THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO NOVEL CLASSICISM: BRITISH FICTION AND THE TRADITIONS OF ANTIQUITY 1740-1840 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE BY KRISTIAN CELIA JANE KERR CHICAGO, ILLINOIS DECEMBER 2016 For my parents, Bruce and Lesley Kerr sero sed serio TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iv Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 I. “The Anatomist of the Heart”: Reading Tacitus in the Eighteenth Century ............................. 16 II. Scott: Vernacular Classicism ................................................................................................... 42 III. Making Modern Classics: The Novel amidst the Canon Controversies ................................. 86 IV. “At Home” with the Ancients: Standardized Classics in the 1830s ..................................... 150 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 204 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The genesis of this project lies in Edinburgh’s New Town, where classical order and harmony have been imposed on a sublime terrain with which, over two centuries, they have come to blend inseparably. That I originate there too, makes it possible to tell a long, especially digressive, even Shandean tale about this piece of work. A more concise version can be told through the debts of thanks I owe to individuals on both sides of the Atlantic, who were all instrumental in bringing this work to this stage. At the University of Chicago, my dissertation committee has been a source of invaluable intellectual inspiration and support. Jim Chandler glimpsed long before I did the potential for a discussion of Scott as a classicist of a very particular bent, and Scott is the central column of the project. His belief in this project, even (and especially) as its architecture changed has been essential. Elaine Hadley has been unstintingly generous in giving time and intellectual energy to a project that rapidly receded from her Victorianist expertise. Her crystalline explanations of complex concepts, insistence on clarity, and pedagogical example have been invaluable. Tim Campbell has been an acute and attentive reader. His bibliographical and rhetorical suggestions vitally shaped amorphous swathes of research material and his transatlantic shepherding kept me in the fold. The faculty, staff, and students of the English Department at Chicago have been colleagues and friends. The organizers and attendees of the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Cultures Workshop must be especially thanked for their time and skill in discussing chapters as work in progress. Over the course of my time at Chicago I have been fortunate to receive a number of fellowships and awards, all sine quibus non. The generosity of the Blair, Tillotson, and Nicholson families made this research possible. Tony Maramarco receives especial thanks iv for funding graduate-student research travel. The days I spent with Scott’s autograph manuscripts at the Morgan Library in New York were revelatory. In the UK, a month’s residential fellowship at the Chawton House Library in 2014 was a privilege which simultaneously deepened and broadened my sense of women writers’ autonomous approach to the classics. At Edinburgh University, Penny Fielding and the members of the Scottish Writing in the Nineteenth Century (SWINC) group have offered an intellectual home-from-home-back-home. Far back in time, it was the late Michael Comber who first introduced me to Classical Reception as a field of inquiry. Christopher Pelling, Helen Cooper, Jon Mee, and Andrew King opened the door to English and Classics. Oxford’s joint-honors course suggested the genre-based framing of the project: from the list of Epic, Tragedy, Comedy, Satire, and Pastoral papers to choose, Novel was missing. This project is, in some way, an attempt to fill this significant absence. In deepest time, John Byrom was a scintillating expositor of the strangeness yet uncanny familiarity of the Romantic period. Far more recently Jonathan Sachs has been a supporter and exemplary exponent of Romantic classicism. Friends and relatives across the world have been overwhelmingly generous with their ideas, spare rooms, and patience. Jan Rutherford, Hugh Andrew, and all Birlinn have been generous and forbearing in the latter stages of this enterprise, for which I shall always be grateful. The greatest thanks must go to my parents, who probably never expected this education to be so protracted but still manage to remain proud. The one is the classicist, the other the novel- reader. Thank you. v Introduction The 1740s is a decade in which the novel’s relation to the classical canon and its critical dictates are a central concern in writing and evaluating fiction. While much has been written about Henry Fielding’s neoclassical “comic epic in prose” or Samuel Richardson’s contrasting deficiency in classical erudition, this study reveals a relationship between British fiction and the legacy of classical antiquity originating in this decade that is more formative and persistent than the idea that the novel is the epic of modernity. In his essay “On the Study of History” (1741) David Hume draws a connection between novels and classical historiography. He relates a purportedly truthful anecdote detailing how he answered a request from a “young beauty” for novels and romances by sending a classical text to her country retreat instead. I therefore sent her Plutarch’s Lives, assuring her, at the same Time, that there was not a Word of Truth in them from Beginning to End. She perused them very attentively, ’till she came to the Lives of Alexander and Caesar, whose Names she had heard of by Accident: and then returned me the Book, with many Reproaches for deceiving her.1 Hume’s anecdote establishes an equivalence between novels and classical historiography that is the basis of my argument about the novel and the classics in the century between 1740 and 1840. Even as Hume champions history-reading over and against novel-reading, his anecdote reveals what will become the basis of the novel’s authority over the subsequent century, that it will usurp historiography’s longstanding status as the genre best adapted to representing human nature.2 Reading history, especially that of the ancient cultures, is to study human nature, declares Hume, 1 David Hume, Essays, Moral and Political (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid, 1742), 70; further references to this edition are parenthesized within the text. 2 Ian Duncan “The Trouble with Man: Scott, Romance, and World History in the Age of Lamarck,” Romantic Frictions, ed. Theresa M. Kelley, September 2011, Par. 4, Romantic Circles, 6 November 2016. <http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/frictions/HTML/praxis.2011.duncan.html> 1 noting that only men and women who are well read in a triad of Greek, Roman, and their own national histories can be interesting conversationalists. Though it would be decades before the novel was received as the legitimate heir to this humanist tradition in Walter Scott’s historical novels, the Enlightenment’s classically based conceptions of prose narrative and societal development influence and inadvertently authorize the genre. At the same time, fiction’s ascent begins to alter both the perception of antiquity and the meaning of the word “classical.” In the second half of the eighteenth century, the classical corpus begins to be read novelistically. In this instance, Hume suggests that classical history offers the same enticing and titillating subject matter as fiction. Has [the female reader] not equal Reason to be pleased, when she is informed, (what is whispered about among Historians) that Cato’s Sister had an Intrigue with Caesar, and palmed her Son, Marcus Brutus, upon her Husband for his own, tho’, in Reality, he was her Gallant’s? And are not the Loves of Messalina or Julia as proper Subjects of Discourse as any Intrigue that this City has produced of late Years. (71) The paradox of classical history is that it had always contained examples of both the most depraved and virtuous deeds. This scandal-laden and gossipy historiography proves that first- century Rome provides a portrait of nature and manners analogous to that in contemporary novels and therefore also modern life. As a “philosophical historian” bringing systematized Enlightenment arguments to historiography, Hume retains a neoclassical, humanist commitment to exemplary narrative that functions through the double effect of creating both sympathetic identification and critical distance.3 As they were emulated by eighteenth-century successors, ancient historians were also interpreted as proto-novelists, offering examples of how to neutralize even salacious subject matter in their alternation of sympathetic engagement and moralized, sentimental reflection. 3 Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: The Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740- 1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 47. 2 Romanticism has long been defined by its dialectical rejection of the Augustan variety of neoclassicism as exemplified, in particular, by the works of Alexander Pope. Yet many critics have shown the persistence of classicism in late-eighteenth