New Conceptions of Time and the Making of a Political-Economic Public in Eighteenth-Century Britain

New Conceptions of Time and the Making of a Political-Economic Public in Eighteenth-Century Britain Author: Amy Witherbee Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/675 This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries. Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, 2009 Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. Boston College The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Department of English NEW CONCEPTIONS OF TIME AND THE MAKING OF A POLITICAL-ECONOMIC PUBLIC IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN a dissertation by AMY WITHERBEE submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2009 © copyright by AMY WITHERBEE 2009 New Conceptions of Time and the Making of a Political-Economic Public in Eighteenth-Century Britain By Amy Witherbee, Boston College Committee Chair Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace This project argues that the British “financial revolution” ushered in a new way of conceptualizing time based in mathematic innovations of the seventeenth-century. As it was employed in financial instruments and government policies, mathematics’ spatialized representation of time conflicted with older, more intuitive experience of time associated with consciousness and duration. Borrowing from the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I examine how he interaction between these two temporalities reshaped conceptions of value, the public, and the body in the first half of the eighteenth century. The first two chapters of my study explore texts ranging from pamphlets that advocated for the establishment of banks to the periodical essays of The Spectator and The Tatler that advocated for political economic conceptions of time and value at the turn of the century. These texts reveal the subtle tensions and strange paradoxes created by the clash of disparate temporalities and open the door to new readings of fictional narratives like those of Daniel Defoe and Aphra Behn. My second two chapters focus on selected works by these two authors to explore how longer first-person narrative forms modeled both the possibilities and dangers of emerging political economic structures. My study concludes with two chapters that follow the development of the oriental tale in Britain. Making use of a seventeenth-century tradition that explores the tensions between representation and meaning in oriental fables, Arabian Nights’ Entertainments follows in the wake of John Paul Marana’s Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy and reshapes the oriental tale genre to reflect the new concerns of a global marketplace in which deferral has become essential to the production of value. I conclude these chapters with readings of Johnson’s Rasselas, Hawkesworth’s Almoran and Hamet, and Frances Sheridan’s Nourjahad, three tales that foreshadow late-eighteenth-century efforts to manage the public and its temporal paradoxes through an attention to the body. Acknowledgements I would like to thank everyone at Boston College who supported, encouraged and advised me during my time there. Thank you to my wonderful committee, to Alan Richardson who saw me through all the examinations and the first glimmers of a dissertation topic, to Robert Chibka who has read through drafts page by page and made this a far better project than it would have been without him, and to Robert Markley at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who generously gave of his time and expertise when they were most required. A special thank you goes to my mentor and the chair of my committee, Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace, who always seems to know when to challenge, when to inspire, and when to offer support. Several of my colleagues and professors at Boston College deserve special recognition for the help they have given me over the years. Thank you to Jim Smith, who more than anyone else, encouraged me to pursue a Ph.D and gave me all the resources and encouragement to succeed. Thank you also to Judith Wilt who saw me through the Masters program with her wit, humor and wisdom, and to Kalpana Seshadri, whose comments on the first chapters of this dissertation were invaluable. Jaime Goodrich, Catherine Michna and Alyssa Connell have been both my closest colleagues throughout this program, and I am a better person for their friendship. Last, but certainly not least, thank you to my husband, Douglas, and my son, Gavin. You make everything worthwhile. i CONTENTS Introduction . .1 Chapter One Finance and the Introduction of Mathematical Time . 13 Chapter Two Addison and Steele’s Public in a Circulating Economy . .40 Chapter Three Crediting and Delay in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko . .69 Chapter Four Daniel Defoe and the Great Clock of Public Credit . .91 Chapter Five The Oriental Tale and Its Deferred Endings: Arabian Nights’ Entertainments in Commercial Context . 127 Chapter Six The Oriental Tale and the Future as Illusion: Johson’s Rasselas, Hawkesworth’s Almoran and Hamet, and Frances Sheridan’s Nourjahad . .172 Conclusion . 205 ii Introduction Joseph Addison’s January 5, 1710 issue of The Tatler presents the remarkable image of a woman’s petticoat so large that when lifted and fully unfurled, it balloons like a dome above the wondering eyes of onlookers: I then ordered the Vest which stood before us to be drawn up by a Pully to the Top of my great Hall, and afterwards to spread open by the Engine it was placed upon, in such a Manner, that it formed a very splendid and ample Canopy over our Heads, and covered the whole Court of Judicature with a kind of Silken Rotunda, in its Form not unlike the Cupolo of St. Paul’s.1 Addison means to draw humor from his narrator’s comparison of the undergarment with the lofty structures of church and state, and certainly, we are justified in reading this essay as an eighteenth-century satire on the female gender and its fashions. We are also meant, however, to think about the century’s increasingly important questions of economy and scale. As it happens, Addison’s self-appointed judge learns that the relatively minor matter of a fashionable petticoat plays a significant part in the economic foundation of the Empire. The rope that holds together the skirt nourishes an entire rope-making industry at home; the whalebone that stiffens its fabric feeds a British whaling interest as far away as Greenland. The advocate for the petticoat cites 1 Joseph Addison, The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond, 3 vols, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987): 192. 1 political economist Sir William Petty and declares that such an oversized item of fashion could multiply the profits of the woolen trade such that its effects “could not fail to sink the Power of France in a few Years” (II.193).2 As ridiculous as Addison’s narrator deems the petticoat to be (he declares the garment forfeit at the end of the trial), the hoop skirt’s expanse reminded the reader that every trivial act of purchase or trade potentially multiplied to become part of the enormous structures of an Empire. The emerging field of political economics challenged Addison’s contemporaries to reconcile the individual bodies of consumers and tax payers with the mathematically derived scale of state finance.3 Addison’s essay highlighted the significance of great masses and great distance to this statistical view, but with the exception of a note that the hoop-skirt wearer spends three days outside the doorway trying to squeeze through, this particular essay hid the importance of time to political economic thought. Britain’s eighteenth-century financial and political expansion was made possible only by the introduction of a new articulation of what time was and what it could do. Reimagined as a field of play from which data could be gathered and value extracted, time was qualitatively different from the experiential time of human consciousness and from early Christian articulations of mortal time and eternity. This is not to say, however, that mathematical articulations of time replaced or even subordinated alternative time concepts. In the eighteenth century as in the twenty-first, many distinct understandings of time shaped the world. For readers in Addison’s century the new conception of time came with enormous financial and political stakes and needed to be integrated with existing beliefs and 2 Addison, 193. 3 For a study of Britain’s economic growth during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Larry Neal, The rise of financial capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); and P.G.M. Dickson’s seminal study, The Financial Revolution in England (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967). 2 experiences. This study seeks to better define the qualitatively different version of time that suffused British finances and popular culture during the long eighteenth century and to trace its repercussions in narrative structures and literary genres of the period. Over the past two decades, a significant field of critical work has emerged to focus on the dramatic cultural shifts that accompanied Britain’s financial revolution.4 James Thompson argues that the recoinage debates of the period brought into relief changing notions of value as Britons sought to articulate the relationship between financial value and coins or credit notes.5 Using a Marxist lens, Thompson shows how concerns about the difference between treasure and

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