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Character in the Age of Adam Smith by Shannon Frances Chamberlain

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Character in the Age of Adam Smith by Shannon Frances Chamberlain Character in the Age of Adam Smith By Shannon Frances Chamberlain A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Janet Sorensen, Chair Professor Ian Duncan Associate Professor Kevis Goodman Professor Emerita Shannon Stimson Fall 2017 Character in the Age of Adam Smith © 2017 Shannon Frances Chamberlain 1 Abstract Character in the Age of Adam Smith by Shannon Frances Chamberlain Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Janet Sorensen, Chair What does Adam Smith’s moral philosophy owe to the literary discourse of his own time? Many recent studies of Smith have focused on finding his fingerprints on later imaginative literature, particularly in the nineteenth-century novels of free indirect discourse. The argument of this dissertation is that we gain both a better understanding of Smith and the eighteenth-century evolution of novels by attempting to place Smith in his original literary context, as a well-informed participant in the debates around the moral and didactic purpose of literature, especially as they concerned “character.” The use and purpose of literary character was undergoing profound philosophical changes during Smith’s career (1748-1790). From the scandalous and barely disguised society figures who occupied the pages of proto-novels and romances in the early part of the century, to Hugh Blair’s late-century assertion that “fictitious histories…furnish one of the best channels for conveying instruction, for painting human life and manners, for showing the errors into which we are betrayed, for rendering virtue amiable and vice odious,” literary character in novels became the crux of a larger debate on the relationship between rhetoric—previously a somewhat suspect and corrupt art—and morality. Smith’s method of instruction in the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres has long been understood as revolutionary, but relatively less attention has been paid to how his description of the “character of the author” and this figure’s careful deployment of readers’ sympathies engages with the relatively new notion that fictional characters were easier to sympathize with, and therefore better figures for the teaching of ethics, than “real” people. Notions of characters’ fictionality evolved, I argue, into The Theory of Moral Sentiments’ assertion that all other human beings are essentially fictional to us, products of their rhetoric and our imagination. 2 I examine the evolution of moral and literary “character” throughout Smith’s career—from his praise for epistolary novels in The Theory of Moral Sentiments to his engagement with Edinburgh literary circles in the later eighteenth century and especially the novels of his close friend, Henry Mackenzie—to offer a fuller portrait of how Smith’s theories came to play such an outsized role in nineteenth-century novels. But part of the purpose of this project is to revise our nineteenth- and post-nineteenth- century understandings of Smith as they have been inflected by J.S. Mill and later thinkers in the liberal tradition, and reinvigorate Smith as the product of a moment that was just beginning to theorize a moral role for imaginative literature. Gulliver’s Travels, Clarissa, and Julia de Roubigné are stories about how we represent ourselves as moral beings to others, and provided Smith with practical examples about rhetoric as a means of moral inquiry and formation. Most fundamentally, I argue that Smith’s conception of the “moral sentiments” evolved from formulating a relationship between readers and writers through characters, a subject that was also a particular interest of the eighteenth-century novel. i Table of Contents Introduction: Character in the Age of Adam Smith vi 1. Character on Desert Islands: How Adam Smith Read His Gulliver’s Travels 1 2. Brought Home to the Breast: Epistolary Sympathies and Clarissa’s Rhetorical Knack 36 3. Invisible Hands and Sociable Virtues: Smith, Mackenzie, and Epistolary Foreclosures 73 Coda: Austen’s Averted Epistolary Novels 106 Bibliography 114 ii Dedicated to the memory of the never-to-be-forgotten Dr. William Nathan Alexander (1968-2009) “The word ‘however’ is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin. There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.” –Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies iii Acknowledgements Adam Smith wrote that “the duties of gratitude are perhaps the most sacred of all those which the beneficent virtues prescribe to us” and looking back on the way that this work was born and the number of hands that have shaped it, I cannot help but agree. First and uppermost gratitude is due to my committee: the ever-patient Janet Sorensen, who shepherded this project through a variety of nascent and naïve forms; Kevis Goodman, whose early encouragement and generous readings gave me the confidence to keep pushing my work further; Ian Duncan, whom I (and everyone else) is in the habit of consulting like an encyclopedia about all things Scottish Enlightenment, which he is too kind to notice; and Shannon Stimson, who stuck with it through the bitter end and from the other side of the continent. Significant support for my research—financial, intellectual, and moral—also came at critical moments from the good angels at the Institute for Humane Studies and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. In particular, I wish to single out Stephen Davies, Nigel Ashford, and Bill Glod for the various ways that they made sure that this work finally saw the light, but also all of the faculty, staff, and fellow graduate students whose society and conversation were always “the most powerful remedies for restoring the mind to tranquility.” Much needed fellowship (in all senses of the word) also came from the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities at Berkeley. I gather that by the time most people finish their dissertations, they are sick of their departments and never want to see from or hear of them again. For me, this is not the case: the English department at Berkeley has been my second home for the last nine years. The Berkeley Connect program—in which I was a mentor for the 2016-2017 academic year and now, as I write this in late 2017, inexplicably and unfairly finds itself on the critically endangered list—was designed to help undergraduates navigate the complexities of a large research university and provide a sense of community; as is so often the case, however, my undergraduates ended up my guides and provided me with the sociable sphere I needed to push through to the end. Thank you, friends, students, colleagues. And to Professors Kathleen Donegan, Lyn Hejinian, and David Landreth, impartial spectators extraordinaires. This project is dedicated to the memory of my undergraduate advisor, Nathan Alexander, who died just as I began my graduate program and whose absence I felt every single moment of it. But you live on every page and in every margin. And at last we come to the people whose contributions were truly fundamental. My parents, Carol and Dennis Ringvelski, who had a policy of buying me every book I ever asked for and are thus to blame for all of this; my first and best friend at Berkeley, Rachel Trocchio, il miglior fabbro; Catherine Cronquist Browning, who bravely tried iv everything first for all of us; Lynn Huang, Margaret Kolb, Serena Le, and Aileen Liu, givers of wise counsel; Meg Elison, who cannot go unnamed. Julian, Mycroft, and Spooky for the occasional use of their furniture and their acts of perfectly indifferent and impartial spectatorship. And—never least—my husband Matthew Chamberlain, always and at the end of all things. And at the beginning, too. v Note on textual abbreviations As is customary in writing about Adam Smith, I will refer to texts that I reference often by abbreviations. The first time I refer to a text, I spell out the entire name; subsequently, texts are described according to the following acronyms: EPS Essays on Philosophical Subjects LRBL Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres TMS The Theory of Moral Sentiments WN An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations References to the editions I used may be found in the endnotes to each chapter. vi Introduction: Character in the Age of Adam Smith This project began in my speculation that Adam Smith—the first modern economist, but also, as is increasingly understood, a pioneer in the instruction of English literature—was more influenced by the eighteenth-century novel than has been previously noted. Smith, as his Glasgow editors admit in their preface to The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; hereafter TMS)i, sometimes seems a bit of a cipher in the context of eighteenth-century philosophy.ii We recognize easily enough the ghosts of David Hume and Francis Hutcheson in his work, but the sympathetic interactions he describes in TMS are a particularly significant departure from these earlier conceptions of automatic and visceral (and visually-oriented) sympathies. On the other hand, the “novelistic” qualities of Smith’s work have interested and puzzled many a philosopher, including one of Smith’s most prominent interpreters, Charles Griswold. Griswold goes so far as to say that TMS “presents the character of a novel” in its proliferation of literary exemplars and references.iii While this seems to confuse the novel and another eighteenth-century genre, the commonplace book, Griswold does anticipate in this statement the growing trend to find Smith’s philosophy in actual novels.iv In literary studies, accounts of Smith tend to emphasize how his highly narrative descriptions of sympathy’s genesis influenced the work of later novelists, like Jane Austen and George Eliot.
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