott Black. My colleagues at the University of Florida helped sharpen my account of Sterne’s place within empiricism, and I am especially thankful to Pamela Gilbert, Judith W. Page, Kenneth Kidd, Phil Wegner, and Jodi Schorb. I learned much from the seminars I took with Sandra Vasconcelos, Franklin de Mattos, and Maria Augusta da Costa Vieira at the University of São Paulo, and Walter Stephens, María Portuondo, Richard Halpern, Drew Daniel, and Mark Thompson at Johns Hopkins. Especially supportive was my M.A. advisor, Marcos César de Paula Soares, who introduced me to the mysteries of literary study. Carrie Shanafelt and Jenny Davidson kindly shared unpublished work with me, for which I am grateful. Special thanks go to my anonymous reader, who helped me clarify the roles played by Richardson and Hume in my broader narrative, and to William Warner, whose generous and sensible report went a long way towards improving my typescript. Finally, I want to thank my editors at Palgrave Macmillan for believing in this project and making the book possible.

xvii xviii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My work beneﬁtted from generous funding from the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, which allowed me to attend the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University in 2011. It was in the pleasant rooms of the Olin Library that my views on Hume started taking their current shape. I was also supported by a number of fellowships at Johns Hopkins – including a Graduate Fellowship at the initial stages, the Allen Grossman Teaching Fellowship, and a Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellowship at our Expository Writing Program. I am very thankful to the directors of Expos, Pat Kain and Will Evans, for their continued support and collegiality. Thanks are also due to the helpful staff of the Milton S. Eisenhower Library and the George Peabody Library. A version of my Chapter 2 was previously published as “David Hume, Literary Cognitivism, and the Truth of the Novel” in SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 54, 3 (Summer 2014), 625–48. Chapter 4 is a revised version of “Empiricism and Henry Fielding’s Theory of Fiction,” originally published in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 27, 2 (Winter 2014–15), 201–28. I thank the editors for their permission to reproduce that material here. Finally, I have accrued a number of personal debts, too numerous to be listed in full. Fabiana Soares Vieira was an invaluable presence during my early encounters with English literature, as in much else besides. (Obrigado, Bia!) Luiz Vieira, Patrick Giamario, and Patrick Bonner were steady sources of friendship and good humor. Above all, I want to say thanks to my partner, Paige Glotzer, for her many, many generous con- tributions to this project – whether through her contagious enthusiasm, her willingness to name our guinea pigs Johnson and Boswell, her probing questions, or the personal support she unfailingly offered, in selﬂess ways, in all times of need. CONTENTS

1 Introduction 1 Empiricism and the Traditional Defense of Poetry 2 Empiricism and the Novel 10 Literary Cognitivism: A Modern Parallel 25 Chapter Summaries 28 Notes 30

2 David Hume and the Empiricist Challenge 39 The Falsity of Fiction and the Truth of History 41 Thought Experiments and Empirical Knowledge 46 The Cognitive Value of the Novel 51 Hume’s Anticognitivism 55 Notes 57

3 Interlude: The Channel of Inﬂuence 61 Notes 66

4 Empiricism and Fielding’s Theory of Fiction 69 Moral Epistemology in Fielding’s Novels 71 Joseph Andrews and “true history” 74 Probability in Tom Jones 79 The Limits of Fielding’s Theory 85 Notes 88

xix xx CONTENTS

5 Varieties of Propositionalism: Lennox, Austen, Godwin 93 The Female Quixote 95 Northanger Abbey 106 Caleb Williams 117 Notes 132

6 Laurence Sterne and the Experience of Reading Fiction 137 Tristram Shandy: The Satire of Propositionalism 139 A Sentimental Journey as Virtual Experience 145 Notes 158

7 Conclusion 163 I 163 II 170 Notes 177

Bibliography 181

Index 197 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AT David Hume, An Abstract of A Treatise of Human Nature. Included in THN. CW William Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. Gary Handwerk and A.A. Markley (Ontario, CA: Broadview, 200). E David Hume, Essays. Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianopolis: Liberty Classics, 1985). ECHU John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975). EHU David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford/New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999). EPM David Hume, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford/New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998). JA Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin C. Battestin (1742; Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1967). L David Hume, The Letters of David Hume, ed. J.Y.T. Greig, 2 volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 1932. THN David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000). TJ Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, ed. Fredson Bowers, 2 vols. (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1975).

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