Eighteenth-Century Fiction

As John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan remind us in the introduction, “working class literature is rarely received in other than partial or contingent ways,” subject to flattened (and flattening) assumptions about what it means to be working class and what it means to claim for a work the status of literature (3). This ambitious collection spans the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, and even makes a brief foray into the twenty-first century, albeit in an essay by Cole Crawford, who writes in his capacity as eighteenth-century expert on digital collections, many of which will interest ECF readers. This is a substantial book. Of its twenty-five essays, twelve are devoted to the eighteenth century and Romantic period, a number that swells to fourteen if we count Crawford’s and a brief afterword by Brian Maidment. Given space and the readership of ECF, this review attends to (roughly) the first half of the collection.

The book starts strong, with Jennie Batchelor’s closely argued call to expand the limits of working-class literature to include genres that are often dismissed as valuable merely in the register of sociological representation. She warns that in demanding of working people “good” writing, we throw in our lot with the elite category of the aesthetic and risk [End Page 280] missing the often sophisticated manipulation of literary genre wielded by labouring people. As evidence, Batchelor close reads an archive of written testimonials that were read aloud to Trustees of the Foundling Hospital. Her rich reading finds evidence of poor women’s dependence on and revision of pre-existing sentimental seduction and street ballad plots. Poor women adapted these plots to suit a complex and contradictory matrix of desperation, need for charity, and the obligation to appear as a victim rather than as the perpetrator of a violation of social expectations. Batchelor’s essay reads especially well with and against Scott McEthron’s fascinating analysis of another London institution, the Literary Fund Society, established in 1788 as a kind of stop-gap charity measure for authors whose works were determined to promote the national good. Later renamed the Royal Literary Fund, the institution neither granted annuities nor funded particular projects. Rather, its aim was to support with single lump-sum payments those authors of merit (or their survivors) who had fallen on hard times. While Batchelor’s essay is concerned with petitioners, McEthron reads his archive from the perspective of benefactors, who, given their society’s mission, had to contend with thorny questions regarding what constitutes literature worthy of charity.

Another highlight is Franca Dellarosa’s treatment of Edward Rushton’s (1756–1814) posthumously published, untitled essay on race. Rushton writes against both the popular climatological model of racial superiority and a pseudoscientific “polygenetic” justification for enslavement, an argument that held that Africans were of a different species than white Europeans. Dellarosa shows how Rushton’s careful rhetoric makes a surprisingly modern case for the constructed nature of race, which follows from his awareness of class position. Neither climate nor genetics—nature—are responsible for what ultimately amounts to the “edifice” (Rushton’s word) of race and class (121). Dellarosa takes her title, “Behold the Coromantees,” from Rushton’s 1824 poem about the plight of enslaved “Coromantees,” people of the Gold Coast, who were forced to fight in a skirmish when French privateers boarded the vessel on which they were enslaved and transported. In Rushton’s poem, the Coromantees become “the synecdoche for those ‘millions’ who are the casualties of any imperial power” (126).

Other essays fall more within the traditionally literary. Readers inter ested in the work of the lauded poet/grain-thresher Stephen Duck (1705–56) will find capable entries by Jennifer Batt and by William Christmas. Steve Van Hagen’s discussion of Ann Yearsley (1753–1806) and “the shoe-maker poet” James Woodhouse (1735–1820) takes up the way these poets wrote verses that resist and repurpose the concept...