Review of A New Species of Criticism: Eighteenth-Century Discourse on the Novel by Joseph F. Bartolomeo
Reviewing Joseph F. Bartolomeo’s first book is a humbling task. Any reviewer risks the hypocrisy of missing the point in the very act of absorbing Bartolomeo’s point: critics are often ignored by the actual authors and readers of the texts they review. I take consolation in the fact that Bartolomeo is aware he is implicated in the critical process he himself reviews: referring to the gentleman readers imagined by many elitist eighteenth-century critics, Bartolomeo writes, “Only recently, while engaged in often acrimonious debate over what constitutes literature and literary study, have we begun to realize that elitism may be necessary but problematic. . . . Therefore, I dare not condescend to these early judges, as they did to novelists and readers, under the lofty but flimsy sanction of culture” (132). Therefore, I dare not condescend to Bartolomeo under the flimsy sanction of a reviewer’s problematic authority, but instead invite the traditional honor of historical irrelevancy with a sincere recommendation.
Bartolomeo argues that the most significant contribution critics make to the early English novel is their inability to agree on a consistent aesthetic platform. Novelists themselves are just as generously inconsistent in their own prefaces. The diversity and dialogism of the critical debate reflects and supports the heteroglossia of discourse so crucial to the development of the early are novel. “Dialogue, within and among novelists and critics, favored options over absolutes, heterogeneity over consensus — thus enabling the genre that we twentieth-century readers think of as having risen in the eighteenth century to continue rising and to remain a genre in the making,” Bartolomeo concludes (161).
Whereas a multiplicity of discourse may strengthen the novel, the multiple voices of his own chapters somewhat weaken Bartolomeo’s work. The first half discusses the prefaces of many different novelists, from Congreve to Godwin, and the second half discusses the reviews of professional critics. Bartolomeo arranges novelists from Congreve to Defoe chronologically (except for Richardson, Fielding, and Johnson, who get a chapter to themselves), and he arranges the critics thematically with interspersed commentary on the prefaces of the later novelists. The result of the awkward multiple structures is that it is often difficult to compare what the novelists and the critics have to say about the same issues and about one another. More significantly, perhaps, the argument suffers from the limited range of critics under discussion. Whereas Bartolomeo searches far afield of the canon for the novelists’ prefaces, he draws reviews almost exclusively from The Monthly Review and The Critical Review. Rival journals such as The Gentleman’s Magazine, The London Magazine, and others often ran reviews which were every bit as revealing and influential. For example, Bartolomeo repeats the received wisdom that Johnson “offered the first significant comments on the comparative merits of Richardson and Fielding” (11), even though interesting reviews in The Magazine of Magazines and The New and General Magazine predate Johnson by up to ten years.
Bartolomeo’s observations in these rambling chapters, however, are frequently brilliant. The canonical authors seem to respond most imaginatively to the pressures of a genre that was alternately inventing rules and breaking them. Defoe’s inconsistency, from the range of genres woven into his fictions to his conflicting truth claims for Robinson Crusoe, are “the inevitable consequences of combining, refining, and expanding the insights of his contemporaries. . . . Defoe necessarily tangled himself in contradictions which, in turn, foreground the combination of pressures on a serious and talented practitioner of a new and unstable genre” (45). Richardson has three conflicting authorial personas, each with a slightly different angle on the moral means and ends of literature, and Fielding also licenses inconsistency behind the mask of a complex narrative persona that reaches out of the prefaces and deep into the novels themselves. Building on his useful observation from Notes and Queries 33 (1986) that Johnson at different points identifies the readers of novels as “the busy, the aged, and the studious” and also the “young, ignorant, and idle” (qtd. 83–87), Bartolomeo paints Johnson as a cautious critic torn between “absolutely candid responses” and “a superimposed, moralistic self-discipline” (87). All three writers “strove mightily to mask a dialogic tendency that today’s readers would wish to celebrate” (87).
The reviewers seem to flaunt rather than mask their dialogic tendencies in a dazzling array of motives, methods, and meanings. The only standard the reviewers share is a “stubborn refusal to evaluate all writers or all novels by a single standard. . . . The victory of diversity over consistency may strike the theoretical purist as contributing to a hopelessly compromised poetics, but it more than compensates for that in its support of a genre forever in the process of re-imagining itself” (160). The closest thing to a shared motive is the pernicious tendency to “stratify the genre and its audience, in order to establish and maintain authority over an elite class of readers” (114). Much like today’s critics who assume the audience of popular culture to be passive and uneducated yet write for an audience of specialists, eighteenth-century reviewers assume the audience for fiction to be young, middle-class, and female, yet write for discriminating male readers who have no intention of cultivating the unhealthy habit of reading novels. The elitism of the assumed audience “shaded every negative comment on novels, novelists, and novel readers. Even when the critics explicitly addressed the clientele of circulating libraries and the authors who stocked their shelves, they were actually speaking to their own readers. . . “ (118–19). Critics were especially cruel to female novelists: “As readers or writers, most women were noticed to remind men that they were beneath notice” (121).
Would that all modern critics could receive the obsequious respect Thomas Amory offers in the preface to John Buncle (1756): “I have only to add, that I wish you all happiness; that your heads may lack no ointment, and your garments be always white and odiferous: but especially, may you press on, like true critics, towards perfection; and may bliss, glory, and honour be your reward and your Portion” (qtd. 109–10). Until that happy day, let us rejoice with Bartolomeo that such sweet flowers are fertilized by the manure of so many well-meaning reviews.
Originally published in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 7:3 (April 1995), 315–16.
