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INTRODUCTION 1. Ian Watt, 'Serious Reflections on the Rise of The Notes INTRODUCTION 1. Ian Watt, 'Serious Reflections on The Rise of the Novel', Novel 1:3 (Spring 1968), 215-16. 2. As Jane Tompkins argues with reference to American fiction, literary texts are (at least in part) 'attempts to redefine the social order'. I would argue that they can also attempt to define and entrench the social order. Sensational Designs: the Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860 (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. xi. 3. Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society (London & Boston: Ark, 1985), p. 273; rpt London: Routledge, 1969. 4. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 21. 5. For a recent discussion of the complexities of the concept of class and the dubiousness of any application that posits a notion of class that is unproblematic see William M. Reddy, 'The concept of class', in Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe since 1500: Studies in Social Stratification, ed. M. L. Bush (London & New York: Longman, 1992), pp. 13-25. See also John Seed, 'From "Middling Sort" to Middle Class in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England', in Bush, pp. 114-35, and Geoffrey Crossick, 'From Gentleman to the Residuum: Languages of Social Description in Victorian Britain', Language, History and Class, ed. Penelope J. Corfield (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 150-78. Seed discusses the intersecting social institutions of family, church, and the public sphere (clubs and other secular organizations) and their role in defining social and class boundaries (pp. 129-35). Crossick examines the interplay of the terminology of class and of other kinds of social and cultural categorization in nineteenth-century Britain, including not only value-laden terms like 'gentleman' and 'the residuum' (the morally and economically destitute members of the lower classes) but also occupational terms like 'dock labourer, clerk, lawyer - [which] stood for a great deal more than the simple description of a job.' (p. 166) Two older but valuable and relevant discussions of class are E. P. Thompson, 'Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?' Social History 3:2 (May 1978), 133-65, and Asa Briggs, 'The Language of "Class" in Early Nineteenth- Century England', Essays in Labour History, eds A. Briggs and J. Saville (London: Macmillan, 1967); rpt Essays in Social History, eds M. W. Flinn and T. C. Smout (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), pp. 154-77. 6. For a comprehensive examination of the values and ideas of the English bourgeoisie from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: 192 Notes 193 Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987). Davidoff and Hall stress in particular the import­ ance of gender and of Evangelical and Dissenting religion in the evolution of middle-class precepts and practices. 7. Coleridge was apprehensive about precisely this effect of leisure read­ ing on the minds of the public at large. He refers with contempt to 'the devotees of the circulating libraries', whose 'pass-time, or rather kill-time' he refuses to dignify 'with the name of reading. Call it rather a sort of beggarly daydreaming', he continues, 'during which the mind of the dreamer furnishes for itself nothing but laziness and a little mawkish sensibility; while the whole material and imagery of the doze is supplied ab extra by a sort of mental camera obscura manu­ factured at the printing office, which pro tempore fixes, reflects and transmits the moving phantasms of one man's delirium, so as to people the barrenness of an hundred other brains afflicted with the same trance or suspension of all common sense and all definite purpose.' This kind of passive absorption of impressions Coleridge classifies with mindless activities such as 'swinging, or swaying on a chair or gate; spitting over a bridge; smoking; snuff-taking'. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, eds James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), vol. I, 48-9; Cole­ ridge's note. Carlyle expressed similar reservations about the passivity of reading, with specific reference to Scott's Waverley novels, which created a 'beatific land of Cockaigne and Paradise of Donothings', a world in which 'there was no call for effort on the reader's part... The reader, what the vast majority of readers so long to do, was allowed to lie down at his ease, and be ministered to.... The languid imagination fell back into its rest; an artist was there who could supply it with high-painted scenes, with sequences of stirring action, and whisper to it, Be at ease, and let thy tepid element be comfortable to thee.' 'Sir Walter Scotf, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 6 vols (London: Chapman & Hall, 1869), V, 251-2; first appeared in London and Westminster Review 12 (1837), as a review of the first six volumes of Lockharf s Life of Sir Walter Scott. 8. Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: the Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: a Political History of the Novel (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Subse­ quent references to both works are in the text. 9. Donna T. Andrew, 'The Code of Honour and its Critics: the Opposi­ tion to Duelling in England, 1700-1850', Social History 5:3 (October 1980), 415. 10. For a detailed discussion of the variety of models of the gentleman see David Castronovo, The English Gentleman: Images and Ideals in Literature and Society (New York: Ungar, 1987). See also Robin Gilmour, The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981). 11. Anthony TroUope, He Knew He Was Right, ed. John Sutherland (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 908. 194 Notes 12. Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes (London: Macmillan, 1965), p. 156. K. C. Phillipps quotes this passage and others from Victorian fiction to demonstrate the equivocal nature of the term in the late nine­ teenth century in his Language and Class in Victorian England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), pp. 6-7. Crossick contends that Phillips 'exagger­ ates the rapidity of the decline [of the meaning of "gentleman"], for the term remained precise in the setting of the landed country elites/ ('From Gentlemen to the Residuum', p. 164). 13. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 112-13. 14. Arno Mayer, 'The Lower Middle Class as Historical Problem', Jour­ nal of Modern History 47:3 (September 1975), 409, 411. Subsequent references are in the text. 15. Ibid., and Geoffrey Crossick, 'The Emergence of the Lower Middle Class in Britain', The Lower Middle Class in Britain 1870-1914, ed. Geoffrey Crossick (London: Croom Helm, 1977), pp. 11-60. Subse­ quent references are in the text. 16. George Gissing, Charles Dickens: a Critical Study (London: Gresham, 1903), p. 42. 17. George Gissing, Will Warburton (London: Hogarth, 1985), p. 237. 18. George Gissing, In the Year of the Jubilee (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1895); rpt Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1976, p. 443. 19. See H. J. Dyos, Victorian Suburb: a Study of the Growth of Camberwell (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1966), pp. 191-2. 20. Alice Dudeney, The Maternity of Harriott Wicken (London & New York: Macmillan, 1900), p. 81. 1 'A KIND OF A SORT OF A GENTLEMAN': THE GENTLEMAN'S PROGRESS FROM SIR CHARLES GRANDISON TO JOHN HALIFAX 1. Thomas Smith, The Commonwealth of England: and the Manner and Governement thereof (London, 1609; originally published in 1583); cited in The Past Speaks, ed. Walter Arnstein (Lexington, MA.: Heath, 1981), p. 192. 2. Ruth Kelso, 'Sixteenth-Century Definitions of the Gentleman in England', Journal of English and Germanic Philology 24 (1925), 370-82. 3. Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660-1730 (Berkeley & Los Angeles: Uni­ versity of California Press, 1989), pp. 5-9. Subsequent references are in the text. 4. John Loftis, Comedy and Society from Congreve to Fielding (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959), p. 1. 5. Richard Steele, The Conscious Lovers, in The Plays of Richard Steele, ed. Shirley Strum Kenny (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), pp. 295-382; IV. ii., 50-7. 6. Laura Brown, English Dramatic Form, 1660-1760: an Essay in Generic History (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 180-1. Subsequent references are in the text. Notes 195 7. George Lillo, The London Merchant, in The Dramatic Works of George Lillo, ed. James L. Steffensen (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), pp. 149- 209; I.i., 21-2. 8. William H. McBurney traces the history of the productions, editions, and nineteenth-century variations of the play in his 'Introduction', The London Merchant (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), pp. ix-xxv. 9. For a detailed discussion of the theme of gentility in Defoe's oeuvre, see Michael Shinagel, Daniel Defoe and Middle-Class Gentility (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). 10. Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, 2nd edn with supple­ ment, 2 vols (London: Rivington, 1727; rpt New York: Kelley, 1969), I, 15. Subsequent references are given in the text by volume and page number. 11. This avenue of social advancement is indeed acknowledged by the eighteenth-century economist and divine Josiah Tucker (1712-99), who stated that the self-made man of business 'may not always meet with Respect equal to his large and acquired Fortune; yet if he gives his Son a liberal and Accomplished education, the Birth and calling of the Father are sunk in the Son; and the Son is reputed, if his Carriage is suitable, a Gentleman in all Companies'.
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